' PRINCETON, N. J. m,t><\7l7. TrTTT^ Section C?!:..L^.../ Shelf .,^^.,p.^...,i.^...^ Number f 3 a""-! THE GENESIS OF EVIL BY THE SAME AUTHOK. Sixth Edition. SALVATOR MUNDI; or. Is Christ the Saviour of all Men ? Crown 8vo, cloth, price 5s. "We are bound to acknowledge the ability, the richness of textual resources, and the felicity of language and illustration which mark these pages, as they do Mr, Cox's writings generally." — Guardian. " An able and deeply interesting volume, and makes a valuable contribution to the study of the subject."'— -S^jecta for. London : C. Keg an Paul & Co., 1, Paternoster Square. THE GENESIS OF EVIL AND OTHER SERMONS MAINLY EXPOSITORY BY SAMUEL COX AUTHOR OF ' SALVATOK MUNDI,' AND EDITOR OF ' THE EXPOSITOR ' LONDON C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1880 (7%e rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.) TO MY CONGREGATION, WITH MY LOVE. PREFACE. It is my happiness, as it is that of many Noncon- formist ministers, to preach to a Congregation com- posed of personal friends, who have been gradually gathered round me, in the slow lapse of years, by community of thought or sentiment. Hence I can speak to them at once more confidentially and more colloquially than I could to an audience of compa- rative strangers : more confidentially, because any allusion I make to my own experience of Truth, or of the difiiculties which stand in the way of receiving it, is pretty sure to awaken an instant response in their minds ; more colloquially, because one of the feeHngs we have in common is a desire to see the technical and theological terms which have come down to us loaded with associations, often misleading, replaced by the simple homely phrases which plain men use and understand. The Editor of Canon Mozley's thoughtful ' Parochial and Occasional Ser- mons ' apologizes, I observe, for leaving in them * some homelinesses of expression ' which he believes * the Author would not have allowed to pass,' rather PREFACE. than substitute for them * the conventional phrases which suggest themselves in their place.' I doubt whether he is right in believing that so able and ex- perienced a Preacher as Canon Mozley would not have allowed his homeliest phrases to pass. I am sure that homely phrases carry more weight and leave a sharper impression than the conventional terms which have been worn smooth and light by constant hand- ling. In the pulpit above all other places men like to hear a spade called a spade ; and that mainly, I suppose, because, despite certain appearances to the contrary, they sincerely long to have the truths of Eeligion brought down into the common round of thought and conduct. And if sermons are to be preached, not for the glory of the Preacher, but for the benefit of his hearers, we need not lament ' the decay of pulpit eloquence,' popular as that theme is with certain Essayists, but should rather rejoice that, for the stately, and sometimes stilted, and often con- ventional eloquence of bygone years, we now so commonly get no eloquence beyond that of good talk. ' He who spake as never man spake ' used the sim- plest words, the homeliest illustrations. There is nothing in the form of the Sermon on the Mount to make it hard to the most unlettered of men. And if He, before whom even Socrates and Aurelius and Epictetus must veil their faces, habitually em- ployed a simplicity of speech which they could com- pass only in their best and highest moods, why should any servant of his apologize for ' homeli- PREFACE, nesses of expression ' ? Homely expressions come home : and, to my mind, the hest sermon is that which most closely resembles the best conversation of educated and thoughtful men. There is another point in which, I take it, a sermon should, so far as possible, resemble good conver- sation. * Coward's castle ' is often uncomfortable to its occupant, if at least he be a sensible man, pre- cisely because he is aware that, say what he will in it, no one has the right of reply, nor can so much as start a difficulty or ask a question. Hence, a fair- minded man, who desires that only truth should prevail, ought, I think, to speak for his Congregation as well as for himself ; ought, that is, to look at the subjects he handles from their point of view as well as from his ow^n, and to state any objections or diffi- culties they are likely to entertain as frankly and forcibly as he can. This conception of the Preacher's duty is so strong in me that I often seem to myself to be listening and replying to the thoughts of my hearers rather than uttering my own ; and I hope it will be found that in many of these Sermons I take a conversational tone, and try to do justice to the other side of the dialogue. I say all this, not in apology for these discourses, but rather as explaining and justifying what may seem peculiar and unconventional in them. Nor do I plead in excuse for publishing them, though I too might urge the plea if I cared, the urgent requests of friends. I publish them because I heartily beheve PREFACE. in the value of the truths which they enforce, and because, as I know they have been helpful to the friends who heard them, I hope they may also be useful to a still wider audience. One of the greatest preachers of the day has recently boasted that he has ' no sympathy with doubt.' I do not know that I have any sympathy with douht, but I have a very keen sympathy with those who are tried by doubts they cannot solve. And if any of these tried but unknown neighbours of mine should gather helpful suggestions from any words printed here, I shall get for the labour bestowed on this book the w^age and reward I most prize. I had named this volume, which contains nearly all the Sermons that ill-health has allowed me to preach during the past year, 'The Origin of Evil,' &c., after the first two sermons contained in it ; but when it was already in the press the publishers dis- covered that that title had been recently appropriated : hence we had to fall back on a less familiar, but still, I hope, sufficiently suggestive, phrase. Nottingham, Christmas Day, 1879. CONTENTS SERMON I. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. PIEST PART. I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things.' — Isaiah xlv. 6, 7 1 SERMON II. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. SECOND PART. I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things.'— Isaiah xlv. 6, 7 21 SERMON III. THE HEAVENLY TREASURE AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.' — 2 Corinthians iv. 7 42 CONTENTS. SERMON IV. GOD UNKNOWN YET KNOWN. PAGE Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near : Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts ; and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord, For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.' —Isaiah Iv. 6-9 61 SERMON V. THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts : and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.* —Isaiah Iv. 6-9 ... 77 SERMON YI. ALL THINGS OURS. All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come : all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ God's.' —1 Corinthians iii. 21-23 91 CONTENTS. SERMON VII. THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. PAGK All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come : all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ God's.' —1 Corinthians iii. 21-23 . • 106 SERMON VIII. LED BY A CHILD. FIRST PART. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together: and a little child shall lead them.' — Isaiah xi. 6 . . . . 122 SERMON IX. LED BY A CHILD. SECOND PART. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together : and a little child shall lead them.' — Isaiah xi. 6 135 SERMON X. THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. But that the dead rise, even Moses implied at the evergreen thornbush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob. But he is not the God of dead men, but of living men ; for all live unto him.' —St. Luke xx. 37, 38 1 i8 CONTENTS. SERMON XI. DEATH AN EXODUS. PAGE And, behold, there were talking with him two men, who were none other than Moses and Elijah ; who appeared in glory, and talked of his exodus which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.'— St. Luke ix. 30, 31 163 SERMON XII. ON SEKVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. For then will I turn to the nations a pure lip, that they may all invoke the name of the Lord, and serve him with one shoulder.' — Zephaniah iii. 9 178 SERMON XIII. WHY WE SUFFER. No doubt this man is a murderer whom, though he hath escaped the sea, Justice suffereth not to live.' — Acts xxviii. 4 . . 196 SERMON XIY. AARON'S APOLOGY. I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.' — Exodus xxxii. 24 212 SERMON XV. THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. The kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability: and straightway took his journey,' &c., &c., &c. — St. Matthew xxv. 14-30 228 CONTENTS. SERMON XVI. THE PAKABLE OF THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. PAGE When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy- angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory; and before him sliall be gathered all nations ; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats : and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left,' &c., &c., &c.— St. Matthew xxv. 31-46 ........ 248 SERMON XVII. THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, who took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish,' &c., &c., &c. — St. Matthew xxv. 1-13 2G3 SERMON XVIII. ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. 1. — THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN. And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat ; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' — St. Luke xxii. 31, 32 . . . 280 SERMON XIX. ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. 2. — THE SCENE ON EARTH. •And the Lord said Simon, Simon, behold Satan obtained you that he may sift you like wheat ; but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.'— St. Luke xxii. 31, 32 298 CONTENTS. SEHMON XX. ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. ,3. — THE SCOPE AND FUNCTION OF EVIL AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE SIFTING OF ST. PETER. PAGE Simon, Simon, behold Satan obtained you, that he may sift you like wheat ; but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' — St. Luke xxii. 31, 32 317 SERMON XXI. ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. 4._C0NVERSI0N AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE CONVERSION OF ST. PETER. When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.'— St. Luke xxii. 32 332 SERMONS. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. FIRST PART. ' I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things.' — Isaiah xlv. 6, 7. From my earliest years, or at least from the earliest in which I drew ' thoughtful breath,' I have been puzzled and perplexed by these words. And I sup- pose this bold unquahfied affirmation that the Source of all Light is also the Fountain of Darkness, that evil as well as good is the work of God, must task and perplex every thoughtful mind. Dazed and con- fused by it as I was, however, I was always glad when this Chapter happened to be one of the lessons for the day, if only for the sake of another sui'prise and per- j)lexity it used to quicken within me. Nor do I see how any intelligent lad who has begun to read B THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. ancient history can fail to be struck and impressed by its opening words : ' Thus saith the Lord to his Anointed, to Cyrus: The mere fact that Cyrus is brought into the Bible at all, that the history of the sacred race is thus suddenly invaded by the history of the general heathen world, is of itself not a little startling and impressive to a mind accustomed to think of the two as divided from each other by a great and wellnigh impassable gulf. And how can such an one fail to be still further astonished and impressed at hearing that God, who spake at sundry times and in divers manners to the Hebrew prophets, also spoke to a heathen, to a hero and king associated in his thoughts with such famous names as Alexander and Caesar ? That a secular hero, a famous conqueror and prince, should be admitted on any terms to tread the sacred stage and listen to the Divine Voice is suf- ficiently surprising ; but how the surprise grows and deepens when we hear Jehovah calling him to assume the part of 'my Anointed,' that is, 'my Messiah' / By what possible compromise and modification of Hebrew and BibHcal ideas, such an one asks, can a Persian conqueror be called the Messiah of the Lord, and be set before us as a type, or image, of the Christ of the Gospels ? Thus two difficulties, and difficulties provocative of thought, meet us in the first seven Verses of the THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. Chapter : the one, God's imperative and absolute claim to be the Creator of evil ; and the other, that God Himself should salute a Persian soldier as his Messiah. And these two difficulties are much more closely related to each other than they seem to be. Let us deal with the easier of them first. ' The character of Cyrus has been admitted by both ancient and modern writers to have been singularly noble. Greek authors for the most part reiDresent him to have been energetic and patient, just and pru- dent, magnanimous and modest, and of a religious mind, ^schylus calls him " kindly " or " generous." Xenophon selected him as a model prince for all races. Plutarch says that '' in wisdom and virtue and great- ness of soul he appears to have been in advance of all kings." Diodorus makes one of his speakers say that Cyrus gained his ascendancy by his self-com- mand and good feeling and gentleness.' The most humane and virtuous of conquerors, he hated the cruel and lascivious idols most men served, and wor- shipped one sole God, ' the God of heaven.' There is none like him in the ancient world, or none among the kings and princes of that world. And when, at his conquest of Babylon, he discovered in the captive Jews a race who also hated idols, and served one Lord, and knew a law of life at least as piu:e as his own ; when he broke their bands asunder, set them THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. free to return to their native land, and aided them to rebuild the temxDle and resume the worship of the God of their fathers, we cannot wonder that in this rare and noble nature, in this virtuous and religious Prince, they saw a ' Servant of Jehovah,' a man 'raised u^d in righteousness,' or even a partial and shadowy resemblance to that Divine Prince and Ee- deemer for whose advent they had long been taught to look. It was but natural that to the Prophets of the restored Israel the Persian hero should seem to be — as they called him and even made Jehovah call him— the ' Servant,' the * Shepherd,' the * Messiah' of the Lord of hosts. If we bear in mind that Cyrus was a Persian, and the very flower and crown of the Persian race, and that the Prophet here represents Jehovah as addressing Himself to Cyrus, we shall find a key to our second and greater difficulty ; we shall understand why, in speaking to him, Jehovah claims to be the Creator of darkness and evil no less than of goodness and light. For the creed of Cyrus and the Persians, though singularly pure and noble, had one grave defect. They believed in one God, indeed, and thought of Him so nobly that their symbol for Him was a circle with wings, — the circle to denote the completeness, the perfection, the eternity of God ; and the wings to denote his all-pervading Presence. But while they THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, believed in one only God, the Maker of all that was good, they also, and out of reverence for Onq to whom they dared not attribute any wrong, believed in an anti-god whom they made responsible for all that was evil. Ahriman (Angro-mainyus), as they called this evil Spirit, was not perhaps the equal of Ahura- mazda, the good creative Spirit, but he was inde- pendent of Him and his perpetual rival. He was not made by God, nor was he subordinate to Him : and it was he, not God, to whom all that was evil in Nature and in human life was to be attributed. In short, they sacrificed the omnipotence of the God of heaven to his righteousness, and to save his goodness curtailed his power. Cyrus held this creed. Nor, pm-e and thoughtful as he was, need we marvel that he held it when even to the pure keen intellect of John Stuart Mill, who died but the other day, it seemed to be the only rational solution of the moral enigma of the uni- verse. Mill expressly affirms that in this respect the only * difference between popular Christianity and the Persian religion is that the former pays its good Creator the bad compliment of having been the Maker of the Devil, and of being at all times able to crush and annihilate him and his evil deeds and counsels, which nevertheless He does not do.' His conclusion of the whole matter is that, if in an universe in THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. which there is so much that is sinister, disastrous, bad, we are to beheve in God at all, we must limit either his goodness or his power ; and of the two he prefers to limit his power, thinks it less irrational to believe in a God who cannot do all that He would than to believe in a God capable of tolerating evil or originating it. This conclusion, however, is impossible to us if we accept the teachings of the Bible. Cyrus held the very creed of Mill ; and the Prophet represents Jehovah Himself as indignantly rejecting it. * I am Jehovah,' He says again and again — the perpetual iteration of this phrase in the Chapter * indicating the immense emphasis laid on this point — ' and there is none else ; there is no God beside me. I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil : I, Jehovah, do all these things.' It is as if He had said : ' I am the good creative Spirit in whom you believe ; but I have no such rival and antagonist as you suppose. Ahura-mazda is ; but Ahriman is not. I claim to be the sole Lord and Euler of the universe. All that is is mine. I am responsible for the dark- ness as well as for the light. Evil is my servant, my creature, no less than good.' Soften it down as we will, it is a tremendous * Isaiah xlv. 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 21, 22. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. claim, a claim which plunges our thoughts into im- penetrable mysteries, and suggests problems we cannot solve. "We may say, and say fairly, that every word of this poetic passage must not be i^resscd as if it were part of a legal statute or a mathematical demonstration ; and that we are not bound to assume from it, therefore, that all the evil in the universe is caused, or created, by God. We may fairly say that, since these words were addressed to a Persian, their main purpose was achieved if they conveyed to him the thought that the universe was not governed by two rival Powers, but by one Supreme Person, ever in harmony with Himself, who tolerated and controlled the evil forces of the universe no less than the good, though He did not originate them. But, soften and modify it as we will, the claim is so tremendous, and involves mysteries so profound, that it cannot but astonish and perplex our labouring thoughts. And yet, it must also be admitted, that it meets and satisfies the cravings both of intellect and heart as no easier, no dualistic, theory does or can do. The universe is so obviously one that the intellect demands unity, and will be satisfied with nothing short of one Sovereign Lord, one Supreme Governor of the Uni- verse. And how can our hearts be at rest until we know and are sure that God rules over the kingdom of darkness as well as in the kingdom of light, that the THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. evils which befall us are under his control no less than the blessings which enrich and gladden us ; that wherever we wander, and through whatever sorrowful changes we pass, we are never for a single moment out of his hand? A God who could not follow us into the darkness in which so much of our life has to be spent, who could not sustain us under our losses, comfort us in our sorrows, and redeem us from our sins, and shew us a path of life through the obscurity of death, would be little better than no God to us : we could not worship Him for long, and still less could we love and trust Him with all our soul and strength. He would be absent from us just when we most wanted Him, impotent just when we were most in need of a helping hand. To believe in a Good Being to whom we owe all that we love in life, and in an Evil Being to whom we might attribute all that we hate, would be a very simple and easy creed, no doubt, and would relieve om- thoughts of many problems by which they are tasked and baffled: but have you yet to learn, my brethren, that obvious theories are rarely true, that easy theories seldom satisfy us long? Is a shnple and easy theory of this vast complex universe likely to be a correct and adequate theory, likely to cover all its facts and solve all its problems ? Would it even be well for us that we should be altogether THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. relieved of the difficulties by which our minds are braced and stimulated as well as taxed and perplexed ? Assm-edly nothing can be more monstrous and um-easonable than the way in which men often treat the great problem, the ultimate mystery, of the imiverse. In nothing are they at once more Hke, and more unhke, themselves. A man will give his whole life to the study of a single class of plants, or of a single family of insects, or of the geological forma- tions of a single district, and deem his life well spent if, in these several narrow fields of inquiry, he can glean a few facts unreaped by his predecessors, or add a few items to the sum of human knowledge. And yet you shall find many a patient inquirer in other l^aths of science who will gravely tell you he cannot believe in Eeligion unless the whole of this immense and com^Dlex science be compressed into a tiny port- able theory which he can master and verify in a few hours, if even he will give so much as a few hours to the study of the most profound and far-reaching problems that can engage his thoughts ! I have had men say to me in a flippant tone, or a tone of triumph even, as if they knew beforehand that I should be hopelessly posed : * But how are you going to jyrove God ? ' who would not give as much real laborious thought to that great question as they would cheer- fully give to the examination and classification of a lo THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. plant they had never seen before ? I have heard men say : ' But how can you reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil ? ' as if that were a question of no more difficulty and importance than. What is the best formula for combining oxygen wdth carbon ? And I have seen them reject the Christian Faith as an outworn fable simply on the ground of the insoluble mysteries it involves when they cannot take, and know that they cannot take, a single step on any path of inquiry without being confronted by the insoluble mysteries of Force, and Life, and Thought. To treat the deepest and gravest problems open to us thus is simply puerile; there is an intellectual dishonesty in it of which, however, those who are guilty of it cannot be always or fully conscious. No man can hope to reach the solution of any difficult problem without earnest and j)rotr acted. labour. No man has ever solved a difficult problem without find- ing that his very solution of it started questions still more difficult or ran up into problems which wit of man can never solve. If we are going to study reli- gious questions at all, let us confess at the outset that of necessity these great questions must be encom- passed by mysteries we cannot hope to penetrate ; let us at once assume that these mysteries will never become credible to us except as the mysteries of THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. ir Energy, Life, Thought become credible to us, by patient and stedfast mental toil. On these terms, though on no other, the mystery here announced by Isaiah — that darkness as well as light, evil as well as good, are under the control of God, and must therefore be consistent both with his IDOwer and his goodness — will, I believe, become credible to us. We shall not penetrate that mystery in all directions indeed, and much less . shall we dissi- pate it. How can %ce hope to do that ? we who are a mystery, and even a whole series of insoluble mysteries, to ourselves ; we in whose complex nature all the mysteries of the universe, all the unsolved problems of matter and of mind, of energy and thought, are compendiously summed up. But we may so approach it as to believe, on perfectly reasonable grounds, that one supreme Lord reigns throughout the universe, and governs all the forces, whether evil or good, which give shape and purpose to our life. ' And this will we do, if God permit.' I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness; I make 2)eace, and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things. That is to say : * There is no Ahriman, no rival god, no anti-god. The universe is one, with one Creator and Euler. I, Jehovah, hold myself responsible for all that is. Even evil is under my control, and was, in some sense, 12 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. created or originated by me.' In short, God here assumes the entire responsibiHty of evil, — a respon- sibihty which we should never have dared to cast on Him; a responsibility which, as we have seen, the human mind, here in England, as well as in ancient Persia, shrinks from casting on Him. Obviously the words open up the whole question of the existence, the permission, the origination of evil ; and so, in a manner, compel us, in Foster's phrase, to knock our heads against the great black wall that runs all round the universe of thought. And in considering this question it will be well for us to determine, first of all, what, and how much, of the evil that exists we our- selves can honestly attribute directly and immediately to God our Maker. (1.) For, obviously, much of the evil within and around us is of otir own making. I as I look back on my life, and you as you look back on yours, can see clearly enough that a large proportion of the pain, loss, and moral defeat of which we have been con- scious, and are still conscious, has sprung from our own follies and faults. We have made mistakes ; we have neglected opportunities ; we have wilfully taken wrong courses ; we have broken laws which we acknowledge to be good laws, and which we could have kept if we had tried : and these follies and mis- takes are responsible for much of our past suffering THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, 13 and for much from which we suffer to this day. After making all due allowance for hereditary bias, for unhappy and unfavourable conditions, for almost irresistible conspiracies of opportunity with inclina- tion, we are conscious of many faults and sins which we might have avoided and ought to have avoided. Most of 118 probably would admit that we are respon- sible for most of the disasters which have weakened and crippled us, and feel that we cannot honestly attribute them to God. He forbad the sins into which we fell. His Spirit strove to hold us back from them. We looxM give in to them, as we now confess with penitent shame. We exonerate Him, candour compels us to exonerate Him, from all re- sponsibility for the sufferings they have produced. We humbly confess that the responsibiHty, the guilt, of them rests with us. (2.) But if much of the evil that has lowered and afflicted our lives has been of our own making, much has also been of ovlt neighbours' making. We in- herited, with much that was good, some evil bias from our fathers. We have often had to breathe an atmosphere charged with moral infections which sprang from the corrupt habits of the world around us. Our education was not good, or was not wholly good and wise. We have had to live and trade, to work and play, with men whose influence on us, if 14 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. often beneficial, has also been often injurious. The laws, maxims, customs of the little world in which we have moved have done much to blunt and lower our moral tone, to encourage us in self-seeking or self- indulgence, to countenance us in yielding to our baser passions and desires. Servants have been un- faithful to us, or masters unjust. The men of business with whom we have dealt have wronged and robbed us, or set us on taking an unfair advantage of others. Those whom we have trusted have not justified our trust in them; those whom we loved have been untrue to us. And thus our moral ideal has been lowered, our character tarnished, our lot marred and made painful to us. xis we look back and think of all that we have lost and suffered, it is probable that we attribute far more of the evils which have fallen on us to men than to God. Our distrust of them, our righteous indignation against those who have wronged us, proves that it is they whom w^e hold to be responsible, not their Maker and ours. If con- science be healthy and active within us, we no more charge tlieir offences on Him than we charge Him with our own. We say : ' I should have done well enough, I should have had little of which to complain, had I and my fellows kept his law and yielded to the motions of his Spirit.' Now here already is an immense deduction to be THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 15 made from the simi of evils which we can fairly attribute to God. Take away all the wrongs, pains, losses, temptations, sins, which might and would have been avoided had both we and our neighbours done our best to obey the law of Conscience even, and how much do we leave ? Very much less than we com- monly assume. (3.) For much that seems evil to us is not really evil, or is not necessarily evil, or is not altogether evil. Cyrus and his Persians had such evils as noxious plants and animals, excessive heat and cold, famine, drought, earthquake, storms, disease, and sudden death in their minds mainly when they spoke of the works of Ahriman, the eternal and mahgnant antagonist of God. But, as we know, iliese apparent ills are not necessarily ills at all, or they are the products of causes which work for good on the whole, or they carry with them compensations so large that the world would be the poorer for their loss. To take but a few illustrations. The storms, that wreck a few ships and destroy a few lives, clear and revivify the air of a whole continent, and carry new health to the millions in populous cities pent. The constant struggle for existence among plants and animals is a necessary condition of the evolution of their higher and more perfect species. To variations of heat and cold, and even to excessive variations, we i6 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. owe the immense variety of the cHmates and con- ditions under which we live ; and to these variations of climate the immense variety and abundance of the harvests by which the world is fed. Famine, as we are beginning to learn in India, has at least this compensation for its horrors — that it is the only sufficient check to excessive increase, the only adequate means of saving a race from sinking to levels of existence too low and squalid to be main- tained. Pain is often a warning of danger, disease a rebuke to habits which imperil health and a hint to amend them. The sudden and cruel end of birds and beasts that fall a prey to their fellows moves us to pity ; but if the choice lie between that and the lingering agony of starvation, as it commonly does, of the two it is surely better to be stung or struck to death in an instant which is not so painful as it seems if w^e are to credit those who have been bitten by a cobra, or shaken in a lion's mouth, or struck down by the tiger's paw. We pray against ' sudden death ' for om'selves and for om* neighbours ; but to the Hebrew poets to be smitten down from the top of happy prosperous days, in place of being condemned to the long slow agony of age with its manifold and growing infirmities, seemed a fate so enviable that they mm-mured and complained if it were accorded to the wicked, holding that it should THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, be reserved exclusively for the righteous. Is labour a curse, or the necessity which spurs us to labour ? The world holds both health and wealth by the sole tenure of labour ; while necessity is not only ' the mother of invention ' but of a whole brood of offspring as excellent as its firstborn. Is adversity an evil ? It is to the struggle with adversity that we owe many of our highest virtues, much of our strength ; and as the men we most reverence are those who dared all things and endured all things, and who could take Fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks, with what face can we complain if God should grant us an opportunity of shewing that we too belong to the same heroic strain ? And as we are driven to toil by the sting of want, and trained to courage by the assaults of adversity, so also we are moved to thought by the perplexities of life, and to trust and patience by its sorrows and losses and cares. In fine, much that we call evil is not necessarily evil, or is not wholly evil. Much of it is even designed and adapted to caU our attention to the true order of human life, and to the benign end to which all things round. Just as ' we take no note of time but by its loss,' so we forget, or should forget, the calm and beauty of Nature but for its storms and failures, its partial and occasional refusals to minister to our wants. We should not observe that health is the c THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. rule, or feel how sweet and good it is, save for the sicknesses which at once deprive us of it and teach us its value. We should not notice that on the whole our life is tranquil and happy if at times we were not summoned to confront pain and strife. We should not know the worth of love, or how much love is lavished on us, but for partings, — if we never lost, or feared to lose, the friends who love us. We should not realize how much of good there is in our lives if the current of our days were never vexed by ill winds. Those who are too conscious of the evils that men suffer, or are driven towards pessimism by dwelling too much and too heavily upon them, could hardly do better than rouse themselves to look on human life as a whole. We have only to extend our view till it embraces the whole universe and all the generations of time in order to recognize and be impressed by the fact, that much which we call evil is not really, or is not necessarily, evil, only evil, and that continually. God sits in heaven, all worlds circling around his feet, all the generations of men rising and falling beneath his glance. And how shall there be a harmony meet for his ear unless there be discords in it ? how a spectacle meet for his eye unless there be shadows in it ? Nay, what should we ourselves care for our Hfe if it were as a mere succession of sweet sounds, with- out any of the severer chords or dissonances apart THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 19 from which the noblest harmony is impossible, or if it were as a picture untoned and unrelieved by any tender depths of shadow ? When wo, stand in the shadow, or form part of the discord, we may find that life has suddenly grown hard and difficult to us ; but the universe is wide, eternity long, God infinite. In his ear our discord may be blended with tones taken from past generations or distant worlds, and may run into a harmonious sequence which as yet we cannot catch. In his eye our shadow may lend new depth and meaning and pathos to a picture too vast for us to grasp as yet. But if one day we should sit down with Him in heavenly places, we .too, as we gaze on the large perfect scene and listen to the mighty and com- plete harmony, may confess that He hath done all things well. I am very far from denying that much which is really and painfully and frightfully evil enters into our life, — much even for which we ourselves are not altogether responsible. And, next Sunday, I will try to shew you in what sense God claims to be respon- sible for such evils as these, in what sense we may reverently attribute all evil to Him. But for the present let us be content to see that much which we think evil is not necessarily or wholly evil, but sub- serves the finest and noblest ends of discipline, raising the life it appears to lower, enriching the life it seems 20 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. to impoverish. Let us humbly confess that the evils from which we ourselves suffer, in so far as they spring from violations of Divine Law, are of our own making, or of our neighbours' making, not of God's ; that it is we who are responsible for them, although He here generously takes the whole responsibility of them on Himself, and bids us leave them with Him. II. THE OEIGIN OF EVIL. SECOND PART. * I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things.' — Isaiah xlv. 6, 7. Here, in so many words, the good God claims evil as his creatm-e and work, and the Father of Lights pro- claims Himself the Fountain of Darkness. How shall we explain and defend this singular claim ? Easily enough — up to a certain point. For Jehovah is addressing Himself to Cyrus the Persian. And the Persians, while they believed in one only God, the Creator of all that is good, also believed in an anti- god, the Author of all that is evil. ' I have no such rival as you imagine,' says Jehovah to Cyrus. 'I am the sole Lord of the universe. All that is is mine. I am God, and besides me there is none else.' The words do not necessarily mean more than this, there- fore ; — that the Persian theory of the universe, the dualistic hypothesis of two dominant Powers working 22 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. independently and antagonistically, was an erroneous theory ; that there is but one Supreme Power ruling over all. In their first intention, they are simply an assertion, conveyed in poetic forms which must not be too closely pressed, of the universal rule of the God of Israel. But though, considering the general intention of the passage, we should not care to press such phrases as ' I create darkness,' ' I create evil,' yet does not this very intention itself raise the whole question of the origin and function of evil quite as effectually as this phrase or that ? *A11 God meant by the words was to disclaim and reject the dualistic theory of the universe held by the Persians, and to assert his sovereign sway, his sole supremacy, over all that is.' Granted. But, then, evil is. And if we are for- bidden to trace the existence of evil to any rival or subordinate Power, have we any alternative save to trace it to God Himself ? Assuredly this is our only alternative : and so the very mystery which, by the help of Cyrus and his Persians, we have thrust out at the back door of this passage comes back upon us through the front window, and we have to face it at last as best we can. And this mystery is a living, a present, mystery. It tasks and perplexes the thoughts of men noiv as THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, much as ever, perhaps more than ever. Under its pressure John Stuart Mill and his school have even reverted to the old Persian theory, the dualistic hypo- thesis of the universe. They doubt whether there is a God, indeed, though they advise us to lean to that conclusion as hard as we can; but they are quite sure that, if there is a God, a God who rules over this sorrowful and afflicted world, He must be limited either on the side of his goodness or on the side of his power. And as a God not perfectly good would be much the same as no God, they incline to the alternative that his power is limited by the activity of some rival being or force,— a something not our- selves, and not Himself, which makes for u?irighteous- ness. To meet our own wants, therefore, or the wants of om- own time, we are obliged to consider what may be involved in the claim which the Prophet here puts into the mouth of Jehovah, the claim to be the sole Crea- tive Power in the universe, the claim to be respon- sible for all that exists, and therefore for all the evil that exists. It is quite true that in considering this question we approach a problem which the wise of all ages have pronounced insoluble; and hence it becomes us to move with diffidence, and to bear in mind that the most we can hope to attain is a working hypothesis 24 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. which will commend itself to our reason, not a final solution of the mystery. That spirit is not an alto- gether unhealthy one which prompts us to say : ' We know so little of man and so much less of God, so little of time and so much less of eternity, that we can never hope to penetrate a mystery so great.' But you will observe that, after all, the question with ub is not of what we can discover, but of what God has revealed, of how we are to explain and vindicate a claim which He Himself asserts. And surely it is but a poor tale if, with a Divine Eevelation in our hand, we are not prepared to shew that the dualistic hy- pothesis of Mill and the Persians is inadequate and irrational, and to replace it with an h^^pothesis more consonant at once with Eeason and with Holy Writ. Who is to 'find words for God,' and for the claims of God, if we cannot ? There is an hypothesis, my brethren, a theory of the origin, and function, and end of Evil suggested by Scripture which seems to me an eminently reason- able one ; a theory which confirms the claim of God to be the Creator and Lord of evil, and disposes of that dualistic hypothesis which recognizes two rival and opposed Powers at work in the world around us and in the mind of man. And this hypothesis, if you will not grudge a little close attention, I will proceed to lay before you as clearly and as briefly as I can. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 2$ When we contemplate the universe of which we form part, the first impression made on us is of its immense variety ; but, as we continue to study it, the final and deepest impression it makes upon us is that, under this immense and beautiful variety, there lies an all-pervading unity. As it is with us, so it has been with the race at large. At first men were so profoundly impressed by the variety of the universe that they split it up into endless provinces, assigned to each its ruling spirit, and worshipped gods of heaven and of earth, gods of mountains and plains, of sea and land, of air and water, of rivers and springs, of fields and woods, trees and flowers, of hearth and home, of the individual, the clan, the nation, the empire. Yet even then there hung in the dark background of their thoughts some conviction of the underlying unity of the universe, as was proved by their conception of an inscrutable Destiny or Fate, to which gods and men were alike subject, and by which all the ages of time were controlled. This conviction grew and deepened as the world went spin- ning down the grooves of change, until now Science herself admits that, by a thousand different paths of investigation and thought, it is led to the conclusion that, if there be a God at all, there can be but one God ; that, if the universe had a Maker, it could have had but one Maker ; that if human life is under rule, 26 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. there can be but one Ruler over all. The same forces are at work everywhere ; the same laws run and hold everywhere ; all things on earth and all in heaven are bound together so intimately and in so many ways that it is no longer possible to believe in gods many and lords many. There may be one God, — that^ to Science, is still an o^Den question; but there cannot be more than one, — that question is closed, and Science herself stands to guard the way to it as with a sword in her hand. But if there be only one supreme Lord, there can- not of course be any rival Power to his, any power that introduces alien forces or works by other laws. There may be subordinate powers ; and at times these may seem to oppose Him, to contend against Him. But one Power, or "Will, is supreme ; for, as the very word itself suggests, the universe is an unity, — a vast complex of many forces perhaps and many laws, but still a single and organized whole. In re- verting to the Persian hypothesis of two antagonistic Powers, therefore. Mill sinned against the most settled conclusion of modern thought. And it is both curious and inexplicable that while Science is so convinced of the unity of the universe that it is seeking to resolve all forms of matter, animate and inanimate, into one proto^Dlasmic substance, all forces into one force un- named as yet, and to reduce all the processes of THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 27 creation and growth under the law of evolution, this great champion of Science should have fallen back on an hypothesis which runs right in its teeth. Now if we either believe in one Supreme Creator and Lord, or, following Mill's advice, lean to that con- clusion as hard as we can, our next step is to conceive, as best we may, what this first great Cause, this crea- tive and ruling Power, is like. Accordingly, we look around us to find that which is highest in the universe, sure that in that which is highest we shall find that which most resembles the Most High. And in the whole visible creation we find nothing so high as man, no force of so divine a quality and temper as the will of man, when once that will is guided by wisdom and impelled by love. Even the material and vital forces of Nature flower in man ; while to these are added the still higher forces of thought, affection, will. As Pascal put it : ' The possession of the whole earth would not add to my greatness. As to space, the universe encloses and absorbs me as a mere point; but by thought I embrace the whole universe.' And, again : * Were the whole universe to rise against him (to slay him), man is yet greater than the uni- verse, since man knows that he dies. The universe knows nothing of its power.' Nor is it only by force of thought that man rises to the top of creation and puts all things under his feet, but also by force of 28 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, will. To him alone of all visible creatures is the strange power accorded of consciously and intentionally arresting or modifying the action of the great physical forces, of conquering Nature by obeying her, of chang- ing her course by a skilful application of her own laws. So that even though the Bible did not assure us that man was made in the image of God, Eeason would compel us to conclude that, since the Creator of all things must include in Himself all the forces dis- played in the work of his hands, and since we must see most of Him in the highest of his works, we must see most of Him in man, and in that which is highest in man, — viz., Thought, Will, Affection. Eeason has reached this conclusion in that ancient oracle : ' Would you know God ? Look within.' We have got our God, then ; in some sense we may even be said to have proved God, since, so far, we have been following the guidance of Eeason rather than of Inspiration : and, in God, we have the creative and supreme Spirit, Maker of all things, the Fountain of all force, the Administrator of all laws, of whom we frame our highest conception when we think of Him as the Source of all that is noblest in man, — as the Infinite Mind, the pure Eternal Will, the absolute Love. And, now, we are prepared to take our next step, THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 29 and ask : How evil came to be ? and how, if God is responsible for it, we can reconcile it both with his perfect goodness and his perfect power. We take this step, then, and inquire, (1) How did evil arise ? and (2) How may it be justified ? (1.) For the origin of Evil we must go back to the creation of all things, and be content to use words which, though quite inadequate to the subject, may nevertheless convey true impressions of it. If the conception of God we have just framed be a true one, and it seems to answer to the demands of Eeason, then there must have been a time when the Great Creative Spirit dwelt alone. And in that Divine solitude — that infinite light which may seem to us an unbounded darkness, that infinite fulness which may seem to us an unrelieved emptiness — the question arose whether a creation, an universe, should be called into being, and of what kind it should be. Or, perhaps, we may rather say, that, just as the intelligent and creative spirit of man must work and act, must disclose itself in deeds, so the creative Spirit of God urged Him to commence ' the works of his hands.' However we may conceive it or phrase it, let us suppose the physical universe determined upon as the stage on which active intelligences were to play their part ; and then ask yourselves what is implied in the very nature of active intelligent crea- 30 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. tures such as we are, and whether anything less than such creatures could satisfy the Maker and Lord of all. Would you have God surround Himself with a merely inanimate world, or tenant that world with mere automata, mere puppets, with no will of their own, capable indeed of reflecting his own glory back on Him, but incapable of a voluntary affection, a spon- taneous and enforced obedience ? Would it have been worthy of Him, even such as you can conceive Him to be, would it have given scope and verge to his energies and affections to make mere marionettes, even though he gave them wings and called them angels ? Why, even you yourselves cannot gain full scope for your powers until jou are surrounded, or surround yourselves, with beings capable of loving you freely, and obeying you with a cheerful and unforced accord, beings whose wills are then* own and who yet make them yours ? How much less, then, can you imagine that God should be content with a purely mechanical obedience, with a purely physical and necessary accord with the determinations of his will, with any- thing short of a voluntary obedience and affection ?^ According to the best conception of Him we can frame, it was inevitable that He should surround Himself with life, thought, affection, with beings resembling Himself and capable of freely becoming one with Him in mind and heart and will. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 31 But if you admit so much as this, consider, next, what is implied in the very nature of creatures such as these. If free to think truly, must they not be free to think untruly ? if free to love, must they not be free not to love ? if free to obey, must they not be free to disobey ? You cannot get a voluntary affection and obedience from creatures incapable of withholding obedience and love. If my heart is not my own, I cannot give it to you. If my will is not mine, I cannot make it yours. And what is all that but to say, that the very creation of beings in themselves good involves the tremendous risk of their becoming evil ? What is it but to say that in such an universe as we know, culminating in myriads of beings capable of ascertaining and obeying the righteous and kindly will of God, there must be a constant danger of some of them falling away from their true blessedness, by violations of the law which they are free to disobey, in order that they may be free to obey it ? Nay, if we consider the matter a little more closely we shall find, I think, that there was more to be confronted than the mere risk of the introduction of evil. To me it seems B^ dead certainty, a certainty which must have been foreseen and provided for in the eternal counsels of the Almighty, that in the lapse of ages, with a vast hierarchy of creatures pos- sessed of freewill, some among them would assert and 32 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, prove their freedom by disobedience. How else could man, for instance, assure himself that he %vas free, that his will was in very deed his own ? He found himself in a vast natural world or order in which all creatures but himself rendered a necessary and involuntary obedience to their Maker and Lord. He was himself part of Nature. He was taken from the dust and had affinities with the dust; the animal life breathed in his nostrils and pervaded his frame. Was he no more than rocks and streams, plants and trees, birds and beasts? What meant, then, these motions of a higher and less restricted Hfe of which he was conscious, this sense of freedom to do or to forbear from doing ? Was he, after all, bound in the same chain of necessity as the creatures around and beneath him ; or, if he dared, could he snap that chain, and be as free, though not so strong, as God Himself ? When once that question arose in the mind of man, as sooner or later it was sure to arise, how long do you think it would be before he risked an experiment, before he put his freedom to the touch, before he ventured to try whether disQbedience was as possible to him as obedience ? The poet Cowper says : ' I could sit at ease and quiet in my chamber all day long ; but the moment I knew the door was locked upon me, I should try to get out at all risks.' THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 33 And is not that a feeling which awakens an imme- diate response in all our breasts ? Is not the craving for liberty, for freedom of action and movement, common to man ? Should we not any one of us try to get out of any chamber, however large and however exquisitely furnished for our pleasm-e and conveni- ence, in which we felt that we were shut in, even though we knew we should gain no advantage and might even suffer by the change ? Are we not impatient of any law even by which we are bound, or suspect that we are bound, however good the law may be in itself ? ' I was alive without the law once,' says St. Paul ; ' but when the law came sin sprang into life, and I died ; ' yet, as he confesses, * the law was holy, and just, and good.' And, again: *I had not known concupiscence if the law had not said, " Thou shalt not covet." ' Look at your little child. Consider how no sooner is a thing forbidden him than he hankers after it, and tries to get it or to do it. Why ? Simply because he is of a depraved nature ? Not at all. But simply because human nature, crea- ture nature, is strong in him ; because he is impatient of restraint; because he wants to prove and assert his freedom ; because he has an intellectual curiosity to see what will come of not doing as he is bid. Free creatures, again, creatures with intelligence, will, passion, are active creatures : and there is some- D 34 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. tiling, as all observers are agreed, in the very nature of activity which blunts and weakens our sense of inferiority, dependence, accountability. ' A messenger employed in his master's service becomes, in the very act of serving him, forgetful of him,' apt to exceed his commission, to assert and glorify himself by acting on his own motion, following his own impulse, as- suming a power and an authority beyond his own. Considering all this we cannot but conclude that the very creation of beings free to love and to obey their Maker involved, not the risk merely, but the certainty that sooner or later some of these beings would fall from their first estate ; and that God must have foreseen and prepared for this certainty. Weakening their sense of dependence by their in cessant activity, impatient of restraint, even of the wholesome restraints of a just and good law, who can wonder if they determined to prove that their powers were theirs by using them, to assure them- selves of their freedom by transgressing their proper limits, to prove that their wills were their own by acts of selfwill ? The Bible affirms that what Reason might have anticipated actually took place. It tells us that both in heaven and on earth the creatures God had made didj thus fall away from Him, doing their own will instead of his, taking their own course instead of THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 35 the course marked out and hedged in for them by his pm-e and kindly laws. It asserts that, free to obey, they chose to disobey. And it moreover asserts, in full accordance with the teachings of Philosophy and Science, that, by their disobedience to the laws of their being and happiness, they jarred themselves into a false and sinister relation to the material universe ; that, by introducing moral evil into the creation, they exposed themselves to those physical ills from which we suffer to this day. On this point, the deduction of physical evils — such as pain, loss, decay — from moral offences, I cannot now dwell, and indeed need not dwell. For surely it must be obvious to every reflective mind that if the whole physical universe was created by the Word of God, if it is animated by his Spirit and ruled by his Will, then as many as disobey that high Will must put themselves out of harmony with all that obey it, must find the very forces which once worked for them turned against them. They are at war with the Will which pervades and controls the universe : how, then, can the universe be at peace with them ? They have opposed themselves to the Creative Sph'it which quickens and rules the whole realm of Nature ; and hence, though no change should pass on heaven or earth, they are so changed that, for them, the fertile earth is cursed with barrenness, and the very 36 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. stars in their courses fight against them. Any creature who quarrels with his whole environment turns that which was meant to feed and gratify and develop him into a mere apparatus of pain, hostility, and death : how much more, then, the creatures who quarrel with the quickening and shaping Spirit of their environment ! If, then, we now repeat the question with which we started : In what sense may we reverently attribute evil to God ? in what sense can we concede his claim to be responsible for evil as well as for good, for darkness no less than for light ? our reply must be that, in creating beings capable of loving and serving Him of their own choice. He created the possibility of evil, ran the risk of its existence, and even knew beforehand that it would certainly enter in and mar the work of his hands. (2.) How, then, we ask finally, can we justify evil ? how can we reconcile it at once with his perfect goodness and unbounded power ? On our hypothesis we reconcile it with his poiver by the plain and obvious argument that even Omnipo- tence cannot at once create freewill and not create it ; that, when once He has created it, even the Almighty cannot interfere with it, cannot coerce and arrest it, without destroying it ? If God made me free to choose evil, how can He possibly covij)el me to be good ex- THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 37 cept by taking away my freedom of choice and action ; i.e. by reducing me from a man to an automaton, a mere puppet of which He pulls the wires ? But if we would reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of God — and this is by far the more difficult achievement — we must take the tvhole theory of human life and destiny taught by the Bible, and not merely a part of it. This theory let me put before you in the very briefest form, not staying to vindicate it — I am much mistaken if it will not vindi- cate itself — but only indicating it that you may see how it bears on our present argument. As I read it, then, the Bible teaches what human reason had conjectured and hoped apart from the Bible, — that the lines of human life and destiny are to be produced beyond the grave, and wrought out to their final result in other worlds than this. It teaches us that while, in large measure, men do re- ceive the due reward of their deeds here and now, yet, since justice is but imperfectly administered here, a more exact retribution will be meted out to us in the world into which we pass at death, — a more abundant reward for all that has been good in us, a more searching and cleansing punishment of what is evil. It teaches us that, as the result of this exacter retri- bution, this keener and more stimulating discipline, the good will be strengthened, settled, stablished, in 38 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. righteousness, while the bad will be purged from their old sins by pangs that will turn them from darkness to light, from evil to good. Now if all this be true — and as yet I do not ask you to affirm that it is true, I say only if it be true — is it any longer difficult for us to reconcile the permission of evil, or even the creation of it, if we must use that word, with the perfect goodness of the Creator ? k.^ we have seen. He could only surround Himself with beings capable of a voluntary, i.e. a real, goodness by leaving them free to choose evil if they would. And if, when those whom He had formed for obedience sinned against the law of their own being and well- being, He had left them to bear the doom which they themselves had pronounced on themselves, we could hardly have impeached his justice with any show of reason. But if it be true that even we who have abused our free will to om- own hurt are^ — not to have our wills forced and coerced, but — to be taught by experience the evil of self-will, and the blessedness of living for others rather than for ourselves ; if we are to be taught, whether in this or in other worlds, that then only are we free when we obey, and then alone strong when our wills are one with the best and purest Will; if evil has come in only that by tasting the loss and pain it involves we may rise to larger and more permanent forms of righteousness, and be THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 39 established in them for ever beyond all danger of falling, who then can reasonably impeach the good- ness which is leading us up, by stairs that ' slope through darkness,' to the light of an unclouded and everlasting day ? As I believe, all this is true, though even yet the half has not been told. For the Bible goes on to teach us that, in his pity and in his compassion, the great Father of our spirits came down to us his sin- ful children, virtually saying to us : * I might much more reasonably attribute the evils from which you sufifer to you than you to Me ; for you owe them to your disobedience and self-will. But, see, I freely take them all on Myself. 1 claim to be responsible for them all. And since you cannot drive it away, / take away the sin of the world by a Sacrifice so great and so far-reaching, by an Atonement so potent, so cleansing, so divine, that you can but apprehend it afar off, and must not hope to fathom its full virtue and force and extent. To brace you for your daily strife with evil, I foretell a final and complete victory over it ; I promise you that in the end I will sweep the evil that harasses and afflicts you clean out of the universe it has marred and defiled. And, meantime, it shall have no power to hurt or harm you if you will but put your trust in Me. All that is painful in it, all the sting of it, I take on Myself. For you, if 40 THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. you will but meet it wisely and trustfully, it shall be nothing but a helpful discipline, a training in vigour, in holiness, in charity.' This, in brief, is the teaching of the Bible on the origin, function, and end of evil : this, at least, is the teaching which I have found in it after devoting nearly forty years to the study of the Bible. And it is with no misgiving, it is with the strongest con- viction that you cannot but grant all which I demand, that I put it to you: Whether you believe in the teaching of the Bible or do not, is not this at least a reasonable theory of the origin and end of evil ? Does it not commend itself to your judgment as far more consonant even with the teachings of modern thought and science than the dualistic theory of Mill and the Persians ? Does it not commend itself to your hearts as affording you the very courage you need as you wage your own daily conflict with evil, and the very consolation you need as you groan under the burdens it inflicts on your fellow men ? At the very lowest, do you know, can you conceive, of any 'working hypothesis' of this great mystery more reasonable, more probable, more welcome, if only it be true ? Assuredly those of you who accept it and rest in it will no longer find any great difficulty in the impres- sive pathetic words : ' I am the Lord, and there is THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 41 none else : I form the light and create darkness ; I make peace and create evil : I, the Lord, do all these things.' Note. — If ever * Evolution' should be proved to be not merely one of the laws which govern and control both the physical universe and the story of man, but the ruling and supreme law, it would only necessi- tate a slight modification of the theory suggested in this Discourse. For, in that case, instead of affirming that man fell from his original goodness, so giving evil an early triumph over him and it, we should have to affirm that from the very first evil is subordinated to good, * and sin itself is but the darTc shadow cast hy human free xoill as it emerges fro'tn, animal instinct ; a fall indeed in appearance, but in reality an ascent from the innocence of ignorance to the righteous- ness that is bred by repentance and faith.' But despite the confident temper of its advocates, I doubt whether Evolution will succeed in making good this claim to supreme power, at least in the genesis and development of man. For, not to insist on the difficulties which still encompass the evolution of mind, spirit, conscience, I do not see how this hypothesis is ever to explain the great social and religious revo- lution wrought by the Christian Faith. III. THE HEAVENLY TEEASUEE AND THE EAETHEN VESSELS. * But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.' — 2 Cor. iv. 7. If I were to begin my Sermon by saying : ' No, Paul, the vessels are pure heavenly as well as the treasure, and in calling them " earthly " you are bringing in a " damnable heresy," ' you would all be very much and very justly shocked. Have no fear : it is quite impossible for me to say anything so profane, except hypothetically, and in order to suggest to you the folly and presumption of certain self-elected cham- pions of Eeligion who denounce ' modern criticism ' and 'modern speculation,' — meaning thereby any speculation or criticism which does not jump with their own. * All light is from God,' affirms St. Paul ; * and, above all, that revelation of Himself, which shines from the face of Jesus Christ. But we who seek to convey and interpret that light, we who are but the organs and media of Kevelation, tve are THE HEAVENLY TREASURE, ETC. 43 human, not divine, earthly and not heavenly.' This is the teaching of an inspired Apostle, although, according to certain modern authorities, it is ' flat blasphemy ' on your lips or mine. * The truth itself,' affirms St. Paul, ' the divine substance of the Kevela- tion, is like gold and silver; but the men and the words that convey it are Hke the great earthenware jars in which ancient princes stored up their gold and silver coin.' Or, in the Eabbinical variation of the figure, the truth of God is like precious wine ; while the men and the words that hold and convey it are like the earthen jars in which of old time wine was kept. But we cannot so much as hint that the jars are of a different and inferior quality to the wine or the coin without being denounced by men who affect to love the Bible more than we do, and to defer to its teaching more humbly. According to them, let St. Paul say what he will, the vessels are not earthly but heavenly. And not only the original vessels ; but when the heavenly wine has been decanted from the Hebrew and Greek into Enghsh vessels, even these Enghsh vessels are pure heavenly too! Nay, still more strangely, even when the heavenly treasure has been pom-ed out from the original and the secondary jars, when it has been melted in the dogmatic crucible, and recast into words and formulae not to be found in the Bible, even these doctrinal vessels are as sacred 44 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE and divine as the ScriiDtural, and you can only detect any flaw in them at your own proper peril ! Now to handle the Bible in this mechanical and slavish spirit, to reduce all its writers to a common level, to assert that they are all, and all equally, infal- lible, is not to honour the Bible, but to dishonour it ; it is not to defer to its own account of itself, but to decline to defer to it : it is not to prepare the way for its ac- ceiDtance, but to ensure its rejection. For, beyond all reasonable doubt, there are physical theories in the Bible — in the Book of Job, for instance — which are not scientifically accurate ; there are historical state- ments which, to say the least of it, lie open to grave question, — as when Moses is contradicted by St. Stephen : there are moral precepts even which, though greatly in advance of the ethics of their time, are nevertheless not perfect, since, as our Lord Him- self affirms, they were concessions to the hardness of their hearts who received them, or were to be super- seded by the more spiritual and penetrating morality of his own commandments : and there are disclosures of sj^iritual realities which are not final and complete, since even the Great Teacher had many things to say which the men to whom He spoke were not able to hear. Had one taken these errors and defects to St. Paul, no doubt he would have replied : ^ We have this heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, and of AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 45 nothing earthly must you expect perfection.' But if we take them to those who hold the vessels to be as heavenly as the treasure itself, what can they do but flatly deny that any such defects exist, and go on denying it whatever the evidence we adduce, and at last try to stop our mouths with the anathemas of their usurped authority ? Their first false step, the assumption of the infallibility of the mere ' letter ' of Scripture, compels them to take other false steps in the same direction, until they are landed in the frightful inconsistency of contradicting the very Scrip- tures for whose authority they contend. How, then, may we avoid their sin and yet hold fast to the Bible as the truest and highest revelation of the will of God yet made to man ? How may we at once reasonably account for the earthliness of the vessels which contain this Divine Treasure, and yet maintain that the Treasure itself is nevertheless divine? The old simple explanation is, I verily believe, as true as it is old. If God was to speak through men. He must take men as He found them. If He was to speak to men, He must speak a language they could understand. It was impossible to antici- pate the effects of centuries of culture, except by a miracle which would have been useless, and even injurious. For had God miraculously moved the ancient Hebrew prophets to speak in the terms of 46 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE modern science and philosophy, neither would they themselves have understood the words they were moved to utter, nor would the people to whom they were sent have understood them. And, moreover, had they been thus raised above themselves, that gradual training and growth in which lies the true hope of humanity would have been violently and fatally interrupted. To lift men suddenly to the high platform of accurate and complete scientific and moral conceptions would have been a miracle indeed. It would have been the creation of a new race rather than the education and development of the men who were then on the earth. And Science herself would have been the first to revolt from so sudden and fatal a break in the continuity of history, in the slow and therefore permanent process by which man is being raised to his ideal nature and conditions. But even if we should grant such a miracle to be possible without a fatal strain to human powers ; if we admit that holy men of old might have been moved to speak in the terms of modern thought ; if we admit, still farther, that these modem terms are both accurate and adequate expressions of the facts of Nature and History — a very large assumption although it is so commonly made ; if we admit that it would have been just and wise of God to write or inspire a book two or three thousand years before any AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 47 man could read it, and to leave the world for all those years without the book it wanted : if we grant all this, have you ever considered what the Bible, formed on this model, would have been like? You know very well how many treatises are now required to set forth the ascertained results of any one province of human inquiry, and can faintly imagine how many would be necessary in order to cover the whole field of Science. Even now they are so many that no man attempts to read them all, or hopes to cover more than a modest corner of that wide field. Could these results, then, have been set forth adequately, and yet with brevity, from two to four thousand years ago ? If not, to what must the Bible have grown ? Who would have been able to read and to master it ? Must not the moral and spiritual elements in it have been swamped in that immense mass of learning ? In St. John's famous hyperbole, the whole world could not have contained the book that would have been written ; or, at least, and without hyperbole, we may say that the whole world would not have contained a man to read it. Do you object : ' But no one demands that the Bible should cover all knowledge and exhaust all discovery. It would have been enough if, when it touched on points of Science and History, it had employed terms consistent with the facts afterwards THE HEAVENLY TREASURE discovered. It need have been no bigger than it is, and yet more accui'ate.' Are you advised of that ? There are not many demonstrable errors in the Bible as it is when due allowance is made, as of course it ought to be made, for the Oriental and poetical forms in which so much of it is cast. But if, whenever it touched on points of Science, it had used terms which we should call accurate and complete to-day, surely it follows that it must either have explained these terms to a genera- tion to which they were unknown, or have run the risk of being rejected for its divergence from the accepted conclusions of the time. Only one alterna- tive was open : either the vessels must be earthen, with the natural flaws and defects of earth about them, in order that the heavenly treasure might not be refused; or the vessels must be as heavenly as the treasure, with this inevitable result, that the earthly eyes then bent on them would have seen no truth or beauty in them that they should desire them, and so would have rejected the treasure they contained. So much you may admit, yet still be perplexed. You may say : * I see well enough that, if God was to speak to men through men, it was inevitable that He should take them as He found them, and speak to them in the only language they could understand. AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 49 The vessels must be earthen if the heavenly treasure was to be effectually conveyed. But ^Yas not this necessity a very perilous one? Was there not, and especially is there not, grave danger lest the heavenly treasure should be refused because of the earthliness of the vessels which convey it ? However precious, and even invaluable, the interior contents of a Eevela- tion may be, if there be error and defect in its out- ward form, may not those who discover these errors and defects be honestly persuaded that the Revelation did not come from God ? I see that for the sake of past generations, and perhaps for the sake of the great mass of men in all generations, the vessels must be of earth ; but may not the very earthenness of the vessels present a difficulty to the men of this genera- tion, or perhaps to the cultivated few of every genera- tion ? In fine, if I admit the Eevelation contained in the Bible to be a perfect revelation, yet is there not grave peril lest even a perfect revelation should be rejected because of the imperfect media through which it reaches us ? ' This, it must be confessed, is a serious difficulty, and a very prevalent difficulty. Thousands of the younger and more reflective members of every branch of 'the Church feel it keenly ; and I myself have known men — and men whom I think Jesus Himself would have loved, and did love, and does love — who, £ 50 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE because they were convinced that the physical theories of the book of Genesis were unscientific, or because they had detected errors in some of the historical books of Scripture, or because Criticism had rendered the date and authorship of some of the Sacred Writings dubious to them, or because they had found a de- fective morality taught or approved in some of the earlier books of the Bible, have felt that they could no longer accept it as the "Word of God, and refused to believe in any written revelation of his Will. The difficulty which drives such men fi*om the pale, with tears of sorrow and despair, must be a very grave one ; it needs to be met fearlessly and kindly : and I would fain treat it as honestly and tenderly as I can. To those who are troubled by it, or, untroubled themselves, have to deal with those who are repelled by it, I would suggest, first of all, that though earth is not so glorious as heaven, it nevertheless has a glory of its own, a beauty that lies nearer to us and touches us more pathetically than the greater glory above. And these earthen vessels of Scripture — these histories, psalms, prophecies, gospels, parables, let- ters : are they not very beautiful even though, in the eyes of the critical, they be not altogether perfect ? Can you match them anywhere ? Do you know any forms of literature more noble, more pure, more j)ene- trating ? or any book that can for a moment be set AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 51 beside the Boole! After having read most of the great rehgious books of the race, I am compelled to confess that for me, both in substance and in style, the Bible stands above all its rivals as high as the heavens above the earth. If it were more beautiful than it is, if it were of a heavenly beauty and per- fection, might it not be too beautiful for our earthly appreciations, ' a thing too bright and good For human nature's daily food ? ' If any one of you were the happy possessor of the most perfect vase in the world— I will say nothing just now of what might be inside it— would you be greatly concerned, so concerned as to break your vase or fling it away, if . the most dehcate and refined Criticism convinced you that one or two out of the multitude of graceful figures carved upon it did not stand in quite the most noble pose imaginable, or that some sandal-string or brooch was not in the best historical keeping, or that in the legend inscribed be- neath the beautiful procession this letter or that was not quite accurately cut, or had been tampered with by some later artist, or was a little defaced by time and use ? When men speak of the defects of the Bible they are apt both to magnify them and to forget for the instant its innumerable, its unrivalled, ex- cellences and beauties. I do not deny these defects, 52 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE although many years' study of the Bible has con- vinced me that they are comparatiyely few ; that when they are at all serious, the defects and errors of its earlier books are almost invariably corrected by its later books, and quite invariably corrected by its animating and ruling spirit : and that for the most part critics would never have discovered them but for the light they had drawn from the Bible itself. I do not deny, I frankly admit, all proved errors and de- fects. But I remember, and I ask you to remember, that even that in the Bible which may fairly be com- pared to earthen vessels is nevertheless of a peerless and incomparable beauty. Suffer me still further to suggest that, practically^ there is but little danger lest men should be really and finally repelled from the Divine Treasure by any earthliness or defect in its outward form. So long as they are ignorant and of a childlike heart, the very'' vessels are as heavenly to them as their contents. They see no flaw in them ; they are troubled by no questions, no doubts. And when men grow wise enough and critical enough to detect an occasional error or defect in the media of Eevelation, ought they not to be wise enough and sufficiently good critics to distinguish between the Treasure and the Vessels that contain it ? Yes, and wise enough even to love the Vessels all the more because, like them- AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 53 selves, they are of the earth and have a touch of earthHness about them ? If you are wise enough to detect some imperfections in the ' letter ' of Holy Writ, ought you not to be wise enough also to dis- cern the beauty and worth of the principles which underlie the letter of it, to admire the perfect and divine ' spirit ' which breathes through every page ? 'Ah, there,' you may say, 'there you touch the very heart of the matter, and raise what to us is the most momentous and difficult question of all. If we must admit, as we can hardly help admitting, that much or little, but still something, in the outward form of the Biblical Eevelation has become question- able, how can we possibly retain our old unquestion- ing faith in it ? How are we to distinguish between the Treasm-e which is from heaven and the Vessels which are of earth, and to hold fast to that Treasure even if we should be compelled to yield the Vessels to the tender mercies of Criticism, which are so cruel ? ' Well, that is the very question which I too hold to be most pressing and important, and to which in- deed I have been leading up in all that I have yet said. And with a few brief hints on this momentous question I will conclude. Only be good enough to bear in mind that I am not now speaking to those who reject the very idea of Eevelation ; but to those 54 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE of you who believe or hoiDe that in the Bible we have a clear and sufficient revelation of the Will of God, but do not see how you are to distinguish between its substance and its form. As I believe, then, the final appeal lies to that moral sense which in a thousand different ways you use and cultivate every day. Mark lioiij you use it. Your little child, let me suppose, runs in from the nursery or runs home from school one day, to tell you that he has been sorely tempted to tell a lie, but adds triumphantly, ' I didn't tell it, Papa, because I knew that if I did God would blister my tongue ! ' What is yom- first feeling as you listen to his tale ? Joy, that he did not tell the lie, or grief and vexation at the silly superstition which held him back from it? Surely your first emotion is one of gi-atitude and pleasm-e that he did not tell the lie, that he felt God would be angry with him if he did tell it. But, lest he should presently discover that lies do not always or commonly raise blisters on the tongue, and infer that there was therefore no harm in telling them; and, still more, because you want him to act on just motives, and to be free from silly superstitions, you proceed to teach him that the lie-and-blister theory is but a superstition of the nursery, and to give him better and higher motives for speaking the truth. That is to say, you see that the little fellow holds AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. 55 a heavenly treasure in an earthen vessel, a vera earthen vessel ; and in this case you have no diffi- culty in distinguishing the one from the other. Take another case, then. Your boy grows up into a lad. You have to send him out into the world. With many fears and many prayers you place him in an office or warehouse, in which he has to associate with men who are older, harder, less pure-minded, than him- self. You know only too well the kind of talk he will hear, the temptations to which he will be exposed, and in how many forms an evil influence will be brought to bear upon him. You therefore encourage him to make a friend of you, to talk to you quite freely of his work and comrades, and of how he gets on with them. One day, let me suppose, he tells you shyly that the talk is so bad, and the evil influence so strong, that he hardly knows how to bear it. But he has always been fond of flowers ; they are so pure and lovel}' that they constantly suggest to him the pure divine Presence in which he stands. And so he has got into a way of taking a flower with him every morning, and jDlacing it on his desk that it may speak pure sweet thoughts to him, remind him of the sacred and august Presence which compasses his path, and help him to bear the strain to which he is exposed. That is a true story ; I once knew a lad who did just that, though he never found courage to tell his father of it. 56 THE HEAVENLY TREASURE Suppose your boy did it : what would you say to him ? Would you tell him that it was very weak and silly of him; that God was no more present in the flower than in the desk on which it stood, and not half so divinely present as in the mind and heart of even the worst of his companions ? Would you say tliat, and forbid him to pluck your flowers any more ? Would you not rather take some pains to keep him supplied with them ? Would you not rejoice in his endeavour to resist evil, and even in the innocent device which helped him to resist it ? In this case, as in the last, you would have no difficulty in distinguishing between the heavenly treasure and the earthen vessel; but even the earthen vessel itself — that simple and natural faith in a special Divine Presence in flowers — would seem to you so fair and harmless that, in all probability, you would hardly care to criticise, much less to censure, it. You have and use a moral sense, then, which enables you to recognise a heavenly treasure even in an earthen vessel, whether that vessel be as clumsy as the little fellow's lie-and-blister theory, or as deli- cate and graceful as the lad's trust in the suggestive purity of flowers. And what is to hinder you from applying that sense to the Bible ? You may think the Biblical Vessels strangely imperfect if you fix your thoughts on some of the physical theories contained AND THE EARTHEN VESSELS. $7 in the Word, for example, or on some of its historical contradictions, or on some of the imperfect precepts given to them of old time : or, on the other hand, you may think them strangely and divinely heautiful if you fix your thoughts on the noble and heroic figures to which it holds a glass, or on the solemn and pathetic music of its psalms, or on the compressed experience and sagacity of its proverbs, or on the exquisite simplicity and compelling charm of its 23arables. But, whatever you think of the vessels, ought you to forget the Treasure, the revelation of God's will and man's duty, which fills and overflows them ? Think for a moment ichat a Treasure the Bible is a Mercy which does not condone men's sins, but a Mercy which saves them from their sins, which calls upon them and compels them to abandon their * wicked ways ' and their ' unrighteous thoughts.' No mercy short of this would be true mercy. To make men happy in their sins is impossible, as im- possible as to make them good in their sins. For sin is misery ; sin is a bondage to an alien and malignant power which every free spirit must resent and abhor. And even if this ignoble miracle were possible, if a man could be made happy while violating the very law of his being, who that is capable of reflection, of virtue, of goodness, would care to have such a miracle wrought upon him ? To be happy in sin he must cease to be himself, cease to be a man. What we really desire, if we are men and have discourse of reason, is to be freed from the chain of om* sins; what we really desire when we ask for mercy is a mercy that will be at the pains to cleanse us from the soils of evil and strike its fetters from our souls. And so long as we cherish this desire, we may be sure that the Mercy of God stands waiting to meet it, to outrun all our thoughts and expectations, all our wishes and hopes. We are not to measure Him by ourselves, nor his mercy by our own. It is high above ours, so high that even the most merciful of men only apprehends it afar off ; so great, so broad and 84 THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. deep, that the fidelity and tenderness, the inexhaust- ible love and pity of the very mother who bore us are lost in its unfathomable and unimaginable depth and volume. No man ever has, or ever can, explore it to its utmost verge ; no man has or can, by searching, find it out to perfection. The Mercy of God, viewed as saving men from evil thoughts and ways, — which is the only true mercy — is simply incredible : so the Prophet affirms, so we pro- fess to think and to believe. But do we really believe it ? Do we act as if we did ? Millions will say to- day : ' I believe in the forgiveness of sins : ' but how many of that vast multitude, do you suppose, will both understand and realize what they say? Many of them hardly believe that they hcive sins which need a great act of Divine forgiveness. Many more do not know that, in order to forgive, God must j)unish their sins. "When the punishment comes, they take it as proving that He has not forgiven them, as proving the severity, the anger of God, not his mercy; and can hardly be persuaded that, if they seek God, they will find Him ; that if they call upon Him, they will discover that He has drawn near to them in the very punishments which warn them that they have sinned, and that all sin is infinitely displeasing to Him be- cause it is injurious to them. In our turn, indeed, we all doubt the Mercy of God THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. 85 when we most need to believe in it, distrust it when we most need to cast ourselves upon it. Any pro- foimd consciousness of sin is apt to make that Mercy incredible to us. And when, like the Jewish exiles by the waters of Babylon, we are suffering, and feel that we are suffering, the due reward of our iniquity, it grows too incredible, too airy and impalpable, for us to grasp. ' If God be merciful,' we say, * why does He inflict this terrible agony upon me now that I see and repent my sin ? If He were merciful. He would never have used me thus.' And so our anchor parts just when the storm is at its wildest and we are driving on the rocks. In our cooler moments it may help us to remember that, as I have just hinted, the very punishments that wait on sin, since they wait on it by a constant and invariable law, are designed for our good. All natural and universal laws must subserve our welfare, if the world and human life be ruled by God ; and, among others, the law which metes out to every man the due reward of his iniquities. In part we can even see how this law contributes to our welfare. It makes us terribly aware that we liava sinned, — a fact we are very slow to realize. "When the retribution comes upon us, we can no longer gloss over our trans- gressions, nor pretend even to ourselves that perhaps after all the wrong we have done was not so very 86 THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. wrong. All the plausible fetches by which we seek to hide our sin from ourselves are suddenly exposed, and "we are left face to face with the sin which has become our torment. We who preach the boundless mercy of God, and hope for the ultimate restitution of all things, do not therefore cease to believe in hell. We believe in hell because we ourselves have been in hell ; for we have been in sin, and sin is the one unspeakable and eternal misery. But we also believe that the pains of hell get hold of men for their good ; because when they have taken hold of us, when we have seen our sin in its naked deformity, when we have been overwhelmed with pain, shame, remorse, with an unutterable self- abhorrence and self-contempt, we have been con- strained to cast ourselves on the Mercy of God, to pray and hope that He Vv^ould cleanse us though we could not cleanse ourselves, that He would forgive us though we could not forgive ourselves : and thus, at least at times, we have passed through the very gates of hell to find ourselves in a heaven of pardon and de- liverance. Those who have ever gone through such an experience as this — and some of us have gone through it more than once — have learned to see the Mercy of God in the pains that punish sin, as well as in the grace that forgives our sins. And even those of you who have not yet gone through it may perhaps THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. 87 gather from what I have said, you may understand even if you have not felt, that you ought to take the retributions which wait on sin, not as proofs that God has abandoned you and ceased to care for you, but as proofs that He is near you, so near that, if you seek, you will find Him, that, if you call on Him, He will answer you. By his merciful punishments God is at once convicting you of sin and calling on you to repent, that, repentmg, you may be forgiven, pm-ged, saved. Finally, you remember what it was we agreed upon at the outset, — that it is not by arguments addressed to the understanding that we come to know God, or the mercy of God, but by experience and sympathy. A notable corollary from that conclusion is, that we must expect to be convinced of the pity and com- passion of God, not so much by having the kindness of his laws demonstrated to us, as by listening to the men whom we believe to have had the largest ex- perience of his ways and to enjoy the profoundest sympathy with his thoughts. Just as we come to know the righteous God by becoming righteous, so we may hope to learn more of Him from the men whose righteousness is far more eminent and con- spicuous than om- own. Just as we come to know the mercy of God by becoming merciful, so we may hope to acquaint ourselves more fully with Him by 88 THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. listening to men far more merciful and gracious than ourselves. Such a man, a teacher such as this, now stands before us in the Prophet who penned these words. If you are familiar with the critical con- troversies of the time, you may doubt whether Isaiah wrote the concluding Chapters of the Book that bears his name. You may even doubt whether the Prophet who did write them got every word he wrote straight from Heaven. But there is one thing which I do not see how you are to doubt if you have read these Chapters with attention. You cannot doubt that somehow, whether by inspiration or by reflection, he who wrote these words, whether Isaiah or another, knew far more of God than you do ; that he had a far richer experience of God and a far deeper sym- pathy with Him. This man, then, whoever he was, has a claim to speak of God with an authority which few can rival. And tills is what he has to say to you of God, — that God's mercy is as much higher than your thoughts of it, as much broader, as much more pure and tender, as the heavens are higher and broader and sweeter than the earth ; that it transcends all your conceptions of mercy, that it seems incredible to you only because it is so large and rich and fi-ee that you can very hardly bring yourselves to believe in it. He affirms that even here our great poet's description holds good, that we THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD. 89 may lift a reverent eye to the very Throne of Heaven and say : ' Mercy is twice blessed,' blessing * Him that gives,' as well as ' him that takes,' since God delights in mercy, and is — if I may speak of so great a mystery in words so homely — at least as pleased to forgive our sins as we are to have them forgiven. My brethren, we are all sinners, all great sinners, for we have all offended against a great Love. And it may be — for who can tell what tumult of passionate emotion may be hidden under the smooth exterior you present to yom* neighbours ? — that some of you are at this very moment feeling your sins very deeply. It may be that you are suffering from them, and for them, although you make no sign. It may be that in your pain and self-contempt and self-disgust, your hard thoughts of yourselves are breeding hard thoughts of God, and you are saying within yourselves : ' If He were merciful and meant to forgive. He would not treat me so.' If I do speak to any who are in this saddened and despairing mood, I bring you a great comfort. For I bring you the testimony of a man who knew God as but few have known Him : and his testimony is, that your widest thoughts of Mercy are not so wide as the mercy of God; that the highest hopes of Mercy you have ever indulged are as far beneath the mercy of God as the earth on which you stand is below the heaven in which He 90 THE INCREDIBLE MERCY OF GOD, dwells. His testimony is, that in all those painful, restless, self-despairing moods bred in you by the sense of sin, God is drawing near to you, and calling on you to seek his face ; and that, if you do seek Him, you shall find Him. Many of us have already listened to his words and put them to the proof for ourselves. And we attest, we cannot but attest, that his testimony is true. We too assure you that the Mercy of God is incredible, unfathomable, of an unimaginable sweetness and purity and depth. Be comforted, then ; and seek, that you may find, your God, and in Him the Mercy that frees all faults, forgives all sins, and heals all the diseases of the soul. VI. ALL THINGS OUES. ' All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come : all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ God's.' — 1 Cor. iii. 21-23. ' All things mine ? 0, how delightful that would be, if only it were true ! ' But it is true. ' All things mine that I may make them Christ's ? If that be true, it is hardly delightful, or hardly so delightful as having all things for my own.' But it is delightful, and even far more delightful than having all things for yom* own. Nay, to give all to Christ is the only way to make all things yours. So we might talk together on first reading this wonderful passage, finding much in it that is difficult, much even that seems incredible, but nothing so incredible as St. Paul's point blank and repeated assm-ance that all things are ours. Even this in- credible assertion, however, may grow credible to you if only you approach it fi*om the Apostle's point of view. 92 ALL THINGS OURS. For the first thing he affirms, the very thesis which he has heen arguing and elaborating throughout the Chapter, is that all ministers are yours. And that is true, is it not ? Perhaps you are tempted to reply : ' 0, yes, that is true enough ; but what are we the richer for that ? ' Now there I differ from you. I am by no means sure that all ministers are yours. I am quite sure that, if they are, you are much the richer for it. Do you demand proof ? You shall have proof. St. Paul's general principle is that the teachers are for the Church, not the Church for the teachers. I admit that principle quite as frankly as you can do. I admit that, in the design and intention of God, the teachers exist for the sake of the Church, and not the Church for the sake of the teachers. But the inten- tion of God is one thing, and the intention of the Church, as shewn by its conduct, is often another and a very different thing. God intended eloquent Apollos, learned Paul, and Peter with his practical sagacity and passionate enthusiasm, — God intended them all for the Church at Corinth : but did that Church pos- sess itself of them all, and make them all their own ? All these ministers were theirs in right ; but did they make them all theirs in fact ? On the contrary, some said, * We are of Apollos,' mainly meaning thereby, ' We are not of Paul or Cephas.' They were ALL THINGS OURS. 93 charmed with the eloquence of the mighty expositor of Scripture, but they did not care for, they did not appropriate, the learned spirit of St. Paul or the plain sagacity of St. Peter. Others attached themselves to Paul, loved his logical disquisitions, his insight into all mysteries, but thought ApoUos too rhetorical, and Peter too rustic and provincial for men of their culture. And still others gloried in St. Peter, boasting no doubt that he preached the simple Gospel; but distrusted the eloquence of Apollos as a too fascina- ting and worldly gift, and the learning and originality of St. Paul as likely to make him too broad or too sceptical. Thus this ancient Chm'ch flung away two thii'ds of its treasure. All these ministers were theirs, — Paul, Apollos, and Cephas ; but they did not care to make them all theirs. Too many of them would only have one minister ; and, not content with simply appropriating him, they spoke and set themselves against the other two. Can we find no parallel to that in our modern Churches ? Alas, where can we look without finding a parallel to it? All the ministers of the Church universal are yours, my brethren, yours in the design and intention of God : but do you make, do you permit them all to be yours ? What, all the ministers of the Apostolic Church, all the ministers of the Patristic Church, all the ministers of the Mediaeval 94 ALL THINGS OURS. Church, all the ministers of the Eoman, the Epis- copal, the Presbyterian, the Independent, the Methodist, the Unitarian, and the Baptist branches of the one Catholic Chui'ch throughout the world ? All are youi-s, and yet how few of them are yours ! Every Christian man who has any truth to teach is a minister, is your minister if you will have him. And if you would learn from them all, from St. Paul down to Dr. Liddon or Mr. Spm'geon, would you not be rich indeed, at least, in teachers, and perhaps also in the highest wisdom ? But here you may fairly object : ' We have neither the means nor the opportunity of learning from many of Christ's ministers,' And that is true. But do you learn as much, and from as many of them, as you might ? Might you not learn more at least from the best ? Do you study the Apostolic preachers — St. Paul, St. John, St. Peter, St. James — with the devotion they deserve ? When wise and holy men of other communions than your own — such men as Piobertson, Lynch, Dj'kes, Dale, Maclaren, Martineau — publish a volume of choice discourses, do you take as much pains to get it as you take for the last new novel, and read it with even as much interest as you bestow on your daily newspaper ? They are all yours ; but do you make them all yours ? There are those in our Churches who so attach ALL THINGS OURS. 95 themselves to one minister that they care to hear no one but him. There are those who so attach them- selves to one that, like the Corinthians, they carp and detract, they set themselves against men of other and even of higher gifts, and refuse to see any power or wisdom save in the little god of theii* private idolatry. Now I do not say that, if you find a minister who can most effectually touch the springs of spiritual thought and emotion within you, you are not to love and to addict youi'selves to his ministry. But I remind you that, in the purpose and design of God, all ministers are yours. I do say that, if you so addict yourselves to one that you can hear no other, or few others, with profit, you are flinging away the greater part of your spiritual heritage ; and that, instead of paying a compliment to the minister you specially affect by declining to learn of others, or by speaking lightly of their work, you rather shew that he has laboured in vain so far as you are concerned, since the end and effect of the ministry of every true servant of Christ should be to open your minds to a thankful reception of truth in whatever form it may come to you, and by whatever voice it may be uttered. Eemember, then, T beseech you, that all ministers are yours, from Paul, Apollos, and Cephas down to the sincere and devout teachers of every Christian Com- munion at the present day; and that you ought to 96 ALL THINGS OURS. rejoice in them all, and to thankfully learn from them all so far as you have opportunit}^ But not only all ministers, all things are yom's : the whole world, the whole ordered cosmos, with all that it includes, — life, death, things present and things to come, all are yom-s. And here perhaps your real difficulty begins. You can easily believe that all ministers are yours, that you have a clear right to appropriate any teaching or help they can give you ; but you do not see how the whole contents of the world, and all the events and successions of time, are yours. They are yom*s in precisely the same sense in which ministers are yours : yours, not to do what you like with, but yours to do what you would like if you were wise ; yours to use and to j)rofit by. God has put them all at your disposal, in order that you may get the true use and good of them, in order that you may appropriate all that is best and most en- during in them, and compel them to minister to your welfare. If a deed of gift were placed in your hand which made over a whole county, or a whole country, or even a whole cosmos to you as your private estate, you might be none the better, none the richer, for that ; you might be much the worse and poorer for it. So vast an estate would entail responsibilities under which any man, even the strongest and wisest, must stagger and faint. If you cared only to make a ALL THINGS OURS. 97 personal and selfish use of it, to enjoy all in it which most delicately ministered to sense and appetite ; if you let it feed your sense of power till you grew proud, insolent, exacting ; if your possession of it robbed you of all stimulus to labour, to mental effort and acquisition, to moral culture and improvement, you would simply sink into the most astounding sot and sinner under heaven ; you would become at once the god and the devil of the world over which you ruled. And when the world perished, or you were ordered out of it, nay, and even while you held pos- session of it, — what the better would you be for it ? nay, how much the poorer and the worse ? Property is what we can appropriate. We possess things in the proportion in which we can get the best out of them that they have to give, that which will minister to our own highest and most enduring interests. And what in the world is there of which, with due pains and trouble, you cannot get the best it has to give ? The splendour and pomp of sunrise and sunset, the changeful glory of the seasons, the beauty of flower and herb and spreading tree, the starry canopy of heaven, — are not these, with all that they imply, open to every man, given to every man ? Do they not become yours in proportion as you have power to discover and appropriate their beauty, their teaching, their value ? If you love them, and 98 ALL THINGS OURS. study them, and suffer them to enter into and enlarge and beautify youi' soul, they are yours, yours for ever, yours in a far deeper sense than any house or piece of land that you have bought. That you may lose by a thousand accidents, and at the best you will soon have to leave it behind you : but the culture, the new and larger powers of thought and appreciation, the refinement, the beauty, the sweet and pure affections wrought into your very spirit by your love and admi- ration of the natural world, this will never leave you ; you can never lose it ; it is part of your very being ; it is an everlasting inheritance. The world is yours, then, if you care to make it yours; yours, as ministers are yours, that you may enjoy and appropriate and get the good of it, that you may be the richer and the better for it for ever. And so are ' life ' and ' death.' For what is there in all the forms and varieties of human life which you may not observe, and so observe as to learn its highest lessons, as to work the very essence of it into the very substance of your mind ? What have men ever done, to what achievements have they risen, what great and noble thoughts have they uttered, of which you may not read, and so read as to make all that is pernianently valuable in them your own ? The noble thoughts and noble deeds of men are as an atmosphere in which you stand or walk : and who ALL THINGS OURS. shall hinder you to breathe it if you will, till you feel that you too are akin to the wisest and bravest of the race, that their thoughts are your thoughts, and their influence a power framing you for noble enterprise ? By awakening your spiritual manhood and perceptions, by teaching you that you and all men are children of the Highest, and that all the events of time are ordered with a view to your welfare, Christ has thrown open to you the whole domain of history and of human life ; and it rests with you to determine how far you will go up into it and possess yourselves of it. And He has made ' death ' your friend and servant no less than 'life.' For if you believe in Him what is death to you, or to those whom you love, but a transition to more life and fuller ? What have you to do with any fear of death now that Christ has not only conquered it for you as well as for Himself, but changed its very natm-e? Death teaches solemn lessons, indeed ; for it teaches us that all which is temporal and corporeal in us, and in the world around us, must fade and pass away : but it also teaches most joyful lessons ; for it teaches us that the temporal passes only to disclose the eternal, and the corporeal only that the spiritual part of us, re- leased from its bondage to the flesh, may unfold itself in new vigom- and beauty. If you have learned that, and believe it, u not death your minister and friend ? loo ALL THINGS OURS. Two other possessions the Apostle confers upon us, or, rather, marks and denominates as ours. * Things present,' with which we are so seldom content, and ' things to come,' which we are so apt to fear, — these, too, he pronounces to be * om-s ' : i.e. since God in- tended them for us, we may make them ours if we will. And, surely, you have all known men and women who were so certain that their present con- ditions, however narrow and straitened, were marked out for them by God and intended to nourish all that was best in them ; so certain also that their future conditions were in the same wise and kindly Hands, that their Hfe has been a sacred and tranquil pos- session to them ; and they have gone on their way, vexed with no want, fearing no evil, although their lot and prospects would have filled you with discon- tent, anxiety, apprehension. * Things present and things to come ' were theirs, as they may be yours. All depends on the ruling aim and spirit of your life. If you are bent on getting the highest and most en- during good out of them, then ' all things ' are yours, yours now, yours for ever : for what is there to pre- vent you from getting this kind of good out of them? and, when once you have got it, who, or what, is to take it away from you ? But if you are only bent on getting a present and sensuous enjo^-ment out of them, then, though all things are yours in right, hardly ALL THINGS OURS. anything is yours in fact ; and what little you do possess will soon be taken away from you. In short, the point to which the Apostle would bring us is this : that every province, every detail, every moment of our life is quick with a Divine intention, pregnant with spiritual good ; and that when we recognize the ordinance and intention of God in them, and seek to learn the lesson and to appropriate the good with which they are fraught, all things in very deed become om's, ours now in this present life, and ours for evermore : we are no longer ruled and tyrannized over by our conditions ; we make them our servants and friends. And if we could but reach this point, and maintain ourselves at it, who does not see with what a noble simplicity, what dignity and sacredness, we should invest our lives? Lords of ourselves, we should also be lords of lands, of all lands, of the whole world, and of all the successions of time. All things are yom's, then, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come : all are yours, but all are yom's in proportion as you make them yours ; and all are yours because you are Christ's, and that you may make tliem Christ's and God's. Nay, as I said at the outset, we can only make all things ours as we give them all to Christ and God. I02 ALL THINGS OURS. That sounds like a paradox, I admit; but, never- theless, it is demonstrably true. For, observe : all ministers are yours, from Paul, and Peter, and ApoUos, down to the humblest teacher of the present day ; all are yours in right, for God has sent them all for your good : but when do you make them all yom-s in fact ? Only when you recognize the good and feel the power that is in them. Only when you learn what they have to teach, and take what they have to give. Only, that is, when you make the best use of the best that is in them, and suffer it to minister to your highest and most enduring welfare. And when you do that, do you not both take them as God's gift to you, and give them back to Him? You get fi'om them stimulus and incentive to live a sober, godly, and righteous life ; and in living that life you carry back to God what He has conferred on you through the ministers He has sent to teach you. And in the same way you make ' life ' yours. Here it lies all around you, taking innumerable and varied forms. And while it lies all around you and touches you on every side, human life also stretches back into the most remote ages. The past is full of noble forms which you reverence, crowded with heroic achievements, with great words and deeds, which command your love and admiration. Hands reach out of it and voices sound out of it which seize upon ALL THINGS OURS. 103 you, and guide your steps, and influence your cha- racter and thoughts and aims. And how does this vast and varied scene of life become truly yours ? Only as you recognize and imitate that which is highest and best in it. Only as you yield to its nobler influences and suffer them to mould and re- form you. That is to say, all hfe becomes yours as you give your personal life to God. The same great history lies behind every man. The same leading influences are at work upon every one of us. But while some seize upon what is best and noblest in them, others seize upon what is at least comparatively trivial and perishable in them. And only those make life truly theks who follow its greater examples and yield to its finer influences, — the influences and examples which conduct to truth and righteousness and love, or, in one word, to God. So, again, with death. Do all men own and possess death ? What ! those who fear it or shrink from it for themselves, or who hate it because it robs them of those whom they love best ? No ; these are not lords of death. Death is their lord, a tyrant whom they hate and di-ead. Only those who believe that Christ has overcome the sharpness and taken away the sting of death, only those who know that death is a minister of God for their good, and comes to give that which is spiritual in them the victory over the I04 ALL THINGS OURS. misleading powers of sense, and that which is eternal in them the victory over that which is temporary, can be said to have death for their servant and friend. And who are these but those for whom to live is Christ, and to die gain ? Who but those for whom to depart is to be with the Lord ? Death is ours only as we are Christ's and God's. And only on the same terms are things present ours and things to come. For we do not own and rule our present conditions while we fret at them, and murmur against them, and would radically change them if we could. Nor is the futm-e ours so long as we fear it and di-ead what it may bring. Present and future become ours only as we know and are sm-e that both are known to God, both ordered by Him, and ordered for our good. But let a man once be sm-e that his conditions are now, and always will be, just the most suitable and best that infinite Wisdom can contrive for his ultimate welfare : and will not he be content and fearless ? will not things j)i'esent and things to come be truly his 1 just what he would have them to be if he could bend and shape them to his mind? You see, then, how true it is that all things — and not ' our wills ' only are ours, and om's that we may make them God's, since only as we do make them God's can we make them truly om- own. You see ALL THINGS OURS. 105 how vast an inheritance is conferred upon us in the purpose and intention of God, — the whole world with all that it inherits, the history of man, the succes- sions of time, the events and conditions of life, the mysteries and splendours of death. And it only remains that we accept and enter on this inheritance, that we make it ours by appropriating all that is best, highest, and most enduring in it, by laying up its title deeds in the secret and inmost chamber of our souls, where neither moth nor time's effacing finger can reach them ; and that we expend in the service of God the immense and growing wealth which He has bestowed upon us : for here, most of all, giving, we shall get, and, spending, thrive. VII. THE TOO GEE AT PEOMISE. ' All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come : all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ God's.' — 1 Cor. iii. 21-23. I SPOKE to you from these words last Sunday, and tried to shew you that, incredible as it seems, all things are verily ours ; ours in the truest, deepest, and most binding sense : and that all things become ours as we become Christ's and God's. In other words, my contention was that all things are ours hy right, ours in the intention and purpose of God ; and that we make aU things ours in fact in proportion as we become of one mind, one will, one life with Christ Jesus the Lord. In order to shew you that this great promise is as greatly fulfilled, I asked you to begin where the Apostle began. He had been arguing, he continues to argue, that aU ministers of the truth belonged of right to the Corinthian Church, — Paul, Apollos, Cephas, with all their colleagues and successors, although, in point of fact, most of the members of that Church THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. 107 ^Yere refusing to make them all theii's : some saying, ' I am of Paul, and will have no other teacher ; ' and others, in the same exclusive spirit, saying, * I am of Apollos,' or ' I am of Cephas.' All were theirs, if they cared to make them theirs, if they would only let all he theirs. And, in the same manner, all ministers of the Truth, from the Apostles downward, are om-s, — not om-s to do what we like with ; nothing is ours in that sense : hut ours to learn from, ours to profit by. We are entitled to make the best and highest use of whatever is best and highest in them all, whatever the Church or the section of the Church to which they belong. They are all the servants of Christ; and if we are Christ's they are all our servants, and helpers, and friends. And in the same sense all other things are ours ; the world, with all that it contains ; human life, in all its forms; death with all its solemnities and splen- dours; 'things present,' i.e. all the conditions by which we are now smTounded ; and ' things to come,' i.e. all the conditions into which we are to shift and rise when we pass from this present scene. All are ours in the same way, and for the same end, as the teachers and preachers of the Word are om-s,— not to do what we like with, but that we may make the best use of them and get the greatest good from them that we can. And that, if you will think of it, is the only io8 THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. sense in which anything really belongs to us. If anything in the world belongs to you, it is, I suppose, your own body, or the money which you have earned by your own labour. And yet can you do what you like with either of them ? Your body is yours ; but is it yours to sm with, or to sin against ? If you do sin with and against it, do you not instantly begin to damage it, to lose your property in it, your power over it ? You cherish exorbitant appetites in it which you cannot control, or you so break down its health and vigom' that you can no longer depend on it to do half its work. Abuse your body, and you begin to lose possession of it. It is only by using it according to God's intention, and for the ends designed by Him, that it becomes, and remains, really yours. So again, your hard-earned money is yours : but is it yours to do what you like with ? By no means. If you make certain illegal uses of it, the law will step in and take it from you. Make certain other, legal but foohsh, uses of it, and you will infallibly lose it. If you make a wise and lawful use of it, if, for example, you buy a loaf with it, that loaf is yours, but still not yours to do what you like with. You must not fling it out of the window ; you must not eat too much of it ; you must not even feed your dog with it if you know of some poor neighbour starving for want of it. Charity, good sense, conscience will THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. 109 not suffer you. You instinctively feel that you are responsible for the use you make of it ; that only by making the best use of it do you, in the true and best sense, make it your own. In precisely the same sense, then, in which whatever you call your own belongs to you, do all ministers and all things — this world and the next, life and death, the past and the future — belong to you. They are not yours to do what you like with, but yours to turn to the best account you can — the best, the wisest, the most en- duringly profitable. This was my argument last Sunday, though I did not put it exactly in this form. And, after you had listened to it, I can well believe that, if some of you w^ere convinced and instructed by it, others of you were disappointed with it and thought it by no means conclusive. It is almost inevitable, indeed, that those w^ho are not of a spiritual turn, or whose minds are not informed by much thought and varied experience, should be dissatisfied with any interpretation of a promise which, as they read it, offers so much and yet confers so httle. It may w^ell be, therefore, that some of you, after you had listened to my explanation of it, thought that after all the promise meant very little ; that all things are not really yours, nor even the things you most need and desire : and that, let ministers and expositors say w-hat they will, they no THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. only evade the real point of such words as these, and take away with one hand what they seem to give with the other. Now as I am very anxious to convince you that these words are literally and demonstrably true, I will ask you this morning to approach them from another side — from the side of your own thoughts and wishes. I will ask you to consider iclfiat, and how much, you are willing and prepared to take of the ' all ' here promised you ; and then leave you to decide for yourselves whether it is God who is not ready to fulfil his promise, or you who do not care to let Him fulfil it, whether it is He who will not give or you who will not take. I warn and challenge you to keep a keen look-out, to see that I. treat you fairly; for I fully believe that, struggle and object as you may, I can constrain even the youngest and least spiritual of you to acknowledge that the whole difficulty rests with you and not with God ; and that He is even compelling you, against your will, to let Him be as good to you as his word. If you feel at all as I imagine you to feel, and as I myself used to feel once, this is what you say to your- selves when you look at such a great promise as this. * All things mine ? That is not true : I wish it were. Very few things are mine. If I only knew any good way, any sure way, of making all things mine, I would THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. instantly and gladly take it. But when preachers talk about such a promise as this, they do not point out any such way; they don't explain the promise, but explain it away : they carry it up into the air, out of sight, out of reach, put some '' spiritual " meaning as they call it, upon it — some forced, unreal, non- natural meaning 1 call it ; and leave me as poor as I was before.' Well, I will try not to do that. I will try to meet you fairly, on your own ground. And, therefore, I will not urge that this promise is made only to those who believe in Christ and love Him with all their hearts ; for, though it is true that only those who have the Spirit of Christ in them make all things theirs, yet it is also true that God meant and wishes all things to be yours even though you have not con- sciously and fully given yourselves to Him. No, I will neither try, nor seem, to slip away from you and from what you naturally understand these words to mean. I admit, I affirm, that in the intention and purpose of God all things, without a single exception, are i/o?(?-s— yom-s in right, yours in fact even, if you care to have it so. But do you care? Are you quite sure that you wish to have all things ? If you do, I pledge you my word that you shall have them. But do you want them? What, quite all? All ministers and 112 THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. teachers of the Word, for instance ; for these are the first things specified in the promise ? Paul, Apollos, Cephas ; St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Bernard ; Luther, Calvin, Knox ; Jeremy Taylor, Howe, Baxter ; Channing, Lynch, Beecher, Eobertson, Stopford Brooke ; Newman, Martineau, Dale, Maclaren, Liddon, Spurgeon : all these, with a great company more, are yours. Do you very much care to have them? to have them all ? Do you care to learn all that they can teach, and to appropriate every influence for good which they exert ? Look at the promise, look at the particulars of the promise, for yourselves, and tell me whether you are eager to possess yourselves of its whole contents, of all that it specifies and includes. What do you find ? Besides ministers of the Word, you find ' life ' ; and perhaps you would be glad, though I doubt it, to have all that Life can give you. But read on, and you find ' death.' Now, honestly, do you want to make deatli yours ? to enter into its secrets and mys- teries, learn all that it can teach, possess yourselves of all that it has to confer ? Some of you, at least, do not want to die, or even to think of death and to prepare yourselves for it now while you are in the full vigour and glow of hfe. What else, then, do you find in the promise? ' Things present.' Well, you would like, perhaps, to THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. 113 have things j^rcscnt, i.e., to have all the conditions amid which you live at 3'our command, so that you could turn them this way or that at your pleasure. But again read on, and you find thinr/s to come, i.e., all the conditions of your future existence, your existence when you shall have passed away from earth. Do you want tlicse to he yours, or even to think ahout them and to make ready for them ? And yet it is hut reasonable that as rational creatures, as mortal and yet immortal, you should think of death as well as of life, of the future as well as of the present, and of how what you do here and now may affect your character and state hereafter. The promise is not too big for reasonable men, look- ing before and after : but is it not a little too big for you? It would almost seem that 3'ou would like it better if it were not so large, if it did not cover so much. It would almost seem as if it offered more than you care to take. You could do with ' life,' but 3^ou don't want ' death ' ; jon would be glad to have 'things present,' but, for the present at least, you don't want to be pestered about * things to come.' And as for all the ministers of the Universal Church, from the Apostles downward, you could very cheer- fully dispense with them all, or, at best, you would far rather dispense with them all than be condemned to listen to them all. 114 THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. See, then, how the tables are turned upon you. At first the promise v/as not large enough and real enough for you ; but now it is loo real, too large ! If it puts at your disposal much that you would like to possess, it also presses on your acceptance much that you would rather not take, although you cannot but admit that it offers nothing with which any reason- able man would willingly dispense. Did I not fore- warn you that the difficulty was with you, and not with God ? He gives all ; but you want only a part, and that the part which, as I will try to shew you, is the least and the worst. But here, perchance, some of you who have taken my advice, and have looked at the promise for yom-- selves, may object : ' Sir, you are not dealing quite fairly with us after all. For among the " all things " the Apostle expressly specifies ''the world " ; and you have said nothing about that, though that is what we should like best of all.' My friends, I did but leave it to the last, because I thought some of you would like it best, and because it answers my turn best to take it up here. You would like the world, then, would you ? Will you be good enough to tell me how much of it you would like ? Do you want what St. Paul here means by the world: i.e. the whole ordered cosmos, — the starry heavens, with all their train, the broad fertile THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. ii earth, with all its continents and seas ? Many a baby cries for the moon who would l)e not a little incommoded if the moon, with its icebergs and vol- canoes, were cast into its lap. You do not surely want the whole cosmos for your own ! And yet it i? your own, so far as you care and are able to make it so. God has given you a right to it all. He has made you free of it all. So far as you can appre- hend it by science, or be charmed by a perception of its beauty, or turn it to any good practical account, it is yours : God Himself has placed it at your service and disposal. Again, therefore, I must ask : Is the promise, is the gift, too big for you? Do you want something less, and more manageable ? Must God be loorse than his word if He is to please and satisfy you ? Well, then, if you do not want the whole cosmos, how much of it do you want or think you want ? and a^re you ready to take it, as you must take all l^roperty, with its natm-al, its inevitable, conditions and consequences ? Tell me frankly what is ,your idea of a comfortable, a desirable, estate. You don't want the cosmos ; you don't want the whole earth ; you don't want a whole continent, or a whole country, or a whole county even. But perhaps you would like — many men assume that they would like — so much of the world, and of life, and of things present, ii6 THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. as would enable you to live without labour or trouble — which means, remember, that you would like to live on the labom- and trouble of other men. You would like to have plenty of leisure for study, for travel, for amusement. You would like not to be' obliged to take thought for what you should eat and drink and wear, but always to have, and to be sure that you always would have, the best of everything at your command. And you would also like to sur- pass and excel your equals, to be eminent and con- spicuous in various ways, an heroic, or, at least a commanding, figure likely to live in the thoughts and praise of men. Let me suppose that this is the sort of portion you would choose for yourselves, if you were free to pick and choose ; it is a sufficiently common ideal, and, let me add, a sufficiently low and selfish ideal. Still, I may assume perhaps that if you had so much as this at your command, you would feel that in a very real and practical sense ' all things were yours,' since you had pretty nearly all that you cared to possess at your disposal. But now, if you had it — which God forbid, if you can frame no higher ideal of life and happiness than this ! — would it after all prove to be enough ? You would have to spend a few hundreds or a few thousands a year. Could you, with a quiet conscience, spend all that on yourself, on your own appetites and pleasures ? THE TOO GREAT PROMISE, 117 * 0, no,' you say; 'that would be too selfish. If I want to enjoy myself, I also want to be good and kind to others. I should like to give away quite as much as I spend.' Should you ? But is it so easy to give away without doing more harm than good ? To give wisely involves as much thought as to spend wisely, or even to earn wisely. And, again, have you considered that, if you lived as you like, on the best dishes and the choicest wines and in what is called 'the best style,' you might soon grow very intimate with your doctor, easily fall into habits of excess, and either lose all power of enjoyment or end your days in an asylum or a madhouse ? Have you considered that, if you had wealth, you would also want health miraculously preserved, or a sobriety and temperance such as few attain to whom the luxuries of life are suddenly laid open ? Have you considered what sort of a figure you would make if, having wealth and the means of enjoyment, you lacked manners, culture, refinement, if your vul- garity, or your ostentation, or your grammar, or your very intonations made you a laughing-stock to those with whom you wished to associate ? And must God, besides giving you wealth and the means of enjoyment, miraculously confer on you health, refinement, cul- ture, and all else that your new station would re- quire ? ii8 THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. But think what that comes to. God offers you ' the world.' You don't want the world, you say ; but you would like a little of it. And this little, it turns out, if you are to be content with it, must be cut out of a quite different world from this, with other ethics, other laws, a world in which men are wise without reflection or experience, cultivated without study, refined with- out training or effort, always young though the years move as swiftly as with us, in good health though they eat and drink too much, valued and esteemed although they do not possess the qualities which here command esteem and respect ! It sounds modest in a man to say, when all the world is offered him, ' I don't want all that ; a very little will do : ' but if it should prove that this little must be specially created for him, and then sustained by a series of grotesque miracles, is there anything so very modest in his demand ? If a man is not content with the world and the laws of the world into which he is born ; if he wants wealth without responsibility, wisdom and culture without labour, enjoyment without peril to health, experience without lapse of years, or a lapse of years that will leave him neither older nor feebler, or distinction without achievement, or goodness with- out effort and self-denial, — I think we must admit, that, whatever other excellent qualities he may have, he is not precisely what we should call a modest man. THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. 119 How sliail wc treat sucli an one as this '} It is easy to see Low a wise Stoic, Epictetus for instance, would have treated him. He would have said to him : ' God has set before you this great and solemn spectacle of human life and destiny. You do not care to witness it ? It is not precisely what you wish ? Very Avell, then ; give up your seat — nobody will miss yoii much — and make room for another who ivill care to witness it, and who will praise the Giver with a thankful heart.' But Christ and his servants are more gentle and considerate than the wise Stoic ; they make a wider allowance for ignorance and in- experience. And, therefore, they say to you : ' You ask for too little, for far less than you will want by and bye, when you know how much man really needs if he is to be at peace. You must meet death as well as life ; and therefore you ought to think of it, and prepare for it. The ' things to come ' loill come, and therefore you should not wrap yourselves up in the present, and still less in mere present enjoyment, but should prepare to meet the future which, ready or unready, you must surely meet. The whole cosmos is not too great an inheritance for those who must live for ever, and will for ever need new fountains of wisdom and new fields of action. God, who made all things, made you for Himself ; and you can only rest as you find rest in Him, as you make Him yours. THE TOO GREAT PROMISE, And, therefore, he has made all things yours, and so 3^ours that they may all lead you to Him, and make you his. You would be content with ' life ' if you might choose only what you like in life ; and hence He both lets you taste the sorrow as well as the joy of life that you may not be content with it, and sends ' death ' to you that it may raise you to a higher life. You would be content with ' things present ' if you might select only that in them which answers to your wishes and desires ; and therefore He mixes the bitter with the sweet in yom* present conditions, that you may be willing to leave them, and then shifts the scene that, in ^ things to come,' you may find a nobler discipline and a higher good. You would be content with that which is poorest and most transient in ' the world,' with that in it which will perish when the world is burned up ; and so He draws your thoughts away from that which is merely visible and temporal in it, fixes them on its imperishable beauty, its spiritual and eternal laws, and makes the Avhole cosmos yours, with all its worlds, even the new heaven and the new earth in which these laws will be revealed in nobler forms and w^ork out to larger and happier results. This is the real reading of this great promise : and, if you will receive it, you must admit, I think, that it is no slight or dubious good which it confers upon THE TOO GREAT PROMISE. 121 you, but a good, a vast inheritance of good, far greater than you had supposed it could include. You must no longer say that it is not true, or that it gives you little while seeming to bestow much. You must rather gratefully confess that, whereas you had been craving only a part, only a small and poor and transient part, it throws open to you all that the reasonable soul of man can need or desire whether for life or for death, whether for this world or for that which is to come. VIII. LED BY A CHILD. FIRST PART. ' The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the f atling together : and a little child shall lead them.' — Isaiah xi. 6. The prophet Isaiah positively revels in these pastoral and picturesque descriptions of the Kingdom of God. Whether or not, when these fair ideals floated through his mind, they were set in any framework of time and circumstance; whether or not he knew when those things should be which he foresaw, we cannot be certain, though, on the whole, it seems more probable that he did not know. There are those, indeed, who have no doubt that he did know, who have no doubt even that they know. They confidently apply all these descriptions to what they call ' the miUennial reign of Christ ; ' they hold that only in the Millennium will the discords of nature and of human nature be stilled, but that then they will melt into a harmony so pure and sweet that an innocent and fearless child, leading. LED BY A CHILD. 123 wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, lion and calf, by rosy ribands gathered into its rosy fist, is but a true and fair symbol of that fair and happy time. To many of us, however, and that mainly because we so strongly beheve in the incscnX and eternal reign of Christ, it is not easy to believe in that millennial reign of which in our earlier years we heard so much. We doubt whether the prophetic symbols and apocalyptic types admit of so literal an interpretation. We hope that the work which Christ began when He came and dwelt among us in great humility has ever since then been growing toward perfection and will never cease ; that He will reign over an enlarging empire in heaven and on earth, not simply for a thousand years, but for all the ages of time, and even through that eternal age on the surface of which all the years of time rise like passing bubbles, and into which they bm'st and lapse. And we are confirmed in this view by the New Testament writers. For they interpret these ancient prophecies as we interpret them, and apply them, not to some far-distant millennial seon, but to the reign which Christ commenced when He became 'a little child,' and dwelt among us. According to them, He, in the days of his humiliation, was the Branch, or Sprout rather, that shot from the decaying stem of Jesse ; the Spirit of the Lord came upon Him, with- 124 LED BY A CHILD. out measure, to make Him of quick understanding : * and we have no right to sink an interval of many centuries between the Verses of this brief prophecy, and to say that while one part of it was fulfilled at the Advent, the other will only be fulfilled in the still distant Millennium. We are rather bound to say : * If the Lord Jesus was the Branch that shot forth from Jesse's root, and the Spirit of the Lord did really €ome upon Him that He might rule and reprove the people, then, from that moment, the wolf began to dwell with the lamb, the leopard to lie down with the kid, the lion with the calf ; and the little Child went before them, leading them to the holy mountain in which they neither hurt nor destroy.' We need fix no date to these words. We have no right to date them, and thus to limit them to any single era. They are not for an age, but for all time, and for eternity too. They describe the universal reign of Christ. They tell us what the spirit, what the distinguishing characteristics, of that reign always have been and always will be. 2. A little Child shall lead them. But how should a little child lead the savage wolf, the fierce leopard, the powerful and majestic lion ? Even a man can hardly do that. Before he can tame them to his will, * Isaiah xi. 1-5. LED BY A CHILD. 125 lie must shew himself strong as the lion, fierce as the leopard, cunning as the wolf. The beast-tamer is distinguished by a quick eye, a prompt punishing hand, a courage and self-possession that never falter : and how should we look for these features and quali- ties in a child ? We camiot expect them ; we should be sorry to see them in any child we loved. But may not a child have other qualities quite as potent, and even more potent ? Is brute force the only force by which even brutes are ruled ? Surely not. Baby lies on the rug with dog and cat. He is not so strong or lithe or quick as they are, or even as you are. Yet he takes liberties with them which you cannot take, — and remember, the cat is of one blood with the leopard and the dog with the wolf. He lies upon them, rolls over them, treads on their sensitive feet, lugs them about by fur or hair ; and yet by some wonderful instinct they recognize his innocence of ill- intention and respect it. Were you to inflict half the pain on them which he inflicts, they would soon let you know that they had teeth and claws ; but they hardly ever tm-n on him. The little Child leads them where he will, and pretty much as he will. Nor are even wild beasts insensible to his claim and charm. Else what mean all those stories of helpless and abandoned childi-en suckled, fed, guarded by wolves and bears and lions ; or of children chosen LED BY A CHILD. by caged wild beasts, the more savage for their cap- tivity, to be their playmates and companions ? Many of these stories are quite true, and shew what power a little child may have, a power beyond that of man. They shew too, I think, that there is a certain humanity in the very brutes, a spirit which responds to the claims of innocence and gentleness and love. It is because they exhibit such gleams of a moral and humane nature that some of us find it quite impos- sible to believe that 'the spirit of the beast goeth down to the earth ' and becomes extinct ; or, rather, we can only believe that, if their spirits do go do^n to the earth, they go by that road to God, while ours reach Him by another way. 3. But when the Prophet tells us that in the Kingdom of Christ, a little Child leads the wolf and the leopard and the lion, as well as the lamb and the Idd and the calf, he cannot simply mean that an innocent babe may have more power over the brutes than a grown man. He also meant, no doubt, that in proportion as Christ reigns on the earth the primal order will be restored ; that men, reconciled to God and to each other, will also be at peace with all the forces of Nature, will rule over them, and bend to their service even those of them which are the most fierce, lawless, hostile, and untameable, and thus regain all, and more than all, that Adam lost. The LED BY A CHILD. 127 earth, which was only a paradise to innocent man, is a heaven to redeemed and righteous men. For what is heaven save the place, or state, where God is, and Avhere the sense of his Presence gives an unbroken peace ? And men, wholly redeemed from evil and the fear which evil breeds, find God everywhere, find Him here. Hence the kingdom of Christ is called *the kingdom of heaven.' And in proportion as we are in that kingdom we are even now already in heaven, and taste a heavenly peace. But some man will say : ' Now how can that be true ? How can we be in heaven so long as we are under a sky often darkened by storms, and on an earth often bleak and cold and unfruitful ? How can we be in heaven while we are still the sport of adverse accidents, and our hearts are torn with the pangs of sorrow and bereavement ? ' Thou foohsh man ! If God he icitJt you, and for you, lioiv can you he anywhere else than in heaven ? If the stormy winds fulfil his word, and adverse accidents express his will, why should they disturb your peace ? Is there no change, no sorrow, in heaven ? If there be not, how did certain spirits * fall away from their first estate ' ? If there be not, how should God Himself be afilicted in aU our afflictions, and feel them even more keenly than we do because his heart is so much more tender and gracious than ours ? My brethren, the laws of 128 LED BY A CHILD. Nature need not be relaxed, nor the wild winds tem- pered, nor the wild beasts tamed, in order that we may be in heaven. Let us only know and heartily believe that God is in very deed with us, that all changes and losses are but expressions of his gracious will whose will is our salvation, and even though the wild beasts tear us limb from limb, or the storm of change sweep away all that we possess, we shall nevertheless abide in the heaven of his peace. The storm which robs us of all we had acquired only makes us a little more obviously dependent on the Divine Bounty on which we always depend whatever we possess ; and the wild beast, by rending the body, only brings us a little nearer to Him in whom alone we always live. Heaven lies all about us, did we but know it, even as we walk the earth. Lord, open Thou our eyes, that we may see Thee, and our heaven in Thee. 4. A little Child shall lead them. Lead whom? The leopard, the lion, and the wolf? Surely not these alone. The familiar interpretation which takes these fierce wild beasts as symbols of the savage and ravening passions of men is at least a permissible interpretation, if not a true one. If the Prophet had not these passions in his mind when he wrote, we may have them in our minds as we read ; for the Spirit which moved him gives us understanding also. LED BY A CHILD. 129 Man is king of the world in many senses. As in his body all the forces of the physical universe meet, so in his soul are gathered up the qualities, energies, passions, cravings, of the animal creation. If the simplicity, tenderness, and playfulness of the kid and the lamb rise to their highest expression in him, so also do the cunning and fierceness of the wolf and the leopard. Naturally enough, therefore, the Hebrew prophets often use the wild beasts of the forest and the desert to symbolize the lower and fiercer passions of man. Take them thus here, and the prediction is that, under the rule of Christ, even the most savage and unruly appetites, even the fiercest and most cruel passions of humanity, shall be chastened into harmony with its gentler attributes ; and that, with their nature thus balanced and harmonized, men shall be led in peace as by the hand of an innocent child. Has not the prediction been verified again and again, and that even on the lower levels of our life ? Here, say, is a bad man, — brutal, fierce, ungoverned and ungovernable. God sends him a little child — conceived in sin perhaps, and born in iniquity. But the child, coming from God, takes no stain fi'om its evil earthly origin. And the rough man and the aban- doned woman, as they lean over it, are touched, softened, pm-ified. In its innocence and helplessness and loveliness there is that which appeals to all that I30 LED BY A CHILD. is best in tliem, reviving memories of their ov;n early days, and quickening in them at least a vague desire to amend and live a better life. But what is all that but just God leading them by a little child toward his holy mountain ? The emotion may soon pass, stifled by force of habit or the pressure of want. Still, at least for a moment it was tlicrc, and spojie for God, and shewed that even yet they might be redeemed — redeemed by a little child. God leads almost all men by their children, leads them to the ' holy mountain,' i.a. to higher levels of life where they breathe a purer air and gain a wider outlook. He sends the * little child,' and forthwith even the hard and selfish grow tender and unselfish, at least in some of their aims. They no longer live to and for themselves alone. They unbend in childish sports to please their child, and find in innocent homely amusements and intercourse a pleasure sweeter and more satisfying than that of base and animal delights. Sacrificing their own comfort to promote the comfort of their children, they acquaint themselves with the joy of self-sacrifice. They labour to support their children, to educate them, to give them a good start in life ; and all the while, though tjaey may not know it, God is educating tlum through their children, enriching them through their expendi- ture and sacrifices, and conducting them to a higher LED BY A CHILD, 131 life. A little child leads them, and they follow his guidance when they would follow no other, his tender fingers clasping not their hands only but their very hearts. They will follow him even to the house and worship of God — for many a man repairs to the house of God for his children's sake who would not come for his own — and find themselves in * the holy moun- tain ' or ever they are aware. 5. So that, when God sent the Holy Child Jesus to lead men into the Kingdom of Heaven, He took no new and untried way with us, but a way long tried and approved. Which of us, even though he have no child of his own, is happier than when with unspoiled and childlike children? Their very presence is a redemption — a redemption from the fretting cares of life, from its impure cravings, from self-pleasing and self-indulgence. And if little children, any of them, can do so much for us, what wonders may not the perfect and holy Child do ? nay, what v/onders does He not do ? Think what He does for us at this hallowed time. Christmas after Christmas we gather round his cradle, led by his star, or by the song of his nativity; and our hearts grow tender and humble and childlilie within us as we worship the Child. What would the year be without Christmas? and what Christmas without the Child who, born of woman, was yet the Son of the Highest ? Now, if 132 LED BY A CHILD. never else, the little Child leads us ; and, following Him, we tread the hol}^ mountain seen from which all the lower world of our common life takes new and brighter forms. But, for us, the Lord Jesus is not the Holy Child only at Christmas, or only because He was once a babe in Mary's arms. When He grew to be a man. He Himself took a child in his arms, and taught his disciples that to enter his kingdom they must become as little children, and that whosoever most fully i30s- sessed himself of the Childlike spmt would be greatest in that kingdom. But to enter his kingdom is to begin to grow like Christ ; and to become great in it is to grow as like Him as we can. To grow childlike is, therefore, to grow Christlike. But how can that be unless Christ Himself is like a little Child ? And that, no doubt, is the very lesson He would have us learn from his words. We are to believe that his heart is as the heart of a child, — pure, friendly, un- worldly, loving, pitiful ; and that therefore we need not fear to come to Him. We are to learn that as we reverence little children, and would not willingly bring anything evil into their presence, so we are to reverence Jesus Christ the Eighteous and to put away evil from our hearts. Thus the Holy Child makes us holy, leading us to the mountain where there is nothing to hurt or destroy. LED BY A CHILD. 133 The Child makes us Children. That, indeed, is the only condition which children exact of us if we would be with them. Be a child, and you are welcome to them, but not otherwise. Affect to be a child, put on a simple laerry air foreign to your nature, pretend to hke them and to be like them, and they soon find you out and will have nothing more to do with you. And, in like manner, the Lord Jesus exacts of us that, if we would be with Him and abide with Him, we become as little children. He has the simple, kindly, tender heart of a child, and to be welcome to Him and to abide in fellowship with Him, we must get a heart like his, we must become of one spirit with Him. And, 0, how clumsy we are at fii'st, and for long ! how we misapprehend his simplicity and limit his tenderness ! how we think to please Him by shewing a spirit alien to his, — by trying to keep other children from Him, as the disciples did once, or by judging them instead of leaving them to his judg- ment, or, rather, to his forgiveness ! It is well for us that, to the grace of a child, Christ adds the wisdom and patience of a man, nay, of a God. If only we love Him, and are trying to learn and do his will. He leads us, anel bears with us, teaching us through our very mistakes, raising us by our very falls, until at last He brings us safe to the top of that holy moun- tain all whose slopes are in the kingdom of heaven. 134 LED BY A CHILD. but whose summit is the very heaven of heavens, — brings us to the eternal city on the shining table- lands which needs no light of the sun, neither of the moon, because the glory of God shines in it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. To which city and home of the soul may He finally bring us all ; and, with us^ all men : Amen. IX. LED BY A CHILD. SECOND PART. ' The wolf also sball dwell with the lamb, and the leopard sliall lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together: and a little child sluill lead, them.' — Isaiau xi. G. With these words we opened our Christmas week. Let us close and seal it with the same words. 6. A little child shall lead them. But does he not lead them already ? A man takes his little girl out for a walk : — and I saw the very scene I am about to describe last Sunday morning as I went home after speaking to you from these words, and felt, as I looked at it, as if my homily had suddenly grown in- carnate. He holds her by the hand, bends over her with an air of protection and concern, abates his manly strides into short slow steps that harmonize with hers, feigns — feigns ? nay, takes — an intense interest in this or that that he may interest and amuse her, guiding her lest she should stray, supporting her lest she should trip. He seems to be leading her : but is 136 LED BY A CHILD. it not she who is leading him ? Very probably they are out at all for her sake rather than for his. Quite certainly it is she who determines the pace at which they walk, the distance they will cover, and, most likely, the direction in which they wdll go. That is to say, he leads the little child, and yet, all the while, it is the little child who is really leading him, and bending the tall strong man to her will. Is that an illustration of my text merely, or of the whole round of human Hfe ? Ai'e not all men led, and in some measure saved — saved from selfishness, the root of all sin — ^by their children? When the little ones come to them, who is it for whom they think, and work, and jDlan? Who is it that deter- mines the amount of their toil, and even the kind of amusements in which they indulge, and often determines also the very aims and methods of their lives ? Go into almost any household you will, and you will find that the children are the real centre of it, the determining influence. A man commonly lives, if possible, nearer to the school to which he sends his children than to his own place of business. It is the children who commonly fix the hour at which he shall dine, and often even what he shall have for his dinner, their health and convenience being consulted before his own. He often goes shabby that they may be well clothed, and sometimes LED BY A CHILD. i37 hungry that they may be well fed. His very home is fm-nished with an eye to them ; and the new carpets or the costly furniture which he would like to have are postponed till the children arc grown up, or the good piano which his wife would hke till the children have got through their practising. Where shall the summer holiday be spent ? is a question in which the children have a potent voice, the casting vote. He would like to go abroad perhaps, and see strange men and strange cities. But he can't afford to take his children with him, and can't bear to leave them at home ; and so summer after summer finds him in the old crowded seaside lodging of which he, poor fellow, has grown weary, or would have grown weary if they were not so dehghted to get back to it. How many a man, too, long after he has laid by enough for himself and his wife, and craves retirement and rest, goes labouring on, either that he may provide for children who caimot provide for themselves, or that he may leave them a little more money when he dies ! How many a man who cannot afford to retire works be- yond his strength, instead of reducing his labour as age creeps on, in order that his children may be better educated than he was or get a better start than he had! In short, no sooner do we consider the point than we find that even those who seem to be living the most free and independent life, and to have 138 LED BY A CHILD. their children in the most perfect control, are really guided and controlled by them, — the whole mode of their life and its ruling aims being determined by the little children T\'hom they seem to lead at their will. The children's health, the children's education, the children's pleasure and amusements, the children's welfare and advance, these are ree.lly the shaping and dominant elements in almost every Christian house- hold. And when the children grow up into young men and women, is it not they who lead the world as once they led their several households ? The ruling and shaping spirit of the world changes with every generation. Without much ado, without spending more thought and trouble on it than it is worth, we cannot even get clothes of the same cut, — the same collars and cuffs and coats and hats — we wore twenty or thirty years ago, nor get our hair, if we have any left, cut in the same fashion. Much less can we think the same thoughts, and cherish the same purposes. Our conceptions of art, of science, of theology, our very modes of speech and action, are all changed. And at whose bidding, pray, if not that of the young? It is they who are our masters, our tyrants ; they who say to us ' Do this ' and we do it, or ' Do that no more ' and we no longer do it. The fact is that we are all in bondage to our children; LED BY A CHILD. 139 they rise up and push us from our wonted seats : we must think as they think, and live as they Hve ; we must move with the moving spirit of Time or we are left stranded and useless, if we are not also openly condemned as behind our time, lagging in the rear and hanging on the skirts, a hindrance to all progress and advance. It is the young who give the tone to the age, who fix the direction in which we travel, and who, to do them justice, achieve the discoveries and reforms which characterize the time. Only as we retain a childlike heart, a heart of youth within us, •will they admit us to their fellowship, or suffer old experience with its prophetic strain to blend with and modify their ardent song. And it is well that it should be so. Their rule, if it be a despotism, is at least a benevolent despotism. It is God who is ruling the world through them, leading the world onward and upward, widening its thoughts, redeeming it from ignorance and selfishness, shatter- ing even good customs so soon as they stiffen into bonds and threaten to enslave and corrupt the world, in order that better customs may come in and a freer larger life. One often hears elderly men say of the young, and say kindly enough ; * Well, well, we have had our day ; let them have theirs.' But that is not sufficient. Like a wise Master- Scribe, God is for ever bringing thuags new, as well as old, out of his I40 LED BY A CHILD. store ; and naturally the new things, if they come from God, are the best, or at least the best for the time. Natm-ally, too, He jDuts the new things into the minds and hearts of the new men, — the young. And, surely, it is strange that we are so slow to recognize the fact that it is God, who is speaking to us through them. Can anything, indeed, be stranger or more unreasonable than this ?— that a man who believes God to be gradually educating the world to a larger pm-er wisdom should hold on to his first thoughts and refuse to believe that God can have better thoughts to give him ! Or tJiis : a man, proud of the ability and promise of his son, endures toil and sacrifice to give him a better education than he had himself, and bids him start where he began ; but no sooner does the young fellow start, and make a little way, and turn round to tell his father what new things he has seen, than his father frowns upon him and wholly declines to admit that he can have seen anything but what had been seen a thousand times before ! How is the world to grow wiser, to become of quicker un- derstanding in the fear of the Lord, if the most ardent and forward-looking spirits of the race are to be no wiser than their fathers were, to discover nothing but what has long been known, and never on any account to see a single inch beyond the paternal nose ? Are we, then, to discrown Age, Experience, Au- LED BY A CHILD. 141 thority, and enthrone Youth, Inexi3erience and In- solence? Are we to listen to ivhatever our children may say, and let them lead us where they will ? By no means. That would be as injurious to them as to us. But we are to realize the fact that God is educating the race ; we are to understand that He is guiding every generation, and conducting it to a point beyond that of the generation which preceded it. We are to believe that it is his method to lead us by our children, while yet we lead them. And, therefore, we are to be sure that in whatever is commonly believed by the cultivated younger men of the day there is at least an element of truth which it will be wise of us to study, whatever the errors and caprices that may be blended with it. This reverence for youth as the new element, the progressive and advancing element, of the world is, I believe, peculiar to Christianity, and even in some measure to the Christianity of the present day. There never was a time, we may be sure, in which parents did not love their children, and were not to a large extent led by them. And yet in that great Eoman Empire into which our Lord was born, the father had power over his grown-up son, power even of life and death. And even among the Jewish race, from which He sprang, the son was at his father's commandment in only a lesser degree. The authority of the man over 142 LED BY A CHILD. the woman, and of the old man over the young, was carried to a frightful and debasing pitch even in those dark middle ages which some, who would be very sorry to have lived in them, still call ' the ages of faith.' And even those of us who can look back forty or fifty years must have heard of, if they cannot remember, a time when a son, even though he were himself the father of a family, did not ventm-e to sit down in his father's ^Dresence until he was bid. It is only of late years that, 'the rights of children' have been recognized. It may be doubted whether, though in some respects the cultus of children is carried too far, the right of the young to think their own thoughts is fully recognized even yet ; whether even in this day we hope and expect that God will reveal Himself in new and larger forms to them, and cause a light to break forth upon them from his Holy Word which was denied to us. And yet only as they see more, and see more clearly, can the world grow in wisdom ; only as they receive a finer and ampler inspiration from above ^can we hope that the world will grow better. 7. *A little child sliall lead them.' These words, as we have seen, refer not simply to the futm-e, but also to the present and the past; they describe a great and common feature of the Kingdom of Christ in every age. But, of course, they do refer to the LED BY A CHILD. 143 future, as well as to the past and the present. There is a iDromise in them even for us who are in the Kingdom of the Holy Child. And the promise is that as the Ivingdom of God comes, in proportion as his will is done on earth as it is done in heaven, we shall he more and more conspicuously led by a little Child ; i.e. we shall be more and more animated by the Child- Spirit, which was, and is, the Spirit of Christ Himself. In proportion as the Kingdom of God comes in us, this great blessing will be ours : in i^roportion as it comes in the luorld, this great blessing will be the icorlcVs. But what is this blessing, and why is it so great ? Well, consider. Consider how /carZess a child is, so that it can play and take liberties with many a fierce creature whose talons or teeth keep you at a respect- ful distance. Consider how innocent a child is as compared with you, and what you would give to be equally clear of stinging memories and impure desires. Consider hoy^ friendly a little child is, responding with smiles and caresses, to every genuine and tender advance. Consider how cheerful it is, with how little it is pleased ; how unworldly, making no distinction between beggar and prince, loving its poor nurse better than the fine lady in all her bravery. Consider how free from care a child is, because it trusts in a wisdom, an ability, a goodness beyond its own — taking no thought for what it shall eat or drink or wherewithal 144 LED BY A CHILD. it shall be clothed. Consider, too, how lordly a child is. Hardly anything strikes one in little children so much as their calm assumption that all the world was made for them, and that all the men and women in it have nothing else, or nothing else so important, to do as to wait on their will and minister to their whims. ' Cry for the moon ' ! Of course the}^ do. What was the moon made for save to comply with their wish and come at their call ? I might cite many more characteristics of the little Child ; but it will be enough if you will only consider these, and compare them with the characteristics of which you are conscious in yom'selves, of which you are at least aware in the men and women about you. You have only to run this contrast in order to see how immense is the blessing promised by the words, 'A little child shall lead them.' Ah, think ; think of the fears by which yon are oppressed, fears for to-day and for to-morrow, fears of the night and of the day, fears for the body and for the soul, fears for yourselves and for those dear to you, — you who were once a fearless child. Think of the sins by which your memory is defiled, of the impm-e cravings by which you are urged and stung, of the amazing difficulty with which you bring your guilt home to yourself and repent of it, — you who were once an innocent child, to whom a fault was terrible, and yet was so easily swept away LED BY A CHILD, H5 by a shower of tears and a mother's forgiving kiss. Think how unfriendly you have grown, insomuch that you suspect almost every strange face and dislike many of the faces you know, not trusting your neigh- bour because you can so little trust yom'self, — you who were once a fi'ank warmhearted child to whom every advance of love was welcome. Think how sad you are, how easily irritated and depressed, how commonly even the brightest day is darkened for you by some foreboding of evil to come, — you who were once so bright and cheerful that all the year seemed summer to you, and all the world was full of hope and joy. Think how worldly you have grown, how selfish, how apt to defer to opulence or position, and to be afraid of being much with the poor, how you long for riches or cleave to them, how you crave distinction or pride yourself on it, — you to whom, when a child, all differences were inward, not outward, natural, not conventional, differences of kindness or unkindness, cleverness or dulness, not differences of wealth or poverty, of high or low degree. Think how careful you are, what burdens you impose on yourself, as if there were none to care for you, or as if God could not provide for to-morrow as well as for to-day, or as if He could not make you rich by poverty, and glad through sorrow, and holy by discipline, and wise by hard and painful experience, — you who, when a little L 146 LED BY A CHILD. child, had so absolute a trust in the love and provi- dence of a man or a woman, father or mother, that care was unknown to you. And, finally, bethink you that, though all things are yours and work together for your good, you often feel as if you could count on nothing, and long for what you liave if you did but know it, and fear and tremble as if neither life were yours nor death, neither things present nor things to come, — you who, when you were a child, claimed the whole universe and dreamed, with Joseph, that sun, moon, and stars did obeisance to you. Think of all this, and then say would it be nothing to you, would it not be all, if you could but get back the simplicity, the fearlessness, the innocence, the friendliness and cheerfulness, the freedom from worldliness and care, the lordship over all things which you once knew; and get them back in even higher forms than those with which you were then familiar? Alas, we may well cry : ^ And, 0, for a man to arise in me,' — the new man, the childlike man, the man formed after the image of Christ, — ' that the man I am may cease to be ! ' For it is to this man, it is to men of this Divine stamp, that the promise is given : ^ A little child shall lead them,' since they too have become * as a little child.' And who that believes that this promise is to be fulfilled in the world at large ; that, through the grace LED BY A CHILD. 147 of God, all men are at last to carry in a manly mind and lieart the spirit of a little child : — who can wonder at the raptures which that divine prospect kindled in the Prophet's breast ? If we compare with the world as it is a world full of little children led by a little Child, a world, that is, full of spiritual men animated by the spirit of Christ, we shall no longer marvel at the songs and fairy tales of prophecy. It will only seem natural to us that in such a w^orld as that the wolf should lie down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid, and the lion eat straw like the ox. To such a race it is but reasonable that God should say : * For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron. I will also make thine officers Peace, and thy governors Eighteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in the land, nor Destruction within thy borders ; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation and thy gates Praise. The sun shall no more be thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee ; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall the moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be thine ever- lasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.' X. THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN, ' But that the dead rise even Moses implied at the evergreen thorn- bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob. But he is not the God of dead men, but of Hving men ; for all live unto him.' — St. Luke xx. 37, 38. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name three men so closely related to each other, and yet so con- spicuously different from each other, as were Abra- ham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham is of the grandest heroic type — heroic in thought, in action, and, above all, in that faith which is the inspiration both of the highest thinking and of the noblest forms of conduct. More than any man of his time, more than most men of subsequent times, he believed in the sacred and august realities of the spiritual world, longed to possess himself of them, and was capable of making any sacrifice, facing any peril, in order that he might live in and by them. On all sides, by all the leading races of mankind, he is held to have been one of the grandest of men ; his heroic stature is admitted ; it is THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN 149 confessed that one of the most noble and momentous roles in the human drama was committed to him. But what a falling off is there in Isaac ! He hardly seems his father's son. Quiet, thoughtful, a lover of ease and good fare, with no genius for action, his very wife chosen for him as if he were incompetent even to marry himself, unable to rule his own house- hold, unable even to die, it would almost seem, when his time was come, he fades out of history years before he slips his mortal coil. His light, such as it was, is lost in his father's greater light ; his story in the more stirring and eventful story of his sons. And yet, unlike to Abraham as he appears, he pro- bably derived at least his thoughtfulness from him. Abraham is so great in action that we too much forget the originality and daring and power of his mind. Yet he who raised himself from the service of the multitudinous and cruel Gods of the ancient East to the worship of the one only and righteous Lord must have been gifted with rare mental powers ; he must have known hours and days of patient and strenuous thought, and must have passed through a long and terrible conflict with doubt. The familiar tradition which represents him as successively wor- shipping the stars, the moon, the sun, and as saying when the stars vanished, the moon waned, the sun set, ' 0 my people ! I like not gods that change and I50 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. pass ; henceforth I turn from these to Him who made the heavens and the earth,' sums up in a striking and memorable form the hahit of bold and patient medi- tation which made Abraham so wise and great in action. And this habit of meditation Isaac seems to have derived from him, though in the son it took a more subdued and placid cast, answering to his less original and less enterimsing nature. Jacob, again, strikes one as unlike both his father and his grandfather. We think of him as timid, selfish, crafty, unscrupulous, with none of the inno- cence of Isaac, little or none of the splendid courage and generosity of Abraham. And yet, obviously, he derives his love of ease and quiet from his father; and, though less obviously yet quite as certainly, he derives his faith in spiritual realities, his craving to possess himself of them at any cost, from his grand- father. He is not free from great faults, like Isaac ; he is not conspicuous for great and rare vh'tues, Hke Abraham : and yet both his father and his grand- father live again in him. Even his craft and duplicity, or at least the germs of them, were in Abraham, though in Inkm we almost overlook them. Twice in his life * the father of the faithful ' exposed his wife to the gravest peril, and bade her lie in order to save him- self from the danger involved in fidelity to truth. And if the sacrifice of Isaac was prompted, as many THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN 151 conclude that it was, by Abraham's desu'e to prove to himself that he loved the Creator more than the creatm-e, and so to save his own soul alive, we may even see in him the very kind of subtlety, that selfish and sinful pursuit of spiritiial gains and ends, which we reprobate in Jacob. Still though, if we look for them, we can trace points of resemblance in the three men, we have to look for them before we discover them ; though we can see the characteristics of Abraham reappearing in his descendants, our first, and perhaps also our last, thought about them is, that they greatly differ from each other, differ so greatly that Isaac hardly seems the son of Abraham, and Jacob hardly the son of Isaac. And what I want you to mark is the grace of God in calling Himself, as He did for moi;e than a thousands years by the mouth of his servants the prophets, the God of each and all of these three men. Different as they were from each other, they are all dear to Him. He has room enough in his heart for them all. That He should call Himself, the God of a man so pure and strong in will as Abraham, a man whose heart was set on aims so noble and lofty, may not surprise us. But that, with equal emphasis. He should call Himself the God of a man like Isaac, who seems hardly to have had any will of his own, and, 152 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. still more, of a man like Jacob, whose will was crooked and perverse, — this surely is a grace which should both surprise and touch our hearts. For, though we may be less innocent, yet which of us is weaker than Isaac was, or more apt to drift on the tide of circumstance ? though we maybe less intensely set on spiritual aims than Jacob was, yet which of us is more selfish, more crafty and ungenerous, more apt to complicate spiritual with temporal aims, or to pursue them in a more crooked disingenuous way ? If God is not ashamed to caU Himself their God, may He not, will He not, be our God too, and train us as He trained them, till all that is weak and selfish and subtle in us is chastened out of us, and we recover the image in which He created us ? Eightly viewed, then, there is a great hope for us and for all men, and a most touching appeal, in the familiar phrase : ' I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' No man, not even Abraham, is so great as to be beyond the need of God's love and care ; and no man is too weak or too mean, not even Isaac or Jacob, to be beyond the reach of his care and love. 2. This is the first thought suggested to us by the passage before us. But there is another lesson in it, — the lesson evolved from this familiar phrase by our Lord Himself. The Pharisees of his time were not THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. 153 content to accept any new truth unless they could find authority for it in the law that came hy Moses. Many truths were floating in the air of their time which were not known hy Moses, or were not dis- tinctly taught hy him, — such truths, for example, as the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and the retribution which follows on the deeds of men in the world to come. The Pharisees would * not admit that such truths as these had been hidden from Moses, or hidden by him ; and hence they found them in his teaching by the common and easy ex- pedient of first putting them there : and that in two ways. First of all, they exposed his writings to what is called a spiritual and figurative interpretation, so bringing out of them what they would. And, then, they supplemented his writings by a vast oral tra- dition, the growth of many centuries, which they affirmed to be an accurate report of what he had said, though he had not taken the trouble of writing it down. Thus, by a double process, they made void the law, substituting the traditions of men for the commandments of God. In a natural reaction against this double method of wresting the plain meaning of the Law, the Sadducees refused both the oral tradition of the Pharisees and their too subtle and ingenious methods of interpre- tation. They themselves held, indeed, that all truth 154 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. was contained in the law of Moses ; they too were unwilling to believe any truths uncertified by him : but they insisted on taking his words in their plain honest sense. And as, taken thus, they found no disclosure in them of the resurrection of the body, or of the life to come, they rejected these doctrines as the inventions of men, as a late and incredible addition to the teaching of Moses. They said to their rivals : * Find us a plain text in Moses which, when honestly read, affirms a -life to come, and we will discuss the doctrine with you ; but till then you have not a foot to stand upon.' And the Pharisees had been unable to meet this challenge. They had searched the writings of Moses for some such text as the Sadducees demanded ; but, so far as I can learn, they had dis- covered none. It is easy, therefore, to imagine their delight when our Lord confounded the Sadducees by adducing such a text. If the text does not seem very plain or conclusive to us, let us remember that it appeared quite conclusive both to the Sadducees and to the Pharisees ; and that even to us it may suggest the very grounds on which the natural hope of im- mortality rests in our hearts. The text our Lord quoted was this : — To Moses at the Bush, — between four and five hundred years, that is, after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were dead — Jehovah had said, * I avi ' — not, I was — ' the God of THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. 155 Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.' But how could He still be the God of these men if they had long been extinct ? He is not the God of dead men, but of living men. The three Patriarchs were very certainly not living in this world when God spoke to Moses. They must, therefore have been living in some other world. Dead to men, they must have been alive unto God. Obviously, then, men do not all die when they die. After death their souls live on. And as for the resurrection of the body, what does that mean but that, as man is compact of body and spirit, if the whole man is to survive the dissolution of death, then to his living soul there must at some time be added a living body ? To us, as I have admitted, this text and the argu- ment founded on it may not seem conclusive. It may sound like a mere verbal quibble ; it may only remind us how little there was in the Old Testament to sug- gest the life to come when even our Lord Himself could find in it no better proof-text than this. I am by no means sure that we do this text justice if we regard it thus. But, however we regard it, we must, I think, admit that it was admirably suited to the purpose for which our Lord adduced it. The Sad- ducees were as rigid and literal in their interpreta- tions of Scripture as the Pharisees, though they were much more honest. They demanded a text which, 156 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. read and interpreted by their own method, affirmed or implied a futm-e life. Christ found them such a text. And the Sadducees have nothing to allege against it, or against his interpretation of it ; while the Pharisees are charmed with it, so charmed that they press round Him to compliment Him on his profound knowledge of the Law and his singular dialectical skill : ' Thou hast ivell said.' And from their point of view, as from that of the Sadducees, He liadj said well. He had convinced them out of their own Scriptures, found the text they had sought for in vain, and produced the very kind of argument that would bite into their minds most deeply since it fell in with their canons and modes of interpretation. 3. Possibly if Christ had been arguing iv'itli us, meeting our doubts and objections. He would also have said well, though He might have uttered very different words and adopted a very different method. But even from these words I believe we may gather real and sure grounds for hope : and that in two ways. (1.) Because our Lord saw in God the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, He inferred that these men could not die ; that even when they did die, they must have lived on unto God. And that after all is, I suppose, the argument or conviction on which we all really base our hope of immortality. Some good and able men doubt, indeed, whether all THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. 157 men are to live for ever. They can find no clear revelation of the natural and inherent immortality of the human soul, either in the structure of the soul itself or in the teaching of the New Testament. But the unsophisticated common sense of the vast majority of men responds to the courage with which the prophet Habakkuk leaps to the conclusion : ' Art Tliou not from everlasting, 0 Lord my God, mine Holy One ? We shall not die.' The eternity of God implies the immortality of man. We cannot, or cannot easily, believe that the Great Father of our spirits has called us into being only that we may cease to be when this saddened and imperfect life is over. It is as repugnant to reason as it is fatal to trust and hope to believe that our Father will leave Himself childless when time shall be no more, or even destitute of human children, or even permit vast multitudes of his children to fade away into nothingness and extinction. We were not made to die, but to live. We have capacities which are not developed, or are only partially developed, when we pass out of this world ; and in these latent capa- cities we find a proof that another and a higher sphere of life and training lies before us. If God be our God, He will not suffer us to perish before our character is formed, while we are still capable of becoming what He would have us be, and of meeting 158 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. his love with ours : and still less will He suffer us to perish when our character is formed, and we stand before Him complete in righteousness and charity, bearing his image, reflecting his glory. What father would let his children perish if he could help it, and be left solitary and alone ? And why should the Father of us all suffer any one of us to be '■ cast as rubbish to the void ' if at least He can make anything better than ' rubbish ' of us ? Because He lives, we shall live also. This is our main ground for hope, for faith, in the life to come ; and this is the ground on which Christ here plants this hope. God is still the God of Abra- ham and of Isaac and of Jacob ; and therefore they cannot be dead ; they must still be alive. (2.) But our Lord at least reminds us by his words of another ground for hojpe. Nature has many sym- bols which speak of a life capable of passing through death, a life which grows in volume, in power, in beauty, by its submission to death. Every spring we behold the annual mu'acle by which the natural world is renewed into a richer lovelier life. Year by year it emerges from its wintry tomb into the fuller and more fruitful life of summer. And I have often thought it a very kindly providence — at least to us on this side the world — which placed the resurrection of Christ, his triumph over death, in the genial spring THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. 159 time that speaks to us by so many voices of a life over which death has no power, save to beautify and enrich it. We may not care to base any very weighty arguments on these deHcate and evanescent yet con- tinually-recurring symbols ; but, nevertheless, they speak to our imagination and our hearts with a force and a winnmg persuasiveness beyond that of logic. The hoj)e of immortality, and even of a resurrection from the dead, has been fed and sustained in myriads of hearts by the symbolism of the gracious spring- tide. x\nd of one of these gracious natural symbols our Lord puts us in remembrance, when He speaks of God appearing to Moses in the Bush. For this bush was a kind of acacia shrub resembling our bramble or our blackberry bush ; but with this notable difference, that it was an evergreen, that its leaves did not wither and fade. And the evergreen, untouched by death and decay, has been regarded by many races as a symbol of the continuous and un- broken life of man, of his proper immortality. So that, in this passage, we have om- main argu- ment for immortahty, "vdz., the pledge imphedin God's eternity, the reasoned and reasonable conviction that BQ long as our Father lives He will not let his children die ; and are also reminded of those natm'al symbols which whisper the hope of immortahty to us with most eloquent and persuasive voices. i6o THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. 4. Finally. Besides the lessons we have already learned from these words— the first, that God is the God of all men, however different from each other they may be; and the second, that God our Father will never let his children die — there is still a third lesson to be gathered from this passage. For surely we may adopt our Saviour's method of argument, and by varying the application of it reach with entire safety a still more recondite conclusion than his. He argues, as we have seen, that since God was still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob long years after they were dead, they cannot be dead, but must be still alive. And what is to hinder us from arguing that, if God is still their God, and they still live unto Him, then God must even now be carrying on the discipline and training which He commenced upon them here, and carrying it on to still larger and happier issues ? If they live, and live unto God, must they not be moving into a closer fellowship with Him, rising to a more hearty adoi)tion of his will, a fuller participation of his righteousness and love ? No one of you will question the validity of such an argument as that, I think. You will all gladly admit that, since he still lives, Abraham must by this time be a far greater and nobler man than he was when he left the earth, and must be engaged in far nobler discoveries and enterprises. You will all admit THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN i6i that, since he still lives, and lives unto God, Isaac has grown more like his father, — less weak, less timid, more capable of action, of authority, of service. You will all be glad to think that, since he also still lives and Hves unto God, Jacob has purged himself of his old sins, has lost every trace of mean and selfish craft, has grown honest, and frank, and bold. And you will all, I trust, gather from this conviction a firmer and more animating hope for yourselves and for one another. For if God be your God, and if when you die to men you will still live unto Him, then your training and discipline will be carried on and com- pleted in the world to come. Your virtues and graces, now so weak and ill-balanced and insecm-e, will gather strength, proportion, certainty; your faults now, as you sorrowfully admit, so many and so heinous and so inconquerable, will gradually fall off from you, until your Father can look into your faces and see in every one of them some fair and perfect, if miniature, reflection of his image. 0, it is a great hope ! a most animating and sus- taining hope ! And if we indulge in it for ourselves, shall we not also cherish it for the world at large ? * Willingly, gladly would we cherish it if we might : but may we ? ' May we not ? I reply. All our hopes of immor- tality, or all at which we have glanced this morning, M i62 THE LIVING GOD OF LIVING MEN. are grounded on the fact that we are God's children, and that therefore He will not let us die, and on the sweet and tender symholisms of Nature which speak of life through death and beyond it. And are not all men God's children as well as we, with capacities not half developed when they pass out of our view ? Does not Nature speak to them with a voice as authentic and tender as that in which she appeals to us? And what says Christ Himself in the very passage before us ? He says : ' God is not the God of dead men, but of living men ; for all (that is, both the dead and the living) live unto Him.' None of us know so much, whether of the will of God, or of the world to come, as Christ knew. You hear what He says, — that all men, even after death, live, live and are trained by the Father of their spirits. Let others limit the scope of his words, if they will ; but as for us, let us wholly and gladly commit ourselves to them, and heartily believe that in ways we know not, by a discipline ' beyond the reaches of our thoughts,' God will not only keep all men in being, but will also quicken and train them unto life everlasting. XI. DEATH AN EXODUS. * And, behold, there were talking with him two men, who were none other than Moses and Elijah ; who appeared in glory, and talked of his exodus which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.' — St. Luke ix. 30, 31. It is difficult to say whether the transfiguration of our Lord is, or is not, to be reckoned among the miracles of the New Testament. If He was what He claimed to be, what those who knew Him best acknowledged Him to be, ' the Son of the Living God,' while we confess his transfiguration to be 'a, sign,' we need hardly account it ' a wonder.' For who has not seen even a homely face transfigured under the stress of some intense and sublime emotion ? Who has not seen the inner beauty of the nature lend a strange exaltation and loveliness even to those whose powers, originally very limited, had been trained and refined by but little culture and a narrow experience ? Where is the wonder, then, if the inner glory of the Perfect Man, who was also ' very God/ should so shine forth i64 DEATH AN EXODUS. at a moment when He was wrapt in a Divine Com- munion, when He was deliberately bracing Himself to give his life a ransom for the world, when, sted- fastly contemplating the end which was to crown his work, his spirit was stirred within Him to its utmost depths ? Where is the wonder, I say, if, under the stress of emotions so profound, 'the fashion of his countenance was altered,' and the inner glory of a nature immeasurably superior to ours shone out, rendering his whole person luminous, irradiating it with a glory so intense that it penetrated the very garments He wore, and made them 'white and glistening ' ? The wonder is, rather, that his glory, 'the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,' could so often, and so long, be suppressed. The Transfiguration, as reported by St. Luke, pre- sents three phases or features. There is, first, the personal glorification of the Man Christ Jesus ; and, second, the apparition of Moses and Elijah; and, third, the utterance of the Divine voice, the testimony borne by the Eternal Father to the character and claims of his beloved Son. It is to the second of these phases, or, rather, it is to a single point in this strange and significant event, that I am about to direct your thoughts. St. Luke's report of it is contained in my text. It is very graphic, very picturesque, though so brief. DEATH AN EXODUS. 165 He opens it 'with the exclamation, ' Behold ! ' to ex- press the suddenness of the Apparition : to express also the surprise with which the Apostles, suddenly wakened from sleep hy the glory that shone round ahout them, became aware that the Man whom they knew and loved was no longer, as they had left Him, alone, but was conferring with Visitants from another and a higher sphere. As if sharing and reflecting the experience of the eye-witnesses of the scene, the Evangelist does not at once name Moses and Elijah. He says only that ' two men ' were talking with Him, — the very form of his phrase implying that they had been talking with Him before the Disciples awoke ; that they awoke only in the middle of a long earnest conference, and were naturally, therefore, dazed and perplexed by what they saw and heard. Then, with a strong accent of surprise, he adds, ' ivlio were,' who proved to be as the talk went on, ' none other than Moses and Elijah ! ' Then, as if to account for the difficulty the Apostles experienced in recognizing men so familiar to their thoughts, he subjoins : ' they ap- peared in glory.' And, finally, he gives us the theme of their conversation : ' they talked of the decease ' literally, of the exodus — 'which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.' In short, if we read it carefully, with a quickened imagination, St. Luke transports us to the very scene, i66 DEATH AN EXODUS. and enables us to share in the awe and perplexity and surprise of those who witnessed it. But here, again, I must limit myself. There is much even in this section of St. Luke's report which we must lay aside and pass by if a manageable topic and an effective impression on our thoughts is to be secured. But there is nothing, I think, in that which we must leave untouched more striking, more sug- gestive, or more consolatory than the new and dis- tinctively Christian idea of death presented to us in the conversation of Moses and EHjah with their Lord and ours. For what it comes to is this : that all three of these august speakers, — that is to say, even if we put it at the lowest, three of the very greatest men in whom our race has flowered, the greatest Law- giver, the greatest Prophet, the greatest Teacher and Saviour — regard death as an exodus; and talk fami- liarly of it under this figure, as if that were the spiritual and heavenly mode of regarding it. Seen from beneath, seen from earth and time, death may be an appalling darkness haunted by terrors of which the loathsome accidents of the tomb are but the faintest type ; but seen from above, seen from heaven and eternity, death is a boon, a joy, an emancipation from the house of our bondage, an exodus or going out, a journey to a large land and a good, a land flowing with milk and honey. DEATH AN EXODUS. 167 This is the conception to which I shall ask you to confine your attention ; for surely, though it be so small a part of the story of the Transfiguration, it is sufficient to engage your thoughts and to illu- minate them with the hues of wonder, joy, and praise, — sufficient even to uphold you in the pros- pect of death, and to comfort you under the pangs of bereavement. 1. And it is strange how much, when we reflect on it, we can find in that great scene *on the holy Mount ' to illustrate this conception, and to impress it on our minds. Look, first, at the speakers — Moses, EHjah, Christ. Was not the death of Moses an exodus? A sacred mystery hangs over the decease of Hhe Man of God.' All we are told of it in Holy Writ is that, while his ' eye was not dim nor his natural force abated,' the Lord took him up into a mountain to die, and buried him in the untrodden recesses of a lofty mountain-valley undiscovered, un- discoverable even to the searching and inquisitive eye of love, so that * no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.' The whole world has felt that his death is wrapt in impenetrable mystery, that he did not die as others die. And the Jewish rabbis, striving to penetrate that mystery, fondly fable that, when Moses saw the grave which the Lord had prepared for him, he trembled to enter it; and that in his com- 1 68 DEATH AN EXODUS. passion Jehovah promised that, if he would stretch himself in it, He, Jehovah, would kiss him on the mouth and draw his soul out of him in that supreme embrace. ' He who died by the kiss of the Eternal' is a not infrequent synonym for Moses in the Eabbinical schools. But, whatever the mode of his death, the Church has always and naturally believed that Moses, or the spirit of Moses, was instantly translated to the very presence of the Almighty ; that, like Enoch, ' he was not, because God took him ' to Himself. Elijah, again, was rapt, we are told, and carried up into heaven, as by a whirling cloud of fiery chariots, — the fire symbolizing, I suppose, the purification which even his great and burning spirit required before it could be admitted to the Divine Presence ; and the swift chariots and still swifter whirlwind the immedi- ateness, the instantaneousness, of the process by which he was purified, transfigured, made meet to take his place among the saints in light. If, therefore, any of the sons of men should be permitted to pass from the spiritual world to hold converse with Christ in the moment of his glory, these were the ' two men ' whom we should expect to hear talking with Him on the Mount ; and that not only because they were the most illustrious of his predecessors in the great work of teaching and saving the world, but also because they had already and DEATH AN EXODUS. 169 fully achieved the exodus or journey of death, and had passed into the large fair land beyond. ' They talked with him of the exodus he should accompHsh at Jerusalem.' Did they talk with Him for our learning alone, or also for their own, and even for his ? It would be to rob the scene of all force and naturalness and dignity were we to conceive of it as an histrionic performance, a spectacle arranged simply for our instruction. Let us be sure, therefore, that Moses and Elijah gained much from their communion with Him, and that even He gained much from his communion with them. It is not well or wise to draw sharp lines of distinction between Heaven and earth, or even between God and the men who are made in his image and likeness, as though they were far off from each other, divided by impassable gulfs, or even by gulfs so wide and deep that they are rarely passed. Heaven lies all about us, and may be within us. God is not far from any one of us ; in many of us, I trust. He has taken up a constant and eternal abode. If the Man Christ Jesus could be strengthened by an angel out of heaven, why should He not be both strengthened and comforted by 'the spirits of just men made perfect,' of men gifted and honoured as Moses and Ehjah had been and were ? They must have had much to tell Him of their experience of death, of how they had found it but a brief fiery I70 DEATH AN EXODUS. passage to the Eternal Love and Home. And why should not they, while strengthening and comforting Him by recounting their own strange and glorious experience, have also learned much from his larger wisdom, his diviner and more glorious doom ? He was to pass into the upper world by the way of the Cross, not in state and splendour, but in humiliation and pain ; not in a whirlwind and chariots of fire as one whom God delighted to honour, but on the ac- cursed tree, as one abandoned by God, as one whom even men rejected and despised. He was not to die * by the kiss of the Eternal,' nor was He to be buried by the hands of Jehovah, but to be killed by *his own ' who would not let Him save them, and to be laid in a grave He owed to the kindness of a friend who was so little of a friend that he would not confess Him before men, by the hands of men and women who were even less to the world than He Himself. And as they talked together of this strange, agonizing, shameful ' decease,' might not Elijah well learn that there was a still more excellent glory than that of being carried up into heaven by the chariots of God ; that to renounce such a triumphant exodus from this world of sin and strife, to condemn oneself to die in ignominy, amid the execrations of men and the hiding of the Father's face, in order that the strife of the world might be composed and its sin taken away, was DEATH AN EXODUS, 171 still nobler, far more heavenly and divine, than to be taken up to God and leave the world to its fate ? Might not Moses learn that to be made sin for sinful men, to pass out of the world with every sign of being forsaken of God and hated by man, was an end, an exodus, still more sublime than to die ' by the kiss of the Eternal ' and to be mourned for ' for thirty days ' by a bereaved and inconsolable world ? And what shall we learn from the exodus accom- pHshed at Jerusalem? We may learn from it all that Moses and Elijah learned, and more. For if we possessed only the record of their last end, though we might see that to them death was but a joyful exodus from bondage, fi'om the hampering conditions of time and sense, into the large freedom and abiding peace of the better country, even the heavenly; yet how could we hope that ice should be called to take the path they trod and share the honour conferred on them ? We could not expect it ; nor, enormous and all-pervading as is our conceit of ourselves, could we account ourselves worthy either to die by the kiss of God and be buried by his hands, or to have his chariots sent down to convey us to his high abode. But when we consider the exodus of Christ — his death of shame, desertion, reproach — then we may surely take heart for ourselves. For in Him we are taught that no conditions can be so mean and painful, no 172 DEATH AN EXODUS. death so lonely and clouded, but that it may be, if we will and if God will, a glorious emancipation from all evil, a sublime and triumphant journey to the peace- ful and fi'uitful land of which God Himself is the Sun and the Shield. It was not in state, but in great humility, not in honour but in shame, not in the embrace of God but ' forsaken ' by God, not wept and bewailed by men but reviled and cursed by men, that the Lord Jesus set out on the great pilgrimage which we too must soon take ; and yet He was, and is, the one true Victor over death and the grave. His death was the most noble, the most heroic, the most far-reach- ing and blessed in its influences that the world has ever seen or will see ; for He died from pure love to men, died to take away the sin of the world, died that we and all men might live. And if we love and follow Him we need not doubt that we shall be ' made partakers of his death ' in this high sense, — that for us, as for Him, death will be an exodus, a journey home. If those whom we loved, and love, but have lost for a while, were humble followers of Him, we need not doubt that, as they shared in his humiliation, so also they will, and do, share in his glory ; that for them the journey is over, that they have arrived in that great home in which a place is being prepared for us, and in which, therefore, we shall be reunited to them for ever. DEATH AN EXODUS, 173 Let no man fear death, then. Let no man weep for the dead. It is life, rather, that we ought to fear. It is for ourselves that we need to weep, and for what we have lost in losing them. 2. The more we study this conception of death the more instructive and suggestive we shall find it to he. As I have already said, we cannot but assume that if, on an occasion so sacred and by personages so illustrious, death was spoken of as an exodus, this figure must be taken as indicating one of the most spiritual and adequate conceptions of death our thoughts can grasj). And I suppose that the event, the illustration which this figure first suggests to all our minds, and which it was intended to suggest, is the exodus of Israel from Egypt. But if we consider what that exodus was and implies, if we then proceed to infer that death will be to us very much what their exodus was to the captive Hebrew race, we shall reach some thoughts of death, and of the life that follows death, which can hardly fail to be new and helpful to us. The exodus from Egypt was a transition from bondage to freedom, from grinding and unrequited toil to comparative rest, from ignorance to knowledge, from shame to honour, from a life distracted by care and pain and fear to a life in which men were fed by the immediate bounty of God, guided by his wisdom, 174 DEATH AN EXODUS. guarded by his omnipotence, consecrated to his ser- vice. And if death be an exodus, if that is the truest and highest conception of it we can frame, then we may say that, by the gate and avenue of death, we shall pass from bondage to freedom, from toil to rest, from shame to honour, from ignorance to knowledge, from a life too often conditioned by care and pain and fear to a life which God Himself will guide and cherish and protect ; and, in fine, to a life in which we shall be drawn into immediate and habitual fellowship with Him. Then, too, we may and must believe that the friends who have left us, dying in the faith of Christ, have already passed into the ampler happier con- ditions which death will bring to us when we follow them from this world to the next. The very word exodus, therefore, as applied to death, when used as a synonym of death, throws what to many minds is a new, what to all our minds is a most welcome and auspicious, light into the darkness whether of dis- solution or of bereavement. It is impossible for us to stedfastly regard death in this light without feeling how blessed are the dead who have died in the Lord ; without feeling also that, though life must be good for us so long as God bids us live, death will be better still because it will conduct us to a better life. It ought to make new men of us that, being delivered from that fear of death which hath torment, we can press reso- DEATH AN EXODUS. 175 lutely on to the end of our course, knowing that what we call our * last end ' will really be the beginning of a new and happier course. And it is with no desire to limit and restrain the strength and joy which such a conception of death must naturally kindle in your hearts, it is rather with a desire to enhance and complete your joy in it, that I ask you to bear in mind that, after the exodus, nay, even after they were at home in the goodly land, the men of Israel did not cease to learn, nor cease from labour, nor sink into any mere easy and slothful delight. Even when they were in the land that flowed with milk and honey, to eat honey and drink milk was not their sole, nor even their main, employ. On the contrary, they had never learned so much, never laboured so hard, never grown so fast in the know- ledge and obedience of the Divine Will. And, in like manner, we may be sure that the journey of death will land us in no easy ignoble Paradise, in which all real advance will have come to a close, where we may lie on, grassy meads and pluck a new fruit every month from the tree that grows in the midst of the garden. No such lazy and degrading Eden could satisfy us for a moment, or for more than a moment. It is the very joy and charm of the Christian heaven that it will yield an ampler scope to all our powers ; that we shaU be still and for ever acquainting our- 176 DEATH AN EXODUS. selves more fully with the works and wonders of God, still and for ever growing into a more complete and sustained harmony with his will, still and for ever developing and exercising new energies and faculties for serving Him in serving our fellows. The sweetest moments of our life on earth have been spent in acquiring knowledge, in learning wisdom, in shewing love and recei-vdng it, in active enterprises to benefit our neighbours, and in the consciousness that we were serving and pleasing God our Father in all we learned and achieved. And it would be but a poor tale if we had to leave these pure and supreme joys behind us when we die. So far from leaving them behind us, we shall continue to enjoy them in purer nobler forms, being made like to those happy angels who excel in strength because they do the command- ments of God and hearken to the voice of his word. Tlfiis, then, is the Christian conception of death : that it is an exodus to the land of life eternal, in which land all that is fair and good here will be seen and enjoyed in its ideal forms. When men come to us and ask : 'What is death ? and what lies beyond it ? ' we are not driven to reply, ' Death is the end of all ; you must look for nothing beyond it save to be cherished in the memory and affection of those whom you leave behind you.' And if we are not driven to the despair of that Atheism which doubts whether life is DEATH AN EXODUS. 177 worth living and is quite sure that the grave is our goal, so neither are we limited to the narrow and irrational forecasts of many who are of the household of faith. We need not and cannot reply: ' Death will take you to a land of indolent and sensual dehghts in which, clothed in white and wearing a golden crown, you will wander through shady groves and beside purling streams, singing sweet songs and striking the sounding harp, incurious of all that may lie beyond, untroubled by the trouble of the lost.' We can appeal to all that is manly, to all that is highest, most loving, most noble and heroic, in the nature of man, and assm-e them that the narrow avenue of death will open out into a land in which they will for ever be learning new lessons of larger wisdom, for ever culti- vating and developing all pure and noble energies, faculties, affections, for ever finding some new task m which they may at once serve their fellows and worship the God who is the Lord because He is the Minister of all. Into that happy land may God gather us all in his good time ; and, in the meantime, grant that the promise and hope of an exodus into it may pluck the sting fi'om death, and lend a new sanctity and a new beauty to the life we now live in the flesh. XII. ON SEEVma GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. ' For then will I turn to the nations a pure lip, that they may all invoke the name of the Lord, and serve him with one shoulder.' Zephaniah iii. 9. ' Then ' / When ? In the day, as we learn from the previous Verse, in which God has risen up to pour out all the heat of his fury on the nations and kingdoms of the earth, until ' the whole earth be consumed by the fire of his zeal.' Now there is no question which more frequently and deeply frets our hearts than this : What is the meaning, what the intention, of the innumerable miseries by which we are tormented ? What is the true function of the sufferings of which the world is full ? And there is no answer to that question which more commends itself to men who have had long and thoughtful experience of human life than this : The miseries of men are intended to purify and elevate them, to make them perfect; springing from their sins, they are designed to correct their sins, and to lead them to the love and pursuit of righteousness. ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 179 It would seem that God deals with us as the gold- smith deals with virgin ore. When the smith takes a piece of fine gold in hand that he may work it into iirtistic form and heauty, he tempers it with an alloy, and thus makes it hard enough to endure 'the file's tooth and the hammer's rap' and the keen edge of the graver. When the work is done, when the vessel is duly moulded, chased, emhossed, he washes it in ' the proper fiery acid,' which eats out the base alloy, and leaves the pure gold untouched. No grain of the precious metal is lost; but its value is indefinitely -enhanced by the artistic labour bestowed upon it. And thus God deals with us ; thus He moulds our nature, in which the pure heaven-derived spii'it is blended with the alloy of the baser ' carnal mind,' into ' vessels of honour.' The miseries and calamities which come upon us are but as the edge of the graving-tool, the rap of the hammer, the grating teeth of the file. By these He gradually and pa- tiently carries out his conception of us, his purpose in us. And, at last, like the fiery acid which separates the base alloy from the pure gold, death comes to divide the carnal in us from the spiritual, and to reveal the beauty and value of the character which the Divine Artist has wrought in and upon us. ' Cure sin, and you cure sorrow,' say the reason and the conscience of man. And, the sorrow comes i8o ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. that the sin may he cured, adds the Word of God. The miseries that spring from sin are intended to eradicate the sins from which they spring. All the fire of God's wrath against evil is to be poured out on the nations in order that He may ' turn to the nations a pure lip,' and lead them to serve Him ' with one shoulder.' The Mercy of Judgment, then, is the Prophet's theme in the Yerse before us. He is sure that God's intention in punishing men is to redeem them from their insincerities, their idolatries, their impurities ; to work in them a pure heart, for ' out of the abun- dance of the heart the lip speaks,' and to draw them into that service in which alone they can truly rest. And he states his thesis in terms so bold and large as to warn us against a too literal interpretation of the words of isolated Scriptures. Bead the eighth Verse of this Chapter as many read those passages in which the future punishment or destruction of the impenitent is affirmed, and what room do you leave for the gracious assurance of Verse nine ? In the former Verse you read of an indignation, a fierce anger, to be poured out on *the nations,' and 'the kingdoms,' of a fire in which * all the earth ' shall be devoured or consumed. What words could seem more final and conclusive? what words could more em- phatically teach the jUtter and universal destructioik ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 181 of the whole sinful race ? And yet, in the very next Verse, we learn that this terrible, and apparently final, destruction is to issue in ilic reclemiitloii of the whole race to the love and service of God — all men are to have a pure lip, all to serve the Lord with one shoulder ! Let us be careful how we read the Scrip- tures, then; let us read them with the spirit and with the understanding, and not after the mere letter : let us read them as a whole, looking for the large general principles they contain, and not drawing out momentous doctrines from the narrow apertures of scattered or isolated texts. But it is to the image of the final clause of my text — and they shall serve God ivith one shoulder — that I wish mainly to direct your attention. It is a very simple image or illustration, but it will yield us ample themes for thought. The image the Prophet had in his mind was that of a number of men bearing a single bm-den. If they are to bear it without strain or distress, they must walk vdih even or level shoulders, no one of them shii'king his part of the task, each of them keeping step with the rest : in short, they must stand and move as if they had but ' one shoulder ' among them. Only thus can they move freely and happily, and make the burden as little burdensome as possible to each and to all. This image, taken from common 1 82 aV SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. life, picked up, as it were, in the streets or highways, the Prophet transfers to the moral and spiritual do- main. The law of God is a hurden which all men have to bear ; it rests on the shoulders of the whole world. Men can only hear it without strain or dis- tress of spirit as each of them freely assumes it, as they all help each other to hear it, as they pace to- gether under it with a willing and happy consent of obedience. It is for this end that w^e are judged and corrected of the Lord, viz., that we may serve Him with one shoulder, and thus make his yoke easy and his burden light. Three thoughts are suggested by this image : (1) That the Divine Lavv^ is a burden which men are reluctant to assume ; (2) that the true freedom con- sists in a willing assumption of this burden, a cheer- ful and unforced obedience to the Divine Law : and (3) that the happiness of obedience depends on its unanimity and universality ; when all obey, obedience will be easy to all. (1.) The Laiv of God is a hurden icliicli men are reluctant to assume. Is not that true ? Does it need proof? Is it not notorious that of those who know and approve that law many decline to obey it, to make it the regulative power of their lives; while even those who are most profoundly convinced that the will of God, as expressed in his law, is a good and ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 18-, kind will, a will which moves in the light of an eternal Wisdom at the prompting of an infinite Love, too often fail in their obedience and prefer their own will to his ? Do not we ourselves find it hard to cross om- wills, though we know them to be erring and imperfect wills, driven to and fro by gusts of passion and caprice, in order to adopt the pui-e and stedfast Will that rules the miiverse ? It is hard — hard even when that W^ill assumes its most gracious and inviting forms. The will of God is never so full of grace and attraction for us as when it is incarnated in the life of the man Christ Jesus, and breathes through the words of Him who came * to publish to mankind the law of love.' When He who laid down his life for us says, ' Do this,' then, if ever, we try to do it. And yet even then it is hard. He Himself felt that it would be hard for us. In some of the tenderest words that fell from his lips He cried : 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' But the rest He has to offer is, after all, the rest of obedience. And this obedience, or the law we are to obey. He admits to be a yoke to om' unruly passions, a hiirden to our stubborn necks. All he pleads is that his yoke is the easiest of yokes, his burden the lightest of burdens ; and that b}^ patiently enduring them we shall infallibly find rest to our souls. 1 84 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. And to our selfwill it is hard, and cannot but be hard, to submit even to the purest and tenderest will. Take any of the most distinctively Christian precepts, and you will see at once that, reasonable and beauti- ful as they are in themselves, there is nevertheless that in us which resents and rebels against them. Jjove them that hate you; Bless them that curse you; Do good to them that injure you; Forgive them that trespass against you : these are among the command- ments which we have received of the Lord. They simply express ruling principles of his own daily life. As we listen to them we consent to them as good ; as we see them incarnated in the lovely deeds of his perfect life we cannot sufficiently admire them. We can see that, were all men to obey them, heaven would come down to earth. We sigh and yearn for the time in which they will receive an universal obedience. But, none the less, we ourselves find it hard, almost impossible, to obey them to-day. W"e delight in the law of Christ after the inward man ; but we find another law in our members, warring against the law of our mind. And how can we enter into ' rest ' while this strife in our natm-e is main- tained, while by the flesh we are drawn toward ' the law of sin,' and by the spirit toward * the law of the Spirit of life ? ' We can only find rest as we impose a yoke on the flesh with its passions and lusts, and ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 185 compel them to bear the burden of obedience to the higher law. In the flesh, or in the spirit, we inuU suffer. The only option before us is — in which ? If the flesh conquer, the spirit groans and strives in a defeat which it will never acknowledge to be final ; if the spirit conquer, the flesh n'lll at times break out into flat mutiny and rebellion. In either case it is VjC who suffer; it is our spirit that frets in dis- honom-able and intolerable bondage, or it is our flesh that rebels against the yoke of the spirit. Of course it is the flesh which ought to be subdued and made to serve. But that is a dreary household in which the servants are for ever trying to elude our vigilance, to thwart our will, to injure om* best and dearest interests. And that is a dreary life in which * the mind of the flesh,' all in us that holds by the visible and the temporal, has to be incessantly watched, coerced, held in with bit and bridle, lest it should debase and injure us. In such a life there can be no freedom, no dignity, no peace. The sjpirit, which has to maintain a sleepless vigilance and endeavour, is well-nigh as much a slave as the flesh which it watches. It can know no security, find no repose. What shall we do, then, what can we do, that we may enter into rest ? Shall we let the flesh have its way ? Or, to put the question more fairly, shall we i86 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. let these weak wavering wills of ours be the sport of the impulses, now good and now evil, which rise within us, and try to be content with yielding at one time to the flesh and at another time to the spirit ? So base a content is, happily, impossible to us. We cannot be content wiiile there is division, discord, in our life, while we are torn by conflicting impulses. We must get unity into our life, we must have one ruling aim to which all other and inferior aims are subordinated, before we can be at peace. (2.) Nay, more : we must get freedom into our life if we are to get peace : and ive can only attain freedom as, with cheerful and unforced accord, ive assume the burden of the Divine Laiv, doing the will of God from the heart. Sooner or later self-will makes us hateful both to ourselves and to our neighbom's. It renders us incapable both of social, and of spuitual, life. Let a man follow the vagrant and fluctuating im- pulses of his own complex nature, acknowledging no higher will than his own, no law which he is bound to obey, and he becomes a burden to himself and to all about him. You can see it at once in extreme cases. Let a lad thmk only of himself, of his own preferences and pleasures ; let him take his own way, and insist on taking it even when, in order to take it, he must thwart the will of his parents, and make himself the tyrant of his schoolfellows and playmates ; ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. iS; let liim strut, and domineer, and rebel, tlie mere fool of Lis o^vn cai^rice, the mere toy of his o^vn Avhims and cravings, and you see at once that, in asserting his freedom, he has sunk into a cruel bondage ; that, in seeking pleasure, he has made himself utterly miserable. His very goodness is not good, because there is no law in it, and therefore no stabihty. His very love is all but worthless, for it is the offspring of caprice, and changes with his changing mood. And a wilful man is at least as much a slave as a wilful lad, and as great a nuisance. You cannot count on him. He cannot even count on himself. Till he curtails his natui-al liberty, he has no true liberty. Till he cheerfully yields to the restraints and respects the sanctions of law — the law of the land, the laws of business and of social intercourse — he is for ever clashing with his neighbours, for ever coming under their censure and incurring the penalties by which they enforce respect for established order and rule. He cannot make himself lord of the whole world. He cannot impose his will on his fellows and rivals, who consider that they have as clear a right to their will as he to his. Any man who sets himself against the world will soon find that the world has even a stronger will than he, and is more competent to enforce it. We must take up some burden, then. We must bear some yoke. We must submit to some i88 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. law on pain of finding our hand against every man's, and every man's hand against us. Here, again, only one option is before us. We can- not say that we will yield to no law ; that choice is not open to us. All we can do is to choose the law to which we will yield. And if we take counsel only of reason and experience, even these will teach us that the law of God — and the law of man in so far as it expresses the will of God — is the Jaw which it will be wise of us to accept. For, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, this is the law which really rules in human affairs. Other laws, adverse to the will of God, may gain a passing vogue and authority ; but in the end, in the long run, the will of God prevails, and must prevail, over all the wills and laws and customs of men. So that, if we would enter into a true security and an enduring rest, we must make his will our will. . And even then our task is not complete. It is not enough that we yield to the will of God; we must heartily and cheerfully adopt it if we are to be free. Not only must we see that it will be prudent of us to make his will our law, since at last his will must be done ; we must also passionately love that will if, in obeying it, we are to walk at liberty. For, as we have seen, obedience involves self-denial, self-sacrifice. To adopt another will than our own, to defer to it, to ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER, 189 cross our passions and desires that we may keep it, is to bear a burden wliicli will often seem heavy to us, to come under a yoke that will often seem hard. There is but one way in which we can make the hard yoke easy, and the heavy burden light. And, happily, it is a way with which we are all familiar ; it is the excellent way of charity, of love. What pain will not a mother cheerfulty endure for the sake of her child, even taking the strangest pleasure in the sacri- fices she makes for it ? What burden of toil and care will not the husband cheerfully carry for a beloved wife ? When a true and pure affection has been kindled in the soul, the most difficult tasks grow easy. The most sacred of bonds is the very gate of liberty. And hence the incarnation and ministry of Christ are of such inexpressible value to us. The law of God never shews so fair as when we see it embodied in Him. The will of God is never so gracious and winning as when it flows from his lips. Apart from Him we learn, in time, that God's will must be done — to our hurt or to our advantage, in om' condemnation or in our salvation. But, in Him, we learn that God's will is our salvation, that He loves us with an everlasting love, and can never cease to seek our welfare. And we love Him who so loved us as to live, and teach, and die for our instruc- tion and redemption. Loving Him, we love the Will I90 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. He lived to do, and which He entreats us to do. That Will becomes beautiful to us, preferable to our own. It was obedience to that Will which made Christ what He was ; and if obedience to that Will will make us like Him, how can we but resolve to do it at any cost ? How can we fail to take delight in the labours and sacrifices by which we are conformed to Him and made partakers of his divine nature ? Thus we take up our freedom. We ^ walk at large ' precisely because we ' keep his commandments.' Love makes the burden light, the yoke easy ; and, because we bear them willingly, we find rest to our souls. (3.) But even so om* rest is not perfect. We have become a law unto ourselves by om- cheerful adoption of the will of God. We are free, therefore. But it does not follow that, because we are free we are also happy. The happiness of ohedience depends largely on the unanimity and the universality of the ohedience. Constrained by love, we gladly put our shoulder to the burden ; but it is only when ' all ' men serve God with one shoulder that all sense of distress and effort will pass away. And that for two reasons. If we really love God and his law, we must also love men and yearn that they should keep his law. Till they share our freedom, it cannot be an alto- gether happy freedom. And, again, till they love ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 191 Him and do his will, they will put many hindrances in our path, strew in it many stones of stumbling and rocks of offence which cannot fail to make obedience difficult and painful to us. Without them we cannot be perfect. As yet, so to speak, the burden may press unduly on our shoulders because our neigh- bours do not faithfully bear their part of it ; or because they are morally shorter than we are, or even because they are morally taller, or because they do not keep step with us. Only when the whole race stands under the burden as wdth one shoulder, and moves under it as with one foot, will all consciousness of the Divine Will as a burden disappear. Then, when our hearts are no longer torn with pity for the disobedient, and our progress is no longer impeded by the hindrances and temptations they cast in our way, the freedom of our obedience will become a happy freedom, and God's statutes will become oui- song in the house of our pilgrimage. In this present world, at the stage we have reached as yet, much of the toil and distress of obedience arises from *the contradiction of sinners.' Not only have we to bear other men's burdens as well as our own, not only have we to strain at the yoke for them as well as for ourselves ; we have also to encounter their opposition, the scorn and contempt they feel, or affect, for those who live above the world and the 192 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. world's law, and the temptations by which they seek to lure us from the path of duty. Would that were all ! But, alas ! the Church, as well as the world, is often against us. Even those who gather in ' one place ' are not always of ' one accord.' Even those who are of ' one heart ' are not always of ' one way.' If at times we brace ourselves to a difficult course of duty, or resolve to speak the whole truth we know at all risks, or decide to serve God rather than man at all costs, it too often happens that the very first to meet us with counsels of pru- dence are of ' the household of faith.' If we are reso- lute, and ivill speak or do what we take to be God's will, they leave us to walk alone, to bear our burden alone, even if they do not add to the burden of obe- dience the still heavier burden of their opposition and dislike. The yoke galls us, not only because they will not put their necks to it, but also because they will fling their whole weight upon it, and make it almost too heavy to be borne. We have to carry them as well as our own proper burden. And thus our obedience is made so hard and painful to us that, were it not for the Father who seeth in secret and secretly upholds us, we should inevitably faint under the too heavy load. We have the freedom, but not the peace and happiness, of a divine service. But when the Church serves God with one shoulder. ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 193 and, still more, when all *tlie nations' serve Him with one shoulder; when the gracious promise is fulfilled : ' I will give them one heart and one ivay, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them and of their children after them,' then, at last, the effort and the pain of obedience will be over, and we shall serve God with unbroken gladness because we and all men serve Him with a single and a perfect heart. Even what is called * an enlightened selfishness,' then, might well inspire us to take our full share in all endeavours to bring men, at home and abroad, to a saving knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, since we cannot enter into our full peace and joy until the whole family of man has taken up the yoke and burden of Christ. That is a poor motive and inspiration, however, for so noble a work, and I will not urge it upon you ; for I trust you would still labour and yearn for the salvation of men even if you knew that when they took up the burden of obedience to the Divine Will, that burden would press still more painfully upon you. The true motive, the high motive is, that God, who is saving you, desires and intends the salvation of the whole world ; that He pom's out the indignation of his wrath on the evils which corrupt and degrade men only that He may create a clean heart and renew a right spirit within them ; that He ' consumes ' only that He may redeem 0 194 ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. the nations and the kingdoms. Let this picture hang in the study of your imagination, then, as an incentive to zeal in evejy good Tvord and work, — the picture of a world searched through and through by pmifying fire in order that God may turn to the nations a pure lip, that they may all invoke his Name, and serve Him as with one shoulder. If that will not at once reconcile you to the mercy of his judgments and stimulate yom- zeal in his service, I know not what will. One word more and I have done. Who are those whom you most admire, in whom you recognize most of the spirit of Christ ? Are they not the gentle and refined women who leave happy homes of which they are the light and joy to minister to the wants of the poor, the vicious, the suffering ; who pass like minis- tering angels through the foul alleys of our great cities, or through the infected vrards of hospitals, or through the carnage and perils of the camp, that they may carry succour and comfort to the wounded, the hopeless, the down-trodden, the diseased? Are they not the men who abandon all they love to announce the good news of eternal life to savage or brutalized races, to dwell with whom must be a kind of hell to their godly and sensitive spirits ? And when these men and women die, killed before their time by their zeal and the horrors they have had to ON SERVING GOD WITH ONE SHOULDER. 195 face in the service of their Master, and are taken to dwell with Him m heaven, can their natures suffer a change so gross that they will no longer pity the sinful, the outcast, the miserable, the lost ? Can you believe that Florence Nightingale, WilHam Knibb, John WilUams, William Carey, David Livingstone, will be so absorbed in their own felicity that they will turn no single thought of pity on the poor souls down there in the pit and place of torment, and never once ask that they may go and share their pain in order that they may comfort them in their misery and teach them the secret of a nobler higher life ? Talk of ' dangerous doctrine ' ! What doctrine can be so dangerous as that which depicts a heaven which no man of a humane and noble spirit, no woman with a kindly pitiful heart, would care to enter, a heaven which makes us less merciful, less loving, less self- sacrificing than we are now ? A depraving heaven ! a heaven which makes men more selfish and not less selfish, the worse and not the better— who can believe in that, when the very earth itself is to be all flooded with righteousness and love and peace ? XIII. WHY WE SUFFER. ' No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, Justice suffereth not to live.' — Acts xxviii. 4. I DO not know that this exclamation would have been less impressive, it certainly would not have been less natural, had the Maltese of St. Paul's time been * barbarians ' in our sense of the word. But they were not. Three civilisations at least had left their traces on the island, — that of Phoenicia, that of Carthage, and that of Rome. ' Barbarians,' as applied to them, meant no more than foreigners. They were a ' barbarous people ' only in the sense in which St. Paul defines the term when he writes: * If I know not the meaning of the language, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.' They were barbarians only in the sense in which we should be barbarians in France or Germany if we did not understand the language spoken by the people among whom we sojourned. IVHV WE SUFFER. 197 The fact is that the conviction they expressed was universal. Neither barbarism nor civilisation had anything to do with it. It sprang from one of the primitive instincts of humanity. All men every- where held that suffering implied sin, special suffering special sin. A Jew, no less than a pagan, a Koman, or a Greek, would have jumped to the same conclusion with these islanders of Malta, had they seen the venomous beast fasten on the hand of a man who had only just escaped shipwreck by the skin of his teeth. I doubt whether there was a man then on the earth who would not have thought or said : ' Justice suffereth not this man to live, though he has just escaped death.' The very Apostles themselves, over a much less striking and dramatic instance than this, asked : 'Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blmd ? ' And I am by no means sure that any modern advance of thought has eradicated, or will eradicate, the stubborn instinct which teaches men to connect suffering with guilt, and even to see a Divine judgment in every adverse and painful acci- dent. Even the most advanced thinkers admit, not only that there is some connection between sin and suffering, but also that the connection is one of cause and effect : while the great mass of men, who neither think nor theorise, instinctively associate the two and look for hidden guilt wherever they see conspicuous 198 JVHV WE SUFFER. punishment. Even if we question the po^Dular con- clusion, or if we hold it only in a modified form, we shall readily grant that it is a natural and primitive instinct which leads men to connect the inward sin with the outward suffering, and that it is only by a resolute use of our reasonmg faculty that we have been able to control it. Admitting the instinct, we ought also to admit its testimony. For, sm^ely, when Conscience insists on tracing human suffering to human sin, it bears a weighty testimony to truths of the utmost value. "We are so made and so bred, it would appear, that we can- not, without a supreme effort, attribute the ordering of events to Chance or Accident. We feel instinctively that a Divine Nemesis manifests itself both in the order of the world at large and in the lot of individual men ; and that, though our sins may be hidden from our fellows, or even praised by them, there is a Power in heaven which detects and will surely punish them. Before a man can get rid of this wholesome religious comdction — which does not in the least answer to Miss Bevington's ignorant and insulting definition of Ee- ligion as * spiritual cakes and ale ' — he must both unmake and remake himself : and even when he has thus radically changed himself, he will be very apt, despite the prevalent petticoat positivism, to revert to his original type. IVHV ]VE SUFFER. 199. For the conviction is a true one, though it often assumes questionable forms. It is true that all suffering springs from sin and bears witness against it, though it is not true either that we can always trace the suffering to its cause, or that the effects of a sin are always confined to the person who commits it. St. Paul traces death, for example, to sin ; yet not every man's death to every man's sin. On the contrary he argues, — one sinned, all died. And it is at this point that men are apt, and always have been apt, to go wrong. The broad fact is true, that sm is the cause of suffering. But, like all large facts, it is capable of many interpretations. And men have commonly mis- interpreted it. They have not been content to say : ' Sin is the cause of which suffering is an effect.' That is not sufficiently definite and precise. And so they have assumed that they can invariably trace the physical effect to its immediate ethical cause, and that the cause is invariably to be found in the conduct of those who suffer the effect. You know how im- possible it was for our Lord Himself to dislodge these assumj)tions from the minds of the men of his own day. ' Suppose ye, ' He said, ' that these Galileans were sinners above all the Gahleans because they suffered such things?' Yes, that was exactly what they did suppose, and what they continued to suppose notwithstandmg his 'I tell you. Nay.' Again He 200 IVHY IVE SUFFER. asked : ' Or these eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt here in Jerusalem ? ' And, again, this was l^recisely what they did think, never sujDposing for a moment that their own sins deserved a similar doom. An horn- before the tower fell, many of them, I dare say, would have shrunk from placing themselves high above those on whom it crashed down. But the moment the tower fell that question was settled for them by God Himself. That they had escaped was a sufficient and a most gratifying proof of their moral superiority, though of course they were very sorry for the poor people who had been killed. Let us learn what in all probability they did not learn even from the Great Teacher, that j)ersonal suffering is not always the result of personal sin ; that family suffering is not always the result of family sin : and that even national sufferings are not always ihe result of national sins. Job suffered many strange calamities and indignities ; yet Job was not a sinner above all the men of his time : God Himself bore witness to him that he was a perfect man and an upright, one who feared Jehovah and eschewed evil. Nay, if it were true that men always suffer for their own sins, and in proportion to their sins, we should be driven to the intolerable conclusion that the Greatest Sufferer the world has ever seen was also IVI/y WE SUFFER, 201 the Greatest Sinner the world has ever seen ; that He who knew no sin was the very Chief of Sinners ! In our recoil from a conclusion so impossible, we naturally ask : What, then, are the causes, other than then- personal sins, for which men suffer ? And i\ twofold answer to that question is suggested by the instances at which we have already glanced. They suggest, (1) that we often suffer for our own good; and (2) that we often suffer for the good of others. 1. We often suffer, not for our guilt, but for our (food. We are ' purged,' not because we do not bring forth fruit unto holiness, but that we may bring forth more fruit. The greater welfare of Job, for example, w^as both an intention, and an effect, of the sufferings inflicted on him. His cruel losses and pains came upon him, suggesting the still more cruel questions by which his heart was long agitated and torn, that he might gain larger and happier concep- tions of God and of the providence of God, and a l)righter and more inextinguishable hope both for himself and for mankind. In like manner St. Paul long writhed and groaned on ' the stake in his flesh,' in order that the unsuspected resources both of his own nature and of the gi-ace of God might be de- veloped in and upon him. And, still in the like manner, we are taught that the Man Christ Jesus * learned by the things which He suffered,' tribulation 202 IVHV WE SUFFER. working experience even in Him; and that He was the more highly exalted, as assuredly He is at least in the thoughts and affections of men, because He humbled Himself to manhood, and to the sorrowful conditions of manhood — pain and grief and death. 2. Again, we often suffer, as for our own good, so also for the good of others. If Christ suffered more than other men, it was that, by suffering. He might become the Saviom- of all men. If St. Paul long writhed in agony, like a man impaled, it was that the power and grace of God might shine the more con- spicuously through him on the world around him. The affliction of Job was designed, not for his own teaching and welfare alone, but also for the teaching of his friends and neighbours, for our teaching even as well as theirs and his. Myriads of men have been the wiser and the better for what he endured, and have learned from him to see ' the end of the Lord ' in afflicting them. ' Call no man happy till his death,' said the wise Greek; and Mrs. Browning has wisely added, ' Call no man w/ihappy till his death.' And who that has followed the story of Job to its close would venture to call him unhappy ? Or take a case more on a level with om' own con- ditions and experience. You all remember the man of whom the disciples asked : * Master, who did sin, tliis man or his parents, that he was born blind?" IVHV WE SUFFER. But have you sufficiently marked our Lord's answer to that question ? How deHberate it was : ' Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents,' shewing that He had considered both sides of the alternative placed before Him ; and how bright with consolatory and hopeful suggestions : ' But that the works of God should be made manifest in him' — that he should become a notable example of the way in which the "Divine Mercy penetrates and suffuses the sufferings of men, giving them an educational and disciplinary force not for the sufferers alone, but also for all who know them or hear of them. The blind man was blind, not because he was a sinner, but that he might first open his eyes on the Friend and Saviour of sinners, and get sight for his spirit as well as for his body. And through this man, unknown to us even by name, the enlightening and redeeming power of Christ has been set forth, in an impressive figure, to all the world. This was the intention, this the work, of God in him. By calling om* attention to him, Christ has taught us to look, in all our own sufferings, for some similar Divine intention and work. They may, or may not, be the consequences of our sins. They may, or may not, be intended for the correction of our sins. But they are always designed for the manifestation of some work of God which will promote our welfare and 204 PVHV WE SUFFER, the welfare of those around us. And by the tone which our Lord took with his disciples as they specu- lated on the origin of this man's blindness He meant, I suspect, to give them, and us, the warning : ^ When you consider the sufferings which men endure, do not lose yourselves in curious speculations on their origin, but rather find yourselves by recognizing their end, by adoring the power and grace by which God over- rules them for good. Search for some Divine inten- tion and work in them, some manifestation of the Divine wisdom and compassion. And when you con- sider your own afflictions, dwell, not on the loss and pain of them, but on the moral intention of them, on the moral discipline they may yield you, on the opportunity they afford you of shewing what the grace of God can do in you, how it can sustain you, and how, by enabling you to rejoice in tribulation also, it teaches you the divine art and mystery of extracting joy even from sorrow. You must bear the pain, the loss, which has come upon you ; there is no escape from that : but why should you fling away the good of it, the very end and purpose for which it was sent, by refusing the discipline it may yield, by not per- mitting it to contribute whether to your own highest welfare or to the welfare of others ? ' Now we all see, I think, that it would be well for us to take this warning. We can see that if, when we WHY WE SUFFER. 205 suffer, we were to fling away, as St. Paul flung off the venomous beast, all that is evil in suffering, all in it that tempts us to distrust or hopelessness or com- plaint, and to recognize the lovrng work and intention of God in it, we should be the gainers by it. And we can also see that, were w^e to take our suffering patiently, bravely, cheerfully, we should be teaching a valuable lesson and giving valuable help to our fi'iends and neighbours ; that even those who once thought we were sinners above other men because we suffered such things would come to think we were braver and better because we suffered them so patiently, and be led to ask whence we got our patience and our courage. For which of us has not been again and again impressed by the modest wisdom, the sweet cheerful submission, the tender consideration and charity of some great and habitual sufferer who had learned, and learned mainly in the school of pain and sorrow, to see God's intention and work in all that she suffered ? Which of us has not known at least one couch that was a centre round which many gathered for wise tender counsel, and even for incentives to cheerfulness and hope ? Which of us has not found at least one unfailing spring of sympathy and encouragement in white lips that were often wrung with pain and a heart that often throbbed with agony ? 2o6 WHY WE SUFFER. We must suffer, then ; but \Ye may so suffer as to get good from it, and to do good by it. This suffering for the good of others is, indeed, demanded of all who follow Christ. For if any man will follow Him, he must take up his cross : and of what is that cross the symbol but of the love that suffers, and is content to suffer, for the welfare of others ? Now do not put this thought away from you as though it did not bear on ordinary lives such as yours and mine. And do not suffer it to hang in your minds only in such hazy, general, and abstract forms as that it will not connect itself with yom- daily ex- perience and tell on your daily conduct. There are many ways in which we may convince ourselves that to lose and suffer for the good or gain of others is a practical, and a practicable, law of the Christian life. What, for example, is the very commonest form of affliction, the form in which no man can escape it, however strong or opulent he may be, however wise or good ? It is, as you know, the pain we feel at the loss of those whom we love. That I must die is a solemn fact for me : but how much more heartrend- ing and poignant is the fact that, before I die, I must lose some of the dearest companions I have known, and yearn in vain for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still ! And yet is it love, is it not rather self-love, that would call, or even WHY WE SUFFER. 207 keep, them back ? Is it love, is it not rather self- love, which makes us so bitterly regret our loss of them that we refuse to be comforted ? If, for them, to die is gain, shall we grudge them the gain because it involves loss for us, and yet call ourselves the ser- vants and friends of Christ, who loved not Himself, but lived in and for others ? There are those who think that to be inconsolable is a proof of love ; but, surely, if they had more of the spirit of Christ, Love would teach them a joy in their friend's gain which would more than counterbalance their grief for their own loss. And, beyond all question, common as this kind of affliction is, it affords us a rare opportunity of bearing witness to the power and grace of God : for who would not admit a strange and mystic potency in Eeligion if, at such moments, it could bear our spirits up, and fill them with the fervours of an immortal love and an inconquerable hope ? True, Job on his ash-heap, and St. Paul on his stake, even the bHnd man in the Temple, and the Apostle when he bore the viper's fangs unmoved, had opportunities of glorifying God which do not come to most of us ; but let no man say that he has no oppor- tunity of glorifying Him, no opportunity of getting good or of doing good by the cheerful patience with which he endm-es suffering, unless indeed he is wiUing to admit that suffering is altogether unknown to him. 2o8 WNV WE SUFFER. For any suffering, whatever the cause from which it springs, any loss, any i3ain, any sorrow may be so borne as to become a clisciphne in goodness to us, and a revelation to others of the power of trust in God to sustain the spirit of man, and to lift it above the changes and chances of this mortal life. Bear any loss, any pang, well, and you will benefit your- selves, and benefit your neighbours ; and, in both, glorify God. There are not many of us, I apprehend, who would deny that we may be the better for our tribulations, and may help to make men better by the courage with which we endure them. But there may be some of us who say sadly : ' I have had much to bear, and I have tried to bear it as well as I could ; and yet I am none the better for it, nor can I see that any one else is the better for it.' Well, of course, that may be so. You may have got little good from your trials ; you may have done little good through them. And yet, all the same, God may have sent them to promote your welfare and that of the little world about you. But even He cannot make you good, or a cause of goodness in others, against your will, without yom* co-operation. Goodness is in the will, in the right direction of it ; in the energy, and certainty, and stedfastness with which it is maintained in the right direction. A compelled good- IVI/y WE SUFFER. .09 ness is no goodness. And the point you have to determine is, whether or not you have habitually and strenuously kept your will in accord with the will of God, whether or not you have recognized his inten- tion, his work, in your trials, and bent yourself to it. Too often we see only the part which men and women play in the common yet fretting and exhausting trials of life— often an unjust and an unkindly part; and in our resentment of their injustice and unkindness we omit to note how justly and kindly God takes up their evil work and infuses a soul of goodness into it. If instead of dwelling on the ill-will and ill-temper, the irritating unkindnesses and dishonesties, of those about us — and these are the most common and fertile source of trial, we were to set ourselves to discover what part and meaning God has in them, what He permits them for, we should soon find that He intends them for our education and discipline in righteous- ness, in patience, in charity. And thus all the sting and meanness, if not all the pain, would be taken out of them. For if God intends them for our welfare, why should we complain of them or shrink from them? If He is providing us in them with oppor- tunities of overcoming evil with good, of shewing that we are of a heavenly strain and temper, and of strengthening and establishing om-selves in righteous- ness, there is a kindly and noble intention in them 2IO IVNV WE SUFFER. which we may well adopt, with which it is worth our while to co-operate. If the Cross we are to bear is not some rare and heroic misery— as for most of us it is not, but the petty details and trials of the daily round and common task ; if in enduring these bravely we ' take up our cross daily,' then these petty trials assume a high dignity, and we may shew a true nobility of nature, a true Christian wisdom and cour- age, in bearing them with composure and fortitude. On the other hand, it does not follow that, because we do not see that we are getting any good out of our trials, or doing any good by the patience with which we confront them, that no good comes of them. There are a good many things which we don't see, and even a good many which are not visible to us. God sees much that escapes our glance. And, for us, all good work is slow work, while much of it lies beyond our range. The task of renewing our souls in holiness and love is a long and gradual task ; so long that, for long, there is not much to be seen ; so gradual that the advances it makes are well-nigh im- perceptible. But of this we may be sure, that, if we are honestly trying to get a little better by the things we suffer, and to make .our neighbours a little better by the constancy and courage and cheerfulness with which we suffer them, there is a real growth of good- IVHY WE SUFFER. ness in our souls, however gradual it may be ; and we are putting our hands to a good work to which God has also put his hands ; and the work is telling and advancing, let who will deny it, and even though we ourselves are never quite sure of it. XIV. AAKON'S APOLOGY. * I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.' Exodus xxxii, 24. If it is strange that so good a man as Aaron should stoop to a subterfuge so false as this, it is still more strange that a man so capable should stoop to a sub- terfuge so silly, contemptible, and ludicrously absurd. Who could be deceived by it even for a moment ? And how came a man of his mark, so ready with his tongue too, to sink to the level of a surprised and foolish maid-servant lying over her broken dish or milk-pot ? His rude work of art had cost him no small labour and pains. He had had to collect from the willing tribes their ear-rings and ornaments of gold, to melt and fuse them, to run the mass into a mould, to fashion it with a graving-tool. He had deliberated on the form he should give it, and de- termined to make it like one of the animal gods — the sacred bull-calf — with which he and the Israelites had been familiar in Egypt. And yet when he is AARON'S APOLOGY. 213 charged with his offence, instead of pleading that he had but sought to pacify the mutinous tribes by giving them an image of the Divine Power ; instead of frankly and manfully confessing his sin — which would have been far better, he is weak and silly enough to plead : ' I cast the gold into the fire, and there came out this calf,' as if the fire were to blame, not he, as if the form assumed by the gold was the pure result of accident over which he had no control, and for which, therefore, he could not be held re- sponsible ! It is the lie of a schoolboy or a slave ; we resent it and condemn it almost as much for its lack of wit and invention as for its lack of truth. One is almost ashamed to hint at any apology for such a self-condemning excuse as this. But in common fairness we ought perhaps to remember that Aaron was a born orator, and that the specifically oratorical temperament is a singularly nervous and sensitive temperament. There are few gifts which Enghshmen more admire than eloquence; but there are few which are more perilous. A man sx^eaks better than his fellows mainly because he is more easily and deeply moved than they are. He sways them because he is himself swayed more quickly and powerfully by the influences by which both he and they are touched. He can utter their thought more richly and expressively than they can utter it, because 214 AARON'S APOLOGY. he is more instantly and profoundly impressed by it than they are. And how should a man be sensitive to good thoughts and influences without also being sensitive to those which are evil ? Action and reaction are opposite and eqml. The man who swings far in one direction will probably swing as far in the oppo- site direction, unless some powerful moral check be applied. The temperament which stands fluttering in poise, and is Hghtly stirred by every breath, is only too likely to become the sport of all the winds that blow. I think I have observed, too, that men who can speak well, better than their neighbours, when they have prepared and braced themselves for the effort, often speak more foolishly and weakly when taken at unawares, and are far less shrewd and capable when summoned to meet a sudden and grave emergency. We can understand, therefore, how Aaron, with his sensitive impressionable temperament, who had instantly responded to the imperative cry of the people, * Up, make us a God to go before us ! * would also instantly cower before Moses as he strode, white with righteous indignation, through the camp, and be cut to the very heart by the fierce irony of his demand : ' How have this people sinned against thee, that thou shouldest bring so great a sin upon them ? ' We can at least partly understand how the eloquent orator, taken by surprise, struck dumb with shame AARON'S APOLOGY. 215 and fear would be likely, as soon as Lo could speak at all, to falter out whatever silly excuse came upper- most. And yet silly and contemptible as Aaron's apology for himself is, how true it is to human nature ! Let no man scorn and condemn him as a sinner, or even as an idiot, beyond his fellows, or even deem it im- possible that under any pressure he should be driven to adopt an excuse so paltry and absui'd. Strange as it may sound, and much as many would resent the charge, we all of us resemble Aaron at his worst, even if we also resemble him at his best ; his words are but as a glass in which every man may see himself. In various ways we all recognize the rule of Accident, and throw the blame of our faults and sins upon it. There can hardly be a man or a woman on the earth who does not at times plead the force of Acci- dent in self-excuse, and say in one of many idioms : * I cast this or that into the fire, and, lo, there came out this calf ! ' Aaron's excuse, as I have already hinted, is the standing excuse of at least one large class among us. Servants use it every day. Who has not heard them plead? 'Please, ma'am, I couldn't help it; it broke in my hands,' as if it were not they, but the wilful jug or dish which was responsible for the fracture, or some malign fate which mocks at human endeavour 2i6 AARON'S APOLOGY, and care. * It was an accident ' has been their sigh ever since domestic ser\dce became an institution among us. But is the plea confined to them ? Do you not also hear it from the lips of every child ? '1 didn't do it,' — they are all quite sure of that ; though, if they did not do it, it would be hard indeed to say who did. Here are two large classes, then, to whom Aaron's excuse is familiar ; and to one of these classes we all belonged in our time. But are there no more ? Most of you will remember that inimitable scene in Adam Bede in which Mrs. Poyser, while rating the clumsy Molly for her broken jug of beer, herself drops a still more precious jug from her angry fingers, and ex- claims : ' Did anybody ever see the like ? The jugs are heivitched, I think.' You will remember how she proceeds to argue that ' there's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird,' and concludes, philosophically enough, that * what is to be broke ivill be broke.' Possibly most of us have known mistresses who, while indignantly repudiating the common excuse of their maids, have nevertheless condescended to employ it in their own behalf. And what bankrupt tradesman, or broken merchant, or fraudulent banker is there who does not plead the same, or a similar, excuse ? It is hardly ever their fault that they cannot pay twenty shillings AARON'S APOLOGY. 217 in the pound ; it is their misfortune, * Things have gone against them.' * Circumstances over which they have no control have heen their ruin ' — not their own rashness, or dishonest discounts, or risky specula- tions. They put their capital into that shop, that firm, that bank, and, lo, there came out this ugly calf of bankruptcy ! But you must not blame them ; it is the furnace that was in fault. And if mistresses no less than their maids, and men of business no less than their wives, attribute to accident, mischance, or a malignant and mysterious Fate, results of which the cause might be found much nearer home, scholars no less than men of business, men of science no less than scholars. Christian com- mentators no less than men of science, too often betake themselves to the same egregious line of argument and excuse. Scholars, for example, who have devoted their lives to the study of classical literature, will take up such a poem as that of Homer, and gravely contend that it had no author; that it is simply a collection of antique legends, recited by rhapsodists in the cities of Greece, which gradually shaped themselves, or were shaped by Accident, into the fair and wondrous unity that now commands the admiration of the world : in short, they maintain that Pisistratus, or some un- known editor, cast a number of stray legends and 2i8 AARON'S APOLOGY. ballads into a pot ; and, lo, there came out this Iliad ! In like manner, there are men of science who attribute the origin of the harmonious universe to the same potent but unknown cause. According to them, it was not made by anyone ; it made itself : it is the work, not of Design and Intention, not of one creative overruling Mind, but of Evolution or Acci- dent. An indefinite number of atoms, with a single force capable of taking many forms — and where these came from Heaven itself does not know- — were flung loose into space — by whom or what it is im- possible to discover; and, lo, out of their action and interaction there came forth this Cosmos ! So, again, there are critics and commentators who affirm that the Christian Story assumed its present form in the same strange accidental way. Brief memoirs may have been current in the primitive Church and fragmentary traditions ; but John wrote no record of ' the Word that came and dwelt among us,' nor Luke, nor Mark, nor Matthew. It was not at the earliest till the second century after Christ, when the literary art was at its lowest in the Church and the air was full of fables and heresies, that those Sacred Narratives were produced which even as works of historical art are still unmatched : but tlien^ — just then of all times when there was hardly a living man capable of writing a book that would live — the AARON'S APOLOGY, 219 ancient fables, memoirs, traditions were flung into an unknown crucible by an unknown hand ; and, by some unparalleled miracle, there came forth these Gospels ! — which let him believe who can ; but he whose credulity is so ample that he can swallow this calf, or camel, of Criticism certainly need not strain at any gnat which he may find, or imagine, in the chalice which the Church offers to his lips. It is not, however, in this province of human thought and action that I would have you linger. There are illustrations and repetitions and modifi- cations of Aaron's Apology which touch us closer home. The man who is a sinner — as which of us is not ? — has it perpetually on his lips. Like the mis- chievous boy, or the clumsy maid, his cry is : ' I couldn't help it ; I didn't do it ; it broke of itself : it fell to pieces in my hands.' How often, when ar- raigned at the bar of Conscience or taken to task by Authority, have we urged that we really could not help ourselves ; that, to use Mrs. Poyser's word, we were * bewitched ' by some evil and mahgnant power : that it was impossible to keep the law we had trans- gressed, and that * what is to be broken ' will and must be broken? 'A hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree.' With passions so hot and strong as mine, with a natural and hereditary bias to evil, exposed to temptations so numerous and so nicely adjusted to my AARON'S APOLOGY. temperament, why should I be blamed, why should I overmuch blame myself, if now and then I have overleaped the cold and strict requirements of the law. Such as I am, in such a world as this, with a passionate craving for immediate enjoyment, exposed to forces so powerful and so constant in their operation, hampered by conditions so inauspicious, how could I do otherwise than I have done ? Is it my fault that, with desire and opportunity conspiring against me, I have sometimes been overmastered or betrayed by them, and broken a commandment which no man has always kept ? In various forms, answering to our various tempera- ments and conditions, we have all, I suppose, de- fended or excused ourselves thus. And, no doubt, even the best of us, even those of us who sincerely love righteousness and pursue it, are tempted at times to use St. Paul's words in quite another sense to his, and say : ' Now it is no more 1 that do it, but Sin that dwelleth in me.' When we consider aU this, my brethren, when we see how much our own excuses resemble theirs, there should surely be some allowance, some kindly amuse- ment even, in the smile with which we listen to the poor housemaid's cry, * It broke itself;' nor should we too fiercely and scornfully condemn even Aaron's apology for himself. Fellow feeling should make us AARON'S APOLOGY. 221 kind. The universality of the excuse should set us on reflecting whether after all there may not he some modicum of truth in it. And, if we reflect, we shall find, I think, that, in whatever form we meet it, it is not wholly false. Accident, or what we call acci- dent, has a real though limited power over our lives and deeds. It is quite true that accidents only seldom happen to the careful ; and that if our servants were more thoughtful and attentive and painstaking they would not break so much as they do. But is it not also true that there is a kind of malice in our fate at times, that by some inscrutable law accident succeeds to accident, that the most dexterous and careful of us seem to turn clumsy for a while, so that if we break or spoil one thing we almost expect that one or two more will be spoiled or broken before the favourable turn comes ? Are we not all liable to the influences of heat and cold and still more subtle and recondite atmospheric variations, of sHght changes of health or disease in our own bodies, of the still more mys- terious changes of our moods and tempers, of the monotony or variety of our life, of solitude and of society, — so liable to them that, while at times all goes well and happily with us, at other times we seem to take hold of everything by the wrong handle and all goes ill with us ? And if we are conscious of these changes in oui'selves, and know them to be inevitable, 222 AARON'S APOLOGY. not to be surmounted by any effort, not to be avoided by any care, why should we expect our servants al- ways to avoid them and to live in a serene atmosphere in which accidents shall be impossible to them? There are bad times in trade, with which a man cannot successfully contend. Things do sometimes go wrong with him, so that he is called to confront conditions too hard and cruel. It is noi by his own default that every bankrupt gets into the Gazette ; and before we blame the man who fails we ought to be sure that he is not a victim to circumstances over which he had no sufficient control. There are traces of what seem different hands in' the Iliad, there are discrepancies in the Gospels, there are facts in Nature and in human life, which in each of these cases render the theory of one creative and designing Mind difficult and in a certain sense questionable ; and some men are so made as to feel these difficulties more keenly than others. We should pity rather than blame them if they are oppressed by the doubts these difficulties breed, and only blame, w^hile we pity, them when they wilfully hug their doubts, and propound theories obviously inadequate or absurd. And, in like manner, there is that in us and around us which in various degrees, answering to our several natures and conditions, makes our sins not all, or not AARON'S APOLOGY. 223 altogether, our own. Do not suffer any creed or dogma to becloud your moral sense, or even your common sense, I beseech you. In so far as you or I sin because of an evil bias we have received from Adam or from any other of our forefathers, they are responsible for our sins ; they must answer for them, not we. But — and do not forget this application of the same principle — in so far as we ourselves weaken and debase the nature we transmit to our children by sin- ful indulgences, we, and not they, shall have to answer for their offences. Confessedly we enter an impene- trable cloud of mystery here, — a mystery not at all lightened by our belief in * original sin,' or our con- fession of universal sinfulness : but, however dark our way may be, of this we may be sure that, under the just rule of the just God, every man must bear his own burden and answer for his own transgressions — his own, and not another's. If Adam is to blame for any sin of mine — though, I confess, my conscience never accuses him — he must bear the blame of it. If I am to blame for any sin of yours, -j^diich only too likely I may be, I must bear the blame of it, and not you. And if, by neglect of the world, any lad is suckled and trained in vice and crime, the world must bear much of the blame of any crimes that he com- mits, and you and I will have to take our share of the blame. 224 AARON'S APOLOGY. This is the sense in which it is true that men may not he always, or altogether, responsible for their sins, in which their sins are not their own. This, at least, is one sense ; and the holy Apostle hints at another and still higher sense in the words : ' Now, then, it is no more I that do it, hut sin that dwelleth in me,' — words far too profound and difficult, however, to be taken up at the close of a discourse. Practically our wisdom is to make no allowance for any sin of our own, but to make as much allowance as we honestly can for the sins of our neighbours. '■ And how much is that ? ' Well, Aaron's excuse for himself has reminded us of a good many excuses as irrational and absurd as his which men make to this day. And we have seen and acknowledged that there is some element of truth in them ; that what we call Accident does play a certain part in our life and the lives of our fellows. But though, in the abstract, we cannot define this mysterious power, or determine exactly how far we are subject to it, in conduct and practice we have no great difficulty in dealing with it. We make allow- ance for our servants ; we admit that even the most careful must meet with an accident sometimes, and that there are times even when a small series of such accidents are almost certain to tread on each other's heels. Nevertheless, if, after due trial, we find that AARON'S APOLOGY. a servant has contracted a constant and incorrigible habit of breaking whatever is breakable, we promptly dismiss her as too mifortunate for us, or as abnormally clumsy, or as wilfully negligent. We make allowance, too, for the accidents of commerce ; we confess that now and then a man may fail honourably because ho fails through no fault of his own. But if we meet with a man who has failed in almost everything ho has undertaken, and who has spent half his time in the Court of Insolvency and its purlieus, we are in no hurry to associate ourselves with him or to assist him ; nay, unless he can bring surprisingly good evidence to the contrary, we set him down as a lazy vagabond or an unscrupulous rogue. Just so we make, or ought to make, allowance for a man who is * overtaken by a sin.' We admit, or should admit, that every man lies perilously open to temptation of some kind. Without for a moment pretending that his sin is not a sin, or assuming that his sin must be hushed up * because he is a Christian brother, and any exposure of him might bring a scandal on the holy name of Eeligion,' we ought nevertheless to feel that there are dark possibilities in every man's nature, mysterious inherited taints of blood and will, in- scrutable forces of evil, at work within and around us all, and not to condemn him as lost be3^ond hope, or even as utterly unworthy of the Christian fellowship, 226 AARON'S APOLOGY. if he repent and amend. It should be our aim, rather, to * restore such an one in the s^^irit of meek- ness, considering ourselves, lest we also be tempted.' But, on the other hand, if a man is an habitual and notorious sinner, if some fresh scandal is for ever cropping up about his feet ; if he has no sense of shame, makes no confession of sin, gives no proof of amendment, are we to suffer such an one to plead : ' I cannot help it, I am so made : ' or, ' I am singu- larly unfortunate, and am always being made out worse than I am ? ' Are we to allow liim to cast his guilt on the back of Accident, to attribute it to circumstances, to predisposition, to temperament, or to pose himself as a victim of misfortune and a mysterious ill-luck ? Are we to suffer him to plead : *'The gold' — in this case hrass might be the more appropriate metal — ' was cast into the furnace, and, lo, there came out this calf ' ? Not till we keep a servant who breaks everything entrusted to her clumsy hands. Not till we give credit to the habitual bank- rupt. Till then, we can only say to him, as Moses said to Aaron : ' How have we sinned against you, that you should bring this great shame on us ? ' And for ourselves, my brethren, let us have done with this poor subterfuge, which we know to be, for us at least, a mere refuge of lies even as we run into it. Let us refuse to plead the weakness of our nature AARON'S APOLOGY. 227 or the strength of temptation, to insinuate, if we do not openly allege, that creatures such as we are in such conditions as ours cannot hope to resist and overcome evil, when we Imow very well that there is no transgression into which we have fallen which we might not have escaped had we resisted it with all our force, and taken the help which God was waiting to bestow. That is not a healthy spiritual mood which prompts us even to palliate our sins before Almighty God. It becomes us rather to cast ourselves before Him with the confession, 'Father we have smned before heaven and against thee,' and the prayer, * Create in us a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within us.' XV. THE PAEABLE OF THE TALENTS. * The kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one ; to every man according to his several ability ; and straightway took his journey,' &c., &c., &c. — St. Matthew xxv. 14-30. The historical conditions which gave shape to the framework of this Parable present no difficulty ; there are few of us to whom they are not familiar. We all know, or easily may know, that in our Lord's time there were two ways of ' dealing with property in the absence of the owner. The more primitive and patriarchal way was for the absentee to make his slaves his agents. They were to till his land and sell the produce, or to use the money he left with them as capital in trading. In such cases there was often, of com'se, an understanding that they should receive part of the profits, though, being slaves, there could be no formal contract to that effect. The other way was to take advantage of the banking, money- changing, money-lending system of which the THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 229 Phoenicians were the inventors, and which at the time was in full operation throughout the Roman Empire. The bankers received money on deposit and paid interest on it, and then lent it at a higher percentage, or employed it in trade or in farming the revenues of a province. This was therefore the natural resource, as investment in stocks or in companies is with us, for those who had not leisure or energy to engage in business.' * The faithful servants of the Parable used their lord's goods in the first way, trading with them and making them more; the slothful servant ought to have dealt with them in the second way, putting his money with the bankers that, when his lord returned, he might receive his own again with interest. If the outward form of the Parable presents no difficulty, so neither does its inner and main drift. As we read it we understand at once that it is a picture of human life, and of the sentence which the Divine Judge will one day pass upon it. Nevertheless there are some points in the Parable on which we need to pause and reflect if we would reach their full meaning and bring it home to our consciences and hearts. 1. First of all, and very obviously, the Parable * Professor Plumptre in loco : EUicott's New Testament. 2.30 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. assumes that all who call Christ ' Lord and Master ^ will find some work to do for Him, and even some distinctively spiritual and religious work. For, of course, the ' goods ' which He delivers to his servants, and with which He exj^ects them to trade are *the things ' — the truths and treasures — ' of his kingdom.' What He demands of us, and of every one of us, is that we exemplify and enforce the truths we have learned from Him, that we shew the courage of our convictions, that we use the gifts and graces of his Spirit, not for our own culture and comfort alone, but also for the good of our fellows, that we make known the revelation of the Divine Love which He was and made ; that, by our own pursuit of them, we induce our neighbours to follow after righteousness, charity, peace : in short, that in some way, in the best way open to us, we take an active and diligent part in the endeavour to enlighten, better, and redeem the world. Not only does the Parable assume that we each one of us have some portion of the * goods ' of Christ entrusted to us, and some capacity for using them ; it also implies that we each of us have precisely that portion which we are capable of using, as much as we can use, and even more than we are always willing to use. As Napoleon's rule was ^ The tools to the man who can use them,' so the law of distribution in the Divine Kingdom is ' To every man according to THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS, 231 Uh several ahilitij,'' according, tliat is, to the ability which severs or distinguishes him from his neighbours. The Master of us all does not condemn us all to one form, or one kind, of service, though He will have no servant who does not in some way serve Him. Ho recognizes the immense variety of our powers, gifts, dispositions, and finds scope for them all. And, however inequitably this world's goods ma^- be divided, a moment's reflection will suffice to shew that in the spiritual realm every man may take and do as much as he can. ■ Who is to hinder us from being as self-denying, as lowly in spirit, as charitable and kindly as we care to be ? If we have a special faculty for apprehending and teaching the truth, what is there to prevent us, if only we om*selves are willing and resolved to endure the toils and sacrifices involved in the exercise of that high faculty, from using and cultivating it ? Or if we are strong in affection and sympathy, if Ave have a special gift for entering into the sorrows of our neighbours and of comforting them, again what is there to hinder us > And so with every other spiritual capacity and gift. Whatever it may be, we may find room for it, ample room and verge, in the service of God. Wliatever we can learn, we may learn; whatever we can appro- priate, we may appropriate ; whatever we can do, we may do ; whatever we can give, we may give. Our 232 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. ' ability ' is the only measure, the only limit, of our right. We are welcome to all that we can take, to all that we can use. And our ability is the only measure and limit of our dutij as well as of oiu- right. Our Master and Lord exi^ccU us to take as much as we can take from Him, and to do as much for Him as we can do, — to take ten talents if we can use ten, five if we can use live, two if we can use two, and to be content with one if we can only use one. But we must all take something, and employ it for Him. So much He demands of us all, and demands it of us both for our own sake and for that of the world, — that we may grow in capacity, in gifts, in serviceableness, and that the world may be the better and the happier for us. 2. The Parable affirms that the term of service is to be followed by a day of judgment, in which every man's work will be tried, and either approved or con- demned. x\nd this is a point to which we give too little heed. Not that we doubt it. There are few articles in our creed to which we more easily and generally assent than that which affirms that God will come to judge the world by that Man whom He has appointed. And yet how seldom do we reflect on the fact, that the Lord whom we serve will one day sit in judgment on our service ! How seldom is our life, and the work of our life, affected by the fact that THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS, 233 a day is coming in ^Yllicll we shall hear what He thinks of us and of our ^YOl•ks, in which our place and the measui-e of our reward will depend on the quality of the service we have rendered Him ! And yet Christ the Judge is well-nigh as familiar a figure in the New Testament as Christ the Saviom*. How many of our Lord's parables, for instance, close with a picture of that solemn session in which quick and dead, righteous and wicked, will be assembled before his bar, to receive according to the deeds done in the body, whether these be good or whether they be bad. And in the Epistles that final judgment is no less prominent than in the Gospels. In a memorable and famous passage, for example, St. Paul tells us that, whenever the earthly home of his tabernacle is dis- solved, he has, and knows that he will pass into, a heavenly and eternal home, not made with hands. He is sure that, for him, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord; and therefore he longs to escape from the fi'ail and hindering tent of his mortality. But there is one thing he longs for even more than this ; and it is that, whether in the body or out of the body, he may be approved by Christ. 'We labour,' he says,* 'that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him : for we must all * 2 Corinthians v. 1-10. 234 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that evenj man may receive the things done in the body, accord- ing to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.' In fine, he recognizes the laws of continuity and evolution on which Science insists, affirms that the future life of men will be an equitable pro-duction and development of their present life ; and, in full accord- ance with our inborn sense of justice, which demands that men should receive the natural and due reward of their deeds, declares that they must and will receive it. No man could be more sure than Paul was that he would be saved by Christ ; and yet he was equally sure that he should be judged by Christ. He has no fear that Christ will condemn him ; but he is gravely anxious lest Christ should not approve of his service. That his ivork should be accepted, as well as himself, was indeed his main anxiety and endeavour. Let us remember, then, that ice may be accej^ted, v/hile yet our icork is condemned. We may be ' saved so as by fire ' — pulled out of the fire in which the wood, hay, and stubble of our works are burned up. Many a man, many a saint, many a theologian and divine, has thought to serve God by actions, and even by long courses of action, which were alien and opposed to the will of God. St. Paul himself had once thought to do God service by making havoc of THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. the Cliiircli. No wonder, therefore, that he ^Yas habitually and painfully bent on making his later service right, — right in form, right in motive, right in spirit, and anxious to know, after all his toils and sacrifices, what his Lord and Judge thought of his service. Wc are at least as liable to error as he was. And if we take no thought for our service, if we never suspect that we may be working in ways that are not good, if we are not bent on doing our best for God and man, and are troubled by no fear lest we should have missed cm- mark, we can hardly hope that our work will pass the scrutiny of Christ and be approved by Him. Since, then, it will help to make us thought- ful and modest, help to set us right and keep us right in action, in motive, and in the animating spirit of our service, let us bear in mind that we too must stand before his judgment-seat, and receive from Him a just, and therefore a merciful, recompense of the deeds we have done in the body, both good and bad. We do well to think much and often of wiiat Christ has done for us ; we shall do better still if we also think much and often of what we are doing for Him. 3. The Parable teaches that the reward of faithful service will be an enlarged capacity and scope for ser^dce. To each of the servants who had traded with his goods and made them more the lord said : ' Thou has been faithful in a few things, I will make 236 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. tliee ruler over many things.' They had not displayed any very singular fidelity or heroism, I dare say; and no douht they had had their moments of indolence, negligence, and self-pleasing : but, on the whole, they had been honest, active, loyal, and had done the best they could, with their capacities, in their conditions, ex- posed to their temptations. And the Master we serve is neither hard nor austere. If, in the main, we have been diligent, faithful, earnest in our use of his gifts and our endeavours to serve Him, though doubtless we shall suffer loss for every negligence and mistake. He will nevertheless acknowledge us to be good and faithful servants : He will reward us openly and generously for toils and sacrifices of which the world, and perhaps the Chm'ch, took no note ; and reward us in the way most grateful to us — by giving us an increased ability to serve Him, and a keener delight in his service, by calling us to serve Him in * many things ' instead of in ' few.' Now this welcome and familiar thought is of special value in a time like this, when men are charging the Gospel with pandering to a base selfishness by its constant promise of reward ; for it furnishes us with a cogent and complete answer to that charge. No doubt there is a base and selfish hunger for reward, — and those are not always most free from it who most loudly condemn it; but it is not very common, I THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 2yr think, either in the Church or in the Avorkl. I^Iost men who wish to rise into hirger and happier con- ditions intend to make a good use of them, or what they conceive to be a good use, should their wish be gratified. And there is nothing wrong, nothing selfish, in wishing to be better off in many ways if we honestly intend to use our larger means for worthy ends. The charge of selfishness is a very common one ; but, after all, is there not a great deal of unselfishness in the world ? Is not very much of the best work that is done in it done for nothing, or for a wage miserably incommensurate with its deserts ? However that may be, the Chrlstkui reward is above suspicion. If we understand it at all, we not only labour and long for it in order that we may use it for worthy ends, but we know that it is of a kind which absolutely cannot be used for unworthy and selfish ends. In our Parable, for instance, as in many passages of the New Testament, we are taught that the reward of good work, of faithful service, is power and opportunity to do more and better work, to serve God and man on a larger scale, in a nobler way : and how can such a reward as that be j)ros- tituted to ignoble and selfish purposes? In other passages the reward of good and faithful service is described as a growing likeness to God which will gradually make us righteous as He is righteous, pure 238 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. as He is pure, and even perfect as He is perfect. And to grow like Him who lives not unto Himself, who rules all by serving all, is surely a reward for which we may yearn and strain without any base or selfish taint. Nay, he who does not long for it may well suspect himself of some hidden baseness or insincerity. He who does not crave to become more righteous than he is, more pure, more gentle and kind, may well fear lest his pm-suit of righteous- ness and goodness should prove to be as insincere as ineffective. The more bent we are on serving God and man the more ardently we must long for the coming of a time in which our capacity for serving them will be enlarged and refined. If we have any likeness to God our Father, we cannot be content until we are ' satisfied ' with his likeness. 4. The Parable implies that the spmt and cha- racter of our service will depend on our conception of the Divine Character and Spirit. We are not expressly told, indeed, that the faithful and indus- trious servants thought well of their master ; we are left to infer that from their cheerful diligence and their fidelity to him. But we are expressly told that the slothful and wicked servant thought ill of him, and was bold enough to tell him so to his face : ' I knew thee, that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 239 not strewed.' And though this conception, or mis- conception of his master, as a stiff and bitter man, capable of plundering his neighbours' fields and barns, was in part an afterthought, an invention of the moment, a mere fetch to excuse his own dis- loyalty, yet no doubt it was in part a true expression of his real thought about him. No doubt he did think of him as likely to demand more than his due, and to expect more of him than he could possibly render,— just as many men now are quite prepared to maintain that even God Himself demands an impos- sible purity of us, or an impossible unselfishness, or an impossible superiority to the common habits and aims of the world around us. Shocking and startling as the fact is when we consider it, it is yet true that a man may think badly even of God ! Every day, and in every age, we may see how the conceptions men frame of God give form to theii* service of Him, or drive them to revolt from his service. Most of us probably have known men who sincerely held God to be what the slothful servant proclaimed his master to be. Even this horrible caricature of the Lord who sustains and rules the kindly universe has been and is entertained, and He is set forth as hard and austere, as reaping where He has not sown, gathering where He has not strewed ; as damning men for the sinful natm-e they 240 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. inherited from their fathers, or for not responding to a call which never reached them, or for not yielding to a ministry never vouchsafed them : or even as decreeing them to an everlasting misery before they were born ' for the praise of his glorious justice/ And from men who thus misconceive the just God and Saviour, who, not content with making Him altogether such an one as themselves, make Him unfathomably worse and baser than themselves, how- can we expect any earnest and sustained efforts to bring back to God a world which they hold Him to have condemned, or to shew much love for the brother whom they suppose God to hate ? But apart from these gross caricatures of the Divine Character and AVill, we need to remember that our conceptions of God, even when they are in great measure true, determine the kind of service we render Him; and that in proportion as they are defective they make our service incomj)lete. We often meet with men, for example, who, with much faith in God, a sincere delight in worshipping Him, nevertheless lack a strict conscientiousness ; in their intercourse with their fellows they do not leave an impression of an integrity that never swerves, of an honour that will take no stain : and hence they do not serve the world as they might, they do not do as much as they ought to make righteousness an efficient THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 541 and ruling power in the affairs of men. They do not feel the claims of justice, or do not feel them quickly and profoundly ; and hence when movements are on foot in which questions of public duty are involved, and the rights of men or of classes of men are advo- cated, they stand aloof. And, very commonly, justice is not so dear to them as it should he, nor righteous- ness so lustrous and attractive, mainly because they have conceived of God as a tender and forgiving Saviour rather than as a just Euler and Judge of men. They are easily drawn toward works of pity and compassion, for in these they are sm-e that they have the sanction and approval of God ; but they do not sufficiently realize the righteousness of God, his care for righteousness and love of it, and hence they do not readily respond to the claims of ' mere justice,' or take their due part in endeavours to put down wrong and oppression. And, in like manner, those who are very sensitive to the claims of justice, and are eager to see right done in the world and wrong put down, often lack tenderness ; and lack it because to them God is mainly an upright Judge, a righteous Euler, and not a pitiful and forgiving Friend. In many ways, in short, our conceptions of the Divine Character determine the quality of our service. And, therefore, it will be our wisdom to frame the 242 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. truest and largest conceptions of Him that we can, to embrace in our thoughts of Him both his righteous- ness and his love, both his compassion and his justice. For though all honest service will find acceptance with Him, yet in the searching scrutiny to which all our works are to be exposed at the great reckoning, those who have served Him best will be most approved, and be rewarded with the largest capacities and the amplest opportunities for future service. 5. The Parable suggests that those who have but slender capacities for service may turn them to the best account by associating themselves with others and helping in a common work. 'If,' says the lord in the Parable to the wicked and slothful servant, *you knew that by and of yourself you could do nothing to please me, why did you not at least put my money with the bankers that I might have re- ceived mine own again with interest ? ' And, what- ever else or more that may mean, it surely must mean that those who know little of God, or of the best methods of serving Him, would do well to take up some recognized and established form of service, put themselves under the guidance of wiser and more experienced men than themselves, and contribute to enterprises which they could neither originate nor conduct. Most of us do thus put our THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 243 Master's money with the bankers. Much of the charitable and rehgious work we do, we do in methods and through organizations originated by abler men. We subscribe to schools, churches, so- cieties which aim at ameliorating the physical and social conditions of men, or at diffusmg a knowledge of the Christian Faith throughout the world ; or we help to worli some of these organizations, contri- buting time and energy to them as well as money. Now and then, doubtless, men, and even Christian men, are to be met who are too conscious of the defects of every existing organization to take part in any of them, while they are also too slenderly gifted or too little in earnest to devise better methods of service. Now and then, too, men, and even Chris- tian men, are to be met who, though they are too weak to originate anything or to work alone, are too strong in self-conceit to work with others or to be content with a subordinate and inconsjDicuous part. But, as a rule, we are most of us content to cast our contributions into some common bank, and to leave the management of it with the bankers. And if we are capable of nothing more, our kindly Judge and Saviour will accept even this at our hand, and say perhaps that we have done wisely in not attempting more. But the implication of the Parable is, I think, that most of us could do more if we tried, and 244 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. would do more if we were good and faithful servants. There is some direct and immediate work which most of us might do if we cared to do it ; there must be at least a few people about us whom we might influence in various ways for good, or help to reclaim if they have gone astray. And what we can do in this way, Christ expects us to do : and surely we shall all wish that we had done it when we come to lay our work before Him and to hear what He thinks of it. 6. Finally, the Parable implies that the rewards both of faithful service and of unfaithfulness and sloth are not arbitrary, but fair, reasonable, inevi- table. ^ To every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' Paradoxical as the words sound, how clear and true is the thought which lies beneath them. For does not every faculty we possess grow by use, and decay, or even die out, by disuse and neglect ? Think what an infinite variety of abilities and aptitudes every child that is born into the world brings with him. You may make ' anything ' of him. You may train him to any one of the thousand handicrafts, trades, callings, professions by which men earn their bread, though each of these demands special capacities specially trained. All dejDends on the faculties you select and develop by the culture you give him. These THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 245 grow by use ; the others die out or remain dormant for lack of use. And when his special faculty, or group of faculties, is developed, do they not continue to grow in force and delicacy so long as he continues to employ them ? If he has gained manual dexterity by working in wood or leather, stone or metal, does not his hand grow ever more dexterous ? If he /ias, and uses what he has, is not more given unto him ? And if he has not, does it not grow ever more impos- sible for him to acquire a dexterous and masterly use of the faculty he has neglected ? If a man has learned one foreign language, does he not find it easier to learn another, and still another ? whereas if he has learned none, if he has suffered this faculty to ' fust ' in him unused till he is advanced in years, will he find it possible to acquire any foreign tongue with ease, or even at last to acquire it at all ? It is true, then, that in every province of manual or mental dexterity the law holds good : to him that hath it is given and given ever more abundantly, while from him that hath not even that which he had is taken away. Nor is it otherwise in the moral sphere. It cannot be otherwise. If a man has exercised himself to apiDrehend truth and enjoy it, must not his ap- prehensions and love of it grow ever larger, stronger, finer ? If a man has practised himself in the love 246 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. and obedience of righteousness, must not his faculty for doing that which is right increase by what it feeds upon ? If a man has long ruled and denied himself, does not mere habit render the task of self- rule easier to him? If a man has long cherished pure and kindly affections, is it not reasonable, and even inevitable, that his love for God and man should become more true and deep and tender ? And, on the other hand, if a man has wilfully closed his eyes against truth, if he has preferred self-indulgence to self-restraint, and greed and sloth to a diligent ser- vice of righteousness, must not his capacity for evil increase and his capacity for good diminish ? It is not, then, by any caprice on the part of our Divine Euler and Judge that, if we have been faithful in few things, we shall receive many things, and that, if we have been unfaithful in little, we shall lose even the little we once had : on the contrary, it is the clear and logical result of our very nature and of the con- ditions under which it works. To what end, indeed, should God give us more than we can use and enjoy? And we can only use and enjoy more even of that which is good as we learn to use and enjoy that which we already possess. Even God Himself cannot smuggle us into heaven through some back-door of secret and sovereign grace ; for we can only be in heaven as we are made meet for it. THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 247 And how can He make us meet, i.e. bow can He make lis good and faithful, against our will ? Our wills must blend and work with his before we can be approved and blessed by Him. Only as we grow like the Lord can we enter into the joy of the Lord. XVI. THE PAEABLE OF THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. ' When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory ; and before him shall be gathered all nations : and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats : and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.' &c., &c., &c. — St. Matthew xxv. 31-46. The Son of Man here claims to be the King and the Judge of 'all nations.' A wonderful claim, surely, for * mere man ' to make ! For what man is there who knows all men ? What man is there who knows 07ie man altogether ; knows him well enough to judge him fairly, even though that one should be himself ? "What man is there by whom we any one of us would like to be judged ? What man is there who would make due allowance for the frailties of our nature, for our hereditary bias, for the temptatians to which we are exposed, the subtle and fatal conspiracies of occasion with desu'e, for our struggles against evils to which we have nevertheless succumbed, for the en- deavours after goodness in which we were neverthe- THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS, 249 less defeated, for the bitter shame and remorse with which we look back on our failures and our sins ? Can any one but the Omniscient God judge us fairly ? Must not He, then, who claims to be our Judge, and the Judge of all men, claim to be God, claim to share his omniscience, his disinterested and impartial justice, his loving kindness and tender mercy ? And if the Man Christ Jesus, ' the best man who e'er wore flesh about him,' advance this claim, shall we tra- verse or resist it ? Before we resist, before we so much as question it, let us at least remember that the claim is as gracious as it is marvellous. For if only One who partakes the Divine Nature can so know men as to judge them fairly, is not One who is also partaker of our human nature the more likely to judge us tenderly ? ' God knoweth our frame,' indeed ; but the Son of Man has inhabited our frame. Like us at all points, He has been tried at all points as we are. He knows, by personal experience, what we are, and what we can do ; what gifts we have received and what use we are capable of making of them; to what temptations we lie open, and how far we are able to resist them. He knows the frailties of that part of our complex nature which is but dust, and the capacities of that part of our nature which is spiritual and divine. And therefore He is able, not only to succom* but io judge us. This, 250 THE PARABLE OF indeed, seems to be the thought which underlies and explains his own mysterious saying concerning Him- self : * The Father hath given him authority to exe- cute judgment also, because he is Son of Man,' as if his humanity gave Him a new claim and the most decisive qualification for the office and function of Judge. And what better Judge could we have or desire ? a Judge human and yet divine ; divine, and therefore above the infirmities which warp our judgment of each other; and yet human, and therefore touched with a feeling of our infirmities which prompts and enables Him to make due allowance for us all. In the Discourse which St. Matthew here records for our instruction the judgment of the Son of Man is set forth under three figm-es or parables. In the parable of the Ten Virgins we are taught that we shaU be judged by our foresight, by our promptitude in seizing opportunities, by our preparedness for the great and happy change of death or om- unprepared- ness for it. In the parable of the Talents we are taught that we shall be judged by our diligent use of the gifts severally entrusted to us, or our lack of diligence. And in this parable of the Sheep and the Goats we are taught that we shall be judged by the active benevolence which has moved us to relieve the distresses of our fellows, or by our want of it. THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. 251 Nor are even these the only tests by which we are to be tried. We are to be justified or con- demned by our words as well as by our deeds ; by our inward emotions, dispositions, motives, as well as by our words ; by the faith without which it is impossible to please God, by the hopefulness which leads us to look for better things to come, by the charity which is even greater than hope or faith. In short, as we learn from the teaching of Christ and his Apostles, every appropriate criterion is to be applied to us ; whatever in the whole round of thought and emotion, speech and action, motive and aim, indicates character will be accepted as evidence for or against us, and will influence or modify the sentence pronounced upon us. The good impulses and kindly deeds of the bad will not be forgotten, nor will the bad impulses and unkindly actions of the good be overlooked. And, no doubt, every kind of test, from the most simple to the most subtle and elaborate, will be applied to us, in order that we ourselves may see ourselves as we really are, and be constrained to ratify the verdict of the Judge. 1. The first and simplest thought we have to im- press on .our minds, then, is, that at, or after, death our whole life will be scrutinized, revised, judged ; and that the sum of all our thoughts, affections, volitions, actions — our character, in short — will determine the 252 THE PARABLE OF condition or state on which we shall then enter ; every man Agoing to his own place,' the place for which he has- fitted himself and into which he will fit. The thought is a simple one; it is consonant with the teach- ing of Science, and of Conscience, no less than with the plain declarations of the Word of God. Nevertheless, it needs to be again and again impressed upon us. In the throng and noise and hurry of our life we too much, and too often, forget it ; and even when we remember it, and profess to believe it, we do not suffer it to exert its due influence whether on our thoughts or our lives. Most of us, no doubt, reflect seriously at times that our life, with all that it inherits, is a sacred trust of which we are bound to make the best use we can, of our use of which we must one day give account, by our use of which our condition will be determined in the world to come. But do we habitually refer to this solemn fact and reckon on it ? Does the fact that we are bound to make the best possible use of our gifts and opportunities, and that we shall have to account for the use we have made of them, influence and control us in our business transactions, for example, or in the management of our property, or in the education and placing of our children, or in the attachments we form, the company we keep, and the style in which we live ? It ought i if it be true. And who can question its THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. 253 truth ? Science tells us that at every moment our life is but the sum and outcome of all that has gone before ; that our future is and must be determined by our past. In affirming a judgment to come, therefore, Eeligion does but confirm the teachings of Science and project them into the future. Conscience, too, the universal conscience of man, pronounces it to be just and right that every man should receive according to his deeds, both good and bad, whether in this world or in any other. History, again, loves to track the steps of that impartial and beneficent Nemesis which dogs the feet of men, smiting even the mightiest criminal with the retribution he has provoked, and bringing a late yet ample reward to lowly virtue, or valiant struggles for the right, or an heroic endurance of wrong. And Nature, while just to our deserts, shews a love and bounty beyond our deserts, permitting every man to reap as he sows, and yet more than he sows, and scattering around us sweet flowers and wholesome fruits whose seeds did not fall from our hands nor from any hands visible to us. So that in proclaim- ing a judgment in which every man shall receive his due, and yet, through the great mercy of God, far more and better than his due, Scripture does but echo and ratify the teachings of Nature and Science, of History and of Conscience. We ought, therefore, to believe in a judgment to 2 54 THE PARABLE OF come ; we ought to let our belief in it influence and determine our various courses of thought and action. 2. Nay, more, we ought to rejoice in this belief. What craving strikes its root more deeply in our nature than the craving for justice, the desire that we should get our due and that all men should get theirs ? Are we not for ever being judged — judged wrongfully, partially, inequitably — by men and yet compelled to submit to their inadequate and erroneous judgments of us? Must it not be an unspeakable blessmg and comfort for us, then, to be removed, as we shall be at death, from their ignorant censures and unjust rule into the rule and judgment, into ' the pure eyes and perfect witness,' of the just yet gracious God ? The ancient Psalmist, vexed by the tyranny of Oriental despots, burst into a very rapture of song at the mere thought of being taken into the hand of God : ' Let the sea roar and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein ; let the floods clap their hands, let the mountains be joyful together before the Lord; for he cometh — he cometh to judge the earth : with righteousness will he judge the world and the people with equity.' And why should the mere hope of the advent of God the Judge fill the Psalmist's heart with a tumult of gladness which only the great world with its seas and floods, its woods and moun- tains, could adequately express, while yet the assurance THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS, 255 of that Advent and Epiphany only saddens or alarms us ? If we loved righteousness as we ought to love it, and longed to see it established in the earth; if we believed in God as we of all men ought to beHeve in Him, and in the blended mercy and equity of his judgments; if we realized that our lives are to be scanned and our sentence pronounced by that gentle and kindly Son of Man who once walked the earth and wore our flesh about Him, instead of shrinldng and trembling at the thought of a Divine judgment and rule, we too should rejoice in it with a joy un- speakable and full of glory. The first lesson we learn from this Parable is, then, that we shall all be judged when we die by the Son of Man ; and the second, that we ought to be very glad that we shall be judged, and judged by Him. 3. But there are many other lessons to be learned from this Chapter, and notably this : that the deeds we have done in the body will go far to determine our sentence. We have seen that every possible and appropriate test will be applied to us in the great assize; that whatever indicates character, whether it be found in our words or thoughts, or in our motives, emotions, aims, will be accepted as evidence for or against us. But we need to mark that, throughout this Chapter, the main stress is laid on what we do. The Virgins 256 THE PARABLE OF of the first Parable have to keep their lamps burning and their vessels charged with oil, and to be ready for the Bridegroom come when he may. The Ser- vants of the second Parable have to trade with the talents committed to them, and to make them ^ more ' by a wise and diligent use of them. And in this Parable men are rewarded for the practical and active benevolence with which they have ministered to those who were in distress, or are condemned for their lack of it. So that, throughout, it is active endeavour, it is our deeds, which are made the first and ruling test. And is not that just ? If ' deeds speak louder than words,' ought not our deeds to have more to say for us or against us than our words ? If no inward im- pulse, no movement of mind or heart be complete till it is clothed in action, if good impulses and kindly dispositions are only made permanent and regnant as we habitually act on them, should not our actions tell for more than the fluctuating impulses and inclina- tions which do not rise into action, and pass through action into habit? And yet there are many good people who depend more on their ' frames ' and in- ward moods than on the toils and sacrifices of active enterprise. There are many who, because they cherish kindly and tender emotions, or prayerful and devout emotions, account that they shall be approved THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. 257 by the Judge. There are many even who expect and urge their neighbours to do much for the Chm-ch, or for the poor, the ignorant, the afflicted, who do very little themselves, — many who, as George Eliot's village preacher quaintly put it, are like the wood-pigeon which for ever flutes out 'do,' 'do,' but never begins to do anything itself. Let us remember, then, that Christ demands action, endeavour, enter- prise of all who love Him, and will judge us not so much by our emotions, or even by om- exhortations, as by our deeds. 4. Let us still further remember that there is one form or kind of activity to which Christ our Judge attaches a special and preeminent value. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats contains his most elaborate and solemn description of the Judgment. And on what do the issues of that judgment turn here ? Simply on the fact of whether or not we have ministered to the hungry and thirsty, the naked and the sick. If we have done that, He takes our service as service done to Himself. Why ? Partly, no doubt, because, we have been doing what He Himself would have done had He stood in our place. But, mainly, because in his love and his pity He has so identified Himself with every man, and especially with the afflicted and distressed, that any kindness shewn to them is virtually kindness shewn to Him. s 258 THE PARABLE OF It would almost seem, indeed, that mere kindness of itself, when at least it is an active kindness, makes men his * brethren,' even though they are not his brethren by faith and conscious personal love. For in this Parable He speaks to certain 'righteous' persons as if they were not his brethren, but had only ministered to ' one of the least of tliese my brethren ; ' and yet He bestows on them the reward of * brethren ' and admits them to the kingdom of his Father. In his sight an active benevolence is of such value that it amounts to 'righteousness,' and is a sufficient proof of brotherhood with Him. And, when we come to think of it, we may easily understand how that should be. For what, according to Christ, is the whole duty of the Gospel as well as the end of the Law ? It is that we love God with all our heart and our neighbour as ourself. God loves us, — that is the whole doctrine of the Gospel : let us love God, — this is its whole morality. And does not St. John teach and assure us that we cannot love the God whom we have not seen, unless we love the brother whom we have seen ? To love our neighbour on earth proves that, consciously or unconsciously, we love om- Father in heaven. And he who loves God and man, — shall not he be accepted and blessed by the Judge? The very end to secui-e which the Gospel was given has been reached in him, even THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. 259 though he be ignorant of the Gospel, even though the Gospel should be incredible to him. Now from this thought we get a most comfortable hope for some in our own day who, in their despair of reaching a settled faith, have devoted themselves to a life of charity, a life of service ; who have sought rest for their weary spirits in tending the sick, the poor, the wronged ; whose days are spent in hospitals, asylums, workhouses, prisons, or in provinces stricken by famine or devastated by war. In ministering to the simplest and most primitive wants of men they have discovered a duty the obligation of which they could not doubt, and in the discharge of this duty they have found a welcome calm and peace for their perturbed spirits. And shall not Christ the Judge say even to these also ? — ' Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me.' 5. For, finally, let us observe that in our Parable both the righteous and the unrighteous are taken by surprise. The former did not know that it was Christ to whom they ministered, nor the latter that it was Christ whom they passed by. Both can say, and say with genuine astonishment : * When saw we Thee hungry or athirst, naked, or sick, or in prison?' The one had not been moved by any theological be- lief, nor the other by any theoretical unbelief. The 'righteous ' had simply acted on the kindly and gracious 26o THE PARABLE OF impulses of their hearts — it ^^as that which made them righteous ; and the wicked had simply trampled down those impulses, so making themselves wicked. And in this thought there lie tw^o suggestions each of which is, I think, very instructive and pathetic. The first is that the judgment pronounced on our life and work by the Son of Man may turn on points we did not anticipate : and the other is that the Judge will be apt to see in our actions far more than we consciously put into them, and to reward us for them far beyond our deserts. Those whom Christ here i)i'onounces blessed of his Father evidently set little store on the works of * common humanity ' which they had performed ; tlfiey, possibly, were fearing lest the Judge should condemn them because their creed, or their knowledge of Him, had been terribly imperfect : and those whom He pronounces accursed may, perhaps, have been con- fidently looking for approval because they knew Him so well and their creed was so * sound ; ' they may never have dreamed that by their want of common humanity they had provoked his anger and demon- strated that, whatever their creed, they had no genuine faith in God. And, very certainly, if we are trusting in any faith which does not work by love, we shall be amazed to find ourselves rejected by the merciful Judge eternal : while, if we are doing kind- THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. 261 ness and shewing mercy to our neighbours in despair of ever learning a higher duty or a larger truth, we may he no less amazed to find that He whom we did not know knew us, — knew, and approved. But there is no need to set faith and works in oppo- sition. The great truth of this passage is that if there he anij good thing in us, or in any part of us— in our faith, in our dispositions and affections, in our motives, words, actions, aims ; if we have tried to think wisely and largely and to give our neighbours the benefit of our thinking ; if we have cherished kindly feelings and a self-forgetting love ; if we have striven to keep ourselves free, and to set our neigh- bours free, from clamorous and selfish desires ; if we have studied how we could serve men in our business life, in our home life, by our devotion to high and noble ends; or if we have gone about doing good, ministering to the necessities of the poor, the ignprant, the sick, the sorrowful : in whatever form or degree we have done the right and possessed our- selves of that which is good, Christ the Judge will discover it by the application of some appropriate test, value it at its true worth, nay, even beyond its worth in any eyes but his ; and, in rewarding us for it, will use good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and yet running over. Here, then, are five great truths suggested by this 262 THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS. Parable and Discourse which we shall do well to lay up and ponder in our hearts : (1.) That we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to have owr lives revised hy Him: (2.) That we ought to he very glad that ive shall he judged, and especially that we shall be judged hy Him : (3.) That, as deeds are the most reliable and complete indications of character, it is mainly hy what we have done that He will judge us : (4.) That by deeds of one kind, hy ministering to the primitive and common wants of men, by an active and benign benevolence, we most of all commend om-selves to Him : and (5) that, though He may apply to us some tests of character which will take us hy surprise, his aim ivill he to discover ichatever there may he of good in us, in order that He ynay reward it with a generosity unstinted and divine. XVII. THE PAKABLE OF THE TEN VIEGINS. *Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, who took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish,' &c., &c., &c. — St. Matthew xxv. 1-13. For aU so simiDle as it sounds this Parable is, pro- bably, the most difficult of which we have any record, as it is certainly one of the most terrible in its sug- gestions. There is much in it which seems alien and opposed to the gracious sjpirit of the Friend and Saviour of men ; much which, on the common hypo- thesis, it is impossible to interpret ; much which, on any hypothesis, it is difficult to handle fairly. Put your heart into your mind, and then put your mind to this picture or parable, and you wiU be startled and shocked again and again. And yet the outward form of the Parable presents no difficulty ; while even its inner spirit and intention, strange to say, seem to excite no feeling of horror and aversion in most of those who have had to expound it. The scene here depicted is one that any traveller in 264 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. the East may come across to this day ; and to most of the travellers who have witnessed it, it appears to suggest nothing more than the accuracy and beauty of our Lord's description. One accomplished writer and traveller, for example, has this passage : * ' At a marriage, the procession of which I saw, some years ago, the bridegroom came from a distance, and the bride lived at Serampore, to which place the bride- groom was to come by water. After waiting two or three hours, at length, near midnight, it was an- nounced, as if in the very words of Scripture, "Behold, the bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him." All the persons employed now lighted their lamps, and ran with them in their hands, to fill up their stations in the procession. Some of them had lost their lights and were unprepared ; but it was too late to seek them, and the cavalcade moved forward to the house of the bride, at which place the company entered a large and splendidly illuminated area before the house, covered with an a^Miing, where a great multitude of friends, dressed in their best apparel, were seated on mats. The bridegroom was carried in, and placed on a superb seat in the midst of the company, where he rested for a short time, and then went into the house, the door of which was imme- * W. Ward. Quoted by Dr. Morison, in loco. THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 265 diately shut, and guarded by sepoys. I and others expostulated with the doorkeepers, but in vain. Never was I so struck with our Lord's beautiful parable as at this moment : and the door was shut. I was ex- ceedingly anxious to be present while the marriage formulas were repeated, but was obliged to depart disappointed.' Beautiful parable ! and special beauty of that touch, and the door was shut ! That is not precisely the impression such an incident would have left on a mind occupied with the grave and momentous realities set forth in the Parable, instead of being pre-occupied with its literary form and ' exceedingly anxious ' to hear the ' marriage formulas of the Hindoos.' To one who has long been haunted by its suggestions of despair, who in his waking and dreaming thoughts has heard that dreadful ' door ' slam to for years, and listened to its echoes rolling and reverberating down the long corridors of endless time, — heard it and trembled for himself, heard it and been shaken with a still deeper pity and apprehension for the millions around him — it is not the beauty of the Parable that strikes him, but the terror of it, the vast, horrible, unending tragedy implied in it. 1. Nor is this the only difficulty involved in the Parable, or in the common interpretation of it. Most of the Commentators whom :I have consulted tell us 266 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. that in this Parable of the Virgins we are to see Christ's judgment of the members, or nominal mem- bers, of his body the Church ; the wise Virgins stand- ing for his true disciples, and the foolish Virgins for his false or pretended disciples ; while in the Parable of the Talents we are to see his judgment on the ministers of that Church, and in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats his judgment of the world at large, and especially of the heathen world. Now I am not prepared to affirm that there is no truth in this scheme of interpretation, nor have I the slightest wish to turn the edge of any warning addressed whether to the Church or to the ministers of the Church. All I want to do is to ask : Does this interpre- tation cover and explain all the facts of the Parable ? There are five wise and five foolish Virgins in it. Are we then to conclude that in the last day it will be proved that there have been as many false as true disciples of Christ, that one half of the very Church itself will be consigned to eternal perdition ? Is that the way in which the Eedeemer of mankind is to * see of the travail of his soul, and to be satisfied ? ' The five foolish Virgins are represented as friends of the bridegroom bent on doing him honour; as having so much oil in their lamps that their lamps were only just ' going out ' when, after their long vigil, the bridegroom came ; as being willing and anxious, even THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 267 then, to beg or buy more oil for their lamps ; as knocking earnestly at the closed door for admission and entreating to be let in. Is that a picture which instantly and naturally calls up before our minds the hypocrites who merely make a false show of religion, who have possessed themselves of the mere form of godliness without its power ? Are we to believe that any love will be rejected by the Saviour, that any service or intention of service will be passed by by the Judge of men ? or that He will for ever exclude from his kingdom any who really desire to enter it ? The wise, or, rather, the ' prudent ' Virgins are re- presented as refusing to help their imprudent sisters, as packing them off to buy from them that sell when they knew that it was too late, that the shops would be shut, or that before their companions could return the bridal train would have swept into the palace. Is that in the spirit of true disciples of Him who gave Himself up for us all ? Can you so much as con- ceive of Him as saying to any seeker after life : ' I cannot give to you, lest I should not have enough for myself ' ? Can you even conceive of Him as sitting down to his wedding-feast with a composed and cheer- ful mind while poor souls, who thought to do Him honour, were shut out in the cold and the dark, knocking and begging for entrance in vain, weeping in vain ? or as saying ' I know you not ' to any who 268 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. wanted to know Him? Would it not be infinite!}^ more in accordance with all you know of Him if, springing from his seat, and leaving his bride to follow at her best speed, He hurried to the door at the first sound of appeal, to rebuke the servants who had so miserably mistaken his mind as to close it against any who would come in, and to give a tender cordial welcome to as many as were willing to eat and drink with Him? If I know Him at all, I for one would far rather stand with the poor foolish things weeping outside in the dark, than with the Pharisees of the door-mat who had shut them out. I do not say that these difficulties are insuperable, though I confess I see no way either over or through them ; I say simply that they are difficulties, and difficulties which attach to the main facts and inci- dents of the Parable, and not to its mere details, — such for example, as the lamps, and the oil, and the vessels, and the traders in oil, on all of which points no little scholarship and ingenuity have been wasted. And these difficulties grow as we remember that, whereas in this Parable one in every two is repre- sented as rejected by the Judge, in the very next Parable, that of the Talents, only one in three is assumed to fail, while in the third Parable, that of the Sheep and the Goats, a vast multitude is repre- sented as approved by the Judge simply on account THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 269 of services which they had unconsciously rendered to Him, — not knowing that it was He whom they had served, not intending and striving, as these poor Virgins did, to do Him honour. From these later Parables indeed we learn what may help us here — and that is the reason why I asked you to take them out of their natural order and study them first — that in the Judgment many tests will be applied to us, every appropriate test; and that the object of the Judge will be to discover our true character, to make it manifest, in order that if there is any good in us it may be cherished and rewarded, and if any evil that it may be condemned and punished. Ministers are members of the Church, and members of the Church are men. Tried as ministers, we may be shewn to have failed, and yet not necessarily to have failed in our private relation to the Church. Tried as members of the Church, we may be shewn to have failed, and yet, as men, we may have displayed that active kind- ness to our neighbours which will lead the Judge to say : ' Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me ; ' or even : * Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' Now this thought of itself, that the Parable is one of a series, and only sets forth one test among many, robs it of half its difficulties. Bead in this Hght, we 270 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. see at once that we must not infer from it the per- dition of half the Church, nor of half the world ; we leave room for the final salvation even of the im- prudent, since the imprudent and uncalculating are often very kindly and self-sacrificing : and we are no longer driven to think of the Judge as rejecting any who love Him and have tried to serve Him, however imperfect their service may have been. 2. In some measure, at least, we may thus recon- cile this Parable with the other teaching, and with the just and merciful spirit, of Christ our Saviour and our Judge. But we are still very far from having discharged all severity from it, all thoughts and suggestions of terror. We shall never do that; we should not hope to do it. For how should Christ be the Truth indeed if his words were untrue to our experience of human life ? And life is often very hard ; there is an inexorable severity in it which no words can soften or explain away. And it is to one of the austerest aspects of our life, projected into the futm-e — prolonged into it — to which, as I believe, our Lord here calls our thoughts. We all know that there are grave conjectures, critical emergencies, auspicious opportunities, in our lives which, if we recognize and use them, alter and raise the whole current of our after-life ; while, if we fail to see and to seize upon them, they never THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 271 return to us, or only return in some different form, and commonly in some form in which we find it still more difficult to recognize and employ them. Most of us can recall opportunities of this kind that we have had, and lost — opportunities of acquiring know- ledge, or rising into a happier or establishing our- selves in a secm-er position ; opportunities of winning distinction or winning affection, of gaining mental or moral culture, or of practising ourselves in the more difficult virtues ; opportunities which we either saw too late, or, seeing in time, nevertheless suffered to slip by unused for lack of courage, or lack of prompti- tude, or from mere indolence, preoccupation, neglect. We all admit that it is not prudent, that it is not wise, to live as if no opportunities, no ' chances ' of this sort would come to us. They come to all men. Yet since no man can tell when, or in what form, they will come to him, we confess that it is our wisdom and our duty to prepare for them, to be on the look out for them, to train and accomplish ourselves as thoroughly and as variously as we can, in order that we may both have the more opportunities of this kind and be the more ready to seize upon them. Even if we have missed some of these golden opportunities — and I am very sure that even as I speak many of you are thinking ruefully of chances you have lost, — we do not allow that a man should leave off looking for 272 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. them or preparing for them. While there is life there is hope. We call no man either 'happy' or 'un- happy ' till his death. Some ' chances ' are gone indeed, and we shall never get them back ; but others may come in their place. And hence we exhort each other not to despair, but to watch and to be ready. Nay, we even teach one another that our very failures, wisely handled, may help to prepare us for the next auspicious occasion, and to set a higher value upon it. ' There is a tide in the affairs of men,' we say, ' which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune : ' and the tides rise at least once every day, and there are even more flood-tides than one in the year. At the same time we admit, with our great Poet, that there are cases in which, if the tide be once missed, all the after life is ' bound in shallows and in miseries.' A man who, because he has missed a favourable conjuncture, begins to despair of himself, may only too easily fall into habits, or sins, from the evil effects of which there is no redemption at least in the present life. For if opportunities come to us by seizing which we may make great gain, temptations come to us to which if we once submit we may do ourselves an irreparable injury. There are stains which no tears can remove ; there are faults and crimes which no penitence can atone. At any moment we may speak a few words, or do a single THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 273 deed, which will permanently darken our whole life, and other lives as well as our own, clouding them with ' mist and a weeping rain;' There are sins — and these not always the worst — which so damage both men and women in their own eyes or in the eyes of the world around them that, if they once fall into them, they can never be the same again whether in character or in reputation ; just as there are chances which, if they are once lost, are lost for ever. And yet even the most disastrous failures may be retrieved — not in the eyes of the world indeed, but in the eyes of Him who is to judge the world. Penitence, meek and patient submission to the inevitable results of sin, faith in the Goodness and Love, which are 'more than all our sins,' personal amendment and care for others, may redeem even the most miserable and self-condemned life from final and ruinous failure. At times we see those who have fallen under the ban of conscience, as well as the censure of the world, out of very weakness growing strong, finding in loss itself a gain to match, and driven by their very failures in this life to fit themselves for a fairer and happier life in the world to come. Sometimes, but not often ; for the worst of utter failure is that we are apt to give in to it, to despair of retrieving ourselves, to contract habits which still fm'ther damage and depress us. •1' 274 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. Human life, then, stands thick with conjunctures for which we prove to be unprepared, with opportunities which we fail to see or fail to improve, with chances which, once missed, never recur, although they may be succeeded by others. And death — such seems to be the teaching of our Parable — will be such a crisis to many ; an opportunity which they are unprepared to seize and to turn to good account. The spiritual world on which they will then enter is one that has been seldom in their thoughts, one in which they have not trained themselves to be at home and to take delight. Stripped of all that they really knew and cared for, they will find themselves lost, naked, poor indeed ; and then it will be too late to make ready. The whole tone and bent of the spirit cannot be changed in an instant. To the merely natural man, the man who has only studied his appetites, or his business, or his social success, the spiritual world must at first be as uncongenial, as alien, as the world of thought and culture and refinement to the most clownish and ignorant of mankind. What charm can there be in purity to the impure, or in righteousness to the unrighteous, or in charity to the selfish, or even in wisdom to the foolish ? When, therefore, our Lord says (Verse 46), ' These shall go away into eternal punishment,' i.e. into the punishment of the eternal world, He is pronouncing THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 275 no arbitrary sentence, no angry and resentful award ; He is simply foretelling the natural and inevitable result of the moral conditions of men who have lived in and for the things which are seen and temporal rather than in and for the things which are unseen and eternal. To he in the world that is spiritual and eternal must of itself be a punishment to the sensual and selfish, to those whose thoughts and wishes and aims are bounded by sense and time. That world cannot but seem to them a foreign world, to which they cannot suddenly adjust themselves, or even a hostile world to which they can hardly hope to be reconciled. They have missed their chance ; they have lost the sovereign and supreme opportunity of life ; and they must long rue the consequences of their folly, their imprudence, their sin. 3. But have they missed their last chance ? is the door which they have shut in their own face shut against them for ever ? We have no right to say that it is. To say that is to be wise above what is written. Nor do I see how we can say it without denying to the self-condemned the very nature of man, and to God the love which He has revealed in Jesus Christ his Son. The imnishimnts of eternity arc no more necessarily to he home to all eternity than the imnish- ments of time arc necessarily to he home through the 276 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. whole duration of time, Man is essentially a spirit : and therefore so long as he remains a man, lie must at least be ca^mhle of being trained to appreciate and enjoy the spiritual world, to be at home in it. And it may be that 'the punishments of eternity' will afford him the very discipline he needs, just as the punishments of time often teach him to make a better use of time. We too often take the redeeming work of Christ as a single action of Divine Love, a solitary irrepeatable instance of it, rather than as the crown- ing revelation of a Love that always was and always zvill he, a Love which can know no change and no diminution. If God be love, if that be his essential quality, how can we doubt that so long as man remains a spirit and is capable of spiritual training, the Love of God, the Love which is God, will be bent on training him for the highest service and blessed- ness of which he is capable ? How can we doubt that the Eternal Father will pursue his erring child with the discipline by which he may yet be brought back to Himself and made at home in his Father's house ? If there are some passages in the New Testament which seem to imply that the fate of men is irrevocably fixed at the Judgment, there are many more which imply that it is the Divine purpose to redeem them all, and to quicken in all the rapture of a spiritual and perfect life. And if we believe in God, THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 277 and in the revelation He has made of Himself in the truth and grace of Christ, are we not compelled to grasp the larger hope, sure that even our largest thoughts of Him must fall far short of the divine realit}^ ? Yes, my brethren, we may cherish hope for all men, even for ourselves ; but, with hope, let us also cherish a wholesome fear or awe. The rigom^s and punishments of time are sharp enough ; but if, when these have failed to correct and redeem us, we are to be exposed to ^ the punishments of eternity,' how sharp must those be if we are to be really penetrated by them and made plastic to the saving will of God ? He little knows himself or God who, because he hopes that he is not to be for ever damned, risks the life to come, and buries himself in a living death from which all the artillery of Heaven will very hardly awaken him. Love is a fire : and to be searched through and through by the pure cleansing fire of Divine Love is a doom before which even the boldest must quail. Isow the Spirit of God comes to you in all benign and gracious forms, wooing and inviting you to turn and live. Will you fling away your chance, and wait till He comes in forms of judgment and of terror which heart of man cannot so much as conceive *? 4. FinaDy, we of the Church need especially to 278 THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. be on the watch, and to jDrepare ourselves to stand before the bar of Christ: for I suppose there is at least so much of truth in the current interpretation of this Parable as may well suggest to us that 'judg- ment will hegin at the House of God,' and that of all things a formal religion, an indolent and imprudent piety, is the most hardening and degrading. Whether the five imprudent Virgins stand, or do not stand, for false disciples, for those who have a form of godli- ness without its power, there can be no doubt that many who assume themselves to be very religious grow so familiar with forms of worship, and so busy themselves in the mere administration and routine of the Christian Fellowship, that they are in no little danger of dropping into a narrow mechanical round in which they lose insight, outlook, forecast, and miss the opportunities of quickened and larger life which God sends them. It was the Church of Christ's day which, absorbed in ritual and traditional routine, missed the supreme opportunity of all time, and put the very Lord and Giver of life to death. It was the Church of Luther's day that, not knowing the hour of its visitation, rejected the truth with which he was charged, and would have put him also to death if they could. And it is at least a large section of the Church which is to-day turning a deaf ear to the new truths of the day — truths of Science and of Criticism, THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS. 279 for instance— and resenting any vital and springing forms of doctrine which would disturb their slumbers and compel them to readjust and enlarge their con- ceptions of duty and worship. In our private lives we all know how difficult it is to remain watchful and alert, to keep ready for the Bridegroom come how and when He may ; to welcome new forms and ministries, or to go on finding new life and incentive in forms and ministries with which we have grown familiar ; to strike out new paths of service, or to walk in the old paths without forgetting that they arc paths, and should lead us somewhere. To us, therefore, as to all, but especially to us of the Church, the warning is requisite which our Lord Himself drew from his Parable. * Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day, nor the horn-, wherein the Son of Man cometh.' For whenever He comes and calls for us, we shall sm-ely wish that, to the very end, we had done our best for Him, and for the Church, and for the world. XVIII. ST. PETEE'S SIFTING AND CONVEKSION. 1. THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN. ' And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' — St. Luke xxii. 31, 32. When we read that marvellous Prologue to the Book of Job which has inspired more than one of our modern poets with his loftiest verse, we are apt to say : ' Sublime as it is, it is only poetry after all. We are not to suppose that Jehovah ever held a court at which Satan appeared among the sons of God to malign the character and motives of the patriarch of Uz, to ask and obtain that he might be delivered into his hands, and put to test after test of the utmost severity, in order that his selfishness and impiety might be made apparent. All that,' we say, ' is but the dramatic form in which the Poet clothed certain abstract conceptions of the Providence of God, and of the discipline by which He perfects the sons whom He will afterward receive into glory.' THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN, 281 Nor can there be any doubt that we have some ground, good ground even, for this conclusion. The sacred reahties of the spiritual world are too large and lofty, too pure and august, to be compassed by human thought or expressed in human words. In our highest flights we do but sldm the mountain tops ; the heavens are still as far beyond us as when we * considered ' them from the plain. We have no truer name for God than Father, for example ; and yet if God be our father. He must be our father in a far other and deeper sense than the father of our flesh, or than Adam even, who is the father of us all. Our best and highest conceptions of spiritual entities and spiritual relations must of necessity be inadequate so long as the spirit in us is hampered and confined by this 'mortal coil.' But it does not follow that our conceptions, because they are inadequate, must therefore be inaccurate and misleading — very few conceptions, indeed, even though they be scientific conceptions of natural laws are adequate ; i.e. very few of them cover all the facts, or are already perfect. They may be true, so far as they go, just as the thoughts of a child about his father and the world his father inhabits may be true, though they must of necessity be partial and incom- plete. That is to say, there may be, there are, spiritual realities and relations answering to our 282 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. conceptions, though, until that which is i3erfect is come, we can but know them in i^art, can but see them as in a glass darkly, can but measure and define the shadows cast by the eternal substances rather than the very substances themselves. Still, where there is shadow there must be substance ; and from the shadow, if only we think enough about it, we may draw a true and hel^Dful prevision of wiiat the reality is like. So that if, on the one hand, we must admit that in the Hebrew Poet's description of the scenes in heaven w^e have only dim shadows of heavenly realities and transactions, we must, on the other hand, be careful not to deny that these shadows are cast by heavenly substances ; if we admit that he gives a di*amatic form to his conceptions of the spiritual world, we must be careful how we deny that there is a spiritual world, and even a spiritual world answering to his and our conceptions of it. If every drama does not set forth an actual story, at least every drama worthy of the name does set forth some of the actual relations which subsist among men, and is based on occm'rences which have really taken place ; it teaches and moves us only in proj)ortion as it is true to nature, true to fact. In this sense, at least, we have many reasons for believing that the Prologue of the Book of Job is THE PROLOGUE IN HEA VEN. true to nature, that it is not a mere fiction which we owe simply to the * fine frenzy ' of some unknown Hebrew of genius; but, at lowest, a fiction founded on facts, a parable which truly, though imperfectly, sets forth real spiritual relations. The very form of it even is not peculiar to the Book of Job, but runs through the Scriptures of a thousand years. In 1 I^ngs xxii. 19-22, for example, we read that, when the Kings of Israel and Judah had been well-nigh persuaded by false prophets to deliver an assault on Eamoth-Gilead, the true prophet Micaiah dissuaded them from it in words which instantly remind us of the opening Verses of Job : ' I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left. And the Lord said, Who will persuade Ahab that he may go up and faU at Eamoth-Gilead ? And one said in this manner, and another said in that manner. And there came forth the spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, / will entice him. And the Lord said unto him. Wherewith? And he said, I ^oll go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He said, Thou shalt both entice him, and prevail. Go forth and do it.' So, again, in Zechariah iii. 1-5, the Prophet represents himself as seeing Joshua the high priest standing before Jehovah, and 'the Satan,' i.e. the accusing spuit, standing at his right 284 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. hand to resist or accuse bim. Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments — the filthy garments representing his own sins and the sins of Israel of which Satan had accused him and them at the Divine bar. But Jehovah bids his ministers ' take away the filthy garments from him ' and clothe him in new robes as for a feast, and to set ' a fair mitre ' on his head, gi-aciously assuring him meanwhile ; ' I cause thine iniquity to pass away from thee, and I will clothe thee in festive raiment.' And so, once more, we read in the Book of the Eevelation (Chap. xii. 7-10) of a war in heaven, in which Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon and his angels, and drove them down out of heaven, — even the great Dragon, 'that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, who deceiveth the whole world.' And no sooner is the victory won than a loud voice is heard in heaven saying, ' Now is come the salvation, and the strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ ; for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accused them before God day and night.' Now it is easy to say that all these are poetic and prophetic visions which must not be taken too liter- ally ; that they simply set forth in a dramatic form the conflict of good with evil, and the victories in which evil is, or is to be, overcome of good. It is natural — to a certain extent, within certain limits, it THE PROLOGUE IN HEA VEN. 285 is right — that we should say so. But we must not forget that behind every drama there is a true story ; that every parable is based on actual facts and re- lations, and sets forth other and higher facts and relations : and that poetry itself is but the truth of life thrown into elevated and beautiful and ideal forms. Nor must we omit to note how strangely persistent this special dramatic form is; how this picture of an evil spirit accusing and enticing men to their ruin, and of good spirits who withstand him and come to their assistance and strengthen them to withstand and overcome the evil one, lives on, and reappears in the pages of Scripture, from the very first to the very last, from the temptation in Para- dise to the final war and victory in Heaven. If there were not much more in it than we commonly sup- pose, if this * dramatic representation ' were not much closer to the facts and forms of spiritual life, it surely would not so often appear and reappear in the writings of those holy men who have taught us nearly all we know of that higher world in which alone we trulj^ live. They may ha-ve seen only * in a glass darkly ; * but at all events they saw more, and more clearly, than we do. They may have ^ known but in part ; ' but their part was at least a larger one than ours commonly is. And I really do not know why we should even try to impoverish the spiritual world >86 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. which they have made so rich, by banishing fr©m it the bright heroic forms with which they have filled it, and replacing them with thin colourless abstractions which have no power to stir our blood. Nay, more : I do not see how we can thus impoverish and dispeople it : for these noble spiritual forms, which as yet we have only caught glimpses of in the visions of the prophets, also invade the realm of his- tory ; they move among actual men, and take an intimate and inextricable part in the grandest his- torical scenes the world has witnessed. Unless we are prepared to dissect the very life out of the Gospel Narratives, to take some fragments of those sacred annals as recording actual facts, and other fragments, which yet stand in the closest ^dtal relation with the former, as recording only the dreams and dramatic inventions of men who warn us of the transition from one to the other by no change of style or tone, even the slightest, it seems impossible for us to deny that the facts and occurrences of human life have their heavenly correspondences and counterparts in the spiritual world, and even their original causes and springs. It is not simply that, according to the Evangelists, the dark figure of Satan throws its shadow across Gethsemane and Golgotha, and that troops of angels, 'legions of angels,' stand waiting for the word of the Son of Man. The fates of common THE PROLOGUE IN HE A VEN. 287 men, of men like ourselves, the temptations, the defeats, the victories, the toils and sufferings of Judas and Peter and John, and of many more, are also affected by the same supernal and infernal influences. There are scenes in heaven by which ilicy are in- fluenced no less than Christ Himself, and which cor- respond to and determine the scenes afterwards enacted in their earthly lives. Take, for instance, the scene recorded in my text, and consider how it is woven into the very stuff of the Narrative, so that j^ou cannot tear it out without tearing the very Gospel itself into pieces. In its present form, as given in our Authorized Version, the meaning and effect of the passage are somewhat blunted. It should run thus: 'Simon, Simon, be- hold Satan obtained you, that he might sift you like wheat ; but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, confirm thy brethren.' Now observe, first, that the pronomi 'you' in this passage is m the plural, while the pronoun ' thee ' is singular; and that the effect of this use of the singular and plui^al pronouns is this : ' Satan ob- tained you all,' i.e. all the disciples, ' that he may sift you all like wheat ; but I prayed for thee '— thee, Peter — ' that thy faith fail not : and thou, when thou art converted, strengthen them.' Observe, secondly, tliat the verbs translated 'obtain' in 'Satan 288 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. obtained you,' and ' prayed ' in I ' lorayecl for thee,' are in the Greek tense which denotes 'acts belonging entirely to the past.' So that our Lord is not speak- ing of the present moment, but of some bygone occa- sion of which He does not give the date. Observe, thirdly, that the Greek verb of the phrase ' Satan ohtained you ' implies and suggests the terrific figure, ' Satan has drawn, or dragged, you out of the hand of God into his own hand : ' that is to say, he has been permitted by God to put forth his hand upon you, to do his worst and utmost against you. So that what this solemn warning really means and implies is that there had been a scene in heaven like that depicted in the Prologue to the Book of Job. On some great day Satan had come to present him- self among the Sons of God. He had imiDUgned the sincerity, questioned the disinterested piety, of the twelve men who stood nearest to Christ. He had undertaken, if he might expose them to a decisive test, to prove that they did not follow Christ 'for nought ; ' that they would forsake Him and deny Him to his face rather than follow Him to prison and to death. And he had ohtained them. God had put them, and all that they had, into his hand, lifting from them the protection of his own Divine hand, in order that they might be tried to the uttermost and that the world might .know what manner of men they THE PROLOGUE IN HEA VEN. 289 were. But Christ, present at this heavenly session in spirit, — for the Son of Man who * came down from heaven ' was, as He Himself affirmed,* ' in heaven ' even while He was on earth — Christ had prayed for them ; prayed that none of them should fail Him save * the son of perdition ; ' prayed especially that the faith of Peter, the leader of the Twelve, should not utterly perish in the hour and power of darkness, in order that, when he recovered from his own partial failure, he might recover and confirm his brethren. All this is clearly implied or asserted in the Verses before us. And the implication is so strange, so momentous, it involves so many mysteries and diffi- culties, it is so alien to the modes of modern thought that, if the passage stood alone, we might be tempted to evade its plain and obvious force. We might say : * It is but a poetic device, a dramatic representation, not an exposition of actual facts and occurrences ; ' we might doubt whether this solitary passage were not the interpretation, the gloss, of some ancient commentator which had gradually crept into the text : we might even argue that, if good men so con- ceived of the springs of moral action in the first century, we are not bound so to conceive of them now. But it becomes very difficult for us to take this line of * St. John iii. 13. 290 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. argument, or evasion, when we observe how the con- ception of my text dominates this whole section of the Gospel story, is referred to again and again, and is even confirmed in the most impressive way by om* Lord Himself. It is not only in one passage, but in many, that we trace the influence of this scene in heaven on the affairs and destinies of men upon the earth. Glance at a few of these passages that you may judge of their accumulated force. When certain Greeks came to see Jesus a few days before He was crucified, He rejoiced in spirit, and cried,* ' Now is the crisis of this world; now shall the prince of this world he" cast doivn ! ' As He sat at the Last Supper with his disciples, no sooner was supper served than, we are told, * t\ie devil put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray him.'t This, however, was only the first inception, the first injection, of that evil purpose ; for by-and-bye we read,{ when the supper was wellnigh ended, and Jesus had given the sop to Judas as a sign of who it was that should betray Him : ' After the sop, Satan entered into him,' following his own evil suggestion, and taking full possession of the traitor's heart, — thus obtaining him in very deed. As they passed from the upper room, * St. John xii. 31. f Ibid xiii. 2. + Ibid siii. 27. THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN. 291 tind went on their way to the garden at the foot of Olivet, our Lord, tremulously sensitive to ^11 spiritual influences, warned his disciples, ' The, 'j^rincQ of this tcorlcl Cometh ' — cometh, that is, to renew his tempta- tion, to put us to the proof once more ; * hut in me he hath nothing.' * In Himself He had the sure forecast of victory, laiowing that in this final conflict the Prince of this world would he dethroned and cast down ; but He cannot be so sure of them, so sure that the Prince of this world will find nothmg in them on which he can lay hold. Nay, He is sorrowfully aware that in them there is that by which the Evil One can strongly lay hold upon them, and move them to what, for a day or two, seems an utter failure of loyalty and faith. And so, when they have entered the Garden, and He advances to his own conflict and agony alone, He bids t them, 'Pray that ye enter not into temptation.' The temptation is coming; so far as that, Satan has obtained them ; and they too must fight their battle alone : but He beseeches them that they do not give place to the devil, that they do not yield to the temptation with which the Prince of this world is about to assail them. If, thanks to his warning, they did not yield to temptation in the Garden, at least they yielded to sorrow and to the * St. John xiv. 30. f St. Luke xxii. 10. 292 ST. PETERS SIFTING AND CONVERSION exhaustion produced by sorrow. And so, once more, as they are about to leave the Garden, his thoughts still intent on ^ the sifting ' they are to undergo, He rouses them with the words : ' Why sleep ye ? Ui%e and pray, lest ye enter into temptation,' lest even yet ye be overcome of the adversary.* Nor is it without interest and meaning for us to observe that even our Lord Himself, as in the temptation in the wilderness, so also in this severer temptation and agony in the Garden was succoured by the coming of ^ an angel out of heaven to strengthen him ; ' f the spiritual world being moved about Him on its superior and heavenly as well as on its inferior and infernal side. Even amid all the bustle and violence of his arrest, more- over. He does not forget his encounter with Satan before the throne of God ; to the chief priests who came out against Him as against a thief He says % with patient dignity : * This is your hour, and the poiver of darkness,' In fine, it is impossible to study the history of the closing hours in the life of our Lord without every- where meeting traces of that Scene in Heaven so briefly yet graphically described in my text. Let what will happen, nothing puts it long out of the mind, or even out of the words, of Christ : — as, indeed, * St. Luke xxii. 46. f Ibid xxii. 43. J Ibid xxii. 53. THE PROLOGUE IN HEA VEN. 293 how should it, when the very essence of his history during these hoiu's was precisely the conflict with the Power of Evil and the conquest over it ? He never forgets that Satan has ' obtained ' both Him and his disciples that he may try and sift them to the core ; and even while accomplishing his own warfare and enduring his o^vn agony, the Son of Man is sufficiently at leisure from Himself to mark how his disciples bear themselves in the conflict, to warn them of their peril, and to animate them to renewed endeavour. As He had prayed for them in heaven, so He seems to be ever jpraying on earth that they may only be sifted ^ like as corn is sifted in a sieve,' and that not * the least grain may fall upon the earth.' Tried they must be, or how can they be followers of Him ? but his one care and hope for them is that, however sharply they may be tried, they may finally be approved of God ; that, though pm-sued, they may not be overtaken, or, if overtaken, may be rescued from the jaws of the lion ' who goeth about seeking whom he may devom\' Now I confess I do not see how we are to set aside this conception of correspondences and pre-intima- tions in the heavenly world of the spiritual experiences of men upon the earth, when we find it not only giving shape to the prologue of a great poem like the Book of Job, and to the visions of the Old and New 294 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. Testament proiDhets, but also entering into the very substance of Gospel history, and moulding the thoughts and actions of our Lord and his Apostles ; when we find the holy Evangelists speaking as simply and naturally of Satan as of Judas or Caiaphas, and of the * angel out of heaven ' who ministered to Christ in Gethsemane as of the women who embalmed his body and laid it in the tomb. If we accept these holy men as our teachers at all, we accept them on the distinct ground that the unseen spiritual world was more familiar to them than it is to us ; that they saw more of it than we see, knew more of it than we know, and were more fully ' moved ' by the Spirit of all wisdom and knowledge. And what they saw was — Heaven in the closest commerce and fellowship with earth : the principalities and powers of the spiritual or substantial universe striving against men and striving for men, plying them with temptations, and helping them to withstand temptation : while the great Lord of the Universe sat high above all, con- trolling all the powers whether of good or of evil, and compelling all to subserve the purpose of his fatherly and redeeming love : Christ ever i^leading with Him on behalf of the tempted, the tried, the fallen, and ever revealing to us in his watchful sympathy and affectionate care the care and sympathy of our kind Father in heaven. THE PROLOGUE IN HE A VEN. 295 And why should we even try to shut our eyes on this grand vision, to refine it away into bloodless abstractions, to persuade ourselves that it is but a dramatic presentation of truths and relations which we could grasp in no other form ? Does not Science itself emphatically teach us both that the universe is one, so that nothing can happen in the remotest star by which we are not presently affected ; and that all this visible world is but a passing show, a transient manifestation and projection, of forces invisible, of things not seen or see-able by the mortal eye ? Why, then, may we not believe in a spiritual world as populous, nay, more vast, and populous, and bright, than the world we grasp by sense, and believe also that the beings and forces of that world act and react on us even more potently than the forces and persons of the world we see ? Does it not add a new dignity, and a new solemnity, to our life to conceive of it as the theatre in which not only om* own pas- sions and impulses are wrought out, but in which also the universal conflict between the powers of good and evil is being carried to its happy and triumphant close ? That our faith is weak, and needs the aid of Imagi- nation, with its airy but picturesque and graphic shapes, is proved by the whole pre-Christian history of man, in which we see him inventinr/ the spiritual 296 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. personages and relations he could not find out to perfection. If it is our happiness that the spiritual world has, at least in part, been unveiled to us, with its armies and hierarchies of ministering spirits, of which even those that are evil can but sift the grain in us from the chaff, while the good bend eyes of sympathy upon us, and bear us in their hands lest at any time we trip against a stone, and cast round us shields on which the fiery darts of the wicked one are quenched, let us not doubt or deny their ministry even as w^e profit by it ; let us rather rejoice that they are sent to minister to the heirs of salvation. And above all, I think, we should value this reve- lation of the heavenly world because it brings home to us, home to our imaginations and hearts, the gracious providence of God. Held simply as bare doctrine, that providence is of the utmost value to us. But if, instead of simply regarding it as an indefinite protecting force, we believe in myriads of strong and busy spu'its, who delight to run on the errands of their King and ours, who are with us in every hour and power of darkness to strengthen and to sustain us, and with us in every hour of light, bringing the light to us and augmenting it by their presence and sympathy, then surely the Divine Providence becomes very real and very welcome to us, so that we can trust it and lean upon it. And best of all is it to THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN. 297 feel that God Himself so cares for us, and so concerns Himself for us, that our lives are not left to the pressm*e of accident or of circumstance, nor to be shaped simply by our own hands or the hands of our fellows, but are discussed and shaped in the very council-chamber of Heaven itself ; that our trials are appointed for us by the deliberate wisdom of the great Saviour and Father and King, and so appointed that all things evil may be searched and sifted out of us : and that heavenly succours and ministries are vouchsafed us in order that, when we are succoured, we may succour those who are still tempted, that when we ourselves are converted, we in our turn may convert and confirm our brethren. XIX. ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. 2. — THE SCENE ON EAETH. * And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan obtained you that he may sift you like wheat; but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren,' St. Luke xxii. 31, 32. St. Peter is so human, his character presents so singular and 3'et so common an admixture of strength and weakness, that of all the Aj)ostles we know him best and like him best. Of some of them we know so little, and even that little is so little characteristic, that we can hardly be said to Imow them at all. And, on the other hand, those whose characters are strongly marked, — elames, for instance, and John, and Paul — are of so heroic a make, or they soar so high above us, that we are conscious rather of their immeasm-able superiority than oi then- likeness to us ; they move through an orbit so large and lofty, with a rectitude so undeviating, that we ' look up ' to them rather than look round for them, regard them as far off from us, not nigh, as having reached a height THE SCENE ON EARTH. 299 which we can hardly hope to attain. But it is not so with Peter, great as he is. He. is on our level, travels by the path we tread, wanders from it and stumbles in it as we ourselves wander and stumble. His very faults endear him to us hardly less than his virtues. They are so exquisitely natural, so closely akin to the faults of which we are conscious in ourselves, there is so much man in them and even so much hoy, that fellow feeling makes us land and lenient in our judg- ment of them, and of him. His impulsiveness and self-confidence, the facility with which he ^delds to the various influences brought to bear on him, his pas- sionate vehemence alike in evil and in good, his forwardness and loquacity, his promptness to speak and to strike, all serve to engage our interest, our compassion, our sympathy, and render us more at home with him than with men of a nature more finely balanced and composed. We could better spare a better man. There is nothing mean and petty in his faults. They spring from his quick sensibilities, his indomitable energy, his large and generous confidence in himself and in those whom he loves. His very failings lean to virtue's side ; for the most part they are but virtuous impulses or emotions carried to excess. Such natures are very lovable, but they lie open to many perils. They move so easily and yet so 300 ST. PETER'S SIETING AND CONVERSION. vehemently that they are in constant danger of losing their balance and toppling over into disastrous frac- ture. A man readily touched by spiritual influences and responding to them strongly, is as accessible to evil influences as to good, and may yield to them as utterly, — as we know that St. Peter did, at least for a time. But though the impulsive self-confident tempera- ment has special dangers of its own, it does not follow that, on the whole, it is more perilous than other temperaments cast in a different mould. Certainly St. Peter did not fall lower, nor so low, in the hour and power of darkness as his fellows, albeit the common impression is that he did. Their pro- mises of loyalty to Christ were as confident as his ; their infidelity to their vow was earlier and in some fsense even more shameful than his. When Christ warned the Eleven, ' All ye shall be offended in me this night,' if Peter was the first to say, ^ Though I should die with thee, I will not deny thee,' yet we are expressly told that so ' likewise said they alV If Peter denied Him in the hall of judgment, they did not evenjfollow Him to the hall, did not stop to be questioned, — denying Him in deeds, which speak louder than words, even before Peter denied Him with oaths and curses. If when He was led away captive by the soldiers they 'all forsook Him and fled,' St. Peter THE SCENE ON EARTH. 301 was the first to arrest himself in that shameful flight ; and while ilmj scattered every one to his own, he at least followed Jesus ' afar off,' to see what would be done unto Him. In short, they fell before Peter fell, and more utterly than he fell, as Jesus had said they would. For what He really recorded and foretold in my text was that, while Satan had obtained permis- sion to try and sift them all, Christ had prayed that Peter's faith might not wholly fail, that he might be the first to recover from their common fall in order that, when he was converted, he might strengthen his brethren. If, then, we have thought of St. Peter as weaker and worse than his brethren, we have done him a grave injustice, and must henceforth think of him as the last to forsake his Master, and the first to reclimb the heights of faith, to which he drew up his brethren after him. Last Sunday we studied the Scene in Heaven in which Satan ' obtained ' the disciples that he might test and prove them, while Christ ' prayed ' for Peter that, however heavily his faith might be tested and strained, it might not snap and part. And it will be weU, I think, that we should now consider the earthly counterpart of that scene in heaven, and mark (1) what it was that was sifted out of Peter, and (2) how it was sifted out of him. 302 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. 1. The secret may be told in a few words. The cause and spring of the most obvious defects in the Apostle's character was that large and assured confi- dence in himself which made him so quick to speak, so prompt to act. But, throughout Scripture, as in human nature, self-confidence is opposed to faith, or confidence in God. Everywhere, too, we are told that God dwells only in the humble, lowly, contrite heart. So that if God was to take up his abode with Peter, if the impulsive and vehement strength of the man was to be schooled into stedfastness and hallowed by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, in order that, being himself divinely moved and led, he might rightly lead the Apostolic Company during those first critical months in which the foundations of the Church were laid, — then, obviously, his self-confidence must be XDm'ged out of him, and replaced by the humility with which God delights to dwell. On no other terms could he be fitted for the work to which he was called. And therefore it was that Saltan ' obtained ' him, obtained, i.e. permission to sift and pm-ge self-trust out of him. If the process was severe, the task and honour for which it prepared him were great ; and greatness is not to be achieved on easy terms. If we are tempted to think the process too severe, let us ask ourselves whether any milder process would have sufQced. THE SCENE ON EARTH. 303 The point is one which it is easy to decide. We all know men who are * very much of their own opinion,' and who have a very good opinion of themselves; self-confident men, always ready with their advice and their censure, however difficult and comx^licated that may be of which they speak, and however ignorant of it they may be: men who beheve, apparently, that all the world is out of joint and that they were born to set it right ; men who assume to teach, to judge, to rebuke even those whom, when pushed, they acknowledge to be far wiser and better than themselves,— just as Peter rebuked Christ, and said, ' This be far from thee, Lord ! ' Is it easy, when this self-confidence has been much and Ions indulged, to pm-ge it fi'om them ? We all know that it is hard, so hard as often to seem impossible. We have seen such men tried in many ways, brayed as in a mortar : the advice they gave has been followed and shewn to be disastrous, or their censures have been disregarded with manifest impunity ; their own affairs have fallen into ruin about them while they were affecting to guide the counsels of the nation : shame has invaded their families and homes through their sins or'their neglect ; they have been pubhcly censured and disgraced : and yet, when all was done, we have seen them carryhig their chms as high as ever, and heard them take the same ' Sir Oracle ' tone, bating no jot 304 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. of confidence in tlieir own wisdom and importance. Of all qualities self-confidence is perhaps the last which we most of us lose ; of all virtues humility the last that w^e acquire. We need not wonder, therefore, to find St. Peter exposed to a most penetrating and fiery trial. For, strange to say, his self-confidence, though it had been so often rebuked, comes out more conspicuously than ever in the last moments he was to spend with the Son of Man ; the need for sifting grows most ap- parent as Satan draws near to sift him. On the very night on which Jesus was betrayed, for example, and as they gathered round the table at which they were to eat and drink with Him for the last time, Peter and his brethren contended among themselves w^hich of them should be greatest. The couches on which they reclined at the Last Supper each held four or five, and each, according to Eastern custom, had its highest and its lowest place. Possibly it was in claiming the better places on these couches that the contention broke out, if it was not rather in the strife as to which of them should wash the others' feet. The petty and shameful strife was silenced by the gracious rebuke of Christ. But the flush and excitement of it seem to have left their traces on Peter's mind : for when, to enforce his lesson of humility, Jesus rose and girded Himself THE SCENE ON EARTH. 305 TNith a towel, and began to wash their feet, Peter first exclaims, * Thou shalt never wash my feet ! ' and then, ' Not my feet only, but also my hands and my head ! ' No doubt the impulses which moved him to these exclamations were fine ; but impulses which lead a man to correct the Divine Wisdom now in this way, and now in that, betray a blind and impetuous self-reliance, however fine they may be in themselves. Emotions, however good, become evil, they become both signs and portents of evil, when they run to excess. The wish to be near Christ, and to stand high in his love, is good ; but it becomes evil when it grows into a wish to be nearer than others, and to stand higher than they. The reverence which prompted Peter to cry, 'Wash not my feet,' was good, and the love which prompted hii^ to cry, ' Not my feet only,' was good; but reverence becomes irre- verent, and love unloving, when they lead us to assume that we know what is meet and right better than our Master and Lord, and still to suggest a something lacking in the way He takes with us. However good his motives and impulses, then, it is easy to see that even at the Lord's Supper Peter was in his most imperiou sand self-confident mood. And the impression grows on us as we follow him to Gethsemane. In the Garden he shews that he trusts more in his own loyalty than in the wisdom and X 3o6 ST. PETER'S SIFTIXG AND CONVERSION. grace of bis Master. ' Though all men should be offended in thee, yet will not I ! ' be cries. And when the Lord repeats the warning, Peter only * speaks the more vehemently, saying, If I should die with thee, I will not ill anywise deny thee!' Even when be falls asleep in the Garden, so belying his vehement 13rotestations of loyalty and love, and proving that he could not ' watch an hour ' for Him with whom he thought he was ready to go both to prison and to death, his confidence in himself is no whit abated. Startled from his untimely slumbers by the clash of arms, and the glare of torches, ' Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it,' and smote off the ear of the High Priest's servant, — nothing doubting but that that was the right course to take, since it was the first that suggested itself to* his mind. He looks to his Master for no sign, waits for no command, or he would not have fallen into that sin. Christ has to undo his evil work, to rebuke his spirit. Peter is put to shame, but not to a saving shame. As his Master will not let him fight, he runs away, forsaking the Friend for whom he had professed himself ready even to die. But, as he runs, he remembers himself; his natural boldness returns : he detaches himself from the other fugitives, and follows Jesus, though ' afar off.' When he reaches the Palace, however, instead of pressing to his Master's side, as who should say, ^ I at least will THE SCENE ON EARTH. 307 1)6 true to Him,' he lingers in the open court outside the judgment hall, and joins the soldiers round the fire, casting in his lot with the very men who had •arrested his Lord instead of with the Lord Himself. And, here, when he is questioned, he again and again denies Him, affirming in the broad Galilean accents which betray him, ' I know not the Man.' Nay, with his constitutional passion and vehemence, he backs his denial with oaths and curses, calling Heaven to "witness that he has no lot nor part in the kingdom of heaven. It is a cruel spectacle, one of the saddest on which the stars have ever looked down, — a brave man turned coward, a true man turned liar, a strong man weeping bitterly over the very sin which of all sins might well have seemed impossible to him ! But Avould anything short of this open and shameful fall, this fracture at his strongest point, have sufficed to purge him of that self-confidence which we have seen to be so potent and so active in him up to the very instant of his fall ? And if nothing else would have so suddenly and sharply sifted it out of him, and wrought into him the humility which fitted him to receive the Holy Ghost and to found the Church which Christ was about to redeem with his precious blood, shall we complain of the severity of the process l>y which he was purged £i*om a dangerous self-trust 3o8 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. and made meet for a task so honourable and blessed ? Shall we not rather ask that we too may be sifted even by the most searching trials, if we too may thus be made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and be qualified for a Divine service ? 2. So far, then, we have seen how Satan obtained Peter, that he might sift him. But if Satan ob- tained, Christ iirayed for him, and even ohtained him in a far higher sense; for he obtained that Peter should only be ' sifted,' and that the sifting should issue in his * conversion.' It is to this second part of the process that we have now to turn our thoughts. For the conversion of the A]30stle was no less gradual, and no less complete and wonderful, than his fall. I must tell the story of it very briefly, but, happily, it is familiar to jou, so that few words will suffice. St. Peter's ' conversion ' began at the very moment when he had fallen lowest. For it was when he denied his Lord for the last time that Jesus turned and * looked ' upon him ; and this look was the turning-point in the great crisis of his life. Jesus does not sjjcajc to him ; words are not necessary ; and even in the very depth of his fall Christ is too tender of Peter to confirm the suspicion of the bystanders and to prove him the disciple he has denied himself to be. He simply looks at him, bends on him, we may well believe, a glance of blended pity, reproach. THE SCENE ON EARTH. 309 and love. But that look is sufficient. As be met it Peter ' called to mind the word that Jesus had said to him; and when he thought thereon'— ov, literally, 'flinf/iiu/ himself on ' that word — ' he wept ' ' wept bitterl}^' And there we have the very man. With passionate vehemence he flings himself as on the sharp edges of his Master's gracious warning and rebuk^, bruises himself against them, rends and tears himself upon them, till the difficult tears of a strong man in his agony are wrung from him. The man is all broken with remorse. He cannot face his old comrades, for, though their sin has been as great as his, to him no sin seems comparable with his. He creeps to a solitary hiding-place where he may weep alone, and see no reflection of his shame from other eyes ; and here he remains during the days that Jesus slumbered in the tomb. Of all the Apostolic Company only John seems to have suspected where he was, to have sought him out, and to have spent an hour with him when he could leave Mary, h is mother now. Now when men have fallen into a great sin, a great shame, a great misery, we all know how apt they are, as they brood over it, to recall the similar sins of which they have been guilty, to deepen their anguish by tracing back their recent offence through previous offences which paved the way for their last and 3IO ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. crowning transgression. We ma}^ be sure, therefore, that in his solitude and grief Peter would compel himself to dwell on the many occasions on which he had been betraj^ed by his self-confident temper into sin and shame. He would recall, for instance, how boldly he had once cast himself on to the heaving waters of the Galilean lake, only to lose corn-age and faith, only to sink and perish but for the grace of Christ. He would remember how, while he had been the first to confess Jesus the Christ of God, no sooner did Jesus begin to speak of his death and of the glory that should follow than he had rudely broken in upon Him with, ' There shall no such thing happen unto thee ! ' And, as he flung himself on these sorrowful remembrances, he would feel that his recent sin was but a repetition and an exaggeration of former sins ; that what he had to momii over was not simply this faithless action or that, but a radical weakness of nature, a self-reliance which was perpetually leading him astray and landing him m open guilt and shame. Such thoughts as these were natural to his position, and we might reasonably conclude that he brooded over them even if there were nothing in the Sacred Eecord to suggest the fact. But there is much. Eor as the Divine discipline always answers to our needs, the gracious discipline now accorded to Peter THE SCENE ON EARTH. 311 indicates bis needs, and his needs the thoughts on which ho had been sorrowfully brooding, Mark what that discipline is. Not only does the risen Lord bid Mary Magdalene go tell his ' disciples ami Peter ' that He has broken from a grave which could not hold him ; not only does He confirm this special and tender sign of grace by appearing to Cephas before He appears to the Twelve ; but having touched Peter's heart wdtli these proofs of a love stronger than death, a love not to be alienated even by infidelity and desertion; having thus shed the light of hope into the darkness of his remorse and despair, and turned his remorse into a humble and healing contrition, our Lord proceeds to convert him, and to prove him converted, by leading him to unsay all his foolish boasts, and to retrieve all the failures which had sprung from too much confidence in him- self, too little trust in God his Saviour. Take an instance or two — we have no time for more — of this process of conversion. When the Apostles returned into Galilee, where Jesus had promised to shew Himself to them again, Peter with his old energy and impatience of inaction, determines to work while he waits for the coming of the Master. ' I go a fishing/ he cries ; and the rest, or some of them, go with him. They toil all night, and catch nothing. But in the morning a Stranger accosts them from the shore, 312 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION tells them where to shoot the net, and now they take a multitude of fishes. The wonder recalls a previous wonder. ' That must be Jesus,' thinks John : and looking stedfastly through the morning haze, he cries, ' It is the Lord ! ' Then Peter, we are told, girded himself with his thick rough coat, ' for he was naked,' i.e. stripped to his shirt, and cast himself i/ifo, or ontoy the sea. The Greek preposition will bear either meaning ; and, as men do not hamper themselves with thick heavy garments when they mean to swim, — and still less when they have to swim, two hundi-ed cubits, i.e. one hundred yards ; as, if Peter meant swimming, he would have been more likely to strip off his coat than to gird it on, we may fairly conclude that what he in- tended was to repeat his old experiment, to walk on the waters into which he had once sunk. And now, animated by no boastful self-trust, by no over-weening ambition to outdo and outdare his brethren, but drawn by Christ and his passionate love for Christ, that he may be marked out as the leader and captain of his brethren, he retrieves his former failure : he comes safely to the shore, and is thus taught how much mightier are humility and trust than self-confi- dence and vainglory. When he reaches the shore a further trial awaits him. On the night of the Betrayal he had boasted of a love beyond that of his brethren : ' Though all {i.e. THE SCENE ON EARTH, 313 all these) should be offended, yet will not I.' And this vain boast had been followed by no less than three open and shameful denials of his Lord. These false steps have now to be retraced, these failures retrieved. Hence, when they had broken then- fast, Jesus turns to Peter with the question, ' Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these f ' 'Do you still hold by your boast ? ' But Simon has not been sifted in vain. There is a tone of shame and disa- vowal in his simple reply, ' Lord, thou knowest that I love thee, — not more than these perhaps ; I no longer measure myself against them ; they may love Thee more and better than I : still I love thee, and thou knowest that I love Thee.' Three times the question is repeated, till Peter is ' grieved ; ' for he ^Z ciled to God and made meet for the kingdom 6f heaven. Nevertheless, this, — this, and not that, — is the teaching of the New Testament, as we may see from the sentence we have just read. For who can deny that, when our Lord warned him of an ap- l^roaching conversion, St. Peter was ah'ead}^ what is commonly understood hy a converted man? Long hefore this he had left all to follow Christ, — home, handicraft, the goodwill of his neighhours — to come under the han of the Synagogue, the rahbis, the Pharisees, the priests. Long before this, too, he had witnessed the good confession : * Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God,' and had received this testimony from the Lord : ' Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this to thee, but my Father who is in heaven.' Which of us has shewn so strong a faith, or can adduce so clear an assurance of acceptance with God ? If Peter was not converted, if he had not become a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, who has ? Yet it is to this converted man that Jesus says : ' When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren ! ' But perhaps it is our Version that is in fault; perhaps the Greek would tell a different tale. No, the word used here (iTricTTpiclxo) is the word constantly used for ' conversion ' in the Greek Testament ; it is 334 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. the very word used by Peter himself when, on the day of Pentecost, he exhorted the multitude that had mm-dered Christ : ' Kepent, and be ye converted, that your sins may be blotted out ; ' it is the very word used by St. James in the well-known passage : ' He who converteth a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death, and hide a multitude of sins.' In short, it is the one word which the New Testament sets apart throughout to the office of denoting that spiritual change, or process, by which men are turned from darkness to light, from evil to good, from the bondage of sin to the service of righteousness. Here, indeed, lies the whole difficulty, such as it is ; for the New Testament does unques- -tionably pronounce him ' converted ' who has once passed through this happy change, and yet it also affirms that this happy change may or must be repeated again and again before Conversion is com- plete. How, then, are we to solve the difficulty ? Nothing is easier, for it is purely a difficulty of our own making. The very moment that we conceive of Conversion, not simply as a sudden and momentary act, but also as a gradual, iterated, lifelong process, the difficulty is solved, and we see that Conversion may occm- many times and take many forms. And to this conception we are led both by our own experience, in which the CONVERSION. 335 transition from evil to good is only too slow and gradual, and by the word we use to denote that transition, no less than by the exj)ress teaching of Christ Himself. For, as the Greek word (epistrophe) means a turning hack upon God, so the word ' conver- sion ' denotes a turning with, or toward some person or force, instead of turning from, or against, it. Our conversion to God, therefore, means simply that we turn back to, or turn toward, the God from whom we have too often turned away ; that we turn with the influences of his grace and Spirit instead of turning against them. So that ichencver we yield to the Divine Influence, instead of resisting it, we are con- verted ; and whenever we yield to it, for the first time, that is our first conversion. But when do we yield to it for the first time? Most of us would be puzzled, I suppose, and even unable, to say: for most of us became very early aware of two great conflicting forces or powers at work within us and around us, of which we felt that only the good force had an imperative claim upon us, though it would often have been more pleasant for the moment to yield to the evil force. Most of us, too, I dare say, can remember the pecu- liar glow of satisfaction which warmed our breast when, in those early years, we denied ourselves some inviting evil — some temptation to falsehood or lazi- 336 ST. PETER'S SIFTING AND CONVERSION. ness, disobedience or selfishness — that we might da what we felt to be right or good or kind. That was our first conversion ; then, first, we voluntarily turned with God and toward Him, and entered the heaven that lay about our infancy. From that time onward our life has been a strangely -blended sequence of sins and of conversions from sin, a chequered series of occasions on which we have yielded ourselves to the gracious influences with which God has surrounded us or have ungraciously resisted them. So that most of us passed through many conversions before, in the technical or theological sense of the word, we were * converted ' at all. Even this conversion, moreover, our conversion in the theological sense of that term, may have taken one of two forms, answered to one of two types ; for, as we all know, there are two main types or forms which this great spiritual change assumes. There is the gradual and continuous type ; there is also the sudden and — if I may use the word — catastrophic type : one man rising into the distinctively spiritual life by changes which are almost imperceptible, while another breaks into it by a change so sudden and violent that it assumes the proportions of a moral cataclysm or catastrophe. Cases of either kind are probably familiar to us all. While we were still children most of us, as I CONVERSION. -^yj have said, now turned toward God, and now turned away from Him, on the spur of a thousand shght occasions. Suppose, then, the child of jDious parents, with many inherited predispositions to that which is good, to grow up in a pious home, such as, thank God, we can most of us remember, in which he is surrounded with sweet and wholesome influences on every side. Is it not probable that, though he will often slip, and sometimes fall, into sin, he will gradually form a habit of yielding to these gracious influences, that he will at least acquire a sincere reverence for all that is good ? At last — say, in early manhood — he comes to know what all this means, to feel that through all God has been guiding and training him for his service, and that it is high time he voluntarily consecrated himself to that service. Accordingly he associates himself with those who are like-minded with himself, enters the Christian fellow- ship, takes the Christian sacrament or sacraments,* and talks with the Christian people about him. At first he is probably a little disappointed with them, but, above all, with himself. He is conscious of no radical and sweeping change in his own character, no budding saintship, no such elevation of spirit and added power of obedience and delight in God as he * In my own Community we only administer baptism on a volun- tary confession of faith. Z 338 .ST. PETER'S SIFTIXG AND CONVERSION. had anticipated. Unless he fall into wise hands, he begins perhaps to doubt whether he has been really converted, whether his experience answers to the Christian t^^pe. Possibly he tries himself by all manner of inapproi)riate tests, by the experience of friends who have had a wholly different training to his own, or even by the history of Oriental Jews who stormed through their grand passionate lives three or fom- thousand years ago. Poor lad ! How should Iw know any deep radical change whose brief life has been a succession of gentle changes, each of which has brought him nearer to God ? How should he feel what they feel who, after years of habitual and gross iniquity, are suddenly seized by great spiritual con- victions, and swung right round as in a moment, — Iw, who has never altogether turned his back on good- ness, but has been drawn on toward it step by step ? If we believe in the sinfulness of man and the redeem- ing grace of God, what other proof do we need, what better proof can we have, of the genuineness of his conversion than this : that he has turned toward God, and is walking with God ? On the other hand, here is a lad who, though he too has had his higher moods and better impulses, has grown, by force of an evil inheritance and an evil training, or by the wild passionate tumult of an unbalanced nature, into a habit of resisting such CONVERSION. 339 ^^racious influences as he has known. Ho runs the riot of the senses, follows his lusts, till he sinks into 11 reckless godless reprohate. 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