^ 
 
 W'J -Dawson 
 
 
 
/<^ .^^.1 3 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Presented by 
 
 BV 4310 .D37 1889 
 
 Dawson, William James, 1854 
 
 1928. 
 The threshold of manhood 
 
THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
:<^v^ 
 
 THE ^<iO[nr 
 
 THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 A YOUNG MAN'S WORDS TO YOUNG MEN. 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 W. J. DAWSON, 
 
 JkUTHOR or "a vision of souls; with other ballads and poems," 
 
 <* QUEST AND VISION : ESSAYS IM UF£ AND LITERATURE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON, 
 
 714, BROADWAY. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE sermons in this volume, with one or two ex- 
 ceptions, have been especially addressed to young 
 men. For five years, while resident in London, and 
 particularly in the latter portion of that time, my 
 ministry gave me special contact with young men, and 
 my previous sympathies were greatly quickened by 
 the closer knowledge I then gained of the temptations, 
 struggles, and needs of city youth. I found that 
 wherever there was any honest attempt made to deal 
 with their intellectual difficulties, and wherever there 
 was manifested an understanding sympathy of their 
 social needs, there was a frank and even affectionate 
 response accorded. The life of a young man in a 
 great city is often one of the loneliest of lives. He 
 has comrades, but few friends ; many companions, but 
 scarcely one counsellor. He has left the safe anchor- 
 age of home, and is often half-intoxicated with the 
 sense of his unrestrained liberty. At the most critical 
 and susceptible period of life he is most solitary, most 
 left to himself, and least guarded against the seductions 
 of impure delight. This period of life is the Threshold 
 of Manhood. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 The two things most needed at such a time are the 
 friendly aid of a thoroughly honest and manly piety, 
 and, if possible, the social rallying-point of Christian 
 club or home life. It is a question which religious 
 households in great cities should discuss, whether it 
 is not their bounden duty to open their doors freely 
 to this crowd of young strangers who surround them ; 
 for to be cut off from the society of good women in 
 the early stage of manhood is an unspeakable mis- 
 fortune. It is a yet more urgent question whether 
 the Churches should not provide in every city social 
 centres for young manhood. I do not mean one or 
 two huge institutions such as we now possess. I 
 mean numerous homes and clubs, where young men 
 coming up in search of situations could find help, 
 welcome, and accommodation, and where after business 
 hours they could gather in genial social intercourse. 
 Some social stimulant the young nature craves, and 
 must have. If the Churches do not provide it, the 
 music-hall will. 
 
 I make no apology for the nature of these addresses. 
 They retain the form of spoken counsels and appeals. 
 Except by the occasional alteration of a phrase I have 
 not attempted to recast them into a more literary 
 mould. I simply seek by their publication a yet 
 larger congregation than any I have talked with face 
 to face. 
 
 W. J. DAWSON. 
 
 Glasgow, 1889. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DECISION •^•••••I«Z 
 
 II. 
 A YOUNG man's DIFFICULTIES • • Z » • 20 
 
 III. 
 ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY . • • • • 41 
 
 IV. 
 THE TESTIMONY OF FACT •••••• 62 
 
 V. 
 
 WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES • • • • « 83 
 
 VI. 
 
 PURITY ••••••••• 102 
 
 VII. 
 THE SIN OF ESAU *.••••• X20 
 
vui CONTENTS. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SINS OF SILENCE ••••••• I4T 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS • • • • . 160 
 
 X, 
 
 JOB ON PESSIMISM • • • • • • •182 
 
 XI. 
 NATHAN AND DAVID ••••••• I98 
 
 XII. 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH .214 
 
 XIII. 
 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD .«§••• 236 
 
 XIV. 
 THE USE OF MYSTERY • « 1 I 1 \ 2K(i 
 
T. 
 
 DECISION, 
 
 "How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God 
 follow Him : but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered 
 him not a word." — l Kings xviii. 21, 
 
 THIS scene is one of the most memorable and 
 striking in history. It represents one of those 
 great culminating points when life suddenly becomes 
 dramatic, when, as it were, the confused groups of men 
 and women on the stage of life suddenly shift them- 
 selves into place and position, and the curtain rises on 
 the acts of great tragedy. Such culminations occur 
 also in the individual life, when the still river of 
 our days deepens, and rushes on in loud thunder, 
 and all our scattered energies become concentrated in 
 one vast struggle. In such moments life is felt to be 
 infinitely significant, and we know that it fulfils itself 
 in the open eye of the angel-crowded heavens. In 
 such moments the character of coming centuries is 
 determined, and individual destiny is sealed and fixed. 
 What, then, are the elements which constitute this 
 great scene ? First of all, you look upon the vision of 
 a whole nation gone astray, blinded by sensuality, 
 swept into the swift hells of a privileged licentiousness. 
 
 I 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 The doctrine of philosophic historians to-day is that 
 certain nations have been raised up to perform certain 
 missions, and perhaps on no other hypothesis can the 
 mystery of the dispersal of the human family so well 
 find solution. The mission of the Jewish nation was 
 to enforce belief in the one spiritual and invisible 
 Jehovah, King of kings and Lord of lords. Amid the 
 vile and endless degradations of universal idolatry, 
 they kept the light of a pure theocracy burning ; and 
 the Jew has done more for the world by his piety 
 than the Greek by his culture, or the Roman by his 
 civilisation. But ever and again in Jewish history 
 there came times when a black mist of all but universal 
 apostasy fell upon the land, and quenched the light 
 upon its altars, and filled the temples with a desolating 
 gloom. Such a time had now come. A corrupt court 
 had produced a corrupt people ; and every bond of 
 morality, of patriotism, of spirituality, was strained or 
 broken. One man only, and he a wild man of the 
 desert, remained faithful, and set him.self Vv'ith magni- 
 ficent valour against king, and court, and people. Far 
 away from the false and fevered life of cities, he wor- 
 shipped where the stars shone like the altar-lights of 
 heaven, where the free air blew, and the heaUng silence 
 taught serenity. He knew that Jehovah was God, for 
 His voice had reached him in the thunder, and the 
 whirlwind, and the fire. He knew that, gild an idol 
 how you will, it is an idol still, and has eyes that 
 cannot see and mouth that is a carven dumbness. 
 He knew another thing: that this invisible Jehovah 
 
DECISION. 
 
 demanded truth to the innermost convictions at all 
 costs ; so he built upon the granite of his own indi- 
 viduality, and dared to be original when originality 
 meant death. He was, in a word, a strong man, " in 
 whom the light of hope burned when it had gone out 
 in others ; " and such men, the Elijahs and the Daniels, 
 the Luthers and the Knoxes, though they be discarded 
 prophets and derided martyrs, are the saviours of the 
 people who spit upon and mock them, and the glory 
 of the lands which spill their blood in sacrifice. 
 
 How the pulse quickens as we read the story I In 
 his splendid isolation stands this one man against king, 
 court, and nation. For three years he has been a 
 hunted fugitive; for three years Jezebel has enjoyed 
 her wicked triumph ; but this one man is unsubdued 
 and unsubduable. At last he comes forth from his 
 desert, and he comes like a thunderbolt. He bars the 
 way of the king's chariot with a gesture, and silences 
 him with one stern accusation : '* Thou and thy father's 
 house have made Israel to sin!" Never was the 
 fearlessness of right so splendidly illustrated, or the 
 impotence of evil so conclusively exposed. The hunter 
 is dumb before his prey ; the tyrant quails before his 
 victim. There is a royalty in righteousness before 
 which all other royalty is but tinsel ; there is a supre- 
 macy in goodness which strikes the wicked dumb. 
 Are you armed with that supremacy ? Dare you stand 
 fearless in the right though the heavens fall ? Only 
 then is a man invulnerable. No one can defeat a man 
 who is in the right. He may be a wild man of the 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 desert and stand in tattered garb, but the chariots of 
 wrong stop at his signal, and kings fear his face. 
 When Elijah says, ''Call all Israel together to Carmel," 
 Ahab knows he must obey. So to Carmel Israel is 
 gathered ; there the broken altars are rebuilt, and there 
 the pregnant question of my text is put to the vast 
 multitude, who at last, when the fire of God descends, 
 cry in fearful acquiescence not less than profound con- 
 viction, " The Lord, He is the God ! The Lord, He is 
 the God!" 
 
 Now, the question of my text is as modern as if it 
 had only been uttered yesterday; and I propose to 
 consider the abiding elements of this subject. The 
 transient elements peculiar to the age and people we 
 may dismiss. What is the modern Baal set up in con- 
 trast with God ? What are the issues of choice which 
 confront us to-day ? 
 
 First of all, it is the contrast between the rectitude 
 of a noble character and the impotence of characters 
 in a state of moral disintegration ; it is the contrast 
 between righteousness and unrighteousness. Ask for a 
 moment, What was Israel in its best and noblest days ? 
 It was a people permeated with the love of righteous- 
 ness. The only King was God. His unalterable glory 
 was symbolised in the awful splendour of the Shechinah, 
 His presence in the pillar and the cloud, the famine 
 and the fire. He watched His people and rewarded 
 them ; He punished and pursued ; He blessed and Me 
 blasted ; He sent them hornets and angels. Go where 
 they would, God always confronted them, and could as 
 
DECISION. 
 
 little be escaped as the heavens which closed them 
 round or the air from which they drew their life. 
 What He demanded was " truth in the inward parts," 
 righteousness as the soul of public life, the very pulse 
 of daily conduct. Accordingly, every law of Israel 
 was framed to this end. Its land-laws were equitable 
 and just. Its laws for personal conduct crushed vice 
 as with an iron foot, and built up the sanctity of the 
 home and the chastity of the individual. The poor 
 were covered as with the wing of God, and the 
 orphaned and widowed became every man's care. 
 Covetousness and avarice were penal offences, and the 
 sense of God was made so supreme in the national 
 conscience that every man felt God near him as the 
 awful Witness of his life and the swift Avenger of his 
 wrong-doing. Such a people in the hour of battle 
 could not but be supreme ; they moved like the glitter- 
 ing sword of God among the demoralised heathen 
 peoples ; they were the Ironsides of ancient times ; 
 and before their faith, their enthusiasm, their moral 
 energy, the greatest heathen peoples succumbed, and 
 the fairest portions of the earth became their heritage. 
 
 Ask what Baal meant to such a people, and the 
 angry voices of Hebrew saint and prophet answer you 
 in many a grim page of history or burning chapter of 
 denunciation. Baal meant the vice, the licentiousness, 
 the moral corruption, which Israel had been raised up 
 to destroy — an obscured vision of God, a debased 
 moral sense, the utter loss of faith and spirituality. 
 And Baal means just the same thing to-day. Look 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 around, and see how far righteousness is the common 
 law of human life. Think of the crowd of men who 
 have no vision of God, because they have thrown down 
 His altars, and follow the fatal feet of Mammon, men 
 whose haste is to be rich, and not to walk in God's 
 ways, whose fear is to be ill-fed, and not to do evil, 
 whose hope is not to gain the imperishable inheritance 
 of character, but some perishable spoil snatched from 
 the sordid banquet of this world's pleasures. It matters 
 little to them that once there was a Cross upon the 
 earth, that still it gleams on city dome and spire, or 
 that others have laid down their lives to win them 
 liberty and faith ; they live only for themselves. They 
 talk loudly of their duty to themselves, and ignore 
 their responsibilities to others ; and for them the Cross 
 is but a legend, and its sacrifice a sacred myth. They 
 do not ask, ''Is it right?" but "Will it pay?" and to 
 the " Thou God seest me" which has been the secret 
 of a thousand noble lives, their insolent rejoinder is, 
 " Does God indeed know ? He sleeps, or He is 
 journeying. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to- 
 morrow we die ! " And so, because the noblest of all 
 thoughts has passed out of their lives, the whole 
 function of thought is vitiated, and the moral nature 
 emasculated. To "get on" and to get pleasure, to 
 escape the rough places of Hfe, to live out of reach of 
 its miseries and out of hearing of its voices of lamenta- 
 tion and appeal, is their all-sufficing aim ; and in follow- 
 ing it they forget the living God, and serve that Baal 
 who is the prince of the power of the air, the evil 
 
DECISIOir. 
 
 spirit, the mocker and derider, who was a liar from 
 the beginning, and the relentless murderer of every 
 pure ambition and unselfish impulse which can animate 
 and deify the life of man. Righteousness : it stands 
 embodied in this man, pure, strong, valiant, mightier 
 than kings, invincible because consecrated to the 
 service of the most high God. Unrighteousness : that, 
 too, is embodied in a weaic king seduced by an evil 
 woman, in a people who have thrown off the fear of 
 God, who rise up to play and lie down to dream, 
 dazzled by a golden idol and emasculated by its 
 sensual rites. It is the spectacle which every century 
 presents to the youth who stands upon its thresholds 
 and prepares to use the gift of years which God has 
 given him ; and from the slopes of Carmel the thunder 
 of that valiant voice rolls across the wastes and voids 
 of time, where the bones of nations which have for- 
 gotten God lie piled in tragic warning : " How long 
 halt ye between two opinions ? " 
 
 It is, again, the contrast between purity and sensuality. 
 It was the sensual pollutions of Baal which awoke the 
 most terrible denunciations of the Hebrew prophets, 
 and sensualit}'^ is one of the first results of a life which 
 has lost righteousness of thought. Do not mistake me. 
 I do not say that impurity is the certain or inevitable 
 result of loss of faith ; but I do say that the man who 
 loses righteousness of thought at least challenges the 
 demon of sensuality to enter in and possess him. Shall 
 I draw a modern sketch of what this aspect of Baalism 
 means ? It is a task I would thankfully evade, but it 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 is a duty from which the minister of Christ dare not 
 be recreant. It is a story with which every student of 
 modern Hfe is only too famiUar, and it is written on a 
 thousand broken hearts and miserable lives. Here is a 
 youth reared in the ordered quiet of some country home, 
 familiar with its domestic sanctities, its household 
 affections and pieties. At length he leaves the home 
 where the fragrance of prayer and love has sweet- 
 ened daily life, and enters the great city; and then 
 the spell of Baal begins to fall on him. He hears in 
 the office, the warehouse, the shop, stories at which he 
 blushes, but which he will soon learn eagerly to devour 
 without blushing. The moral sensitiveness becomes 
 deadened, and the influence of comradeship begins to 
 tell. Through the ear-gate the enemy enters in, and 
 soon the citadel is captured. One by one his small 
 habitual pieties disappear ; the Testament his mother 
 gave him lies unused ; the habit of prayer is dropped, 
 for perhaps he shares a room with one who does not 
 pray, and how difficult it is to pray then I know full 
 well, for I have had to do it. In a few weeks the work 
 is done ; the boy's pure imagination is polluted, the 
 boy's blood begins to riot with unholy impulses, and 
 on the inward ear there falls more clearly and resist- 
 lessly every hour the delirious whispers and suggestions 
 of impure seduction. He begins to think it manly to 
 be cynical, and clever to talk of women in Luch a way 
 that if his mother heard him she might wish that she 
 had never borne him. And if the evil goes no further, 
 can any say how great the havoc that is wrought ? Is 
 
DECISION. 
 
 it nothing to fill the memory with unclean suggestions? 
 Have you not found that the memory holds such images 
 with a strange tenacity ? Would not some of you 
 gladly give a year of life if you could rid yourselves 
 of foul and leprous ideas eagerly and ignorantly imbibed 
 in younger days ? Oh, I could tell you of many a 
 man who has come to me, men educated in great 
 colleges, lovers of right, seekers after truth, but almost 
 in despair because their memories seemed poisoned 
 with impure jests which they could not forget, and 
 which haunted them like whispers of the pit. And I 
 need not add that such moral deterioration seldom stops 
 with the thought : it is incarnated in the life. And if 
 I fill in my sketch aright, I must speak of things scarcely 
 lawful for a man to utter : I must track this youth to 
 the chambers of iniquity; I must picture his first shamed 
 plunge into vice ; I must show the gradual hardening 
 of the heart, and darkening of the mind, and maiming 
 of the V, ill, till unchastity becomes a law, and impurity 
 an impious and despotic master. You have heard the 
 story of Frankenstein : how a great chemist strives to 
 make a man, and builds the physical frame up bone by 
 bone, and sinew by sinew, and at last finds some occult 
 means whereby he breathes into him the spirit of life, 
 and the monster moves and lives. He is its creator ; 
 and from that hour the thing which he has made 
 haunts him, dogs him, will not let him rest, is a walking 
 .terror he cannot evade, a hideous presence from which 
 he cannot flee. So he who raises the devil of impure 
 delight raises a devil very difficult to lay. It enters 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 in, and brings with it seven other devils worse than 
 itself. It quenches conscience, it masters the will, it 
 destroys too often intellectual pleasures, it robs the 
 mind of peace, and visits the body with loathsome 
 suffering, till of a man made in God's image it leaves 
 something worse than a beast : and it makes the body, 
 which should be the temple of the Holy Ghost, the 
 mere agent and minister of infamous delights. Purity : 
 it is embodied in an Elijah whose thoughts are full of 
 God, whose 
 
 " Strength is as the strength of ten, 
 Because his heart is pure." 
 
 Sensuality : it is embodied in a Jezebel who has given 
 her name to all bad women, and an Ahab who forgets 
 the duties of kingship in her guilty fascinations. Purity 
 is the badge of every good and great man ; impurity 
 is the foul hoof-print, the leprous taint, of every Baal- 
 worshipper. Who are these who are evermore the 
 saviours of their age ? They are the pure in heart, 
 who see God and " live ever in the great Taskmaster's 
 eye." Who are these whose life is a wasted treasure ; 
 whose days are lit with lurid light ; whose old age, if 
 such comes, is diseased and miserable ; who taint the 
 young ; who defile the pure ; who die with their own 
 damnation visibly stamped upon their bloated bodies, 
 corrupt, obscene, vile ; whom we gladly cover up with 
 the grave's merciful oblivion ? These are the impure, 
 and they shall not see God, but the wrath of God 
 abideth upon them. And once more from the slopes 
 of Carmel that stern voice of Elijah pierces to the 
 
DECISION. II 
 
 present age, an age of great cities cursed by impurity, 
 an age when in literature, in art, in life, impurity is 
 continually flaunted before the public eyes : ^' How 
 long halt ye between two opinions ? " 
 
 The contrast, again, is between the popularity of 
 custom and the noble isolation of the remnant. In every 
 age there is a remnant, a holy seed, who defy the 
 custom of the world, and cleave to God. It is the 
 remnant, the ten righteous men, the aristocracy of 
 virtue who save a nation and redeem a time; and th^y 
 do so in defiance of the many, who cheerfully go to 
 their damnation and refuse to be saved. It is here, 
 again, this subject is so intensely modern, and teaches 
 eternal truths. The priests of Baal are four hundred ; 
 they have spread their toils so carefully that the 
 people do not want to be redeemed ; the force of habit, 
 the dignity of royal sanction, the spells of passion, all 
 are with them : and when that great voice cries, '' I, 
 even I only, remain a prophet of Jehovah," the people 
 answer not a word. Is not this true still ? Do not 
 all the people bow down before the golden image ? 
 Is not everybody witched by sackbut, and psaltery, and 
 harp ? Will not everybody in the office laugh at you 
 as a greenhorn if you are virtuous, and mock you as 
 a milksop if you are pious ? Does not all the world 
 seem to go one way — the way of the tide, the broad 
 way, the primrose path that leads to everlasting burn- 
 ing ? Is that so ? Well, even then it is no reason 
 why you should join them. You are a man, not a reed 
 shaken with the wind. You are here as God's servant ; 
 
12 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 and it is to Him, and not to them, you must give 
 account. Ask yourselves where would the world have 
 been if all men had reasoned thus. Where would 
 liberty have been if no patriot had bearded the tyranny 
 of despots, or truth if no scholar had braved the ignorant 
 fury of the mob, or sainthood if no martyr had dared the 
 lion and the fire ? Where would the English Bible have 
 been if Wycliffe had not defied the anathema of Rome, 
 or the right of popular government if Hampden had not 
 died upon the field, or the right of human Hberty if 
 Wilberforce had not lived down the enmity of capit- 
 alists and the scornful laughter of a hundred drawing 
 rooms ? There is no more Divine right in majorities 
 than in kings ; though a thousand do evil, it is no reason 
 why you should. Dare to stand alone, to think your 
 own thoughts, and go your own way, and have your 
 own crnvictions and to act upon them. Dare to stand 
 on God's bide, though no one else will ; front the priests 
 of Baal in open battle, and dare them to the test, and 
 you shall not be confounded. Look around again. 
 Why is it all reform is so slow ? Why is it the poor 
 go unfriended and the rich unrebuked ? Why is it 
 men daily sacrifice their spiritual honesty, and dare not 
 defy conventionalism, and will not live by the truth ? 
 Take a hundred men man by man, and each will tell 
 you privately he is convinced of the need of reform ; 
 take them in the mass and publicly, and why is it 
 every lip is dumb, and every hand unlifted ? Can you 
 tell me why this is ? Can you tell me why it is that 
 you, who acknowledge my arguments, do not crown 
 
DECISION. 13 
 
 them by consecrating yourselves to the Lord ? It is 
 because you are afraid of the paltry verdicts of human 
 opinion ; you are cowards, and you know that you are 
 cowards. It is so easy to go with the tide, even though 
 you hear the rapids ; it is so hard to breast it, even 
 though it means life eternal. And there again Elijah 
 stands forth as the embodiment of manly courage— a 
 man who dares to be true, who can die but will not 
 lie, who is willing to be slain by the priests of Baal 
 rather than purchase Hfe by apostasy to God. And 
 there again Ahab and the people stand as the embodi- 
 ment of the cowardice of custom, the poltroonery of 
 false conventionalism ; and when that noble voice 
 rings along the slope of Carmel, though a hundred 
 hearts vibrate, and, sunk as they are in vice, know 
 that the true prophet is come at last, there is the 
 silence of cowardice : " The people answered not a 
 word." 
 
 Here, then, are the three great characteristics of 
 Baal; and are we not all too familiar with them? 
 Who has not found the difficulty of righteousness, 
 and has not been made conscious of that fatal vitiation 
 of character which manifests itself in tolerance of evil ? 
 Who has not caught some waft of that intoxicating 
 perfume of impurity which fills the world, and has not 
 felt that something has gone out of his hfe, a bloom, 
 a fragrance, a chastity of desire, a blessed guileless- 
 ncss, and somet: ing has come into it which has spread 
 a contaminating darkness through the soul ? Who has 
 not felt the force of custom and of numbers, like a 
 
14 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 secret tide, sweeping him away in spite of himself? 
 And what is the remedy ? Do what Ehjah did : be 
 true to conviction and true to God. Elijah presents 
 precisely the type of religious manliness we want to- 
 day : intense power of conviction and firm grasp upon 
 reality. We think in masses ; we act on regulation 
 patterns; we accept the axioms and platitudes of society : 
 how few think for themselves, or act upon their true 
 convictions ! How often under stress of temptation 
 we pare down the truth to suit our company ! We are 
 not entirely false ; we do not lie, but we prevaricate ; 
 we rely on dexterity and adroitness rather than in- 
 tensity of statement : and so our words have no fire, 
 no thunder, no grip, about them. The secret of Elijah 
 is fearless sincerity. Conviction breeds conviction, 
 and the man who is only half convinced himself never 
 convinces other people. The Church itself has grown 
 afraid of plain-speaking ; it is only parenthetically 
 brave, and is habitually apologetic, and therefore is 
 heard with disguised contempt, and dismissed with 
 easy scorn. The only way to regain authority is to 
 regain sincerity ; and that is true both of the collective 
 Church and of the individual. We want a more virile 
 type of piety — fearless, sincere, uncompromising. We 
 w^ant not pious sentimentalists, but men. We want 
 men who will bring into politics the old spirit of belief 
 in God and love of righteousness which Cromwell had ; 
 men who will bring into literature the living faith wL .ii 
 shall heal the Marah waters of our troubled thought 
 such as Bunyan brought ; men who shall apply to com- 
 
DECISION. 15 
 
 merce the Sermon on the Mount, and who shall bring 
 into the Church the inspired audacity and Divine 
 aggressiveness of the first Apostles. It is with you, 
 the young men of to-day, that the shaping of the future 
 lies. You will be the statesmen, the magistrates, the 
 merchants, the leaders of thought, in that coming time 
 whose light will only shine upon the graves of those 
 to whom we look to-day. Let the dead past bury 
 its dead. Let the reign of compromise, with all its 
 bitter humiliations, end for you just now; and to 
 that fearless voice which speaks from Carmel let us 
 reply, "The Lord, He is the God; it is Jehovah 
 whom we serve and whose we are ! " 
 
 So, then, I notice, lastly, that a vast class of men, 
 and especially young men, is indicated here ; viz., the 
 undecided. They halt between two opinions ; they are 
 lame, and crippled, and impotent for want of one sturdy 
 act of will which would change their life. Remember 
 that power of will is a matter of habit, and that he 
 who tampers with his will at last destroys it. Can 
 you tell me who are the most hopeless wrecks that 
 toss on the broken waters of society ? They are men 
 without power of will. One such man came to my 
 house only the other day. He was a man of brilliant 
 promise, who began life side by side with me. When 
 he came to me, he was a tramp, and had the tramp's 
 squalor and the tramp's Hmp. He had slept for weeks 
 in low lodging-houses. It was useless to help him ; he 
 had destroyed his power of will. His nature was like 
 a rotten wall in which no nail would hold. I could 
 
l6 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 weep over him, I could keep him from starvation, but 
 I could not rouse in him the power of will to save 
 himself. There are thousands such — brilliant wrecks, 
 of whom much was expected, but from whom nothing 
 came, of whom their friends said twenty years ago, 
 " He will be a great man," and fifteen years ago, " He 
 has a good deal in him," and ten years ago, somewhat 
 more doubtfully, " He may succeed yet," but of whom 
 now they never speak at all, because they know that 
 he in whom they hoped is a tragic failure, and the 
 failure has been indecision. For God's sake, be decided, 
 even though it be in sin, for there is more hope in that, 
 than in a life frittered in vain compromise between God 
 and Baal, in futile drifting between right and wrong. 
 Every good emotion stifled is a good emotion seared ; 
 every true impulse defeated makes such an impulse 
 more difficult of repetition. If God is the Lord, serve 
 Him, if Baal, then serve him ; and, deplorable as such 
 a decision may be, it is better than a lifetime of shilly- 
 shally. Yes, and it has more ultimate hope in it, for 
 the more energetic a servant of the devil a m.an is the 
 sooner does he find out what a bad master he has got. 
 But, oh, decide ! Do not drift into that most hopeless 
 class of worshippers who are touched by every sermon, 
 convinced in every service, thrilled by every hymn, but 
 never changed, or converted, or redeemed by any. I 
 appeal to young natures, the force of will unvitiated in 
 many, and only partially weakened in any ; and in God's 
 name I ask you, "How long halt ye between two 
 opinions ? " 
 
DECISION. 17 
 
 I know I have your verdict ; your conscience is m}'' 
 judge. Not more surely if now the last dread trumpet 
 sounded, and out of the chasm of the rent heavens the 
 great white throne of judgment flashed into view, 
 would the moral issues of a theme like this be settled 
 than they are settled now. You know what is right 
 and what is wrong. You know where the balance of 
 final victory will be; and you may well dread the 
 eternal comradeship of that polluted crowd of blinded 
 eyes and wasted brows who cursed their age with 
 Baal-worship, and have gone to their own place. It 
 only remains, therefore, for me to press the question, 
 How long? How long? For as these words reach 
 you memories of the old home have stirred in you ; 
 the prayers of a long-dead mother have vibrated on 
 the ear, and her dying voice has thrilled you ; and you 
 have thought of the men whom you have known, the 
 lost men, all whose brilliant promise has burned down 
 into dead ash, and whose bright young lives have been 
 blighted in an early grave. The way of transgressors 
 is hard. How long halt ye between two opinions ? 
 How long? For the time is short. Nearer than we 
 know stands the cloaked shadow, the inexorable 
 messenger; and the year will soon dawn which will 
 only shine upon our graves. 
 
 "Our life is a dream, 
 Our time as a stream 
 Glides swiftly away, 
 And the fugitive moment refuses to stay.** 
 
 How long haltest thou between two opinions ? How 
 
 2 
 
1 8 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 long ? For, behold, prophets pass away ; and the voice 
 which God has specially sent to thrill and call you 
 shall have performed its task, and no other be vouch- 
 safed ; and the time comes when there will be no open 
 vision in the land for you, nor answering oracle, and 
 character will acquire its last mould of awful perma- 
 nence : " He that is holy, let him be holy still ; and he 
 that is filthy, let him be filthy still." How longhaltest 
 thou between two opinions? How long? For life 
 and death hang on the decision. Like a gay ship the 
 young life bounds over the bright waters, and the 
 silver voice of riot fills the sunlight, and "all goes 
 merry as a marriage bell." But even now the tempest 
 lowers ; the sea shivers into foam as the wind 
 strikes it ; and the grey waves run in thunder, and 
 break no more in ripples. Infirm of purpose, how 
 long haltest thou between two opinions ? Knowest 
 thou not that he who steers no course steers the 
 wrong course, that he who makes no decision has 
 made the wrong decision ? Dost thou not see, far 
 away, yet ever nearer, that belt of white foam 
 spanned by the thunder-cloud, smitten by the light- 
 ning, that last harbour, the final shore of doom ? 
 There is no time for delay ; is Jesus with thee in 
 the little ship ? The storm comes on apace, and 
 death is near ; is He who stills the waters with thee 
 now ? Now is the time ; there is no other. Claim 
 the hour; the reversion of the morrow is assured to 
 none of us. I warn you, I appeal to you, I beseech 
 you, but I cannot save you. You must choose ; you 
 
DECISION. 19 
 
 only can. Remember the words of a great writer 
 recently in our midst, — 
 
 *' This passing moment is an edifice 
 Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild ; " 
 
 and now, while it is called to-day, choose whom you 
 will serve. Who this day will consecrate himself unto 
 the Lord ? 
 
II. 
 
 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 '• If ;?ny man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, 
 whether it be of God." — John vii. 17. 
 
 I HAVE selected this text, but I do not mean to stick 
 to it. I shall use it later on as an illuminating 
 principle for those in intellectual difficulties. Why 
 I have been led to choose this subject is briefly this : I 
 have recently received a remarkable letter from a young 
 man entirely unknown to me, in which he details his 
 intellectual difficulties. As his identity is not likely 
 to be revealed by anything I may say, I think it will 
 be no breach of confidence if I take the main points 
 of his letter as difficulties common to-day among many 
 thinking young men, and say what I can about them. 
 Leaving out certain portions of this letter which I 
 regard as sacred, the case presented is this : My 
 unknown correspondent says that until three years 
 ago he was quite orthodox, but that since that time 
 he has read certain works which have utterly under- 
 mined his faith. He names Matthew Arnold, Renan, 
 Huxley's *' Life of Hume," Spencer's " Sociology," and 
 various articles on Biblical criticism, and books on 
 Buddhism. He adds that he has also read the Bible, 
 "The Imitation of Christ," Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 21 
 
 Shakespeare, Kingsley, and Robertson. He finds he 
 does not believe in a " God who thinks and loves," 
 in Jesus Christ still living as God, or in the super- 
 natural. He does still believe in a vague ^' First Cause," 
 the Source of life and power, and that Jesus was a 
 sublime Teacher, who lived an ideal life, taught noble 
 truths, died gloriously, and whose memory he loves 
 and venerates. Certain dogmas — e.g.y original sin and 
 eternal punishment — he never could believe in. Then 
 there is the difficulty of Buddhism ; if Christ was God 
 incarnate, why not Buddha, and may not another man 
 arise who shall live as perfect a life as either ? And 
 there is the difficulty of the pain and sorrow of the 
 world, which seem inconsistent with the existence of 
 a God of love. Finally, he adds pathetically that he 
 is not in despair, duty is his law of life, and if there 
 is any help outside ourselves he wants to find it. This 
 letter has deeply moved me, because it is obviously the 
 sincere utterance of an honest soul in difficulties ; and 
 because they are typical difficulties with young men, 
 I will do what I can to help you to their solution. 
 
 Doubts and Doubters. 
 
 Now, doubt is sometimes the crotchet of a feeble 
 mind, sometimes the disease of a developing mind. It 
 may be the evidence of sincerity or the outcome of 
 inconsistency, the grim Apollyon with whom the true 
 soul must grapple before the green pastures are reached 
 or the haunting fiend invoked by the repudiation of 
 moral obligations. Many men reject Christianity be-. 
 
22 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 cause they have already rejected Christian morality ; 
 and, having thrown away the law of conduct, they find 
 it necessary to invent a theory to justify their revolt. 
 Polygamy existed in Mohammedanism before polygamy 
 was justified by Mohammed, just as slavery existed in 
 Christian lands before men ransacked the Bible for 
 texts and arguments in its support. In other words, 
 it is common among men first to live as though there 
 was no God, and then to persuade themselves there is 
 no God. The philosophy does not produce the life, but 
 the life produces the philosophy. 
 
 But there is another class of doubters to whom these 
 strictures do not apply, and my correspondent is among 
 them. Like the young ruler who came to Christ, they 
 seek eternal life, and seek it honestly; but they find 
 the quest beset with difficulties. We live in an age 
 when the very foundations of religion have been laid 
 bare, and the reason of man has claimed supreme 
 domination and right of decision in religious as in all 
 other spheres. A great world of new facts, of which 
 our fathers never dreamed, lies open to us ; and new 
 currents of thought and tendency stream round us, 
 and touch the mind on every side. Science has literally 
 annexed new heavens and a new earth ; Biblical criti- 
 cism has quarried deep into the debris of buried 
 centuries, and has brought up from the depths facts 
 of solemn and far-reaching importance ; the study of 
 other religions has revealed to us elements of noble- 
 ness in systems of thought which our fathers scarcel}? 
 regarded as worthy of more than passing contempt, 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 23 
 
 and certainly as unworthy of serious refutation ; and 
 on all sides there heaves a great sea of intellectual 
 ferment and unrest. Even poetry and fiction have 
 caught the vibration of the new movement ; and the 
 poet no longer sings, but preaches ; and the novelist no 
 longer paints idyllic life, but life at fever-heat, life in 
 intellectual ferment, life as spiritual battle for the 
 truth. And so far I think the signs of the times are 
 with us. Anything, even the most hostile and search- 
 ing criticism, is better than indifference. When sincere 
 men doubt, it is a sign that they have begun to think, 
 and that they feel the immense solemnity and import- 
 ance of religion. It is not, then, to the flippant and 
 ignorant questioner of sacred things I speak, but to the 
 sincere doubter. It is to the youth who has come to a 
 point of crisis in his career when he feels the kingdom 
 of thought shaken, and the kingdom of truth which 
 remains is not yet set up. I speak as one who has 
 himself sat in the shadow of death, and journeyed 
 through the impenetrable gloom. I, too, have 1 ad to 
 fight my way out of the valley of Apollyon, as many a 
 better man has had to do before me ; and I have found 
 
 "A power was with me in the night 
 Which made the darkness and the light, 
 And dwells not in the light alone." 
 
 And because I know how bitter the struggle is, and 
 know also that there is a way out of it to the solid 
 ground and heavenly sunlight, I speak to those in 
 whose ears the spirit that denies is whispering even 
 while the choral singing of the sanctuary rises from 
 
24 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 their lips, and who question the very existence of Christ 
 even while the shadow of Christ, like a luminous and 
 spiritual presence, falls across the tired heart unnoticed. 
 
 Primal Difficulties. 
 
 First, then, there are certain primal difficulties of 
 religion felt by my correspondent. He finds it hard to 
 believe in a God who " thinks and loves," in a living 
 Christ, and in the supernatural ; but he cannot help 
 believing in a First Cause, and in Christ as a sublime 
 Teacher whose memory he loves and venerates. Let us 
 look at these points. 
 
 In a First Cause all nations have believed ; a nation 
 of atheists has never yet existed. It is the fool who 
 says in his heart, " There is no God ; " and nobody but 
 the fool says it. It is no mere poetic sentiment which 
 perceives upon the everlasting hills the burning wheel- 
 tracks of the chariots of God, or which says of the 
 serene pomp and splendour of the midnight firmament, 
 '* The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma- 
 ment showeth His handiwork." It is the natural cry of 
 man when he finds something mightier than himself, 
 an inscrutable wisdom and majesty in the ordering of 
 the world which he inhabits. One of the greatest of 
 German philosophers has spoken of two great facts 
 which confront man everywhere : '' the starry heavens 
 above, the moral law within." Nor is it difficult to mark 
 the connection between these two facts. Man is con- 
 scious of law above him and law within him ; and he 
 thinks the power which shaped a star and works within 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 25 
 
 the soul is one. The existence of a First Cause is 
 therefore the creed of reason ; and reason sees its proof 
 in the heaving ocean and movements of the stars, in the 
 colouring of the leaf and ripening of the fruit, in all that 
 vast process of law which, with a thousand minute or ma- 
 jestic adjustments, holds the universe in place and order. 
 But we want something more than the God of the 
 reason ; we want the God of the heart, the God who 
 " thinks and loves." Mark, then, where the argument 
 stands. Thought and love are human words for human 
 functions ; if, then, they are not the creation of God, 
 whence are they? See what they have wrought m. 
 human life. Civilisation is nothing but embodied 
 thought ; the human family is nothing but embodied 
 love. When I go down the Clyde to see some vast 
 vessel launched, it is no mere mass of inert steel and 
 timber I look upon ; it is a visible thought which slides 
 down the cradle at a sign, and floats off into the deep 
 water like a thing of life. When I cross the Border, it 
 is a thought that carries me, a winged and fiery thought, 
 whose name is swiftness and whose glory is its strength. 
 This church is thought translated into stone ; the pic- 
 ture is thought translated into colour ; music is thought 
 translated into harmony; speech is thought translated 
 into sound; and books are thought translated into 
 symbols. Are not the heavens also thought translated 
 into splendour, and is not the earth thought translated 
 into life and matter ? And of all this wealth of love 
 which we find in human life, is not the same deduction 
 just ? From whom has come the impulse of love ? 
 
26 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Who has made the heart which vibrates with ecstasy 
 or thrills with agony in the joy or loss of another ? It 
 is love which is the golden barrier between man and 
 the beast. The beast has passion and instinct ; but 
 man has the power of intelligent choice and spiritual 
 devotion. How, then, can God be less than we ? How 
 can we conceive the Maker of the world creating facul- 
 ties in man which He Himself does not possess ? How 
 can the picture be created without the sense of beauty 
 in the artist, or the church without the sense of sym- 
 metry in the architect ? No, we are not greater than 
 God, but we are the shadows of God ; and what we 
 have in part, that He has in full. Our love is but the 
 broken hint of His, our thought but the feeble echo of 
 His wisdom, our noblest hope that hereafter we may 
 know even as we are known ; and so close and vital is 
 this connection between man and God that the writer 
 of Genesis says man was made in God's likeness, and 
 Jesus urges us to be perfect, even as our Father in 
 heaven is perfect. If there is a God at all, it is clear, 
 then, that God must " think and love." 
 
 Who was Jesus Christ? 
 
 But a further difficulty named is belief in the living 
 Christ, Jesus Christ — who was He ? That is the great 
 question of the ages. In His own day the most brilli- 
 ant scholars of the time asked, as in this very chapter, 
 " How knoweth this man letters, having never learned ?" 
 And the most acute observers asked in something more 
 than mere astonishment, "Whence hath this man these 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 27 
 
 things ? " The reply of Jesus was simple and con- 
 sistent. He said He was the Son of God. He said, 
 "My doctrine is not Mine, but His that sent Me." He 
 did not need human learning, because He had drunk at 
 the fountain-head of wisdom. He knew all things, not 
 by the laborious processes of acquisition and observa- 
 tion, but by Godlike intuition. Now, I will presently 
 refer to the difficulty of Buddhism stated by my corre- 
 spondent ; but let me say now^ that no human lips since 
 the world began ever tittered such a claim as this. 
 Buddha repeatedly declared he was only a man ; he 
 refused Divine honours, and said that what he was 
 every man might become. Mohammed never swerved 
 from his honest declaration that there was one God, 
 and he was but His prophet. But Jesus never ranked 
 Himself even with the greatest of prophets and teachers. 
 He claimed to supersede them. He entered into the 
 firmament of human thought as the sun enters when 
 at the breath of dawn all the stars fade away, and are 
 visible no more. He had about Him none of the con- 
 ciliations and compromises of the mere human reformer; 
 He spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. He 
 held out to His followers superb promises which mere 
 genius could hardly have conceived, and which only 
 omnipotence could fulfil. In the last hours of His life 
 He solemnly asserted He was the Son of God ; He 
 described Himself as a King, and He died as a King 
 might die. What every man has, therefore, to face 
 about Jesus is this question : Was He what He said 
 He was, or was He a fanatical impostor ? His claim is 
 
28 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 SO great that you must concede all or nothing. I will 
 not press the question whether an impostor could have 
 uttered the sublime ethics of Jesus or have preached 
 the Sermon on the Mount ; but I simply say every man 
 has to face this plain question : Was Jesus God, or was 
 He an impostor? It is useless to say we love and 
 venerate His memory if He was an impostor, because 
 we can do nothing of the kind. If Jesus was not what 
 He said He was, His life was not ideal, but infamous ; 
 and He merited every stroke of the scourge and all the 
 anguish of the Cross for having deluded mankind with 
 vain hopes based upon a most blasphemous assumption. 
 Let us be honest in this matter. Let us be either Jews 
 or Christians. But for that species of reverence which 
 clings to the ethics of Jesus after denying the facts on 
 which the ethics are based there can be neither stand- 
 ing room nor respect. *^ Whence, then, has this man 
 these things ? " 
 
 The Heart of the World is with Christ. 
 
 But if we grant that Jesus was what He said He was, 
 then all difficulty about belief in the living Christ at 
 work among us to-day is gone. And what evidence 
 have we of Christ among us to-day ? We have the 
 perpetual evidence of lives^ not merely reformed, but 
 transfigured and regenerated by the power of Christ. I 
 point you the great phenomenon of human conversion. 
 Approach it honestly and examine it for yourselves. 
 Here are the facts. Christ is reported to have said just 
 before He disappeared from this world, " All power is 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 29 
 
 given unto Me, in heaven and in earth." He said that 
 after a given period of waiting a new, nameless, extra- 
 ordinary spirit of power would change and animate His 
 disciples, and would spread throughout the world. In 
 the case of the Apostles it is clear that some such 
 extraordinary change did occur. The enemies of Jesus 
 were so confounded by the transformation effected in 
 Peter and John that, for want of a fuller explanation, 
 they said they " had been with Jesus." Paul gives a 
 circumstantial account of a miraculous change which 
 passed over him ; and we know that his Hfe was split 
 into two parts, as though an earthquake had torn it 
 asunder : and the parts differed as light and darkness 
 differ. Through all the early centuries similar records 
 abound. In the sixteenth century Luther tells the same 
 story, in the seventeenth Bunyan, in the eighteenth 
 Wesley, in the nineteenth an innumerable multitude. 
 The phenomenon is occurring to-day. It is variously 
 described, but essentially the accounts agree; it is as 
 though a new life streamed into a dead heart, and a 
 transfiguring change passed over the entire character. 
 The drunkard then realises that he has a power which 
 snaps the bonds of habit, and the profligate feels within 
 him an impulse of purity which effectually lifts him out 
 of the rottenness in which he lay content. If you want 
 evidence, every minister in Great Britain can say, as 
 Wren's monument says in St. Paul's, ''Circumspice ;" 
 and at a wave of the hand scores of thousands will spring 
 up and declare that Christ has saved them. And that 
 is conversion. That is what is meant by Christ living 
 
30 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 to-day. Other men charm me, but this Man changes 
 me ; other men breathe into my brain the message of 
 their minds, this Man breathes into my soul the essence 
 of Himself. He passes like a live flame through my 
 nature, and leaves me glowing with spiritual vitaUty, 
 wonderful and glorious. No other man wields this 
 spell ; none has ever done so. I invite you, therefore, 
 to turn from the contentions of mere destructive criti- 
 cism, the dreams of philosophic doubt, the wonders of 
 natural science, and face this extraordinary phenomenon 
 of human conversion. Surely it should be as inter- 
 esting as, and is far more important than, the age of a 
 Greek parchment or the dissection of a beetle's wing. 
 It is a Divine wonder ever new, and ever renewing 
 itself; and the only interpretation I can find for it is 
 that Jesus Christ spoke the truth when He said, ** Lo, 
 I am with you alway, to the end of the world," for, 
 behold, " He is alive for evermore." 
 
 The Difficulty of the Supernatural. 
 
 As to the difficulty of the supernatural^ that also dis- 
 appears when we believe in a living God and a living 
 Christ. A live God can work wonders ; it is a dead 
 mechanism which is always uniform. Life means 
 freedom of action ; life means will and power ; and 
 power and will do not always obey conditions, but 
 create them. If I am not an animal, but a spirit; if 
 this world is not my cradle and my grave ; if round 
 me lie unmeasured voids of mystery, worlds beyond 
 worlds of whose laws I know little or nothing ; then 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 31 
 
 it is not difficult for me to. believe in the supernatural. 
 Not to believe in it is to apply my yard measure to 
 the infinite, and to make my narrow intelligence the 
 sole standard by which God is to be judged and the 
 universe adjusted. And who am I to say that God 
 never does the unusual — I, who think, but cannot 
 say what thought is ; who live, but cannot find out 
 what life is ; who feel and know I have a soul, yet 
 have never seen it, nor can describe what it is, or how 
 it came to be ? To deny the supernatural is the last 
 imbecility of human ignorance and arrogance. And 
 who, after all, are these who so calmly write that 
 ** miracles do not occur, and God cannot think or 
 love " ? They are but a small and insignificant band 
 ranged against the giants of the world's past who 
 believed in God. The very names quoted by my 
 correspondent tell their own tale, for what sane man 
 would barter Shakespeare for Renan, or Wordsworth 
 for Arnold, or Kingsley and Robertson for the innumer- 
 able smart writers of Biblical criticism who afflict us 
 in the magazines of to-day ? And far as we have 
 gone in science, Kepler and Newton are not j^et out- 
 shone ; and he would be a bold man who would venture 
 to throne either Spencer or Huxley beside Galileo and 
 Milton. No, sirs, depend upon it, the intellect as well 
 as the heart of the world is with Jesus Christ, nor 
 is it possible for me to believe that eighteen centuries, 
 crowned with the most illustrious names in history, have 
 all been wrong, that at last of living men Professor 
 Huxley alone should be right. 
 
32 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Faith and Dogma. 
 I now come to certain special difficulties suggested by 
 my correspondent. He says he never could believe in 
 the dogmas of original sin or eternal punishment. I 
 have but one observation to make here ; viz., that no 
 man is bound to believe either in order to be converted 
 and find the Hving God. Christ's question to all who 
 sought His help was, " Believest thou that I am able 
 to do this ?" He used no other catechism. All sorts 
 of people came to Him : Roman soldiers, Jewish beggars, 
 Greek exiles ; and each had different theological ideas. 
 Christ said nothing about them ; He simply asked if 
 they had faith in Him. Even when a man honestly 
 replied that he had very httle faith, and could only say, 
 ** I believe ; help Thou my unbelief," Christ did not 
 hesitate to help him. And it is so still. If we post- 
 pone coming to Christ till we have assured ourselves 
 of every dogma of Christianity wx may wait for ever. 
 The very fact that all the Churches disagree on dogma 
 is suflicient to teach us that there is something of 
 infinitely higher importance on which they agree, and 
 that is the living Christ. The child does not need to 
 understand all about the law of heredity before he can 
 know his father loves him, nor need we gain any theo- 
 logical learning to prepare us for the healing and love 
 of Christ. The fact is, men rake amid the dust of 
 dogma when they should be coming to the Cross ; and 
 while they fight over doctrines Jesus passes by, and 
 their "eyes are holden," that they cannot see Him. 
 Let us take the alphabet first ; we can leave the schol^rr 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 33 
 
 ship till afterward. Christianity is neither this dogma 
 nor that ; Christianity is Jesus Christ. 
 
 The Buddhist Spectre. 
 
 And then as to this gigantic brocken-spedre of 
 Buddhism^ which casts its chilling shadow over many 
 an inquiring mind. What are we to say to that ? Was 
 Christ better than Buddha? Is Christianity better 
 than Buddhism ? asks my correspondent. We know 
 whence these ideas come. During the last few years 
 Buddhism has become a study, and its noblest elements 
 have been again and again put before English readers. 
 The story of Buddha's great renunciation has been 
 told with matchless skill by Sir Edwin Arnold in *' The 
 Light of Asia;" the psalms of Buddha have been 
 translated into faultless cadence by Max Muller, and 
 other Oriental scholars. And next to the story of 
 Jesus tlxre is none nobler, and next to the Psalms of 
 David there are none more loftily devout. Jesus said 
 of John, he was '*a burning and a shining light;" and 
 I find no difficulty in saying as much of Buddha. 
 The very spirit of Jesus breathes in such words as 
 these : " Never will I seek or receive private salvation ; 
 never will I enter into final peace alone, but for ever 
 and everywhere will I live and strive for the universal 
 redemption of every creature." Ihese are the words 
 of Buddha, and self-sacrifice as noble as that of the 
 Galilean inspired the Hfe of Gautama. The 'Might that 
 lighteth every man that com.eth into the world" shone 
 in him ; and we can venerate and love him if we wi:l, 
 
 3 
 
34 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 but not with that species of faith which daily piles 
 " forests of flowers on his stainless shrines," and daily 
 moves '* countless millions of lips to repeat the formula, 
 * I take refuge in Buddha.' " And why ? Because we 
 have known a greater, even Him who is the Light of 
 the world. Buddhism preaches pessimism and extinc- 
 tion ; Jesus brought life and immortahty to light by 
 the Gospel. Buddha claims no deity ; he claims only 
 to be an erring man, who tried, by the practice of noble 
 virtues, to free himself from the tyranny of desire, and 
 in return to gain, not the boon of Hfe, but of death, 
 to be extinguished and annihilated, as the bubble is 
 extinguished in the ocean. The one point in which 
 Buddhism touches Christianity is in its teaching of 
 austere purity and self-sacrificing love. Buddha him- 
 self regarded his religion as elementary; he said it 
 might last five thousand years, and then a new Buddha 
 would appear. The Nirvana, or heaven, of Buddhism is 
 simply painless annihilation, the com.plete destruction of 
 identity and personality. Its promise is. Whoso follow- 
 eth me shall die for evermore. The promise of Christ is, 
 " Whoso believeth in Me shall never die." In Buddhism, 
 strictly speaking, there is no God ; in Christianity there 
 is the ever-present sense of ^* our Father who art in 
 heaven." Buddhism is one great truth, the truth of self- 
 sacrifice, caught up and illuminated by a great example; 
 it is the star hung upon the threshold of the day, and 
 Christianity is that day in which it is swallowed up. 
 Christ fulfils its hope ; He completes the circle of which 
 it is a segment. Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Chris- 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 35 
 
 tianity are the three great historical religions ; and, says 
 Max Miiller, Christianity absorbs the best elements of 
 both, and adds the Diviner elements which they lack. As 
 for me, so far from Buddhism being a difficulty, I rejoice 
 in it as a glorious evidence that God has never for- 
 gotten His creatures, but in every age has nourished 
 the human heart with those instincts and impulses of 
 worship out of which all religion and virtue spring. 
 
 A little more patience, a little more insight, a little 
 more breadth of view, is what is needed for the dissipa- 
 tion of difficulties like these ; and the same remark 
 applies to the philosophical difficulties suggested by 
 my correspondent in regard to the existence of pain 
 and suffering. Pain is the sentinel of life, the stern 
 guardian angel who shields us from destruction. If 
 pain did not teach us that fire burned, we should be 
 devoured by the cruel splendour; if the gash of the 
 knife caused no agony, there would be nothing to 
 remind us of our peril or save us from it. Every law 
 of nature is founded on some unalterable necessity, 
 and that which bears most hardly upon the individual 
 is often the most beneficial for the race. But, while 
 natural law cares for the race, spiritual lavN^ atones for 
 its defect by caring for the individual, and reminds us 
 that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. 
 Once let us grasp the great truth of a living God, of 
 God who is our Father, and in the light of that truth 
 ail the others become clear ; the impenetrable darkness 
 of the world lifts, and leaves us face to face with One 
 who loves, who pities, who saves. 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 " I say to thee, do thou repeat 
 
 To the first man thou mayest meet 
 
 In lane, highway, or open street, 
 **That he and we and all men move 
 
 Under a canopy of love. 
 
 As broad as the blue sky above ; 
 ** That weary deserts we may tread, 
 
 Dreary perplexities may thread, 
 
 Through dark ways underground be led J 
 "Yet, if we will our Guide obey 
 
 The dreariest path, the darkest way, 
 
 Shall issue out in heavenly day." 
 
 The Key of Knowledge. 
 
 One last question remains then : " How are we to 
 find this knowledge?" This text is the answer: "If 
 any man willeth to do the will of the Father, he shall 
 know of the doctrine." Man's mode of religion is to 
 begin with the head ; Christ's is to begin with the will 
 and the heart. To the question, "What is truth?* 
 man's reply is enlightenment ; Christ's is surrender. 
 Man says, " Prove me these things by a logic so keen 
 that I cannot resist, and I submit ; " Christ ignores the 
 demand of the intellect, and addresses Himself to the 
 spirit. And Christ is right, because mere enlightenment 
 does not change the heart or transform the life. The 
 drunkard and the profligate are well enough enlightened 
 as to their folly, but the knowledge of the effects of 
 alcohol on the body does not deter the drunkard from 
 his vice, and the knowledge of the penalties of impurity 
 does not convince the profligate of his fatal madness. 
 The way of reform is not in mastering the theory of 
 right, but in practising just as much of the right as 
 
A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 37 
 
 we know. The doubter will never gain the light by 
 analysing the qualities of darkness, but by resolutely 
 following just such faint and feeble ghmpses of the light 
 as he may have. There are some things every man 
 knows to be right and good ; let him cleave to these, 
 and the horizon will broaden to him. Into this 
 ApoUyon valley of doubt the truest and bravest spirits 
 may come ; but it is never so dark but that the will of 
 the Father can be discerned, like a Divinely luminous 
 path, threading the gloom and leading upward. Says 
 Robertson of this very experience in his own life, 
 " But in all that struggle I am thankful to say the 
 bewilderment never told upon my conduct." Mark 
 that, young man. " In the thickest darkness I tried to 
 keep my eye on nobleness and goodness, even when 
 I suspected they were only will-o'-the-wisps." The 
 question is. Are you ready to be taught? Will you 
 renounce your own will and do the will of the Father 
 as far as you know it ? Will you act up to the frag- 
 ment of conviction that is still yours, and if you have not 
 the ten talents, be faithful to the solitary one ? The 
 boy at school learns grammar without knowing its uses, 
 and works out the tedious problems of Euclid without 
 discerning their application. It is not till long after- 
 wards the use is seen ; and in a sudden flush of triumph 
 the youth realises that a language is unlocked to him, 
 and a literature is his. So it is for you to learn what 
 God wants to teach you now. Be true to that. Will 
 with all your strength to do the will of God. If He hum- 
 bles your intellect, submit ; and then when you inquire 
 
38 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 of the doctrine your obedience will be repaid, and the 
 wisdom of God will make you wise unto salvation. 
 
 The Province of the Heart. 
 And remember, finally, two things. First, we are not 
 intellect only ; the heart has to be reckoned with. " The 
 heart has reasons which the reason does not know of," 
 says Pascal. Faith in unseen things and things un- 
 proven to the perception is a daily necessity ; we do 
 not feel the earth move, but we believe it : we never saw 
 the other side of the world, but we send our messages 
 to its farthest boundary without misgiving. And every 
 day, imprisoned as we are in a world of law, we triumph 
 over law, just as every tree and flower defeats the law 
 of gravitation when it forces its way upward to the 
 light and seeks a wider world. 
 
 "If e'er when faith had fallen asleep 
 I heard a voice, 'Believe no more,* 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 That tumbled in the godless deep, 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part. 
 And, like a man in wrath, the heart 
 
 Stood up, and answered, 'J have felt."* 
 
 Yes, we have felt. When every fact has been against us, 
 a Divine intuition in the heart has buoyed us up and 
 given us hope. Beside the beds of the dying all the 
 facts have seemed against us ; but we have felt that all 
 the virtue and the patience of that closing life could not 
 be lost, but must survive somewhere, if only in obedi- 
 ence in that law of economy which permits no waste in 
 nature. Beside the graves of great men we have felt 
 
A tOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES. 39 
 
 that all those powers, sharpened to the finest uses, could 
 not be utterly destroyed ; and it has been impossible for 
 us to think of the putrefaction of the grave : we have 
 perceived the entrance on immortality. And when the 
 great earth has been dumb to our inquiry and the stars 
 deaf to our prayer, we have still told ourselves our hopes 
 should not be disinherited, nor our prayer be mocked. 
 Do you remember that word of Paul's, " With the heart 
 a man helieveth unto righteousness^^ ? Oh, well do I re- 
 member how like a flash of light that verse illumined my 
 soul one day when all was at its darkest for me. And 
 then I saw what it all meant : that God did not ask me 
 to believe with my intellect at all, but to trust Him with 
 my heart. From that hour the world has brightened in 
 me, for I know now that I have found God. Often and 
 often now I cannot believe with the intellect, but I 
 can with the heart. And so may you. Come, doubts 
 and all, to the blessed Lord, and let your hearts go out 
 to Him, and He shall give you rest unto your soul. 
 
 The Cross of Mystery. 
 
 And the other thing I would ask you to remember 
 is that Christ does not profess to have told us every- 
 thing, or cleared up every human mystery. From 
 vast tracts of thought He has not lifted the curtain ; they 
 lie unilluminated, or revealed only by some vivid flash 
 of light which makes the darkness visible. And when 
 Jesus tells me to take up the cross and follow Him, He 
 does not mean only the sacrifice of ease, or wealth, or 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 importunate desire ; He means also that cross of un- 
 answered mystery which He lays upon my intellect, 
 and which is not the least heavy of the many crosses 
 He gives the children of men to bear. But He has told 
 me enough. He has revealed the infinite and (om- 
 passionate Fatherhood of God. He has given me an 
 absolutely clear and infallible code of conduct. He has 
 shown me, not merely my duty, but how it may be done, 
 and has promised me a Divine influx of strength, 
 whereby I may accomplish it. He is alive for ever- 
 more, and stands even now close to each of us, as He 
 did to Thomas in the very moment when his heart was 
 sick with doubt. And what happened then ? Thomas 
 had demanded proofs, and now he had them ; but he did 
 not use them. He thrust no hand into His side or finger 
 into the wound. He did not ask whether this solemn 
 Presence was the vision of hysteric ecstasy or hallucina- 
 tion. All he knew was that he saw his Master, and 
 the warmth of that living Presence streamed round 
 him, and his heart broke out in the rapturous cry: 
 " My Lord and my God ! " Brother, Christ is now 
 breathing on thee the breath of Hfe. Dismiss the voices 
 of the intellect, and let the heart speak. Believe with 
 all thine heart, and thou shalt enter into peace. O that 
 to any doubters who may read these words, and to my 
 unknown correspondent, there may come the dawn of 
 faith, heralded by that heart-piercing cry of Thomas 
 called Didymus, " My Lord and my God I '* 
 
III. 
 
 ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY, 
 
 "And there followed Him a certain young man having a linen 
 cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on 
 him: and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked/'— 
 MarkxIv. 51, 52. 
 
 THIS incident is related by St. Mark only, and is 
 one of those undesigned touches of realism which 
 gives dramatic completeness to the scene. Christ is in 
 Gethsemane; it is the hour and power of darkness. 
 He knows now that nothing but the Cross awaits Him, 
 that He has spoken to a wicked and gainsaying people, 
 and that the bitter cup of defeat must be drunk to 
 the last dregs. He knows also — and that is the most 
 poignant thought of all — that His own disciples have 
 had no real or stable faith in Him, and that His own 
 familiar friend has lifted up his heel against Him. 
 When Christ stepped out of the supper-chamber and 
 passed through the moonlit olive-gardens, singing a 
 psalm with His disciples, it was in truth a requiem for 
 great hopes, a dirge for ended faith and confidence. 
 
 Is there any bitterer trouble to a great soul that has 
 toiled for others than to feel that its toil has been wasted, 
 to know that its heroic love is answered by inditference, 
 its self-sacrifice by hostility and contempt ? Can God 
 
42 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 call any human spirit to a more tragic Gethsemane 
 than this ? It was that and more — the crushing sense 
 of hum 1 sin, the burden of the wrong of others — 
 which Christ felt in that hour when the torches of 
 His foes flashed through the shadows of the olive- 
 gardens and the trampling of innumerable feet fell 
 upon His ear. The whole city was aroused ; and in the 
 tumult and excitement, probably the youth mentioned 
 in this text sprang from his bed and ran toward the 
 garden. Who he was and what he knew of Christ it 
 is impossible to say ; but it is not unnatural to suppose 
 that he may often have seen Christ, and heard Him, and 
 may possibly have loved Him. He may have been one 
 of those young men who had questioned Christ about 
 eternal life, and whom Jesus had loved for the integrity 
 and simplicity of his spirit. That he was no stranger 
 to Christ we may infer from the fact that he follows 
 Him when others flee ; and that he must have felt for 
 Christ some passionate impulse of love or curiosity we 
 may judge from the fact that he leaps from his bed 
 and runs nearly naked to the garden at the first sound 
 of approaching danger. Did he hope to defend Christ ? 
 Did he hope to warn Him or to save Him ? We 
 cannot tell, but this at least is clear : here is a young 
 man moved by a generous and noble impulse toward 
 Jesus, who has a supreme chance of proving his love 
 and courage in the hour of Christ's deadliest peril, but 
 who loses the golden opportunity, and in the confusion 
 of the arrest forsakes Jesus, as did all the others. 
 There, then, the history terminates ; and nothing 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 43 
 
 more can be conjectured or explained. But the inci- 
 dent is fruitful of suggestion, and is worthy of your 
 thought. Fix your eyes then upon the scene, the 
 sublime figure of Jesus standing calm and undefended 
 in the presence of His foes ; the tumult, the terror, 
 the confusion, of the arrest; and somewhere in the 
 crowd, his eager face revealed to us by the broken 
 lights of the torches or the moon, this youth, with 
 who can say what a conflict of noble passion in his 
 heart? We are going to talk with this young man. 
 We are going to ask him the secret of his conduct, and 
 learn the secret of our own. Look pt ^im well, then : 
 a young man seized by young men, struggling to get 
 at Christ, half throttled and wholly frightened in the 
 attempt ; that is the scene which we must keep in view 
 while we talk together. 
 
 ** There followed Him a certain young man." That 
 I take to be the statement of the supreme attraction 
 there is in Jesus Christ for youth. Have 3'ou ever 
 pondered the fact that Jesus Himself was a young 
 Man, and that all His marvellous life was lived out in a 
 brief period of years which never reached maturity ? 
 Our adoration of Christ not infrequently obscures 
 a lesson like this, obvious as it is in studying 
 the life of the Man Christ Jesus, There is to me 
 something infinitely touching and impressive in this 
 youthfulness of Jesus Christ. We are accustomed 
 to-day to leaders of thought and society who are 
 grey with service, and it is rarely that a man leaps 
 into notice now till middle life is reached. And 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 therefore it is, I suppose, that we talk so wisely of the 
 need there is for men to learn the world before they 
 attempt to reform it ; and the favourite way of silencing 
 youth is to sneer at its lack of experience. It is a 
 custom of long tradition to make arithmetical computa- 
 tions about the ignorance of youth, as if wisdom were 
 the sole monopoly of age and folly the prerogative of 
 youth. It was precisely in this way that grey-headed 
 doctors of the law treated Jesus ; they computed His 
 birthday when they could not answer His arguments, 
 and closed all controversy by remarking, *^ He is not 
 fifty years old, and does he teach us ? " And as 
 we see this young Carpenter, fresh from the homely 
 rusticities of Nazareth, standing up before the elders 
 of His people, teaching, rebuking, illumining them, 
 what is the moral significance of the spectacle? 
 We see that Jesus represents the glory and supre- 
 macy of youth. He teaches us that intuition is 
 Diviner than experience, and that the intuitions of 
 youth are a nobler force than the experience of age. 
 All this supernatural wisdom, from whose founts the 
 ages have drunk, is the utterance of a young Man ; 
 all this Divine life, whose deeds have stirred the souls 
 of millions, was the -life of a young Man, who barely 
 touched the threshold of mid-age, when the sudden dark- 
 ness fell and covered all. And the lesson is neither 
 new nor strange. The trumpet of God peals to every 
 human soul, ^^What thou doest, do quickly." The 
 greatest deeds of the world, the greatest poetry, the 
 deepest and most fruitful influences, the most splendid 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 45 
 
 conquests and achievements — these are all the work of 
 young men. He who does not come upon the stage 
 of action till mid-life finds half the audience gone, and 
 hears the fingers of death busy with the pulleys that 
 bring down the curtain. Life is too short for the 
 postponement of great purposes ; he who moves the 
 world must bring to his task the courageous buoyancy 
 of youth, not the procrastinating caution and timidity 
 of age. There is always room for youth in the world. 
 The world is always crying out in its weariness for 
 the power of youth to come and do what the slow 
 hands of age cannot accomplish. It is to a young Man 
 the world owes the Sermon on the Mount ; it is to 
 a young Man we owe the redemption of the world : 
 and what wonder is it, then, that Jesus Christ 
 should be the centre of intense attraction for the 
 youxig ? 
 
 And you will notice, too, as you read the life of 
 Christ, that He also felt a strong attraction to the 
 young. He reciprocated their hopes. He loved them 
 for the freshness of their impulses, and was very sorry 
 when they turned away from Him. People have aske3 I 
 me sometim.es, ^^ Why do you so often preach to young \ 
 men ? Why not preach a special sermon to old men ? 
 Why this intense desire and effort to help and save 
 young men ? " I will tell you why it is. It is because 
 I believe that if ever the kingdom of Jesus Christ is to 
 be set up upon the earth, it must be young men who 
 will lay the foundations* of its strength, and shape the 
 pillars of its splendour, and be the master-architects oi 
 
46 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 its success. The kingdom of Christ is not something 
 we go to, but that comes to us; it means the complete 
 purification of human Hfe, in all its offices, till the will 
 of God is done on earth even as it is done in heaven : 
 and if ever that stupendous battle is won, it is the 
 young men of the age, and of the ages, who must win 
 it. Ask yourselves how new thoughts infect society, 
 how a new theory of poetry, or philosophy, or science 
 becomes established ; and the reply always is that you 
 must first infect the young with its message, and then 
 you can safely leave them to do the rest. Take for 
 instance, a great poet like Wordsworth, who writes 
 amid all but universal scorn for nearly forty years, and 
 whose name is received by every critic of his early 
 days with guffaws of brutal ridicule. Then there is a 
 change, and Oxford receives him with reverence, and 
 by common consent and acclamation he becomes the 
 Laureate of his country. How did this happen ? The 
 explanation is that those who jabbered idiotic abuse at 
 Wordsworth were old men, and those who believed in 
 him were young men. They were the leaven that 
 leavened the whole lump. They carried their evangel 
 with them, and they spread it. At length the hour 
 came when no man was left to contradict them, and 
 then the slow public believed their witness ; and a new 
 poetry of pure and simple sentiment, which taught the 
 dignity and sang the sanctity of the homeliest human 
 life, received its due reward in the praise of all the 
 world. It is so in all the great kingdom of human 
 thought : the young men are the crusaders who conquer 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY, 47 
 
 the centuries. The world belongs to its youth; and 
 what the youth of a nation is, that the future of the 
 nation must be. Is it then a contemptible, because a 
 merely sensational, impulse which urges me to speak 
 to this vanguard of the future which I see around me ? 
 No. If I speak specially to you, it is because I know 
 that if drunkenness and profligacy shall cease to curse 
 the twentieth century, it is because you will be pure 
 and sober ; if juster views of God and human duty will 
 prevail, it is because you must first imbibe them ; if 
 there shall rise a nobler and completer society of more 
 helpful human hands and more serviceable lives, — wealth 
 redeemed from selfishness and poverty from dishonour, 
 what is vile in human custom purged into purity, what 
 is false illumined with the truth, what is true strength- 
 ened into triumph — if, in a word, this world of weak and 
 struggling creatures shall indeed recognise Christ as the 
 Light of life and Leader of its thought, it is because you 
 will first find Him, and teach in yourselves the lessons 
 of this Diviner obedience, and be in yourselves the 
 forces of this Diviner victory. That work none but 
 you can do. Let the old man rest ; his work is done, 
 and the time of his departure is at hand. But with 
 infinite love and expectation the great Captain of souls 
 looks on you, the young, tlie strong, the eager, whose 
 hearts are all athrob with forceful impulses and 
 passions, and cries, ^' Will ye also be My disciples ? " 
 
 "They all forsook Him and fled," but this young 
 man followed Jesus. That was a noble impulse, and 
 impulse is one of the finest qualities of youth. And 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 what is impulse ? It is an act of the heart rather than 
 of the will, a spontaneous movement of the soul. It is 
 impulse which makes us love, and justifies itself by 
 creating love in others. By what law is it that the 
 lark springs aloft at the first sign of day, and is 
 already singing at heaven's gate when it is yet half 
 dark below, and the everlasting doors have not opened 
 for the entrance of the sun ? It is an impulse in its 
 own nature which bids it sing and soar, and sends it 
 up like winged music into the waste heavens, which it 
 floods with invisible delight. By what law is it that 
 the little child flushes when the father's footstep is 
 heard, and leaps up to his lips to welcome him ? It is 
 simply the impulse of love, not meditated nor pre- 
 meditated, the swift, spontaneous action of the heart. 
 Or what force is it which prompts the man who has 
 never dreamed of doing anything heroic when he rose 
 at morn, to suddenly leap into the running tide to rescue 
 some poor soul he never saw before, and does not even 
 know ? It is impulse, the strenuous impulse of courage 
 and humanity. It was such an impulse which made 
 this young man suddenly range himself on the side of 
 Christ in the moment when all others had deserted 
 Him. For one brief, glorious moment he was the only 
 human soul in all this world of men who dared to stand 
 with Jesus. Quicker than we can describe it the whole 
 drama was over; there was no time for reason or 
 debate. And who does not justify, and who will not 
 applaud, the impulse ? Who does not perceive that it 
 is in such Divine moments of intense feeling we see the 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY, 49 
 
 narrow way to eternal life, and as we look back upon 
 them we know that 
 
 "Just this or that poor impulse, 
 "Which for once had play unstifled, 
 Seems the whole work of a lifetime 
 That away the rest has trifled"? 
 
 Oh, I know that it is easy enough and common enough 
 to scorn impulse and talk of impulsive people as 
 though they were foolish and hysterical people ; but I 
 say, Give me your impulse, and you may keep your 
 caution. I never heard that caution ever did anything 
 yet but put the drag upon the wheel of progress, but 
 impulse is the flaming force which drives it. If the 
 lark debated how it could well climb up the steep, 
 invisible stairways of the heavens, or the child why 
 it should kiss its parent, or the man whether he was 
 justified in saving the drowning, there would be 
 neither song, nor love, nor courage left us. And it is 
 because love is an impulse, and because the relation 
 between us and Christ, if there be any relation at all, is 
 love, that I bid you now follow the impulse w^hich 
 impels you toward Christ. Do not fight against it; 
 follow it. Let the heart act for you, and the brain will 
 follow. You are not asked to explain Christ or under- 
 stand Him ; you are asked to love Him. Let your 
 impulse leap up into the sky that is yet dark, and, Hke 
 the lark, it will see the light while yet the song is on 
 the lip. The great, startling, tragic, decisive acts of 
 life are all sudden. They are the work of moments. 
 Our act leaps from us like an immitigable fire, which 
 
 4 
 
so THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 we can no longer restrain, because we feel, we think, 
 we love, intensely. And in such an intense moment of 
 sacred impulse we find Christ, we love Him, we side 
 with Him, we adore Him, and follow Him. We sur- 
 render ourselves to the guidance of the heart ; and in 
 the surrender of ourselves we find the Son of God, 
 and are vivified by His embrace. 
 
 But, you will say, is impulse a safe guide ? May it 
 not lead men to ruinous folly and punishment ? Yes, 
 a bad impulse may, but not a good one. There are 
 impulses of the flesh and impulses of the spirit, im- 
 pulses which we know to be from our baser selves and 
 impulses which flash on us from all that is highest in 
 us ; and we can readily enough distinguish them, and 
 know the good from the evil. It is because men follow 
 the bad impulse — the tingling of the sensual nerve, the 
 craving of the bestial appetite, the thousand hungry 
 passions which consume us — that they lose the power 
 of feehng noble impulses, and learn to think of all im- 
 pulse as a ruinous and delusive thing. You must 
 judge the source of an impulse by its quality and 
 object, and it is by that rule I judge the impulse of this 
 young man right and good. For what was its object ? 
 It was Christ. What was its quality ? It was cour- 
 ageous. He felt the heroic fibre thrill in him; the 
 forlorn majesty of Christ appealed to him ; he longed 
 to stand beside Jesus, and defend Him, and be His 
 comrade to the death. Do you feel that ? Do you 
 recognise Jesus Christ as the Captain of salvation, not 
 in any narrow and selfish sense, but literally of the 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. l\ 
 
 world's salvation ; that He is fighting for the redemption 
 of man from all sorrow and wrong into all purity and 
 glory? Oh, why so many men, called or miscalled 
 Christians, do so little for the world, is because they 
 recognise Christ only in relation to themselves, and not 
 in His relation to the world at all. Christ is to them 
 personal safety, not personal service. With those im- 
 measurable, Divine, unselfish aims which led Christ to 
 the Cross they have no sympathy, because they have 
 no understanding. They see the Christ who heals, 
 not the Christ who serves, who suffers, who rules, who 
 is against every wrong and tyranny, and is the cour- 
 ageous Champion of all the poor, and trampled, and 
 despised. They see the Christ who utters comfortable 
 words and kind, not the Christ of Gethsemane, drinking 
 the cup of bitterness He might have avoided, alone 
 because He dared to die for righteousness' sake, 
 deserted because none other dared so much as He. 
 And it is the Christ of Gethsemane we need to see. 
 We need to catch that glow of spiritual comradeship 
 with Him which makes us cry, — 
 
 "O Thou pale form, so dimly seen, deep-eyed, 
 
 Do I not 
 Pant when I read of the consummate deeds ? 
 Do I not shake to hear aught question Thee?*' 
 
 The sort of religion we want is the courageous religion 
 which is not afraid to face Gethsemane and Calvary, 
 and holds not its life dear unto it for the sake of the 
 Gospel. There is no night which darkens over the 
 wide world when the soldiers do not go out to seize 
 
5t THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Christ, no morning which dawns when the world has 
 not got its Calvary ready where Christ is crucified 
 afresh. The mere sentimental impulse which makes 
 you admire Christ we do not want; thousands in 
 Jerusalem on the night of His arrest had that, who 
 were not willing to lose an hour's rest on His behalf, 
 or to lift a voice in His defence upon the fatal day 
 which followed. We want the brave impulse which 
 makes men range themselves on the side of Christ in 
 the hour of His worst desolation, when He is despised 
 in the office and jeered at in the workshop, when men 
 forget Him in the avarice of trade and insult Him in 
 the frivolity of pleasure, when the world marches all 
 its forces on Gethsemane, and the hoarse cry of the 
 people fills the air, "Away with Him! He is not fit 
 to live ! " When Wilberforce was in the thick of his 
 great agitation against the slave trade, an old, gouty 
 peer said to him, " So, young man, you intend to reform 
 society, do you ? Do you see that?** said he, pointing 
 to a cross near by. " That is what those come to who 
 attempt to reform society." And it is true still, and 
 true for you, if you are bold enough to make it so. 
 Dare you be Christ's disciple? Dare you follow the 
 courageous impulse of the heart which makes you feel 
 the world well lost for Christ ? It is the very glory 
 and quality of youth to be courageous. It is youth 
 which climbs " the imminent deadly breach," and faces 
 the deadly hail of battle ; it is youth which defies the 
 tyranny of custom and the hatred of the world. We 
 have compassion for age that sees fears in the way, but 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 53 
 
 youth which is cowardly is contemptible. There is 
 not one of you who would not rather be exiled for ever 
 than be branded as a coward and know that you 
 deserved it. That is why Christ wants you. That is 
 why your place is at the side of Christ. When all 
 men forsake Him, it is the hour of youth to prove its 
 chivalry and rally to His side. Dare you do that? 
 Will you follow the impulse of the soul which draws 
 you to the Son of God ? See, the torches flash upon a 
 hundred angry faces ; spears are lifted ; oaths are 
 uttered ; blows are struck : but He, the supreme Master 
 of the world, stands calm, and turning His piercing 
 eyes on you, cries, " If any man will be My disciple, 
 let him take up his cross and follow Me." 
 
 Turn the subject round again : ^^ And the young men 
 laid hold on him : and he left his linen cloth, and fled from 
 them naked" It was a hard trial ; when Apostles fled, 
 one young man might well flee : yet he behaved so nobly 
 while the power of that self-forgetful impulse was on 
 him that we could weep tears of disappointment to see 
 him do this. To have been the only one of all man- 
 kind who went with Jesus to prison and to judgment, 
 the solitary soul faithful among the faithless found — 
 that was the part he might have played ; and, oh, what 
 a part to miss ! And see, they were not old men who 
 dismayed him and broke his purpose down. There are 
 young men against Jesus as well as old men, and there 
 is no limit of age in that crowd which mocks Christ 
 in Gethsemane. Perhaps these young men who laid 
 hands upon him knew him : old comrades of light and 
 
54 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 jesting hours, who thought him mad ; cautious youths 
 who intended risking nothing themselves, and objected 
 to anybody else doing so ; youths roused from the mid- 
 night debauch by the riot in the street, who found a 
 piquant jest in hustling this young man and cursing 
 him for his folly, a folly far too wise for them to un- 
 derstand, a madness too Divine for them to dream of. 
 Sooner than he guessed his courage was put to the test, 
 and it broke down miserably beneath the strain. He had 
 no time to grasp Christ's hand or touch His garment ; 
 in an instant the irrevocable deed was done. Terror 
 seized him ; and before he could ask what he had done, 
 he had left his raiment in the hands of his foes, and 
 had fled into the night. Breathless and frantic, we see 
 him plunge into the deep shadows of the olive trees ; 
 and as he runs a burst of jeering laughter follows 
 him ; and, worse than any taunt of man, there burns 
 in his heart the bitter sense of his own defeat and 
 cowardice. 
 
 ^^ And he fled naked^^ Cannot we too well fill up the 
 picture for ourselves ? Here is a youth but lately 
 come up to the university. Far away in some quiet 
 spot of north or west you had your home among the 
 simple faiths and pieties of rustic life. Your ears were 
 familiar with the Bible from a child, and its words were 
 woven into the very texture of your mind. You knew 
 what it was to hear a father's prayers, and to watch a 
 mother's life of steadfast purity and self-denying toil. 
 You heard prayer, and you prayed ; you read the 
 Scripture, and loved it ; you were full of simple trust, 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 55 
 
 and never doubted. But now what is yoiir history ? 
 You have got into the wrong set, and your piety is 
 shaken. You have learned to think lightly of religion 
 and to jest at purity. You have sat in the seat of the 
 scorner, or have at least listened to its cynicism ; and 
 wherever young men gather, the seat of the scorner is 
 there : and the devil usually takes good care to fill it 
 with a competent professor. If you ask me what has 
 happened to you, I can tell you in a sentence : the 
 young men have laid hands on you, and your faith 
 in God is gone. 
 
 Here, again, is a youth who once had a fair ideal of 
 what life ought to be, and strove to realise it. You 
 valued purity and loved truth, and you were pure and 
 truthful almost without conscious effort. Your days 
 were sweet with health, and your sleep wholesome with 
 peace ; Nature breathed her joy into your soul, and God 
 visited you in hopes and yearnings after goodness. I 
 know what has happened to you. It takes no very 
 penetrating eye to discern the marks of a great catas- 
 trophe upon you. The frankness of your smile Is gone, 
 and the impress of hateful knowledge is on your face. 
 The young men have laid hold of you ; the black sheep 
 of the warehouse have infected you. Comradeship, 
 which should have strengthened you, has slain you. 
 You can listen to abominable things without shrink- 
 ing, and say vile things without shame; and there is 
 pollution in your presence and peril to the pure in your 
 very touch. Once you were not far from the kingdom 
 of God. Your impulse would have driven you to the 
 
56 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 side of Christ ; but the young men laid their hands upon 
 you, and you fled. The calamity which has befallen 
 you is that your purity is gone. 
 
 There are those of you also who have not lost faith 
 or purity, but you have lost the impulse toward religion. 
 The spiritual force that once was in you has decayed, 
 and mainly because you refused to yield to it. 
 Religion has become to you a formal thing, and appeals 
 fall dead upon you, because your heart is a vacuum. 
 The vital air of religious life has been pumped out of 
 you by trifling with holy things and resisting holy 
 impulses. The word for you also is true that the 
 young men, the C3^nic and the worldling, have laid hands 
 on you ; and you have fled. Oh, how solemn and far- 
 reaching are these pregnant words ! How many hungry, 
 empty, naked souls crowd round us who have 
 renounced Christ for fear of man, and who turn hither 
 and thither, seeking rest and finding none, conscious of 
 cowardice, and tortured by the knowledge of weakness, 
 and ever fleeing through the darkness to that deeper 
 darkness where character acquires eternal permanence, 
 and he that is unholy is unholy still ! Can I do you a 
 better service then than warn you against the peril of 
 evil comradeship? Do we not all know men, gay, 
 brilliant, fascinating, with a natural quahty of leader- 
 ship, whose work it is to corrupt the purity and sap 
 the faith of those around them ? I will tell you what 
 is the common curse of all places where young men 
 gather together, whether in the school, the university, 
 the barracks, the club, or the office. It is an inordinate 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY, 57 
 
 worship of merely intellectual force or the qualities of 
 personal fascination. The character of a man is the 
 last thing you inquire about. You ask, Is he witty? 
 Can he sing a good song ? Is he clever ? Can he tell 
 a good story ? You do not ask, Does he love God ? 
 Does he honour purity, and meet the great demands of 
 truth and righteousness? You are attracted by the 
 specious glitter of mere surface qualities ; and you do 
 not ask about the qualities of his heart, his life, his 
 action. How many men have I known who have 
 excelled in all these qualities of jovial comradeship with- 
 out possessing one single element of noble character I 
 And the influence of such men is utterly destructive, 
 and their course in life is marked by the poisonous 
 deposits they have left behind in other lives. And how 
 many amiable and well-meaning youths have I known 
 who were the victims of such men ! Evil communica- 
 tions have corrupted good manners : purity has perished 
 in the polluted atmosphere of the comradeship they chose, 
 just as flowers cannot live in' the reeking air of the bar- 
 room ; truth has died in them, because they have 
 admired the brilliant liar, and the love of God, because 
 they have followed the lead of a man in whose thoughts 
 God had no place ; and if I wrote their lives, I could do 
 so in a single sentence : '' The young men laid hold on 
 ihem, and they fled." It is a sufficient biography ; and 
 all over these lands there are homes where joy is dead 
 and parents weep in secret for the sons who have 
 been taken in the toils of evil comradeship. 
 
 There are two questions, then, for you to determine ; 
 
58 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 and the first is, What is your relation to Christ ? I do 
 not say to religion as a theological system or to the 
 Church as a religious organisation, but to Christ. 
 Here is One who claims to be the Son of God and the 
 Master of the world. You acknowledge that claim, in 
 part at least, when you join in His worship. If that 
 supreme cla'm is admitted, then you must define your 
 relation to this Christ, who is alive for evermore, and 
 by whom you will be judged. In all the closing scenes 
 of Christ's life, we see Him, not in His relation to the 
 multitude, but to individuals : to Caiaphas, to Herod, 
 to Peter, to Pilate ; and it is so here. In the intense 
 light which falls on this scene, we see Christ and this 
 young man alone ; and all other figures for the time are 
 lost in darkness. The tragedy of Gethsemane is sus- 
 pended until this personal incident is settled. And so 
 you stand in sharp, clear, unmistakable juxtaposition 
 with Christ ; and you must determine what your future 
 relation to Him shall be. Do you hate Him or love 
 Him ? Are you for or against Him ? Is His cause 
 your cause ? The Christ of Gethsemane stands before 
 you in the unhealed wrongs and sorrows of His 
 world ; do you mean to help or perpetuate them ? 
 Do you elect to stand with the brutal and passionate 
 crowd that pushes Christ on to execution or with 
 this solitary human soul who dares to follow when 
 others flee and loves while others hate ? Sooner or 
 later that choice will be forced on you, for Christ 
 permits no compromise. It is a question of anta- 
 gonism or service, and ask yourself whether it is not 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 59 
 
 time that you boldly defined what your relation to 
 Jesus is. 
 
 The second question is, Do you want religion ? If 
 you turn to the story of Pentecost, you will find that 
 those who received the Holy Ghost on that memorable 
 day were not the promiscuous multitu^le, but "devout 
 men," already impregnated with religious truth. They 
 were seekers after truth, who had followed the light 
 they had close up. Just as steel once polarised is 
 always susceptible to the magnetic force, so they were 
 polarised by previous devoutness; and when the Apostles 
 addressed them, the living current of the Divine mag- 
 netism flowed into them without a break. So you 
 may roughly divide the mass of men into those who 
 want religion and those who care nothing for it. The 
 young men who laid hold on this youth did not want 
 religion ; they were the riffraff of the city, the mid- 
 night roysterers ''flown with insolence and wine," to 
 whom the whole occasion was adventure. This young 
 man did want religion, and was conscious of the charm 
 of Christ. The youth whose weekday life is passed 
 in the bar-room and the billiard saloon, and who enters 
 the sanctuary on the seventh day in occasional obedi- 
 ence to troublesome custom, does not really want 
 religion. He has no real interest in it. But the youth 
 who loves truth and wants to find it has already 
 prepared himself for its reception. Have you done 
 this ? Do not pretend an interest in religion you do 
 not feel ; that is adding, insincerity to callousness. Be 
 honest with yourself, and ask whether you do really 
 
6o THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 want religion or not, for that is the question you must 
 first settle if you would go further and define your 
 relation to the Christ of Gethsemane. 
 
 And, lastly, let me remind you that if you would 
 settle these solemn questions, you must dismiss all 
 solicitation of comradeship. They are your questions ; 
 you alone can settle them. We cannot help following 
 in imagination this young man. What became of him ? 
 Think of all he had seen and felt that night, the 
 turbulence and stress of passion which had shaken 
 him. It is impossible for men to forget such hours. 
 They make too deep and indelible an impression on 
 their lives. The coward cannot forget that once he 
 was almost heroic, or the cynic that he was once almost 
 religious. The man who has been as near Christ as 
 this young man was, and then forsaken Him, must 
 bear the scar of his treachery, the mortifying memory 
 of his infirmity of purpose, through all his Hfe. Can 
 you not picture this youth as he reaches home that 
 night, breathless, sobbing, unstrung by the vehement 
 excitement he had suffered? What a night for any 
 man to pass through ! How the face of Christ would 
 haunt him, with its reproachful friendliness and forlorn 
 pathos of appeal ! Can we not distinguish this youth 
 in the crowd around the judgment-hall of Pilate, or 
 standing bowed in fruitless shame in the darkness of 
 Calvary, with the loud dying cry of Jesus ringing in 
 his ears ? Whatever future life was his, of this at 
 least we may be pretty sure : that night in Gethsemane 
 vrculd always stand out terribly clear and luminous as 
 
ON IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY. 6i 
 
 the one supreme event, the crowning moral opportunity, 
 of his life. And he lost it. He lost that which never 
 could be his again. For the great lesson of moral 
 impulse is that it is so quick to come and go, that we 
 must needs be alert to use it, and dare not trifle with it. 
 " Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the 
 way," says the Psalmist, for all too scon the Son passes 
 from our sight, and the impulse we restrained has no 
 other opportunity of vindication. And once more, as 
 the torchlight fades away, and silence once again 
 possesses the garden where Jesus sorrowed, that 
 Divine voice comes to us from the broadening distance, 
 ''Will ye also be My disciples?" "Will ye also go 
 away ? " 
 
IV. 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 
 
 "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived 
 that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled ; and 
 they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. And 
 beholding the man that was healed standing with them, they could 
 say nothing against it." — Acts iv. 13, 14. 
 
 THE force of this passage is that it is the testimony 
 of enemies to the effects of Christianity, and 
 such testimony is the most valuable form of evidence. 
 Through all the long Hne of Christian history this 
 testimony has been repeated. It is hardly too much to 
 say that it is beneath the digjnity of Christianity to 
 publish apologetics or subtle arguments v^hy it should 
 be permitted to exist ; it exists because it must, because 
 it cannot help existing, and because it is justified by 
 its results. From the moment when the darkness 
 rolled away from Calvary an infinite light has filled 
 the world, and it has been daybreak everywhere. Men 
 have instinctively realised the presence of a new force 
 in the world, and they have been forced to respect it. 
 Like light, it has grown silently ; but, like light, it has 
 also been invincible : it has come with a potent supre- 
 macy, subduing men as the light subdues the darkness 
 when at the break of day it beats the darkness into 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 63 
 
 flakes of crimson fire beneath its feet. The light asks 
 no leave of men to shine, no permit of any human 
 power to fill the world ; but surely and pervasively it 
 takes possession of the waking earth, and defies dis- 
 lodgment or defeat. Its evidence is in itself. Its 
 right to be is its power to cleanse and bless. To the 
 blind man the light does not exist, indeed; but the 
 blind man is not a fit judge of light, nor do we go to 
 him to tell us what the light is like, or what it makes 
 of the grey world when its sudden splendours fall out 
 of the chambers of the east, and all lands are flooded 
 with the vivifying radiance. When we want to know 
 what the light is like, we ask our own eyes to tell us ; 
 when we want to know what Christianity is like, Ave 
 ask those who have seen and felt it, and who have 
 witnessed its work day by day upon man and human 
 society. And the reply even of its enemies is, '*A 
 notable miracle hath been done, and we cannot deny 
 it ; " we fear, we wonder, we hate, but we can say 
 ^'nothing against it." 
 
 Here, then, stand these two simple-minded men 
 against the world, and challenge its utmost scrutiny. 
 Who they were we know; what they were we are 
 told in the famous phrase that they were '* unlearned 
 and ignorant men." In birth, in station, in manners, 
 in intellectual calibre and knowledge, they are not to 
 be mentioned in the same breath as their adversaries. 
 They are men of the commonest social type, men who 
 in the ordinary course of things would have lived and 
 died in village industry and obscurity. What then is 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 there remarkable about them ? This : that they have 
 been the chosen companions of the Man of Nazareth, 
 the Son of God. They have broken bread with the 
 visible God ; they have heard the wisdom of the 
 Eternal, and walked in daily intimacy with Jesus Christ. 
 And the power of that supreme companionship has 
 told upon them. The spiritual force of Jesus Christ 
 has streamed through and through their nature, till it 
 has changed them from glory into glory ; and they have 
 risen into a dignity of manhood strangely new and 
 glorious. Do we not know how love can transfigure 
 and renew men still ? Have we not watched the subtle 
 assimilations of love as it softens asperities, and 
 cleanses the thoughts, and moulds the mind, till in those 
 who have loved each other tenderly through long years 
 so perfect an affinity is set up that thought answers 
 to thought, and even feature to feature, and voice to 
 voice in its sym. pathetic inflexions and reduplications ? 
 This process, but upon a Diviner scale and in a 
 completer method than the world has ever known, has 
 been accomplished here. The miraculous force of Jesus 
 has not merely streamed through their nature, but it 
 has left its power upon them. They too can work 
 miracles ; they too can touch the sick, and, behold, they 
 are made whole. Jesus is living in them ; they them- 
 selves are temples of the Holy Ghost, and agents of 
 the miraculous power of Christ. In earthly culture 
 they are ignorant still ; in the wisdom of books they are 
 still unlearned ; of the mere accomplishments of oratory 
 they are still d'^stitute, and have the uncouth utterance 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 6$ 
 
 of Nazareth, the provincial twang which the polished 
 scholars of Jerusalem abhor and the temper of scholar- 
 ship resents ; but they walk clothed with moral dignity, 
 and speak, as their Master did, with authority, and not 
 as the scribes. The hmit of the change is accurately 
 defined in them ; no miracle makes up to them the 
 defects of early education, but the miracle is in the 
 transfiguration of their character, the enlargement and 
 consummation of their manhood. What does it all 
 mean ? How do you explain it ? The explanation is 
 given in the one pregnant sei tence that the rulers 
 " took knowledge of them that they had been with 
 Jesus." 
 
 Now let us study this group of men a mom.ent. 
 There, then, are the " rulers, and elders, and scribes." 
 Their identification in modern life is not difficult. 
 They are the aristocracy of their nation. They repre- 
 sent, so to speak, both Houses of Parhament and 
 Convocation thrown in. They stand for all the political 
 power and intellectual culture of their time. We can 
 see them as they gather in grave confabulation, learned 
 men, acute men, entirely respectable men, men of ligl t 
 and leading, naturally contemptuous of the populace 
 and indifferent to its praise or blame. And here also 
 stands this poor abject cripple, one of the habitual 
 beggars at the gate of the Temple, an unconsidered 
 item of humanity, with no claim to notice save his 
 physical misfortune. Life to him has been one slow 
 tragedy ; he has been lame from his birth. We can 
 see him also, excited and astonished, devoured with 
 
 s 
 
66 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 curiosity, hardly able to believe that his feet are his, 
 watching the scene with a shrewd eye, and eager to see 
 these great men who never gave him anything but their 
 shadows as they passed in and out of the Beautiful 
 Gate of the Temple, discomfited by these two miracle- 
 men of Galilee. And here are the two men, Peter and 
 John, in whom the real interest of the scene is centred. 
 One of them we know with something like intimacy. 
 We know that Peter was a coward. No one has yet 
 forgotten the tale of Peter's boasting and the fact of 
 Peter's denial. We know that Peter was an uncouth 
 fisherman, and we still hear the servant-girl in the hall 
 of Caiaphas telling him that his speech bewrayeth him. 
 We know that Peter had been bred up in all natural 
 reverence for the priesthood, and ought, according to 
 all natural anticipation, to have been very humble in 
 the presence of his betters, and doubly humble with 
 the memory of that ugly story of his broken boast 
 clinging to him. But see, he is nothing of the kind. 
 He stands up before the elders of his people with an 
 almost offensively aggressive manliness. He speaks 
 with a majesty and fire of phrase worthy of a great 
 orator. He accuses, he reproaches, he rebukes, the 
 lords temporal and the lords spiritual of his nation. He 
 is bold even to rashness; he is vehement even to insult. 
 And what is more, no one interrupts him ; no one gain- 
 says or replies to him. He is the uncontested master 
 of the situation. And as he speaks his voice grows 
 more sonorous, the strength of his passion gives strange 
 power and vehemence to his words, till at last, in one 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 67 
 
 great burst of defiant faith, he concludes thus : " This 
 is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, 
 which is become the head of the corner. Neither is 
 there salvation in any other : for there is none other 
 name under heaven given among men whereby we must 
 be saved." The only companion picture in history to 
 this is that memorable moment when a poor German 
 monk, facet o face with all the imperial and ecclesiastical 
 power of his time, and with the fire of martyrdom 
 almost lit beneath his feet, cri.-d at last to the Arch- 
 duke's splendid court and the great company of priests 
 and nobles who through the long day of controversy had 
 tried alternately to argue or frighten him down : " Here 
 I take my stand. God help me. I cannot retract I " 
 
 Here, then, is a sample of what Christianity can 
 do ; and I submit it to your judgment. And the first 
 thing I ask you to notice is that Christ emancipates 
 and enfranchises the intellect. You perceive at once that 
 the intellectual stature of these men has been infinitely 
 increased by their comradeship with Jesus. I need 
 not delay on this point ; it needs neither argument nor 
 explanatory rhetoric. I state a fact, and an incon- 
 trovertible fact. And I do so for this reason: that 
 there is a flippant and foolish assumption abroad that 
 Christianity, so far from emancipating the intellect, 
 enslaves it. To believe— that is, to accept truth on any 
 other evidence than the evidence of the senses or the 
 reason— is, I am told, to put a fetter upon the intellect ; 
 to disbelieve is to enter into intellectual enfranchise- 
 ment. Then when a young man has repudiated the 
 
68' THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 faith of his fathers and classified his Bible among the 
 romance books of history; when he has joined the 
 noble company of the doubters who are prouder of 
 their doubts than wise men are of their discoveries; 
 or when he has become an Agnostic, who does not 
 know and will not even take the trouble to doubt ; 
 then, when the voice of Jesus Christ is silenced, and 
 instead the great babble of humi, i opinion is received 
 as a sufficing gospel, then come liberation and growth 
 of mind, then are experienced enlargement of faculty 
 and intellectual new birth ! That is the assumption 
 which challenges the young men of to-day on every 
 side ; and, I say, never was there a more entire and 
 mischievous blunder. Has the repudiation of Chris- 
 tianity ever led men to wider intellectual life ? If those 
 who have repudiated Christianity have been great men, 
 is it not in spite of their infidelity, and not because 
 of it ? When we have read the record of such lives, 
 has it not been easy to perceive that the absence 
 of religious faith produced defect and limitation of 
 intellect, and not enlargement ? What is there in the 
 wisdom of Jesus Christ to stultify the most daring 
 mind, or repress the largest intellectual energy ? Did 
 Christ fetter or emancipate the intellect of Paul ? Did 
 He stifle or inspire the genius of Augustine ? Michael 
 Angelo was no fool, and he adored Jesus Christ. 
 Milton was no dullard when he wrote his immortal 
 epic, nor Newton when he threaded the maze of natural 
 law, nor Kepler when he swept the heavens with his 
 scrutiny and made a pathway for his thoughts amid 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT 69 
 
 the suns and constellations, nor Wordsworth when 
 he sought the revelation of nature amid the silences 
 of mountain tarn and solitude, nor Ruskin when he 
 touches with illuminating magic the world of art ; yet 
 all these, and many others worthy to be ranked with 
 them, have dwelt or dwell in the knowledge of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. It is not the faithful, but the 
 faithless, who dwell in a contracted world, with half 
 the intellectual faculties dead or torpid for the lack 
 of use— it is they who put back the wheels of progress, 
 not they who serve the world in the name that is above 
 every name. Do not be deceived with the insolent 
 pretensions of unbelief. Pause before yoa believe its 
 promises of liberty, and recollect that the intolerance 
 of heterodoxy is ten thousandfold stronger and more 
 intense than the intolerance of orthodoxy. Do not 
 take unbelief at its own price, nor accept its empty 
 boasts as historic certainties. Think of Peter and John, 
 and consider what Christianity did for them. Mark 
 the new and intense intellectual life of these unlearned 
 and ignorant men. See how they become orators, 
 authors, historians, poets ; see how vast an impulse 
 and enlargement of intellect Christianity produces in 
 them ; and then remember that Christ is on the side 
 of the intellect, and not against it. It is surely no 
 common thing that fishermen and churls should sud- 
 denly become the organisers of a Church, the lucid 
 exponents of a Divine and subtle system of thought and 
 morals, the shapers of the world's future, and heroic 
 workers in the world's progress; and the power that 
 
TO THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 gave them this infinite expansion of faculty was no 
 common power: it was the power of Jesus Christ 
 working in them and through them to do His good 
 pleasure. 
 
 And that this should be so is readily explained by 
 the fact that nothing gives so deep an impulse to the 
 intellect as the certainty of eternal things. Tell me, 
 that I am only a creature curiously fashioned from the 
 dust, that this world is all I have, that I am but an 
 insignificant life struck out from the great whole, a 
 spark of ethereal fire falling back into the night from 
 which I came, a bead of foam tossed a moment on the 
 sea of conscious being and lost again in the next roll 
 of the dubious wave — tell me that, and you rob me 
 of the very instinct of intellectual progress. What 
 impulse have I then to expand powers which I know 
 are doomed to speedy and complete annihilation? 
 What is all this laborious structure of civilisation but 
 a bitter mockery, the playing of ants upon an ant-hill, 
 which the first heedless foot may kick away? Why 
 should I strain my mind to know all mysteries and 
 speak all tongues, if all this wealth of knowledge and 
 experience is but the accumulation of the miser, which 
 never can be used in any world beyond ? Tell me I 
 have no future beyond the grave, and the very impulse 
 of intellectual progress is destroyed. But, oh, make me 
 know, not by mere hearsay or the dull force of argument, 
 but in myself and through my own spirit, that there 
 is an invisible world close at hand to me, that what I 
 am is but the promise of what I can be, that I can 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT 71 
 
 Speak with that hidden world, that One is there who 
 made me, loves me, wants me, and is waiting for me, 
 and then the horizon of my thought broadens into 
 infinity. Then I walk this little earth with a new sense 
 of power, and dignity, and hope. Then I can rise 
 above the maxims of the foolish and the customs of 
 the cowardly, and talk to Sanhedrims boldly, in my 
 own natural rights as a man. Then I am indeed 
 renewed, emancipated with a glorious liberty, for I 
 am filled unutterably full of glory and of God. Yea, 
 I can even work miracles. My poor words take force 
 and fire from the power of God which is in me, and 
 are winged with a mastery which is not my own. I 
 can do all things through Him that strengtheneth me, 
 for I am ennobled with that vision of the world to 
 come ; and others take knowledge of me that I have 
 been with Jesus. My brother, this is no vain dream. 
 I speak the words of truth and soberness. I point out 
 to you plain, clear, indisputable facts. Again and again 
 has Christ taken hold of illiterate men, and made them 
 kings of thought and deed, the saviours of society, the 
 emancipators of an age. The power of the world to 
 come made John Bunyan a great writer, and John 
 Hunt a great missionary. God found the one mending 
 kettles and the other driving the plough ; and the work 
 of one lives in an immortal book, of the other in a 
 converted nation. And therefore I say you will never 
 know what the fulness of intellectual life is till the 
 mind that was in Christ is the mind that is in you. 
 You will never even recognise the possibilities of 
 
72 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 greatness which lie slumbering in your nature, waiting 
 for development, till you become a new creature in 
 Christ Jesus and know Him whom to know is life 
 eternal. 
 
 But the effect of contact with Christ is not only in- 
 tellectual enfranchisement : it is moral courage. It was 
 the boldness of Peter and John which astonished every 
 one. There was a gigantic audacity about the men 
 which positively staggered the grave and potent fathers 
 of the Sanhedrim. What, could they believe their 
 ears? This man, this fellow, this rude, lliterate 
 peasant, rebuking them ! Why, all Jerusalem knew 
 that but a few weeks ago he had sneaked away like a 
 pitiful cur in the hour of his Master's peril ; and now 
 look at him ! He plucks them by the beard, and flouts 
 them to their face. He positively has no respect what- 
 ever for dignitaries. He is as uncontrollable as a 
 whirlwind. He smites right and left, and has a sort 
 of diabolically inspired instinct for striking hardest on 
 the tenderest places. What does it mean ? What 
 are things coming to ? And the fellow cannot even 
 speak decently, and has probably never had a day's 
 education in his life ! You can overhear all the 
 whisper and the babble, for the world has often heard 
 it. And as I look upon the scene the lesson I learn 
 is that the firstfruit of Christianity is not meekness, 
 but courage^ not the saintlike spirit of gentleness, but 
 the soldierly spirit of audacity. 
 
 Does that sound a strange gospel ? If so, it is be- 
 cause you have never read the Acts of the Apostles. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 73 
 
 I know very well that the prevalent idea of Christianity 
 is something very different from this. Christianity is 
 supposed to be something to make men meek and 
 prudent, to draw the sap of manhood, and restrain 
 the too boisterous energies of youth. You must bend 
 all your energies to save your own soul. You must 
 be very careful not to offend anybody, for does not 
 St. Paul teach that we should hve at peace with all 
 men ? You must be decorous to those who disagree 
 with you, and be content to politely differ with the 
 enemy, and must needs walk warily in this present 
 evil world and daily adorn the great doctrine of 
 Christian non-intervention ! Yes, that is a common 
 enough view of Christianity ; and its total effect has 
 been to reduce Christianity to a matter of hymn-singing, 
 and sermon-making, and pew-letting ! Behold the 
 magnificent result : meekness translated into pliability, 
 gentleness sunk into cowardice, and prudence trans- 
 formed into the most hideous selfishness and egotism 1 
 But as I read the Acts of the Apostles a new and 
 altogether different conception of Christianity dawns 
 upon me. I find that it was the boldness of the 
 Apostles which astonished everybody. They spake 
 as though joy did make them speak. They faced 
 death with the sublime innocence of children who had 
 never even thought of it. They did right with a per- 
 fectly heroic self-forgetful ness, never asking for a 
 moment where right would lead them. Elders, scribes, 
 priests, Sanhedrims, and mobs were all one to them; 
 they had a work to do, and, like their Master, were 
 
74 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Straitened till it was accomplished. They were swept 
 on by an overmastering impulse ; they acted as men 
 inspired ; they manifested a superb fearlessness which 
 filled even their enemies with admiration. What was 
 this impulse ? How did they do this ? The explana- 
 tion is given in the words of one of that immortal 
 brotherhood, who wrote, *'The love of Christ con- 
 straineth me." "I count all things but loss for the 
 excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." 
 " For to me to live is Christ ; and to die is gain." 
 
 And moral courage is based on two things : first 
 the certainty of rights and second carelessness of self; 
 that is, conviction and unselfishness. To be right is 
 to be strong. To be certain of your facts is to be 
 invincible in argument. To know that Jesus Christ 
 has risen from the dead because we have felt the 
 risen presence with us, and to feel hourly the life of 
 that Christ who is born again in the heart, thrilling 
 and throbbing through every thought and act of life — 
 that is the secret of Christian boldness. Who cares 
 for man then ? Does not the voice of Jesus reach us : 
 " Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have 
 no more that they can do " ? Who fears the enmity 
 of the world ? Does not He say, " Be of good cheer ; 
 I have overcome the world " ? Who walks in the 
 terror of death then ? Death is for us extinct, anni- 
 hilated, deposed ; and we say, with Richard Baxter, — 
 
 " If life be long, I will be glad 
 That I may still obey ; 
 If short, yet why should I be sad 
 To soar to endless day?" 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 75 
 
 And not fearing death, the fear of lesser evils is re- 
 moved ; a sublime carelessness about self is ours. 
 The praise or blame of men is nothing to us. Wealth 
 has no lure, pleasure no bribe, ease no paradise, poverty 
 no terror. And again I say this is not rhapsody, but 
 historic fact. This is the temper which Christianity 
 has produced in the lives of tens of thousands, who 
 lived not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Ob, 
 when shall we all share it? When shall we shake 
 ourselves free of the fear of each other, and dare to 
 be fools for Christ's sake, that His wisdom may be 
 revealed in us ? When shall we dare to do what He 
 did — make ourselves of ^^ no reputation " — be outcast 
 from men, that we may be found in Him? When 
 will that boldness of rebuke which characterised Christ 
 characterise us, in the face of the lies, and tyrannies, 
 and evils, and impurities of our day ? Oh, when shall 
 we cease to be cowards, and rise into the boldness of the 
 first Christians? And the answer is. When we live with 
 Christ as they did ; and then, when Christ is all and in 
 all, and our words become the just reflection of our lives, 
 and our life is hid with Christ in God, then, and not 
 before, will others wonder at our moral boldness, and 
 take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus. 
 
 The last thing to be noticed is, then, that Christianity 
 bases itself u^on concrete fact " And beholding the man 
 that was healed standing with them, they could say 
 nothing against it." There is the triumphant and in- 
 controvertible evidence — the man healed. Internal and 
 external evidence, arguments a priori and arguments 
 
76 THE THRESHOLD Ot MANHOOD. 
 
 a posteriori^ subtle deductions for the historic authenti- 
 city of Christianity drawn from idiom and mannerism, 
 pleas, treatises, systems, apologetics — let them all go; 
 here is the supreme evidence : ^' And beholding the man 
 who was healed standing with them/' Christianity does 
 not arrest your attention as a system of thought, but as 
 a fact ; not as a philosophy, but as a life. It addresses 
 itself to the common-sense of mankind. It holds no 
 traffic in intellectual casuistries, which are the riddles 
 of the learned ; it puts its proof so plainly that the way- 
 faring man, though a fool, cannot err therein. There are 
 more fools than wise men in the world, and Christian- 
 ity takes count of the fools. For one who can follow 
 a profound argument, there are a million incapable 
 of sustained thought ; and Christianity addresses itself 
 to the incapauities of the common people. Common 
 people have a healthy hunger for facts; and for that 
 mat er, even learned people have a wholesome respect 
 for them. Fact is indeed the highest argument. It 
 is the invincible granite on which the wave of in- 
 tellectual subtlety is always broken. It cannot be put 
 dovvn, or got rid of, or ignored. When you have quite 
 done your profound harangue, it says, '' I am still here. 
 You have not explained me. Please to reckon with 
 me, for you have got to do so sooner or later." You 
 want fact, then, do you ? You ask, not for sermons, 
 but for facts, do you ? You shall have them. Here 
 is a fact which has been standing in the world's high- 
 way this eighteen hundred years, and no one has yet 
 been able to get rid of it : *' And beholding the man 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT, 77 
 
 who w^s healed standing with them." It was no hal- 
 lucination. It could not be got rid of by rubbing the 
 eyes and trying a fresh argument. Here was a man 
 who yesterday could not walk, who had never walked 
 in his life, and here he stood whole, firm-footed, virile, 
 able to walk or race with the strongest of them. Peter 
 might be insolent, but the man was healed, and that 
 was enough to give vehemence to a less turbulent 
 tongue than Peter's. Christianity may be exploded by 
 a hundred treatises, and indeed its total overthrow has 
 been so often announced that we have ceased to be 
 troubled by the news ; but here is the fact, men are 
 healed, millions of them, and are being healed every 
 day. What have you to say to that? When the 
 Sanhedrim looked upon that very lively and obvious 
 fact of the healed cripple, they did the only thing 
 sensible men could do : they admitted they could say 
 nothing against it. 
 
 And it is on that fact I take my stand. Will the 
 eyes of some youth who is already half atheist and 
 altogether infidel read these pages ? I hope they may. 
 You repudiate Christianity because it presents serious 
 difficulties to a philosophic mind. The iron system 
 of necessitarianism which you have built up is logically 
 consistent and complete. It may seem to you right 
 that the world should be emancipated from the follies 
 of supernaturalism and the credulities of creeds. You 
 may even believe that you would confer an inestimable 
 benefit upon mankind in destroying its faith in Jesus. 
 Shelley thought so once; Renan thinks so to-day: I will 
 
78 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 take it for granted that you honestly think so too. 
 But now can you tell me what actual benefit atheism 
 has yet conferred upon mankind, or on yourself? Has 
 atheism proved itself beneficent or philanthropic ? 
 Has it given men the victory over selfishness ? Plas 
 it wiped away the tears of the mourner, or comforted 
 the bruised heart of the orphan, or given crushed and 
 struggling men a new impulse to heroic endeavour ? 
 Has it ever yet built an orphanage, an almshouse, a 
 refuge for the outcast ? Can it show me the man that 
 it has healed ? I have never heard of him. I have 
 heard of the men it has destroyed, but never of the 
 men whom it has healed. I do not remember to have 
 seen an infidel orphanage, an iconoclasts' hospital, 
 or even an almshouse for atheist widows. You can 
 destroy, but you cannot construct. You can slay, but 
 you cannot make alive. You can deform and defile, 
 and make a man's life so bitter to him that suicide 
 wears a new enchantment ; but you cannot heal. I 
 show you the men whom Christianity has healed. I 
 show you the drunkard who is sober, the hopeless who 
 have learned to look up again and become victors, the 
 profligates who have received a new impulse of purity 
 which has lifted them into newness of life, the children 
 of darkness who have become the children of the light. 
 Can you say anything against it ? 
 
 Or does the Socialist read these words ? You too 
 have honest aims. You are filled with the spirit of 
 righteous indignation against the artificial inequalities 
 of life and man's inhumanity to man. In so far I 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 79 
 
 agree with you. But you preach the gospel of spolia- 
 tion, the crusade of universal anarchy, as the prelude 
 to the age of universal happiness ; and in that I dis- 
 agree M^ith you. You had your chance just a hundred 
 years ago in France ; did you heal mankind with that 
 fiery medicine of class-hatred and revenge ? Is the 
 man who was healed found in France to-day? Did 
 that tremendous cautery of revolution after all extir- 
 pate the disease it aimed to cure ? I point you to the 
 one true Socialist, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Take 
 His teachings as the code of individual conduct, 
 and you will soon find the world leavened with a 
 new spirit. Every force that to-day purifies and 
 sweetens the life of nations is the direct fruit of His 
 influence in the world. Wherever Christianity has 
 been honestly applied, there the working socialism of 
 love and charity has been set up ; and the difference 
 between us is simply this : what you seek in vain to 
 do by force, Jesus Christ accomplishes by kindness. 
 Can you say anything against it ? 
 
 And, lastly, I turn, in like manner, to the numerous 
 modern Sanhedrims of philosophers and pedants, states- 
 men who construct ideal republics, writers who are 
 eloquent for untried remedies. Church dignitaries who 
 have lost the spirit of Christ in the pomp and comfort 
 of the world's rewards. Spin the bright weft of your 
 philosophic doubts, construct your ideal society — on 
 paper, pour out your volumes of learned speculation 
 and poetic foreshadowings of the ideal future, but is 
 the man who is healed standing in your midst ? Have 
 
9q THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 you ever really helped any human spirit to a nobler 
 style of living ? Call your congresses, good Churchmen, 
 if you will ; appear in all the pomp of ecclesiastical 
 state : but is the man healed in the midst ? It is to 
 that test all our schemes of human regeneration must 
 eome. And as I ask the question old scenes seem to 
 kindle into life before me. I see John Bunyan dragged 
 before your fathers, and sent home to prison for 
 preaching the Gospel. I see John Wesley reviled or 
 ignored by your elders in the hour when he was saving 
 England frcm the curse your lethargy had brought 
 upon her. I see poor Salvation Army captains brought 
 before you to-day, much as the Galilean fishermen 
 were brought before your relatives a long time ago in 
 Jerusalem, to be handed round, and discussed, and 
 criticised with envious magnanimity or wondering con- 
 tempt. Well, Bunyan, and Wesley, and the Salvation 
 Army can at least give a good account of the notable 
 miracle which has been wrought through them in the 
 healing of multitudes. You can say nothing against it, 
 for the facts are with them. Wherever Christ is, there 
 the old miracle of salvation is still wrought. And 
 therefore I hail any man, any Church, any system, any 
 institution, that can show me the man healed with them. 
 I care not how it may shock my prejudices, how it may 
 insult my dignified preconceptions ; if men are saved, 
 Christ is there. That is the one infallible token of His 
 presence. That is the one unalterable sign of the true 
 Church, for there is '^none other name under heaven 
 given among men whereby we must be saved" 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF FACT. 8i 
 
 The cripple still lies in the Beautiful Gate of the 
 Temple, and the problem we have to solve to-day is 
 how he is to be healed. It is the problem of statesman- 
 ship not less than of the Church. Sabbath by Sabbath, 
 as we come up to the ordered and decorous worship of 
 the Church, there in our very pathway lies the loath- 
 some and leprous form of the unhealed sorrow and 
 misery of the world. The dumb beggar at the gate 
 rebukes us for our pride, and pierces our comfortable 
 formality with the poignant glance of his appeal. He 
 is the living, shuddering, breathing agony of the world 
 laid at our gate ; the sorrows of centuries look out from 
 his dim eyes, and are written on his wasted cheeks. 
 And we are told to-day that, whatever power there was 
 once in Christianity to heal this disfigured form, that 
 force is now exhausted, and the time has come to 
 formulate a religion of humanity which shall supersede 
 the religion of Jesus Christ. Do you remember 
 Tennyson's poem " In the Children's Hospital " ? A 
 little child lies white and patient waiting for the 
 surgeon's knife, and prays to Jesus to help her bear 
 the unknown pain. But the surgeon smiles with grim 
 scepticism at her prayer ; and the nurse who tells the 
 story says, — 
 
 "Then he muttered half to himself; but I know that I heard him say, 
 ' All very well, but the good Lord Jesus has had His day.' 
 Had ? Has it come ? It has only dawned. It will come by-and-bye. 
 Oh, how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world was a lie ? 
 How could I bear with the sights and the loathsome smells of disease 
 But that He said, ' Ye do it to Me when ye do it to these ' ? " 
 
 That puts the whole contention in a nutshell. If the 
 
 6 
 
83 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 good Lord Jesus has had His day, then farewell to the 
 charities and sacrifices which have made life easier to 
 millions ! The truest love of humanity is kindled at 
 the Cross. It is all very well to argue on paper that 
 the moral effects of Christianity can go on without any 
 necessary belief in Christ, but the fact remains that 
 when Christ passes out of Christianity, Christianity is 
 gone. It was in His name and by His power alone 
 that the Apostles spoke healing to this man. In the 
 living love of Christ alone is there the force that can 
 arm men to be the true servants of humanity. In this 
 at least the ages have altered nothing. And this day 
 of His perfect victory has not yet come. But slowly 
 as we pray and toil there rises on the eyes of the 
 spirit the vision that aged poet saw, when he sat 
 down at the end of a long life to write his last poem in 
 the solemn shadows of approaching death. It was a 
 noble farewell to the world ; it is a noble creed for 
 those also who stand upon the threshold of its 
 struggle : — 
 
 *',Out of the shadow of night 
 The world rolls into light; 
 It is daybreak everywhere," 
 
V. 
 
 WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES, 
 
 <• For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of 
 the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the P'atber, but is of the 
 world. And the world passeth awaj', and the lust thereof : but he 
 that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." — I John ii. i6, 17. 
 
 ANY one who reads the Epistles must be struck with 
 the constant recurrence of such phrases as "the 
 world," *' this world," occasionally " this evil world." 
 In what sense is the word used ? Do the Apostles 
 speak of " the world " in our use of the term, as the 
 physical universe, with its glorious vesture of living 
 bloom and beauty, or is " this world " put in contrast 
 with the other worlds of the stellar universe with which 
 astronomy has made us familiar ? We know that the 
 latter supposition is impossible, for the veil of mystery 
 which covers the firmament was not removed for the 
 eyes of John and Paul ; and of that star-sown heaven, 
 with its rings of light and array of planets moving in 
 their ordered courses, they knew nothing. We know 
 that the other interpretation of the phrase would be 
 almost as unfamiliar to them, for it is a curious thing 
 to note that not once in the Acts of the Apostles, not 
 once in the familiar diaries and letters of the Apostles, 
 
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 is there a solitary reference to what we know as 
 natural beauty. The Apostles travelled through the 
 noblest scenery of Europe, but there is not a single 
 phrase which has reached us which might lead us to 
 suppose that they felt its inspiration or were impressed 
 with its charm and glory. It is quite admissible, 
 indeed, to suppose that when they spoke of the world 
 passing away they did include the physical universe, 
 which to them was an unsubstantial pagf^rint. They 
 believed and taught that, firm and stable as the globe 
 looked, yet it was a mere bright illusion, and would 
 vanish in a moment when the elements melted with 
 fervent heat. But in their common use of the phrase 
 " the world " this is scarcely included. In their mouths 
 the word acquired a new and original significance. 
 What was that significance ? The Apostle tells you 
 in these phrases which are my text. 
 
 "The world" to John meant the great fabric of 
 human civilisation, the pomp and splendour, the glory 
 and desire, the lust and ambition, of that creature 
 called man who was its lord and master. It was man 
 who gave significance to the world. It was man who 
 was vastly more than the globe he lived upon. And to 
 John that globe was a place of infinite trial and tempta- 
 tion, and its supreme temptation was to blind men by 
 its shows and splendours to the spiritual significance 
 of life. It was the Vanity Fair, where the pilgrims of 
 eternity forgot their noblest purposes and were allured 
 from their Divine quest. Its gaiety and glory, its 
 glittering baubles and visions of beauty, bewitched the 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 85 
 
 sense and made man forget the greatness of his origin 
 and the greatness of his destiny ; in its booths of 
 pleasure and chambers of delight, its novelty and fasci- 
 nation, and airy laughter, men were allured to destruc- 
 tion and forgot that they were pilgrims and sojourners 
 as all their fathers were. And what, after all, was the 
 world but a mere series of shows and vanities, like 
 a village fair, all alive at night with light and music, 
 and in the morning nothing left but the trodden grass 
 and a broken pole or two to mark where it had been. 
 It was passing away like a stage picture upon which 
 the curtain would soon fall. It would pass, and " leave 
 not a wrack behind ; " but he that did the will of God, 
 he that pushed on in his quest towards the house of 
 God beyond, would abide for ever. 
 
 One can readily construct a very noble picture of the 
 influence which these thoughts had upon the lives of 
 the Apostles. One can follow Paul or John as they 
 pass on their many pilgrimages, with their faces lighted 
 with this rapt and silent flame and their hearts full of 
 this great and simple thought. We see them enter 
 great cities — cities like Athens, and Ephesus, and 
 Corinth. There, on every side, rise vast temples, 
 theatres, academies. There the chariots, with silver 
 axles, go flashing down the streets ; and the soldiers, 
 with glittering banners, are massed in mimic war ; and 
 the air is everywhere perfumed with pleasure, and 
 alive with the quick, eager, throbbing vitality of a great 
 and sensuous people. We follow these men as they 
 walk in their tattered raiment among the happy throngs, 
 
86 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 and we notice that that still flame upon their faces 
 seems to burn brighter as they go. The flower-decked 
 throngs, the crowded theatre, the music of the viol and 
 lute — the spectacle of all that various, busy, brilliant life, 
 seems to have no fascination for them. They pass on 
 to the city's poorest quarter, and there, entering some 
 low doorway, they look upon a very different scene. 
 And what is that? It is a little group of simple, 
 humble, hard-working men and women who have 
 come together to learn the lessons of the Crucified. 
 But on their faces, too, there burns this same flame, 
 and their faces are marked by this sam.e upward wist- 
 fulness, for these men are united by a common thought 
 and are animated by a common purpose. And what is 
 that ? The thought is this : that, after all, that great 
 world outside is passing away. Time, the great scene- 
 shifter, already touches it ; and soon silence will have 
 fallen on theatre and stadium, and it will have vanished 
 like a dream. But this little group of men have dis- 
 covered something which will never fade or wither; 
 they have found the great secret after which the East 
 had always yearned, the futile dream of science and of 
 philosophy for ages. They have found immortal life. 
 Ephesus will pass ; Corinth will be sown with dust ; the 
 chariot-wheels of time will roll over all these great 
 cities of Asia Minor, and level and obliterate them so 
 that one stone will not be left upon another. The 
 great world itself ^ill be rolled up like a garment, and 
 put away like a worn-out vesture. But these men and 
 won^en will stand unhurt amid the wreck of empire. 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 87 
 
 and stand victorious over time and death. They are 
 heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. '* The world 
 passeth away, but he that doeth the will of God abides 
 for ever." 
 
 Now, let us ask, was this the mere morbid dream 
 of an ascetic, or was it true ? And if it be true, in 
 what way is it true ? What is it that is passing 
 away ? What is it that abides ? Why does it abide ? 
 Let us try for a few moments to answer these ques- 
 tions. 
 
 " The world." " This world." By implication, then, 
 there is another world. I need not dwell long upon 
 that primary fact. I only dwell upon it that I may say 
 this much : that if there are any people who more 
 than others are apt to forget the existence of another 
 and a spiritual world, unseen, but real and close to 
 them day and night, it is the people who live in cities. 
 The very housetops shut out the visible heavens from 
 view. The contiguity of human life seems to lessen 
 the sense of Divine mystery. Men who spend many 
 solitary hours with nature — men whose calling is in 
 the great waters or the open fields — cannot help feeling 
 something of the ghostly side of nature. For them 
 there are presences on the solitary hills ; there are 
 voices in the wind ; and there is the sense of unseen 
 life touching them on all sides, to which the imagination 
 is sensitive and coni^ious. But when men come to 
 live in cities, they are like little children who crowd 
 round the bright fire in a little room, and do their best 
 to forget the illimitable mystery of the wide night that 
 
88 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 reigns without. There is no solitude ; there is no time 
 for silent communing ; there is no chance for nature to 
 find us. The veil between us and the angel-world 
 seemed very thin in the days when the rushing of the 
 wind over the wide moor at night seemed like the 
 passing of many wings, and when the shimmering of 
 the moonlight in the shadow of the trees was like the 
 white gliding of heavenly presences. But here it is a 
 thick and stifling curtain, and the sense of wonder 
 slowly perishes within us. We have no sense that 
 we are passing away. We are like men on board ship 
 who fulfil their duty hour after hour as though they 
 were upon the land, and forget that every moment the 
 screw turns and the wake of foam flies behind, and 
 league after league of wave is passed \ and busy as 
 they are, still they are being borne on unconsciously 
 beneath the wind-swept vault of heaven to the distant 
 harbour. Everything with us seems so fixed and so 
 stable — the bank, the 'change, the office, the order and 
 routine of life and duty — that the natural instinct 
 of another world, real and near, gradually decays, and 
 we are apt to become men of this world, who have 
 their portion in this life. 
 
 But John specifies in these phrases precisely what he 
 means when he says that the world is passing away. 
 First of all, he says that " the lust of the flesh '* passes 
 away. By that I understand the animal needs and 
 appetites, the physical strength and vigour. If you 
 take it in the narrowest sense, how true it is. " Lust, 
 when it has conceived, bringeth forth death." Lust 
 
WHAT IT IS Til AT LXDURES. 89 
 
 Stings itself to death. There is a period in life when 
 the desires of the flesh exercise immeise influence and 
 subtle power over the imagination. They seem to 
 promise illimitable delight and inexhaustible pVasure. 
 They sting the flesh with their violence, and send the 
 blood boiling through the veins like a tide of fire. 
 The imagination runs through the world and sees 
 everywhere alluring forms which point to intoxicating 
 joys. That is not an unusual experience. It is 
 common to all of us in the heyday of youth and 
 strength; and I only allude to it to ask this ques- 
 tion: Have you considered that this is passing away? 
 Do you know that the gamut of appetite and passion 
 is very limited after all ? You can soon reach 
 up and strike the topmost note, and downward and 
 strike the lowest. Do you know that these violent 
 delights have violent ends ? They are soon exhausted, 
 and the hungry passion is satiated, and the promise 
 which it made is found a cheat. It is so. It is so if 
 for no other reason than this : because physical Hfe 
 itself fails. Youth is soon gone ; manhood is soon 
 passed ; old age is soon reached. You are not what 
 you were. Already the keen edge and zest of earthly 
 appetite is blunted. You disHke, perhaps, to admit it ; 
 and yet you know in your hearts that the best cup of 
 wine which life has to give you is already drunk, and 
 that life will never prepare again for you the like. 
 You say, perhaps, as Shelley said — and some of you 
 say it at the age at which Shelley said it : you say it at 
 thirty ; you say it with a heart embittered ; you say 
 
90 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 it with a life shattered ; you say it standing amid 
 ruined hopes — 
 
 « O world, O life, O time, 
 On whose last str ps I climb, 
 
 Trembling at that where I stood firm before, 
 When shall return the glory of my prime? 
 No more, ah nevermore ! 
 
 "Out of the day and the night 
 A joy has taken flight ; 
 Fresh spring, summer, and winter hoar 
 Shall fill my heart with grief. 
 But with delight 
 
 No more, ah nevermore 1 " 
 
 In other words, the lust of the flesh is passing away. 
 Your desires, and passions, and appetites are already 
 weakened by drudgery, by sickness, by use, by years ; 
 and they smoulder like a fire which is almost spent. 
 You fan it for a moment into feverish activity, but that 
 is all. The flame spurts up to die down again into 
 deeper darkness. 
 
 Have you lived, then, for the lust of the flesh ? Are 
 you, young man, living for the lust of the flesh ? Are 
 the chief uses and joys of your life mere animal uses 
 and jo3^s ? Then you will soon be bankrupt. They 
 are passing away ; and you will soon realise the bitter 
 epigram, " Youth is folly ; manhood is struggle ; old 
 age is regret." 
 
 Then, again, John uses another phrase : " the lust 
 of the eyes." The eye is the portal of innumerable 
 delights. It is *'the meeting-place of many worlds." 
 Through it there stream in upon the mind the vision 
 of beauty, the revelation of science, the pomp and 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 91 
 
 pageantry of earthly power, all the bright, shifting 
 splendour of human glory. Have you ever considered 
 that riches appeal mainly to the eye ? It is the eye 
 which interprets to a man the stateliness of the house 
 which he has built, the beauty of the gardens which he 
 has laid out, the picture's charm, the statue's grace, 
 the horse's symmetry — in a word, all those costly 
 embellishments with which wealth can adorn life. To 
 the blind man they are nothing. To be blind is to lose 
 almost everything that riches can bestow. Yet, says 
 John, the lust of the eyes, too, is a fading passion 
 which is soon satiated. The first house a man buys 
 looks better and bigger to him than any house he owns 
 afterwards. The first picture a man owns brings him 
 more genuine pleasure than all the others put together. 
 And, after all, a man can only sleep in one bed at a 
 time, and can only live in one house at a time ; and 
 that lust of the eye which desires to add house to 
 house and land to land has a lessening pleasure in 
 its acquisitions. Like the lust of the flesh, after all 
 it is a life of sensation ; and all sensation is limited 
 and soon exhausted. You, perhaps, have set your 
 hope in some such direction as this. You desire 
 to be rich ; your eye lusts for the luxurious abodes 
 of wealth and the circumstance and state of social 
 greatness. When the lust of the flesh fails, the lust 
 of the eye often develops ; and the man who has lost 
 the one frantically tries to recoup himself by flying to 
 the other. But it is vain. The miseries of the idle 
 rich, their enmity their listlessness, their discontent, their 
 
92 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 imbecile thirst for new sensations, their perpetual 
 invention of new and artificial joys, remind us how 
 true are the words of John that the lust of the eyes, 
 too, passes away. 
 
 And the third aspect of the world John characterises 
 as ** the pride of life." That may signify either the 
 pride of power or the pride of knowledge. Take it, for 
 instance, as the pride of power. Take it in regard to 
 that great and splendid empire with which the Apostles 
 were famihar. It seemed built to last for ever. It was 
 just ; it was powerful ; it was imposing. To be a 
 Roman was to be armed with an invincible defence. It 
 was a proud boast which clothed the meanest man with 
 dignity. The tramp of the legions of Rome echoed in 
 every city ; the silver eagles were borne in triumph 
 through all the world ; its laws had imposed civilisation 
 upon the most barbarous peoples ; and its power had 
 crushed nation after nation Hke green withs in the hand 
 of a giant. There was no sign in John's day of any 
 overthrow. Its colossal fabric rose without seam or 
 fissure, and it seemed as stable as the everlasting hills. 
 Yet this solitary man told the truth when he said, not 
 merely that it would pass away, but that it was passing 
 away. He recognised a deeper law than man's — that 
 mysterious law of God which seems to take nation after 
 nation, and give to nations their chance, and strengthen 
 them with universal victory, and then depose them, lest 
 one good custom should corrupt the world. Egypt, 
 Chaldea, Bab3'lon, Greece, all had had their day, and 
 ceased to be. And so it would be with Rome. This 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 93 
 
 solitary man stood before its impregnable walls, and 
 saw the doom already written on them, and in his 
 vision saw them sink in the great abyss, and time close 
 up above the wreck, as the waters close up above some 
 stupendous shipwreck. He said that it would pass 
 away and was passing away. We to-day know that 
 it has passed away. 
 
 And it is true of the pride of knowledge. The justest 
 and noblest pride of life, because the highest, is the 
 pride of knowledge. Yet that, too, is transient. 
 Nothing shifts its boundaries so often. Nothing is so 
 illusive. Nothing passes through such strange and 
 rapid transformations. The knowledge of Galileo 
 would be the ignorance of to-day ; and if Isaac Newton 
 were alive now, he would have to go to school again. 
 A century, a half-century, a single decade, is often 
 sufficient to thrust the most brilliant discoveries into 
 oblivion, and to number them with the memories of an 
 obsolete past. The steam engine has supplanted the 
 coach ; but the steam engine is already passing away, 
 and in fifty years' time will be supplanted by some 
 greater and more serviceable power. The telegraph 
 has bound nations, together, and has made all nations 
 neighbours; but the telephone is becoming its rival: and 
 in another century and less, perhaps, men will hear each 
 other'b whispers round the globe. Gas has played its 
 part, but few can doubt that years will efface it with a 
 nobler light ; and our children will wonder at our gas 
 jets, just as we wonder at and pity our ancestors with 
 their farthing candles. A thousand illustrations might 
 
94 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 be given of how knowledge perpetually effaces its past, 
 and the discoveries of which we are so proud perish even 
 while we praise them. You cannot rest in science, for 
 science knows no rest. It knows no finality. It is like 
 Jonah's gourd : it doubles itself while he sleeps. It 
 does not abide ; it cannot abide. It is merely another 
 great object lesson which the Great Master puts upon 
 His black-board, as it were ; and then He rubs the 
 diagram out and begins a higher and nobler one. If, 
 then, you enthrone yourself on the confident edicts of the 
 latest science, if you should oppose to the simplicity of 
 the Divine teaching the intellectual pride of a mind 
 secure in what it calls " scientific certainty," I reply 
 that there is no certainty in science ; it is passing 
 away. It affords no place for the sole of the foot. 
 The knowledge of to-day will be the ignorance of 
 to-morrow, and the abstrusest calculations of time will 
 be the mere rudiments and alphabet of eternity. 
 
 Nor is this a mournful truth. It is rather a glorious 
 and hopeful one. It is no tolling bell which announces 
 that the world is passing away. It is rather the 
 pealing of a triumphant trumpet. It means that God's 
 law is progress ; and that is a glorious truth for those 
 who can understand it. But there is a mournful side 
 to progress, and it is that many men resent it, and 
 cling to their old habitations long after the doom of 
 decay has been written over them. School is an admir- 
 able thing, but we do not always want to be at school. 
 We catch visions of a larger life beyond. We are 
 waiting for the moment when the Master will say that 
 
WHAT IT JS THAT ENDURES. 95 
 
 school is ended, and the door is opened ; and we shall 
 leave this little schoolhouse to find a world larger than 
 we dreamt of, and nobler and more various in its employ- 
 ments than we have ever conceived. That is the true 
 view of life ; and therefore we cannot regret, but rather 
 rejoice, that one by one our lessons are ending, our 
 classes are, being passed : we are graduating in the 
 discipline of life, and are passing to the life of eternity. 
 Well, then, what is it that abides ? In a word 
 it is character. It is what a man is, not what a 
 man knows, or what a man acquires, or what a man 
 achieves. Character outlives the centuries. Moses, 
 Paul, John, stand before the world to-day untouched 
 by the defacement of time. What they were they 
 are, and what they are they will be through all the 
 unmeasured and immeasurable spaces of eternity. 
 The lust of the flesh perishes. Of all those gay 
 multitudes who filled the streets of Ephesus, and 
 paced with busy feet across the squares of Corinth, 
 not a footprint remains ; and their passion, their pride, 
 and their lust have perished with them. The lust 
 of the eyes perishes ; and Babylon is marked by a 
 heap of rubbish, and ancient Rome by a crumbling 
 arch, a weather-beaten pillar, a ruined Coliseunu 
 
 " Where the domed and daring palape 
 Shot its spires 
 Up like fires ; 
 Where a tower in ancient time 
 
 Sprang sublime, 
 And a burning ring all round 
 The chariots traced 
 As they raced ; 
 
96 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Where the multitude of men 
 
 Breathed joy and woe 
 
 Long ago, 
 Nowthe country does not even 
 
 Boast a tree, 
 
 As you see." 
 
 And the pride of life, the curious speculations of the 
 world's greatest philosophers, become the, pastime of 
 the learned ; and their names become thin shadows in 
 a vanished past. But there is something that abides ; 
 it is character. "He that does the will of God 
 abides for ever." 
 
 And that is true in its mere altruistic and earthly 
 sense. Character abides. We all of us know the 
 beautiful verse of George Eliot, — 
 
 " Oh, may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In lives made better by their presence." 
 
 It expresses a noble truth ; such lives do live again. 
 Such lives do not know death. The trampling and 
 confusion of victorious armies die away; the pomp 
 and glory of throne and court perish; the very con- 
 quests of knowledge are forgotten. But lives that are 
 lived for others, lives that are lived in doing the will 
 of God, lives that sow the seed of goodness and of 
 noble impulse in the hearts of others — those lives go 
 on living, and defy the centuries. The thoughts of 
 Paul are more to us to-day than all the triumphs of 
 Rome. The life of Jesus is infinitely more to us 
 than the lives of all the Caesars put together And 
 when the glory of empire is forgotttn^ and when all 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 97 
 
 the brilliant achievements of a man's life are blotted 
 out by the obhterating hand of death, Jesus tells us 
 there is one thing which will be remembered — one 
 thing which, perhaps, the man himself has forgotten, 
 but it is remembered in the heart of God : inasmuch 
 as this nan "gave a cup of water" to one of these 
 little ones, it is remembered at the judgment day, 
 when he stands before his Master. Goodness, mercy, 
 love, all that constitutes character— the hfe Hved in 
 the service of others, the life poured out in self-for- 
 getful toil, the life of the saint, and the hero, and 
 the martyr— we see that these do abide for ever in 
 the memory of mankind ; and still more do they abide 
 in the records of heaven. 
 
 But John goes deeper than that, he shows us how 
 character is to be gained. It is by doing the will 
 of God. In each man's heart there is the revelation 
 (f that will. There is no life that God does not 
 touch. There is no man who can escape the scrutiny 
 or who can escape the voice of God ; and to do that 
 will of God as that will is revealed, to do it when 
 it is difficult, to do it simply, and humbly, and obe- 
 diently—that is the way towards character, towards 
 character whit h outlivt s death. 
 
 Notice, it is personal life which John speaks of when 
 he says that such a man will abide for ever. It is not 
 the immoitality of memory and influence. It is not 
 that impel sonal im.mortahty which simply means that 
 our lives will be a mere bright tradition living among 
 men and blessing them when we are gone. Oh, no : 
 
 7 
 
98 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 it is personal life. The man who does the will of 
 God passes through a stage of moral evolution. He 
 enters upon immo'tal life. He has broken the barrier 
 of the earthly, ard has inherited the heavenly. He 
 has touched a higher life, and has already begun to 
 live with an everlasting and Divine vitality. Doing 
 the will of God, he has put himself, as it were, in 
 line and in touch with the living power of the universe ; 
 and he shares its life. He has broken the walls of 
 this sluggish life as the chrysalis breaks its cerements 
 when the silken wings are given to it, and it flutters 
 away in o the spring air, "a thing of beauty and 
 a joy for ever." So the man who does the will 
 of God has passed out of a lower condition into a 
 higher condition. He has passed through a moral 
 evolution which enables him to lay hold of a larger 
 and of a higher life. He is joined to God, and God 
 is immortal He is grafted on a living tree ; and, 
 poor as the graft may be, the life of that Divine 
 tree soon fills its veins : and it, too, lives for ever. 
 
 O, young men ! there is the secret of immortality. 
 Do the will of God ; love the love of God ; live the 
 life of God : and " this is Hfe eternal, to know the 
 only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent." 
 
 And, blessed be God, there are men all over the 
 world who have consciously entered upon this eternal 
 life. Just as we see Paul or John turning aside from 
 the crowded ways of som.e great city, leaving the wide 
 streets, with their brilliant throngs and their vivid and 
 various life; just as we catch sight of them as they 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. 99 
 
 enter some low doorway and find a little group of 
 men and women who have received this message 
 of immortality, so we turn aside from the streets of 
 our great cities, and every here and there we find 
 gathered little groups and congregations of men and 
 women who have consciously entered on eternal 
 life. Not many great, not many mighty, but many 
 poor and many humble there are, whose life is filled 
 with this daily consciousness of life in God. They 
 feel in themselves the power of an endless life. They 
 know that Christ is born in them, the hope of glory. 
 They know in whom they have believed, and are 
 persuaded that He will keep that which they have com- 
 mitted to Him against the eternal day. Their poor 
 homes are lit with the splendour of the true Shechinah. 
 Their feet move to the sound of heavenly music. Their 
 homes are filled with the whisperings of voices sweeter 
 than any earthly. They are daily trying to live as 
 Christ lived. They are seeking to be gentle, meek, 
 and humble, to comfort the broken-hearted sister, to 
 nurse the sick child, to lift the stumbling feet. London 
 will pass away ; its cathedral, its Parliament-house, 
 its palaces, its Bank, its Exchange, its mighty streets, 
 its noble monuments, will all crumble before the breath 
 of the ages ; and some day, perhaps, the sea will 
 roll over the spot where now St. Paul's lifts its 
 golden cross, and the wild fowl will cry over the 
 place where once St. Stephen's sheltered those who 
 held the world in awe : but these, the poorest and 
 the humblest of them, will live long after London 
 
lOO THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 has vanished Hke a distempered dream — for, having 
 done the will of God on earth, they will have fitted 
 themselves to do the will of God in heaven, and will 
 abide for ever. The greatness of England herself 
 will one day pass away. The bonds of her mighty 
 empire will be loosened. The story of her long 
 supremacy will become a tale of reverend antiquity, 
 and other fleets than ours will sail the seas, and 
 another flag than ours will be carried round the world 
 in triumph. But the victory of these, who did the 
 will of God, will still abide, and they will share the 
 glory of a kingdom which is everlasting and of whose 
 power there is no end. 
 
 And at last the world itself will toil onward to its 
 close, and its central fires will cool and its infinite life 
 and glory will perish; but in that hour 
 
 "When the stars grow cold, 
 And the world grows old, 
 And the leaves of the judgment book unfold,** 
 
 those who have done the will of the Father will still 
 abide in a world where there is no night, no sorrow or 
 sighing, no decay or death. Oh, it is no dream, it is 
 no poet's vision, it is no vain utterance. It is the 
 message of Christ, uttered, perhaps, to rebellious 
 hearts and to sceptical ears, that we may come unto 
 Him and have life, and have it more abundantly. 
 
 And we may do another thing : we may become 
 men of this world, and have our portion in this life. 
 We may be dazzled and deceived by its splendours ; 
 we may deny free play to the nobler instincts that are 
 
WHAT IT IS THAT ENDURES. loi 
 
 within us ; we may quench the Holy Spirit which 
 kindles in us Divine yearnings. You may narrow 
 your life down till you become contented with it in 
 its narrowness, just as the prisoner, long imprisoned, 
 forgets the green, bright world outside and the singing 
 of the lark, and at last is content with his cell, and even 
 comforts himself that his cell is better than another 
 next to him ; and so because there is a lower depth 
 still opening which he has not yet reached, he is happy 
 in his narrow world, and congratulates himself on his 
 imprisonment. And so you will have your portion in 
 this life. You will have it as Dives had it, of whom 
 it is said : " He died and was buried." There was 
 nothing else to say. But that treasure in the heaven, 
 that secure habitation, that Divine life of purity and 
 duty, you will have lost. You will have gained that 
 which brings with it sorrow in the getting. You will 
 have lost that which alone was worth the gaining ; 
 and what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
 world and lose his own life — his life of lives, his 
 own soul ? 
 
VI. 
 
 PURITY, 
 
 "Keep thyself pure." — I Tim. v. 22. 
 
 THIS is a counsel to a young man, spoken by an 
 aged man. The young are the strength of the 
 present and the inheritors of the future ; theirs is the 
 accumulated wisdom of the ages which are ended and 
 the endless hopes of the ages which are to come. 
 They bring the vigour of undiminished energy into 
 the struggle where older men are weary, and are the 
 perpetual reserve-force which nature marches up to re- 
 inforce the baffled armies of to-day. That which aged 
 hearts have longed in vain to see they will behold ; the 
 broken promises of the past it will be theirs to possess 
 and redeem. The old man catches at his few remaining 
 years of life as a miser at his lessening gold, but the 
 young man has a sense of infinite wealth in the un- 
 squandered future which is his. To be young is to 
 be a millionaire in hope, to feel young is very bliss. A 
 nation's future is with her young men, for what the man 
 of twenty thinks the nation will soon think. I address 
 you, then, as the only truly wealthy people in the world 
 — rich in strength, in resolve, in ambition, in time, in 
 opportunity ; you, who stand in the golden gateways 
 
PURITY 163 
 
 of the dawn, and see the years before you like a fruit- 
 ful country at your feet ripe for conquest ; and with 
 no nobler word can I salute you, as you go down to 
 your battle and your inheritance, than this w rd of 
 Paul's to Timothy : ' Keep thyself pure." 
 
 Now, if I were to ask you. What is the greatest force 
 in human life? I wonder what reply you would give me. 
 There are many men, and among them those with the 
 keenest knowledge of the world, who would perhaps 
 answer, Afow^j/. See, they would say, what money can do ! 
 It can dictate war or peace for nations, it binds together 
 the most distant lands with invisible cords, it can lift 
 the beggar into honour and the pauper into the proud- 
 est vantage-ground of luxury, it can shake the markets 
 of the world with one whisper of its golden lips, it 
 can infect whole peoples with the frenzy of avarice at 
 the rattling of its burnished coin. Money, like a mighty 
 sorceress, mesmerises the world into obedience ; and to 
 possess it the patriot will sell his country, the man of 
 genius his brains, the woman her chastity, the merchant 
 his conscience. Money harnesses the lightning to run 
 its errands, and plucks the heart of the earth out to swell 
 its gains. It is the Hfe-blood of commerce and the 
 defence of nations. For lack of it the charities of noble 
 hearts are unexpressed, and the inventor's skill is para- 
 lysed upon the brink of victory. Great is money, cries 
 the youth who stands amid the whirl of life in a great 
 city, for is it not what all the city seeks, the secret pivot 
 round which all the vast circles of the roaring, restless 
 maelstrom perpetually revolve and race ? 
 
104 I^HE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Or, says another, Power, force of intellect, foresight, 
 will — these things are the mightiest forces in human 
 life. The faculty of governing makes one man the lord 
 of m.illions, and one nation the dictator of the world. 
 Money without brains is a w-eapon without hands to 
 wield it ; money is the end of little men, but the means 
 of great ones. But this strenuous faculty, which we 
 call greatness in a man, is the real master, gathering 
 into its mighty hands the threads of opportunity, and 
 weaving from them the purple robe of fame, defying 
 circumstance, and making it the ladder of ambition. 
 
 Or, cries yet another, Love is the real master of the 
 universe. Men are governed by their passions, and 
 the heart is the rudder which turns the ship of man- 
 hood whither it will upon the roaring time-floods. 
 The heajrt prompts the intellect, and the intellect rules 
 tlie will, and the will shapes the world. Love, in the 
 blindness of its passion, has wrecked empires, ruined 
 statesmen, and sapped the pillars of the most ancient 
 thrones and temples. It is, in fact, the vital heat of 
 life, and the hearts of men are the real seats of govern- 
 ment, the centres from which the world is ruled. 
 
 Money, Power, Love — is there no mightier force in 
 the world than these ? Money, which takes to itself 
 wings and flies away ; power, which covers the world 
 with empire and perishes in the impotence of exile; 
 love, which drops its magic wand at the vision of the 
 open grave ? Think again ; is there nothing higher, 
 mightier, diviner ? There is. Character is the grandest 
 force the world possesses. It is that which determines 
 
PURITY. 105 
 
 the use and direction of money, and love, and ambition. 
 It is that which is the secret force working behind and 
 through all human life. It is character which shapes 
 the centmics, and leaves its indelible mark on the 
 records of the world. Character never dies ; the tomb 
 is its enfranchisement, the indefinite enlargement of its 
 area of influence. The words of Shakespeare are but 
 the beautiful vesture spun to clothe his character, and 
 his character is the living form which moves within 
 his works. Character is that solitary and inalienable 
 possession which time and death cannot destroy, which 
 survives vicissitudes and sorrows, which rises triumphant 
 over the brief infamy of slander, and pierces the frail 
 defence of lying praise ; character is that which shapes 
 life and determines destiny, and which death itself is 
 impotent to annihilate or overthrow. 
 
 Now, push the question a step further, and ask, what 
 is the greatest force in determining character ? There, 
 again, you might reply, Energy, perseverance, purpose; 
 but these are the results rather than the causes of 
 character. There is a diviner quality, and that is 
 Purity. Purity is Hfe ; purity is the true vital element 
 which supplies energy to character. Glance over the 
 crowded field of human action, and see how true this is. 
 There are men we meet who seem prodigally g fted in 
 many ways, but there is some mysterious lack about 
 them, of which we are painfully conscious. Their 
 words are eloquent and beautiful enough, yet they do 
 not impress us; their presence is fascinating, yet it has 
 no potency really to affect others. Somehow we do 
 
io6 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 not trust them ; there is an instinct which warns us 
 they are laths painted to look like iron, that their 
 brilliance springs from no true interior light, but is 
 merely outward, like the deceptive glimmer of phos- 
 phorescent paint, which makes a clothes-prop shine 
 like a pillar of fire ; that, in fact, the real man is very 
 different to the apparent man. There are other men 
 we meet whose intellectual gifts are perhaps very 
 limited, but yet they are clothed with a mysterious 
 power, and make us sensible of a prevailing personality. 
 There is something accompanying the word they speak, 
 a breath of divinest music which pierces to the heart's 
 core. Men say when they leave such a man, ^' He's a 
 good man," although he has never said a word about 
 religion. Bad and worldly men seem to feel a strange 
 and subtle fragrance falling on their world-hardened 
 hearts while they talk with them, like the faint gust of 
 sweet perfume blown by spring winds from distant 
 violet-beds and yellow meadows, which sometimes 
 penetrates the London smoke, and meets us unaware, 
 and suddenly makes us yearn for the country. What 
 is this power? It is purity. Like the light which 
 shone on the face of Mo?es after he had talked with 
 God, so a mysterious splendour seems to clothe the 
 man whose heart is pure. But the impure heart 
 vitiates everything. It leer^ like a satyr out of the 
 eyes which gleam with intellect ; it runs like a mocking 
 discord through the voice which thrills with eloquence. 
 The impure man carries with him a force which per- 
 meates and spoils everything, and which discounts all 
 
PURITY, 107 
 
 his gifts of intellect. It was purity which robed Christ 
 as with a garment of power, and was an invisible 
 armour shielding Him from the shafts of enmity. It 
 was the secret of a majesty men could not comprehend, 
 of a spell men yielded to even while they hated Him. 
 It fell upon them like a great and searching light ; 
 silent as the light it wrought its magic, mighty as the 
 light it miraculously prevailed, beautiful as the light it 
 shamed the darkness and drove it back discomfited. 
 Unquenched by infamy and death, it broke out anew 
 upon a cross at whose foot the very executioner cried, 
 " This is a just man ; " and it has since flooded the 
 world with a splendour which has pierced all ages and 
 drawn the wondering regard of all. Christ was the 
 Light of the world, and the light that dwelt in Him 
 was the Divine Light of a perfect purity. 
 
 That absolute sinless purity of Christ stands 
 alone ; but I have now to ask you to remember that 
 there are two great inheritances which every man starts 
 the world with — viz., Human Innocence and Puritv. 
 Christ presupposed that when He looked round upon 
 that great crowd at the Mount, and said, " Blessed are 
 the pure in heart, for they shall see God." He seemed 
 to have recognised there some of those flower-like 
 human faces which are full of innocence. Paul also 
 urges Timothy to maintain unimpaired that which he 
 already possesses : " Keep thyself pure." Christ makes 
 the type of Christian character a little child ; and to 
 have a child's heart — fresh, loving, docile, innocent — is 
 to enter the kingdom of God. Do you say, Has the 
 
io8 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 child no evil tendencies ? There are tendencies, tem- 
 pers, passions which are full of peril, but the child's 
 heart is pure, his mind is untainted. He comes to us 
 clothed in the celestial raiment of innocence, and purity 
 is the crown and secret of his beauty. O blessed little 
 children, we are sometimes tempted to cry, would that 
 we could keep you from the evil sights and sounds of 
 this sad world! Would that we might shut you up in 
 some garden of lilies and roses, far from the ways oi 
 men, that you might grow as sweetly as the flowers, 
 and be clothed with as fair a beauty, and distil as rich 
 a fragrance ! Would that the tender bloom upon the 
 mind might never be rubbed off, that the pathetic 
 ignorance of evil might never be bartered for polluting 
 knowledge! But for whom is that possible? And if 
 it were possible, would it be desirable ? Have not men 
 and women often fled the world to escape the evil of 
 the world, and has not the result been that the pc llu- 
 tions of the n on.stery have outweighed its pieties ? 
 I should be a poor coun e.lor of young men if I taught 
 3 ou that purity is only pj£s"b'e by isolation from the 
 v/orld. We do not want that sort of hohness which 
 can only thrive in seclusion ; we want that virile, 
 manly purity which keeps itself unspotted from the 
 world, even amid its worst debasements, just as the 
 lily lifts its slender chalice of white and gold to heaven, 
 untainted by the soil in which it grows, though that 
 soil be the reservoir of death and putrefaction. You 
 may make your bed in hell, and yet be clothed with 
 the raiment of heaven ; you may touch the impure, 
 
PURITY. 109 
 
 and know the secrets of impurity, and yet keep the 
 untainted thought and uncorrupted Hfe. Innocence 
 perishes, but purity may survive. One has the fragile 
 beauty of the flower, the other of the block of crystal, 
 drawn out of the darkness, but still white ; or of the 
 diamond, lying in its bed of clay, but with the fiery 
 sunlight still stored up in its heart, and flashed forth 
 undimmed upon the comradeship of dust in which it 
 lies. Innocent we scarce can be ; pure we all may be. 
 I ask you then to notice. Purity is possible; it is a 
 possession; it may be kept, *' Keep thyself:" that 
 teaches individual responsibility. Get that fact clear 
 and distinct to the mind; grasp it, and live by it. 
 And why do I emphasise this very trite and common- 
 place observation? Because we hve in a world of 
 bottomless cant, and the first duty of a true man is to 
 free his mind from cant. Men pray " lead us not into 
 temptation," and then hang round a drinking-bar ; they 
 say *' deliver us from evil," and then sit down to read 
 a scrofulous French novel. Men pray God to keep 
 them, and then open their ears to the foul story or 
 indecent jest ; they look to God's grace to save them, 
 but they take no pains to save themselves. But God's 
 grace is useless to the man who will not use it. It 
 is hke the sunlight ; we can have it for the asking, 
 but we must draw up our blinds to let it in. It is 
 like water — everywhere — but God does not cause it 
 to spring up exactly under our dining-room tables to 
 save us the trouble of drawing it ; if we want it, we 
 must fetch it. How can God keep a man pure who 
 
no THE THRESHOLD OE MANHOOD. 
 
 has eyes full of adultery, and who lets his imagination 
 feed upon the secret suggestions of unchaste passion ? 
 A 'man might as well pray to escape fever, and yet 
 persist in sleeping with a fever corpse ; to escape fever 
 you must guard against it. Young men plead the 
 strength of their passions and the ardency of their 
 imaginations, but strong passions are simply an in- 
 dication of weak will. The world is full of bright and 
 holy things for the imagination to feed upon; but if 
 you feed it with offal, what wonder that the thought 
 is coarse ? A man's will is the king of his body ; let 
 the will rule then. But remember you cannot take 
 fire into the bosom and not be burned; you cannot 
 listen to impure jests and be unpolluted ; you cannot 
 read vile stories and remain clean ; the seat of the 
 scorner is a bad place to sing God's praises in, and he 
 W'ho stands in the way of the ungodly soon is hustled 
 onward by the crowd, and must needs walk and run 
 in the way too. If thou wouldst be pure, " Keep 
 thyself pure." 
 
 Further, it must be noted Purity is not Outward^ but 
 Inward. How can a man keep himself pure ? Read 
 Leviticus, and you will see how men once attempted 
 it. The Mosaic law is one great treatise on purity ; 
 there were certain meats impure, certain acts and con- 
 ditions of health impure, and certain washings and 
 ceremonies were needed to restore the forfeited purity. 
 It was all outward and physical, and for a degraded 
 people, learning the alphabet of moraHty, it was no 
 doubt a good and wise discipline. Nations walk 
 
PURITY. I»« 
 
 before they run ; they learn the elements of physical 
 purity before the greater lesson of spiritual purity, 
 and perhaps a clean body has more to do with a clean 
 mind than some of us suppose. But because this 
 Mosaic purity was all physical and outward, it broke 
 down ultimately. Men found out that purity began 
 within and worked outward, not without and worked 
 inward. And so, what did David say? He had no 
 doubt scrupulously observed every law of physical 
 purity, and yet in one wild hour of passion he became 
 an adulterer and a murderer. And then what did he 
 say ? '' Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew 
 a right spirit within me!" The fifty-first Psalm is 
 the most pathetic cry which ever came up to God from 
 the depths of a man's sore heart and sinful spirit ! It 
 is the acknowledgment that sin begins inside a man, 
 and that there can be no change of act till there is 
 a change of heart ; that to be pure the spirit must be 
 pure; to act righteously we must think righteously; 
 to Hve w^ell before men we must live well before God. 
 '' Oh," cries the poor, soiled, broken-spirited man in 
 his hour of shame, '' create in me a clean heart, and 
 renew a right spirit within me ! " 
 
 Perhaps this lesson also, that Purity is inward and 
 not outward, seems a very trite and commonplace one ; 
 but see how much it implies. Are not men perpetually 
 blaming circumstance instead of self? There is a youth 
 listening to my words who is fresh from the country. 
 The first efiect the multitudinous life of a great city 
 has had on your mind is to loosen your seuse of 
 
112 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 rerpf risibility. Your individuality seems blotted out 
 in tl.is great n ass of men. At home every one knev^r 
 yoU; and this sense of their scrutiny was a restraint 
 upon you. Here no one knows you, and you are in 
 the perilous position of one who can do wrong without 
 loss of reputation. And then, too, there is another 
 influence of a great city which you have already felt. 
 A great city seems to give publicity to things only 
 hinted at in the country. Life is on a magnificent 
 scale, and the cracks scarcely discerned on the small 
 picture yawn wide and plain on the vaster canvas. 
 You see things you only dreamt, and hear things you 
 only thought, and touch things you only imagined. 
 And then you begin to delude yourself that if you had 
 only remained in the village you could have been pure, 
 but that purity is scarcely possible in a " Sodom ol 
 covetousness and fornication," whose smoke ascends 
 day and night, ai.d blots out the healing vision and 
 blue serenity of heaven. Is that what you say ? It 
 is all false, sir, and you know it ! The village has its 
 vice as well as the city ; morally the city is only the 
 village writ large. If you are not pure in thought 
 here, neither would you be there. Such excuses 
 simply amount to this : you were virtuous when you 
 could not sin, but ycu are ready to sin as soon as 
 opportunity shall connive with your desire. You blame 
 the situation, but the man makes the situation, not the 
 situation the man. I have no faith in hot-house virtue 
 which can only thrive in peculiar soils, and at given 
 temperatures; true virtue is virtue anywhere. The 
 
PURITY. 113 
 
 true gentlerran behaves as finely before paupers as 
 before kings ; the truly honest man is as honest stand- 
 ing up to his knees in another man's gold as in keeping 
 a bag of coppers safe ; and true purity is purity any- 
 where, just as light is light everywhere, whether it 
 stream into the lazar-house of vice, or fall on the 
 sumptuous embroideries which are in kings' chambers. 
 And why is it so ? Because it is inward and not out- 
 ward ; it is independent of circumstances and triumphs 
 over them. If you have the pure heart, it will be as 
 pure amid the smoke of London as in the clear atmo- 
 sphere of your native village ; and so far from speaking 
 in scornful anger of great cities, you will recognise 
 that great cities are the great battle-grounds of Christ, 
 where the harder conditions of the strife only make 
 the warfare doubly glorious. 
 
 See, too, how men deceive themselves by practising 
 an outward purity when there is none within. You 
 have never done an unchaste deed, you resent the 
 imputation with an angry blush. And, O my brother, 
 it is much to be able to say that! There are thousands 
 who would give a year of life to be able to say it, 
 thousands who to-day are plagued with the hideous 
 memory of one vile act, and who cry in vain, as Lady 
 Macbeth did, " Out, damned spot ! " But examine 
 your own heart, and tell me what thoughts are yours ? 
 What shapes are these which inhabit the secret 
 chambers of the soul ? Have you made your memory 
 the haunt of unclean stories ? Do you not often set 
 the imagination om fire with evil suggestions, till 
 
 8 
 
114 ^-^^ THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 through the unguarded doorways of the heart troop 
 the satyrs, and your inward eye gazes unabashed on 
 the riot of corruption ? You have not done the act 
 but you have thought it ; you have not broken the 
 command, but you have desired to; outwardly you 
 are without spot, but you are a leper within. O, let 
 me plead with you, ''Keep thyself pure." ''Every 
 man is tempted when he is led away of his own lust 
 and enticed." You are the tempter of yourself. Sin 
 is a thing of desire before it can be incarnated in the 
 deed. Dismiss the alluring shape ; shake off the vile 
 spell ; fall to your knees and pray mightily to the 
 God who gives us the power we lack, for you stand in 
 slippery places. The foulest monsters of humanity 
 once stood where you are standing. They drank in 
 eagerly the suggestions of iniquity ; they acted out the 
 drama of wrong a thousand times in the empty theatre 
 of the heart. Then the divine shyness of modesty 
 began to die away ; they went a little and a little 
 nearer to the dance of death, till its poisonous wind 
 swept their faces, and the odour of its intoxicating 
 pollution smote upon their senses, and the fringe of 
 its flying raiment touched them as it passed, till in- 
 sensibly their feet too began to tremble with the 
 passion of the dance, and at last they were drawn 
 into its hideous circle, and swept on and on till, fallen, 
 broken, maimed, ruined, there was given unto them 
 the heart of a beast and not the heart of a man ! By 
 the fiery anguish and the shame, the lazar-house and 
 the early grave, the ruin of great gifts and downfall 
 
PURITY. 115 
 
 of brilliant hopes and purposes, I adjure you, young 
 man, " Keep thyself pure." 
 
 I put purity before you, then, as the badge of the 
 noblest manhood. A man is never so contemptible as 
 when he imagines there is anything clever in wicked- 
 ness. Yet men do imagine it, and say it too. Inno- 
 cence is ridiculed, and vice is half admired. To be a 
 man of the world, to see life, to know its shameful 
 by-paths, and be familiar with its mysteries of wicked- 
 ness — this is often the ambition of very young and 
 very foolish men. There are those who must know 
 these things, because their duty lies among the shadows 
 of human life. The magistrate, the physician, the 
 minister must know many things which are sad and 
 tragical and bad to know. For the great majority the 
 veil which covers those darker secrets of hfe need not 
 be lilted ; and let them thank God for it. But mark, 
 that is nevertheless not purity which can only exist by 
 ignorance of evil. Who is purer, the country youth 
 who cannot imagine the dreadful indecencies of a 
 London slum, or the man who knows every nook of 
 their secret foulness, because he is daily there to help, 
 and purify, and heal ? Is the country maiden, with 
 her sweet and innocent thoughts, any purer than an 
 Elizabeth Fry, standing as Carlyle described having 
 seen her stand, like a fair white lily among the name- 
 less abominations of old Newgate ? No ; it is the 
 purity of such natures which is the secret of their 
 sympathy, and their sympathy is the fountain of their 
 service. Prudishness shuns the vicious as an infected 
 
Ii6 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 population ; purity pities them, and goes among them 
 to redeem them. Prudishness shudders at evil where 
 no evil is meant ; purity .touches evil, but is undefiled. 
 Prudishness affects a virtue, though it has it not ; but 
 the strength of true virtue is not to shun vice, but to 
 vanquish it. Prudishness is the outcome of a diseased 
 pruriency ; but to the pure all things are pure, and the 
 knowledge of ill falls from true purity as the mud-clots 
 from the white raiment of Faithful at the fair. To be 
 pure in heart is to be strong for the service of man ; 
 and the purer a man is the more pitiful, self-sacrificing, 
 and effective will be his service. ' Blessed are the 
 pure in heart, for they shall see God." With them 
 the vision of God perpetually tarries, and they know 
 Him whom to know is life eternal. These are the 
 men we want to-day ; men who see God, who live 
 ever in the clear light of God, who know Him as a 
 Father and serve Him as a Master, who touch Him 
 and are strong. These are the men we want to-day — 
 men unstained by impurity, but pitiful to the impure, 
 to whom no depth is too low or heart too vile for the 
 heahng touch of their wise and tender sympathy. We 
 want pure men in the Press, the Senate, and the office, 
 who shall shame vice into silence by their lives, and 
 raise men into manly virtue by their deeds. We want 
 pure men and pure women in the drawing-rooms of 
 society, who shall make the profligate conscious of his 
 moral leprosy by their example, and visit him with 
 that rebuke which society is ever so loath to give to 
 the titled and the wealthy. When such men attack 
 
PURITY. 117 
 
 wrong their '^strength is as the strength often, because 
 their hearts are pure." They bring to the battle of the 
 right no maimed and halting will, but the undiminished 
 vigour of a clean heart and right spirit. And it is 
 because the battle of the future is with the young men 
 of any given age, these words of an old veteran to 
 a young man gather such solemn emphasis and force, 
 *^ Keep thyself pure." 
 
 There are those to whom I speak who have lost not 
 only innocence, but purity. Your memory is full of 
 the unquiet ghosts of long-dead deeds of wrong ; your 
 record is one of strong passions and weak will. There 
 is nothing vvhicli sears the conscience like impurity ; 
 there is nothing so fatal to the finest instincts and so 
 debasing to the nobler impulses. Of that you yourselves 
 are only too bitter witnesses; you do the sin, and hate 
 it ; you fly the sin, and are drawn back by a lure 
 stronger than your will ; you resolve to break the bond, 
 but the chain of habit seems rusted into the very flesh ; 
 and often, O how often ! you think of the bright days 
 of young innocence, and wish with what a passion of 
 wild regret you were a boy again. That cannot be. 
 But you may be born again. You may be forgiven, 
 and receive into yourself the principle of a new life 
 which is stronger than sin. " His name shall be called 
 Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins." 
 Was ever music half so sweet as that ? It is music : 
 the music of a Divine hope. Christ claims your man- 
 hood ; He waits to restore you to a nobler freedom, to 
 instil the habit of love which shall be stronger than the 
 
Il8 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 habit of sin ; and you may know the truth, and the 
 truth will make you free ! 
 
 There are others who, like Timothy, owe much to 
 heredity. Timothy had a godly mother and a godly 
 grandmother, and came of pure and noble stock. The 
 best inheritance God can give a man to start life with 
 is a pious ancestry and a good home, and this many 
 of you have had. But the purest ancestry, the godliest 
 home, the cleanest blood, will not prevent temptation, 
 and you are face to face with the great transgression 
 of the world. Seek strength from God then, that you 
 may keep your inheritance unimpaired. Beware the 
 idle thought, the gleam of satanic entrancement shot on 
 you from wicked eyes, the impure jest, the book which 
 calls itself realistic, but whose realism is the Hterature 
 of the sewer, the naked, shameless study of those 
 secrets of putrefaction which God and nature hasten 
 to hide in merciful oblivion — beware these things. To 
 see God is better than to " see Hfe," and *' Blessed are 
 the pure in heart, for they shall see God." There is no 
 cleverness in vice ; it is mere brutality and shame, and 
 to know nothing is better than to know evil. In virtue 
 only is strength, in purity only is the secret of peaceful 
 thoughts and manly energy, and wise and temperate life 
 ripening into good old ?ge. l^ake not the Sodom's apple 
 though the very bloom of heaven seem to clothe it ; it 
 will but turn to dust and bitterness between the teeth. 
 Covet not the bad man's knowledge ; it is a poison 
 working anguish and desolation in the Hfe. Calm and 
 undramatic as your life may appear beside the delirious 
 
PURITY, ri9 
 
 whirl and passion of lives swept into the dreadful mael- 
 strom of evil, yet remember yours is safe life, yours is 
 true life, yours is noble life, yours is abiding life too. I 
 remind you of the last words of Gough, uttered in that 
 very instant when death laid his finger on his lips — 
 words in which the whole teaching of that eloquent 
 tongue seemed compressed : " Young man, keep your 
 record clean !" I remind you, also, of older words than 
 his, in which the wisdom of many buried ages lingers : 
 " Therefore, keep innocence " — or we will say purity — 
 " and do the thing which is right : so shalt thou be 
 brought at the last to thine end in peace." 
 
VII. 
 
 THE SIN OF ESAU. 
 
 "Lest there be any fornicator or profane. person, as Esau, who for 
 one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that 
 afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was 
 rejected : for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it 
 carefully with tears." — Heb. xii. i6, 17. 
 
 THE Bible is the story of the moral evolution of 
 the human race, and it is this truth which gives 
 such emphasis and value to the individual histories 
 which are recorded in the Old Testament Scriptures. 
 Sceptics say — nay, honest and perplexed doubters say, 
 " Look at the frightful record of brutal and relentless 
 wars which the Hebrew Scriptures contain ; the fierce 
 and cruel spirit which sometimes turns even the Psalms 
 of David into curses, and strikes every string of that 
 clear harp into discord ; the records of individual 
 violence, meanness, cupidity, craft, and lust, in which 
 the historical books of Israel abound — and is this your 
 Bible ? " Yes, this is our Bible, and its very honesty 
 is the pledge of its authenticity and the seal of its 
 value. No other book takes so solemn a view of life, 
 or is marked by so terrible a fidelity in its delineations 
 of life. But throughout the Bible we see moral evolu- 
 tion going on. As the race of men march onward 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 121 
 
 the light grows clearer, and the conception of God is 
 nobler. Evolution begins its work in the dark voids 
 of the uncreated world, and among the first blind 
 struggles of a primeval race ; it ends it in the city of 
 which the Lamb is the light, where all nations and 
 peoples and tongues swell the vast unison of the final 
 song of triumph before the face of God. So rudi- 
 mentary were Jacob's ideas of God that he thought 
 when he fled from Esau that he had left God behind 
 him in the tents of Luz, and it was with amazement 
 he cried, when he woke from his dream of the staircase 
 of fire on which the angels moved in tender minis- 
 trations, " God is here too ! God was in this place 
 and I knew it not ! " And this truth, which dawned 
 upon the mind of a fugitive suffering the rewards of 
 sin, goes on expanding and completing itself until 
 Christ says, " Lo, I am with you always," and Paul 
 says, " God is not far from every one of us." The 
 Bible is thus the priceless chronicle of the evolution 
 of moral ideas, and this truth is the key to the right 
 understanding of the Old Testament Scriptures. Man 
 begins with rudimentary and imperfect conceptions of 
 God ; he ends with the universal prayer, " Our Father, 
 which art in heaven ! " 
 
 Another thing we need to be reminded of in study- 
 ing the individual histories of the Old Testament is 
 that human nature is essentially the same in all ages. 
 Go deep down through the crust of the earth, the 
 mere filament of soil and verdure with which nature 
 covers her abysses, and what do we find ? We find 
 
122 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 immense and definite strata, which run under the soil 
 of many nations, now dipping deep, now breaking 
 through the surface, but uniting the antipodes them- 
 selves with a gigantic chain of stone. A hundred 
 differing races Hve and toil above ; here the earth is 
 green with spring, and there white with snow and 
 swept by icy winds ; but underneath all, this back- 
 bone of the world runs, and is unchanged. Even so, 
 beneath all differences of nationality and environment, 
 the primordial elements of human nature remain 
 unchanged. Beneath the dim gulfs of vanished time 
 runs an invisible network of communication, along 
 which the most distant z%'^ discharges the electric 
 current of its sympathy and influence to the most 
 modern. The rich man has the same prime elements 
 of character as the poor man, and *^ one touch of 
 nature makes the whole world kin." Beneath the 
 delicate veneer of the highest European civilisation 
 lurk the passions of the savage, and it only needs the 
 fierce call of war to awaken the murderous instincts 
 which have slumbered, and fill the world with a 
 sudden access of brutahty and fury. The centuries 
 may lie thick as fallen leaves beneath Esau and Paul, 
 but there are underlying strata which unite them. 
 There are Esaus in modern fife menaced by precisely 
 the same temptations before which the ancient Esau 
 fell, and therefore Paul's illustration is never obsolete 
 when he says, " Looking diligently, lest there be any 
 fornicator or profane person, as Esau." Esau's was a 
 beacon-life, casting a glare of lurid warning over 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 123 
 
 human history, Hke the light flashed down an iron 
 coast, gleaming fitfully over fatal waters, and pro- 
 claiming the sunken shoals and foaming wells of the 
 sea which wait to swallow the unwary. History is 
 full of such warning lights. Such a life was Byron's 
 — a great beacon-fire, lit with the wreck of high 
 hopes and splendid gifts. Such a life was Wolsey's, 
 *' floating many a day upon a sea of glory," only to 
 sink at last in vast ruin and heart-brokenness. And 
 Esau teaches us how the best instincts of life may be 
 sacrificed to appetite, how fife may be wasted, how 
 its natural nobility may be debased, how the bitter 
 ** afterward" of old age may close amid vain regrets 
 and impotent repentance : " For we know how after- 
 ward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he 
 was rejected." 
 
 Let us look for a moment at the actors and the scene. 
 The narrative is singularly exact and vivid, and is 
 full of dramatic intensity. In the first scene we have 
 the hungry hunter coming in from a hard day's chase 
 upon the mountains, almost dying with exhaustion, 
 and the crafty supplanter, quick to see his oppor- 
 tunity, and unscrupub us to press it home to the 
 utmost. The fragrance of the pottage is a maddening 
 incitement to the sensual appetite of Esau, and Esau's 
 weakness is Jacob's opportunity. "And Jacob said, 
 Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said. 
 Behold I am at the point to die, and what profit 
 shall this birthright do to me?" Can we not read 
 tne orccess of thousht in Esau's mind ? ''The birth- 
 
124 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 right, what good was it ? It means no more money, 
 or cattle, or land. It means only the barren honour 
 of being priest, chaplain to the famil}^ Jacob would 
 make a better chaplain than I. Wh?t I want is 
 pottage, not priesthood. Tangible food is better to a 
 hungry man than the invisible possessions of honour." 
 So he ate the pottage, wondering in his heart what 
 Jacob could see in the birthright that was worth so 
 much envious diplomacy, and how any man could stoop 
 to so mean a trick to gain his ambitious ends. He 
 felt something of the clumsy man's impotence in the 
 presence of a subtler intellect, and something of the 
 strong man's brusque contempt for intellectual motives 
 he could not understand. He felt also the strong 
 man's healthy scorn for meanness ; he was outwitted, 
 and, says the record, " he despised Jacob." So do we. 
 Our sympathy goes inevitably with the wronged man, 
 and if we censure the man who so flippantly bartered 
 his birthright, it is clear we cannot admire the man 
 who practically stole it. 
 
 To compare the characters of Jacob and Esau in 
 a sentence is difficult, but the contrast is instantly 
 apparent. Let me use an illustration. You have seen 
 a morning of pure and perfect radiance, passing at 
 noon into a black turbulence of wind or tempest, or 
 a haze of dull and heavy gloom. This is a transcript 
 of the life of Esau. You have also seen the troubled 
 day breakiig through thick mists, and you have 
 watched, with almost eager interest, the sun battling his 
 way through heavy masses of clouds, shining feebly 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 125 
 
 at first in faint victory, but at last going down in full 
 and peaceful glory. Such is the life of Jacob. Jacob 
 was a man full of faults, and among them were con- 
 spicuous those least easily forgiven, namely, faults 
 of meanness. We most of us feel we would rather 
 receive a sound blow than an underhand thrust, and 
 Jacob was expert in underhand tricks. For this 
 chapter of his history there is neither defence nor 
 excuse, and do not let us suppose God approved it. 
 On the contrary, God measured out upon him instant 
 and terrible retribution. He became a fugitive and 
 an outlaw, for twenty years he toiled in weary exile, 
 he never saw his mother's face again, and when he 
 came back purified and pardoned, the shadow of his 
 old sin met him on the threshold of the land he loved, 
 and turned his triumph into terror, and his joy into 
 bitterness. But the great thing we notice about Jacob 
 is that his character grew in strength and dignity : he 
 learned the bitter wisdom which is taught by error, 
 and rose on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher 
 things. 
 
 Esau's, on the other hand, is the very character most 
 men impulsively admire. He was free, frank, and 
 generous, and we feel there was about him a certain 
 nobility and sturdy grace. He brings the free air of 
 the mountains with him, a wholesome atmosphere of 
 honesty and manliness. But he was essentially an un- 
 spiritual man, in whom the finer instincts are gradually 
 dulled and obhterated. He despises the religious faith 
 which alone could give him the one element of true 
 
126 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Stability, the note of noble character which he lacked, 
 and so gradually he degenerates into the free wild man, 
 the strong hunter, the trained athlete, the splendid 
 savage. There are many such men in our midst to- 
 day, men for whom the culture of the body is every- 
 thing, and the culture of the intellect and spirit nothing. 
 There is a sort of sensuous pagan delight in bodily 
 strength and prowess still alive and active in the 
 world, and the natural man despises the spiritual man. 
 But with Esau what happens ? At length the body 
 and its appetites become supreme with him, and so the 
 sun passes into thick gloom, and the character other- 
 wise so admirable is wrecked. In E-^au we watch the 
 slow debasement of character, in Jacob its gradual 
 purification and ledemption. 
 
 The second scene of the dying Isaac, half-incredulous 
 befoie the deceit of Jacob, the triple lie of the sup- 
 planter, " I am Esau, thy first-born," and then the 
 exceeding bitter cry of Esau, " Bless me, even me also, 
 O my fall.er," wh^n the blessing has gone f oin him 
 beyond retrieval, is one of the most pathetic in the 
 literature of the world. That exceeding bitter cry of 
 Esau rings along the centuries, and still sets the heart 
 vibrating with genuine pity, and that pity deepens into 
 scorn and loathing of the mother and son who could 
 conspire in such a plot. It is true that having bought 
 the birthright, the blessing had become Jacob's, but 
 there was a manly way of claiming it, and a treacherous 
 way of stealing it, and Jacob, always physically a 
 coward, naturally preferred adroitness to straight- 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU 127 
 
 forwardness. But the first thing to remember is that 
 no adroitness of temptation on Jacob's part can be 
 accepted as any sufficient excuse for the irreverence 
 and weakness of Esau. When Esau sold the birthright 
 he was undoubtedly the victim of a strong temptation. 
 It came upon him unawares, his great hunger pleaded 
 with him, every languid pulse turned devil's advocate ; 
 but, nevertheless, only a morally weak man could have 
 acted as Esau did. There was plenty of food in the 
 world, and a noble man would rather have starved 
 than have purchased food at such a price. But we 
 are all clever at shifting responsibility, and are readily 
 persuaded that we are to be pitied rather than blamed. 
 We can always find a convenient Jacob upon whom the 
 real fault of our wrong-doing should be visited : It 
 was the serpent tempted us, it was the occasion, it 
 was some horrible concatenation of unfortunate circum- 
 stances. The public-house had a fatal contiguity to 
 our craving. The wine was on the table ; we were 
 pressed to drink ; it was a birthday, a bridal, a holiday ; 
 ordinarily we are sober men, honest men, truthful men 
 
 so the excuses run, and can be multiplied with facile 
 
 ingenuity. But think you those excuses will be ac- 
 cepted at the Judgment Day ? Nay, are they accepted 
 now ? Do they even impose upon ourselves ? Do 
 they pass current at the bar of our own conscience ? 
 Brethren, the blame of all wrong-doing rests alone with 
 the wrong-doer. I would say no harsh word against 
 the man who is overtaken in a fault. I know well how 
 true are those lines of Burns : — 
 
128 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 "Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
 Decidedly can try us; 
 He knows each chord, each different ton^ 
 Each spring, each various bias. 
 
 "And at the balance we are mute, 
 We never can adjust it ; 
 What's done' we partly may compute; 
 We know no^ what's resisted." 
 
 But we are the architects of circumstarfce, not the 
 victims of it ; we may defy it, we may subdue it, we 
 may " breast the blows of circumstance and grapple 
 with our evil star." Admirable opportunities of theft do 
 not excuse the thief, nor fatal glibness of speech the 
 liar. Christ saw all the glory of the world pass before 
 Him, and yet uttered no little, half-whispered word of 
 hesitating allegiance to evil. No ; a man is not the 
 creature of circumstance, but the master of it ; and if a 
 man be a drunkard, a glutton, a profligate, it is not his 
 opportunities of doing evil which will absolve him, for 
 a thousand have walked the same path, and have walked 
 it unseduced. " Esau despised Jacob : " a man with a 
 more sensitive conscience would have despised himself. 
 
 "^ fornicator or profane person:" the words sound 
 unnecessarily hard and bitter, do they not ? ^* Forni- 
 cator " — terrible, damning word, burning like a drop of 
 corrosive acid into the fair page of history, and leaving 
 its indelible stigma on name and character ! " A profane 
 person, ' a godless and God-forgetting man, literally a 
 man outside the temple, cast out from holiness, excom- 
 municated from the sweetest and tenderest sanctities 
 of life ! What has this man done to deserve suf b an 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU, 129 
 
 overwhelming verdict of reproach ? He had preferred 
 appetite to God's favour, the sensual to the spiritual ; 
 that was the sin of Esau. He did what every drunkard 
 does who sells himself to the bewitchment and exhilara- 
 tion of the winecup, who parts v\ith name and honour, 
 fair fame and friends, for the frenzy of an hour, who 
 sinks at last into the cunning maniac, who will cheat 
 the sentries of the most vigilant love, and in one fierce 
 bid will sell body and soul together for the gratification 
 of the horrible appetite which has mastered him. He 
 did what every man does who gives the rein to his pas- 
 sions, and finds his highest pleasures in the sensations 
 and desires of the flesh. He did what every man does 
 who derides or neglects the spiritual verities which 
 environ human life, who appraises religion with cheap 
 scorn, and, refusing to sec the miracle and mercy of 
 God, tacitly agrees to dismiss religion as a dream of 
 fools and women. He did what every man does who 
 makes it his supreme ambition to secure the savoury 
 messes of wealth and posit'on which the wo: Id can 
 offer him, and whose enjoyments are the plens ires of 
 the man who is little better than a S| leridid human 
 animal. It is thus that the sin of Esau must be mea- 
 sured. To be the firstborn, according to the standards 
 of his time, v. as a man's highest inheritance, and Esau 
 flung it from him in contemptuous indifference. To 
 leprerent his family, and to do it nobly, is an ambition 
 we can share and undei stand ; but Esau had no inter- 
 est in anything beyond the passing mom.ent. What 
 was better than that a man should rejoice in his 
 
 9 
 
150 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Strength, and have phasure in the full passion and 
 vigour of his days ? To take up the sacred burden of 
 chieftainship v^^hen Isaac was gone, and to bear it 
 nobly, v^ras an honourable ambition ; but Esau w^as 
 essentially an unspiritual man, and could scoff at 
 honours other men and better men estimated at a 
 priceless worth. The rejection of the birthright looks 
 a small thing ; but it was not so ; it was casting God's 
 gift back in His teeth ; and, hard as the words of Paul 
 are, yet they are true. It is as though a ray of white 
 light out of eternity lit up the scene and revealed it in 
 its true significance ; it is as though the heavens opened 
 above these two men, and in their depths we saw all 
 the elder brothers of the race gazing down with sorrow- 
 ful resentment and amazement on this despiser of his 
 birthright, who is a fornicator and a profane person. 
 For profanity is not swearing only ; it is an attitude of 
 mind, and there is an irreverence of the heart as well 
 as of the lip. Fornication is not one form of sin 
 merely; it is the type of all those gross lusts of the 
 flesh which obscure and finally choke the spirit. You 
 a fornicator ! You shrink from the foul word as from a 
 blow. Ay, but you eat, drink, and are merry, and 
 appetite is the law of Hfe, and the pleasures of appetite 
 your supreme passion. You profane ! Not in spoken 
 blasphemy it may be, but you live only for the seen, and 
 Christ calls you from the Cross, yet you will not even 
 turn your head to listen. You have not struck the 
 C irist, nor spat upon Him, nor wagged the head against 
 Him ; but this is your profanity, that you have cruci- 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 131 
 
 fied Him afresh by your neglect, and put Him to an 
 open shame by your contempt. 
 
 '* Who for one morsel oj meat sold his birthright^ 
 Oh, what horrible disproportion is there here ! What 
 Divine scorn breathes in the words ! How they scathe 
 the fool, and reveal the vastness of his felly ! How 
 they show the blind idiocy with which men who sin 
 forget the just proportion between the means and the 
 end ! For a morsel of meat ! Yet have we not known 
 that fatal bargain struck ? We smile at the mediaeval 
 legends of men selling their souls to the devil, but 
 morally they are true. I have seen men sell their 
 reverence to win the laughter of fools — the imbecile 
 applause of men whose only idea of wit is profanity or 
 indecency. I have seen men sell their ease of conscience 
 to secure a moment's immunity from duty, or their purity 
 for the fierce devouring pleasure, or worse, for the cold 
 and calculated licence of a moment's guilty passion. 
 Every police-court illustrates for how paltry and uncer- 
 tain a reward men will risk their liberties and lives. 
 There are thousands on the pavement of this wicked 
 city, thousands in the offices and behind the counters, 
 some even in the pulpit, w..o for one morsel of meat have 
 sold their birthright. They have sold their best aspira- 
 tions, their spiritual honesty, their intellectual freedom ; 
 they have pawned the heavenly raiment of the spirit, 
 and cast away the wealth of noble feelings and divine 
 desires, and have hardened themselves into a routine 
 of avarice, or empty pleasure, or cowardly time-servnig. 
 And for what ? Ask that when the lights of file burn 
 
132 THE THRESHOLD OF MAAHOOD, 
 
 dim and the feast is over, and the clear white light of 
 the last dawn breaks in upon the disordered hfe. Ask 
 that when you sit — which may God forbid — a grey- 
 haired man whose mind is but a charnel-house of evil 
 memories, where bad thoughts stir and writhe like 
 serpents in the dark, and remorse utters its perpetual 
 wail. Ask that when the first chill drop of the death- 
 water laps the feet, and rises higher and higher to 
 the lip ! For what ? A morsel of meat, a sop thrown to 
 the insatiable wolves of passion, a brief joy long since 
 turned to the dust and bitterness of sad remembrance; 
 and that is the devil's wages ! Truly, the words of 
 Christ touch us here again : "What shall it profit a man 
 if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " 
 
 So then, the root of Esau's sin was his scorn for the 
 spiritual side of life; and is not that precisely the 
 crying sin of our modern life ? It is not that you 
 dislike rehgion ; you have not sufficient interest to 
 be hostile, and you are, therefore, simply indifferent. 
 It is not that you disbelieve religion; you quietly 
 dismiss the whole subject, so that God is not found 
 in your thoughts. There are so many things to do ; 
 the campaign of daily business absorbs you as the 
 eagerness of the chase absorbed Esau, you hold fast 
 to the tangible realities of Hfe, you desire the vivid 
 and actual pleasures of the present, and so the soul is 
 starved out of you, and the vision of God withdraws 
 itself because the suiface of your life has beco.ne too 
 obscure to reflect it, and there is developed only the 
 animal man, in whom the spiritual sense, the large 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU, 133 
 
 hopes, the diviner aspirations, are shrunken into 
 pitiable infirmity and impotence. Oh, how true is this 
 of thousands, how true of some of us ! At first 
 heedlessly, in mere lightheartedness ; at first almost 
 unconsciously, but at last positively, you have dis- 
 missed God from your knowledge and turned your 
 back on the spiritual side of things. But that spiritual 
 side of fife is still there ; the grave is there with its 
 mystery, and the future with its recompense ; and the 
 time will come — it may come soon — when those dis- 
 regarded spiritual forces in life will reveal themselves 
 in appalling omnipotence as they did to Esau, and the 
 cry with which you will meet them will only be an 
 exceeding bitter cry of infinite regret, of late but 
 irremediable remorse. 
 
 It seems to me that the sin of Esau was essentially 
 a young man's sin. It was the thoughtless repudia- 
 tion of spiritual opportunities by a nature which had 
 never tasted the bitter waters of suffering, a nature 
 whose mere animal vigour had blunted the edge of its 
 finer sympathies. To many a young man the home, 
 unhappily, becomes irksome, and the restraint of its 
 pieties and traditions unbearable. In his insolence 
 of strength he has small patience with the slower feet 
 of age ; in his buoyancy of spirit he has little care for 
 the sadder thoughts of parents ; in the eagerness of his 
 keen zest for the pleasures of life he forgets the sacred- 
 ness of the ties which bind him to the home of his 
 birth. Like a callow bird, no sooner is the wing 
 strong than he is eager to leave the nest, and try his 
 
134 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Strength in the boundless blue of the free heavens, 
 and his own selfish joy in life blinds him to the more 
 sacred instincts which attach an eternal reverence to 
 the mother who bore him, and the father who trained 
 his life when it was feeble and sheltered it when it 
 was weak. He *' hears the days before him, and the 
 tumult of his life." He longs for freedom, and the 
 sense of being his own master is an intoxicating joy. 
 He will claim his portion, and go into a far country 
 where the reproving eye can never follow him, and the 
 burden of family responsibility be never reimposed. 
 So the very buoyancy of youth becomes a snare, the 
 very energy of manhood a means of ill, and not till 
 the hour come when the strong man is called back to 
 the home of his childhood by the sudden advent of 
 death does he see his error, and pour out his heart in 
 the bitterness of the cry, " Hast thou no blessing for 
 me ? Bless me, even me also, O my father ! " 
 
 You will notice, once more, how the discovery of his 
 loss came finally to Esau. " Ye know how that after- 
 ward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he 
 was rejected ; for he found no place for repentance " — 
 literally no way to change his mind — " though he sought 
 it carefully with tears" His desire changed, but 
 his environment was fixed ; he changed his mind, in 
 our sense of the phrase, but he could not change his 
 condition. 
 
 That discovery of loss did not come all at once. 
 The great, strong hunter went forth, and hunted, and 
 slept, and waked with the serene pulse of health, and 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 135 
 
 what had he lost ? The skies spread as fair above 
 him, the mountains rose in the silence of their beauty 
 as majestically around him, the blood leapt with all 
 the old blissful magic in his veins as he hasted after 
 the chase, his life went on as of yore, and what had 
 he lost ? If any higher quality had passed out of his 
 life, he had not noticed it ; it had passed like an un- 
 regarded shadow, and the sunlight seemed undimmed. 
 And then at last there came that awful day, when 
 his heart was broken in him, and the great judgment 
 fell upon him, and the exceeding bitter cry rang out, 
 praying for that which he had cast away, wailing in 
 fruitless agony for opportunities for ever squandered, 
 •'Bless me, even me also, O my father." Afterward. 
 It is the saddest word in human life. The irrevocable 
 and irretrievable sob through its pathetic chords. It 
 is a cry after the scorned angel who vanishes, the 
 lost good we threw away, the better part we did not 
 choose. O young man ! you did not mean to break 
 your mother's heart; you did not mean to fill her 
 faded eyes with tears, and make her last thoughts of 
 you sad and anxious thoughts : you only forgot to be 
 regardful of her, you only spoke lightly ind flippantly 
 of the things she loved most, and we krow how that 
 afteimjardy when the fatal telegram found you in your 
 folly, and you rushed home only to find the ears for 
 ever closed to your late words of tenderness, oh, we 
 know how you would have given worlds then to have 
 said the things you never said, and to have unsaid 
 what you said ! Oh, older man, you never meant to 
 
136 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 throw the chances of life away ; you were only vain 
 and reckless you only chose doubtful companion- 
 ships and let the years go by in emptiness of purpose 
 and carelessness of good, and we know how to-day 
 you would give all you have to be a youth again, and 
 start life as you once meant to start, when you left 
 home a bright lad to seek your fortune in a great 
 city ! It is afterward — when the slight chain of habit, 
 once a mere thread of gossamer, has hardened into 
 links of adamant ; when the evil that once wore so 
 fair a face has dropped the mask, and risen up a foul 
 and hideous creature to subdue and slay us; wh :n 
 we become conscious for the first time that we have 
 thrown away that which was best worth having, and 
 have done that which cannot be undone — it is then 
 that the sense of infinite consequences following trivial 
 deflections from the right, or what we foolishly thought 
 trivial deflections, weighs upon us, and the exceeding 
 bitter cry sobs like a restless ghost through every 
 chamber of our life. There are shining doors of op- 
 portunity daily opened on us ; there are fair and noble 
 chances which meet us with each day's new dawning ; 
 and because we use them not, at last the bitter weeping 
 waits us in the years which have no light. We create 
 not only difficulties for ourselves, but impossibiHties, 
 not merely entanglements, but reversions of unspeak- 
 able remorse; and then when the knowledge of our 
 folly rushes on us, we cry, ''Oh, if I only had; if 
 I only had not ; " but the great doors of opportunity 
 are barred and bolted, and it is too late. It might 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU. 137 
 
 have been ! Words of ineffable mournfulness, but 
 daily uttered! Words that sweep across the bright 
 fields rf life like a bitter wind, or like a low sigh 
 pregnant with the agony of a million dying lips ! How 
 many men and women, in those brief but terrible 
 moments when the mistakes of life reveal themselves 
 in all the significance of their meaning and result, have 
 uttered that low cry with streaming eyes and breaking 
 heart, " It might have been ! " All the ruined possi- 
 bilities of the past reveal themselves, all the blooms 
 of nobleness that had no fruitage, all the diviner 
 desires that reached no achievement, and they see them 
 with piercing clearness for one moment, as Esau saw 
 them when he bowed over his fatlier's dying lips ; 
 and then 
 
 "They take up the burden of Hfe again, 
 Saying only, It might have been ! 
 God pity them, and pity us all 
 "Who vainly the dreams of youth recall. 
 For of all sad words of tongue or pen. 
 The saddest are these, It might have been I " 
 
 Brethren, ye know how that afterward when Esau 
 would have changed his mind, he col Id not change 
 his environmxent, and when he would have inherited 
 the blessing he was rejected. 
 
 But is it true that a man may repent and find no 
 place for repentance? Only in this sense, that he 
 may change his mind but cannot escape the conse- 
 quences of his folly : that there are things lost which 
 can never be recalled. 
 
138 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 But all was not lost for Esau : all ts not lost for you. 
 The birthright, and the elder brother's blessing, these 
 were indeed gone, and gone beyond recalling. But 
 there was the lesser blessing left, there was the promise 
 that after long years of servitude Esau should break 
 the yoke and have dominion— and was this nothing ? 
 A ^' sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier 
 things," but hope turns from the desolated past, and 
 discerns the bright shapes that advance towards us 
 from the future. Much is lost, my brother, but much 
 is left also. You cannot get the past back, but you 
 have the present and the future. You cannot know 
 again the child's bright innocence of heart, but the 
 blood of Jesus cleanse th from all sin. You cannot 
 be as though the fire had never scarred you, but you 
 may come out of the searching flame purified. You 
 are not what you might have been, but you may be 
 so much more than you are. 
 
 '* * O that it were possible, after long grief and pain,' 
 
 to recover our lost happiness," cries one of the sad 
 voices of our time, and that cannot be. But there 
 is a deeper and a truer happiness that may yet be 
 won ; the long storm may roll away and leave the 
 heavens bright; the thick darkness may lift, and a 
 better than youth's morning glory fall upon you, and 
 out of our very follies themselves we may build those 
 sharp stairs of expiation on which we shall chmb 
 slowly to the skies. It is the lost Christ came to save, 
 it is out of the life that seems ruined He builds the 
 
THE SIN OF ESAU, 139 
 
 new and nobler nature. Do you remember that touch- 
 ing story Gough tells of himself — how once he lay 
 brutalised and insensible with drink in the gutter, 
 with the full sun of summer pouring down on his 
 unsheltered face ? Many persons passed him in the 
 public way, and doubtless turned with shuddering 
 contempt from so foul a sight. If ever any man 
 looked helplessly lost and ruined it must have been 
 Gough, as he lay like a hog in the gutter that day. 
 But at length there drew near him a woman with a 
 Christlike heart in her, and she pitied him. She could 
 not lift him to his feet, it was useless to address him, 
 so what did she do ? She noted how the sun beat 
 perilously on the bloated face, and taking out her 
 handkerchief she gently laid it on that face, and went 
 away. Presently Gough woke. He felt the handker- 
 chief, and began to ask how it got the/e. At last it 
 dawned upon him that some true heart had pitied 
 him, and he said to himself — " I am deep enough down, 
 God knows ; but some one has thought me worth 
 pitying, and if I am worth pitying I am worth saving ! " 
 It was the turning-point of Gough's life ; he began to 
 hope, he began to think all was not lost. I bid you 
 hope, my brother. All is not lost, and never can be, 
 while Christ remains. And this is Christ's gospel of 
 good news. 
 
 And this is also Christ's consistent view of humanity. 
 Harlots, publicans, usurers, taxgatherers, the poor, 
 soiled, sinful masses of men and women who have 
 failed — so weak, so cursed with shameful follies, dwell- 
 
140 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 ing some of them in the very scorch of hell, and with 
 the smell of fire upon them — yet they are not beyond 
 retrieving, they are not outcast from the Divine love, 
 Oh, no ! How can that be, so long as we know that 
 Christ came to seek and save the lost, so long as His 
 words remain — " Him that cometh unto Me I will in 
 nowise cast out I ' 
 
VIII. 
 
 SJJVS OF SILENCE. 
 
 " And if a soul sin and hear the voice of swearing, and is a witness 
 whether he 1 ath seen or known of it : if he do not utter it, then he 
 shall btar his iniquity."— Lev. v I. 
 
 V 
 
 LRY probably the casual reader of the Scriptures 
 has often £sked, What is the true sigiiificaace of 
 this Book of Leviticus ? It seems dry, eftete, obsolete. 
 The minuteness of its details appears tedious and even 
 offensive ; its unfaltering inquisition over the most 
 secret realms of human life strikes upon our modern 
 sense as something painful and repulsive. There is 
 nothing which escapes the searching scrutiny of the 
 Mosaic law ; it legislates for the lips and for the eye, 
 for the appetites and for the senses, for the raiment 
 and for the body, for wives and children, for masters 
 and servants, for the sowing of the grain and the 
 reaping of the harvest, for disease and health, for life 
 and death. Its ''Thou shalt not" peals like the 
 thunder of Sinai, or the voice of the trumpet which 
 waxed exceeding loud, everywhere over the crowded 
 plains of human life ; its iron hand strikes heavily at 
 ail points on the slightest disobedience. It is rigid, 
 exact, inflexible ; it demands absolute obedience in every 
 jot and tittle. Well, what does it all mean ? Why do 
 
142 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 we read it in the Christian sanctuaries of the nine- 
 teenth century? Has not the world moved onward 
 into a larger liberty in the three thousand years since 
 it was written ? Have the books of the Mosaic law 
 in fact any real significance for the men of to-day ? 
 They have, and a most profound significance too. 
 The spiritual truth underlying the Mosaic law is that 
 man is under the direct eye of God, and his life is, 
 therefore, hfted into direct responsibiHty to God. God 
 sees us, and God sees everything about us and within 
 us. Sins of silence and secrecy, sins of public error 
 and notoriety, which go before a man to judgment, are 
 alike open and naked to Him with whom we have to 
 do. Space cannot shelter us ; if we take the wings of 
 the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, 
 He is there. Immensity cannot shield us; if we could 
 sink into the depths of the sea, behold the beams of 
 His chambers are laid in the water-floods, and on the 
 uttermost verges of creation He still confronts us. 
 i arkness cannot cover us, for behold the darkness 
 and the light are both alike to Him. Moses taught that 
 the fife of the meanest man fulfilled itself under the 
 open eye of heaven, and that God knew his downsitting 
 and his uprising, the words whispered in the ear of 
 solitude, and the secret vibrations of the impulse, which 
 was scarcely registered even on the dial of the will. 
 He was no mere atom in the human ant-hill, no 
 insignificant unit of humanity lost in the vast ebb and 
 flow of universal fife, for insignificance is impossible 
 to man, and obscurity is denied him. He was a person, 
 
S/NS OF SILENCE 143 
 
 active, powerful, working woe or weal to others ; and 
 just as the calling of a man's voice, or the footfall of 
 a child's step, stir the waves of sound which travel 
 onward and ever onward, till they may be said to break 
 upon the shores of the furthest stars, so the influences 
 of a man's life were boundless. His little part was 
 acted out before God and all the angels, his whispers 
 travelled through eternity, his footsteps echoed through 
 the chambers of the Most High. That was the view 
 of human life which Moses took, and he lived as 
 ''seeing Him who is invisible." That was the view 
 of life which he taught in all the ramifications of his 
 law, — that all human hfe, in its every department, lies 
 under tribute to God, and that the motto for all true 
 dignity and purity of life is, " Thou God seest me." 
 
 This passage which we are about to consider is a 
 striking illustration of these principles. It recognises 
 that sin may lie in silence as in speech, that to hear 
 the word of swearing and not rebuke it is to share 
 the guilt of it ; that men are responsible to each other 
 because they are responsible to God. There can be no 
 lesson of greater service to the young men of our day 
 than this. And why ? Because it seems to me that 
 the tendency of modern civilisation is on the one hand 
 to exaggerate the liberty of individuality, and on the 
 other hand to lessen the duty of responsibility. Man 
 has become the great study of man, and is to-day the 
 centre of art, of science, of literature. Art no longer 
 paints Christ, but man ; literature probes the mystery 
 of his motives, and clothes with glowing phrase the 
 
144 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Story of his love, his passion, and his heroism. Science 
 asks perpetually, Whence is he ? and all its profound 
 curiosities and patient researches travel upwards to 
 the culminating curiosity of that great inquiry, What 
 is man ? It may be said that even Nature has been 
 obscured by the immense shadow projected across her 
 by the personality of man. Man has dominated her, 
 and she is made to vibrate to his moods, and is inter- 
 preted by lyric rapture or sombre imaginings as he is 
 sad or happy. And what is the moral tendency of this 
 modern movement of thought ? It is upon the whole 
 to exalt man and obscure God, to leave every man to 
 become a law unto himself, and to snap effectually 
 those delicate but Divine fibres of moral responsibility 
 which bind man to man and hold society together. 
 One fruit of its influence is found, for instance, in the 
 morbid charity which the wcrld extends to the faults 
 of men of genius, minifying their vices into mistakes, 
 their wickedness into frailty, and their most hideous 
 immoralities into mere errors of judgment. But the 
 law of Moses knew no such distinctions, and neither 
 does the law of Christ. Theie Cod is first, God is 
 supreme, God is Master. High and low, genius and 
 fool, king and beggar, owe common allegiance to Him, 
 and He is no respecter of persons. And you will find 
 that the noblest periods of history are the periods when 
 this belief was most vigorousl}' held. It was the secret 
 of their moral dignity and victorious valour. It made 
 Israel the visible sword of God among the corrupt 
 heathen peoples they attacked. It filled the men of the 
 
S/NS OF SILENCE. 145 
 
 Reformation with the same gigantic energy; it made 
 the words of Luther "half-battles;" it clothed Knox 
 with that mysterious power before which a court quailed 
 and a kingdom bowed obedient. It was the fiery force 
 which throbbed in the heart of Puritan England ; and 
 the true secret of all this moral energy which has again 
 and again overturned kingdoms, and driven back the 
 powers of darkness in overwhelming defeat, while the 
 sun of setting liberty was stayed above the nations — 
 the secret is that these men felt and realised their 
 direct relation to God, and acted on it. They lived 
 their life with the keen consciousness that the inspect- 
 ing eye of God was always on them : they ** lived ever 
 in the great Taskmaster's eye," to quote Milton's noble 
 phrase. The secret of fidelity is this consciousness of 
 the nearness of the Master : Lo, God is in this place : 
 Thou God seest me. 
 
 There are three forces in human life, the action of 
 which is illustrated by this passage. The first is 
 Influence. What is influence ? It is that intangible 
 personal atmosphere which clothes every man, an 
 invisible belt of magnetism, as it were, which he 
 carries with him. Every human being seems to 
 possess a moral atmosphere quite peculiar to himself, 
 which invests and interprets him, and the presence 
 of which others readily detect. For instance, a pure 
 woman carries a moral and ennobling atmosphere with 
 her. She enters a room where bad men, or light and 
 foolish women are, where the talk has been peril- 
 ous if not vicious, low-minded and mean-spirited, or 
 
 10 
 
146 THE TlIRESnOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 saturated with that underlying double-meaning which 
 is the first symptom of corruption ; and it is as though 
 a garden of lilies suddenly bloomed in the room. A 
 sort of spiritual fragrance seems to pierce the heated 
 air ; her very looks and garments exhale the odour of 
 purity. She brings the beauty of holiness with her, 
 and her face seems to wear a fresh light, like the 
 light upon the faces of the young angels in the pictures 
 of the old masters. There is an ineffable dignity of 
 goodness and sweetness about her ; and pure and quiet 
 thoughts make an invisible music round her as she 
 comes. The atmosphere which clothes her seems to 
 flood the room, and the coarse weeds of vicious 
 thought and talk cannot thrive in it. How magically 
 that loud, bad laugh is stilled ! How instantly the 
 current of conversation is changed ! She has brought 
 hght, sweetness, fragrance with her ; she has made all 
 that crowd of light, foolish, worldly people suddenly 
 think of their dead mothers, their httle children, of the 
 flowers that filled the woods when they were young, of 
 the angels they seemed to see in the bright day-dreams 
 of childhood, of all sorts of tender and pathetic pas- 
 sages in past life ; yet she has not said a word ! Her 
 influence has interpreted her. 
 
 Or look on the other side of the illustration. Picture 
 a type of man but too common — the fast man of society. 
 There is an exhalation of evil which goes before him 
 and spreads around him. His smile is fascinating, his 
 speech is bright and witty, there is no outward sign 
 of the corrupting foulness within; yet the pure feel 
 
SAVS OF SILENCE. 147 
 
 instinctively that an evil presence has drawn near 
 lh( m, and good women say, ^' We don't like that 
 man ! " We perhaps smile with a sense of superior 
 sagacity at what seems to us the absurdity of a woman's 
 reason, but intuition is a fine weapon, which pierces, 
 where the blunter edge of mere sagacity is useless. 
 The fastidious instinct of a true purity has instantly 
 detected such a man. There are subtle currents which 
 interpret him, a magnetic power of evil which sends 
 its shock out silently to the clean-hearted; and from 
 the pure-hearted there are delicate tentacles of feeling 
 which stretch out invisibly and touch him, and shrink 
 back dismayed with a sense of wrong. He says nothing, 
 but yet he interprets himself, and the atmosphere he 
 brings with him is felt by all sensitive souls at once 
 to be vile and dangerous. That is Influence : some- 
 thing subtle, indefinable, yet real; without lips, yet 
 speaking ; without visible shape, yet acting with 
 tremendous potency, like the magnetic forces which 
 throb and travel unseen around us, hidden in the dew- 
 drop and uttered in the thunder; Influence, which 
 streams out from every human being, and shapes 
 others, and moulds and makes them ; Influence, which 
 is stronger than action, more eloquent than speech, 
 more enduring than life, which being holy sows the 
 centuries with the seeds of holy life, and being evil 
 multiplies, indeed, transgressors in the earth I 
 
 The second force is Example. That is something 
 more tangible, because it is mainly a matter of words 
 and deeds. Every man sets a copy for his neighbour. 
 
148 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 and his neighbour is quick to reproduce it. Words- 
 worth speaks of the little child from whom the remem- 
 bered light of other worlds is slowly wasting into the 
 light of common day, as learning all he knows of the 
 world through the faculty of imitation : 
 
 "The little actor cons another part, 
 As though his whole vocation 
 Were endless imitation." 
 
 But it is not only true of children ; all men are born 
 actors. We often find it ludicrously true, do we not ? 
 We catch the trick of another man's thought, we echo 
 the intonation of his voice, we reproduce the idiosyn- 
 crasy of his manner, we copy the very peculiarity of 
 his gait; yet it is all done with perfect unconscious- 
 ness on our part. What is called fashion is built upon 
 example : when a poet discards collars society goes 
 bare-necked, and when a princess limps society becomes 
 lame. If these were the only illustrations of the opera- 
 tion of this law of imitation we might content ourselves 
 with a tolerant amusement at human folly; but when 
 imitation enters the world of morals it becomes a 
 solemn and a tragic thing. Then we find that no 
 man fives to himself; he could not if he would. The 
 covetous man has a miser for his son, the light woman 
 has a daughter hastening towards the ways of shame, 
 the unclean man poisons a workshop with his lecherous 
 imagination, the drunkard infects a whole neighbour- 
 hood with his vices, the swearer finds his little child, 
 scarce out of babyhood, uttering bestial oaths, and 
 shaping his tiny lips in the blasphemies which are the 
 
S/NS OF SILENCE. 149 
 
 common speech of the house in which he Hves. Who 
 knows how far a word may travel ? When it leaves 
 us it is gone for ever. It has floated away into the 
 blue heaven on wings of its own, and we cannot recall 
 it if we would. It has set new thoughts stirring 
 already in a score of hearts, and will travel on in 
 multiplying influence till the ears of men are full of 
 it. Each man lives in a huge whispering gallery, and 
 his whispers travel round the world, growing louder 
 as they go, till they fall back upon him like the rever- 
 berations of distant thunder. The word spoken in the 
 ear is trumpeted upon the housetop ; forgotten by us, 
 it is remembered by others ; dismissed by us, it has 
 leapt into Hfe elsewhere ; and on the threshold of 
 another world, where every idle word is known, the 
 speech of a Hfetime rolls back upon the spiritual ear. 
 Just as the phonograph treasures up the most dehcate 
 inflexions of the human voice, and can reproduce them 
 at the will of the operator, so a thousand minds have 
 already received the impression of our words, and, if 
 they were evil, share the iniquity of them with us. 
 
 And then, from influence and example there results 
 Responsibility. Do you say, "Am I my brother's 
 keeper?" You are. You cannot help yourself You 
 can as easily evade the law of gravitation as the law 
 of human responsibility. If you cease to speak, that 
 will not rid you of the burden ; you must cease to be 
 to do that. Nay, even death itself is powerless to 
 destroy influence. Often it multiplies it a thousand- 
 fold. Death can enthrone a man upon a coign of 
 
ISO THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 vantage from which he speaks to all the ages. The 
 poison of a bad life goes on infecting uncounted gene- 
 rations, just as good men from their graves touch the 
 remotest ages, and inspire the youth of the most distant 
 centuries to faith and heroism. Has John Bunyan 
 ceased to be a living force in English life? He speaks 
 to-day from such a pulpit as he never dreamed of in 
 his life, and the w^alls of the cathedral where he 
 preaches are the immeasurable horizons of the uni- 
 verse, and his congregation is as a multitude whom 
 no man can number. Is the life of the heroes, the 
 patriots, the martyrs really closed ? They were never 
 so much alive as now ; the fire that slew them freed 
 them, and the steps of their scaffolds were the staircase 
 of immortality. They shaped the lives of others on a 
 mighty scale, but you also do so, and not so ins'gni- 
 ficantly as you think. You speak, you think, you act ; 
 and every hour other lives take colour and purpose 
 from yours. Thus influence and example bring with 
 them responsibility to God and responsibihty to man. 
 Every man is your brother, all have claims upon you ; 
 and if you sin, and another witness it, behold he shares 
 your iniquity. 
 
 Let us mark further the precise way in which these 
 forces work. First it is clear tha.t personal sin always in- 
 volves others. " If a mi an hear the voice of swearing," if 
 he even knows of it, he shares the complicity of the sin. 
 There is always seme one who hears, who witnesses, 
 who shares. Steal forth, O youth, in the deep stillness 
 of the night, wrap the darkness round yourself as a 
 
S/JVS OF SILENCE. 151 
 
 mantle, let your feet be shod with silence and your face 
 covered with secrecy ; go, glide stealthily as a shadow, 
 and hide at the footfall of the traveller, and enter the 
 chambers of sin like a thief, and shut the door without 
 sound behind you — still some one sees, some one hears, 
 some one notes the fact on the indelible tablets of his 
 memory I There is always a witness where we least 
 expect it ; tread we never so softly, some one wakes, 
 and hears, and guesses all about our errand. And 
 that single human eye has in an instant seen everything, 
 and that solitary human ear has vibrated to our speech 
 and flashed the message up to that invisible scribe we 
 call memory, who sits in the centre of the brain and 
 writes down everything ! What telegraph is there half 
 so swift and wonderful as that rapid magic of the eye 
 and ear, which instantly registers our minutest actions 
 on another human creature's consciousness ? The word 
 half-withdrawn in its very utterance, the act for which 
 we thought we had secured the most vigilant secrecy 
 — they will be known, they will be pondered and acted 
 on ; or, if they be not acted on, yet have we passed 
 en our guilty secret to others, and they share the 
 iniquity of concealing it. Oh, brother, here is the most 
 tragic and awful aspect of sin — we share our sins ! 
 We have involved oth'^rs in our guilt, and if we 
 forget they will go remcml ering. It is v.ell that thou 
 shouldest cleanse thy lips and sing to day the holy 
 Sabbath sorg; but that wicked story thou didst 
 tell has already been told and retold, and is working 
 its foul wizardry of temptation in a hundred lives 
 
152 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 already ! It is well that thou shouldest stand in 
 God's house to-day, clothed with decorous reverence* 
 unsuspected, and with no scar of fire upon thee ; but 
 what of the poor soiled body of that other one, the 
 sharer of thy sin and shame ? For there is a dreadful 
 comradeship in guilt — often intentional, for men love 
 company in their sins, but often unintentional, for 
 others share what they concealed and know what they 
 did secretly. It is the most apalling aspect sin assumes ; 
 it is never sterile, it is always multiplying and prolific, 
 passing like a fever-taint from man to man ; till from 
 one sin a world is infected and corrupt. 
 
 Notice again, that he who sees a sin and does not 
 rebuke it shares the sin and bears its iniquity. The 
 only way to purge oneself of the contaminating con- 
 plicity of another man's guilt is instantly to rebuke it 
 or witness against it. There is no other course open 
 to a spiritual honesty. 
 
 Look, for instance, at this truth personally. No one 
 need go very far for an illustration. You are a youth 
 employed in a warehouse or office where religion is at 
 a discount. Wherever men and women assemble in 
 numbers — in the barrack, the warehouse, or the school, 
 there are always to be found the missionaries of the 
 evil one. In the warehouse there is sure to be a fast 
 set, a group of youths whose habitual talk is seasoned 
 with profanity or impurity, and who are always eager 
 to get an audience for their shameful recitals. Their 
 boasts are pretty generally mere brazen lies ; they 
 themselves are contemptible to every manly intelli- 
 
S/ATS OF SILENCE. 153 
 
 gence ; but they have influence ; and they know it, and 
 love to use it for evil. It is with them a malicious and 
 exquisite amusement to say their most outrageous things 
 when a comrade who professes piety is listening. You 
 have heard their speech ; what did you do ? You were 
 silent, you blushed, you felt ashamed, you were in- 
 dignant, you turned aside full of abhorrence for the 
 sin and contempt for the sinner, and no doubt you 
 flattered yourself you must be very virtuous and good 
 to feel such virtuous anger, and there you were content 
 to rest But this text puts an entirely new meaning on 
 your conduct ; because yo\x did not witness against that 
 sin you shared it. Blushing is one thing, confessing 
 Christ quite another. Your silence made you the 
 accomplice of the sin you hated; you are the yoke- 
 fellow with the sinner, and " bear his. iniquity." Oh, 
 who is guiltless ? Who has not allowed himself to 
 become the confidant of bad secrets ? Weakly, care- 
 lessly, unconsciously almost, for mere lack of robust 
 fibre and quick honesty, you have drifted into a false 
 position. The cynical confession has been made, the 
 impure incident has been duly recited, and, having thus 
 been a dumb auditor of a shameful story, you have felt 
 you could not afterwards say what you wanted to 
 say, and so have been silent, and have become the 
 accomplice of the sin. The text speaks particularly 
 of oaths, and certainly profane swearing is the most 
 entirely stupid form of sin over inv^^nted. It is usually 
 a meaningless habit. M n seldom think of what they 
 are sayhig, ai.d u a iiio.n must translate his irritation 
 
154 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 into speech it would relieve his feelings quite as effec- 
 tually to use a few mathematical terms, carefully 
 selected with a view to expressiveness and effect. 
 But I have ventured to enlarge the scope of this 
 passage, so that it covers the whole area of sins of 
 speech and example ; and I say there is nothing more 
 perilous than to allow yourself to become the confidant 
 of bad men. You must witness against them if j^ou 
 would be honest. Do not hesitate. Do it at once. 
 It will be easier to do it on the first impulse than ever 
 afterwards, and once done it will be always easy. 
 Failing to do it, the unmistakable verdict of this text — 
 and surely it is not an unreasonable deduction — is that 
 we share sin by not rebuking it, and bear its iniquities 
 by conspiring to cover it. 
 
 Look at this matter nationally. Look at what is 
 going on at the present time in India, Hong Kong, 
 the Barbadoes, wherever the flag of Britain is flying. 
 What is going on, do you ask ? This, that wherever 
 that flag goes the shame of British vice follows. Your 
 police officers are being paid not to maintain order and 
 suppress vice, but to decoy, to deceive, and ruin native 
 women by every art possible to the ingenuity of infamy. 
 What the Government dare not do here it is doing 
 there, because there the native is weak and the 
 Englishman strong, and the public opinion of England 
 appears to be too distant a force to be feared or 
 reckoned with. When a Governor of Hong Kong 
 comes home, horrified by what he has seen and 
 known, and shows unmistakable signs of indignation, 
 
S/NS OF SILENCE, 155 
 
 he is forbidden by the Colonial Secretary to speak 
 publicly on this question, and so the facts are stifled 
 at the birth. Here is a case vouched for by no less 
 competent an authority than Mrs. Josephine Butler, 
 in which a poor Chinese woman, in fleehig from these 
 British police whom we have made the sleuth-hounds 
 to hunt down innocence, falls from a •housetop, and 
 is taken up dead. The case of this outraged and 
 murdered woman does not stand alone. It is typical. 
 With one hand we build the church, and with the 
 other the house of infamy ; with one hand we offer the 
 Bible and with the other the certificate of shame ; and 
 the bodyguard we provide for the missionary is the 
 police des mceurs ! And now, mark, who is responsible 
 for all this ? According to my text, all who know the 
 facts, and therefore from this hour all who hear these 
 words are responsible for the existence of this licensed 
 infamy. You are responsible, young man, in whose 
 hands the future of England lies, and therefore I bid 
 you witness with vehement anger against this great 
 wrong done against God and womanhood. You do well 
 to be angry, for the honour of your country is being 
 stained, the dignity of womanhood is being outraged, 
 the helplessness of weakness is being mocked ! By all 
 that is chivalrous and pure, by all that is manly and 
 righteous, it is your duty and mine to protest against 
 this abominable wrong, everywhere, at all times, in 
 season and out of season, till the rising tide of public 
 indignation shall sweep it away; and if you do not 
 witness against it you connive at it, if you do not utter 
 
156 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 your protest against it your silence is a conspiracy to 
 shelter it, if you do not rebuke it you share its present 
 shame and the sure and overwhelming retribution 
 which will follow ! 
 
 This passage particularly rebukes, then, sins of 
 silence. Sins of speech we can easily identify. The 
 power of language is the distinguishing glory of man, 
 and in proportion to the splendour of the power is 
 the mischief of its perversion. The tongue which is 
 touched of God, the tongue of a Wesley or a Whitefield, 
 the tongue of flame, whose utterance is the Spirit-call 
 of heaven, an inspiration which sets the brain throb- 
 bing with new and noble thoughts, and the heart with 
 the strong influx of spiritual motion — oh ! how vast a 
 power it is. Its 
 
 " Echoes roll from soul to soul, 
 And grow for ever and for ever." 
 
 It speaks across the centuries, it makes the lips of death 
 its trumpet to reach the unborn ages. Like the sweet 
 and solemn reverberations of the Alpine horn in 
 mountain soHtudes, long after the authentic voice has 
 ceased, the music of such voices falls upon the inward 
 ear, and time and distance reduplicate and invigorate 
 the . magical purity of the effect. But the tongue 
 which is set on fire of hell, impure, rancorous, bitter, 
 glozing over vice with honeyed words, hiding poison 
 in its soft speeches, the tongue that runs through the 
 world and is a liar from the beginning, and finds its 
 congenial task in slaying innocence and undermining 
 character, how vast a curse is it I But there are sins 
 
SINS OF SILENCE. 157 
 
 of silence too. To be silent when you should speak is 
 as evil as to speak when you should be silent. To 
 be tongue-tied by cowardice when wrong discovers its 
 hideous nakedness to us, is as vile a thing as to praise 
 wrong and sing the coronation song of wickedness. 
 There are many men prodigally gifted with mere 
 animal courage — the iron nerve, the steady hand — men 
 who could ride with an unwhitened lip against a flaming 
 battery, and stand amid the murderous rain of bullets 
 on a battlefield as calm as on a parade-day, who in the 
 higher tests of courage must be dismissed as cowards. 
 They are the men of whom Bunyan spoke in his quaint 
 verse — 
 
 "Though you could crack a coward's crown, 
 Or quarrel for a pin, 
 You dare not on the wicked frown, 
 Or speak against his sin." 
 
 It is harder to face ridicule than bullets,' to witness 
 against wrong than to lead forlorn hopes on the battle- 
 field. But if we are Christ's freedmen we shall do it. 
 We shall have the higher courage, we shall know the 
 truth, and the truth will make us free of the fear of 
 men. We shall see God, and, seeing Him, we shall 
 see no fears in the way when His signal waves us 
 forward ; and so we shall confess our Master before 
 men, and He will confess us at the last in the presence 
 of the holy angels. 
 
 The great need of the religious world at this hour is 
 manly men. We want no goody-goody piety : we have 
 too much of it, and could very well afibrd to export a 
 
158 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 little. We want none of the knock-kneed, nerveless, 
 sentimental piety, which grows ecstatic in singing hymns 
 on Sunday, and is conveniently blind to the injustices of 
 earth and the inhumanities of man to man on Monday, 
 The sort of religion which is put away with the Sunday 
 coat usually resembles the Sunday coat in fitting ill, and 
 looking like a genteel encumbrance ; the religion we 
 want is one that will stand the rough wear and tear of 
 daily life. We want men who will do right though the 
 heavens fall, who believe in God and nothing else, and 
 who will confess Him though all men forsake them 
 and despitefully entreat them. A new age is fast coming 
 on us, and a better one, I think. That species of 
 Puritanism which believes in justice, righteousness, and 
 reality is rapidly passing into the ascendant, and will 
 soon be the dominating force in national life. The 
 philosophies and politics of mere expediency are 
 crumbling into dust, and men are turning more and 
 more to the law of Christ as the true code of govern- 
 ment for men and nations. The new age will hate 
 cant more than heterodoxy, and will use very search- 
 ing tests to sift the chaff from the wheat in 
 Christian profession. If will be a real age, and will 
 demand reality ; it will be a morally courageous age, 
 and will demand courage in the followers of Christ. 
 You, young men, are the natural heirs of that great 
 age which is coming. The twehtieth century is yours. 
 You will march on when the flag has fallen from the 
 failing hands to-day ; you will be in the van of battle 
 when the dust lies thick upon the faces of those who 
 
S/NS OF SILENCE. 159 
 
 now front the music of the guns ! Therefore I adjure 
 you to be real, to be true, to be brave, to be honest men 
 and unflinching witnesses, to quit you like men and be 
 strong. And if I have seemed to set before you an 
 impossible ideal of Christian courage — oh ! if we look 
 with yearning eyes towards that ideal, but with a 
 sickening sense of our own impotence to reach it — then 
 I bid you to remember also that we do nofe adore a 
 Christ who simply tells us what we should do, but a 
 Christ who lives in our hearts by faith, and helps us 
 to do all that He has commanded us. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS, 
 
 " He then having received the sop went immediately out : and it 
 was night." — John xi.i. 30. 
 
 THIS history which lies behind these words is the 
 saddest and most terrible in the annals of Chris- 
 tianity. We are most of us so constituted that we learn 
 most quickly through the imagination ; and that which 
 the imagination has once bathed in its searching Hght 
 the memory seldom loses. An ethical statement may 
 be remembered by its epigrammatic force or clearness, 
 but the history of a human life becomes woven into the 
 very texture of our thought, and is never wholly oblite- 
 rated. We best understand patriotism when we read 
 the life of the hero, and faith when we study the 
 martyr's farewell to life, and love when we recollect our 
 mother's gentle ways, and self-forgetful toil, and nightly 
 kisses. So, too, I think we shall best understand 
 what is meant by deterioration of character culmi- 
 nating in crime and sorrow, not by any bare state- 
 ments or appeals I might make, but by the living 
 picture of a living man's downfall and despair. Just 
 as Esau was the type of the fleshly man, waking up 
 too late to the conviction of spiritual truth, so Judas 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 
 
 is the type of the partially-spiritual man^ whose better 
 nature is gradually sapped by evils imperfectly resisted, 
 till the light of piety dies out, leaving the house of the 
 spirit desolate and dark. The whole tragic story is 
 summed up in this one dramatic touch of narrative, 
 *^ He went immediately out : and it was night." 
 
 I desire, therefore, to trace the main outlines of this 
 strange life, and to mark the moral issues it involves. 
 It is a difficult and delicate task, for while no per- 
 sonality is more pronounced than that of Judas, none is 
 more intricate and subtle. We have to grope in dark- 
 ness or among half-lights to find the motives of the 
 man, and, when his character is revealed, it is suddenly 
 and for a moment only, in the vivid flash of some 
 solitary and significant word ; read, as it were, by 
 lightning, manifest only to be withdrawn. He himself, 
 like Esau, is one of the beacon-lights of history, casting 
 far over the troubled waters of Time a lurid gleam, 
 rising high above us on the solitary crag of this 
 immortal remorse in dreadful warning. He who would 
 approach the study of Judas therefore with bftterness, 
 or contempt, or hatred, does ill ; rather should he 
 approach it with infinite pity, such as men feel when 
 they see a great intellect warped, a splendid possibility 
 blighted, a noble mind overthrown. It is thus Christ 
 regards him when, with ineffable sadness. He dis- 
 misses him from the table of the passion, troubled in 
 spirit because He knows the devil has overmastered 
 one whom He had loved and trusted. It is thus 
 Peter speaks of him without bitterness, or passion, cr 
 
 II 
 
i62 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 angry blame ; the whole scene is too tragic for anger, 
 too intensely sad for posthumous reproach — " he fell 
 from his apostleship ; he has gone to his own place." 
 It is so we should speak of him : as a man and a brother, 
 who suffered temptations which assail us, and fell, as 
 the bravest might fall but for the grace and power of 
 God. 
 
 First, then, let us glance at the Apostolic Life of 
 Judas. It is obvious that Judas was once full of noble 
 aspiration and pious thought. For what did it mean 
 for a man to be an Apostle of Jesus Christ ? It meant 
 following Him who had no place to lay His head, con- 
 tentment with houseless wandering, resignation to 
 perpetual privation. It meant the renunciation of all 
 the ordinary avocations of human life which command 
 fame or fortune, wealth or honour. It meant that a man 
 should be prepared to leave father and mother, the calm 
 of prosperous days, the prizes of successful toil, the 
 strife of secular ambition ; or, to put the least evil last, 
 that he should endure insult and ignominy, the proud 
 man's contumely, the oppressor's scorn, the contempt 
 of all cautious and sedate citizens, to whom the words 
 and life of Christ were at best a sort of splendid mad- 
 ness. It was not, perhaps, the narrowing of life, but 
 it was the concentration of life upon a single purpose ; 
 and the effect of concentration is to intensify rather 
 than to narrow life. And what bait had Christ to offer 
 His followers ? What was the earthly reward for this 
 great renunciation ? There was absolutely none, save 
 His friendship ; and the friendship of a forlorn man, a 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 163 
 
 *' Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," is not 
 usually attractive to shrewd and ambitious minds. 
 
 Let us put the case to ourselves, then, and let us 
 measure Judas by it. Let us suppose there should 
 appear in our streets a man of strange presence and 
 stranger speech. He defies conventional ideas and out- 
 rages conventional opinion. He has no visible means 
 of support, no trade, profession, or occupation ; he is an 
 itinerant prophet, professing to unfold a wholly original 
 ideal of human conduct and duty. He has been an 
 artisan, and is still dressed in the simple raiment of the 
 humble toiler. His own brethren disown him, and the 
 village of his birth yields him neither praise, attention, 
 nor honour. Yet humble as he is by birth and train- 
 ing, he has the audacity to attack the representatives 
 of weaUh, culture, religion, and social opinion. He is 
 in the habit of using language of bitter sternness, almost 
 one might say of bitter violence. Nothing is safe from 
 the winged arrows of his daring words : the futile 
 defences of custom and respect are shrivelled up, as 
 though they were a spider's web, before the heat of 
 his courageous speech. He stands utterly alone, in 
 what some would call a ridiculous, and ethers a sublime, 
 isolation from all sects and parties. His only following 
 are women of the humbler class, and men like himself, 
 artisans and fishermen. His one message is that he 
 comes to found a kingdom of a new social and spiritual 
 order, and that he holds his authority direct from the 
 inscrutable Creator Himself. Do you see the scene? 
 Do you grasp the position ? Can you reason out ita 
 
1 64 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 probabilities ? What should v/e do with such a phe- 
 nomenal man as this ? Beyond doubt we should seize 
 him for the first indictable offence, and try him at the 
 nearesf tribunal of justice. Who would follow him ? 
 Who would believe in him ? Should we ? Should we 
 be eager to go after him in his lonely wanderings and 
 share his bitter bread of sorrow ? Should we be 
 resolute to leave home, friends, comfort, and position 
 to follow one so despised, so strange, so lonely ? Yet 
 that is just what Judas Iscariot did. He heard this 
 Man's voice, and his heart was shaken by it. He left 
 all, and went out, and followed Jesus in the way. It 
 is needless, therefore, to repeat that Judas must once 
 have been a man full of noble enthusiasm, a rare soul, 
 an original nature, a man with great convictions and 
 courage enough to act upon them, a man noble enough, 
 and brave enough, and spiritual enough to do what 
 scarcely a hundred men in all London would dare to 
 do to-day, if the conditions were repeated ! 
 
 It is always easy to be wise after the event, and 
 to say, as John says, when the tragedy is all acted 
 out, and l^e relates the episode of Judas' objection to 
 the waste of the ointment, "This he said because he 
 was a thief." Unquestionably a great act of crime 
 often does give a clue to many mysteries of past 
 conduct. It is the flashing of a signal which is caught 
 up and repeated along the whole line of the past, so 
 that many a trivial occurrence of that past leaps up 
 into new and startling significance. But, on the other 
 hand, the truly noble points in past character and 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 165 
 
 conduct are often forgotten or obscured in such 
 moments of tragic revelation. We are always ready 
 to assume that the traitor was always a traitor, and 
 the poor lost woman of the streets never anything 
 but impure. It is a comfort to our own insecure 
 virtues to assume that the vicious are certain special 
 and unique monstrosities, exceptions to the common 
 race of men, creatures built up from the ooze and 
 ashes of hell, and dedicated to a preternatural wicked- 
 ness from their earliest breath. But nothing can be 
 more false or more unjust. It is the hypocrite's view 
 of character ; it is the Pharisee's attitude towards sin ; 
 and the human heart contradicts it. For ask. What 
 is the root of murder? Oftener than not it is a 
 sudden access of evil passion, and who has not been 
 guilty of violence of temper ? What is the root of 
 treachery ? It is insincerity, the unstable and double 
 mind ; and who has not sometimes acted below his 
 convictions, and swerved somewhat from the strict 
 integrity of his speech ? What is the root of vicious 
 excess and profligate error ? Is it not unchastity of 
 thought, and who has not entertained evil concep- 
 tions and dallied with the impure impulse ? In the 
 murderer, the traitor, and the outcast we simply see 
 the consummation of our own evil tendencies, the 
 dreadful exposition of our own privately rehearsed 
 but mercifully unacted vices. " Let him that is with- 
 out sin cast the first stone," said Jesus, and oh ! how 
 significant is the result — not one dared to smite the 
 sinful woman at His feet, for each felt he might have 
 
i66 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 sinned even as she had ! Until t^e seed of sin is 
 destroyed in our own natures, we have no right to 
 smite the fallen ; and when it is destroyed we shall 
 have no desire to do so. 
 
 No ; there is a picture in the far past of the life of 
 Judas very different to this closing down of despair- 
 ing darkness which St. John paints. We seem to see 
 the infant on his mother's breast, and hear the 
 innocent lips laugh loud with glee amid the flowers 
 of Kerioth. We see the serious child hushed in 
 evening prayer, or going up to the Temple, even as 
 Christ did, in some pilgrim band which fills the desert 
 solitudes with the song of solemn praise. We mark 
 the first Divine awakening of the spirit when the 
 voice of God reaches it, and the vision of truth is 
 revealed. He grows up strong in a Jew's faith and 
 nourished in a Jew's patriotism, a student of the 
 history of his people, an ardent youth burning for the 
 fulfilment of the great promises of sage and prophet. 
 And then somewhere, some time, there flashes on his 
 view the strange face of the Son of God ; he thrills 
 beneath the spell of His gentleness, and bows before 
 His Divine hoHness, and is troubled by the searching 
 splendour and penetration of His speech. His admir- 
 ation becomes love, his love becomes v/orship. He 
 is ever in the congregation, and for weeks together 
 leaves home and kindred that he may hear more of 
 the voice of this strange, sad, solitary Man. At last 
 the reward comes ; those keen eyes have marked his 
 presence, and that Divine hand is on his shoulder, 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS, 167 
 
 and that voice, only heard from afar before, speaks 
 to Him alone, " Judas Iscariot, lovest thou Me ? " 
 And he stammers and is confused ; he bows himself 
 hushed and lowly, as when a great, pure love dawns 
 upon a lonely soul, and says, ''Yea, Lord, thru 
 knowest that I love Thee ! " The spell draws him 
 and he follows on, and into his life, as truly as into 
 the life of John or Peter, there comes this new. Divine, 
 wonderful indwelling of the love of Christ. Oh, think 
 of that chapter in the life of Judas, for be very sure 
 some such unwritten chapter there was, some such 
 experience steeped in the tender lustre of love and 
 memory ! Think of it, I say, and learn when you 
 meet the dishonest, the false, the wicked, the branded 
 felon, the poor shivering outcast of the streets, the 
 despised exile from the abodes of love and honour, 
 overwhelmed with contumely, only spoken of with 
 shame and shuddering, the swine and refuse of society 
 — oh ! think then of the brightness and innocence of 
 earlier years, and remember you behold a spectacle 
 not to be shunned with loathing, but to be wept over 
 with tears of infinite compassion. 
 
 Remembering what Judas became, perhaps some of 
 you wall ask, Why did Christ choose him at all ? Christ 
 chose him for what he was, and what he might have 
 been, not for what he became. Christ chooses men 
 not for their attainments, but for their possibilities. 
 Do you suppose Christ chooses men for their ability 
 or their character? He chooses them that He may 
 give them character and inspire new capacities within 
 
i68 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 them. He chooses twelve men, and one was a traitor ; 
 the average of treachery in human life is usually higher 
 than that. Moreover, the election of Christ does not 
 fetter the free-will of a man. In a certain high and 
 almost inscrutable sense it is true that it all happens 
 ^' that it may be fulfilled ; " for though the bad man 
 may seem an accident he is not, but in some way fits 
 into a Divine order. The wild wind roars through 
 the troubled heaven, but somewhere there is a sail to 
 catch it, so that all its fierceness is yoked to fairest 
 uses, and transformed into a mysterious helpfulness. 
 There are no accidents in the Divine order ; the harvest 
 of to-day is the fruitful child of the storm-weat' er of 
 a century ago; it was all that it might be fulfilled. 
 But whatever may be the ultimate issue of events, the 
 will of man works freely within their circumference. 
 Christ has chosen every living soul, and called him ; 
 yet few there are that shall be saved. You are as free 
 to work evil in an apostleship as in a fisherman's boat. 
 Nay, more, if this man was so cursed and burdened 
 with evil aptitudes, was it not an act of divinest mercy 
 to call him to an apostleship ? There are some men 
 who never would be Christians at all unless they were 
 Christian ministers. They need the constraint of solemn 
 responsibilities ; the only chance of saving them is to 
 set them to save others. And, looked at in this light 
 of human experience, how Divine was that discernment 
 which chose Judas, and gave him this unique oppor- 
 tunity of making his calling and election sure beneath 
 the very eyes of Jesus ! For the evils which destroyed 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 169 
 
 Judas had not ripened in him when Jesus called him. 
 He came in the untainted freshness of faith, perhaps 
 in the unbroken energy of youth. He had more than 
 ordinary capacity, for at once he became the organiser 
 of the Httle society, its steward, its financier, the cus- 
 todian of its m.eans. To paint him therefore in the 
 light of the after event, as most painters have done, 
 disfigured with the leer of low cunning, scowling with 
 the meanness of baffled craft and delayed cupidity, is 
 altogether false. He who paints Judas must put into 
 his face the dying light of what was once noble enthu- 
 siasm—the shadowed eagerness of w^hat was once 
 heroic faith. He must paint a face full of the anguish 
 of remembrance, the traces of perished nobility, the 
 tragedy of overthrown ideals. He must paint no 
 haggard miser — 
 
 " I saw a Judas once, 
 It was an old man's face. Greatly that artist erred 
 Judas had eyes of starry blue, 
 And lips like thine that gave the traitor kiss." 
 
 In a word, we must remember Christ called him, and 
 not in vain ; Christ loved him, and not without cause ; 
 and, howsoever dreadful the end may be, there was 
 once a bright, a brilliant, and a beautiful beginning. 
 
 We turn, then, to the great error in the life of Judas. 
 It is impossible to tell where that deterioration in 
 character began, but we know that it was not un- 
 observed. Long before the end Jesus said, "One of 
 you is a devil." Already He had marked the waning 
 zeal, the growing worldliness, the encroaching greed. 
 
I7b THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 But He did not cast this man out. He left Himself to 
 be robbed and betrayed, knowing well that if the con- 
 straint of love will not keep a man, outlawry will not 
 redeem him. It is the central point of God's thought 
 about man ; we are to be saved by love or no salvation 
 is possible. The doors of His Church are wide open, 
 and into them throng not only the meek and noble, but 
 the ambitious, the sordid, the worldly ; people touched 
 by transient emotions of piety, and over-mastered by 
 abiding instincts ofwordliness, men desirous of power 
 and covetous of publicity, they all come, and the sheep 
 are not separated from the goats. It is difficult to find 
 a pure breed of either sheep or goats ; to our dull 
 discernment the finer lines of demarcation are indis- 
 tinct. There is no keen dividing line, no flash of 
 revealing light, no angry roll of judgment thunder. 
 Saint and pseudo-saint sing out of the same book, John 
 and Judas bow in the same prayer. We do not see 
 the difference ; we even mistake fussiness for zeal, and 
 thirst of power for ardour in work ; and so the wheat 
 and tares grow together "until the harvest." One 
 only sees, and His face, full of solemn scrutiny, is 
 never turned away, and His eye pierces all disguises. 
 Strange words ! ''One of you is a devil." How they 
 must have startled the disciples ! In these early 
 days when zeal was at its height, and no shadow of 
 treachery had fallen, " One of you is a devil." " One ! " 
 — which ? I do not know ; I cannot tell. We look 
 aghast into each other's faces. The words are like the 
 flash of the thunderbolt out of the clear sky, like the 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 171 
 
 voice of doom crashing in amid the happy singing. 
 But He knows who He means, and already in some 
 heart He perceives the first slow crumbling of decay, 
 the beginning of irrevocable ruin, the signs which 
 declare the denier, the apostate, the betrayer that 
 shall be. 
 
 There were two motives which actuated Judas in the 
 betrayal of his -Lord : one is clear and certain ; the 
 other is probable, but perhaps not less real. The first 
 was cupidity. Cupidity is the most mean and sordid 
 of all human vices. It narrows the whole horizon of 
 life to the rim of a piece of money, and discolours the 
 whole world with the yellow blindness of gold. It 
 distorts the intellect and hardens the heart, and, like 
 all other vices, grows by what it feeds on. Into that 
 vice Judas had fallen. His custody of the bag had 
 led him to covet its contents, and a meaner sin — when 
 we remember the poverty of the disciples, and the 
 destitute, whose source of help was in the bag — it is 
 impossible to conceive. 
 
 The second motive has strong probability upon its 
 side. Perhaps Judas may have reasoned that the hour 
 had come to force a declaration of Christ's kingdom 
 on earth. Remember that it was an earthly kingdom, 
 and no other sort of kingdom, which all the disciples 
 anticipated. The two disciples on the road to Em- 
 maus expressed precisely the sense of disappointment 
 felt by all the disciples when they said, *' We trusted 
 that it should have been He that should have redeemed 
 Israel." The very last question the disciples put to 
 
173 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Christ immediately before the cloud received Him out 
 of their sight was, ^' Wilt Thou at this time restore 
 again the kingdom to Israel ? " What they all looked 
 for was a great surge of patriotism, which should carry 
 Jesus on its crest to the throne of David, and before 
 which the invader and alien should be swept away. 
 Three years had almost passed, and that kingdom had 
 not come. To every word of warning wisdom as to 
 the true nature of that kingdom they had been per- 
 versely deaf. It began to look as if that kingdom 
 were never coming, as if they had followed a bright 
 illusion, a fascinating but fatal phantom. What was 
 the use of miracles, sermons, popularity, fame, if the 
 kingdom did not come ? Judas was astute enough to 
 know that such things as fame end as rapidly as they 
 begin, and he was ambitious enough to desire more 
 tangible results than these. And now, as the days 
 pass, and he seems no nearer to the goal, — always the 
 crowd but never the army, always the homage of the 
 crowd but never the fiery watchword nor the stroke for 
 power — the hearts of men like Judas misgave them. If 
 Christ did not move, then he, the prime minister of 
 the little company, would move. To thrust Christ 
 into the very hands of His enemies would be only to 
 ensure one more stupendous miracle, and He who 
 had trodden the angry seas into calm by the mastery 
 of Omnipotence could defend Himself in such a case. 
 It would bring matters to a crisis : either the kingdom 
 on earth would be declared, or the whole bright dream 
 would break up and vanish like an exhausted illusion. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS, 173 
 
 And SO for him there would be not only the reward 
 of cupidity, but the pleasure of outwitting the higli 
 priests and gaining his own ambitious ends. I think, 
 at least, that is a probable, as it certainly is a merciful, 
 view of Judas, which we may permit ourselves to take. 
 Cupidity, vanity, worldliness, lust of power— all that 
 is meant by the corroding influence of low ideals ever 
 becoming lower, acting on the spiritual nature and 
 wearing it down, that is the drama painted here, and 
 it is being acted out in our midst every day. Is not 
 that young man listening to me who, like Judas, has 
 already been brought under the spiritual influence of 
 Christ? Your life has thriven in the sheltered sun- 
 light of a pious home, and across your youth has fallen 
 the mysterious presence of the Christ ; your spirit has 
 thrilled beneath His touch and responded to His voice. 
 But that first freshness of faith has faded from your 
 life, and now the bhght of worldHness has fallen on 
 you. You have not fallen into open vice, but, you are 
 estranged from Christ, and the spiritual is ceasing to 
 affect your life. You are like a ship which still seems 
 to hold the same course, but curious watchers on the 
 shore perceive that the course is altered, and know that 
 there arq, secret currents which are drifting you toward 
 the rocks. The deterioration of character has begun. 
 The integrity of your purpose is corrupted. The 
 bright enthusiasm of boyhood is passing into the 
 worldling's callous pessimism. Some secret sin is 
 already festering in your life, and, like the slow worm 
 toiling darkly and silently in the centre of the fair tree, 
 
174 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 is eating out your heart. And oh, what is half so 
 terrible as this wreck of character ? The loss of in- 
 tellectual vigour, the slow decay of the body fashioned 
 in strength and beauty, the crumbling of historic 
 monuments, the downfall of great empires — all this is 
 comedy beside the spectacle of the slow disintegration 
 of character before the secret force of sin. What lips 
 can utter the music of infinite lamentation which such 
 a theme deserves ? But this disintegration of character 
 is going on even now in some of us, and as Christ 
 passes through our midst He pierces all the clever 
 shows of virtue with which we deceive others and half- 
 deceive ourselves, and His word strikes like a lightning 
 flash into the interior darkness of the most hidden life, 
 '^ Verily I say unto you — one of you is a devil ! " 
 
 But however we may interpret the motives of Judas, 
 we cannot but reflect, How inadequate the reward to the 
 risk ! Take it on the nobler supposition, — was the 
 possible result of compromising Christ worth the peril 
 of the venture ? Take it on the lower, and is it 
 possible to conceive a more miserable reward for so 
 stupendous a piece of wickedness ? ^' Who sold his 
 Lord for thirty pieces of silver ! " You cannot utter 
 these words without a sense of keen, sad, bitter irony. 
 Between the act and the reward there seems an im- 
 passable gulf — the one is vast in Satanic wickedness, 
 the other contemptible in Satanic meanness. But it 
 is always so ; the reward of evil is perpetually ina- 
 dequate. Think, O traitor, in whom the spirit of 
 falsehood has already begun to work — ^you will betray 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 175 
 
 your friend, your party, your country — think of what 
 it is you risk ! What is that, do you reply ? This : 
 the scorn of men, and the still more scathing scorn of 
 yourself — that all men will shun you as a moral leper, 
 that through all the years of your life you must 
 hide your shameful secret in solitary places, and cry, 
 " Unclean, unclean ! " And this, also, that some man 
 may chance to take a pen and narrate your deed, 
 as the deed of Judas is narrated ; and that little scrap 
 of printed paper will go fluttering dcwn the centuries 
 and secure you the certain execrations of posterity ; 
 and that all this will last as long as men can read 
 and there is a sun to read by, and a human heart 
 left to scorn the memory of your deed ! Is it worth 
 the price? Think, O thief, pilfering only little sums 
 to-day perhaps, what it is you risk : the felon's 
 cell and the felon's brand, perpetual outlawry from 
 society, infamy for yourself, and heartbreak and 
 anguish for your friends ; and for what reward ? For 
 a few pieces of paltry silver, spent in shameful plea- 
 sure or hoarded in agonising terror ; and tell me, is 
 it worth the price? Think, O youth, beguiled into 
 profligacy, what it is you sell, and for what a price ; 
 a pure heart, an untainted imagination, a clean record, 
 and in exchange an infamous and transient pleasure 
 followed by guilty and degrading knowledge, an irre- 
 parable stain, growing like a spot of leprosy, till life 
 is loathsome, and death a rack of unspeakable anguish 
 and despair. Tell me, is it worth the price ? Yet 
 such is the madness and folly of men, they are ready 
 
176 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 to pay it. They pay it, knowing well how vilely they 
 are cheated. With a sort of insensate impulse men 
 do evil long after evil has ceased to gratify them, the 
 very power to do ill deeds making ill deeds done. 
 Call to me the great host of men who have taken the 
 price. Is there one happy man among them ? Was 
 there ever a joyful felon, a mirthful murderer, a merry 
 traitor ? See them, as they shuffle forward in view, 
 the bondservants in iniquity ! All light save the 
 hateful light of cunning is burned out of their eyes ; 
 they laugh, but never smile ; black fear is riding 
 at their back ; they flit phantomlike in desolate places 
 and have no rest, they hide themselves in the deepest 
 purlieus of great cities, they clothe themselves with 
 darkness as with a garment, for they ever feel the 
 strangling cord about their throats, and the dooms- 
 man's hand upon their shoulders — look at them with 
 their haggard brows, and silent lips, and stealthy, 
 crouching walk, and behold their faces are as the 
 faces of the lost, for already they dwell in the fiery 
 circles of a worse Inferno than any Dante painted ! 
 These are the men who have taken the pricey and, 
 like a low moan carried by a sad wind through the 
 lighted ways of life, the accumulated sorrow of their 
 wasted lives cries to those who stand in the first 
 happy sunlight of youth or strength or on the verge of 
 dark temptations: ''The way of transgressors is hard!" 
 Mark, then, that sin is a cumulative force. No one 
 ever expects to join that dreadful company of men 
 who have taken the price ; no one ever did. No one 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 177 
 
 ever sees the ominous shadow of the prison or the 
 lazar-house falling on him in his first act of sin, or 
 believes he could betray Christ in the hour v^hen he 
 is first conscious of withdrawing from Him. On the 
 contrary, each one is ready to say there are certain 
 sins he could not do, and he honestly beHeves it. 
 Probably no one was more indignant than Judas 
 when Christ said, " One of you is a devil." But no 
 man knows how far he may fall when the avalanche 
 begins to move beneath his feet. The profligate 
 always thinks he will be so cautious in his vices 
 that their penalty will never fall on him, and the 
 drunkard always says he knows just how much is 
 good for him and is not likely to be the slave of 
 drink. But see how rapidly the evil hidden in the 
 heart of Judas is developed. A few months pass, 
 and he is found at the Last Supper with the price of 
 his Master's blood upon him. All are sad; he only 
 is confident. All are touched with pity for the Divine 
 sufferer ; he only sits hard and resolute, with his guilty 
 secret locked securely in his own bosom. And then 
 Christ is troubled. It seems as if the sin of the 
 whole world sits before Him incarnate in this one 
 disciple. He cannot eat the sacred supper in that 
 dreadful presence. He cannot speak the last words 
 of ineftable love while such ears are listening. Christ 
 knows that He will be betrayed, and says so. And 
 then Judas, in a very consummation of effrontery, 
 says, *'Is it I?" That sentence marks the last 
 depth of guilt in Judas. Christ can only answer; 
 
 12 
 
178 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 "Thou hast said." "And he . . . went immediately 
 out; and it was night." 
 
 And then follows the great Remorse, *' When he saw 
 Jesus condemned — " So he did see it. He saw the 
 trial before Caiaphas and Herod, the scourging and the 
 mockery, and when he saw it, the whole horrible truth 
 of his own crime broke upon him, and with one wild 
 outcry of despair he threw up his hands, and fled 
 through the thick darkness of Calvary, and went out 
 and hanged himself. How terrible is that moment 
 when a man sees himself as he is, and is able to measure 
 the full consequences of his acts. After the darkness 
 of evil deeds there always comes that clear, troubling, 
 avenging light. In one of Frith's pictures, the culmi- 
 nation of the tragedy is reached when the day breaks, 
 and shines through the uncurtained window on the 
 ruined gambler. In the most tragic page of fiction our 
 time has produced, the same truth is taught in that one 
 intense ringing sentence, which tells us how when the 
 murder was done the day broke, and the sun " shone 
 upon the blood. It did." When Judas saw Christ 
 condemned, the high priest scornfully flinging Him aside 
 like the broken tool He was, the black cross lifted high 
 against the lurid sky, the bowed head, the wasted 
 blood-stained face of Him whom he had kissed, and 
 heard the great cry of His parting anguish as He gave 
 up the ghost, then the last veil of deception was rent 
 in him, and he saw himself as Christ saw him. And 
 the time comes when you will see your sin as God 
 now sees it, and will measure it in its full irreparable 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. 179 
 
 consequences as God now measures it. When Judas 
 saw that sight, he said, " I have betrayed innocent 
 blood, and he went out and hanged himself." 
 
 Many and solemn are the lessons which crowd upon 
 the mind as we close the record. Almost every phrase 
 used about Judas is in itself a sermon, a tragedy, a 
 revelation ! '* Is it I ? " They all said it ; for they 
 were all shaken with fear, and felt themselves capable 
 of the wickedness of Judas, even as we bow with a 
 bitter knowledge of our weakness and pray, " Deliver 
 us from evil." ** He went out, and it was night." It is 
 always night when a man turns his back on Christ ; to 
 leave Him is to enter the outer darkness. " He went 
 to his own place" — that is precisely where each of us 
 is going. There is a Voice which says, " I go to 
 piepare a place for you;" but we cannot enter that 
 place unless we are prepared for it. The final law of 
 the universe is like to like ; the closing voice of Time 
 gives men the unrestrained heritage of their own free- 
 will : " Let him that is unjust be unjust still." You 
 will go to precisely the society you have fitted yourself 
 for, and the place you have prepared to receive you. 
 Where that place was for Judas, to what land of gloom 
 and tears he went, we know not ; but it was his own 
 place. Beyond that word no other is given us. There 
 the history closes on this side the veil, and it closes 
 with the terror of suicide, the blasted tree with its grim 
 burden hanging over the dreadful precipice, and the 
 field of Aceldama, with its heap of bruised and battered 
 clay, '' the field of blood." 
 
l8o THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 But if we cannot pierce that dreadful gloom and 
 follow the flight of that guilty spirit to the face of God, 
 or guess with what words the fallen Apostle and the 
 Divine Master may have met in that revealing light 
 beyond, one thing we do know, and are quite sure of : 
 we know that Judas left Christ, Christ did not leave him. 
 Oh, had he turned, even in that last moment when his 
 foot was on the threshold of the door, and he faced the 
 eternal blackness ; had he even then fallen on his knees 
 and cried, " Lord, be merciful, I am a sinful man," 
 would not that great heart of Christ have taken him in ? 
 Would not He have rejoiced more over this one sinner 
 who was lost and found than over the ninety and nine 
 who need no such sore repentance ? Ah ! can we not 
 picture how, while all the disciples shrink back in con- 
 sternation and dismay from such guilt as his, He alone, 
 the blessed Healer of men, puts His hand upon that 
 fallen head, and in the darkness Judas perceives above 
 him " the waving of the hands that blessed " ? And 
 can we not perceive further how, forgiven much, this 
 man might have loved much, and have been known to 
 us to-day by the splendour of his saintliness, and not 
 by the huge horror of his shame ? It might have been 
 for Judas : it may be for you. You are going out — 
 you are going out immediately ; are you going into the 
 night ? Oh, brother, I cannot let you go till Christ has 
 blessed you. You stand on that threshold which is 
 the narrow verge between two lives. Christ claims 
 your discipleship, and in Christ only is the secret of 
 true manhood. Do you reply that this steadfast dis- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS. i8l 
 
 cipleship, this ideal manhood I have tried in these 
 addresses to point you to, is impossible for one so 
 weak as 3'Ou ? Then I reply once more, We go to 
 Christ not because we are strong, but because we are 
 weak, and all that Christ tells us to be He will help us 
 to become. Do you stand, weak, tempted, half-despair- 
 ing on the brink of that great darkness, that night of 
 nights into which Judas sank ? Oh, listen, brothers ! 
 He calls us ; He bids us hope ; He is saying, '^ Ye 
 shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come 
 upon you." That is what 1 want : power to do right 
 and love right ; power to love Him and to suffer for 
 Him ; power such as that which changed Peter, the 
 cowardly denier, into Peter the tongue of fire. As for 
 me, I obey that Voice. I turn my face from the dark- 
 ness to the light. I come simply because He has called 
 me. That is all I can say as I fall contrite at His feet, 
 but it is enough. 
 
 " Just as I am, without one plea, 
 But that Thy blood was shed for nie, 
 And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, 
 O Lamb of God, I come.' 
 
X. 
 
 JOB ON PESSIMISM. 
 
 "Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." — Job 
 V. 7. 
 
 THE Book of Job is the grandest poem in the 
 literature of the world. The majesty of an 
 almost primeval world breathes in it. In all that con- 
 stitutes the highest human genius — sublimity, devout- 
 ness, pathos, dignity of thought, largeness of touch 
 and view, it is unsurpassed. But it lives not merely 
 because it is the work of sublime genius, but because 
 the heart of the world beats in it. The deepest ques- 
 tionings and yearnings of the soul of man are embalmed 
 in it. The ages do not alter these: they do but in- 
 tensify them. The Book of Job is being written anew 
 to-day in a thousand homes, where first the servant 
 sickens and then the child, first the treasure disappears 
 and then the house falls, till stripped and peeled, bare 
 and desolate, smitten but rebellious, men bow them- 
 selves in utter weakness and abasement, and cry with 
 an exceeding bitter cry, '^ My soul is weary of my life. 
 Would God that I were dead ! There the wicked 
 cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest ! " Let 
 
JOB ON PESSIMISM 183 
 
 US look at Job's view of his troubles, as he stated it 
 in his darkest and most pessimistic moment. 
 
 First of all, then, we have an obvious truth, that 
 ''man is born to trouble." That needs neither eluci- 
 dation nor amplification. The life which has wholly 
 escaped the stroke of trouble has never yet been lived. 
 For there are at least two species of troubles, which 
 it is utterly out of the power of any man, however 
 prosperous, to checkmate or elude — viz., bereavement 
 and death ; and neither can he escape the physical 
 ills which produce both. Long life, for instance, is 
 one of the blessings most coveted by men ; but so 
 closely are blessing and curse interwoven, that the 
 longer the life, the more certain is the action of be- 
 reavement, and the more disastrous will its sorrows 
 become. Conceive to yourself the most perfect of 
 human lives — perfect in its health, in its vigour, in 
 unbroken intellectual activity, in capacity of enjoyment, 
 in its achievement of earthly successes. Watch such 
 a life, as it grows in power and breadth, as it wins 
 knowledge and experience, as it rises into public 
 honour and reverence. It is the life we all of us most 
 covet ; and it is a healthy desire which prompts us to 
 covet it. But if you come to watch this life with any 
 closeness of scrutiny, you will see at once that one 
 grievous form of trouble is multiplied to it, though 
 m.any other forms are avoided— the trouble of bereave- 
 ment is there. As it grows in years it becomes more 
 isolated and solitary. Friend after friend departs, and 
 shcck after shock of sorrow must be endured. It is 
 
1.84 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 the penalty of old age to be lonely. The old man is 
 like a traveller who started long ago with a jocund 
 company upon the mountain path ; but as day wanes 
 one by one his friends drop behind, and fall out of 
 sight or hearing. One is lame and one is weary ; the 
 cloud rolls up and covers one, and the snowstorm 
 blows and hides another : one sleeps beside some 
 flowery hollow on the way, and one was smitten by 
 the lightning or the avalanche : he alone is left, press- 
 ing on with failing heart to the solemn inn of death, 
 which crowns the mountain summit, and where in 
 awful solitude he lies down to die. He is born to 
 trouble, and cannot escape trouble. Neither fame, nor 
 honour, nor length of days can teach him any secret 
 whereby he may elude that awful presence. The coin 
 in which life pays itself to him may differ, as gold 
 differs from silver or copper, but the mintage and 
 superscription are the same. 
 
 Now if the most perfect human life which one can 
 imagine is born to trouble, if hearts break in palaces 
 as in cottages, and men bear the grief of a wounded 
 spirit in the house of luxury as well as in the seclusion 
 of penury, we need not pause to verify the words of 
 Job from the more visible and open sorrows of the 
 world. We need not enumerate the disappointments 
 and disasters, the calamities and pains of a life which 
 never knows good-fortune, or more than passing flashes 
 of joyous sunshine. The poor, the broken-hearted, 
 the unhappy, the unfortunate, are always with us. 
 The invalid and the dying are in every street. No 
 
JOB ON PESSIMISM. 185 
 
 hour passes when Rachel is not weeping for her 
 children, and when the cry of desolate hearts is not 
 going up from the sick-chamber, which has become a 
 death-chamber, while we laughed or while we slept. 
 
 But the great question that meets us is this : how 
 do we interpret this unhappiness of human life ? We 
 know how the pessimist interprets it. He tells us 
 frankly that life is not worth living, and that no sane 
 man would choose to live it, if power of choice were 
 his. He tells us that the only way of getting through 
 the bitter ways of life tolerably is to cultivate callous- 
 ness of heart, and to wear the armour of a trained 
 stoicism. He says that if any responsible Power did 
 make the world, He blundered Badly in His work ; so 
 badly that we could make a better world ourselves, if 
 the chance were given us. And finally he tells us that 
 the best hope of man is to be done with life as soon as 
 prssible, the best power of man is power to terminate 
 it at once, and the best wisdom of the race is universal 
 suicide. This is a philosophy of hopelessness which is 
 being preached to-day. Its effect is to fill the world 
 with — 
 
 "Infections of unutterable sadness 
 Infections ot incalculable madness, 
 Infections of incurable despair." 
 
 Its gospel is — 
 
 " O brothers of sad lives ! they are so brief, 
 A few short years must bring us all relief; 
 
 Can we not bear these years of labouring breath? 
 But if you would not this poor life fulfil, 
 Lo, you are free to end it when you v\ill 
 Without the fear of waking aft^r death." 
 
l86 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Let us examine this view of life then, and see how 
 far its pretensions can be sustained. 
 
 I. First, then, What is trouble ? 
 
 Now trouble is a wide word, and may be said to 
 include three ideas at least ; viz., labour, pain, and 
 dissatisfaction. Trouble and labour in the Old Testa- 
 ment writings are often used synonymously, as you 
 will see by a glance at the marginal reference of this 
 very verse. Pain and dissatisfaction are constant sources 
 of trouble, in the conventional acceptation of the word. 
 If then we take these three facts of life as constituting 
 what men assume to make the bitterness of existence, 
 we shall not be far off a right understanding of the 
 text. It is these three facts of labour, pain, and dis- 
 satisfaction in human life which fill the pessimist with 
 despair, and on which he founds his railing accusation 
 against the Governor and the government of the uni- 
 verse. First of all then, let, us examine the meaning 
 and effect of labour on human life. 
 
 Well, what is it the pessimist has to say against 
 labour ? It is that it is a curse, and nothing but a 
 curse. In a well-constituted world labour would not 
 be a necessity. In such a world all mouths would be 
 amply fed without toil for bread, and all lives freely 
 lived without the grinding yoke of toil. Labour pre- 
 vents the free development of human life. It makes 
 men for the larger part of their time slaves and 
 drudges. It is like toiling at a dyke — keeping its frail 
 barrier up with infinite effort against an encroaching 
 sea, because we know that if labour is relaxed, the 
 
JOB ON PESSIMISM. 187 
 
 waters of desolation and misery would rush in upon us, 
 and overpower us. The ideal world is an idle world — 
 a paradise of loungers, a land where it is always after- 
 noon, a lotus-eating realm of drowsy ease, where ring 
 of hammer or roll of wheel is never heard, because the 
 fruits of Eden drop unbidden into sensual mouths, and 
 food and rairrent are provided with the same bountiful 
 precision as light and air. That is the pessimistic ideal 
 of perfect life, and a perfect world. 
 
 But now ask. Is labour a cuise ? Something of truth 
 there is in the pessimist wail, because the incidence of 
 labour oftentimes is unjust. The frantic effort of the 
 world from the beginning has been to escape work. 
 It seems as though every man had asked himself, 
 " Can I set some one else to work for me, and steal 
 the fruit of his labour?" or, "Can I live without 
 work?" or, "Can I, by labouring at express speed 
 for a given number of years, at last manage to live 
 without work?" I do not pause to examine these 
 questions fully, but I remark about them all, that the 
 escape from labour which men covet, and do often 
 gain in part, so far from blessing them, generally 
 ends in cursing them. To modify the drudgeries of 
 human life is, and should be, the aim of any Christian 
 civilisation. Labour is a curse when it allows man 
 no leisure for books, or for recreation, or quiet thought. 
 But the escape from labour by setting another to toil 
 for you, or by toiling at double speed yourself for half 
 a lifetime, to idle through the c thcr half, is a worse 
 curse than honest drudgery. Indolence leads men 
 
i88 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 not to paradise, but to hell. It debauches and it sen- 
 sualises ; it depraves and it debases ; it poisons the 
 blood and fans the passions into perilous activity ; it is 
 the destruction of a man, not his elevation or emancipa- 
 tion. Let the lives of the idle and effeminate rich be my 
 witness in this ! And how can it be otherwise ? Such 
 lives are lived in direct defiance of the just law of life, 
 that *' if a man work not, neither shall he eat ; " and the 
 outraged law is avenged upon them in enftm and misery, 
 in the disintegration of the moral nature, and the 
 effeminacy of the physical ; and therefore I say human 
 experience condemns the pessimistic ideal of paradise 
 as wicked and absurd. It is the conception of a niean 
 mind and grovelling nature. It springs from an utterly 
 base and paltry view of human nature and its capacities, 
 and were such a paradise gained to-morrow, it would 
 soon prove a field of Aceldama, or garden of Gehenna. 
 '*As the sparks fly upward" — yes, upward! says 
 Job. That is the true tendency of labour — upward ! 
 Labour is the safeguard of human manhood. It is the 
 source of human civilisation. What is it but the 
 necessity of labour that has drawn man from his cave- 
 dwellings and mud wigwams, and taught him to build 
 palaces and temples; and in order that he might build 
 them, has set him to pierce the barriers of nature, and 
 wrest from the stubborn mother the secrets of her 
 wealth ? Is it not labour which has disciplined his 
 powers, and by the development of these powers has 
 lifted him from the ranks of the savage to a place but 
 little lower than the angels ? Is it not in the school 
 
JOB ON PESSIMISM. 189 
 
 of labour that his hand has gained deftness and flexi- 
 bility, his eye has learnt precision and discernment, his 
 brain has broadened into a supreme engine of thought, 
 before which the secret of the heavens has stood re- 
 vealed, and the mystery of nature has been laid bare 
 and naked ? All that man is, all that man has, he 
 owes to labour. It has lifted him up, not cast him 
 down. It has become the music of life, the secret of 
 health, the minister of peace, the impulse to develop- 
 ment. Is it then to be deplored as a disaster ? Is 
 the best dream of man an idle world ? Is this the sort 
 of paradise to which he aspires ? The man who has 
 no higher aspiration than desire for ease has already 
 abdicated his royalty, and ranged himself with the 
 monkey and the ape rather than with the man. But 
 the man who toils, and rejoices in his labour, has 
 already drawn the sting of the primal curse, and finds 
 liow true is the word of Job, that as sparks fly upward, 
 when the smith's hammer rings upon the anvil, so a 
 man rises when he vv'orks, and sinks when he disdains 
 work, and chooses rather sensual ease and indolence 
 and self-indulgence. 
 
 II. Take again the idea of pain. What has the pes- 
 simist to say to that ? His reply is. Pain is nothing 
 but a curse, a malady, a disaster ; something that no 
 God who w^as good could ever have permitted in thj 
 constitution of His world. Any able pessimist could 
 have made a better world, and in the pessimistic world 
 fain would have had no place. Now perhaps that 
 £eems to some of you a just criticism. There is a 
 
190 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 plausible benevolence in the idea that is seductive. 
 You will recollect that this power and presence of 
 pain in the world, was one of the difficulties of my 
 unknown correspondent, referred to in an earlier 
 address. But ask again, would a world without pain 
 be an improvement ? We are born to it ; would it 
 make better men of us to cheat our fate ? Is it a 
 right assumption that a world without pain would be 
 a better world than the world as it is ? You have but 
 to think to see how false is the assumption. For, to 
 begin with, pain is the operation of law, and is one 
 safeguard against peril. Look at it in regard to our 
 own daily well-being. Suppose nothing warned you 
 when you did a wrong to your body. Suppose you 
 could eat or drink without any sensation of fulness, 
 or any pain to teach you the error of gluttony. What 
 would happen ? We know that very soon death would 
 be upon us. Pain is the sense which interprets our 
 peril, and warns us against errors which end in death. 
 It seizes us roughly, and touches us with its flaming 
 sword ; but the sharp twinge of agony prevents a 
 woise thing 1 appening to us. It is the voice of law, 
 which sa}?, " Thus far shalt thou go, but no farther: 
 for be} end this lies physical extinction." And so true 
 is this, that in many sickness cs, when pain ceases, it 
 is the sign that hope of hfe is o\er. Pain is the sign 
 tl at life still struj^gles against its foes, and strains 
 e\ery nerve for victory. But when a sudden blissful 
 ease shoots through the wearied frame, and the sick 
 man says, '' I no longer suffer," the wise physician turns 
 
JOB ON PESSIMISM. 191 
 
 away with downcast eyes : he knows mortification has 
 set in, and death is near. 
 
 Or look at it in regard to the outer world. Suppose 
 no torture warned us that fire burned, how could we 
 guard against it? Now we are warned, and therefore 
 we are safe. Pain stands like a wise sentinel at all 
 the points of danger in the path we take, and will not 
 let us pass with impunity. It warns the drunkard of 
 his folly, the profligate of his fatal recklessness, the 
 mountain-climber of the line of peril which he may 
 not cross, and the miner of the danger which lies in 
 wait for him. It clutches the throat of the miner and 
 the athlete, and pushes them back from the jaws of 
 death ; and it touches the heart, the head, the Hmb, and 
 nerve of the drunkard, and reminds him that a worse 
 thing may yet befall him. Dismiss that sentinel ; then 
 what happens ? The man is doomed. The red flag 
 of peril is removed, and he goes on to his fate un- 
 warned. There is no one to warn him back from the 
 pit of destruction, on whose brink he stands defence- 
 less. In other words, pain is the armour of safety in 
 which Gcd has clothed mankind, and when that is 
 lemoved, man stands without shelter in the presence 
 of inevitable death. And here again Job's words con? 
 front us : "As the sparks fly upward ! " In the 
 development of character pain is one of the greatest 
 of all teachers. It does not crush : it elevates. It 
 teaches sympathy, tenderness, compassion. It refines 
 the heart, and sends the thoughts of men flying up- 
 wards, like the bright sparks of the smith's fire, in 
 
192 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 which the shapeless is fashioned into youth and beauty, 
 and the useless into grace and service. On beds of 
 pain the spirit of man has gained its clearest visions 
 of God, and uttered its noblest thoughts about Him. 
 Beside the bed of pain the hands of man have been 
 trained to their wisest tasks, and the heart has been 
 touched with the great purgation of a Divine compas- 
 sion. How much poorer the world would be without 
 the ministry of pain, let the man answer who can con- 
 ceive what the world would be without the patience 
 and resignation of the sick-room, the Christ-like service 
 of the hospital, the sedulous and self-sacrificing tender- 
 ness of the nurse. Pain is a fire indeed, not penal, but 
 cleansing; not diabolical, but Divine; and through it 
 human spirits rise into the vision of that God, whose 
 only-begotten Son was also '' the Man of sorrows, and 
 acquainted with grief." 
 
 III. Or take the idea of dissatisfaction^ and here 
 again the same truth is taught. Dissatisfaction, as the 
 pessimist interprets it, is one of the worst curses of life. 
 The ideal life is the satislied life. The ideal life should 
 know no passionate craving or restless yearning. It 
 should move calmly, and with invariable pulses, in 
 meek obedience to the law of its own limitations. Now 
 man is tortured with the restlessness of visionary aims, 
 and impossible hopes. He 
 
 ** looks before and after, 
 And sighs for what is not. 
 His sincercst laughter 
 With some grief is fraught, 
 His swpetegt spngs are those that tell of saddest thought.** 
 
fOB ON PESSIMISM. 193 
 
 He cannot be content : he has stolen the Promethean 
 fire, and it burns in him with a devouring energ3^ 
 Or so he says : inventing, and then believing idle 
 myths, to justify his revolt against his environment 
 and his incurable u^ happiness. 
 
 In the ideal world of pessimism all this will have 
 entirely disappeared. And with it, what else ? For dis- 
 satisfaction is the secret of human progress. It is 
 dissatisfaction with filth which produces cleanliness, 
 dissatisfaction with savagery which leads to civilisa- 
 tion, dissatisfaction with ignorance which kindles the 
 thirst for knowledge. It is the master-stop of the great 
 organ on which the noblest music of the world has 
 been sounded. It breathes alike in the invocations of 
 the saint and the passion of the poet. It is the cease- 
 less impulse pushing man on to be more and better, 
 greater and wiser, than he is. It will not let him 
 rest in ignoble ease. It passes like a spirit of fire 
 through his stagnation, makes him leap up into action. 
 It lures him on and on, to ever greater heights of 
 achievement, and deeds of nobler victory. It quickens 
 his spirit with infinite longings, and then it is that he 
 becomes the seer, the saint, the prophet, and the poet, 
 whose eye sweeps the universe, and whose thoughts 
 find no resting-place but in God. Withdraw that sense 
 of dissatisfaction, and what have you left ? You have 
 left the life and habitudes of the beast. The beasts 
 rise no higher, because they have not this impulse of 
 dissatisfaction ; and man, without it, would become even 
 as the cattle. Born to dissatisfaction indeed we are ; 
 
 13 
 
194 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 bu. see, the sparks fly upward ! Man's discontent is 
 the wing of his spirit, the impulse which gives him 
 power to soar. His thoughts then become prayers, his 
 desires great purposes, his yearnings Divine achieve- 
 ments. He is dissatisfied with his environment, because 
 he is greater than his environment, and his dissatis- 
 faction is the evidence of his greatness. Withdraw 
 that, and his soul has passed out of him, and he is 
 but an animal. Foster it, and the spirit grows within 
 him till he cries, '' God is my refuge and my strength. 
 Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and who upon the 
 earth is like unto Thee ? I shall awake in Thine image, 
 and be satisfied ! " 
 
 And so in rela'ion to those anxieties and conflicts of 
 life, which we often speak of as trouble, it will be found 
 I hat out of them we emerge stronger and better, and 
 the tendency is upward. Take, for instance, the cares 
 and burdens of motherhood. At the gates of mother- 
 hood Death stands on guard, yet not the less mother- 
 hood is desired by every woman's heart, and is counted 
 an unspeakable bless'ng. And why is this? It is 
 because motherhood is the broadening and fruition of 
 the woman's nature, and is the cleansing and consecra- 
 tion of her affections. But it implies heavy, and almost 
 endless burdens, beyond this peril of death and anguish 
 of birth. The mother's hands are never still, her task 
 is never done, her vigilance never asleep. Her days 
 pass in the perpetual round of small recurrent duties, 
 and for years the true mother, whose means are small 
 and family large, must needs be the willing drudge of 
 
JOB OiV PESSIMISM. 195 
 
 her children. But what is the effect of such sacred 
 drudgery ? Does it deprave and narrow the heart ? 
 Does it take the sunHght out of Ufe ? No, the sparks 
 fly upward. The woman's nature fulfils its highest 
 possibiHties in faithful motherhood. She finds a 
 sunlight in her children's smiles, and a music in their 
 laughter, which sun could never shed, nor the skill of 
 harp and dulcimer produce upon the ear. The children, 
 with all their querulous demands upon her patience, 
 are nevertheless to her as messengers from God, who 
 call the thought up higher; and every night, as she 
 bends over the little cot, and kisses the tumbled gold 
 upon the pillow, she counts herself blessed among 
 women for the joy that God has sent her. Yes ; let us 
 grant that motherhood is toil and care, and is purchased 
 at the price of pain and peril, nevertheless it works out 
 the purification of human nature, and is the consecration 
 and coveted goal of human love. It does not depress, 
 but elevates, human nature : the sparks fly upward." 
 
 Let us hear then the conclusion of the whole matter. 
 Trouble "does not spring out of the ground," says 
 Job. That is to say, we are not the victims of blind 
 chance, though in our darker hours we are apt to 
 think so. A Power is fashioning us, we know not how. 
 See how yonder mountain is made. First of all, if we 
 have strength of imagination to look back far enough, 
 we see the rolling back of some abysmal sci, and the 
 emergence of the rude shapes which the ebb and flow 
 of mighty waters ha\e beaten into isolation and con- 
 sistency. Then come long ages during which the ice 
 
196 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 reigns, and the darkness and sterility of death and 
 desolation is over all. Then at last a new movement 
 is begun, and the great ploughshare of the glacier begins 
 to work, and to drive its way onward to the plains that 
 lie below, splintering the solid granite as it goes, and 
 rounding it into a thousand strange and shattered 
 shapes of fantastic novelty. Every year now the 
 mountain changes shape : the tempests beat upon it, 
 and wash away its soil ; the fiery bolts of the lightning 
 burn along its grim serrated front; the hurricane 
 drives across its brow, and the frost chips and fashions 
 it, as with the uptiring strokes of an incessant chisel. 
 At last there comes an hour when the process is 
 complete, and upon some summer's evening we stand 
 and look upon it, and see the sunset clothe it with a 
 purple magic, and watch the waning light transforming 
 and transfiguring it, till at last the glorious enchantment 
 is complete, and the cressets of the stars shine over it 
 like watchfires signalling the triumph of some mighty 
 cause : and we say, " Now we know what a mountain 
 is, and understand what the Psalmist meant when he 
 talked of looking to the everlasting hills, from whence 
 came his strength ! " What Power has shaped that 
 mountain ? The Power of law. What Power is 
 shaping us ? The Power of love. There is no malice 
 in its work, no mercilessness ; every stroke of the chisel 
 is needed in the process, if the shape of beauty may 
 emerge at last. The whole process is for us an 
 upward process, and the glory of its consummation 
 justifies the sorrow and the patience. Out of the 
 
/OB ON PESSIMISM. 197 
 
 ground ? Trouble the mere caprice and spite of blind 
 unseeing chance? No; a Mind is there; a Heart 
 is therfe I 
 
 "Let us be patient! These severe afflictions 
 Not from the ground arise, 
 But oftentimes celestial benedictions 
 Assume this dark disguise." 
 
 Finally, then, we should embrace any and every 
 agency likely to make us better men and women. 
 That is a final test, and a complete one. 
 
 Would absence of labour, or pain, or dissatisfaction 
 be good or ill for us ? If ill, the theory of the pessimist 
 stands utterly condemned. But if labour gives patience, 
 and sorrow teaches faith, and dissatisfaction breeds 
 Divine aspiration, hard and sharp as the tools that 
 shape us are, let us welcome them. The one thing we 
 have to do is to become like God. The one ambition 
 worth fulfilling is that. In a few years it will matter 
 very little whether we laboured or rested, rejoiced or 
 sorrowed ; but it will matter everything whether our 
 life on earth lifted us to the life of heaven or no. 
 
 Keep the thought fixed on that. Put that supreme 
 aim before you, and then welcome any discipline that 
 will help you to becom.e '' perfect, even as your Father 
 which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
XI. 
 
 NATHAN AND DAVID. 
 "Thou art the man." — 2 Sam. xii. 7» 
 
 THE literature of the world probably contains no 
 more pitiably human story than the story of 
 David's great sin. The man who can gloat over it 
 with heated passion is an animal; the man who can 
 laugh at it with malicious cynicism is a fiend. It is 
 one of those sad and lamentable stories which make 
 us ashamed of our passions, which make us feel a 
 sort of degradation in the possession of desires which 
 can be potent with such infernal mischief, and can lead 
 to such foul and tragic consequences. As we read the 
 story we are ashamed of human nature, and it is not 
 difficult to despair of it. " If," we say, " the sweet 
 singer of Israel, a man so true, so valiant, so heroically 
 manly, could fall so deeply, who is safe in the presence 
 of temptation ? " One can readily understand how 
 such a story as this might fascinate and terrify a 
 sensitive nature, till the only way of escape seemed 
 celibacy, and the only true method of life a monastic 
 isolation from temptation. 
 
 But presently sturdier and calmer thoughts return 
 to us, and then we instinctively perceive that isolation 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID, 199 
 
 is no remedy. It is the retreat of the coward, not 
 the victory of a brave man. The mischief is within 
 us : it is simply the accident of circumstance which 
 develops it. It is at once futile and foolish to quarrel 
 with the elementary facts of our nature : the pas- 
 sions are as truly a part of ourselves as the intellect 
 and spirit. It was no deficiency of intellectual per- 
 ception which made passion triumphant for a single 
 damning moment over the nature of David. There 
 are cases where the intellectual faculties are so much 
 less than the physical, that men commit the grossest 
 sins of the flesh without any adequate realisation of 
 the degradation they incur. But the sin of David was 
 the sin of a savage committed by a saint. It was a ter- 
 rible and sudden outbreak of the lower nature in a man 
 who had for years sedulously cultivated the spiritual 
 nature, and it is that which makes it so tragically 
 significant. It was in fact one of those sins of surprise 
 by which really noble natures are suddenly swept 
 away, and to which the noblest are liable. I am not 
 speaking to men in whom savage and passionate in- 
 stincts are dominant, with whom gross desire is the 
 law of life, and the gratification of desire the joy of life. 
 I am speaking to men accustomed to the restraints 
 of civilisation, acknowledging the royalty of goodness, 
 conscious of the crown of honour which chastity con- 
 fers on human nature ; and it is for you this story is 
 so full of warning. So full of warning : why ? Be- 
 cause David acknowledged these very truths and forces, 
 and yet committed one of the cowardliest and foulest 
 
200 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 sins on record. It fills us with astonishment and 
 horror. We ask, Hov/ could he do it ? What made 
 it possible for him suddenly to fall into such horrible 
 sensuality and crime? It is that question which is 
 answered in the touching parable of Nathan. With 
 the sure analysis of spiritual insight the whole drama 
 of the fall of David is here laid bare. Let us mark 
 the story : God help us to learn its lessons. 
 
 The first fact revealed by Nathan is, then, that such 
 a sin as D2iV\d's> sprmgs from selfishness ; for the man 
 who spares to take of his own flock, and steals the poor 
 man's one ewe lamb, is the type of the basest selfish- 
 ness. Now by common consent the highest ideal of 
 manhood is unselfish. Why is it that we enthrone 
 in the highest immortality of fame the patriot and 
 martyr, the man who toils for men and the man who 
 dies for men ? It is because we reverence their sub- 
 lime unselfishness. They quietly put down the lower 
 forces of their nature and obeyed the higher. They 
 reached a noble altitude of spiritual development which 
 to us seems miraculous and unattainable. There is no 
 real hero who has survived in the reverence of mankind 
 of whom it is not true that his sublime unselfishness 
 made him supreme. Any stain upon a character like 
 this is like a blow which falls upon our own hearts. 
 Imperfect as we are, we are conscious of what perfec- 
 tion is; and impotent as we are, we still struggle to 
 achieve it. We may stand at the foot of the mountain 
 among the common crowd who never get beyond its 
 lower slopes, but at least our eyes can yearn toward the 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 201 
 
 sunlit crags we do not climb ; and we can perceive the 
 dignity of those who stand upon the summit, and dis- 
 cern how it was they triumphed, and how it is we fail. 
 
 Now jvrt as unselfishness is the true triumph of 
 life, so selfishness is the degradation of life, and is the 
 secret of its failure. Reduce sin to its primal elements, 
 the last result is always selfishness. Begin where 
 you will among those common and well-known sins 
 and defects of habit, whose nature is perfectly ascer- 
 tainable by sad experience and bitter knowledge, and 
 see if this be not true. Take, for instance, temper. 
 That is a common sin enough. There are thousands of 
 households wrecked by the ungovernable irritability 
 of an individual. He cannot restrain his tongue. 
 The slightest provocation produces an explosion. Then 
 follows a torrent of bitter, biting, sarcastic words, 
 which fill the air like a cloud of poisoned arrows, and 
 rankle in the wounded heart long after the careless 
 archer has gone upon his way and forgotten them. 
 You may explain that phenomenon by euphemistic talk 
 about a hasty nature, or the irritability of genius, or 
 what you will ; but the real root of it lies in the un- 
 regenerate selfishness of the man's nature. Because 
 passionate sarcasm is a momentary relief to his nervous 
 irritation, he indulges in it. The essence of unselfish- 
 ness is to realise what another feels, to interpret his 
 needs, to share his thoughts by the revealing power of 
 sympathy, to be able instinctively to understand what 
 will wound or grieve, and to exercise a severe self- 
 reprcLsion to avoid it. But the angry man has no 
 
202 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 such realisation of the nature of others, and cannot 
 understand the havoc which his hasty words produce. 
 He is simply conscious of himself, of his own wrongs 
 and discomforts, and just as one man flies to drink, or 
 another to dissipation, to relieve his misery, so he flies 
 to the undiscerning wrath of hasty words. If you are 
 a violent-tempered man, learn to be unselfish, and that 
 will teach you to restrain yourself, and to be pitiful 
 one with another, forgiving one another, even as God 
 for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. 
 
 Now if this be a correct analysis of mere hasty 
 temper, which seems far removed from the region of 
 vice, how much truer is it of indulgence in carnal 
 passions I " The one ewe lamb" — most pathetic, most 
 powerful image ! Here is a man blest with all human 
 blessings — riches, fame, honour, provision for all the 
 natural desires of the flesh, for whom no healthy wish 
 goes unsatisfied, no want unmet; a great captain, a 
 great king, with intellectual resources such as few 
 kings have ever known ; loved, powerful, idolised ; but 
 but there is a poor man at his gate with one ewe lamb, 
 and the king covets it. The madness and delirium of 
 desire begin to riot in his blood, and he must have 
 it ! To the thick vision of his lust adultery is no sin, 
 and killing no murder. When did the man in whom 
 the brute was master ever stop to count consequences ? 
 What is it to him that the one ewe lamb is all the poor 
 man has ? What cares he that the poor man has nou- 
 rished it, and round it the tendrils of his heart are 
 bound, and in that deep affection all his peace of 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 203 
 
 mind and all his pride of life are centred ? " The 
 one ewe lamb," the one daughter of the house, the one 
 hope and pride of some honest man's heart, the one 
 light and joy of his hard existence, innocent, helpless, 
 defenceless, at the mercy of a rich man who desires to 
 
 " Dower her with shame, 
 With a sort of infamous fame." 
 
 Alas I it is a picture which needs no elucidation. There 
 is no mercy in the profligate ; there is nothing which 
 so sears and deadens a man's heart as lust. There is 
 nothing in this spectacle of cottage peace, this pure and 
 contented innocence, to move the profligate when once 
 his eye has shot its evil fire of impure coveting towards 
 this unpolluted dwelHng which love has made a home. 
 ^'The one ewe lamb;" and, says Nathan, with grim 
 emphasis, it is to be slain to feed the rich man's 
 appetite, for that is what it means. There is no death 
 but sin, and this fair innocence is to be slain, this pure 
 Hfe is to be blasted, to gratify the covetous appetite 
 of a tyrannous rich man. Does not some lurid light of 
 revelation begin to break upon the mind of David as 
 the prophet speaks? Does he not begin to perceive 
 what he means — that the lamb means innocence, and 
 that it is innocence, the modesty and chastity of an 
 uncorrupted nature, modesty once gone and gone 
 for ever, that he has sacrificed to his guilty passion ? 
 '' The one ewe Iamb !" Does not our imagination, and 
 perhaps our guilty conscience, interpret all it means ? 
 Do we not see, as in some dream of horror and amaze- 
 ment, in some happy British home the fair bright fa-e 
 
204 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 of the one ewe lamb, the destined victim of the spoiler, 
 for whom shame and anguish wait, and whom the dark- 
 ness and corruption of wicked cities shall swallow up, 
 and hide away in obscure and voiceless infamy ? Oh, 
 do I speak to one who has committed such a wrong as 
 this ? Let him tremble. Do I speak to one who has 
 stood upon the verge of such a sin ? Let him loathe, 
 and hate, and despise himself. Let the vision of that 
 one ewe lamb rise before him, as the vision of the slain 
 Lamb of God, all pallid, dust-smeared, bleeding, shall 
 rise in the Judgment Day before the eyes of them who 
 slew Him, in the hour when all nations of the earth 
 shall wail because of Him ! The Lamb of God — the 
 poor man's one ewe lamb — shall not Christ com- 
 passionate this poor slain innocence, and avenge His 
 own elect who cry unto Him day and night ? Yes, 
 His own elect, elected to a purity man has made 
 impossible ; to a love man has forbidden ; to the 
 honour of a wholesome life man has devastated and 
 destroyed — oh ! do not their wasted faces float up- 
 ward, pale and ghastly, on the bitter sea of tears, and 
 their dying voices moan into the ears of Him who 
 made the heavens? This is the work of selfishness. 
 This is the most terrific exposition of what selfishness 
 can do in human life. Reduce the diamond to its 
 elements, it is soot ; reduce such sin as this to its ele- 
 ments, and, brilliant and alluring as it may look to the 
 fevered fancy — see, it is blackness at the core, the most 
 diabolical and damnable of all sins which a man can 
 commit 1 And again I say, if you would be proof 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 205 
 
 against such crime as this, there is but one way — by 
 overcoming self, by rising into that Christlike purity 
 of manhood which is infinite in sympathy, in tendei- 
 ness, in thought for others, to which the thought of 
 another's pain is intolerable, and another's shame an 
 agony worse than death. 
 
 But it is not merely the selfishness, it is the deceit- 
 fulness of sin which is illustrated here. We can picture 
 David listening to Nathan's story, with a keen sense 
 of its artistic truth, its imaginative force, its dramatic 
 power, and thrilling with sympathetic admiration as 
 he listens. And the most striking moral lesson in the 
 whole narrative, perhaps, is that David does not appear 
 to have realised what his own sin was like till it was 
 interpreted to him by the lesser sin of another man. 
 There is a dreadful power in unresisted evil to stupefy 
 the moral sense. Thrust your hand rapidly first into 
 hot water and then into cold, and do so many times, 
 and presently you are unable to detect which is hot 
 and which is cold. The sensitive nerve grows callous, 
 and its discernment is destroyed. So a man may ex- 
 periment with sin till he feels no instinctive recoil 
 from its abiding horror. The moral sense is like some 
 delicate and sensitive instrument, which indicates with 
 perfect- accuracy the tendencies of conduct so long as it 
 is untampered with ; but once wronged its power is gone. 
 It is Uke putting the clock back because we do not 
 wish to know the hour ; the clock goes on working, 
 but henceforth all its results are wrong. So the moral 
 sense still works, but it strikes the wrong hour. It 
 
2o6 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 tells US what we want to hear, not what we need tc 
 hear, and what we know is true. Who has not been 
 made conscious of this pliant perversion of the moral 
 sense ? You have not desired to believe a thing 
 wrong, and you have soon succeeded in believing it 
 almost right. You have first shaped your conduct, 
 and then invented theories to justify your conduct. 
 The justification of conduct rarely precedes the sin ; 
 men first sin, and then seek to justify their sin. Look 
 back, young man, to that dark and well-remembered 
 hour which has wrought such havoc in your life, and 
 tell me if I do not chronicle your life aright when I 
 sketch it thus. First came the divine shock of shame, 
 the keen consciousness of wrong, the perfect truth 
 told upon the clock of conscience ; then, when the deed 
 was done, followed the justification of the sin, and 
 that process has gone on till some of you are now 
 ready to argue that sins such as yours are venial and 
 not to be avoided, and indeed are excused, and ought 
 to be excused, by all reasonable men of the world. 
 You have put the clock back, and that is why you 
 cannot tell me the hour. That is precisely what David 
 did. There was doubtless no trace of remorse or 
 shame in David's face when Nathan began his parable. 
 He had justified his sin, and the drugged conscience 
 was fast asleep. It was not until the stern hand of the 
 prophet put the clock right, and it struck with a tone 
 that rang like the bell of judgment through the whole 
 nature of the guilty king, that he saw the abasing 
 vision of his own vileness, and cried, in the bitter horror 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 707 
 
 of that revealing moment, '^ I have sinned against the 
 Lord." 
 
 How true and striking this aspect of our subject is 
 our own experience testifies. Watch how angry David 
 grows as Nathan's story is told. He is the very incar- 
 nation of indignant justice. He is absolutely eager to 
 punish the selfish scoundrel who has injured the poor 
 man. The spoiler eager to punish the spoliator ? The 
 villain burning with a fine sense of angry justice 
 against the lesser villain ? It is even so. We can 
 pluck out the mote from our brother's eye, and be 
 utterly regardless of the beam in our own. We can 
 pass sentence and applaud judgment on the cruelty of 
 another, but our own cruelty we do not even perceive. 
 It is not until some prophet focuses the light of judg- 
 ment on our act, and puts before us what such sins as 
 ours work in other spheres and other lives; it is not 
 until we see our ungovernable temper reflected in the 
 awful spectacle of the man upon the gallows, whose 
 passion has carried him just a point beyond our 
 own ; till we see our self-indulgence vividly illustrated in 
 some broken drunkard shambling down to his obscure 
 and shameful grave ; till our solitary carnality takes a 
 living, leprous shape and form in the corroding vice 
 which poisons all the world with its reek of horror ; till 
 our individual impurity stands typified in the wasted 
 face of some wronged and shameful woman, lifted 
 towards ours in dumb reproach beneath the city gas- 
 light ; — it is not until this happens that the real truth 
 about ourselves flashes on us, and the cry of Nathan, 
 
20^ THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 "Thou art the man!" terrifies us with its heart- search- 
 ing accusation. And the accusation is true — you cannot 
 deny it. That infinite hell of human corruption into 
 which thousands of poor wretches drop off every hour, 
 pushed out of the ways of human honour, overwhelmed 
 with the black waves of infamy and anguish, — that 
 is your doing, O young man, sinning against purity 
 to-day ! Thou art the man ! The wave of shame 
 recoils on you, and covers you with its darkness. The 
 vast agony and horror of that shameful side of human 
 life we dare hardly name accuses you, and a million 
 fingers of the wronged and lost through all the ages 
 point against you, and their lips wail out your name. 
 No man liveth to himself, none dieth to himself, and 
 in the death of your purity the innocence of others 
 has perished. Numbers will not conceal you, solitude 
 cannot cover you, exile cannot hide you ; the blackness 
 of the night is as the* light about you ; and like that 
 avenging finger which pointed from the heavens to 
 the spilt blood of Abel, the finger of Him to whom the 
 darkness is as the light points you out, and His voice, 
 pealing from the chambers of eternity, cries, " Thou art 
 the man ! " God forgive the man who has doomed any 
 human soul to the long searing agony of a slain inno- 
 cence. But to be forgiven the conscience must first be 
 roused. A roan must perceive what he has done. He 
 must reahse that his solitary sin has added something 
 to the weight of that intolerable load which crushes 
 down as in a living grave the blighted lives of multi- 
 tudes. He must perceive that the cruelty of him who 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 209 
 
 takes the one ewe lamb, " and has no pity," is akin to 
 the cruelty in his own heart ; that by whatever dazzling 
 name he has called his sin, it was nothing but base, 
 devilish, hideous cruelty, such as a man might well be 
 content to die in atonement for, if by his death he could 
 restore what he has taken. Oh, terrible yet healing 
 hour, when a man sees himself as he is, in all his 
 unrecognised baseness and unremembered vileness, 
 and cries, with breaking heart, " I am indeed the man ; 
 God be merciful to me a sinner ! " 
 
 And once more we are taught the Divine supremacy 
 of conscience. What was it made Nathan so fearless ? 
 Why was it the king quailed before his subject, whose 
 life was altogether in his hand ? We know well why 
 it was. It is the ancient spectacle, repeated in precise 
 form when Elijah stops the chariot of Ahab, and John 
 denounces Herod to his face, and John Knox thunders 
 in the court of Mary Stuart. ' We know that " con- 
 science doth make cowards of us all." We know that 
 a man standing on the right is mightier than kings, 
 and that kinghood is impotent before such a man when 
 kinghood is defiled. It was a pure conscience animated 
 Nathan with dignity, and clothed him with a Divine 
 royalty; it was an evil conscience which made David 
 cower and tremble before his servant like a beaten 
 hound. Some of you may perhaps smile at this talk 
 of conscience. The hour of your awakening has not 
 yet come — my voice does not penetrate your heart. 
 But there is an hour when a voice mightier than mine 
 will speak ; when in the solitude of sickness strange 
 
2IO THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 thoughts and memories will perplex the mind ; when 
 in the embittered loneliness of an unloved life, the sun 
 going down while it is yet day perchance, strange foot- 
 steps will seem to move about the house, and '^ in the 
 dead unhappy night, when the rain is on the roof," 
 strange yet remembered voices will fill the ears ; when, 
 in the hour of death, from the grave of the unforgiven 
 past strange shapes will rise, and throng about the 
 dying bed, and WTing their hands, and shriek their 
 curses on you, and cry, " Despair and die ! " And 
 then you will know what conscience is. You. will know 
 what a tremendous power of life there is in it, and 
 how it can suddenly subdue and defy us, like a spring 
 held back by force for years, which at last mocks our 
 failing strength, and leaps up in derisive mastery. And 
 there is an hour beyond that, when " we must all appear 
 before the judgment-seat of Christ," and the Voice 
 before which heaven and earth shall flee away shall 
 cry, " Thou art the man ! " And then conscience will 
 become a terrific force, a companion who cannot be 
 shaken off", a living terror which we cannot annihilate, 
 while the Thou art the man of God rolls like thunder 
 through the vast darkness which closes over us, and 
 shuts us out from the vision and companionship of 
 our Father who is in heaven. ^* Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God ; " the impure shall not 
 see life, *' but the wrath of God abideth on them." 
 
 Finally, we have lessons of retribution and reparation 
 here. There is forgiveness, but it is not possible 
 without retribution and reparation. God's curse is 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID ail 
 
 to fall on the house of David, and he who has slain 
 the innocence of the mother is to witness that saddest 
 of all sights, the dying of his own innocent little child. 
 And in some way — in bitter memory if not in public 
 shame ; in lifelong humiliation before God if not in 
 physical results of disease and sorrow — we must be 
 punished for sin. There is no salvation which promises 
 escape from that. It is for God to measure that 
 punishment, and appoint its methods ; let us be glad 
 that it is not man who judges us and afflicts us. If 
 we are sincerely penitent we shall not seek to escape 
 punishment. Nor shall we forget that it is for us to 
 do what we can in reparation of our error. Do not 
 pray to be forgiven and reinstated till you have done 
 that. Let him who has stolen not merely steal no 
 more, but restore fourfold. Let the cruel and pas- 
 sionate man humble himself before his victim. Let 
 the man who once fell into impurity give up his life 
 to rescuing the impure. God will not destroy while 
 fulfilment is possible ; let us seek to fulfil in sacrifice 
 for the world what we nearly destroyed in our wrong 
 done against the world. Are you penitent ? Do you 
 see as you never saw before the hideousness of your 
 sin ? Is your heart broken at the vision ? Listen 
 then to the words of the kingly penitent, written pro- 
 bably in those bitter hours when he mourned over his 
 dying child, and bowed before God : " The sacrifices 
 of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart 
 Thou wilt not despise. Hide Thy face from my sins, 
 and blot out my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, 
 
212 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 God, and renew a right spirit within me. Restore 
 unto me the joy of Thy salvation. Then will I teach 
 transgressors the way, and sinners shall be converted 
 unto Thee." 
 
 Young men, I have specially addressed you because 
 
 1 know that the temptations to unchastity in a great 
 city are numerous and incessant. I bid you remember 
 that an impure man is as shameful as an impure 
 woman, and should receive the same treatment ; nor 
 will he find any difference of treatment with that God 
 who is no respecter of persons. The woman receives 
 her punishment here : the man will receive his here- 
 after. You are and will be daily tempted to unchastity 
 of thought and imagination, if not of act, and therefore 
 I pray you keep the mind pure. Do not listen to the 
 voice of unholy seduction. Learn to hate impurity 
 in thought, in speech, in gesture, in suggestion, in 
 literature, in life, with an invincible abhorrence. The 
 crown of manhood as of womanhood is chastity. 
 Respect and guard it in yourself and others with a 
 sacred vigilance. And to those who have fallen into 
 the snare, as to those who have resisted it, I preach 
 Jesus Christ: Christ in His purity. His tenderness, 
 His self-sacrifice, as the type of perfect manhood, and 
 I bid you follow Him. In Him is forgiveness for the 
 fallen, and strength for the tempted. In the abiding 
 sense of our love and devotion to Him is the best safe- 
 guard against sensual surprises, and the best impulse 
 toward the service of humanity. It was the vision of 
 the Holy Grail that lifted Sir Galahad into supreme 
 
NATHAN AND DAVID. 213 
 
 purity and steadfastness of manhood ; it is the vision 
 of the living Christ Himself that inspires us ; and when 
 that blessed Presence is an abiding presence with and 
 in us, then, and then alone, our 
 
 " Strength is as thf. strength often, 
 Because our hearts are pure." 
 
XII. 
 
 THE IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 
 
 "For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth." — 
 2 Cor. xiii. 8. 
 
 ST. PAUL is writing to a Church in which grave 
 disorders have arisen, and he says he comes with 
 the mandate of God, and will not spare. He views the 
 office of the Christian minister as not only persuasive 
 but judicial. It is at once the most solemn, the most 
 awful, and the most responsible, which any human 
 creature can assume ; none should dare to assume 
 it except upon the irresistible call of God, and none 
 who understand its privilege and burden rightly will 
 attempt to do so on any other call. The issues of life 
 and death for multitudes are in the lips of the Christian 
 minister, and none can tell how far his lightest word 
 may travel, or how much his invisible influence may 
 accomplish. Words are like the feather-seed, carried 
 afar on the wings of the wind over busy cities and 
 void valleys, but sure to fall at last and spring up in 
 prolific harvest. Influence is like the air that girds us, 
 — invisible, but stirred by the slightest sound or move- 
 ment, and multiplying that movement. To all men 
 the power of speech and influence belongs, but to none 
 
IMPO TENCE OF RE VOL T A GAINST THE TR UTH. 2 1 5 
 
 in more solemn degree than to the minister of Christ. 
 Recreancy on his part is disaster to the whole army 
 of God. If he dares not smite the wicked, if he is 
 dumb when he should speak, or forgives where he 
 should judge, or judges hastily where he should for- 
 give, his defection weakens the whole Church of God, 
 and what is sin in another becomes crime in him. He 
 is specially set for the defence of the Gospel, and should 
 be so completely under the guidance of the constrain- 
 ing love of Christ that he has the right to say : " I 
 can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth." 
 He is the vassal of the truth, and the measure of his 
 consecration is the measure of his power. 
 
 But these words obviously command larger issues 
 than any which are personal to Paul : they involve 
 great facts which concern all men. What are those 
 facts ? Briefly these : that revolt against the truth is 
 wholly futile ; but that submission to the truth is the 
 secret of peace and of service. 
 
 I. The futility of revolt against the truth. — Now there 
 are two great truths against which the world has 
 been in perpetual revolt : the one is the moral truth oi 
 God's government, the other is the spiritual truth 
 of God's government by Jesus Christ. 
 
 (i) The moral truth of Gods government. — That seems 
 a vague and frigid phrase : let us try to translate it 
 into living fact. What does it mean? What does 
 it imply ? It means that there is a living and a righ- 
 teous God ; that God's righteousness governs the world, 
 and that all the strength of God is against evil. It 
 
2i6 THE THRESHOLD OF MAJSfHOOD. 
 
 means that He will reward righteousness wherever it 
 is found, and that He will pursue with unfailing retri- 
 bution the unjust, the unholy, and the wicked. That 
 is the sublime belief uttered in every page of the Bible; 
 it is announced at the threshold of the world as man 
 crosses it into the life of action ; it is elaborated at 
 Sinai ; it is glorified in the beatitudes of Jesus ; it is 
 the last note of the Bible, as it was the first, enforced 
 in the words of John that there is a second death, and 
 that without the gates of life are thrust the adulterer, 
 the unclean, and whosoever maketh a lie. By that 
 belief the noblest nations have lived, and the noblest 
 periods of history have been the periods when that 
 belief was most vigorously held. It has transformed 
 slaves into peoples, peoples into heroes, heroes into 
 saints. It regenerated Europe through the voice of 
 Calvin, as afterward it regenerated Scotland by the 
 energy and faith of Knox, and England by the voice 
 and deeds of Cromwell. It vibrates in every word of 
 the old Hebrew prophets, and is the foundation of 
 the teaching of Christ. There is a God, and He is just ; 
 His sword is sharpened against iniquity. He rides 
 upon the wings of the wind, and the thunder and the 
 lightning go before Him ; He maketh wars and de- 
 solations in the earth, and the hills shake at His 
 presence ; He is ** angry with the wicked every day ; ^, 
 He is *' glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing 
 wonders." So sang Moses beside the Red Sea, when 
 he had looked on the great deliverance God had 
 wrought ; so have sung the innumerable choir of just 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 217 
 
 men ever since ; so sing the spirits made perfect who 
 are before the throne, for even there, there is a Song 
 of Moses as well as a Song of the Lamb, the song of 
 judgment as truly as the song of love, and both make 
 one music in the ear of God. 
 
 Brother, do you accept or do you deny that truth ? 
 Denying that truth, the world becomes an unintelligible 
 riddle, a bitter mystery, a fathomless and maddening 
 problem. Its sun is put out, its meaning gone, and it 
 swings on through the wide spaces of the firmament 
 like a lost star, a blind, wandering fragment of wreck 
 and chaos. It becomes what Carlyle said the ma- 
 terialists made it — "a mill without a miller," whose 
 wheels turn endlessly in the tide of the ages, but with- 
 out purpose or result. There are those who have no 
 better explanation of the universe than this. They are 
 in revolt against the truth of the moral government of 
 God. They deny what the wisest ages have believed, 
 and c'eride the faith which made the greatest peoples 
 great. And it is as though a child mocked the sun for 
 shining, or lifted a finger to stay the passage of the 
 hurricane, or bade the tide rise no farther on the shore; 
 for such revolt is the madness of an empty pride, and 
 is as futile as it is wicked. '*We can do nothing 
 against the truth : but for the truth." 
 
 (ii) The second great truth against which the world is 
 in revolt is the spiritual truth of GocPs government by 
 Jesus Christ. Christ stands before men as the embodied 
 holiness of God, and His law of life is the law by 
 which human holinef-rs is attained. He proclaims His 
 
21$ THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 law of unworldliness, self-sacrifice, and self-abnegation, 
 submission to God and service to man. Against that 
 Divine Presence the world has been in perpetual revolt. 
 The past sign of that revolt is Calvary ; its present 
 sign is the selfishness and un-Christliness of human 
 life. Just as the one seemed triumphant long ago, so 
 the other seems triumphant now. That blood-stained 
 Cross, lifted against the lurid light of the darkened 
 heaven, is the symbol of its ancient triumph, and the 
 selfishness of human life is its symbol to-day. But 
 long since the Cross has been answered by the sepul- 
 chre, and on the steep stairs of sacrifice Christ has 
 ascended into universal supremacy. Do you remember 
 what happened immediately after the entombment of 
 Jesus ? The Pharisees had hated Him living, and 
 they feared Him dead. And so they come to Pilate, 
 and ask him to give them a watch to set around the 
 tomb where the Wonderful lies silent. And v/hat is 
 his reply ? " Ye have a watch " — set it ; seil the tomb ; 
 ''make it as sure as ye can." How sure was that ? Was 
 it prophecy or irony which animated Pilate's speech ? If 
 the nations could be set in watch around that tomb, or 
 the vast round of the firmament itself be the seal upon 
 its doorways, how shall they restrain the Lord of Life 
 — the Lord before whom Death had evermore receded, 
 and who at last was destined to confront the dread 
 destro^^er, and 
 
 " — quell him with a breath, 
 And lead him where He will 
 "With a whibper in the ear"? 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 219 
 
 The revolt against Him was futile then, and it is futile 
 now. The Cross has become the meeting-place of the 
 nations, and He, being 'Mifted up," is drawing all men 
 unto Him. There are those who resist that infinte 
 attraction, for whom the law of Christ is a law of folly, 
 and the supremacy of Christ a phrase for laughter. 
 They live only to get and gain, not to help and serve ; 
 they rejoice in unrighteous laws, and oppose the law of 
 sacrifice. They suck the poisoned honey-flower of vice, 
 and drink the red wine of voluptuous pleasure, and 
 hasten after the f.ital fruit of Ma nm m, an j " crucify the 
 Son of God afresh." Theycrovn Him with the t\orn- 
 crown of derisive malice, and offer Him the gall and 
 vinegar of agnostic mockery. Some of you have done it. 
 But again the voice of Paul speaks, and eighteen cen- 
 turies have only added victorious confirmation to his 
 words : it is a \ain conflict, a futile and pitiful rebellion, 
 a mutiny born in folly and ending in despair. Christ 
 does reign, and is King already, and all power is given 
 unto Him. *'We can do nothing against the truth." 
 
 But it may be said. After all this is mere affirmation : 
 where is the proof? what /*5 ti'uthl By what signs 
 can we discern it ? One proof of truth, at least, is 
 found in the eternity of its life : it is immortal. I do 
 rot say that error docs not possess life, and long fife ; 
 but error carries the seeds of its own death with 
 it, and its life at best is transient and intermittent. 
 The truth is known by the indestructibility of its life. 
 It is error that changes : truth abides. 
 
 Ask, for instance, what has been the history of 
 
220 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD 
 
 civilisation ? It has been a history of the slow but 
 certain conquests of truth. There have been periods 
 when the world has seemed to have fallen asleep, and 
 the centuries have passed by dark and silent with 
 noiseless feet, or have been as a heavy tide whose slow 
 and sluggish waves, with their mechanical rise and fall, 
 have only lulled men into deeper slumber. No great 
 voice has spoken, no heroic act has flashed an ennobling 
 fire through the evil darkness, no Divine purpose has 
 called the nations to its victorious crusade. Years 
 have passed ; years of languor, impotence, and sloth. 
 Then from that vast slumbering host one head has 
 lifted itself, and one man has seen a new light kindling 
 in the far firmament. He has risen and announced his 
 great discovery, and called on men to believe in it. 
 Sometimes he has been a prophet with a new spiritual 
 message for his age ; sometimes a thinker, with a new 
 and living word of wisdom ; sometimes a student, who 
 has kept his ear close to the beating heart of nature, and 
 has at last perceived the rhythmic working of some 
 great natural law, which for him has altered the aspects 
 of the universe ; sometimes a statesman, with daring 
 schemes of government, which promise a new era 
 of hope for subjugated peoples. What has been the 
 history of such men and their discoveries ? They have 
 been disbelieved, ignored, persecuted ; thrust into the 
 dungeon or gibbeted for the scorn of fcols. Their 
 ^\ords have been fiercely debated; flung hither and 
 thither as firebrands of contention and division, and 
 the conclusions they set forth have been attacked by the 
 
IMPO TENCE OF RE VOL T A GA INST THE TR UTH. 22 1 
 
 enmity of ignorance, derided by the flippancy of folly, 
 asserted with the enthusiasm of faith. But one thing has 
 always happened : time has tried them. The error has 
 proved itself error by perishing; the truth has proved 
 itself truth by living and triumphing. Astrology has 
 perished, but astronomy survives ; alchemy has been dis- 
 missed as a cheating fantasy, but chemistry has grown 
 into a mighty science. The scientific heresies of one age 
 have become the commonplaces of the next. Time, hoary 
 and mighty, has stood hke a gigantic thresher, and on 
 the threshing-floor of the centuries has threshed out 
 the wheat from the chaff, annihilating that which is 
 false, and keeping only the eternal truths of things. 
 Against the chaff he has been victorious, but he has 
 been able to ''do nothing against the truth, but for the 
 truth." 
 
 "Thus it is that through the ages an increasing purpose runs, 
 And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." 
 
 The untrue thing proves its untruth by perishing, 
 but the truth vindicates itself by living. Inch by inch 
 the darkness has been driven back, and wedge after 
 wedge of light has pierced its solid bulk, until the hour 
 of its uttermost disintegration seems at hand. And so 
 men have advanced from height to height of knowledge, 
 and the dust of the centuries upon their feet is the 
 crumbled debris of error, and the light upon their path 
 is the broadening day of wisdom, and the banner which 
 waves before their innumerable host bears this great 
 inscription : '* We can do nothing against the truth but 
 for the truth ; great is truth, and it must prevail." 
 
222 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 In like manner we say that one proof of the moral 
 government of God is that the centuries assert it ; and 
 of the spiritual kingdom of Christ, that the centuries 
 have been unable to destroy it. No righteous govern- 
 ment of the world ! The wo-ld a mere drifting chaos 
 of anarchy and tumult ! Not thus does the wise man 
 read history. Is there nothing in the history of nations 
 significant of retribution ? Think how many great 
 monarchies have arisen and covered the world with 
 empire, and where are they now ? " Where are the 
 snows of yester-year ? " Did ever empire seem more 
 likely to endure to the crack of doom than the Roman ? 
 Was there ever a people more splendid in resource, 
 more victorious in achievement, more world-wide in 
 ambition ? But they are gone ; how, and why ? They 
 perished of excess of vice, they became loathsome with 
 impurity, and then the invisible vengeance which had 
 long tarried fell upon them, and all that mighty empire 
 of the Coesars fell like a house of cards, and crumbled 
 like a pillar c{ dust in the desert. On all nations which 
 become corrupt the sam.e fate falls sooner or later, 
 and on all men. 
 
 "The mills cf God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; 
 Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness He 
 grinds all." 
 
 Have we not before our eyes to-day the spectacle of a 
 great nation shrinking into narrower and yet narrower 
 bounds, forfeiting year by year the pre-eminence of 
 the past, worshipping the "goddess of Lubricity/' 
 and careless of the God of Purity ; and what does the 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 223 
 
 philosophic historian say about France ? " France 
 slit her own veins and let her own life-blood out on 
 the day of St. Bartholomew, and has been perishing of 
 exhaustion ever since." And what does all this mean, 
 but that there is an avenging Holiness in the world 
 mightier than man, which rules the nations with a rod 
 of iron ? 
 
 Or ask how is it that the spiritual empire of Jesus 
 Christ has survived ? The world has been leagued 
 against it from the beginning. Rome, which tolerated 
 all local religions, instinctively realised that this religion 
 was more than local, and for three centuries did her 
 best to crush it. She perceived that in the forlorn and 
 famished missionaries of the Cross she had to deal 
 with the agents and heralds of spiritual revolution. 
 Against them, and their kingdom, men have done their 
 worst. The key-note of revolt and hatred struck on 
 Calvary has echoed through the ages. Kings have 
 summoned their armies to destroy this kingdom ; hell 
 has loosed its flaming seas tu overwhelm it. The world 
 has blcized with stakes as the battle-field with watch- 
 fires, and has rung with cries of anguish as the battle- 
 field with death-ciies. Yet the kingdom survives, 
 and the fiery waves have fallen back quenched and 
 impotent, and the wrath of man has passed like a waft 
 of smoke, and the sun has shone out again in ever- 
 brightening glory. The Christ survives. The wrath 
 of man praises Him, and only serves to reveal and 
 enhance His majesty. Scourged, crucified, dying, 
 slain and sepulchred, Christ has still triumphed, and 
 
224 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 is the moral Emperor of the universe to-day. What 
 does it all mean ? It means that the kingdom of God 
 in Christ is a fact, and cannot be destroyed : it is true, 
 and men " can do nothing against the truth." Their 
 fury is impotent. " Why do the heathen rage, and 
 the people imagine a vain thing ? . . . He that sitteth 
 in the heavens shall laugh : the Lord shall have them 
 in derision." Oh, think of it ! — the derision of Omni- 
 potence, the dreadful laughter of Him who inhabiteth 
 eternity, to whom this great world itself is but one 
 dust-mote floating in the rays of His terrible and 
 glorious light ! Who shall stand before that consuming 
 fire of HoHness and Power ? Let a man wrestle with 
 the " live lightnings " and crush them in his grasp, 
 let him chain the sun down that he shall not rise — 
 then shall he also upset the chariots of God with 
 the cords of pride he weaves across their path, and 
 dethrone the Christ by the words of fury he utters 
 at His feet ! The whole rebellion of man against 
 God is one wild spasm of despair : it is pathetic in 
 its hopelessness, pitiable in its folly, sad in its very 
 futility ; for the word which rings through the ages 
 is : '* We can do nothing against the truth, but for 
 the truth." 
 
 Here, then, is that aspect of terror with which Jesus 
 Christ confronts the world, and which is too generally 
 forgotten. Meek as a lamb, gentle as a mother ; yes, 
 but His is ''the glory and the majesty and the power;" 
 He is "the Wonderful, the Counsellor, the mighty 
 God ;" " King of kings, the Lord of lords," the Judge 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 225 
 
 of quick and dead. Are those dread ascriptions the 
 poetic exaggerations of devout souls, or are they truth ? 
 Do we modern Christians use them with any awe- 
 struck sense of their subhme significance ? If we do, 
 we shall not appeal only by the pathos of Christ's love, 
 but by the greatness of His power. '' Knowing the 
 terror of the Lord, we persuade men." He is not 
 a Presence meekly soliciting the suffrage of our pity ; 
 He demands the loyalty of our obedience. We have 
 something more to preach than Calvary, something 
 more to see than the Man of Love, who for love of 
 the world had no place to lay His head ; we see the 
 grave shattered at His word, and the heavens opened 
 before the majesty of His voice. Is there nothing 
 terrible in all that ? Dare we trifle with Him before 
 whose face heaven and earth flee away? Dare we 
 treat Him with indolent disdain, before whom we must 
 appear to answer for th- deeds done in the body? 
 Dare we fulfil His demands with languor, or run upon 
 His errands with reluctance ? Is there no'hing in the 
 thought of this sovereignty of Christ which gives 
 pause to our foo'.ish laughter, and fills us with a 
 solemn fear? And some of you come to sing His 
 praise, and then go out to shape your life of pride 
 and pleasure, and forget that His doom has gone out 
 against such a life as yours. You defy Him before 
 whom tie keepers of the tomb were as dead men, 
 and all the enmity of the f ges but the fcam upon the 
 wa\e, which e' bs even while it rages! O fools 
 and slow of heart, know ye not ye can do nothing 
 
 15 
 
226 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 against Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life? 
 
 You can, of course, deny the truth, and defy it : in 
 the ruined greatness of man made in God's image there 
 is still power enough left to do that. So, too, you 
 may deny the law of gravitation, but if you defy it, 
 and leap from yonder steeple to illustrate your defiance, 
 there is one sure result — the law triumphs and the 
 man is slain. You can deny the penalties of vice, but 
 if you defy them the slow poison will eat the heart 
 out notwithstanding, and in premature old age, and 
 broken health, and crippled intellect, they will vindicate 
 themselves and be avenged on you. You may deny 
 the movement of the earth, but the earth will go on 
 moving, and the stars will go on shining in their calm 
 and perfect strength, as though you had never spoken, 
 and such an one as you had never been. There are 
 certain things which have long since been lifted out 
 of the realm of speculation into certitude. It is no 
 brilliant coiijccture which calculates the hour of the 
 eclipse, or the track of the tornado. Why is it no one 
 doubts these prophecies of scitnce ? It is because we 
 have discovered certain laws of the universe which are 
 subject to no caprice, open to no revisal. They are 
 not hindered by our malice, nor disturbed by our in- 
 difference or insolence. And so in the spiritual universe, 
 when we see the same cause producing the same 
 effect through the long course of various centuries, we 
 know we have found a truth which is untouched by 
 human transience, and unchangeable by human opinion. 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 227 
 
 When we see, through all the faded past of human 
 history, Christ's love inspiring love, and Christ's light 
 bestowing light, and Christ's life imparting life, we 
 know that we are dealing with an unchangeable Force, 
 and can forecast the spiritual future of the world with 
 unerring accuracy. There is my warrant for preach- 
 ing : the unchangeableness of the Christ I preach, and 
 the absolute certainty that His power over men is 
 unchanged too : " Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever." With Him we are omnipotent, 
 for we '' can do all things through Christ that strength- 
 eneth " us : against Him we are impotent, " for we can 
 do nothing against the truth." 
 
 II. And now take the second clause: "But for the 
 Truthy — The truth even prospers on our opposition. 
 It has always been so in the day of persecution. The 
 liurricane has carried the seed of truth afar; the fire 
 has purged the hearts of men ; the storm has de- 
 stroyed the old building, only that it shall be replaced 
 by a nobler and more stable structure. It is the 
 very mockery of triumph : the very irony of victory ! 
 God indeed holds His enemies in derision, when their 
 best-planned revolt crowns His arms with new glory, 
 and the very ingenuity of their hatred helps on His 
 sovereign purpose. 
 
 But impotent as we are to l 3>ail the truth, we are 
 all able to assirt it. Do you say, how can that be ? 
 Ho V is it possible thU the creature who can off r 
 only futile resistance sl.ould yet be capable of effectual 
 aid ? Can he who is impotent to thwart be strong 
 
228 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 to assist ? It is no empty paradox to reply that 
 he can. You cannot hinder the truths of astro- 
 nomy ; but think of it, — those high miracles of starry 
 wonder shone unrecognised for ages, the mere street- 
 lamps of the city of night, waiting for the man whose 
 divine curiosity should pierce the curtains of their 
 chambers ; and how much did that man do for the 
 truths of astronomy who levelled the first telescope 
 against the blue vastness of the midnight firmament ? 
 You cannot hinder the truths of medicine; they are 
 one and indivisible ; but the secret waits for the patient 
 and splendid research of man ; and how much does 
 that man do for the truths of medicine who, like 
 Pasteur or Jenner, finds a new remedy for some 
 hitherto incurable disease ? You cannot revoke the 
 laws of science, they are the same to-day as when 
 the dawn of the world broke ; but they lurk in silence, 
 and wait the approach of the intellect of man, and 
 the demand of his noble curiosity. You can destroy 
 none of these forces ; but how much you can do for 
 them ! It is even so with the kingdom of Jesus 
 Christ. You cannot destroy it, but you can aid it ; 
 3^ou cannot overcome it, but you can spread it : the 
 mightiest cannot hinder its certain victory, but the 
 meanest can hasten it by his devotion, his valour, 
 and his love. 
 
 Let our hearts rejoice, then : Christ's kingdom can- 
 not be shaken. Think of the continuity of faith which 
 has run through all the ages. Think of a Paul, an 
 Augustine, a TertuUian ; think of Christian painters 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 229 
 
 like Raphael and Angelica, Christian historians like 
 Neander, Christian scientists like Newton, Christian 
 musicians like Bach and Handel, Christian poets 
 like Milton and Wordsworth, Christian martyrs in a 
 hundred generations, and Christian saints in every 
 century, and then ask : Is it possible that all these 
 believed in vain ? Was the spring of all this heroism, 
 the well of all this faith, the source of all this inspira- 
 tion, a mere idle myth, a noble phantasy ? We 
 are face to face with an age of doubt and denial. To- 
 morrow the shrewd sceptic will propose his question 
 to you. I give you a question to propose to him. 
 Ask him — put it on no higher ground — simply, Is it 
 probable that all the ages have been wrong, that at 
 last Herbert Spencer alone of all living men should 
 be right ? Is it probable — I put it on no higher 
 ground — that t^is great galaxy of genius and goodness, 
 this innumerable company of human spirits made 
 perfect, who have found their joy and life in Jesus, 
 — is it probable that they have all believed in vain, 
 and that the nineteenth century agnostic alone is 
 right ? Well, an agnostic is one who does not know, 
 and the man who does not know we usually call an 
 ignoraniits. For my part, I decline to follow one 
 v;ho tells me he does not know ; and I prefer to 
 believe that vast anthem of certitude which rolls up- 
 ward from the saintliest and noblest hearts of all the 
 world's great past : *^ I know whom I have believed, 
 and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which 
 I have committed unto Him against that day." 
 
230 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 I call you, then, to loyal submission and noble 
 service. Cease from a revolt which is impotent, enter 
 into that allegiance with God from which shall issue 
 peace and victory. Submission to God is the first 
 step towards peace, and then comes love, which, 
 turning its face toward God, becomes piety, and turn- 
 ing its face toward man becomes morality and service. 
 Love has its rules, its restrictions, its bondage ; 
 but it is a golden fetter, and the lowdiest service 
 of love is better than the wildest liberty of revolt. 
 Christ's "yoke is easy," His *' burden i? light;" 
 for we have come unto Him and found rest unto 
 our souls. Put yourself on the side of His truth, and 
 then you will be clothed with an irresistible moral 
 force, which wall make you true helpers of the race, 
 and invincible soldiers of the right. Then you will 
 have a serene and unsubduable faith in the victory 
 of the kingdom of Christ. Remember it has triumphed 
 over greater odds than any now arrayed against it. 
 Picture to yourselves, if you can, the young convert 
 of Paul's day as he enters some great pagan city. 
 On every side he sees the pomp of martial power, 
 the luxury of sensuous life. There vast temples rise, 
 and altars smoke to Jupiter ; there philosophers dispute, 
 and yonder go bright garlanded processions, with the 
 sound of flutes and dancing, to unhallowed festival. 
 Soldiers march with steady tramp, and everywhere 
 the silver eagles of the empire gleam. But to him, 
 poor youth, fresh from fast and vigil, lonely prayer 
 and spiritual ecstasy, deep and humble pondering on 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH, 231 
 
 the lessons of the Crucified, all this seems strange, 
 skd, hr.tLful: 
 
 "He locks upon the city every side, 
 Far and wide, 
 All the mouptsins topped with temples, all the glaJ.es, 
 
 Colonnades, 
 All the cau£cys, bridges, aqueducts, and then, 
 All the men ; " 
 
 and he turns away saddened and disheartened. Is it 
 possible all this can be changed; chaiiqcd too by the 
 gospel of One called a felon? And then he turns 
 aside into some lowly street, and amid the humb'est 
 people begins to preach that strange Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ. And what happens ? In three centuries not 
 a heathen temple is left in Rome ; the Cross hns 
 everywhere triumphed over the ea.cle as love must 
 always conquer strength. The truth as it is in Jesus 
 was but as a little leaven, but it was sufficient to 
 leaven the whole lump of that corrupt pagan world. 
 
 "And centuries came, and ran their course, 
 An J unspent all the time 
 Still, still went forth that Cliild's dear force, 
 And still was at its prime." 
 
 I call you to new and nobler enthus'asm for this 
 kingdom. Enthusiasm is the true fire of manhood, 
 the pulse of action, the soul of heroism ; and when 
 that leaves a man, a church, a nation, its true glory 
 is departed. Empires are not won without self- 
 forgettir.g valour and devotion. " Paradise lies under 
 the shadow of the swoids," cried the mighty Oman 
 when he uiged his armies to the dcath-giip; and we 
 
232 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 want something of that magnificent frenzy which 
 counts Ufe worth having only for the accomplishment 
 of great deeds. We are the children of a King ; let 
 the royal note of confidence fill our preaching, our 
 praises, our life. We want the enthusiasm of that 
 young minister who refused a hard and poor station, 
 but that same night heard Bishop Simpson preachy and 
 as he heard sprang to his feet, and cried : " Bishop, 
 I will go anywhere for Christ now ! " We want the 
 enthusiasm which shames men of their niggard gifts, 
 and counts no box of frankincense too precious for 
 that Head which bowed in death for us. To be 
 half-hearted in worldly things is folly, but to be 
 irresolute in heavenly things is treachery and infamy. 
 Oh, if that sacred tide of love of truth, and over- 
 mastering love for Him who is the Truth, now rises in 
 the heart, sweeping away all barriers of selfish prudence 
 like films of shattered gossamer, do not restrain it, 
 do not be ashamed of it ; thank God for it ! There 
 is little enough of enthusiasm for the truth of Jesus 
 in an England which saves annually two hundred and 
 thirty millions of money, and gives a million and a 
 half for missions; which spends one hundred and 
 thirty millions in drink, and squanders thousands 
 daily on the trifles of an unregarded luxury. And 
 if this kingdom of Christ's truth is to change the 
 vvcrld, to whom can I appeal more reasonably than 
 the young men who for good or evil must shape 
 the future? We shall not think we have done too 
 much, or given too much, when Christ's trumpet 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH. 233 
 
 peals. All the holy recklessness of generous deeds 
 will be well rewarded then. The night is far spent, 
 the day is at hand ; already the heavens signal His 
 approach, and His chariot- wheels are heard afar. 
 
 "O that each in the day of His coming may say, 
 I have fought my way through, 
 
 I have finiirhed the work Thou didst give me to do! 
 O that each from his Lord may receive the glad word 
 Well and faithfully done ; 
 Enter into My joy, and sit down on My throne!" 
 
 Fix this then in your minds ; yoii can help the truth. 
 The humblest life may be inspired and animated by 
 spiritual honesty, by resolute sincerity, by dutiful 
 allegiance to that which it recognises to be be?t and 
 highest. The service of the truth is a bond whose 
 catholicity includes all earnest souls through all the 
 ages, and it utterl}^ ignores all differences of social 
 state or intellectual culture. The truth is served by 
 the meckiicss of the saint and the boldness of the true 
 reformer ; by the audacities of genius and the [atknce 
 of mediocrity ; by the resignation of suffering and the 
 valours of action ; by the master spirits of humanity, 
 whose voices rouse the world with trumpet-music ; and 
 the insignificant toilers, whose names are never known 
 beyond the humble limits of the street wherein they 
 have lived, and the church in which they pra3'ed. 
 One of the things most difficult for us to learn, and 
 therefore most slowly learned, is that mere narrov/ness 
 of circumstance can set no bound to our power of doing 
 good, and that men of humble powers can serve the 
 
234 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 world not less efficiently than men of magnificent 
 endowments. To the man of one talent the rate of 
 usury is just the same as to the man of five ; and he 
 can make his life as noble as the lives of those who 
 began with the larger capital of opportunity. A new 
 Augustine may not read this page, but an undiscovered 
 John Howard may; and who shall say which has 
 served the world the better, the genius of Augustine or 
 the sympathy of Howard ? Do not plead then the dis- 
 qualification of narrow powers or opportunities : you 
 must serve the truth where you are, or nowhere ; with 
 the powers you have or not at all. 
 
 If you have ever gazed upon the Matterhorn, that 
 lone and dreadful peak, thrust up like a huge black 
 wedge into the everlasting blue, so steep the snow can 
 scarce do more than powder it, so terrific in its grandeur, 
 all other mountains seem huddled at its feet in terror, 
 you will have thought that if ever there was a type of 
 majestic strength it is the Matterhorn, standing there 
 immutable since the beginning, and you will have 
 pictured its mighty spire catching the first splendour of 
 that first dawn when God said : " Let there be light ! " 
 But ask science to tell you how the Matterhorn was 
 made, and it will tell you how, ages upon ages since, 
 there were drifting mica-flakes floating in an abysmal 
 sea, and one by one they came together, and were 
 beaten into hardness and consistence, and grew in bulk 
 and steadfastness, until at last the watCx-s rolled back, 
 and there was uncovered that vast Alpine tower against 
 whose " imperishable spire " '' the wild north winds 
 
IMPOTENCE OF REVOLT AGAINST THE TRUTH, 235 
 
 should rage in vain, and the great war of the firmament 
 should burst, yet stir it not." * And even so Christ's 
 kingdom is built up. Little by Httle, life by life, the 
 kingdom grows. Out of weakness God brings strength, 
 and humble things confound the mighty, and at last 
 become the mightiest of all. It is built up inch by 
 inch, until at last it rises mighty, impregnable, " and 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." 
 
 Shall our lives be added, as living stones, to this 
 growing grandeur ? Shall they be fretted out in blind 
 rebellion against this Rock on which men are broken, 
 and which when it falls crushes men to powder ? For, 
 or against ? But before we answer, the decree is fixed 
 and is irrevocable : we may know the Truth, and the 
 Truth will make us free ; but we can do nothing against 
 the Truths but for the Truth. 
 
 ♦Ruskin's "Modern Painters 
 
XIII. 
 
 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD, 
 
 "Philip saith unto Him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it 
 sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with 
 you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip ? he that hath seen 
 Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us 
 the Father ? " — John xiv. 8, 9. 
 
 OUR subject of thought is Christ's conception of 
 God ; and to arrive at what we mean by that, 
 I ask you to consider this question which PhiHp put 
 to Christ, and Christ's reply. And as we turn it over 
 the first thing we feel about it is, that it is extremely 
 difficult to determine the spirit and temper in which 
 it was uttered. It is at once acute and foolish : it may 
 be the extravagant demand of an unbounded but mis- 
 guided faith, or the vain demand of mischievous igno- 
 rance. Perhaps we should not be far wrong if we assume 
 that it was one of those foolish and blundering questions 
 which the disciples often put to Christ, through their 
 entire misconception of His person and His teaching. 
 John, when he wanted Christ to call down fire upon his 
 enemies ; Peter, when he lectured Christ on the folly of 
 the speech in which He anticipated crucifixion, both 
 manifest precisely the same spirit as Philip dees in 
 reference to this question. They did not comprehend 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 237 
 
 the majesty of Christ. They wanted to apply the test 
 of a blind and brutal criticism to His most transcendent 
 utterances of faith, of insight, and of imagination. Peter 
 patronises Him; John is disappointed in Him; Philip 
 controverts Him. They are perpetually reducing His 
 poetry to prose, and punctuating His speech with the 
 narrow ideas of a provincial intelligence. To His Divine 
 height of thought they cannot rise, and therefore they 
 try to drag Jesus down to their own miserable level. 
 The picture is very human, and we can understand it, 
 because it is just what men are doing still with the 
 words and the teaching of Jesus Christ. They fail to 
 see their infinite suggestion, their illuminating meta- 
 phor; they invent a theory of theology which was 
 never Christ's, and, by the wresting of solitary and 
 isolated verses, try to make us believe that Christ taught 
 what He could never even have conceived. When the 
 words of Jesus suit their tastes, they recommend them 
 to us with a patron's commendation ; and when they do 
 not, they either ignore them, or say that Christ was no 
 doubt misreported in this or in that respect; and so 
 Peter and John and Philip still give to us their muti- 
 lated and imperfect Christianity, and the Christianity of 
 Christ is recklessly forgotten, or wickedly obscured. 
 
 Now, for me at least, this much is clear, that I must 
 take Jesus Christ for all in all, or not at all. It is 
 nothing less than intellectual dishonesty to play fast 
 and loose with the words of Christ, choosing what suits 
 me, and rejecting as unauthentic what I do not care to 
 hear or believe. Supposing I took up some book of 
 
238 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 astronomical science, and calmly marked out all the 
 passages which I did not approve, not because 1 had 
 any wider astronomical knowledge than the writer of 
 the book, but simply because his conclusions upset 
 my preconceived conceptions of astronomy. Or sup- 
 pose I re-edited Plato, or Xenophon, on the principle 
 of eliminating all passages that I personally disliked, 
 on the ground that no doubt they were unauthentic, 
 mere interpolations of some other and later mind. 
 What an outcry there would be ! How the Press 
 would jeer at my supreme ignorance and egotism I 
 Why, they would say, on that principle no book is 
 safe. Milton may be re-edited on the plea that so 
 great a poet could not possibly have written such 
 poor theology ; and Bunyan, because no great English 
 writer ought to teach such a material theory of 
 heaven as he teaches. But if I said Milton's daughter 
 misrepresented Milton when she took down the mighty 
 lines from the lips of the blind old scholar, or that 
 Bunyan's fellow-Baptists had no doubt written por- 
 tions of his works, especially the portions that I dis- 
 like, and therefore I eliminate such portions from his 
 works — if I did so, you would call me a blundering 
 egotist. You would be eloquent about the intellectual 
 dishonesty of a process which re-edited great authors 
 on the principle of leaving out what we disliked, and 
 retaining only that which we approved. Yet that is 
 the new criticism which men to-day apply to the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ ; and I say that it is unfair, it 
 is dishonest, and it is intellectually contemptible. We 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 239 
 
 must take Jesus Christ for all in all, or reject Him. 
 But if we accept Him, we must accept the difficulties of 
 the position, and be content to accept them. When 
 Jesus Christ utters hard truths we must neither rebuke, 
 nor correct, nor controvert them ; our duty is simply to 
 take up the intellectual cross and follow Him. 
 
 Whatever may be said about the spirit of Philip's 
 question, it is obvious, however, that it touches one of 
 the deepest needs in human nature. Man desires to 
 worship, if he can find an object worthy of his worship, 
 and he cannot worship that which is unknown and 
 unconditioned. If there be any power in the universe 
 other than ourselves, we want to know that power, 
 and we must know it. Professor Huxley has recently 
 told us in 77?^ Nineteenth Century that he invented the 
 familiar and popular term, ^'Agnostic," and he in- 
 vented it because very early in life he found he could 
 know nothing about that Divine Power which was 
 said to govern tl:e universe. And while he admits 
 that religion has dene much to elevate human conduct, 
 he thinks that human conduct may now be safely 
 trusted to go on by itself in moral evolution without 
 any furtlier interference of the idea of God at all. Do 
 you think it can ? I do not. The ship does not go on 
 when the fires are put out in the engine-room, and 
 human conduct will not go on when the noble impulse 
 of divine and personal relationship to God is quenched. 
 When the fires in the engine-room are put out, the ship 
 swings hither and thither in the trough of the sea, and 
 it is drifted b^^ the tide, or it founders in the tempest ; 
 
240 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 and human conduct founders when the soul of man is 
 bereft of God. I grant that there are men — who owe, 
 however, much more to the influence of Christianity 
 than they are conscious of or admit — I grant that there 
 are men who still retain irreproachable character amid 
 the decay of faith. But try your experiment on any 
 large and general scale, and you will find that the loss 
 of God means ruin to character and conduct. Occa- 
 sionally the doomed ship can set a sail when the engines 
 are silent, and may find some port and escape ship- 
 wreck ; but taking it as a rule, we know that the ship 
 in which the engine fires are put out has no chance of 
 any sail being spread or port being gained, and is pretty 
 sure to founder in the darkness of the night. No ; the 
 knowledge of God is the foundation of all noble human 
 life, and to know God is the insatiable thirst of the 
 human heart. We want to know what God is; we 
 want to know what God demands ; we want to know 
 what God is to us, and what we are to Him ; and 
 therefore it is one of the deepest cries of the soul 
 of man which pierces through the strange speech of 
 Philip when he says, ** Show us the Father, and it 
 sufificeth us." 
 
 Such, then, is Philip's question to Jesus Christ. 
 Now let us look at Christ's answer to that question, 
 and let us note : The completeness iviih which Jesus 
 Christ reveals to Philip this idea of the Fatherhood oj 
 God. Now, when we speak of Christ as revealing the 
 Fatherhood, what is it that v.^e mean ? AVe have before 
 us to-day a Bible — not one book but m.any books, 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD, 24I 
 
 ranging over vast periods of time, summing up the 
 history of vast numbers of the human race, and in this 
 series of books the Gospel of Jesus Christ is but a part, 
 and it is a small part. In all the books known as the 
 Old Testament there is comparatively little trace of this 
 idea of the Fatherhood of God. God is strength, God 
 is power, God is wisdom and purity, but not Fatherhood. 
 His purity is the flame before which even the angels 
 shrink dismayed,it is the essential light which no man 
 can look upon and live. His wisdom is manifested in 
 the governing of human destiny, His power in the up- 
 rearing of the starry pavilion of the firmament, His 
 strength in the mountains, which are His handiwork, 
 and the sea, which is held in the hollow of His hand. 
 A thousand images, sublime, terrible, majestic, bring 
 home to us the conception of the supreme purity, 
 wisdom, and majesty of God : it is a glorious 
 conception, before which we quail with terror and 
 bow in abject humiliation. One idea only there is 
 running through the Old Testament which recalls us 
 to a spirit of solemn content, that is, that God is at least 
 manifested in the particular care He has for individuals 
 of the human race. He talks with Enoch ; He comforts 
 Jacob ; He counsels Moses, but it can hardly be said 
 that love enters into these various relationships. He 
 is Jah, Jehovah, terrible in strength; He is easily 
 offended, hard to be conciliated ; not a man that he 
 should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent ; 
 a Being to be served with awe, with trembling, with 
 contrition, but not with free and filial affection. To 
 
 16 
 
242 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 the mind of Moses I suppose that the idea of affection 
 towards God would have seemed almost blasphemy^ 
 something little short of sacrilege and profanity. 
 There are, no doubt, tender moods and moments in the 
 Old Testament when the heart gushes out in lovely 
 longings after God, and uses sweet and tender words 
 of yearning. But take the Old Testament through and 
 through, and the general impression given us of God 
 is of purity, not pity; of majesty, not compassion; of 
 supreme, ineffable righteousness, and power, and wisdom 
 — the God of the roaring sea, and the live lightning, 
 and the tremendous thunder, not the Parent of little 
 children who can claim His love and render in return 
 their filial service. The Old Testament pictures God 
 as a King, not God as a Parent. 
 
 And let me say that this idea of God still dominates 
 theology and fills the thoughts of men. And 1 think 
 it will not be difficult for us to understand why it is so. 
 Before the Reformation, amid all the pollutions of 
 Catholicism, there was one thing true and noble which 
 it preserved, that was the idea of tenderness in God. 
 When it paid homage to the Virgin Mother, when its 
 poets sang lauds and chants in honour of the Nativity, 
 when its painters painted with perpetual zeal the holy 
 Mother bearing in her arms the infant Christ; when 
 its priests placed upon the throne of heaven the 
 Mother and weaved in her hair the seven stars of 
 government, and placed in her hand the golden rods of 
 empire, they at least did this — they preserved the idea 
 of Divine pity, and tenderness, and compassion. That 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 243 
 
 is the great lesson that comes to us to-day from the 
 glorious pictures of Raphael and Murillo, and which 
 gives to them their ineffable grace and pathos. But 
 when the Reformation came, in its righteous indigna- 
 tion against the pollutions of Rome, it swept away this 
 idea of Divine tenderness ; and the old Hebrew idea 
 of God, as infinite strength and majesty, was rehabili- 
 tated. The Parent disappeared, the King again became 
 visible. Calvinism built up its iron logic, and struck 
 the fear of God into the hearts of men. The fiercest 
 Psalms of David became the popular lyrics of the day, 
 and it was the God of battles who was again invoked 
 and worshipped. The God Cromwell worshipped was 
 the God of the Hebrews who was clothed with thunder ; 
 the God Milton believed in was the Great Taskmaster 
 in whose eye he sought to live. The age demanded a 
 stern ideal of God to inspire the valour of the battle- 
 field, and the strenuous agonies of renunciation unto 
 death, and it found it in the ancient Scriptures of the 
 Hebrews. And that is the idea of God which still 
 prevails in every land where the Reformation was 
 triumphant — God is still worshipped with fear and 
 served with trembling. It is from the Hebrew Scriptures 
 preachers take their texts, and it is the Hebrew idea 
 of God which is set before the people. And what is 
 the result ? At its highest, life is elevated by a stern 
 ideal of duty ; at its lowest, fife is crushed into a slavish 
 and joyless round of formality. But the ideal Christ 
 1 as given us in the parable of the Prodigal Son, or that 
 of Paul when he says, '^We have not received the 
 
244 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 spirit of fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we 
 cry, Abba, Father " — this is forgotten ; and so the joy 
 is taken out of piety and the sunshine out of life, and 
 instead of being Christians we are really Jews, per- 
 meated with Jewish ideas of God, and forgetting, if 
 not repudiating, the very different ideal of God which 
 is set before us by Him we call Master. 
 
 Do you say, then, What are we to do with the 
 Hebrew Scriptures ? Are they not inspired ? Yes ; 
 they are inspired, in that they give us the history of 
 inspiration ; they are the gradual unfolding of the idea 
 of God as man was able to bear it. It is no irreverence 
 for me to say that the God of Jacob is not my God, 
 because I am not Jacob, and Christ has taught me 
 infinitely higher views of God than ever Jacob had. 
 Jacob's God was a Being with whom he made bargains, 
 and Jacob's prayers are bargains made with God. My 
 God is the Father with whom I talk in friendly and 
 loving intercourse. It is no irreverence for me to say 
 that David's God is not my God : David's God was a 
 mighty King who blessed him but cursed his enemies, 
 nnd who would continue to do both one and the other 
 as long as His law was obeyed. David's God is not 
 my God, because Christ has taught me that the Father 
 makes His sun to shine upon the good and the evil, and 
 His rain to fall upon the just and the unjust, and that 
 He is no respecter of persons. Do not shrink from 
 admitting these statements : they are the statements of 
 Jesus Christ Himself. Christ took up the law of Moses 
 and rent it into shreds when He calmly said, " They 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 245 
 
 of old time said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
 tooth ; I SAY, Bless them that hate you, and pray for 
 those that curse you " ; and One is our Master, even 
 Christ. His ideal of God we accept, and not the ideal 
 of any Hebrew patriarch or lawgiver, however eminent. 
 That, at least, is Christ's claim. He does not destroy : 
 He does something far nobler — He fulfils. He gathers 
 up all that is true in the Old Testament, and interprets 
 it and confirms it. Against all the voices of the past 
 He opposes His majestic '* I say," and closes all con- 
 troversy. If I want to know, then, what God is, 
 I must not ask Moses, but Jesus ; for Moses has 
 resigned all authority unto Him to whom every knee 
 shall bow, and of whom every tongue shall confess 
 that He is God, to the glory of the Father. The revela- 
 tion of God proceeds along one continually broadening 
 line, from the imperfect to perfection, from the crude 
 and the incom.plete to the final and complete, till at last 
 we hear the universal litany from the million-peopled 
 earth rising upward in one continuous cry of trust and 
 exaltation, " Our Father, who art in heaven." That is 
 the revelation Christ gives us of God, and it is some- 
 thing more than a coincidence, — it is the seal of the 
 perfect authority and knowledge of Jesus, that His 
 first recorded word in this world was, " I must be 
 about My Father's business," and His last recorded 
 word was " Father," when He bowed His head in the 
 agony of Calvary and said, ** Father, into Thy hands 
 I commend My spirit." 
 
 What is there then that is new in this revelation that 
 
246 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Christ makes to us of God ? Briefly put, it is this — 
 that He perceived that the ruhng power of the universe 
 is not force, but love. And what is love ? We all 
 know what it is better than we can define it. We 
 have had parents, and we know how our father 
 and our mother interpreted love to us ; we have 
 children, and we know how we think of them, and 
 what we do for them. Let our mothers lift up their 
 work-worn hands and tell us how many stitches they 
 have put in little garments when the house was quiet 
 at night, and how many distasteful tasks they have 
 done for little feet, never finding them distasteful, 
 because of the power of love which animated and 
 inspired them. Let our fathers stand up and tell us 
 how they have pinched themselves to purchase plea- 
 sure or education for their children, and how Hght 
 they have thought the sacrifice when they have seen 
 them growing up into vigorous and honoured life. 
 Let those who have children who have wronged them 
 — the father of the prodigal and the mother of the 
 outcast — stand up and say whether the latch of the 
 heart is not always lifted for the wanderer's return, and 
 what they would give if only they could fold their 
 lost child to their hearts again. Let us know why it 
 is you keep that tress of faded hair in the secret 
 drawer, and why it is that distant grave is so perpetu- 
 ally in your memory. Let the poets tell us of the 
 passion of love which many waters cannot quench, and 
 fill our ears with their unearthly waiHng of distress for 
 vanished love, and their rapturous rejoicing in love that 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 247 
 
 finds its consummation in united lives. Whatever 
 other forces there are that shape our Uves in this 
 world, love is everywhere the master-spring, and the 
 deepest impulse of life. 
 
 "All thoughts, all feelings, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 Are but the ministers of love, 
 And feed his sacred flame." 
 
 Is that true of man ? Christ says it is infinitely 
 truer of God. It is not that God is not just, for love 
 can be just ; it is not that God is not strong, for love 
 can be strong ; it is not that God is not pure, for 
 love is purity; it is not that God is not wisdom, for 
 love is wisdom ; but it is that every attribute of God 
 feeds the attribute of love, and love is the sacred 
 flame which burns in the heart of the universe and 
 illumines all the worlds. God is love, and, because 
 God is love, God is light, and in Him there is no 
 darkness at all. Every act of earthly love is but a 
 gleam of light fallen from His nature, and is a hint 
 of His unutterable love. What my mother was to me, 
 God is to me, but with a wiser and tenderer affection 
 than ever any earthly mother knew, or could know. 
 Take parentage at its very noblest among men ; that 
 is the type of God's parentage to us, and that is the 
 truth that Christ came to reveal. That is the idea of 
 God which He perpetually enforced ; and how divinely 
 new and original it was you may judge by comparing 
 His words with the words of Moses; and you may 
 judge also by the fact that, though 1,900 years have 
 
24S THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 nearly passed away, the world is still startled by this 
 thought of the Fatherhood of God, and still hesitates 
 to accept it. 
 
 And the corresponding truth is that Fatherhood in 
 God means childhood in man, and carries with it 
 brotherhood among men. It is upon the basis of the 
 Fatherhood of God that Christ founds all His doctrine, 
 and if you take that away it will all collapse. When 
 He tells me to become a little child, and to be born 
 again, the truth that lies behind His words is that God 
 is my Father, and loves me ; when He tells me to love 
 my neighbour as myself, He puts a new interpretation 
 upon the word "neighbour;" and it is only the com- 
 mon Fatherhood of God that can interpret it and justify 
 it. If God be my Father, I have claims upon Him for 
 protection and sympathy and pity, and He has claims 
 upon me for love and obedience and service. God 
 meets my claim when He tells me that the hairs of m}^ 
 head are numbered. He bids me meet His claim by 
 " loving the Lord my God with all my heart and mind, 
 and soul and strength." Force disappears and love 
 reigns. Force is there still, just as force is the pre- 
 rogative of the father, in the vigour of whose arm there 
 is ten thousandfold greater strength than there is in 
 the child's arm ; but love commands the force that is in 
 the father, so that the arm that could crush defends, and 
 the hand that could smite caresses. Prayer is no longer 
 a bargain ; it is the free intercourse of love. I do not 
 ask certain gifts of God, and promise Him in return 
 certain duties. The merchandise of love knows no 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 249 
 
 tariff. The child does not love the father because he 
 ought to love, but because he cannot help it. I love 
 God because He has first loved me. And so life 
 moves out of the shadow of fear into the atmosphere 
 of perfect sunshine. I love, and the world is all 
 sunshine to love. Why should I trouble about the 
 disposition of my life ? The Father knows what things 
 I have need of. Why should I fear sorrow or death ? 
 Whether I live or die it is nothing to me ; I am the 
 Lord's. " Who shall separate me from the love of 
 Christ ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, 
 or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ? I am 
 persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor things 
 present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
 nor any other creature shall be able to separate me 
 from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, my 
 Lord." So the great Litany ends in one long chorus 
 of rejoicing, and the hallelujahs of that chorus shall 
 reign for ever and ever. 
 
 ^' Show us the Father then," says Philip, " and it 
 sufficeth us." What was it that Philip expected? Is 
 it some sudden unsealing of the heavens, some tre- 
 mendous vision of the Omnipotent and Eternal ? Jew 
 as he is, with all the sublime words of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures ringing in his memory, words that set forth 
 the unapproachableness of God, the flame of His awful 
 purity which angels cannot look upon, the intense in- 
 effable glory before which all the light of all the worlds 
 pales its ineffectual splendour, — can he suppose that 
 he is able to look upon such a vision ? Is it the 
 
250 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 sublime defiance of despair which cries, '' Let me see 
 it, though I perish, so, at least, I perish sufficed and 
 satisfied, and every doubt set at rest " ? That, at 
 least, has been the cry of noble human spirits who 
 have sought by fast and penance, and arduous purifi- 
 cation, to fit themselves for the vision of God, and who 
 would have been content to die if they could but 
 have seen for a single moment the vision of the infinite 
 God revealed and made manifest to them. But it is 
 not thus that God reveals Himself The reply of 
 Christ is : " He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father." That is to say, all that you can see or know 
 of God is manifest in Jesus Christ. And what God is 
 you may measure by v/hat Christ was. Think of the 
 hands that healed and the heart that loved ; think of 
 the purity of Him in whom even His worst foes could 
 find no sin or reproach ; think of the compassion which 
 never tired of toiling for the ungrateful ; think of the 
 patience which tolerated and taught the ignorance of 
 men like Peter and Philip ; think of the tenderness for 
 all weakness and the sympathy with all suffering ; and 
 remember also the hatred of all injustice arid tyranny 
 and wrong that was in Jesus Christ. Picture that, and 
 you see God. Perfect light we cannot see : '* Light 
 untempered would be annihilation. Light is only 
 beautiful, only available for Hfe, when it is tempered 
 with shadow. Pure light is fearful and unendurable 
 by humanity." And it is in the humanity of Christ we 
 find that shadow through which the pure light of God 
 is tempered to our vision. Happy he who sees that 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 251 
 
 vision, to whom the shadow is a help to vision and 
 not a hindrance, an interpreter of hght and not an 
 enemy, to whom Christ has no need to address the 
 pathetic reproach of this text : " Have I been so long 
 time with you, and hast thou not known Me, Philip ? " 
 '' Show us the Father." It may be the cry of despair 
 in the presence of the grim facts of nature. Men 
 have said, " Where is there any sign of the mercy of 
 God in nature ? " One of our greatest naturalists* — or 
 perhaps I should be more correct if I said our greatest 
 writer upon nature — has told us that nature cares 
 nothing for man; she is blind and deaf; she does 
 nothing for him, and she can do nothing for him ; 
 man must do everything for himself. The most trivial 
 observer sees nature ''red in tooth and claw with 
 rapine," and is appalled at the ruthless cruelties of 
 life ; and Paul acknowledges that '' all creation travails 
 together in pain until now;" and the anguish of the 
 world is never-ending. Do you say, ''Where is the 
 Father in all this ? Is not the law of life sorrow, and 
 is not life full of everlasting cruelties ? " Do you cry 
 in despair, " Show us the Father caring for His crea- 
 tures, and it suffices " ? Christ asks you, was He cruel ? 
 Did ever any living thing suffer at His Hands ? Was 
 not He a Beneficent Presence bringing light and heal- 
 ing everywhere ? Laws there may be, and must be ; 
 but though the leper is in the highway, the paralytic in 
 the temple, and the dead child in the home, Christ was 
 a power higher than law ; and wherever He came there 
 
 * Richard Jeffries. 
 
252 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 was hcciling for the stripes that law had made; and 
 wl erevcr he came tie asserted the supremacy of love. 
 That, then, is the nature of God. He overrules sorrow 
 and ] ain. He causes all things to work together 
 for good to those that love Him. He knows every 
 sparrow that falls to the ground, and perhaps in His 
 love there is compensation even for the sparrow's pain. 
 He shows us in Jesus Christ His living Fatherhood, 
 and it sufficeth us. 
 
 ** Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Perhaps 
 it is with you the cry of vain curiosity. You want 
 a completer demonstration of God than I can give 
 you. You want to prove His existence with the 
 logical certainty of mathematics ; you want to certify 
 it as you would certify a chemical experiment. The 
 answer is, that if you will but try to understand Christ 
 you will begin to comprehend God, and not other- 
 wise, because He is the supreme demonstration of 
 Deity; He is the express image of God's person, and 
 the fulness of the Godhead bodily. You sweep the 
 firmament with piercing scrutiny, but the true star 
 shines over the manger in Bethlehem ; you look for a 
 burst of splendour in the heavens, but the revelation 
 comes to you in a little Babe ; you ask for a terrible at- 
 testation of power, God replies to you with the tender 
 attestation of love. It is not with the intellect that we 
 know God, and it is not to the intellect that God reveals 
 Himself, but to the heart ; and when we love Christ, 
 through Christ the infinite God is revealed to us, and 
 we know Him whom to know is life eternal 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 253 
 
 Or it may be the cry of the man who is overwhelmed 
 with the sense of his own personal insignificance in the 
 great sum of things, and who cries, " Show me the 
 Father, and it sufficeth me." You realise the infinite 
 multitude of men, and it seems altogether unthinkable 
 that God can care for each one. So you might argue 
 that it would be impossible that one sun could lighten 
 every man that cometh into the world ; and yet it is 
 done, and every day there are millions of eyes that 
 rejoice in the same sunbeams. Because God is the 
 Father, this sense of personal insignificance is destroyed 
 for me. I am no longer a mere atom of life driven and 
 drifted along the great vortex of time and death. I am 
 an individual with a birthright and with a destiny. The 
 father cannot help knowing his child, and the child the 
 father. We move in the cognisance of the Father's eye, 
 and the embrace of heaven is upon us. To mere power 
 we might be mere atoms, unconsidered dust-motes, 
 floating in the cold light of eternity ; but to love we are 
 individuals to be loved with discriminating tenderness, 
 and in the love of God we are sufficed and satisfied. Oh 
 the sense of infinite peace that falls upon us when we 
 realise for the first time that we are brought into 
 personal relation as sons with the blessed Father ! 
 And that you may realise now and here. This is the 
 Gospel I preach to you, my brothers, that you may 
 know the Father. That is the Gospel that Jesus Christ 
 preached. There is no other gospel ; it is the Gospel 
 that sufficeth men. 
 
 In the life of Henry Ward Beecher there is a very 
 
254 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD, 
 
 Striking passage. A young man wrote to the great 
 preacher and said to him : " I am sinking down into 
 the depths of shame : preach the terrors of hell to 
 me — anything to me — I shall be at the church next 
 Sabbath — anything that will save me." The preacher 
 said, " That night I preached about the Fatherhood 
 of God : I felt, if that would not save him, nothing 
 would." That is the Gospel of Jesus Christ to you, 
 my brother. Is it clear? Do we now understand 
 what it was that Christ wanted us to know about 
 God ? Have we now grasped the great conception 
 of God that Jesus Christ would flash home upon 
 our spiritual intelligence ? If you are not quite 
 clear about it, listen ! Listen to the words of Jesus 
 Christ Himself; and they shall close my sermon for 
 me. This is His word about a wayward and dis- 
 obedient child : " But when he was yet a great way off, 
 his father saw him, and had compaj^ion, and ran, and 
 fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said 
 unto him. Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in 
 thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. 
 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the 
 best robe, and put it on him ; and put a ring on his 
 hand, and shoes on his feet : and bring hither the 
 fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: 
 for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was 
 lost, and is found. And they began to be merry." 
 There is the complete picture of Fatherhood, both in 
 its severity and goodness. Behold the severity which 
 will not allow men to fall without being hurt, and 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 255 
 
 ordains for prodigals who spend their substance in 
 riotous Hving, the bitter pains and penalties of dis- 
 obedience. Behold the goodness, which has compassion 
 on them when they are yet a great way off, because 
 they are still children dear to the parent's heart. 
 They began to be merry, and the universe resounds 
 with that Divine merriment, with that infinite and 
 unspeakable joy still, when son and father meet. 
 Do you wish to know what Christ wanted you to 
 know about God ? Turn to the fifteenth chapter of 
 St. Luke's Gospel, and read the parable of the 
 prodigal, and see there the conception of God that 
 Jesus Christ carried in His own heart, and expressed 
 in His own life, and preached to all who heard Him, 
 and preaches to the world to-day, if we will but 
 listen, if we will put aside the fears and darkness 
 of a distorted theology, if we will but accept Him 
 an J find rest and satisfaction in Him. May we say : 
 *' Lord, it sufficeth us." '^ I will arise, and go to 
 my Father." 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE USE OF MYSTERY, 
 
 "And Jesus answering saith unto them. Have faith in God."— 
 Mark xi. 22. 
 
 'TnHE incident of the cursing of the fig-tree is one 
 -■- of the most remarkable and mysterious in the 
 career of Jesus. The impression which the occurrence 
 produced on the minds of the disciples we can readily 
 understand. There was something in this display of 
 power over nature which awed them more than the 
 healing of the sick or the cleansing of the leper. 
 Alone among the miracles this is a miracle of cursing ; 
 but it is a curse upon inanimate nature, and for a 
 leason which seems sufficient. When Christ would 
 show the retributive aspect of His power, the bolt falls 
 not on a man, but on a tree ; not on an enemy, but on 
 that which cannot feel loss, and yet may teach the 
 unspeakable lessons of what such loss means. For the 
 first thing we have to recollect about the miracles of 
 Christ is that they were never purposeless, and never 
 appealed to the mere terror or admiration of men. 
 Let there pass before the mind's eye the long array of 
 miracles, the great crowd of lame who leap, of dumb 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 257 
 
 who speak, of lepers who are cleansed, the mighty 
 pageant of stormy seas hushed into silence, and the 
 forces of a hitherto unfettered nature bound into 
 obedience, — and then ask, Did Christ work these signs 
 and marvels only to excite the curious wonder of 
 men ? It is because men have risen no higher in their 
 conception of what a miracle is than this, that they 
 have found it difficult to believe in miracles. But the 
 true signification of a miracle is that there was a new, 
 a supernatural, power in Christ to undo the results of 
 evil, to restore lost good, to set up a more beneficent 
 order among men, and at the same time to judge and 
 condemn men. The miracle is always more than a 
 marvel, it is a sign. 
 
 You will notice that Christ does not make the fig- 
 tree barren ; He simply seals its barrenness with the 
 curse of death. As it rises before the tired eyes of the 
 traveller, with its tender green and promise of fruit, it 
 is a living deceit, and its punishment is a judgment on 
 deceit. In fact the only possible signification of such a 
 miracle as this, is that it is an object-lesson and index 
 of certain aspects of Christ's power which are generally 
 overlooked. The tree is stricken because its profession 
 is false, because it stands like a bold hypocrite chal- 
 lenging the praise of men, but mocking their expecta- 
 tions. Its true use was to bear fruit, and the life that 
 has no fruit is a life on which the doom of death must 
 fall, and ought to fall. Thus, then, the cursing of the 
 fig-tree is the exposition of the retributive power of 
 Jesus Christ, the Divine vision which discerns deceit, 
 
 17 
 
258 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 the Divine power which punishes it, the Divine anger 
 which consumes it. 
 
 But to the disciples there was another and more 
 awful thought ; the miracle seemed to oppress them 
 with a sense of mysterious judgment which they could 
 not explain nor understand. It seemed to open to 
 them a vision of those hidden processes of law which 
 underlie the smooth surface of life, and only now and 
 again startle us with their tragic force and swift 
 display. Explain it how they would, the act of Christ 
 was mysterious. And what do we mean by a mystery ? 
 We mean something which we cannot explain by any 
 process of reasoning or by any facts of knowledge, 
 som: thing that baffles, that puzzles, that dismays us. 
 For instance, we meet from time to time certain curious 
 legends of ghostly lore — v.arnings conveyed in dreams, 
 coincidences which set m more than accidental, premo- 
 nitions which stir the blood with terror, wailing voices 
 in the air before the dea h of heroes ; as though some 
 unseen mechanism in nature had suddenly acted, and 
 along some hidden chords of sense there had flashed 
 the subtle and supernatural presage. For such occur- 
 rences we have but one word — they are mysterious. 
 Reason them away as we will, according to the know- 
 ledge of the laws of illusion which we possess, yet 
 there is a point where no explanation is vouchsafed, 
 and the mind can produce no satisfactory solution of 
 the problem. Even so Christ seems to acknowledge 
 that there are certain things in His actions, certain 
 processes in God's providence and government, which 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 259 
 
 must remain for ever insoluble to man. He does not 
 explain the moral lessons of His miracle. He does not 
 justify His act. To the curiosity of the disciples He 
 replies with — a sublime silence. And yet it is not a 
 complete silence. While He does not answer the 
 query of the intellect, He addresses Himself to the 
 question of the heart, and solemnly says, as though 
 admitting all the spiritual difficulties of the disciples 
 and sympathising with them, — ^^ Have faith in God." 
 
 Now let us mark how these words apply themselves 
 to our modern needs. I use the word " modern," but 
 in truth all human needs through all the age5 are alike; 
 God and the soul of man alone abide. We often speak 
 of an age of faith and an age of unbelief, as though at 
 certain periods every one believed and at others no 
 one did, and as though such periods were separated by 
 distinct and arbitrary demarcations. But than this no 
 assumption can be falser. The *' thoughts of m.en are 
 widened with the process of the suns," but the root- 
 thoughts of men are always the same, and suffer little 
 change. We tell ourselves that " had we lived in that 
 great day" when Christ moved among men, belief in 
 Him had been easy ; but I think that belief would have 
 been certainly not less difficult, but m.ore difficiilt, ia the 
 presence of the human than the Risen Christ. If we 
 believe not Moses and the Prophets, neither should we 
 believe though one rose from the dead. To have 
 been born two thousand years earlier would not have 
 helped us in the least degree towards belief. What 
 these disciples saw is what we see : a sublime, unearthly 
 
26o THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 Figure, calling Himself the Son of God, moving with 
 calm majesty and mastery through the crowded world, 
 at once terrible and tender ; doing things which make 
 the unbidden tears fill our eyes, and things which make 
 the heart stop with terror, and thus representing in 
 Himself the "goodness and severity of God." What 
 they saw is what we see : a world that is evermore a 
 problem, conditions of society which shock and startle 
 us, goodness interwoven with evil as clouds are mixed 
 with sunlight, or the grey and crimson threads of silk 
 in some strange and lovely fabric ; a world where so 
 much is unexplained and inexplicable that there is a 
 perpetual call for faith, and a perpetual rebuke to the 
 mere vain-glorious pride of knowledge. In so far the 
 world has not altered one jot since Peter looked upon 
 the fig-tree in curious and half-terrified amazement. 
 We too have our fig-trees, our mysteries of law and 
 judgment, our apparent anomalies in the Divine order. 
 We too are often full of pained surprise, nay, more, of 
 doubt and dread. And to us also Christ speaks, and 
 it is no perfect explanation of the mystery He vouch- 
 safes ; it is indeed no explanation at all : it is simply 
 the quiet voice of One who looks up through the opened 
 heaven, and sees behind the rolling thunder-cloud and 
 angry lightning the face of the Father in heaven, and, 
 pointing to that vision of a throned and mighty Love, 
 says, *' Have faith in God." 
 
 Let the words be applied to mysteries 0/ nafure : for 
 obviously this fig-tree, thus withered at a word, was a 
 miracle of nature, appalling, startling, inexplicable. In 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY, 261 
 
 like manner we are face to face to-day with a vision of 
 nature which appals and thrills us. It is no arbitrary 
 or isolated miracle we behold: it is the vision of a 
 gigantic miracle slowly evolving itself through un- 
 counted ages, the stairs of life widening as they rise 
 higher, the forms of life rising out of one another in 
 vast phantom-like procession, all life linked with life 
 from the lowest to the highest, and betraying its 
 relationship in a veracity of likeness beyond dispute ; 
 and, above all, this gigantic process going on, as if of 
 its own will, with a pitiless, unerring precision, kind 
 only to the strong, pitiless to the strong and weak 
 alike. That is the vision of the mystery of nature 
 which confronts us to-day. Age by age the curiosity 
 of man has questioned nature, and the patience of man 
 has wrested her secrets from her. Like one who 
 penetrates into the vast silence of the mountain ice- 
 world, and brings back stories of what is there, so 
 marvellous that he who dwells in the valleys cannot 
 comprehend them, so a long line of great scientists 
 have returned from the secret places of nature, and have 
 startled us with the strangeness of their .revelations. 
 Little by little the great chain of evidence has been 
 welded together, and the inherited ideas of men have 
 perished before its force. But how have men received 
 such evidence? What have they said? What did 
 the world say to Galileo when he pierced the secret of 
 the stars, or Columbus when he calculated the secret 
 of the waters? What did the Puritans say to the 
 revelations of astronomy ? What did our fathers say 
 
26a THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 when geology began to reveal the age of the earth, and 
 to lift the veil from a world not six thousand years old, 
 but six thousand times six thousand ? These revela- 
 tions were to them little short of blasphemies, and 
 were resisted with intolerant disdain. They assumed 
 that all that could be known of God they knew, and 
 that any fresh knowledge was a delusion and a lie. 
 The httle transcript of nature which they had prepared 
 was to them the charter of the universe, and to deny it 
 was to deny God. In a word, they had not faith in 
 God. They found it hard to learn the lesson of the 
 use of mystery. • They could not trust God to survive 
 the revelation of the scientist, and therefore they 
 treated science as necessarily opposed to God. Has 
 that temper quite departed ? Are not men's hearts 
 still full of fear, foolish fear, futile fear, because science 
 is revealing new mysteries in nature? Do they not 
 act as though they were afraid God could not take care 
 of Himself? And because they are afraid therefore 
 they are unjust and intolerant, for there is nothing so 
 unjust and intolerant as fear. What if our inherited 
 ideas of natural law do perish ? Truth must stand 
 whatever perishes. The God who has survived astro- 
 nomy and geology will also survive biology and 
 evoluticj. " Have faith in God," says Jesus. There 
 are unexplored remainders of knowledge, and ever will 
 be : there are mysteries of nature which dazzle and 
 confound us ; and this is so, simply because the law 
 of progress, which applies neither to God nor to the 
 beast, does apply to man, and the discovery of igno- 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 263 
 
 ranee is the condition of progress. And there are 
 revelations of law and judgment which will some day 
 come to light and will explain the things that are now 
 mysterious, just as the lost line of some ancient poem, 
 when we find it, gives us the clue and meaning long 
 concealed. But whatever happens, " Have faith in 
 God ! " Before the mountains were brought forth, or 
 ever the earth and the world were formed, from ever- 
 lasting to everlasting He is God. The word that opens 
 the book of history is " In the beginning God," — God 
 creating, God thinking, God governing ; and in the 
 end the last word will still be, God. And so our fear 
 passes into faith, our confused darkness into light, as 
 we hear from the great abyss of Time the breathing 
 of a mighty Voice which says, " Why art thou dis- 
 quieted in vain ? Be still, and know that I am God." 
 
 So, also, the counsel of Christ applies itself to the 
 mysteries of judgment in human life, with which we are 
 confronted. It was the mysterious judgment which 
 had fallen on the fig-tree which perplexed the disciples. 
 Suddenly and invisibly the blow had fallen, and there 
 before them in the morning light stood the ruined tree, 
 its foliage withered as with the fires of shame, its life 
 and beauty brought to an ignominious end. And even 
 so we look upon terrible dramas of human life which 
 confound and perplex us. We see them among men. 
 Here is a man at the very height of earthly prosperity 
 and success. Suddenly he is withered. A mysterious 
 judgment has fallen on him. In a moment his wealth 
 has vanished, on the point of public triumph he becomes 
 
264 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 a gibbering paralytic, in the full heyday of fame some 
 damning secret of his past life is ripped open, and his 
 career is ended. We pass him by and see in him a 
 monument of ruin. There is something pathetic in 
 his disaster which appeals to us, just as we can readily 
 conceive that the passer-by would find that there was 
 something pathetic in this* blasted tree, standing bare 
 and scorched, like a leper among its fellows, which 
 far and wide lifted their green boughs in the tossing 
 breeze and happy sunshine. What has the man done 
 that this appalling fate should overtake him ? Why 
 has this happened to him ? There are thousands as 
 bad as he, just as every hillside of Palestine had its 
 barren fig-trees which made a specious show of fruit. 
 Why w^as he selected for this overwhelming vengeance? 
 As we pass in the morning light, there stands this 
 ruined man, a tragic figure, an embodied mystery 
 of judgment, haunting our imagination with strange 
 thoughts, and suggesting painful reminiscences for 
 many a day. Who can explain it ? Christ does not. 
 He says, " Have faith in God," because it needs faith to 
 interpret judgment. Men sometimes question me about 
 the origin of evil, and ask me how I can satisfactorily 
 explain that? I cannot explain it, and I will not argue 
 with them. It is a baffling circle in which the mind 
 travels evermore, unresting and unrcsted, till at last 
 darkness closes down, and the fierce tension of the 
 brain ends in death or madness. Christ gives me a 
 wiser counsel when He says. Do not seek to know it. 
 Be content with such knowledge as is given, and have 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 265 
 
 faith in God, that He who has made the world, and in 
 the beginning said it was ''very good," will do all 
 things well, and in the end will finish His work with 
 a new h raven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness. 
 
 Or we see such mysteries of judgment on a larger 
 scale among nations. Suddenly, as though smitten 
 by a secret disease, nations wither away. Sometimes 
 by the shock of unexpected battle, sometimes by the 
 swift outburst of hidden and destructive forces, a 
 nation is blotted out, and the morning light rises on 
 a gigantic ruin, a smoking plain where Sodom stood, 
 a wilderness of sand and lava where yesterday was 
 Pompeii. Who can reflect on such a spectacle un- 
 moved ? Who has not had solemn and searching 
 thoughts, which he has scarce dared to utter to himself, 
 in picturing such a tragedy ? Who does not say, 
 It may be the nation was corrupt and deserved to 
 perish, but see, the innocent suffer with the guilty, 
 the babe perishes with the mother, the only son of 
 the widow is trampled down on the bloody field, from 
 which the man who made the war escapes ; the bullet 
 strikes the bravest and spares the guiltiest. Is this 
 fair? Is this just? Is this the discrimination we 
 expect of Deity, or is it the mere madness of wild 
 chance, which sweeps like a storm, irresponsible and 
 ruinous, across a land? And again the one reply is, 
 "Have faith in God." Who are we to measure the 
 methods of the Divine judgment, we whose judgments 
 are so faulty, whose keenest discriminations are sp full 
 
266 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 of error ? How do we know what recompense God 
 has hereafter for those who suffer innocently in the 
 overthrow of guilt ? How can we judge or foresee 
 the Divine reconstruction which will presently arise out 
 of the calamity which appals us ? He who knows 
 nothing of surgery might denounce the inhuman 
 butchery of the surgeon's knife : but science knows 
 nothing of butchery, — it calls such work by another 
 name, and says that though the knife be called severity 
 the hand that holds the knife is mercy. National 
 putrefaction is a worse thing for the world than national 
 extirpation, and when God's judgments are written in 
 flaming ruin across a land, there is at least driven 
 home to the heart of nations the truth of an eternal 
 Righteousness which cannot be mocked with impunity. 
 In such hours of national crisis the greatest spirits 
 learn to say as Emerson said of the American civil 
 war, *'I shall always respect war hereafter. The 
 waste of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are 
 overpaid by the vistas it opens of eternal life, eternal 
 law, reconstructing and upholding society." The sun 
 rose upon Sodom as Lot entered into Zoar. There 
 lay the blackened plain indeed ; but high above the 
 drifting smoke-cloud which rolled upward from that 
 glut of death, there rose the serene unsullied sun, the 
 fair new day ; and so, once more, a quiet Voice calls us 
 from the regions where the new day is being born and 
 new nations are always being trained into greatness, 
 '' Be not afraid. Have faith in God ! " 
 
 The same counsel applies to all the social problems 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 267 
 
 which distract our times. Civilisation is the history of 
 systems which have seemed perfect in their day, but 
 which at last have borne no fruit of use or beauty, and 
 therefore have withered away. We too stand amid 
 the decay of social systems. The England of the 
 knight has given place to the England of the worker, 
 the wealth of inheritance to the wealth of commerce, 
 the England of villages to an England of cities, and the 
 time is full of the death-cries of the old and the birth- 
 throes of the new. Do we despair ? Does the future 
 seem to us big with terror ? Is there the stir of revo- 
 lution in the air ? No true Christian dare despair. 
 The temper of Christianity is a wise optimism founded 
 on moral certitude and faith. *'The old changes, 
 giving place to new," but nevertheless God does " fulfil 
 Himself in many ways." He still sits above the Time- 
 flood, and if we do believe in Him with all our hearts, 
 fear will not afflict us with its shuddering and dismay : 
 for amid the wreck of all human systems and kingdoms, 
 we shall see that kingdom which cannot be shaken 
 rising into everlasting domination. There is no sterner 
 or diviner lesson which we need to learn than this, 
 that throughout God's universe the one title to life is 
 use, and when use ends the quick judgments of God 
 destroy that which has already become a mockery and 
 a fraud. But it is the misfortune of our ignorance not 
 always to know, indeed seldom to detect, when the 
 period of use is past in systems and institutions. To us 
 they appear as the fig-tree appeared to the disciples, — 
 still sturdy, still vigorous, Hfting themselves up in pride 
 
268 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 and beauty, and we are unconscious that the spreading 
 foHage covers no fruit, and that, measured by the only 
 true test, the test of use, they are already worse than 
 worthless. Oh, be sure of it, no institution, no system 
 of society, no code of social order, has ever existed 
 that was not in the first place justified by its uses ; and 
 none has ever perished till its period of use was past, 
 and already corruption had eaten out its heart. Amid 
 the dissolution of old forms of society in which we 
 stand to-day, this then is our hope, — God still rules, and 
 He is just. He will destroy nothing that is worth 
 keeping. He whose power guided and controlled the 
 monastic age and the feudal age, will not forsake us in 
 the vast democratic age which has now burst upon us. 
 Let the old perish : let us embrace the new and salute 
 without fear that strange dawn which grows upon us. 
 For, as men hear out of the gray heights when the 
 light is just breaking the chimes of some great cathe- 
 dral tower, uttering silver voices, sacred music, holy 
 anthems, carillons of hope, above the waking city and 
 the sleeping earth, so we hear above all the movements 
 of human society, in the hush of prayer, the voice of 
 Christ speaking, and saying, " Have faith in God.'* 
 
 Or apply the counsel again to the judgments of a 
 Future world. The very idea of faith implies that 
 which is unseen, that which eludes the senses, and 
 hence is full of mystery. If the judgments we see 
 below be mysterious, how much more mysterious those 
 that are beyond. How dreadful and overwhelming, 
 almost too terrible for contemplation, is the idea of the 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 269 
 
 final adjudication on all human affairs, the summing-up 
 and completion of all human life ! How appaUing that 
 vision of barrenness confirmed in barrenness, and 
 deceit fixed in unalterable revelation of its own nature, 
 when God separates the sterile from the fruitful, the 
 sheep from the goats! What wonder that the eager 
 eyes of men strain into the great darkness, and that we 
 long to read the mystery. What wonder that the idea 
 of individual life going on through endless ^ons some- 
 times seems unthinkable, and the idea of age-long 
 pain unbearable. What wonder, too, that a hundred 
 instances of human lives— bad, but not wholly bad ; 
 vitiated, but not quite vile ; failures, yet touched with 
 som^e possibilities of success never ripened into activity 
 on earth— suggest themselves to us, and we ask with 
 tremulous hope what judgment shall the God of the 
 whole earth pass on these? What shall be said of 
 those cursed by heredity,— the drunkard's son who 
 became a drunkard, the harlot's daughter who is a 
 cast-away ? What shall be said to those nurtured in 
 crime, with but the faintest chances of good or know- 
 ledge, and those chances snatched from them by the 
 cruel irony of life and the uncharitable callousness of 
 man ? How about those who wither and bear no fruit 
 because no kind hand nurtured them when the sap of 
 life began to flow, or trained them when the hour of 
 leafage came ? It is thus our thought pierces into the 
 unrevealed future, and flutters back again, like a bird 
 that meets an icy air and is afraid and faint. We 
 should not be human if we did not have such thoughts, 
 
270 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 if we did not sometimes feel what Wordsworth called 
 the burden of this "unintelHgible world." 
 
 These obstinate questionings are as old as human 
 thought, and what answer is there to them ? Simply this, 
 *' Have faith in God." There are many things God has 
 not revealed, and they are hidden that we may learn to 
 trust Him. The use of mystery is that it is the school 
 of faith. We have to trust God's wisdom as well as 
 His love, and accept the unrevealed in meekness as well 
 as the revealed in thankfulness. We must submit our 
 intellect not less than our heart to God, and serve Him 
 with our ignorance as well as with our wisdom. Know- 
 ing God is Love, we must have faith in God that Love 
 will not fail to do the uttermost of which Love is capable 
 for every creature it has made, and to our murmurs 
 and our tears the voice of Him who inhabiteth eternity 
 replies, ^'What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know 
 hereafter, for thou shalt know even as thou art known." 
 
 There are two or three lessons that remain ; and first 
 we must grasp as the great vital truth of all religion, 
 that God is good, God is wise, God is over all. There 
 are nations which have cast out the idea of God, and 
 have done it boldly. Greece, in her decline, denied her 
 gods and brake their carven images. France in the 
 fury of the Revolution spat upon the name of God, and 
 would not retain God in her knowledge. We English- 
 speaking peoples have never done that, but we have 
 done that which is worse. We have said, " There is 
 indeed a God, but His government is defective; there 
 are flaws in His order and errors in the process of His 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY, 271 
 
 law ; He orders, but He does not govern ; He commands, 
 but it does not stand fast ; we praise His mercy and 
 His justice, but we do really believe in neither of these 
 things, and therefore, though we honour His name with 
 public reverence. He has no place in our hearts, and 
 no real rule in our lives;" and that is worse than 
 saying boldly and defiantly, *' There is no God.'* It is 
 atheism set to hymn-tunes ; it is atheism with the rags 
 of worship left to cover its deformity and nakedness. 
 This mere outward worship of a God who does not 
 rule our hearts or inspire our lives, has no power either 
 to bless or purify, to teach us courage in the conflicts 
 of time or humiUty before the mystery of eternity. 
 There is but one way of believing in God which brings 
 us peace, and that is to believe in Him with all our 
 hearts. If God is, we must needs believe He does all 
 things well ; if He does things ill, it is better for us 
 that God should not be. To believe that God is over 
 all, over all judgment, retribution, and calamity, and 
 that He rules wisely, is the main article of any true and 
 vital piety. Have you that faith in God ? If you have 
 it not, in very truth you have no God ; you are without 
 God, and without hope in the world. 
 
 And then, too, we have to learn that part of the 
 discipline of life is faith. If all were known there 
 would be no room for trust : for trust is the eye which 
 sees Him who is invisible, the hand that pushes itself 
 out into the unknown. 
 
 " You must mix some uncertainty 
 With faith, if you would have faith be. 
 
273 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 The use of mystery is seen in the training of th^se 
 faci 1 ies of the soul which, Hke some of ihe fairest 
 flov ers, thrive best in shadow, and, indeed, can thrive 
 wtll nowhere else. We might desire a world without 
 shadow, as men often desire a sky without cloud ; but 
 presently we should complain of the monotonous rigidity 
 of the landscape, as m^en have often complained of the 
 ''cerulean vacancy" of Italian skies. Mystery is the 
 shadow of God, in which the flower of faith prospers, 
 and attains its utmost purity and fragrance. We have 
 to recollect always that there is a larger life to come, 
 and be content to wait its larger revelations. The man 
 who lives in that spirit wdll find that the mysteries of 
 life purify and elevate him, and teach him how to walk 
 in childlike humihty of soul, ever waiting for that hour 
 when the day breaks and the shadows pass away. 
 Such a man will be strong for duty because he is serene 
 in spirit, and amid all the shocks and buffetings of 
 earthly life, will learn to feel the spirit of those lines of 
 Browning's, often on the lips of General Gordon, and 
 so applicable to his steadfast and heroic manhood : 
 
 " I go to prove my soul ! 
 I see my way, as birds their trackless way. 
 I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first, 
 I ask not : but unless God sends His hail, 
 Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow, 
 In some time, His good time, I shall arrive 1 
 He guides me, and the bird." 
 
 Lastly, Christ teaches us that Faith solves all diffi- 
 culties. *' Say to this mountain, Be thou removed, and 
 be thou cast into the sea," and if thou shalt not doubt 
 
THE USE OF MYSTERY. 273 
 
 in thine heart, it shall be done ! Inscrutable words ! 
 They sound like a splendid paradox, a brilliant exagger- 
 ation. What do they mean ? Not that the mountain 
 ceases to be a mountain, or that it is removed bodily 
 into the sea ; but that it ceases to be an obstacle, its 
 grim menace is forgotten, its power to depress us is 
 removed. This is the true work of faith. We cease 
 to torture ourselves with questions impossible of 
 answer, and are content to be numbered with the 
 simple. We know not how, but we do know that all 
 things work together for good to those who love God, 
 and that it "shall be for ever and for ever well with 
 them." We see the vast chaos of human society, but 
 know there is a Divine Spirit who broods above it : 
 we hear all the clamour and turbulence of men, but we 
 feel the presence of One who holds the winds in His 
 fist, and hushes the tumult of the people. Like little 
 Pippa, in the famous poem, we walk through a world 
 where base and bitter things abound, but we have 
 become little children in our faith, and we sing ; 
 
 ** The lark's on the wing, 
 I'he morning's at seven, 
 The hillside's dew-pearled, 
 Cod^^ in His heaven^ 
 Alfs right with the world* 
 
 THE END. 
 
STANDARD RELIGSOUS BOOKS 
 
 Sl)c Clerical library. 
 
 JTf HIS SERIES of volumes is specially intended for the Clergy, Stu- 
 
 '*• DENTS AND SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERS OF ALL DENOMINATIONS, 
 
 and is meant to furnish them with stimulus and suggestion in the various 
 departments of their work. Amongst the pulpit thinkers from whom 
 these sermon outlines have been drawn are leading men of almost evety 
 denomination in Great Britain and America, the subjects treated of being 
 of course practical rather than controversial. The best thoughts of the 
 oest religious writers of the day are here furnished in a condensed form 
 and at a moderate price. 
 
 Eight volumes in crown 8vo are now ready {each volume complete in 
 i/^elf). Price, $1.50. 
 
 NOW READY— FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 300 OUTLiNES OF SERMONS ON THE NEW TESTAMENT. 
 
 By 73 Eminent English and American Clergymen, including 
 
 Archbishop Tait. 
 Bishop Alexander. 
 Bishop Browne. 
 
 Bishop LiGHTFOOT. 
 
 Bishop Magee. 
 Bishop Ryle. 
 Dean Church. 
 Dean Vaughan. 
 Canon Farrar. 
 Canon Knox-Little. 
 
 Canon LiDDON. 
 Canon Westcott. 
 Rev. Prin. Cairns. 
 Rev. Dr. M. Punshon 
 Rev. Dr. W.M.Taylor. 
 Rev. Phillips Brooks. 
 Rev. Dr. R. S. Storrs. 
 Rev. Dr.W.G.T.SHEDD. 
 Rev. Dr. T. L. Cuyler. 
 Rev. Dr. J. T. DuRYEA. 
 
 Rev. Dr. H. Crosby. 
 Rev. Dr. Pres.McCosH. 
 Rev. Dr. M. R. Vincent. 
 Rev. Dr. Jno. Peddie. 
 Rev. Dr. C. T. Deems. 
 Rev. C. H. Spurgeon 
 Rev. Dean Stanley. 
 Rev. Dr. A. Raleigh 
 And many oihen 
 
 OUTLINES OF SERMONS ON THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 G. S. Barrett, B.A. 
 Dean E. Bickersteth. 
 Bishop E. H. Browne. 
 J. Bald. Brown, B.A. 
 T.P. Boultbee, LL.D. 
 J. P. Chown. 
 Dean R.W. Church. 
 E. R. Couder, D.D. 
 T. L. Cuyler, D.D. 
 A. B. Davidson, D.D 
 Ror.ERT Rainy, D.D. 
 Alex'r Raleigh. D.D. 
 C. P. Rf.ichel, D.D. 
 Chas. Stanford, D.D. 
 Dean A. P. Stanley. 
 W. M. Stratham.B.A. 
 
 A UTHORS OF SERMONS 
 
 J, Oswald Dykes,D.D. 
 , E. Herber Evans. 
 Canon F.W. Farrar. 
 Donald Fraser, D.D. 
 J.G.Greenhough.BA. 
 W. F. Hook, D.D. 
 Bishop W.Basil Jones. 
 John Kerr, D.D. 
 Canon Edward King. 
 Bp. J. B. Lightfoct. 
 Wm. M. Taylor, D.D. 
 S. A. Tipple, B.A. 
 H. J. Vandyke. D D. 
 Dean C. J. Vaughan. 
 J.UfES Vaughan, B.A. 
 I 
 
 Canon Liddon. 
 j. a. m acfayden, d. d. 
 Alex. M aci-aren, D. D, 
 Bishop W. C. Magee. 
 Theodore Monod. 
 Arthur Mursell. 
 Joseph Parker, D.D. 
 Dean E. H. Plumftre 
 
 [OIIN PULSFORD. [D.D 
 
 \v. Mokley Punshon. 
 M. R.Vincent, D.D. 
 W. J. Woods, B.A. 
 C. Wadswoi? iH, D.D 
 G. H. Wilkinson. 
 
 Bp. C. WORDSWOJLTii 
 
 Copies sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price. 
 
TH£ CLERflCAL UIBRARY-iContinued;. 
 
 OUTLINES OF SERMONS TO CHILDREN. 
 
 With numerous Anecdotes. Crown 8vo. Cloth, $1.50. (Being the 
 3d vol, of the Clerical Liijrary.) 
 
 " These sermons are by men oj acknowledged eminence in possessing the happy 
 faculty of preaching interestingly to the young. As an evidence of this, as well as 
 of the character of the teaching, it is only necessary to mention such names at 
 those of William Aknot, the Bonaks, Principal Cairns, John Edmc-nd, D.D., 
 Drs. Oswald DvKEi> ««</ J. Marshall I^a^^c, besides ma^ty others."— Canada Pres' 
 tyterian. 
 
 "This book contains a very h'gh grade of thinking, with enough illustrations and 
 anecdotes lo slock the average preacher ior many years ol ch.ldren's sermons." — EpiS' 
 tipal Register. 
 
 "They are full of suggestions which will be found exceedingly helpful ; the habit oi 
 nsing apt and simple illustrations, and of repeating good anecdotes, begets a facuky 
 and power which are of value. 'Ihi.^ volume is a treasure which a hundred pastors will 
 find exceediiigly convenient to draw upon." — N. Y. Evangelist. 
 
 PULPIT PRAYERS BY EIMINF^'T PREACHERS. 
 
 Crown 3vo. Cloth, $1.50. (Being the 4th vol. of the Clerical Library.) 
 
 The British Quarterly says: " These prayers are f.'csh and strong; the oT' 
 dinary ruts of conventional forms are left and the fresh thoughts of living hearts 
 are uttered. The excitement of deiwtional thought and sympathy must be great in 
 the offering of such prayers, especially when, as here, spiritual intensity and de- 
 voutness are as jnarked as freshness and strength. Such prayers have tfteir char- 
 acteristic aaoantages." 
 
 London Literary World: "Used aright, this volume is likely to be of great ser- 
 vice to ministers. !t v> ill sl.ow ihcm how to f ut \aricty. freshness and literary beauty, 
 as well as spirituality of lone, into their exteii;poraneous prayers." 
 
 Anecdotes IlIustratiYS of New Testament Texts. 
 
 With 600 Anecdotes. Crown 8vo, 400 pages. Cloth, $1.50. (Being 
 the 5th vol. of the Clerical Library.) 
 
 Londo-t Christian Leader says : " This is one of the 7nost valuable books of 
 anecdote that we have ever seen. T/iere is hardly one anecdote that is not of first- 
 rate quality. They have been selected by o>ie who has breadth and vigor of jnind 
 as well as ■ keen spiritual insight, and some of the most effective illustrations <^ 
 Scripture texts have a rick vein of humor of exquisite quality." 
 
 The London Church BeUs : "Hi^ anec 'otes are given in the order of the texts 
 which th.y illustrate. There i'- nn ample index. The bo^k is one which ihc5«; who 
 have to prepire senncns and ad 'rfsses will do well to have at the r elbow." 
 
 N. Y. Christian at Work: "A'; an apt ti.mtstr ation (ttev pr.»ves the nail 
 
 WHICH FAS-KNS TiIF i'l UTM !N' THE r,lINl\ THIS VOI TME VVU.L PKOVK AN' AD MRABLH 
 AND VALT-Alil.K A'D, N )T OXI.V T> C KRGYMEN, BUT TO SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHERS 
 
 AND Christian- workers r.ENE'y»LLV." 
 
 N. Y. Observer : "A book replete with incident and suggestion applicable to every 
 occasion." 
 
 Ci^pL'S sent by mail, /jo. >;/./, on receipt of prus* 
 
THE CLERtCAL LIBRARY-<Continued). 
 
 EXPOSITORY SERMONS AND OUTUNES ON 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. $1.50. Being the 6th vol. of the Clerical Library. 
 
 Containing Sermons by 
 
 Pkof. a. B. Da.vid?on, I George Mathe^ox, D.D, 
 D.D..LL.D. ' " 
 
 Ven. Archdeacon Farrar. 
 CanonW. J. Knox-Little. 
 Canon H.P. Liddon, D.D. 
 Alexander Maci.aken, 
 D.D. 
 
 "Rick in practical application, these Sermons tvill he an education and an iv 
 ration to many." — N. Y. Christian Advocate and Journal. 
 
 W. Alexander, D.D., 
 Bishop of Derry. 
 
 A. Barry, D.D., Primate 
 OF Australia. 
 
 Dean Bradley, of West- 
 minster. 
 
 Stopford a. Brooke. 
 
 Joseph Parker, D.D. 
 Dean J. J. S. Pekowne. 
 C. Stanford, D.D. 
 Lord Bishop of Chester. 
 Dean Vaughan. 
 
 PLATFORM AND PULPIT AIDS. 
 
 Consisting of Striking Speeches, Home Work, Foreign Missions, 
 THE Bible, Sunday School, Temper.\nce, and Kindred Sub- 
 jects, WITH Illustrative Anecdotp:s from Addresses. Crown 
 8vo, cloth. I1.50. Being the 7th vol. of the Clerical Library, 
 
 By 
 
 PKftBENDARY AiNSLIE. 
 
 W. Arthur. 
 Bishop of Bedford. 
 Dean of CANTERbURv. 
 HisHOP OF Carlisle. 
 Bishop Boyd Carpenter. 
 Dean of Chester. 
 Dean Close. 
 R. W. Dale, D.D. 
 
 J. C. Edghill, D.D. 
 Dean of Bangor. 
 liiSKOP Ellicott, D.D. 
 Archdeacon Farrar. 
 Canon Fleming. 
 Newman Hall. 
 Dr. Livingstone. 
 Bishop of London. 
 J, A. Macfadyen, D.D. 
 
 R Moffat, D.D. 
 Sir W. Muir, K.C.S.L 
 J. Parker, D.D. 
 W. M. Punshon, D.D. 
 Principal Rainy, D.D. 
 C. H. Spurgeon. 
 A. Moody Stuart, D.D. 
 Archbishop Tait. 
 Cakom Tristram. 
 And oiliers. 
 
 "Just the hook to give to some overworked pastor who has many speeches to make, 
 with little time for study, and less money to spare for new books. We have here a 
 collection of some of the best speeches of many of the great piat/orm speakers of our 
 //w^."— Christian. 
 
 ANECDOTES ILLUSTRATIVE OF OLD TESTA- 
 MENT TEXTS. 
 
 With over 500 Illustrations and Index of Texts. Crown Svo, cloth. 
 $1.50. Being the 8th vol. of the Clerical Library. 
 "It will be found invaluable to all f>reack-rs. frahe's, and fiu'lic speakers, ai 
 placing at their command a vast storehouse oj inc'drnts with which to enforce ami 
 fasten an idea or point a moral.'''— ^. Y. Chr(stian at V.^gfk, 
 
 Copies sent by iKaif, fosrp,:ij, on rcct'pl ,•/" f>rice. 
 
BOOKS FOR YOUNC PEOPLE, 
 
 TALKS WITH YOUNG MEN. 
 
 By J. Thain Davidson. i2mo, in handsome cloth binding, illuminated 
 
 cover. Price, $1.25. 
 "These talks are direct, practical and pungent, such as young men like to hear, 
 rhey are crowded with points ot counsel and direction ; they will be invaluable to any 
 young man, and all so plainly and forcibly told, andsofuily nlusirated, that one can but 
 pursue the reading of them to the end. The graphic descr.ptionsot human nature, and 
 sharp laying open of motive in worldly and selfish li\mg, show an unusually keen 
 sense of obsarvation and understanding of the human heart. It should have a wide 
 circulation." — -V. K Evangelist. 
 
 Rev. Mr. SP URG EON says : " The author gives young men fine 
 advice — full of grace and thought — enlivened by stojy and proverb, fresh 
 -with sympathy, and on fire with zeal. These sho7't talks are just what 
 they should be, and all that they ftiriher need is to be largely distributed 
 among the crowds of cur advancing manhood. TO BEGIN TO READ IS 
 TO BE BOUND TO CONTINUE; THE TALKS ARE SO SENSIBLE 
 THAT NO ONE WISHES TO SILENCE THE TALKER-BY LAYING 
 ASIDE THE BOOK." 
 
 N. V. Christian Advocate and Journal says : ** This volume will find 
 readers vi^herever it is known. The talks are fervent and DIRECT AP- 
 PEALS TO THE HEART. THE STYLE IS ANIMATED AND PICTUK- 
 ESftUE. ANJO THE BOOK WILL BE READ BY ALL WHO BCJY IT.» 
 
 Hy the same Auihor. 
 
 FOREWARNED-FOREARMED. 
 
 In cloth. Uniform with " Talks With Young Men " i2mo. $1.25. 
 
 Methodist Recorder : " To young men we would specially recommend this useful, 
 earnest, and interesting book. They will find themselves not preached to, but talked 
 with, and that they have in Mr. Davidson a friend wise, tender and true. Faihers 
 could not do better than place this excellent volume in the hands of their sons at onco." 
 
 DR. DAVIDSON'S NEW BOOK FOR YOUNG MEN. 
 
 THE CITY YOUTH. 
 
 Uniform with " Talks With Young Men." i2mo, cloth. $1.2^,. 
 
 It has been the Author's aim, in the preparation of this book, to supply a genial 
 and useful Friend, who will talk cheerily yet seriously to the new-comer, anti jjut 
 hivn on his guard against the moral dangers by which he is certain to be beset. 
 
 THE CHURCHETTE: 
 
 A Year's Sermons and Parables for the Young. 
 By the Rev. J. R. Ho\v.\tt, Uniform with " Talk.s With Young Men.* 
 Cloth. $1.25. 
 Literary World : "Short, simple, cheery, colloquial, imaginative, impressive, th« 
 sermons yield abundant e\idence th -t, as he says, his 'aim has been to speak to chil- 
 dren in the sunshine.' rbero is -I-o - f esh'iess. not to sav an originality, about th« 
 subjects selected a-.d th i.'- treamci-t, wS h r-rives a special charm to the book." 
 
OR. DAVBDSON'S NEW BOOK for the YOUNG 
 
 SURE TO SUCCEED. 
 
 I2mo volume, handsomely bound, illuminated cloth. Price, - - $1.25 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 The Secret OF A Successful Life. | A Smooth Road, but a Fatal 
 
 What is Man ? j Kndlng. 
 
 \rt Thou in Health? ! Fot:r Anchors out of Tine Stern, 
 
 'H^'siCAL Recreation. j A Choice Yuung Man. 
 
 i HE Body to be Careh for. 
 Strong in Divine Grace. 
 Giants in these Days. 
 Doing Exploits. 
 Fighting the Lion. 
 The Way to Prosper. 
 Why not Confess Christ? 
 
 The Model Christian. 
 Sobriety of Mind, 
 Right Hearts and Tight Ham)s. 
 Our Father's Business. 
 The Secret of Sikength, 
 Our Duty to God and Man. 
 
 JV. y. observer says: "We heartily and earnestly recommend 
 this volume to all who are interested in promoting the welfare of young 
 men. Tlie counsel it gives is infused with so much common sense and prac- 
 tical wisdom, that it must command the respect, if not the hearty assent, 
 of every young man to whom it comes." 
 
 Christian Herald : "A B 10K FUi.L oF SOUND advice to young men, 
 showing that the most successful life in the world wi'hout Christ is only 
 failure." 
 
 Phila. Presb\ terian : " The eminent author recognizes the needs of the 
 body as well as of the soul, and shows himself in sympathy with the aims 
 and ambitions of the young. His style is clear, and the arguments are so 
 true that they cannot fail of conviction." 
 
 Journal and Messenger : " A father may well put this work into the 
 hands of his son; and committees should make a note of it for 
 
 their .SUNDAY-SCHOOL LIBRARIES." 
 
 Baltimore Baptist : " We should be glad to see this book in the hands 
 of every young man hi the land. Good would result." 
 
 N. Y. Witness : "Any one desirous of awakening \x\ a young man as- 
 pirations to a nobler plane of living, will do well to give him this book." 
 
 Zion^s Herald: "Practical, plain-spoken addresses to young men. 
 They are written in an easy and interesting, yet forcible and pungent, 
 style, and convey wholesome truths which all young men would do well ta 
 follow." 
 
 Copies sent by mail on receipt of price. 
 
 A. C. aHrUSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York. 
 
STANDARD RELICBOUS WORKS. 
 
 New and Enlarged [4*h] Edition, in Cheaper Form, 
 
 OF 
 
 CHARLES L BRACE'S SESTA CHEffl 
 
 A HISTORY OF HUMANE PROGRESS UNDER CHRIS- 
 
 TIANITY. With New Preface and Supplement 
 
 tary Chapteii 540 pp., cloth. 
 
 Pi-ice reduced from Ss.^o to $1.^0. 
 
 " It is especially adapted to assist the clergytnan and religious teacher in hs strug- 
 gles with honest, thoughtful infidelity." 
 
 '■* It presents a storehouse of fiicts bearing on the influences of Chrislianitj'- upon 
 such important topics as the paternal po.ver, the position of woman under custom and 
 law, personal purity, and marriage, slavery, cruel and licentious sports, and all matters 
 of hum.anity and compassion, etc. The thoughtful reader will here gather in- 
 
 FORMATION AHICH COULD ONLY BE OBTAINED FROM LIBRARIES OR MANV VOl.UM'S." 
 
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 DESERVES THE VERY WIDEST CIRCULATION FOR ITS CAREFUL- 
 NESS AND CANDOR, ITS AMPLE LEARNING, its just, discriminor 
 ting analysis of historical movements as initiated or governed by 
 moral forces, and for the fine spirit which pervades it." 
 
 " 1 he skill and industry with whi :h Mr. Brace has gleaned and sorted the vast ac- 
 cumulation of mnterial here gaihe.ed together, the better to show lorth the power and 
 influence, direct and indirect, of Christ's teachings, is not only praise-worthy, but even 
 in a certain Fense wonderful. He has a complete mastery of h:s subject, and many 
 chapters in the book are of exceeding value and interest." — London Morning Post. 
 
 A NEW and REVISED EDITION, with NEV/ MAPS and ILLUSTRATIONS, 
 
 SUIEI'S SISAf AID PAlESTll. 
 
 In Connection with their History. By Dean A. P, STANLEY. 
 
 V/ith 7 Elaborate and Beautifully Colored 
 
 Maps, and other Illustrations. 
 
 Large Crown 8vo Vol., Cloth, 640 pp. Price reduced from $4 to $2.^0. 
 
 The late Dean Stanley published a new and revised edition of his 
 " Sinai and Palestine." In it he made considerable adaitionsand cor 
 rections, giving the work the final impress of his scholarship, taste and 
 ability. This edition has been carefully conformed to the last Engli.sh 
 edition — including the new maps and i'llnstrations, and is herewith com- 
 mended anew AS THE MOST READABLE AS WET.L AS THE 
 MOST ACCURATE \VORK ON THE SUBJECT IN THE ENG- 
 LISH LANGUAGE. 
 
 Rev Dr. H. A/. Field, Editor of "A". V. Evans^eVstr sxys f Stanley's "Sinai 
 and Palestine" : " We had occasion f )r its co-istant use in crossing the d-'sert, and m 
 journeying through the Holy Land, and can bear witness at once to its accuracy and to 
 the charm of its descriptions. Of all the kelps we had it -wai by far the most cap' 
 tivating.''* 
 
 Copies sent by mail on receipt of price. 
 
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DATE DUE 
 
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