tibrarp of Che theological gcminavy PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY PRESENTED BY The Estate of Rev. Robert 0. Kirkwood BX 5937 .B83 V5 1910 Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893, Visions and tasks, and othei sermons Phillips Brooks's Sermons In Ten Volumes 1st Series The Purpose and Use of Comfort And Other Sermons 2d Series The Candle of the Lord And Other Sermons 3d Series Sermons Preached in English Churches And Other Sermons 4th Series Visions and Tasks And Other Sermons 5th Series The Light of the World And Other Sermons 6th Series The Battle Of Life And Other Sermons 7th Series Sermons for the Principal Festi- vals and Fasts of the Church Year Edited by the Rev. John Cotton Brooks 8th Series New Starts in Life And Other Sermons 9th Series The Law of Growth And Other Sermons 10th Series Seeking Life And Other Sermons E. P. Dutton and Company 31 West 23d Street New York Visions and Tasks And Other Sermons By the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D. Fourth Series N EW YORK E P • DUTTON & COMPANY 31 West Twenty-Third Street I 9 I O Copyright, 1886 (Twenty Sermons) BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS' NOTE This volume was originally published as " Twenty Sermons " T£bc *n(chcrboclicr prcos. Hew lorh TO THE MEMORY OF jFrebertck iBrooks I INSCRIBE THESE SERMONS. CONTENTS. SERMON I. Wtstons cmb GTasks. PAGE 11 While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee." — Acts x. 19 . . .1 SERMON II. ®ije jlotljcr's flflonber. "Son, why hast thou thus dealt ivith us ?" — Luke li. 48 . . 20 SERMON III. Wqz Cljurct) of tije Chung Ok>b- " The Church of the living God."—l Tim. iii. 15 . . .42 SERMON IV. Staubtng before ©ob. " And I saiv the dead, small and great, stand before God." — Revelation xx. 12 60 SERMON V. Bro%rtjoob in €tjrtsi " Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother ; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother." — Matthew x. 2 . .76 v vi Contents. SERMON VI. ©Ije (ftiant roitlj tlje MJoimbeb $eel. PAGE ''And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and be- tween thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel." — Genesis iii. 15. 93 SERMON VII. ©Ije Sea of ©lass jlingleb roiiij Mn. "And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that had gotten the victory over the beast". . . stand on the sea of glass, having the M harps of God." — Revelation xv. 2 110 SERMON VIII. ©Ije {Beautiful ©ate of tlje ©emple. " The Beautiful gate of the temple."— Acts iii. 10. . . . 127 SERMON IX. Disciples anb Apostles. " And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and of them he chose twelve, tchom also he named Apostles." — Luke vi. 13 152 SERMON X. ©Ije ©art!} of tlje fteoempiion. u The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord's : but the earth hath he given to the children of men." — Psalm cxv. 16. . 173 SERMON XI. Slje jlan roitl) fllroo ©alcnts. " To another he gave tico talents.''— Matthew xxv. 15 . . 192 Contents. vii SERMON XII. D-estmcttott mtb 4fal|Um£nt PAGB " lam not come to destroy, but to fulfil.'' — Matthew v. 17. . 210 SERMON XIII. Makz tlje Mm Mt JDottm. "And Jesus said, Make the men sit down." — John vi. 10. . 226 SERMON XIV. " He hath made everything beautiful in his time." — Ecclesias- tes ill. 11 244 SERMON XV. Wqz Stnorb #a%b in tyzanzn. "For my sword shall be bathed in heaven." — Isaiah xxxiv. 5. . 262 SERMON XVI. " As the Father Jcnoweth me, even so know I the Father." — St. John x. 15 u Then shall I know even as also I am known." — 1 Corinthi- ans xiii. 12 280 SERMON XVII. &n (ftml Spirit from itje Corb. " The spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him." — 1 Samuel xvi. 14. . . 297 viii * Contents. SERMON XVIII. ©mttg up to Stents ctlem. PAGE "Then Jesus tooJc unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written concern- ing the Son of man shall be accomplished." — Luke xviii. 30. 316 SERMON XIX. ©jje Safttn cmb helpfulness of iuttlj. "They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them. Tliey shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." — Maek xvi. 18 333 SERMON XX. ©jje ©real dfcpeciatton. "Let your moderation he known unto all men. The Lord is at hand." — Phlllippians iv. 4 353 SERMON I. " While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him. Behold, three men seek thee." — Acts x. 19. THESE words recall to many of you a most fa- miliar picture, for the story of St. Peter's vision is one of those passages of the New Testament which have almost become the proverbs of mankind. Peter had been sitting on the top of Simon's house at Jaffa, and there had been shown to him the sight of the great sheet full of all living beasts, of which he had been bidden to take and eat. And when he hesi- tated, you remember how a voice had spoken to him, and rebuked the narrow punctiliousness with which he drew distinctions, and thought some of God's creatures clean and others unclean. He was sitting there, pondering this vision, "doubting in himself what the vision which he had seen should mean." A new idea had come to him. He saw it very vaguely ; and its developments, what it would lead to if he followed it out, he could not see at all. It was all abstract and impalpable. It just bewildered and eluded him. But as he sat there, steps were heard below, and to his mind the Spirit spoke, saying. Visions and Tasks. " Three men are asking for thee." They were the servants of Cornelius, the Gentile, coming to ask him to visit their master. Their visit gave him immediately the chance to put in action the idea which had possessed him. Our verse shows him then standing between the vision and its appli- cation. On the one side of him was the mysterious sheet full of the multitude of beasts ; on the other side were the three men who needed just the princi- ple which the sheet-full of beasts involved. It was a critical moment. The question was whether the vision could pass through Peter to the three men and Cornelius. When on the morrow he " went away with them," the question was decided, and the idea and its appropriate duty had joined hands. Man standing between his visions and his tasks — that is the subject of our verse then. That is our subject for this morning. It is the place where certain men are often called upon peculiarly to stand ; and in some degree it is the place in which all men are standing always. For every man has visions, glimpses clearer or duller, now bright and beautiful, now clouded and obscure, of what is abso- lutely and abstractly true ; and every man also has pressing on him the warm, clear lives of fellow-men. There is the world of truths on one side, and there is the world of men upon the other. Between the two stands man; and these two worlds, if man is what he ought to be, meet through his nature. Think of an instance, and you will see what I mean. Here are you, a thoughtful, meditative man. Visions and Tasks. You have been pondering and studying. Some- how it has become clear to you, let us say, that there is a God. The supernatural behind the natural, the will behind all forces, has revealed itself to you. For the moment, it is enough for you just to know that mighty truth. Turning it this way and that, you think in one view and another how mighty it is. But very soon, if you are a true man, your nature begins to hear and feel a stir upon the other side of it. Under the win- dows which look towards the world, the tumult of the needy life of your fellow-men comes rising up to you. Perhaps it is more definite than that, and certain special fellow-men come, with footsteps which you can hear, up to your hearts' doors and knock. At first their coming seems to be only an intrusion. Why can they not leave you alone with your great idea ? What right have they to claim a share of the sunshine in which you are sitting? But by- and-by you see more wisely. You begin to wonder whether their coming on this side of you is not the true correlative and correspondent of the coming of the vision on the other side of you. You begin to feel that the practical life may be needed to com- plete the meditative life. If you open the door to your intrusive fellow-men you find that it indeed is so. Your idea of God falling upon the many mirrors of their various needs and natures, gains new interpretations and illuminations. Their human hearts get hold of the reality of God, which they never could have found out for themselves, through Visions and Tasks. your belief in it. And your own life, open on both sides, on this side to the vision, and on that side to the men, grows rich and sacred as being the room in which that most deep and interesting transaction which the world can witness, the meeting of truth with the human mind, takes place. Truth is vague and helpless until men believe it. Men are weak and frivolous till they believe in truth. To furnish truth to the believing heart, and to furnish believing hearts to truth, certainly there is no nobler office for a human life than that ; and the doc- trine which I want to preach to you to-day is that the human life or human nature is so made as to ful- fil just that office. How can we better tell the story of you who first believe in God yourself and then are drawn out to make your fellow-men believe in Him, and in making them believe in Him find your own belief grow steadier and clearer — how shall we better depict this human life which never learns anything without hearing other human lives clamoring to share the blessings of its knowledge than by recurring to the story of Peter, to whom, "as he thought on the vision, the Spirit said, Behold three men seek thee." It is illustrated, this central and critical position in which a man may stand, by the way in which the artist stands between the whole world of beautiful ideas and the hard world of matter, in which these ideas at last find their expression through him. The artist dreams his dream, and as he thinks upon the vision, the Spirit says, Behold the marble seeks thee;" and instantly the chisel is in his hand and the work Visions and Tasks, of carving has begun. Ideas would hover like a great vague cloud over a world all hard and gross and meaningless, if it were not for man who brings the fire down and makes the whole of nature significant and vocal. If civilization has changed the face of nature, and out of rocks and trees built monuments and cities, the whole long history is but the record of the meeting within the transmitting intelligence of man of the abstract idea with the adaptable ma- terial. But to return from our illustration to our truth. There are some moments in life when this position of man, as standing between the visions which he bus seen and his fellow-men on whom he is to bring them into power, is peculiarly manifest. There are perhaps some young men here to-day who stands just at one of those moments now. When any process of education has been finished, when the college doors have just dis- missed their graduate, when the professional student stands upon the brink of the troubled waters of his profession with the calm scholar-days behind him, when the young minister is just feeling the hands of ordination on his bowed head, in all these days how real this sense of the two worlds between which he stands is to any truly thoughtful man. Between the silence and the stir, between the calm accumulation and the active employment of his truth, the young man stands with a strange consciousness which is never so vividly repeated at any other moment of his life. The two worlds, one on each side of him, re- ceive illumination from each other, and this illumi- Visions and Tasks. nation is sent hack aud forth through him. Truth never seemed BO sacred as when he comes in sight of its true uses; and the world never seemed so well worth living for as when he sees how much it needs his truth. Sad is the lot, sad is the nature of any man who can pass through such a moment and not be solemnized and exalted by it. Sad is the man who can graduate from college and go out into the world, and think of his education only as a drudgery from which he has at last escaped, or as an equipment with which he is to earn his daily bread. Sad is the lot and nature of any man who sees his youth fading back behind him, finds himself grow- ing out of the specially vision-seeing period of life, and counts his visions as they fade, mere pleasant recollections, or, it may be, things to laugh at and to be ashamed of. Sometimes you see a happy man, of whom, as he grows older, nothing of that kind is true. A man we see sometimes who, as he comes to mid- dle-life, finds Iris immediate enthusiastic sight of ideal things grown dull; that is the almost neces- sary condition of his ripening life. He does not spring as quickly as he once did to seize each newly offered hope for man. A thousand disenchantment s have made him serious and sober. He looks back, and the glow and sparkle which he once saw in life he sees no longer. He wonders at his recol- lection of himself, and asks how it is possible that life ever should have seemed to him as he remem- bers that it did seem. But the fact that it really did Visions and Tasks. once soem so to him is his most valued certainty. He would not part with that assurance for anything. All the hard work that he does now is done in the strength and light of that remembered enthusiasm. To have been born into the world as he is now ; never to have had any years in which the sky seemed brighter and the fields greener, and man more noble, and the world more hopeful than they seem to-day, would make all life for him another and a drearier thing. Every day the dreams of his boyhood, which seem dead, are really the live inspirations of his life. To such a man there surely came, some day or other in the past, a Peter-hour, a time at which the visions of his youth and the hard work of his manhood met and knew each other. From that time on the power of his vision passed into his work; and now, as, with his calm, dry face, seeming so unemotional, so unmoved, he goes about his labor, doing his duty and serving his generation, it is really the fire of his youth which no longer blazes, but still burns within him that makes the active power of that dry, prudent, conscientious, useful man. Peter plodding over the dusty hills to reach Cornelius, may seem to have lost the glory which was on his face while he sat and thought upon the vision, and caught glimpses of the essential nobleness of man — but the vision was at the soul of his journey all the time, and was what made his journey different from that of any peddler whom he met upon the road. One longs to speak to men whom the hard work and dry details of life are just claiming, as they are 8 Visions and Tasks. leaving their youth behind and passing into middle life. You may expect to grow less enthusiastic and excited. Do not be surprised at that. But in the meet- ing of the facts of life with those accumulated con- victions which must be the real heart of any true enthusiast, you ought to be growing more and more earnest the longer that you live. There are trees whose fruit does not ripen till their leaves have fallen ; but we are sure that the ripe fruit does not laugh at the fallen leaves whose strength it has drawn out into its own perfected shape and color. If you do not see the visions which you saw when you were a boy, that does not prove that the vision was not true. That boy's belief that man is essentially noble, and the world is full of hope, is as genuinely a part of your total life as this man's experience that men will cheat, and that the world's great wheels move very slowly. The emotions grow less eager and excited, but the convictions ought to be growing always stronger — as the kernel ripens in the withering shell. Believe in man with all your childhood's confidence, while you work for man with all a man's prudence and cir- cumspection. Such union of energy and wisdom makes the completest character, and the most pow- erful life. I have been wandering a little from my subject. The power of man to stand between abstract truth upon the one side and the concrete facts of life upon the other, comes from the co-existence in his human nature of two different powers, without the possession of both of which no man possesses a complete hu- Visions and Tasks. inanity. One of these powers is the power of knowing, and the other is the power of loving. I ask you to give to both of the words their fullest meaning, and then how rich the nature grows which has them both — this human nature, which is not truly human if either of them be left out. The power of know- ing, however the knowledge may be sought or won, whether by patient study or quick-leaping intuition, including imagination and all the poetic power, faith, trust in authority, the faculty of getting wisdom by experience, everything by which the human nature comes into direct relationship to truth, and tries to learn, and in any degree, succeeds in knowing — that is one necessary element of manhood. And the other is Love, the power of sympathetic intercourse with things and people, the power to be touched by the personal nature with which we have to do — love therefore, including hate, for hate is only the reverse utterance of love, the negative expression of the soul's affection ; to hate anything is vehemently to love its opposite. Love thus, as the whole element of personal affection and relationship of every sort, this too is necessary, in order that a man may really be a man. These two together must be in all men. Not merely in the greatest men. It is not a question of greatness, but of genuineness and completeness. Just as the same chemical elements must be in a raindrop that are in Niagara, and, if they are, then the raindrop is as truly water as the cataract ; so the power of learning truth and the power of loving man must be in you or me, as well as in Shakspeare or Socrates ; and if they are, io Visions and Tasks. then we are as genuinely and completely men as Socrates and Shakspeare. From this it will immediately follow, that the more perfectly these two constituents of human nature meet, the more absolutely they are proportioned to each other, and the more completely they are blend- ed, so much the more ready will the human nature be for the fulfilment of every function of humanity. And if, as we have seen, one of the loftiest functions of humanity is to stand between the absolute truth and the world's needs, and to transmit the one in such way that it can really reach and help the other, then it will also follow that the more perfectly the knowing faculty and the loving faculty meet in any man, the more that man's life will become a transmitter and interpreter of truth to other men. That sounds like a dry inference ; but it is one of which our own dearest experiences have borne to all of us most precious testimony. If you look back to the men who have taught you most, and in the fuller light where you now stand, study their character, you will surely find that the real secret of their power lay here, in the harmonious blending of the knowing and the loving powers in their nature ; in the opening of their nature on both sides, so that truth entered in freely here and you entered in freely there, and you and truth met, as it were, familiarly in the hospitality of their great characters. The man who has only the knowing power active, lets truth in, but it finds no man to feed. The man who has only the loving power active, lets man in, but he Visions and Tasks. u finds no truth to feed on. The real teacher welcomes both. You know this in all who are really teachers. It is most clear of all in that highest of all the teacher- ships which the world has to show, which comes with its blessing to the beginning of every human life which is not by special misfortune poorer than it ought to be. Ask where a mother's power lies, and surely the answer must be that no being like the true mother stands between visions of the highest truths on one side, and a human soul on the other, and offers a nature in which the knowing power and the lov- ing power are kneaded and moulded together into a perfect oneness, into a sacred and pure transparency for the transmission of the first facts of the uni- verse, and God and Life to the intelligence of her child, who lives in her knowledge by her love. The purest mingling of all elements into one char- acter and nature which we can ever see, is in the Christian mother, in whom the knowledge of all that she knows and the love which she feels for her child, make not two natures, as they often do in men, in fathers, but perfectly and absolutely one. She values knowledge not for its own sake, but for her child. She loves him not with the mere animal fondness with which the brute mother loves her child, but as the utterance and revelation of every truth to her. Thus her love and her intelligence are blended perfectly ; and the result is that which we know, the wonderful power of the mother's life to bring the deepest, highest, farthest truths, and 12 Visions and Tasks. win for them their first entrance into the nature of her child. The New Testament tells us of Jesus that He was full of Grace and Truth. Grace and Truth ! These are exactly the two elements of which we have been speaking, and it must have been in the perfect meet- ing of those two elements in him that His mediator- ship, His power to transmute the everlasting truths of God into the immediate help of needy men consisted. He was no rapt self-centered student of the abstract truth; nor was he the merely ready sentimental pitier of the woes of men. But in His whole nature there was finely wrought and combined the union of the abstract and eternal with the special and the personal, which made it possible for him, without an effort, to come down from the mountain where he had been glorified with the light of God, and take up in- stantly the cure of the poor lunatic in the valley ; or to descend from the hill where he had been praying, to save his disciples half-shipwrecked on the lake ; or to turn his back on the comforting angels of Geth- semane, that he might give himself into the hands of the soldiers who were to lead him to the cross. "While he thought upon the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold three men seek thee." Can any words more typically tell the life of Christ than those ! It is a truth which we have all learned from some experience through which we have been led, that any great experience, seriously and greatly met and passed through, makes the man who has passed Visions and Tasks. 13 through it always afterwards a purer medium through which the highest truth may shine on other men. Have you not seen it ? Here is some man whom you have known long. You have seemed to have reached the end of all that it is possible for you to get from him, all that it is possible for him to do for you. Nothing has come through him from behind to you. You have seen him. You have seen a sort of glint or glimmer of reflection of God's light upon the surface of His life, as the sun might be re- flected on a plate of steel. But nothing of God or God's truth has come through him to you as the sun shines through a lens of glass, pouring its increased intensity upon the wood it sets in flame. But some day you meet that man, and he is altered. Tenderer, warmer, richer, he seems to be full of truths and revelations which he easily pours out to you. Now you not merely see him ; you see through him to things behind. As you talk with him, as you look into his face, you see with new surprising clear- ness what God is, what man is, what a great thing it is to live, what a great thing it is to die, how mysteri- ous and pathetic are sorrow and happiness, and fear and hope. You cannot begin to tell the change by merely thinking that the man has learned some new facts and is telling them to you, as a book might tell them from its printed page. The very substance of the man is altered, so that he stands between the eternal truths and you no longer as a screen, which shuts them from your sight, but as an atmosphere through which they come to you all radiant. You 14 Visions and Tasks. ask what has come to him, and you hear (if you are near enough for him to tell you his most sacred history), of some profound experience. He has passed through an overwhelming sorrow. He has stood upon the brink of some tremendous danger. He has spent a day and a night in the deep of some bewildering doubt. He has been overmastered by some sudden joy. It may have been one of these or another. The result has been in such a change of the very substance of the nature, that, whereas before it was all thick and muddy, so that whatever light fell upon it was either cast aside or else absorbed into it and lost, now it makes truth first visible, and then clear and convincing to the fellow-men who see truth through it. And when you try to analyze this change, do you not find that it consists in an impregnation of the nature which has had this new experience with two forces — one a love for truth, the other a love for man ? and it is in the perfect combination of these two in any life that the clarifying of that life into a power of transmission and irradiation truly lies. What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating shams and pretences, hunger- ing for truth ; and also full of sympathy for his fel- low-man whose capacity for suffering has been re- vealed to him by his own. It is the perfect blend- ing of those two constituents in the new nature of your tried and patient friend which have given him this wondrous power of showing God and truth to you. Visions and Tasks. 15 What man goes bravely and faithfully through doubt and does not bring out a soul to which truth seems to be infinitely precious, and the human soul the most mysterious, sacred thing in all the world. Out of the union of those two persuasions has come the prophetship of this life which now you cannot look at without seeing the infinite behind it made clear by it. Surely, if we can believe this, then the way in which God lets his children encounter great, and sometimes terrible, experiences is not entirely inex- plicable. Surely if these souls which now are deep in sorrow, or are being cast up and down and back and forth in doubt, are being thus annealed and purified that they may come to be revealers, mediators be- tween God and their fellow-men, then into our wonder at the existence of doubt and sorrow in God's world there comes a little ray of light. Who would not bear anything that could refine his life into fitness for such a privilege as that ? I had meant to speak of several of the special vis- ions which, through the soul that is prepared for such an office, become transformed into influence and blessing to mankind. I can only indicate them in the slightest way. Suppose that God has let you see His goodness. A strong, unalterable persuasion that God is merciful and kind has been poured onto your life, into your mind. That fact itself, once known, absorbs your contemplation. If you and God were all the universe, the knowledge of His goodness would be everything to you. You would sit lonely 1 6 Visions and Tasks. in the empty world and fill your soul with gazing on the brightness of that truth. So you do sit to-day, as if you and God were indeed alone, and no one in the universe except you two. And then, as you sit so, there comes some sort of appeal from fellow-men. The three men are down at the door while you are dreaming on the housetop. Your child comes to you with some childish joy and wants its explanation ; some puzzled neighbor cries across to you, from his life to yours, and wants to know if you have any clue to all this snarl of living. Somehow the cry awakens you, and you go down and put your truth into your brother's hands. At first it seems almost a profanation. The truth is so sacred and seems so thoroughly your own. But as you give it to your brother, new lights come out in it. For God to be good means something more when the goodness turns to new forms of blessing in the new need of this new life. O you who think you know that God is merciful because of the mercy which He has shewed to you, be sure there is a richness in your truth which you have not reached yet, which you will never reach until you let Him make your life the interpreter of His goodness to some other soul ! Or again perhaps the truth which you have learned, the vision which you have seen, is the sinfulness of sin — what a terrible thing it is for any child of God to disobey his Father. Overwhelmed with that knowledge, you sit and brood upon your sad estate. I think that all religious history bears witness that that conviction, if it remains purely a personal truth Visions and Tasks. 17 of our own life, certainly grows tyrannical and mor- bid and brings despair. As soon as it becomes a stimulus, inspiring us to go and help our brethren es- cape out of their sin, it becomes salutary and blessed. If I knew any soul to-day, haggard and weary with its consciousness of sin and danger, I think that what I would try to do to help it would be this — make it see in its own sinfulness the revelation of the sin- fulness of all the world; then let it forget its own sin- fulness and keep only the impulse that must come out of its sight of how horrible the world's sin is; then let it go, full of that impulse, and try to save the world. So it must find its own salvation. So of the truth of immortality. Not as a per- sonal privilege of mine, but as a token of the great- ness and worth of the human soul, making every service which I can render to it more imperious and delightful — so do I come to understand the fact that man never dies with the fullest faith. So of such a truth as the Trinity. Not as a puz- zle or a satisfaction of the intellect, but as an ex- pression of the manifold helpfulness with which the divine nature offers itself to the human, so it will be to me the richest and the holiest creed. There are no limits to our doctrine. Every truth which it is possible for man to know it is good for him to know with reference to his brother men. Only in that way is the truth which he knows kept at its loftiest and purest. This is the daily meaning which I want to find in the picture of Peter sitting Visions and Tasks. before his vision, on the house-top and the three men knocking in the street below. There is a danger, which we all recognize, of self- ishness in our religion. It comes in various forms. It makes one man say : " I am content, for I have seen the Lord." To that man the great host of his fellow-men who need his Lord as much as he, are nothing. He will leave them unheard in the street and sit within, wrapped in the complacency of his assured salvation. Another man says, ' ' What busi- ness is it of any one except myself if I close my eyes and do not see the Lord ? Does it hurt any one but me ? Who has a right to interfere or urge me ?" To both of these men is there not a message in the story of Peter which we have been studying this morning? To the first man it says: The seeing of your own vision is but half, and half without the other half grows weak and perishes. Your religion, kept sole- ly for yourself, will certainly decay. Up, up, and go abroad and find the men who need your Christ, to whom you can bring Him, in giving Him to whom alone you can make your own faith in Him complete and strong. To the other man it says, Indeed it is the business of other men than you, it is the whole world's busi- ness whether or not you are a Christian ! Indeed it does rob other souls than yours, if you will not live spiritually and see the truth which God is showing to your soul. If there are men whom, being your- self a Christian, you might bring to Christ, then you rob not only yourself but them, if you refuse to come Visions and Tasks. 19 to Christ. The window which makes itself dark, darkens not merely itself, but also all the room into which the light might have shone through it. I dare to hope that some generous nature may feel this appeal. Be spiritual, be religious, come to Christ. Cast off your sins, not for yourself, but for some soul which possibly may learn from you, what it could not learn in any other way, how good and strong and forgiving is the sinner's God. It is a terrible thing to have seen the vision, and to be so wrapped up in its contemplation as not to hear the knock of needy hands upon our doors. It is a terrible thing to hear the knock and have no vision to declare to the poor knocker. But there is no greater happiness in all the world than for a man to love Christ for the mercy Christ has shown his soul, and then to open his whole heart outward and help to save his brethren's souls with the same salvation in which he rejoices for himself. May none of us go through life so poor as never to have known that happiness. SERMON II. m &tftef$ Wmfttv. u Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us ? " — Luke ii. 48. THE mother of Jesus is the speaker, and it is of Jesus that she asks her question. On the way home from the temple at Jerusalem, where they had gone to worship, you remember, they missed the child Jesus from their company. On going back they found him in the temple, " sitting in the midst of the doc- tors, both hearing them and asking them questions." Then it was that His mother said unto him, ; ' Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us ? Behold thy fa- ther and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me ? wist ye not that I must be about my father's business ?" "Why hast thou dealt thus with us?" It is a puzzled question. The boy, who had been an obedient child in her household, whom she had cared for in her own way and found always docile to her guidance, had suddenly past beyond her and done a thing which she could not understand. It seemed as if she had lost him. Her tone is full of love, but there is some- thing almost like jealousy about it. He has taken 20 The Mother s Wonder. 21 himself into his own keeping, and this one act seems to foretell the time when he will take his whole life into his own hands, and leave her outside altogether. The time has past when she could hold him as a babe upon her bosom as she carried him down into Egypt. The time is prophesied already when he should go in his solitude up to the cross, and only leave his mother weeping at the foot. She is bidden to stand by and see her Son do his work and live his life, which thus far has been all of her shaping, in ways she cannot understand. No wonder that it is a clear, critical moment in her life. No wonder that her question still rings with the pain that she put into it. No wonder that when she went home, although he was still " subject unto her," her life with her son was all changed, and she " kept all these sayings in her heart." I think that this question of the mother of Jesus reveals an experience of the human heart which is very common, which is most common in the best hearts and those who feel their responsibility the most. It is an experience which well deserves our study, and I ask you this morning to think about it with me in some of its examples. The Virgin Mary is the per- petual type of people who, intrusted with any great and sacred interest, identify their own lives with that interest and care for it conscientiously; but who, by-and-by, when the interest begins to manifest its own vitality and to shape its own methods, are filled with perplexity. They cannot keep the causes for which they labor under their own care. As his mothel 22 The Mother s Wonder. asked of Jesus, so they are always asking of the objects for which they live, " Why hast thou thus dealt with us?" Such people are people who have realized responsibility more than they have realized God. Just as Mary felt at the moment when she asked this question, that Jesus was her son more than that he was God's Son, so there is a constant tendency among the most earnest and conscientious people, to feel that the causes for which they live and work are their causes, more than that they are God's causes, and so to experience something which is almost like jealousy, when they see those causes pass beyond their power and fulfil themselves in larger ways than theirs. For such people, often the most devoted and faithful souls among us, it seems to me that there must be some help and light in this story of Jesus and his mother. The first and simplest case of the experience which I want to speak of, is that which comes nearest to the circumstances of our story. It comes in every childhood. It comes whenever a boy grows up to the time at which he passes beyond the merely parental government which belonged to his earliest years. It comes with all assertion of individual character and purpose in a boy's life. A boy has had his career all identified with his home where he was cradled. What he was and did, he was and did as a member of that household. But by-and-by there comes some sudden outbreak of a personal energy. He shows some disposition, and attempts some task distinctive- ly his own. It is a puzzling moment alike for the The Mother's Wonder. 23 child and for the father. The child is perplexed with pleasure which is almost pain to find himself for the first time doing an act which is genuinely his own. The father is filled with a pain which yet has pride and pleasure in it to see his boy doing something original, something which he never bade him do, something which perhaps he could not do himself. The real understanding of that moment, both to child and father, depends upon one thing — upon whether they can see in it the larger truth that this child is not merely the son of his father, but also is the son of God. If they both understand that, then the child, as he undertakes his personal life, passes not into a looser, but into a stronger, responsibility. And the father is satisfied to see his first authority over his son grow less, because he cannot be jealous of God. It is a noble progress and expansion of life, when the first independent venture of a young man on a career of his own, is not the wilful claim of the prodigal: " Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," — but the reverent appeal of Jesus : " Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business ?" Let this serve for an illustration. It is the scene which, recurring in every household, as a boy claims his own life, is constantly repeating the experience of the household of Nazareth. And now all respon- sible life, all life entrusted with the care of any of God's causes, has this same sort of correspondence with the life of the mother of Jesus. There can be no higher specimen of responsibility than she ex- 24 The Mothers Wonder. hibits. She is entrusted with the care of Him who is to be the Saviour of the world. And that responsi- bility she accepts entirely. She is willing to give up everything else in life, to be absorbed and worn out in the task of supreme privilege which God has given her. There comes no trouble or lack in the degree of her readiness for labor or for pain. But the quality of her self-sacrifice shows its defect else- where. She is not able to see where the limits of her work must be. She is not able to stop short in her devout responsibility, when the task passes beyond her power, and her son begins to deal directly with his Father. Compare with her, in the first place, that person with whom we are familiar in all the history of Christianity, whom we see about us constantly — the champion of the Faith, the man who counts it his work in life to maintain and protect the purity of the belief in Christ. It is a noble task for a man to ac- cept. It is filled with anxiety. The faith for which the man cares is beset with many dangers. It costs him sleepless nights and weary days. He incurs dislike; he excites hostility by his eager zeal. To all this he is fully equal. The danger of many a stout champion of truth comes quite at the other end. There comes a time when God, as it were, takes back into His own keeping that faith over which He has bidden His disciples to stand guard. The truth begins to show a vitality upon which the believer has not counted. It puts itself into new forms. It develops new associations. No wonder that he is troubled. No The Mothers Wo7ider. 25 wonder that, unless he is a large and thoughtful man, thoroughly reverent of truth as well as thoroughly devoted to the truths which he has held, he grudges truth in some way the larger freedom which it is claiming for itself, and almost opposes its develop- ment. Take an example. A good man has for years count- ed himself a champion of the often denied and insult- ed justice of God. He has been ready to maintain it everywhere. Against all weak representations of God as a being all indulgence, he has asserted that God must punish wickedness. That truth he has supported, as he has conceived it, in its simplest, crudest form — physical, unending punishment. Sup- pose the day comes when that faith claims for itself a free and more spiritual meaning ; when men's souls become aware that in the world to come, as in this world, the punishment of sin must be bound up in sin itself ; when not the agonies of hell, but the de- gradation of the moral nature, stands out as the dreadful thing. No wonder that at first, the surprised believer is almost dismayed. His faith, over which he has stood guard so faithfully, seems to be slipping away from him. His faith seems to be playing him false. He is bewildered, as Mary was when Jesus for the first time began to show his personal will and ways. But by-and-by the time came when she rejoiced in it, no doubt. " Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it," she ordered the servants at the marriage in Cana. By that time she had learned to trust her Son far out of her own sight, to look to his own self-develop- 26 The Mother s Wonder. ment with perfect confidence. And so the believer, and the champion of belief, comes in the course of time to rejoice when his belief outgrows him ; when what he has to stand guard over is seen to be, not the spe- cial form in which a dogma has been conceived, but the spirit to which knowledge can come, and to which it must come always more spiritually and richly; not the truth, but truthfulness. It does seem to me that this is what many a be- liever needs to learn to-day. His faith seems to be slipping away from him. Truths will not remain the definite and docile things they used to be. His doctrine opens into some deeper form. He turns to the doctrine he has held and says to it, " Why have you dealt thus with me ?" " Why will you leave me ?" And the answer is, "I must be about my Father's business." Truth is God's child. Truth must be what God wills, not what the believer wills. It is a bless- ed day for the believer when he learns this, and thenceforth only waits to see what new forms God will give his faith from year to year, and then is ready to follow it into whatever new regions God will send it forth to seek. And this same truth applies to the care for the world's reformation and improvement, which differ- ent kinds of good men have. There are some men undertaking to reform the world who want to keep the whole plan in their own hands and never have its working outgo their wisdom. There are other reformers who believe themselves to be working in a great system which is far too large for them to The Mothers Wonder. 27 comj rehend, to which they can only give a helping touch at one point where it comes near their lives. The first kind of reformer believes that he under- stands it all, knows just how evil is to be eradicated, just how good is to be aroused and the world saved. The other reformer does not profess to know any- thing except that God is over all and that under God he has the privilege of helping this cause or that cause of righteousness in some special time of need, and at some special point which he can touch. The first is the reformer with a theory. The second is a reformer with a devotion. And it is evident what will be the different effect on these two men, if, as so often happens, the pro- gress of humanity seems to declare a will of its own, does not advance as we expected it to advance, lags where we look for it to hasten, or leaps to some great attainment where we expected it to proceed by slow degrees. The theoretical reformer, who thinks him- self a master of human progress, and has imagined that he understood it all, is entirely lost as he sees the reform which he has thought could only come to pass in one way, attaining its accomplishment in another, and going on its way far off in some new direction, leaving him behind. The devout reformer, who has considered himself the servant of human good, is glad enough to see that human good is far larger than he can understand, and is content if he can lend his little skill to some corner of its many wants, and be carried on with it, working for it, to unknown results. 28 The Mother s Wonder. There are always people who are uneasy if hard times improve by other ways than they suggested. There are men enough in our land to-day who cannot be totally glad that slavery is abolished, because its abolition did not come about by their plan. There are men in the Church who begrudge the work she does, if it is not done by their own school of church- men. What is the trouble with all these people ? Is it not simple enough ? They have the care of some one of God's children, some one of the causes which are born of Him, and which He loves, but they treat it as if it were not God's child, but only theirs. They are afraid if they see it growing strong in ways which they do not understand. When it dawns upon such a man that behind all the care which he has for any of the great interests of righteousness and the use which God is making of him in its behalf, God himself is holding that interest in the hollow of His hand, and with His infinite wisdom is preparing for it ways of success which His servant cannot begin to know, how calm and confident the servant's care for that good work must grow ; how ready he must be to see the methods of the reform which he desires change utterly before his eyes, to see it taken utterly out of his hands and yet work on for it with all his! might and soul. Here is the salvation of honest partisanship. You believe that only your political party can save the country. But if you believe that the salvation of the country is a care of God, you will stand ever ready to help whatever new party God may seem to entrust with one period of that ever im< The Mothers Wonder. 29 finished work. You and I believe that our Church has a great work to do for Christ's Gospel in our country, but if we believe that Christ's gospel is something which is very near to the heart of God, we cannot possibly limit our sympathy to what our Church is doing. Even if our Church fails of its duty, we cannot possibly feel as if the gospel had failed. We shall have to rejoice, even while we work on with her, that God has other ways to do the work in which she does her part so feebly. These cases are no doubt too general ; they do not touch us very closely. Let us try to come nearer home. I think that the same principle ap- plies to every work which any one of us tries to do for any of his brethren. I know that in this con- gregation there must be many who are anxious for the life of some one whom they love. A certain re- sponsibility lies upon you for some brother's life. Somebody seems to have been given to you to care for. You did not seek the care. But here is some one who, because there is no one else to care for him and see that he goes right, has grown to be your care. That responsibility is no light one, you well know. It presses on you. You are anxious under it. Can our story help you? Surely it can. You say, "How? Is there not an un likeness at the very outset of the story? Was not this one over whom the Virgin Mary watched, the Son of God ? " But tell me : is not the man whom you are anxious for, the brother who is in the midst of his temptation, the friend who is out of work and growing idle, the beggar whom you 30 The Mother s Wonder. are trying to reform out of his drunkenness, is not each of these too a son of God ? And is it not true, and must it not enter into the very centre of your care for them, that they are under God's care just as truly as they are under your care; and that, while God uses you for their development, it is perfectly possible, it is every way to be expected, that He will develop them by means and in directions of which you never would have dreamed ? I think that it is hopeless for any man to under- take to render high help to another man's life who is not constantly aware of this. Mary learned two things about her Son that day in the temple, things which she had known before, but which became per- fectly and permanently clear to her there. One was, that his life was mysteriously larger than her own. The other was, that God was over and behind her, caring for that life for which she had been caring. The largeness and mystery of her Son's life and the fatherhood of God to him, those two things she learned there, and thenceforth they were part of her life always. She never can have forgotten them again. They must have made all the future service that she rendered to him at once more faithful and more calm and more sacred. And my dear friend, you too must learn these truths about the life of any man whom you are trying to help, any man who seems to be committed to you by God, or you cannot really help him as he needs. You must know the mystery of his life and his sonship to God. Ah, how God sometimes teaches us those things The Mothers Wonder. 31 about some one whom we are trying to guide and aid. Wo have undertaken our task very flippantly and narrowly. " Well, this is my man," we say, " I do not see who else can help him, and so I will. I will patronize him. I understand him ; I see what is to be made out of him ; I will make him this, and this," — laying some fine plan down in our mind. "This is what he shall be," and so you take your scholar into your school ; your companion into your company ; what you call your friend into what you call your friendship. The time must come, if you are ever really going to be of deepest use to that man, when, out of something which he says or does, these two truths come to you about him, that he is larger in his nature, more mysterious than you can grasp, and that he is the son of God, led by his Father, over and above your care. We talk about men's neglect of one another's lives, and certainly there is enough of it. They go their way saying of each other, in some utterance of their indifference, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We recognize how terrible it is because we see that, as of old, he who scornfully disowned his brother's care, really was his brother's murderer, so always he who thinks he has no duty of helping other men, certainly hinders them and does them harm. But beside all the pain at seeing how men disown the care of their fellows, there is another pain which is often yet more painful as we see how men who do attempt to help their brethren, help them all wrong, with such ignorant and clumsy hands that they do 32 The Mother s Wonder, them more harm than good. Meddlesomeness, arro- gance, foolish indulgence, wanton severity, wooden insistence upon a way of goodness which God never meant for the man whom you are trying to make good, opposition to good impulses because they hap- pen to be in other lines than yours, fussiness, suspic- ion, jealousy, all of these evils come in, and others witli them, to make sometimes worse than worthless the most sincere desire of some good man to help ai id guide his neighbor. Blind leading the blind everywhere ! What, it seems to me, all these good people need, is this: the larger view of the life that they are anxious for. There is a mystery about this man which I cannot fathom. And this man is a child of God. You say, " I might feel that about, some inspired child whom I was privileged to teach. How can I feel it about this poor sot, whom I am trying to keep out of the grog-shop; or this poor tritier and lounger whom I want to bring to church ; or this poor creature with the shattered nerves whom I must watch lest he should throw himself into the fire ? Can I count his life mysterious, count him a child of God ? " Unless you can, you cannot help him with any truly deep help. You may keep him un- scorched and presentable, but the shattered, broken, wasted life at the centre, where its real exhaustion lies, will get no reinforcement from the man who has no reverence for it and no sense of God's love for it. The moment that Moses forgot that the people he was leading were God's people, and smote the rock, crying, "Hear, Israel, must 1 bring you water The Mother s Wonder. 33 from this rock ? " that moment his highest help to them was gone. He could give them water still, but the water which he gave as if it were his gift, and not God's, was an insult both to them and to God ; and from that day his death began. And if we ask what will be the characteristics of the ministry of any man, who, while he renders help to other men, feels these truths deeply about the men to whom he ministers, the answer will be clear. It will have the qualities which we can easily imag- ine to have been in the treatment of the child Jesus by His mother after her experience in the Temple. It will consist in general inspiration more than in special direction ; and it will be more occupied in removing obstacles to growth than in dictating the forms and directions in which growth shall grow. The best advisers, helpers, friends, always are those not who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and de- sire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find what our own form of right action is. And always the best thing you can do for any brother, I am more and more convinced, is to try to keep him from being a bad man, and so give God a chance to make him a good man in whatever way He may choose. This takes away the superior and patronizing tone which is the blight of many a man's most sincere desire to be useful. This leaves the humblest free to help the highest. The mouse may gnaw the lion's net, but he does not ask the freed lion to crawl into the wall with him and live a 3 34 The Mother s Wonder. mouse's life. So you may help a strong man to shake off his vice, but when he is at liberty, leave him to God to learn what life God made him for, and be thankful if it is something a great deal larger and higher than your own. There are small men to whom all this would be depressing. They do not want to do anything for other men unless they can take the whole work into their own hands and make it wholly theirs. For a larger man it is a great deal nobler and more enno- bling to work with God and on a material of which God has shown to him the mystery. A weak He- brew mother, with a poor stupid boy who never left the company with any true impulsive life to seek the God whom he belonged to, may well have pitied Mary, and thought her unhappy in her wilful child. But " Mary kept all these things and pon- dered them in her heart." She learned that it was nobler to bring her boy to God and see him take God for his Father, than it was to keep him to herself. And so you and I come to understand that the type of the truest relationship between man and man is not the Romish confessional, the spiritual di- rectorship where one man gives his life into another's hands, but is the frank friendship of generous men, wherein each helps the other, but is always glad to know that he is really only helping God to help him; and so each always rejoices to see the other, under God, outgo himself. But we must not stop here. There is a yet deeper and closer care laid upon a man than his care for his The Mothers Wonder. 35 brother, and that is the care of himself, of his own soul. And there too the truth applies which we have won out of our story of Jesus and his mother. There too it is true that a man cannot execute his responsibility aright unless in that for which he is responsible he sees something mysterious, and a child of God. A man's care for himself ! How strange it is ! How a man seems to separate his life ; to stand off, as it were, and gaze at his own life with criticism and anxiety. It is the commonest of all experiences with all thoughtful people. " Know thyself," says the old proverb; as if the knower and the known were genuinely two, distinct from one another. "Keep thy heart with diligence," says Scripture, as if the heart and the heart-keeper were separate. The will and wisdom stand guard over the conscience and the character. A man who is really thoughtful, who has risen to the capacity of such self-care, praises himself, and blames himself, with a more even-handed justice be- cause with a more intimate and conscientious knowl- edge, than that with which he judges of the lives of other men. He is to himself like something outside of himself, with whose conditions nevertheless all his own fortunes are inextricably bound up. Therefore he lays out plans for his own treatment. He says: "I will make myself this or that." He says, " I will bring myself to my best in this or that way." And then, as he tries to carry out his plans, he becomes aware that on this self of his which he considered so 36 The Mother s Wonder. entirely his own, in his own power, some other force besides his own is working. He finds himself the subject of some other will and wisdom, some other education than his own. His plans for his own life are overruled and interfered with. He meant to educate his self by self-indulgence; this other force, below his own, sweeps his self off into distress and deprivation. He meant to live in self-complacency ; the deeper force plunges him into mortification and shame. It is as if the wind thought that it was ruling the waves which it tossed to and fro, but gradually became aware of the tide which underneath was heaving the great ocean on whose surface only the wind spent its force. Is this a true picture of human life as the thought- ful man comes to know it ? I think it is. Who is there of us that is not aware that his soul has had two educations ? Sometimes the two have been in opposition ; sometimes they have overlapped ; some- times they have wholly coincided; but always the two have been two. Our own government of our- selves is most evident, is the one which we are most aware of, so that sometimes for a few moments we forget that there is any other; but very soon our plans for ourselves are so turned and altered and hindered that we cannot ignore the other greater, deeper force. We meant to do that, and look ! we have been led on to this. We meant to be this, and lo ! we are that. We never meant to believe this, and lo, we hold it with all our hearts. What does it mean ? It is the ever- lasting discovery, the discovery which each thought- The Mother's Wonder. 27 ful man makes for himself with almost as much sur- prise as if no other man had ever made it for himself before, that this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his soul only, but is God's soul too. The revela- tion which came of old to the Virgin Mother about her child — Not your child only, but God's child too; yours, genuinely, really yours, but behind yours, and over yours, God's. That is the great revelation about life. When it comes, everything about one's self-culture is altered. Every anticipation and thought of living changes its color. It comes sometimes early, and sometimes late in life. Sometimes it is the flush and glow which fills childhood with dewy hope and beauty. Sometimes it is the peace which gathers about old age and makes it happy. Whenever it comes it makes life new. See what the changes are which it must bring. First it makes anything like a bewildering surprise impossi- ble. When I have once taken it into my account that God has his plans for my soul's culture, that these plans of His outgo and supersede any plans for it which I can make, then any new turn that comes is explicable to me, and, though I may not have an- ticipated it all, I am not overwhelmed, nor disturbed, nor dismayed by it. I find a new conviction growing in my soul, another view of life, another kind of faith. It is not what I had intended. I had determined that as long as I lived I would believe something very different from this which I now feel rising and taking possession of me. It seems at first as if my soul had been disloyal to me, and had turned its back 38 The Mother s Wonder. faithlessly upon my teaching. I appeal to it, and say: "Soul, why hast thou thus dealt with me?" And it answers back to me : " Wist you not, that I must be about my Father's business? Did you not know that I was God's soul as well as your soul ? This is something Avhich He has taught me." That is the real meaning, my dear friends, of many a case in which men say, " I do not know how I came to believe this truth. I never sought it. I never meant to believe it. I always said I never would believe it. But the belief in it has come about in spite of myself." It was the over-fatherhood of God. It was God claiming His own soul. Let a man see this, and he welcomes the convictions that have come to his soul thus direct from God, even more cordially than those which he has sought out and won with deliberate toil. What he has believed in spite of him- self he believes even more strongly than what he has struggled to believe. He cannot be jealous of what God does for his soul. He is like a servant taking care of a child, with the father of the child standing behind and watching and making plans with a wis- dom which the servant rejoices to know is wiser than his. Oh, if there were no higher guidance than what we can give to our own lives ! Oh, if our souls never outstripped the plans which we make for them ! Oh, if we never came to more truth than we are brave enough and wise enough to seek ! There are two different conditions in which a man receives without bewildering surprise the changes which come to him in life. One is the condition of The Mother s Wonder. 39 the man who believes in no government of life at all. The other is the condition of the man who thorough- ly believes that God is governing his life. To both of these men mystery is not merely conceivable ; it is inevitable. To one it is the vague, dreary mystery of chance. To the other it is the rich, gracious mys- tery of loving care. To one it is the mystery of ac- cident, the most awful and demoralizing atmosphere for a man to live in. To the other it is the mystery of personal life, which is the noblest end of thought which man can reach on any side. Neither of these men can be surprised. One of them cries, " It is an- other accident ! " The other cries, " It is my father ! " when any most unlooked-for thing occurs. Between the two there stands the man with his own tight self- made plan of living which he looks to see fulfilled, denying both mysteries, refusing to believe in acci- dent and yet ignoring God. He is the man whose life is all battered and buffeted with surprises. He is like a man who sails the ocean and refuses to be- lieve in tides. No wonder that after a long and dreary voyage, he drags at last a broken and wrecked life up on a beach which he never dreamed of when he started. The other consequence of the great revelation of life, the revelation that the soul for which we care is God's soul, for which He is caring too, will be that the true man will have one great purpose in living, and only one. He will try to come to harmony with God, to perfect understanding of what God wants and is trying to do. Let me not be trying to make 4-0 The Mother s Wonder. one thing out of this soul of mine while He is trying to make entirely another ! Once more return to the story which has given us our suggestions for to-day. As Mary went back with her son, realizing out of his own mouth, that he was not only her son, but God's ; as she settled down with him to their Nazareth life again, must not one single strong question have been upon her heart, '" What does God want this Son of His to be ? 0, let me find that out, that 1 may work with Him." And as you go into the house where you are to train your soul, realizing, through some revelation that has come to it, that it is God's soul as well as yours, one strong and single question must be pressing on you too. " What does God want this soul of mine to be ? 0, let me find that out that I may work with Him." And how can you find that out ? Only by finding Him out. Only by un- derstanding what He is, can you understand what He wants you to do. And understanding comes by love. And love to God comes by faith in Jesus Christ. See then, what is the divine progress of self-culture. You let Christ give you his blessings. Through gratitude to Him you come to the love of God. By loving God you understand God. By understand- ing God you come to see what He wants you to be, and so you are ready to work with Him for your own soul. From the first touch of Christ's hand in blessing, on to the eternal work of laboring with God for our own sanctification, that is the progress of the Christian life. The Son of Mary was a revelation to the mother The Mothers Wonder. 41 in whose care He lived. So a man's soul, his spirit- ual nature which is intrusted to his care, is a per- petual revelation to him. If you can only know that your soul is God's child, that He is caring for it and training it, then it may become to you the source of deep divine communications. God will speak to you through your own mysterious life. He will show you his wisdom and goodness, not in the heaven above you, but in the soul within you. He will make you His fellow- worker in that which is the most di- vine work of His of which we can have any know- ledge, the training and perfecting of a soul. That is the privilege of every man who knows, and finds his life and joy in knowing, that the soul which lives within him, the soul which he calls his soul, is the child of God. SERMON III A DOMESTIC MISSIONARY SERMON. 11 Tfo Church of the living God."—l Tim. iii. 15. I WANT to preach to you to-day about the Church, It has grown to be our habit on this Sunday morn- ing, when we annually make our contribution for Do- mestic Missions, to speak especially and definitely about the Church ; not, that is, directly of the personal Christian experience, but of the great corporate body of Christian life throughout the world, and especially of that particular organization in which we live and worship, and whose work in our own country we are to contribute to extend. If the Church is often thought about, and talked about, in a petty and me- chanical and formal way, let us be very careful, if we can, to avoid formality and pettiness in our talk of her to-day. Let us try to make her seem what she really is, the Church of the living God, and the Home of living men. Let us begin then with one of the most pictu- resque and striking and perhaps perplexing incidents which occur in the Church's life. A minister is called 42 The Church of the Living God. 43 upon to baptize a little dying child. It is an infant of a day. A ray of light has come from heaven, and just flashed for an instant into the great flood of sunlight, and now is being gathered back again into the darkness out of which it came. The minister goes and baptizes the unconscious child. He does an act which perhaps to those who stand around, seems like the blankest superstition. " What does it mean?" they say. " Have a little sprinkled water and a few whispered words any influence upon this flickering flame of life which in a moment is to go out? If the child is to live elsewhere after its brief life here on earth is over, will this ceremony do it any good ? If it revives and lives its life out here on earth, will it live any better for this hurried incantation?" Meanwhile, to the minister, and to the Church of which he is a minister, that baptism of the dying child has a profound and beautiful significance. It is not thought of for a moment as the saving of the child's soul. The child dying unbaptized goes to the same loving care and education which awaits the child baptized. But the baptism is the solemn, grateful, tender recognition, during the brief mo- ments of that infant's life on earth, of the deep mean- ings of his humanity. It is the human race in its profoundest self-consciousness welcoming this new member to its multitude. Only for a few moments does he tarry in this condition of humanity ; his life touches the earth only to leave it; but in those few moments of his tarrying, humanity lifts up its hand and claims him. She says, " You are part of me, and 44 The Church of the Living God. being part of me, you are part of me forever. Your life may disappear from mortal sight almost before we have seen it, but, wherever it may go, it is a hu- man life forever. It belongs to God, as, and because humanity belongs to Him." Humanity, recognizing itself as belonging to God, recognizes this infant portion of herself as belonging to Him, claims it for Him, takes it into her own most consecrated hopes, appropriates for it that redemption of Christ which revealed man's belonging to God, declares it a mem- ber of that Church which is simply humanity as be- longing to God, the divine conception of humanity, her own realization of herself as it belongs to God. Can there be any act more full of significance, more free from superstition ? And is there not in this act, just because of the feeble unconsciousness of the child to whom it is administered, the most distinct indication of the nature of the Church into which he is admitted ? There is no fact developed yet about the child except his pure humanity. We know nothing whatsoever about his talents, or his character. It makes no difference whether he is rich or poor. He may lie cradled in daintiest lace, or in most squalid rags. Beauty or ugliness, bright- ness or dullness, friendship or friendlessness, good blood or bad blood, are not taken into account; we baptize him, be he what he may, so that only he is a human creature, the child of human parents, the sharer of our human nature ; we baptize him into the fellowship of consecrated humanity, into the Church of the living God. The Church of the Living God. 45 Have we not then presented to us in this simple ceremony, which to one bystander may seem so in- significant and to auother so superstitious, the deep- est and broadest meaning of the Christian Church ? It is the body of redeemed humanity. It is man in his deepest interests, in his spiritual possibilities. It is the under-life, the sacred, the profounder life of man, his re-generation. Every human being in very virtue of birth into the redeemed world is a poten- tial member of the Christian Church. His baptism claims and asserts his membership. And now suppose that Baptism were universal, and suppose that instead of being, what it is so often, even among Christian people, a formal ceremony, everywhere it were a living act, instinct with mean- ing, what a world this would be ! Every new-born immortal welcomed by the whole spiritual conscious- ness of his race ! There is some true sense, we may well believe, in which the physical life of humanity grows richer through its whole substance by the added life of each new body. Just in proportion as the spiritual is more sensitive than the physical, may we not hold that the spirituality of the whole race is richer for the access of this new soul ? Bap- tism is the utterance of the rejoicing welcome. The whole world of spiritual capacity thrills with de light and expectation. The Church accepts its new member and undertakes his education. For w T hat time he is to be in her, a part of her, before he goes to his eternal place to be a member of the Church in heaven, whether it be for a few short hours or for a 46 The Church of the Living God. long eighty years, the Church belongs to him and he belongs to the Church. If he does good work it is the Church's gain and glory. If he sins, and is profligate, it is as a member of the Church that he is wicked. The Church is spiritual humanity, and he, a spiritual human being, is, by that very fact, a Churchman. I cannot tell you, my dear friends, how strongly this view takes possession of me the longer that I live. I cannot think, I will not think about the Christian Church as if it wei*e a selection out of humanity. In its idea it is humanity. The hard, iron-faced man whom I meet upon the street, the degraded, sad-faced man who goes to prison, the weak, silly-faced man who haunts society, the dis- couraged, sad-faced man who drags the chain of drudgery, they are all members of the Church, mem- bers of Christ, children of God, heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Their birth made them so. Their bap- tism declared the truth which their birth made true. It is impossible to estimate their lives aright, unless we give this truth concerning them the first impor- tance. Think too, what would be the meaning of the other sacrament, if this thought of the Church of the liv- ing God were real and universal. The Lord's Supper, the right and need of every man to feed on God, the bread of divine sustenance, the wine of divine inspi- ration offered to every man, and turned by every man into what form of spiritual force the duty and the nature of each man required, how grand and glorious The Church of the Living God. 47 its mission might become! No longer the mystic source of unintelligible influence; no longer cer- tainly the test of arbitrary orthodoxy ; no longer the initiation rite of a selected brotherhood ; but the great sacrament of man ! The seeker after truth, with all the world of truth freely open before him, would come to the Lord's table, to refresh the freedom of his soul, to liberate himself from slavery and pre- judice. The soldier going forth to battle, the student leaving college, the legislator setting out for Wash- ington, the inventor just upon the brink of the last combination which would make his invention perfect, the merchant getting ready for a sharp financial crisis, all men full of the passion of their work, would come there to the Lord's Supper to fill their passion with the divine fire of consecration. They would meet and know their unity in beautiful diversity — this Christian Church around the Christian feast. There is no other rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the great Christian Sacrament, the great human sacra- ment, to become that rallying-place. Think how it would be, if some morning all the men, women and children in this city who mean well, from the re- former meaning to meet some giant evil at the peril of his life to the school boy meaning to learn his day's lesson with all his strength, were to meet in a great host at the table of the Lord, and own them- selves His children, and claim the strength of His bread and wine, and then go out with calm, strong, earnest faces to their work. How the communion 48 The Church of the Living God. service would lift up its voice and sing itself in triumph, the great anthem of dedicated human life. Ah, my friends, that, nothing less than that, is the real Holy Communion of the Church of the living God. And then the ministry, the ministers, what a life theirs must be, whenever the Church thus comes to realize itself! We talk to-day, as if the ministers of the Church were consecrated for the people. The old sacerdotal idea of substitution has not died away. Sometimes it is distinctly proclaimed and taught. What is the release from such a false idea? Not to teach that the ministers are not consecrated, but to teach that all the people are ; not to deny the priesthood of the Clergy, but to assert the priesthood of all men. We can have no hope, I believe, of the de- struction of the spirit of hierarchy by direct attack. It may be smitten down a thousand times. A thou- sand times it will rise again. Only when all men become full of the sense of the sacredness of their own life, will the assumption of supreme clerical sacredness find itself overwhelmed with the great rising tide. The fault of all onslaughts upon the lofty claims of the ministry has been here. They have vociferously declared that ministers were no better than other men. They have not bravely and devoted- ly claimed for all men, the right and power to be as good and holy and spiritual as any St. John has ever been in his consecrated ministry. When that great claim is made and justified in life, then, not till then, lordship over God's heritage shall disappear and the The Church of the Living God. 49 true greatness of the minister, as the fellow-worker with and servant of the humblest and most strug- gling child of God, shall shine out on the world. Yet once more, here must be seen the true place and dignity of truth and doctrine. It is not knowl- edge anywhere that is the end and purpose of man's labor or of God's government. It is life. It is the full activity of powers. Knowledge is a means to that. Why is it that the Church has magnified doc- trine overmuch and throned it where it does not be- long ? It is because the Church has not cared enough for life. She has not overvalued doctrine ; she has undervalued life. When the Church learns that she is in her idea simply identical with all nobly active humanity, when she thinks of herself as the true in- spirer and purifier of all the life of man, then she will — what ? Not cast her doctrines away, as many of her impetuous advisers bid her do ; she will see their val- ue, their precious value, as she never lias seen it yet ; but she will hold them always as the means of life, and she will insist that out of their depths they shall send forth manifest strength for life which shall justify her holding them. The decrying of dogma in the interest of life, of creed in the interest of conduct, is very natural, but very superficial. It is superficial because, if it succeeded, it would make life and conduct blind and weak. But it is natural because it is the crude healthy outburst of human protest against the value of dogma for its own sake, of which the Church has always been too full. Let us not join in it, 5<3 The Church of the Living God. Let us insist that it is good for man to know every- thing he can know, and believe everything he can believe of the truth of God. But while we will not pull down dogma, let us do all we can to build up life about dogma, and demand of dogma that service which it is the real joy of her heart to render to life. I will not hear men claim that the doctrine of the Trinity has no help or inspiration to give to the mer- chant or the statesman. It has great help, great in- spiration. I will not hear men claim that it means nothing to the scholar or the bricklayer whether he believes or disbelieves in the Atonement. It means very much to either. Out of the heart of those doc- trines I must demand the help and inspiration which they have to give. Then I must do all that I can to make the life which needs that help and inspiration hungry for them. I must do all that I can to make the world's ordinary operations know their sacredness and crave the sacred impulse which the dogmas have to give. I must summon all life to look up to the hills. I must teach the world that it is the Church, and needs and has a right to all the Church's privi- leges, and so make it cry out to the truths of the Trinity and Atonement to open the depths of their helpfulness, as they never have heard the call to open them when only theologians were calling on them to complete their theologic systems, or only a few special souls were asking them for special com- forts or assistance. Here, in the assertion of the great human Church, is the true adjustment of the The Church of the Living God. 51 relations of Doctrine and Life ! Doctrine kept active by life. Life kept deep by doctrine. Ah, but you say, this does not sound like the New Testament. There certainly the Church and the world are not the same. They are not merely differ* ent ; they are hostile to each other. There is a per- petual conflict between the two. Indeed there isj But what Church and what world are fighting to- gether there ? The Church is a little handful of half-believers. The world is a great ocean of sensii" ality and secularity and sin. Of course between those two there is an everlasting conflict, so long as each is what it is. The world distrusts the Church, in part at least, because it feels coming out from it no spiritual power. The Church dreads the world, which is always dragging it down from its imper- fect loyalty and consecration. But he has listened very carelessly to the New Testament who has not heard in it the muffled, buried voices of another Church and another world, crying out for life! A Church completely strong in faith, not standing guard over herself, but boldly claiming all the world in all of its activities for Christ, and a world con- scious of its belonging to divinity, counting its sin and intrusion an anomaly, a world ashamed and hungry, the world of which St. Paul dreamed, the groaning and travailing creation. How often as we read the New Testament, this deeper Church and this deeper world are dimly seen and faintly heard beneath this present faithlessness and sin. How, whenever they are seen and heard, we recognize, be- 52 The Church of the Living God. yond a doubt, that they are the true Church, and t\^j true world, and that every departure from or falling short of them is a loss of the Church's or the world's reality. And how, when the true Church and the true world stand before us, we see and know that they are not in conflict; that they are in perfect har- mony; nay, far more than that, that they are identi- cal with one another. There is no fight so fierce and vehement as that which rages between two beings which ought to be perfectly one, but which, because each falls short of what it was designed to be, are now in conflict with each other. So long as the Church and the world are what they are there must be discord. We who are in the Church must keep watchful guard over her, and must dread and oppose the evil influences of the world. But at the same time we never must let ourselves forget that all this is unnatural. We must never lose out of our sight the vision, never lose out of our ears the music of the real Church and the real world struggling each into perfection for itself, and so both into unity and identity with one another. Very interesting have been in history the pulsa- tions, the brightening and fading, the coming and going of this great truth of the Church and the world ideally identical. That truth is always present in the words of Jesus. He told his disciples how they were to fight with the actual world, to be per- secuted by it, even to be murdered by it. But he \ as always pointing abroad and saying, "The field The Church of the Living God. 53 is the world." The ideal Church, which was the real Church in his eyes, knew no limit but humanity. By-and-by came the persecutions of the early Church, and they drove the Church in upon itself, and made the few believers think of themselves as outcasts and exceptions. The intensity of their per- sonal experiences dulled and dimmed the thought of their being simply representatives of all humanity. The Church lived like a sect of souls with special privileges and illuminations. The mediaeval Church in its own way caught sight again of the idea of universality, but it was formal and selfish. It did not think of itself as ful- filling the life of the world, but of the world as ex- isting for it, and to be practically swallowed up in its dominion. Still it had some notion of it and the world coming to identity with one another, though it was almost the identity of the wolf with the sheep which he has devoured. With the Protestant Reformation came another in- tense assertion of the personal nature of religion, and the larger aspects, the world-meaning of the Church, was lost or lay in silence. Calvinism was too busy with the intense problem of the individual soul to think much of the great Redemption of the world, of all humanity. But now, when in these latter days, there are so many signs that we are passing into a new region, beyond the strong immediate power of the Reforma- tion which has prevailed from the sixteenth century till now, it is the relation of the Church to the act- 54 The Church of the Living God. ive world, the conflict and the possible harmony be- tween them, the message of the Church to the world, the turning of the world into the Church, these are the problems and the visions which are more and more occupying the minds of thoughtful vision-see- ing men. Such alternations and pulsations cannot go on for- ever. The hostility of the Church to the world, and the conformity of the Church to the world, neither of them is the final condition, nor shall the Church vacillate between them always. Gradually, slowly, but at last surely, this must come forth which we saw testified even in the hurried baptism of the lit- tle child who made this earth his home but for a single day, that the earth is the Lord's, and so that to be living in this earth is to belong to God; and that all human life is by the very fact of its human- ity a portion of His Church. I think that we can do the best work in the Chris- tian Church only in the light of that truth cordially acknowledged. Because that truth is coming to more and more cordial acknowledgment, I believe that the Christian Church is becoming a better and a better place to work in every year. If I ask where in the Christian Church one can best live and work, I answer myself that it will be where that truth is most vital, where it makes most strongly the real power of the Church's life. And this brings me to what little I want to say about our own Church, on this morning when we are to make our annual contribution for the extension of The Church of the Living God. 55 her work. We value and love our Communion very deeply. To many of us she has been the nurse, al- most the mother of our spiritual life. To all of us she is endeared by long companionship, and by famil- iar sympathy in the profoundest experiences through which our souls have passed. When we deliberately turn our backs for a moment upon all these rich and sweet associations, and ask ourselves in colder and more deliberate consideration, why it is that we be- lieve in our Episcopal Church and rejoice to com- mend her to our fellow-countrymen and fellow-men; the answer which I find myself giving, is that our Church seems to me to be truly trying to realize this relation to the whole world, this sacredness of all life, this ideal belonging of all men to the Church of Christ, which, as I have been saying, is the great truth of active Christianity. I find the signs of such an effort, in the very things for which some people fear or blame our Church. I find it in the impor- tance which she gives to Baptism and in the breadth of her conception of that rite ; for Baptism is the strongest visible assertion of this truth. I find it in her simplicity of doctrine. I find it in the value which she sets on worship; her constant summons to all men not merely to be preached to, but to pray ; her firm belief in the ability and right of all men to offer prayer to God. I find it in her strong historic spirit, her sense of union with the ages which have past out of sight and of whose men we know only their absolute humanity. In all these things I recognize the true, strong ten- 56 The Church of the Living God. dency which our Church has to draw near to the life of the world, and to draw the world's life near to her. In this tendency all true Churchmen must rejoice. Her breadth of doctrine, her devoutness, and her clear hold upon the long history of human life, all these qualify her for a great work in bringing up human- ity, and making it know itself for what it is, the true universal Church of the Living God, toward which all ecclesiastical establishments which have thus far ex- isted in the world, have been attempts, of which they have been preparatory studies. Can our Church do any such great office as this for the America in which she is set ? There are some of her children who love to call her in exclusive phrase The American Church. She is not that; and to call her that would be to give her a name to which she has no right. The American Church is the great total body of Christianity in America, in many divi- sions, under many names, broken, discordant, disjoint- ed, often quarrelsome and disgracefully jealous, part of part, yet as a whole bearing perpetual testimony to the people of America of the authority and love of God, of the redemption of Christ, and of the sa- cred possibilities of man. If our Church does especial work in our country, it must be by the especial and peculiar way in which she is able to bear that wit- ness ; not by any fiction of an apostolical succession in her ministry, which gives to them alone a right to bear such witness. There is no such peculiar privi- lege of commission belonging to her or any other body. The only right of any body liea in the earnest The Church of the Living God. 57 will and in the manifest power. The right to preach the Gospel to America lies in the earnest faith that the Gospel is the only salvation of the people, first as men, and then as Americans; whoever brings that faith has the right to preach ; whoever does not bring it has no right, be the fancied regularity of his com- mission what it may ! In some sense there has been reason to fear, and there is still reason to fear, that what makes part of the strength of our Church, may also make part of its weakness. Its historic sense binds it, in a very live way, to the sources from which it immediately sprang, and tempts it to treasure overmuch its association with the great Church of another land, the Church of England. So long as it does that it can never truly be the Church of America. So long as it prefers to import customs and costumes, names and ways, instead of creating them here out of the soil on which she lives, she will be what she has been in very much of her history, what she is in many parts of the land to-day, an exotic and not a true part of the nation's life. The Episcopal Church's only real chance of powerful life, is in the more and more complete identification of herself with the genius and national life of America. To do that, she must become a great moral power. No careful preservation of the purity of doctrine, no strictness of ecclesiastical propriety, can take the place of moral strength. It is by the conscience, that the Church must take hold of this people. It is in the conscience, that the nation is uneasy. In its rfi The Church of the Living God. uneasy conscience, it sees the vision and hears the voices of the life it might be living. To the con- science of the nation then, the Church that is must speak to tell the nation of the Church that it might be. The Church which forty years ago had bravely cried out at iihe sin of slavery, would be more power- ful than we can imagine in America to-day. The Church which to-day effectively denounces intem- perance, and the licentiousness of social life, the cruelty or indifference of the rich to the poor, and the prostitution of public office, will become the real Church of America. Our Church has done some good service here. She ought to do much more. Largely the Church of the rich, she ought to rebuke rich men's vices and to stir rich men's torpidity. She ought to blow her trumpet in the ears of the young men of fortune, summoning them from their clubs and their frivolities to do the chivalrous work, which their nobility obliges them to do for fellow- man. She ought to speak to Culture, and teach it its responsibility. She ought to make real contributions to the creation of that atmosphere of brotherhood and hope and reverence for man, in which alone there is any chance that the hard social and economical problems of the present and the future can find solution. If she can do such things as these, she will be following in the steps of all the largest minded, deepest-hearted Fathers of the Church, all the way from St. Paul down. That is the true apostolical succession. That she must not boast The Church of the Living God. 59 that she has, but she must struggle more and more earnestly to win. My friends, it is not possible for the true man to think of his Church without thinking of his country. I cannot be the Churchman that I ought without being a patriot. On this Sunday morning, when we plead for our Church, let the image of our country stand before us, with her chances, with her dangers, with her glories, with her sins ! We are glad indeed that our Church is not the only church which is laboring for the land's salvation. We rejoice in all that our brother Christians of other names are doing-, but we believe in the work which our Church has to do. We pray to God, keep her simple, brave and earnest, free from fantasticalness and cowardice and selfishness, that she may do it. We look on, and far, far away we see the Nation-church, the land all full of Christ, the Nation-church, a true part of the World-church, issuing into glorious life, and swallowing up our small ecclesiasticisms, as the sun grandly climbing up the heavens swallows up the scattered rays which he sent out at his rising. And full of that vision, we are ready to do what we can to make our Church strong for the work which it must do in preparation for that day ! SERMON IV. ftadittfl Mm $wJ. "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God." Revelation xx. 12. THE life which we are living now is more aware . than we know of the life which is to come. I Death, which separates the two, is not, as it has been so often pictured, like a great thick wall. It is rather like a soft and yielding curtain, through which we cannot see, but which is always waving and trem- bling with the impulses that come out of the life which lies upon the other side of it. We are never wholly unaware that the curtain is not the end of everything. Sounds come to us, muffled and dull, but still indubitably real, through its thick folds. Every time that a new soul passes through that vail from mortality to immortality, it seems as if we heard its light footfalls for a moment after the jealous curtain has concealed it from our sight. As each soul passes, it almost seems as if the opening of the curtain to let it through were going to give us a sight of the un- seen things beyond; and, though we are forever dis- appointed, the shadowy expectation always comes 60 Standing Before God. 61 back to us again, when we see the curtain stirred by another friend's departure. After our friend has passed, we can almost see the curtain, which he stirred, moving, tremulously for a while, before it settles once more into stillness. Behind this curtain of death, St. John, in his great vision, passed, and he has written down for us what he saw there. He has not told us many things; and probably we cannot know how great the disappointment must have been if he had tried to translate into our mortal language all the ineffable wonders of eternity. But he has told us much ; and most of what we want to know is wrapped up in this simple and sublime declaration, " I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God." I think that it grows clearer and clearer to us all that what we need are the great tru ths, the vast and broad assurances within which are included all the special details of life. Let us have them, and we are more and more content to leave the special details unknown. With regard to eternity, for in- stance, I am sure that we can most easily, nay, most gladly, forego the detailed knowledge of the circum- stances and occupations of the other life, if only we can fully know two things — that the dead are, and ' that they are with God. All beside these two things we can most willingly leave undiscovered. And those two things, if we can believe St. John, are sure. " I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God." What is meant by ; ' standing before God?" We are apt to picture to ourselves a great dramatic 62 S landing' Before God. scene. Host beyond host, rank behind rank, the millions who have lived upon the earth, all standing crowded together in the indescribable presence of One who looks not merely at the mass but at the individual, and sees through the whole life and char- acter of every single soul. The picture is sublime, and it is what the words of St. John are intended to suggest. But we must get behind the picture to its meaning. The picture must describe not one scene only, but the whole nature and condition of the everlasting life. The souls of men in the eternal world are always " standing before God." And what .does that mean ? We understand at once, if we con- sider that that before which a man stands is the stand- ard, or test, or source of judgment for his life. Every man stands before something which is his judge. The child stands before the father. Not in a single act, making report of what he has been doing on a special day, but in the whole posture of his life, almost as if the father was a mirror in whom he saw himself reflected, and from whose reflection of him- self he got at once a judgment as to what he was, aud suggestions as to what he ought to be. The poet stands before nature. She is his judge. A cer- tain felt harmony or discord between his nature and her ideal is the test and directing power of his life. The philosopher stands before the unseen and ma- jestic presence of the abstract truth. The philan- thropist stands before humanity. The artist stands before beauty. The legislator stands before justice. The politician stands before that vague but awful Standing Before God. 63 embodiment of average character, the people, the demos. The fop, in miserable servility, stands before fashion, the feeblest and ficklest of tyrants. The scholar stands before knowledge, and gets the satisfac- tions or disappointments of his life from the approv- als or disapprovals of her serene and gracious lips. You see what the words mean. Every soul that counts itself capable of judgment and responsibility, stands in some presence by which the nature of its judgment is decreed. The higher the presence, the loftier and greater, though often the more oppressed and anxious, is the life. A weak man, who wants to shirk the seriousness and anxiety of life, goes down into some lower chamber and stands before some baser judge whose standard will be least exacting. A strong, ambitious man presses up from judgment room to judgment room, and is not satisfied with meeting any standard perfectly so long as there is any higher standard which he has not faced. Greater than anything else in education, vastly greater than any question about how many facts and sciences a teacher may have taught his pupil, there must always be this other question, into what presence he has in- troduced him; before what standard he has made his pupil stand: for in the answer to that question are involved all the deepest issues of the pupil's charac- ter and life. And now St. John declares that when he passed behind the vail, he saw the dead, small and great, stand before God. Do you not see now what that means ? Out of all the lower presences with which 64 Standing Before God. they have made themselves contented ; out of all the chambers where the little easy judges sit with their compromising codes of conduct, with their ideas worked over and worked down to suit the conditions of this earthly life ; out of all these partial and imper- fect judgment chambers, when men die they are all carried up into the presence of the perfect righteous- ness, and are judged by that. All previous judg-, ments go for nothing unless they find their confirma- j tion there. Men who have been the pets and favor- ites of society, and of the populace, and of their own self-esteem, the change that death has made to them is that they have been compelled to face another standard and to feel its unfamiliar awfulness. Just think of it. A man who, all his life on earth since he was a child, has never once asked himself about any action, about any plan of his, is this right ? Suddenly, when he is dead, behold, he finds himself in a new world, where that is the only ques- tion about everything. His old questions as to whether a thing was comfortable, or was popular, or was profitable, are all gone. The very atmosphere of this new world kills them. And upon the amazed soul, from every side there pours this new, strange, searching question : " Is it right ?" Out of the ground he walks on, out of the walls which shelter and restrain him, out of the canopy of glory over- head, out of strange, unexplored recesses of his own newly-awakened life, from every side comes pressing in upon him that one question, " Is it right ?" That I is what it is for that dead man to " stand before God." Standing Before God. 65 And then there is another soul which, before it passed through death, while it was in this world, had always been struggling after higher presences. Re- fusing to ask whether acts were popular or profit- able, refusing even to care much whether they were comfortable or beautiful, it had insisted upon asking whether each act was right. It had always struggled 1 to keep its moral vision clear. It had climbed to heights of self-sacrifice that it might get above the miasma of low standards which lay upon the earth. In every darkness about what was right, it had been ! true to the best light it could see. It had grown into a greater and greater incapacity to live in any other presence, as it had struggled longer and longer for this highest company. Think what it must be for that soul, when for it, too, death sweeps every other chamber back and lifts the nature into the pure light of the unclouded righteousness. Now for it, too, the) question, " Is it right ?" rings from every side ; but in that question this soul hears the echo of its own best- loved standard. Not in mockery, but in invitation ; not tauntingly, but temptingly ; the everlasting goodness seems to look in upon the soul from all that touches it. That is what it is for that soul to " stand before God." God opens his own heart to that soul and is both Judgment and Love. They are not separate. He is Love because He is Judgment ; for to be judged by Him, to meet His judgment is what the soul has been long and ardently desiring. Tell me, when two such souls as these stand together " before God," are they not judged by their very standing there? Are 66 Standing Before God. not the deep content of one, and the perplexed dis- tress of the other, already their heaven and their hell ? Do you need a pit of fire, and a city of gold, to em- phasize their difference ? When the dead, small and great, stand before God, is not the book already opened, and are not the dead already judged ? "The dead, small and great," St. John says that he saw standing before God. In that great judgment- day, another truth is that the difference of sizes among human lives, of which we make so much, ; passes away, and all human beings, in simple virtue of their human quality, are called to face the everlast- ing righteousness. The child and the greybeard, the scholar and the boor, however their lives may have been separated here, they come together there. See how this falls in with what I said before. It is upon the moral ground that the most separated souls must always meet. Upon the child and the philosopher alike rests the common obligation not to lie, but to tell the truth. The scholar and the plow-boy both are bound to be pure and to be merciful. Differently as , they may have to fulfil their duties, the duties are the [ same for both. Intellectual sympathies are limited. The more men study, the more they separate them- selves into groups with special interests. But moral sympathies are universal. The more men try to do right, the more they come into communion with all other men who are engaged in the same struggle all through the universe. Therefore it is that before the moral judgment seat of God all souls, the small and great, are met together. All may be good — all Standing Before God. 67 may be bad ; therefore, before Him, whose nature is the decisive touchstone of goodness and badness in every nature which is laid upon it, all souls of all the generations of mankind may be assembled. Think what a truth that is. We try to find some meeting ground for all humanity, and what we find is always proving itself too narrow or too weak. The one only place where all can meet, and every soul claim its relationship with every other soul, is before the throne of God. The Father's presence alone fur- nishes the meeting-place for all the children, regard- less of differences of age or wisdom. The grave and learned of this earth shall come up there before God, and find, standing in His presence, that all which they have truly learned has not taken them out of the sympathy of the youngest and simplest of their Father's children. On the other hand, the simple child, who has timidly gazed afar off upon the great minds of his race, when he comes to stand with them before God, will find that he is not shut out from them. He has a key which will unlock their doors and let him enter into their lives. Because they are obeying the same God whom he obeys, therefore He has some part in the eternal life of Abraham, and Moses, and Paul. Not directly, but through the God before whom both of them stand, the small and great come together. The humility of the highest and the self-respect of the lowest are both perfectly attained. The children, who have not been able to understand or hold communion with each other di- rectly, meet perfectly together in the Father's house, 68 Standing Before God. and the dead, small and great, stand in complete sympathy and oneness before God. Another thought which is suggested by St. John's verse, is the easy comprehension of the finite by the infinite. All the dead of all the generations stand before God together. How such a picture sends our imagination back. We think how many men have died upon the earth. We think of all the ages and of all the lands. We think of all the un- counted myriads who died before history began. We see the dusk of the world's earliest memory crowded with graves. We let our minds begin to count the countless dead of Asia, with its teeming kingdoms ; of this America of ours, with its sugges- tions of extinguished races. We remember the earth- quakes, the battle-fields, the pestilences. We hear the helpless wail of infancy, which, in all the genera- tions, has just crept upon the earth long enough to claim life with one plaintive cry, and die. Where should we stop ? We know that " All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom;" and yet how crowded is the globe to- day. Not one must be left out ! We heap up mil- lions upon millions until we weary of the mere reit- eration, and numbers cease to have a meaning. And yet not one must be left out ! All must be there. All the dead, small and great, out of all the ages; out of all the lands ! All the dead, small and great, , are standing before God. Is there an effort more staggering than this, the effort to gather up in our imagination all the hosts of humanity, and be- Standing Before God. 60 lieve in the true immortality of every one of them ? Here, I think, is where the faith of many men in their own immortality staggers the most. If only there were not so many of us ! A man feels his own soul, and its very existence seems to promise him that he is immortal. And in his brethren, whose life he! watches, he sees the same signs that for them too there is another life. But when he looks abroad, the multitude dismays him. There are so many souls. What world can hold them all ? What care can re- cognize, and cover and embrace them all ? If there only were not so many of us ! The thought of one's own immortality sinks like a tired soldier on a battle-field, overwhelmed and buried under the multi- tude of the dead. Have not many of you felt this bewilderment ? I think that it is one of the most common forms in which perplexity, not clear and definite, but vague and terribly oppressive, lays itself upon a human soul. What can we say to it ? How can we grasp and believe in this countless army of immortals who come swarming up out of all the lands and all the ages ? There is only one way. Multiply numbers as enormously as you will, and the result is finite still. Then set the finite, however large, into the presence of the infinite, and it is small. Its limi- tations show. There is no finite, however vast, that can overcrowd the infinite; none that the infinite cannot most easily grasp and hold. Now, St. John says, that he saw all the hosts of the dead stand "before God." We too must see them stand before God, and they will not oppress us. 7j through which God meant that truth and righteous- ness should flow, are bearing pollution to innocent hearts, and temptation to weak hearts, and discour- agement to sad hearts; pain instead of joy, hopeless- ness instead of hope. I know all this. Who can live in the midst of this network of brotherhood and not know it ? But yet all this misuse and perversion of the principle only makes the principle more plain. Every sight of cor- ruption running freely through the channels which connect life with life, only shows how open those channels are, and makes an earnest man more anxious to rescue them for their best use. "What shall we do then ? W^hat shall you do, who feel with every breath you draw how other lives are living in open communication with yours, how their very life-bloods flow together in one common system ? What shall you do, who are anxious that what is best in each should come to all the rest; that you should be able to give to your brethren the faith which is so strong in your own heart, and get from them the faith by which they live ? What shall you parents do, who want to make your children love the Lord you love ? What shall you brothers do, who want to make your brothers know the truth you know ? What can you do to make the channels of your fam- ily life and of your natural relationship to one an- other, carry the influences which you want to give, and bring back to you the influences which you want to receive ? It is not hard to tell, although it may be very hard to do. First, you can try to keep the Brotherhood in Christ. whole character of your intercourses fine, and pure, and high. Look into countless families that you know — perhaps if I dared I might even bid some of you look into your own — and ask yourself whether, supposing some one member of that family to be truly religious, the atmosphere of the home is lofty enough and pure enough to furnish the proper medium by which that one member's religion may freely pass in- to the lives of all rest. Fire will leap through heated air ; and the most deep of all emotions, the most eager of all desires, the emotion of the love of God, the de- sire to serve and know Christ, will pass most readily from heart to heart where all emotion is pure and lofty, and where all desire is unselfish and enthusias- tic. But in homes where all the air is full of selfish- ness, where the whole tone is sordid, where every member is jealously watching that no other gets ad- vantage over him, where brotherhood means suspic- ion, and fatherhood petty tyranny, and childhood restless impatience to be free, what chance is there for the divine fire of the higher life to leap through a heavy atmosphere like that? "I have been a Chris- tian all these years; and look at my children — not one Christian among them all ;" so the perplexed, dis- appointed father or mother talks. But when you open the door of that household's history, you feel the rea- son of the failure in an instant. As the door opens there comes pouring out on you a turbid wrangle of family quarrels, or a chatter of perpetual frivolity, or perhaps, what perhaps is worst of all, a great, dull, heavy cloud of well-fed stupidity, and ignorance, and Brotherhood in Christ. 89 mental stagnation, which is all that family life within those walls has ever meant. Through such a dark- ness as that, what wonder that the little candle-light of the father's or the mother's piety, weak enough it- self, has never had the strength to pierce. No ! The first thing to be done, in order that the natural rela- tionships may be made the channel for religious in- fluence, is that they should be kept pure with unsel- fishness, and open with intelligence, and fine with sympathy. Then when any religious influence socks to pass from life to life, it will find already built a channel that is worthy of it and fit to carry it. But there is something more definite than that. It is a very wide law and a very beautiful one, that the best way to make a thing fit for the use for which it was first made is to put it to that use. The best way to make the dusty trumpet clear is to blow mu- sic through it. The best way to make the sluggish mind capable of thinking is to think with it. And so the best way to make the natural relationships ca- pable of carrying religious influence is to give them religious influences to carry, so strong and ardent that they shall force and burn their own way through whatever artificial obstructions may have stopped up the channel through which they were meant to go. Again I hear a Christian parent complaining that his religion has not told upon his children to make them Christians ; but, when I ask, I find that there never has been one direct effort to make it tell; never, in all the years while they have lived together, one word or act, which definitely and specifically, tried to send the 90 Brotherhood in Christ. father's religion through the open channel that was between them, from the father's life into the child's. Everything else, every other truth and interest and treasure, has been offered and urged over and over again, but not one word or act has ever urged or even offered religion. I know what will be said at once, and I think I understand it. I know how often it is hardest to speak about the most sacred things to those who are the nearest and the dearest to us. I understand that shrinking which keeps the brother's lips closed from urging on his own brother the truth and the per- suasion which he will urge freely enough on any other man. The glib and ready Sunday-school teacher goes from his class to his home, and in the presence of his own children he is silent as a stone. In that phenomenon, which is so familiar and often so per- plexing, I think we can see the mixture of two feel- ings, one of which is bad, the other good. The bad feeling is the sense of shame which comes when we think of pressing the love of God and the service of Christ upon the minds and consciences of those who are always living with us, and who know what poor, weak, wicked and unfaithful things our own lives are. The good reason for our silence is more subtle. It is, I think, the feeling which comes to us almost everywhere, but comes to us most strongly in the presence of those whose hearts lie nearest to our own, that for the conveyance of the most sacred influences words are the most clumsy and unsatis- factory of means; that life is the only testimony by Brotherhood in Christ. 91 which the power of Christ in one man's heart can thoroughly bear its witness to the heart of any other man. It is natural enough that this consciousness should be most clear and strong just where the pos- sibility of heart bearing direct testimony to heart becomes most evident, in the home where hearts ought to lie nearest and openest to one another. I know how these two reasons, and perhaps some others, make it very hard sometimes for the father to talk to his child, or for the brother to talk to his brother, about the most sacred things. And yet I know how often just one word is needed to break through the obstruction and reserve, and let all the wealth of God's grace which has been gathering in one humbly consecrated heart, pour forth into another which is waiting empty and hungry all the time. At least we are all bound to be sure that it is something nobler than mere pride or shame that is keeping us from saying to our brother what may be his word of life. But, after all, the word is only one method; the simplest, the most immediate, the most natural, but not the only nor the richest method by which men send influence forth to their brethren. If, honestly, the urgent word does not seem to be the true way to reach the lives which God has set the closest to our own, the truth remains that he who really seeks to send abroad the Gospel, and who lives that Gospel in the centre of some one of the networks of brother- hood with which God has covered thv earth, and who cares for other souls beside his ...wn, and 92 Brotherhood in Christ. is on the watch for every feather with which the arrow of his influence can possibly be winged, will surely find the ways he seeks, however impossible it is to tell before what they will be ; and cannot fail to discover at last that God has blessed through him the lives which are no less dear to him than his own. With that assurance, full of responsibility and full also of encouraging hope, I leave the truth which I have tried to preach to you. Go to your homes and question them ! Zebedee ! mother of Zebedee's children ! ask yourselves whether your household is kept open by pure, refined, unselfish, elevated liv- ing, by a continual sense of God, by ever present prayer, so that the best of light and strength which God has given to any one tends freely to become the strength and light of all. Why are John and James so often not together in the company of Christ? What does it mean that so often Simon Peter lingers in darkness, while Andrew is in the full sunshine of the Master's service ? Go home and question your household life about these things, and claim for your home that blessing for which God made our homes; the blessing of persuasive grace ; the blessing of a brotherhood and sisterhood in the divine life, ever echoing and fulfilling the brotherhoods and sister- hoods which make the richness and beauty of our human living; and ever picturing and anticipating the perfect brotherhoods and sisterhoods in the great world-family of God. SERMON VI. me mmt witft tfte W*mM Seel. " And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." — Genesis iii. 15. THE scene in the story of which these words are written is fixed deep in the imagination of man- kind. We read it in our childhood, and it is never afterwards forgotten. As we go on, seeing more and more of life, life and this story of the Book of Genesis become mutually commentaries on each other. Life throws light on the story and the story throws light on life. Let us take one passage from the story now, and try to hold it in the light of life and see its meaning brighten and deepen. God is represented as talking to the serpent who has been the tempter of man- kind. The serpent, the spirit of Evil, has forced his way into the human drama. He has compelled the man and woman to admit him to their company. He cannot now be cast out by one summary act. He has come, and he remains. All that takes place in human history takes place in his presence. Upon 93 94 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. everything he tries to exercise his influence. He is everywhere and always, and always and everywhere the same. To this serpent, this spirit of evil in the world, God is speaking. What is it that he says ? He might tell the monster that the world belonged to him. " Since man has let you in, he must abide the issue. He is yours. There is no help for it, and you must do with him as you will." On the other hand he might with one sweep of his omnipotence bid the hateful reptile depart. " Begone ; for man belongs to me ; and even if he has given himself to you, you can have no power over him at all, for he is mine.'* The words which are written in our text are different from both of these. What does God say ? There shall be a long, terrible fight between man and the power of evil. The power of evil shall haunt and persecute man, cripple him and vex him, hinder him and make him suffer. It shall bruise his heel. But man shall ultimately be stronger than the power of evil, and shall overcome it and go forth victorious, though bruised and hurt, and needing recovery and rest. He shall bruise its head. Is there not in these words which the awful voice of God is heard speaking at the beginning of human history, a most clear and intelligible pro- phecy of human life ? It separates itself at once from the crude theories which men have made on either side. It is not reckless pessimism nor reckless optimism. It is God's broad, wise, long-sighted pro- phecy of man, harassed, distressed and wounded on The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 95 the way, but yet in spite of wounds and hindrances finally getting the better of his enemy and coming to success. With that promise of God — promise and warning together — sounding in his ears, man started on the long journey of existence, and has come thus far upon his way. We want to ask ourselves how far that prophecy has been fulfilled, how far it has justified itself in history. We grow all out of patience with men's crude and sweeping and unqualified epitomes of life. One man says " It is all good," and will see none of the evil and sin and misery which are everywhere. Another man says " It is all bad;" and for him all the brightness and graciousness and perpetual progress go for nothing. One man calls humanity a hopeless brute. Another man calls humanity a triumphant angel. God in these words of Genesis says," Neither ! but a wounded, bruised, strong creature, not running and leaping and shouting, often crawling and creep- ing in its pain, but yet brave, with an inextinguish- able certainty of ultimate success, fighting a battle which is full of pain but is not desperate, sure ultimate- ly to set his heel upon his adversary's head." Cer- tainly there is a picture of man there which, in its most general statement, corresponds largely with the picture which history draws, and with that which our own experience presents. Let us look a little while first at the truthfulness of the picture; then at the way in which it comes to be true, and then at the sort of life which it will make in men who recognize its truth. The fact, the reason, and the 96 The Giant ivith the Wounded Heel. consequence. Those are the natural divisions of airj subject. Let them be the divisions of ours. I look first at the institutions which mankind has formed for doing his work in the world. Institutions are nothing but colossal men. They are the great aggregations of humanity for doing those universal works which it is the interest not merely of this man, or of that man, but of all men to have done. Church institutions, state institutions, present the workings of human nature on a large scale, and so give excel- lent opportunity to study the fundamental facts of hu- man life. And when we look at the great institutions of the world, what do we see ? Everywhere, whether it be in Church or state, essentially the same thing. Noble principles, vast, beneficent agencies, grad- ually conquering barbarism and misery, making men better, making men happier, but always miserably hampered by wretched little sins of administration ; stung in the heel by the serpents of selfishness, and sordidness, and insincerity and narrowness. Civil- ization, which is simply the sum of all the institu- tions which are shaped out of the best aspirations of mankind — it is simply amazing when we tell over to ourselves what the powers are which keep civili- zation to-day from putting its heel square and fair upon the head of barbarism, and finishing it forever. Popular government perverted by demagogues ; Com- merce degraded by the intrusion of fraud; the Church always weakened by hypocrisy; Charity perplexed by the fear of imposture and the dread of pauperism. Why, is not the image of institutionalism, embody- The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 97 ing great principles, full of the consciousness of great ideas, and yet hindered and halting everywhere through the blunders and weaknesses of its admin- istration — is it not just the picture of the giant with the bruised heel, the great strong creature, limping dubiously along the road over which he ought to be moving majestically to assured results ? Look again at society — that great mother and mis- tress of the thoughts and lives of so many of our old and younger people. It has its devotees and its de- nouncers. How few of us have ever seriously set our- selves to ask what is the real value and meaning of that social life which occupies so large a portion of the activity of civilized humanity? In its idea it is beautiful. Eagerness to take pleasure in the com- pany of fellow-men — eagerness to give pleasure, by whatever contribution we can make — a wish to share with others all their gifts and ours — these are most true and healthy impulses. The society which is in- stinct with these impulses is the enemy of solitude ; it puts its foot on selfishness ; it makes men brothers ; it kills out morbidness and self-conceit. Society is doing this — " What ! our society ?" you say, " this false, and foolish, and corrupt, and selfish, and frivol- ous uproar which takes possession of our city every winter, and runs its round of excitement, and jeal- ousy, and dissipation, until Lent sets in ?" Yes, even that ! Sorely bruised in the heel it is, wounded and crippled in a melancholy fashion ; a poor enough image of that divine communion of the children of God, which is the real society of men and women — 98 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. but yet a thing to be cured and cleansed, not to be cast away, not a thing for any man to turn his back upon and be a misanthrope, but for all men and wo- men to do what they can to rescue and to fill with the spirit of a nobler life. Then, think again of learning. We have a per- fect right to indulge our enthusiasm over man as a studying and learning creature. Man seeking after knowledge is felt at once to be man using very noble powers. It is man doing the work for which a very noble part of him was made. We think of the ready and cheerful self-sacrifice of the scholars, great and little, not merely of those who have been rewarded for the surrenders which they made by the applause of a delighted world, but of the scholars whose self- sacrifice has lain in obscurity, who have eaten their crusts in silence, and not even recompensed them- selves with groans. We think of all that man's un- tiring pursuit of knowledge has attained ; of the great conquests which have been rescued out of the kingdom of ignorance. We let our imagination run forward and picture in delighted bewilderment the future triumphs of the same divine audacity, man's brave determination to know all that is knowable. And then, while we are glowing with this large en- thusiasm, what is this which comes to interrupt and chill it ? What are these petty jealousies and hates of learned men ? What is this pedantry ? What is this narrowness which neglects and despises, and even tries to hinder other learning than its own? Close on the large ambition comes the miserable The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 99 discontent, the carping criticism, the discourage- ment, the love of darkness. The worm is in the wood of the brave ship that sails so proudly out to sea. The rust is on the arrow which is sent flying through the air. What is the Poet's complaint, that "knowledge comes but wisdom lingers," except a declaration that here too the full completeness of a great process is prevented, the serpent is stinging at the heel which ultimately must be set upon the serpent's head and crush it. And what shall we say about religion ? The future of mankind is a religious future. It is man as religious, that is to rule the world. What changes of form religious thought may undergo, who can pretend to say? But that religion shall perish, none of us believes. And if religion continues, she must reign. We cannot imagine for her a merely subor- dinate or passive life. She must reign, reign till she has put all enemies under her feet. Indeed I do not know how any man can really believe in religion to- day, who does not believe in the destiny of religion to be the mistress of the world. I cannot believe in God without believing that he is the rightful Lord of every- thing ; for that is what " God " means. A God who is not rightful Lord and Master, is not God. We say this with entire certainty, and then, we look up to see religion conquering the world. We do see what we look for. But we see something else besides. How the great conqueror is harassed and tormented. What petty annoyances and trouble, she is beset with. Look at the crudeness, and the mercenariness, ioo The Giant ipith the Wounded Heel. and mechanicalness with which men, even her own friends, misconceive her most spiritual truths. Look how her theories break down in human action. Behold the hypocrisy, the selfishness, the bigotry, the fanaticism, the untruthfulness, the formality, the cowardice, the meanness of religious people! Wounded in the house of her friends, is this great majestic Being who is some day to rule and save the world. And outside of her friends, among her en- emies, men insult her and oppose her as if she were their worst foe, and not, what she really is, their only hope. The work which she is bound to do will none the less be done, but it will be done under perpetual opposition and persecution, done with torn and bleeding hands and feet. Thus hurriedly I think over the great powers which are helping the world, and everywhere the case concerning all of them seems to be the same. All of them are doing good work. All of them are destined to ultimate success. Of none of them do we despair. But every one of them is working against hindrance and enmity and opposition. Not one of them goes freely and fearlessly to its victory. It is the combination of these two facts that gives the color and the tone to human history. From every century comes forth the same report. Great powers, sure to succeed, yet ever hindered at their work; never abandoning hope, yet moving timidly because they know, that sure as their final victory may be, their immediate lot is wounds and insult. Is it not exactly the old prophecy. The serpent The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 101 whose head is ultimately to be crushed, now ever wounding the heel which is finally to be its destruc- tion. Could any image picture human history so well ? Turn now away from this large look across the fields of history, and think how true the picture of the Book of Genesis is to our personal life. I might open the closed and sacred pages of any man's ex- perience. Here is a man who for his thirty, forty, fifty years has been seeking after goodness, trying to conquer his passions and vices, and be a really good man. What will he say of his struggle as he looks back upon it ? Let him stand upon this Sunday hillock, a little nearer to the sky perhaps than on the week-days ; let him stand here and say how life looks to him as his eye runs back. You know the hindrances you have met. Paul's story has been your story. When you would do good evil was present with you. You never sprang most bravely from the low ordinary level of your living, that a hand did not seem to catch you and draw you back. You never felt a new power start up within you that a new weakness did not start up by its side. Terrible has been this quickness of the evil power, giving you the awful sense of being watched and dogged. Awful has grown this certainty that no good impulse ever could go straight and uninter- rupted to its victorious result, and yet, is it not won- derful how you have kept the assurance that good and not evil is the true master-power of your life ! The resolution has been broken. It has been wounded. 102 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. It has limped and halted. It has stood for months, perhaps for years, in the same place and made no progress, but it has never died. There is no man here who has not failed ; but is there any man here in all this multitude who has given up ? Not one ! Every man here, when he looks forward, means some day to enter into the gates of salvation, to leave his sins behind him and live the life of God. In such a hope, in the light of such a resolution only, is life tolerable. Everything that hinders and delays that resolution is an accident and an intruder. The res- olution itself is the utterance of God's purpose for the life. I think the same is true about our faith. To be- lieve is the true glory of existence. To disbelieve is to give ourselves into the power of death, and, just so far, to cease from living. And you are living and not dead. You do believe. You are quite sure of spiritual verities. God is a truth to you. Your soul is your true self. Christ, the spiritual perfectness of manhood, the true Son of God, is really King of the world. This spiritual faith you would not part with for your life. It is your only hope. You look for- ward to the day when it shall have conquered and cast out every doubt in you, and reign supreme. But now, how doubt besets you ! Now, how a denial comes like its shadow on the heels of every faith ! Who is this man whom in your loftier and more hopeful moments you discern, far off, on some bright distant day, entering into the open portals of a per- fect faith, and leaving doubt dead outside the door The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 103 forever? Is he the victor of an easy fight? Does he come springing up the shining steps with muscles only just tried enough to feel themselves elastic from the long struggle ? Indeed, not so ! The man — yourself — whom you see finally victorious, comes crawling to the temple of entire faith, dragging after him the wounded heel which Doubt, for long years before at last he died, stung, and stung, and stung again. Wonderful is that faith in faith, a thing to be thankful for to all eternity; wonderful is that faith in faith by which the soul dares to be sure, even in the very thick of doubt, that in belief, and not in unbelief, is its eternal rest and home. I have spoken of the prophecy of Genesis as if it referred to that total seed of the woman which is all humanity. I have no doubt that it does so refer. But it has also always been considered to have refer- ence to that special representative humanity which was in Jesus Christ. To him it certainly applies. What is the story of that wondrous life which, centuries afterward, Christ lived in Palestine ? It is the story of a life wounded again and again by an antagonist whom at the last it overthrew. Christ's victory was perfect on the cross. There, finally, he conquered the world, he conquered sin. There he went up upon his throne, and Sin and Death were under his feet. But how did he come to that throne ? Behold him staggering, wounded, bruised, beaten, all the way from Pilate's brutal judgment hall to Calvary. Remember what the years before had been. All the time he had been conquering the world and sin, and 104 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. yet all the time sin and the world had been appar- ently conquering him. At the tomb door of Beth- any, he stands and groans and weeps. Death has cut deep into his affections. His friend is dead. We may well believe that he hesitates and almost doubts. Then he lifts up his head and cries, " Lazarus, come forth !" and as the dead man comes to life, is it not true in that moment that the bruised heel of the woman is set upon the head of the ser- pent which has bruised it ? Is not the old prophecy of Genesis, in that moment, perfectly fulfilled ? May I not then rest here my statement and asser- tion of the fact? Is it not true that everywhere the good is hampered and beset and wounded by the evil which it is ultimately to slay; true also that the good will ultimately slay the evil by which it was wounded and beset ? These two facts, in their com- bination, make a philosophy of life which, when one has accepted it, colors each thought he thinks, each act he does. The two facts subtly blend their influ- ence in every experience. They make impossible either crude pessimism or crude optimism. No man can curse that world in which the best of men, and the best of manhood, is steadily moving onward to the victory over the serpent. No man can un- qualifiedly praise the world where that onward move- ment of the best is always being wounded and re- tarded by the serpent, over which it is to triumph at the last. But surely it gives certainty to our own observation of the history of man ; surely it gives dignity to what has seemed to be the mere accident The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 105 of confusion in our own lives, when we find them both prophesied on the first page of the world's Book. Yes, that which puzzles you or me, that which so often seems to make life meaningless and cruel, at least it is no chance and thoughtlessness by which it comes, for it is written in the very pro- spectus and prophecy of human life. It would be possible, 1 think, also to show that it is written, or at least the possibility of it is written in the very necessity of things. On that I must not linger. I have dwelt so long upon the fact, that I must say but a few words of the cause and the con- sequence. Of the cause I may say only this, that there is one conceivable state of things which in its opera- tion must produce just that phenomenon which we have been studying at such length this morning. That state of things is a vast general purpose for the best good of mankind, submitted for its execution to the wills of men. Granted a God who means all good for his creatures, and who, as a part of his benevolent designs for them, calls their free agency to help in bringing about his purposes, and what shall we behold ? Indubitable evidences that the good is stronger than the evil ; a great, slow, steady pro- gress of the good, forever gaining on the evil ; and all the time reactions and detractions, rebellions of the evil against its conquest by the good. A stream with grand majestic onward flow, whose broad strong bosom is not smooth, but flecked all over with eddies, little twists and turns, in which the 106 The Giant with the Wou?tded Heel. water for a time is running the wrong way. A stately figure of humanity, slowly pressing down its heel upon the serpent's head, yet with its face full of dis- turbance and of pain, because the serpent on whose "head the heel is set is always stinging with the very venom of despair the heel that crushes it. Tell me, my friends, if this is what would come if there were a great divine purpose in the world ne- cessarily submitted for its execution to the will of man: then, since this has come, since this is the very picture which our eyes behold, shall we not let our- selves believe that the cause which I have de- scribed does indeed lie behind this wonderfully inte- resting, pathetic, fearful, hopeful life we live ? A great divine purpose, dependent for its detailed ex- ecution on the will of men ! Let me believe that, and then I know what means this ineradicable hope and this perpetual discouragement. Let me know that, and then I understand both why the good does not conquer now, and why the good must conquer at the last. Our last question still remains. What sort of human life will this world tend to make in the mean time, or what will be the truest and most fitting life to live in a world such as this which we have seen our world to be. For man is capable of many lives, and is able to answer to the world in which he lives with its appropriate response. Two qualities, I think, must certainly appear in the man who has thoroughly caught the spirit and is susceptible to the best influences of this world, The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 107 One quality I call watchful hope, and the other 1 call anxious charity. We need our adjectives as well as our nouns when we describe the true temper in which a man must live. The nouns describe the fundamental confidence which must arise from the conviction of a divine purpose for the life of man. The adjectives depict the sense of danger which comes from the knowledge that this divine purpose is committed for its execution to the unstable wills of men. Hope and charity, these must both spring up from the soul of faith. If God has truly a pur- pose for our lives, who dare be hopeless ? If God has really a purpose for our brother's life, who dare despair of him ? Ah, we do only half believe it. Therefore our hope is such a colorless and feeble thing ; therefore our charity so doubts and hesitates. But they are in us still. They must be in us just in proportion to our faith in God. And yet the hope must be a watchful hope, the charity must be an anxious charity. Neither can fling itself out broadcast and without reserve. Hope is aware of danger ; charity is full of fear; in this world where God has done all God can, and yet leaves the last decision of his own destiny in the hands of man. A watchful hope ! An anxious charity ! Are not these very clear and recognizable qualities ? Do they not make a very clear and recognizable charac- ter ? They make a character which has stamped the life of humanity wherever it has really known and felt the conditions of its life. 108 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. One sometimes thinks how it would be if to each star which floats in space the life which its inhab- itants are living should impart a color, which other stars might see as they pass by it in the never rest- ing chorus of the planets. Can we not picture to ourselves with what a special hue the long spiritual experience of the men who live upon it must have clothed this earth of ours ? A sober glory, a radiance of indescribable depth and richness ; and yet a cer- tain tremulousness as of a perpetual fear ; no outburst of unquestioning, unhesitating splendor, but a re- strained effulgence, hoping for more than it dare yet to claim, pathetic with a constant, age-long dis- content. Whether our sister stars discover it or not, we know it well; we who live here and see the highest typical life of man upon the earth. Do we not know how all the best and holiest men live in a hope so great that its own greatness clothes it in a mystery which is almost doubt, as the sun clothes itself in sunlight which is almost a hiding of the splendor it displays. We cannot describe it to ourselves or one another, but how well we know it ; that watchful hope and anxious charity; that sober, earnest, cheerful, and careful richness which have filled the lives and shone out of the faces of the best men the world has seen, and given its profoundest meaning to the name of Man ! When we look up to Christ and catch the color of His wondrous life, is there not there the confirmation and supreme exemplification of all this ? In him are The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 109 watchful hope and anxious charity complete. This story of his life is no wild shout, flung forth out of the cloudless sky, but a rich, solemn, deep, beautiful music, wherein the sense of danger always trembles and sways beneath the constancy of an unalterable certainty of God. If we are saved by Christ, it will be into the life of Christ that we are saved, into the inextinguisha- ble hope and into the watchful fear together. Not intoxicated by the hope and not discouraged by the fear, we shall go on our way expecting both parts of the old prophecy to be fulfilled in us, as they were both fulfilled in Him. Expecting to be stung and bruised by the serpent, but sure ultimately, if we let God give us all His strength, to set the bruised and stung heel on the serpent's head. That life may we all have the grace to live. SERMON VII. %\t $m of (&Un minqM with Jit*. "And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that had gotten the victory over the oeasV . . . stand on the sea of glass, having the " harps of God." — Revelation xv. 2. WITH all the mysteriousness of the Book of the Revelation, one thing we are sure of; that in it we have the summing up of the moral processes of all time. There may or may not be a more special meaning discoverable in its pictures, but this there certainly is. Many people find great pleasure in tracing out elaborate analogies between its pro- phecies and certain particular events in the world's career. " Here," they cry, pointing to some particu- lar event of contemporary history, " do you not see that this is what these chapters mean ?" — " Yes," we may generally answer, "they very possibly do mean that, but they mean so much besides that. They mean that, and all other events in which the same universal and eternal causes were at work. These special examples fall in under them, but do not cer- tainly exhaust their application. They are much larger and include much more. They take in the whole circle of great spiritual and moral principles. 110 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 1 In this way I look at, and shall ask you this after- noon to study with me, the verse which is our text. I take it to represent, in a highly figurative way, the result of all moral contest. We may call that our subject. It surely is no unimportant one. It is a subject that ought to touch all of us very closely, to waken our interest and deep anxiety. I am not to speak to you of imaginary or unreal conditions, not of un- heard of depths of sin, or unimagined heights of holy rapture, but only of moral contest, of this struggle with suffering and wickedness, of trial, of that state which every earnest man who is conscious of his own inner life at all knows full well. What is to be the end of it all ? How is it all coming out ? These are the questions for which I find some suggestion of an answer in the pictorial prophecy of St. John. They who had gotten the victory over the Beast stood on a sea of glass, mingled with fire. What is the meaning of this imagery ? I confess that I do not pretend to know in full what is intended in the Revelation by this term " The Beast." But on the principle which I just stated, I think it certainly means in its largest sense the whole power of evil in all its earthly manifestations ; everything that tempts the soul of man to sin or tries his constancy with suffering. Others assert more personal mean- ings for the name. One very large school says that it means the Church of Rome ; another set of com- mentators used to make " the Beast " to be Napoleon the Third. Perhaps the name may well include them 112 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. both, in so far as both stand for badness and mischief in the world ; but for our present purpose at least, it will be well not to meddle with any of that sort of partial, precarious interpretation, but to hold what certainly is true, that " the Beast," in its largest sense, means all that is beastly, all that is low and base and tries to drag down what is high and noble; all sin and temptation; and so that "they who have gotten the victory over the Beast," are they who have come out of sin holy, and out of trial pure, and out of much tribulation have entered into the kingdom of heaven. These are to walk upon " a sea of glass, mingled with fire." What does that imagery mean ? The sea of glass, the glassy sea, with its smooth transpa- rency settled into solid stillness without a ripple or the possibility of a storm, calm, clear, placid — evident- ly that is the type of repose, of rest, of peace. And fire, with its quick, eager, searching nature, testing all things, consuming what is evil, purifying what is good, never resting a moment, never sparing pain ; fire, all through the Bible, is the type of active trial of every sort, of struggle. " The fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." " The sea of glass," then, "mingled with fire," is repose mingled with struggle. It is peace and rest and achievement, with the power of trial and suffering yet alive and work- ing within it. It is calmness still pervaded by the discipline through which it has been reached. This is our doctrine — the permanent value of trial — that when a man conquers his adversaries and his The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 3 difficulties, it is not as if he never had encountered them. Their power, still kept, is in all his future life. They are not only events in his past history, they are elements in all his present character. His victory is colored with the hard struggle that won it. His sea of glass is always mingled with fire, just as this peaceful crust of the earth on which we live, with its wheat fields, and vineyards, and orchards, and flower- beds, is full still of the power of the convulsion that wrought it into its present shape, of the floods and vol- canoes and glaciers which have rent it, or drowned it, or tortured it. Just as the whole fruitful earth, deep in its heart, is still mingled with the ever-burning fire that is working out its chemical fitness for its work, just so the life that has been overturned and overturned by the strong hand of God, filled with the deep revolutionary forces of suffering, purified by the strong fires of temptation, keeps its long dis- cipline forever, roots in that discipline the deepest growths of the most sunny and luxuriant spiritual life that it is ever able to attain. How wide this doctrine is. The health of the grown man is something different from the health of the little child, because it has been reached through so many strains and tests and dangers. His strong body carries within it not only the record, but the power of all that it has passed through. His bones are strong by every tug and wrench and burden they have borne. His pulse beats even and true with the steady purposeful power which it has learned from many a period of feverish excitement. His blood 8 ii4 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. flows cool, his eye is clear with the simple and healthy action which they have gathered out of many a time of danger that has come since the rosy untried health of babyhood. He is stronger by the accu- mulated strength of trial. His sea of glass is mingled with fire. So take the strong man who has won a large proper- ty through many disappointments and reverses, and compare him with the baby of fortune who has just dropped by inheritance into money which he never earned. Compare the rich fathers who have made the fortunes with the rich sons who spend them. Is there no keener and more intelligent sense of the value of money in one than in the other ? Sometimes indeed the sense is only keener and not more intelli- gent. Sometimes the father is a miser, while the son is a pattern of judicious liberality. These differ- ences are personal ; but always, either for good or bad, the old contest, the long, hard days of patience, the corn-age, the perseverance which earned the fortune color its whole possession and use. The repose of old age is full of the character that came from the early struggle. The sea of glass is mingled with fire. Or shall we take the man whose life has known bereavement, who has passed sometime through those days and nights which I may not try to de- scribe to you, but which come up to so many of you as I say the old word, death ? Days and nights when he watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt the golden bowl dashed down and broken of which his The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 5 very life had drank. The first shock became dulled. The first agony grew calm. The lips subsided into serenity. But was there not something in him that made him greater and purer and richer than of old; something that let any one see who watched the change, that it was " better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." A whole new qual- ity, that rich quality which the Bible calls by its large word " patience," the power of his trial, was in his new serenity, until he died. His sea of glass was always mingled with fire. So it is with the world ; so it is with nations. A people that has fought for its life, that has had its institutions and ideas subjected to the fiery ordeal, can never be again what it has been. It is not sim- ply older by so many years, but deeper and truer by so much suffering. Besides the mere value which men learn to put into what they have had to fight for, however worthless it may be in itself, the nation that has been saved by struggle, if it has faith enough to believe that it was really saved by strug- gle and not by accident, by the strength of its ideas and not by the chance turning of the weathercock of battle, must always, in whatever times of peace may follow, deal with its ideas with greater rever- ence for the strength that has come out of them in war. Under its safest security it will always want to feel still the capacity for the same vigorous self- defence if it should ever again be needed. Thus its sea of glass will always be mingled with fire. These are all illustrations of our doctrine. But 1 1 6 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. the trouble will be that, however much we recog- nize the general rule, the exceptions to it, the varia- tions in the effect of trial upon character, will be so numerous as to perplex us. We meet with so many people whose character seems not to be elevated or fired, but depressed and smothered by suffering. They come out of adversity apparently with a great loss of what was noblest and most attractive in them before. Men who were smooth and gracious in health, become rough and peevish in sickness. Men who were cordial and liberal in wealth, turn proud and reserved and close as poverty overtakes them. If trial kindles and stirs up some sluggish natures, on the other hand it quenches and subdues many vigorous and ardent hearts and sends them crushed and self- distrustful to their graves. It seems sometimes as if trouble, trial, suffering were in the world like the old fabulous river in Epirus of which the legend ran that its wonderful waters kindled every unlighted torch that was dipped into them, and quenched every torch that was lighted. But however much difficulty this may give us in single cases, it falls in well with our general doctrine. For it makes trial an absolutely necessary element in all perfected character. If so much character does really go to pieces at its first contact with suffering and struggle, then all the more, no matter how terri- ble the waste may be, we see the need of keeping struggle and suffering as tests of character. We see that to sweep them away would be both an insult and a cruel harm to the nature which was meant to The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 7 meet them, to crush and conquer and analyze them, to assimilate their strength out of them as a plant assimilates the nutriment out of the hindering ground through which it has to fight its way up into the sunshine, and to grow strong by struggle. You may just fling your seed upon the surface, and it will easily come to a sort of sickly germination. It has no earth to fight its way through, but then it has no earth to feed on, either ; and the first of it is almost the last of it too. We cannot exaggerate the importance of the change which comes to pass in a man's life when he once thoroughly has learnt this simple truth. Disappoint- ments of every sort, sorrows, sufferings, trials, strug- gles, restlessness and dissatisfaction, false friends, poor health, low tastes and standards all about us — who shall enumerate the million forms, new to each man's new appreciation, in which life is to each man dark and not bright, bitter and not sweet ? Who shall catalogue the troubles of human life ? But who shall tell the difference between two men who live in different aspects of all these things? Are they intrusions, accidents, thwartings and disap- pointments of the will of God ? Or are they (this is what our doctrine says they are) Messiahs, things sent, having like the ships that sail to our ports from far-off lands of barbarian richness, rare spices and fragrant oils and choice foods that we cannot find at home, whose foreign luxuriance forces its odorous way through the coarse and uncouth coverings in which their wealth was packed away in the savage 1 1 8 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. lands from which they came? Are they prolific sources of spiritual culture, contributing what our best happiness could not have except from them, the energy and vitality which there is no way of stirring up in human nature but by some sense of danger, the fire to mingle with the glass. In sick-rooms, in prisons, in dreary, unsympathetic homes, in stores where failure brooded like the first haze of a coming eastern storm, everywhere where men have suffered, to some among the sufferers this truth has come. They lifted their heads up and were strong. Life was a new thing to them. They were no longer the victims of a mistaking chance or of a malignant devil, but the subjects of an educating God. They no longer just waited doggedly for the trouble to pass away. They did not know that it ever would pass away. If it ever did it must go de- spoiled of its power. Whether it passed or stayed, that was not the point, but that the strength that was in it should pass into the sufferer who wrestled with it; that the fire should not only make the glass and then go out, leaving it cold and hard and brittle The fire must abide in the glass that it has made, giving it forever its own warmth and life and elastic toughness. This is the great revelation of the per- manent value of suffering and struggle. But some lives still grow old, some men live strongly and purely in this world, you say, and then go safely and serenely up to heaven, who have no struggle anywhere, who never know what struggle is. What shall we say of them ? How are they The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 9 ripened and saved ? How does the fire get into their sea of glass ? Ah, my dear friend, first you must find your man. And you may search all the ages for him. You may go through the crowded streets of heaven, asking each saint how he came there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a man morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. Will you take the man who never had a disappointment, who never knew a want, whose friends all love him, whose health never knew a suspicion of its perfectness, on whom every sun shines and against whose sails all winds, as if by special commission, are sent to blow, and who still is great and good and true and unselfish and holy, as happy in his inner as in his outer life ? Was there no struggle there ? Do you suppose that man has never wrestled with his own success and happiness, that he has never prayed, and emphasized his prayer with labor, "In all time of my prosperity, Good Lord, deliver me ! — "Deliver me!" — that is the cry of a man in danger, of a man with an antagonist. For years that man and his prosperity have been looking each other in the face and grappling one another. Whether he should rule it or it should rule him, that was the question. He saw plenty of men whose prosperity ruled them, had them for its slaves, bound them, and drove them, and beat them, and taunted them, mocked them with the splendid livery it made them wear, which was only the symbol of their serv- itude to it-, that dreadful prosperity of theirs which they must obey, no matter what it asked of them, to 1 20 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. which they must give up soul and body. He was determined it should not be so with him. He wres- tled with his prosperity and mastered it. His soul is not the slave of his rich store or of his comfortable house. They are the slaves of his soul. They must minister to its support and culture. He rules His, and that is a supremacy that was not won with- out a struggle, than which there is no harder on the earth. So that even here there is no exception. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle. Every poor soul that the Lord heals and frees goes up the street like the man at Capernaum, carrying its bed upon its back, the trophy of its conquered palsy. There are no glassy seas which will really bear the weight of strong men but those that have the fiery mingling. All others are counterfeits, and crack or break. There are several special applications of our doc- trine to the Christian life, which it is interesting to observe. I. It touches all the variations of Christian feeling. In almost every Christian's experience comes times of despondency and gloom, when there seems to be a depletion of the spiritual life, when the fountains that used to burst and sing with water are grown dry; when love is loveless, and hope hopeless, and enthusiasm so utterly dead and buried that it is hard for us to believe that it ever lived. At such times there is nothing for us to do but hold with eager hands to the bare rocky truths of our relig- The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 2 1 ion as a shipwrecked man hangs to a strong ragged cliff when the great retiring wave and all the little eddies all together are trying to sweep him back into the deep. The rough rock tears his hands, but still he clings to it. And so the bold bare truths of God and Christ, of responsibility and eternity, un- clothed for the time of all the dearness that they used to have, how sometimes we have just to clutch and hold fast by them in our darkness to keep from being swept off into recklessness and despair. Then when the tide returns, and we can hold ourselves lightly where we once had to hang heavily, when faith grows easy and God and Christ and responsi- bility and eternity are once more the glory and de- light of happy days and peaceful nights, then cer. tainly there is something new in them, a new color, a new warmth. The soul has caught a new idea of God's love when it has not only been fed but rescued by Him. The sheep has a new conception of his shepherd's care when he has not merely been made "to lie down in green pastures," but also has heard the voice of him who had left the ninety and nine in the wilderness and gone after that which had wandered astray until he found it. The weakness of our own nature and the strength of that on which we rely : danger and its correlative, duty ; watchful- ness, and its great privilege, trust, come in together, and are the new life of the soul, the active power in its restored peace, the fire in its glassy sea. The same applies to doubt and belief. " Why do things seem so hard to me ?" you say ; " why does 122 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. every conceivable objection and difficulty start up in a moment, just as soon as I attempt to lay hold upon the Christian's faith ? Why is it so easy for these others to believe, so hard for me ?" One can- not answer certainly until he knows you better. There is a willful and an unwilling unbelief. If it is willful unbelief, the fault is yours. Man must not certainly complain that the sun does not shine on him, because he shuts his eyes. But if it is unwilling unbelief; if you really want the truth ; if you are not afraid to submit to it as soon as you shall see it, and it is something in your constitution, or in your circumstances, or in the side of Christian truth that has been held out to you that makes it more difficult for you to grasp it than your neighbor; then you are not to be pitied. You have a higher chance than he. To climb the mountain on its hardest side, where its rough granite ribs press out most ruggedly to make your climbing difficult, where you must skirt round chasms and clam- ber down and up ravines, all this has its compen- sations. You know the mountain better when you reach its top. It is a realler, a nobler, and so a dearer thing. If there be such here, let me speak to them. The world has slowly learnt that Christianity is true. If you learn slowly, it is only the old way over again. The man who learns slowly learns com- pletely, if he learns at last at all. If you can only keep on bravely, perseveringly, seeking the truth, saying I must have it or I die; saying that till you The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 23 do die ; dying at last, if needs be, in the search ; then I declare not only that somewhere, here or in some bet' ter world, the truth shall come to you ; but that when it comes the peace and the serenity of it shall be made vital with the energy of your long search. Yours shall be that faith with which a pure, truth-lov- ing soul may stand unashamed before the throne of God, and hear his work called " Well-done," and blessed and consecrated to pei-petual value. You will believe better even in heaven for these earthly difficulties bravely met. For perfect truth- fulness must find the truth at last, or where is God? As we look out, the applications of our doctrine widen everywhere. What is the whole history of the world under the Gospel of forgiveness, from its first to its last, but one vast application of it. Here are men whose condition as perverted, mistaken, sinful beings makes it absolutely necessary that the dis- pensation that shall save them must be one not of mere culture and development but of rescue and repentance. Let the great future of those men be what it will ; let the sublimest regions of calm unbroken holiness be reached in some celestial sphere; let truth and godliness become the atmosphere and the uncon- scious life-blood of the perfected man, still the perfected man must carry somewhere in the nature which holds high converse with the angels and worships with affectionate awe close to the throne of God, the story of its sin and its escape. Eedeemed, its great redemption must forever be the shaping and the coloring element of all its glorious life. 124 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. " Worthy is He who hath redeemed us " — that song the purest lips and the most exalted heart never will outgrow. Simon Peter is forgiven, re-adopted, becomes the preacher of the first sermon, the converter of the first Gentiles, the founder of churches, the writer of epistles, the champion of faith ; but he is always, to the last, the same Simon Peter who denied his Master and struggled with himself in all the bitterness of tears, upon the crucifixion night. Paul mounts up to the third heaven, hears wonder- ful voices, sees unutterable things, can give in bold humility the autobiography of the eleventh chapter to the Corinthians, but he never ceases to be the Paul who stood by at the stoning of Stephen, and had his great darkness rent asunder by the bright light that he saw upon the road from Jerusalem to Damascus. You and I, brethren, come by Christ's grace into sweet communion with God, but the power of our conversion — does it ever leave as ? Are not we prodigals still, with the best robe and the ring and the shoes upon us, and the fatted calf before us in our father's house, conscious always that our fil- ial love is full of the strength of hard repentance which first made us turn our faces homeward from among the swine ? And so the saved world never can forget that it was once the lost world. All of a history such as its has been accumulates, and none of it is lost. It will forever shine with a peculiar light, sing a psalm among its fellows that shall be all its own. The redeemed world — all the strong vitality The Sea- of Glass Mingled with Fire. 125 which that name records, will be the fire that will mingle with the glassy serenity of its obedient and rescued life. Here then we have the picture of the everlasting life. What will heaven be ? What will be the sub- stance on which they shall stand who worship God and praise him in the ages of eternity ? I find man- ifold fitness in the answer that tells us that it shah be a " sea of glass mingled with fire." Is it not a most graphic picture of that experience of rest always pervaded with activity ; of calm, transparent contemplation, always pervaded and kept alive by eager work and service, which is our highest and most Christian hope of heaven ? Let us be sure that our expectations regarding heaven are scriptural and true. Heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idle- ness, not any mere luxurious dreaming over the spirit- ual repose that has been safely and forever won ; but active, tireless, earnest work ; fresh, live enthusiasm for the high labors which eternity will offer. These vivid inspirations will play through our deep repose and make it more mighty in the service of God than any feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever been. The sea of glass will be mingled with fire. Here too we have the type and standard of that heavenliness of character which ought to be ripening in all of us now, as we are getting ready for that spiritual life. As men by the grace of God gra- dually win the " victory over the beast," they begin already to walk upon the sea of glass mingled with fire. Let this be the lesson with which we close our 126 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. thoughts upon our text. Surely, dear friends, there is a very high and happy life conceivable, which very few of us attain, and yet which our religion most evi- dently intends for all of us. Calm and yet active, peaceful and yet thoroughly alive, resting always completely upon truth, but never sleeping on it for a moment, working always intensely, but serene and certain of results, never driven crazy by our work, grounded and settled, yet always moving forward in still but sure progress, always secure, yet always alert — glass mingled with fire. That life which we dream of in ourselves we see in Jesus. Where was there ever gentleness so full of energy ? What life as still as his was ever so per- vaded with untiring and restless power ? Who ever knew the purposes for which he worked to be so sure, and yet so labored for them as if they were uncertain ? Who ever believed his truths so entirely, and yet be- lieved them so vividly as Jesus ? Such perfect peace that never grew listless for a moment; such perfect activity that never grew restless or excited; these are the wonders of the life of Him who going up and down the rugged ways of Palestine, was spiritually walking on "the sea of glass mingled with fire." As more and more we get the victory over the beast, we too are lifted up to walk where he walked. For this all trial, all suffering, and all struggle are sent. May God grant us all much of that grace through which we can be " more than conquerors through him who loved us," and so begin now to " walk with him in white," upon " the sea of glass mingled with fire." SERMON VIII. Mt *§tmt\inl t&wlt «ri tint $*mjrte. " The Beautiful gate of the temple." — Acts iii. 10. PETER and John went up to the temple to- gether, and as they went they passed through "the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful." This gate must have been very beautiful indeed. It was the outer gate of the temple, that which opened upon the temple area from the broad and splendid street which led from the city to the sacred place. As the entering worshipper passed through this gate, the glory of the splendid structure displayed itself before him. He saw the open courts, the vistas of the galleries, the sweep of stairs, the brilliant walls of the temple of Herod. Entering by the Beautiful gate, he saw the whole in all its beauty. And the gate itself was worthy of the view on which it opened. It was made entirely of the precious Corin- thian brass, and its workmanship surpassed that of every other gate in all the temple. There was a cer- tain satisfied sense of fitness here. The gate which opened on the sublime and beautiful prospect was beautiful and sublime itself. The worshipper entered 127 128 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. on the glory of the temple through a portal that fore- told the coming glory by its own. The architecture of the old Jewish Temple may serve us for a parable to-day. The truth that it sug- gests will be the harmony between a noble under- taking and a beautiful beginning — that every true temple ought to have a beautiful gate. The impor- tance of beginnings is the veriest common-place of practical virtue. That first step which costs, we know, cannot be too costly, if it starts the enterprise aright. And when we look at the fairest things that have been, or that have been done ever in the world, we are much struck by seeing how often the en- trance has been at least worthy of, and, alas, how often it has surpassed with its beauty, the court to which it gave admission. The whole world had its beautiful gate in those days of innocence and perfect happiness which passed in Eden before man's sin and the sorrow that it brings began. Christianity com- menced its career with the perfect Life of Jesus, and then the simple beauty of the Apostolic Church, to which our later eyes are ever looking back. So every human life starts in the beautiful mystery of childhood. So every nation begins its career in the romance of some mythology, or the idealized memory of some heroic man to whom it owes its being. So every man's labor in his profession opens with the days of study and theory, when the idea of his pro- fession is beautiful and clear before him. So every best 'friendship and life-long love starts in a glamor The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 129 of admiration that almost worships the image of the coveted friend. We might dwell upon several of these, but let us think only of the wisdom and love of God who has put the beauty of youth at the entrance of every hu- man life. Through that Beautiful gate every man comes into the temple. The temple is beautiful it- self. Life is filled with joy and sacredness. But how few lives are more beautiful than the youth that leads to them ! And how the noblest lives are prom- ised in their youth by fair anticipations of their com- ing beauty ! And then think again that the highest life always is religious. The best glory of the most full existence is in the overfilling of its fulness with the love and fear of God. And that sets us to asking whether to the beautiful temple of a mature religious life there is also a beautiful gate. Is there such a thing as a child's religion worthy of, and ad- mitting to, the broad thoughtfulness and happy de- votion of the mature religion of the grown man and woman, as there is a child's body and a child's mind, with their own beauty, worthy of and introducing to the physical and mental life of later years ? This brings us to our subject. I shall not ride the parable to death. I shall not weary you with Gates and Temples. I only wanted by the old passage in the Book of Acts to suggest our theme. I want to speak of the child's religion. The child's religion, as introductory to the religion of maturity, but yet as a distinct reality which has a substantial existence of its own. To surely is a subject which has its interest 130 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. for everybody. The parents who care for their own children, the teachers to whose care the children are immediately intrusted, the Church which has its com- mission to all the world, and evidently must not leave the children out, the lover of his kind who looks for its religious progress — where is the man who can say or think that he need have no interest in the possibil- ity and character and means of children's religion ? Here are the children all among us, and yet we often talk to one another, as if nobody under twenty had anything to do with the great things which are of such unspeakable importance after we have come of age. Here are the children all among us, and many a time a minister stops in his sermon and feels dis- heartened — almost dismayed — when he thinks how he is going on year after year, saying almost never a word in church, to tell the children that the Christ he talks of is not a gray lecturer, giving grown men lectures on hard dry truths, but a kind friend, young with the divine youth of eternity, and wanting them to come to him. Here are the children among us, and we open our Sunday-school and make it bright for them, and do get very close to them there with the love of God, but all the while we feel (and the chil- dren are quick and sensitive enough to feel it too), that the Church does not more than half know what to do with them; its theories and machineries are made for grown up people. It wishes the children would hurry and grow up, so that it might know how to talk to, what to do with, what to make of them. They belong to the Church, and yet do not belong to The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 131 it. Here are the children all around us, and yet we have to begin to speak of a child's religion by saying something about the very possibility of such a tiling. And the first thing that we must say, when we are asked whether it is possible for a child to be religious, must be this, I think; that the religion of childhood is not only possible, but is the normal type of religion; is that which Christianity most contem- plates, and that which, when Christianity shall have really entered into her power, all men shall accept as the very image and pattern of religion. We might as well ask whether a child's life is possible. The child is the embodiment of life, life in its freshness and first glory. As unnatural and exceptional as is the birth of a man full-grown — an Adam or an Eve without a childhood — to the true idea of living, so unnatural and exceptional to the true notion of relig- ion is the thought of a grown up man being convert- ed, beginning his religious life with the stiff move- ments and faded affections of mature years. The New Testament is our book of authority ; but the New Testament is always leading men astray, be- cause they deal with it unreasonably, because they do not take into account the times in which it was first written. And so the current idea of the churches, which has only just begun to be dislodged, that adult conversion is the type and intended rule of Christianity, comes largely from the fact that the first preachers of Christianity had of necessity to be largely occupied with men who had known nothing of Christianity in their youth. Peter and Paul had 132 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. to go to grown up men, and ask them to begin the Christian life. But surely that was not to be the perpetual picture of Christian culture. Christ was too human for that. God had written through all his creation, in the interweaving of young life with old, his intention that one continuous culture should run through the whole scale of the human creature's development. Christ had been too evidently a child ; the incarnation had too evidently taken all of life into its benediction, for the children ever to be wholly counted out. The great Erasmus once wrote a piece in Latin for a boy to speak which had this last thought beautifully put: "We commemo- rate," so he taught the young declaimer with his bright eye and his glowing face to say, "we boys commemorate the boy — pueri puerum — we commemo- rate our Master Jesus, the chief ideal of all, but yet peculiarly the chief of us — that is, of boys." The evident design of God's creation, the comprehensive form of the incarnation, the clear presence in child- ren of the power of and the need of religion, these are the forces which, in spite of every tendency of the grown people to make children wait till they grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a trust, how- ever blind, that a child's religion was a possible reality ; that a child might serve and love and live for God. But even where this has been granted, the old feeling that religion belongs to adult people, still has power, and defeats the best results of that faith in the religious possibilities of children which has been The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 133 persistently uttered in the Church's sacrament of baptism, and which has in modern times founded the Sunday-school, and created the vast religious litera- ture of childhood. The old feeling still is strong enough, while it allows the possibility of children's being religious, to insist that their religion must be of the sort that has taken shape for adults alone. Bead many of the children's religious books, listen to many of the children's sermons, and you will understand in a moment why they have not wrought their fruit and filled our churches with young Samuels and Timothys and Marys. They attempt to impose upon the child the religion that belongs to the man. They take the elaborate self-conscious experience to which men have been forced by the stresses of their life, and they bid the children look at those experiences and imitate them, and so be religious. The result is that nine-tenths of the children do not get hold of religion at all, and accept the easy heathenism to which they seem consigned; while the other tenth get hold of it only too much, and are the self-conscious little saints, the priggish and pedantic Christians whom it is so sad to see and so easy to caricature. So it comes about that, though it is the type of truest Christianity, a really healthy Christian life in a child is a rare sight. There have been some men, of whom one can hardly express himself too strongly, who have gone through the country preaching what they call children's revi- , vals, taking that type of the beginning of a new life which belongs to thieves and murderers, and gray 134 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. old reprobates, who by the grace of God are casting off the vices of a horrible lifetime, and repenting of the most brutal sins — an experience full of convul- sion and agony, who try only too successfully to create a counterfeit of that experience in the child- ren whom they want to convert. It is a real dis- belief in the reality of a child's religion, and so an attempt to make the child assume the man's. It is the modern echo of that medieval marvel which was called the children's crusade, when their leaders took the children of Europe and led them as their fathers were going to the conquest of Jerusalem, and wasted their little lives by hundreds all along the weary and disastrous way. But even where the sad extravagance and blunder of the children's revival is not attempted, and could not be tolerated, still I am sure that we are making a corresponding error when we try to force truth in the hard scholastic shapes into which men have cast it on the minds of the young. Every theologian must own that his theology is harder than the New Testa- ment. It is the New Testament and not his theolo- gy that he ought to teach the child. The child's mind is natural and not artificial. Our theological systems are artificial and arbitrary, not natural. And the child, while he can make nothing of the bal- ancing of persons in the scholastic doctrines of the Trinity, will know quicker than you or I the mean- ing of the equal divine love of Father, Saviour and Spirit. Though his mind will make nothing of the notion of a scheme of an atonement, he will under- The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 135 stand wonderfully that Jesus lived and died for him. Though he will cast off the notion of an angry God, wreaking vengeance on his creatures forever and forever, he will understand that sin is dreadful, and must bring, of its own essential nature, dreadful con- sequences ; and that of those consequences none but he who knows the measure of the sin can see the end. Who can say what a power children may some day have over religious thought, in bringing back Christianity, as we long to see it brought, from a scheme of complicated and artificial arrangements to be the free utterance of the heart of God to man ? And so we come to this ; that while men believe in the possibilities of children's being religious, they are largely failing to make them so because they are offering them not a child's, but a man's religion, men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience. The child makes nothing out of either. The one power that he has and longs to use is the power of personal loyalty and love. He wants Christ. When through the systems here and there the personal Christ steps forth, the true character of the child's religion always suggests itself, as the child runs to him. I have already said that there was something in the Epistles that had worked to the discouragement of children's piety ; but there is nothing of that in the Gospels. The Gospels come after the Old Testa- ment, like spring after winter. There is child- life in the Old Testament, but it is crushed and buried. When Jesus appears, the children come singing Ho- 1 36 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. sannas, and asking him to bless them, as the ground laughs with its flowers when the sun gets high. And then our next question comes. If there is such a thing as a child's religion, and if men have made great mistakes because they did not understand it, then, what is it ? What is the true character of the religion of a child ? Certainly, to be sweet and real, it must be the possession by God of the faculties and qualities that belong especially to childhood. And it is not hard to enumerate some of those qualities at least. The first and most prominent of them all is the faculty of genuine, unqualified, unhesitating ad- miration. The grown man has to find out his ideals with difficulty. The world is tarnished to him. He has to abstract himself, and it is by a labored effort that he culls out from under its stained and battered surface the unseen and beautiful idea and promise which is at the heart of everything. But a child has no such effort. To him the world is beautiful, and he sees everything easily in its perfection. While the grown man is ready first to criticise, and only afterwards to discover what there is good and beautiful in the faulty thing, the child is struck first with admiration, and only reluctantly discovers that what he admires is not wholly good. Now this dif- ference surely must tell upon the kind of religion that we are to look for in the earlier and the later life. There is a religion which finds the world un- satisfying, and so turns longingly, wistfully, patheti- cally, wearily to God. There is another religion which finds the world wondrously beautiful and good, yet The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 137 always suggesting something more beautiful and better than itself, and this religion too turns to God, but glowingly, springingly, hopefully. The first re- ligion starts from a sense of sin and comes to God for forgiveness. The second religion starts in a thank- ful joy, a sense of promise, and comes to God for ful- filment. The first starts with disgust at self, and so comes to love for God. The second starts in admira- tion of God, and so comes to forgetfulness of self. It is needless to say that both these religions meet in the fullest religious experiences ; but it is evident which of them most naturally belongs to the exper- ience of a child. You cannot teach a child that ha- tred of himself, you cannot fill him with that sense of sin that sends the worn and weary sinner with his load of sins staggering up to cast them down before the cross. The attempt to create such experiences in children either kills them with morbid misery or makes them dreadful little hypocrites. But this power of admiration in the child promises its own religion, of its own natural kind. His are the years in which one can really believe in ideals. God can stand out before him, awful, yet dear; for to the child to whom all is mysterious, nearness and awful- ness do not destroy one another as they do to us old- er folk. No doubt of God's faithfulness, no question- ing of His ways comes in to cloud the perfectly un- spotted adoration. How good it is that there are years at the beginning of every life when it is the most easy thing to believe in an absolute right and goodness. How strange it is that we should not 138 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. use those precious years for the attainment of their own appropriate and beautiful religion. We grudge children their ideals. There are the much abused Sunday-school books which many good people unite to condemn. They are bad enough, many of them; but that which is made the special object of abuse in them, that they describe unnaturally perfect boys and girls, is not necessarily a fault. If the perfect children they describe are only healthy and not sickly in their virtue, they just meet and cultivate that belief in the possibility of perfection which is instinctive in a child's heart, and which in a man's is so often, so soon, buried deep under the accumulated conviction of the reality of sin. The present tenden- cy of those who write children's books is to describe not the perfect child, but children as they are. The old-fashioned way was truer to the child's idealizing nature. For the first feature of a child's religion will be this, which we cannot ignore, that a child will come to God far oftener and far closer from love of the good than from hatred of the evil. And then another thing in a child's religion is the perfect healthiness of his traditionalism, of his be- longing to a certain sect and holding to certain opinions. So many grown people seem to have mixed up as much of evil as of good in their adher- ence to the faith of their fathers. They cling to it controversially. Their love for it is mixed up with jealousy and spite and pride. A child knows nothing of all that. His denomination, his creed, is like his nation, or his home. It is his because he was born The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 139 there. It is dear to him with the unquestioning sense that he belongs to it and it to him. Alas, that our sectarian lines are drawn so narrow that very often a child cannot keep this simple home feeling as he grows up ; alas, that so often as the child goes on to develope his own appropriate type of Christian faith and feeling, he finds that the sect in which he was born will not hold his special aspect of the truth, and so has to go abroad and break the ties of earliest sympathy in order to be the Christian that the Lord meant him to be. Alas, that we are all such secta- rians, whatever we may call ourselves, and that the great idea of a whole Christian Church is as yet so little realized. But these are troubles which the man grows into. The child may freely glory in his own Church, and yet be no sectarian; may accept his creed from the lips of others, and yet be no dog- matist. And so a second feature in the child's relig- ion will be this — a healthy traditionalism, a warm, true love for the Church he is brought up in ; not an abstract and general, but a clear, localized religion. The true parent, the true teacher, will try not mere- ly to make the child love God, but to make him love his own church, as the place where he knows God, and where he finds God always. And then again, as a child is able to love his own church without any of the evil effects of sectarianism, so he is able to love the organizations and habits of the Church, without the evil effects of formalism. The child's nature is poetic. This is seen in the ease with which it feels the symbolic character of sym- 140 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. bolic things. Its symbols are real symbols; they really stand for something besides themselves, some- thing unseen. Now formalism comes largely from the sheer loss of the poetic sense. The stupidity of ritualism is the prosaic way in which its symbols have lost their meaning, and become valuable in and for themselves. This is the way in which many people make a Fetish of the Church. The Church is the most poetic of all things, so long as men see her with poetic eyes, so long as her outward shows stand for spiritual truths ; but there never was any- thing so wretchedly prosaic as the outward shows and ways of the Church, her visible sacraments and tactual successions, when they have ceased to be merely representative of spiritual verities and are valued for themselves. Now, is it saying too much to claim that a child with his nature full of poetry is able to take and use the ceremonies and external things of the Church and keep their meaning, as many men cannot ? He needs them. It is all very well for you to say that you can worship without a liturgy, and without the company of a congregation. You think you can. You have faith in your power for abstracted and solitary devotion ; but it is not right for you to assume that your child can do it. This is why, as I think, all the children of a parish such as this, even those who are best taught at home, ought to be gathered into the parish Sunday School, which for many purposes is their church. Apart from what they learn there, it brings them into a true conscious partnership in the church and its work- The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 141 ings, makes itself their church, fills them with its spirit, lets them understand its life, and look on it as their home. This is why I wish all the children of our church were there. Only one thing more let me say about the charac- ter of the child's religion. Is it not true that the simplest and primary form of the presentation of the Gospel is the one which is preserved most truly and necessarily in the teaching of children ? The Gos- pel came first into the world as good news. It was a simple, glorious story, told in the purest and direct- est way. It was a message, a revelation, God's love to man, God's pity and salvation for man, told by the roadside and the wellside, told in the temple courts, told from the cross. But how that first con- ception of the Gospel gets blurred and lost. To us grown men, the Gospel is a philosophy of life, a sys- tem to be argued about, almost anything but a mes- sage coming right down from God to man. But the child's nature is all receptive of stories, open for messages on every side. The child is a little Athe- nian, always listening for some new thing. All the world about him is mysterious, ever breaking out into tidings of itself. And so the child is ready, if it can be rightly told him, to hear, above all the other messages that come to him out of this ever opening and surprising world, the best and highest news of all, the Gospel, simply as glad tid- ings of the love of God and the salvation of the world by Jesus. I must not mention more ; but put together in 142 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. your own mind these characteristics of a child's relig- ion which we have recounted, and see if you have not a recognizable and beautiful conception as their lesult. It is no monstrous thing. It is no priggish and unpleasant aping of what is possible only for maturer life. It is a true child who loves God and sees everything beautiful in Him, who loves the Church and finds its ways and forms full of signifi- cance and pleasure, and who hears and accepts as part of the story of the world which it is gradually learning to know, the story of how God loved that world, so that He came into it and lived here and died here, to help every man to live in holiness and to save every man when he fell into sin. There is no child for whom that religion is not possible. Brave, true, frank, gentle, joyous, what is there better than this in the labored religion of our later days ? It is not only a promise, it is a present reality. The boy is not only a little man, he is a boy, with his own pres- ent capacity of character. He is even now " a mem- ber of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven." We have said something of the possibility and of the character of a child's religion. And now we want to go on and say a little of the methods of it; how is it to be created in all its beauty in these chil- dren whom you know ? Ah, first of all, let us feel for our comfort and humility that the power to create it rests far back of our feebleness. They are God's children. We stand over the little stalk and say, " How shall I make this flower grow ? " Think how The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 143 God must listen to us as we say that. God who made the growing power of that little flower, and ripened it in the flora of worlds that perished before our history began. No education can be true or fruit- ful which forgets the perfect education of which it is but a minister. No man can care wisely or well for any one he loves, who dares forget that God is caring for that friend of his, whether he be old man or little boy, with a wisdom and love incomprehensible. I cannot but think how many families and schools it would at once fill with happy earnestness and relieve of nervous anxiousness to be pervaded with this re- membrance continually. So often grown people here pass out of childhood and become incapable of deal- ing with children. But God is always young and always sympathises with the children whom He sends into the world. Bear this in mind, and then before us opens the work of helping under God in the training of his children. It is not easy. The child's nature every- where shows its imperfectness. It is hard to open it for what it ought to receive, and it is hard to close it against what it ought to reject. It is like the beautiful gate with which we are comparing it, for Josephus tells us about that gate, that it took the strength of twenty men to open it or close it. I am not going to undertake a general treatise on the Christian education of children. There are only two suggestions which I want to make and urge with all the force I can upon those to whom the training of children is intrusted. 144 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. The first is this; the absolute need of perfect truthfulness in children's religious training. Nobody, I think, can look at the strange state of religious thought in this day, without seeing at once the im- portance and the difficulty of making truthfulness first and absolute when we try to teach children re- ligious truth or to excite them to religious feeling. Religious truth has passed in many people's minds into new forms. Men hold other conceptions than they held twenty years ago. I do not argue now whether the newer theology is more or less true ; but many an earnest thinker to whom the truth has come with a freshness and a force to his own soul in some new shape, will still, as he undertakes to teach children, tell them not what he believes, give them not the fresh food on which he knows that his own soul is nourished, but spread before them traditional statements of orthodoxy which are ordinarily reputed safer, but which he himself really does not believe. He has not full faith in his truth. He is willing to rest himself, nay, he is gladly resting himself upon it daily for salvation ; but when he comes to teach the children, he draws back, and from a curious mixture of timidity and care for them and spiritual faithless- ness, he puts before them some dead husks instead of the live truth on which he feeds. Are there not many parents and teachers whose views of the Bible as God's Book, of the Lord's Day as His festival, of the Atonement as the free expression of His love, of the Resurrection of the body and the life in heaven, are free, rational, scriptural and vital, who will yet The BeatUiful Gate of the Temple. 145 teach their children as they were taught, in hard, mechanical and untrue statements of those great Christian verities ? It keeps the religious education of our nurseries and Sunday-schools too often behind the best religious conviction of the time. It is not right. I do not ask that every crude speculation should be immediately thrust upon the minds of trusting children, who will take it in all its crudeness for a settled conviction; but I do believe that he who is set to teach children about God, should show to them the best and fullest that the Lord has shown to him, and not another something which he does not believe, but which for some reason he has come to think is best for them at present. See what are the evils of such strange conduct. In the first place, it is insincere in the teacher. That is reason enough against it. In the second place, it will be ineffective, for a man cannot teach with his whole heart what he only half-heartedly believes. The bright eyes of the children will see through him. And, in the third place, it is doing fearful wrong to the children's future, who must find out some day that what they have learned is not true, and so must give it up ; and in giving up your feeble and false version of it, will stand in ter- rible danger of giving up the Christian religion alto- gether. No, give the children the best that God has given you. Teach them nothing that you do not believe they can carry on, growing to them with their growth, through all this life, into the life beyond. 10 146 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. There is a difference between a child's religion and a man's religion, but remember always it is not a difference of false and true. The child's religion must be like the clothes with which the Israelite children started out of Egypt, which, according to the old legend, grew as they grew till the boys and girls were men and women. To have a partial re- ligion grow into a perfect religion, is one of the most natural and healthy processes of human life. To change a false religion for a true one is the most necessary, but most violent struggle of the human soul. There is a class of books and teachers — the ordi- nary Sunday School talker, is often of that sort — who, it seems to me, does very much, partly from timidity, partly from laziness, partly from sensationalism, to keep a certain unreality and insincerity in the relig- ious teaching of the young. Everywhere but in religion, in history, in science, each new and truer view, as soon as it is once established, passes instant- ly into the school books of the land. Am 1 not right in saying that there are great convictions about scripture and the Christian faith which are heartily accepted by the great mass of thinking Christian people now, which are not being taught to the children of to-day ? If that is so, as I fear it is, then this new generation has got to fight over again the battle that our generation has fought, and fight it, too, less hopefully, because there will have been less of sincerity in its education. It is always a better and safer process to outgrow a doctrine that we have been The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 147 sincerely taught, than to abandon one that had no real hold upon our teacher's mind. In the first case we keep much of the sincerity, even if we let the doctrine go. In the second case, when we let go the doc- trine, there is nothing left. Is there not here the secret of much of the ineffective religious teaching of the young, of the way they cast our teaching off when they grow up ? No ! my dear friends, all of you anywhere who are called to teach, with larger faith in truth, with larger faith in God, with wise love for his children, I beg you to make truthfulness the first law of your teaching. Never tell a child that he must believe what you do not believe, nor teach him that he must go through any experience which you are not sure is necessary to his conversion and his Christian life. And then the other principle that I wanted to re- mind you of, was the necessity of a larger element of suggestiveness in the best training of a religious na- ture. A child is not a block of marble, to be hewn out into what you will. A child, and especially a child considered as a religious being, is a plant which you are to set into the right soil of truth, and then watch as it developes its own special nature. And every child is a separate and peculiar plant, different from every other. What shall the teacher do then ? Not say, "I will make of this child before me, this or that," but " I will quicken every activity with its own spiritual stimulus. I will break off the chains and get every obstruction of sin and slothfulness out of the way, and help this child to be what God made 148 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. him to be, whatever it is." A teacher who says that, brings truth always so fresh to each young life that it can be eaten and turned into that life's own forms of action; not hard and fossilized, so that it must always be kept in just the shape in which it is first given. He will not be surprised or disappointed when he sees his pupil developing a type of Christian life different from his own. If it is only real, and pure from all conceit, and truly full of Christ, he will be delighted to watch it, and rejoice more to have given an impulse to a movement which shall far outrun him- self, than he ever could have rejoiced to train a hun- dred scholars into mere echoes and repetitions of his imperfect individuality. This power of suggestiveness runs everywhere. More is accomplished in this world always by the suggestions of motive and force than by the imposi- tions of form and rule. He who believes in sugges- tion has trust in the vital powers of things. The whole world is waiting to start into far higher action than anything yet, if one could only touch its springs. This is the beauty, this must be the quiet satisfaction of the lives of those obscure and patient workers who build nothing themselves, but who suggest the need and wish of building to other minds greater than theirs. Think of being the schoolteacher of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pascal; and yet only a few antiquarians know the name of either. Surely there are last that shall be first. Surely this power of suggestiveness must always be the teacher's wisest and best. The Beatttiful Gate of the Temple. 149 Let me rest with these two ideas. You see at once how both of them, truthfulness and sugges- tiveness, are words of personal character. In all teaching, but most of all in religious teaching, the personal nature of the teacher is supreme. " I am thy God that teacheth thee," Jehovah said. Only in deity are met perfectly those qualities that make the perfect Being, " apt to teach." We are under teachers in God's school here. But what a light all this throws upon that which seems so ter- rible to us on earth, the sad and awful mystery of a child's death. What is it when a child dies ? It is the great head-master calling that child up into his own room, away from all the under-teachers, to finish his education under his own eye, close at his feet. The whole thought of a child's growth and develop- ment in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exalting and bewildering on which the mind can rest. Always the child must be there. Always there must be something in those who died as child- ren to make them different to all eternity from those who grew up to be men here among all the tempta- tions and hindrances of earth. There must forever be something in their perfect trust in the Father, some- thing in the peculiar nearness and innocent familiar- ity of their life with Jesus, something in the sim- plicity and instinctiveness of their relation to the truth, something pure even among all the perfect purity which we shall all have reached, something wiser than the wisest, showing that even there there is a revelation that can be given only to the babes. 1 50 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. Something more perfectly triumphant and serene to mark forever the perfected life of those who never sinned, and whose whole education has been in the full sunlight of their Father's presence. There will be seen forever what we have tried so dimly to depict to-day, the possibility and beauty of a child's religion. We hear much in these days of the precocity of children. Never were they so forward. Never were children treated so like men and women. Never did they get ideas so freely from the freest contact with the life about them. It may be bad or good; which- ever it be, it marks a critical time and multiplies the responsibility of those who in any capacity are teachers now. Josephus tells us that once in the seige of Jerusalem this golden gate which we have made the image of childhood, vastly heavy and hard to move, " was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour of the night." And he says that some thought it was a good omen, "as if God did open then the gate of happiness." But others thought it very bad, " as if the gate was open to the advantage of their enemies." So in this criti- cal time of ours, not the least critical sign is this : that the golden gate stands open wide; that child- hood is exposed and sensitive to new impressions and ideas. Is it for good or evil ? Certainly, not necessarily for evil, if with a deep trust in God and a true love for His children, those to whom the care of the gate is given can only do their duty. The wider open the gate the better, if only the truth can be poured in. The more receptive the children's The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 1 5 1 life the better, if only they who train the children can thoroughly believe that there is a manly and beautiful religion of which the child is capable, and work with God to bring their children to it. When that conviction takes possession of the Church, then the Church shall indeed have her children in her arms. Then Isaiah's vision of the complete New Jerusalem shall be fulfilled. " Thou shalt call thy walls salvation, and thy gates praise." SERMON IX. A FOREIGN MISSIONARY SERMON. ".4w