^^^^. i^rS-^^-^ ^i^j€€^C^C 'c:^:) LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. BV 4253 .T45 1886 Thorn, John Hamilton, 1808- 1894. Laws of life after the mind LAWS OF LIFE AFTER THE MIND OF CHRIST. Uniform with this Volume. LAWS OF LIFE AFTER THE MIND OF CHRIST. First Series. Second Edition^ price Js. 6d. "A volume of essay-like sermons addressed to a thoughtful and cultivated audience. The 'sweet reasonableness' of the Gospel,. its beauty, and many of its winning aspects, are exhibited with sim- plicity and grace by Mr. Thorn." — Academy. "It is difficult to open the volume anywhere without lighting on the traces of a powerful intellect, fully imbued with the spirit of Christ, and keenly critical of the Christian deficiencies of the age, with which it is the preacher's duty to deal." — Spectator, London : Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. ^M OF m LAWS OF LIFE JULsii A.. MIND OF CHRIST T/ie Lata of the Spirit of Life in Christ fesus. — St. Paul. DISCOURSES JOHN HAMILTON THOM. SECOND SERIES LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1886. (The rights of translation a7id of ref>rod7iction are reserved^ CONTENTS. I. PAGE The Peace that passeth Understanding ... ... i II. Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven ... ... ... i6 III. Christian Dynamics ... ... ... ... ... 30 IV. The Faith that overcometh the World ... ... 45 V. The Fatherhood of God ... ... ... ... 61 VI. The Kingdom of God without Observation ... ... 76 VII. The Sin of Omission ... ... .. ... ... 91 VIII. Conversion ... ... ... ... ... ... 105 vi Contents. IX. PAGE Love, the fulfilling of the Law ... ... ... 121 X. The Peace of Trust in God ... ... ... ... 136 XL The Conditions of receiving Christ's Bequest of Peace 152 XIL Wilful Sin against One Law of the Spirit, Entire Disloyalty ... ... ... ... ... 167 XIIL The Moral Limits of Accident ... ... ... 182 XIV. Use and Abuse of Religious Sensibility ... ... 196 XV. Worse than an Infidel ... ... ... ... 210 XVL Diversities of Gifts co-operating by One Spirit ... 225 XVII. By their Fruits shall ye know them ... ... 239 XVIII. Religion and the Child ... ... ... ... 253 XIX. Casual Diversions of Spirit, and the Ever-present Comforter ... ... ... ... •■■ 270 Contents. vil XX. PAGE The Resurrection World ... ... .... ... 284 XXI. Christ's Law of Love to our Neighbour ... ... 300 XXIL The Lordship of Service ... ... ... ... 316 xxin. Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life 331 XXIV. Spiritual Gains of Bereavement ... ... ■•347 XXV. Unspiritual Objections to Spiritual Christianity ... 361 XXVI. The Transfiguration of Souls ... ... ... 379 ERRATUM. Page 64, line 6 from bottom, /br " us " read "this. LAWS OF LIFE AFTER THE MIND OF CHRIST. I. Philippians iv. 7 : " The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. " There is that which passeth understanding in a// God's personal relations to us ; but it is in our moments of blessedness, especially of unexpected peace, that the mysterious presence, the divine Causation, is most strongly felt. The Peace of our spirits passeth understanding more than do the Sorrows of Con- science, Flesh, or Heart. In the worst ills and suffer- ings that befall us we can discern how we are a Law unto ourselves, how they are naturally, constitution- ally, or circumstantially derived. We cannot feel that we are a Law unto ourselves in the very least thrill of pure joy, rapture of soul, or assurance of peace, that has possession of us. It is more the living con- tact of God Himself, less open to our analysis, less II. B 2 The Peace that passeth Understanding. the obvious and intelligible product of the conditions in which we are. Even in the highest order of our Sorrows, those that come most directly from God, such as the restlessness of our spiritual nature under a sense of imperfection and poverty of being ; the uneasy stings of Conscience, not brooking our low estate ; the knowledge that we are not what we were intended for, that we are below our calling, even though no conscious sin is present to us ; or in that deepest anguish of Bereavement, which is not sorrow for our own desolation, nor any doubt of the blessed- ness of those who now live with God, but the un- appeasable sense of lost opportunity, of a Life of the Heart gone from Earth without having been fully known, of the infinite remorse of tenderness, not mourning the present, but gazing wistfully on a vanished Past from which the richest essence was not drawn whilst yet it was with us ; — even in griefs like these, which touch the infinite side of our nature, we can understand the inner sources. But of what jfoy, that is of a high order, can we penetrate to the source, or tell how it comes, of what it is composed, and refer it to the human conditions or surroundings as sufficient to explain it } It is impossible to enumerate the Joys that become a Man, so rich are we in the possibilities of Blessedness ; but take their principal Classes : the transfiguring touch of any deep emotion ; the uprising of the Heart, the witness in the Soul, when we are in the presence of living Good- ness, or have it vividly presented, created in our consciousness by the silent page ; the spiritual The Peace that passeth Undtr standing. 3 influence of Nature, the mediation of Earth and Sky, a mediation lower but as real as that of Christ him- self; the Lord God mirrored in its forms and whispering in its sounds ; our strange restlessness at the Spring's first breath as of the sap of life rising to new births of the spirit ; the deeper meaning of .Autumn's look and promise under the glory of decay ; the unknown fields of Being to which Meditation opens the gates ; the Life of the Aff*ections — the blessedness which comes most freely when least we seek our own ; the prophecies of the Heart out of itself, from what it has known and tasted of Good- ness, human and divine ; our sense of Immortality, most assured from the beauty of holiness, the seal of the imperishable on the face of our dead ; — of these, and such as these, what can we say but that they are, and that they are of God's great Mercies ; and that for any farther knowledge of them it is too wonderful for us, — it is high, and we cannot attain unto it. Our Sorrows, even when most pure, reveal intelligible Sources ; but of all worthy Peace the spring is hid in our wondrous connections with Him in whom our life is, in the deep places of our nature where only His Spirit is in contact with our being. There is of course a vast amount of Peace which does not pass our understanding, the circumstance and the condition of which we can fully describe ; and they who are satisfied with this, will see no mystery in human Blessedness. The Appetites that are here amply provided for need not lead our thoughts to occult Causes, nor to unknown fields of being. 4 The Peace that passeth Understanding. Theirs is the peace of St. Paul's natural man, not necessarily a carnal man — there is no occasion to descend so low — but of every part of the man except the spiritual man ; of the intellectual man, who can live in the most intimate connections with this mysterious Universe, and occupy himself with all its secrets and all its grandeur, and by some strange blindness or security, not discern that the Seen is the symbol of the Unseen, nor feel the awful depths on which he is floating for a moment an entranced spec- tator ; of warm-hearted men, whose dearest part of Life is in human Love, but with whom, through some fatality of constitution, or of unreflecting habit, the daily hunger of the Heart never divinely fortifies the Heart, nor opens the eyes of the Spirit. Yes, it cannot be denied, there are men of great intellects, of noble hearts, whose pursuits are all high, whose affections are all pure, who yet, in their loftier and larger sphere, have no surer Peace than the peace of the Child upon the lap of Nature, blessed up to the fulness of faculty with her freshness and variety, her inexhaustible wonders, her sunshine, her freedom, and her flowers, — with no desires unmet — the kind of Peace ascribed to Adam in Eden before the consciousness of a diviner life, the conflict with a higher Will, arose within him, and broke for ever the unspiritual dream. Yet any measure of inward insight must, it would seem, disclose how unsatisfying all that Peace is which does not pass our Understanding, the sources of which we are able to unfold ; for the source is no deeper than its circumstance, earthly provision and The Peace that passeth Understanding. 5 sentient faculty. The noblest tributaries to our spiritual life, intellectual delight and human love, would surely not of themselves veil from the sight of any deep-hearted man the end that awaits them, nor give the feeling that a few years of high thinking and pure loving, under hourly liability to a Death that closed everything, was a life to be content with. If we had no spiritual life that made us partakers in the Life of God,Ibut only Love and Intellect, yet Love and Intellect would surely shrink from such a being ; and it is difficult to understand how it is that men with tender and sacred Hearts, who live in con- verse with Truth and Beauty, with Art and Science ideal in their sphere, with all that is suggestive in affection, with all that is unlimited in refinement and grace and the hunger for more, are not drawn on by the life they have out of this outer court into the Holy of Holies, and do not hear what so many who are vastly their inferiors in mental range, often in nobleness of living, are permitted to hear — the invita- tions of the Father of Spirits, offering Himself, His own perfections, to His children with an inexhaustible pursuit for Mind, Heart, ^oul, and Strength in the outer and inner sphere of their calling. Yet the fact that this is so, without in the least diminishing our own faith — for as the Father hath given to us, so we hear and so we speak — should make us very humble ; for among those who it would seem cannot believe, there are men who are enthusiasts for Truth, who seek it and sacrifice everything to it more earnestly than most of us seek God, whose whole life is lofty 6 The Peace that passeth Understanding. and ideal, who are farther from self-sufficiency than anchorites, and as free from selfishness as Saints. However we may account for this — and we cannot account for it on grounds of personal merits or de- merits — the fact remains, that any Peace which is as a House upon a Rock, to which the Soul can flee as the Bird to its Mountain, is from the Spirit who bloweth where He listeth, and passeth understanding. Intellect, Genius, the splendours of Imagination, mighty as they are, and capable of serving its glory, belong themselves to a lower sphere of being, and cannot confer it. The world will not give it, and will not take it away. It is not born of Circumstance : its only relation to Circumstance is in this, that it appears at its height in circumstances that would seem fitted to destroy it. The Peace of Trust — it could not exist if God never veiled His face. The Peace of Conscience — has it not to be born anew day by day of fresh aspiration and penitence } Is not humiliation its nurse and effort its instrument? — for no Habit, whatever be its height, will satisfy the ever- growing demands of, and for, God ; and he who is without conflict knows it not at all. The Peace of Love — how else is that possible to beings who have sacred hearts and are crushed before the moth — who, because of their sacredness of Heart, cannot live the life of nature, enjoy while they may, and perish when they must.'' But while the Peace is of God, there is with Man a preparation of the Heart : and the conditions in us most favourable to receptiveness would seem to be — The Peace tJiat passeth Understanding. 7 that all our Thoughts of God should be true to His fatherly character, and that our lives should not disturb the perceptions of our souls ; that we know Him as He is, and not alienate ourselves^ by lowering, defiling-, or dishonouring the spiritual Life in us to which He communicates His Spirit. We are but recipients, and the vessels of our Peace are our sus- ceptibilities of God. To him that hath is given. In our best estate we are but mirrors of God, and if the mirror is soiled God is not seen. In proportion as we are pure, the promptings in us of the Holy Spirit are quickly felt. In proportion as we are merciful, no suggestion from the Spirit of Mercy is unheard or discarded. In proportion as we are trustful, can God give more to Faith than He ever takes from Sight. Light in the face of the Heavenly Father with whom we have to do, and that faithfulness to the light we have which enables the Father of Light to %\m^ us more light, — these are the two aptitudes, the two factors, of the spiritual growth and Blessedness of Man. And these conditions of the Peace of God are not always found together : for though it is true that we never fully know Him until we love Him, and that we never fully love Him until we do His Will, yet there are ways of misconceiving God, of evilly, errone- ously — I do not mean sinfully — contemplating His character. His methods, and His purposes, that make sad the hearts of the righteous ; and as an unfaithful life will take the fellowship of His peace from a soul that thinks of Him most exaltedly, an 2injust thought of Him, a Belief about Him that is below His real 8 The Peace that passeth Understanding. goodness and glory, will disturb the Blessedness of the most devoted Service. I do not like to name Examples — one shrinks from the irreverence of speak- ing of, or appearing to judge, the inward life of those who become known to us only by Eminence of some kind — but there are conspicuous Cases of what in a measure belongs to all of us, of Light without Faith- fulness, of a marvellous power of seeing God with no power and with no Will ; I do not mean with no desire, but with no Will to be conformed to Him. This can give no Peace : rather is it the exposure of a soul to the full eye of the Judge, looking with a sadness and severity it could not wear if in our ignorance we had a cloak for Sin. To knozv that God is Love, and not rest upon Him ; to know that the Hand is God's, and not be willing to take the cup it offers ; to know that the Voice is God's, and not rise up and obey it; to know that the Man is our Brother, and not help him from perishing ; to be absolutely clear in spiritual vision, and abject and effortless in Will, this is possi- ble ; and perhaps no condition on Earth is farther removed from the felt Peace of God, for it seems to approach the condition in which He does most for us, and we do least for Him. Neither, on the other hand, will an incessant activity of the struggling Will, an incessant offering of Good Works to express the debt Vv^e owe Him, give us the peace of knowing Him, if with the eyes of our souls we never see the Lord God, except in a character that is not His and that is unworthy of Him. And this, too, is possible. There are those The Peace that passeth Undej^standing. 9 who in religious constancy, through energy of Will, put to shame many who far surpass them in justness of spiritual vision, and yet are themselves the blindest interpreters of God's Love, who believe that God our Father cannot in His own person make Righteousness and Mercy to kiss, — who, in the sufferings of Life, and in the appointment of Death, though it was the culture by which He perfected His own Son, can see only the awful shadow of the Judge, the stings of unconquered Sin, the witness of a Holy God against a World lying in wickedness. ''The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your Hearts and Minds through Christ Jesus," that is, with the temper and method of otir lives identified with his, hid with his in God. The expression, through or 171 Christ Jesus, implies that the garment of Peace will fit no spirit but his — that we must get more and more within the vesture of feelings, of personal relations, of filial and fraternal affections that united him to God and man. The knowledge of God that made it impossible to Christ to use any Name but that of Father ; his Sense, at every point of the perishable surface of his life, that God was at its centre ; the Obedience of his Love and of his Faith, these are the Elements of perfect Peace. Li which of these is it that we are wanting .? Is it that we really do not know that God is holy Love ? Or is it that we will not rise to meet the purpose of His Spirit in all those times when our natural Humanity is tempted, suffering, afflicted, and de- pressed ? Is it that we are thrown out of harmony I o The Peace that passeth Undei^standing, with Him, because in the midst of so much Sin and Misery we do not use the opportunities He gives us of doing- the Works of our Father, and so do not permit Him to bless us as He would ? Certain it is, that the first lesson in spiritual Life a Man has to learn is this, that the possessions that are most worthy to be dear to us are yet dear to us, under their present forms, not solely for what they are, but still more for what they mean, for what they express of God's intentions : and until we have learned this, the affec- tions and the possessions that we cherish most, and that are most worthy to be cherished, are just the points where we are most open to be wounded every day through frailty and mortality ; and beyond this, and worse than this, have in themselves no promise of perfection. Men of noble hearts who value Life for human Goodness and for human Love, but who do not feel that God is at the centre of their beine, in the times even of their best emotions, of their purest joys, and in the very measure of their noble- ness, are liable to a rush of sadness that threatens reason, so cruel seems the disproportion between their nature and its fate. And if there mingles with the sadness a feeling of resentful rebellion, of wrone endured, what is that but a witness to some latent root of Faith deep-planted in their Hearts, that they are in the hands not of Fate, but of a Personal Power whom they do not know and trust — but yet arraign ? And so this Peace of God, passing understanding, is as necessary to any real enjoyment of our Blessings, in the day of their intensest life, as it is necessary for The Peace that passeth Ujiderstanding. 1 1 our consolation in the day that from our earthly sight we lose them all. Religious Faith is ever the inner spirit of the most tranquil moments of posses- sion : it is it that transfigures mortality, and makes us feel that it is good for us to be here : it is it that sees the promise of perfection in the dear familiar good- ness, of eternal constancy in the daily fidelity and love, which are as ordinary things to common eyes, but full of infinite meaning to a Heart that knows how to value them, and that adds the faithfulness of God to their significance. And according to the measure in which the Affec- tions have had their earthly life rooted and hidden in God, do they readily adapt themselves to the great vicissitude, and open rapidly to a new Life of faith. I speak of what comes to us in Bereavement, through no effort of our Will, but by the Act of the Spirit in whom we live. There are times of utter in- action in Sorrow, when we can do nothing but receive the impressions that come, when all struggle ceases, all call to effort is over, and we are left alone with God and the Past. We can do nothing now to affect the final peace of the Affections. The time for that is gone. Retribution, in the form of the spiritual reali- ties as they imprint themselves upon us, is alone with us. Our Hearts, like naked mirrors, are held up to Heaven to reflect the images of Truth, from relations all unalterable now. We are quite passive in those moments, receiving what is sent ; but God is intensely active in us. In that pause of being, when the course of ordinary thought stands still, His Spirit takes the 1 2 The Peace that passeth Undei' standing. place of ours and works our Life ; and blessed are those to whom it is then given to know an inexplic- able Peace, in the existence of which at such a time they could not have believed — to whom the awful silence is tranquil and holy as with a divine Presence, and no Solitude is felt, for the Heart, led by a Love no longer earthly, has followed into Heaven. All life and its faithfulness is a preparation for that great ex- perience ; and the air of eternal quiet breathing over the Heart of desolation is surely the Peace of God that passeth understanding. But this Calm from the Spirit who bloweth where He listeth is not our final rest ; it is itself another invitation to new life and higher Peace, for God never long permits us to remain in the Past, or suspends us from our calling of ever new co-operation with Himself, in whatever altered conditions of our being. No change of circumstances changes this ; it only changes the Work given us to do. In whatever wreck has fallen upon us, be it of Health, be it of Wealth, be it of dear spiritual companionship, or, worse than all, be it from our own weakness and unworthiness, — the outward forms of our Duties may all be changed — the Service that is possible to a man in pain and sickness, to a man in poverty and low estate, to a man in soli- tude and bereavement, to a man in penitential self- knowledge, is now what God requires. The Duties may be severer in themselves, and with less of human solace ; but the demand of God never intermits that in Love and the Works of Love our life, out of its existing materials, should be to Him the richest The Peace that passeth Understanding. 13 tribute we can raise ; for in reality it is He who is offering to us more of His own Peace in the opportu- nities of Faith, opportunities of so bearing and so doing His Will under trial, within the limits He appoints, as to enter not indeed into new Happiness, but, far beyond what we call happiness, into new Blessedness of Spirit. The Beatitudes of Christ are not at all in the language by which we would describe what we call Happiness, but they are the conditions of perfect Peace. And if we will aim so high — for it is ever our Mark that determines what we reach — if, knowing that only for a little time can we live upon the Past, that only in some sacred pause of being will God bless us without the active co-operation of all that still is ours of flesh and heart and mind ; if to the initial peace of submission and of love we strive to bring also something of the creative spirit of God our Father working in us, to mould as soon as possible a new symmetry and order out of the wreck His hand has made of the dear conditions of our life, we shall learn how little His service and His peace depend upon what men call Circumstance ; how it was neces- sary for a Saviour of Men to be their Fellow-sufferer, passing ever into the closer fellowship of God out of a straiter lot, a severer or a lonelier life. And call to mind how great a Thing it is we are aspiring to, when we venture to speak of God's Peace in any connection with ourselves, for we know that we are asking for what God cannot give to the selfish, to the worldly, to the effortless, the unfaithful, the slow of Heart, or blind of Spirit. We are not 14 The Peace that passeth Undei^standing. asking for what God could give without our co-opera- tion — for happiness, for pleasures, for quiet days and nights, for exemption from pain and trouble, and mortal weariness and the burden of great cares. We are asking for courage, for fortitude, for self-forgetful- ness, for the heart of Christ, for the fellowship of God, and to be worthy to suffer for their sakes. We are not asking to be saved from the Cross, but to have it laid upon us and to bear it well. We are asking for Souls to which God can come and make His abode with them, and we know that great Hopes cannot be given to mean, unenterprizing men, nor foretastes of Heaven to the earthly, the sensual, the uncharitable, the unforCTJvincr, nor the strength of the Lord to those who do not strive upon His side. In the passage of the Text, St. Paul states with equal depth and beauty the conditions in us for a participation in God's Peace. They are these : the Trust that is natural to a Heart warmed by grateful memories of His former Goodness ; the energy of Prayer to meet the present occasions in which, if we will permit Him, He is desiring to raise and bless us more ; and, mark it well, a familiar delight and con- verse, a habit of intercourse, with whatever in this World is touched by the charm of Greatness, Good- ness, and the Grace of Heaven. " Be careful for nothing ; but in every thing by prayer and supplica- tion, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. And the Peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your Hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. And, whatsoever things The Peace that pas set Ji Understanding. 1 5 are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any Virtue, if there be any Praise, take account of these Things, and the God of Peace shall be with you." II. Isaiah xxxviii. i : " Set thine House in order : for thou shalt die, and not live." The earthly portion of our immortal life must have some functions to discharge in the formation of Character, that will not equally belong to the heavenly periods. This is necessary truth to one who reflects on the unwasteful economy of God. In the material husbandry there is its own work for each season, which cannot be taken out of order, nor intermixed. And in the spiritual husbandry, from infancy to the allotted term, we cannot drop, or anticipate, or linger too long upon a stage, without injury to something that ought to have come in its time, and to have flavoured the quality of all that comes after. We must go through all our natural seasons, if we are to be ripe at last. No one should wish to see the charac- teristics of one period of life appear prematurely in another, for they can be anticipated only in an un- healthy form, and at their natural time will want something of the full mellowness of normal growth. A sweet, unburdened childhood ; an active, discip- Earth tJie Seed-plot of Heaven. 1 7 lined boyhood ; a studious, or enterprising youth, or both united ; a laborious and responsible manhood, full of high trusts, with objects and exercise for affec- tion and for faculty, — in orderly succession, with nothing lost by the way, all the lower stages carrying their contributions into all the higher, are necessary to the perfection of old Age, whose attribute is ripe Wisdom, largeness of Nature, when white hairs emblem the full light in which all the colours of Experience blend. And if this is so, can we look on to the celestial spaces of our life and suppose that the earthly space has no peculiar contribution of its own, no seasonal function in the natural history of souls, which, if lost, must in some sense be lost for ever ? Can we sup- pose that God placed immortal beings under our con- ditions of mortality, with all these screens and veils on spiritual sense and faculty, with all that is most noble and blessed in us living upon trust, growing out of a root of faith and hope, unless there was something that made this necessary to our final ripening, something to be drawn forth, or infused into us, by this first season of our Father's husbandry, be- longing to the essences of our imperishable life. And again, if this be so, can anything be more prepos- terous than an attempt to skip these earthly stages, or any part of them, to omit the present season in the tillage and culture of our nature, to fix our eyes only on the celestial spaces at which we are not yet arrived, — to transfer ourselves to conditions in which, as yet, our responsibilities, our duties, do not lie, — to II. C 1 8 Ea7'th the Seed-plot of Heaven, draw our life from a soil not yet given to our labour ? It is most true that only as leading up to, and pass- ing into, that celestial future, can we understand aright the meanest moment of the present ; that only from the highest elevation accessible to us can we see this life as it is ; but this is a reason not for neg- lecting, but for diligently observing, the uses of the time, as the husbandman while he lives in hope never works out of season, and just because of the visioned harvest is, whilst it lasts, exclusively devoted to the labours of the seed-time. Everything in our human life points heavenwards, but we must stand where we are, and from the things that we experience, given to our love and care, draw the heavenly foretastes, else clearly they belong not to the spiritual realm of Duty, but only to the unreal realm of Dreams. What the whole of the peculiar contribution of this world may be to the ultimate ripening of our nature, the uses of the earthly seasons having no like times in Heaven, it may be impossible to determine ; but there are certain elements of character, as belong- ing to a mortal — a needy and a veiled condition, in which we see as through a glass, darkly, liable to all kinds of suffering and mistake, as contrasted with a coming condition of open vision freed from physical illusions, which may afford indications of the frames of temper and disposition with which it may be the appointed service of this world to impregnate our souls. I conceive that we set our earthly House in order, only when, available for every present use that God would have it serve, the instrument and Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. 19 the shelter of our fitting work, protecting, cherish- ing, adorning, perfecting whatever here is dear, it is also as the observatory from which we see the heavens and read the celestial signs ; and that if we fill it with angel guests and with orderly tasks, we need not trouble ourselves about the evil spirits which come to houses that are empty, swept and garnished to receive them. I may indicate a few of the special products and ministering spirits of our earthly house, frames of Christian temper, of which it is possible that this world is the seed-plot, the natural opportunities for which may not, in like fashion, occur again. And, first, with regard to that whole frame of spirit, pre- eminently Christian, which is produced by a suffering, afflicted, blind, imperfect condition of ourselves and of our fellow creatures, which takes the various forms of endurance, faith, compassion, sympathy, self-sacri- fice, readiness to help. A man in whom this kind of spiritual fruit is not setting and ripening is clearly losing the uses of the earth. What can this World teach him, if it does not teach him this } Its sea- sonal function is not discharged in him; and his house cannot be in order. It must be full of wants that are neglected, of opportunities that are not met as they arise, of unheard appeals which, mute or spoken, can- not be resisted without accumulating against him — accumulating, too, the load of inhumanity within him. It is not necessary to pursue this line of thought, which would open out to any extent. Could any man wish this form of the mind of Christ to be absent 20 Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. from his own Character ? Yet it may be, that no Hke appeal will ever be made to it, that, if he has wilfully hardened himself against the seasonal want and invi- tation, a peculiar fragrance and flavour may be lost, and though the future disposition be in him, it cannot have a like exercise and a like test. At least, the common ideas of Heaven exclude the conditions of human nature which appeal to sympathy in the suf- ferings and necessities of Earth ; and even the pro- phetic anticipation is of no pain, no sorrow, all tears wiped from all eyes for ever. But how could there be this infinite beatitude, if from a state in which we begin to aspire after perfection we are to have the retrospect of a neglected seed-time, of an unsuscep- tible soul in its day of opportunity ? Every man who meets the want of the time, though only with the disciple's cup of cold water, who bears patiently with infirmities, who thinks for the thoughtless, who brings help to the helpless, whose love does not fail, though all it has to feed it is the great need for it, the occasions for its exercise, the sacrifices it requires, is casting his bread upon the waters, as seed-corn for a harvest that can in no other way be had. Then, let us set our house in order in the directions which God and Nature now give us : the heavenly mansions will have calls and fitnesses of their own. The same kind of difference between this world and the next may make the earthly season of our life the fitting birth-time for another Element of '' The Mind of Christ," our failure in which, when it was here appealed to, may touch the blessedness of Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. 2 1 Heaven with a sense of wondering and sorrowful reproach. It may be here only that God veils His face ; here only that tendencies full of blessed pro- mise are suddenly broken off, or pass into death or darkness ; here only that seeds of joy are buried or checked ; here only that the Father gives indications both of His power and of His will to make the intense blessedness of His Children, and then drops the cloud of circumstance on the opening scene ; here only that faith may have to overcome the world, and childlike trust have opportunity of bearing witness that the inward sign, the inward whisper, are enough to give patient waiting, and unbounded hope in God. I do not mean that faith in God can be superseded, but that hereafter the Evidence may be so ample, we may so live in the light of His goodness, so come to understand whatever has been trying or mysterious here, that no matter of experience could be more certain to us than that the hopes of the pure heart are the invitations and promises of its Inspirer already accomplished in the eternal Will. Even in this world matters of faith pass into matters of cer- tainty, so that we forget the grounds on which our expectation rests. Both moral and physical expec- tation arise out of experience with as much confi- dence as if it was a matter of logical necessity, whereas we have no grounds of certainty that any experience of good in the past will not be disap- pointed in the future, except in the faith that God's love will not change nor fail. We have no ground for reposing tranquilly on any past experience as 2 2 Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. a promise of perpetual blessing, except the ground of religious trust. There is no logical necessity that the sun should rise to-morrow. The physical neces- sity belongs to the supposition that things remain as they are ; but that must depend on the Almighty's will. '' Thy word, O God, is settled in the heavens : Thy faithfulness is to all generations: Thou hast estab- lished the earth, and it abideth : they continue this day according to Thine ordinances : for all are Thy Servants." The faithfulness of God to every promise in His works is a pledge of His faithfulness to His every word of promise whispered to the soul, to every gleam of heavenly purpose that He causes to strike brightly upon us, however soon it may be engulfed in night and darkness. Every glimpse into the ever- lasting brightness, though the door is closed at once, is an appeal to faith, and marks the earth as the season for acquiring that trusting frame and attitude of soul, without which a seraph's open vision may want some element of filial fulness. When God shall unveil His face, and remove the screens of discipline, and all uncertainty shall have for ever disappeared, one shadow may remain which Heaven itself cannot then shine away, the remembrance of our past Dis- trust, that we doubted Him in the time that He appealed to the hearts of His children to confide in Him and walk in faith when for the moment the appearances were against Him, darkness beneath His feet, and the cloud before the Throne. And our House may be disordered by failure of faith in man, as well as by unfilial distrust of God. Earth the Seed-plot oj Heaven. 23 Nowvcid^y be the time for testing all kinds of generous confidences, human or divine. As the love of God may for a time be veiled, so may the honour or the friendship of a Man, and that veil may bring no discredit to him, but a deep discredit to us, if we have not eyes to see through it, or confiding gene- rosity to wait trustfully until it is lifted off Neither man nor God claim our confidence without, or against, reason for trust ; but the admission of suspicion, even in circumstances otherwise open to suspicion, after grounds for faith were once laid, may be fearful dis- closure of what the knowledge of ourselves makes us capable of believing. Discernment of spirits is one of the highest attributes of pure natures, nor could there be more certain evidence of inward impurity, that the glass of our own soul was clouded, than that we are apt to receive impressions of wrong where no wrong is. A philosopher* once remarked that the neces- sity for analytic chemistry might be regarded as arising from the imperfection of human eyesight ; that it is possible to conceive a vision so acute that all the elements really present should be sensibly apparent. It is certainly possible to conceive a spiritual vision so pure that no element of good in a man could hide itself from us, and that we should be absolutely incapable of suspecting an element of evil where no evil is. And, again, all the common Ideas of Heaven forbid us to suppose that this kind of appeal to con- fiding trust will be needed there, that there the soul of honour and love can be so hidden and veiled by * Dr. Thomas Brown. 24 Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven, circumstance, that only honour and love can find them, and hold fast faith in them. There, we are told, we shall see face to face. Then is there not a seasonal spiritual function in this life of earth, if it thus throws both man and God on the pure faiths and instincts of the soul in a way that may not occur again ? To the pure all things are pure : our House is not in order if this spiritual lamp of Trust, which our earthly life both needs and feeds, is not its central Light. There is another spiritual fitness which may only have earthly opportunity. There are susceptibilities in the same man so different that they might seem to belong to two natures ; and there is an aptitude, more or less acquired by use, to elicit in our fellows the evil or the angel nature. Even Christ felt the touch of an evil power in unspiritual man, as though it might dim the divine instincts of the soul. " Get thee behind me, Satan, thou savourest not of God." Now that is a peculiarity of condition that, on both sides of it, may disappear from the heavenly state. It may be here only that we shall be under temptation to awaken in another thoughts and passions that had better sleep, — to cloud, defile, or obstruct the happier nature by sting, or taunt, or evil provocation. And it may be here alone that the desire to speak to what is good and noble in another, and to abstain from casting wicked fire, may distinguish any one. That must be the universal disposition of Heaven. The Satanic desire to touch dormant evil, to awaken dor- mant pain, cannot exist there. I do not mean that Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. 25 Heaven will not be a place for the formation of character ; but that the present conditions may dis- appear from the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness ; that all special con- ditions have a fruitage and flavour of their own ; that only where it was peculiarly needed, and peculiarly tempted, can the spirit which would sweeten and purify human hearts be a distinction, and its posses- sion here give privilege of entrance without shame and remorse on the universal goodwill of Heaven. Then, no man's earthly House is in order, in which any unhappy tendency is needlessly provoked, or any angel spirit unsolicited. Again, it is impossible for us to know how much even of the natural aspects of this world may be only seasonal, and never occur again. There may be other adaptations of external nature to other growths of soul. God may not repeat the great discourse of His Works, as now we read it. Other heavens may open around us, and in a land where there is said to be no night and no sea Nature must have other teachings, other solicitings than those we know here. Yet, who can doubt that there is a wisdom and a spirit ever seeking us, ever breath- ing itself towards us, from the nature that is now around us — from morning and evening, from sunrise and sunset, from cloud and shadow, from lake and mountain, from tree and flower, from form and colour, from light and darkness, and the worlds that dark- ness reveals, which make the spiritual appeal that in this our earthly stage we need and are fitted to take 26 Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven, in, and which if we miss through hardness, negh- gence, carnal self-absorption, low insensibility, from the idle or the sordid thought that God does not speak to His children through His Works, we must suffer a special, it may be an irreparable, loss, for no one believes that these things must return again as here they are. And the Lesson of all is this, that we love, trust, and study every aspect of the life that is now around us ; that we confide, and diligently abide our time, in the school in which the Father has placed us ; that we draw from it its natural spirit, and meet it with the response and receptive- ness it demands, assured that it is the fittest training for us ; that we shall best set our earthly house in order by no contempt of it, but by contentment with it, by deep delight in it, by earnest understanding of it, by hospitality to every guest and influence God sends into it ; and, above all, by faithfulness under its changing conditions to the creative work of our souls, in building up the best that is possible to us out of the materials given to us, or left for us from the wrecks of time. For, if our House is set in order for life, it is set in order for death. Death is but the passage from life to higher life, and the only readiness for advance- ment in our Father's service is, that when our Lord Cometh He find us faithful in the Work given us to do. We may trust our God to arrange the stages of our progress ; in assigning us our place here He knows the employments and the exercises that will best fit us for entering with full faculty and delight Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. 27 on the higher posts of His service ; and it is not piety, but presumption, or impatience, or poverty of sympathy, that would transfer our interest from where we are to some visioned sphere were we are not. It cannot be the fuhiess of spiritual life, but the feebleness of it, that finds our appointed service not enough for our affections, our efforts, or our rewards. Yet the break that Death makes in all present relations does introduce special necessities, requiring preparations and arrangements for leaving our post suddenly, without warning, that would not be needed if our progress was one of continuous earthly develop- ment, and we were to live on here for ever. When we are called away, our earthly concerns must lie as the call finds them ; our hand never touches them again. That might be of no significance to those who pass onwards, did it not afTect survivors ; but in affecting them it becomes a test of our preparation for the great change. "He that loveth not his Brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen } " He that is careless of what confusion and desolation he leaves behind him on Earth, how can he be in the temper of Heaven .'* Thoughtfulness for survivors is therefore one of the touchstones of fitness to die, of the preparations being made, of the House being in order. Our " House " embraces those who are beyond ourselves, and yet are part of ourselves. Have we made the earthly house sign, type, prophecy of the heavenly home t Have we lived in the faith, and is it dear to us to die 2 8 Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven. in the faith, that those who are nearest to us, those of our house, are to stand by our side for ever ? Is our family hfe a state of order for death and for immortahty, so that if we vanished from our place to-night, we should leave for the morrow no tangled circumstance which only we could put in order, no unspoken word that needed to be spoken, no cry of agony out of any heart for one hour more of Earth to set things right for ever ? It is not that any work or interest of Earth is to grow pale, and look insignificant, in our anticipations of Death and Heaven. On the contrary, we have no heavenly life in us, nor fitness for it, unless it gives meaning, richness, glory, and the joy of promise to the Earth. Only through our connections with the eternal, can we value aright the fleeting moments of this world. " Set thine house in order : for thou shalt die and not live." The sentence is gone out, irreversible, incommutable ; nothing is uncertain but the time ; we are only reprieved from moment to moment, from day to day. But, if to live is to be under the culture of God for higher life, and to die is to gain that life, then we would spend the time of our preparation not as in a condemned cell, but as in the ante-chamber of the eternal Home, as within sight of the glad and awful brightness, within hearing of the sweet and solemn music,— if not in full fruition, yet in faith, hope, and loving expectation, not without a vision of angel faces, — in righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, as those who have ex- perienced something of what it is to have the Father Earth the Seed-plot of Heaven, 29 and the Son abiding with them, to whom eternal life, not altogether unknown, already planted, and rooted, and bearing fruit, has only to be transfigured in the beatific Presence, when the earthly tent-house of these pilgrim days shall be exchanged for the build- ing of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens. III. Philippians iv. 13 : " I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me." If a man wills to do God's will he partakes of the strength of Christ ; he is as the Vine that is rooted in the Father, and the sap of the divine life rises in him. The desires of the heart, the insights of the mind, the inspirations of the soul, become realities of character, constituents of an everlasting growth, when they culminate in a holy will. Until this, the end for which they were given, has been reached, our spiritual faculties are but elements " to convict us of sin, and of judgment." Intellect may legislate, imagination gaze, conscience rebuke, desire grow sick with longing, and yet " a// tilings " remain as they were, because in the inaction of the persona/ power there is no executive. Physical Science, whatever possibilities it discerns, can accomplish nothing without a working power adequately applied ; and Moral Science may demon- strate what might be, what ought to be, yet contribute nothing to the dynamics of a perfect life. And a great lesson is brought home to us by observing how Christian Dynamics. 31 physical science passes from theory to achievement. The discovery of what is possible may long precede the fact of its accomplishment. There is higher science than art has yet reduced to use ; and there is higher Morality, as in the Sermon on the Mount, than men have yet reduced to practice. In each case the instruments are wanting, to execute theoretic possi- bilities, to exemplify spiritual laws. Man has been defined as a being who has to make his own tools. What we call our material civilization is from im- proved instruments. Centuries ago men foresaw the wonders of modern art By supplying the adequate instruments it has transferred the previsions of theory to the daily miracles of experience. And in the spiritual kingdom it is still by the power and the fineness of the instrument that the possibilities of God, the commandments in the heart, the faiths of the soul, the standards in the conscience, the visions and prophecies of the spirit, are transferred from the thoughts to the life, and become realities of Character. Every Christian man believes that the life of Christ, the goodness of Christ, is attainable, though only Christ has attained it. The human possi- bility has no impassable limit, but it has at each moment an actual limit in the purity of our hearts, in the composition of our will ; and what is possible to man will not be possible to ns so long as our spiritual executive is the same imperfect instrument and motive power that has brought us no further on our Christian way than where we now stand. It is manifestly true that the qualities of Christ are precisely those which 32 C/irtstian Dynamics. man requires to adapt him to his present place and develop his eternal growth, and therefore that we could do all things in him that strengtheneth us, if we had the mind of Christ, living to and from God speaking in us as he lived to and from God speaking in him ; but this will not be possible so long as we gaze upon him with only the pictorial faith, the outward eye which has its object at the dim distance of eighteen centuries, and instead of the image after which we were made formed within us, contemplates him as an aerial meteor of a world not ours, without roots in our humanity. The things that are impossible to man are possible to God : the things that are impossible to man without God are not only possible but natural to man when he co-operates with God working in him. You may gaze for ever on an example set before you, on a goodness which, if gained, would be the kingdom of heaven within you, and yet be nothing but a gazer, because your will is too feeble in resolve, your soul too untrue in impulse and in love to aim at and execute the work proposed. It is as vain to expect a common life from all orders of spirits, as to expect a common performance from all orders of instruments ; our inward nature, our personal being must become the seat of a new power before the aims and lessons of Christianity can be brought down, from the region of conception, to the business and the bosoms of men. It is fully understood how one man can accomplish apparently with ease what to another at the utmost tension of his existing capabilities is impossible ; and in the case of the same man at different times, how he Christian Dynamics. 33 may be so inspired, so full of strong desire, so braced and high-hearted, so set upon the execution of a purpose, or so languid and dispirited, as in effect to be two persons, at one moment equal to trample upon difficulties which at a less holy or resolute moment trample upon him. And it is not the amount of anxiety you bring to a work that carries you success- fully through it ; it is the power you bring to it ; and if the instrument is inadequate, no anxiety will avail, except so far as it contributes to raise the power. But in spiritual things zve are both instruments and agents ; we work with our souls, and to achieve higher or severer work, our soul, our personal power, must be recast, making what before was impossible to become possible through new indwellings of God. No man can do the works of Christ unless Christ be in him. If a man has not the spirit of Christ he is none of his : whilst his temper is vindictive he cannot forgive and love his enemy ; whilst his heart is worldly he cannot love and serve God without reserve. It is vain to set a high standard before us, unless there is an 'adequate loving and moving power within us. And this may account for the despondency, or resentment, that sinks or chafes many a heart when a wider vision of our higher life, and the great example of Christ, are pressed home upon it. It is conscious of increased demand without increased power or will to meet the demand. We become at enmity with truth which we cannot deny, and will not appropriate. With a mingled feeling of despair and injury the spirit stiffens and resents, as though a hard task- II. D 34 Christian Dynamics. master was continually Increasing work without in- creasing faculty. And it were indeed a vain expecta- tion to be uplifting for ever the standard of the cross of Christ, requiring the same spirit that had been unequal to a lower to rise to a loftier goodness. It is discouraging to be made to see with our minds, with our reasonable conscience, that our responsibilities are gathering, the way of a true life ascending, whilst ourselves remain the same, with not one fresh impulse of love, or hope, or faith. It is inevitable that one thus placed, under sense of a grander life, with no new force to live that life, must become an idealist, a spiritual voluptuary, or sink into a reproachful de- spondency, or take refuge in a determined distaste for the contemplation of Christian obligation, of the per- fection proper and possible to man. Conscious that in his existing state of soul and habit to profess to exemplify Christian standards would be a dream or an insincerity, a man who hates pretension is tempted to pronounce as absolutely visionary what is visionary to him, and in open scorn to take the lower place as the only real place, with a spiritual pride of his own which, because of its plain honesty, is not unpromising. This is, in part, the explanation of whence it is that Christianity has been ineffectual to rear in the general conscience its own standard. Christian life is growth from a seed, but in our ambitious way we have thought more of the great tree, with its top reaching unto heaven and the birds singing in the branches, than of the inward power that rears that stately grace. We have so perverted the parable that Christian Dynamics. 35 we make more of the visible grandeur than of the invisible vitaHty. In eagerness for results we have overlooked the hidden life, and lost our Lord's lesson. Christian obligations have been pressed, when it would have been better to present Christ himself. Even under the Gospel, the Law has been preached and trusted rather than the spirit. Mistaking the Master's directions we make dry' and hard demands for fruit, without supplying the tree with the waters of life. Unspiritual moralists are always reiterating their sterile cry for facts, and always distrusting, or failing to feed, the only source from which results can come with ever fresh grace and power. Out of the heart are the issues of life. It is altogether true that " by their fruits ye shall know them." But it is equally true, and on the same authority, that you cannot gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles — that only from a great heart great deeds can come. It is not the fruit that makes the tree, but the tree that makes the fruit. Men have set forth Christ as though he taught by commandments, another Moses enforcing a better law, a more enlightened Master in the same school and with the same discipline. But the method of his spiritual teaching is what is peculiar to Christ. He spoke seldom of an outward kingdom of heaven, of observable results, but continually of the seeds, the roots, the springs, the living relations with God that cannot fail to produce them. The Law came by Moses ; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Duty as an outward standard repels or appals ; living goodness attracts and subdues the 2,6 Christian Dynamics. whole nature in the conscious delight and awe of the desire and the power to do likewise. Too much has been said of the greatness of the work, too little of the only source from which it can proceed. We are all too didactic and preceptive, laying down the Law, making too little account of the heart of life, the springs of holy love moved of God to all fine issues. If a man is spiritually weak, failing in obvious duty, our method is to press down upon him a severer sense of his responsibilities, — that is not to raise the power but to increase the weight, as if by the rational act of enlarging his conception of what is required from him his will and aspiration must spring to the same proportions. Moralists will never enable us to be perfect men ; they can lay the burdens on our shoulders, they cannot touch the sense of power ; whereas if the spring of life is reached we lift these burdens willingly, and find in ourselves a law, receive from God a law, which carries us to fields of labour into which no mere Moralist can logically compel us, and from that law of the spirit, of self-sacrifice through love, we come to know that nothing is impossible to us. We must mark, indeed, with strictest eye our moral deficiencies, our shortcomings of duty towards God and towards man, as the dweller in the valley of Egypt when he marks the deficient crop knows where the river of life has not come. The dweller in the valley of Egypt can do nothing to make the flood swell, but to us in the spiritual husbandry it is given to touch the fountain spirit and bring the river of God's grace into our souls. When Christ was asked Christian Dynamics. 37 for the commandments of eternal life, he gave in the same breath the law and the spirit, the weight and the power ; thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself : all deficiencies in duty are deficiencies in love. We look the wrong way when we look to the vastness of the work, instead of to the power which makes the yoke easy, the burden light. We look the wrong way when we sigh over the heavy call "to do all things," and turn from the glory of being able to do all things in him that strengtheneth us ; that if there is no limit to the possibilities of man, it is because there is no limit to the fellowship and help of the spirit that worketh in him. Why measure our tasks, and leave the power which must accept these tasks, the soul that is in us, unlighted by the hope, cold to the love, uninspired by the faith, unvisited, unawed, ungladdened, by the living presences which would make duty a task no more, but the dear service that is perfect freedom, as with the heart the will of God is done in Heaven } The stature of our lives is the stature of our souls. We cannot have a divine life with a self-centred heart. No man acts beyond the height of his inspirations ; no spiritual man con- sents to act below them. What is his Soul } What is its range } What is its sensibility } What is its law } What aims, what standards does it place before him .'' With what divine persons does it hold him in communion as inspirers, standards, judges } This is the one vital question. Whether we can lead 38 Christian Dynamics. the lives of God's children, whether the Sermon on the Mount is a call to which we will respond, or can respond, depends upon our having souls that are bap- tized into the faith, filled through and through with the sense that God is the Father of our spirits, that every impulse to good is from Him, His prompting and leading, not our presumption. It is not for us to impose a spiritual law upon ourselves, but if God lays it upon us, then it is God who is drawing us to Him, and pledging Himself for the result. If He calls, and we hearken, He will not leave imperfect what He has begun. He will not deny the relation Himself established. He who took the first step in making us sons and heirs, will also take the last. He who calls us, will justify His call ; and He who justifies will also glorify; He will not desert us half- way upon the heights if we do not drop His hand. Whether we can do the works of Christ, whether w^e can feel that our natural life would be the filial sub- mission and obedience, the fraternal sympathy and self-sacrifice of the Sermon on the Mount, depends upon whether we have the spirit of Christ in us. As well try to make a tree grow by pulling forcibly at its top, as urge Christian perfection upon a man who at the living springs of his heart does not feel himself to be a child of God. The Sermon on the Mount is a hard law, it is an impossible law, except in the strength of the divine relationship it assumes. To the soul that feels the relationship, all is changed ; the law becomes inspiration ; its yoke our birth- right, our inheritance of glory ; and Christ's words, Christian Dynamics. 39 however slowly we may grow to them, neither strained nor strange, '* Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." If any one amongst us could feel, as St. Paul felt, that Christ was Son of Man and Son of God, if any man's soul was imbued through and through with the faith that he was so fathered and so brothered, that man could take up St. Paul's words in simplicity and truth, — " The love of Christ constraineth me : " "I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me." If any one thinks that this is refining overmuch, that without this movement in his soul he can serve all the needful purposes of life, and do his duty where providence has placed him, we ask, What is his life ? What is its purpose ? What are its ends } Is it to be a citizen of this world, or to be a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, to accept the soul that God has given us, with all its responsibilities of growth '^. Is it to have an honest and a kindly life for a time on earth, or is it to have, and to know that we have, an eternal life in God ? Nor for these ends have we to look beyond this life ; they are in our hearts to know them and do them, and their appointed accomplishment by us, our ac- complishment in them, is now on earth — not yet in heaven. We have only to hold our station, using its opportunities, accepting its sorrows as signs and wit- nesses of what has been, pledges and promises of what is to be. We are God's building : we work under Him ; we cannot, without spoiling it, hasten His work, or take its orders and directions out of the 40 Christian Dynamics. Master Builder's hands. If our appointed place, our work of life, is not as clear to the disciple as it was to the Master, is it not that we do not equally wait upon the inward signs, and yield ourselves to the divine p-romptings? He who looks into himself for the germs of faculty, and observes his fellow men and their wants with a sympathizing heart, cannot long be in doubt about at least some things which God would have him do ; and he cannot want light and leading whose soul is full of pictures from the life of him who was the Way and the Truth, who answered the prudential suggestions that sought to restrain him when God was calling him, "Are there not twelve hours in the day ? If a man walk in the day he stumbleth not." And we are learning to " do all things in him that strengtheneth us " when we exercise the mind, the heart, of the Son of Man within the near home circle designed to be the spiritual image of the whole Family. The Church is only a larger household of brethren, the spiritual children of one Father. And we are made to feel and know the divine signatures, the heavenly marks, on those of our own house, that we may be fitted to discern them everywhere. If we are faithful in that which is least, we shall be faithful in all, to the outermost circle of the alien or outcast ; for there are no two ways of spiritually looking upon man. We cannot see the divine imprint in one man without looking for it, believing in it, however latent, for all men. And so Christ, though honouring them with his dying lips, never exaggerated the claims o Christian Dynamics. 4^ blood and earthly lineage. He made them universal. His friends were the kindred of his spirit. He who stretched forth his hands and said, " Whoso doeth the will of my Father, the same is my mother, my brother, and my sister," could not exalt an accident at the expense of a spiritual reality. But the home comes before the world or the Church, as the nursery in which love is trained to "think no evil," discerning there as in a mirror of mankind "the heart of good- ness," how the sense of right can be strong under surface outbreaks of wrong, and gentleness and resent- ments, tenderness and jealousies, self-sacrifice and jets of passion, high thoughts and dishonouring habits, in- termingle with clearest signs that only the noblest will survive. No Christian man will deny that it is possible to grow for ever in the holy charity that is spiritual discernment ; and, as we have it, we have with it St. Paul's power " to do all things in him that strength- eneth," for it hopeth all things, beareth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things, and never fails- We " can do all things in him that strengtheneth us," when Christ is so formed within us, so lives in us, that as Members of his Body, which is his Church, we are in his personal relation to the Father, and receive the witness of the Spirit that we have eternal life from God. The flesh and the spirit, the mortal and the immortal, are indeed unequally yoked in our earthly frame ; but how else could the higher nature declare itself, strengthen under trial, and go on unto perfec- tion } How could we be assured of a living principle that unites us to God if it had no test, if it could 42 Christian Dynamics. not prove an indestructible life, that it depended not on circumstance, that temptations, even when yielded to, could not silence it, nor trouble overwhelm it, nor earthly confusion blot its witness out ? Yet must there be no violence. It is not by extinguishing any- thing natural to man that faith and the soul establish a kingdom of God on earth ; it is by preserving every element, honouring every member, recognizing the claim of every desire, but holding each in its own order, and in due subordination to what is higher than itself and to the whole. Natural infirmity is one of the conditions of spiritual strength, as a difficulty, a conflict, is the condition of a victory. What would be the worth of faith if nothing ever interposed between us and the unclouded face of God } It would be a small thing to have our eyes always turned 4:o the light of heaven if they were never dimmed and moistened by earthly tears.* The more complete a man is the more will they be so moistened, but the more also faith will supervene. No doubts could attach to the Fourth Gospel on the grounds that it would have been unworthy of Christ to have wept at the grave of Lazarus, touched by the profound pathos of that mortality which yet he knew to be but an incident in the divine life of man,t or to have ex- perienced the agony and preparation of self-distrust before the supreme hour in which he most signally * "Too proud would be the eye ne'er moistened by a tear." Blanco White, Life, vol. ii. p. 329. t " Sunt lachrymoe rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt." Virgil. Christia7i Dynamics. 43 witnessed to and glorified his Father in Heaven. If human nature had no legitimate weakness, and knew no mortal pang, how could spiritual life, personal faith in God, exist, or manifest itself? Our calling is to be Christians, not Stoics : we are not to destroy anything that is in man, but to stamp it all with the divine image ; and we deny ourselves only in exalting ourselves to our true vocation. He is but half a man who is not touched with the infirmities of man. We have not to be strong in ourselves, but, " tempted in all things," by choosing what we know to be our highest guidance, by obeying the heavenly voice, to let God perfect His strength in our weakness. Finally, we " can do all things in him that strengtheneth us" when, through much communion, we take the divine impress, and are changed into the same image as by the Spirit of the Lord. This is what is meant by putting on the Lord Jesus, by having the same mind in us that was in him, by being branches in the vine, having the same life-blood flowing through us. It is the burden of a still stronger metaphor, which appeared harsh even to Orientals who had through spiritual sympathy no key to his meaning. " How can this man give us his flesh to eat } " " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." For occasional effort we might collect occasional strength. Even feeble and capricious men can brace themselves to do magnanimous things upon occasion ; but for the con- stancy of the Christian life we must have a constancy 44 Christian Dynamics. of the Christian temper, and that comes only through the heart's converse with the Hving fountains of grace and goodness. There is a growth of pervading and dominant influence with which in kindred cases we are familiar. It is understood how the love and the power of nature gain upon us through thoughtful intercourse with Nature. It is understood how the discernment of beauty becomes delicate, as though a new sense was created, by familiarity with the master- pieces of Art. The eye rolls in finer light, and an organ, a faculty, an insight, is gradually communicated which no didactic teaching could convey. In the presence of Christ we come to see what we did not see before. We had walked like men born blind until our eyes were couched by the vivid light of living 'goodness. We may gaze long on the face of Nature without finding its spiritual expression ; but suddenly the complex harmony yields its meaning, and we look as it were upon the face of God. And so, when in the struggling elements of our life we meet the look of Christ and see our divine oppor- tunity, spiritual order is established, and we rise to his call in inspired strength, or behold ourselves as through his holy eyes in stricken penitence. And this we must remember : A spirit that can continually strengthen may not plead natural frailty or imperfection as exemption from the next step in self-conquest or progress. What is required from us is only growth out of a right heart ; not perfection, which belongs to God only, but a "going on imto perfection." IV. W\xt Initlt tftat mmmutU t\u WnU. I John v. 4, 5 : " This is the Victory that overcometh the World, even our Faith. And who is he that overcometh the World, but he that beheveth that Jesus is the Son of God ? " Religious differences among Christians would be of no significance if we were well grounded on what the scriptures mean by Faith. Faith is personal Trust in spiritual Beings, inspirers of the life that is in us as God is, realisers of the earthly possibilities of that life as Christ is. Faith is the inward Knowledge that a divine Life belongs to us, as the vocation of our nature, through our experience of promptings from Him who is its Source, and of affinities draw- ing us to those who have that life in themselves. Only the inspiring and upholding power of living Persons, making us partakers of ^their moral being, is of the essence of Faith. BeHef is not Faith : there may be Belief to any extent, and no Faith. A man may believe in God and have no faith in God, no sense of a living God near his bed, around his path, the providence of his life, the Holy Spirit in his 4-6 The Faith that overcometh the World. Conscience, the Appointer of the steps he should walk in. A man may believe in a future life and have no Faith in a future life, for Faith involves us, as children and as heirs, in the essential life of God, feels the eternal issues of our hearts, reads the present by its light, puts immortality into every dear affection, into the eyes through which we look on every child of man, on every opportunity from God. Belief in a future life may be a state of the understanding ; Faith in immortality, with the Martyr Stephen, sees the heavens opened, and the Son of Man, Mankind imaged in the Son of man, on the right hand of the throne of God. A man may believe in the existence and mission of Christ and have no Faith in Christ, no Christ formed within himself the hope of glory, dwelling in the heart by faith, to the end that, rooted and grounded in love, we so know the love of Christ that we too may be filled with the fulness of God our Father. And if faith does not consist in the belief of spiritual Existences, neither is it to be confounded with the acceptance of any doctrinal statements that can be put into words, or made the subjects of pro- positions respecting such Existences. Faith is not assent to propositions ; it is the sense of a living and supreme Authority in the hidden man of the heart. A man may accept any of the Creeds, of the Council of Trent, of the Confessions of Augsburg or West- minster, of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and be without the Faith that overcomes the World. We may know nothing of a man's Faith, The Faith that overcometh the World. 47 of the life that feeds his soul, when we have fully ascertained his Creed. Neither is Faith attained by the most unhesitating acceptance of an historical Revelation. You may receive all the facts, or statements, in both the Testa- ments, and neither understand, nor be ruled by their spirit, having nothing in yourself of the confidingness of Abraham, of the loyalty of Moses, of the suscepti- bility of David, of the spirituality of Isaiah, of the fire of Paul, of the filial heart of Christ. Once more, — to close our account of what Faith is not, — we have no Faith in what we fear. Faith, like Love, casts out fear. Objects of terror cannot be objects of trust : we cannot live in them, and by them, an inspired and blessed life. They may be accepted as realities, and they may be realities,— sin, tempta- tion, pain, moral corruptions, the separations of death, — and then if our faith in God does not illumine, interpret, and subdue them, they will extinguish our faith in God. Awe and reverence attract ; elements in the love and confidence that cannot be shaken ; fear repels. The Apostle determined the character- istic difference between Belief and Faith;— "the Devils believe and tremble." The clear proof that none of these constitute Faith is the absence from them all of its essential attribute, " the power of over- coming the World." We all know how possible it is to accept the whole Christian Religion, and yet to let the World dwell too close to our hearts, to be the slaves of its pleasures, the dupes of its vanities, the puppets of its breath. We all know how possible 48 The Faith that overcometh the World. it is to give our assent to awful facts of life and death and judgment, and yet to have sensuaHty and sloth rotting our noblest powers, or the worm of envy and mean jealousies gnawing at our hearts. And we all know that terror overcomes nothing but the abject mind it terrifies — that it is not gladdening, elevating, self-forgetting — that in their hours of despair men become reckless and abandoned. States of Faith, then, are states of spiritual Vitality in which our souls respond to the touch of living Powers who appeal to what is highest in us. We are in states of Faith w^hen God, and the image of God in our humanity, are personally operative on the conscience and the heart, on hope, on love, on aspira- tion — when the light of all our seeing is drawn from the Father who moves in us, and sustained by the obedience of His holy child in whom the light was life. When is there faith in God } When He quickens our conscience, unveils our sins, destroys our solitude, thrusts the awful glory of His righteousness on our every retreat, and through all that can disquiet or alarm sheds from Himself a peace thatpasseth under- standing. When is there faith in Christ t When he so lives in us, the image upon Earth of our divinest vocation, that he will not let us sink below his own standard, or violate his spirit, without acute pain and shame as guilty of resisting the witness, entreaty, and appeal beyond which none can be conceived, and crucifying the Son of God afresh. When is there faith in Immortality? When it makes sacred in our eyes the spiritual nature of every man ; and sets every The Faith that over come th the World. 49 joy, sorrow, and temptation, God's promise, or God's discipline, in the light of that essential, eternal, life which is fellowship with Him. Take, in confirmation, the great examples and heroes of Faith. Abraham is the Old Testament type of its perfectness. What did he believe } He believed nothing to which the word " what " will apply. You must put it in the personal form, " Whom " did he believe. He believed God, not merely that He is, or anything whatever of the modes of His being, but that He is true and faithful, incapable of deceiving, incapable of betraying, incapable of disappointing an expectation Himself has raised — and that having come into personal relations with him, and spoken a word to his inmost soul, nothing in the world of outward experiences could be found in irreconcilable contradiction to the promise and whisper of His spirit. And what was the nature of the temptations that tried in vain to shake this faith 1 The trials of Abraham's faith, if they were repeated every day, are not of a nature to prevent any man signing any of the Creeds ; against no Belief of that sort would his practical difficulties have had the slightest disturbing power. Nor were they of the nature of those mysteries of speculation, of scientific analysis, which by disinclining men to theories of God cause them with such blind precipitancy to be classed, and some- times to class themselves, with unbelievers. No — but they were of the nature of those dread mysteries of life which still assail the sinking heart of man, which try to dim the spiritual eye by crowding on 11. E 50 The Faith that overco7neth the World. it repugnant things as the only realities, and in the face of dark experiences to pluck the bright hope out of the soul. When present and palpable fact, broad, prominent, awful, undeniable, conflicts with a divine expectation, contradicts it, postpones its completion, seems to render it impossible, laughs it to scorn, then are we tried with the trials of Abraham's faith. When Nations go back in civilization, when they avow great principles only the more pointedly to give them the lie, when they break up old governments in the names of liberty, fraternity, equality, only, in the quick dis- appointment of incapacity, to deliver themselves to a master, and surrender the reins to a selfish despot, — or, having written on their Charter of Independence that all men have equal rights, make a man a chattel and a property with no personal rights, then might the faith that looks for the coming of God's Kingdom to Earth be tried with more than the trials of Abraham's faith, for the predicted ages recede in- definitely, the powers of life seem to be tried and found wanting, the principles that are professed are the principles that are dishonoured : men know the Truth, and it does not make them free. Again, as often as human life is without sacred- ness, without sense of responsibility, without felt connection with God and with His purposes, without any of the deep affections which guard themselves from pollution, when body and soul seem of one mould, so that death appears not to take the dis- honoured spirit from the clay, but rather to return the whole whence it came, earth to earth, ashes to The Faith that ovcrcometh the World. 51 ashes, dust to dust, then does faith in human im- mortahty pass through an ordeal far more dishearten- ing than Abraham's trial, for here the difficulty is to show any ground for faith, to make out the claim of such a being to an eternal life, for to commit him to annihilation would seem no injustice to his nature, no disappointment to his hopes. Again, when human misery rolls around us like the waves of a restless sea, and threatens to over- whelm all that it surrounds, when philanthropy can only wring helpless hands, and the wisdom of the wisest do no more than suggest palliative measures to reduce the woe when it appears, when the bene- volence of the world is for the most part employed in filtering the foul stream of evil, curative rather than preventive, wrestling with ills as they arise but not knowing how to close their open fountains, and when all this exists at the most advanced period of civiliza- tion, when there is more wealth, more knowledge, more power, more accumulated capital, more instru- ments of production, more facilities of distribution, more thought, more energy of love concentrated on this one problem, of how to mitigate and destroy the sources of human wretchedness, than earth ever witnessed before, then does a heavier cloud attempt to obscure faith in providence than weighed upon the heart of Abraham, for he had only to wait in trust for God's action, whereas we amid the unreduced sufferings and horrors of the brightest era of man- kind, in war and universal preparations for war, in bloodshed and inhuman ambitions, in the public good 52 The Faith that overconieth the World. subverted for selfish ends by the unscrupulous false- hood and baseness of party politics, have to discover for ourselves the secret of His rule, the traces of His presence, the underlying purpose of peace on earth and goodwill to men, and then by our own insight, sacrifice, and action to work His Will, and vindicate His ways. We perceive, then, what was the nature of Abra- ham's faith, and what in our own experience is of like nature to it ; and we know that this, and no other, is the type of New Testament faith. " He is the father," says St. Paul, " of all them that have Trust, of all, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, who walk in the steps of his Faith." Read the chapter in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the lives and deeds of the heroes of Faith are recorded, and you will find their spiritual rank measured by their reliance on the inward whisper and promise of God's spirit, when all the outward world of experience seemed in arms against their hopes. Or turn to Christ's words, and observe what kind of Faith it must be, to suit the case, when he delights in a man because of its force, and speaks, or looks, him into shame because of its weakness. When the centurion, a Roman soldier whose creed was far from faultless, besought him to heal his servant, in the confidence that the powers of disease were as much at our Lord's command as the soldiers of his own troop were obedient to his orders, it was surely not of his beliefs but of his trust that Christ said, " I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel : go thy way, and accord- The Faith that overcometh the World. 5 J ing to thy faith be it unto thee." When he thanked God that what was hidden from the wise and prudent was clear to babes — when he rebuked the faihng faith of the disciples in their fear that he and they were perishing together in the Lake of Galilee — when he caught Peter by the hand and upheld him on the water, saying, " O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt ? " — when he spoke of the Faith that could remove mountains of difficulty, is there a moment's doubt that he was speaking of personal reliance on God, of the heart's occupation by Almighty goodness and holiness, of the all-conquering enthusiasm of the affections and the will when they have living inspirers and leaders, and feel the spiritual world and its interests to be supreme, real, and near. And there is no true sense in which Faith and Reason are opposed. Faith has no sphere into which Reason does not penetrate. Reason and experience present the evidence when Faith discerns the inward meaning, seizes the clue, and confides in the invisible reality. Reason, indeed, has a sphere which does not belong to Faith, because the things within that sphere are not of a spiritual nature, having other witnesses than those from the soul : but faith has no sphere which does not also belong to reason. When I have faith in a man, because of my experience of him, that he is good and just and true, my conviction is not of the -nature of demonstration, nor can we say of any man that it is absolutely impossible he should dis- appoint our confidence, yet our faith is founded on large grounds of reason and experience submitted to 54 The Faith that over comet h the World. our inward moral discernment. And so is it with our Faith in God : the Reason that commends it is more absolute, the experience it springs from immeasurably richer, its witnesses everywhere, without beginning and without end, still it is spiritually discerned, the soul acknowledges it, the heart is possessed by it : it does not belong to the department of sense or of science. Things known by demonstration, or sensible experience, or unquestionable testimony, or logical inference, are not matters of Faith ; there is neither generosity, nor purity of heart, nor childlike simplicity and prophetic vision, in believing them : you could not disbelieve them if you would. But God appeals, trusts for the acknowledgment of Himself, to the insight of the soul, the witness of the heart. You are now within the region of Faith, but you are not out of the region of Reason ; you are where there is no demonstration, and the outward eye does not perceive its objects, and testimony without witness of the spirit is of no avail, but you are where consciousness has had commanding experiences and large discourse of God, and where Faith, the apprehensions of the soul, are not less reasonable, though of a higher order, than the perceptions of the understanding and the senses. Faith is properly contrasted with sight and syllogism, not with Reason. All convictions of Faith are also convictions of Reason, but Faith has its realm wherever, over and above facts and logic, spiritual discernment is required. And even more palpably groundless than the supposed opposition of Faith and Reason is the sup- The Faith that ovei^ comet h the World. 55 posed opposition of Faith and Works. A faith that does not operate is as much a contradiction in terms as a magnet that does not attract. BeHef may be a purely intellectual state touching no active emotion, but " Faith worketh by love." It is of its essence that it lives and moves, and has its being, in, and for, and towards those in whom its trust is, its objects of worship, its models of duty, its springs of inspiration. The living God, and the living imprint of God in our humanity, become, through faith, the feeders, the comforters, the instigators, the standards and masters of our existence. Faith is that condition of convic- tion and emotion, of will, affection and desire, in which whatever is real and enduring in us is felt to belong to a Divine Life of which we are partakers through the spirit of our Father in us, an inexhaust- ible life, of endless growth, hid with Christ in God. It is the prompter and support of all effort, of all interest in the souls of men, of all sacrifice and prac- tical goodness. How could we love and toil for a nature in which we had no faith, no faith that God cares for it and holds it sacred, no faith that, at the best, it is anything more than a flowering weed hurry- ing away on the stream of time } Or, how without Faith could we discharge the highest offices of love, to be the friends of a man's soul, to resist him in his evil, to lose our lower life, ease, and pleasure, for his gain, to wound him that God may heal him, to endure giving him pain and suffering for the sake of that without which he is dead while he liveth ? It was through Faith that a son of God was able to be 56 The Faith that overcometh the World. a Brother to other children of God who as yet had no understanding of his spirit. " I am not alone, for the Father is with me." But a man without Faith has neither a Father nor Brethren of his spirit, and when he mingles with men he shares their worldliness, or hides apart in awful solitude. It is the root of all reverence, of all respect for ourselves or others, for if a man does not cleave to One who is ever drawing him upwards, ever convicting him of evil by ever inviting him to holier life revealed to conscience, what is self- reverence but pitiful self-idolatry? And it is the reconciling, the binding, the cementing power in human life. Beliefs separate ; Faith unites. Opinion, speculation, pride of intellect, pride of knowledge, are schismatic powers. Faith draws into one church of the living God all who thirst for the divine life breathed forth by our Father, and taken in by a Son who lived in, and by. Faith. St. Paul speaks of the righteousness of Faith, and the school men reconciled Sin and Salvation by imputing Righteousness to faith alone ; but the real opposite to the righteousness of faith would be the absence of righteousness where there is no faith. The righteousness of Faith is the righteousness that springs from Faith, the mighty works of love and sacrifice that are born of Faith, and what is contrasted with this is the dwarfed stature of goodness, the poor sapless life, the timid or mean ambitions, the unaspiring heart of a man who is without faith in God, or in the reality of any image of God in humanity, who draws his life only from himself, who, in scripture imagery, is as a stagnant The Faith that over comet h the World. 57 cistern of wasting water, with no fresh, inexhaustible, supplies from a living Fountain. Faith is concerned with life, with spiritual realities, with hunger and thirst for righteousness, with aspira- tion and effort after all purity and goodness, growing out of trust in the moral Inspirer of our conscience, animated and upheld by the Models of true life, the life that cannot perish, in those children of our Father who, touched by our infirmities, tempted as we are, have reached towards the stature of perfect Man. Belief is concerned with intellectual apprehensions, with the mind's opinions, inferences, or perceptions of truth abstract or experimental. We believe in God when we infer a First Cause. We have faith in God when we know that we are never alone, that we are " haunted for ever by the eternal Mind," by the Spirit who can- not separate Himself from His children, " partakers of the divine nature," made in His image, and by Him for ever called to grow therein. " Can a woman forget her child f The symbol is too weak; she is not the source of life, author and giver of good. " Yea, she may forget, yet will not I forget." And God teaches and invites by sample : He nourishes and encourages faith in the life He prompts by the power and grace of a Son of Man who had faith in the spirit of his Father, in whom light became life. The movement of God's spirit in every soul of man now reveals in Christ to what, to whom, it points. Scepticism cannot chill it by uttering the mocking words. Unreal, Unreal. In " the captain and per- fecter of Faith," we have " the substance of things 58 The Faith that over comet h the World. hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ; " " the Desire of our eyes " set before us ; the things that are counted weak overcoming what the world deems strong ; meekness, purity, love for God and Man, the soul's eternal life, reducing to nothing all other dis- tinctions ; the servant of all, the Master of all, in his most commanding attitude when stooping to wash men's feet ; serving, living, and dying for his brethren because they were the children of his Father ; and whilst seeking not his own raised, with acknowledged authority, to the place of highest greatness, as the most perfect type of life which heaven permits to earth. And now, how are we to strengthen that Faith through which the world is overcome ? By becoming children of God ourselves, through observing and honouring the inspirations of our Father. The promptings of Faith it is not ours to originate ; that is God's work in us ; it is ours to keep, cherish, and obey them. We can quench His Spirit in us by not listening for it, by disregarding and dishonouring it. God gives to every man as much of the suggestions of holiness, love, and faith as he will receive, — but the Holy Spirit respects the reserve which is everywhere the law of spiritual intercourse. God offers Himself, but does not force Himself on a reluctant soul. He could not do it without superseding Faith itself, with- out extinguishing our spiritual life with all that is free and filial in trust and love. Therefore we can turn from Him if we will, and let Faith perish because its promptings are dishonoured. Like all The Faith that ovcrcomcth the World. 59 living powers it is strengthened by its own acts, by works of faith adequate to express it, by prayers of faith breathed out of the Hfe which God quickens, and reaching towards the Hfe which Christ fulfilled, by meditations of faith keeping its realities near the springs of our being, '' musing till the fire burns." In whom a man trusts and lives depends on his obedi- ence, in sonship or in bondage, to the spirit working in him. No man can expect that the Holy Spirit will continue to be imaged in the mirror of a nature that is turned away from Him, that is clouded with impurity, disordered or convulsed by unworthy pas- sions. The faiths of the soul are kept bright by the corresponding fulfilments of the life, and a dishon- oured nature gives no fresh revelations. Every impulse from God that leads to nothing retires ; or, if it remains, remains only as a sting. If we had kept the primal harmony of being which Christ character- ized as the image of the kingdom of God in the un- spoiled instincts of our childhood, if daily obedience as the sphere of life gently opened had kept clear the fountain of living water, and the spiritual ear attentive to His whisper in us, to what energy of faith and purity of discernment, and continual delight in action, might we not have reached as by the stages of a natural growth ! And to one who would become God's child again the way is always open. We have but to look into His face to know that we had been walking in our own shadows, that we had turned away from Him, not He from us. He who takes it for his essential life to work out what God works in 6o The Faith that overcometh the World. him, will fill his soul, and the world of opportunities, with the presence of the Holy One. He who for righteousness' sake overcomes whatever is lower, in obedience to his Father's spirit, will come to know what it is to have Christ formed within him, dwellino" in his heart by faith. And he who loves his earthly friends and all his earthly fellowships for the sake of what is sacred in him and them, will never, in any shadows of the valley of sin and death, lose sight of the fulfilment of the promises as sure as God is true, nor feel himself far from the family in heaven, the household of our Father, the unwaning lights in the city of the Eternal King. V. Ephesians v. I : *' Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children." A RELIGION that, rooted in the Fatherhood of God, legitimately makes such an appeal, and looks for such issues of life, has no natural connection with error or limitation, and is potentially coextensive with absolute truth, absolute goodness, and the service which is perfect freedom. When Christ said, "Be ye perfect even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect," he condemned all theologies which make piety foreign to man, and declared our spiritual nature to be constituted in and for God. We cannot grow unto a likeness of God unless a seed of God is in us. Whatever accidental errors may have histori- cally connected themselves with such a Religion, it is not answerable for them ; they are not growths from it, but accretions and hindrances upon it. It is no more answerable for them than the stars are answer- able for the Ptolemaic system, indeed far less, for the stars utter no audible protests against false theories, 62 The Fatherhood of God. they do not warn men against misinterpretations in spoken words as God in Christ has clearly done. It is plain that a Religion which in impulse and in object is coincident with the eternal Spirit, and proposes no aim but the development in man of fellowship with the All"perfect, can have no essential connection with anything transient or imperfect ; such things may, through human frailty and inherited prejudice, cling to it for a time, but they must fall off as not belong- ing to it, since its own roots are in the living springs whence proceed Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the harmonious Laws of universal being ; its prompting force is communion with the holy Love that rules in all things, and its limit is God Himself The imperfect medium of its first hearers and later interpreters, the accidents of transmission, the false philosophies of the ages, may have encumbered it with many mixtures of obscurity and misconception, but by native power it separates itself from these as freely as the wind blows the cloud, and the sun melts the vapour, off the face of heaven. Asserting nothing, aiming at nothing, but the possibility, duty, and delight of growing oneness with God, it Is manifest that it casts off whatever proves not to be of God, that in its principle it is coincident with all Truth, in its spirit with all Goodness. Even if it could be proved, which in its essential issues or germs of growth cannot be proved, that the Teacher of this religion stood with his contemporaries at an early and imperfect stage of opinion in relation to some questions of social or prudential ethics, this The Fatherhood of God. 6 would not touch the perfection of a religion which impregnates man with quickening principles and methods, which does not profess to give the results of speculative discussion on every human interest, but to draw men's souls towards the Fountain of truth, to fill them with a right spirit, to train them to a right method, to set their faces in the direction of the Source of light. A Master who taught his followers that they must think through God's mind, and feel through God's heart, and act through the inspirations of God's righteous will, remains the same, yesterday, to-day, and for ever, through whatever growths his own spirit may develop, as an oak remains the same when by vital power it expands in height and girth, or overgrows an accidental scar ; and when Christ taught men that because of kindred nature, because they were God's children, their truth must be as God's thoughts, their affections as God's love, there lives as God's holy will, he gave us commission to disown, in his name, whatever was not of God, even though a thousand scriptures should appear to contain it. If Ave are to grow, through the quickenings of God, towards God, it would be monstrous to suppose that nothing new was to develope itself, or that any former state of man could be the measure and standard of his last. If men grow they must change for the better, and if they change for the better a time must come when, continuing one in spirit, they shall have outgrown all former products of that spirit, all but the perfect Son himself. If he is one in affection and spirit with the Father; if the Almighty Will still flows into him and 64 The Fatherhood of God. becomes his own ; if his life in heaven as his Hfe on earth is ever in the plane of God's action ; if he still grows, as he taught his followers to grow, from a root of God, they can never outgrow him ; he remains the representative Head of Man, Leader and Lord for ever. It is vital for us to feel that when Christ calls us to be followers of God as dear children he is not issuing strained or impossible orders ; that he is appealing to principles acknowledged, authenticated, and reissued by our own souls ; that he is calling us to act not against our nature but according to our nature, — according to our whole nature whenever, as a whole, it is harmonized with itself, and against even its low^er and perishable impulses only when they are permitted to break the unity of our being, and, instead of keeping their place of orderly subordination, to riot and rule alone. By the natural supremacy in us of conscience and of love we are constituted in and for God. This argument which gives obligation to Christ's appeal by the response to it in our own souls, drawn not from what we are but from what we are inwardly moved to be, has to be deeply and universally felt if the Christ is to be " formed within us." Insensibility to us was, and is, the ground of the World's unbelief Christ himself was grossly misunderstood because men would not adopt his introspective method in spiritual things, and verify what he declared by look- ing inwards to read what God had written in their hearts. What, mainly, are the Gospels but records of The Fatherhood of God. 65 attempts on Christ's part to make the inward nature of man a witness to God's spirit, and of misconcep- tions on the disciples' part when they could not understand his appeals to their spiritual consciousness, and asked him to speak more plainly ? Nay more, what to this hour perpetuates the grossest misconcep- tions of his spirit and his truth, permits the most incongruous mixtures to obscure his doctrine and overlay his power, but the preference of men for out- ward before inward and spiritual teaching, for pictures in words before pregnant principles, for schemes of salvation on definite verbal and logical systems that can be learned like a catechism, before seeds of Faith deep hidden in man's nature but reaching towards the Infinite ? What made, and makes, the Christian Church a House divided against itself, and the Refor- mation to become Anti-Christ, cursing more than blessing, breaking the unity of the spirit into mutually repelling factions denouncing and condemning one another, restoring to Romanism the breath of its life, but incapacity, because of unbelief, to develop our whole theology from what is contained in the first words of the Lord's Prayer, that God is our Father, that the pure in heart see Him as He is, and believe with the heart unto righteousness, — to take the spiritual issues from this faith as our truth and life, and cast off whatever is inconsistent with them as alien alike to God, to Christ, and to us ? The essential principle from which religious life proceeds is that God has given us a spiritual nature kindred to His own, so that our perceptions of right, II. F 66 The Fatherhood of God. our love and pursuit of goodness, our reverence for holiness, are in their essence identical with the affec- tions and principles that exist and reign in Him. If this were not so, to call God our Father would be to use words meaningless or false. A Parent is one who imparts his own nature. This alone separates the idea of a Creator from the idea of a Father, and accordingly we do not call God the Father of animals, rocks, and trees. If this were not so Religion would be as impossible to us as it is to animals, rocks, and trees, for the feeling and conception of God must be for ever inaccessible to us if God did not implant it in us, if God in the Conscience did not reveal to us that it cannot be its own source, that a Holy Spirit breathes in it and holds towards it the relation of Inspirer, Sustainer, Reprover, and Judge. It is the portion of kindred intellect God has given us that enables us to discern the traces of the infinite Reason. As the print of footsteps on the sand of a desert shore makes known to the shipwrecked that a man has been there, so when the mind of man begins to read the Universe he discovers with awe and trembling the imprint of his own thought upon creation's face. He is stirred with reverent fear to find himself so near the Source of all things, for knowing our weakness, our dependence, our beginning, our end, our conditioned being, what could so move us to the recognition of one fountain Spirit as that Nature, which to us seems infinite in space and eternal in time, should thus reflect upon us our own image ? God, says Plato, works by^Geometry. Now, that science is a pure creation of human thought, TJie FatJici'Jiood of God. 6j absolutely independent of material things. It borrows nothing from experience, and asks no verifications from without. Yet when we turn to the Universe, we find the Creator and Ordainer framing and disposing His Works according to principles which in the abstract, without reference to concrete things, reveal themselves as necessary truths to the intellect of man. Could there be clearer evidence that the God who made the worlds gave Man a share in the principles of thought and reason according to which the worlds were fashioned .^ As has been finely said, " We think God's thoughts after Him." A star which was never seen is first discovered in the Astronomer's calculating mind as a necessity from God's laws, and then the telescope is set to look for it, diwd finds it. I do not adduce this to prove that the same God made the universe and man, but what is immeasurably higher, that the God who made the Universe made Man in His own Image, gave him in understanding an access to Himself, capacity for approaching for ever towards the infinite Mind. God is the Creator of animal instinct and intelligence : He is the Father and Original of human Reason. In the Spiritual World our access to Him is more direct, our kindred nature more obvious. The Uni- verse and our own intellect display a God of power and wisdom virtually infinite to us, but only our spiritual nature manifests a God of infinite Goodness, gives us an awe of Holiness, sets up in us a standard of Perfection, and, all frail as we are, binds us in closest ties to a spirit before whom Sin must tremble 68 The Fatherhood of God. and hide its face. The outward world is not the Mirror, or manifestation, of absolute Goodness ; that revelation is given to and by the human soul. Whence is this ? What are we that we should dream of Per- fection } What are we that we should think of being saints, and be abashed every day because we are not } What are we that we should deal to ourselves such hard measure as to try our thoughts, our deeds, our virtues, our sacrifices, by the exactions of a Goodness which we do not see exemplified, and which con- demns our best as shortcoming and poor .'' Who, or what, is He who is constantly judging us, touching us with a sense of unworthiness, though we never see Him, so that all our days are passed under the shadow of His tribunal } Why do we not cast off this awful, invisible Exactor, and lead the free life of unspurred, unbridled Nature t We cannot ; the con- science that is in us is not our own, and we cannot set aside one tittle of its Law ; the Spirit that is in us prompts, orders and commands, and has its authority acknowledged : every man knows that he is not dealing with himself alone ; that when guilt-stricken and full of remorse, he is not merely condemning himself, but trembling and bowing his head before the God and Father of his spirit. God calls us daily to an unattained Goodness ; our own nature responds to the righteousness of the call ; and this is just the relation between a Heavenly Father and an aspiring Child. Have we no objective verification of this spiritual obligation to follow God as dear children ? Have we The Fat hei' hood of God. 69 no outward sign that we have not mistaken the inward voice, that we are not dreaming of a duty and a glory to which we are not called, for which we are not fitted ? Yes ; what our spiritual nature preaches and prophesies, Christ fulfilled. In him God put the crown of accomplishment on the indications of Conscience, on the filial aspirations of the soul. There is our warrant, our encouragement, or our condemnation ; for he who in his own person con- demned and conquered sin in the flesh, now con- demns us if sin has dominion over us. And if God is our Father, what is our birthright ? Let us enter on our inheritance ; " if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ." What is involved in this relation when we take it in its fulness, feel it as a faith, and adopt it as a life } It is possible to feel strong movements of it in our nature without obeying it. It is possible to know much of struggle and endeavour under constraint of law with- out sense of divine encouragement, or glow from God on the affections. Only when faith and love beget Jife, and life strengthens and verifies feeling, and this action and reaction have long gone on, does the fulness of the relation become known, and a richer experience grows out of faith, and faith is brightened every day by the fuller testimonies of experience. The initial sense of divine relations, out of which proceeds the exhortation to follow God as dear children, without which the exhortation would fall as dead and meaningless as if addressed to a stone, involves the faith that by fellowship of spirit He 7o The Fatherhood of God. has immediate access to us, and we have immediate access to Him ; that by instigations, promptings, reproofs, calls, and opportunities in the discipline of His providence He is for ever seeking us, doing all that is possible to draw us to Himself without destroying our individual will, forcing our affec- tions, and so obliterating the divine .image in us; that nothing intercepts this action of God but the darkening of the heart through disobedience, the surrender of ourselves to the lower Instincts of our being through the suppression of the higher ; that our Father, because He is our Father, will persevere for ever with the applications of His Spirit until we ''come to ourselves," and to Him our light of life ; that to whatever depth the sinner may have sunk he cannot annihilate the neglected seeds of '' the divine nature " in him; that the moment "he comes to himself" there is an open way to his Father, with visita- tions growing in power and clearness with the rever- ence they receive ; that on this way of ascent, since there can be nothing in God's spiritual being of which God's child may not partake, and God is infinite, there must be eternal ages through which to grow into the likeness of the Perfect, — the immortality needed for such a destiny being manifestly the birthright of a child of the Eternal. Will you say that this is too much to Infer from the words " Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name" ? Yes, truly, if it is but a word. Yes, truly, if you think that Christ, and the witnessing spirit in you, are mocking you with metaphors. But The Fatherhood of God. 71 if it is a true word, and not an irreverent fiction, then all that we have deduced from it is but the poorest shadow of the glory it involves. If Christ was not " speaking that which he- did know," if he was using figures of speech with no corresponding reality, then, indeed, we should have no outward verifica- tion of the law and the prophets in our souls, and the charge of the Jews against the Christ, that he w^as blaspheming when he called God his Father, would hold good. The charge is meaningless against him who lived his doctrine, and achieved the Son- ship he declared. " Say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world. Thou blas- phemest ; because I said, I am the Son of God } If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." I have used the word " Inspiration " to express the communion of God's spirit wdth our own. We feel that He is in communication with our Conscience to prompt us to goodness, to filial and brotherly acts of service, and to impress the authority and sanctity ,of His Will upon us when we are inclined to shrink from its severity. At critical times in our life, under the sense of failure, weakness, and disappointment, in the discovery of some root of evil in those with whom we are allied, or to whom we have given our love, or of some dread hollowness in ourselves ; then, when all security seems to be drifting away, and the foun- dations of our being to be breaking up, if we turn for refuge to the faithfulness of God, the Father and Inspirer of the nature w^hich seems to be betraying 72 The Fatherhood of God. us, in that moment of light, the light of the know- ledge of the Holy One, all our trusts revive in the clear discernment of the soul that the faithlessness is with ourselves, that we have fallen away from Him, not He from us. This is inspiration : when a peace that passeth understanding, which does not belong to the circumstance, but comes from Him. who is above the circumstance, " is shed abroad in our hearts." It is deplorable that even the Christianity which exists amongst us, false views of the Mediation of Christ tend to obstruct personal communion with the Holy Spirit, to enfeeble the sense of the direct access of God to the spirits of His children. It is a tendency that has become Anti-Christ, for by it Christ is made to subvert His own purposes, when instead of ''showing'' us the Father, leading us to God Him- self, the Bible and Christ become substitutes for God. This is essentially idolatry. Anything, however excel- lent, however needful, that supplants God becomes an idol, and we are in the practice of idolatry when we so employ it. We make even Christ an idol, we make our elder brother our God, if he does not so lead us to the Fountain of our souls that we feel our Father's spirit moving in ourselves. Only when we adopt into our life this religion of the Father does faith in God acquire its full power, when we hearken to every prompting, and give obedience to every \vord — the obedience of an earnest and loving child, though with struggle and against the will of the flesh, until it becomes the unconstrained service which is perfect freedom, when inspiration and desire, no more The Fatherhood of God. jt^ at conflict, unite their strength in a holy will as the actuating and the consenting forces of the soul. Then shall we be growing into the likeness of God, in all we do, in all we forbear to do, our whole ordi- nary life become religious and prophetic, our con- versation as religious as our prayers, our relaxations as our toils, our fellowship with all orders and con- ditions of men the issue and outflow of our fellow- ship with their Father and our Father. Is the difficulty of this still the strongest impres- sion that remains with us ? But, Christ achieved it. Will you say that he is no example for us ? Why so .? Are you sure that it was not also difficult to him ? Rather, must you not be made certain, if you study his life, that in its initial stage, which is our stage, it was difficult to him .^ Why do we go on looking at him as a celestial being belonging to another world, a passing angel cleaving with bright w^ing our earthly atmosphere, and never learn to look at him as he really was, the man Christ Jesus, tempted in all things even as we are, touched with a feeling of our infirmities, encompassed by our conditions, rising, not without struggle, out of the trials of our humanity because ever listening for his Father's voice } Why do we not realize what he tells us of his heart's sorrows, loneliness, and sinkings ; out of what long faintings went forth the cry, " My God, let this cup pass from me," and how the thought, the prayer, that gave him strength, " Father ! Thy will be done," is the prayer that in words we utter every day } It is not that Religion has not had, and has not still, the 74 ^>^^ Fatherhood of God. power to wring mighty sacrifices from men, for in no other name, in no other cause, have men willingly undergone so much. What else could exact such frightful penances, such dreary, cheerless lives, such obscure, unhonoured hardships, such utter excrucia- tions of nature ? But the religion that has done this has too rarely been the religion of the Fatherhood of God. Some distortion of Religion, the terror of the future, the fear of judgment, the possibility of escape by voluntary penalties, have taken stronger hold upon certain self-regarding portions of our nature than has the love of the All-holy, and the All-merciful, upon our whole being. Men who worship God as a Sove- reign to be expiated, believing that by nature and Birth-sin they are aliens, with no access to Him, un- able to do His will and under sentence of condem- nation, have realized and paid the uttermost sacrifices that Fear or Law could suggest, — but how many of us have, with equal vividness, gratefully felt and gladly paid, the filial service faith in Him as a Father prompts. If in that character we have not embraced Him, the power that lies in the relation has not yet come forth. In this there is a reserve of hope for the w^orld : for if the imperfect Religions have extorted so much, only because distrust of Him, and care for self, could terrorize imagination, what blessed king- dom of heaven on earth has the religion of the Father, " Be ye perfect, for I am perfect," yet to produce ! When shall we begin to believe the words we speak, to live the faith we profess ? How poor we are ! How puny the doings, how timid the The Fatherhood of God. 75 hopes, how faithless the fears, how stinted the human charities, how downcast the mien, how low the ambi- tions, how faltering the onward steps of those who yet walk under banners that bear the inspiring words, " Be ye followers of God as dear Children." VI. Luke xvii. 20 : " The kingdom of God cometh not with observation : neither shall they say, Lo here ! or, lo there ! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you." A MIND in willing subjection to the spirit of the Gospel is the Kingdom of God. He reigns in the Heart whose will is one with His. He has a King- dom where Truth is sought and followed ; where Hope with Love are ruling ; and all the Strength we have is striving to give Life and Body to the inner faiths of Heart and Soul and Mind. The expression, " The kingdom of God," through that common figure of language which by fine tran- sition passes from means to end, from cause to effect, from process to result, or vice-versa^ is often employed in the New Testament to denote the Power that brings the soul into harmony with God, — any . or every portion of that quickening Life which we gather into one complex name, and call Chris- tianity, — but this leads to no ambiguity, and only implies such absolute reliance on the Grace of God The Kingdom of God witJwiit Observation. 7 7 in the Gospel of His Son that the same words desig- nate the Power that acts upon the souls of men and the glorious consummation of its Work, the centre of intense individual life from which the Kingdom of Heaven begins to extend, and its universal extension in the World. And whether by this comprehensive expression we are to understand a soul which the Father of Spirits has drawn into harmony with Him- self, or the living Power, that works on character and moulds it to God's Will, or the whole Family of Mankind, when it shall consist of saintly souls and be a Family of God, — in either of these senses, it accords with the Genius of our Religion, that it is quietly developed, secret and silent in its workings, that " the Kingdom of God," too sacred to be ostenta- tious, too genuine to be rapid, too deep to be quickly comprehended or seen by the outward eye, " cometh not with observation." The most obvious sense in which it holds true of the reign of God in the soul that it cometh not with observation, is that its growth is too pure, too natural, too much in accordance with the mysterious and hidden Laws of Life, to be at any single moment outwardly prominent. Even in cases of sudden Con- version, the fount within that is freshly opened is deep and secret, — and it is only the struggle between the old Life and the new Spirit that for a time makes itself observable. Take the moment in which, accord- ing to the divine order, a soul first awakens to the secret of spiritual Life, that is, to a personal recog- nition of a Father in Heaven whom it is to cleave to 78 The Kmgdom of God luithout Observation. and obey ; and from that hour of spiritual birth, if no persistent sin of ours interferes to break it, there would be a normal progress, not maintained by fits and starts, nor struggling towards its place by violent efforts, but, with the inner force of all things that have Life in themselves, running its parallel with Eternity. There is no element of the Kingdom of Heaven whose seed is not buried deep in the hidden Man of the Heart, and whose growth is not slow : seeing that we are not growing for to-day or for to-morrow, nor towards a limited stature, nor within perishable sea- sons, but towards the inexhaustible Father, and with Immortality for our Time. God Himself, who com- municates to us all the Life we have, is received by degrees of illumination into our understandings and our Hearts. All History declares how slowly man learns to know God — I do not mean to imitate Him, to grow in His image — but to conceive of Him as He is — to know what the Image is in which we ought to grow. It would be unhistorical to assert that any man had ever before his soul the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, until Christ gave us the spiri- tual Image in living form. Nor does that great revelation of Christ remove the necessity for stages of growth with any one of us. The spirit is given unto us by measure as we are able to bear it, and measure after measure must be given before a man knows God as the Son knew the Father. For no teaching can convey the full idea of God into the soul of child or man by a sudden Revelation. More The Kingdom of God zuithout Observation. 79 easily can you force the blossom from the seed with- out waiting for Heaven's air and dews and light and seasons to unfold the hidden flower. Religion can be taught only experimentally, only according to the personal experiences a man has of incentives from, and communion with, the Holy Spirit, — and if this was understood, God's Providence would be largely justified, — for it would be felt that each Soul must go for itself, through its own cycle of quick-darting Life as from the shooting of a seed, of dawning light, of light struggling with darkness, of doubts like mists clearing off and passing away through doing, being, and believing, — of growing knowledge, of faith becoming dominant and peace confirmed. The ex- perience of others may doubtless at some of our stages remove difficulties and speed our progress, but only by helping us to the same experiences as their own ; Christ can help us only by making us like himself; for the soul must reach God, as the mind reaches Truth, through its own apprehensions, by the pathways of its own sensibilities, its own hold upon the eternal realities presented to it. None but God can make a soul feel its want of God : none but God can make a soul feel the presence of God. It would be infinitely easier to find a royal road to Science than to spiritual knowledge ; whoever feels our nature's connections with the living God must know them from his own findings, and in a sense that is strictly true be as their original discoverer. No flood of Light can be poured upon a soul, that will render unnecessary the strengthening discipline of 8o The Kingdom of God without Observatiofi. wrestling with Powers of Darkness, and putting forth inward might against unlawful dominion. Witness the prayers, the retreats and agonies, the victories through faith and trouble of spirit, even to his last hour, of Christ himself! No really noble dream of Heavenly rest is permitted to a soul that has not wrought its way to that high conception, and through cherished purities and self-denying efforts formed acquaintance with Perfection. No rush of Sight or Faith carries us at once into the unveiled Heavens by vision or by ecstasy, so as to supersede our trials and our trusts, or to enable us to dwell with God through any easier means than those of a blended experience in which our Father's face is veiled, and the kindred spirit of His child has to remove the covering shadows, and discern the Light within the Cloud. We thus come by continual growth into the knowledge, and into the enjoyment, of our ever present Father, as into a spiritual possession : — we possess God, and God possesses us, as we have real habits of practical piety, and take into ourselves the several hues of religious feeling, whether of Aspira- tion, of Gratitude, of Trust, of Resignation, of quicken- ing Love, of suspended but undying Hope which belong to the experience through which the God of the spirit causes us to pass, and the fulness of His kingdom is surely coming in a soul which is thus learning to appropriate His teachings. For, every blessing that in this way we trace back to God is living knowledge of Him who is more to us than all The Kingdom of God without Observation. 8 1 His Gifts ; every effort of duty, by giving a conscious- ness of inward strength, of a reserved Power, of an inner spring of Life, is real contact with Him towards whom all duty is an approach, and who thus rewards it ; every sorrow that finds no Comforter but God, and finds him sufficient, not to dispel suff*ering but to find Patience and Hope, brings home to us the con- solation of an eternal Friend ; every gleam of happier or of holier Thought, that seems to come by chance, reveals the bountifulness of Him with whom we have to do ; every natural grace, every mystic expression that flits over the face of Creation, puts us into spiritual intercourse with the Creator ; every hour of silent communion leaves the Image of Heaven in our Heart — until by these '' tuiobserved'' advances God gains over to Himself the whole realm of con- sciousness ; and in the inner convictions, habits, and order of our life has at once a Temple and a Throne. And if the Knowledge of God must thus grow in the soul from a child's first sense of a living Power within the Conscience to the God and Father of Jesus Christ, that spiritual Goodness which is His real image embodied in us can come no faster : our like- ness to God will always fall behind our best thoughts of Him — for our best thoughts of Him, if we are faithful, are always growing ; nor can it be unknown to any of us that the Kingdom of Heaven may be far from us long after we have fully felt that God is our rightful King. Perfection, even as an Imagination, as an ideal Picture, as the theoretic solution of the practical problem presented by the mixed elements 11. G 82 The Kingdom of God without Observation. in our nature, does not break upon the soul in one conception ; and if it did, it would go as it came, a gliding dream which we had no power to reduce to practice, to model into life. It is by faithfully acting according to the measure of our light, contentedly making the efforts we are equal to, finishing the work that comes to us where we stand, making careful studies of the smallest parts of a dutiful life, as a painter studies the veins of leaves, and thus holding in permanent colours whatever spiritual Beauty has dawned upon us, that God permits us to grow to fuller strength, and discern the more glorious sym- metry of completer aims. The Kingdom of Heaven thus substantiated spreads itself: every pure thought that we strive to avow in some act of life, every merciful prompting that we shrine in some real word or sacrifice, removes the debilitating and infidel sense that we are only spiritual voluptuaries, instead of visionary Dreams, brings us near to the living God Himself, and lays the foundations of our House not made with Hands upon the Eternal Rock. It is thus that the Kingdom of Heaven advances upon us. It begins with fragments of duty, and with imperfect comprehension like that of the Disciples, speaking as they were moved, yet not knowing what they said. The proportions of the finished Temple are not yet perceived, the Design is with God, not with us ; but the work grows under dutiful Hands — each day's patience and love are developing its form — each new grace of acted feeling is an inwrought ornament, and if we are but faithful in the performance of every The Kingdom of God imthout Observation. 83 clear service, righteous to pursue even the least prompting- of Conscience and of Love, we are silently rearing that House whose real Builder and Maker is God, even as the symbolic House of God rose into the air like a jointed plant, with stones made ready beforehand that dropped silently into their places, so that no noise was heard in all the building, nor any sound of hammer, axe, or tool of iron. And whilst the Kingdom of Heaven is thus visibly advancing, visible in the result though not in the process, \\\q principle of our religious life, the working spirit in the character, is meanwhile undergoing change,, assuming new and deeper power. Obedience to some fixed rules, to some authoritative will, was our first conception of Goodness. A few simple directions to be implicitly followed, a few simple feelings to be cherished and loved, make our manual of duty so long as we can lean upon others, and are fenced round by elder care. But as soon as we stand alone, and have to answer for ourselves, cases occur to which our rules do not apply ; we are thrown into situations where feelings, it may be passions, are called into play which we had not known before ; our small maxims and precepts give us no help in the new conditions, and prove unable to guide us, and then do we silently begin to out- grow all narrow formularies, to exchange rules for principles, outward laws for an inward spirit, and to approach God, as the only Standard of Right, with a more filial worship that brings nearer to the open- ing soul the vast idea of a Heavenly Father's perfect- 84 The Kingdom of God imthotit Observation. ness. There is a period in the Hfe of every growing soul, as there was in the Hfe of mankind, when often unconsciously we pass beyond all limited examples and formulated virtues, when the motives that are most influential change their nature, and the moral arguments that are addressed to the men of this world cease to have any sensible application to the scale and order of our thoughts. Prudential reasons for Goodness are then felt as an affront to a pure spirit : they do not seem in any way to touch our real Life. The Law, as a schoolmaster, came in our days of preceptive training : Grace and Truth came with our recognition of a Son of God. The Law which we are now to follow is the Righteousness of Faith, the fruit of a spirit that loves God and must be like him, that loves man and must serve and bless him. To be like our Father, to do good to our brother, is the Law of the Spirit of Life in a Son of God, and when we have reached to this, then is the Kingdom of Heaven come nigh unto us, and God has found a worshipper in spirit and in truth. We might adduce other illustrations of the gentle and still formation of that spiritual-mindedness w^hich is the goal of all our way. The contrasted elements of a perfect goodness require large experience, they do not come together suddenly, they do not combine rapidly, and they are all found in peace at last only in a soul in w^hich the presence of God Himself leaves no room for any evil spirit. The discipline of Life which forms Character, or rather which gives oppor- tunity for the action of those inward powers which The Kmgdo)n of God zuithottt Observation. %^ really do form it, opens gradually, often without obser- vation. It comes by parcels : and we are advanced to new social relations, and have different parts of our Nature called into exercise, and schooled by trial, as we become qualified to bear the weight they lay upon us. The tenacity and continuity of Habit resist any sudden, involuntary expansion of the Kingdom of God : our strongest and most spontaneous affec- tions before they do great things, or make great sacrifices, need the sustained pressure of the con- scientious Will. It is no flash of feeling that is to create a soul anew ; no agony of desire, no paroxysm of remorse, that is to transform a character. And so we pass to the practical conclusion, that if the King- dom of Heaven cometh not with observation, then no moment of its natural growth must be lost. Brilliant and rapid advances we are not to expect : they may come, but if we look for them, if we stand and wait for them, we effectually prevent their coming, and have passed out of the order of God's Law. The Life of Christ is beyond the sudden grasp of Genius 'or of Will. The Kingdom of Heaven suffers no violence : and in vain the violent would take it by force. The spirit of God and of Goodness may indeed strike instant root in a Heart, but how long and patiently must it grow, and what prunings must it suffer before it bears only the perfect fruits of the Father's spirit. If one effort could attain unto it, if one agony of the gathered Will could reach it, it might for a term, though not sinlessly, more safely be neglected ; but now no season can be spared from a 86 The Kingdom of God witJioitt Observation. work to which every touch of Life adds unconscious grace, and which, because of its nature, being indeed the Life of the infinite God within us, never can be finished. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the result of straining efforts, of one distracted rush for oil and light when the midnight is upon us — but of an ever- lasting growth ; and by the Grace of. God on un- ambitious faithfulness, on pure and gentle love, keeping to its own path though it must pass through all the strait gates and take up all the crosses by the way, the Divine likeness comes full at last in those who yet know not the glory that is shining in their face. The fully-inspired man is the last result of long obedience hearkening ever to the voice of His word in us. And this ought to relieve us from much harassing anxiety about the state and prospects of our souls. If a man seeks his own life, he shall lose it. If we are saved by Love, we cannot be saved by anxiety about our own safety. Do the work, and accept the sorrow that God provides, and be careful for nothing more. Do it, and bear it, and as God lives, and Him- self works in us what we ought to do, it has given its contribution to the Kingdom of Heaven, to the blessed- ness of our Immortality. If only our life is religious life, however small the service, however obscure the place, the Father of spirits, who weighs goodness only in qualitative scales, is making us a Kingdom for Himself We may be watching for the coming of that Kingdom, like the Disciples who would sit on Christ's right hand, too anxious for our own part The Kingdo7n of God without Observation. 87 in it to be self forgetful, and so removed from the divine charity that does God's work and seeketh not her own — restless and dissatisfied at our tardy growth, inpatient of minute toil and thirsting for great things, — depressed, perhaps, at the contrast between high- wrought imaginations and the pale colours of the feeble life that acts and suffers in ourselves — but stand where God has placed you — make, from day to day, a garden of the Lord of whatever wilderness lies around your own contracted steps on earth — do what your hand findeth to do — cherish whatever may cheer and sweeten the hearts that are nearest to you — entertain, though you can do nothing for it but give it a hospitable lodging in your soul, every project of goodness that the Holy Spirit prompts, and the Kingdom which cometh not with Observation is advancing upon you as rapidly as God, who knows you, sees to be safe, as rapidly as is consistent with spiritual foundations, with a solid framework, and imperishable gains of growth. And in what we call our Civilization there is a ■process going forward which is preparing the way of the Lord and making his paths straight. Follow out any great line of investigation and it will lead direct to God. Science, Astronomy, Geology, Political Economy, without designing it, were widening the bounds of Revelation itself, freeing the spirit from the letter, when pursuing their own paths of thought. There is no great truth that does not cause some narrow doctrines, and in departments other than its own, to shrink from before it. Some thirty years 88 The Kiiigdo77t of God without Observation. ago in England there was an irreligious fear, not that the age was too exclusively practical, for that may- have been, but that no spiritual Good would come out of science— a distrust that the earnest pursuit of any kind of reality could fail to come at last into contact with God. The intellect of the age, and of the country, was then too much a worshipper in the outer court. But this did not and could not last ; all things are of God and lie close together. Science has her mysteries as well as Faith ; Social Economy, demonstrate what she may, soon finds that she can achieve nothing without the heart of a brother, with- out the Spirit of our Father ; and now it comes upon us as a new gospel, that the age and the country, through earnestness in great, and apparently in- dependent, directions, have touched the conterminous spiritual land, have reached thoughts with which spiritual narrowness cannot co-exist, have without observation been outgrowing traditional and lifeless systems, and are prepared, instead of Articles of Belief, to find the bright forms of Universal Truth in Nature and in the Bible. Thirty years ago every preacher of a free Gospel, of the religious fruitfulness of spiritual liberty, had to do battle, as for his life, on behalf of principles that now seem part of the light that lighteth every man that Cometh into the world. And if some advances of free Science, as in applied economic truth, have not as yet had their due spiritual results in the eleva- tion of the people, this has been owing to spiritual causes, because, through failure of education, the The Kingdom of God zvithottt Observation. 89 minds and souls of the working classes were not morally prepared to use the breathing time that was given. And if the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, then the blame of losing Heaven falls not on circumstance, but on some failure within. To look anywhere for relief but to righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, is only to plead that we should be pure if we were not tempted — contented if God did not disappoint us — tender if we were not provoked beyond reasonable bounds — charitable if those who need our charity had not such a multitude of sins to cover. It was in the face of the Tempter, in defiance of his powers, that Christ kept his allegiance, and Angels of Peace ministered unto him. And whatever may be true of the quick darting of God's light into a soul, or rather in our recognition of the light always there, the Voice of the King heard within us will not at once make us His Kingdom, though it may set us on our onward way. Even of one so pure as Christ we must remember those forty days in the Wilderness and the continual retreats of prayer ; of one so noble as Paul, whose conversion was rather to right views of God than to a right Heart, we must remember the retirement of those three years amid the mountains of Arabia. For our type of the Kingdom of Heaven we have him who greiv in grace and in favour with God and with man, who would not strive nor cry, nor let his voice be heard in the streets. In spiritual things, though we know it not, we " move entirely when we move at all." 90 The Kingdom of God zuithoiU Observation. In every true act of love or of obedience God is gaining us altogether. The effect of any one service or sacrifice we can no more determine than of any one touch of the pencil or the chisel on the great works of Art. The hand of Genius may labour long and patiently, and to an unskilled observer there is no progress — but an immortal work is growing. Let no one doubt who serves. If he works slowly, let him bethink himself that he is working for Per- fection — and love his work, for its own sake, with at least as earnest a devotion as an Artist would who, filled with some divine conception, has a life beyond the world, and a perpetual joy in the labour that is to give it a glorious though a fleeting form. And here no effort fails : human Genius is not needed, for God is our Inspiration : when we work for a spiritual end it is our Father that worketh in us to will and to do of His own good pleasure. He knows where He is leading us ; we know whether every step by the way is taken in Faith and Love ; and if so, the hour is at hand when we shall neither say, Lo here ! nor Lo there ! for, behold, our hearts are right with God, and the Father who loves us has come to us to make His abode with us ! VII. James iv. 17 : " To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The unhappiness of life, apart from the discipline of trial and sorrow which trains to faith and goodness, is the fruit of Sin — of selfishness, disorder, unchastened temper, vicious indulgence, morbid self-esteem. Yet the dwellers in this evil, the workers of this woe, may escape any poignant sense of the guilt they contract or of the misery they create. Nothing is more diffi- cult than to bring a man face to face with his own character, with his own actions and their consequences. We live in strange ignorance of what we are, of the mixed motives that deform us, the self-regard that vitiates our purest ambition, the streaks of imperfec- tion that cloud with baser matter the transparency of our love and dull its power ; of the impressions of our- selves we leave on other hearts, the shadows we cast, the joys we restrain, the virtues we injure, the passions we inflame, the burdens or the weariness, the soreness or irritations we occasion. We are sinning ; producing 92 The Sin of Omissio7i. the fruits, casting the shade or blight of sin ; our path is often as the trail of the serpent, whilst no self- knowledge holds the mirror up to nature and shows us the image of ourselves. Is this an overcharged statement? Put it, then, to a very simple test. How small a part of a man's life, of the full use and enjoyment of his -being, consists in the abundance of the things that he possesseth — of those things, at least, which the world can give or take away ; for the great, universal gifts of God, the dower of nature and of grace, are not to be con- founded with conditional or perishable property ! How little would suffice for the blessedness of home-life if hearts and minds were kindled by high interests proper to themselves ; the recurring days devoted to pursuits that could never be deprived of healthy oppor- tunity or of the sense of God's favouring blessing ; and the sources of all the wounds inflicted by the uneasiness of moral discontent closed up by fellow- ship in the self-forgetting cheerfulness of earnest occu- pation ! What precious blessings of Almighty God within the dwellings of this land are daily lost, or turned to poison, through the want of adequate pur- suits to elevate and tone the character, or, short of this, from the want of a loving spirit of direction and self-government in the ordered conduct of a just life ! Almost everywhere may we see collected the ma- terials of blessedness, wanting only the pure and constant flow of spiritual purpose and endeavour to maintain the regulated glow of growing life. If we could distinctly see what the causes are which dis- The Sin of Omission. 93 appoint the hopes with which God ever warms the heart of inexperience, we might stand aghast at the sacrifice of His richest opportunities from the absence of the most elementary principles of Christ's spirit and estimate of life. Self-engrossment blinds the fine faculty of moral observation ; we see not what is passing around us ; other hearts, wills, and wants might be extinguished, so rudely are they dealt with, so heedlessly do we pursue our own way, little knowing what mischief we are working, from what love and joy we are banishing ourselves, what fine tissues that better than an armour of proof would have covered and protected us against the calamities of fortune we are painfully rending, the danger we incur of being felt as a foreign substance in unbearable contact with the acutest sensibilities of another's life. What lies at the root of the resulting wounds and estrange- ments, the abounding resentments and bitterness ? Self-will, a want of that rudiment of Christ's spirit which would compel a man to lift his eyes off himself, and live too much within the hearts and lives of others to petrify their sympathies or trample on their rights. When the band of tender respect falls away, and individual inclination rules, out of that hardness and wilfulness come the intensest disappointments, and, as the corruption of what is best is ever the worst, family life that is not mutual life, that has its forms but not its spirit, its bonds and powers and familiar privileges but not its love, becomes the most effectual of all means for wounding and wither- ing the heart. There is a Greek proverb : " What can 94 ^^^ Sin of Omission. a man drink if water chokes him ? " What can purify and soften a man's nature if the life of his home affections makes him inconsiderate, selfish and wilful, overbearing and hard ? And often, where there is no habitual insensibility, an unguarded weakness, an ungoverned impulse, a moment's passion, can violate the peace of others or stain them with dishonour. Anger will give a voice to carnal instinct ; appetite seize the offered draught of guilty pleasure ; sloth and self-indulgence relax the law and order of moral well- being ; yet when the natural disasters follow — broken confidence, with all the agonized and disturbed rela- tions of hearts in which the tie of esteem and trust is loosed — they will be distributed among numberless circumstances, and the fact evaded that they are directly chargeable on personal Sin. How is it that we can sow the seeds of manifold failure and loss of peace, and yet when the retribu- tions come not recognize that we are reaping our own harvest? We disorder our tempers, and go forth amidst earth and sky, and our spiritual nature is so jarred that the works of God are no longer a medium of communication between us and Him, and yet we can escape the knowledge that it is our Sin that has deranged us. We forfeit the security of the sweet intercourses of life, and complain of the inconstancy of friendships we had selfishly abused. We fall behind in work and duty, and go into society with heavy arrears upon our hearts, and find it stale, flat, and unprofitable, without discerning that the dead- ness is the oppression of an unelastic spirit, our The Sin of Omission. 95 weariness the shadow of a sinful burden. The causes which betray a man into Sin enable him to avoid the distinct imputation of its consequences to himself in the self-regard, the occupation with our own wills and ways, which becomes insensible to the claims of men and the offered opportunities of God. All Sin is of the nature of an intense selfishness, a wayward indulgence of personal inclination ; and the more selfish a man is the less does he know that he is so. It banishes God from remembrance, shuts out His fellowship, dares to do without His present love, and cancels His former mercies. God within the soul, and God the Lawgiver, the soliciting Father, the righteous Avenger, with all His spiritual and eternal relations to our being, is for the time extinguished. It ignores, rather than knowingly violates, the claims and rights of others ; hears not, sees not, the anguished pleadings, the imploring looks of those w^hose bosoms it will pierce like a sword ; the self-concentration of indulgence becomes our normal state, and in the most obvious retributions we can see misfortunes, hardships, wrongs to win for us consideration from others, rather than condemnation on ourselves. This tendency of Sin, to be blind to its own con- sequences, to know them not as its own fruits, is promoted by the evil influences it exerts in disturbing and alienating the hearts of others, so that hardly can the purest stand in sinless relations to Sin when drawn into close intercourse with it. Our Sin cools love, awakens natural resentments, makes confidence or genial intercourse almost an impossibility to sensitive 96 The Sin of Omission, natures, and in the wretched complications that ensue the self-concentration at the root of sinful indulgence will readily glide into the impression that it is unjustly used, and more sinned against than sinning. And thus the sin of one, out of the weakness or inaptitude of others, partly because they want love and patience to bear with it, partly because they want wisdom to deal with it, will produce a whole harvest of sins, and enflame all the unhappy elements lurking in un- chastened natures. But torpid and callous must be the conscience that turns the resentful misery it evokes into a plea of self-justification, instead of dis- cerning in it the most awful aggravation of sin. It must needs be that offences come, but woe be to that man by whom they come ! For it also must needs be that while the originating selfishness of sin endures, the offences it provokes will hide from it the discern- ment of itself. Troubled waters reflect no image ; and it is only when looking into the sorrowing face of patient love that hard or passionate self-will is startled and punctured by the contrast. The extent to which we all succeed in banishing the consciousness of Sin, our escape from any distinct feeling of God's disapprobation, ignorance of our- selves as violators of the first law of spiritual beings, in leaving known evils unremoved, in turning from the pursuit of that measure of good which the eternal Spirit has brought within our knowledge, demonstrate the torpor and inaction of our souls. That we suffer so little from the sense of sin, that we can be so free from unawed introspection of this sort, is surely The Sin of Omission. 97 alarming proof of how utterly we can forget the only ends for which our existence was bestowed, and be unconscious of personal relations to Him in whom we live. For what is the implied condition of our being, on any view that does not destroy the connection of our nature with God ? Is it not that we s4:rive to retain within our spiritual frames, to unfold and re- present in the actions of our lives, that measure of moral perfectness which the Source of Good has brought clearly to the knowledge of our souls ? To extinguish Sin within ourselves, to be drawn into inward and practical co-operation with the holy blessedness God's providence is aiming to produce, the reign of love and knowledge, of goodness and beauty, of spiritual law and truth in the hidden parts, — it is impossible for^'any one not an atheist, nor a fatalistic sensualist, to conceive that life was given for other purposes. Yet, how can we stand before Heaven, in the light of this thought, and not be weighed down under the consciousness of an abused existence, and pierced through by the awe of God ! Christianity, which always gives distinct expression to the holiest thought of the human heart, and encourages it to come forth by showing it realized in the life of the Son of Man, expressly declares that to aid us in the great aim of the extinction of Sin, and assimilation to our Father, was the one object of the Saviour's mission : " Ye know that he was manifested to take away Sin ; whosoever abideth in him sinneth not." Yet Sin is the most common experience any of us know, aggravated by the consciousness that, II. H 98 The Sin of O77nsston. so little are our hearts set on its extinction and the incarnation of the Divine Word in ourselves, so little is God's only object in our lives the first object in our thoughts — the pain occasioned by the recognized stings of Sin makes an inappreciable part of the vast sum of human wretchedness. I do not mean that we do not suffer from the consequences- of our Sins — that we do daily, hourly, unintermittingly — but for the Sins themselves, regarded as our own spiritual degradation and unmaking, we consciously suffer very little. We are weary, restless, unstrung, dissatisfied with our position in the world, our reputation with men — with that jaded sense of the worthlessness and disappointment of life which must cling to those who are without the peace of God which passeth under- standing ; but though it is impossible not to see everywhere the unmistakable marks of this kind of suffering, it is also impossible to deny that, for the most part, we lose their spiritual significance, and fail to see in our general unhingement and distress the measure and retribution of our sins. I am excluding now those paroxysms of remorse which come to us in critical periods, in seasons of overwhelming con- viction,7when it is no longer possible to evade the knowledge of what we are, when our spiritual being must make an effort to recover itself through throes of shame and agony, or sink into insensibility for ever. It is well when even these life struggles are not more coloured by the bitterness of exposure to human consequences, by wounded self-regard, than by the consciousness of our spiritual degradation, of The Sin of Omission. 99 the sinful relations of our souls to a holy God who had poured His light into us, and offered us strength and grace, so that we sinned against knowledge and without excuse. It is well if that terrible convulsion of convicted conscience is even then only the godly sorrow that worketh repentance to salvation, without admixture of the sorrow of the world that worketh only human shame and deeper death. The writhings of our sufferings when, like a worm, we are uncovered and refugeless in the eyes of men are not to be mistaken for the utter woe of contrition which the awakened soul would not have other than it is, thankful in its deepest humiliation that the hour of revulsion has arrived, and that no more it can escape, or desires to escape, the searching eye of God. That we have no experience of this violent effort of the spiritual nature to save itself from destruction, may only show that we have not yet reached the crisis when God must interpose to restore the lost balance of our being, by means of a sudden and spas- modic Hfe communicated to one or more of its perish- ing powers. Far short of this, our own souls ought to be continually interposing, making it impossible for us to ignore the approaches of Sin, or so to walk aside from God as to feel not the searchings of His eye, the requirements of His spirit. For what is Sin .'* It is not to be confused with the gross acts of wrong- doing by which guilt is contracted ; it is not to be confounded with crime. To commit no legal wrong may carry acquittal before Man : to neglect a prompt- ing of the Divine spirit is condemnation before God. lOo The Sin of Omission. " To him who knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is Sin." Which of us can meet this test ? Who orders his life according to this rule? Who distributes his time in obedience to this law? Who expends his means, that portion of them which he holds himself free to spend, and does spend, on things not necessaries, according to the suggestions of this spirit ? How much of obvious good do we all know, to which we contribute nothing of effort, sacrifice, prayer, or thought, to bring it forth into life and being ! How many gracious and, in this suffering world, most needful things has God's spirit suggested to our hearts as good, holy, and useful, things that clearly ought to be done, and yet the suggestion received no entertainment from our souls ; we turned to our own ways and dismissed it to forgetfulness ! How much do we know that would be good- — good for our own souls, good for those near to us as our own souls, good for the world — which, being within our power, we yet neither do, nor mean to do ! Nor does our Sin stop here. We not only refuse, neglect, to do the good which God makes known to us ; we do the opposing evil. We know the power of meekness, and indulge in what we call just resentments. We know that in the sight of God there is no respect of persons, and indulge in pride of place. We know that only the pure in heart attain to spiritual discernment, and suffuse the soul with thick clouds of worldliness and sense. The easy way in which certain reputations are gained shows how lightly some faults are esti- mated, with what a low sense of duty some actions The Sin of Omission. loi are overpraised. What so great thing would it be, for instance, if, in this perishing world into which we brought nothing, out of which we take nothing, in the matter of Hberahty men were to act up to the fulness of what they know could not but promote objects that are dear to God ? Would it be any remarkable virtue for a man who knows that only his soul is immortal, not to care, in comparison with well-doing, for accu- mulations, luxuries, trappings, costly furnishings, — and having food and raiment therewith to be content ? It is vain to plead that there is uncertainty as to the means of doing good, and a possibility of doing evil. It is not always this that stints our beneficence. How little obtains for a man the reputation of gener- osity, when in the estimation of Him who gave the talents, and assigned their stewardship, he may be hiding, or appropriating, his Lord's money ! There was an age of Christianity when a man would make some mighty sacrifice, build a Cathedral for instance, as an offering for his soul. That was in times when great Sins sought great atonements ; but perhaps now there is many an accumulation of mean and creeping sins that amass as large a sum of wretchedness and evil, and yet awaken no sense of the necessity of seeking a reconciliation with God. It is true that such sacrifices had their roots in personal fear; but why should not the love of God and man, and of all things good, produce as large offerings as the wretched fears of superstitious guilt bargaining for its own salvation t And how are men free from Sin if, knowing the great interests of God that need their aid, knowing the 102 The Sm of Omission. perishable and the imperishable uses of earthly things, they will not do as much out of sympathy with the spirit of our Father, out of pure love for the ends that are dear to His providence, as did the self-seeking devotees of another age as a compensation for their sins, and a protection against their Judge? In an age of violence, of unrestrained passions, the terrors of religion exacted fearful penalties of a material kind from great offenders. In an age of order, when there are no offences that the law does not punish, and religion wrings no vast tributes from remorse, how can it be accounted for, except through prevailing sin- fulness, low preferences, wilful blindness to spiritual interests, that in the extent of individual sacrifices for human well-being, and of self-immolation before God, Christianity so seldom wins from love what supersti- tion drew from fear ? We all know the good we might do, and do not : yet we are not much burdened by the weight of sin, nor feel the eye of God reproach- fully upon us. How can this be ? How can we live in Sin, knowing what is good to be done and doing it not, and escape remorse ? How, in our sins of omission, can we refuse to God's universal love the good He suggests to our hearts, and looks for from our hands, and yet lead the easy lives we do, un- haunted by the thought that the Eternal Spirit sees so little in us that He can desire 1 There is but one explanation, the deep and awful one, that we escape the sense of Sin by escaping the sense of God. " He is not in all our thoughts." " We live without Him in the world." His fellowship, The Sin of Omission. 103 the light of His countenance, is not our prime neces- sity. We are familiar with the phrase, not with the power, of " communion with His holy spirit." Even in our prayers we feel Him not directly, we see Him not as He is. We can speak to Him aside, and never so hold our souls to meet the intense gaze of His spirit that we could not remain in ignorance of what we are in the sight of the Holy One. Oh ! nothing is easier than to keep all the forms of religion, to pray twice a day, and to deceive our own hearts, never really meeting the eye of God, or baring our souls to His inspection. Doubtless the first effect of any true searching of His spirit, if we look into the face of the infinitely Holy One with a pure desire to know and to be known, must be a knowledge of our own evil ; this is inevitably the first conviction of a living soul in in- tercourse with God ; but, if as we learn to know our sins we learn to hate them, and if they are revealed to us by the light of our Father's countenance gazing into us that will certainly be the case, then shall we come to love what He loves, and to abhor what He abhors, else could we not continue to meet His look, and must shrink from His eye ; and so, as the fruits of any real fellowship with Him, all wilful disobedience and estrangement must of necessity be disappearing, however long may adhere to us the imperfections of our frailty. This is ever the office of the Comforter, to convince of Sin, of Righteousness, and of Judgment. If we have God in our thoughts we must keep His com- mandments and work out His promptings. If we I04 The Sin of Omission. quench His spirit we cannot bear to look into His face, and are compelled to turn aside and forget Him. Christ's law of Discipleship was derived from the law of his own Sonship, " If a man love me he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." viir. (Rmvmmh «» Acts iii. 19 : " Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord." Psalm li. 10 : ** Create in me a clean heart, O God : And renew a I'ight spirit within me." Is it possible for great and radical changes to take place in Character — changes so affecting the fountain of a man's nature that, of its own accord, it will now send forth sweet water instead of bitter .? Is it pos- sible for a new spirit to enter into a man, displacing the most deep-seated types of feeling and action, as the gushing of a clear spring will remove the foulest things that have gathered over it ? Is regeneration of Life within the compass of spiritual influence ? Is Religion a Counsellor for the prudent, and a Mentor for the good, but with no redemptive power for the bad ? Is it extravagant, or against experience, to believe that there may be a mighty action of God 1 06 Conversion. within the soul, giving the knowledge of Sin, and at the same time such assurance of Divine love and power, as will transform all the relations of the sinner to his God, and all the inclinations of his Heart ? Is Christianity and the Christian Church only as a Sanitary Commission with preventive measures for the healthy, but incapable of delivering the plague- stricken ? Can we only guard the door against the unclean spirits, and are helpless to cast them out, once they have entered in and taken possession ? Is it vain to look for entire revolutions of soul — for the self-indulgent to become the self-denying — for the sensual and impure to live on heavenly food — for the worldly to discover the true riches — for the hard- hearted to be so melted by the fire of Divine Love as to grieve all their days at the remembrances of unnatural feeling — for the proud to have their eyes opened to their real place before God and Man — for the rebellious and the despisers to be overcome by Him who through all rebellion, and all scorn, sheds down silent Grace, and causes His sun to shine, and His rain to fall, upon the evil and upon the good ? Must it be once bad, always bad ? once brutal, always brutal ? once bitter, always bitter ? once mean, always mean ? once false, always false ? once a prey to vile passions, to envy, spite, jealousy, vindictive- ness, steeped in them for ever ? Is there no power in Religion to alter all this ? If not, then Religion brings us into no contact with Him to whom all things are possible, and nature and habit hold us helpless. Conversion. 107 It will not serve to answer such questions as these by scriptural quotations — " Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots ? " Other quotations exhibiting both the possibility and the fact of entire conversion are ready at hand, leaving untouched the truth contained in the first, that the change is as great as though the leopard were to lie down with the lamb and take its clothing ; or the mysterious conditions on which colour depends were suddenly to efface the distinction between an Ethiopian and a Circassian. The vastness of the change is not in question, nor its mystery either — if by mystery is meant that it lies beyond the reach of human power, or of human understanding ; but neither vastness nor mystery are inconsistent with probability or fact. No change, moreover, is desired either in the Ethiopian or in the leopard, for everything is good according to its kind. There will always be complexional types of character, which can no more be altered than the Races of men. There are the two great moral types of the contem- plative and the active form of man, each good in its kind, depending upon differences of original make, which may be modified and have their proportions largely altered by culture, but which never can be and never were intended to be obliterated. There is no such thing as either one quantitative or one quali- tative measure, for mental and physical properties to meet and mingle in the human being. The absolute perfection of man may depend upon such proportions — but the relative perfection of the Individual depends upon no such unattainable thing, but simply on the io8 Conversion. spirit that animates and sways the forces given to him, such as they are. It would be monstrous to dream of a uniformity, a mingling of elements, a dis- appearance of the differences between Newton and Washington, Shakespere and Cromwell. And besides the healthy complexional varieties which are of the utmost value to human progress — for what could men all the same contribute, or what stimulus apply, to one another ? — tJiere aj'e constitutional imperfec- tions, such as natural debility, weakness of fibre, deficiency of animal spirits, slowness of understand- ing, which are not subjects for a moral change, and which though they modify, and no doubt limit, the form of soul and life, the direction and the range of power, may yet in inward purpose be of the grandest elevation, swayed by the spirit of a martyr or a saint. Conversion, then, must not be tested by cases of complexional variety, nor by cases of constitutional defect. It cannot alter such types as these ; it can only deal with the ruling spirit that disposes of the forces of a man's nature, be those forces what they may ; it cannot make a man different from what God made him, but it can make him all that God intended him to be ; it cannot add a single element to his nature, but it can introduce peace into the midst of them, and make God their Ruler, instead of selfish- ness or passion. Conversion does not mean perfec- tion ; it means that such forces as a man has shall be directed by a spirit of order, aspiration, purity, and sweetness. Conversions have fallen under the observation of Conversion. 109 us all, if we have had eyes to see them, to an extent sufficient to give us faith even in the strongest cases. Begin with the most intelligible forms in which you can trace the influences at work, and ascend to those in which all investigation ends in the personal action of God. It has happened to most persons to see a member of a family in early life, it may be of fine powers, and with no unamiable dispositions, all untuned and jarred, wrong with every one, gloomy, captious, con- tradictory, finding in everything a rock of offence. Some spirit, not necessarily an evil one, has entered into the waters and troubled them. It may be the first feeling of personal freedom and responsibility, not easily adapting itself to the small bondage of domestic rules too long continued ; it may be the restlessness of desire at that period of life when the ideal nature is all at work, and as there are no prac- tical duties to hold it down, it lives in Dreamland, and is thrown out of harmony v/ith the actual ; it may be affection and faculty beyond the measure of the food and occupation provided for them, and instinctively craving ; it may be a sense of injustice, and wounded self-respect, a jealousy of interference, a fretting under authority, if sphere, and freedom, and place in the family, do not keep pace with con- scious growth ; and no doubt it may be self-will, and arrogance, the superiority of inexperience not to be harshly judged, largely mingling with all these. This is the diagnosis of the case : not a very alarming one ; and yet if you were to judge of it by the out- no Conversion. ward symptoms, by the haggard, self-occupied look, the moody restlessness, the gloomy, fitful abstraction, the wild irritability, the half-sullen half-savage inde- pendence, you might take it to represent a case of demoniacal possession. Here assuredly there are elements of danger — with some natures elements of insanity — and a Conversion is urgently needed. What is to effect it.? Gently to let slip the yoke of authority so that self-love may not needlessly gall against it : the removal, imperceptibly if possible, of the restrictions that belonged to earlier years, and are natural grounds of offence ; a growing respect, deference, and courtesy — not the indulgence shown to a child, but something of the consideration shown to an equal ; for older people often commit great injus- tice, and great rudeness, and through their incapacity to understand the moral elements before them, put down what they call self-will with a very coarse self- will of their own ; — and if in addition to this mere removal of the roots of bitterness, something of earnest sympathy could be supplied by one who, without any condescension, was yet felt to raise the uneasy spirit to a level somewhat higher than its own, the lost balance may be restored, freedom, ease, and sweetness recovered, and the whole character transformed by causes as natural, though of a far higher order, as when the evil spirit departed from Saul when David touched the harp. There is again the class of Conversions produced by human, intelligible influences not involving the mysterious action of God, when some strong and Conversion. 1 1 1 sweet affection turns all currents into its own channel, and is powerful enough to occupy the whole nature with itself and with the duties that grow out of it, quelling at once the habits or passions that are unworthy of it, with the misery and self-torture that belonged to an objectless condition. A fountain of purity, and a fountain of peace, are opened to- gether. The man has now a life out of himself, and by losing has found himself, so impossible is it for any one to be the centre of his own existence, to be held by no holy tie out of himself without hardening into miserable selfishness, or going off into wild irregularity. Conversions of this kind are widely different in their circumstances, and in the nature of the influence exerted, having only this common feature, that one mind has become the master spring of another, not necessarily its superior, but supplying to it something that before it needed, and that now preserves it from objectless disorder, the delicate or mysterious bond that holds the faculties together, and saves from the worst of all dangers, a looseness of existence. Not dissimilar to these are the Con- versions that take place when a man has found his calling, and becomes engaged in a pursuit, that whilst it has the zest of a passion, is also large enough, and arduous enough, to occupy all his nature. For this is essential in any Conversion that is to be per- manent ; it must not only change the order of the affections, introducing a new spirit into the midst of them, it must also provide a life, a sphere, an occu- pation. It is not enough that the House is empty. 112 Conversion, swept, and garnished ; it must be filled with good angels, not a chamber of it left vacant, nor long deserted by its rightful tenants, else the evil spirits will return to it again. It is this that makes momentary Conversion so easy, effectual Conversion so rare, when produced by foreign influence, as by the action of one mind upon another, if the re- generating mind cannot become the centre of the other's life. It is not difficult to introduce flashes of light into a darkened mind, or a ray of reason into a disordered one, nor a strong gushing of sweetness and purity into a corrupted one, along with vehement desires that the new, strange feelings, so fresh and cleansing, should continue for ever ; but no affection can endure except by producing its own works and living on its own fruits ; and if it has no fruits, no works, no absorbing life, no career, — if you cannot take the changed heart and give it corresponding occupation, — there is nothing to sustain the new emotions, and the old life returns, even as the gloom gathered again on Saul's dark spirit when David's harp was stilled. There is nothing so disappointing, and in the end perhaps so debilitating to the subjects of them, as these repeated shocks of spiritual action, that lead to nothing. It is like galvanizing the dead ; they fall back into insensibility, or rather the real state, and the apparent state, become once more the same. And this is the weak side of all intermittent spiritual influence, indeed, of the Christian Church. You can send the thrill of a new life through a soul — that is not difficult — but where is the sphere, the Conversion. 113 work, the full, eager, and ardent career that is for ever to sustain it ? You have swept it for a moment with a strong wind ; but the old covering mantles again the standing water. Those eras that have been conspicuous for great and effectual Conversions have always been marked by this, that the Conver- sion opened a way to the Life that was at once its fruit and its nourishment. The cry for repentance, and for works meet for repentance, came together, as when Christ made apostles of his converts ; or at a period of the deepest religious torpor that ever benumbed this country, Wesley sent his penitents to carry the new life that was burning in them to those still dead in trespasses and sins. It is far other, and less noble work, that indeed soon ceases to have any nobleness in it, and often looks very awful in its mimicry and hoUowness, to awaken feelings that have no career, and no issues ; to produce transient conversions in passive listeners, and excite emotions that work off their strength upon themselves. It may be greatly doubted, on this account, whether the Christian Church, in so far as it is itself alive at all, is not in large measure an organized system for producing spiritual debility and exhaustion. And this will ever make a man who reverences Reality, and who fears the swoln guise of it beyond any other fear whatever, more anxious to speak a word of earnest principle that may take application and clothe itself with life, than to awaken storms or floods of passion that flow off into no river of life, that have no field of healthy action in toil and II. I 1 1 4 Conversion. sacrifice — but die where they were born, until stirred again by foreign influence in the heart they convulse and weaken with a mimic fight. Any earnest pur- pose, any pure incHnation, that carries its occupation and life with it, even though directly it had no religious bearing, and originated in no religious im- pulse, is far beyond all this as a real agent in Con- version. I have known a man's whole nature and character absolutely transfigured, and in a time won- derfully short, by suddenly developing a taste, and at no early period of life, for one difficult and obscure branch of Natural History. He had, before, all the marks upon him of constitutional debility, and though pure and negatively blameless, he was physi- cally and spiritually perishing under a conscientious- ness that was not, and could not be, satisfied with the feeble work, and the feeble fruits of it, to which alone he could attain in the profession, it was that of a minister of Religion, to which he belonged. When this new Life opened upon him, and he dis- covered his aptitude for it, and the honour that might attend him in it, the spiritual honour that ever waits !ipon real work faithfully done, it would be no figure of speech to say that he was regenerated. He became laborious, ardent, and full of perpetual joy ; his weakness vanished ; his whole bearing changed and he became a man manifestly dignified and en- nobled by the happiness of useful work, by uncon- scious self-respect, and by overflowing gratitude to God who had at last called him to serve where service found continual inspiration and delight. It Conversion. 1 1 5 is on this account that there is no nobler promise for character than when a strong passion for some one study or pursuit takes possession of a man's nature, if it is a pursuit, as indeed every pursuit is that is really important to the world, worthy of an exalted love, and providing inexhaustible materials for labour and for thought. And there is no sign so sure of a pervading weakness, of a nature from which great endeavours are not likely to come, as the ab- sence of such determining tastes, or the suppression of their feeble appearances under the opportunities of self-indulgence. There is another class of Conversions which do involve the personal action of God, and not only lead to Him but begin with Him, yet which are so little mysterious in their nature, and of such large and amply tested occurrence, that they will be universally admitted cases of spiritual Power. I mean those cases in which the sense of God comes for the first time upon those who have been living without Him in the world. I mean the case of rude, brutal, un- civilized men, leading the life of nature, abandoned to themselves, following their appetites, given up to self-indulgence, ungoverned, unrestrained — but not mean, not false, not cowardly, not inwardly twisted and crookened by the odious vices of the class that prey upon civilized man — not living upon craft or dishonesty, upon hypocrisy, upon fraudulent beggary, if enjoying like animals yet working like men, shrink- ing from no labour, and honestly earning what they spend — spend it as they may. These are cases in 1 1 6 Co7iversion. which often it would be hard to say that the men were sinful ; evil and debased they are, but it would be scarcely true to say that they were acting against their Light, against any inward Voice that spoke clear words to them. They have been drifted away from the spiritual to the carnal, by circum- stances not by Will, so that they appear absolutely free from any kind of spiritual conflict ; Conscience and God make no remonstrances with them. Now for the first time let them be pricked to the Heart, let a part of their nature be addressed that never was spoken to before, let a direct appeal be made to that sense of God which it is impossible finally to separate from the awful elements of human nature, of being and of death, of affection and of nothingness, of love and the anguish of love, of fear and hope, — and let Him appear not in menace but in invitation, not in wrath but in compassion, not condemning them but seeking them, and the new Life sets in like a flood, so that for a time the balance of the faculties is overpowered, and strong men, under the inadequacy of their customary understanding to deal with these strange experiences, agonize and faint under the new emotions of their souls. And it would show a very superficial acquaintance with the nature of these cases if we were to infer, either from its suddenness or from its violence, that the change could not be permanent. They are the subjects of a new experience which, once opened to them, may continue open for ever ; a new Life has really entered into them, and as spiritual influence is of incalculable and unlimited Conversion. 117 power, the life of the senses and the instincts, into which they can never sink again without a conflict, may have utterly exhausted its interest for beings so deeply and so strangely moved. There is no reason to despair that a strong current of spiritual Life may at any time set in upon those who from force of cir- cumstance are living without God in the world, or that when they are ripe to receive it God will send forth His ministers and His Spirit. These things do not depend upon accident ; Nature herself comes to a crisis ; wrong ways of life become at last emptied of every zest, and in the weariness and hopelessness, the sense of worthlessness and wretchedness that ensue, preparation for a change has taken place, and the craving is awakened which is the opportunity of God. The first Christian Conversions were mani- festly of this nature. Multitudes were weary of a worn- out existence, in which not an element of freshness remained ; and whilst pining in the midst of deadness, the new breath of the Gospel, of a Religion of love, grace, holiness, of universal pardon and of absorb- ing enterprise, passed over them like the creative spirit of God. The new life may spring out of the death of the old one. We are not in circumstances perhaps readily to understand this. Christianity is not to us a new influence, and though we may have never felt its power, which with most of us is really the case, we have yet spoiled it by emotionless familiarity, and deadened the edge of the sword by habitual handling. Christianity is to most of us like a school classic, supposed to be well known, but never 1 1 8 Co7tversion. at any time vividly received, now farther removed from living apprehension than if we had never known it at all, and capable of being truly imprinted upon us only at some critical time when inward and outward opportunity shall be made to coalesce, when the spirit moved to its depths by trial or by suffering becomes conscious of its wants, and God bears in upon us the revelation of His grace. For this is ever the immediate Power in Conversion, a real feeling of the Spirit of God working in us, a real gaze into the face of God looking at us. If that is attained, there is nothing in the spiritual world that is not open to us. Though we have only arrived, as it were, at the more intricate cases of Conversion, it will not be denied that if a real feeling of God could enter into a soul, whatever its former state, there would be no limit to the spiritual changes that might take place within it, and no after mystery in the process. All real Conversions must take place in this way, whether they be Conversions from Sin, or from great and mis- leading Error : tJie Heavenly Spirit imist look in tipon the soul, and the soul must see Him as He is. The Conversion of St. Paul was in this way. A God whom before he did not know was all at once re- vealed to him. He looked for the first time into the face of a God who loved the Gentiles, and was the Father of every spirit, and all his old life fell away at once. Everything else in him remained the same ; his purposes had all been righteous, his faculties trained and obedient, his whole nature fired Convej'sion. 1 19 with zeal, the Honour of God the sole spring of his life ; nothing of all this is altered, but the true God is made known to him, he sees Him in His Image and takes its print, and at once, and for ever, all is changed, fanaticism melts into universal Love, the Jewish zealot pours the glowing ore of his nature into the moulds of a Christian man. Here, then, is the one great question, whether we are seeking our own Conversion, or of some one of the strayed and lost, or of a world lying in wicked- ness. At whatever stage we are of the spiritual life, here is the Power that is capable of supplying an influence as new, as mighty, as transforming, as if for the first time it was calling us from the dead. But how are we to bring this Power into operation } How are we for ourselves really to look into God's face ? There is no limit to the Conversions that might take place in us if we saw God as He is, nay, if we brought our souls to meet Him as we know Him to be. This is the real inquiry. How is the living God to look in upon our souls, so that the whole fatherly Spirit, quickening Grace, perfect Holiness, measureless Compassion, may act upon us at once, in our con- sciousness of a living union with Himself? The more we know ourselves the more we will be ready to confess that this is a way of Life that may be new to us, and that Christianity, the personal communion of God with a human soul, is an experience we may have never steadily known. And if so, what inex- haustible forces of Life are yet in reserve for us ! We may have never felt the action that is to quicken 1 20 Conversion. us for ever. Much interest in Religion, and in religious views, as much interest in Nature, may be different in kind from the personal power of the living God. Here is the fountain of all Life : how are we to reach it, and drink at the Source t Will you say — God does not unveil His face to us ; He does not speak to us ; as a Person He does not meet us ; when we think of Him we are only dealing with our own Thoughts.^ Is it so? Then, indeed, we do not know Him, and have never been under the power of His Spirit. But it is not so. God does bring us into contact with Himself personally. We all have momentarily known that we have had to deal with a spirit that was not our own, with an invisible pre- sence, an inaudible voice, that could not be more real if the presence assumed a form, and the voice a sound. Only remember, that effectual Conversion is not unconditional. God is willing ever. God is seeking ever. The light is ever shining towards us, if we will keep the eyes and the souls it has once touched steadily fixed upon it. We may turn towards it, and walk ever in the light of God's countenance. We may turn from it, and walk in our own shadows. Nothing is wanting for perpetual regenerations, to renew our strength, and mount as eagles, but to have " Christ formed within us," and with desiring eyes to look ever "into the face of our Father who is in Heaven." IX. I Cor. xiii. 4-7 : "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; chanty envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil ;" rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth ; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." There is a grand simplicity in thus referring all Christian graces to one source, — in cutting short the whole train of philosophic maxims, of prudential cal- culations and artificial restraints by which feelings are schooled and conduct adjusted,— and supplying their place by one heart-affection, which, expressing what it is, acting according to its nature, breaks forth into the virtues, as God's sunlight gives all its varied beauty to the world. Next to the character of Christ, Christianity's greatest contribution to GOOD- NESS was in the distinct revelation of its Source, disclosing the deep fountain in which God is mir- rored, and whence issue peace on earth, good will to men, communion with the spirit of the universe. For all Goodness is a form of holy Love ; all hope, all enthusiasm, all Art, all ideal life, all self-sacri- 122 Love, the f til filling of the Law. fice, and that out of which self-sacrifice proceeds, all pure devotion, are inspirations of Love, Love of God, Love of Truth, Love of Man, Love of Nature, Love of Heaven and of Heavenly Perfectness. *' All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame." Christ knew nothing of that legislative morality which instead of an affection gives a precept ; instead of touching a spring of action lays down a rule ; instead of making the heart overflow with living waters carves and defines the channels in which they are to run. Christ spoke seldom of how much men have to do, for there is no measure to Love — but constantly of the living spring, constantly of that ful- ness and richness, and purity of heart which is the well of water springing up into everlasting Life. And would that we thought less of "what is in the bond," less of measuring our requirements, less of defining duties, and performing tasks, — and more of awakening the perceptions, of feeding the desires, of enriching the affections which would give us a share in the spirit and principle of goodness, make our own nature an original fountain of things merciful and lovely, take us into God's fellowship, and render our pursuit of beneficence and all perfection as the daily craving and satisfying of our soul's hunger and thirst ! *' With the heart men believe unto righteousness." It need not alarm the jealousy of Reason that the heart is the source of goodness — for Intellect is the Love, the fulfilling of the Laiv. 123 great minister and benefactor of the spiritual nature, and if Reason requires to be purified and directed by the moral feelings it repays the service by light and guidance amid perplexing and embarrassing appear- ances, in opening channels of beneficence, in framing instruments of action, in showing goodness the prac- tical ways to her own ends. It is indeed a fatal injury to our Nature to touch its simple and vigorous integrity, to parcel it out into contrasted or discon- nected faculties — to suppose that they act separately and that the strength of one is the weakness of the other — that a man of emotion must want prudence — a man of imagination be defective in observation or in judgment — instead of combining all to furnish the full of Image of God their Giver, receiving its own supply of service from each of the contribu- tories of spirit and of life. It is mainly the business of reason to confirm and direct moral truth : it is the office of the heart to receive it purely from God its fountain, to suggest it by a divining light, and always so to love and cherish it, that it bears its full fruit in the warm culture it receives. In the region of spiritual life the heart anticipates truth, projects it from itself ; and even in physical inquiry the com- petent imagination seizes a clue and leaps to the theory which is afterwards practically established. The great learners, the great teachers, of God, are those to whom common facts act as suggestions, con- veying by a hint the Divine thought, the Divine intent to minds that God has constituted in the image of His own. In all science it is Genius and 1 24 Love, the ftdfilliiig of the Law. Imagination, the suggestive faculties, that first catch a sight of the outlines of truth — and the heart is the genius of goodness, the prophet and forerunner of the Kingdom of God. It is only the faith which comes out of the impulses and fore-reachings of the heart, out of the divine instincts of goodness, that has heavenly powers and works great wonders, or of which Christ would have said, " Blessed art thou, for flesh and blood have not revealed it unto you, but the spirit of my Father." There is a faith which is an act of the understanding and stops there, and that faith is dead — even as the Devils were said to believe in God, and nothing to come of it but trembling. There is a Faith which worketh by LoA/e, the joint product of the affections, the reason, and the soul, when a Divine truth is taken into the interior warmth where the heart muses till the fire burns, and is there clothed with the hues of feeling until it lives before us a visible reality. For what is a truth that is admitted, but not loved, not cherished, not detained before the heart and the imagination until it rises to its natural dimensions and assumes its glorious form ? It is but a physical fact, bereft of its vitality — no more a quickener of thought, a feeder of hopes, a guide of life, a deliverer from circum- stance, than an unwatched star in the midnight Heavens when men are sleeping, which directs no wanderer, and shines unregarded in its cold sphere. It is on this account that the most intellectual are not always the most spiritual, nor the most morally excellent. Faith does not come from intellect — it Love, the fttlfilling of the Laza, 125 comes from affection and emotion and conscience — and in its most real form it is a passionate Love of Goodness. It is not the Truth perceived, but the Truth cherished in the heart, that goes hke leaven through the character. The attainment of Truth, and the living power of Truth, may depend upon different parts of our nature. Its spiritual energy for the most part comes from a meditative love, a con- templative act — the internal gazing at a Truth until the soul is full of it — the quiet dwelling upon some picturing of Faith until the inward eye is coloured Avith its glory, and w^hoever will not thus cherish his Truths may in their trial hour find them dead and barren — and never reach the height of their natural inspiration, with his convictions transfigured into conscientious impulse and will, his whole faith in his Heart, his whole Heart in his Life. It is in harmony with the directest dictate of our moral Nature, as with the deepest teaching of Reve- lation, since there is one root of perfection the same in us and in God — for " God is Love, and whosoever loveth dwelleth in God, and God in him ;" — that the Apostle goes direct to the pure heart, kept pure, for all the strength and for all the graces of character, and crowns the queenly head of Christlike Charity with the coronal of all the virtues. We are not now inquiring how this catholic Love, which is in fellow- ship with God, with all God's creatures, and with all God's works, may best be cultivated — though to that inquiry the simple answer would be that every gift of God is best cultivated by honouring it and letting 126 Love, the fulfilling of the Law. it live in its natural fruits ; but, supposing its exist- ence, we now desire to discern what is involved in it — how necessarily it generates all the great and all the gracious qualities which exalt or adorn our Nature. And as we notice each of the streams of grace and goodness as it issues from the fountain, by a simple appeal to conscience and to consciousness, by a glance of self-inspection, we discover whether the fountain itself is open and playing in our hearts. If the fruits do not appear — the kindred growths of the tree of Life — the roots must be partially dead- Now Love of God is fellowship with God ; love of Man is fellowship with Man ; love of Nature is fellow- ship with Nature ; love of Truth is communion with Truth, a keeping close to Reality in thought and life, in word and work. And, first, as to fellowship with God. All elevation of Thought, all great Hopes, all Peace that cannot be shaken, all Life that is contented, that can thankfully take the place that is given to it because it rests not on itself, have their ground in our Love for One in ivJwm we can trust, whom our con- science acknowledges as the Lord of all Perfectness, and to whom our soul is allied by ties in comparison with which all other relationships are remote and unaffecting. The most beneficent relationship on earth, that of parent to child, is the creation of God ; the Child draws its true Life from the Heavenly Parent. The earthly ties are symbols and shadows of spiritual facts. If man was sufficiently reflective, if there was but meditative depth in our hearts, Love Love, the fulfilling of the Law. 127 to God would be irrepressible ; duty and effort apart, if we acquainted ourselves with Him our Nature must adore Him, and delight itself in Him. The complaint of God is that men will not reflect, that they will not recognize the spiritual facts, that they will not look into the face of Him with whom they have to do. " The ox knoweth his owner, but Israel will not know ; my people will not consider." Spiri- tually present in us He is the strength of our Hearts in hours whose natural weakness no earthly friend can ever know — which we do not sufficiently under- stand ourselves to unfold or describe it to another. He holds communion with thoughts that earthly friends, cannot satisfy; and meets wants that no earthly friends can touch. Nor could we reflect how all other Love must be traced back to His Love with- out joining in the Psalm, " Whom have we in Heaven but Thee or who is there on the earth that we should desire in comparison with Thee ! " All derived per- fections, all human tenderness, all that mysterious sympathy with Nature which in its highest states is not so much the sense of beauty as the sentiment of Eternal Life, are but the signs that God is with us, and in us ; that through these expressions of His Spirit we are drawn near and nearer to the very source of Thought and Love, and hence the com- mand to love with the mind, with the heart, with the soul, with the strength of the will, for it requires the union of all these to make Him known, and none of them is exercised without new faithfulness on His part — new increase of Life on ours. 128 Love, the fulfilling of the Law. Now this Love, wherever it exists, takes up Christ's words, " Father ! not my will, but Thine ! " Discord, or even doubt, beyond the hesitation, the reluctance of nature over which Grace prevails, is destructive of the supposition. Piety is the faith of the soul, from His dealings with our souls, that He whom we love is always good and always right — a boundless Trust adopting as its natural language, " It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth to Him good." And this necessary effect is of course a test of the Love we have for God. Even in human relations that union totters where moral harmony is broken — where disagreement is a frequent experience — when the uncertain bridge of reconciliation has again and again to be traversed ; and with God, where His Will is known, this moral harmony should be absolute, for His Nature leaves no room for those varying lights of opinion and of sentiment which the frailty and partiality of ours in its purest earthly intercourses both occasions and tolerates, and when directed towards the tender Goodness and severe Righteous- ness of God, Love is accordance, absolute submission when He speaks His will. Love for God partakes of the unlimited nature of its object — it delights in walking by faith, in yielding without terms ; its natural feeling is, " Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." Now nothing so quickens spiritual discernment, so gives insight into another's mind, even into the mind of God, as a strong movement of the affections. It is sympathy with some leading part of another's Love, the fulfillhig of the Law. 129 character that gradually opens to us all the depths of his nature. And Love, by thus helping insight, conducts to the most exquisite observance of practical duties. We may witness even in the affections of childhood, much more of the matured mind, the effect of feeling in quickening the perceptive powers, in enabling the seeking eye of Love to read unex- pressed wishes as though it glanced directly on the heart, in anticipating even the thoughts when Affec- tion makes a study of its object, thus establishing a spiritual intercourse which is at once emblem, and prophecy, and part-fulfilment of Heaven. Now, sup- pose this natural operation to take effect in our relationship with Him towards whom we all are children, and how would it serve to unveil to us the hidden things of His Providence — make us quick to discern our Father's Spirit when He works in secret or clothes His Love in trial — to disengage from dis- cipline and life the deep intent with which He would penetrate our souls, and by enabling the hearts of the children to know the great Parent's Mind, incline them to the blessed and duteous service of a full filial homage. For Love of God is more than sub- mission to God, more than resignation or acqui- escence — it is the active power of these passive qualities — it is desire for conformity, the aspiration of whatever is kindred in us, the eager approach of our spiritual life towards Him who moves it. There is nothing else in Religion that we can compare with the natural action of the Love of God, it is the one mighty power to which all other powers contribute, II. K 130 Love, the fiilfilling of the Law. when the same Being draws to Himself unfearing affection and adoring veneration ; when the heart that feels itself encircled within a tenderness that is infinite is also touched with deepest awe ; and the most joyful confidence, the most reverential obedience, the most aspiring hopes, the heart of a child and the soul of Christ, are nourished and upheld by one Affection, and by one Being. These are the natural fruits of Love for God, and wherever the Will is struggling against Providence, or the soul disquieted, or the spirit slow to understand, or the life turned away from glad aspirings, a Searcher of Hearts might say in those piercing words of scripture, " I know you, that ye have not the Love of God in you." H. Turn now to the natural workings of Charity in its fellowship with Humanity. Briefly, then. Love seeketh not her own. Inasmuch as it is Love it passes from itself to its objects, and lives in the life of others. That is its essence. You could not in any way define it without saying so much. It is vteasured by the efforts it would make, by the self-denial it would practise to confer a blessing ; by the strait gates it will force itself through that it may go on the way of its life. Pure love, and willingness to suffer for the sake of what it loves, are commensurate terms. And consequently all true charity must love the light that guides it, and pursue it at whatever cost. As St. Paul expresses it, " It rejoices in the Truth." P'or, seeking to bless, it seeks both the right end and the right means. It is no random adventurer in philan- Love, the fulfilluig of the Lazv. 131 thropy ; it is alike earnest and cautious out of its great Love ; knowing how possible it is to work lasting wrong by presumptuous benevolence, it hails every TriLtli, new or old, as the instrument of good, the finger-mark of God. Whoever loves mankind must be a patient seeker after Truth, its incorruptible wit- ness — if need be, its social martyr — knowing that God works by Truth alone. Yet Charity, though it has the laws and ways of God for guidance and instruments, and moves and works in such high fellowship, is thoroughly simple, equally loving and pursuing its end when the method loses magnificence, and might have no charm for an ambitious philanthropist. There are men who from some other impulse, from an intellectual devotion to truth, an indignant recoil from injustice, a severe rectitude of nature, do good service to the world, but whose philanthropy never condescends, who carry with them no genial heart to make happiness where it can and fertilize the scenery of our daily life. Humanity cannot afford to turn away from any who are willing to bless it in their own way ; but they have much to learn of the spirit of Christ. It is Christian Love to be true to its own nature, to desire to diffuse blessedness how, where, and when it may ; and therefore, when it enters into social intercourse, its sympathies are all awake, its senses are present and exercised, observant of what is passing around it, because its heart is stirring ; it is kind, not easily pro- voked, and, if needs be, suffers long ; it has no malign inclination, and therefore neither envieth nor thinketh 132 Love, the fttlfilling of the Law. evil ; it has no constrained part to play, but free in its simplicity, the eye that beams on us is uncon- scious of its own light, and the tones know not their own music. Instead of petty and torturing rules to control the petulance of temper — instead of artificial checks to cover over the evil when the outbreak is imminent — instead of a laboured formalism to preserve the proprieties of outward demeanour, let us have the genuine feeling, the true spring of grace and goodness, and leave it to its freedom ; and whenever there is Unkindness in our life — or the bitterness of contempt, that worst poison of all goodness — or even a passing irritation taking too readily the indulgence of expression, let us know that the Heart is wrong, that the Spirit is for the time unloving, uncharitable ; and, commencing the work of reformation there, by chastening and purifying the affections, provide for the life that flows from them. III. For, lastly, if we look to it in its relations to individual character, Charity, the spirit of fellowship with God, with Nature, and with Humanity, is indeed the Peace that passeth understanding shed abroad in men's hearts. What purity so entire as that which, springing from the love of God, strives to keep itself unspotted, that it may be worthy to have communion with Him ; or which disengages itself from all evil that it may be an instrument of His goodness, knowing that the righteous cause of human well-being can be advanced only by righteous men, and that no man of impure heart can truly love his brother. Even Jesus Christ acknowledged the cleansing power of Love, the fMlJilling of the Law. 133 Charity in aiding the purification of his own spirit. " Father, / be led into the presence of the hving God, and by the reverence it pays to His voice become a wiUing worshipper in spirit and in truth. It is in this way that all through life the noblest and the most devo- tional form of character is maintained, that the saint and the martyr is made, that we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, by identifying suggestions and beckonings of conscience with the voice and the finger of God. It is remarkable, and it is not altogether satis- factory, how much of that figurative language by which we strive to bring God near to us, and which with those who first used it originated in His felt nearness to them, is derived not from anything in our own experience of life, but from a quite foreign life that only sacred literature has imprinted upon us. '' God is our Shepherd, and we are the sheep of His pasture." " We sit under our own vine and our own fig-tree, with none to make us afraid." We have no more modern, no more personal way of saying these things in figurative words fresh from our own life. We would not lose these expressions on any account, we are in every way richer for possessing them — and though we are not a pastoral people, and do not dwell in a land flowing with milk and honey, with wine and oil, these forms of existence are so simple, so easily conceived, that the language is readily adopted and is still instinct with life. But, why is not our own living experience more creative of spiritual language of this sort } Why do not we, like Christ, speak parables of Nature and spiritual fellowship from the 266 Religion and the Child, commonest things around tLs, and find them not mean or vulgar but fresh as with the morning dews of Heaven ? Is it not that with us the profane aspect of our common Hfe is too strong, and its sacred aspect too weak, too uncertain, to permit us with safety to borrow our spiritual language from our ordinary call- ings ? For example, if the Hebrews had been a com- mercial and sea-going people, if they had had expe- rience of anything but an inland traffic or an inland sea, unquestionably they would have spoken of God as their Pilot as well as their Shepherd. We dare not do so : yet the image brings us nearer to infinite, mysterious, and heavenly guidance. Of course we cannot attempt to force figurative language from familiar sources ; if it does not come naturally it is worth nothing : but it shows the difference between an age when the commonest forms of life were full of God, and an age like this, when we have to retire within ourselves even from callings that readily ally themselves with divine similitudes, to feel Him near us : and it is very much the difference between a spiritual child and an unspiritual man. Another of the preposterous methods of religious education, that might well provoke to not unrighteous wrath in later years if the mind ever awakes to the tyranny practised upon it, is the habit of teaching as revealed truths perplexing and doubtful doctrines before the spirit is " able to bear " such subjects, or can arrive at any real possession of them, or is sufficiently alive to its own interests to resist encroachment on its future rights. A religious teacher thinks it a righteous Religion and the Child. 267 thing to crush in the seed the natural force of evidence, and by arbitrary will to incapacitate a mind from ever attaining an unbiased view of the great questions that divide the deepest religious thinkers. I know not that a more serious wrong could be inflicted, that the idea of justice could be more gravely violated, than to take a mind incompetent and helpless, and by an act of usurpation make it a copy of ourselves — by pre-occupying it with our opinions, when it can have none of its own — to provide against the time when it might think impartially and with adequate knowledge, that it shall think in no other way than as we determine. An instructed conscience would as soon think of robbing a child of its birthright, of destroying its future freedom of action in the things that belong to the world, as its future freedom of thought in the things that belong to God. In what sense, then, is Religion the foundation of all education — for there must be a sense in which this can be maintained without betraying the independ- ence of the individual spirit or the ever-fresh in- terests of progressive truth. It is true of Religion : it is not true of Theology. In thp hands of bigots this is a formidable premise : Religion is at the root of all education ; for since to them all the power of true Religion is in their Theology, the inference is clear, that it is a duty to lose no time in occupying the mind of childhood with their own creeds. It is the religious sentiment, all that is of the nature of personal communion with God, and of spiritual experience, that ought to be at the foundation of 268 ReligioJt and the Child. education, not '' doiibtfid disputations^ It is true of everything in Religion that conscience, and affection, and the Spirit of God attest ; it is not true of that supposed truth which depends on philosophical speculation or inferential interpretations to which a child is not adequate, — on evidence, and a faculty of weighing evidence, with neither of which a child is furnished. No religious truth that a parent receives himself on spiritual Evidence need he be restrained from imparting to his child. For example, he may teach the unity of God, for all spiritual minds receive it : but he may not teach a metaphysical plurality in that unity, for, even if true, it rests not on spiritual grounds, but on external or argumentative proofs quite beyond a child's province. He may teach the inexhaustible goodness and forgivingness of God — but no scheme of salvation, beyond the sim- plicity of the parable of the Prodigal Son : " I will arise and go to my father." "This my son was dead, and is alive again : he was lost, and is found." He may bring up his child, as in the nurture and admoni- tion of the Lord, in .regard to all convictions of his own for which he can make God his direct spiritual Witness. And this usurping system of religious education is only a fragment of a very general want of faith iii Ti'utJi. Men do evil in the hope that good may come of it. They do not confide in the light, and endeavour by foreign means to influence the result. Strange to say, it was the party that believed in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures that was opposed Religion and the Child. 269 to a revised Bible, to a true text, and a true trans- lation. They were afraid that what they held as all-important truth might lose some accidental, yet unfair, advantage which then it had. This is the teaching that makes sceptics, indifferentists, bigots : crushing all genuine faith. This distrust of truth — this manoeuvring for righteousness' sake — acting falsely for God, is the most dangerous form of infidelity. Again and again does that profound question of the Master fall upon our hearts, " When the Son of Man cometh will he find faith upon the earth } " Let us live in faith : work in faith : teach in faith : sow good seed far and wide in faith : cast our bread upon the waters in faith — and when we are dead and gone, if God gives His Blessing — it will bear good fruit, and feed the coming ages ! XIX. (Rixmnl §mxmm &i ^\mi, mu\ the (^xtx-\mm\t i^mxUxUv. Samuel xvi. 23 : **When the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, David took a harp, and played with his hand ; so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him." Every one must have observed, with encourage- ment or with humiliation as he was affected for better or for worse, how most serious changes in modes of temper, in frames of mind, in attitudes of soul, in the practical disposal of time, are produced by very slight changes in the influences that are acting upon us. Character and conduct would seem not moved and sustained by the strength of an inner spring of senti- ment and will, constant in direction, uniform in power, but rather to be driven and drifted by the circumstances brought to bear upon us — sometimes raising us to Heaven as the native atmosphere of pure and loving hearts untroubled by ambitions, some- times letting us fall dejected to the earth, our props all broken, and the buoyancy of our spirit gone. Under one set of influences, it may be with one Casual Diversions of Spirit. 2 7 1 set of companions, \vc walk according to the spirit, from our deepest convictions and our highest feeHngs, looking into the heart of things with open face as though nothing again could distort or cloud the reali- ties that concern our eternal peace : under another set of influences, or with other associates, we walk according to the flesh, take the colour of the time, have no character independent of casualty, and leave our nature to be a debtor for its states to the acci- dents of evil or of good. Yet, to extract such consolation as we may under the different spiritual aspects of the same man at different times, — we are inconsistent without being purposely, or consciously, insincere. In seasons of thought, in solitude, in prayer, apart with Christ on some mount oi meditation, or under awe of the U7ispoken Word, we may feel the glow of devotion on our erect and awakened nature, the soul to be the enduring reality, God to be in all things and all things in God — and how elated we can become you all remember, how impossible we deem it that the sub- limity and awe should utterly pass from our souls, that we should ever sink again to the littleness of irritable tempers and miserable cares, the helpless victims of a wayward moment, — and yet how slight a thing may avail to change the currents of our being — how trifling the discomfiture that can insinuate its vexation and edge away from the Heart that sacred peace, reducing us once more under a dominion that is unworthy of us — and because of the elevation we have fallen from, leaving us more remorseful and 272 Casual Diversions of Spirit, unhappy, perhaps weaker in the reaction of our self- distrust, than if we had never been so hfted up ! In the times of our spiritual-mindedness, in the clearer moments of our faith, we can look all facts and their issues in the face, and, while yet the fire burns, feel every yoke to be easy, every burden to be light, and even temptation and sacrifice as only the high incitements of God, the animating tests of power, the distinguished stations on the race where the victor earns his crown : yet who needs to be told that all this can pass away, and leave not a vestige of its sacred- ness or its confidence behind, that the descent of a soul can be rapid and utter, that he who under one set of influences was dreaming of doing the will of God as the angels do it, walking as on ether, treading in thought the mountain tops of life, may under another set of influences, and ere an hour passes, put forth the sad and mortifying exhibitions of peevish and selfish and mere ordinary humanity ? In any moment of real communion with Christ, in any earnest application to the fountain of all serenity of spirit, under the power of human sympathy when that sympathy is of the purest quality and on the highest things, or even in states of less spiritual activity, in the home-confidences of the heart, the natural movements of affections habitually trustful, we may triumph without even the consciousness of struggle over such afflictions as are only circumstantial, — bring our stronger sorrows under the express gaze of Faith, and know that they are blessings in the making, and yet if but one step of that inward eleva- and the Ever-present Comforter. 273 tion be abandoned, if but the lightest cloud of unworthy- care, of mean, ungenial passion trouble our quiet and veil our trust, if for a moment we forget everything but the vexations that are around our feet, in that moment we have fallen from the heights that com- manded heaven, to struggle as we can through the tangled undergrowth of life. And it is not in our spiritual frames only that this unstable equilibrium prevails ; the social aspects of the natural man are just as liable to fall under un- worthy servitude to circumstance. Under an impulse of benevolence, a fresh gale of love, we maybe hurried into the commission of a generous deed, — softened by the presence of distress, with its wretchedness before our eyes and its plaint in our hearts, we may seek to relieve the strong anguish which the sight of suffering creates, vanquished by compassion, — and yet, when the casually excited emotion that had surprised us into free goodness has subsided, when the sad, tones that reached and tortured our sensibilities obtrude no more their beseeching melancholy, we can forget that there is misery in the world, and with a soul at ease shut out every troublesome application, and never dream that we are selfish though we know that there is destitution in the next street, and that we have cut ourselves off from the unsought sufferings of our kind. Or, under the influence of companionship, we may feel a sudden warmth at the fountains whence are the issues of life, reserves and cold distrusts be swept away and the floodgates of the heart unlocked by the power of brotherhood, and in that hour of overflowing II. T 2 74 Casttal Diversions of Spirit, cordiality the littleness of personal interests are forgot- ten in the transcendent delight of generous emotion, in the loving rivalries of friendship : and these pledged brothers of to-day may meet to-morrow on another stage where insensibly other motives come into natural play, where the heart grows as cautious and self as dominant as ever, and the old breath from the gale of worldliness introduces another class of associa- tions, turn into the accustomed channels the currents of desire and all that was generous in profession, all that was sincere though fleeting in feeling is borne down by a dead pressure which has come to be regarded as the settled order of life, and all that would disturb it as but the foolishness of a passing excitement. Everywhere do we find illustrations full of per- sonal application, showing the dominance of super- ficial influence, when by outward circumstances we are soothed into tranquillity or vexed into irritations, melted in charity or contracted into self-seeking, breathe of holiness or wear the shade of impure thought, walk in faith within the felt guardianship of God, or, amid unspiritual interests and alien imagina- tions turn ourselves away from the light of His Coun- tenance. And these facts point to a principle that lies at the root of all self-culture, of all voluntary discipline, of all formation of character, so far as that formation depends on influences which lie within our own com- mand. We have seasons of elevation, we have times of holier and better thought, we have frames of feel- and the Ever-present Com farter. 275 ing and of action which would indeed be blessed if only they were permanent ; wc know these, we know the influences that produce them ; whither we go wc know, and the way we know : we have also our tendencies to sink, to merge the spiritual in the host of meaner things that assail us, and it rests largely with ourselves to determine the prevailing presence under which we will live, what powers we choose to keep around us, what spirits we will have to enter in and make their abode in the chambers of our hearts. The king of Israel could charm away the gloomy irritations of a disturbed, disordered mind by the dominant power of a natural influence. Saul was the victim of a moody nature, and in the fierce trouble of ungoverned passion the sweetness of music could win him to a happier frame. The heart of the undisci- plined man could not attune itself, but when David took the harp and played with his hand, the mystic ministry of sounds put forth its healing, penetrative voice, touched the latent springs of gentle emotions, of healthy life, and the evil spirit departed from him, displaced by a holier presence. That was not self- control : it was a mechanical way of producing a calm of the passions. It was a diversion in favour of reason and of purity wrought by an extraneous hand. The soothing influence fell like breathings from Heaven on the strife within, and so long as the music floated over the entranced sense it beguiled the listen- ing spirit from its ungentle retreats, "took the prisoned soul and lapped it in Klysium;" but when the magic spell was removed, the dark, bad temper, left again 276 Casual Diversions of Spirit, to its own workings, distilled anew the black drops of bitterness, not again to know rest until the outward charm again infused gentler thoughts and freed the slaved and tyrannotis heart from servitude to itself. That is not the way for a man to be governed : it is the way for a demon, a demoniacal temper, to be exorcised. What ive want is some power similar in its effects to that harp of solemn sound, in that it will always give us our saving emotions, our loving heart, our reasonable will, our healthy life, but spiritual in its nature, independent of accident, to be found of all that seek it, waiting upon no circumstance, resting between us and God alone. We want a presence that can both charm and nerve, sweeten and strengthen, heal our wounds and give us fresh armour. We want a living and present power from whose action we are never excluded, from whom nothing but health can come, and from before whose face, if we will meet His face, every evil spirit must pass away. No expedient, whatever be the rare faculties God has bestowed upon it, whatever eloquent music it can discourse, will supply that power. Ruffled emotions, perverted hearts, may be lulled and led by potent sounds, but the dark, unhappy nature is only enter- tained, not changed, and the suppressed passion swells back to the bosom when the enchantment dies. External influences we must indeed use, they are for our help or for our discipline, for our joy or for our strengthening, nor can it be denied that they may have a legitimate right to do anything with us that and the Ever-present Comforter. 277 is in their power to do, except to make us in spirit their dependents, except to let it rest witJi them to determine what the temper of our hearts, the fashion of our souls shall be, whether we are to be reasonable or unreasonable, loving or selfish, calm or passionate, devotional or worldly. Doubtless God has given to outward things, and to other minds, a great power over us. That power should be well understood. It is God's own ministry to us in Nature and in humanity. The scenes and the circumstances that are full of natural religion, that touch the instincts of faith, amid which we find that there is an aptitude in us to think of God, and be devotionally moved, should be dear and familiar, influences so known and sanctified by use that whenever we resort to them former associations return, and with ever-cumulative power make the place a temple and our soul a worshipper. The intercourse with men that touch some of the springs of unselfish feeling, — the power of simple kindness, the interchange of thoughts that lie below the surface of life and belong to the inter- preting spirit ; the free grace of God on some happy natures that in their exemption from doubt and sin seem to keep the blessing of their birthright and to live as they were born, members of the kingdom of Heaven ; the loftier strain of others with heavier burdens through thick darkness upwards to the light ; the simple, hearty, brotherly, sympathy in all the ills that flesh is heir to, which awakens effort, charity, and the blessed sense of usefulness, — all this winning or pathetic music of humanity every heart must 278 Castial Diversions of Spirit, desire to hear that desires to meet God in His natural ways, to have its affections fresh and right, ready to be enHsted in every work of need. And every man may have a rich share in this most costly knowledge, a knowledge of the influences that awaken the soul, while they put to sleep the passions and the world. Every one knows some situations in which his spirit grows thoughtful and solemn — some influences under which he feels that the cloud melts out of his heart, and he becomes gentle and guileless as a child ; some scenes, some persons, whose power over his emotions is beneficent, delicious, and constant ; where unkind- ness could not dwell with him, where the world loses its worldliness and keeps only its healing breath and its holy mysteries — some associations with generous impulses, with holy incitements, with awakening and entrancing truths which we can call up when we will, and fill our hearts with their beauty and restorative power. For all this, the food and the medicine of the soul, through the power and grace of natural affec- tions, God has made some provision for every child born into the world. Yet, true as all this is, there are times when the rivers and the streams will fail us, and there is no draught to be had but at the fountain head ; and at all times the rivers and the streams seem to be deserting us, and lose their healing virtue, if we know not whence they flow. He that is devotional only when God is speaking to him through the glory of His visible works will often be worldly. He that is good only from the attraction of kindred goodness and the Ever-present Co7nforter. 279 with Its voice wooing and its eye kindling on him, will often be miserably selfish. He that knows his right relation to the world's need and misery only when its wretchedness is before his eyes, and its anguished cry in his ears, will often be deeply guilty. The influence that is to keep us ever dutiful, ever thoughtful, ever quiet at heart, possessors of our own souls when our souls are most themselves, must have its abode within the soul itself. Doubtless we are creatures of influence, though we are not the creatures of circumstance ; for the one influence that is omni- potent over all circumstance is from the centre of our being, the influence of the Father of spirits. God, and God alone, can speak to every tone and to every want of the Heart, and make His voice sweet or awful, healing or searching, according to our need. In whatever strait we are, if we wait upon Him, and listen for the still, small voice, it will speak His truth — the truth, the reality, that will make us free. We need a Power ever present, ever truthful, never sparing us, yet for ever compassionate ; and we find Him in the Lord of our conscience, in the Holy Spirit of our souls. What syren need prevail with us against the music of our own Faith, and Hope, and Love — what evil spirit against the inspiration of our God .? It hangs on no man's breath — it comes not from the fair face of Nature ; these may be absent yet it will be present. The Power in whom we live is not foreign, but very nigh to us ; " the word is even in our hearts, that we may hear it and do it." What can compare with this, or contend against it on equal ground .'' We 28o Casual Diversions of Spirit, make not light of circumstance, but what is circum- stance against God — what persuasion ought to prevail against our own faith — what voice against our own conscience ? Assign to temptation all the terrible power it has ; and to your own weakness the worst that is natural to it ; and if you assign to either any- thing less than this they will surely prevail against you ; but still the mightiest thing that is in us, the mightiest power that can touch us, is our Faith, our Truth, our God, whom to deny is to deny ourselves — ■ whom if you will hear, every storm will be a calm, or as the distant music of many waters ; every trial a divine invitation to take one step nearer to the Heavenly Throne. When we speak of internal influences, of the Spirit of God as of right supreme, we are not forgetting, or undervaluing, that external ministry which each of us may both exert on, and receive from, our fellow- beings. Indeed, the influence within us is not likely to be healing or holy, if the influence that goes out from us is carelessly regarded. If we will not be as a harp to sweeten others, it can only prove that we need a harp for ourselves. I do not say that this ministry of personal influence is an office for men to aim at ; hardly could they do so without some injury to modesty and to natural grace. Nor is any one less likely to succeed in the blessed work of toning and elevating the hearts of men than one who could convince himself that he had a special gift of that kind, that to him in some high spiritual sense had been confided David's harp for the purpose of charm- and the Evei^-present Comforter. 281 ing the disordered spirits of the world. The first condition of a real gift of influence is that God work through us by silent grace, and that the human instrument be not too conscious of the power it is exerting. Men will receive as from God through another's soul an influence that will lose its divine character if the man is seen purposely to aim it. If we have life in ourselves, enough and to spare, it will break from us, the more unconsciously the better, in simple thoughts that show a pure Heart, an uncorrupted nature — in graces that are seen and felt by others, though they know not themselves — in spontaneous love fulfilling the law — in oil ©n troubled waters, the meekness that turns away wrath ; the large charity that is not easily provoked, and thinketh no evil — in the natural witness we give to truth and goodness for their sakes, not for ours, nor for a purpose. A man full of grace and truth will act and speak graciously and truly, and God will use him accord- ingly ; but if he occupies himself with thinking of his own influence he will act hurtfully on its natural springs, and turn the divine music of his being into mimic and offensive tones. There is but one rule for the man who would sweeten and purify the lives of others, for ever in God to sweeten and purify himself, to come freely into all natural relations with man, to neglect no fellowship that opens to him, not as one graced and gifted for their good, but simply, as under con- straint of Christ, out of his impulse and his love. Let a man be good, and true, and pure, and loving 282 Casual Diversions of Spirit, in word and in work, and he need not think about his influence — only let him beware lest he spoil him- self by any insincerity, by any want of reality, for being an unconscious instrument in God's Hand. But though the grace of our influence is with God, there is no limit to the measure in which we may qualify ourselves for being so used by Him ; no limit, that is, to the measure in which we may permit God to be an energizing influence on ourselves. What evil thought could live in His presence } What despair could look into His face and survive } To sanctify the soul we have but to invite God into it. The heart is holy if He is there. God permits us to use without stint or limit His own Goodness, the image of His goodness in our nature, for the saving and cleansing of our spirits. The use of the crucifix may become a superstition ; but who could fill his soul with Christ crucified and not for the time dispel guilty passion from his inmost being .? All that most concern us are near us — within our reach, within our prayers ; if we invite them they will come and make their abode with us. All the powers of the world to come are within our own souls. The pleading angel that is in us, as in the little ones of Christ, can look ever into the face of our Father who is in Heaven. There is no life anywhere, here or in Heaven — the life of our dead who are now the living for evermore — which may not be used to attune the hearts of us men still walking on this earth. It is this that makes all our sin to be without excuse ; for withm us, when we turn to Him, is the Power that can subdue it — the God and the Ever-present Comforter. 283 who will be present when we invite Him, and who cannot dwell with it in the same Heart. It is this that makes all sorrow without hope as a wilful turning-away of our eyes from the Hills whence Cometh our help ; for Heaven is open, and the Com- forter abideth for ever. " Why art thou cast down, oh my soul t and why art thou disquieted within me } Hope thou in God : for I shall yet praise Him, who is the Health of my countenance, and my God." XX. Cor. XV. 41, 42 : *' One star dififereth from another star in glory : so also is the resurrection of the dead." The prevailing language about the future life which gives the main prominence to the place to which we go has naturally led to that classification of the world of spirits which distributes all departed souls into two divisions, and assigns the one to a region of absolute joy, the other to a region of un- qualified woe. If there is a place wherein the spirits of men gone from this life are for ever in bliss emparadised, and another place wherein they are for ever in pain incarcerated, then all spiritual distinctions and discriminations in the future are reduced to nothing when compared with the single consideration of admission into the one, of escape from the other. The whole question of judgment and the eternal award will present itself under the form of two localities. It is in their conceptions of t/ie invisible, where they cease to be held in check by the great realities of God The Resurrection World. 285 around them, that men have displayed most of a fanatical and also of a carnal and unspiritual ex- travagance ; shaping that mystic world after material patterns at once easy and symmetrical, instead of looking into the soul, and the Divine arrangements in the actual life we know, for their ideas of the true, the good, the blessed, the real, the eternal, in the unknown future. They are misled, too, by a narrow fondness for system. All unspiritual minds would have God to act upon a rule, and a rule so precise that they themselves can lay it down and systemati- cally apply it, forgetting that in their scheme of the Future, which they do not know, they are violating all the analogies of God's Providence in the present, which they might know. It is the spirit of theory, under the vulgar impression that authority is at its highest when it is least qualified and cuts the sharpest lines, which chooses to determine that in a futurity wherein God reigns and Man is judged there must be a place where He is in the fulness of beatific presence, and another place from which He absolutely with- draws — a place free from every mixture of solicitude, where no guilt excites a spiritual care, no grief a pang of sympathy, and another place unredeemed from its evil uniformity by any meltings of penitence, any opening lights of grace or goodness. Here, on earth, the dutiful mingle with the sinful, the blessed in spirit with the disobedient and unquiet of heart. Here, on earth, they are members of the same society, of the same family and household ; and their absolute separation would be destruction to all the highest 286 The Restun^ectioji World. purposes of God's Providence in their spiritual edu- cation. If Christ lived, and chose to live, with publicans and with sinners, that he might seek and find the lost, and qualify their life by his own, it is strange that Christians should be so quick to conclude that the kingdom of Heaven must be constituted on directly opposite principles. But men whose notions of perfection are not spiritual, but mechanical, shaped upon a model of uniformity, forget all this ; forget what God deems good and holy in the only world they know, and on the theory that all futurity is Judgment, and Judgment ONLY, they make a sym- metrical Heaven and a symmetrical Hell, each abso- lute of its kind, and imagine that they have magnified the consistency of God by these boundary lines — that they have vindicated the spirituality of His Govern- ment by a local separation of the two elements in man — conceiving for Almighty Love and for Infinite Wisdom no higher aim, no holier result, than to abandon the conquest over evil in the hearts of those whom yet they call His children, as beyond His Will or beyond His Power, — and according to a prepon- derance of either in the moment of Death to detach the good element for eternal felicity, the evil element for endless suffering. That Christ should have lived and taught, and declared God's Will for man, and spoken the Parable of the Prodigal Son to set forth the Father's relations to the most sinful of His children, and yet that men, thinking to exalt God, should believe that this ever- lasting defeat of God is the predicted consummation The Resurrection World. 287 of all things, is surely as marvellous as anything that could be named — the extreme instance of what is narrowest in man, his spirit of judgment, making itself the measure of what is highest in God, His Spirit of Grace and Power. Does this scheme of an absolute separation between the good and the evil elements in human wills bear any resemblance to the Providence of God on earth ? We may be assured that it will bear just as little to the Providence of God in Heaven. The evil will never be separated from the good until evil itself is overcome by goodness and melts into its life ; and instead of an everlasting uni- formity of blessedness and of woe every passing hour of eternity must, there as here, make innumerable changes as new rays of truth and light fall upon the infinite complexity of souls. How widely different from the merely territorial view of the eternal world of spirits is the figurative descriptiveness of St. Paul : " One star differeth from another star in glory : so also is the resurrection of the dead." Here is introduced a picture of spiritual variety as unlimited as imagery can convey ; indeed, as it had to be to meet the case, too unlimited to be distinct. " There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars." From the sun, who to us walks the heavens alone — not that he is alone, but because the myriads of lesser lights are lost in his beams, down to the smallest or most distant star visible only in thickest darkness — are the materials to be gathered that go to make up this vast image of spiritual co- existence ; and, as the conceivable symbol of a Divine 288 The Resurrectio7i World. fact, it sets forth the reasonable truth that all the varying hues of essential spiritual character shall be met by as many fitnesses of natural retribution ; that as star differeth from star in glory, so the dwellers in Heaven shall take their place according to the bright- ness of their souls, and receive their measure of the divine enjoyment of God according as they are able to bear it. Whatever is spiritually true in the present remains true for ever. All laws of the soul are the same for heaven and for earth. " What is bound on earth shall be bound in heaven : what is loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Nothing that is right here can be wrong there ; nothing that is wrong here can be right there ; no mingling of unlike souls that is according to God's holy will here can be unholy in Heaven. Heaven and earth shall sooner pass away than one tittle of the Spirit's law shall fail to be accomplished. Now, what is the Spirit's law as to the intercourse of the righteous with the un- righteous, of the blessed with the yet unblessed ? Cer- tainly Christ has left this in no doubt, so far as his authority and his practice can determine it. It is the one element of spiritual identity, of spiritual analogy and law, which, amid whatever inconceivable changes of circumstance, will harmonize earth and Heaven in the successive processes of one educational purpose. This affords our only means of discernment into the Future. Let us apply a moral rule to souls on earth ; and if it would manifestly be evil or impossible there, then it must be evil or impossible, not there only, but wherever human souls are found. Who, then, in The Resurrection World. 289 reference to the human souls at any time congregated on this earth, even if he had a judgment true as God's, would think it possible to run between them a line of separation which should divide them into two classes of merit, each individual clearly belonging to his class and the classes marked by impassable distinctions ? And if in reference to earth this is morally incredible, what is there that can make it just and right in Heaven ? But what is Heaven ? What lax imagi- nations have gathered around that high word and corrupted its purity, that whenever it occurs it is almost certain to usher in some luxurious fallacy, some carnal vision, some image of the senses ? Is not the definition of Christ altogether forgotten or altogether misunderstood : " Neither, lo here ! nor, lo there ! for behold, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you"? That life in Heaven may be fitted to communicate the most exquisite delights, who can doubt that has ever known communion with Nature or felt God's power to address the soul through the Spirit that lives in, and looks into us out of, His works ? But however this may be, these are not the essentials of Heaven. Many good men here on earth know little of this power, and make little account of it ; and the purest blessedness, whether drawn from this or from any other source, will owe more to the inward soul than to the outward circumstance. There may be all of external glory by which God can worthily be revealed, there may be sounds that we name, but do not know, as the music of the spheres ; there may be an ethereal atmosphere through which God is glassed, II. U 290 The Resiirr^ection Woidd. as in open vision ; there may be more of this, and such as this, than it hath entered into the heart of man to conceive, yet are we assured that none of these, nor all of them together, make the spiritual Heaven of Christ, the Heaven of our personal fellowship with God — that the essential delights of that Heaven, without which these, if we could realize them in a world of judgment, would ow\y expose us to torturing shame, are righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Even as on earth, so in Heaven, it is within that we must look for the properties that can make an elysium out of external things, — it is by the powers of the inward life that we walk now on God's world with a kindling eye and a drinking spirit ; from the calm of a conscience not satisfied indeed, but desiring to be true and just before God, and from the thirst for full communion are gathered now the spiritual elements of boundless trust and peace, and if these inward qualities had no germ in us, there could be no Heaven for us ; in the presence of God and of the Holy Angels and of the spirits of the just made perfect we should feel ourselves to be outcasts, and the new Heavens and the new Earth wherein dwelleth righteousness be our most ungenial abode, a mocking exile. If the Angel of Death, on the warning of a moment, were to summon any one amongst us to the reckonings of a commenced Eternity — the habits of holiness that are now formed within us, the spiritual relations that we have now established with our God, the currents of pure and elevated thought that are now working The Rcstin^ection World. 291 channels in our hearts, the practical amount of our present sympathies with the love and self-sacrifice of the perfect Son of Man — these would make the ele- ments of our initial Heaven ; and to reverse the picture, our ingratitude, our disobedience, our insensibility, our deadened affections, the estrangement between the soul and its God, the distance we have wandered from our Father's House, the perverseness that has resisted all His entreaties to return — these, with whatever deeper committed sins may cleave to us, would provide its food for the worm, its fuel for the fire. If only our hearts were pure, and set on God in simple trust, what strength and spiritual patience might wait upon the thought that the future, essen- tially considered, must be a development of the Divine germs that are in the present, that nothing is lost, that nothing has irrecoverably gone from us, that nothing is unavenged or unrewarded, that all the seeds of life we have kept in our hearts shall remain with us to render in full measures the blessedness they enfold ! For the moment of death can make no spiritual change in the soul : only, all that intercepts judgment is then removed, and we stand face to face with retribution. " After death the judgment." It is the crisis in the spirit's history : the reality, the full truth as to what we are, and what we deserve, can no longer be evaded or ignored. We shall then begin to know, even as we are known. The infinite variety of human character must all appear again, with nothing intrinsically altered, unless it be in the lost power of 292 TJic Resurrection World. hiding from ourselves. God will not destroy our present characters, and recreate them in an instant in some other form. He will carry us forward from what we now are. Otherwise this world would be a needless waste of experience, discipline, and suffer- ing, — and judgment and retribution have no reality. Doubtless all issues of life are as acts of Divine Justice, and we ourselves are at this moment God's judgment upon our own past ; but now we do not know our- selves, and cannot read the sentence. Besides, this world is not purely retributive : for if it was, it could not be disciplinary ; we should have no trials of love, or faith, or patience. Death ushers us to our first experience of a life which, whatever else it may be, is retributive ; and as we close our eyes on earth, do we appear at once in Heaven. Every form, and degree, and complexion of Goodness shall be there — from the steadfast soul that leans on God and " walks with inward glory crowned," to the willing spirit that leaves itself at the mercy of the weak flesh, and slips at a sudden temptation ; and every form of Evil shall be there — from the yet timid guilt where conscience still palsies the trembling hand and beat- ing heart, to the desperate hardihood of the sin that knows nor fear nor hope. The soul shall appear as it is, prepared or unprepared, clothed or naked : the saint, just released from the strain of discipline, with the light of faith yet streaming on his face, and the set of the Heavenly Purpose on every feature ; the sinner, with the marks of his standing fresh upon him ; the seeker of pleasure, and the seeker of self, opening The Resurrection World. 293 his eyes for the first time as dimly conscious of a lost way; the trifler in his levity; the liar, "pale with false- hood ; " the prodigal and the drunkard, with the look that tells the awful story of how he had renounced his Father's House and his Father's Spirit, and lived on husks, and had not yet "come to himself;" the mur- derer, with the blood-stains on his soul. Then, not by an outward judgment, but by a spiritual fitness, the one take their place among those who draw their life from God ; the other, "blinded by excess of light," without a condemning sentence, must feel their outer darkness. Are these first adjustments to be the fixing of our unchangeable destinies ? Is earth to man the whole of Divine Teaching, and all the future nothing but an irreversible sentence ? Is the unending life to be all execution of judgment upon a few dim, mistaken days, and the hand-breadth of present time to be the whole of opportunity for man } Who can believe it ? Who can really think of Eternity, and couple it with such a thought ? Who can really think on man's nature, on God's Love, on God's Righteousness, and credit such an infinite contradiction } If this were so, then, indeed, let us desire to remain where we are, and contend against Death, and fear it as our worst foe ; for this world would be more spiritual than the world to which we go : here, at least, there is a place of repentance for the worst, as well as of improvement for the best, and Death would come only to cut off progress. I believe that only a single cause has kept Chris- 294 ^^^ Resurrection World. tendom from doubting the successive developments of our spiritual nature through discipline and educa- tion in the Eternal Life : and that is, because it is supposed that the Bible, as an oracle of belief, including all it is taken to affirm, excluding all else, does not contain an explicit statement of this truth in so many words. It is amazing how verbal men expect God to be in His communications to them, when they look upon the Bible, not as a record of the impressions He has made on holy souls, but as His own Word, and the whole of His own Word, to man. They will not know what it is to be spiritually taught ; they will not know that the real Word of God is that which is spoken to the soul, not that which is written in a book, and that all Scripture — and beyond Scripture, God's living Word in His Son — only help us so far as they enable us to understand God speaking within ourselves. There are those who will believe nothing that they do not find in the words of their Bibles ; who believing that Heaven is a place, yet doubt the fact of mutual recognition, because that is not stated, though Christ prayed, "Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me, be with me where I am." This is an idea of revelation that takes from religion all that is spiritual ; for to require to be told everything from an external source is to receive nothing from our Father's Spirit. Is not this to make the Bible an instrument of suppression and obstruction towards the spiritual truth that may legitimately be drawn out of itself? For is there any word of Christ that is not as a seed of faith, of life in the soul, eternal and The Restirrection World, 295 progressive ? Christianity is the Image of God in the Person of a living Man, quickening in our hearts out of its fulness in his own, the knowledge of our Father's relations with us. Are we not to believe in the directest inspirations unless we can find in words what God has taught us in the spirit ? Until we cease to look upon the Bible as a depository of all spiritual truth in its ultimate form, and begin to regard it as so much seed for the soul, so many pregnant and inexhaustible hints fitted to kindle our own eternal life, there can be no hope that the Bible will contribute all it might do to the advancement of mankind, and no doubt that, viewed as it now is, it is often retarding the natural course of religious progress. The morality and the theology of the Christian world, its Creeds and its ideals, are behind what they might have been, if, in this last century, the dead letter had been withdrawn, and, with the Image of Christ in their hearts, the souls of men had been left alone with the Spirit of their Father. The letter has been killing the spirit ; written words have been killing the real Word of God in men's hearts The English translation of a Greek word which scholars say has no reference to time, has kept nearly all Christendom believing in an ever- lasting Torturer, against the spirit of everything that Christ taught and showed of God, and of everything that God has said for Himself within our hearts. No learning will preserve men from such ignorance of God : rather will it expose them to it if they regard it as the key that opens the revelation. The Bishop of Gloucester, a scholar (Divine truth is not a matter of 296 The Resii7n'ectiofi World. scholarship but of spiritual discernment), once asked with a simplicity most instructive as to the effects of the theological system under which he has lived, '' What could lead a man who is free from speculative tendencies to sympathize readily with the denial of everlasting punishments, if he had no guilty self- knowledge, which made it his interest so to deny ? " Is it come to this, that only a speculative turn of mind, or an evil conscience, could lead a man to question everlasting punishment ! May not a man have a pure heart without speculative tendencies ? And do not the pure in heart see God ? And will a man who sees God in a pure heart, in a heart which is all love — for no other heart is all pure — readily believe that pain for ever, as the doom on a creature born in sin, is one of the garments of light in which the Father of Spirits shows Himself to His children ! But the day is coming when we shall receive the practical and the speculative helps together ; when Christianity shall present itself not as a Book, but as the Image of God in the Person of a living Man — the In- carnation of Faith and Work ; when the Bible shall be re-read in the light of Christ's spirit, and as we walk in his steps, live as he lived, pray as he prayed, we shall have the Spirit that taught him teaching us, and see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shining in his face. But how is it that the heart of Christendom has come to believe this evil of God ? We have suggested how the theory of a local retribution and the mis- understanding of words quenching the living teach- The Rcsitri'cction World. 297 ing of the Spirit have contributed to it There is another explanation : Those who think that man by nature is without God, and that Eternal Life is not by spiritual development, but by supernatural rescue with a new nature infused, necessarily conclude, even out of their piety, that since the spiritual action is all God's, where He acts the rescue is perfect, and that in all other cases the original enmity remains. And thus a system may hold together, through the corresponding unsoundness of its parts. Any real and true element in the present Faith of Christendom, such as that Christ is the Image of God, or that God is the Father and Teacher of our spirits, if allowed its free and full action In our souls, would deliver us from all that is inconsistent with itself — from all the heavy weights with which Theology burdens Religion. Surely these things serve to account for the defective operation of Chris- tianity Itself, and we must look at them out of very tenderness for our Faith. How can we defend the Religion of Jesus, or explain its halting action on the world, and be silent about these things t These are the views which for ages have had the world to themselves, to mould It as they could ; and what have they made of It ? Who believes that in his own person he Is to suffer everlastingly ? No one who is sane enough to be permitted to go abroad among men. If a man really believes It, and believing it falls into a reasonable melancholy, he is pronounced to be religiously mad. Their nature — the Spirit of their Father In them, though they know Him not, 298 The Resiin^ection World. will not permit men to think so hardly of God. But whilst this view of the judgment of God upon their sins is practically rejected, there is no spiritual view to take its place. The consequence is, that with the great mass of men the future exerts no influence at all upon the present ; there is no law of eternal retribution which Conscience can hold before the soul. There is no natural, necessary, or just con- nection — I speak on behalf of God — between sin on earth and everlasting misery ; the penal conse- quence has no spiritual justification; no one believes it in his own case, and if there is no mid-way of Judgment between escape from this and a place in Heaven, is not this to deprive the souls of men of all effective belief in a spiritual retribution } '^ As one star differeth from another star in glory : so also is the resurrection of the dead." And yet — for God is their Maker — all are still stars, and capable of light. Here is the heavenly scale, with all the natural gradations : the spiritual law of separation, with the sentence already in ourselves, when we shall stand before God, not so much for judgment — for judgment is already recorded in what we are — as for execution of judgment. And every hour is determining our initial judg- ment, the form of soul in which we shall first make trial of our preparation to find our blessedness in our Father's House, and before our Father's face. Say not that since the unwasting ages of an eternal life will for ever be with us, the lost opportunities of time can always be regained. That is to forget that The Resurrection World. 299 immortality is only commensurate with our calling — that Eternity itself will not exhaust our possible ascent towards God. If our souls were to reach a limit, the argument, utterly immoral as it is, might have meaning ; but with no limit short of God, how can we lose time, or wander from the way, and yet ever again be as far upon our course as though we had never loitered, and never wandered ! Progress to the penitent will always be open ; but to suppose that we can wilfully abuse our life, and yet be at some future time as if we had not abused it, is to fall back into the old unspiritual view of a local Heaven, and to forget our eternal calling. It can be no justification of delay that time is endless, if the way of our Eternal Life is endless too, nearer and nearer unto God. The essential matter is whether really we have our life in Him. If we are born of Him we shall go on unto perfection, desiring no arguments, pleas, or excuses, against the blessed leadings of His Spirit. XXI. Mark xii. 31 : "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." We are required to love God with all our faculties, to find in Him the end and rest of every affection we possess ; we are required to love our neighbour only as we love ourself There is a great difference here. We have to love God with all our heart, because the heart that delights in goodness finds in Him the perfection of goodness ; but neither our neighbour, nor ourself, may have any claim to Love upon that ground. We have to love God with all our soul, because the spirit in us that delights in the beauty of holiness, in purity, in rectitude, and in- violable law, finds in Him the source and the fulness of these high desires ; but neither our neighbour, nor ourself, may possess any of these great qualities that would attract the loving reverence of spiritual beings. We have to love God with all our mind, because the powers that are delighted, strengthened, and deve- loped by the contemplation and search of truth are kept humble and healthy only through their devout Clunsfs Lazu of Love to ottr Neighbour. 301 alliance with One who is true, as conscious students and worshippers, not of abstractions, but of the living and eternal Reason ; but neither our neighbour nor ourself may have any capacity for feeding the love of those who are seeking the life of thought, or helping it towards its rest in Him who is its supreme Nourisher and inexhaustible Spring. We have to love God with all our strength, because we are inspired with a desire to imitate Him who is the God of Reality; because we are not creatures of affection, or contemplation, or speculation only, but have a practical conscience, facul- ties of action, shaping powers of the will, that involve us in clear sin and inevitable remorse, if we do not labour to make the facts of our life correspond with the spiritual patterns and ideas that are in our souls, to have His holy Will done upon the earth, and to establish His kingdom of Heaven even in the midst of the world ; but neither our neighbour nor ourself may be fit objects for the high love that is awakened by those who are standards and examples, who can communicate the kind of power which belongs to those who are fellow-workers with the Father ; sharers, not in the inspirations only, but also in the life of God, working out with effort and joy whatever good thing God works in them. Not to love God in all these ways would be to imply that the faculties of feeling, thought, aspiration, imitation, — of heart, soul, mind, and strength, — were either dead, or knew not that He ivas the fulness of their desires ; but all these faculties mght be in a state of very high activity, and yet not find in our neighbour the 302 Chris fs Law of Love to our Neighbour, qualities in which they could delight, which would satisfy their affections in the same sense — I speak not of degree — in which God satisfies them. And so no such impossible demand is made, no such sentence of degradation, for such it would be, is passed upon us as the requirement to love our neigh- bour with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength; for this would be to deprive us of an infinite Object of love and aspiration, to shut us up within the idolatry of our own nature, to make our spiritual affections stop short of God, and find their end and rest beneath the per- fect. We love God as the Perfection of Being — the absolute fulness of that spiritual existence whose germs are in ourselves, the Source and Nourisher of some portion of His own holy and eternal life within our life ; and as He is One Being, for so Christ pre- faces the commandment : " Hear, O Israel ; the Lord our God is One Lord ; " as there are not Gods many and Lords many, the love He is fitted to inspire knows no variations according to persons, and is placed at once at its height: ** Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength : " but with regard to men, they are not one, nor of one character; and so the commandment which enjoins us to love them all is necessarily limited to that quality of love which even the lowest of them is fitted to inspire, and requires that we love our neigh- bour even as we love ourself For, how do we love ourselves ? Not for the goodness that is in us, with Chris fs Law of Love to our Neighbour, 303 the delight of a moved and grateful heart ; nor for the hoHness that is in us, in the reverential contemplation of our own spiritual rectitude, with the affections of the soul ; nor for our insight into God's thoughts, for the reach of our knowledge, for our empire over Truth, for the harmonies between our reason and the universe around us, with the love and worship of the mind ; nor yet for the glow of life that pervades our being, and sets all our energies to turn our aspirations into spiritual fact and substance, for the sake of the joy that comes out of a strong and devoted will, making sacrifices of the lower things for what it holds most dear ; — ^not in this way, nor for these things, do we love ourselves ; and so, therefore, we may not with- hold our love from our neighbour because he cannot be loved in this way, nor for these things. We love ourselves by desiring our own blessedness, by wishing and seeking our own good, by shunning and deprecat- ing needless pain, pain to which we are not called by submission or conformity to God, or by love for man ; and this is the lowest love we must feel for our neigh- bour, to have benevolent affections ; and as the test of such affections, where opportunity is, to render beneficent service towards all mankind. I say the lowest love, because there are many men who are worthy of a higher love, even of some measure of that kind of love with which we love our God. We desire the fulness and joy of our own life ; we desire, if it maybe, to taste the full cup of God's blessings, and to that end we desire the free exercise of every natural right, to be untrammeled in the use and development 304 Chrisfs Laiv of Love to oiti' Neighbour. of whatever endowments we have directly received from our Father in Heaven. We desire from those of our fellow-men, with whom we are brought into alliance, such aid and sympathy as they can give us without incommensurate pain or injury to them- selves ; we desire, in as large measures as we can receive them, the goodwill and friendliness, the kindly sympathies, and gracious courtesies, and generous constructions of other beings ; and we deprecate all wrong, all injustice, all unkind suggestions or misin- terpretations, all inconsiderate or wanton evil ; and by every law of reciprocity, by every honest affection and natural sense of right, by every claim we can be conceived to have upon God for the fulfilment of these desires for ourselves, we are required to desire for others, and for all others, the same enjoyment of their being, the same liberty to make full use of all the privileges of their nature and condition, the same friendly sympathies, and gracious regards, and kindly help, the same protection from every measure of injustice. There is no conceivable circumstance, no change in a man's inward character or outward condition, that ought to deprive him of this degree and quality of Love. Whatever he may be in himself, though degraded by every vice, — whatever he may be in his relations to us, though inflamed by every malignant passion, and clothed with an accidental power of wounding us where we are most vulnerable, it is impossible, without approaching to his level, and par- taking of his malignity, that the desire for his good. Christ's Law of Love to our Neighbour. 305 the best desire that we entertain for ourselves, should ever cease ; and the more imminent seems the utter wreck he is making of his peace, the more of earnest- ness will naturally be breathed into our wishes and, if the way opens, into our efforts for his rescue. The desire for his good will include the desire for his reformation, and, of course, for whatever spiritual experiences are essential to that result ; and if some shame and suffering must belong to such a process, it is not the suffering that we wish for him, but the renovated nature and the new life, the new wisdom and new health, to which it leads. It is impossible to frame a case in which we could be exonerated from desiring a man's well-being ; and if we are enlight- ened enough, and pure enough to place our own well-being in our spiritual life, in our fidelity to God and to duty, it is impossible that this desire for our neighbour should not close and crown, and indeed hold in subordination all the other desires for him that benevolence can form. I do not know what is meant by the love of our- selves, in any good sense, but having a desire for our own peace, our own perfectness, our own blessed- ness — meaning by that our openness to God, our fitness to receive of His best gifts — and in this sense, to love others as we love ourselves, to desire their blessedness as well as our own, is surely the very least degree of goodwill that man owes to man, the smallest measure of affection that is compatible with the absence of malignity, and with the sense of a universal Father in Heaven. I purposely use the II. X o6 Clu'isfs Law of Love to otir Neighbou7\ expression, a desire for our blessedness, as the legiti- mate form of the love of ourselves ; not a desire for our happiness, for the word happiness is susceptible of, and may suggest a degraded meaning ; and often the deprivation of happiness, the loss of what is dearest, leads to blessedness. To love others as we love ourselves, to desire their well-being, to be grieved by their sorrows, to rejoice in their blessings, — this is not all the love that human beings may claim from us ; it is the very smallest degree, and lowest quality of Love, which the most indifferent man, as soon as he becomes an object of distinct interest and contem- plation, must instantly command, and which the worst man in the most unfriendly relations cannot be denied, unless malign or vindictive passions are pre- sent with us. If we loved no human being for better reasons, with an intenser satisfaction, a higher quality of love than we can love ourselves, then none of our higher affections could be gratified by men, except the goodwill that springs from kindness and rejoices in universal well-being ; for this surely, except in a bad sense, is the only love that we have for ourselves ; we are only one of the objects of our own goodwill. We cannot love ourselves for our goodness with the love of the heart, nor for our holiness with the love of the soul, nor for our wisdom with the love of the mind, nor for our own actions with the strong delight of the will in god-like reality and fact. But there are men whom we may love, and whom we ought to love, for all these reasons, with all these affections — men who are worthy of grateful honour, of spiritual rever- Chrises Lazu of Love to oitr Neighbour. 307 ence, of kindling admiration, brothers to all men, meek children of God, yet heroes of goodness ; and these we love, not as we love ourselves, but rather as in these things they reflect the image of their Heavenly Father with some measure of the love we have for God. There are no doubt many had senses, in which, as we say in our imperfect speech, a man may love himself— vainly, selfishly, sensually, blindly, idola- trously ; but none of those were in our Lord's mean- ing ; and there is no good sense in which a man can be the satisfying object of his own love. In fact, then, there are many men whom we love with a far higher quality of Love than Christ has asked from us for all men. When we find in others satisfying objects for our love, we love them for themselves ; they are personally dear to us ; and though we desire and seek their happiness, and might make any sacrifice for it, they^ not their happiness, are the objects of our affections. But there is no intelligible sense, except a vain or a vicious one, in which we can be the satis- fying objects of our own affections, though there is a just and natural self-love which is not, and cannot be, indifferent to our own well-being. When we love ourselves, unless indeed we are in extreme need of God's compassion and of all men's pity, we do not love our own character, or make ourself an object for our own moral affections ; but when we love a good man, we desire his well-being indeed, but it is the man hhnself who is the object of our love. Now, whilst perceiving that Christ requires, and 3o8 Christ's Law of Love to ou7' N'eighbour. legitimately requires, universal Love and Goodwill, let us lay no unnatural burdens, no yokes that Christ did not lay, and that no genuine man can bear. There are men who, without some change in their existing character and sympathies, could not become to us the objects of personal afifection ; on whom heart, or soul, or mind, or strength, could not delight to lean or rest. But Christ's Law does not require that we should experience this, or that we should attempt it ; it requires us, out of the spirit of pure Love that is in us, out of our reverence and apprecia- tion for the nature that is in them, and, to use an expression of Roman Catholic piety of great force and compass, for the sake of the honour of God, that we love them as we love ourselves, that we desire their good, and desire it with the same sincerity and consistency, with the same freedom from malice, that we desire our own. To this Love, in its spirit and in its truth, all men have a right — for otherwise we have no claim ourselves upon God's Love ; this Love no heart can withhold from any without dropping out of fellowship with Him who is Love. But God does no violence to our nature, and that other Love which, in their measures, goodness, holiness, consecrated thought, devoted self-immolating service, win from us, cannot be given at our will, and is the rightful property of those by whose personal gifts it is inspired. And so this Rule, which is often represented as inaccessibly high and severe in its exactment, asks for all only that Love which no good man can refuse, and asks for none others that kind of Love which only good men can inspire. Clij'ist s Law of Love to our Neighboii7\ 309 In fact, unless this second Commandment is held in the closest dependence upon the first, it will prove a very imperfect guide to the wise discharge of our brotherly duties. For until we know and love God, we can love ourselves only with a blind instinct ; we know not where our real blessedness is, and in loving others even as we love ourselves we could cherish for them only poor and ignorant desires. It is after our spiritual nature has been awakened to the love of God, and is fixed on Him as its end and rest, that to love others as we love ourselves becomes a perfect practical rule, as well as a right affection ; for then only, to consult for their happiness as we consult for our own includes their true blessedness, and makes us their friends and helpers on that course. For if we first love God, then what is the nature of the well- being that we desire for ourselves t To be in His image ; a well-being that has its sources in His nature and affections ; a life rooted in and drawn from Him ; some sense of fellowship with His Spirit, of the blessedness of goodness, of the beauty of holiness, of the majesty of truth, of the glory of disinterested action. This is the blessedness of Him, the Blessed for Ever, to act from holy Love ; and all who love God desire to share that blessedness, and through partici- pation of His Spirit to be children of their Father in Heaven. " Love your enemies," says the great Interpreter of God's Love, "bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefuUy use you and persecute you ; that ye may be the children of your Father in 3 TO Christ's Lazu of Love to our Neighbour. Heaven : for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same ? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others ? do not even the publicans so ? Be ye therefore perfect, universal in your Love, even as your Father is universal in His Love." And thus the two Commandments really resolve themselves into one, that he who loves God love his brother also. The second is the issue and the test of what is involved in the first ; for he who loves God desires to be in communion with God — desires to have his blessedness in being good as God is good ; and this is the disposition whose delight it is to make happiness, and which finds the joy of existence in disinterested Love. If a man so loves God that he responds to God's Spirit, that implies that he does love others even as God loves them, and finds his blessedness in Love, and finds it more and more as Love directs and consecrates all his faculties — con- sumes, purifies away, subdues under itself, whatever habits and affections are mere self-seekers resisting the sacrifices Love requires for the fulness of its action. It is not necessary that we should get entangled in any casuistry as to the legitimate extent of a man's love for himself; the only practical interest is, in what does he make his true good to consist ? He may innocently desire for himself any blessedness that flows out of the affections with which he loves CJirisfs Lazu of Love to our Neighboii7\ 31 1 God ; he may innocently avoid any pain that does not come to him in the service of God and man, or in the culture of that strength which fits for service. Christ uttered the Laws of his spiritual kingdom under the form of Beatitudes, and however little a good man may think of his own happiness, he is so far from being careless about his peace, the Peace of God which passeth understanding, that there is no other man so willing to sacrifice everything else that he may save it ; who at such great cost of what is called pleasure will carry out the desires of his spirit ; who will so keep and augment his treasure, and guard his essential blessedness from corrupting blight or taint. Apart from casuistry, and apart from unnatural re- quirements, the broad difference between a good man and a selfish man is in the moral difference of the affec- tions and desires, in the indulgence and the exercise of which is the joy and the end of their existence. To say that a good man did not find blessedness in his goodness — I am not speaking of happiness or pleasurable sensations — to say that he sacrificed his peace to his duty, to say that another course would have brought him more of joy, would not be to raise but to lower him in the scale of goodness ; for so far as he is a good man, he could take no other course without opening a fountain of bitter remorse and misery in his own nature. A good man does indeed make many sacrifices ; he sacrifices anything that is lower to the one thing that is highest ; he sacrifices anything else to keep his peace with God, at the clear demands of those affections whose end and rest 312 Chrisfs Law of Love to our Neighbour. is not in happiness, but in goodness, in holiness, in truth, in spiritual reality. He seeks first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and God adds the blessedness unto him. If there is any man who labours in Love and finds it a hard service, that not yet does the blessedness repay the cost, that not yet is the yoke easy and the burden light, that is only a sign that not yet is Love made perfect ; let him not turn back, let him pray for perseverance, let him go on strengthening his better affections by trusting and by acting upon them, and God will assuredly reward him. How ? By giving him such increase' of Love, in purity and in measure, that it will deliver him from the lingering bondage to self which now restrains the fulness of his peace. A selfish man is one whose affections and desires centre upon his own comforts — he is his own object. A good man is one whose affections have others for their object ; to whom Love is a spring of action that stirs him with a force no selfish interest can exert ; the denial of which for the sake of the ease it might disturb would be like bartering life for a day's food and raiment ; to whom the indulgence that might be obtained by the neglect of kindly offices to men would be so opposed to his own sense of right, to his feeling of that wherein our life consists, so darkened by the consciousness of a broken fellow- ship with God, that it could not be taken or enjoyed. The best Love we can have for ourselves is in the desire that we should be able to love as God loves, freely, purely, wisely, blessedly ; and of that Love, Christ" s Laio of Love to otir Neighbour. 313 when we have drawn it down from above, our neigh- bour is the object But who is our neighbour ? Christ has answered that question. The good Samaritan finds a neighbour where he finds a suffer- ing man. " Go thou," says the Saviour, to whoever would waste the time of action in cavil or specula- tion, in vain talk about goodness when the work remains undone — " Go thou and do likewise." And Love shows most like to God's when Love has no motive but Love, when our object is to impart a blessing, not to seek our own. And goodness is at its height when it is exerted in the most difficult circumstances, and we love those who most need our Love — the unhappy, the ignorant, the helpless, the sinful. And we love them best when we apply our Love as God applies His grace, by the direct action of spirit on spirit ; when Love makes us seek personal relations with them, when we do not hide ourselves behind the machinery of benevolence, but trusting in the affection more than in the things it has to give, bring heart to heart, mind to mind, face to face, and try the whole force of our spiritual power ; when, not content to palliate, we desire, as with the healing Love of God, to close sources of evil and open fountains of good. No doubt he whom we find in the most urgent need is the nearest neighbour to our love ; but as a rule, those who are brought into close personal con- nection with ourselves through any of the natural relationships of life, seem to be marked out by the Finger of God as the objects of special thoughtful- 314 Christ's Law of Love to our N'eighbotir, ness. There are in the present day many large schemes of benevolence, all of them more or less liable to abuse, all of them founded on some view or principle which in its working may prove to be defective. I can therefore understand many good men and women standing apart from large systems and large machinery in some perplexity of spirit. They do not see their way through the complications of a scientific benevolence : it may prove a mistake ; it may do more harm than good. They can only trust them- selves to take the step that lies before them, to heal the wounded man who is thrown in their way, to express the kind feeling and do the kind act for which the opportunity presents itself. Each has his own gift and his own fitness ; there is no safer, perhaps no truer. Love than this ; and if each of us filled our own place of Love, the place that God provides in the clear opportunities He makes for us as individuals, which He brings under our very hands, and lays down at, or within, our doors, there would be little left for those larger schemes to accomplish, into which, however pure our feeling, the possibility of theoretic error more readily enters, and with such disastrous results. In the immediate home, in the outer circle of the family, in the converse with in- dividuals which the varied forms of service, and the needful intercourses of life naturally bring ; in the ever-widening relationship with men of all conditions which thus springs up unforced, are the occasions in which personal interest arises, in which neglect of opportunities is most clearly to reject a call from God Chrisfs Law of Love to oicr N'eighboitr. 3 i 5 and Nature, in which Love may apply itself to do good in the most fitting circumstances, and with the fullest knowledge and power. Closely should we exa- mine our own hearts, and inspect our own lives, to discover how many of those clear claims we are dis- regarding, or how little our affections are toned and eager for such natural service — lest instead of loving our enemies, and doing good to those that hate us, it should be found that we are not even loving those that love us — not even providing for those of our own household, with a self-denying tenderness, with a wise, thoughtful, and earnest care. And the one thing needful is that we feed our hearts with the love of God and of goodness, until it becomes our moving affection — the element of bles- sedness in which we live ; for it is the selfish temper that works selfishly ; no man can do the works of God without the Spirit of God, and out of the heart are the issues of life. XXII. John xiii. 12-14 " Know ye what I have done to you ? Ye call me Master and Lord : and ye say well ; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet ; ye also ought to wash one another's feet." All religions before Christ had their rituals — a prescribed external service through whose forms effi- cacious worship was performed. Christianity has none : its service is Christian life, filial and fraternal ; the Beauty of Holiness the ritual in which it embodies worship. There is a period, in the history of the individual, as of mankind, when it is necessary, instead of a shaping spirit and fruitful principles, to give specific directions prescribing particular acts. It might be to little purpose to tell a child to live in accordance with the Law of Love, and leave him to discover for him- self what courses of conduct that Law requires. He alone, however, is a fit moral instructor of childhood who so prescribes the external act that the spirit, the sentiment, the affection from which it proceeds is con- stantly developed in the young heart, and becomes at The Lordship of Se7^vice. 3 1 7 last the best suggester of its own deeds. The Pro- phets never hesitated to cast aside the rind of custom or ceremony and to penetrate to the sources of fresher Hfe. The Old Testament is a statute book, with the spirit of the Law shining through it : the New Testa- ment is a record of inexhaustible principles, illus- trated by examples. The Law of the Spirit of Life works now in every Christian heart, and daily writes afresh on living tablets the changing letter of duty. Law was by Moses ; grace and truth are by Jesus Christ ; whilst we move under constraint and direc- tion of outward enactment, we are not yet his ; we become his when we have in ourselves the seminal principles of all goodness, the self-developing germ of perfect man turning ever towards God as a plant turns towards the light. There is an essential connection between our morality and our religion, for a true life is that which corresponds with the highest sentiments Faith opens to us of our relations with God and man. In every genuine man his life aims to be a transcript of his spirit : his duty is breathed out of his faith. If he believes in a Father's providence he does not live in miserable fears : if he worships a spiritual God he does not approach him through a priest. Positive religious institutions always co-exist with unworthy concep- tions of God. These elementary rules having no inexhaustible power to bear ever new fruit unto life eternal, when at their best, act as remembrancers of customary dues ; when at their worst, as accredited charms. As spirit becomes known to spirit, person 3i8 The Lordship of Sei^vice. to person, God to man, all this disappears. Religion is then strong enough to live in the natural fruits of its own spirit. It requires no longer an artificial representation in regulative or symbolical institutions. Worship becomes the self-devotedness that springs from quickening views of God ; His service perfect freedom, for it is the homage of the heart appearing in the life. " Pure and undefiled religion, before God, even our Father, is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep one's self unspotted from the world." The ritual of religion is then the fruit of God's Spirit ; the evidence that He is with us and in us is in our beneficence and purity. St James does not say that religion is the same thing with morality, that piety is the same thing as charity and cleanness of heart, but that the worship of God — real, not ceremonial — is to act in His spirit and to grow in His likeness ; that the only honour we can do to Him who is above all height, the only service we can pay to Him in whom is all blessedness, is to love His children, and to sanctify His image. " Religion " is not used by St. James for the inner sentiment of God, but for the worship that is the spiritual fruit of that sentiment, to become holy as God is holy, and merciful as God is merciful. " The children of God are manifest in this : whosoever doeth not righteous- ness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother." If religious life is thus the transcript of religious faith — a felloAvship with the Heart of God towards all creatures and all things — what are the great relations The Loi'dship of Service. 319 which Faith reveals as existing between man and God, and through their fellowship in God between man and man ? Simply, our relation to God is a filial one ; our relation to man is a brotherly one. It is not amiss to state thus briefly the elements of the religious life. Our morality is invigorated and refreshed, adorned with a living grace, when it is bap- tized anew at its primal springs, its fountain-head. Such is our faith ; and he is an infidel, in the only proper sense of that word, whose life denies his faith. To such relations only one spirit corresponds. Let this at least be laid up in our hearts as certain, what- ever may remain doubtful, — that duty to God is filial devotedness ; that duty to man is in the brotherly affection that desires to bless him and to do him good. Whatever may be the right workings of this spirit, about which there may be much legitimate difference of opinion ; whatever may be the wisest ways of acting it out in the complicated details of human circumstance, which may often be a most arduous inquiry ; whatever may be the special direc- tions and efforts by which it may have a grand, healthy, and fruitful life of blessed deeds, still we have touched a fundamental fact, that the spirit of holy love is the well-spring of goodness and of good living ; that whatever is conceived and done in this spirit is moral. Christian, and godly ; that whatever is conceived or done in forgetfulness, or violation of this spirit, is immoral, unchristian, and ungodly. Here is a test which a man can always apply, if not to the wisdom of his measures, to the spirit of 320 The Lordship of Service. his being ; and if he ever suspects that another sentiment is prompting him, let him at least cease from speech and action, until by communion with God, he recovers a right heart And whatever out- ward act, or natural expression of itself, this right heart suggests, as the flower of holy charity in us, let us be flexible to its bidding, for thereby come grace and truth into our lives ; therein is our only way of being not dry copyists and imitators, but having in our own personality some genuine reflec- tion of God. Perhaps the main cause of the low state of character, whether we regard the dimensions of our goodness or the efficacious grace of its performance, is that we are not borne through the details of our existence by any spring of life, by any germinating spirit that would give organic development and symmetry to the natural flow of being. Outward law, custom dead as frost, presses upon us, and we live not from inward springs, from the Spirit of our Father in us. Habit, fear, prudence, convention, a haunting apprehension of what is expected, or, it may be, a strong and honest purpose to do what is right without any burning love for doing it, or fine perception of where it lies, shape us from without ; - and so there is neither health nor beauty in us — for health and beauty are from inward force and grace. We become dry, measured, and wearisome — weari- some even to ourselves, because there is no well of water in us springing up into everlasting life. We go throu2:h the details of what we deem our duties, of The Lordship of Se^'vice. 321 what are our duties, without always knowing or feel- ing the spirit of which they are the details ; and con- sequently the fresh impulse which makes all things new, which in a living heart can make the most familiar thing, the word of welcome, the household smile, the morning greeting of daily custom, as fresh- and gladdening as the morn itself, has no operation, and details tamely repeated, emptied of the spirit which gives them natural beauty, become oppressive formalities, the lay figure of a Christian, vestures and externals, without the animating soul that moves the drapery into living curves of grace. Many are the conscientious persons who pace the rounds of accus- tomed duty with unceasing toil, and yet shed no refreshment upon any heart because some natural charm is absent ; and often to themselves must their lot seem hard, when they see others who, perhaps, do much less, yet, because they do it wdth a fresher spirit, win a more grateful love and exert a more benignant power. Without the gracious feeling that is the soul of action, the most conscientious may be felt as formalists, and suffering the formalist's fate, become weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The poor child of superstition, who reckons devotion by the number of the beads instead of by the throbs of the agonizing heart, doubtless finds some way of effectual working with the all-pitying grace of God, who sees when we are doing our best, and for Him- self needs nothing from us ; but the most unceasing painstaking, without the inspiration of Nature, without the charm of the living soul looking out through the IT. Y 32 2 The Loi^dship of Service. deed, is apt to be ungratefully received by the dry heart of man thirsting for refreshment. For on others, on those especially that need it most, the power of the Christian life is in the spirit that is vividly com- municated, and not in the statistics of work. The word duty, which expresses the business of every man's life, has with most men no one meaning. It means a vast number of things, but what the one thing is that is common to this vast number, and makes them duties, is not clearly felt. And so men learn their duties by a kind of tact ; their virtues might be catalogued like articles of furniture ; their character is a series of accretions, with no organic life the product of one root. Wherever this is the case, and it is very near to us all, we have adequate explanation of any amount of dryness and poverty of being, of the inefficacious lives of all who are sterile at heart, who put works above faith, the letter above the spirit, the outward and visible sign above the inward and invisible grace — who are yet in the Judaism of religion, and, not having the spirit of Life in Christ Jesus, cannot do his gracious and wonderful works. The law of Love, then, is that which alone can conform our lives to the eternal relations of our souls. And the life of love to God is in receiving His holy Image ; the life of love to man is in doing him good, and in doing him pleasure, through all works of earnest beneficence, and all acts of gracious courtesy. He who wills that his soul shall be open as a mirror to the Divine perfections, with every known stain and The Lordship of Service. 323 soil carefully removed, that it may reflect God more perfectly ; he whose life is moulded by a hearty desire to contribute to the essential well-being and to the innocent happiness of mankind, throwing him- self as a shield between other hearts and avoidable pain or degradation, whatever he may be in other respects, in knowledge, capacity, or practical power, is in principle, at least, at the springs of character, a religious and a righteous being. And here it is that the spiritual nature begins to move the intellectual nature, and, to serve its own great purposes, calls the whole being into action. The Love of God is the loftiest instigation to all know- ledge — the spur and the reward of devoted effort to draw nigh to Him in sustained contemplation of His thoughts and works. The Love of man is the most powerful motive for seeking all practical wisdom, all helpful accomplishments, as the means and instru- ments, the hands, the feet, the eyes, the speech, with- out which our good desires are ineffectual, halt, maimed, dumb, and blind ; for the most difficult questions are opened by the honest desire to serve our fellow-creatures, as to how this principle of Love, with the most of good and the least of evil, may promote its own ends, not by the abundance of its self-expression, but by the benefits resulting to its objects. And this is an inquiry to the solution of which right feeling is of itself not adequate, and in which, if it is honest, it will summon to its counsels all the wisdom, it can command. Here, indeed, in circumstances capable of being defined, there would 324 The Lordship of Sei'vice. often be great use In rules of conduct, if they could be rightly framed. They would be directions setting forth the special acts and means by which Love may practically realize its own purposes, teaching Devotion how, under the various forms of God's discipline, it may become Holiness in spirit and in truth ; teaching Benevolence how it may pass into Beneficence — the desire for good how it may be and do good. It is evident, however, that rules, except in the form of the most barren generalities — precepts rather than rules — cease to be applicable to circumstances that are continually varying, and in which no two cases are exactly the same. The method of accomplishing good, of fulfilling Love, that is best for one man and for one condition, is no guide with another man or in another condition. That great class of duties which arise out of our social state, out of what is called our civilization, can never be made the subjects of per- manent rules ; at least, if the rule is at all of the nature of a practical direction, though we may attain to guiding Principles, Laws of Moral Science, in con- formity with which all rules must be framed. No one will pretend to know by what practical measures Society may best be served a century hence ; what, for instance, will be the social, the sanitary, the educa- tional, the artistic and aesthetic wants of this great community a hundred years from this day. No one, therefore, can be qualified to bequeath practical directions to the next century, to carve out the precise channels now in which the spirit of goodwill is then to flow. The poor, indeed, we shall always The Lordship of S advice. o^D have ; and, therefore, schools for their children and hospitals for their sick are wants that may pro- spectively be provided for, but not schools in which the mental opportunities provided for the child of the working-man are to perpetuate the unworthy conceptions, the pride or the fears of an outgrown civilization, nor hospitals prescribing the methods of to-day. A loving spirit to move us, scientific know- ledge to guide us, are the wants of our Christian Life, but 110 rules, unless the rule is, like the physician's prescription, written for each case — useless, and prob- ably perilous, for every other. At no time — not even under the Master's eye — did Christianity in the appli- cation of its principles, in the works of its spirit, remove responsibility from the individual conscience to take it upon itself. Much less did it enact under what forms the Love of God, the culture of the religious Life, the good of man, are now to be sought and pursued. Not even in ecclesiastical affairs, in that great part of our education and our interests which is outwardly represented by the institution of a Church, has Christianity left us one word of definite guidance. Each of the three leading forms of Chris- tian Churches professes to find in Scripture the Divine model of its government, and each finds there only what it brings. The Episcopalian finds that there is mention of a bishop ; the Presbyterian that there is mention of an elder ; the Independent that there are various signs of local freedom and of corporate acts ; and each of the three puts the whole of its own com- plicated system into one or other of these really 326 The Loi'dship of Service. equivalent signs and words, and is blind to the equal authority that remains for the others. Whether a Church provides for its various offices through Bishops, or through Presbyteries, or through Congregational authorities is a question of pure expediency, the solution of which depends on the fitness of circum- stances, and upon which, as involving no spirit or principle of Life, the New Testament in the way of permanent direction is absolutely silent. The progressive improvement of mankind, along with the fresh vitality of the individual spirit, is carried on by every age having to apply for itself eternal principles to shifting conditions. If the wants and aspects of Society never altered, then we might have had precepts teaching the spirit of Love how it was to clothe itself with the most blessed results ; but this, thank God, is not a true account of the ever-new problems of things to be done, the ever-new theorems of things to be explained, that God, for the education of new generations, is for ever introducing afresh into human life, and therefore universal Rules are impossible. There is nothing universal in human morality but its spirit and its temper. With these each generation and each man must be inwardly imbued, and grow in grace, knowledge, and power, through the responsibility of finding for themselves wise modes of action and a fitting machinery of Love, with such helps as Science and experience give. The obvious necessity that benevolence should desire to see the right means to its own ends connects morality with individual culture ; and since a pro- The Lordship of Service. 327 gress in all knowledge may be the necessary condi- tion of an effective beneficence, the spiritual part of us is manifestly the lord of all the rest — not merely their superior in rank, but bound to employ them in its service, and the highest source of their activity. He is defective in Love who does not seek in his own life to pursue those plans, to perform those actions, by which the spirit of Love achieves the noblest results ; and what those plans and actions are, we become qualified to discern only as our minds are large, our knowledge accurate and extensive, our observation quick and sure, our imagination capable of presenting to the inward eye truthful pictures of man's various wants and sorrows, so that we shall not live in ignorance of what our fellow-creatures are — our sympathies, practised and prompt, going forth out of ourselves as the Samaritan went up to the wounded man, not burning our own hearts to ashes. Of course, I do not mean that every good man attains to all this, or can attain it. I mean that every benevolent man who is regardless of this, who takes no pains to qualify himself with instrumental knowledge, is using his benevolent feelings as a form of self- indulgence, and wasting the motive-power of his nature. Take the simplest form of a moral question. How may you serve a fellow-being who comes to ask your aid ? Who does not constantly feel the difficulty of that inquiry, though the principle on which we should act — the desire to serve him, and means to serve him with — may be clear, strong, and sufficient .'' It needs 328 The Lordship of Service. the largest wisdom to keep the readiest Love from doing mischief; and the Love is not true Love if it does not seek the wisdom. No doubt the alloy that is in our Charity, instead of seeking the accomplish- ments for zuisely helping, will be tempted to plead this danger as a reason for doing nothing ; but this is only one of the false excuses of those who did not wish to assist at the Marriage Supper of their Lord — at the Feast of Love. In what different ways would not minds of different cultivation — different in spiritual rank and insight — act upon the precept, " to love our neighbour as ourself " ! With some to love their neighbour in the same fashion that they love them- selves would be to seek for them distinctions, plea- sures, occupations, from which a wise man would desire to be excused. With others to love their neighbour as they love themselves would be to open for them everlasting possessions. It is at least a solemn persuasive to all forms of self-culture that every other portion of our nature subserves the master- spirit of our life ; that all faculties of knowledge and of feeling, all Truth and all Grace, are the agents of Love, the advisers and the ministers of the spirit of Duty, instructing us, if we can do no great thing, how at least we may do some little thing with a healing power — how to speak a word in season to him who is v/eary, how to wash one another's feet by the gentle fellowship that refreshes the travel-stained on life's journey, and lifts the worn spirit out of the dust. The Pope and Cardinals reproduce at Easter Christ's beautiful symbol, by washing in public the TJie Lords flip of Se^^vice. 329 well-prepared feet of twelve so-called pilgrims, pouring on them water from costly vessels, and touching them with fine linen. It is for us not thus to turn our Lord's symbol of the all-embracing activity of Love into an exhibitory Sacrament, but through the suggesting grace of Christ's Charity to be quick to see what acts we can perform for the refresh- ment of mankind. The personal relations of Christ to this spirit of life are close and intimate. '' Ye call me Master and Lord." He might well say, " by this shall all men know that ye are my Disciples if ye have love one for another," who opened the sources of that love in the spiritual faith, " One is your Father : and all ye are brethren," and who lived the faith he taught. He strengthened that spirit, gave it Divine support by making it the element of our Eternal Life. Love is of God, and never faileth. I am not limiting faith in Immortality to the Christian religion, and I am not denying that there are hearts which would live true to their noblest law, and sacrifice themselves if there was no eternal world at all ; for this would be to insult the Spirit of God in human nature, and leave no ground for faith to stand upon ; but a man's know- ledge of his own frailty and slightness will at times make him ashamed to connect imperishable life with his own being, and then he looks out for supports of Faith, and learns how our nature can be enfolded in God ; for there is no proof so strong of the Heaven that God wills for us all as the Heaven that dwelt in the soul of one of us — in the Love that never lost an 330 The Lordship of Service. opportunity, that being of God was never below an occasion and never needlessly above it, from the first gracious words that fastened on him all the eyes of the synagogue of Nazareth till he washed the Disciples' feet, to express in symbols what no words could utter ; and from the cross, having consigned an earthly parent to one whom he loved, and prayed for his enemies, when there was nothing more to do or to suffer, and all the work of Love on earth was "finished," committed himself to the Love of Him whose work is never finished : " Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit ! " XXIII. Romans xiv. 7, 8 " For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord : whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." " None of us liveth to himself." Of whom can this be said ? Or in what sense ? For it may be truly affirmed even of the most selfish. Their lives concern not themselves only ; but are to others disci- plinary or pestilential. They may be their own ends, their own objects, their own interests ; but not with- out affecting the moral atmosphere, and becoming burdens, obstructions, tempters, offences, or objects of effort and compassion to their brethren. Under one aspect, it is a testimony to the closeness of the spiritual tie by which God has bound us all together, that no man can live apart, that his sins become the opportunities of other men, the tests of their love and heroism, the battle-fields where the noblest victories are won : under another aspect, it is the plague of all unwholesomeness that it exhales poison — it cannot live to itself, or die to itself, without oppress- 332 Living and Dying tmto the Lord of Life. ing and wasting all that is around it. This for the most part is an unintended effect ; but it is nature and necessity. No man, whatever may be his desire, can confine his evil to his own heart, or fail to discharge his own spiritual offices without, at the least, throwing a disproportioned weight upon the moral life of others. But turning from this unhappy sense, in which it is as true of the basest selfishness as of the highest Love that it does not live to itself, and looking upon us all as members of a Body which is not complete without us, and out of which we, apart from it, are but as separated limbs, what justification of facts, in this spiritual and Christian sense, shall w^e find for St. Paul's large proposition, that " None of us liveth to himself"? If this was to be taken as a declaratory statement, perhaps in regard to himself no one of us w^ould deny that the very reverse of it would be nearer to the truth. With Christ's life for his standard, should we not rather expect St. Paul to have said, " Every man liveth to himself, and every man dieth to himself." Often there is no pretence in the world of living for any other purpose ; and if there was, some would deem it a weakness, and some would deem it a mask, and some would deem it an econom- ical mistake. Exceptions would at once occur to us all : witnesses for God, types of spiritual completeness the earth has never been without ; men whose life passes from off themselves into the life of others ; to w^hom Death is but widening vision and diviner fellow- ship ; who living or dying seek not their own, and find a better life than they lose ; — but not in such numbers Z iving and Dying nnto the L ord of L ife. ^-^ as to break the apparent rule, far less to turn the spiritual sentiment of St. Paul into a universal affirmation. His own well-being-, his own prospects, his own comfort, his own power, ease, and reputation — or if you raise the standard, his own improvement, his own knowledge, his own social weight and influence ; or if you raise it yet higher in the direction of the affec- tions, still that extension of himself — his family, his children, his household, whose warmth is his warmth, and whose honours and reputations are all gathered into his bosom, and reflected in his face — an average man lives for these, and so he dies ; his objects, motives, and ruling passions, when they deserve so forcible a name, go down with him to the grave. That he cannot help : he dies as he lives, as we all do. No man can empty his soul of its accustomed life and estimates, and bid another spirit enter into him, or transform his spiritual frame by a volition only because the time has come when he deems that a change would be seasonable. God will not accept even our wills, unless our hearts go with them ; when they serve not our aspirations but only our present views of our selfish interests ; when they are spas- modic for an outward purpose, not the instruments of our innermost life ; when we come to the door of His presence chamber and knock, not for His ends but for ours ; not as servants and sons, but as self- seekers. In the last hours of a selfish life, by no possible disposal of things that he cannot appropriate, or carry with him, can a man set himself right with God and man, or make any atonement for his soul 334 Living and Dyin^' tmto the Lo7'd of Life. unless he can utterly change it. And there would seem to be an instinctive perception of this truth ; for whether it be from the inveteracy of habit, or whether it be that the natural understanding sees the hopeless- ness of a mockery so monstrous, a very small propor- tion of those who have lived selfishly make an attempt to repair it in their death by posthumous acts. This, so far, is not to the discredit of human feeling, rather to the credit of its consistency ; for the posthumous beneficence would not imply a particle of benevolence ; and the perseverance in the old ways is rather a testi- mony to the ingrained continuity of character. Doubt- less there are men willing to purchase Heaven by any conceivable testamentary disposal of their goods, provided only it would avail ; but seldom does God so utterly desert a soul as to permit that idea even to be entertained. In their last hours, the selfish perceive, or act as if they perceived, that though they were to give their goods to feed the poor and their bodies to be burned, it would profit them nothing ; it would be but selfishness still, world-worship and happiness- seeking, dying to themselves even as they had lived to themselves. It is a strong attestation to a spiritual instinct in man to be satisfied in his hopes or fears only by realities, that there are few such direct attempts made to mock at God. But this living to ourselves is not confined to those whom Society recognizes as selfish. Society, indeed, has no standard of sentiment or opinion on such matters that would permit it to pass such judgments, to cast such stones, or call such names. A man must Living and Dying tuito the Lord of Life. 335 live to himself very inveterately before Society will attach an evil reputation to him on that account. It would not be just, however, to attribute this tolerance and forbearance merely to the fear of establishing a law that would condemn ourselves ; for there is in Society much genuine and pure-minded reluctance to look with any purposes of scrutiny into the souls of our fellow-men, to be searchers of hearts and testers of righteousness ; but a man cannot look into his own heart without perceiving for what large measures of time, and in that time with what absorption of being, even they can live to themselves who yet recognize the duty of co-operation with the universal Love of God, who are aware of the sin and of the mistake of selfishness ; who know that no hour of life is righteously spent or purely enjoyed if so spent or so enjoyed as to break our harmony with the aims of Providence ; who are classed not amongst the worldly, but with those to whom God and His Law are the supreme interests. It is wonderful how correct a man may be in all his spiritual judgments, and yet how feeble may be his solicitude to express those judgments by any enthusiasm of affection or com- pleteness of living ; even with what anxious care we may guard against having our inward nature, the sentiment of the soul, the jewel within the casket, polluted by low, sordid estimates of the objects of life, and stripped of sacredness, and yet have our daily pursuits and conversation, the tenour of our works, the crowd of our purposes accommodated to, apparently borrowed from, those very views of exist- OJ 6 Livhig and Dying unto the Lord of Life. ence which we would banish from our inmost being as desecration and death. Men are better, purer, more spiritual, loftier in their thoughts, more inde- pendent in their being than their lives would lead you to suppose. This inconsistency affects all our relations with religion. There is something in all our hearts which none of us express in our lives — nay, which we patiently suffer our lives to appear to con- tradict. Our inmost convictions seem to have no sufficient vouchers, and so our religion, that within which what is deepest in us is gathered up, is set apart, not as the inspirer and guide of common life, but rather as something that is to be our satisfac- tion and atonement for it. It is true that so long as God is the Spirit of our conscience there must always be an ideal hidden in our being which is above our life. It is not of this necessary and struggling imper- fection I am speaking, but of the inconsistency that not in outward manifestation at all do we aim, or find it natural, to express the highest life of our spirits ; that we have come to regard its legitimate sphere as an inner one, and not as the Word made Flesh. That God will always be working in us something that we have not yet worked out is admitted ; but it is not admitted, as it ought to be, that only in our habitual interests, only in our commonest pursuits, only in the life which all men see, can that which God works in us come to its birth at all. These are some of the bitter fruits of that wretched superstition which regards human nature as only evil, and necessary human pursuits as only secular, and so foregoes the Livmg and Dying unto the Lord of Life. 337 effort to make the man himself in his most ordinary- works and most worldly employment the temple of God's Spirit and the representative of His love. If a man viust do that which yet in itself is not capable of being elevated into a satisfying worship, a full, spiritual service to God and to man, what can he do but keep his religion apart, and look upon his daily life as gross. Bound to a life of material labour as most men are, they must live to themselves if a life of material labour cannot be regarded as religious and holy life, so long as a vestige of the sentiment remains that religion is something that expiates a man's ordi- nary and necessary existence, and not as the spirit that moulds it and finds its righteous expression nowhere else, as the principle that rules, the affection that hallows us, when we go about the meanest work that God has made necessary, and find no meanness in it, or give free way to the innocent feeling of our lightest moment, and find no levity in it. How can a man do otherwise than live to himself, if it be true that indis- pensable portions of human existence, indispensable offices and employments, are not living to God ! Those who have called the world profane have suc- ceeded in making it so ; and those who would attach some holier meaning to religion than that "he who doth righteousness is righteous," and that " he loveth not God who loveth not his brother," have only dese- crated daily life. Hence it is that we can avow and cherish respect for principles and sentiments, and yet are conscious of no inconsistency when it is not within them that we live, and move, and have our 11. z 33^ Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life. being, inasmuch as the world is a bad world, and not their sphere. In this way the highest professors have thrown scorn upon human nature, to account for the grossest laxity, and to succumb to it under protest. No such thing as contempt for living to God, or for living in love, may stain our inmost souls; and yet the explicit lives we lead, and the implicit homage we pay to the spiritual law of life, may be things separate and apart. Religious life and ordinary life are not blended together in all our acts. We admit a distinction and a separation. We acknowledge the principle of a life of Love ; but when v/e practically execute its claims it is not by our whole life, but by some act of special service, by a subscription, or a contribution, or an institution — some particular instru- ment we set up for curing men's souls or bodies ; it may be by the tithe of our goods. We feel that it would be very dreadful to live only for ourselves and to do nothing for others, and so we do special acts for Love's sake ; and, generous and self-denying as these often are, they may involve a confession that to live always to God, and always to others, and to find in that living our natural life and blessedness, is a measure of fellowship with God and Christ which we have neither attained in our character, nor compassed in our thought. For what are all our specific chari- table doings but an attempt, it may be in every way a right attempt under the circumstances, to supple*- ment what is defective in the normal workings of our established relations one to another } If Society was Christian, all our special charitable institutions would Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life. 339 assuredly be superseded as utterly out of character with the spiritual sentiment of our life, for every man would find his brother's claim more happily provided for. Our charitable institutions are mainly external arrangements for upholding a society whose conscience is largely awake, but whose ordinary aggregate life is all unspiritual and disordered. I am not disparaging this measure of unselfish life that exists amongst us, the aims of those who by institutions seek to abate the evils which the nominal relations of Society do not prevent ; rather will these aims come with a new force to every heart which feels our ordinary life, as now actuated and organized, to be so defective that extraordinary agencies cannot be dispensed with for Humanity's sake, or even as the visible monuments of our shortcoming. I know that wherever Christianity has a voice the general con- science attests the highest law on this matter, and that the affections of a few will not suffer it to be for- gotten ; but the facts show that each of us should ask his own heart, How would it do, so far as depends on us, that Society should forego its organized, and therefore to some extent its mechanical benevolence, trusting that its living spirit will naturally supply what is needed, since all men exist in relations, and under obligations of mutual love and service, one to another. Are we in this sense members of one Body, finding in the actual relations that bind us together channels for the natural passage of spiritual life, help and fellowship, from man to man } Or rather do we not withdraw our spirit from this articulate frame- 340 Living and Dying ttnto the Lord of Life. work which God has made for it to flow in, and give it some special direction determined not by what is most fitting, or most needed, but by what is most convenient or most pleasant ? To whom are we always ready to be courteous, gracious, and helpful ? Whom are we ever willing to serve, to speak to them our kindest words, to postpone our purpose or con- venience at their lightest desire? Upon whom do we bestow our knowledge, our choicest thoughts, our most eager pains ? Upon those that need us, or upon those that need us not ? Upon those who could do without us, or upon those who cannot do without us without interrupting the natural communications through which flows the life for God ? What say our habits of Society of our not living to ourselves, but to God and for others ? Is the spiritual physician with the spiritually sick ? To whom most is the Gospel preached ? To those who know it already, or might know it — or to those who know it not, and cannot know it unless it be spoken to them ? Where most are the ministers of religion ? In the houses and at the tables of the rich, or in the chambers of the poor, and in the workshops of the toiling ? " Who," says the Saviour, "would not leave the ninety and nine that are in safety, and go after the one that is lost?" How often do we reverse the rule ; keep by the one in every hundred that is safe, and leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness unsought ! And yet these habits of society in which we seem to live so much to our- selves are often rather dead conventions, than pur- sued for the sake of any selfish pleasure they afford. Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life. 341 They are not intensely enjoyed, and hang upon us only as customs. They are maintained at a cost and toil far beyond the value of their returns, and often under the conviction that they are weariness and vanity. We give up to mere usages, of which we might truly say that our soul has no pleasure in them, what we should deem mighty sacrifices of strength, time, and means, if asked for in the name of any great endeavour. It is not always from the zest or joy that belongs to living to ourselves that we are tempted to forego living to God and for others. We keep the beaten way not so much from the impulse of inclination, as from the inertia of habit. Few have the independence of character; few have the resources and strength of determination ; few have the vigorous, manly genius, the insight into its spiritual satisfac- tions and delights to adopt a simple life. Men engrossed in the world, having no larger or vigorous existence out of their secular engagements, are apt to fall into the belief that there are no higher oppor- tunities of life outside of its conventional and me- chanical workings ; that these turn up healthily only in the course of this world's interests, and cannot be more directly or independently pursued. They ex- press doubts of one another, whether they would not rapidly deteriorate if they stepped out of the round of labour. Men who retire from some special pursuit, only outwardly instrumental to true life, are considered by those who continue in the pursuit to be throwing themselves away ; and so no doubt they are, unless they retire for the sake of serving and 342 Living and Dying tinto the Lord of Life. enjoying more truly, more directly, a higher and more durable existence. Much depends, whatever be our round of occupation, on having a pure inward eye ; on seeing clearly, amidst whatever distraction, what are the pursuits that are really imperishable, and what are the interests that are really inexhaustible ; and in a yet higher order much depends on a right choice, on a man's soul having made any deliberate choice at all ; we have amongst us every day men who, if only their aim was fixed and the way open, have enterprise, energy, and generosity enough to win a place on the too-scanty roll which contains the names of Loyola, Zavier, Howard, and their peers. Our condition of natural dependency, one upon another, might well be an irresistible provision of God against living to ourselves. We ought to live for others, since we cannot help living upon them. By no effort can we avoid borrowing everything we have, and owing some one a debt for it. Since the first hour when the affections of others received us, when the only act we w^ere capable of was the in- stinctive cry which, so far as any consciousness of ours was concerned, was sent into a blank universe with no knowledge of the Love that God had placed there to hear and answer it, — from that hour we have been drawing all that we are, have, know, or hope, from the long line of the dead and the living. In effect, no doubt, we are often living for others, when consciously we are living only to ourselves. The most selfish man on earth cannot avoid doing some Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life. 343 good to his fellow-men, though, because he does it bHndly, he may prevent any spiritiiat good resulting to himself. A man cannot spend his own gold, how- ever selfishly, without giving it to others. He cannot turn his own means into personal enjoyment, without at the same time parting with them, enriching others with the price of their services. In ordinary affairs we must all give at least the material equivalent of what we get. But do we this unconsciously, mechanically, and of necessity ? Or do we it consciously, sympa- thizingly, with a clear purpose of acting in the spirit, and serving the Providence of God } It will not in the least spiritually serve zis, that God's mighty Law works good, blindly so far as we are concerned, if we lend it no intelligent co-operation nor voluntarily throw our spirits into its blessed opportunities ; if all our giving is only for the sake of getting, and all our spending for the sake of the returns. It will not even serve us that we see, with whatever clearness and satis- faction, a beneficial law in the economic world, if we aid it by no voluntary spiritual effort, introducing a new force that transcends economic power. That which God does without our will is not ours, nor to be set to our account, however clearly we may see it. And some- times this economic insight chills or kills spiritual effort, when it concludes that, because God's natural laws work beneficently. He requires no purposed co- operation from tis, but only a due obedience to the natural laws within our own sphere. Certainly God does not require us to assist or amend His laws ; but He does require us to have sympathy with the spirit 344 Litnng and Dying unto the Lord of Life. of His character, and with the ends that His Provi- dence is seeking in the free spiritual Hfe of man. Be- cause a wise self-love cannot serve itself without serving others, because He can make the wrath of man to praise him, and the remainder of wrath He can restrain, are selfishness and wrath their own justi- fication ? This is to use God's Spirit against Him- self ; because He works benignantly, and in the very constitution He has given to things reveals the pur- pose of His heart, to conclude that our heart is not required and need take no part in his service ; and so the light that is in God's face engenders spiritual darkness in us. By such inversions of the truth we turn His blessings into curses ; and calamity is re- quired to heal us, to teach us on our own persons that the natural laws are not enough for our soul's health and peace. A man who reasons in this way, in word or act, has need to have all natural good torn from him, that he may learn, even through his suffer- ings, that what God desires for us is a conscious fel- lowship with Himself which natural good can neither give nor take away. For God cannot do our spiritual acts, though He can urge them upon us. Natural laws can affect only natural good ; economic laws can operate only for economic benefits ; physical laws have only physical results ; but spiritual good comes out of the spirits, the wills, the endeavours of those who consciously are fellow-workers with God, when consciously we take the Law of His Spirit, the pur- pose that lives in Plim, and make it supreme in and over us. Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life. 345 And it was precisely this that was in St. Paul's view when he affirmed that none of us liveth to him- self, and that no man dieth to himself. He was not speaking of any persons who had attained to this per- fection, but of the law of spiritual life under which we all have passed. God is our Law ; Christ is our Rule ; and whilst no more free to follow inclinations that would draw us out of accord with them, we are liberated from all lower authority. Their service is then perfect freedom : we are no longer free to live to ourselves, because our will has passed into a higher life. How can he, says St. Paul, who is dead to sin, live any longer therein ? We are determined, even as God is determined, by the highest life that is in us. And in the Apostle's words, — for we might fear to use such words from ourselves — we become joint rulers with God as we become His servants from our souls. We rule through willing submission : accord with the Highest is command over all that is lower than He. We obey natural law, and it obeys us ; we obey the law of labour, and it yields us its returns ; we obey God, and He is the strength of our souls and our portion for evermore. This is the great Law of Life which delivers us from ourselves and our own blind- ness, so that, living or dying, life and death are freed from the colours of earthly accident, and centred in God. This is the only true liberty, to know that we are not our own masters ; that a Will higher than our own rules us out of Heaven. All this, and far more than this, Wordsworth has expressed in that great " Ode to Duty" which shows 34^ Living and Dying unto the Lord of Life, that the whole secret of spiritual life is in the renun- ciation of unconsecrated will : — "Me this unchartered freedom tires : I feel the weight of chaiue desires : My hopes no more must change their name : I long for a repose that ever is the same. ' ' Oh, let my weakness have an end ! Give unto me made lowly wise The spirit of self-sacrifice, The confidence of Reason give, And in the light of Truth, Thy bondsman let me live ! " XXIV. John xvi. 7-1 1. "It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I go, I will send him unto you. And when he is come, he will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment : of sin, because they believe not on me ; of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more ; of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged." It is but a truism to say that we know nothing of God until Himself has revealed it unto us ; yet in that truism is involved the necessity of communion with Him face to face. We know Him only as a Person, as a Spirit in intercourse with spirits. A knowledge of our own feelings is not a knowledge of God. The pure in heart see Him, not in their own purity, but when they know that God is the spring of their purity ; and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness know God only when they know that they hunger and thirst for that which is not in themselves ; that from One w/io is righteous comes both the thirst and its supply, and that their aspirations are not the sighings of an independent or a solitary nature, but longings after One who moves within them. If Religion is the 34^ Spiritual Gaijts of Bereavement. knowledge of God, then is it personal communion, personal dependence, personal sympathy, our measure of fellowship with the Holy Spirit ; and until this exists we walk in spiritual darkness, not having the light of Life, even though we should walk blameless within the strictest fences of the moral law. The three great lessons indispensable to man, the three great perceptions of the soul, are the understanding of what is good, the understanding of what is evil, and the understanding that the living God is in the one, and eternally against the other ; — in the language of the text, the conviction of sin, the conviction of righteousness, the conviction of judgment — all coming to us in the measure of our personal fellowship with the Spirit of God. From no secondary experience, from no hearsay, from no lower range of knowledge, from no ethical consideration of wisdom, prudence, and expediency — only from spirit acting upon spirit, can they be acquired. The Disciples during the life of Christ did not participate with him in the original sources of his inspiration. He looked upon God ; they looked only upon tradition and him. They walked in a borrowed light, and did not perceive whence it came. They instinctively yielded to the attractions of a spiritual power the sources of which were not open to them- selves. His intercourse with them was that of one who by the spell of great qualities exerts a command- ing influence over those who have no real compre- hension of his character, and may themselves be marked by qualities of a conflicting kind. By the spiritual Gains of Bereavement. 349 natural magic of goodness and of spiritual might they were awed, chastened, subdued ; but he and they did not drink from the same fountain of spiritual life : they from the traditions of their nation ; he from the living water. The veil that concealed from them the knowledge of God shining in the face of His Son was the conventional religion in which they lived, the tissue of Church notions which had wrapped them from their birth. They could not see the inconsist- ency of confounding the Son of Man with the Mes- siah of their local expectations. By a strange ming- ling of personal sympathy and of national prejudice they felt what was' Divine in the Man without being carried on to the discernment of what was universal in his mission ; they blended things so incongruous as the spirit of Jesus and the Jewish Messiah. It was expedient that he should go away ; that Death and the Resurrection should destroy for ever this combination of incompatible beliefs, and whilst pre- serving their personal trust in his Divine qualities shed the interpretation of Heaven and Immortality upon the sources of his power and the nature of his kingdom. This was the character of the change wrought in the Disciples by the removal and exalta- tion of their Lord. Their trust in himself was con- firmed, for God put His seal upon him through their faith in the Resurrection : their conceptions of his purpose were totally transfigured, in that he was gone to the Father, and they saw him no more. There was no longer coherency between a Jewish Avenger and a Prince of Life and of Immortality. 350 Spiritual Gains of Bereavement. In this way the Spirit of God found direct access to the souls of the Disciples, and the Mediator, who after he had passed into the heavens could no more be mistaken for a leader of Jewish armies or a conqueror of Roman masters, drew the gaze of men upon him- self only to fix it upon the Father whom he revealed. And thus the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, in taking away the bodily presence of their Lord admitted them to communion with his living soul. They were now nearer to him than ever they had been before. Before, they were under his commands, as servants with a master : now they partook of his inspiration, and drank at the same wells. It was expedient for them that he should go away, if thus they were to be drawn into more vital union with him, — that having life in themselves, no longer led by a force they did not understand, they might thenceforth be as friends and fellow-workers with their Lord, of the kindred of his spirit. In all analogous cases of character being strength- ened or transformed by the removal of a guiding influence on which we had leaned with too external a dependence, of whose help and sweetness we freely took without penetrating to the Divine depths where it had its spring, it is manifestly in the greater fulness of its spiritual presence with us, in more of inward fellowship that the blessedness of the change consists. It is often expedient for a son to go away from his father's house, not that he may forget it and become a vagrant in heart and spirit, but that he may value it and know it as he never spiritual Gains of Bereavement. 351 knew it before, — that Its affections, its purities and prayers may have their spirit revealed to him, and no longer be regarded as things of course that have no special blessing in them. A departure from home is expedient, in the sense that our Lord's departure was expedient, only when the spirit of home can thus more fully be disclosed ; and only the wisest and the best of parents can in this way bless their child when, as by their own death, they are parted from him. It is expedient that advancing years should deliver each mind to a self-subsistence, not that we should break loose from our early guides, but that we should be taken into more intimate fellowship with them, that the individual responsi- bility we then acknowledge should unite us at the same fountain of inspiration and of action. Mere physi- cal growth will emancipate from parental control, but the true emancipation is that of growing insight and sympathy, which deepens our reverence for our first guidance as we become partakers of the same spirit, and removes dependence to substitute unity, drawing parent and child to the same Father. And so it may be expedient that separation, and the great teacher Death, should touch our earthly relationships and leave us alone, but only that the undying spirit in these relations may reveal itself. In this, one of the deepest mysteries of our spirits, that we fu-lly come to know our blessings only as they recede, is our clearest admonition of the insight that is wanting to us, and help towards its attainment ; for by these retrospec- tive lessons when God has taught us to read what was 352 Spiritital Gains of Bereavement. in our human life and our human affections, if our eyes could have seen it, we may learn hereafter, in some more heavenly frame, without further shifting of condition, to discern the riches and the glory of the present that then is with us. And so it is that any condition of existence may unfold its hidden treasure to us only when it is passing away, that we lose it outwardly to gain it inwardly, that its ideal and imperishable spirit comes to abide with us for ever, and that when we regain it in person it will be in a fuller and higher form. What may not be good for any of us in the way of present change or loss, if it could be good for any one that Jesus Christ should go away from him and be with him no more — if his absence was needful that it might interpret the blessing of his presence ! How often do those who would have more of external help and assurance than God has seen fit to give, ignorantly desire that they had but lived in the days of the Son of Man, forgetting the parallel vanity of those blind of heart, " If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets ! " How many can read the past, who cannot interpret the present ! How many can acknowledge the dead prophet who would not have recognized the signs of his living power ! Which of us is sure that he would have seen the glory of God in the form of a servant ? Which of us is sure that he would not have been of those who said, " Is not this the carpenter's son ? " We in fact are more favourably placed in relation to Christ than were his spiritual Gains of Bei^eavcment. 353 own Disciples : by all the developments of the Life that was in him, by all the fruits of his spirit, of the travail of his soul, do we know more of him than did John or Matthew or Peter on the day that he was parted from them. Better to know the inmost heart of a friend who is absent, than to have his bodily presence with a veil between his soul and ours. No man should complain of his Father's Providence, or be in despair of himself, with whom the Past is unfolding its deeper meanings to him. Though, especially blessed are those with whom there was no spirit in their past that may not, in distincter recog- nition and in richer forms, abide with them for ever ; whose life flows through tracts of experience that they do not abuse even when it is an experience that they do not understand, and wanders away amid no rocks and wastes from which it can escape only by falls that leave their scars, and for long after make the course of the waters to be dark and troubled. When Christ went away from the Disciples, the blessing that he promised as the more than com- pensation for his presence was that they should enter into the significance of his past companionship with them, that the Spirit should bring to their re- membrance whatsoever he had said unto them, and, in the light of his death and exaltation, become the Interpreter of all the deeper things which in their natural intercourse with him their eyes had not been open to perceive. Their first participation of his spirit, their first insight into the real nature of his kingdom, was to bring with it a conviction of sin, of II. 2 A 354 Spmtual Gains of Bereavement. righteousness, and of judgment — a conviction of their own sin, and of the nature of all sin ; a conviction of his righteousness, and of the nature of all righteous- ness ; a conviction of God's judgment, and the grounds of it, upon every spirit of the world kindred to that which had rejected him, because it knew not the Father nor him. This first true understanding of Christ as the spiritual Image of God, the first ray of the Spirit of Truth coming from that face now serene in Heaven, brought conviction of the incapacity for spiritual judgment in which they had been living when they had looked only for a Redeemer of Israel, when their cry was towards the earth, and not for the living God ; and yet this conviction of sin was wrought by the Comforter, and brought healing with it, because it came through the spiritual gain of fellowship with himself. When it is the Spirit of God, some gleam of holy life that entering into a man convinces him of a state of sin, there may be anguish and reproof, but there is also heavenly com- fort ; it is the Comforter that does it, because it is the p7'esence of Divine Goodness that has revealed our poverty, our ignorance, or blindness, and in re- vealing it has so far taken it away. There are other spirits that deal with sin, but as they give it no better experience, shine in upon it with no light of holy communion, they do not convince, and they do not comfort. We think to convince men of their evil by other means than by the entrance of the Spirit of God. There are spirits of rebuke, spirits of anger and resentment, spirits of exposure and judgment, spiritual Gains of Bereavement, 355 that either work no conviction at all or a conviction that degrades. Human convincers would rebuke us out of sin, but pride or shame hardens our heart against them ; some exaggeration or some harshness, which we are quick to perceive, vitiates the whole plea they advance against us ; or, if they do succeed, it is not to make us yielding, reverent, and receptive in the presence of what is good, but full of confusion and remorse, in which is no germ of hope and holier life. How can you convince a man of sin except by giving him some living experience of the beauty of the affection or the holiness of the sentiment against which he has offended ? For Satan cannot cast out Satan ; only the Spirit of God can accomplish that ; only some touch of love can melt obduracy, some feeling of holiness cast out impurity, and so convince of sin that it dies at the roots, and a new life begins. When it is the presence of God that casts out the evil spirit, He takes possession of the temple for Himself ; but when it is shame, or reproof, or com- punction, or the world's opinion that expels it, there is nothing that has a Divine right to take the vacant place ; and, finding it empty and ready for their use, the evil spirits after a little, return to it again. Now this conviction of sin, because of the presence with them of the Spirit of Truth, was to come upon the world in a way that would remove the sources of former unbelief, and reveal the unworthy causes of Christ's rejection. An entirely selfish man seeks no deliverer from his selfishness ; the conviction of sin must come first ; it is some feeling of mercy stealing 356 spiritual Gains of Bereavement. in upon his heart that suddenly opens his inward eye upon the whole character of his life. A sensual man will have no spiritual compunctions until some example of holy self-denial startles him with the knowledge of what he is, and turns the sweet fruit to ashes in his mouth. A worldly man will have no knowledge of the meanness of his being until un- worldliness stands before him ; for until then he has no standards but his own, and supposes that all men weigh the interests of life in the same scales of estimation. And thus the more the Spirit of God is with us the more are we convinced of sin ; but then not without the Comforter, not without con- fidence of everlasting deliverance, for He in whose Light we have our life has communicated Himself unto us. That fellowship with One who is good, which is awakened by any perception of the Spirit of God in the life of Christ, would convince us all of one class of sins — the sins of omission. Law only forbids, and says, " Thou shalt not ; " but it is another and diviner Spirit that whispers to us the good things that we might do, and makes its whispers obligations. Un- less the suggesting Spirit of God is with us, we will live in the constant omission of all those graces and Christian acts which no law defines, or can define, and yet not be convinced of sin. The Comforter will convict us, when He has opened to us the Divine beauty of Christ's life ; when, in our Lord's words, " He has taken of the things that are his, and has shown them unto us." Then will the Spirit of Truth spiritual Gains of Bereavement. 357 be daily convincins^ us of sin, because we are falling short of the merciful and holy things which He puts into our hearts to do ; and yet daily comforting us, for it is His own Presence with us that gives the convicting and correcting light. And that conviction of sin which comes from sympathy with the Spirit of God in Christ, brings with it the conviction of Christ's righteousness, and of the essence of all righteousness; that he possessed the Divine idea of what true glory is. Surely this was the needed lesson of his day, and is the needed lesson of all time, — that we should know what is the greatness and the glory of man. Far other were the ideas of greatness in which the world had faith. He was not the Power of God, the Vicegerent of Heaven, it had pictured to itself. He was too lowly, mean- born, patient, and submissive. He called no fire from Heaven. That humble, merciful, forgiving man, going to be a guest with men that were sinners, liable to insult and meek beneath it, could not be the Lord's Christ. They could see no stamp of the Divine greatness in Christ's humiliation. Such a representation of the glory of God was to the Jews an offence, and to the Greeks foolishness. Truly the world required much to be convinced of righteous- ness, to be instructed as to what Divine Manhood was ; and when God put the seal of Immortality on the rejected and the lowly. He acknowledged him whose claim to be His Son the world had refused ; in that thus he was the accepted of the P'ather, and men saw him no more, the Father avowed that 35^ Spiritual Gains of Bej^eaveinenf. Christ's conceptions of righteousness and life were also His own. And so the Comforter came to the hearts of the humble, and " showed " them the glory of their Lord, convinced them that they had seen the Son of God, full of grace and truth. And still it is evident that it requires some spiritual strengthener, some inward purifier against the false standards of the world, to convince us of the righteousness of Christ, to fill and satisfy ambition with the Christian type of greatness. For wherein was he powerful ? In the power of love, in meekness, in sympathy, in gentleness, in self-denial, in the might of the Cross, in faith in God and truth. It would be felt at once as a fall to a lower order of conceptions if any one was to name intellect, or genius, or knowledge among the characteristics of his greatness. Now can we say that in this sense we are convinced of righteousness, — that we see our nature to be complete in him ; that we have no other idea of what is exalted, no other dream of greatness or of glory ? The world certainly has not this conviction ; the lust of power does not own it ; the pride of birth does not own it : the lowest pride of all — the pride of riches, weighs human dignities in other scales. Can any of us say that through our knowledge of Christ, and of the Spirit of Truth, of eternal realities in and through Christ, we no more sink and rise upon the waves of the world } Has that Image of Righteousness of Perfect Man, so taken possession of us that our eyes are purged, and we are open no more to the false worship of power or opinion, intellect or sense, genius, wealth, or fame, spiritual Gains of Bei'cavement. 359 that we could pass through all the temptations of Christ, and worship only the Lord our God ? The third conviction to be wrought by the Spirit of Truth, as men saw the righteousness of God in Christ, was that the prince of this world is judged ; that every form of that worldly spirit which rejected Christ is doomed to wither from the roots, as having the whole energy of God eternally against it. Nothing short of the Comforter, the Everlasting Strengthener in men's hearts, will give and renew the conviction that judgment has gone forth against the prince of this world who rules through the lust of the eye, and the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Vainly does human law strive to convince the sinner that his sin is judged ; no suffering brings conviction, if first God has not entrance to the darkened heart Vainly does human opinion seek to convince the world of judg- ment, for it can show no goodness of its own that silently transforms ; its secular judgment is not always the judgment of God ; it too often appeals to one low motive against another. Even the natural retri- butions of God, as distinct from the spiritual manifes- tation of Himself to the souls of men — ruin, exposure, pain, disease, and death, a countless multitude of avengers, traverse the ways of guilt with tribulation and anguish ; and still the world is not convinced of judgment. Only when the Comforter has first been with us can we read His own retributions aright. Otherwise, they may be terrible experiences, warn- ings of something wrong, but they do not change the affections of a sinful heart. When we think of many 360 SpijHtual Gaiiis of Bereavement. of our own objects and pursuits, and of the passions and pursuits of men, can we say that the prince of this world is judged because the Comforter is with us ? Is he cast out from the market, or even from the Temple of God, from the senate, and the council chamber, and what the Scripture calls the inscrutable heart of kings? Is it the Spirit of Truth that challenges God's judgment in the world's diplomacy ? Is it the Prince of Peace who summons nations to the carnal tests, the unspiritual decisions of war ? Are we ourselves so convinced of judgment, of how and where the eternal award will fall, that no worldly passions pollute the sacredness of our homes, or disturb by vain desires the spiritual contentment of our hearts ? The only way of life and safety is so to use all the manifestations of God to us that we live in continual intercourse with God Himself; to obtain our convictions of sin, of righteousness, and of judg- ment, from the light of His Spirit in us interpreting the glory of Christ ; for then, when our sin is revealed to us it will be for the comfort and deliverance of our souls ; when our righteousness is assailed by false pleas of honour or of dignity, the Spirit of Truth will uncover the illusion ; and if judgment proceeds from us, or silently shapes its awful form within us, it will be as God's judgment, not ours,— its holiness so tempered with love and mercy, that it will bring no judgment upon ourselves, and with the measure we mete it may be measured to us again. XXV. John i. i8. " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared Him." There are two classes of objection to which a true Rehgion may be open. It may have real diffi- culties, from the limitations of human faculty belong- ing to all forms of Religion ; it may have apparent difficulties, belonging only to the position of the objector, to an impure discernment, to unjust expec- tations, to a conventional bias. Thus Christ himself, present in person, with all his great credentials visible to the eye, audible to the ear, livingly presented to the heart and to the soul, was to the Jews an offence, and to the Gentiles foolishness. They did not discern his essential truth and beauty ; he was not the embodiment of their desires ; he did not meet their wants as they understood their wants ; being universal Man he was not, and could not be, the man of the age, the man of the day, to Roman, Greek, or Jew. So the Mahometan, from his spiritual place, takes objection to Christianity, finding it wanting in the 362 Unspiritual Objections to comforts, the privileges, the indulgences, the prospects, and kinds of everlasting delights which he desires from a religion. So the Roman Catholic objects to Protestantism, that it is shadowy and insufficient, having neither penance nor absolution of sins at the hands of an authorized representative of God, nor the real Presence in the ever-renewed sacrifice of the Mass, nor the intercession and transferable merits of the Saints, nor doctrinal infallibility, nor any other foundation less insecure than human faith and reason. And so, in its turn, dogmatic Protestantism objects to spiritual Christianity, that it rests too much on the goodness of the Holy One, on the Fatherhood of God, and provides no certain salvation for a sinner. All such objections exhibit only the spiritual status of the objector ; they assume his expectations to be legitimate, and accept, or reject, accordingly. They do not argue, " Your religion is not the way in which the perfect Father exerts His living energy, and is spiritually unworthy of Him," but " It does not meet what I, in my present condition, think to be my wants ; it is not so framed as to bring certain relief to me, as I feel myself to be ; it does not permit me to repeat the great Atonement, without which the efficacy of the purchased salvation, the reality of the covenanted grace, are in danger of fading from my heart ; it does not assure me that I am forgiven, for I do not know that a holy God can forgive on repentance alone, and I do not know that I am re- pentant : " or, ** No one can be sure, from his own conviction, that he has the true faith, with contrition spiritual C/wisfianiiy. 363 and newness of life, and therefore no Religion can give peace but that which attaches salvation to a sacramental act, performed in an authorized way, and through an authorized person, so as to leave no possible doubt that you have complied with the saving condition." All this is only to say, " I have no measure for God's truth and grace except my own view of my own weakness ; I want a Religion that will provide for my helplessness and fears, such as they are — that will take me as I am and comfort me ; I am ready to do anything, to believe anything, only let it bring the certainty of safety to a weak creature precisely in my condition." This is the secret of the success of all forms of external religion, sacerdotal, ascetic, or authoritatively dogmatic, that they are the refuges of our weakness, not the educators of our strength, — that not trusting to God and His holy love, to the spiritual affections, the faith of the heart, the inspira- tion and allegiance of the conscience, they meet the demand of unspiritual human nature for positive certainty through creeds, or sacraments, or works of mortification, about which there can be no mistake, and which hold God fast to His word. And such objections cannot be removed by any fulness or clearness of proof supporting and adorning true Religion, for still the answer comes, " It does not meet my wants as I feel them to be ; my necessities find no relief within its circle of provisions." The self-evidencing truth of Christianity was not brought home to those who felt Christ's living touch, who 364 Ujispiritual Objections to heard him speak as never man spake, who saw the glory of God in his face, because he did not meet what they beheved to be their wants ; to them the Kingdom of God, with its aims and desires, was within a region of notions and expectations of which he was not the fulfilment. To remove such objec- tions you must spiritually transform the objector ; you must change the character of his wants, so that what before was foreign to his conditions of desire and thought may now commend itself as the food for which he hungers and thirsts. What, for instance, is gained by any demonstration of the personal unity of God, with one who believes that he wants three Divine, co-equal Persons to save his soul — that One infinite God, if He is only one Person, cannot, or may not, for metaphysical moral reasons, be able to redeem him ? In surveying, then, some of the most common objections to spiritual Christianity, I shall aim to vindicate it by considering the positions from which the objector mistakes the spiritual wants of human nature. I. There was a desperate view taken of the lost condition of man, which gave material and terrible distinctness to the interposing act of a Deliverer, in comparison with which any exposition of the salvation of Christ as a spiritual process within the individual soul seemed to fade away into airy nothingness. To lis he is a Saviour because he fulfilled the prophets and the law in human nature ; the law in the con- science, through which God declares present duty — Spirihial Christianity. 365 the prophecies of faith and aspiration in the soul through which He opens the way of heavenly perfect- ness. With others he has hitherto appeared as one who removed a difficulty from God himself, and restored to Heaven a power to pardon which inherited sin had taken away ; for that before the atoning death, the redemption by an all-sufficient Substitute, the impediment was in and with God, the penalty threa- tened against disobedience remained in force, and forgiveness could not be. This was th^ position from which men looked on spiritual Christianity, and objected that it did not make a Saviour necessary in any forcible sense, that in it there seemed no deliverance required, no place for a Redeemer. " No deliverance required ! " What ! Did human trans- gression come to an end with the exclamation from the Cross, " It is finished " } Are there no sins ? Is there no ignorance of God "^ Are there no low con- ceptions of the objects and value of human life } Is there no slavery to evil powers and passions, no dis- honour to our nature and to Him who made it in His likeness .'' Are there no superstitious ways of pro- pitiating Heaven, as debasing as a fetish worship, making our spiritual food a poison or a drug } Has the unreal impression of a difficulty removed from God, by the suffering and death of His co-equal in substitution for all mankind, extinguished the im- pression of the only real difficulty that ever existed, and which still exists, in the spiritual condition of the individual soul? It might well be supposed that so awful a transaction, if real, provided for every claim 366 Unspirihial Objections to and closed for ever the account between man and God. "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people /r^;;^ their sins." And is it possible for a man to look into his own heart, even when his heart is most a mirror for Heaven, without feeling that he is a Deliverer, a Redeemer, a Saviour, who in its desires, its affections, its will, its peace, will make it right with God ? To establish filial relations of the spirit of man with the Spirit of God is the one purpose of Revela- tion. Where that relation is established salvation, the health of the soul, is established ; for our spiritual life is "the life of God in the soul of man." And how does God, in Christ, declare His purpose and invite His children to this fellowship ? By the most direct of means — by showing one human spirit in these relations, and proclaiming to mankind, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him." The question was, and is. How is human nature related to God, and what, according to the demands of that relation, ought man to be ? And God answers the question in a Son of Man who was a Son of God, leading a human life on earth true at all points of present obedience and of prophetic trusts to his Divine lineage. And by this method of God Christ is more than a revealer of Truths ; he is a quickener of Life. If God could be manifested in Person, and not, as now, only through the indications of His works and the whispers of His Spirit mingling mysteriously with ours ; if He could answer that ancient cry of humanity, *' Oh, that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come spiritual Christianity. 367 down ! " if we could hear His voice and feel His love in its tones, and look into His face and receive, through soul and sense, the living contact of grace and power, we might be raised and quickened by a way that is conceivable, though not possible. God cannot thus vivify by externally sensible manifestation, but He can employ a power of that kind. Though we cannot see God, we can see His image in our own nature made in the likeness of Himself Goodness is the mightiest inspirer of goodness. Its spirit is creative; it quickens whatever Divine seeds have been planted in us. This is the highest office of Christ — to be a Conductor of life from the source of life. Our nature starts when it sees him to its spiritual functions, and "leaves all to follow him." By its vivid presentment he awakens the Divine life that is slumbering in us to spiritual con- sciousness. " No man hath seen God at any time ; the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath made Him known." It is the function of the Gospels to place us in the living presence of Christ ; it is the function of Christ to carry us beyond himself into the living presence of God. And, whether we look on Christ as a Revealer of Truth, as an Impersonation of Providence, or as an Imparter of Life, is this to preach a religion within which a Saviour has no place ? II. But it is objected that this is "to heal the hurt of the people slightly, and cry, Peace, peace, where there is no peace ; " that it provides for man's safety at the cost of God's truthfulness ; that it leaves in force the Divine edict of " death " against " sin," and, whilst pro- claiming "peace on earth" and "good will towards o 68 Unspiritual Objections to men," strikes " Glory to God in the -Highest" out of the heavenly anthem. This is the saddest fact that has been able to connect itself with the religion that says, " God is Love ; " " Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect. Be ye holy, for God is holy." The objection amounts to this: God would be merciful, but He cannot ; holiness forbids it. Must He not keep His Word ? Has He not said, " The soul that sinneth, it shall die " ? And has not every one sinned, and had a parentage of sin ? Hence, " the scheme of salvation," as it aptly calls itself, guarding against everything imaginable in God that might destroy us, imputing the most revolting moral necessities to the Divine Nature that it may provide for them. For some of the most nicely fitted adaptations of Dogmatic Theology there would seem to be no explanation but this : " Let the worst we can think of God be true, still the * scheme ' saves us ; from all risks at His hands we have a means of escape." From our ordi- nary Systematic Theology it might naturally be inferred that the end of religious faith was not so much to confide in God as to be protected against Him. What but this can account for a spiritual creature, with a natural conscience, being able to frame the hypothesis that holiness may restrain the heavenly Father from accepting His penitent child ; may quench the smoking flax of reviving purity, and break the bruised reed of contrite and suppliant love ; that though Mercy might both move the first advances and go forth to meet the returning wanderer " whilst he was yet a great way off," Righteousness must legally spiritual Clwistianity. 369 be compelled to refuse forgiveness, and, unless a theo- technic remedy existed in the tri-personal resources of the Almighty, to leave the crushed and longing heart to the outer darkness of despair. Holiness and Love are co-acting, not conflicting, attributes of God : Righteousness and Mercy for ever kiss one another. Yet, incredible as it may seem to any one nourished only on the inspirations of ancient piety, or commun- ing with God through his own heart, I am not need- lessly protesting against the teachings of obscure or obsolete fanatics. The thirteenth Article of the Church of England declares that, " Works done before the grace of Christ are not pleasant to God, do not make men meet to receive grace, and have the nature of sin." Yet I think, if we communed spiritually with God, conscience is better fitted to find absolute rest on His holiness than the heart is to understand the action of His Love, and that the one thing we should know of God is this, that, because He is holy. He will lend us the whole co-operation of His Spirit to lift us out of sinful states, to fan the smoking flax of devout penitence and breathe it into flame. I do not know what the Love of God may yet do with me or for me ; in the directions of His loving kindness I have no organ or capacity to gauge the measure or the wisdom of His ways ; I can only trust Him with all the instincts and all the insight of a nature that experience of His goodness has raised to boundless confidence. Of His Love, though infinite, I only know that it will do what is best for me, and may leave me, for my good, to suffering and shame and trial, or the long II. 2 B 370 Unspirittial Objections to hunger of the heart; but of His holiness I know its definite action — that it is ever willing to welcome the faintest emotion of penitence, to help me to extinguish sin in me — that, because He is holy, the gates of Heaven and the arms of God are open for every man the moment " he comes to himself," and says, " I will arise and go to my Father." God is one : we cannot divide Him into parts, one part Goodness, and one part Righteousness, capable of separate action, as if the All-perfect could act out of only a part of Himself, exhibiting at one time His love, at another His holi- ness. His holiness is love ; His love is holiness ; they are not separable in conception or in operation. Men do strangely and grossly err, out of a fear which makes Conscience no longer a mirror of the Divine righteousness, a fear that is not " born of God," nor reverence for Him, but a carnal and ungodly terror for themselves, when they tell us that in trusting ourselves to His saving goodness we forget that there is an obstacle in His holiness against which their " scheme," through the metaphysics of His being, has provided them with a protection. " But how then," it is asked in tremulous distrust, as though all the possible pitfalls were not stopped up, " is God released from His threat, ' The soul that sinneth, it shall die ' ? " This is a conspicuous example of how the letter killeth, of the unavoidable danger of committing Divine Truth, spiritual reality, to the uncertain vehicle of human words, that unspiritual men, instead of taking the words in their highest sense, the sense most honourable to God, will take them in spiritual Christianity, 371 the sense that is least honourable to God, a sense suggested not by their faith, but by their fear. Either these words cannot be taken literally, as threatening the extinction of every soul that sins, or, there is no possible escape from them. And in fact no one takes them literally, for the unspiritual apprehension of them is not that the sinning soul shall die, but that it shall live eternally in pain. There is a perishing of the soul that sinneth, in the gradual darkness that falls on Conscience when we dishonour its light, in the gradual withering of the heart when we stifle the promptings of God's Spirit. Sin is the quenching of the inner life, as righteousness is its growth ; the death of sin, the life of righteousness, and "the soul that sinneth, it shall die," is but the obverse of more glorious words, " He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and he that liveth and believeth shall never die." In view of God's holiness, then, as in view of His love, we have but one want — that He with whom are the preparations of the heart should so prevail with us that we turn to Him and live. " Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways ; for why will ye die, O house of Israel ? . . . When I say unto the wicked. Thou shalt surely die ; if he turn from his sin, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die." III. It is objected by those who think three co-equal Persons ivantcd for man's redemption, and to provide society for God, objects worthy of and responsive to His love within His own being, to rescue Him from the solitude of Power, that we who rest on the Fatherhood 372 Unspu'itual Objections to of God, as revealed within our souls and objectively manifested in the filial perfectness of the man Christ Jesus, do not, and cannot, know the power and presence of the Holy Spirit as He is. What is meant by this ? Is it that we do not feel our spirit when prompted to any goodness to be to God's Spirit as stream to fountain ; that however far we wander from our Father's House we cannot cease to be His children, and be no more " partakers of the Divine nature " ? No ; it is quite another system of religious thought which believes this — that another nature can be intro- duced, another spiritual lineage established, so that we are all, without exception, born not of God but of the evil one. "Holy Spirit" is simply the scriptural name for God when God is in inward communion with us, when He moves, and is felt to move our souls. In our souls He Is at all times, but He Is known as the Holy Spirit only when all our veils and alienations being removed we consciously meet Him. It is from the factitious /^i-/V/^;/ of the objector within a "scheme of salvation " without reality, as we believe, in the wants of man or in the nature of God, that we are said to have no place for the Holy Spirit in our theology. We believe that for ever, not at times or exceptionally, the Father is seeking the hearts of His children. W^e know that there are in us movements of His grace, pleadings of conscience, impulses to goodness, starting suddenly from a life within us that is ours only because it is His. We know that only by a sense of His presence in us do we ever clearly see how low and poor we suffer ourselves to be. Any Spiriliial Christianity. 373 other doctrine of the Holy Spirit is not too much, but quite too little for us. Daily do we grieve the Holy Spirit of God, who would seal us for ever as His own. Nothing more arbitrary, more daring, has ever appeared in connection with the pretensions of speculative theology than the hypothesis that only an eternal and co-equal Son within the Godhead could make the Father capable of feeling a Divine Love, or of being loved by the children of His Spirit. On this hypothesis — that filial love can be infused into us, only by One who, by the eternal constitution of his being having his own filial relations perfect, is also, as God, in organic communication with our souls to inlay the image, not of the Father, but of a Son, is it boldly declared that the Heavenly Father, not Himself hav- ing filial affections, could not directly from Himself move and fill the hearts of His children with filial faith and love. This is to strip the Heavenly Father of that which to every earthly Father is the essential property of fatherhood, the power of imparting himself to his children as direct object of their knowledge and their love. Yet on this speculative assumption there is a school of theologians who dogmatically state that we cannot know and rest in the Fatherhood of God unless He has a co-equal Son for His own love ; and that we cannot love or know the powder of His "holy child," unless, as God, he is mysteriously imprinting in us his own filial similitude. From a priori heights this class of theologians become deductive defamers of the piety of all the rest of mankind, as neither 374 Unspirihial Objections to actual nor possible ; and from 2. postulate of their own as to the psychology of God, regardless of concrete evidence as absolved from all further consideration of facts or persons, do not shrink from pronouncing sentence on their brethren, as demonstrated certainty, " You have not, because you cannot have, the love of God in you." Did mediaeval scholasticism spinning systematic necessities out of its own abstractions to enslave the mind and soul of the universe, ever with a more hard and unfeeling presumption speak as in the name, and from the judgment-seat, of God ! IV. It is objected to a spiritual religion which rests in the Fatherhood of God as manifested in Christ, and sees only unfilial distrust in the protections provided by theotechnic schemes which require " a miracle" to release the Almighty Father from a moral inability to forgive upon repentance, however deep and lasting,* that it does not sufficiently abase us in the consciousness of sin, and of the needs of sin, before the holiness of God. If in answer to that charge we were to make any claim to humility we should be condemned out of our own mouths. To think ourselves humble would be the blindest and most offensive self-righteousness. The question is not whether we are sufficiently lowly before God, sufficiently alive to our own evil, for we know that we are not, but whether our reliance on God, the character of our Christian faith, encourage us in spiritual pride, and are indeed the reflection of our self-esteem. Does it make a man spiritually proud * See the Bishop of Peterborough on "The Ethics of Forgiveness." spiritual Christianity. 375 and self-absolved to know that his sin is personally his own, of his own generating, of his own wilfulness, and not the universal and unavoidable curse upon his nature which no man can escape ? Humility, so far as it relates to sin, is surely a feeling of our own sin, and not an inherited humiliation inflicted by our Creator for the sin of being born. How could He be the Father of a nature from which His image was defaced by the necessity of its constitution ? I can- not feel accountable for my nature, but only for my abuse of my nature. I make no counter-charge ; but surely it is the theory that by nature we are alien from God, not children of His Spirit, not born in His likeness, nor members of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Christ said the little children were, that might release a man from a feeling of personal abasement for his sins. It is in the knowledge that we are not zvhat we might be, in contrite sighings after perfections we have suffered to escape us, that we hear the just reproach of God ; it is in the consciousness that we permit our life to fall away from the promptings of our Father that humility consists. It is not for the meanness of our nature, but for dishonouring our nature, resisting the vocation wherewith we are called, choosing evil when good was divinely offered, that we justly humble ourselves before God. The profoundest religious thinker that has adorned the Church of England, though by birth he belonged to the Puri- tans, Bishop Butler, in treating of human sinfulness, makes this deep and pious remark : "We should learn to be cautious, lest lue charge God foolishly by ascribing 2)"] 6 U7ispirit2ial Objections to that to Him, or the nature He has given us, which is owing wholly to our own abuse of it. Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the world according to the experience they have had of it ; but Human Nature, considered as the Divine workmanship, should, methinks, be treated as sacred : for in the image of God made He man." But, in fact, this whole subject of Humility is so misunderstood as to degrade Christianity itself. Humility is not the posture of sin, the grace of sinners ; it is the upward look to God that saves from sin. Humility is the grace of saints. The children of God, the followers of Christ, are humble, in all watchfulness and communion of prayer, not because they have fallen, but that they may not fall. Humility is our loftiest elevation, our heavenward gaze, our protection against natural weakness, our strength in God. Who would honour the disgraceful shame of unguarded self-confidence with the name of Humility } If Peter had been humble he would not have denied his Master. When his Lord looked at him, he had forfeited the holy safeguard of humility, and the tears he shed were from the bitter source of humiliated presumption, the remorse of faithless and dishonoured love. The humility of Christ would lift us to, and keep us near, himself — the humility that had no confidence even in a strength that had never fallen ; the humility that arms itself with God, and with prayers, fears, and the tremblings of a holy preparation, meets the great duties to which His Spirit calls. spiritual CJiristianity. 2)11 This charge of want of humiHty meets us under many forms, even the monstrous one that we claim to be saved by our own works. No one who under- stands what a spiritual religion is, as distinguished from ecclesiastical systems of salvation, could make that charge. How could we have our life in God, and rely upon ourselves } We might say with one Apostle, that, **As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also," and with another Apostle, " That by works can no man be saved, but by faith only ; " that it is the desire in the heart, the hunger and thirst in the soul, the longing after Divine goodness, the filial trust and effort, and not the out- ward measure of our poor deeds, that God in His holy love accepts and blesses. We must combine the spiritual conditions, they are the halves of a completed whole ; " By works is faith made perfect." Obedience, conformity to the Divine Will, is the ladder of ascent by which Faith daily gains a nearer and a wider view of Heaven. The more we know and love God, the more we know of our own imper- fections. Once more : it is said that there is a want of humility in our belief that religion and Christianity are progressive, not fixed and closed for ever, — that there is a pride of intellect in not taking the Revela- tion as it is. The Revelation as it is ! that is, as we, or others, see it at some one moment of time ! But what is fixed ? and what is progressive ? Christ knows no change. But may not we be changed into his image ? Neither sight nor faith can follow his 378 Objections to Spiritual Christianity. continued life and growth in God, so that we ever see him as he was in his human relations as a child of God. But may not we be progressive ? May not the veil be taken from our eyes ? May ive not discern more and more of the light of the glory of God in the face of His Son, as we live more and more in his spirit ? Is it indeed presumption to believe that we have not yet attained, that there are inexhaustible riches in Christ, a breadth and length, a depth and height of Love which passeth knowledge, — that he might still say to us as to the Disciples of old, " I have many things to impart to you, but ye cannot receive them yet " ? We, too, might ask questions ; but we abstain, because we are conscious that those who live them- selves w^ithin the influence of one circle of beliefs do not always know the strength, the power, the inspira- tion which may be found by those who stand within another. And whilst freeing spiritual Christianity from factitious objections, that belong only to the assumed position of the objector, we would neither define nor depreciate, far less deny, the fellowship with God and with His Christ w^iich may flow to others from modes of conception whose eflicacy, or co-existence with the best life that issues from the religious heart, because they are not ours, we are not the best fitted to understand. XXVI. Matt, xvii. 4 : " Lord, it is good for us to be here." Apart from the objective reality of the vision of the Transfiguration, it would be difficult to conceive an emblematic representation more fitted to prove sug- gestive to a Hebrew imagination. To a mind familiar with the associations of Judaism it would teem with significance. If their hearts had drooped before when Jesus intimated the humiliations through which his glory was to be revealed, now might their courage rise again when for the displaced vision of earthly magnificence they saw their ancient symbol of the Almighty's presence, death transfigured from gloom to brightness by Moses and Elias, who died no man knew how, who were not, for God had taken them, and these idols of the national faith waiting as ministering servants upon Christ and hearing from Heaven, as attesting witnesses, the proclamation of their own subordination. Well might hearts which had fainted before regather a broken confidence, and exclaim aloud, as light broke confusedly upon them, "Lord, it is good 380 The Transfiguration of Souls. for us to be here." "Christ transfigured" was a kind of evidence that suited the times of the legend. It came to those who looked with the imagination at holy things, and figured the greatness of Messiah through national symbols the significance of which a Jew could not altogether escape. Christ's own difficulty with the Apostles was to reach their convictions through a spiritual evidence. Preoccupied with the most worldly anticipations of what Messiah was to be, they had no relish or affinity for what he was. Strange to say, they had no historical preparations for such a Lord, for if, as he told them, they had read their own prophecies aright, they must have looked for a king who was to rule in meekness, who would not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax, nor let his voice be heard in the streets, and yet who would lead forth Righteousness unto victory. But so completely in the long night of their degradation had the fiery trials of earthly passions burned this mild heavenly light out of their souls that all their national anticipations had become of a different order, and accordingly when Christ came clothed only in the glory of his moralities, in the beauty of holiness, of spirit and of truth, he found points of contact only here and there with the souls of individuals, appealed to none of the feelings that were most awake in the popular heart, and touched none of the sources of the national zealotry. The topics on which they were ready for excitement were topics on which he would not excite them. Slaves to his person and to his power, if the tempter had found any evil ambition in him, he could instantly have made them ; The Transfigttration of So7ils. 381 but children and fellow-workers of God cannot be made by miracle. They were material and local in all their expectations, he was spiritual and universal in all his, and, with so little in common, it was impos- sible he should at once qualify them for his service, or win them to himself, by direct instruction and immediate sympathy. To imaginations of this cast, unspiritual in all their affinities, instruction may come through symbols, if the symbol carries a glorified meaning. And yet they are imaginations of this cast that such teaching may mislead and inflame. To give spiritual impressions through the senses — I mean for man to attempt it, with God it is an ever-used power, blessed and awful — is always a perilous experiment, for the language too often will only stir the material imaginations with which it is already allied, and enhance a tendency of mind that is already too strong. This was one of the great difficulties of Christ as a teacher. He could only cast in seeds of truth, waiting for time to quicken them. Of the meaning of his own life he knew that Death would be the only interpreter, that nothing else could draw away the veil from Jewish eyes. The analogy was ever before his mind : '* Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone : but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." He could not give his thoughts of God in their own proper form, in spirit and in truth, for this requires large and prompt sympathy between the teacher and the taught. If he attempted to suggest them through lively emblems, the danger was that the emblems would call up only the images 382 The Tra7isJigti7'ation of Souls. already floating in the Jewish mind, and take the colours of the dominant fancies of the time. The Transfiguration might suggest real views of the great- ness of Messiah without inflaming the unspiritual dreams w^hich then formed the prevailing tendencies of Jewish faith. Christ transfigured, however, even if historical, would belong only to the scaffolding of Christianity, for other feet than ours. It is its inward and universal evidence, its power to meet the soul in all moments of present time, to herald it from height to height, or from depth to depth, of spiritual know- ledge, achievement, and peace, that must now sustain the cause of the Gospel. Not Christ transfigured on Tabor or on Hermon, but Christ formed within us, the Image of God transfigured in ourselves, growing every day divinely bright as we are true enough and large enough to take the glory in, must now call the con- fession from our hearts, in rejoicing or in chastening, to Him who places us successively in the advanced posts of spiritual experience where Christ can give us lieht — " Lord, it is crood for us to be here." When zve are changed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord ; when there is an eleva- tion within us of the power of faith, love, meekness, holiness, then ?into its is Christ transfigured. When in every crisis of our trial Christianity, faithful and sufficient, points the way and gives us strength to walk in it, then cometh tuito tis that voice from Heaven, " This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him," — a Son of Man indeed, in his adaptation to all the ages, "the same yesterday. TJic TransfigiLvation of Sotds. 383 to-day, and for ever," because as universal as the lot of humanity and the Providence of God. Holding, then, that wherever we are, if we bring to our circumstances the Spirit of Christ, tJiere it is good for us to be, we propose not to specify, which would be impossible, but rudely to classify some of the aspects of our life under which the Christ formed within us may be transfigured, the conditions of being in which, with an impulse from God thereto, we may feel and say, " Lord, it is good for us to be here." And, first, it is good for us to be under the familiar power of our everyday life, the quiet flow of common and unagitatcd experience, the pressure of circum- stances that only come up to the ordinary level of expectation. There is great uniformity in God's method of dealing with us. Our education is carried on not so much by the introduction of new instru- ments as by the constant reiteration of old experi- ences. The same mornings, the same evenings, the same weeks, the same years, open and close upon us ; or if there is change, it is normal change in the seasonal vicissitudes of our being. Our lives are for the most part from day to day repetitions of familiar acts, presenting the same scenes, appealing to the same feelings, offering the same opportunities. The power that makes all things new certainly belongs not to anything without ; for in an immense propor- tion of our external experience, notwithstanding the power of time and change, there is a remarkable sameness. But contrasted with this sameness of out- ward life there is an appetite in our minds that 384 The Ti^ansfiguration of Souls. hungers and thirsts for freshness, a tendency whose characteristic it is that it wearies of uniformity. These two opposites might seem to argue a want of adaptation, but in the spiritual result which jointly they contribute to produce there is the manifestation of educational design on the part of Him whose highest glory it is as the God of Providence, as the Father of spirits, that He develops character. A prevailing uniformity of moral experience from with- out, with a desire for freshness from within, would seem the needed combination to call into requisition the personal resources of the soul, to provide the gratification which is the law of its appetite, but which before it can have it must shed- upon out- ward things a transfiguring influence of inward force through new movement or brightness in itself God has so made us that we delight in fresh impressions ; He has also so made and placed us that for the most part we obtain no fresh impressions except through a new freshness in ourselves, and a more living cry to Him for new supplies of light and grace. By these two conditions our transfiguration is sought to be provided for, and that not by force of outward influence, but by the spiritual energies of living souls. Where there is no change there is no growth. Change, therefore, is the condition of spiritual life ; and the question was, How is that change to be effected ? Had it come to us from without, from vivid and overwhelming circumstance, from irresis- tible appeals and stimulants, our nature must have lain passive under such a treatment, and no power The Transjiguration of Souls. 385 be called out of ourselves. It is good for us, there- fore, out of the most ordinary experience to have to provide for deep inward wants, to have to work out perpetual freshness and renewal of life. It is good for us to have to make our daily engagements daily more interesting, not through change in them, but through the new spirit in which we discharge them, the new connections in which they are seen because of the fresh lights of a richer and more unfolding nature. It is good for us to have to infuse a new sweetness into daily intercourse, not from any fresh charm in circumstance, but by a brighter wisdom and love growing in ourselves — to have to provide fresh life for the affections, not through the outward appli- ances of variety and a more richly dowered lot, but by the unselfish spirit that makes all things new, — to have to draw from other hearts new draughts of joy, not because those hearts are changed, but because deeper fountains are opened in ourselves. It is good for us that we must find a satisfying life in the ever- new contemplation of familiar things, in the inex- haustible teachings of familiar experiences, in the infinite variety of familiar scenes, in the richer performance of accustomed duties, in the dearer recurrence of accustomed joys — that, independent altogether of the eddies or chance breezes of excite- ment, we are called upon to possess our souls in peace through the wisdom and the sweetness which a faithful and true spirit may gather out of the tamest sphere. These unexciting circumstances are those in which we must have life in ourselves, or rather look II. 2 c ^S6 The Transjigwation of Souls. solely to the Spirit of Life within us to enable us to do and to be what He prompts, but through which, if transfigured by the inner lights of love, wisdom, and conscience increasingly applied to them. He ever breathes fresh upon the heart, out of the new fulfil- ments of His purpose, the blessed consciousness, " Lord, it is good for us to be here." But the ways of God are not to be calculated ; no man must be able to say, To-morrow shall be as to-day. For our soul's health, for its faith and power, it is needful that we should have to stand in im- faj/iiliar w^ays, that the routine of daily experience should sometimes vanish like the shifting scenes of a drama, and strange joys, unexpected sorrows and responsibilities, cross our path in an hour that we think not of He is barren of heaj't who cannot draw^ fresh life from familiar things ; but he is poor in soul, unfamiliar with God, wdio stands aghast, as one struck down at the most sudden change, the quickest reverse in lot. Nothing has taken you, says the Apostle, but what is common to man — and before it comes, God enables you to lay down the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it. It is a rest- less and shallow mind that lives upon outward ex- citement, but it is a weak nature that cannot bear it when it comes. Neither can attain to what is signally great or good in thought or in action — the lover of excitement because he wants the fulness and repose of inward life — the shunner of excitement because he cannot sustain the fervid beams of that strong light in which the objects of duty or meditation must The Transfiguration of Souls. 387 be set before they flash upon the mind powerful conviction, and stir our purposes to great issues. Excitement, enthusiasm, are words used without a due perception that the impulse or emotion they express admits of no common measurement for dif- ferent orders of mind. What to one man is an un- wonted, and if continued, an oppressive excitement, is to another of loftier make his habitual feeling-, the even tenour of his way. The larger amount of emotion and of impulse, of lofty sentiment and passion, a man can sustain without injury to the clear vigour of his practical understanding and executive power, the more noble and mighty is that man's nature. The ballast of the character is valuable for this, and for this alone, that it can safely bear more spiritual impulse, and offer itself to the full gales of heaven ; without this, the ballast is dead weight. No man should live in excitement, if by excite- ment is meant the unmastered condition in which judgment and reflection stagger under the stroke of feeHng ; but every man should regard the quantity of feeling that he is able to sustain, and worthily to express in outward deed, as the measure of his spiritual rank, — for spiritual life is measured by the quantity of elevated sentiment which our nature is large enough to experience and strong enough to use. We often hear warnings against excitement, and it is wise and well that every mind should know itself and be contented with its place ; only, let it not measure others by itself, for the excitement under which it reels and faints may be only the calm, 388 The Transfig7t7'atio7i of Soids. vicrorous, and efficient condition of larger breasts. The violent throbbings of some bosoms may be less than the regular pulse-beats of truer or mightier natures. The intensest glow of love and pity that can be induced in an ordinary man by circumstances of the most touching pathos, may not equal the con- stant warmth that was in the heart of Christ, or Paul, or John, and which was there not as an excitement but as their condition of habitual sympathy. This is a matter in which the lower and the poorer natures are apt to arrogate a superiority over the richer and the higher, if for a moment they are overtaken in a fault ; but caution is not wisdom, and prudence is not goodness. They are indeed the necessary, but only the negative sides of these great qualities. The spiritual law on this matter is evidently this : the more of elevated sentiment you are able constantly to bear without its amounting to an unmastered ex- citement, overbalancing the soundness of your under- standing, unsteadying the hand of action, tainting the simplicity of your life, the better for your nature. It is not to feel much, or to be swayed by mightiest impulses, but to have your feelings out of proportion to your powers of clear judgment and adequate per- formance, that constitutes unhealthy excitement. It is good for us then to be habitually learning to live under high feeling, rich faiths, and enthusiasms, as our ordinary and manageable state. Doubtless it is for this that God exposes us to terrible conflicts, casts us on sudden emergencies, makes us to pass through deep and surging waters. And if we do not The Transfiguration of Souls. 389 shrink from the gradual trials He sends, the gradual demands He makes on strength and nobleness of heart, this is a power that will grow with us. If we take the currents as He sends them, little more at first than overflowing the sole of our foot, we shall have gained the strength both of yielding and of resisting as the need is, — the right habit of leaning our vigour with the stream, or against the stream, before it is so wild and masterful as to whirl us quite away. It is good for us to be where we must gradually increase the strain we can bear without veering or tottering beneath it, to have to face the circum- stances that task thought and stimulate sympathy, to be familiar with our nature in all its times of trial, to know men's souls in their adversities, to have seen every awful look of human condition, and with our own eyes beheld the outward form of every woe. It is good for us to be intimate with the soul when it is cut off from external dependencies and cast upon its own resources ; to stand by deathbeds, to see men in those hours when the world is nothing to them, — when they are pushed, as it were, from all footing on earth or on earthliness, and yet feel conscious of subsistence because in God is their life. And this leads to the inner condition of permanent influences under which it is good for us to be — the influence of eternal things — of the faiths and senti- ments whose fulfilments are not here but hereafter, which in every day of Heaven will have fuller and yet fuller fruits through eternity itself. It is good for us to be brought under the habitual sense of immor- 390 The Transfigur^ation of Souls. tality, of all that we sum up in the word Heaven, as the kingdom of God, a realm of life in which His Spirit rules — not for lure or threat, but that our true nature may take its independent course in the simple faith that God is the instinct of our souls. The one right use of our faith in immortality is neither as bribe nor as menace, but simply to free us from all disturbance about the consequences of righteous action, to give us strength to look singly at the quality of our life, not at all at its results. It is good for us to be wherever we may grow in this simple confidence in God and in goodness, and in whatever is involved in their eternity ; to regard death as the day of our birth into a world where we shall enjoy and learn as we have affections, capacities, desires, habits of being, which will place us in fellowship with the light and love which alone have free course there ; or where we shall suffer and learn as we have passions, habits, and desires which find not their home with God, in righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And he who, in the discipline that is laid upon us all, revealing to us what is real and what is unreal, is learning through the gradual purifying of his spiritual life to obey God with the least thought of reward, and more and more out of that love of holiness which makes the righteousness of God Him- self, is strengthening the fellowship with His Spirit that is of the essence of eternal life, which alone in any experiences through which He leads us, in Heaven above or in earth below, can put the song into our hearts, " Lord, it is good for us to be here." We The TransfigiL7'atioii of Souls. 391 have only to remember that, wherever we are, there is but one transfiguring power — that in any circum- stance we can turn from the light and walk in our oivu shadow, or we can turn to the light and receive its brightness — but that in no case can we do more than reflect that which shines upon us when we look into the face of our Father who is in Heaven. And thus, only when by our own wilfulness we wander into forbidden ways, and stand on ground from which we know that God has warned us off, can we say with certainty, Lord, it is not good for us to be here. Everywhere else, whether we know it or not, the Divine hand has placed us, and for a merciful issue. Long may we struggle against Him and close our eyes to His purpose, pursuing our own ; but all the more needful was it that we should pass through this experience to discern its hidden lesson and garner its eternal fruit. It needs only that we turn to Him with the faith of the little child of Christ, not for our- selves alone, but for all, that when we call Him Father we say no more than we believe to make it im- possible that there should be any position in which the comfort of His Spirit did not overflow the cir- cumstance of His Providence — in which there was not some blessing falling from Him on our life, some grace called out of our hearts — if no other grace, the richest of all, the grace of filial trust, of submissive waiting for light in the midst of darkness. With these habits of faith, with a heart ever looking to Him to catch some new reflection from His Spirit, we may pass through every way of mortal experience 392 The Transfiguration of Souls. until we come within the shadow of the dark valley — we may close our eyes on this world, and open them on the next, with one assurance in our souls, one con- fession on our tongues : " Lord, it is good for us to be here." THE END. 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