CHERS 
 

 Cibrarjp of €he t:Heolo0ical ^eminarjo 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. Wiedinger 
 
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{pxiAC^ixe of t^t (g^e 
 
 HENRY ROBERT REYNOLDS, D.D. 
 
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LIGHT AND 
 
 MAY 25 MS 
 
 SERMONS AND ADDRESSES 
 
 HENRY ROBE 
 
 BY 
 
 RT -^ 
 
 EYNOLDS, D.D. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF CHtSHUNT COLLEGE 
 
 n 
 
 i^r 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & CO. 
 
 31, WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
 
 1892 
 
DEDICATORY PREFACE 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE FORMER STUDENTS OF 
 CHESHUNT COLLEGE. 
 
 My dear Friends, 
 
 I can scarcely do other than, in the first instance 
 commend these meditations to your generous consideration 
 and acceptance. During several years, I was precluded by 
 physical weakness from undertaking any service more public 
 than a daily ministry to the religious and intellectual 
 progress of those of you, who were preparing in this College 
 for the ministry of the gospel in various Churches of 
 Great Britain, and in many departments of home and foreign 
 service. 
 
 The majority of these discourses were prepared for our 
 weekly meetings for devotion and addressed primarily to 
 yourselves. It is, therefore, only under protest, with 
 extreme diffidence, and in an indirect fashion that I can 
 allow myself to be reckoned among *' the preachers of the 
 age." 
 
 The prominent idea in this particular series of discourses 
 is the recognition of the genuine relation that prevails 
 between religious ideas and holy living. 
 
VI DEDICATORY PREFACE. 
 
 Faith rests on conviction of truth, and is the radix 
 omnium virtutum. Faith is hght, and hght is sometimes 
 peace. When hght flashes out of darkness for om* behoof, 
 it does not merely appeal to our admiration, but shines 
 to point out our pilgrim way. 
 
 I have endeavoured, in Sermons I. and II., to show that 
 the intelligent apprehension of the glory of God in the face 
 of Jesus Christ illumines the darkest places of our thought, 
 our duty, and our destiny. Sermons III.-XII. are variations 
 of the same melody, and are so far related as to show 
 that the law of the spirit of life, the laws of surrender, of 
 growth and sacrifice, and the standard of union among 
 Christians are derived from the best light that has been 
 given us touching the very character and nature of God 
 Himself. Fresh illustrations arise in following the lines of 
 consecrated service, the necessity for combat, and the powers 
 of love and waitmg, which one by one issue in a peace that 
 passeth all understanding. 
 
 The last sermon is the record of an address that 
 preceded the celebration of the Holy Communion in the 
 College Chapel, in January, 1887, when a large number of 
 you assembled to realize afresh your brotherhood in Christ 
 Jesus. The tokens of your friendship and affection have 
 been rare and rich ; and should the perusal of this record 
 of a time of refreshment soothe an hour of missionary toil, 
 or stir some pulse of pastoral duty in these great days of 
 mingled storm and light, it will cheer the close of my 
 prolonged and quiet ministry at Cheshunt College. 
 February, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 PAGK 
 
 " vSeeing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who 
 shined in our hearts, to give the light [illumination, R.V. 
 marg.] of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ." — 2 Cor. iv. 6 , i 
 
 Preached at EviDianuel ChurcJi^ Cambridge^ November^ 189 1. 
 
 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY. 
 
 ■'The light [illumination, R.V. marg.] of the knowledge of the 
 
 gloiy of God in the face of Jesus Christ." — 2 Cor. iv. 6 ... 19 
 
 Preached at Emmamtcl Chitrch, Canib7-tdge, November, 1891. 
 
 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 How shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious ? " 
 — 2 Cor. iii. 8 
 
 Preached at East Parade Chapel, Leeds. 
 
 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 Ye ought ... to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how 
 He Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 — Acts XX. 35 
 
vm CONTENTS. 
 
 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians; both to the 
 wise and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready 
 to preach the gospel to you also that are in Rome." — Rom. 
 i. 14 ..• ^ 1Z 
 
 Preached in Mansfield College Chapel^ Oxford^ J<^^i- l8» 
 1 89 1, m aid of the work of the London Missionary 
 Society. 
 
 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 " And He said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast 
 seed upon the earth, and should sleep and rise night and day, 
 and the seed should spring up and grow, he knoweth not 
 how. The earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, 
 then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. But when the 
 fruit is ripe straightway he putteth forth the sickle, because 
 the harvest is come." — Mark iv. 26-29 ^9 
 
 Preached in East Parade Chapel^ Leeds, 
 
 THE IDEAL AND STANDARD OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. 
 
 ' ' That they all may be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, 
 and I in Thee, that they may be one in Us : that the world 
 may believe that Thou didst send Me."— St. John xvii. 21 103 
 
 Preached in East Parade Chapel, Leeds. 
 
 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 " The greatest of these is love." — i Cor. xiii. 13 116 
 
 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 " Great is thy faith : be it done unto thee even as thou wilt." — 
 
 St. Matt. xv. 28 133 
 
 Preached in Cheshunt College Chapel, Jzcne 28, 1S21, at 
 the ordination of two students appointed for missionary 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING OF THE CHRIST. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " When I come unto you, I shall come in the fulness of the 
 
 blessing of the Christ." — Rom. xv. 29 149 
 
 Preached at Hastings, June 3, 1891, on the eve of the 
 departure of a young missionary for foreign service. 
 
 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; they 
 shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not 
 be weary; they shall walk, and not faint." — IsA. xl. 31 ... 163 
 
 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 Address preceding the celebration of the Holy Communion 
 at the opening of the Mansfield College^ Oxford, October 
 15, 1889 181 
 
 MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 Address preceding the celebration of the Holy Communion 
 at Cheshtitit College Chapel^ at the formation of the 
 Cheshunt Union of Former Students, Januaiy 16, 1888 195 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OE THE 
 GLORY OE GOD. 
 
 B-6 
 
Preached N'ovcmhcr, 1891, at Ejiinianucl Congregational Churchy 
 Cambridge. 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE 
 GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 " The knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." — 
 2 Cor. iv. 6. 
 
 Only a few of the sons of men enjoyed the strange and 
 wonderful experience of gazing into the face of Jesus Christ. 
 Only a few hints are given to us of what they saw and felt 
 when they did so. A group of His earliest disciples saw 
 His glory, and under that spell said very starding things. 
 One exclaimed, " Thou art the Christ," and another, *' Thou 
 art the Son of God." The mighty Baptist found in Him 
 one mightier than himself, and in strange prophetic trance 
 cried, " Behold the Lamb of God." Peter wailed in agony, 
 " Depart from me, I am a sinful man." The Samaritan 
 looked into that face and exclaimed, " I perceive that Thou 
 art a prophet." The leper prayed, " Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou 
 canst make me clean." The officers said to the Sanhedrin, 
 *' Never man spake like this Man." A ruler of the Jews 
 gazed into His face, and said, " We know that thou art 
 sent from God." A Roman centurion exclaimed, " Truly 
 this man was the Son of God." When His treacherous 
 disciple caught sight of His face in the dark night of the 
 {)etrayal, '' he went out and wept bitterly." 
 
4 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 Every human face is a mask through which streams 
 the hght of an otherwise invisible reality. Every face is 
 moreover covered with a mysterious script which others 
 imperfectly strive to interpret ; each face conceals, and yet 
 partially reveals, a history. The dimples of childhood and 
 the wrinkles of age alike proclaim their complexity and 
 mystery. The character, the temperament, the past and the 
 future of every life are depicted on the face. The effort 
 to repress expression has its own cipher. Even our purpose 
 to hide our emotion involuntarily proclaims itself upon the 
 mystic veil that we draw over our inner and real self. We 
 often interchange the word "face" with the other terms by 
 which we denote individuality. Art has represented for us 
 its idea of our greatest men, but such portraiture is only 
 a faint approximation to the reality. " The exterior sem- 
 blance belies the soul's immensity." And if this be true of 
 a httle child " whose fancies from afar are brought," how 
 much more is it true of the face of Jesus Christ 1 Every 
 effort hitherto made to conceive or pourtray this face, by 
 line or hue or word, has been a failure from the nature of 
 the case. Painting and poetry have perhaps succeeded 
 best when they have sought to represent the Child Jesus, or 
 the dead Christ. This is because in the effort to do the im- 
 l)ossible, artists have been able in these regions to utilize two 
 proximate reserves of power. With the ideal Child, they have 
 been able to draw upon the resources or characteristics of 
 ripened years, so that the Infant has seemed more than an 
 infant by some faint touch of the Ancient of days. So, in 
 depicting the corpse of the Crucified, the painter has been 
 able to draw upon the resources of life, and to make death 
 pulsate with some strange hints of a victory over itself. 
 But while Raphael and Tintoret, Diirer and Francia 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 5 
 
 have expounded to us with some satisfaction the infant or 
 the dead Christ, yet Raphael and Da Vinci and every modern 
 master of form and colour have failed to set forth even their 
 own imagination of the man Christ. Colours, lines, and 
 words are equally powerless to do more than hint at absolute 
 perfection. The face which troubled the Sanhedrin and 
 confounded Roman power and hushed the maddened 
 prejudice of a reckless and murderous mob, — the face to 
 which little children turned with confiding love, and before 
 which penitent harlots and the dying brigand found the utter- 
 most consolation, transcends representation. The face which 
 was set against all evil^ and whose glance unmasked hypocrisy 
 and broke the hearts of treacherous disciples, — which read 
 all that was in man, and saw into the depths of heaven, 
 — which at times shone above the brightness of the sun, and 
 lavished the sense of an infinite benediction upon the 
 helpless and unworthy, presents an impossible problem to 
 the artist, the poet, or the man of science. The historian, 
 whether scientific or picturesque, offers us sometimes an 
 unintelligible and sometimes a monstrous combination 
 which has no verisimilitude or realism, and which criticism 
 readily consumes in its crucible. 
 
 If we can trust the only authorities we possess, we have 
 to see, with the eyes of imagination and faith. One in our 
 own nature, image, and likeness, who, nevertheless, re- 
 peatedly claimed to hold the destinies of all men and genera- 
 tions in His hand. We are called upon to believe that 
 there did once enter into the life of our race a Personage 
 whom born Jews believed to be more royal than David, 
 wiser than Solomon, greater than the prophets, mightier 
 than Moses or Elias, more august than their temple, more 
 holy than their Sabbath*. How can pen, or pencil, or word 
 
 N 
 
6 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 set forth a face which revealed at one and the same time the 
 uttermost self-abandonment and the highest self-conscious- 
 ness ; which was the expression of the loftiest moral ideal, 
 and yet without a trace or quiver of conscious sin, or even 
 demerit ? How can we pretend fully to realize a human 
 life which was meek and gentle, and yet capable of deliver- 
 ing the most terrible judgments upon every form of selfish- 
 ness, hypocrisy, and sin; which, while the embodimeot of 
 the deepest humility, yet did not hesitate to claim equality 
 with God, a oneness with the Father and a consciousness 
 of being, even while He spake to men, /// heaven 1 We 
 trace to some extent the lonely path of the Son of Man till 
 we find Him the object of the concentrated hatred of His 
 contemporaries, the victim of every passion and lie which 
 was disgracing humanity. But how can we realize that 
 face, the very breath of whose mouth might have consumed 
 His enemies and blasted His executioners, but which yet 
 turned in infinite compassion upon His bloodthirsty foes^ 
 fulfilled a sublime purpose in submitting to the shame and 
 curse of sin, and gave Himself up, demonstrating thereby the 
 condemnation of all sin, and the terms of Divine suffering 
 on which alone the Eternal Righteousness could and did 
 pardon it ? We have to think of One who died and rose again 
 in the human form which had been humbled to the death of 
 the Cross, and so conferred upon it a glory which abolished 
 death. We have to realize a human life and death which 
 brought into the consciousness of those who witnessed it " the 
 Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," and opened 
 such a door in heaven, that our faith can even now see 
 that He is " the Lamb of God in the midst of the throne." 
 When those who perpetrated the most tragic deed of all 
 time discovered what they had done, they shrieked with 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 7 
 
 fear, until they saw, through the coming judgment and on 
 the cloud of doom, the bow of promise, and the mystery of 
 infinite love. When St. Paul caught sight of this stupendous 
 fact, that the Christ, whom his contemporaries had crucified 
 and whose followers he had himself madly persecuted, was 
 " the Lord of Glory " and the Christ of all the prophetic 
 hopes of his people, his life was transfigured and revolu- 
 tionized. He was eager to confess that he counted "all 
 things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 
 Jesus." Now, St. Paul here speaks of the face, the visible 
 presentment of this mysterious Personality. 
 
 What consideration can aid our endeavour to think out 
 for ourselves this astounding paradox ? What hypothesis 
 suggests the only satisfactory interpretation of this tran- 
 scendent manhood ? Who can tell us what it means to us ? 
 
 The difference between the other great men of the 
 human race and the personality of the Christ is so vast as 
 to be immeasurable. The face of Buddha or Zerdusht, of 
 Confucius or Mohammed, the face of Socrates, Aurelius, 
 Francis, or Loyola may demand long and careful meditation, 
 but we can take the parallax of these men. Moses and 
 St. Paul himself present grand themes for the historic 
 imagination, but they do not confound our sense of pro- 
 portion. W^e are not intensely anxious to learn their judg- 
 ment upon our character or destiny. But a restless yearning 
 arises to know what Jesus thinks of us, and to discover 
 some worthy explanation of the personality of the Son of 
 Man. We are resolved, as every generation before ours 
 has resolved, that if it be possible we will find out what the 
 Christ is, what the Christ thinks of our life, and what actual 
 personal relation we sustain to Him. 
 
 The various solutions that have been hazarded of this 
 
<S THE KNOWLKDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 amazing problem make our hearts throb. Our own genera- 
 tion is especially rife with suggestions. The very air of 
 this nineteenth century is as full of them as was that of the 
 second century. The Gnostic and Oriental philosophy, 
 Alexandrine metaphysics, mediaeval scholasticism, Western 
 science, the speculations of Newtonians and Darwinians 
 have one after the other been absorbed with the tran- 
 scendent theme. No age can afford to ignore a series of 
 facts which has effected an undeniable revolution in every 
 department of life and thought and action. 
 
 We do not affect to deny that one tendency of human 
 thought, from the first century to our own day, has ignored the 
 difficulty of the problem, nor that many have said Jesus was 
 the production of His own age ; that He was the evolution 
 of a consummate flower upon the barren stock of humanity. 
 To many, He was simply Judaism or Rabbinism at its best. 
 Others add that Hellenic wisdom or Oriental exaggeration 
 touched the memory of Jesus with a mythical lustre. It is 
 supposed by some that the law of evolution will account 
 for the entire manifestation, and for all the history of the 
 subsequent influence of the strange meteoric flash of His 
 passing across the stage of this world. 
 
 Much that was once thought of as sporadic or super- 
 natural has undoubtedly been shown to be the natural 
 outcome of previous circumstances. Yet there are more 
 mysteries for us to-day in the stellar heavens than either 
 Newton or Laplace dreamed of. These multiply with 
 every fresh organ or triumph of research. The passage 
 from nothing to something still confounds the disciple of 
 pre-organic evolution. The advent of life upon the planet, 
 and the distance between the highest vertebrate and man, 
 provoke the most urgent inquiry. And I suppose that 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 9 
 
 even the theistic evolution of history will long be troubled 
 with a few facts in the development of Christianity. E.g.^ 
 no critics hesitate to admit that Saul the persecutor wrote 
 these weighty words, addressing them to a European com- 
 munity within thirty years of the death upon the cross of 
 Jesus of Nazareth. That bare historic fact speaks volumes. 
 In itself, it seems to me to be as startling as any super- 
 natural event reported in Holy Scripture. 
 
 These words suggest, however, the hypothesis which 
 satisfied St. Paul's own mind. Nearly nineteen centuries 
 of infinitely varied experience have verified the intuition. 
 The supposition was this, that the glory of God was visible 
 IN THE FACE OF Jesus Christ. All who are imperatively 
 summoned to say what they think of Christ, come more or 
 less to an identical conclusion. 
 
 St. Paul's illustration is very remarkable. He fastened 
 upon what he believed, and what we in this year of grace 
 also believe, to have been the primal act of Divine energy, 
 or creative might and wisdom, when ''light" broke on the 
 universal darkness. The apostle took his stand beside the 
 author of Genesis. He saw in " Holy Light . . . since 
 God is Light . . . Bright effluence of Bright Essence 
 Increate." No lower conception, no less imposing parallel 
 satisfied him. He boldly declared that such a glory of 
 God beamed from the face, and could alone interpret the 
 personality of Jesus. 
 
 St. Paul comforted and warned the Corinthians by 
 assuming that they with him had discovered in the face of 
 Christ, power and purpose, character and claim answering 
 to their loftiest ideal of what is to be worshipped and 
 glorified. An abashed sense of irresistible power dazzled 
 and overwhelmed him. The awful purity of the eternal 
 
10 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 essence radiated from the human Hfe and death of Jesus, 
 and smote him with an idea of righteousness more intense 
 than any formal law or moral principle. The capacity of 
 Christ to meet all the needs and peril of all men enchanted 
 him. The manifestation of an appaUing and bewildering 
 self-sacrifice entranced and captivated him, bought him 
 over to a life-long service. The words of the Lord Jesus, 
 though fashioned into human speech, embraced infinitely 
 varied suggestions, condensing the highest moral wisdom, 
 transcending the resources of the schools, and seeming to 
 be not the wisdom only, but the very word of the living 
 God. This wisdom, though on its human side and in its 
 human form limited, yet connoted an inward basis which 
 was possessed of all the characteristics of infinity. More 
 than this, the love of Christ was nothing short of the 
 love of God, and it constrained him. Through Christ, Paul 
 felt that he got right up to God Himself. This love wrought 
 upon his heart with all the sweetness of human affection, of 
 surpassing gentleness, of healing and forgiving grace and 
 benign sympathy, yet, so far as he, Paul, was concerned, it 
 dealt directly with the moral conscience, and appealed to 
 the God-consciousness. 
 
 St. Paul was acquainted with Oriental incarnations, 
 which overpowered and demolished the human shrines in 
 which tlicy were supposed to dwell ; but here was the glory 
 of the Infinite God flashing in the face of One who had 
 lived and died and risen again among men. Western 
 apotheoses were common enough in the views of Roman 
 centurions or Greek sophists, but they only broke up the 
 very idea of God into a rabble of Deities. If Gr^eco- 
 Roman fashion called a philosopher, a physician, a court 
 favourite, an imperial Augustus " God,"' the process merely 
 
' THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. II 
 
 degraded and silenced the conscience, bandied profane 
 compliments, and lowered the very conception of God 
 Himself into a blasphemous superlative for the use of the 
 market, the camp, or the schools ; but here^ i?t the face of 
 Jesus Christ, was a conception which was more than all the 
 legendary incarnations, more than all the political deifica- 
 tions current in St. Paul's day. He who first commanded 
 light to shine out of darkness, i.e. the absolute Eternal 
 God, had caused His own glory to shine from the face of 
 Jesus Christ, on a darkness deeper than primaeval chaos. 
 This brings to us the central word of this remarkable 
 sentence. 
 
 St. Paul does not say that the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ has illumined the world. His position is that 
 the Eternal, *'who commanded light to shine out of darkness, 
 has shined in our hearts, to give the illumination of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 We have therefore two themes — (i) the knowledge of the 
 glory; (2) the light or illumination beaming forth from such 
 knowledge. 
 
 The heavens declared the glory of God during untold 
 millenniums ; but, so far as man is concerned, the world 
 waited for the eyes which could see it and the lips which 
 could speak of it to their fellows. 
 
 Truth is the realization by men of fiict. The fact of 
 the glory of God must be realized as a thought by some 
 human minds before it can become the light of all our 
 seeing. 
 
 Granted that the deepest essence of God, the highest 
 revelation of His nature gleamed from the dying face of 
 Jesus, still the eye of faith and love must catch sight of the 
 glory, transform it into thought ani word, before it can 
 
12 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 illumine the darkness of human destiny. Revelation here 
 follows all the law of Divine education of the race. God has 
 taught mankind by the great divisions of the human family. 
 These, again, have been illumined by the special vision and 
 intuition of a few elect souls, who have seen into the mysteries 
 of nature, into the depths of the heart, into the meaning 
 of history, and clothed their thoughts in words. They 
 have believed, and they have spoken. Their words have 
 been light, and bread of life, and water of life to their 
 brethren. Thanks be to God ! Human eyes have per- 
 ceived, human hearts have conceived, human lips have told 
 what they saw of the glory of the Only Begotten of the 
 Father. They absorbed the glory ; they have been changed 
 into the same image from glory to glory. They have, 
 by their knowledge of the glory, become lights in the 
 world. 
 
 The knowledge of the glory is indispensable to us all. 
 The almost intolerable magnificence of the sky is lavished 
 upon us by day and night from generation to generation ; 
 yet how few form the faintest conception of its meaning. 
 Nature is a sealed book to the enormous majority of the 
 human family, who pass across its stage and neither see nor 
 know. So God's unveiling of Himself in Christ falls often 
 upon eyes that are veiled and blinded and do not see nor 
 know. The prophetic hope of the Church is that a day is 
 coming when no one shall have need to " say to his brother, 
 * Know the Lord,' for all shall know Him," and "the know- 
 ledge of the Lord shall cover the earth." Every eye shall 
 be opened, and shall see Him before long. Meanwhile, the 
 most urgent work of the Church is to open men's eyes, 
 and to compel old and young, wise and unwise, to see 
 this great glory, to look and live. 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 1 3 
 
 ^'eriIy no one set form of words can do more than 
 make a faint approximation to all the reality ; yet all 
 theology consists of etitbrts to put into form the supreme 
 fact of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 
 This has been by no means an easy task. Other 
 thoughts and other knowledge have threatened this new 
 thought with annihilation. Thus, c.^., in grasping this 
 supreme and illuminating fact of the incarnation of God 
 in Christ, men have had to encounter two positions 
 which were more fundamental still — the unity of God and 
 the perfect humanity of Jesus. Neither of these truths 
 could be surrendered. The Jirs^ is the most certain dictum 
 of the moral conscience, and of the highest philosophy, 
 and is the grandest tradition of our race : and the second 
 is the stupendous fact, the quality of which has given 
 rise to the overwhelming conviction of the early believers, 
 that God was in Christ, and the Word was made flesh in 
 Him. Yet it must be conceded that the vast conception, 
 that " the Word was made flesh " in Christ, and that " He 
 took up His tabernacle " with men, and that they ^' beheld 
 His glory," and saw that it was '' the glory of the only 
 begotten Son of God, a fulness of grace and truth," 
 somewhat confounded and imperilled their faith in the 
 Divine Unity, and in the perfect humanity of the Lord 
 Jesus. Sometimes they expressed themselves so loosely 
 that their enemies charged them with hero-worship akin to 
 that which they were summoning an idolatrous world to 
 relinquish. Their answer was that the glory of God was 
 effulgently beaming in the face of Jesus Christ. Then the 
 reply was that they must be splitting up their idea of God 
 into that of two or more Gods of different degrees and 
 faculties. This charge was vehemently repelled by those 
 
14 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 who knew that the unity of God was the prime anchor 
 of their faith and their morals, the only safeguard against a 
 widespread dualism, and a reality for the confession of 
 which they were ready to sacrifice life. 
 
 Yet in repudiating a mere hero-worship, on the one 
 hand, or any form of polytheism on the other, the early 
 believers refused to blend the human and Divine in their 
 thought of Christ, into a tcrtluin quid^ that was neither 
 Divine nor human- — not human enough to understand our 
 experience, nor Divine enough to create and save. 
 
 What, then, was the problem which was set before them ? 
 They found, in their effort to kuoiv the glory of God in the 
 face of Jesus Christ, that they must simply state all the 
 facts that were indubitable to them. The speculative 
 puzzles and theories were one by one laid aside, and they 
 boldly resolved to take their stand on the facts w^ithout 
 solving the mystery. 
 
 This kind of "knowledge of the glory of God" is not 
 unhke the knowledge of the facts of gravitation. The 
 generalization, in which modern philosophy rests calmly, 
 does not expound the mystery nor explain the nature of the 
 force which accounts for the falling of a leaf and the shape 
 of a tear, for the swing of the pendulum and the motions of 
 the sateUites, but it states the operation of one great and 
 universal law of the relations of matter to itself. In like 
 manner the Christian consciousness finds, without solving 
 the mystery of the relation of the Infinite and Finite, that 
 it does not dare to relinquish any of the facts of this 
 sublime synthesis, and strives to express them all — the 
 unity of the Godhead, the humanity of Jesus, the Divinity 
 of the Christ, the knowledge of the glory of God in the face 
 of Jesus the Christ. 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OE GOD. 1 5 
 
 Doubtless, there are still and always have been those who, 
 while accepting some one or more of these factors, disregard 
 the rest. Thus, at the present moment, there are many lofty 
 spirits who so far deviate from this knowledge that they are 
 content with the subUme ideal of character, of self-sacrifice, 
 of humanity which Jesus has left as His legacy to the world. 
 They accept some of His teaching concerning both God 
 and man. They rightly believe it to be the most lofty and 
 veracious which has been uttered in this world, and they 
 even transfer to the world's idea of " the Father," thoughts 
 which are only possible to the Church as inferences derived 
 from the incarnation of God in Him. The Christ is thus 
 impoverished by them, and the idea of the Father is built 
 up of unproved ipse-dixiis^ against which our modern science 
 of nature and our ethical pessimism easily prevail. The 
 light of the knowledge of Jesus, as He was eighteen 
 hundred years ago, is certainly brighter than the light of the 
 knowledge of Buddha, of Socrates, or of Marcus AureHus ; 
 but if it be of the same character or kind, it leaves us always 
 at liberty to repudiate it, or search for what is better. The 
 humanity alone -is insufficient to explain the history of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 The Eternal has drawn near men in that wondrous Per- 
 sonality. Their destiny is proclaimed by those loving lips. 
 Heaven blazes forth upon them in that face. His word is 
 eternal truth. Their knowledge is to them the Eternal Life 
 itself. Because they know that He lives, they live also. 
 
 But, on the other hand, there are those — and they have 
 been far more numerous — who have so dwelt upon the 
 Divine element in the Christ, have so sunned themselves in 
 the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that Jesus, the 
 Saviour, the Brother, the sympathizing Friend, the one 
 
l6 THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 Mediator between God and man, has been practically 
 ignored. One issue has been that they have reincarnated 
 His Godhead in that of His virgin mother. We glorify God 
 in the mighty function ascribed to this vessel of grace, and 
 declare, with angels and saints, that she is "blessed among 
 women ; " but the very cause and glory of God in the 
 incarnation seem pitilessly shorn of their lustre by lifting 
 another into the place which the Divine Son has never 
 deserted. If, by fiUing our eyes with the Deity of His 
 Person, wc virtually lose thus the true humanity of Jesus, 
 we sacrifice one prime factor in our knowledge of the glory 
 of God in the face of Jesus Christ. He is all and infinitely 
 more to us than we have any reason for believing that she 
 or any other of His saints can be. 
 
 Again, if we forego our hold on the union between the 
 Man Christ Jesus and the Eternal Son of God, our ideas of 
 both have a strange propensity to part asunder, and we are 
 practically, as well as theoretically, left to a mere humanity 
 of Christ on the one side, and to an inaccessible Deity on 
 the other. The knowledge of the glory of God in the face 
 of Jesus Christ, — such " knowledge," indeed, as in our weak- 
 ness and helplessness we can frame — becomes a compendium 
 of the entire revelation of God. The excellency of it 
 transcends that of all otlier knowledge. In it we realize 
 facts about God and man, about perfection and corruption, 
 about sin and redemption, about eternity and time, and 
 about the blending of the two, about the possibilities of life 
 and the real significance of death, which surpass all other 
 Licts, all other teaching. AVe grasp them in their simplest 
 form by pondering the life of Jesus, by waiting near His 
 cross, and by the powers of holy responsive love. A little 
 child can accept the revelation. '' Even so, Father, for thus 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 1 7 
 
 it seemed good in Thy sight ! " Often concealed from wise 
 and prudent ones, it is unveiled to babes. The longest 
 human life, the most intense religious experience, avails to 
 fill up a portion only of the outline which is given at once 
 to childlike faith ; and the noblest of the apostles, at the 
 close of his martyrlike ministry, counted all things but loss 
 that he might know Him. 
 
 The knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ can only be faintly expressed in any form of words. 
 Neither logic nor poetry, neither history nor theology, can 
 express the fulness of this vast perception. Our worship, 
 our sacraments, our self-sacrifice in the greatest cause, our 
 Church hfe, are only the steps, the instruments by which 
 this wisdom of the truly wise is ever growing to maturity. 
 Our wanderings and perils, our failures and fears, reveal the 
 heart and the power of the Shepherd of souls. The sins 
 which we have committed, the new vistas into the universe 
 and into eternity which open day by day, the novel enter- 
 prises to which we are called, all find encouragement or 
 caution in this vast conception, one which brings God 
 Himself, in all His holiness and His gentleness, in all His 
 majesty and His mercy, so awfully, so tenderly near to our 
 hearts. 
 
 c-6 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
Preaclud ill November, 1891, at E /a man 11 el Congreg-atioiial Churchy 
 Camhriii(:e. 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 
 
 " The light [the illumination] of the knowledge of the glory of God 
 in the face of Jesus Christ." — 2 CoR. iv. 6. 
 
 '^ The entrance of Thy word giveth light." The transfor- 
 mation into thought, of the blended glory and sympathy, 
 the interwoven majesty and tenderness, of the Christ has 
 created a new dawn in the mid-day of nature. 
 
 The light brighter than the sun which broke over the 
 consciousness of St. Paul on his way to Damascus illu- 
 mined every truth which he had already made his own. 
 It reversed for him the highest wisdom of the past, and 
 cancelled his inheritance in the privileges and pride of 
 centuries. The knowledge of the glory of God in the face 
 of Jesus Christ became so brilliant an illumination, threw 
 such floods of light on deep problems, on obscure and un- 
 suspected places of thought and of human experience^ that 
 he found himself in a new world, with new ideas of all 
 things in heaven and earth, in time and eternity. 
 
 St. Paul was not alone in this matter. Every mind that 
 has so far followed the apostle as to kiiow God in Christy 
 has g;one through a like experience. The effect of the 
 glare of light which thus illumines life differs with us all in 
 
22 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 accordance with our previous circumstances. The more 
 than meteoric splendour which breaks upon some minds in 
 the advent of knowledge touching tliis supreme fact in the 
 history of the world has in some periods so stimulated the 
 understanding of mankind that those who saw it could do 
 little else than try and formulate it, or endeavour to reduce 
 the sublime synthesis to some form of creed. During 
 hundreds of years, men could not rest in the light. It 
 waked them so completely from their dreams, that it might 
 seem they had forgotten the power of the light itself in their 
 restless efforts to fit it into their previous scheme of the 
 universe. This was not all the truth, however. New light 
 meant new life. New life meant a strange power, and a 
 peace which passed understanding. So that, while the 
 philosophers and the councils were fighting about the way 
 in which they could adequately express the relation of the 
 Father and Son, and the relation of Jesus to both, hundreds, 
 thousands were content to die for their Lord, and were 
 bravely defying all the power of Roman courts, all the 
 refinements of heathen malice, and all the cruelty of mur- 
 derous mobs. They were following the Lamb whitherso- 
 ever He led them, to prison and to death, and triumphing 
 over both with songs of deliverance. 
 
 Sometimes the very same men who were most active in 
 the intellectual endeavour to analyze the light, were also 
 able to bear with sublime and saintly patience the uttermost 
 cruelty of pagan hatred, and the desperate outbreaks of 
 partisan intolerance. So through all the centuries, theo- 
 logical intensity has not always strangled, but rather 
 stimulated, moral heroism and missionary enterprise. 
 
 Some special epochs have been sharply characterized by 
 the endeavour to criticize and refine theological forms ; and 
 
OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 23 
 
 Others, again, by the tendency to ignore the intellectual 
 side of Christianity, and even to abandon great truths for 
 ethical enthusiasm, or for altruistic or ascetic devotion. 
 Every generation has its own main feature, and perhaps the 
 most dominant sign of these times is a revolt against 
 theology, and an unwillingness to trace the connection 
 between the truth and the life. Surely, my brethren, this 
 light, this illumination of the knowledge of the glory of 
 God in the face of the Christ, is not to be simply gazed at 
 with sharpened eyes of scientific or metaphysic subtlety, but 
 it is to be lived by ; and we have not merely to look, but to 
 live. 
 
 Any attempt to exhaust such a theme is futile, but it 
 may help some of you to higher life and deeper peace, if we 
 dwell on a few of the spheres of human thought and experi^ 
 ence upon which the glory of this light falls. 
 
 I. It illumines all the facts and laws of nature. The cross 
 of Christ provides a new observatory of the universe. The 
 heavens have a new meaning to us, for, if Christ be what 
 He says that He is. He is more and greater than they ; and 
 the death of the Son of God means more to us than if we 
 saw the whole constellation of Orion, with all its suns and 
 nebulas, blotted from the skies. 
 
 We, like our brethren in ancient times in the far East, 
 who brooded over the vastness of the universe, and shrank 
 abashed from the measureless extent of time and space, 
 until they lost themselves, and felt that they were but help- 
 less waves passing over the bosom of a boundless sea, — we, 
 like them, have sometimes extinguished our sense of respon- 
 sibility, and have drugged ourselves to silence and repose, 
 while insatiable desires have been, vulture-like, gnawing at 
 our heart. The vastness of things, the majestic sweep and 
 
24 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 awful persistence of force, the interminable and unconquer- 
 able millenniums of continuous activity have confounded and 
 oppressed us, as they did our fathers. Neither they nor we 
 have been able to bear these things. 
 
 Do we not turn from these considerations, as our eyes 
 do from the unveiled disk of the sun at noon? Are we 
 not, with our sense of the infinity of being, often baffled and 
 crushed into helplessness and recklessness? Do we not 
 seem veritably poised on the verge of bottomless precipices, 
 with our sensibility quickened to morbid intensity, asking 
 day by day, and sometimes moment by moment, " O Infinite 
 All in One, what am I ? whence have I come? whither am I 
 going ? and how can I bear to plunge me into this fathom- 
 less abyss for an eternal 8eon of aeons without some answers 
 to these queries, without some voice to soothe my breaking 
 heart?" 
 
 Philosophy has often tried to answer such throbbing 
 questions by dogmatically forcing upon us the sacrifice of 
 self altogether, or by the endeavour to do that impossible 
 thing — think our ego out of all existence. Again, ingenious 
 speculations, like Pascal's or Chalmers', have bidden us find 
 rest in the revelations of the infinitely little, where the grace 
 and power of the Creator is also manifested, world within 
 world, atomy within atomy, for ever. To some minds this 
 is a cold bath of refreshment, but to the majority of us it 
 gives but momentary relief. We do find, indeed, that in 
 little things, in invisible points, in infinitesimal vibrations, 
 the great things of the universe are effected, and in the 
 tiniest spheres the mightiest forces of the infinite, unknow- 
 able reality are perpetually working. But oh, the enchant- 
 ment of this discovery becomes a new agony ! There 
 is to these thoughts, when once we are in their clutch, 
 
OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 25 
 
 no relief either from science, or common sense, or from 
 manly fortitude, from either robust conscience or old- 
 world maxims, from the tyranny of modern phrase or 
 forward movements, or any other idol of the forum ; 
 but surely even we may rise above them and fairly grapple 
 with them if once we realize that the Word of God 
 has been made flesh, if it be a fact that the Eternal Life 
 has been manifested and given to us in the Son of God. 
 If we have come to know the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ, we have in Him verily come to the centre 
 of infinite space and eternal time. This high conception 
 has transmuted our sense of terror into one of comparative 
 repose. The highest light has produced the deepest peace. 
 If the most august perfections and powers and all the glory 
 of God flash upon us in the smile of Jesus, we cry from the 
 depths of our heart, '' My Lord and my God ! " He who 
 dwelt for ever in the bosom of God is absolutely one with 
 Him who took the children in His arms, and hushed the 
 storm and snatched the crown of hell and broke the spell 
 of death. "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory 
 through the Lord Jesus Christ ! " This is one part of the 
 illumination ; and one secret of the work of Christ is to 
 familiarize us with the eternity to which we belong, to lead 
 us by our union to Him up to the prime centre of it all. 
 
 2. The knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
 Christ illumines and enlarges and deepens our idea of 
 God. 
 
 The least sympathetic thinkers are ready to admit, that 
 the best and most restful concepts of Deity were originated 
 by Jesus. But we go far beyond this, for if we know that 
 the human personality of Jesus Christ is the best and the 
 truest revelation of the Father, the torment and unrest of a 
 
26 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 hundred generations are absolutely stilled. We discerr^ 
 not only the image of God in the human heart and will, 
 but the surest revelation of God in the highest type of man. 
 In the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ, the 
 Almighty comes forth from the cloud and darkness in 
 which our feebleness of vision has enwrapped Him, and 
 comes close to us. We know Kim and are known of Him. 
 Direct intercourse with Him becomes feasible, and the 
 inaccessible light shines with gentle lustre on our mysterious 
 pathway. The cry, " Father forgive them," is the whisper of 
 the eternal love. The summons, " Come unto Me," is a 
 voice from'the excellent glory. The shout, " It is finished," 
 rends the veil of the eternal temple from the top to the 
 bottom. By believing in Him, wc find ourselves in the 
 holy place, in the Father's house, in the mansions prepared 
 for us from before the foundation of the world. 
 
 3. But the illumination of this knowledge gives a new 
 meaning to the whole of human life. Herein and hereby, 
 we see the highest possibilities of man. Human nature 
 is redeemed by its Head, and all the ways and types of our 
 humanity are strangely changed by the realization of Divine 
 glory in the ideal of it. Truth itself about God and man is 
 transfigured. Justice is seen melting into love. All beauty, 
 all virtue, all that is praiseworthy, all that is urged upon us by 
 the imperative of conscience is read off afresh. We take 
 new inspirations to crur study of nature, and new motives 
 to every act of our life. Beholding as in a mirror of 
 perfect adequacy the glory of the Lord, we are changed 
 into the same image from glory to glory ; we drink of the 
 river of the pleasures of God and we are satisfied. 
 
 4. Further, while such a revelation of what man may 
 become and ought to be maizes evident to us the difference 
 
OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 2/ 
 
 between what is possible and what is actiiai, we obtain the 
 most terrible disclosure of the nature of sin, and the only 
 light which makes it tolerable. Our first religious ideas 
 have often proved to be a sense of conflict with God. The 
 conviction haunts us that we have broken with the Almighty ; 
 that we have forfeited all hold upon Divine protection ; that 
 we have wilfully entangled ourselves in the consequences of 
 broken law ; that we have incurred the issues, which no 
 obedience, no penitence, no sacrifice of ours can remit or 
 remove. The sense of evil, of increased severance from 
 God, and the sense of coming doom are forced upon us by 
 conscience and by the sense of desert. 
 
 Numerous and strenuous efforts have been made by our 
 fathers and brethren in many ages and generations to put 
 themselves right with God. These futile endeavours have 
 constituted the pathetic story of the world and of the 
 religious life. 
 
 Moreover, the prince of this world boldly offers us 
 his favour and solace, such as they are. Many voices 
 round about us are minimizing our fault, and promising 
 to exculpate our guilt and exonerate the transgressor. 
 Numerous duties, innocent amusements, and necessary 
 business do for a while distract attention from the fact. 
 Agnostic utterances will sometimes obliterate the appalling 
 sense of sin, and pride will whisper that we, after all, are 
 not as other men : and yet the guilty conscience is not 
 appeased. 
 
 There are those, on the other hand, who confidently 
 assure our trembling spirits that they can pardon our offences, 
 or guarantee our future. But though the morbid growth of 
 self-complacency or the promises of the priest may for a while 
 produce a seeming peace, neither knife nor anodyne stay the 
 
28 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 progress of the disease. The sins of youth or of later days 
 hunt down or come up with the transgressor. The paUia- 
 tions of pride, of courage, of deceit, cease to console, the 
 distractions of life fail to divert contemplation. The bowl 
 is broken at the fountain of pleasure, and fear, like an 
 armed avenger, confronts the naked soul. 
 
 But, my brethren, when we see the glory of God as the 
 true and only solution of the face of Jesus Christ, even 
 when He agonizes on the cross, we find then that a new 
 light has shone upon the fiery filthy wound of our nature. 
 This light is infinitely piercing and infinitely sympathetic. 
 We do not cease or lose our wrath against sin — God forbid ! 
 — nor do we minimize its blame. We find it has slain Him 
 and we enter into God's wrath against our sin. In our self- 
 despair we find His unmerited pardon. We vanquish our 
 fear because the pardon which He speaks is the principle of 
 a new life. Our sins are not covered up ; they are more 
 conspicuous than ever in the blaze of the glory of God 
 which radiates from the face of Jesus Christ, but, since they 
 are the enemies and crucifiers of our dearest Friend, they are 
 renounced. The new knowledge is a light which reveals 
 emancipation from the curse, because we know that in our 
 pardon an infinite expression has been given to the wrath 
 of God against sin. 
 
 Nor need we ask any theologian, or any priest, or any 
 philosopher to tell us Jioiv viuch of virtue, or obedience, 
 or self-denial, or aversion to sin is necessary, nor how 
 many prayers or Communions we should make, nor how 
 many acts of kindness we should perform, nor how many 
 propositions we should assent to. We eat the flesh and 
 drink the blood of the Son of CJod ; we dare, poor sinners 
 that we are, to smile through our tears, because the liciht 
 
OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 29 
 
 of the knowledge of an infinite righteousness and of an 
 eternal love is perfect peace. 
 
 5. The light of this knowledge falls on the otherwise 
 insoluble mystery of sorrow. I will not try to establish this 
 mystery, or pourtray the dark shadow, or weigh the burden 
 of life. We all know it by bitter loss and pain. Still, there 
 are many ways in which men seek explanation of it or 
 deliverance from it. Rivals to Christ as the great Consolator 
 loudly proclaim their own potency. Some are persuading 
 us to absorb ourselves with duties, and forget our sorrows. 
 Pleasures and niceties and novelties are suggested. We 
 are bidden to conquer the pain of bereavement by a new 
 diversion. AVe are told to make a manly conquest of a 
 morbid emotion, and that Time will dull the edge of our 
 grief. Well, the great world is partially successful; but when 
 we come into the light of this knowledge of the God-Man, a 
 new meaning is given to our sorrow and to all sorrow. The 
 wide-spread incidence of human grief may silence our wail, 
 as in the Buddhist legend, but it will not touch the secret 
 of our agony.^ But, once we permit this light to shine upon 
 our darkness, we find ourselves called into the fellowship of 
 the Son of God, and we are reconciled. 
 
 A myriad of hearts broken beyond all human mending 
 or time-healing have come into the fellowship of the sufi'er- 
 ings of Christ, have taken up His cross, to bear it after 
 Him, and they have sung in the valley of their humiliation— 
 
 "Thy way, not mine, O Lord, 
 However dark it be ! " 
 
 * " What medicine is there," a bereaved mother asked of Gautama, 
 "for my dead child?" "I know of some. I require," said he, "a 
 handful of mustard-seed taken from a house where no son, husband, 
 parent, or slave, has died." Thus she learned that '* the living are few 
 but the dead are many." — " Buddhaghosa's Parable!^," p. 108. Trans- 
 lated from Burmese by Captain Rogers. 
 
30 THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 and so the sorrow of the bitterest humihation, the torture of 
 severest pain, the threat of despair, and all the spectres of 
 doubt have vanished like dreams of the night when morning 
 breaks. My brethren, will you not allow this supreme 
 truth to shine into your heart ? and, if you feel the mighty 
 secret, Avill you not take up the failing chorus, and proclaim 
 to others the magic of the solace that it gives ? 
 
 6. The heaviest mystery of all pain is the silence of ojtr 
 dead. No trouble is so great, so deep as this. When the 
 veil falls we have had our last word with them, and we 
 cannot be certain that our wildest lament pierces the 
 shadow and the darkness which conceal our loved ones. 
 Look at the history of the struggle with death, written in 
 the Egyptian and Etruscan tombs, told in the most splendid 
 of Grecian myths and of classic poetry. One can find 
 nowhere a clear proof of reconciliation with this mystery, 
 nor of any satisfaction with the inevitable doom, till the 
 light of the glory of God in the face of Christ has abolished 
 death and brought life and immortality into full view. 
 He who holds in His hands the keys of death and of 
 hell, says in words that have broken the silence of death, 
 "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give to thee 
 the crown of life." Our dead are with Christ nnd He is 
 with us. 
 
 So, my brethren, let this light shine into your hearts, 
 and it will soothe your trembling anxieties over the awful 
 problem of the infinite ; it will reveal to you the nature of 
 God and the possibilities of man ; it will blend with your 
 deepest sense of sin and of guilt the assurance of a full and 
 free forgiveness ; it will unriddle the mystery of pain and 
 sorrow, of even Divine forsaking and intolerable loss, and 
 will comfort you in the cold shadows of the tomb. But 
 
OF THE GLORY OF GOD. 3! 
 
 hiore than all, it supplies you with an ideal of duty, a 
 motive for service, a prediction of triumph, and the only 
 valid guide in the tremendous task now set before all 
 Christian men and Churches, in their endeavour to heal the 
 wounds, to wipe away the tears, and to rectify the wrongs 
 of the world. 
 
 When this light shines upon us, we have a message to 
 the world of heathenism, and to the nations that are groping 
 in darkness ; we have in the brotherhood of our Lord a 
 commission which will go straight to the evils that are 
 festering in the heart of our modern civilization. We have 
 what we know to be the abundant justification of the exist- 
 ence and mission of the Church. We are certain that we 
 have in it a remedy for all sin, all guilt, all conflict with 
 Providence, and war between man and man. We have the 
 open secret and the abiding possession of a peace that 
 passeth all understanding. 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE 
 SPIRIT. 
 
 D— 6 
 
Preached at East Parade Chapel^ I^eeds. 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF 
 THE SPIRIT. 
 
 " How shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious ? " 
 —2 CoR.-iii. 8. 
 
 What man does not yearn over the long-lost joys of his 
 boyhood, when he remembers the merry game, the light 
 heart, the cheerful circle, the holiday and the prize, the 
 youthful love and the freedom from care which marked 
 those early days? And yet we all honestly think that 
 manhood is a nobler thing than childhood ; that the cares 
 which have worn wrinkles on the brow have been part of a 
 heavenly discipline, and that the energy and pursuit of 
 active life are greater gifts than those which are sunned 
 over by the glow of life's bright dawn. Who does not 
 yearn, amid the doubts and difficulties awakened by maturer 
 judgment, for the simple faith with which, in his early days, 
 he received all the statements that were made to him, w^hen 
 to hear and believe were one, when suspicion never clouded 
 the face of truth, when difficulties and questionings were 
 almost unknown ? Yet those who have gone through the 
 agonies of honest doubt, and have conquered, feel that the 
 knowledge which springs out of such questioning, and 
 the faith which can survive such a test, and the love that 
 
36 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 has passed through such a fiery ordeal, are worth more than 
 the impUcit faith or simple assent which never cost a mental 
 pang, and was not bought at so high a price. 
 
 The springing corn, with its emerald glow of fresh young 
 life, is glorious ; but the rich harvest is rather glorious. A 
 scaffolding is sometimes a thing of beauty, and it seems a 
 mistake to destroy it ; but the building which it surrounds 
 deprives it of permanent interest, and makes us anxious 
 for its removal. There is a strong disposition on the part 
 of some people to praise the good old times; to cry out 
 that they were better than these, to sigh after the return 
 of a simplicity, a slowness, and weakness which modern 
 inventions, improvements, and education have scattered to 
 the winds, and to think that all things are tending to a 
 crisis for which society in general, and themselves in par- 
 ticular, are unprepared. Yet no man of competent mind 
 can take a large view of human affairs and events, and come 
 to the conclusion that God's providence stands still, that 
 humanity is on the decline, that the times of limited educa- 
 tion, restricted commerce, slow transit, spiritual despotism, 
 and triumphant priestcraft were better than these ; or that 
 humanity at any previous period of its history was so moral, 
 spiritual, benevolent, right-loving, and religious as it is at 
 this present moment. 
 
 There is, however, and always has been this conserva- 
 tive tendency at work in society, and the Christian Church 
 has never been freed from it. Even in the days of Paul 
 and ApoUos there were Gentile Christians to whom the 
 Christ had come so dressed up in Jewish garments that 
 they were anxious to retain as much as possible of the older 
 dispensation. Now, though there were at Corinth those 
 who were more in danger from indulging their freedom and 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 3/ 
 
 turning their religious liberty into philosophic licence than 
 from clinging to Hebrew or conservative prejudices, Paul 
 was not afraid — in spite of the imputations which the 
 Judaizing spirit had brought against his teaching— to 
 reassert with unflinching boldness the spiritual nature of 
 that gospel which he had been the first to proclaim to them. 
 He knew that truth was mightier than prejudice, that no 
 real harm could come from the utterance of what he 
 believed to be true ; and so at the risk that some of his 
 readers would misunderstand and abuse the sublime truth, 
 and while he frankly admitted that the older dispensation 
 was in many of its aspects a glorious heritage, yet he boldly 
 maintained that the ministration of the Spirit was rather 
 glorious. 
 
 Paul felt that when the Spirit of Christ wrought upon the 
 inert, almost animal life of the world, man would become 
 once more the image of the invisible God, human society 
 would be incorporated into a living body for the Holy 
 Spirit, and that then all mankind would be transformed 
 into the everlasting " living temple " of the Godhead. Yet 
 there were then, and there are now, men ignorant of the 
 power of that Spirit. Many are saying, " Show us a sign 
 that we may see and believe ; " and seem scarcely to know 
 whether there be any Holy Ghost. Let us endeavour, in 
 response to this state of feeling, to bring out the meaning 
 and power of the inquiry of the text, by contrasting, as Paul 
 himself does in this chapter, the ministration of the Spirit 
 with other ministrations which precede, anticipate, and 
 rival it. 
 
 I. In order to understand the ministration of the Spirit, 
 contrast the Spirit with that which is most often brought 
 into comparison with it, namely, the body. We cannot 
 
38 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 understand what is meant by body, without answering the 
 previous inquiry, What is spirit? nor can we reply to this 
 question without setthng in our minds something about 
 the body which it inhabits. If we see several things, or 
 parts of things, united to each other by some secret bond, 
 and subserving some general purpose, we are accustomed 
 to speak of the:ii as a body, and of that secret intention or 
 purpose as their uniting spirit. In the same way a crowd 
 of persons in the street, an assembly of individuals instinct 
 with a common idea or intention, are constantly spoken of 
 as bodies of men, and their common object is the spirit 
 which actuates them. This arises doubtless from our 
 consciousness that we are ourselves compounds of many 
 parts, organs, members, and passions, over the strange 
 assemblage of which a presiding spirit rules. We have a 
 body ; we are spirits. The body is dependent on the spirit, 
 not the spirit on the body ; the body may perish while the 
 spirit lives, the body may be still alive when the spirit is 
 virtually dead. 
 
 Now, associations of men, when governed by strong 
 principle, in view of great objects and ruled by those 
 whose spirit is capable of being infused into all around 
 them, are such bodies ; and even the bodies of these fellow- 
 ships have a great work to do, for without their aid, however 
 strong the spirit might be, it would evaporate and be lost to 
 the world. Paul very frequently speaks of the Christian 
 Church under this image. He says that it is the " body of 
 Christ," and that it is inhabited by the Spirit of Christ. 
 There is, says he, " one body and one Spirit, even as ye are 
 called in one hope of your calling." '' As the body is one 
 and hath many members, even so are ye one body in Christ, 
 and every one members one of another." The body of 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 39 
 
 Christ has a great work to do. It has to hold as it were in 
 sacred keeping the invisible Spirit of Jesus ; it has to exhibit 
 in its countenance His feehngs, and in its conduct His will. 
 It has to seek its food and support amid the circumstances 
 and according to the laws of human life. It has, like every 
 other "body,-' to take up and turn as it were into its own 
 wonderful substance the proper kind of aliment that is 
 adapted to nourish it ; it has to bring the knowledge, the 
 science, the business, the poHtics, the poetry, and the reality of 
 life under the same Divine influence, to submit it to the power 
 of the same Spirit ; and in fact all these functions of man 
 as well as all classes of men are baptized into one body. 
 Verily the body of so Divine a Spirit must be the most 
 glorious association and the most powerful existence in the 
 world. 
 
 Under the Old Testament dispensation a similar but 
 inferior body grew up from childhood to maturity in the 
 Holy Land ; and the revelation of God made through it 
 consisted to a great degree in the rules that were assigned 
 to this body. The religion of Moses and Samuel and 
 Ezra might with reverence and truthfulness be termed 
 a ministration of the body. It consisted of innumerable 
 regulations for the external management of the individual, 
 the community, the priest, the king, the temple, and the 
 State. Implicit obedience to these laws was grand and 
 glorious until the prejudices of Israel led them to suppose 
 that the body w^as of more consequence than the spirit, and 
 the form more precious than the power. It must have 
 been an awful and sublime spectacle to have witnessed the 
 first revelation of the Divine law and the accompanying 
 manifestation of the Divine presence. It was a grand 
 education in the best days of the Hebrew theocracy to trace 
 
40 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 the government of the heavenly King in His earthly king- 
 dom ; to witness the splendour of the ceremonial when the 
 Lord in very deed dwelt with man upon the earth ; when 
 the temple in which He shone forth upon the eyes and 
 hearts of men was fashioned after His own design; and 
 when the body was fed by His own loving hand, clothed 
 and adorned by His own absolute wisdom and unbounded 
 resources. But just as this ministration to a body was 
 glorious, the ministration of the Spirit exceeds it in glory; 
 and directly that the body considers itself to be the chief 
 end of existence, whether it be the body of a man, of an 
 institution, or of a Church, the spirit is impaired and hastens 
 to its end. The man who sinks into such a condition 
 becomes a morbid valetudinarian, a slave of his poor body ; 
 the instittiiioti thus perverted becomes obstructive to the 
 end that called it into existence ; and the Churchy Hebrew 
 or Christian, which in gorgeous ceremonial, antique rite, or 
 prescriptive usage substitutes a care for the body in place 
 of all the weightier matters of law and gospel, is unques- 
 tionably quenching the Spirit of God. When the Spirit 
 works upon us as individual men, it transfigures our whole 
 nature, and supplies us with abundant principles for every 
 action ; and while it convinces us of sin, of righteousness, 
 and of judgment to come, it puts the Divine law in our 
 inward parts, and will make us love holiness, do justly, and 
 walk humbly with our God. It will eat out the evil desires 
 of the flesh by filling us with holy passions. We shall 
 then never be satisfied with the most careftil attention to 
 the most venerable rule or use, but shall be moved to live 
 a Divine life. 
 
 Again, we have many institutions and societies, the 
 body of which has sprung into existence, we believe, under 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 4I 
 
 the direction and teaching of the Holy Spirit. In propor- 
 tion as they are Christian associations and imbued with the 
 Spirit of the Son of God, sanctified by His presence and 
 existing for His glory, they are parts of His scheme of 
 mercy for a ruined world. But if we in our vanity begin to 
 regard the mere association as the end rather than the 
 means, if we endow the body with the dignity and value 
 which belong only to the Spirit, we utterly fail. Let us 
 beware of making our own sanctuary or schools or organi- 
 zations, our Church principles, or even what we believe to 
 be our true doctrine, into our idols, the ends for which we 
 labour. All these things are of priceless value and rich in 
 glory; but the ministration of the Spirit excels them in 
 glory. That out of which all righteous action, all holy 
 enterprise, all manly zeal must constantly spring, excels 
 them as the spirit excels the flesh and blood over which it 
 rules. In the childhood of the Divine life it is very im- 
 portant to strengthen the spirit by the nutrition and educa- 
 tion of the body ; and there are many things that minister 
 to the process : but the ministration of the Spirit, direct 
 communion with the living God — with the Fountain of all 
 life, truth, wisdom, and purity, — excels the dispensations 
 of childhood, the prescriptions given to the infancy of our 
 race. By forgetfulness of this, many a soul, many an 
 institution, many a Church has sunk into lethargy, ceremo- 
 nialism, and formality ; has confounded little prescriptions 
 with great principles, and has quenched the fire or silenced 
 the voice of the Spirit of God. The ministration of the 
 body, that is, the splendour and ritual of worship, the forms 
 of holy sacraments and common prayer, the details of Church 
 organization, of apostolic and other successions, may be 
 glorious ; but the ministration of the Spirit is rather glorious. 
 
42 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 II. Contrast the Spirit with the letter. The simplest 
 illustration of this antithesis may be found in the nature of 
 language. Take any word you please. Write it down. 
 Look at it. Of what does it consist ? Of a few strokes 
 only, which in themselves are utterly unmeaning. Pro- 
 nounce the word. What is it ? A sound or collection of 
 sounds which have no meaning in themselves. All that 
 you know, after you have looked or listened long, is, that 
 you and others agree to represent certain ideas and feelings 
 by that word ; but there is no necessary connection between 
 the word and the meaning : for the same word may convey 
 ideas and suggest thoughts that are altogether dissimilar to 
 different people or nations. Illustrations of this are un- 
 necessary, even though some may be unwilling to grant it, 
 so soon as the word or letter has been used to represent for 
 them some of the most precious or august ideas. Thus, 
 though the letter and the word have great value, they are 
 transitory, accidental, liable to change ; but the thing itself 
 connoted, or the spirit conveyed by the letter, may have an 
 undying worth, and be a permanent, an eternal truth. 
 
 We speak of the letter and the spirit of a law or of a 
 testament. The one may be observed, while the other is 
 violated. It is quite possible to break the spirit and fulfil 
 the letter of the law of our country, or to respect the spirit 
 and reject the letter of it. It is very easy to fall in with the 
 injunctions of a dying man, rigidly to obey the letter of his 
 instructions, and to violate their spirit and set at nought 
 all his wishes. Often has the letter of the Divine law been 
 scrupulously kept, while its spirit has been irreverently 
 trifled with ; and very often the spirit of that law has been 
 established, while the letter has been discarded and set at 
 nought. Thus a Divine Spirit penetrated and illumined 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 43 
 
 the restrictions and rules of the Old Testament dispensa- 
 tion ; the spirit of that covenant of God with man has been 
 ministered afresh in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but the letter 
 in which that spirit has been conveyed by Moses and by 
 Christ has widely differed. At one time the nation and 
 government of Israel were the form in which God's love to 
 man and His providence over His whole Church were made 
 known to the world; but now the holy nation, the peculiar 
 people, are not enclosed by the mountains round about 
 Jerusalem, are not fed with honey from the rock, nor cheered 
 with the milk and wine of earthly prosperity ; but they are 
 found wherever hearts beat high with loyal childlike love to 
 the Father and Ruler of the universe, and wherever the Son 
 of God has been revealed to living faith. They are found 
 in the general assembly and church of the first-born. The 
 spirit has been preserved, the letter has been changed. 
 
 In like measure the principle and spirit of sacrifice were 
 seen in the thank-offering and the burnt-offering. In these 
 ceremonies were expressed the devotion, the reverence, the 
 dependence of God's children as well as their sense of His 
 justice. But the mode of expressing these things — the 
 letter — has been changed. Where is the temple ? Not one 
 stone is left upon another. Where are the priest and the 
 sacrifice? Now that He is come who is "the end of the 
 law " they have " ceased to be offered." On the other hand, 
 the spirit of sacrifice is not lost ; the gospel of Christ is the 
 ministration of that spirit to the world. It presents the 
 highest conceivable form of sacrifice, of entire surrender to 
 the Father's will, even though the great High-Priest who 
 offered up the sacrifice found therein humiliation, tempta- 
 tion, near contact with the evil one, and the most awful 
 form of death. Here is a complete propitiation, a perfect 
 
44 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 sacrifice, a noble testimony to the Divine holiness, a fearful 
 exposition of the evil of sin, the most sublime incentive to 
 self-sacrifice. The gospel is the ministration to us of the 
 intensest spirit of self-sacrifice ; it teaches us, as its spirit 
 enters into us, to present our own bodies as living sacrifices, 
 holy and acceptable unto the Lord. 
 
 Take another illustration : the idea of holiness, of con- 
 secration to Divine use, and separation from all contami- 
 nating influence, was traced out and developed into 
 marvellous detail among the favoured people. It was 
 possible for everything to be holy ; not only were the priest 
 and the people, the father and the child, the day and the 
 place consecrated, but from the high altar to the bells on 
 the horses, everything that men could use, every class of 
 society, every duty, every hour of every day, every article 
 of dress, had its own mode of sanctification. The most 
 minute rule was given for every act, from the ceremony that 
 consecrated a king or a priest to the humblest operation in 
 a household. These rules have for the most part been 
 superseded in the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The 
 letter has been laid aside by the infusion and sufficiency of 
 the far higher principle of love to God. Yet the domain 
 of holiness itself has not shrunk into narrower limits ; we 
 are not excused from the responsibility of being humble, 
 conscientious, or consecrated in every relation of life, but 
 the spirit of holiness now takes a far wider sweep, and gives 
 us principles of action rather than rules for every act ; we 
 serve God in ''the newness of the spirit, not in the oldness 
 of the letter." The gospel of Christ supplies us with power- 
 ful motives, puts hoHness before us on a higher elevation, 
 exhibits it to our view in an embodiment of its loftiest per- 
 fection, and assures us that the same Spirit that was given 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 45 
 
 to Him and that abode on Him is sent forth into our 
 hearts, crying " Abba, Father." Let us not^ forget that the 
 ministration of the letter was glorious. We shall not 
 understand the dispensation of the Spirit unless we ap- 
 preciate the real excellence of that which has been super- 
 seded and outshone. 
 
 The letter was glorious when it first of all clothed 
 Divine thoughts in undying words and communicated them 
 to men ; but when the Word was made flesh, and the 
 Divine ideal of humanity was no longer expressed in a 
 series of sentences but in a perfect human life, the ministra- 
 tion of the Spirit surpassed the ministration of the letter. 
 
 The elaborate ceremonial of prescribed rules was 
 glorious. '' Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole 
 earth was mount Zion.'' "This is My rest for ever," said 
 Jehovah, "here will I dwell, for I have desired it." The 
 sacrifices which set forth the majesty of law, and the 
 triumph of mercy ; the priesthood which took the burden 
 of the sinful heart into the awful presence and consumed 
 it there with holy fire ; the sabbath on which Israel entered 
 into Jehovah's rest; the jubilee when the whole land 
 reverted to the Divine Ruler, — were all glorious : yet it 
 must have been a still grander sight to have seen some old 
 Jewish priest — who valued his temple, his sabbath, the 
 sacrifices that he had to offer, and the sacerdotal course 
 to which he belonged, as deeply as his own soul— approach 
 the gorgeous pile that crowned the heights of Zion, and 
 declare, " There is One greater than the temple ; there 
 is a Sacrifice more precious than this costly hecatomb ; 
 there is a rest more holy than my sabbath ; there is One 
 who is the Word of God, the Word made flesh and dwelling 
 among us; there is a glory that excels all that once 
 
46 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 enshrined for me the Divinity ; the way unto my Father is 
 now made manifest." 
 
 The same principle must apply to the contrast between 
 the letter and the spirit of the gospel. Incalculably precious 
 as this new letter really is, it must not be forgotten that 
 it is letter, and that the spirit of the gospel far excels it in 
 glory. The letter of the gospel may ultimately prove to be 
 no less indefinite, no less imperfect, no less transitory than 
 the letter of the Old Testament ; but its spirit is eternal 
 and can never exhaust its energy or lose its power. " The 
 letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 
 
 Many are striving to bind down even the spirit of the 
 gospel by prescribing rules of holy living, by special modes 
 of expressing the Divine life, by logical inferences drawn 
 from the revealing word, by the experience which has 
 been sanctified in the Church, by words and phrases of our 
 holy gospel itself. It is none the less true here, also, that 
 though the ministration of the letter be glorious, the 
 ministration of the Spirit is rather glorious. 
 
 III. Another contrast, and one which is still more fre- 
 quently unfolded in the New Testament, is that between 
 the Spirit and the flesh. This contrast, upon which St. 
 Paul dilates at great length in the Epistle to the Romans 
 and elsewhere, involves a far profounder view of human 
 character and destiny. 
 
 It is clear that by '^ the flesh " the apostle does not 
 mean the mere physical system as opposed to the soul or 
 to the spirit, but he refers to the fleshly nature of man. By 
 the flesh he means the whole of our nature when left to 
 itself, or, as he elsewhere expresses it, ''the natural man." 
 He means man such as he is when untouched by higher 
 influences; man, when he is following the desires and is 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 4/ 
 
 walking in the imaginations of his own heart. He means 
 that which is born of the flesh and is flesh ; the carnal mind , 
 which is enmity against God and is not subject to the law 
 of God. The apostle and the other writers of the New 
 Testament mean by "the flesh" the mere functions, ten- 
 dencies, and impulses of the human being, in unrenewed 
 and unregenerate humanity, not such as God had made it, 
 but such as sin has left it. We know that the society of 
 heathendom in Paul's day was so bad, and the light of 
 truth and the working of the Holy Spirit were so new and 
 so much restrained, that it was necessary that he should dip 
 his pencil in the darkest shades to give a true outline of 
 the corrupt state of man. But even in the present day the 
 higher faculties of man evince some of his worst charac- 
 teristics ; and poetry, science, philosophy, business, pleasure, 
 when left to develop themselves without a Divine and 
 controlling principle, reveal the lamentable anarchy of our 
 nature and the miserable bondage of our will. It is with 
 this flesh, this unregenerated humanity, that St. Paul con- 
 trasts the ministration of the Spirit, the life of the spiritual 
 man. By the latter he everywhere means the result of the 
 new creation within us, the setting up within a human soul 
 of a new and Divine life by the Spirit of the living God. 
 
 By the " Spirit " as opposed to the " flesh " Paul 
 means the dwelling in us of the living Christ, the over- 
 powering and overawing of both the lower and the more 
 cultivated passions of the soul by Christlike and heavenly 
 longings ; he means that expunging and renunciation of 
 ungodliness and worldly lust, that strengthening of our 
 inner man, that being rooted "and grounded in love," by 
 which we both comprehend and *' know that which passeth 
 knowledge." The apostle by this phrase aims at nothing 
 
48 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 less than the completion of man after the completeness of 
 Christ, the quickening of our whole spiritual being, and an 
 alliance with God Himself. 
 
 The more we know of the gospel the more we see that 
 it is designed and adapted to awaken and minister to the 
 great change from flesh to spirit j that its prime end is to 
 produce, to exhibit, and to complete it; that the Divine 
 Creator-Spirit thus " pours His joys on human kind," thus 
 renews and saves the soul of man, creating that which will 
 find body and letter for itself. The gospel is " the minis- 
 tration of the Spirit." It conveys spiritual blessings, not 
 temporal advantages ; eternal life, not human distinctions ; 
 the favour of God, not the praise of man ; heaven, not 
 earth ; a new life, not a new dress ; a new heart, not a new 
 language ; nothing less than " a new man after the image of 
 Him that created him ; " " changed into the same image, 
 from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." 
 
 There are those who teach otherwise ; who describe 
 the gospel of Christ as only a new and enlarged edition of 
 the self-instruction which the human heart and intellect 
 have found for themselves in nature, in providence, in con- 
 science, a mere ministration of the flesh, of the unaided 
 nature of man, deprived of its heavenly origin, and robbed 
 of its Divine attestations. 
 
 Now, we must not forget that the ministrat'on of the 
 flesh, including under that term all that the intellect, con- 
 science, and will of man, unaided by the Divine Spirit, 
 have ever been able to achieve, has been undeniably 
 glorious. There is an appalling grandeur in some of the 
 efforts of man. The daring of Prometheus, the wisdom of 
 Confucius, the conscience of Socrates, the mental affluence 
 of Aristotle, the insight of Plato, the self-sacrifice of Buddha. 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 49 
 
 and all the long and dreary effort which the flesh has made 
 to crucify itself are full of wondrous sublimity. I do not 
 say that there is no leading of the Spirit of God through 
 all these forms of the ministration of the flesh, but they are 
 powerfully contrasted with the dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 We are awed and smitten dumb with amazement at the 
 power of falsehood and folly to inspire enthusiastic reve- 
 rence ; we are confounded by the gorgeous fanaticism of 
 the eastern world at work through untold ages, from the 
 builders of the pyramids to the last processions in honour 
 of Juggernaut ; and we are at times anxious and agitated 
 when we see the triumphs of a purely physical science that 
 repudiates every possible mode of stating faith in the Uving 
 God, — yet it cannot be denied that the whole ministration 
 of the flesh has some glory of its own. Still, it has no glory 
 by reason of the glory that excelleth. How much does 
 the ministration of the Spirit excel the glory of all that 
 attempts to rival it ? The spirit soars into a region where 
 the flesh in its most refined form cannot penetrate ; it deals 
 with problems that science is proving herself less competent 
 than ever to solve \ it induces in human nature a new series 
 of forces and energies which transcend reason, satisfy con- 
 science, sacrifice self, and glorify God. 
 
 IV. Consider, in the last place, the apostle's contrast 
 between the ministration of death and the ministration 
 of the Spirit. The ministration of the body was a ministra- 
 tion of that which is perishable and must die, and hence it 
 is a ministration of death. The ministration of the flesh is 
 a ministration of that which has no real vitality in it, which 
 does not draw its strength from unseen and eternal sources ; 
 and hence it too is a ministration of death. The ministra- 
 tion of the letter^ of the law graven on stones, had a glory, 
 
 E--6 
 
50 THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 but it was a ministration of threatening and warning and 
 destruction, rather than of life. It possessed, however, a 
 glory of its own, and when Moses descended with it from the 
 secret place of the Most High his face shone with supernal 
 radiance ; but it was a glory which was to pass away^ and 
 the passing away of which was concealed by the veil that 
 covered it. But the ministration of the Spirit is eternal in 
 its character, unfading in its beauty, outlasting temple and 
 tabernacle and veil. The law became a ministration of 
 death. The thunder of Sinai, the fire that consumed the 
 sons of Aaron, the plague and the earthquake, the fiery 
 serpent, the raging sword, the destroying angel, and Death, 
 the standing enemy of our race, became the awful ministers 
 of the dispensation of God. These commandments were 
 grievous, and though ordained ultimately for life were found 
 to be unto death. Sin, taking occasion by the command- 
 ment, deceived and slew its victim. It is in contrast to 
 this that the apostle describes the ministration of the life- 
 giving Spirit ; that Divine message from God to the human 
 race by which the spirit of man, instead of being submitted 
 to restrictions which cross its desires and aspirations, is 
 expanded and developed into agreement with the mind of 
 the Lawgiver, — instead of being wrought upon by a machinery 
 designed to restrain its corrupt propensities, is brought 
 under the influence of a power which shall inspire Divine 
 impulses and desires. 
 
 The whole of the ministration of death had a glory of its 
 own. The great Lord of life utilized the strange and 
 mysterious law of death_, and made it teach mankind lessons 
 of life and happiness. The flaming sword of cherubim, the 
 sepulchral waves of the deluge, the procession into the 
 deep waters of death of kings, sages, and saints, of hoary 
 
THE MINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 5 I 
 
 patriarchs and prattling babes, the heroes of many times 
 and peoples who, spite of their love of life, loved virtue and 
 their country and their conscience more, were in and 
 through death a sublime ministration of the law of the Most 
 High. The bleeding victims on a thousand altars, and pre- 
 eminently those which special revelation made prophetic of 
 the great Sacrifice of Calvary, were a ministration of death 
 that was glorious in holiness and fearful in praises. " When 
 the burnt-offering began the song of the Lord began." The 
 incense of gratitude sweetened the hecatomb. The glory 
 was great, though it was terrible. The ministration of 
 righteousness, the dispensation of the higher life, imparted 
 through living faith in the dying and risen Lord, exceeds it 
 in glory. As the sunrise is more glorious than the sublimity 
 of the midnight storm, as the dayspring from on high is 
 more glorious than the dazzle of the lightning or the sweep 
 of the devouring hurricane, as the smile of spring and the 
 fertility of summer are more glorious than the " autumn 
 fire," than the magnificence of the iceberg or the gorgeous 
 mirage of the desert, so does the ministration of righteous- 
 ness exceed in glory all the ministration of death. We 
 have, then, in these contrasts of St. Paul deep reasons for 
 adoring gratitude, for profound satisfaction, for ardent holy 
 longings. We may be stimulated by them to open our 
 whole nature to the Spirit and to His mighty working. We 
 may rest calm in the triumph which we know the Spirit will 
 gain over the mere body, over the mere letter of our insti- 
 tutions or our dogmas; we may cherish an unwavering 
 confidence in the ultimate victory of the Spirit over the 
 flesh and over the doom of the flesh. " To be carnally 
 minded is death, to be spiritually minded is life and peace." 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 "Ye ought ... to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how 
 He Himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." — Acts 
 XX. 35- 
 
 When St. Paul visited Miletus, and delivered his parting 
 charge to the elders of the Ephesian Church, several of his 
 own most potent letters had been already penned. These 
 were saturated with thoughts the origination of which we 
 cannot fairly attribute to him, and for which we can find no 
 adequate explanation either in Hebrew literature, sacred or 
 apocryphal, in Greek philosophy or Alexandrine theories. 
 We read between the lines, ideas, principles and facts 
 already taken for granted by St. Paul and his readers. He 
 and those to whom he wrote had clearly moved into a new 
 world. The veil had been lifted. The unseen had become 
 visible. The way to the blessed life had been manifested. 
 Both worlds were dominated for them by one Supreme 
 Personage, who, though nothing less than God over all, 
 " blessed for ever," had yet so taken up into' Himself our 
 humanity, had so glorified the dying and risen Christ, that 
 every problem of life had been restated, every aspect of the 
 world had been revolutionized, every ethical question that 
 had distracted the schools of Athens, Ephesus, and Rome 
 had received a new solution, 
 
56 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 If the new faith cannot be fathered on Hebrew prophet 
 or Greek sage, and was not then and there being wrought 
 out and revealed in Paul's own consciousness — we must 
 look deeper for an explanation of the great apostle's views 
 of sin and death, of God and redemption, of salvation and 
 life eternal, and of the God-Man Himself. Where can we 
 find any explanation more rational than that Paul had been 
 himself revolutionized by the "words of the Lord Jesus"? 
 This much is historically certain, that when the apostle 
 was making this memorable voyage, a society of men was 
 rapidly coming into existence which embraced both the 
 living and the dead, which enshrined the principles and 
 caught the spirit of the Christ. This fellowship was built 
 on the assurances and promises which were uttered in 
 human words by Jesus Christ during the brief period of His 
 sojourn on earth. Not more than a quarter of a century 
 had elapsed since men still living believed that they saw 
 Him, in the humanity that they loved, " pass through these 
 heavens that He might fill all things." He was nothing less 
 to them than the " wisdom of God " and " the power of God." 
 He met the needs and the passionate yearning of Jew and 
 Greek, of Oriental and Roman, of Barbarian and Scythian, 
 of bond and free : Christ was said to be "all and in all." 
 
 Strange to say, from our modern standpoint — so far as 
 we know — not one of the four Gospels had then been 
 written, still less circulated. Nevertheless, the teaching of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ had gone forth from the hills of 
 Palestine into all lands. His words had moved " like the 
 appearance of lamps " in Ezekiel's vision. They " went up 
 and down among the living creatures, and the fire was 
 bright, and the living creatures ran and returned as the 
 appearance of a flash of lightning ; " and " the noise of their 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 57 
 
 wings " was as " the voice of the Ahiiighty." St. Paul had 
 clearly grasped and thrown into his own phraseology the 
 thoughts and words that the beloved disciple subsequently 
 recorded in the fourth Gospel. Moreover, we gather from 
 his indubitably authentic letters, that those words of the 
 Lord Jesus which are preserved by the third Evangelist — in 
 (what M. Renan calls) the most beautiful book in the 
 world — were ever in the heart and on the tongue of the 
 apostle of the Gentiles ; and that neither Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke, nor John gathered up a tithe of these Divine words, 
 which spread like prairie-fire round the whole seaboard of 
 the Mediterranean. 
 
 The patristic contribution of these memorable sayings to 
 general tradition is fragmentary but noteworthy, and within 
 the last decade a previously unknown "word of the Lord 
 Jesus '' ^ has been let fall upon us as a drop of liquid light, of 
 strange potency, and not without its bearing on the '' Word " 
 which is embedded in a form of crystalline beauty amid the 
 admonitions of this farewell speech of the Apostle Paul. 
 Many another word may there and then have been circu- 
 lating like the visionary "wheels" of Ezekiel. Sometimes 
 they burned like fire, and anon as they passed from lip to 
 lip, from language to language, from heart to heart, they 
 distilled Divine refreshment or poured themselves out in 
 showers of blessing. We are conscious of no exaggeration 
 when we say that we could more willingly part with many 
 an ancient classic, with many an ode of Pindar or oration of 
 Demosthenes, many a treatise of Aristotle or Cicero, whole 
 sutras of Buddha and much Vedic literature, than with this 
 Divine utterance which goes down to the very depths of 
 human life, and stretches out to embrace the essential 
 * See the Didache, i. 6, and compare with Ecclesiasticus xii. i-6. 
 
58 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 blessedness of God Himself. Small and bright as a dew- 
 drop, yet, as we watch, it swells into a veritable ocean of 
 love, on whose placid surface are reflected all the glories of 
 heaven and earth. 
 
 "It is more blessed to give than to receive!" Our 
 Divine Lord said '■^ more blessed." Then it is blessed to 
 receive. Until we know the blessedness of "receiving," we 
 cannot appreciate the higher blessedness of "giving." 
 There is no antithesis here between the blessedness of 
 giving and the //^/^-blessedness of receiving. The com- 
 parison which our Lord made was between the greater and 
 the less, between the higher and lower forms of blessedness. 
 Oriental mysticism, Buddhist legends, have urged the 
 hyperbole of self-sacrifice for its own sake, have stumbled 
 into this veritable pit of pessimism. The Lord Christ 
 illumined the profoundest problems of ethic and the true 
 secret of the religious life, when He said : " It is more 
 blessed to give than to receive ; " " freely ye have received, 
 freely give." 
 
 Let us ponder for a few moments the blessedness of 
 receiving some of the richest and noblest things of human 
 and Divine love. God Himself is the great Giver. His 
 gifts are messages direct from His heart, and the Father's 
 signature upon them brings Him very near to the minds 
 that interpret this mystic handwriting. By receiving the 
 bestowments of love, we enter into the mind of the Giver. 
 If 7ve cannot receive. He cannot give all that He is willing 
 and able to impart. If the object of love fails to appreciate 
 and appropriate the royal bounty, God Himself is wounded 
 and pierced by the ingratitude. Hearken to the wail of the 
 heart-broken prophet Hosea, a man who was inspired to 
 weave out of his own infelicity and domestic tragedy a 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 59 
 
 representation of the injury done to the Lord God by His 
 faithless bride : " She did not know that I gave her corn, 
 and wine and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold." " I 
 have written . . . the great things of My law, but they 
 were counted as a strange thing." And again : " I taught 
 Ephraim to walk, taking them by their arms, but they knew 
 not that I healed them." Thus Isaiah also pleaded in the 
 name of Jehovah with the men of Judah : " What could 
 have been done more to My vineyard that I have not done 
 in it?" And our Lord remonstrates with His hearers : 
 " Ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life." 
 Because we are too ready at times to get beyond our 
 position of humble recipiency, we often fail of the grace of 
 God. Some enumeration of these gifts may help to chastise 
 our ingratitude, and disturb the pride that is anxious to 
 earn and to merit grace, before it is roused to perceive our 
 own utter helplessness, our mendicancy, our entire depen- 
 dence upon the gifts, the tokens, and the amnesties of 
 Infinite Love. 
 
 I. It is blessed simply to receive Nature's gifts even 
 before we can apprehend their full complexity, their lavish 
 abundance, their anticipation of our desires, their hidden 
 secrets, and their boundless possibilities. All the progress 
 of man is measured by the degree to which he has 
 appreciated and received, discovered and utilized, the free 
 gifts of God in nature. When man first understood what 
 Nature had done for him in offering him the flower and 
 fruit and seed of corn, then began the harvest of the 
 world. When human intelligence apprehended what was 
 involved in the chalk-beds and coalfields and mineral 
 wealth at his feet ; when he grasped the meaning of fire 
 and lightning, and the contents of water and air; when he 
 
6o THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 thus received these treasured forces and boundless provisions 
 of Nature ; when he began to " receive " and utilize the 
 energies which had been moulding the world for untold 
 centuries, — then science took its birth. If we stubbornly 
 refuse to receive the light of heaven, we stumble blindfold 
 into the pitfalls at our side. Should we refuse to receive 
 our daily bread, or put it from us with suicidal hand, we 
 perish. Furthermore, Nature lavishes upon us together 
 with these elementary gifts, appeals to our higher and more 
 subtle desires, awakens them by her magic touch, and gives 
 us the sense of beauty, truth, and goodness. The surpass 
 ing loveliness of much of Nature's work must be received by 
 those who have the eyes and ears of the spirit opened to 
 perceive it. All that Art has ever done to soften and 
 beautify the career of man upon earth, has been to record 
 the high joy, or subtle pain akin to bliss, which the percep- 
 tion and reception of the glory of Nature has given to a 
 comparatively few elect souls. The great artists and poets, 
 musicians and sculptors, have so embodied their strong 
 emotions in abiding form and material, that others may 
 learn from them the blessed secret of receiving the mystery 
 of beauty, and accepting some of the truth and goodness of 
 its eternal Source. 
 
 2. All human love is a ministration of Divine love. 
 Human tenderness is but a channel cut by Holy Providence 
 through which the rivers of God's pleasure flow. God 
 lavishes His own love upon us through the hearts and by 
 the hands of those who love. Now, it is blessed to receive 
 huma7i love, and the gifts of love. Self-sacrifice would be 
 a form of selfishness, if it monopolized all the blessedness of 
 the process. See the child with its hands full of birthday- 
 gifts, intense joy lighting its eye, almost bursting the tiny 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 6l 
 
 heart. If the little one had no blessedness in receiving 
 father's, mother's, and sister's tokens of love, and found no 
 joy in its new riches, if such were thrown idly away and 
 conveyed no thrill of bliss, the grace of giving would be 
 doubtful. Sometimes pride of spirit refuses to be beholden 
 to another, resents the sense of obligation, groans over the 
 necessity of accepting beneficence, cannot confer the higher 
 joy on those who have the power and will to give. Perhaps 
 the explanation is, that they desire to reverse the relations : 
 they envy the power of giving the smaller blessedness to 
 another. However this may be explained, it is an exception 
 which illustrates the enormous spread of the rule, that it is 
 " blessed to receive ; " only on this principle can the 
 inequalities of human power and capacity be compensated, 
 can the strong help the weak, can the physician heal the 
 sick, can the wise instruct the foolish, can the ignorant 
 walk in the light of knowledge, can genius lighten care, and 
 the great thoughts of a few become the bread of life to the 
 many. Because it is ''blessed to receive," we can drink 
 into the spirit of the mighty dead, we can utilize their 
 pregnant guesses and apply to our own case their hoarded 
 wisdom. All beneficence would be dried at its source, all 
 philanthropy and evangelism at home and abroad would 
 sicken and die, if there were no blessedness in receiving 
 the streams of living water which are always pouring forth 
 from human hearts. 
 
 Is this too much of a truism to illustrate further? 
 Perhaps the effort to do so at all would be superfluous if 
 there were not lamentable forgetfulness of this principle on 
 the part of some recipients of the noblest gifts of all. Are 
 there not specimens all around us of ingratitude for blessed- 
 ness already enjoyed and utilized ? Are not parents 
 
62 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 sometimes broken-hearted because they never know the 
 blessedness of receiving the confidence of their children ? 
 Are children always enriched as they might be with the 
 blessedness of receiving the best gifts their parents could 
 (if their minds were spiritual and unworldly) freely bestow ? 
 Do husbands and wives always find opportunity of rejoicing 
 in one another's gifts? Are not kindness and sympathy 
 often withheld where they might flood the parched heart 
 with lovingkindness ? Would not human life be indefinitely 
 brighter, if many who were gorged with advantages lavished 
 upon them by others^ no longer ungratefully withheld from 
 those to whom they owe so much the blessedness of receiving 
 a faint recognition of the debt ? Let us think of our great 
 discoverers who have conferred joy on millions, yet have died 
 in poverty and neglect ; of the poets who have added 
 sunshine to daylight, yet who have never found one beam 
 of love to cheer their own dark lot ; of the great patriots 
 and statesmen who, age after age, are made the butt of 
 malice, and are hated for their goodness; of the martyrs for 
 liberty, truth, and righteousness, who have never known the 
 blessedness of sympathy, and whose dying agonies have 
 been mocked by prophecies of eternal hatred, and threats 
 of everlasting fire. Such tragic indices of the stolidity and 
 corruption of the human heart prove how imperfectly we 
 recognize the blessedness of receiving human love. 
 
 3. Once more, the most impressive illustration of the 
 principle is the veritable blessedness of receiving the grace 
 of God. The secret of receiving from the living God what 
 is neither earned nor merited, and, moreover, that to which 
 we cannot lay the smallest claim ; nay, further, that which 
 we have madly, meanly, gracelessly forfeited, is a secret 
 which some are slow to learn. Human pride comes in and 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 63 
 
 resents unmerited compassion, and disputes the necessity 
 for mercy. Philosophy helps it to minimize the peril of 
 sin, and a shallow science throws all the blame of sin on 
 nature or matter or on God Himself. The blessedness 
 of receiving Christ's supreme gift is disputed, because 
 it involves too severe a self-scrutiny. The flesh which 
 crucified Him once, resists the crucifying process when 
 faith begins to drive the nails into its own quivering hands. 
 The world must be crucified by the cross of Christ, but the 
 world in our hearts dies hard. It is blessed to accept 
 Christ as our wisdom, when we have once done it, but it is 
 a bitter trial to confess that our own wisdom is folly. It is 
 blessed to receive the Lord Christ as our righteousness, but 
 the self-battle is often stern and long before we relinquish 
 our own righteousness. It is life from the dead to find that 
 Christ has redeemed us through the agony and death 
 wherewith He accepted the full penalty and curse of human 
 sin ; but most of us have a fierce struggle before we admit 
 our helplessness, or consent to the fact that " without Him 
 we can do nothing." 
 
 It is blessed to receive what Jesus Christ gives to man, 
 even though it smite down our pride and explode our self- 
 sufficiency. We are blessed in this poverty of spirit, 
 blessed even in our mourning, blessed in our new and 
 heavenly hunger, blessed in the purging of the eye of the 
 heart, blessed even when persecuted and reviled for such a 
 faith, blessed though we are infinitely beholden to Him, 
 blessed though it will take eternity to express our obligation 
 or to pay "our debt of endless gratitude, still paying still 
 to owe." It is blessed to receive the greatest gift, to 
 receive into our very nature a new and endless life, to be 
 born from above, to find thrilling within us the pulses of the 
 
64 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 Eternal Love, and to know that we can take no honour, no 
 credit whatever to ourselves for this Divine indwelling. It 
 is blessed to sit in the sunshine of the Divine Presence, to 
 behold the glory of the Son of Man, to be satisfied with the 
 grace of the Lord Jesus, to be filled with all the fulness of 
 God, and to be for ever with the Lord. 
 
 These golden words of Christ admit and enforce all 
 this, but they authoritatively proclaim a deeper truth, and 
 promise a blessedness that surpasses that of receiving from 
 nature and human love their best gifts, or even that of 
 receiving Divine grace. // is MORE BLESSED TO 
 GIVE than to receive. 
 
 Can any reason be assigned for such a sweeping and 
 comprehensive inversion of all ordinary maxims ? Why 
 should the bestowment of joy be a greater blessedness to 
 the giver than to the receiver ? Some tell us of the essential 
 nobility of the disinterested affections. Others assure us 
 that we are so constituted that we cannot have any real joy 
 ourselves without imparting joy to others. Some dilate on 
 the grandeur of human nature which invests sacrifice with 
 this royal robe. Others undervalue this beatitude by regard- 
 ing it as nothing more than a glorification of the golden rule. 
 Is it enough to say that this is an ultimate truth deeper than 
 thought itself? Will a wide induction of the so-called joys 
 of earth and of unspiritual men confirm the statement ? 
 Should we not tremble to put it to such a test here in this 
 Christian England of ours? Let the race-course and the 
 stock exchange, the insurance office and the Parliament of 
 England, the law-courts and the land-courts answer ! Let 
 diplomacy with its Do tit des, let trade and speculation, let 
 professional etiquette and social distinctious and cliques be 
 submitted to the fire of this principle. The honest advocate 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 6$ 
 
 of such a law of life would be branded with scorn, and 
 hustled off any stage of human activity. We need not 
 travel to the Oriental seraglio, to the gangs of slave-traders, 
 or to the battle-fields of commerce or of national rivalries, 
 to the hells or slums of heathen cities, to see that ethical 
 philosophers who try to find this great law of blessedness 
 in a study of Human Nature as it is, have miserably failed. 
 Our own daily habit and inward experience convince us 
 that we are handling, in this profound and golden utterance, 
 a state of things w^hich oug/i^ to exist, but does not ; which 
 has not yet been adequately put to the proof, even within 
 the society of the redeemed in the Church of the living 
 God. 
 
 Have we personally acted upon this teaching even at 
 the table of the Lord ? Is it the regal principle at work in 
 what calls itself the very body of Christ ? Individuals may 
 occur to us whose whole being is one unceasing process of 
 giving, on whose brow there sits the dove of peace, and in 
 whose eyes, wliich are full of tears of boundless sympathy, 
 there gleams the light of heaven's own joy. But is their 
 experience, their blending of apparent sorrow with sacred 
 blessedness, a final proof ? How can we justify this 
 divine and prophetic utterance of the Lord Jesus ? Is it a 
 true law ? Can w^e take the Son of Man at His word ? The 
 very form of the phrase seems to reveal the essential con- 
 trariety between Christianity and either Oriental self-sacrifice 
 or Buddhist Nirvana^ v/hich is now discussed by many who 
 seem to do so in a spirit hostile to the religion of Christ. 
 Buddha recommended the extinction of desire, the cessation 
 of all yearning, utter quietism and invincible repose. 
 Christ promised satisfaction to the highest desires, and He 
 declared; moreover, which were the highest and the best. 
 
 F— 6 
 
66 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 He made such satisfaction a motive, He placed such joys 
 as these before Himself, and He holds out to every faithful 
 and loyal servant the privilege of entering into His own joy. 
 
 The judgment of the Lord Jesus was authoritative for 
 St. Paul on this ethical and religious problem. The saying 
 of the text must be true, and will be found to be true 
 because He who is the truth uttered it. He must know. He 
 came forth to us from among the sources and causes of all 
 things. By Him and through His agency God made the 
 worlds. He came out from God, and came into the world. 
 He is more than a revelation, an unveiling of the truth. 
 He is the truth, the reality and the complete expression, 
 too, of human life and of Divine fulness. What He says 
 about " blessedness" is of more weight than that which any 
 other of the sons of men have said. He gave to the 
 principle here involved the most complete expression. He 
 tested it, as no other could possibly do, on the one hand, by 
 a receptivity open to all the amplitude of the Holy Father's 
 love lavished upon Him from eternity ; and, on the other, 
 by a sacrifice and gift of Himself, which was practically and 
 to our most vivid imagination infinite and absolute. 
 
 He compared the eternal receiving and the infinite 
 giving of His own experience with each other ; and in the 
 hour of His sorest travail, of His deepest humiliation, He 
 seemed to say, " It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 This was His conviction, and He clearly made it the rule of 
 His human life. The law of this blessedness was the law of 
 His self-manifestation. In the wilderness He was tempted 
 to use His supreme powers for the satisfaction of His 
 personal requirements ; He was tempted to receive miracu- 
 lous sustenance and protection from disaster, so as the more 
 easily to win acceptance from the sign-loving, wonder-seek- 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 6/ 
 
 ing nation. He was tempted to receive the homage of the 
 world by ceasing to wage warfare with the evil enshrined in 
 it. He " suffered, being tempted ; " but the higher blessed- 
 ness of supreme self-sacrifice won the day : He gave Him- 
 self to life-long need ; He consecrated himself to earnest, 
 patient, and persuasive work. He gave Himself to the 
 stniggle with the world, the flesh, and the devil; to be 
 crowned with thorns ; to endure sweat of blood ; to meet all 
 the power of darkness ; and He found all this more blessed. 
 
 When we are on the search for any ultimate principle, or 
 for a sufficient explanation of some otherwise insoluble 
 mystery, w^e always find ourselves driven to the same place 
 of thought. E.g.^ when we want to answer the question, 
 "What is truth?" we never get rest till we find it in the 
 presence of God, and learn that truth, per se, is thai which 
 God thinks abojit things. If we yearn after a solution of the 
 problem of the absolute Beauty, we can find it, not in the 
 pleasure it gives, nor in the associations it summons, nor in 
 the symmetry, nor in the resolved discords of the harmonies 
 of nature, but in the robing, the vesture — indicating the near 
 presence — of the Almighty. All beauty is but the cloud of 
 incense round the shrine of His glory. Beauty is God's 
 behaviour, just as Truth is His thought. 
 
 Goodness and Rightness are never explained by 
 such synonyms as " the beautiful," or the " true ; " nor ex- 
 pounded by the unsatisfying dream that the "good " is the 
 pleasurable ; or that the " right " is simply the useful, 
 profitable, or advantageous course of conduct. The con- 
 science, the intuition of mankind, has never rested in that 
 solution, nor does the mind ever feel at peace until it sees 
 that the Good, the Just, the Rightful are simply names 
 for the Supreme Being — for that which He is by His 
 
6S THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 eternal nature. This shows us why all these terms melt 
 into one when we press their meanings out into the Infinite. 
 So if we wish to solve the deep meaning of our text, and 
 ask why is it " MOfr blessed to give than to receive " ? we 
 can only find the answer in the fact that God — the Eternal 
 One and Three— is the great Giver, He finds His giving 
 more blessed than His receiving ; Plis Supreme Being is 
 the witness to this, and so are His noblest acts. 
 
 A few words on each of these points. 
 
 The Eternal relation of the Father and the Son is the 
 eternal interchange of giving and receiving love. There is 
 a mutual aifection in the depths of Deity. The philosophic 
 and barren conception of a supreme, impassive, unalterable, 
 impersonal monad strives hard to hold its ground, but 
 Christianity has undermined it, and it will utterly vanish 
 before the conception of God as " Zove." Before all worlds, 
 before the angels were, or any force, or place. He was from 
 eternity "Love." There was the perfect subject and the 
 perfect object, and the perfect union of infinite Love : Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit. In the text before us we see the 
 very order of the Trinity. The Father's giving, greater than 
 the Son's receiving. So Jesus says, " I and the Father are 
 one ; " but " the Father is greater than I." 
 
 The Godhead in the effluence of His glory is greater 
 than is the reflection of that glory from the entire universe. 
 From this principle we see some hint for the motive of the 
 creation. The Lord called forth an object for the super- 
 fluity of His infinite Love. It was more blessed for Him 
 to give than to receive, so the heavens appeared and all 
 the host of them, and all the pomp of worlds. In this 
 sense, to the glory of His great name, " they are and were 
 created." From everything He receive? soriie tribute, some 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 6g 
 
 reflection of His essential being, some echo of His word, 
 some recognition of dependence upon His supreme will ; 
 but only from conscious mind can adequate response be 
 made to love. From the love of God's creatures He receives 
 an augmentation of blessedness, and so Lore is the law for 
 them, which if they break they introduce harsh discord into 
 the music of the universe. Great is the joy of the Lord in 
 the praises of His children, but greater still in bestowing 
 upon them ever-abounding reasons for their praise. 
 
 The noblest and the most wonderful gift of the Lord 
 God is the Licarnation of the Son of God, and that great 
 act of the Father is the blessedest of all. He gave His 
 only-begotten, His well-beloved. The fountains of the 
 great deep of the Divine nature were broken up, but His 
 joy was full. It was the joy of the Lord God Almighty. 
 
 But we must adapt this great principle of blessedness to 
 the smaller range of our own experience, after seeing it 
 tested in this flaming crucible of the Infinite Love. 
 
 Vd ought to remember and act upon the uwrds of the Lord 
 Jesus, because they express the whole manner of the perfect 
 man, and the mind of the Lamb of God, and the very essence 
 of the Eternal Godhead. St. Paul was apt at linking great 
 and world-wide universal principles with our daily duties. 
 E.g., St. Paul will not prevaricate about his visits to 
 Corinth. Certainly not. But why not? Because lies 
 in the long run are disadvantageous or unpleasing ? Nay ; 
 but because "all the promises of God are yea and Amen" 
 in Christ Jesus. Therefore, Paul's "yea" must not be 
 "nay." And so out of a law of life, as revelatory of the 
 nature of God and the heart of Jesus as this is, St. Paul 
 calls upon the Miletan elders to look tenderly after the 
 weak and the erring. " Ye ought to remefuber" because it is 
 
70 THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 
 
 a truth you are, in the corruption and weakness of nature, 
 in continual danger of forgetting, that it is more blessed 
 to give than to receive. 
 
 I grant you all the blessedness of receiving the gifts 
 of nature and of the world, and of the love of man : you 
 must aim at the higher and greater blessedness of diffusing 
 and conferring, of giving freely to others what you know 
 to be worthy. The first believers sold their possessions, 
 stripped themselves utterly that they might yield themselves 
 to this sublime impulse, and know something of the blessed- 
 ness of Christ, some of the blessedness of God. Many a 
 saint and martyr has done the like, from St. Anthony to 
 Basil and Gregory, Francis and Columba, and tens of 
 thousands of those who have renounced all for Christ and 
 His poor ; all for Christ and those for whom Christ died. 
 Ye ought to remember these words of the Lord Jesus when 
 you are tempted to say : " Soul, thou hast much goods laid 
 up for many years ; " you ought to remember the words 
 of Christ, when — to put it in a practical form — there is a 
 question between the blessedness of buying a ring, or a 
 picture, or a house, or a book, or a coat for yourself; and 
 the blessedness of giving to the sick, the helpless, the 
 naked, and the fatherless. 
 
 Most earnestly St. Paul counsels you to receive the grace 
 of God, to receive the Christ, to receive the gift of 
 the Incarnate Son of God, by a strong grasping of faith, 
 in the implicit confidence of a perfect trust. This will 
 make you blessed. Here is the blessedness of holy rest. 
 With eyes suffused, with hearts aglow, you take the symbols 
 of the body broken for you, of the blood shed for you. 
 O, Christian believer, great is thy faith, great is thy 
 blessedness ! But art thou going to sit and sing thyself 
 
THE TENTH BEATITUDE. 71 
 
 away to everlasting bliss? Nay, ''Remember the words of 
 the Lord Jesus." Ye ought to do so. There is a greater 
 blessedness than this : you are to givp:. Yes, to give your- 
 self back to God in holy consecration. You are not your 
 own, but you are His who has given Himself for you and 
 to you. Human love is colourless unless it be mutual and 
 ever-growing. Is love between the soul and Christ to be 
 satisfied with lower levels and measures than the love of 
 earth ? 
 
 Lastly, we shall find the truth of our Lord's undying 
 words when we enter into His joy. Heaven will surely not 
 be the joy of an infinite and continuous recipiency, but the 
 full comprehension of and the uttermost response to the 
 Saviour's love. With all the saints may we comprehend 
 the height, depth, length, and breadth of it ! May we 
 know that which passes knowledge, and lose ourselves in 
 a supreme gift to Him ! Not until we chant the endless 
 hallelujah, not until we yield ourselves absolutely to our 
 Lord God for eternity, having no will but His, shall we fully 
 know how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
Preached in Ihe Chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford, [c^nitary iSlh, 
 1891, ?'// aid of /he loork of the Londoti Missio7iary Society. 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 "I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise 
 and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the 
 gospel to you also that are in Rome." — Rom. i. 14 (R.V.). 
 
 St. Paul himself preserved for the Church the priceless 
 words of the Lord Jesus, that " it is more blessed to give 
 than to receive." He implied in these very words, that it is 
 blessed to receive the gifts of love, to receive the smile of 
 reconciliation after estrangement, to receive the forgiveness 
 of sins, the power and opportunity for service. What is 
 there that we have not received ? Christian experience 
 undoubtedly turns upon the readiness of a man to receive 
 unmerited and unearned mercy. It is "blessed" when 
 pride humbles itself to receive an unexpected boon. We 
 are pensioners on the bounty of the great Giver, and we 
 are the daily recipients of gifts from a past which we cannot 
 requite, gifts from our teachers and leaders, gifts from 
 society which we have done so little to create, and from the 
 noble hearts and bleeding hands of those who have suffered 
 and died for us. It is blessed to receive all these things, 
 but it is, said the Holy One, the Incarnate Word, 7nore 
 blessed to give, — and He knew. Giving is more like God 
 Himself, and is the very note or mark of His essential 
 
16 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 Being. He is the fountain of life. He supplies all our 
 need. He satisfies the desire of every living thing. The 
 joy and blessedness of Almighty God is His infinite 
 capacity to give us all that we enjoy, all that we need. 
 Though He knows perfectly the blessedness of receiving 
 the love, the appreciation of His children, the reciprocation 
 of the Eternal Love, the homage of the spirits to whom He 
 has given their life; yet He who came from His bosom, tells 
 us that there are degrees even in the blessedness of God, 
 and that, as between giving and receiving, there is no 
 uncertainty : " It is viore blessed to give than to receive." 
 
 This was also the experience of the Incarnate Love 
 itself. He knew the blessedness of receiving the cup of 
 cold water from one who was made happy by bestowing it. 
 The breaking of the alabaster box of costly nard gave Him 
 joy ; but^\\, was more blessed in His esteem to give Himself, 
 to surrender His all of earthly solace, to lay down His life 
 as a ransom for many. Brethren of this Lord Jesus, believe 
 Him and all His prophets and apostles when they teach 
 you, by word and by example, that the fragrant essence of 
 the new and Divine life is to give its best, to give its all, 
 to give and relinquish itself to others. 
 
 Now, when St. Paul said, "I am a debtor to Greek 
 and Barbarian, to wise and foolish," had he forgotten these 
 words of the Lord Jesus ? Did he find it necessary to fall 
 back upon the sense oi duty^ in order to sustain the flagging 
 energies of his love ? No ! The love which gives, is in its 
 nature more blessed than the duty which prompts and 
 urges us to some unwelcome task. 
 
 We do not deny that some cases may arise when even 
 love needs the spur of duty, when *' the stern daughter of 
 the Voice of God " urges even the heart of love to do its 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. >jy 
 
 best. Still, I cannot but think that when St. Paul used 
 these memorable words, or when he said, *' Woe is unto me 
 if I preach not the gospel," the sense of debt to different 
 classes of men was but the travail pang of an inward and 
 overpowering love to his brother-man, which thus expressed 
 itself. 
 
 The possession of a life-giving secret may, to a selfish 
 and unrenewed nature, occasionally suggest nothing but per- 
 sonal advantage ; and, at times, a limitless love may yearn and 
 travail in the effort to express itself. The Samaritan lepers 
 soon became ashamed of their selfishness, and they said 
 one to another, " We do not well. This day is a day of good 
 tidings, and we hold our peace : if we tarry till the morning 
 light, punishment will overtake us. Now therefore come, 
 let us go and tell the king's household." ^ So St. Paul felt 
 that the whole world demanded from him the healing truth 
 to which he had given the unqualified assent of his entire 
 nature. He seemed to see the bewildered world, the 
 Caesars, the philosophers, the slaves, the cultivated few, 
 and the toiling millions, rise from their places and take him 
 by the throat, and cry, " Pay us that which thou owest." 
 His sense of the brotherhood of man was becoming so 
 strong, so intense in him, that he found that he had no 
 right to retain these tidings of great joy to all people 
 locked up in his own breast. The passion of his love to 
 Christ and to those for whom Christ died constrained him ; 
 and so, in the sublime uprising of a love that was stronger 
 than death, he said, *' I am a debtor," — " I am a debtor : 
 I must pay my debt to old and young, to Greek and Jew, 
 to Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free." Can we who glory 
 in the name^ in the teaching and life of St. Paul, catch a 
 ' 2 Kings vii. 9. 
 
78 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 little of his spirit ? Can we take the world of men upon 
 our heart, and, with the certitude born of living communion 
 with the great Master and Lord of St. Paul, can we sting 
 with the scourge of duty our transcendental sentiment into 
 some definite lines of action ? can we rise up out of our 
 comforts and our culture, from our self-indulgent dallying 
 with truth, and proclaim with a new and even passionate 
 outburst of love, " We are debtors — we are debtors to 
 Greeks and Barbarians, to wise and foolish. So, as much as 
 is possible to us, we are ready to preach God's gospel of 
 righteousness and love to every creature " ? 
 
 When the proposal shapes itself in this practical form, 
 some anxious thoughts arise within us, and tend to depress 
 our enthusiasm. Can we offer the religion of Englishmen 
 to the hoary East, when we are openly discussing whether 
 we have a religion or not ? Ought we to carry to the 
 heathen world the assurance of a Divine Son of God, who 
 is the Saviour and King of men, when here, at home, we 
 often permit our message to evaporate into vague platitudes, 
 and substitute ethical speculation for a revelation from 
 heaven, and social proprieties for the religious life ? 
 
 European thought, we are told, is suffering from violent 
 transitions. It is said everywhere that we must adopt new 
 platforms and new methods for the criticism of historic facts 
 and literary survivals; and that we are in gravest doubt 
 about the essence of our message. Can we, then, venture 
 to break into the Oriental dream with our unsettled 
 problems ? Have we any truth worth uttering ? Should 
 we succeed in waking up the Brahmin or the Buddhist 
 ascetics from their age-long sleep ? At least, ought not our 
 hands to be clean ? Ought we not to compel our Govern- 
 ment to abolish the opium traffic as a means of Indiari 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 79 
 
 revenue before we presume to teach morality to India 
 or China ? Should we not wait until adventurous traders 
 cease to prey upon the passions of savages after gunpowder 
 and ardent spirits ? Would it not be rational to pause until 
 the divisions of the Church are healed, and we have reduced 
 our message to its simplest terms and forms, which no 
 science will forthwith rush to analyze, and which will prove 
 itself by its own proclamation to be true ? 
 
 Our humble answer to this series of inquiries is, that if 
 the principle had been adopted in other days, civilization 
 and knowledge, science and history would have been 
 strangled in their birth. If Newton had waited till he had 
 solved the mystery of gravitation before enunciating its law, 
 we might still have been learning scholastic astronomy. If 
 Harvey and his followers had waited to solve all the mysteries 
 of the circulation of the blood before proclaiming the 
 luminous working hypothesis which has been so great a 
 boon to medical science and practice, we might still have 
 been floundering in the bog of mediaeval medicine. Many 
 analogous illustrations easily suggest themselves with respect 
 to the same law of obvious duty. If St. Paul had kept his 
 secret until the conflict between the synagogue and the 
 Church had been determined, the marvels of the first century 
 might have been delayed for a hundred years ; and then it 
 would have affected human destiny with a feebler touch and 
 with diminished fire. St. Paul did not refuse to deal with 
 the "waifs and strays" of Corinth until the philosophers 
 at Athens would give him a more patient hearing. When 
 Jews contradicted and blasphemed, and judged themselves 
 unworthy of everlasting life, he turned to the Gentiles, and 
 drew the dividing line between the ancient and the modern 
 world. 
 
So ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 Moreover, the differences among Christians orb themselves 
 far less conspicuously in face of a dominant and fanatical 
 heathen superstition than they do here, where they are often 
 contending with each other and competing for general 
 favour. After all deductions, the voice of the Churches 
 and the message of Christendom is one voice, and one 
 message is being offered to the world. Further, we cannot 
 and dare not wait until the morning breaks, and until we 
 have purified our own English life and washed out the 
 stains from the national escutcheon. 
 
 Men often incorrectly estimate the direct message from 
 heaven, which may and can be spoken by those who have 
 seen the heart of God and who are sanctified by the Word 
 and Spirit of the Lord, not by what it is in itself, but by 
 tlie indirect effect of the Christian principle of a few upon 
 society at large. Very slowly indeed has the standard of 
 righteousness risen, even in Christendom. With tardy step 
 has legislation been leavened with Christian principles. 
 The wrongs of women, the traffic in slaves, private wars, 
 fierce competitions, militarism, self-indulgence and vice on 
 colossal scales have very gradually and partially yielded to 
 the inward pulses of Christ's religion in individual hearts. 
 Most certain is it that we have yet to see a Christian nation 
 and, I almost dare to say, a truly Christian society. All the 
 victories of the Cross have been won in spite of these odds. 
 And the missionaries of Christ have always done their 
 work against these tremendous difficulties ; i.e. they have 
 preached their gospel notwithstanding the fact that their 
 ministry has been all along the line confronted by monstrous 
 hypocrisies, and discounted by travesties of the faith. Lies, 
 lust, greed, tortures, offensive wars, slave trades, tyrannies, 
 persecutions wrought by so-called Christians have always 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 8 1 
 
 cast their deadly shadows over the great enterprise. But 
 hugely as these still loom to-day, they were never held so 
 much in check, by the life of Christians, as they are at 
 this hour. Nations know, as they never knew before, that 
 these things are contrary to the mind and will of Christ, 
 and must yield to His imperial voice, and they will not live 
 even in the region of politics, or commerce, or diplomacy, 
 or hierarchies, when once the Lord of men rises up to rule : 
 '• Be wise now, ye kings : be instructed, ye judges of the 
 earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. 
 Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish out of His 
 way, when His wrath is kindled but a litde." Our duty and 
 our love join to tell us that, having learned the great secret 
 of remedying the evils both of Christendom and heathendom, 
 we have no option — we are debtors to Greeks and Barbarians, 
 to the wise and to the fooHsh. Our love is not to be stifled 
 by our difficulties, and we must put forth all the energy we 
 have, to overtake the work that was left undone in the great 
 ages of faith, and which has been left undone by our fellow- 
 workers of to-day. 
 
 Some of the deeper questions to which I have referred 
 will come more forcibly into view when we survey the two 
 great classes of mankind to which, like St Paul, we are 
 debtors to make known the riches of Christ, debtors to 
 offer the living bread, debtors to preach by life and lip the 
 gospel of the grace of God. 
 
 The Greek and the Barbarian. Many who are 
 sceptical about the message we have to deliver to them- 
 selves, have little to urge against missions to Barbarians, 
 and heartily admit that it has been an immense advantage 
 to the Samoan and the Sandwich Islands, to Madagascar 
 and New Guinea, that they should be lifted even to the 
 
 G— 6 
 
S3 ST. PAUL A btBTOR. 
 
 level of English Christianity. The story is often told of 
 Charles Darwin's subscription to the Patagonian Mission. 
 The Agnostic gives an ungrudging sympathy to the man 
 who single-handed grapples with ferocious cannibals, tames 
 them, wins them, clothes them, shows them how to live, 
 teaches them the songs of the universal Church, and dies 
 bravely at his post. Even the illusions of Christianity are 
 to him a thousand times better than the delusions of the 
 New Hebrides. Men like Livingstone and Moffat, Mackay 
 and Hannington, Paton and Chalmers, receive the homage 
 of those who can see that Barbarians are lifted from 
 degradation by receiving the ideas of the m.uch-decried 
 Christianity of the nineteenth centur3\ This result is not, 
 however, the motive of the missionary. He looks beyond 
 all the civilizing effects or literary results of the enterprise. 
 Soul by soul, man by man, these Barbarians must be taught 
 what manhood means. They must be put under the spell 
 of Divine law, and be won by the Divine love. The fact 
 that they know nothing of either, makes them the creditors 
 of the apostle, the claimants for his secret. Their misery 
 and hopelessness unconsciously press the claim. This is 
 enough for any man who has caught the spirit of the dying 
 Christ. 
 
 The fact is proved beyond doubt that the Negro, the 
 Australian, Maori, and the Patagonian savage, the cannibal 
 of the Islands, the hill tribesmen of India, the Malagasy, 
 the Karens, the Pulliars, and the hke, can and do appre- 
 hend the word and imbibe the spirit of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and become so far imbued with the mind of Jesus, 
 as to serve, to suffer, and die for His holy name. This is 
 a commonplace of all missionary experience from the 
 beginning until now. For the most part, St. Paul's dictum 
 
ST. TAUL A DEBTOR. 8^ 
 
 is demonstrably true, that God has chosen these "weak 
 things of the world to confound the mighty, and things 
 which are w/, to bring to nought the things that are." For 
 the most part, the vitalizing changes wrought by Christianity 
 have originated in the lower stratum of society, and 
 developed upwards until they have become conspicuous 
 and assured. The muster rolls of martyrs contain, doubt- 
 less, a few illustrious specimens of sanctified culture ; but 
 for the most part they are the unnamed, the unknown, who 
 were faithful unto death, and whose blood was "the seed of 
 Christians." 
 
 This startling fact, in its degree, is still the great note of 
 the Church in all lands. It justifies the fervent enthusiasm 
 with which all devoted representatives of the Church do now 
 throw themselves upon the lowermost classes of our cities, 
 devising new methods to win them, seeking to preoccupy 
 their minds with the ideas and impulses of our holy faith. 
 The story of the noblest movements in the history of 
 Christ's kingdom — those that have left the deepest traces 
 upon Italy, England, and Germany — is the story of holy 
 men, distinguished by high scholarship and burning hearts, 
 who, in addition to their culture and grace and commission, 
 have virtually said with the apostle of the Gentiles, " We are 
 debtors to Barbarian and Scythian, to bondslaves and serfs, 
 to waits and strays : we owe them the payment of a debt 
 which they have a right to claim at our hands." At this 
 moment, nine-tenths of the missionary field is crowded with 
 Barbarians, with savage races, with the uninstructed 
 residuum of polytheistic civilization, with the victims of 
 tyranny, of barbaric customs, of fierce passions and cruel 
 vices. The Apostle Paul, the great confessors of old, the 
 Catholic missionaries, the reformers of Christendom, our own 
 
84 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 noble society during the whole course of its history, from its 
 Tahitian beginnings to its most recent triumphs in Africa, 
 New Guinea, and Madagascar, have taken the same motto : 
 "We are debtors to Barbarian and to unwise, to the down- 
 trodden and to the slave, to the victims of our trade- 
 juggernaut, to the ignorant and the foolish." St. Paul knew 
 only too well that there wxre hordes and hosts of these 
 Barbarians ^wQXi in Rome itself, and that on his arrival there 
 he might have to commence his evangelistic work with 
 common soldiers, with jail-birds, with the rabble who 
 clamoured for panein et circenscs^ with Tryphenas and 
 Tryphosas, wath freed men and fugitives ; but he declared 
 himself a debtor to the outcast in Rome, quite as much as 
 to the saints in Caesar's household. 
 
 This group of St. Paul's creditors, and of ours, does 
 not exhaust his obligations or drain the affluence of his 
 love. He was a debtor to the Greek as well as to the 
 Barbarian, to the cultivated as well as to the ignorant, to 
 the wise and prudent as well as to babes. So when w^e 
 acknowledge a similar debt to the thoughtful and self- 
 satisfied Hindu, to the Chinese official, to the Japanese 
 scientist, to the critical Zulu, to the esoteric Buddhist at 
 home or abroad, we find our chief anxiety and difficulty. 
 Few criticize our missionary propaganda to the Barbarian. 
 They thank us for our work, and reap the harvest we or 
 our fathers have sown, with no little appreciation of the 
 martyr-like pioneers ; but many scoff at our endeavour to 
 bring the gospel of the Incarnation, the truth of the life 
 and sacrifice and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, to 
 bear upon the literature, traditions, and theosophies of the 
 Eastern world. 
 
 St. Paul believed with a profound conviction that he 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 85 
 
 had a message which would disturb the dream of the 
 Epicurean, and the equanimity of the Stoic ; he had facts 
 to propound to the most dih'gent student of nature and man 
 that could not be found among any of the Socratic sects. 
 Paul was even passionately driven to pronounce sentence 
 upon polytheism, and its moral malaria; and he dared 
 to tell Platonist and Philonist that the relation between 
 knowledge and virtue had not been solved by philosophy. 
 He could speak of the invisible world and eternal life with 
 a realism which only the Mysteries had attempted, and 
 which they had confined to an initiated few. Paul was 
 ready to reveal, to preach, that " unknown God " whom 
 cultivated men were ignorantly worshipping, whether under 
 the shadows of the Palatine or within the sight of the 
 Athenian Acropolis. At the present hour, we have the dis- 
 tinct conviction that whatever truth is contained in the 
 " Sacred Books of the East," that very truth is expressed 
 with greater clearness in the Christian Scriptures; that 
 whatever truth of moral order, whatever elevated conception 
 of the character of God, or of Divine Incarnation, or of 
 human apotheosis, or of union between God and man, has 
 been dreamed of in heathendom is positively achieved and 
 set forth in Him who was manifested in the flesh ; that if 
 the Fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of man has 
 been faintly conceived or declared in the highest develop- 
 ments of non-Christian literature or observance, these 
 principles have received a culminating and demonstrable 
 expression in the life and death of our Lord ; that the 
 whole theory of redemption from sin, and of true sanctity, 
 of conversion, salvation, and deliverance, is verified, and 
 that we are bound to make it known ; and that the whole 
 method and principle of contact and communion with God 
 
86 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 through faith in Christ infinitely transcends all the methods 
 of Oriental religion. 
 
 Most certainly, unless our gospel will stand this test of 
 detailed comparison with all that other religions have to 
 offer, either in their heroic history or their present fruits, 
 our missionary enterprise will collapse. We would not 
 offer our gospel, even to the Barbarian, unless we could 
 confidently press it upon the wise and prudent, upon the 
 most thoughtful Hindu and Buddhist, upon the proudest 
 Confucianist or Moslem. 
 
 This is neither the place nor time to institute the com- 
 parison, but we have no shadow of doubt that, when Christ 
 is brought, in the lustre and uniqueness of His own con- 
 sciousness of His own work and claims, into direct com- 
 parison with the supreme 7/ian of every other faith. He will 
 prove to be the Lord of all, the King of these kings of men. 
 
 The upshot of our meditation is simply this, that if we 
 are alive to God through Christ, if we are irrefutably 
 convinced of the truth about man given to us in His life, 
 cross, passion, and glory, we must throb with a holy 
 impulse to disclose a secret so life-giving to ourselves and 
 one which affects the whole human race. Because the 
 gospel of Christ deals with most universal facts of human 
 nature, and bears upon the destiny of every human being 
 in all time, we can trust and obey it for ourselves. 
 
 The missionary spirit and enterprise become powerful 
 auxiliaries to the proof of our holy faith. We see in 
 them an expression of that which is most essential in 
 Christianity. If, with our present knowledge, we could 
 have stood by, when the first man revealed the conscious- 
 ness of his relations with the Supreme Being and Law, we 
 
ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 8/ 
 
 should have discovered the highest revelation hitherto made 
 of the glory and nature of God. 
 
 If we could, with our present apprehension of the history 
 of the world, have listened to the intercessory prayer of the 
 Lord Jesus, or watched His dying agony or heard His last 
 words, we should never have doubted again that the Word 
 had been made flesh, and that His glory was that of the only 
 begotten Son, full of grace and truth. In fellowship with 
 Him, we still feel that we have the one secret of life that is 
 worth possessing. When we come face to face with the 
 supernatural marvels- which the truth about Christ works in 
 human hearts, amid all kinds of men, and when we witness 
 with our own eyes the miraculous change which declares 
 that a man is reconciled to God, and has entered His 
 kingdom, we too become more alive to God, and begin to 
 live in both worlds the life eternal. 
 
 This missionary spirit, and this consequent strengtlien- 
 ing of Divine life, is not confined to youth or maiden, to 
 veteran or to pioneer who has given up an entire existence 
 to the enterprise. It should be the spirit of every Church, 
 of every Christian college, of every individual who professes 
 or calls himself a Christian, It is the most vivid form of 
 consecration to God, and the most certain sign and seal of 
 the blessed life. 
 
 While yielding ourselves to its Divine captivation, wo 
 cannot despair of any human soul. Circumstances may 
 degrade, pride may stupefy, self-indulgence may paralyze, 
 doubt may bewilder, superstition, tradition, evil habits, 
 inherited vice may check our hope ; but we know that in 
 the knowledge of the only veritable God and Jesus Christ 
 Himself, the Apostle of God and High Priest for man, we 
 have eternal life. There is no spell which has been wound 
 
88 ST. PAUL A DEBTOR. 
 
 about a human soul which will not vanish before the light 
 of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ. No greater blessing can enrich our life than a 
 mighty hope for our brother-man. In cultivating, in sustain- 
 ing, the missionary spirit and hope, we catch a glimpse of 
 the sunrise that is lighting the horizon of time, and we are 
 preparing "the dawn that is spread upon the mountains." 
 None have penetrated the invisible so far, or are so sure 
 of the heart and of the power of the Son of God, as those 
 who are verily acting on the motive which mastered the 
 great apostle's ministry, and who can do no other than cry, 
 " We are debtors, we are debtors to Greek and barbarian, 
 to wise and unwise, insomuch as we are ready to proclaim 
 the gospel of an infinite and righteous love to every 
 creature." 
 
 The dawn of the eternal day will break over the 
 earthly life of that young heart that consecrates itself to 
 this high service. Brethren, you have but one life to live. 
 To-day it is yours to give it to the grandest work that is 
 being done among men. To-morrow you may have passed 
 the crossing of the ways. Consecrate, then, this precious 
 treasure to the noblest service, for our Lord Christ's sake. 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
Preached at East Parade Chapel^ Leeds 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 "And He said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast 
 seed upon llie earth ; and should sleep and rise night and day, and the 
 seed should spring up and grow, he knowelh not how. The earth 
 bearcth fruit of herself; fust the blade, then the ear, then the full corn 
 in the ear. But when the fruit is ripe, straightway he puttcth forth 
 the sickle, because the harvest is come,"— -Mark iv. 26-29. 
 
 The parable of the Sower, as it is given by each of the 
 three Evangelists, commences with the words, '• Behold, a 
 sower went forth to sow." There is no introductory phrase 
 whatever. It is true that, when expounding the parable to 
 His disciples and those that were with Him, our Lord 
 characterized the seed as ** the seed of the kingdom ; " but 
 he made no such reference in the original utterance of the 
 great enigma. Now, it is not to be supposed that among 
 the vast crowds who waited on Him, those only who re- 
 mained behind for further instruction gained glimpses of 
 the meaning of His discourse. The image was one frequently 
 used by classic and Oriental writers, when discussing the 
 relations of the teacher to the taught. 
 
 A Galila^an crowd, accustomed to the use of figurative 
 language, would perceive at a glance some part of the great 
 Teacher's meaning ; and since many among them were 
 ''wayside hearers," and others resembled the dry shallow 
 soil upon a rocky place, the sense of disappointment may 
 
92 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 have thrown a cloud upon their faces, while their feelings 
 ran in this fashion — " What has this to do with the kingdom 
 of God ? We want some manifest visible assurance that 
 that kingdom has come nigh unto us ; ' we would see a sign 
 from heaven.' All that this Man has said to us, as yet, 
 describes merely the relation of the Teacher to the taught ; 
 there is no special reference to that kingdom which all 
 our prophets have taught us to expect, to the scene of its 
 splendours, or the method of its growth. Why does He not 
 tell us how He is going to establish it? Let Him take to 
 Himself His great power and reign, that we may flock to 
 His standard and crown Him king of the world." Perfectly 
 true, there was no direct allusion made to the kingdom, no 
 sure promise of its approach, and no explicit definition of 
 its form ; but, there was a prior truth, one that His hearers 
 failed to recognize, one apart from which there can be no 
 visible kingdom at all. Nevertheless, the Redeemer of the 
 world, from His knowledge of what was in man, seems to 
 compassionate this earnest cry of disappointment, and pro- 
 ceeds to show, that although the point of His first parable 
 only referred indirectly to the establishment of His kingdom, 
 and though the resemblance which He instituted only con- 
 cerned that between the activity of seed and certain well- 
 known realities of the spiritual world, and though it was 
 used in the main to illustrate the responsibilities of the 
 hearers of His gospel; yet the image itself was capable of 
 new expansion. The parable of the Sower might yield at 
 His touch royal similitudes, and be made to give forth the 
 trumpet-peal which would usher in the advent of their King. 
 Therefore was it that, according to St. Mark, He exclaimed, 
 " So is the kingdom of God, as if a ma?i should cast seed tipon 
 the earth" That little word " so " appears to me to indicate 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 93 
 
 that some conversation took place here, that some break 
 had occurred in the thread of discourse, that some inquiry 
 had been made, not unlike that which I have suggested, 
 and which not only evoked the parable, but its Divine 
 interpretation. Our Lord seems to say, " However striking 
 may be the resemblance that exists between the sowing of 
 seed upon different kinds of soil and the preaching of truth 
 to men, there is a still more powerful resemblance possible 
 between the action of seed and the establishment of the 
 kingdom of God in the world." A clear perception of this 
 purport of the parable may remove a difficulty which sug- 
 gests itself concerning the agency here represented by "the 
 MAN " who casts seed into the ground. 
 
 If the reference be simply to the agency made use of 
 -for the dissemination of Divine truth, then the first part 
 of the parable is quite comprehensible, but the last part 
 becomes obscure. In Avhat sense is " the man " who sows 
 the seed to put in the sickle and gather in the ripened 
 harvest ? On the other hand, if " the Son of God," the 
 true Lord of the harvest, is indicated, how can it be said of 
 Him that ZTt' knows not how the seed grows and germinates? 
 This difficulty has perhaps arisen principally from failing to 
 perceive that it is not one single sowing of the seed, upon 
 one class of hearers, that is spoken of here, but the whole 
 of that sowing to the end of time — a sowing in which Christ 
 participated for a short period during His earthly ministry, 
 but which He then entrusted to those who had accepted 
 His mission ; while *' the harvest " represents the final con- 
 summation of the kingdom, in which it will be His preroga- 
 tive to act exclusively and alone. The image would have 
 been obscure, if, when the great Teacher intended to 
 indicate the mighty agency which should be employed for 
 
94 THE SEED OF THE KlNGDOiM. 
 
 the establishment of the kingdom of God in the earth, He 
 had made use of an illustration which in that period of 
 history could have been applicable only to Himself, while 
 He shows that the final development of the whole is pointed 
 at by alluding to the great harvest, to the sickle of Divine 
 Providence and Judgment, and to the granaries of heaven. 
 
 There are, then, more reasons than one for attending to 
 the opening words of this parable, '-'And He said, So is the 
 kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the 
 ground." 
 
 The parable as a whole suggests (i) The adaptation 
 of the seed of the kingdom to the condition of humanity. 
 (2) The law of its development. (3) The ultimate result. 
 
 I. The adaptation of the seed to the condition of 
 humanity. " He said. So is the kingdom of God, as if a 
 man should [cast seed upon the earth ; and should sleep 
 and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and 
 grow, he knovveth not how. The earth beareth fruit of 
 herself; first the blade, then the car, then the full corn 
 in the ear. But when the fruit is ripe, straightway he 
 putteth forth the sickle, because the harvest is come." 
 
 Christ appears here to occupy the position of the first 
 Sower. He is the first link of the mighty chain of agency 
 that He was calling into existence, by which the sublimest 
 truths about God should be brought into contact with 
 human hearts and human society. By "the earth," I 
 conceive that He meant, not any individual mind, not any 
 one assembly of men, not any particular congregation or 
 community, but the human race. He referred to all the 
 instincts, habits, tastes, opinions, philosophies, and institu- 
 tions of mankind, even to the uttermost limits of place and 
 time, — to the whole of that vast and complicated structure 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 95 
 
 which can be directly or indirectly permeated and affected 
 by the truth of God. Such a conception of the *' earth" 
 on which the seed of the kingdom would be cast, was 
 adapted to draw the minds of His hearers away from their 
 national prepossessions and prejudices. They would obtain 
 more comprehensive views of the true kingdom of God, if 
 they could once deign to accept the idea of a ki?igdoin 
 which was based upon fritth, of the victories of a King which 
 would be gained, not by armies, but by the proclamation of 
 the amnesty of heaven, if they could appreciate the founda- 
 tions of a kingdom laid by a process so apparently incon- 
 spicuous as the preaching of a great gospel. Christ teaches 
 us that, in addition to all the mighty human impulses tliat 
 are germinating in society, and in addition to all the king- 
 doms that are arising in the world, and independently of 
 the sovereign power that exists inherently in the large con- 
 ceptions and fertile discoveries and creative intelligences of 
 every age, there is the seed of another kingdom, which is 
 not of earthly origination nor of human creation, and which, 
 wheresoever it germinates, creates a province of the king- 
 dom of God. " The kingdom of God is as if a man should 
 cast seed upon the earth." By a man casting seed into the 
 ground, sleeping and rising night and day, and in ignorance 
 of the processes by which the seed springs up, Christ 
 pointed to the whole of that human agency by which the 
 truth of God shall be sown in the ground of humanity. It 
 is indeed a Divine seed of awful potency and glorious 
 possibility, but the sowing of it is entrusted to human 
 hands. 
 
 The germination and development of the kingdom of 
 God in any class of institution, character, or thought must 
 necessarily be effected through the exertion of its influence 
 
96 . THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 on individuals. Now the processes by which these tilings 
 are accomplished are profound and often inscrutable. 
 Nothing is more manifest to the sower of the seed than 
 the transformations which occur in individuals and com- 
 munities under the influence of this truth ; but where, when, 
 and how the result has been produced, " he knoweth not." 
 The effects can be traced, the results are patent, but the 
 seed springs and grows up " he knoweth not how." Verily, 
 all workers who do so much, and know so little, are virtually 
 warned by this parable not to be searching at the roots, not 
 to be over careful about results, nor self-tormented about 
 the final issues of the sowing. As men, we know no more 
 about these things than does the husbandman who has cast 
 seed into the ground, and leaves the wondrous influences 
 of sun and shade, of dew and zephyr, of frost and rain, to 
 co-operate with the pent-up forces of the seed, and bring 
 about the divinely predestinated result. 
 
 "Sleeping and rising night and day" simply alludes to 
 the withdrawment from the scenes and avocations of daily 
 life of the Christian worker. It tells us how the sower 
 leaves his seed with God, incapable of taking another co- 
 operative step in the process of its germination. There 
 may be in it a remote reference to the Son of Man as the 
 Head of this human agency. If so, it was of His humanity 
 that the parable speaks : and a dim prophecy perchance 
 is involved of the solemn sleep of His death, a hint given 
 even of His withdrawment to the scene where, though not 
 constantly watching and tending the seed, He is engaged 
 in pouring out the Divine influence on which all results are 
 dependent, by which alone they can be accomplished. It 
 is only in this sense that He can be said to leave the seed 
 to itself; not indeed without the daily supply of His 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 9/ 
 
 spiritual power, nor without the quickening sunbeams of 
 His providential favour and the gently whispering breath 
 of His Spirit; but^ though " present" by the power of His 
 Spirit, the manifestation of His humanity is suspended. He 
 is hidden in the light of God. He would have us to under- 
 stand that He is waiting for the results of His work, expect- 
 ing the harvest of the world. So far as it is true that He 
 will come again to us, He is now absent. In proportion 
 to the fulness of His ultimate triumph and the glory of the 
 final display of His interest in us, and of His great mani- 
 festation when every eye shall see Him, we must regard 
 this intervening period, in which He is hiding Himself 
 from our gaze, as an absence. He has gone His way. He 
 will come again. We have no question at all that the 
 harvest of the world will ripen, that the powers of conviction 
 will become irresistible, that the manifestation of His true 
 nature will eventually be so conspicuous and transcendent 
 that every eye will see Him. But we cannot say this yet 
 of any single generation, since the gates of heaven closed 
 behind Him. If we contrast the ages of delay with the 
 sublime fruition of all our prophetic hopes, we must say 
 with the angels, '' He is not here." The seed is sown, the 
 great Sower is waiting to return to the harvest-field. Mean- 
 while, "the earth bringeth forth fruit of itself" In the 
 earth there exist all the elements which subsequently con- 
 tribute to the substance of the corn j in like manner there 
 are existing in human minds capacities, ideas, feelings, and 
 tendencies which are being reconstituted by the truth of 
 God. Faculties and possibilities are lying dormant in 
 liuman life and society, just as the carbon, nitrogen, and 
 various salts that contribute to the material of the grain of 
 wheat lie in the earth unused and unproductive ; but when 
 
 H— 6 
 
98 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 the power that can attract them from their lurking-places 
 comes into contact with them, they organize, act, and 
 re-act upon one another, and as they show the signs of 
 combination and life, they prophesy a happy future. 
 
 The idea which Christ suggests here, is the exclusion 
 of the agency of the Sower from this part of the mighty 
 process. The heart of man finds in the truth of God some- 
 thing essentially adapted to give life to the dull, apparently 
 inert, materials of which it is composed. Human society 
 finds in the truth of the Church of God the combining 
 organizing power by which it is eventually to become the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 II. The parable is still further pregnant as it reveals the 
 law of the development of the kingdom of God. " First 
 the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." 
 This is a beautiful illustration of the different stages of 
 spiritual growth, somewhat akin to the division by the 
 Apostle John into " little children," '-young men," and 
 " fathers ; " and by the law of interpretation which we 
 think we have discovered, we are bound to consider it the 
 law of the progress of this new hfe in the history of man 
 and in the records of God's Church ; yet the exhibition of 
 this law on the grand scale is the consequence of its truth 
 in the history of every individual man who brings forth 
 fruit with patience. It is because fresh life and infant life 
 is poured into our world every day, that the whole world is 
 ever young ; it is because there are always children among 
 us, learning the results of previous centuries of toil and 
 labour and discovery, that the whole race is ever advancing ; 
 it is because there are young men who combine the vigour 
 of youth with the resolution of age, the fire of enterprise 
 with the calm maturity of fruition, that the world is ever 
 
TPIE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 99 
 
 Strong, and marches forward towards the fuhiess of its 
 prime. And it is because we see everywhere God's master- 
 work, man, the man of mature years with his strength and 
 his knowledge, his wild fancies converted into the energy 
 of imagination, his hasty prejudices chastened or uprooted, 
 or in some cases perhaps dignified into well-reasoned 
 opinions, his character rich with virtues, and his whole 
 existence bearing witness to the life he has lived, that we 
 anticipate the day when the entire human race shall have 
 reached such a manhood, when the toils, illusions, and 
 disappointments of the world's youth, the discoveries of 
 centuries, the failures and martyrdoms encountered in the 
 prolonged search after truth, shall issue in the full com- 
 munion of humanity with nature, and the blessedness of 
 the bridal between heaven and earth. 
 
 That which happens in the great world of men becomes 
 a parable and type of the Church and kingdom of God on 
 earth. The birth-cry is ever sounding, babes in Christ are 
 being born continually into the kingdom. The regeneration 
 of men is not a dream, but a blessed reality. The little 
 children of grace, with their new fresh energy of wondrous 
 beauty, their youthful charm and hopefulness, as yet the 
 victim of no heart-breaking disappointment, souls sanguine 
 but yet docile, make and keep the Church of God always 
 young. Moreover, new fields of holy service are always 
 being covered with the spring verdure of ne^vborn hope. 
 The Church has never yet lacked the ardour of fresh enter- 
 prise, the charm of new anticipations, the inspiration of the 
 young life of the newly born. 
 
 Similarly the Church takes a character, as the world 
 does, from its fully developed life. To every heart in which 
 Divine life has been implanted, there must come the hour 
 
100 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 of conflict, cf struggle, of temptation, of doubt, of fear ; 
 when faith trembles, and the first credulous confidence of 
 the child is staggered by the cynical and sceptical voices 
 of the unregenerate world ; when that which is taken on 
 trust has to be proved to the satisfaction of the intellect ; 
 when youthful glories of child-like faith become the in- 
 tuitions of divine certitude; when, after having believed 
 that it might know, a higher experience believes because 
 it knows ; when manhood, strength, experience, fruitfulness, 
 characterize the Christian life. What is true of the indi- 
 vidual gives a character to the whole Church. The king- 
 dom of God is always youthful, but it is also always manly. 
 It has always been characterized by childlike simplicity, but 
 it is always throwing off the follies of childhood. It 
 presents, like the tropical fruit-tree, at one and the same 
 time the tender green of spring, the expanding blossom of 
 summer, and the ripening fruit. 
 
 It would be well for the critics of the infantine sim- 
 plicity of the faith of God's elect, to look more steadily at 
 the manly force and vigour with which the Church is ever 
 being taught of God to discard its own prejudices, to grow 
 in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 It would be equally wise for those who are trembling at the 
 signs of its vigour and aghast at its claim of glorious liberty 
 to turn and see how fresh and beautiful and untarnished 
 are the buddings of its early promise, and the childlike 
 ways that " mark the newly born." 
 
 Once more, the man of God at last weathers all the 
 influences adverse to his faith. He becomes a " Father in 
 Christ Jesus." The hour arrives when old temptations are 
 powerless and the perplexities of his prime have vanished, 
 when the fascination and exaggerated importance of this 
 
THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM!. lOI 
 
 world dwindle into insignificance and its pleasures fade 
 away before the brightening vision of heaven. Then hoary 
 hairs become a crown of righteousness, and we see standing 
 on the shore of the river of death a goodly company attired 
 for their passage, catching on their brows the reflected light 
 of heaven. Our eyes brighten as we see them, for they 
 give an earnest and prophecy of that condition of the 
 Church when the last conversion shall have taken place ; 
 when none shall need to say to his brother, " Know the 
 Lord," when all shall know Him from the least to the 
 greatest ; when Jew and Greek shall have ceased their con- 
 tentions ; when Paul and John shall have finished their 
 work ; when no Stephen and no Polycarp shall need to seal 
 a testimony with blood, and no mere worldly patronage 
 shall threaten the spirituality of the kingdom of Christ; 
 when the last conflict with Antichrist shall have been 
 victoriously completed, and the whole world shall have 
 become one vast company of fervent diligent workers ; 
 when the silver cords of prayer which bind this world to 
 the throne of God shall contract, and earth, with its mighty 
 burden of harmonious sympathies, shall rise— rise heaven- 
 ward, until all that intervenes between time and the beatific 
 vision of eternity shall be the thin transparent glass of the 
 few moments of probation which yet await those " that are 
 alive and remain," and which the trumpet of the Archangel 
 shall shiver into fragments. " First the blade, then the 
 ear, then the full corn in the ear," is the law of development 
 for the kingdom as well as the man. 
 
 III. The parable exhibits in the circumstances of the 
 harvest the ultimate issues of the kingdom. " When the 
 fruit is ripe, straightway he putteth forth the sickle, because 
 the harvest is come." 
 
102 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 It is true of the man, and true of the kingdom of God 
 as a whole. 
 
 When the whole fruitage of the Divine life is complete, 
 the great Lord of the harvest, who alone has the power of 
 life and death, puts forth His sickle. He alone knows the 
 reaping time for souls. With Him are the issues of life. 
 He uses His power over all flesh, and His dominion over 
 all souls, with sublime independence of our foolish criticism, 
 with infinite tenderness and perfect wdsdom. When the 
 fruit is ripe, then He puts forth the sickle. Some- 
 times the young and tender plant shows all its fruit, and 
 He sees all its possibilities, accepts graciously unfulfilled 
 intentions, and garners the bare promise of a glorious 
 summer. But there are those who bring forth fruit in old 
 age : and not till they have finished all their course does 
 He take them into His arms and reap the shock of corn 
 fully ripe. And we may rest assured that the great harvest 
 of the world will be reaped by the same command, when 
 the hour of its full fruitage shall have struck. He waits 
 patiently. Henceforth He expects. He will see of the 
 travail of His soul and be satisfied. 
 
 Far from us be the dastardly fear that the harvest of 
 the world will never ripen, that the difficulties in its way 
 are insurmountable, that the rampant growth of Oriental 
 heathenism will never give way, that the blight of scepticism 
 will destroy all the flower of the field, that the powers of 
 the world will trample all the golden grain into dust. God 
 has eternity to work in, and can wait ; but the day will 
 dawn when the harvest will be ready to His hand, and then 
 immediately He will put in the sickle, not to destroy our 
 hope, but to fulfil His promise. 
 
THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. 
 
rrca:hcd at Last Parade Chapel, Leeds. 
 
THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. 
 
 " That they may all be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and 
 I in Thee, that they also may be in Us ; that tlie world may believe that 
 Thou didst send ]\Ie."— John xvii. 21. 
 
 Every word of the high-priestly prayer affords thrilling 
 insight into the unique consciousness of our Divine Lord. 
 These audible communings of Jesus with the Father reveal 
 facts which transcend every other human experience. They 
 expound the Incarnation ; they provide a part at least of 
 the reason which led St. John to set forth, as the presupposi- 
 tion of his Gospel, that " the Word who was God, and was 
 in the beginning with God," " in whom was life " and 
 " light," actually '* became flesh, and took up His tabernacle 
 amongst us." They prove that " He who was in the bosom 
 of the Father, as His only-begotten Son, had indeed 
 declared Him." The world had never known the Righteous 
 Father, nor apprehended the opulence or the righteousness 
 of God's eternal love to the humanity whom He made in 
 His image. The Son of God, the responsive object of the 
 Absolute Love, alone comprehended its supreme essence. 
 " No one knoweth tlie Father save the Son," and " I (said 
 He) have known Thee." Therefore He alone had power to 
 
I06 THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 
 declare the Name, and glorify it in full sight of the men 
 who were given Him out of the world. Astonishing 
 personal differences characterized these men. The morbid 
 doubtfulness of Thomas; the eager credulousness and 
 impulsive heroism of Peter ; the yearning of Philip for a 
 vision which, unperceived by himself, had already been 
 granted to him; the despondency oi Judas (not Iscariot) 
 because no crushing or convincing effect had been pro- 
 duced on the hostile world around them ; the silent 
 mysticism suppressing the passionate intensity of the best- 
 beloved John; the flashing fire of that other "son of 
 thunder" who would be the first to drink His cup and 
 follow Him through mortal agony into the thick darkness 
 of the great light ; the Messianic literalism of Matthew ; the 
 patient meditations of Nathanael, that Israelite without 
 guile j the dreams of the political zealot Simo?i ; the brotherly 
 love and practical sense of Andrew ; and finally the self- 
 repressing modesty of the son of Alpheus, ever lost in the 
 greater honours of his brethren and namesakes, — made the 
 incomparable eleven, types of the whole of redeemed 
 humanity. These all stood or kneeled around Him as 
 Jesus poured forth this wondrous monologue. 
 
 Profoundly dissimilar in temperament, education, and 
 capacity, they were bound to each olher by their personal 
 consecration to their Lord. He loved them to the utter- 
 most, and they constituted a veritable brotherhood, a 
 crystalline unity of many flicets, each refracting with more 
 or less of perfect colour some of the manifold rays of the 
 one great light of the world. The apostles were not the 
 sole objects of the intercessory prayer. There arose before 
 the consciousness of Jesus numberless hosts of those who 
 would believe on Him throuo;h their word. Tlie desire of 
 
OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. lO/ 
 
 His perfect love embraced these also. He prayed that 
 they might become one in Him, that Jew and Greek, male 
 and female, bond and free, should all be one, that every 
 contradiction and antithesis should be resolved, that all 
 individualities should be blended into one all-conquering 
 unity. Thus only would the world believe that the Father 
 had sent Him. 
 
 We can never read the prayer without a deep sinking of 
 heart, because from the first day until now the gospel of 
 the perfect love of God to man seems rather to have 
 accentuated the natural antagonism between man and man, 
 to have proved a sword of division as well as the message 
 or implement of peace. Nothing, so it might seem, has 
 more pitilessly separated chief friendships and divided 
 hearts that otherwise, like kindred drops^ had blended into 
 one. A man's foes have been those of his own household, 
 two against three, three against two. Communities bearing 
 Christ's beloved name have been cruelly rent into fragments. 
 Church against Church, heretic against heretic, Catholic 
 against both alike. On every question touching the idea 
 of God and of man, of the Christ Himself and His work, of 
 the mission of the Spirit, of the organization of the Church, 
 nation has risen against nation, the East and the West have 
 ceased to hold communion with each other, and these in 
 their turn have vied with one another in exasperating 
 persecutions, ceaseless divisions^ and bloody reprisals. 
 Who dare say that any single fraction of the divided body 
 has been free from moral blame and judicial blindness? 
 The story of every century, from the second to the nine- 
 teenth, has emphasized in its degree, and on well-ascertained 
 grounds, the fact that the Lord kindled fire and sent a 
 sword upon the earth. The very means which were 
 
I08 THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 
 professedly adapted to harmonize and combine have been 
 the most potent in dividing hearts, in arresting and quench- 
 ing the Spirit. There are no pages in the sad history of 
 the world more humiliating and deplorable than the records 
 of sacrosanct councils and rival ministries, than the clash of. 
 swords over the meaning of the sacraments, ceremonies, 
 and creeds of the Christian Churches. Volumes are 
 needful, as we all know, to present a full picture of the 
 passions which have been fostered and the crimes which 
 have been committed in the name of Him who prayed in 
 the last night of His agony that all w^ho loved Him and 
 believed that He came out from God might be o)ie. Never- 
 theless, these dividing and colliding forces may receive some 
 explanation when we review for a moment the disintegrating 
 tendencies which have been always at work in humanity. 
 
 Consider the causes of disunion existing in the nature of 
 human life and mind. Confusing differences of language, 
 hereditary characteristics of race, the measureless influence 
 of climate, soil, and food, combine to induce Jew and 
 Greek, Chinaman and Saxon, Barbarian and Scythian, bond 
 and free, to pursue different ideals. Within the limit of a 
 single nation the divergencies of sentiment are violent. 
 Political rancour hardly exceeds in virulence the exaspera- 
 tion that scientific philologists and different schools of 
 literary and artistic criticism can express with reference to 
 each other. The conservative and revolutionary spirit are 
 always wielding drawn daggers. Fundamental distinctions 
 are vehemently maintained as to the very sentiment of 
 beauty, and the apphcation even of the standards of right 
 and wrong to particular cases. 
 
 All this is aggravated by the mysterious isolation of each 
 soul. No two men perhaps have ever used precisely the 
 
OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. IO9 
 
 same language, or meant exactly the same thing by identical 
 words. What are grammars, dictionaries, and manuals of 
 different tongues but well-meant attempts to bring about a 
 mere make-belief of unity? No two persons have precisely 
 the same idea about themselves or God, about the world or 
 the universe. Men abreast of each other in science, in 
 philology, in criticism and historical knowledge, fiercely 
 and contemptuously contend against conclusions at which 
 they have severally arrived. Doubtless, master minds 
 which have a certain magnetic power of enforcing their own 
 ideas upon others produce some approximations to unity, 
 but they are lame and halting. Parliaments, senates, 
 universities, brotherhoods, reveal notable but disheartening 
 endeavours after a unity of dissevered souls. 
 
 Even religion itself, which ought to blend dissimilar 
 natures in the fervour of common emotions, has been less 
 successful than so-called civilization. The heathen re- 
 ligions are as numerous as the types of character which 
 race and environment have generated. That which is God 
 to one race is often devil to another. That special nation 
 which was trained for two thousand years to bring the world 
 to understand the unity and glory of God broke into 
 fragments, while internal tendencies vehemently opposed 
 each other. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism 
 have been professed by men who fiercely contested within 
 their own pale the most fundamental principles of their' 
 respective faiths. 
 
 What shall we say of Christianity in this respect? 
 Apart from the deadly animosity which it quickened in the 
 breasts of its enemies, how cruel have been the conflicts 
 between its rival schools 1 Doubtless there have been 
 moments when Christians were and are still seen to love 
 
no THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 
 one another; but a heathen historian bluntly asserts that 
 the rivalry and mutual hostility of Christians is positively 
 more malicious than that of wild beasts. The manner in 
 which the Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, and Origenistic 
 controversies were conducted is a scandal to humanity. 
 The divisions of Protestantism are obvious consequences 
 of the despotic claims of the Papacy, and hostile sections 
 have used weapons sharpened and poisoned in the armouries 
 of theological and .ecclesiastical rivalry in order to abase 
 each other. The efforts to produce and enforce unanimous 
 judgments have in every region absolutely and signally 
 failed. 
 
 Nevertheless, He who knew what was in man, while 
 suffering in the furnace of volcanic and titanic antagonisms, 
 and on a site where Eastern and Western cultures were 
 coming into disruptive contact, where Roman and Oriental 
 civilization were fighting no phantom battle, on the night 
 when His perfect goodness had roused the deadliest 
 malice of those who for centuries had been prepared by 
 God's providence to receive their King, but who were 
 actually plotting " the deep damnation " of His judicial 
 murder, prayed to His Father that all His followers "might 
 be one." A unity among men did then present itself to 
 Him, as an object of a prayer which is " always " heard, as 
 the prophecy of a future which must come to pass. 
 
 What was that unity? Of what kind and according 
 to what standard? 
 
 Absolute inidledual oneness and perfect unanimity of 
 \\yxm'AX\ judgment could not have been His meaning. AVhat 
 would such a dream as this require before it could be 
 reahzed ? Surely nothing less, to begin with, than a 
 universal language and identical conditions of thought for 
 
OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. Ill 
 
 all men, a state of things than which nothing could 
 be less thinkable. Unanimity of judgment would mean 
 that the endless differences due to climate, race, food, and 
 ideal of happiness must be all reduced to complete uni- 
 formity. All the indefinite force of tradition, of inherited 
 sentiment and taste^ must be counteracted. Hindu and 
 Chinaman, Saxon and Negro, Arab and Italian, Scandi- 
 navian and Hawaiian must severally lose their idiosyncrasies. 
 A unity which demanded such uniformity would be the 
 practical abolition of humanity. None of the striking 
 individualities of our race could survive. There would be 
 no teachers, no rulers, no guides ; no discoverers, no 
 heroes, no masters of thought. All would be necessarily 
 brought up or down to the same dead level. Such a con- 
 summation is obviously farther off than ever, and utterly 
 undesirable. 
 
 But further, the unity for which the blessed Lord prayed 
 must be independent of the forms of government to which 
 either in Church or State those who believed on Him 
 would submit. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy were 
 severally ruling the affairs of the world, both politically and 
 religiously, in the first century as much as they are in the 
 nineteenth. The unity must be different in kind from that 
 which partially enshrines itself in these forms. It must bind 
 the despot and the slave, and blend the warring elements of 
 a turbulent republic into one fellowship. The sage and 
 the boor, the patriarch and the child, the prince and the 
 menial, the greatest captain and his humblest thrall must 
 on that supposition submit to the same regimen, or be 
 excluded from the unity. The more the prayer is pondered 
 on such lines as these the more impracticable it becomes, 
 except at the cost of the final martyrdom of man, the loss 
 
112 THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 
 of individuality, and the ultimate repose and frigid death of 
 all that makes up what we know of man. 
 
 Is the prayer, then, a hopeless dream ? Can it be heard 
 in any sense ? Can we hope for or desire its realization ? 
 Does the Lord in the very form of His sublime petition 
 suggest the line along which He confidently hopes and 
 predicts its realization or fulfilment ? " That they all may 
 be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee." 
 
 This very analogy suggests that the oneness was not in 
 external organization, not in the rules of some ingeniously 
 compounded society, not in some uniform style of self- 
 manifestation, but " as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in 
 Thee." Now the burden of much of our Lord's teaching 
 was, "No man hath seen God at any time" — "Ye have 
 neither heard His voice, nor seen His shape." But on the 
 other hand, Jesus Christ was visible, audible, present to 
 men. His face, image, voice, word, life, and example con- 
 stitute the most potent fact among the grandest that have 
 been achieved in the history of the world. 
 
 The union between the Father and Son was the positive 
 antithesis of a union produced by external forms, machinery, 
 or organization. It was absolute but not visible, a mutual 
 indwelling, a spiritual, not formal unity. This simple fact 
 must put us on our guard, when to this, that, or the other 
 organization men point and say that in such a society 
 is the union among believers which answers to the 
 Redeemer's prayer. The very uniformity provokes sus- 
 picion. The material completeness and conspicuous 
 visibility of the so-called unity show that it fundamentally 
 violates the analogy which clieered the dying soul of Jesus. 
 
 The unity for which He prayed could not be for a funda- 
 mental resemblance in self-manifestation; seeing that it 
 
OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. II 3 
 
 was to be as " 'Thou, Father, art m Me, and I in Thee,' I 
 pray that they may be one, ' even as We are one.' " The 
 manifestation of the Father differs from the manifestation of 
 the Christ. The infinite Father manifests Himself in all 
 the universe, in every thrill of force, in every star-glint and 
 every atom, in the orbits of planets and the fertilization of 
 mosses, in the pomp of worlds and the sound of many 
 waters ; but the manifestation of the God-Man is in man — 
 in the tears of penitents and in the consecration of saints, 
 in the enthusiasm and sometimes the clash of opposing 
 interests, in the chastisement and exhaustion of human 
 pride, in the agonies, strong crying, and tears of holy 
 sorrow, in beatitudes and submission, in the faith, courage, 
 and death of martyrs, in the visions and consciousness of 
 the Divine life. 
 
 The unity between the Father and the Son was a 
 mutual indwelling — " I in Thee, Thou in Me : " a union of 
 two correlates with each other. All the self-manifestation 
 of the Father culminated in the life of the Son of God. 
 Jesus Christ, "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," 
 pours a flood of light upon all the boundless government of 
 the Father, is the type and measure of the pulsations of the 
 heart of Eternal God. 
 
 Again, to our limited observation, the whole method of 
 the government of man by the law of God's natural opera- 
 tion takes no account of ignorance, temptation, or fear j it 
 chastises and punishes, and even destroys for the smallest 
 infraction of law, known or unknown. In the course of 
 long lives, in the career of nations and races, we see on 
 which side the Author of Nature stands in man's terrible 
 collision with Him. Only in the Incarnate Word do we 
 
 learn the law of pardon, regeneration, deliverance from sin, 
 
 1—6 
 
114 THE IDEAL AND STANDARD 
 
 and victory over the world. The cry of the sacrificial 
 Christ is, on behalf of His murderers, " Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do." In the cross of Christ 
 such a revelation is given of the mind of God, and the 
 future life, and of the ends of discipline and death, that the 
 dark side of nature is illumined by a new light. We 
 become reconciled to the Absolute and the Infinite, to the 
 actual supremacy of Divine order, on the one hand ; and, on 
 the other, we find that the heart of Jesus is sustained by 
 * all power that is in heaven and eartli." He who has taken 
 our nature into His own is in the Father and the Father 
 in Him, 
 
 "The voice that rolls the stars along 
 Speaks all the promises." 
 
 Consequently it was not in the method and form of the self- 
 manifestation of the Father and the Christ, but in the 
 essence of their mutual love, that we see the law of the 
 Divine unity. 
 
 The beloved apostle saw in the Lord Jesus when He 
 poured water into the basin to wash His disciples' feet, and 
 never more than then, that He had come out from God 
 and was going back to God, and that the Father had put 
 all things into His hands. The Father then was in Him 
 and He in the Father ; the union was certain and eternal, 
 and has never been broken. It is still absolutely perfect, 
 and is a union of essence, of power, of purpose, and of 
 infinite issues to man and to the universe. 
 
 Into this union, not of logical formulae, nor even of 
 modes of manifestation, nor external organization, nor 
 national or ecclesiastical government, the Lord prayed that 
 all that believed in Him should come. The so-called unity 
 of Christendom to be effected by mutual concessions touch- 
 
OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. II5 
 
 ing the eternal procession of the Spirit, by the terms of some 
 theological formula, by the recognition of this, that, or the 
 other bishop to the highest rank in some indivisible society, 
 even if achieved, might be at once characterized by civil 
 internecine war on other matters arising out of the per- 
 sistent individualities of men or the idiosyncrasies of 
 nations, and would be in itself, even if successfully per- 
 formed, a very small and faint adumbration of the real 
 union of the Divine life in the Father and Son. 
 
 The union of souls in the common participation of the 
 Divine love is the only perfect union that has ever been 
 achieved among men. This Divine life of the Father and 
 the Son is the same everywhere, in all ages, and in all 
 circumstances. It can transcend and does overleap the 
 barriers of language, of nation, and colour. The perse- 
 cutor and his victim, the lord and his vassal, the Catholic 
 and the Puritan, the stern iconoclast and the pious pilgrim, 
 whatever may have been his shibboleth, his password, or his 
 pride of birth or station, has felt in the common life of the 
 Spirit his oneness with the Father and the Son. When 
 Huss was on the way to the stake, and saw the enthusiastic 
 votary of the Catholic creed who was bringing a faggot to 
 add to the flame which was to consume him, he is reported 
 to have said, " O sancta simplicitas ! " Those two were at 
 that moment truly one in the love that was infinitely above 
 them both. The outcome of the Divine life in man, of the 
 supernatural and new relation to the Father by the Holy 
 Spirit, IS a veritable brotherhood. Whether this brotherly 
 relation is discovered or not, it is the fundamental reality. 
 It is always waiting for recognition, and transcends and 
 outlives all artificially constructed societies. 
 
 The identical results which follow the activity of grace 
 
Il6 IDEAL AND STANDARD OF CHRISTIAN UNITY. 
 
 in human hearts and Hves constitute the supreme manifesta- 
 tion of the undivided and indivisible body of the Christ. 
 These results convince the world that He, the Lord and 
 Head of men, the everlasting Son of the Father, has really 
 taken hold of and manifested Himself in the flesh. These 
 glorious Gesta Chrisil, and these alone, harmoniously sing 
 the chorus of thanksgiving to Him that sitteth on the throne, 
 and to the Lamb, for ever and ever. 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY 
 LOVE. 
 
 *'The greatest of these is love." — i Cor. xiii. 13. 
 
 Numerous attempts have been made to prove that, in sonic 
 of its aspects, ^^ love'' is greater than either "faith" or 
 " hope." Some, by narrowing the content of faith to its 
 lowest connotation, by reducing it to intellectual assent, by 
 depriving it of its closely associated graces, and by ridding 
 it of all part in its own glorious issues, have found it an 
 easy task to say that love is greater than faith. Ends are 
 greater than means to the end. The superstructure of a 
 building is nobler than the foundation. The fruit is more 
 than the seed, and so love is obviously greater than faith, as 
 being the end, the fruit, the outcome and upshot of a genuine 
 faith. Now, faith is a right royal gift of God. It is the 
 capacity for blessedness, it is the principle of union with 
 unseen realities, it is the hand which takes hold of the 
 strength of Almighty God. Faith gives validity to promise, 
 and is the only rational treatment that man can offer to 
 truth. What can we do with a truth of any kind except 
 beUeve in it? It is most certain that by faith we can 
 remove mountains of difficulty, we may overcome the world, 
 we may cast out the devil, and become vividly conscious 
 
120 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 of the things that are unseen and eternal. "Without faith 
 it is impossible to please God," and " to faith all things are 
 possible," and nothing impossible. Yet in this mighty 
 dithyramb of holy love, we are distinctly told that " now 
 abideth faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is 
 love." 
 
 Other writers, jealous for the consistency, if not the 
 orthodoxy, of the apostle, have justified this somewhat 
 paradoxical statement by referring to the perpetuity of 
 love, as compared with' the variableness of faith, and with 
 the temporary aspects and changing qualities of hope. 
 They have quoted St. Paul, when he contrasts the per- 
 sistence of love with the fleeting phases of prophecy, of 
 great gifts, and of human knowledge; and, contrary to his 
 own statement, have argued that faith will no longer be 
 needed when knowledge and vision have taken its place ; 
 that hope will be discarded as useless when we, who now 
 see in a glass darkly, turn round to behold God face to 
 face. ''What a man seeth why doth he yet hope for?" 
 Therefore, they argue, love, which is only enhanced by 
 vision, must be greater than faith or hope. 
 
 I cannot think that this is the explanation of St. Paul's 
 burning words, "The greatest of these is love." For if we 
 understand anything about the nature of " faith " or " hope," 
 we cannot conceive that they will ever cease to be practical 
 and mighty energies in our spirit-life. Higher faculties 
 than we now possess will but reveal fresh marvels, mysteries, 
 difiiculties, and problems to the faculty of faith. Hope, too, 
 will never be exhausted. Every fruition of previously 
 anticipated privilege will wing the flight of fresh expectation 
 and desire. The compass and depth of the Divine fulness 
 are immeasurable and infinite. Besides, the apostle dis- 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 121 
 
 tinctly declares, ''Now abideth faith, hope, love" — the first 
 and second, as well as the crowning grace, — " these three 
 {abide), but the greatest of these is love." 
 
 We may, however, take heart for the solution of this 
 paradox, by remembering that " love " is of the very nature 
 of God Himself, that love is His essence, that God is love, 
 and since only by the extravagance and crudity of anthro- 
 pomorphism could we attribute *' faith" or "hope" to God, 
 therefore it is that love is greater than faith, and that love is 
 greater than hope. Since faith and hope imply imperfection 
 of power and state, incompleteness of being, they cannot be 
 equated with the essential glory and greatness of the Divine 
 essence. Love is of God, and it is the peculiarity of this 
 manifestation of tlie eternal glory, that it demands response 
 of the same kind. We love because He first loved. In 
 the response of love to love, there is the consciousness of 
 our heavenly birth : we discover the Fatherhood ; there 
 dawns upon us the sublime and marvellous assurance that 
 we, too, have come from Him, and are returning to Him ; 
 that He is ours, and we are His. 
 
 There are some who solve the problem of the text by 
 comparing faith irT God with the love of man, to the fearful 
 disparagement of the former. But surely there is no true 
 love of man which does not spring from love of God, and 
 there is no love of God which is not rooted in faith ; so 
 that such hurtful comparison or antithesis between " faith " 
 and "love" vanishes into thin air. The comparison on 
 which the depreciatory judgment on faith turns is often 
 enhanced by taking faith as a mere verbal assent to orthodox 
 propositions, thus reducing it to its lowest terms, and 
 taking love in the amplitude of its response to God Himself 
 and then towards all the objects of the Divine love. This 
 
122 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 leads me to ask your examination of some of the powers 
 or functions of holy love. Love does wonders for faith and 
 hope, and also for knowledge and obedience, transforming 
 the lower forms of these graces into the higher and nobler 
 forms, in an ever-augmenting energy. The deepest, truest 
 love is never satisfied with less than love itself in return, 
 and a love which differs not in kind, though it may in 
 degree. Like the action of the physical heart, it is a 
 perpetual giving and receiving, a reception with no other 
 purpose than to give, a giving with an untiring confidence 
 of a continuous reception. Love is the blending of two 
 natures into one personality. The link between them is so 
 perfect, that each becomes one with the other. 
 
 The consequence of these well-known facts is such that, 
 when we speak of " holy love," or " the love of God," we 
 are conscious of what may be called a glorious ambiguity. 
 No logical or grammatical rule can decide apart from con- 
 text, whether we mean by " love of God " His love to us or 
 our love to Him, or mean by the " love of Christ " His love 
 to us or ours to Him. In the language of the New Testa- 
 ment, the love of God is a divine state, into which His 
 children are brought by the Holy Spirit, and in which there 
 is the fullest, sweetest interchange of holy affection, where 
 the strongest passion is enlisted on the side of the highest 
 principle, and in which the lovers of God love all that He 
 loves with a Divine self-forgetfulness. 
 
 It is more easy to write and speculate about " the love 
 of God," and the transformation it can effect in us and in 
 the world, than it is to cherish these sublime affections. 
 God is so august, so immeasurably great, so infinitely good 
 and holy, so far above the influences which disturb our 
 vision and distort our conceptions, that we often tremble at 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 1 23 
 
 our audacity in speaking of the love that prevails between 
 us. Some exposition, however, of the nature and power of 
 love may not be useless. The apparent revolution of a 
 planet round its primary is really explained to our thought 
 by the common revolution of both planet and primary 
 around their common centre of gravity. The earth and the 
 sun alike revolve around a point central to the two. That 
 point is far within the body of the sun. So of every other 
 body in the vast system of which the sun is the centre. 
 The sun as surely revolves round the smallest asteroid as 
 round the vast system of Saturn, and so it holds all these 
 common centres within the mighty embrace of its own 
 being. We obtain hence some notion, some faint illustra- 
 tion of the relation sustained towards Himself by every soul 
 that is born of God. There is a mutual gravitation, and a 
 genuine centre of revolution for God and every soul 
 smitten by the power of holy love. There is twofold 
 attraction, a twofold and mutual self-abandonment of the 
 one to the other. God is as surely and as fully drawn to 
 the soul as the soul is to Him. " Love " in this large sense 
 cannot be limited to one or the other of the subjects of this 
 twofold synthesis. God loves man, man loves God. God 
 is attracted to man, man draws nigh to God. Each loses 
 itself in the other. This state of soul is blessed beyond 
 words. Those who have become fully subject to it can 
 hardly be conscious of it, for it is deeper than conscious- 
 ness. It is heaven itself, where meditation upon personal 
 blessedness is left far behind and below, and the realization 
 of the Eternal Life takes its place. 
 
 We are a long way, here and now, from this perfect 
 accord ; for " in us, that is in our flesh, there dwelleth no 
 good thing." In the regenerate there is still the centrifugal 
 
124 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 passion, which is ever aiming at severance from the highest 
 love, and which would rush into the ghastly darkness of a 
 perfect independence of the Divine love. 
 
 Only once has *' the Word become flesh," and humanity 
 been utterly interpenetrated with the Divine light, and the 
 issue of this sublime conjunction was that even the flesh 
 of Christ put on immortality, was received up into glory, 
 and is set down on the right hand of the eternal Majesty. 
 Still it is possible for holy love to make continuous 
 advance to the fulness of communion with God. " We 
 have received of His fulness, and grace over against grace," 
 in every augmenting pulse of holy affection in all the sacred 
 interchanges of holy love. 
 
 This becomes manifest when we consider the several 
 relations which love sustains to obedience, knowledge, 
 FAITH, and HOPE. There are several wide and suggestive 
 utterances of Holy Scripture which appear contradictory 
 until we have discovered this fundamental law of holy 
 love. The most obvious contradiction in form is be- 
 tween certain statements of our Lord. Thus He says, 
 on the one hand, " If ye love Me, keep My command- 
 ments." In this exhortation, love to Christ is the mighty 
 energy that produces holy obedience. The loving eye is 
 quick to discern the wdll, the wish of the beloved. The 
 heart which truly loves cannot break one of the least of 
 these commandments. Even if the commandment seem 
 arbitrary, it is enough that He who is supremely loved has 
 said, " This do in remembrance of Me." That is enough. 
 Such motive is sufficient. It is simple, clear, and explicit. 
 The obedience wiiich is the witness, the pledge, the conse- 
 quence of love, and is neither formal nor perfunctory, but 
 the outcome of a self-sacrificing affection, is alone well. 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 12 5 
 
 pleasing. This idea pervades the language aUke of prophets 
 and apostles. Isaiah and St. Paul combine to repudiate 
 an obedience which springs from any lower motive. Here 
 we find a link which unites the Old Testament with the 
 New. Two great principles emerge as we contemplate it. 
 One is : (i) We must 7iot dignify by the name of love that 
 which is unwilling or unable to yield obedience to the 
 beloved, or which is not strong enough to overcome all our 
 carnal reluctance to do that which God commands. (2) We 
 dare not build anything upon an obedience which is not 
 the child and the consequence of a genuine love. But is 
 this all ? Certainly not. Our Lord says elsewhere, " He 
 that hath My commandm.ents and keepeth them, he it is 
 that loveth Me : and he that loveth Me shall be loved of 
 My Father, and I will love him ; " and again, " If ye keep 
 My commandments, ye shall abide in My love." 
 
 At first sight it would seem that ''obedience" is re- 
 garded in these words as the parent of love, not only the 
 pledge, but the occasion of mutual love, and of all the 
 Divine interchanges of sacred aff'ection ; in other words, iJiat 
 obedience and love had changed places I It might seem from 
 this exhortation that an authoritative command was jarring 
 with that gracious self-abandonment to which love calls. 
 But is not the solution of the apparent discord found in the 
 following underlying thought ? There is verily a love which 
 prompts to obedience, but this obedience, again, is the 
 stimulus and food, the provocative and the ground of a 
 still higher love, leading on to a sublimer response of 
 mutual affection. We begin by "loving little;" but if the 
 little love is strong enough to express itself by keeping the 
 commandments of love, the love grows by what expresses it : 
 and the higher love leads to a more complete obedience, and 
 
126 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 SO Oil for ever. The burning seraph loves, because he goes 
 and returns (on the Divine behests), ''as it were a flash of 
 lightning." Obedience is the libration of the wings of 
 love. Love flames into seraphic fire when fed with the oil 
 of obedience. 
 
 The powers of love reveal themselves in like manner in 
 their relation to knoivledge. Take the text, '' This is life 
 eternal, that they might know Thee the only veritable God, 
 and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." The knowledge 
 is life eternal. Not to know God is to abide in death and 
 darkness. We read elsewhere that life itself is the light of 
 men. " They that know Thy name will put their trust in 
 Thee," and " Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose 
 mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee." 
 All this is re-echoed from every part of Divine Revelation. 
 There is a knowledge, a full assurance, a divine intuition of 
 the living God, which is life eternal. The beatific vision is 
 but the perfection of the knowledge of God. It is the 
 complete satisfaction of our whole spiritual nature : we who 
 pant and yearn after reality, after eternal truth, can only 
 find it in the knowledge of God. 
 
 Yet there are many things said of knowledge^ per se, 
 which bafile us. Elsewhere we read that ^'•knowledge 
 puffeth up." St. Paul tells us in this chapter that we may 
 have the gifts of knowledge, may understand all mysteries, 
 may speak with the tongues of men and angels, may 
 prophesy with fine intuition of the truth, and yet be mere 
 clanging cymbals, or sounding brass. In order to meet 
 this apparent contradiction, we may remember that without 
 some knowledge, without mental realization of truth, we 
 can put truth to no use. Knowledge, acquaintance with 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 1 27 
 
 the idea of God, must, by the nature of the case, precede 
 credence and love. 
 
 K7iowIedge is a necessary preliminary to faith and its 
 attendant virtues. How can we believe that which is not 
 made known to us? At times, moreover, knowledge in its 
 deepest sense and most life-giving essence is shown to be 
 dependent on putting into practice, on doing that which we 
 know to be right, by not only '' hearing," but '' doing " the 
 sayings of Christ. At other times we are told that obedience, 
 a willingness to do the will of God, will open the eyes of the 
 understanding to appreciate, to kno7ci the doctrine, wliether 
 it be of God. At other times " knowledge " is boldly 
 contrasted with love. " Knowledge puffeth up," " Love 
 buildeth up ; " while knowledge without love is nothing 
 worth. So that knowledge is at one time represented as an 
 essential preliminary to both faith and obedience ; and, 
 again, at other times, knowledge is represented as even 
 dependent upon and actually conditionated by a heartfelt 
 obedience. 
 
 What we have already seen to be the value and place of 
 holy obedience may help us to resolve this seeming contra- 
 diction ; but we have more certain and satisfying light upon 
 this mystery in the profound utterance of St. John: "He 
 that loveth not, knoweth not God." This is true of other 
 objects, both of love and knowledge, as certainly as it is 
 true of the love and knowledge of the Lord God. We do 
 not know any thing, any person, any science, until we love 
 it. The " dry light " needed for scientific pursuit is the eye 
 unbleared by prejudice, unfilled with tears of foolish and 
 inappropriate emotion, not an eye which does not flash with 
 love. It is sometimes said that " Love is blind." Cupid 
 has been imaged with shaded eyes. No greater mistake 
 
128 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 can be made. Love has microscopic eyes to see both the 
 faults and excellences of the beloved object. What a world 
 this would be if mothers could see in all children the divine 
 attractions and worth which they do see in their firstborn ; 
 and if lovers could see in all persons the wonderful lovable- 
 ness they easily discern in one another ! It is only the 
 LOVER of truths, of persons, of countries, of great causes 
 and principles, who really and veritably knows them. He 
 that loveth not his country, does not know it. He that 
 loveth not Nature, does not know it. He that is not ready 
 to sacrifice his own pleasure to secure the triumph of a 
 great principle, does not know that principle. I do not 
 mean that he shows himself to be ignorant of it, seeing that, 
 if he knew it better, he would love it more ; but that the 
 love, the going out of self towards an object, is itself reve- 
 latory of the object. Consequently, and a fortiori^ he thai 
 loveth not God, knoiveth not God. Love is actually the 
 condition of the highest knowledge. If this be a law of 
 knowledge, then we see at once how easy it is to explain 
 the relations of knowledge and life, and of knowledge and 
 obedience, which puzzled us just now. 
 
 The difficulty is resolved thus : — There is a kind of 
 knowledge which is a necessary antecedent to any faith, 
 to any obedience, to any love; and yet such knowledge 
 may remain barren and useless for the higher life. We 
 may, as many do, know, and fall short of believing ; know, 
 and not obey ; know, and refuse to love. Such knowledge 
 may puff up its possessor and vaunt itself. It leads 
 nowhither, it is neither life nor peace. But there is 
 another knowledge, born of simple obedience and holy love, 
 and this knowledge is "life eternal." So we gather from 
 this meditation another of the powers of " holy love." It 
 
THE rOWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 1 29 
 
 transforms the incipient knowledge, the verbal assent to 
 propositions, into the invincible assent of full assurance. 
 The knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ 
 which is born of holy love, quickened and stimulated by the 
 microscopic eye of strong, reverent affection, is nothing 
 short of the beatific vision ; it is, as our Lord said, life 
 eternal. 
 
 In close relation, and by similarity of argument, we see 
 that other powers of holy love give great intensity to faith 
 and hope. 
 
 There are degrees oi faith, varying from simple credence, 
 admission of the truth of certain facts without passion or 
 any corresponding conduct, on to a certainty which tends 
 to high and appropriate emotions, to the full assurance 
 which appeals to and absorbs the whole nature. Faith 
 varies from the admission of a moderate probability to the 
 vision and revelation of the Lord. The degrees of fiith 
 differ, as a solitary grain of mustard-seed differs from the vast 
 forest-tree trembling at every point with the wealth and 
 glory of its developed life. What is the energy by which 
 faith passes from stage to stage ? Faith is energetic through 
 love. Divinely implanted love, spiritually inspired self- 
 surrender increases every faculty of knowledge, deepens 
 every impression made by truth, opens the eye which in- 
 difference or passion had blinded, purifies the gaze which 
 prejudice or evil bias had corrupted and obscured, and so 
 makes the trembling faith which can only cry, *' I believe, 
 help my unbelief," grow, burn, gleam with holy enthusiasm, 
 until it cries, "I know whom I have believed, and I am 
 persuaded." 
 
 There is faith which leads to love and is manifested in 
 
 K— 6 
 
I30 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 love, but there is the higher faith which is born of a perfect 
 trust, and which again in its turn blazes into the flame of 
 that holy confiding love which cries, " I am persuaded that 
 neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to 
 come, nor principalities, nor powers, 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." 
 
 In like manner there are degrees of ^^ hope." Who has 
 not experienced what he and others call Christian hope, 
 but which on close analysis is found to be little better 
 than a faint and feeble desire after better things, and a 
 desponding cry of the soul for what is just a grade better 
 than blank despair? This is not the hope that saves. 
 Contrast it with the full evidence of things hoped for, which 
 is imparted by living faith. Let desire be large, and 
 expectation strong ; let hope embrace all Divine promises, 
 and it becomes a vast capacity for blessedness, and often 
 bursts out in solitary places and on dark nights into songs 
 of rejoicing. Then is revealed what the apostles call 
 " patience," born of quiet waiting, with a smile upon its face, 
 reflecting all the lustre of the Divme manifestation. Tribula- 
 tion and sorrow are but the crucible in which this precious 
 quality and energy of soul is refined. " This hope maketh 
 not ashamed," and can never be disappointed, because it is 
 a veritable prelibation of its own object — it is the earnest 
 and foretaste of the purchased possession. We ask once 
 more, what leads the soul from hope to hope, from the 
 faint uplifting of the wearied weeping eye to the " hope full 
 of immortality " ? St. Paul gives us the answer: "Because 
 the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy 
 Spirit given to us." 
 
 In this answer, moreover, the apostle throws a flood of 
 
THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 131 
 
 light upon what he meant by ''the love of God," and 
 reminds us that he identified it, here and elsewhere, with 
 the whole of that supernatural and new life which is 
 produced in the spirit of man by the Holy Spirit of God. 
 " Regeneration," " a new creature," "consecration," " sancti- 
 fication," " resurrection and ascension with Christ " are 
 terms which in part adumbrate the full effect of the baptism 
 with the Holy Ghost, or the indwxlhng of the Holy Spirit 
 of God in the life of man. Consequently, what in one 
 place St. Paul calls the '•' fruits of the Spirit," elsewhere he 
 verbally enumerates as the powers of Holy Love. This 
 apparent inconsistency is resolved by perceiving the glorious 
 fact that the Holy Spirit brings the soul into genuine, 
 veritable relations of love to God, and into the spiritual 
 consciousness of the love of God. Thus it is that incipient 
 knowledge, quickened by love, becomes the knowledge 
 born of love, which is life eternal ; that faith which trembles 
 on the verge of extinction becomes a faith active through 
 love to remove mountains ; that hope becomes the anchor 
 of the soul, sure and steadfast ; and that obedience becomes 
 an absolute submission, a self-abandonment, and a beatific 
 vision. 
 
 Just as the relations of the soul with God are deepened 
 and enriched by holy love, thus fully justifying the high 
 eulogiums of the apostle, so all our relations with our 
 fellow-men are heightened and sanctified by the love which, 
 at the cross of Christ, we have learned to cherish towards 
 them. 
 
 We must know something of men before we love them, 
 but when the souls of men become precious to us in the 
 light of heavenly love, then we begin to know them and 
 their worth, to estimate them at the price set upon them by 
 
132 THE POWERS OF HOLY LOVE. 
 
 their Redeemer ; finally, as the outcome of such knowledge, 
 the love breaks forth afresh and never faileth. In like 
 manner, our hope for the future of our race will, on the basis 
 of God's love, lead to zealous and stimulating effort for the 
 amelioration of the race ; and such a love reveals the awful 
 and glorious facts of the redemption of the soul and of the 
 race. When love has educated our hope it becomes in- 
 vincible, it towers over the harsh and cold judgments of 
 the world, it anticipates the ultimate victory. 
 
 The powers of this holy love turn faith into vision, hope 
 into rapture, effort into triumph, and earth into heaven. 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF 
 BLESSING. 
 
4 
 
 Preached on May 28, 1 891, in the Chesliimt College Chapel^ at the 
 ordination of two stiidoits appointed to viissionary service, the one 
 in Mongolia, the other in Madagascar, 
 
 i 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF 
 BLESSING. 
 
 "Great is thy faith : be it done unto thee even as thou wilt," — St. 
 Matt. xv. 28. 
 
 While faith occupies a most conspicuous place in the New 
 Testament, as the instrument by which men become united 
 to God, and are prepared and quahfied to receive the light 
 and peace of the gospel, we must be upon our guard against 
 drawing too much conclusion from the analogical lessons of 
 our Lord's miracles. The method of Divine mercy varies in 
 each case. When Christ called Matthew from the receipt 
 of custom, the imperative summons was immediately 
 obeyed. When our Lord, in the royalty of His love, spake 
 to the dull, cold ear of death, there is no hint that the 
 child of the centurion, or that the widow's son, or that the 
 spirit of Lazarus was stirred into faith by the person or 
 claims of Jesus. In these and other instances, Christ 
 declared Himself independent of any human condition 
 whatever on the part of the recipient, yet, in a multitude of 
 other cases, He did regard faith, moral surrender to His 
 will, profound recognition of His claims as the channel of 
 His noblest gifts, and as the measure of the kind and degree 
 
136 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 of blessing which He was able to impart. " Believe ye that 
 I am able to do this ? " is the question he put to the blind 
 men of Bethsaida. *' If thou canst do anything," is the 
 language of the father of the epileptic child. In our Lord's 
 reply, He seemed to reproach the half-faith which made 
 so feeble a draft upon the almightiness of God, and cried, 
 " If thou canst believe, ... all things are possible." He 
 could not do many mighty works, because of the unbelief 
 of His own people. 
 
 Here the Lord makes the faith of a heathen woman 
 the measure of the blessing she might draw forth from His 
 Divine power. Faith in the nature and promises of God's 
 greatest self-manifestation appears the normal method for 
 the bestowment of Divine blessing. Faith on sufficient 
 evidence, moral acquiescence in tlie character and claims of 
 the living Christ, is the prime condition of life itself. Faith 
 is the capacity for blessedness and the condition of power. 
 It is the eye by which we see supernal beauty, the hand 
 with which we grasp exhaustless treasure, the ear into Avhich 
 falls the melody and harmony of truth, the faculty for tasting 
 the sweetness of the Divine mercy, of acquiescing in the 
 mastery and supremacy of the Divine will, and the power 
 by which we take hold of God and abandon self to the ends 
 of the kingdom of God. 
 
 Now, I have chosen the words of my text, as graciously 
 uttered by the Lord Himself to you and other young servants 
 of Christ on the eve of departure to the work of foreign 
 missions. There are many analogies between your yearn- 
 ings and passionate pleading and those of the Syrophe- 
 nician woman. The narratives contained in the Gospels of 
 Matthew and Mark describe the approach of the blessed 
 Lord to the confines of the heathen world. He seems to 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 1 37 
 
 have gone into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon to prove to 
 His disciples that His gospel broke through the narrow 
 boundaries within which both Pharisees and Sadducees 
 would confine any Messianic privileges. He had no sooner 
 come into the borders of heathendom, than some presented 
 themselves who had apparently a vague knowledge of His 
 claims and powers, and who began to draw at once upon His 
 resources. A mother's heart pleaded wildly, importunately 
 for her child that was grievously vexed with a devil. The 
 disciples were impatient. " Send her away," said they, 
 " for she crieth after us." For a moment, Christ seemed 
 as if He were deaf to her importunity, and were yielding 
 to the Pharisaic prejudices of His own disciples: *'He 
 ^ answered never a word." Again came the moan, " O 
 Lord, Thou Son of David, have mercy." Then, as though 
 He would express and so condemn the Judaic withholding 
 of grace from heathendom, and as if He would expose the 
 pride which was ready to burst from the lips of His 
 disciples, He said, '' I was not sent but unto the lost sheep 
 of the house of Israel." Thus He put the mother's heart 
 to a still severer strain, and she fell at His feet and 
 worshipped Him, saying, " Lord, help me." Then once 
 again reiterating in stronger language the universal feeling 
 of the Pharisees and Sadducees, He said, '•' It is not meet 
 to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs." One's 
 heart quails to hear from the lips of the Saviour these 
 terrible repulses of the heathen woman's plea. Her perti- 
 nacity and enthusiasm see through the apparent harshness 
 of His words ; she must have perceived some deeper reason 
 for them, and some meaning of His apparently haughty- 
 rejoinder, as she crouched before Him, and cried again, 
 " True, Lord, let the children have their bread ; but 
 
138 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the 
 master's table." The loving heart of Jesus was awaiting 
 that final intercession. He drew it from her broken spirit, 
 and the grand, abundant, lavish gift was dispensed with 
 royal largess, *' Great is thy faith : be it done unto thee 
 even as thou wilt." 
 
 Much depends upon the voice which utters such 
 approval and promise, whether it be that of the world, or 
 the Church, or of the Lord Himself; but let us think for 
 a moment of the analogies between you and this impor- 
 tunate intercessor. Do you not take upon your heart and 
 upon your lips the necessitous cry of the world that is 
 sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death ? Notwith- 
 standing all the wondrous leading of Providence, all the 
 light that lighteneth every man, and all the striving of the 
 Holy Ghost, and though there is much that is good and 
 true in some of the systems of heathen thought, do you not 
 feel that the object of your self-annihilating love, that this 
 heathen world, is '' grievously vexed with the devil " ? Have 
 you not identified yourself with the suffering and ignorance, 
 the madness of a lost soul, so as to plead concerning it, 
 " Have mercy upon me " ? Do not the scorn and prejudice, 
 the spirit of aristocratic monopoly falling from the lips of 
 modern Pharisee and Sadducee, verily burn into your soul 
 when they seem to your troubled heart to be sanctioned 
 by the coldness of the Church and the silence of the Lord ? 
 Do not the methods which He uses to test your courage 
 and to rebuke His half-hearted disciples pierce you to the 
 quick ? And when the voice comes which apparently 
 implies that the Bread of Life, the gospel of Divine love, 
 is only meant for EngUsh folk, and that Fetichism is good 
 enough for New Guinea, and Confucius all-sufticient for 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 1 39 
 
 China,— that it is not meet to take the children's bread and 
 cast it to the dogs, — are you not smitten to your knees ? 
 But, my brethren, you are not repulsed even by that sup- 
 position, for you know that there is bread enough and to 
 spare ; that even the crumbs from the Master's table may, 
 in the Master's hands, be multiplied so as to fill all mouths, 
 and satisfy all needs. You know that there is "enough 
 for each, for all, for evermore " at the table of the Lord, and 
 you boldly face the facts and the apparent impossibilities 
 that even grace should ever overtake these millions of 
 starving men. At length the Lord, who knows all that 
 you feel, lets fall upon your yearning heart the words, 
 " Great is thy faith ; be it done unto thee even as thou wilt." 
 Yet, before I ask you to accept this lifegiving assurance 
 that your faith is the measure and the prophecy, and even 
 the channel of Divine benediction, I must remind you 
 that THE WORLD tells you, with cynical and ironical com- 
 pliment, that yom faith is indeed "great." You hear the 
 tones of its scornful laughter rippling through the popular 
 journals, " Great is thy faith ! " What is meant, however, 
 by the world's ironical compliment is little more than a 
 heartless reproach, for, in other words, it declares that you 
 have yielded to some spasm of ' excited feeling, that you 
 have been stirred by some imperfect apprehension of your 
 task, that you are going to take part in a solemn farce, 
 that you are going on a fool's errand. Your faith has run 
 away with your prudence, your glowing motives transcend 
 your reason. " Great " indeed is your faith if you imagine 
 that you can sap the giant upas-tree of caste in India, or 
 grapple with the ancient superstitions of Feng-shui in China, 
 or present a doctrine which will be more acceptable to 
 Mandarins than the ethics or history or minstrelsy of their 
 
140 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 sacred books. " ' Great,' " says the jesting world, '' ' is your 
 faith ' if you think that you can prove that ' the Light of 
 the world ' shines more brilliantly than * the light of Asia.' 
 ' Great is your faith ' if you believe that with your schools 
 or with the veneer of Western civilization drawn over the 
 untamed passions of the Malagasy, or the Papuan, you will 
 ultimately transform them into Christian people. Atheism, 
 Pantheism, and Fetichism, idolatry and caste, opium and 
 alcohol, slavery and lust will be too mighty for you. * Great 
 is your faith ' ! " Meanwhile, you, brethren, bear up bravely 
 under this avalanche of reproach, and you are confident 
 that a faith which scattered the Olympian gods from their 
 high places in Europe, which has abolished the most loath- 
 some and cruel barbarism by the magic of its revelations, 
 which has secured its trophies in every field of exertion, 
 and over every kind of man, may, even in your hands, do 
 wonders yet again. You have each taken upon your heart 
 the burden of a world, you have agonized over its sorrows 
 and have identified yourselves with the sufferers, and you 
 confidently appeal to the Lord for mercy. I hear you 
 murmuring day and night in your prayers to God, '' Lord, 
 help me ; Lord, help me ! This heathen world, for which 
 I am willing to give my life, is grievously vexed and ready 
 to die." 
 
 But the Church itself— English society, indeed, in its 
 multiform aspects and activities — often smiles its approval 
 at the enthusiasm which is burning up your self-will and 
 consecrating your life. The approval does not always 
 amount to sympathy. The Church at home, though it has 
 supplied the sinews of war, and a machinery which positively 
 is on a large scale, utterly fails as yet to appreciate the 
 magnitude of the task before it. When, like the woman 
 
J^MTfl THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. I41 
 
 of our narrative, the missionary's eager cry falls on the car 
 of the disciples, we hear some sensible and devout persons 
 echo the cold rejoinder, " ' Send her away, for she crieth 
 after ns.' We have too much to do at home to attend 
 to this importunate appeal." Even the Church misappre- 
 hends the test to which the Lord submits it, when He seems, 
 for our rebuke, to let us have our selfish way, and suppose 
 that we are the only sheep of His pasture, that we must 
 have our privileges, our attractive services, our powerful 
 preachers, our sacred music, our treats and comforts, the 
 banquet in the Father's house, let the slaves and the dogs, 
 the lepers and the pariahs of the world, the fanatical Hindu, 
 the self-satisfied Moslem fare as they may. When the 
 Lord, to our confusion, sends us a plentiful feast, but sends 
 leanness into our souls, missionaries are fain, nay, are 
 compelled to plead for the crumbs, the fragments, the 
 broken pieces for the dying world, which is still grievously 
 vexed by the devil and all his angels. But, my beloved 
 young friends, take no rebuff. Plead on with God and with 
 men. Be true princes with God in the strife, and overcome 
 Omnipotence with your cry. Let us, under the glances of 
 our Lord's criticizing love, see what the rich man's table is. 
 How it groans with delicacies, and is garnished with all 
 kinds of savoury viands ! how often the voice is heard, 
 "The oxen and fatlings are ready, the corn and wine and 
 oil are served, all things are ready ! " At length, after 
 many delays and excuses, the banquet is furnished with 
 guests ; the song and enthusiasm rise high. Te Dciims 
 and Magnificats are chanted in joyful chorus ; waste of 
 strong emotion occurs, and fruitless shouts of triumph 
 simply end in desire for another banquet, as rich in 
 provision^ and as finely seasoned with minstrelsy. On such 
 
142 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 occasions you say to one another, " Oh for the crumbs 
 which fall from the rich man's table ! " What would the 
 heathen world not give for service which, however faithful 
 and spiritual, is not seasoned up to the fastidiousness of 
 modern English taste ? If heathendom were at liberty to 
 feed on the fragments that remain over and above when all 
 the invited guests are satisfied, there would be enough and 
 to spare. So, my dear young brethren, pause not in your 
 pleading for help, and call upon the Lord. Give Him no 
 peace until He arise and have mercy, and then most 
 assuredly the voice will come from His excellent glory — 
 " Young men, great is your faith ; be it done unto you even 
 as you will." 
 
 When St. Peter in the direst extremity cried aloud, 
 "Lord, save vie!'^ he was thinking only of his own life ; 
 and the Lord's answer was, " O thou of little faith, where- 
 fore didst thou doubt?" but when the Syrophenician 
 woman had lost herself in the safety of her child, and, 
 against all temptation to distrust, and even to hopelessness, 
 had not yet despaired of the love or power of the Son^of 
 man. He read the depths of that riven heart, and said, 
 "O woman, great is thy faith!" Thus the faith of an 
 apostle in those days may have been less than the faith of 
 a youth in these days who, looking the black darkness 
 of devil-ridden masses in the face, is persuaded that Christ 
 is able and willing " to save to the uttermost all that come 
 unto God by Him." But let us observe that a ^^ little 
 faith " may grow to more, may perceive in the very silence 
 and reserve, and even in the repulses of the blessed Lord, 
 new phases of His nature, and may cherish fresh love to 
 His person, and so the ground of confidence in Him may 
 increase, until it becomes ^'- ^reat^ Faith neither seeks nor 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 143 
 
 finds a demonstration that the mind cannot resist. It may 
 be so when He comes in the clouds and every eye shall 
 see Him ; but as yet a veil is round about His throne. 
 You do not pretend to have received an absolute or final 
 revelation, but such is your confidence in that which you 
 have received, that the Lord responds to your self-conse- 
 cration, ''Great is your faith." 
 
 Knov/ledge, love, faith, prayer, service, — what strange 
 powers they possess ! They are linked with each other as 
 heat, motion, electricity, light are related to each other, 
 and they have a tendency to produce one another. There 
 must be some initial knowledge to believe and to love ; but 
 just in proportion to the simplicity of your faith and the 
 reality of your love is your knowledge deepened. When 
 this higher knowledge breaks upon you, then your faith 
 becomes a full assurance, an invincible and real assent; then 
 love burns more fervently and flashes a higher enthusiasm 
 for holy service, and demands self-abandonment. If faith 
 be great and strong, it becomes ■sc prophecy^ a seeing of the 
 invisible, a knowledge of what the will of the Lord is. 
 Your hand takes hold of the Lord's hand ; His strength is 
 made perfect in your weakness. The expression of your 
 faith is twofold. It takes the form of prayer and service, 
 of intercourse with God and consecrated life. The highest 
 conception of prayer is revealed to us in the intercession of 
 Jesus. Some have told us that the prayers of Jesus are a 
 positive disproof of the idea of the God-Man. How, say 
 they, should God in Christ pray to God? My brethren, it 
 seems to me that only in the God-Man, in the incarnation 
 of eternal wisdom and power and love in Jesus, can the 
 function of prayer be fully exercised, and only here do we 
 see its true ideal realized. Only He could say, '' I know 
 
144 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 that Thou hearest Me always." His perfect harmony with 
 the will of God rendered His prayer a prediction of what 
 would be. His desires, for ever weaving themselves into 
 supplications, or rather communings with the central and 
 supreme Power of the universe, became the programme of 
 Providence and the outline of the future. Further, it is 
 just in proportion as your own hearts and minds rise up 
 into the heart and will of your Lord, that jw/r importunate 
 prayer also becomes a prophecy of God's ways, an anticipa- 
 tion of what He will do. You are let into the secret of His 
 heart ; you know that the answer of love is near, and that 
 the Lord Jesus will triumph. There is no apparent limit to 
 His grace. Ask what you will, and it shall be given ; seek 
 what you intensely desire, since He gave you the desire, 
 and you shall find. Press Him hard with what faith tells 
 you is veritably in harmony with His will, and you will have 
 the answ^er of peace. Certainly, if God hears the prayer of 
 man at all, either the wishes of man prevail over the decrees 
 of God, or the desires of man must have been purified and 
 lifted up into the purposes of the Eternal. But this is not 
 the whole of the mystery and miracle of prayer. The 
 prayers, the desires, of men are part at least of the ways in 
 which these purposes of God are effectuated. God would 
 seem to have declared Himself incapable of feeding one of 
 His creatures by bread only. He must give desire or hunger 
 as well as food. He must give not only the wondrously 
 constructed atmosphere, but the power to breathe it. There 
 is no calculation of the extent to which the yearning of any 
 one of us may not bring down blessings upon ourselves and 
 upon one another. Unutterably close, but for the most 
 part unconscious, is the interwining of human" destinies. 
 Pray, then, without ceasing, and your prayer may be not 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. I45 
 
 only the sign of your having entered into the heart of 
 God, but the very channel by which the prayer will be 
 answered. Your faith is great. Be it unto you according 
 as you will. 
 
 Count upon great things; go to heathen lands with 
 large desires that the evil may be exorcised. Count upon 
 much blessing for these lands that need so much grace, 
 for these souls that are bound and manacled, not with 
 feeble threads, but with fetters of iron. If your faith is 
 great, your cry will be importunate and triumphant, and 
 your life will correspond with your faith. 
 
 You may ask me. What faith are you suggesting ? Is it 
 simply faith in a Divine call to this work, and a persuasion 
 that God is good, infinitely better than we are, to these 
 heathen peoples? To my mind it is more than this. I 
 admit that no great thing has often (perhaps ever) been 
 done in this world, save by those who were^ and who felt 
 that they were, predestiiied by God to serve Him along 
 certain revealed lines. Think of Abraham and Moses, 
 David and St. Paul, St. Athanasius and St. Augustine, Luther 
 and Columbus, Cromwell and Livingstone. These men 
 believed that God had destined them for their special 
 services ; but the faith of which these and many other 
 narratives speak is a faith about and in God. It is a 
 saturation of mind with, and submission of the whole will 
 to, a great revelation of the righteousness and mercy of 
 God proclaimed in the atoning work, in the Divine majesty 
 and claims of Jesus Christ, and in the healing power of 
 the Spirit of the Lord Jesus. 
 
 Faith is often charged with being credulity of under- 
 standing, acceptance of statements from teachers without 
 sufficient evidence or reason. The charge ignores the fact 
 
 L— 6 
 
t46 FAItH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 that we possess a religious nature and sensibility which sees 
 the invisible, and which gives invincible assurance ; and 
 that the highest truths and realities thus cognized are more 
 certain to those who apprehend them than any conclusions 
 drawn from sensible phenomena or one-sided logic. Faith 
 is often confounded with vain religiosity, as though the 
 /acfs presented to the moral and religious faculties were not 
 as 'reliable as those which are offered to the senses of men 
 and generalized by the experts of science. Those thinkers 
 and workers will rule the future who stand closest to al/ the 
 facts ; certainly, not those who ignore the chief facts 
 revealed to our religious nature, and facts, moreover, which 
 are the key of knowledge to all the facts and mysteries of 
 the universe. 
 
 Faith is not compatible with the self-sufficient repudia- 
 tion of the voice that has come to you from the excellent 
 glory, nor is it a blind passion to diffuse some speculation 
 of your own; neither is it a vague belief that it will be all 
 right, or all the same with everybody. If you have no 
 steadfast conviction, no real message, no abiding objective 
 fact which stirs, goads, forces you from within to obey its 
 behests, it is not too late to renounce the enterprise. Great 
 faith in ample and sufficient power to meet every kind of 
 sickness and peril of our humanity will secure the Divine 
 response, and this it is which we covet, for you and for 
 ourselves, *' Be it unto you according as you will." My 
 brethren, what is it that you will for the heathen world? 
 Is it simply the blessing of Western civilization, the intro- 
 duction of a higher education, the uprising of a noble dis- 
 content, the careful formulation of a logical creed, the 
 founding of new institutions? Verily, all these things arc 
 good as means to an end ; but nothing short ot that end 
 
FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 1 47 
 
 can satisfy you, and the end itself is what you have so far 
 entered into the heart of Jesus as to crave, and into the 
 purpose and work of the Christ as to desire beyond all 
 other things. 
 
 Now, no such prayer as this is rational without corre- 
 sponding eftbrt^ and such conduct and consecration of life 
 as may conduce to the sublime end of all this soul-hunger. 
 A self-indulgent life would vitiate the prayer for help. Self- 
 consideration, collision with God, rebellion against His 
 providence or against the disappointments of your service, 
 or any weariness or resentment at the apparent silence of 
 God our Lord, will eat out the spirit and power of prayer. 
 There does come at times over the spirit of every missionary 
 a feeling of hopelessness, as though he had attempted more 
 than was rational or even possible ; but do not exaggerate 
 this sentiment, because, here at home, and indeed in all 
 departments of service, we are attempting absolute impossi- 
 bihties unless we know how to make use of Divine power. 
 What can the electrician or engineer, the astronomer or the 
 navigator accomplish, until he finds out the use of the 
 inexhaustible energies of Nature, or rather of the Author 
 of Nature? What can the Christian do, in facing the 
 tremendous mysteries of life and death, but find out how to 
 appropriate infinite power, righteousness, and love? We 
 here, you there, are attempting impossibilities to the mere 
 wisdom or power of man : but the truths you have to speak 
 are seeds ; the seed of the great Harvest is the Word of 
 God. The light of the Sun of Righteousness is shining in 
 the darkest lands. The head waters of the river of life are 
 ready to diffuse themselves. Think well what it is, then, that 
 you " will " for heathendom, and it shall be done. While 
 you go forth on this great enterprise, many will follow you 
 
148 FAITH THE MEASURE OF BLESSING. 
 
 with their prayers, and, " like a fountain, day and night," 
 will rise the cry of fellow-feeling, of deepest sympathy, and 
 continual intercession for you to the heart of Jesus, to the 
 throne of God. 
 
THE FULNESS OF THE 
 BLESSING OF THE CHRIST. 
 
Preached on June 3, 1891, <?/ Robert soti Street Chapel^ Hastings, at the 
 ordination of a missionary appointed for service in A^eiv Guinea. 
 
THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 OF THE CIH<IST. 
 
 " When I come unto you, I shall come in the fulnc^is of the blessing 
 of the Christ."— RcM. xv. 29. 
 
 A MIST hangs over the future of our earthly life, as laipene- 
 trable as that which conceals the invisible world. The 
 possibilities, perils, temptations, and tasks of the future, the 
 collapse of our brightest anticipations, the development of 
 unknown powers now slumbering within us, the utter 
 change of our surroundings, the possible assaults upon our 
 character, the cruelty of the world, the triumphs of grace, 
 may lead us through greater mysteries than the valley of 
 the shadow of death itself. The petulant coward who 
 takes his own life confesses that it is easier to face the 
 invisible and eternal world than to encounter the reproach of 
 men or the difficulties of circumstance. The martyr can 
 rush to the stake rather than condescend to tamper with 
 conscience or be treacherous to truth, and he confesses 
 that the mystery of human life on earth is as great as the 
 mystery of eternity. 
 
 Every man who has an unknown enterprise before him 
 
152 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 
 observes, it is true, a line of light borrowed from his own or 
 his brother's scant experience which indicates the probable 
 form of his earthly future, but as to the perplexing and all- 
 important details of time and season, of success or failure, 
 of bereavement or privation, he knows nothing, he sees 
 through a glass darkly. The young missionary who forms 
 only the faintest image of the principalities and powers that 
 will confront him^ who anticipates poignantly the peril 
 arising from the hypocrisy or insensibility of the heathen, 
 the agony which creeps over him from the ennui and 
 isolation of his own heart or the gigantic work he is 
 attempting, may rationally feel that he has undertaken a 
 responsibility utterly beyond his own strength. My young 
 brother, unless you are sent forth by Christ Himself, the 
 difficulties which encumber and encompass you will be too 
 great for you. You need the sense of alliance with super- 
 natural order and of Divine commission, and you must be 
 as sure as St. Paul was of your moral union with Christ, 
 you must be certified that nothing can separate you from 
 the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. You must be 
 sure of yourself to this extent, that, whatever happens to 
 you, Christ is the same, and your moral relation to Him 
 cannot be essentially modified in any conceivable circum- 
 stance that may arise, either in this world or the next 
 world. St. Paul ultimately reached Rome in a different 
 phght from that which he anticipated when he wrote these 
 exhilarating words, nevertheless they were a true description 
 of the mood, the courage, the hopefulness, the faitli, the 
 vision with which he faced the Roman courts, the Pr?etorian 
 guards, the unbelieving Jews, the Christian believers of the 
 imperial city. Bonds and imprisonment awaited him, but 
 " in the fulness of the blessing of the Christ " he knew how 
 
OF THE CFIRIST. 153 
 
 to be abased. Contradiction and blaspheming confronted 
 him, but in the power of that fdness of blessing he learned 
 in whatever state he was, therewith to be content. Dark 
 hours rolled over him, but the fulness of the blessing turned 
 the shadow of death into the morning. Unbelief, ignorance, 
 idolatry and lies, unutterable sins and the memory of his 
 own rebellion against the supreme love harrowed his tender 
 heart, but it was his earnest expectation and burning 
 desire that Christ might be magnified either in his Hfe or 
 byliis death. The fulness of the blessing encompassed 
 him like a cloud of glory. When he was weak, then he 
 was strong ; he found in it consolation in distress and 
 strength for duty. Let us take the same motto as our 
 breastplate and our helmet, our shield and sw^ord, and thus 
 equip ourselves for every great and solemn undertaking, 
 however mysterious it may be. 
 
 There are other and rival principles of service. Many 
 of these are fairly excellent in their way, and need not be 
 discounted as valueless; but, my young brother, they are 
 not adequate to your requirements, (i) Thus the fulness 
 of the blessings of Westerfi civilizatiofi is not to be under- 
 rated. Roads and houses, ships and weapons, tools and 
 books, legitimate trade and applied science are admirable ; 
 but you have something more precious than all these. 
 Music and medicine and magic lanterns may arrest atten- 
 tion, but nothing short of the blessing of the Christ will be 
 the panoply in which you move, and the treasure you have 
 to convey. Again : (2) the fulness of the blessing of a 
 sound and liberal education is ennobling and uplifting. 
 You must and will endeavour to quicken all the mental 
 faculties of the heathen among whom you live, and wall 
 put every healthful thought into the minds of the young 
 
154 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 
 generation that is rising around you. But you go in the 
 full determination to lead them into the highest wisdom 
 needed by sage and child, by Greek and Barbarian, bond 
 and free ; you would make them wise unto salvation, or 
 you fail altogether. Again : (3) you might go in the fulness 
 of the blessing of an ortliodox creed ; and few are less 
 ready than I to undervalue the vast importance of a sound 
 and rational construction of Christian belief. A thinker 
 who has no theological principles, and no settled con- 
 victions which link him with the great brotherhood of 
 believers, — who has no tidings, no message to deliver which 
 he holds to be true and trustworthy, — is exposed to con- 
 fusion at the blast of the hostile wind of controversy or 
 doctrine. But you are in dire need of what is incalculably 
 more precious still, viz. the fulness of the blessing of the 
 living Christ. (4) You might go in the fulness of the blessing 
 of an ordination granted to you by Episcopal hands, linking 
 you by some artificial mechanism with the historic Churches 
 of England or Rome. I am far from denying that some 
 men may find this to be a comfort, an inspiration, and 
 a strength to them. They may assert, and the heathen may 
 believe, that they, in virtue of this, can work invisible and 
 impalpable miracles upon the bodies and souls of men. 
 But j^/<; need that which is indefinitely greater than this ; 
 you, if you go, must do so in the fulness of the blessing of the 
 ever-living and Divine Christ Himself. Without the realiza- 
 tion of that supreme benediction, which is more real than any 
 other fact in your experience, not only you, but they also, 
 will utterly fail of the end at which you both aim. (5) Some, 
 again, go forth in what they regard as the fulness of the 
 blessing of some critical methods, or of certain scientific 
 dogmas, which happen to be in vogue to-day, but which 
 
OF THE CHRIST. I 55 
 
 will be strangely modified to-morrow, which need a power 
 of criticism yet before they are verified, and ^often lead 
 honest men into perilous confusion before they are aware. 
 Weapons of distinction and precision are very well in their 
 way, but they recoil on those Avho use them carelessly or 
 ignorantly. The knowledge of them ofttimes puffeth up, 
 and recklessly destroys that which should be tenderly 
 protected from injury. You cannot do without the fulness 
 of a blessing which, being already verified in your own 
 experience, is above all suspicion and proof against all 
 criticism, one which you invincibly hold, as a reality more 
 certain than any dogma, however it is bepraised or trusted. 
 (6) Some missionaries may enter on their work in the 
 fulness of the blessing of a vigorous philanthropy, of a 
 doctrine of ascetic self-sacrifice, of a manly determination 
 to live a good life before men, doing justly and loving 
 mercy, setting forth an example of fortitude and charity, 
 purity and justice. Nor do I assert that such purposes are 
 vain or fruitless. Beautiful buildings may be raised upon 
 sand, or constructed upon ice ; but rain and wind and 
 even sunshine will level them to the ground. Principles 
 like these need a deep foundation or a living root. Graces 
 of character which have no spiritual source resemble 
 artificial flowers surreptitiously threaded to a barren or 
 dead tree. You crave some stronger principle, some surer 
 benediction, and you will not find this except in the real 
 presence of Him who is the life-giving source of all holi- 
 ness, and in the constraining energy of a love to Him who 
 is the Life and Light of the world, " Jesus Christ, the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever." 
 
 All these rival principles have value if they be the out- 
 come and offshoot of the Divine life, but by themselves 
 
156 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 
 they have failed. They are of the earth, of time, of sense, 
 and belong to the world that is passing away ; they belong 
 to a lower sphere of life and activity ; they cannot soar 
 above the low level of self-created energy; they all fall 
 short of " the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our 
 Lord," short of the "light of the knowledge of the glory of 
 God in the face of Jesus Christ ; " far behind " the fulness of 
 the blessing of the Christ." 
 
 I wish, then, to (Jwell for a few moments on that blessings 
 and then on i\\Q fulness of it. 
 
 The blessing of ike Christ f what is it but a realization 
 within yourself of that which is essential to Him— the 
 benediction which comes from being in Christ, and 
 having Christ in you^ of being saturated with the thought 
 and charged with the Word and filled with the Spirit of 
 Christ ? Tills blessing will be your power for good, your 
 panacea for all evil, your energy and enthusiasm, your 
 courage and joy in danger, your reason for every great enter- 
 prise and even for the smallest duty, your patience in dis- 
 appointment, your endurance unto the end, your watchword 
 at the gate of death, your welcome into the Fathers 
 house. Is it possible to overstate "the blessing of the 
 Christ " ? Doubtless it has many aspects. Every phase of 
 the blessing, like the separate colours of the spectrum, is 
 of immeasurable value; but to know how transcendent 
 this blessing is, it may be well to glance at some of these 
 aspects. 
 
 Thus (i) He is the ideal of your manhood. He is 
 your greatest man. He surpasses in moral sublimity, and 
 in the blending of many and often opposed qualities, all 
 that we ever have heard or conceived of humanity at its 
 very best. Combine the excellences of the highest men, 
 
OF THE CHRIST. I 57 
 
 who all suffer from some drawback, deficiency, or fault ; 
 let Moses and Confucius, Solomon and Socrates, St. Paul 
 and Buddha, Augustine and Fene'lon, Luther and Mohammed 
 pass in review before Him, and their lustre pales and 
 vanishes in the light of the Sun of Righteousness. You 
 have a goal of perfection in His character which no 
 evolution will ever transcend or equal. It will be a 
 l^erpetual inspiration to you ; and whether you are confront- 
 ing the ideals of Greek and Barbarian, of Oriental sage, or 
 European philosopher. He will always be far beyond and 
 above them, and yet, within certain specific exceptions, He 
 will be more available as an example, more imitable as a 
 leader and master, than they all. We have become almost 
 too familiar with the memorials of our Lord's character. 
 We pastors and teachers at home almost covet the grand 
 chance you have of making known such a manhood, such 
 a miracle of majesty and mercy, of authority and sympathy, 
 of spotless rectitude and passionate pity, of a purity and 
 righteousness that brings men to their knees, and of a love 
 which induces them in self-despair to kiss His feet, and 
 cry with adoring gratitude, '' Lord, I will follow Thee 
 whithersoever Thou goest." 
 
 But (2) the blessing of the Christ is much more than 
 this. Though He is the highest holiest Man, He is the 
 only sufficient manifestation of the living God. His know- 
 ledge of God goes back into the past eternity. For ever 
 and ever He has received and responded to an Infinite 
 Love. You feel that, in having Him, you have taken hold 
 of the central power and authority of the universe. In 
 knowing Him, you know the Father. In that He is 
 incarnate God, you can be calm amid the boundless spaces 
 and the measureless time. The vastness of the universe 
 
158 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 
 does not bewilder you, the eternities do not crush your 
 thought, the resistless powers do not abolish or mock you, 
 for you know you have reached their very centre, and are 
 at peace. When you cry "My Lord and my God," you 
 know that this Lord has all power, and is able to save you, 
 to shield you from the strange and awful possibilities of the 
 unseen world. You are " persuaded that neither life nor 
 death, neither angels, principalities, nor powers, neither 
 things present nor things to come, neither height, nor 
 depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us 
 from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 
 (3) The blessing of Christ is not limited by the 
 perfect Humanity and the absolute Divinity that are indis- 
 solubly blended in His person. The heart of man is 
 broken, and needs a healer. The sins of your own life 
 convince you that you would have cut yourself off from 
 these consolations, unless you had found a Redeemer, an 
 Expiation for sin, a Fountain which can positively take away 
 and cleanse from all iniquity. The unsurpassable splendour 
 of the Divine Humanity would be a dubious consolation 
 after all, if you did not know that His infinite power brings 
 all the perfections of God to bear on human sinfulness, to 
 eat out the curse in our nature, to rectify our personal 
 relations with the eternal order. The example and glory 
 of Christ are not the ivJiok of the blessing in which you 
 live and move and have your being. The men and women 
 whom you now are undertaking to teach have to face 
 death, and to triumph over their fears touching a deeper and 
 a second death. You have a sublime gospel to tell them : 
 it is, that the Incarnate God bore their sins and carried 
 their sorrows, that He represented on the Cross the 
 subHme fact that the Lamb was slain from the foundation 
 
 I 
 
OF THE CHRIST. 159 
 
 of the world, and that, by His resurrection and ascension, 
 He opened the eyes of those who knew Him best to see 
 Him as the " Lamb slain in the midst of the throne." You 
 have a gospel larger than the entire encyclopaedia of 
 science or civilization, when you declare without shrinking 
 that the blood of Christ not only was shed for the remission 
 of sin, but that it cleanseth from all unrighteousness. 
 You have to show^ by a perpetual effort, by endless illustra- 
 tion, by copious experience, by untiring zeal, by reiteration 
 that should flow like waves upon the river of life, that this 
 pardon does cleanse, that the cleansing by the blood of Christ 
 is the sure and only guarantee of pardon. Men must hate 
 and trample upon the sins which need such means to pardon 
 them. The new life is the best assurance of faith. 
 Holiness is the sacred and satisfying proof of the faith 
 which has taken hold of God. 
 
 But again (4), the blessing or the benediction of Christ 
 did not terminate on the cross or in the cloud which received 
 Him from human sight. Strange flashes of light have 
 gleamed from that unmeasured glory. The breath of Heaven 
 — now gentle as a zephyr, soft as the waving of a dove's wing, 
 exhilarating human hope, producing the mind of Christ in 
 human hearts, leading the Church into every kind of truth, 
 substituting the glory of Christ for the claims of self, — the 
 Spirit of the Father and the Son — becomes the atmosphere 
 breathed by the new-born soul. But this Heavenly breath 
 is sometimes rushing and mighty, strong as tempest, com- 
 pelling submission, subduing the earth, convincing the 
 world of sin, of righteousness, and judgment to come. 
 
 Moreover, this sublime benediction has so wrought into 
 the very warp and woof of human nature as to be insepar- 
 able from it ; nothing but absolute annihilation of the soul 
 
l66 THE FULNESS OF THE BLESSING 
 
 can destroy it : and thus, however perplexing and mysterious 
 life before or after death may prove, untold myriads know 
 that they are living in Christ and He in them, by the 
 eternal Spirit that He has breathed into them. They have 
 become conscious possessors of an eternal life, which sets 
 all chance or change at defiance. This Christ-life within a 
 man transforms him so radically that the difference between 
 the new and the old life is more surprising than that which 
 separates animal from human life, and it even approximates 
 that which separates a corpse from a living man. 
 
 Now, every portion of this "blessing of the Christ" 
 quivers and vibrates with the eternal force which constitutes 
 the very being of every other portion. Every fraction of 
 the reality has the tendency which may bring all spiritual 
 things to bear upon the soul, just as the fractions of a magnet 
 retain the magnetic properties and relations of the whole, 
 and can be shown to stand in veritable and startling 
 harmony with the poles of this great world. Wheresover 
 you see the trembling of a soul in prayer and find the 
 strange rapture of a sense of pardon, which has overcome the 
 sense of sin, you know that the pulses of the Divine life 
 have begun to beat, and that they will throb for ever in that 
 soul. 
 
 But, once more, the most comprehensive blessing of all 
 is, that Jesus is "Lord of all," is Master of every soul, 
 Head of every community. King of every nation, the 
 Supreme Son of God. They, to whom you can teach this, 
 overcome the world, they triumph over the world's fashions, 
 they are indifferent to the world's praise or blame, they 
 outlive the world's smile, and, in the darkest hour, they cry, 
 *' Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for 
 ever ! " 
 
OF THE CHRIST. i6t 
 
 Now, in few words let me impress upon you that you 
 are to enter upon your work in " the fulness of the blessing 
 of the Christ." Half the evils which have afflicted the 
 Church or arrested the Divine life have arisen from the 
 dismemberment of the Christ ; from losing sight of, or 
 losing touch with, some essential element in this ample, 
 this opulent blessing. 
 
 Some men are ready to ignore His Divinity, some as 
 perilously to forget His human sympathy. Some generations 
 have so exalted His character and example as to lose all 
 appreciation of His priesthood and sacrifice, and the 
 offering of His body once for all. Some have so emphasized 
 His atonement as to lose sight of His regal claims, His 
 awful righteousness, His commandments, and His Spirit. 
 Many have so dwelt on the life He lived eighteen hundred 
 years ago, as to conceal from view the fact that in Divine 
 humanity He fills all things and lives for evermore, " the 
 same yesterday, to-day, for ever." Go to your work in the 
 fulness of the blessing of the Christ ; comprehend with all 
 saints the height and depth, the length and breadth, and 
 know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that 
 you may be filled with the fulness of Him that fiUeth all in 
 all. May it produce the simplicity of life, the reverence 
 and holy trust, the self-sacrifice and devotion, the prayerful- 
 ness and consecration, which a blessing so many-sided and 
 abundant is designed to produce ! Charge yourself anew 
 with this fulness. Be in it, and let it abide in you, and you 
 will not only communicate the great benediction to others, 
 but will actually augment its force and vindicate its glory. 
 
 M— 6 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 " They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; tliey 
 shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not be weary ; 
 they shall walk, and not faint." — Is A, xl. 31. 
 
 The problem of life becomes more weird as the ages roll. 
 When self- consciousness is half awake, and the infant 
 spirit is dancing like a feather in the breezes of spring, the 
 thought of whence it came and whither it is bound does 
 not haunt the memory or blight the future. When once 
 the consciousness of self is stirred, and man finds that he is 
 not what he seems, that the centre of his personality is 
 behind all the veil of sense, that he is a spirit, that he /las 
 a body, then the conflict has begun which never ceases. 
 The whole of life is a fruitless effort to crush or deny, to 
 educate or soothe, the strange perturbation that has arisen. 
 Doubtless Oriental mind, by hard schooling and hereditary 
 habit, has to some extent applied a narcotic to the restless 
 inquiry, and found solace in the belief of an all-encompass- 
 ing illusion ; and so it murmurs in words like these — 
 
 *' For all that laugh, and all that weep, 
 
 And all that breathe are one ; 
 
 Slight ripple on the boundless deep 
 
 That moves, and all is gone." 
 
1 66 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 But, then, as Tennyson's ancient sage replies — 
 
 ** That one ripple on the boundless deep 
 Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself 
 For ever changing form, but evermore 
 One with the boundless motion of the deep." 
 
 Neither asceticism, nor the forcible extinction of desire, 
 nor the wildest license of illusive pleasure, nor intellectual 
 denial of the soul, nor harsh blasphemy against nature or 
 God, nor any struggling with the thews of a Titan to be 
 free, nor any courage of despair, nor any contemplated 
 suicide, ever really ended the strife. He who has found 
 out that he is a spirit, akin to the tremendous Spirit that is 
 back of all things, even of the tiniest and the vastest, must 
 continue the search for some solution of his questions, 
 ''Whence came I?" ''What and why am I?" "Whither 
 am I bound?" These questions, now with rattling in- 
 cisiveness, again with long low moan as of a wintry sea, are 
 evermore heard within him. 
 
 Every life is confronted with the sharp cries that love 
 hears issuing from the bewildering self-consciousness of 
 another, and the multitudinous sighs of man become, as 
 they are pondered, loud as mighty thunderings, and the 
 tears that are shed over these mysteries would fill all the 
 four oceans of the world. 
 
 Bereavement, loss of friendship, violent uprooting of 
 old and quiet resting-places, perpetual apprehension and 
 fear of what is worse, aggravate the sense of helplessness 
 and dependence, and sometimes suggest, in the very 
 extremity of despair, a gleam of hope. 
 
 The sense of collision with the Power which is above 
 and behind all, the miserable aversion to what is best and 
 wisest in it, enmity to the eternal Righteousness, goodness, 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 1 67 
 
 and power, forbid rest and sap strength. Whensoever a 
 man finds out that his inner self, his own spirit, is on one 
 side and the Infinite force on the other, he may become 
 alive to the fact that he is himself to blame for this enmity, 
 that he is the cause of his own unrest ; and the problem 
 becomes even more intolerable. " Deep calleth unto 
 deep." 
 
 Moreover, the consciousness not only of evil done but 
 of duty left undone, of opportunities wasted, of " chains of 
 lead about the flight of fire," of goals lost sight of, ends 
 unfulfilled, and all the threads of life tangled and ravelled, 
 begets further agony ; and so we hear outside of us and 
 within us booming up the cry, " Oh, wretched man that I 
 am, who will, who can deliver me ? " 
 
 Yes, verily ! one can only look at the fierce haste after 
 pleasure, the absorbing pursuit of gain, the loathsome 
 struggle for pre-eminence under the mask of principle and 
 patriotism and zeal for truth, as another form of the same 
 despairing cry, "Who will show us any good?" Is it 
 romantic, illusory in itself, to go to Isaiah of Jerusalem for 
 some solace, some secret of peace ? How can the Hebrew 
 seer lift the burden off the heart of the Western world in 
 the nineteenth century of Christendom ? Yet, verily, when 
 some of God's dear prophets have spoken their noblest and 
 best, we find that the tones of their voice have set other 
 prophetic souls vibrating with the same note, affirming the 
 truth, confirming the utterance. 
 
 Some chords well struck waken resonant murmurs in all 
 the corresponding strings of the great harp of human life. 
 If we listen to Isaiah's triumphant discovery, we find it is 
 enriched and deepened and made sonorous in many a word 
 of Him who is the Word incarnate. " Wait upon the 
 
l6S WAITING UrON THE LORD. 
 
 Lord " finds its answer in " Come unto Me, and I will give 
 you rest." 
 
 It is well-nigh impossible to unwind the meanings of this 
 wondrous phrase. There are not fewer than twenty different 
 words in the Llebrew and Greek Scriptures which are all 
 translated by one English word " wait," and this simple fact 
 shows us how the prophetic and troubled souls of God- 
 taught men have strained and writhed to express the 
 thought that was in them. I think they may be reduced 
 to three fundamental ideas — silence^ hope, and eager ex- 
 pectancy. The prophets call on their souls to wait silently 
 and patiently, to ivait hopefully, and to wait expectantly, for 
 the Lord. 
 
 A few remarks on each of these notes in the great 
 chord. Each note represents one element of relief, one 
 attempt at the solution of the portentous questions which 
 the soul awakened to know itself and to see its peril must 
 ask with ever-deepening solemnity. 
 
 I. Silence before God the Lord. '' Be still and know 
 that I am God." ''Truly my soul is silenced before God." 
 When the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. Job 
 answered and said, " I lay my hand upon my mouth. Once 
 have I spoken and I will not answer, yea twice, but I will 
 proceed no further." This silent waiting is the patient and 
 still endurance, the quiet abiding in Christ our Jehovah. 
 This is the patience which does not give way in the hour of 
 trial which comes to try all those that dwell on the earth. 
 This is the grace which has made the martyrs calm when the 
 heaven did not open and send down avengers to save them 
 from the lions or the hungry fire. To understand it at its 
 loftiest and best we must go to Gethsemane and hear the 
 Holiest One cry, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." This 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 169 
 
 is the secret of the noblest mystics who lost their self-will, 
 not by obliterating consciousness, but by a sense of the 
 holiness and goodness of the Lord God, so that they could 
 lie content, absolutely silent, profoundly quiet and passive, 
 in the arms of the besetting God. When we can thoroughly 
 trust in the living God the mystery is read, the deepest 
 shadow is accepted, the horror of great darkness is felt to 
 be the hollow of the hand of Him who dwelleth in the 
 thick clouds. This kind of waiting upon the Lord is 
 closely akin to the abandonment of self which reconciliation 
 with God insures at the beginning of our spiritual life, and 
 is often much needed when new perplexities arise to our 
 faith which the mere reason cannot solve and which no 
 experience can adequately meet. There are moments of 
 transition and unclothing, when the troubled and worried 
 spirit had best be silent. Sometimes when the fancied 
 ornaments of the temple of God are being removed by 
 ruthless hands, we are tempted to think that the whole 
 structure is about to fall and involve all that is most 
 precious to us in immediate ruin. Let us wait silently and 
 patiently, let us wait only upon Him, and we shall find 
 that the removal of the supposed beauty adds to its true 
 glory and its veritable stability. We may easily be induced 
 by clamour and passion to suppose that some showy 
 buttresses to God's truth and temple are essential to its 
 continuance. Let us wait patiently, and we shall before 
 long renew our strength of conviction in the imperishable 
 solidity of the foundations which can never be destroyed. 
 Those things which cannot be shaken remain, even when 
 the earth and heavens are shaken and the elements are 
 melting w^ith fervent heat. Such silent waiting casts all 
 the responsibility upon God, as upon One who is great 
 
I/O WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 enough and strong enough and wise enough to solve all 
 problems in His own time and way. It does not hope, nor 
 fear; it does not moan, neither does it sing. "In the Lord 
 Himself," such silent watcher says, " I have confidence and 
 strength." God is all and in all. 
 
 There are moments of fierce trial for old Christians, 
 when certain formulae seem to have vanished, some flowers 
 and fruits of grace seem to be sucked out and squeezed 
 of all sweetness, and some phraseology sanctified by long 
 usage appears to have lost its savour and even its meaning. 
 These discoveries are like looking into the burning fiery 
 furnace, and the best form of our waiting upon the Lord 
 is to be still, and know that God is God. 
 
 Moreover, there are physical trials and domestic losses 
 quite beyond measurement and human endurance. The 
 desolation is complete. The agony is piled up. The 
 cross is sharp. The cruel disappointment can never be 
 soothed. We who are finite are clashing swords with 
 Infinite Power, and striking at and wounding ourselves on 
 the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler. Be still, my soul, 
 and wait thou only upon the Lord. If thou knowest Him, 
 thou perhaps wilt find, notwithstanding all thy fears, that — 
 
 " His most holy name is Love, 
 Truth of subUming import ! with the which 
 Who feeds and saturates his constant soul, 
 He from his small particular orbit flies 
 With blest outstarting ! From himself he flies, 
 vStands in the sun, and with no partial gaze 
 Views all creation : and he loves it all 
 And blesses it, and calls it very good ! 
 This is, indeed, to dwell with the INIost High 1 
 Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim 
 Can press no nearer to the Almighty's Throne." 
 
 Such peace springs from the absolute submission and 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 171 
 
 perfect quiet of the soul. Thought dies into enjoyment. 
 Desire is lost in ecstasy. Self-obliteration is complete. 
 The mightiest Love has won the victory. The soul is 
 loved sublimely, and entirely loves — whether in the body or 
 out of the body, it knows not ; — 
 
 " Rapt inlo still communion which transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayers and praise, 
 The mind is a thanksgiving to the Power 
 AYhich made it. It is blessedness and love." 
 
 Yet it must be admitted that quietism and stillness 
 cannot cover the whole of our experience. Some thinkers 
 make it the consummation of the religious life, and consider 
 that to lose ourselves finally in God is the goal of all our 
 striving, the heaven of all our faith. Such a treatment of it, 
 however, savours more of the Oriental nirvana than of the 
 Christian life. Quietism closely approaches '' absorption," 
 i.e. if it be made an end rather than a means to an end. 
 To reach it, the soul must cease to hope or fear, must 
 school itself to become less even than the faintest ruffle on 
 the bosom of the Infinite ocean of being, to be nothing, to 
 lose even the power to know its own blissfulness. But if 
 the stillness or silence be regarded as a means to an end, 
 Avhat is it but another name for full reconciliation with 
 God ? Perfect accord with the Divine majesty and mercy, 
 such as is brought about by acquiescence in the Divine 
 reconcihation with us through Jesus Christ our Lord, 
 answers our yearning, but does not abolish our conscious- 
 ness. God knows that there are many things whereunto 
 He needs in His perfect wisdom and love to reconcile us. 
 We become conscious of a damaged nature, and a rebellious 
 heart and strange desires. Moreover, an unknown destiny 
 haunts us. The wages of sin impend. We finish nothing, 
 
172 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 we achieve little, and our life is like a broken column and 
 a smoking torch, and a cruel disappointment. He is 
 Himself reconciled to us in the death of His Son, and He 
 reconciles us to Himself under these strange conditions by 
 the same mysterious awful fact. We appropriate the death 
 of the second Adam, as we had previously realized as ours 
 the sin and death of the first Adam. As in Adam all die, 
 so in the dying of One for all, all died ; and this death once 
 realized is life and peace. We leave all then to God, and 
 this is the earliest stage of the Divine reconciliation, and our 
 souls are still. The little child can thus rest in the love of 
 Jesus, the beginner in the Divine life knows the secret. 
 
 2. But this is not the whole idea of " waiting upon the 
 Lord," for over the silently waiting spirit comes the breath 
 of hope. It is reconciled, but it searches the meaning and 
 end of its own reconciliation. The silence prepares to 
 break forth into song. That human friendship is very 
 deep indeed when twin souls are utterly quiet in one 
 another's presence, when they can meet and part without 
 a word, and yet the friendship grow and the love deepen. 
 But such love as this always holds a future in its grasp. 
 Sacred stillnesses inwardly yearn and hope for mutual 
 expression. " Still communion " rises up into, and antici- 
 pates hopefully the ends of such fellow^ship. Because we 
 are reconciled to God we find ourselves in the stress of a 
 new contest. Hope is born in the breast of the weaned 
 child. We see a goal to be pursued and an end to be 
 secured beyond the simple fact of our reconciliation. We 
 find ourselves in the midst of a plunging onward movement. 
 What seemed like siilbiess is the equilibration of mighty 
 forces, is the balance of the parts of our nature in their 
 rushing race. The reconciliation reveals other forces and 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 1 73 
 
 adverse ones, principalities and powers which must be 
 subdued under us, which are against us, but which we must 
 more than conquer— nay, which we must transform into our 
 allies. Being reconciled by the death of the Son of God, 
 much more we are to be saved by His life. We are saved 
 by cherishing a sacred desire. What we see, we do not 
 hope for. But many things are invisible. We gaze still 
 through a glass darkly ; and we hope on and look upwards. 
 So it comes to pass that much which Holy Scripture 
 describes as waiting upon God, is a Divine longing. *' My 
 soul waiteth even in the depths, waiteth for the Lord more 
 than they who watch for the morning." God gives us these 
 desires after Himself. They are the prophecies of the 
 fulness of His love. They are the veritable prayers of His 
 elect who cry day and night unto Him. We have known 
 something of resting in the Lord and waiting patiently and 
 silently for Him, with wonder and with holy fear, but from 
 this point we have gone forward, not backward, when we 
 have proceeded to cry aloud unto God our strength, and to 
 desire at least one thing, that we may not merely lie passive 
 in His hands, but that we may see His fair beauty and drink 
 of the river of His pleasure. 
 
 Nor (3) is this blending of silence and desire all that the 
 saints of Holy Scripture have meant by "waiting upon the 
 Lord." Another word is used by prophets which couples 
 with desire an earnest p:xpectation. To the simple idea 
 of holy longing, St. Paul too binds another, viz. that of 
 eager and strained anticipation. He sees the Christian 
 athlete a-tiptoe, with an all but realized yearning for the 
 crown, or bending forward with the eye on the goal, and 
 the hand stretched forth to grasp the prize, not only with 
 Strong desire, but with full assurance of faith. 
 
174 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 We may easily confound the higher and the lower, and 
 invert the order of their excellency. Absolute quietude, a 
 full reconciliation which desires nothing and hopes for 
 nothing, and a satisfaction that does not even seek to 
 respond to the Divine goodness, falls short of this full 
 assurance. Verily, the beatific vision is more than a rest 
 Avhich scarcely knows that it sees, or is. The somnolences 
 of some high-flown experience soon reveal the indolence of 
 half-hearted reconciliation. Moreover, the heart that is 
 being disciplined by the highest vision and the stoutest 
 expectation is most alive to the work of God in the world 
 of men. 
 
 Those who drink of the river of the Lord's pleasure, are 
 already powerfully expecting this triumph over all that 
 disfigures His kingdom. Noble work is done by those 
 who know that God's love to the world cannot be a failure. 
 Because they see^ they toil. Because they expect great 
 things />-(?;;/ God, they do great things/£7;'God. Disappoint- 
 ment, dark clouds, angry storms of human hate ; nakedness, 
 peril, and sword, are powerless to crush those who are 
 persuaded that nothing can separate them from the love 
 of God. The despairing pessimism of our day is the child 
 of agnosticism, is the cloud which rolls up from the " sunless 
 gulfs of doubt." Those who wait upon the Lord are not 
 dismayed by the past history, nor confounded by the present 
 condition of the world. They are ever blending joy -with 
 sorrow. They "glory in tribulations also, knowing that 
 tribulation works out patience, and patience experience, and 
 experience hope, a hope which will not put them to shame 
 because the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by 
 the Holy Ghost given to them." 
 
 It becomes, then, a comparatively easy task to under- 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 1/5 
 
 Stand how " they who wait upon the Lord," in these three 
 senses "renew their strength." 
 
 (i.) Silent waiting upon the Lord, absoKite resting in 
 God and full reconciliation with tlie Father become a 
 renewal of strength. Let us at the foot of the cross of 
 Christ cast ourselves utterly upon God's strength, upon 
 the imperishable foundations of His throne, upon His 
 own sublimest characteristics, upon God Himself at His 
 greatest and best, and we shall find that He confers even 
 upon us the stability of His own Being, the sufficiency of 
 His own righteousness. This is a process which may be 
 reviewed, reconsidered, and done over and over again, so 
 that we may prove, time after time, how strong is our 
 resting-place. The Divine life is a continuous renewal of 
 relations with God. The living plant, from the very 
 beginning, continually puts on fresh forms, new shapes of 
 beauty. From sun and air and earth, the life draws its 
 sustenance. It rests, but renews itself day by day. So the 
 most entire acquiescence and submission to the Divine 
 will, produces continually a new form, a new flower, a new 
 fruit of grace, till the purpose of the Father is fulfilled. 
 
 (ii.) The hopeful waiting upon the Lord shows that the 
 new desires of the reconciled spirit correspond with the 
 purposes of God. In other words, prayer is answered. 
 These yearnings of the spiritual creation are a " renewal of 
 strength." Their travailing in pain and their groanings 
 over the bondage of the whole creation are not pessimistic 
 nor despairing ; they are Christ's own tears and travail in 
 the members of which He is the Head, and thus they 
 become vehement and sacred desires for the manifestation 
 of the sons of God. '' In this tabernacle we are burdened, 
 earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which 
 
176 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 is from heaven." Such counting on *' the unseen and 
 eternal," such looking for the glory of God, is a daily 
 renewal of the " strength " to do this thing, and works out 
 " the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." 
 
 In like manner (iii.) the expectant waiting, which pierces 
 and lifts the veil of the future, verily triumphs over 
 obstacles, works while it is day, and even at the midnight 
 has its lamp burning and its loins girt for battle or for 
 pilgrimage, or for entrance with the Bridegroom to the 
 marriage festival of heaven and earth. This strong 
 expectant waiting seems to offer a much higher conception 
 of the consummation of our life than an eternal stillness 
 does. The difference between our finite knowledge and 
 the infinite fulness of reality in God suggests eternal 
 progress — not the exhaustion and completion of effort, not 
 the dead monotonous levels of even the loftiest character, 
 but a perpetual renewal of strength. 
 
 The text suggests an apparent anti-climax in the 
 imagery employed by the prophet. First, he spake of 
 soaring like the eagle, then of coursing like the athlete, 
 and, finally, of walking steadily along life's common way. 
 Is this a climax or a bathos ? I am inclined to think that 
 Isaiah knew perfectly that the floating and soaring of the 
 great eagle over the desert waste or mountain-top was, after 
 all, though a lofty and blessed image of renewal of strength, 
 not the highest. It represents a rapture, if you will ; it is 
 the image of one who can gaze undazzled on the sun. Yet 
 the eagle cannot outsoar the atmosphere of earth by which 
 it is sustained. Though it rises high, the chamoix and the 
 chamoix hunter, too, may climb as far. The eagle soars, 
 but with an eye on his prey. He hovers in almost awful 
 stillness that he may drop plumb-down out of the azure to 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 177 
 
 the quarry that his eye, imblenched by the unveiled sun, 
 has the more keenly perceived. So it comes to pass that 
 raptures of reconciliation and high upliftings of the soul do 
 not always portend the fulness and completeness of joy, 
 and the continuous renewal of strength. All through the 
 history of the Divine life it is the same. Great is the 
 power of patient, silent waiting for the slow ''grinding of 
 the mills of God." Wonderful is the peace which passes all 
 understanding, when we can lift ourselves above the world, 
 and scarcely sympathize with the sorrows of the race to 
 which we belong, and are insensible to the stings and 
 smarts and losses of this earthly life, having blown out the 
 fires of anger and desire — yet the soaring on the wing of 
 eagle or dove may not be the noblest victory. This was 
 not the highest life of all. Isaiah himself had raptures, so 
 had Balaam and Micaiah and Eliphaz. Some moments of 
 sacred vision and hearing of unspeakable things were 
 granted to Paul and John, and on the Mount of Trans- 
 figuration the Holy One was lifted up above the world of 
 opposition into that of Divine love — yet that mountain 
 height was not the goal of the life of Jesus. In every case 
 the floating of the soul out into the empyrean of imagination 
 and holy rapture were means to an end, 7iot in itself the 
 highest kind of life. 
 
 The 7'imfwig of the race to a visible goal ivlthout weari- 
 ness may be a higher expression of the life that we ought 
 to live. Hopeful waiting upon the Lord is more than a 
 placid, patient, uninquisitive peace. Tiie prophetic image 
 suggests no rapturous escape from trouble, but a steady grasp 
 of duty and pursuit of ends dear to God arid man. It is 
 the Old Testament anticipation of the apostolic summons : 
 " Let us run the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus." 
 
 N — 6 
 
178 WAITING UPON THE LORD. 
 
 If we can run without weariness, more than human 
 strength has been supplied to us. Hopefulness has stirred 
 our peacefulness to higher consciousness. The waiting 
 upon the Lord, which encourages us to rush onward along 
 the paths and sorrows of life, in sympathy with men and 
 with the end in view, seems more noble than rushing out 
 of the world, and more akin with the life of Jesus, and with 
 all the other ways of the Lord God Almighty. If we 
 admit that the sons of Benedict and Dominic mounted on 
 wings, the brethren of the Lord Jesus have renewed their 
 strength with the hope and joy set before them, and so 
 have endured the cross, despised the shame, and have set 
 themselves down with Him upon His throne. 
 
 But, finally, must it not be freely conceded that the 
 last clause of the prophetic image falls short of the first 
 exhibition of the renewal of strength 1 It matters compara- 
 tively little whether it be correct or otherwise in rhetoric, 
 yet for my part I cannot doubt that a steady onward 
 plodding in a narrow path which winds and zigzags up a 
 storm-cleft height ; that a dutiful i)rogress on a well-marked 
 road, which, by monotonous levels, hides equally all the 
 really distant past or future ; that a march on — on — 
 onwards, though the sky be dull, the fog around the soul, 
 and no clear vision of the goal opening to the eye, accom- 
 panied nevertheless by an inward hopefulness and strong 
 anticipation, is, if done without succumbing to the tre- 
 mendous strain, in the poet-prophet's soul the highest fonn 
 of strength drawn straight from the Lord God Himself. Of 
 this, too, we feel assured that he who does outwardly press 
 without discouragement along the pathway with an eager 
 desire and expectation that Christ may be magnified in 
 him, whether by life or death, may a little later in his path- 
 
WAITING UPON THE LORD. 1 79 
 
 way sec the goal itself, and cry, '' Henceforth there is laid 
 up for me a crown of righteousness that fadeth not away." 
 Such renewal of strength may do more for him still, for the 
 time will come when St. Paul, having finished his course, 
 having kept the faith, mounts on something stronger than 
 an eagle's pinions. He veritably outsoars the atmosphere 
 of earth. Eyes are given him strong enough to gaze 
 without tears or fears on the unveiled face of the Father. 
 He sees the regalia, the crown of righteousness, which the 
 Lord, the Righteous Judge, will give to him, and not to 
 him only, but also to all those who love His appearing. 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS 
 AND THINGS. 
 
Address preceding tlie cclcbraiioii of I he Holy Com lu union, at t/ie opening 
 of Mansfield College, Oxford, October iz„ 1SS9. 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS 
 AND THINGS. 
 
 The symbols of the broken body and shed blood of the 
 incarnate Son of God always express for us our unutterable 
 need and the fathomless depth of the righteousness and 
 love of God. They have inexhaustible resources of 
 suggestion. As the centuries move on with all their weight 
 of mystery, of memory, and high endeavour, they mean more 
 and more to us. Under their inspiration, men like our- 
 selves have lifted up their hearts unto the Lord, and " with 
 angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" 
 have lauded and magnified the thrice holy Name. The 
 sense of utter unworthiness has been rescued from undue 
 dejection by the promise of a free pardon and the 
 stirrings of a new and sacrificial life. The keen bliss of 
 human love is sharpened by these memories of a love 
 stronger than death. The shadows of the tomb are 
 dissolved in the light ever gleaming from the Cross, or 
 rather from the face of Him who was dead but is alive for 
 evermore. 
 
 Enterprises of "great pith and moment " are only safely 
 entered upon when, as at this service, we can realize the 
 mighty presence of our Lord, and when we dare invoke 
 
184 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 that, which is the perpetual 'prayer and the constant beati- 
 tude of the Church. When our fathers in the wilderness 
 finished their work a cloud covered the tent of the con- 
 gregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, 
 and whensoever, in the dead of night, amid the recesses of 
 the catacombs, on the mountain sides, in the forests, in the 
 dungeon or on the battlefield, the martyr-Church of many 
 names has clasped by faith inseparable hands with all who 
 loved the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, the cloud of 
 glory has been seen and felt " a shadow by day and a fire 
 by night, in the sight of all the Israel of God throughout 
 their journeyings." 
 
 An enterprise of moment to the Church of Christ now 
 reaches consummation. Numerous services of consecra- 
 tion have been solemnized on this site of many memories. 
 Churches and colleges thus raised have embodied strong 
 tendencies at work in the Church and State. Their signifi- 
 cance to-day is proportioned to the strength of those ideas, 
 to the loyalty and faithfulness of those who profess them, 
 and to the intensity with which living men can realize in 
 conjunction with them the Divine presence and approbation. 
 In a similar manner, certain potent ideas and living prin- 
 ciples of thought, of worship, and Divine service have been 
 already crystallized into these walls. The buildings them- 
 selves are the creation of much personal enthusiasm, not 
 only of worthy and learned men, but of poor saints, and 
 they represent a dominant spiritual idea which may make 
 another epoch in the history of the Church in England. 
 With the memory of the dying love, with the fire of the 
 living presence of our Lord, we hope to consecrate this 
 place to Him and to His glory. 
 
 The dedication of the house to highest uses can only 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 1 85 
 
 be fully consummated by a conscious self-consecration to 
 those uses. In the strength of a deep love to Him who 
 alone confers on these principles and on these uses any 
 value, let us grasp them with such fervour that they will 
 become more to us than our own life, and dearer to us than 
 we are either to ourselves or to one another. They will 
 assuredly live and work in the higher life of England — of all 
 the Churches of England — when we have all passed beyond 
 the need of symbols, into the great reality where we shall 
 see Him as He is. 
 
 Those are thrice blessed whose highest aims and 
 whose practical services coincide. There is, however, one 
 fear, one peril to be avoided in such cases ; our lower 
 motives, our proximate ends, have about them a certain 
 overmastering force, a kind of brute strength ; a species of 
 mechanical energy and of rare glamour withal, which, even 
 while they are bent in facilitating means of consummate 
 value for effecting noble ends, condemn us often to rest 
 satisfied Avith the proximate measures and to substitute 
 means for the ends. May the highest ends be paramount 
 to-day ! 
 
 The immediate purpose which is obviously enshrined in 
 these buildings, and which we seek to effect by them, is a 
 higher training of the ministers of our free Churches. We 
 desire in this institution to transcend that Avhich has 
 hitherto been achieved. We wish to give our young men 
 a larger outlook into the world which they yearn to bless. 
 Our passionate desire is that they may know the best 
 things that are knowable ; that they may apprehend, not only 
 the needs and tendencies of their own clique or persuasion, 
 but the conscientious convictions of men of other schools 
 of thought ; that they may drink deep draughts of know- 
 
1 86 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 ledge; that they may sharpen with all available means 
 their appetite for truth itself, by pursuing with enthusiasm 
 some of the specialities of their great theme. We desire 
 that they may learn the secrets of many minds, so as to 
 unriddle the perplexities of some^ and lift off the incubus 
 which burdens the heart and conscience of others. We 
 have so much confidence In the reality and glory of 
 the Christian faith, that we have no fear of the result. 
 Some who are suffering from that sensitiveness whicli 
 Schlelermacher called "the phthisis of the Intellect" may 
 have to endure a furnace In which their strength will be 
 sorely tried; but those who have veritably received the 
 Divine life, who have entered consciously into the 
 kingdom of God, who are born again of Incorruptible seed 
 by the Word of God which abideth for ever, will find the 
 mission on which they are set and the message they have 
 to deliver revealed to them anew In a veritable gleam of 
 light. They will see more and more of the convergent 
 forces which, with unresting progress, are unveiling the 
 King of kings and bringing Into view the destiny and 
 redemption of the world by Jesus Christ. They will not 
 lose In a superficial and exhausted mysticism their vision of 
 One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of men. 
 
 Doubtless these are days of transition, when some 
 positions once held most certain have been taken from us 
 by the ever-continuous wear of the critical wave. More- 
 over, some modification of the way in which our funda- 
 mental truths are stated may be found imperative ; but the 
 Christian faith is stronger with every fresh conclusion of 
 sanctified IntelHgence. There have been many such crises 
 in the history of the Church and in the methods of Divine 
 revelation, and God has not yet been driven from His own 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 187 
 
 temple, nor is the Christ less manifestly real in His power 
 and grace than He ever was. Consequently we accept 
 without fear an inheritance and a possibility from which 
 the sons of the Puritans were long debarred, and we hail 
 an opportunity to bear more thoughtful witness than ever 
 to that which is to us the primal truth of the bearing of the 
 Incarnation of the Word upon the destiny of the human race. 
 These are a few of our practical aims and secondary 
 motives. However numerous and noble they may be, they 
 are simply the means in our hand to compass a sublimer 
 end. What we aim at is something entirely beyond any 
 machinery, any party triumph, any honour that we can 
 achieve in doing what is in itself worthy or noble : it is 
 nothing less than opening the kingdom of Heaven to all 
 believers ; it is the revelation of the Lord Christ to the 
 world ; it is the saving of those for whom Christ died ; it 
 is the proclamation of His gospel to the world. 
 
 The meaning of our communion service to-day is our 
 fervent desire to bring the ultimate end of this special 
 endeavour into the burning focus of the Divine Presence. 
 We yearn to consume in this baptism of fire all unworthy, 
 all insufficient motive. The altar is built, the sacrifice is 
 laid on the wood, and the cry of our hearts is that the fire 
 from heaven may descend. We know that one flash of 
 light from the presence of the Lord will do more for the 
 realization of the best wishes that are cherished to-day than 
 could any conceivable addition to our resources, or any 
 dazzling augmentation of our prestige. 
 
 God forbid that, as we take these symbols of an infinite 
 sacrifice, we should be inwardly sighing for any end less 
 than the glory of our Lord in the revelation of Himself to 
 the world. 
 
1 88 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 We know that advantages such as those which we here 
 provide for our young ministers may be delusive ; that mere 
 culture of intellect, that richer and fuller education, like 
 the oxen and sheep in the courts of the temple, like the 
 tables of the money-changers, may be eminently convenient 
 to a Sadducean priesthood, or attractive to a secularized 
 Church, but may yet perpetrate a profanation in the view 
 of the Lord of that temple. If our desire is only to gain 
 pre-eminence or power by advanced culture, the Master 
 will come with the scourge rather than with the approving 
 smile, and His terrible voice will be heard, *'Take these 
 things hence." 
 
 We have a holy mission; we are the witnesses to a 
 principle of consummate preciousness, the guardians of a 
 truth concealed from many, the prophets of a mystery 
 which has been hidden from many generations. If the 
 fellowship of this mystery should pervade the Churches, 
 then the consecration of these buildings will be an event 
 and an epoch in the history of religious thought. Great 
 movements have been favoured, persecuted, and finally 
 triumphant in Oxford. Lollardy and Puritanism, en- 
 thusiasm for the past, strength of invincible intuitions, 
 vehemence of drastic criticism, passions which first created 
 and then burned the martyrs, have, in succession, swayed 
 the minds of men. Here arose, too, that sense of the 
 value of each soul of man, and the superb hope that a man 
 alone with God might find his calling and election sure. 
 Here the Evangelical Revival found for a time scope and 
 impulse. 
 
 During the last fifty years a more notable movement 
 took its origin in Oxford, one which has deeply affected 
 all contemporary religious life. The past history of the 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 1 89 
 
 Church of England has been re-written, and a new con- 
 ception of the Church as a whole has been fathered and 
 fostered, which has exerted an incalculable force on 
 millions. In this university there was obtained the vision 
 of a vast catholic organization, which embraced in itself 
 the whole past evolution of the Church, whether Eastern 
 or Western, Anglican or Oriental, and this, notwithstanding 
 irreconcilable differences between them. 
 
 It is true that these sections of the catholic Church 
 have not been reciprocally conscious of their solidarity ; 
 yet, as far as Anglicans are concerned, learned and holy 
 men have become pathetically alive to the existence of a 
 Body visible to them wathin certain restricted lines of 
 historic continuity and corresponding organizations. They 
 have, by the power of sanctified imagination, seen the 
 Divine life and the supernatural order in certain well- 
 defined regions, and have cherished the hope, and cherish 
 it still, that all Churches must at last blend into this sacred 
 unity of the flock and fold of God. But is this the last 
 word that can be spoken touching the unity of the spiritual 
 body of Christ ? May we not cherish, and in this very 
 service of reverence and love express, our profound con 
 viction that the great Evangelical movement of the last 
 century, and the Anglo-Catholic movement of this century, 
 are co-operating to produce a greater movement than 
 either? It is not impossible that even we may have 
 something to do in stimulating its progress and develop- 
 ment. Should it once move forward on the wings of faith 
 and love, it will prove the most potent and far-reaching of 
 all the great upstirrings of mind and heart which have 
 taken their origin in this university. Common interest in 
 sacred learning, friendly intercourse, mutual observation. 
 
190 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 co-operation in common pursuits, will be its coadjutors; 
 but the sublime motive power is nothing short of the in- 
 dwelling of the Spirit of God in all sections of the Church. 
 Then, by a new and irresistible impulse, they shall combine 
 to fulfil the prayer of the Divine Lord, " that they all may 
 be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee, 
 that they also may be one in Us." 
 
 If the unity between the Father and the Son be the 
 test and the norm of the union of the Church for which 
 the Saviour prayed, then the glory and the exceeding 
 blessedness will not be realized in form of words, or in 
 unanimous expression of thought. No consent to creeds 
 or definitions, however accurate and comprehensive they 
 may be, according to the wisdom of to-day, can answer the 
 prayer of the Christ. No vast world-embracing eccle- 
 siastical order can ever satisfy the conditions of the 
 problem. The notion of a universal creed and of a 
 universal monarchy of Christian ministries has been dis- 
 possessed of its pre-eminence by the inexorable logic of 
 fLicts. 
 
 But in the mutual and common realization of the true 
 body of Christ, wherever His Holy Spirit — the Spirit of the 
 Father and of the Son — puts forth Divine life in the 
 myriad-sided organism of the new humanity, it will fulfil 
 the glorious prayer of the blessed Lord. This is no new 
 phantasy. It is the oldest of all. The Divine life, the new 
 spiritual Sonship to God, is a fact ; and the cry from the 
 regenerated soul, from the adopted child, " Abba, Father, " 
 indicates and creates a rccjl brotherhood, not a mere 
 society. The elect souls in every Church have for ages 
 been discovering this blessed reality. U/>i' Christus ibi 
 ecdesia has been the sacred talisman by which many cruel 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. I91 
 
 controversies have been reconciled. Noble testimonies to 
 the triumphant principle have been borne by men whose 
 life has sweetened the very breath of the world. Our own 
 peculiarity is that we are the special guardians of a prin- 
 ciple which has seemed at times too ethereal to live as a 
 prominent form of Church life. I know we are far from 
 fully embodying it in our own life ; but if we depart from it, 
 we utterly fail in our distinct and specific mission. Never- 
 theless, when the hour comes that the vigorous representa- 
 tives of what are called free Churches can see the kingdom 
 of God in all its other manifestations, whether in Rome or 
 Constantinople, Geneva or Canterbury, and when the most 
 spiritual, devout, and conservative members of the historic 
 Churches can recognize and act upon the recognition of 
 the Divine life, of the brotherhood in Christ, of the super- 
 natural order beyond the pale and boundary hitherto 
 assigned ; when the union between such as are one in 
 Christ becomes a mutual indwelling such as that between 
 the Father and the Son, then all ivill be one according to a 
 higher ideal than has ever yet been powerfully embodied 
 among men. The Anglo-Catholic conception is a wonder- 
 ful step in the right direction. It avails to overleap the 
 most formidable barriers of confession, discipline, and 
 practice. It offers its sense of brotherhood, moreover, to 
 those who do not reciprocate the sentiments, nor admit its 
 orders, nor give back the kiss of peace ; and it seems to us 
 that the Church principle of which we are the guardians 
 does but carry out to its full expression a similar law of love. 
 I dare to hope that the tiny stream which bursts to-day 
 from its long-hidden sources here, may contribute to swell 
 that vast, bright, abounding river of life, by the banks of 
 which the historic Churches will drink deep draughts, and 
 
192 CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 which will most assuredly lave the walls of *' the city built 
 for the perfected spirits of the just." 
 
 This prophetic conception has been cheering the noblest 
 spirits in all the Churches. Wherever life has been more 
 than form, and the spiritual body more than its raiment, 
 this glowing hope has burned on the altar. The sacred fire 
 has been extinguished, and even its custodians have some- 
 times smothered it in their eagerness to add fuel to the 
 flame ; nevertheless, it is fast becoming a world-wide illu- 
 mination. This enterprise of ours is but one involuntary 
 expression of a vast force of sanctified judgment, without 
 which our present action would have been impossible, and 
 it bids fair to transcend the conception of Wicliff and of 
 Cranmer, the burning breath of Wesley, the far-reaching 
 ideal of Newman and Pusey, and will be, in fact, the 
 supplement and the complement and eventually the realiza- 
 tion and the co-operation of them all. 
 
 i\t present we have only a faint adumbration of what a 
 full Pentecostal efi'usion of the Holy Spirit must achieve. 
 The spiritual temple rises in the midst of much debate. 
 
 " O God, Thy architecture meets with sin, 
 For all Thy fame and fabric is within. 
 There Thou art struggling with a peevish heart, 
 
 Which sometimes crosses Thee, Thou sometimes it ; 
 The fight is hard on either part ; 
 
 Great God doth fight, He doth submit. 
 All Solomon's sea of brass and world of stone 
 Is not so dear to Thee as one good groan. 
 And truly brass and stones are heavy things, 
 
 Tombs for the dead, not temples fit for Thee, 
 But groans are quick and full of wings ; 
 
 And all their motions upward be ; 
 And, ever as they mount, like larks they sing : 
 The note is sad, yet music for a king." 
 
 ''The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for 
 
CONSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 193 
 
 the revelation of the sons of God." At present they are 
 not fully revealed ; not yet can they even see each other : 
 but as the mutual glances are interchanged a new meaning 
 will be given to sacraments and orders ; a fresh set of 
 facts will be supplied to agnostic historians and philoso- 
 phers; the souls of the martyrs will live again ; intolerance 
 will die in the new atmosphere that circles round the earth ; 
 criticism, however eager, will forget to sneer, and the 
 world will believe, as it has never yet done, in the presence 
 of the Christ who liveth for ever and ever. When this 
 flood of life overflows the ramparts which divide us, they 
 will in these great waters be only rocky islets in a boundless 
 sea. 
 
 Let us draw near, then, to the symbols of a perfect love ; 
 let us hail the signal that the Uving Christ who died for 
 our sins is in the midst of us. The special glory that 
 beams from the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, on hearts 
 broken by a sense of sin, shame, and peril, is so dazzling 
 that such cannot fail to see when they turn thence — as turn 
 they must, to daily duty and to absorbing affairs of the 
 world and of the Church— the spectrum of that Christ still 
 in their field of view. It is strange, but most blessed, to 
 find that, instead of confusing their mental picture of other 
 things, that spectrum harmonizes wifli and explains them all. 
 
 We turn with deepest reverence once more to Him 
 the symbols of whose living and dying and resurrection are 
 renewed and spread before us. We humbly seek to use 
 them now as records of all the mighty history of the 
 kingdom of God, as significant tokens of all that our Lord 
 has done for us and would have us do, the absolution and 
 remission of all our sins, and the gift of eternal life. We 
 desire to lose ourselves once more in Him. Bought by His 
 
 0—6 
 
194 COxVSECRATION OF HEARTS AND THINGS. 
 
 precious blood, we desire to blend our bitterest sorrow for 
 sin, our uttermost shame at the sins of even our hoHest 
 service, with our eucharistic shout of adoring gratitude. 
 We dare to believe that He has taken upon Himself the 
 responsibiUty and task of our full redemption, and that He 
 is able to accomplish it. We, being many, are one loaf, 
 seeing that we are partakers of the one bread, and we enter 
 afresh into the unity of the spiritual body of Christ. We 
 are seated at a table where the apostles, prophets, martyrs, 
 saints and confessors of every age are feasting still. We 
 join with the Fathers of the Early Church, and with many 
 who were cast out as evil thinkers and wrong-doers, 
 with Reformers and Puritans, and with those who swore 
 Holy League and Covenant in their blood, and we know 
 we are one in Him. We are creating no new society, but 
 realizing the fact of a brotherhood created by the Holy 
 Ghost. We are not inaugurating but claiming a fellowship 
 with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. 
 
'MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM 
 YE BELIEVED." 
 
Address preceding the celebration of the Holy Communion^ at ChesJiunt 
 College Chapel, at the fori7iation of the Cheshnnt Union of Fon7ier 
 Students, January 1 6, 1888. 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH 
 WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 "What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through 
 whom ye believed ; and each as the Lord gave to him." — I COR. iii. 5. 
 
 This moment is unique in the history of the college. 
 Many dates are red-lettered in its calendar. Hours of deep 
 impression have come and gone. Of its father, the friend 
 of its foundress, it may be said, as was sung of Dante, — 
 
 " From land to land, 
 Like flame within the naked hand, 
 His body bore his burning heart." 
 
 Missionaries, scholars, preachers, pastors, cjuiet labourers 
 for God's truth have caught some of their earliest inspira- 
 tions from its sacred memories. In lonely places, in distant 
 regions, its freemasonic token has been of service. A 
 goor'ly number of brave workers for Christ have often been 
 stirred to better service by realizing their Cheshunt brother- 
 hood. Not a few of your comrades have joined the com- 
 pany of the perfect ones within the veil, and will not have 
 altogether forgotten us. They are not far away from us 
 to-night, when, for the first time in our history of a hundred 
 
igS "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 and twenty years, a serious effort has been made to combine 
 and exchange our manifold emotions, to give zest to present 
 duties by renewing our early consecration. The vinculum 
 that has held you together has been very elastic, apparently 
 fine as a gossamer thread, and yet it has been strong enough 
 — I hardly know how or why, save that the Lord has willed 
 it — to draw you together and induce you to revisit Ches- 
 hunt as a sacred place. The special charm is, that you 
 have not gathered to hear some famous preacher or illustrious 
 chairman, nor to inaugurate a new constitution, nor to 
 contest some principle that you have felt to be endangered ; 
 not for mutual admiration, nor for the honour and prestige 
 of our college, but simply for the glory of God, out of love 
 to one another, and faith in one another's power, by His 
 grace to kindle a new enthusiasm aiid loyalty for Christ and 
 His kingdom. 
 
 Some explanation may be found in this, that here was 
 the *' birthplace of deep love " and much sacred friend- 
 ship, and if Cheshunt were not the cradle of your Divine life, 
 yet it was the spot where that supernatural life touched 
 maturity, where, after much questioning and many prayers, 
 you began in a deep sense consciously to /^e, to enter on '• the 
 eternal now." Here many of you came into more intelligent 
 communion with apostles and prophets, and so to climb 
 "the altar-stairs," until you found deeper fellowship with the 
 Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. Did you not here 
 do battle with the seven deadly sins ? Was not self-conceit 
 smitten ? Did not self-control and self sacrifice take the 
 place of wilful self-pleasing? Did not the healing of pardon 
 and of discipline follow the assurance of faith ? Perhaps 
 here the one tremendous chance of life loomed for the first 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." I99 
 
 time like a vast comet on your midnight sky, and Truth, 
 veiled but beautiful, invested with much drapery, but living 
 — no mummied corpse of dead men's thoughts, but the 
 veritable thought of the Eternal, perfect and peerless, — here 
 dared you to look on her face and live. Here you began 
 to understand the terms which you had used from earlier 
 days. Many a religious phrase which had erewhile been only 
 a blank cheque was consumed to ashes ; but some of these 
 blank cheques were signed by God, and countersigned by 
 your own conscience, and were thenceforward transformed 
 into boundless wealth. 
 
 Having once beholden the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ, you begin to wonder at the sang froid with 
 which otiose assent was readily given to the very same 
 ideas which, when you discovered them, shook your whole 
 being to its centre. Flattering dreams of being able to 
 compel men to see and feel with you, led you on. Bitter 
 disappointments were soothed by gracious illusions, and the 
 sympathy of brothers beloved. In many a sacred corner 
 of the college, coteries have solved the problems of the ages. 
 The puzzles of metaphysics vanished. Theories of evil and 
 of death, of atonement and life, the claims of Rome and 
 Westminster, of Tubingen and Halle, have been settled out 
 of hand, to say nothing of ecclesiastical affairs that were 
 nearer home. 
 
 How we smile in after days, not cynically, but sweetly, 
 on our sanguine hopes and the infalHbilities of our boy- 
 hood ! I do not wonder, then, that you should have 
 anticipated some pleasure, perhaps not unmixed with pain, 
 when asked to come and take a bath in the fountain of 
 sunrise, to resume with manhood's strength some of the 
 

 200 "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 glances of the infancy of your higher intellectual and moral 
 life, to gather round the cross of Christ, to cherish a 
 new hopefulness, to become more conscious of your calling 
 of God and your mission in the world, and to renew the 
 testimony you have to give to spiritual reality, alike in 
 theological thought, in Church principles, in Christian life, 
 and in holy enterprise. 
 
 Many of you can gratefully record years of service. 
 You have wielded pen and pencil and pilgrim staff. In 
 the pulpit, on the platform, in the professor's chair, in the 
 direction of great institutions, in the guidance of political 
 opinion, in hand-to-hand encounter with idolatry, intem- 
 perance, poverty, and sin, you have been fulfilling your 
 course ; yet there is not one of us who does not with a sigh 
 confess that the service he has rendered has fallen far below 
 the ideal that once rose enchantingly before him. We all 
 acknowledge the intrusion of selfish consideration, the close 
 proximity of unhealthy dispositions and morbid desires. 
 Much of our ministerial life has resembled the " green ear " 
 of the parable, rather than the fruit which it promised but 
 failed to realize. 
 
 The tares which confuse, the thorns which choke the 
 heavenly life have not been wanting. For one, physical 
 weakness or shattered strength ; for another, cruel domestic 
 sorrow has impeded work. Some have had to mourn over 
 the rivalry of sects and the feverish vitality which pulses in 
 all our organization ; others have shrunk dispirited from the 
 higher attractions which the world in many forms presses on 
 those whom they most wish to influence. Some of us have 
 had to suffer occasional paralysis from straitened resources, 
 or from the awkwardness of temper, or the grumbling of 
 
"iMINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 201 
 
 our fellow-workers. Our excellent friends are often loud 
 in their appreciation of some ideas suggested by a stranger, 
 which we had been vainly striving to hammer into them by 
 long courses of instruction. 
 
 Perhaps we have all at times felt awestruck with the 
 problems which have perpetually come to the front, and 
 have been more or less bewildered by the acute crises that 
 have followed one another in the world of thought. We 
 dare not deny that at times the solid earth has seemed to 
 tremble under our feet. Even the kingdom of God, that 
 cannot be shaken, has appeared, as we received it, to quiver 
 and reel. In our present retrospect we may, however, 
 remember that the tempest which breaks over each man's 
 soul is often peculiar to himself; he it is who is being 
 shaken, not God's truth. It must be confessed also that 
 the rainbow which the unveiled sun paints upon the 
 threatening but departing cloud is subjective. In this 
 case we have been consoled by the direct radiance upon 
 our own soul of the Sun of Righteousness. That Sun may 
 have been hidden for a while, but has soon emerged from 
 the interception whether of a hurrying satellite or a passing 
 cloud. 
 
 The Church of God has been always in the purgatorial 
 flame. But we may say of this, as Virgil said to Dante, — 
 
 "Be well assured, that should'st thou here abide 
 Within this womb of flame a thousand years, 
 No loss of e'en one hair should thee betide." 
 
 The kingdom of our Lord and of truth is by its very 
 nature militant, but invincible. It is tossed by tempest 
 and upheaved by earthquake, beleaguered by the spirits of 
 evil, and in constant peril from enemies and treacherous 
 
202 ** MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 friends; but the gates of hell will not prevail against it. 
 The Lord knows that in bidding us defend it, He has given 
 to us a task impossible to our unaided strength. The 
 adjustment of the claims and mutual relations of the Divine 
 and human in nature, in revelation, in the person of the 
 Christ, in the spiritual life, is a feat passing wonderful. In 
 ourselves we have no strength equal to it. The Lord Jesus 
 said, on the night of the Passion, to His chosen apostles, to 
 Peter, Matthew, John, '' Separated from Me, without Me, 
 i.e. by the aid of your own wit or wisdom, by your own 
 power or holiness, jiw^ can do nothifig.''^ We, too, have found 
 His words to be true; and only in the degree to which 
 we have drawn upon His supernatural strength, felt His 
 precious blood cleansing us from sin and coursing through 
 the veins of our spiritual nature, and the Divine life of the 
 God-Man thrilling through our whole consciousness, and 
 transforming us into the members of the spiritual Body of 
 which He is the Head, have we ever done any one thing 
 of the smallest advantage to God or man. We are here, 
 dear Lord and God, gathered to-night to eat Thy flesh and 
 drink Thy blood, to assimilate Thy Divine-human nature, 
 to live by Thee, " that our sinful bodies may be made 
 clean by Thy body, and our souls washed in Thy most 
 precious blood, that we may evermore dwell in Thee and 
 Thou in us." 
 
 Let us encourage one another, comfort one another, 
 with the words of life, and open our hearts to receive a 
 new baptism of the Holy Ghost, so that we may be able to 
 see God, to discern the Divine working, as we resume the 
 duties to which in various ways He has called us. In every 
 case, and notwithstanding our disappointments, the work 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 203 
 
 done has been immeasurably more than an ilkisive dream. 
 The result of it has been more sacred, more blessed, more 
 spiritual in its issues, than in our most sanguine youthful 
 hours we prayed that it might prove. Once we aimed at 
 the production of a glorious leafage which should add to the 
 strength of our individual life, the honour and admiration 
 of men. Now we are satisfied with nothing but fruity 
 which, though it exhausts our strength, is the veritable 
 end of our existence. Once we loved our life, and lost it ; 
 now we have hated our life, and learned to find it only 
 in Him. 
 
 I feel, more than I can possibly express, the honour 
 and happiness of greeting so many of you, who have been 
 my joy and crown of rejoicing, and the solemnity and 
 sacredness of the opportunity of once more addressing 
 you. 
 
 What is the one supreme and sublime end of our 
 calling — ei'her as workers in the Church, as preachers of 
 the gospel, as teachers of the young, as heads or leaders of 
 colleges or societies or unions of Churches, or as mission* 
 aries to heathen nations ? May I not put the question in 
 St. Paul's burning query, *' What then is Paul ? What is 
 Apollos?" Is Paul the man who has been thundered to 
 from the skies, or caught up into heaven to hear unspeak- 
 able words ? Does he glory in his wisdom, or his might, or 
 his gifts ? Are these the essential features of the apostolate ? 
 Nay, verily! What is Apollos? Is he the Alexandrine 
 philosopher? the eloquent writer? the ingenious rhetori- 
 cian ? These characteristics utterly vanish in comparison 
 with the essential purpose and prime factor of his call. 
 What is Paul, what Apollos, but mi?iisters through whom 
 
204 "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 ye believed? The entire end of their existence in the 
 world was to create faith in others. The apostolate was a 
 means to an end ; the end was the faith of the Church. 
 The faith of a little child, of some slave of Chloe, of some 
 son of Stephanas, was more precious to God than the 
 entire career of an apostle per se. So our pastorates, our 
 publications, our Churches, our colleges, our great societies, 
 our sacraments, have one sublime end in view, im- 
 measurably greater than themselves. All these are but a 
 ministry by which men believe ; God honours the means, 
 He loves the end. 
 
 Is it necessary to justify this statement ? 
 
 Perhaps it might be necessary in the outside world of 
 men, or when face to face — as we may be to-morrow — with 
 the titanic energy of modern unbelief, or when confronted 
 with the cynical scorn of those who cry, " Let us know 
 what you can do. Let us see what you are. Let us 
 have proof of your character. We care nothing about 
 your faith." It may be indispensable to vindicate the 
 apostle when in the presence of those who minimize the 
 force, discount the advantage, and empty out the contents 
 of faith ; but, even here and now, it is not without some 
 advantage to inquire. What do we mean by producing faith ? 
 and how are we continuously to pursue this apostolic 
 function ? 
 
 I would not exaggerate the significance of faith, nor 
 put into it what is not of its essence ; I would not define 
 faith by its own consequences, and then deduce those con- 
 sequences from faith. That mistake would be equivalent 
 to the fault charged by Dr. Martineau on the physicists, 
 — who first imagine an atom and a unit of force ; who. 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 205 
 
 secondly, mentally transfer to the atom thus conceived, all 
 the potencies and glories of nature ; and then, thirdly, 
 by an apparently logical process^ deduce these from the 
 primordial atom. 
 
 If by faith I choose to connote all the mystery of the 
 Divine hfe, all the beauty of Christian character, all the 
 fruits of holy living, it would be an apparently easy task to 
 show how they, one by one, burst from their germ and 
 follow from their source. We cannot, any of us, produce 
 faith in this comprehensive sense ; we cannot bring about 
 moral surrender to God ; we cannot recreate the soul of man. 
 The living God, by His Holy Spirit, can alone regenerate, 
 can alone produce the heavenly mind, or give eternal 
 life. There is, however, a work for us to do. Our 
 mission is to help men to perceive the substance, the 
 underlying reality of all we hope for, to make evident the 
 things unseen. 
 
 Even Nature here may help us. The underlying 
 substance is indefinitely more than the accidents by which 
 we are enabled to recognize it. The all-pervading force is 
 unspeakably more than all the manifestations of it. This 
 substance, this force, is more than nature ; it is the super- 
 natural. Our ego is again unutterably more than all the 
 states and impressions with which some would confound it. 
 It is above nature, intimately related with Cause itself. All 
 cognition of the substance of all things is the result of the 
 faith-principle of our inmost ego. We cannot repudiate it 
 without mental suicide. This same faith-principle takes 
 hold of the eternal reality that has been manifested to our 
 understanding. It is by means of it that we see the invisible, 
 mount up on wings from the temporal to the eternal, and 
 
'206 "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 find the awful Holy One with whom, verily, we have to do, 
 whether we like it or not. As soon as the object of faith 
 takes shape, we find ourselves confronted with abundant 
 hostility from the flesh, from the principalities, powers, 
 rulers of the darkness of the world, who strive with 
 passionate eagerness to close every chink through which 
 the light of eternity, the revelations of a living God, may 
 gleam. There are those who sedulously toil to transform 
 every hint of the supernature above, around, and within us, 
 into the closed circle of nature. Miracle, inspiration, in- 
 carnation, atonement, spiritual life, sacrificial consecration, 
 eternal blessedness, are all reduced to fleeting phenomena, 
 of that which is called nature. However comprehensive 
 nature may thus become, and though we identify all her 
 ways with the purposes and order of the Eternal, yet He is 
 infinitely more than they. We are summoned, it seems to 
 me, to lead men to feel, to see, to handle the unseen and 
 eternal, to lift them up into the Holiest of all, and bid them 
 look and live. 
 
 Let us take the sublime fact which we commemorate this 
 evening, namely, the Sacrifice of the Incarnate Word for 
 our sins, the Body broken, the Blood shed for us, and shed 
 for the remission of our sins. If by faith we press behind 
 these memorials, behind these accidents, behind all the 
 words by which we speak of it, to the substance, — if we 
 grasp the unseen and eternal thing here foreshadowed, — we 
 come into direct contact with an almost blinding light. 
 The glory of God in the face of the dying Christ is so 
 unutterably resplendent, that only the eye of faith can bear 
 it ; but if it be indeed the glory of God, then it is the out- 
 flashing upon us of that which is eternal, which was before 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 20/ 
 
 all worlds, is now, and for ever. Infinite love and absolute 
 righteousness, exhaustless pity and consummate sacrifice, 
 the inflexibility of eternal law accepting the anomaly of 
 humiliation and pain, the glorification of death in the agony 
 of holy love, God, at His very best, and as He is from 
 eternity to eternity, breaks on our vision ! The Lamb of 
 God slain from before the foundation of the world, the 
 Lamb in the midst of the throne, stands before our inward 
 eye. Our faith lays hold of these when we see Jesus. 
 These outstretched bleeding hands, as we look on them by 
 faith, become the everlasting arms, "mighty to save." It 
 is this faith in the unseen and eternal that it is our function 
 to evoke, by all our ministries of whatever kind. Only so 
 far as we call it out, can we fulfil our course. Such a 
 mission is worth living for, worth dying for. 
 
 Some of us have occasionally been shy of this conception 
 of the eternal God ; but what tremendous power there is 
 in the truth of the Divine Nature, just as it is. Sacrificial 
 but eternal love to His creature blended with burning 
 wrath against sin. All His dispensations in the past, all 
 the temporal mission of the Son and of the Spirit are 
 expressions of His eternal nature, revelations not only of 
 what He once was or did or said, or of something that 
 He may perchance be or do in some unknown future ; 
 but of what He is at this present hour, and will be for ever 
 (Ps. xc). Let us ponder for a moment our infinite need of 
 it. Surely nothing can exceed the pathos and the misery 
 of our condition, whatever science or philosophy may say 
 to comfort us. Child and woman, sage and peasant, rich 
 and poor, king and prophet, poet and practical philan- 
 thropist, have felt the insupportable burden of existence 
 
i 
 
 208 "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 when once the portentous fact of sin has been perceived. 
 Many religious teachers have sought to solve the problem. 
 Some have emphasized the pain, and have sought, like 
 Buddha, refuge in 7iirvana. Others have dwelt on the 
 omnipotence of God, and sought, like Mahomet, to make 
 all things straight by a tour de force. Some have lowered 
 the sense of right to the level of etiquette, and have^ like 
 Confucius, lost the sense of futurity. Others, under the 
 power of Hindu philosophy and ritual, have so reduced the 
 consciousness of individuality, that man has appeared to be 
 but a wave lifted upon a boundless ocean, drifted for a 
 period — which is like the twinkling of an eye— from nowhere 
 to nowhere. Many in these days would have us renounce 
 our inquiry and lose our transcendental fears in the admira- 
 tion and cultus of humanity, and they tell us that the future 
 evolution of our race will settle all the inequalities and wipe 
 out the old scores.; while others assert that poetry will take 
 the place of religion, and will prove strong enough as an 
 anodyne for our irresistible conviction of enmity against 
 God, endeavouring thus to throw so much charm around 
 " the service of man," as to make the coming age indifferent 
 to " the service of God" ! 
 
 Now, our hopefulness consists in this, that the genuine 
 Christian experience is such a contact with the living 
 God in all the grandeur and fulness of His Being, that 
 it offers the one solution at which all other forms of 
 pseudo-religious experience aim, but never find. By faith 
 in the Christ of God we have learned to blend in one 
 indivisible act the most poignant sense of sin, the most 
 vivid hnagination of evil, with the perfect assurance of 
 pardon; to cherish at one and the same time the utter- 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED. 209 
 
 most sense of impotence and insignificance with the over- 
 powering conviction of conscious union with the Eternal 
 One. We learn with the pang of a broken spirit to shout 
 "Hosanna;" to be veritably crucified and buried with 
 Christ, and nevertheless to live; to transform the cup of 
 blood into a cup of thanksgiving. 
 
 The brotherhood of man is the indefeasible concomitant 
 of the righteous Fatherhood of God, as revealed in the 
 cross of Christ. Every movement of love to man, every 
 device of Christian heroism, every act of consecration to 
 Christ, every effort to take upon ourselves some of the sin 
 or sorrow of another, opens to us the heart of Christ, which 
 is the lens whereby we can gaze upon the Lord God Him- 
 self in the eternity of His blended beauty, the awfulness 
 of His holiness, the fathomless ocean of His boundless love. 
 How infinitesimal the distinction of sect, of society, of 
 office, of method, when we are set upon securing the great 
 end — namely, so speaking, acting, hving, loving, that men 
 may believe and live. 
 
 What we have to do is to produce /^/M — in the unseen 
 and eternal ; God Himself will do all the rest. 
 
 But how ? First of all, it is obvious, by exercising it. 
 We must ourselves believe and live. The blind cannot 
 lead the blind, nor set the telescope for vague and wander- 
 ing eyes. We often deceive ourselves by the illusion that 
 we can induce a deeper faith than we feel. We try, it may 
 be, to lift people to our own shoulders, and then almost 
 in despair to exclaim, " Now you may see what I cannot ; " 
 but little comes of it. There is much constant communion 
 with invisible things demanded from every man who would 
 induce faith. Incessant prayer and waiting upon God are 
 
 p— 6 
 
2IO "MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED. 
 
 needed by us all. We should, I think, sometimes make 
 inroads upon our abounding tasks, cle.ir a space of time, 
 and refresh and recreate ourselves herein with meditative 
 vision and abandonment to Christ. The greatest realities 
 of our life lie behind that of appearance. The kingdom 
 of God is within us. By inward waiting upon God we renew 
 our strength, we mount up with wings, we see the invisible. 
 we run the race, we endure to the end. 
 
 Secondly, we must cherish the consuming desire to 
 produce faith. I know that I have the desire, but I some- 
 times fear that it is only the desire to have the desire, and 
 sometimes, alas ! the credit of the desire. The desire often 
 becomes languid, and I am tempted to feel that perhaps 
 something else may be as good for me as that faith which 
 is the evidence of things unseen. Can we stir up one 
 another to desire the thing itself, to desire to win souls, 
 to be " ministers by whom men believe " ? 
 
 Thirdly, I feel convinced that we should aim at the 
 production of faith, rather than aim, as we sometimes 
 exclusively do, at the production of the fruits or conse- 
 quences of faith. The kingdom of God is as if a man sows 
 seed in his field ; he sleeps and rises, night and day, and 
 the earth brings forth of itself. The husbandman does not 
 plant germs without roots, or thread either real or artificial 
 flowers upon barren stocks. How much, then, belongs to 
 God in all this work ? And yet Almighty God seems to 
 crave the aid and call for the service of human hearts and 
 hands in the great work of creating faith in the minds of 
 His children. 
 
 "Do ye now believe," said the dying Christ, with 
 almost plaintive tenderness, "■ that I came forth from God ?" 
 
"MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED. 211 
 
 Then, when He had the assurance that they did believe, 
 and even though He knew that one would betray Him, and 
 that they ^// would forsake Him, He seemed to say, ^'Now 
 I can go onward to the cross." Humanly speaking, if they 
 had not believed, the Church of God would have perished 
 that night in its cradle of sorrow and blood. All periods of 
 revivals have been times of vision. The victory that has 
 overcome the world has been faith in the Son of God. 
 Times of retrogression and horrors of deep darkness have 
 passed over the Church, but only when faith has been 
 weakened or exhausted, paralyzed by superstition, or en- 
 cumbered by incomprehensible propositions, or, it may be, 
 counteracted by the feverish and deadly excitement of the 
 visible, the sensual, and the selfish. Some knowledge is 
 indispensable to faith, but faith is necessary to the know- 
 ledge which is eternal life. Some of this knowledge is 
 indispensable to love ; but " he that loveth not, knoweth 
 not God, for God is love." 
 
 Fourthly, we cannot instrumentally excite faith in others 
 without deep sympathy with them. We must understand 
 their difficulties, and admit that some of their perplexities 
 are genuine and honest, are the product of neither their 
 conceit, their waywardness, nor their depravity. There is 
 honest doubt on the part of those who are anxious to 
 believe, but cannot. There is an agnosticism which pre- 
 pares the way for faith. But let us not forget that there 
 have been times and Churches in which for a while the 
 chief apparent function and desire of the priest or presbyter 
 has been to scatter confidence, undermine belief, and dis- 
 solve faith. God save you from this deadly fashion. It 
 
212 ''MINISTERS THROUGH WHOM YE BELIEVED." 
 
 is well at times to rush forth into the open plain that we 
 may see the stars of God. We must understand the tempta- 
 tions of men if we are to indicate firmly the way of escape, 
 or bring before them the counter-attraction of the Cross. 
 How difficult it is to get so close to a brother as to inspire 
 an admiration for that which he slights, or scorns, or fears, 
 or loathes. You cannot force a man to feel with you about 
 really good music, poetry, painting, or argument, if his pre- 
 possessions are all the other way. You will not succeed by 
 simply abusing his ignorance or scoffing at his lack of per- 
 ception. You must take him hand in hand, and lead him out 
 of his bad taste, and put the true beauty before him until 
 his taste flows into harmony with your own. So we should 
 strive to set forth the Christ in such beauty and power that 
 we shall obtain the answering fulness of admiring and 
 adoring contemplation. Only by much study, by purged 
 vision, by prolonged training, by earnest prayer, by manly 
 effort, can we undertake the solemn function of leading 
 men to enter into the faith and fellowship of the Son of 
 God. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Beginnings of the Divijie Life, 1858. Third Edition, 
 i860. Six Sermons. Elliot Stock. 
 
 Notes of the Christian Life. A Selection of Sermons. 
 Macmillan. 1865. 
 
 John the Baptist, being a contribution to Christian Evi- 
 dences. Congregational Union Lecture. 1874. Second 
 Edition, 1876. Hodder and Stoughton. Third Edition, 
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 Joint Author of Yes and No, or Glimpses of the Great 
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 Series of Essays. 1870. Second Edition, 187 1. (Con- 
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 Editor Q>{ Ecclesia. Second Series, 187 1. Contributed 
 Essay on The Holy Catholic Church. Hodder and Stoughton. 
 
 Author of Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles. Pub- 
 lished in First Series of The Expositor. Hodder and 
 Stoughton. 
 
 The Philosophy of Pi'ayer, and other Essays. 1882. 
 Religious Tract Society. 
 
 Buddhism and Christianity, a Comparison and Contrast. 
 '' Present Day Tract Series." Religious Tract Society. 
 
214 lilBLIOGRAPHV; 
 
 Athanasius : His Life and Life- Work. Church History 
 Series, 1889. Religious Tract Society. 
 
 Lntrodudion to the Gospel of St. John, with Exposition 
 and Commentary. " Pulpit Commentary." Two volumes. 
 Third Edition, 189 1. Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. 
 
 Editor with Rev. Dr. Allon of British Quarterly Reznew, 
 1 866-187 4. Articles — LViilosophy and Religion of Aiigust 
 Comte ; Our New Religions ; Religious Systems^ Ancient 
 and Modern ; Montalemberf s *' Monks of the West ; " The 
 Lfistory of the Doctrine of the Atonement ; The Buddhist 
 Pilgrims ; Congregational Ministiy and its Education ; 
 Religious Ideas and Modern Thought ; The Life of August 
 Comte ; etc., etc. 
 
 Contributor to Drs. Smith and Wace's '* Dictionary of 
 Christian Biography." Articles on Eusebius of Nicojtiedia ; 
 Eusebius of Samosata ; Fulgetitius of Ruspe ; Fulgentius 
 Ferrandus ; Fru7ne?itius ; Gregorius of Ncoccesai-ea ; The 
 Ethiopian Church; The Sabceans ; etc., etc. 
 
 ONDON : I'RINTF.D BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CKOSS. 
 
Preachers of the Age. 
 
 In uniform crown 8vo. Volumes, with Photogravure Portraits 
 
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 Cloth extra, price 3s. 6d. each. 
 
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 OF Canterbury. 
 
 II. The Conquering Christ, and other Sermons. 
 
 By the Rev. Alexander Maclaren, D.D., of Manchester. 
 
 III. Verbum CRUGIS. By the Lord Bishop of Derry. 
 
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 Price Hughes, M.A., of the West End Wesleyan Mission. 
 
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 By the Lord Bishop of Wakefield. 
 
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