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 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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 Presented by \-V-o-^ .c5o\nYn"X3<s\A3 \-W ,:D ZD 
 
 IK^X 9843 .H5 S4 1891 
 
 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 1805- 
 
 1890. 
 Sermons 
 
SERMONS. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 REASON IN RELIGION," "WAYS OF THE SPIRIT," "HOURS WITH GERMAN 
 CLASSICS," "atheism IN PHILOSOPHY," " THE PRIMEVAL 
 WORLD OF HEBREW TRADITION." 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1891. 
 
Copyright, 1891, 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 ©ntbtrstts Press: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 I. Three Views of Life 1 
 
 II. Authorities and Scribes 21 
 
 III. The Lesson of Flowers 35 
 
 IV. Nothing to Draw with 50 
 
 V. The Pure in Heart shall see God .... 68 
 
 VI. The Soul's Deliverance 81 
 
 VII. Reserved Power 97 
 
 VIII. The Gospel of Manual Labor 109 
 
 IX. The Lot of the Called 120 
 
 X. The Baptist and the Christ 139 
 
 XI. The Broad Church 150 
 
 XII. Love cancels Obligation ....... 171 
 
 XIII. And wished for Day 183 
 
 XIV. All Things to all Men 199 
 
 XV. Strength in Weakness 211 
 
 XVI. Spirits in Prison 224 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 XVII. The Spirit's Rest 235 
 
 XVIII. The Religion of the Resurrection . . . 219 
 
 XIX. Love is of God 261 
 
 XX. Our Life is in God 276 
 
 XXI. The Comforter 288 
 
 XXII. All Souls' Day 301 
 
 XXIII. Conscience 315 
 
 XXIV. The Future Life 329 
 
I. 
 
 THEEE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. 
 
 Luke xv. 12. 
 
 Nay ; but I will verily buy it for the full price. 
 
 1 Chron. xxi. 24. 
 
 It is more blessed to give than to receive. 
 
 Acts xx. 35. 
 
 /^UK manner of life will depend very much on 
 ^^ the view we take of the meaning and ends 
 of life. Our practice will correspond with our the- 
 ory. Perhaps you have no definite theory on the 
 subject. You may not be conscious of entertain- 
 ing one. I suppose very few are conscious of any 
 such thing. You do not speculate ; you do not rea- 
 son ; you project no elaborate scheme ; you seldom 
 say distinctly to yourself, This is my view and plan 
 of life, and such is the use I intend to make of 
 myself and the world. Nevertheless, we all have 
 our theory, conscious or unconscious. We have 
 our general idea of life, which consciously or un- 
 consciously underlies our scheming and our dream- 
 
 1 
 
2 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 ing, according to which our course is shaped, and 
 according to which our destiny proceeds. 
 
 Now, there are three principal views of life indi- 
 cated in the three brief passages of Scripture which 
 I have quoted. I will call them the childish view, 
 the manly view, and the heroic view. 
 
 1. The first is tlie cliildish view. Its lanofuagce 
 is, " Give me the portion of goods that falleth to 
 me." Observe the expression, " falleth to me," — as 
 if anything fell to us of right. The distinguishing 
 principle in this view of life is having without get- 
 ting, unconditional reception, gratuitous bounty, 
 unmerited luck: "Give me the portion of goods 
 that falleth to me." You remember who it was 
 that the Scripture represents as making this de- 
 mand. It was the Prodigal Son in the parable. 
 His subsequent career is a signal illustration of 
 the natural tendency and practical operation of 
 this view of life. This young man, it seems, — 
 very young he must have been, and very green in 
 his judgments and expectations, — looked out upon 
 the world from beneath the paternal roof, and saw 
 there something that drew him with irresistible 
 attraction. 
 
 What was it? A life of active usefulness? Hon- 
 orable distinction, the respect and good-will of his 
 fellow-citizens, the consciousness of well-doing, 
 well-merited success ? Nothinor of the sort I He 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 3 
 
 was not looking in that direction. He saw a vision 
 of a fast young man, centre of a choice circle of 
 boon companions of both sexes, occupying them- 
 selves with games of chance, tossing the incon- 
 stant dice, or reclining at the mighty banquet, the 
 sparkling wine-cup in their hands, the festive chap- 
 let on their brows, enjoying " the good things that 
 are present," and " speedily using the creatures 
 as in youth." This was his vision of a blessed 
 life. And he said to his father, " Give me the 
 portion of goods that falleth to me." And the 
 father, who should have known better, gave it to 
 him. Foolish man ! He has a son who is bound 
 for destruction, and he gives him a swift horse 
 to carry him thither ! Forbear, rash father ! Re- 
 sist thy son's importunate desire ! If he ask for 
 money, give him work. If he come to thee for a 
 living, send him to Joppa, place him in charge of 
 some prudent shipmaster, to do business on the 
 great waters, to struggle with the elements ; or 
 bind him apprentice to some useful handicraft. 
 But by all means withhold from him yet that por- 
 tion of goods, nor send a young man into the 
 world with large means and little sense and no 
 principle, and no guidance but his own mad will. 
 
 It is not my design to follow out this particular 
 case of practical aberration resulting from a false 
 and foolish theory of life. It is one of the proofs 
 
4 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 of the blessed Master's insight into human char- 
 acter that thus deduces the profligate life of the 
 prodigal son from the false expectation with which 
 he begins his career. 
 
 " Give me the portion of goods that falleth to 
 me." How many young men set out in life with 
 this demand, thinking more of their fancied claims 
 than they do of their real obligations, more of luck 
 than of work, of that which is to fall to them than 
 of what they are to win by their own labor; re- 
 garding life as a game of chance instead of a long 
 and laborious task, — the world as a house of en- 
 tertainment, board and lodging free, or nearly so, 
 and sumptuous at that, — everything that heart can 
 wish, with very little trouble in the getting of it ! 
 This childish view of life has many modifications. 
 One expects his portion of goods to fall to him by 
 inheritance ; another expects it by special indul- 
 gence from the world. Here is one who has no 
 thought of maintaining himself by any adequate 
 exertion of his own ; and there one whose notion 
 of self-maintenance consists in so watching his 
 opportunity as to snatch a competence by some 
 lucky hit, some financial operation which creates 
 no real values, but realizes large profits on the 
 faith of artificial ones. 
 
 In either case, and in all cases where this view 
 is held, whether consciously or unconsciously, the 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 5 
 
 main point is having without producing, or having 
 beyond all proportion more than one produces by 
 legitimate effort. The view implies an imaginary 
 claim, — the portion that falleth to me: as if any- 
 thing fell to us of right ; as if the mere fact of our 
 existence and our wants created a claim to any- 
 thing more than the requisite faculty by which 
 that existence is maintained and those wants sup- 
 plied. This is all that Nature furnishes to any of 
 her children. No creature is supported without 
 an adequate outlay of strength or skill, or without 
 some equivalent in return for its maintenance. 
 Wliy should man, of all creatures the most richly 
 endowed, with faculties equal to all the exigencies 
 of his complex life, — why should he be indulged 
 with an ease accorded to no creature besides ? 
 
 You say your existence is not voluntary, — you 
 did not ask to be ; you were thrust into the world 
 without any will of your own : the world which 
 produced you is bound to maintain you ; the world 
 owes you a living. It may be so ; but whether or 
 not the obligation exists on the part of the world 
 is a matter of no practical consequence. It is cer- 
 tain that the world will not maintain you except 
 on certain conditions. You must either work or 
 steal, by whatever name you call your stealing. 
 Every other existence is just as uncalled for as 
 your own. Beast, bird, and insect did not ask to 
 
6 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 be ; they are thrust upon the world without any 
 wish or will of their own. But if one of these 
 creatures should deny its instincts, and call upon 
 Nature to maintain it, and take no thought for 
 itself, there is no provision made for it : none of 
 its tribe will minister to it ; it must inevitably per- 
 ish. Your existence is forced upon you ; but along 
 with that existence are given you the faculties and 
 organs needful for your support, — the reasoning 
 mind, the cunning hand, brain, sinews, muscles, — 
 and, for capital, a vast amount of hereditary knowl- 
 edge, the accumulated wisdom of all preceding 
 generations. With this outfit your claim is satis- 
 fied ; you have no fair title to anything more than 
 this, except as you create one by your service. 
 Beyond this the world owes you nothing but wages 
 for your work. 
 
 Let us see what kind of character is likely to go 
 with the childish view of life, what kind of charac- 
 ter it is likely to produce, what kind of life he is 
 likely to lead who is looking for something to 
 fall to him without compensation. Self-indulgence, 
 luxurious indolence, will form the distinguishing 
 trait in such a character and such a life, — that 
 indolence, which, if not the most deadly, is the 
 most incurable of moral diseases, lodging itself in 
 the marrow of the bones, and becoming a compo- 
 nent part of the system it attacks. And indolence 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 7 
 
 loves company. Profligate and dissolute life is its 
 natural concomitant. He who takes his portion of 
 goods without an equivalent will not be very scru- 
 pulous as to the amount which he takes. The 
 principle is the same, whether he takes much or 
 little. When once a man opens an account with 
 his neighbor for goods which he has no means and 
 no serious intention of paying for, he is not careful 
 to limit the amount by the actual necessities of his 
 condition. He will go on taking as long as goods 
 and credit last. 
 
 Neither will such a character be likely to use 
 with moderation the portion of goods which he 
 takes. That which is easily got is easily dissi- 
 pated ; and he who begins by living without cost to 
 himself will be likely to end with the heaviest cost 
 wliich a man can pay for his living, — the price of 
 his innocence. 
 
 Or suppose this view of life to be entertained 
 with somewhat different modifications. Suppose 
 it to be entertained by a person of some energy, 
 who is not content to be inactive, and does not 
 look to be maintained without effort, but whose 
 idea and expectation are to acquire a sudden and 
 ample fortune, with the least possible outlay of 
 actual labor. In that case the life will not be an 
 indolent and dissolute one, but a life of cunning: 
 and intrigue, a life spent in speculating on the 
 
8 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 industry and credulity of others, instead of toiling 
 and amassing for one's self. Most of our politi- 
 cians by profession are of this class. The world 
 abounds in characters and lives of this descrip- 
 tion. There is a prevalent shrinking from hard 
 work, — a disposition to throw off the burden of 
 productive industry on those who are forced by 
 necessity to undertake it ; to strike out easier and 
 quicker roads to wealth, while others plod the 
 rugged way to delving toil; to play at dice with 
 the world ; to gamble for one's portion of goods 
 instead of working for it, without considering very 
 nicely the rules of fair play, if any such rules 
 there be in such a game. The clerk in the shop 
 or counting-room who embezzles the proceeds of 
 his master's business to defray the cost of his 
 pleasant vices, the agent of a joint-stock company 
 who appropriates the general funds, are the natu- 
 ral products of this tendency. It manifests itself 
 in other ways. The excess of trade over humbler 
 and more laborious pursuits, the abuse of credit, 
 financiering on the large and the small scale, spec- 
 ulations and peculations, and whatever else par- 
 takes of this character, are all symptoms of the 
 manifold and wide-spread disease engendered by 
 this false view of life. 
 
 But, aside from these, the state of mind which 
 this view originates in or presupposes is radically 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE, 9 
 
 wrong, and at war with the evident design of 
 Deity implied in the human organism. Every 
 muscle in the human body is a protest against it. 
 Every faculty in the human mind refutes and con- 
 demns it. By every muscle in his body and by 
 every faculty in his mind, man is called and bound 
 and dedicated by God to labor. 
 
 Some allowance must be made for the difficulty, 
 in many cases, of finding the needful employment 
 and a sphere of action congenial with or suited to 
 one's powers. There come to us beggars who beg 
 for work. A very legitimate kind of begging is 
 that. Sad that we should ever be unable to satisfy 
 that demand, — that we cannot always bring those 
 muscles and sinews, that good-will and faculty, 
 into fruitful contact with the world of matter and 
 the necessary tasks of society. Sad the spectacle 
 of young men or young women who are willhig to 
 work and can find no work to do. Sad the will 
 without the opportunity, but sadder still the oppor- 
 tunity without the will. There is no more mel- 
 ancholy spectacle than to see a young man in the 
 bloom of life, with sound health and a perfect 
 organization, shrinking from labor and suffering 
 his days to glide away without profit to himself 
 or the world. 
 
 Suppose some costly ship, designed to navigate 
 the seas, never to become acquainted with her 
 
10 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE, 
 
 proper element, never to dip her keel into the 
 wave, never to feel the surge against her bows 
 and the spray in her rigging, but to remain for- 
 ever high and dry in the ship-yard, sliored and 
 propped and carefully stayed to keep her in place, 
 and converted, perhaps, into a storehouse or a 
 house of entertainment, stuffed with good things 
 for home consumption, instead of following her 
 natural vocation on the wide deep; or sujipose 
 that, being launched, instead of traversing the seas 
 from continent to continent, and taking and dis- 
 charging cargoes at Calcutta or Sydney or Boston, 
 she should float a mere pleasure-barge on the 
 river's tide. That gallant vessel would not more 
 lamentably fail of her destination than the healthy, 
 vigorous, and well-endowed youth who has no part 
 in the world's work, no path on the world's deep, 
 no calling, no mission to his fellow-men, no aim 
 or aspiration but to take the portion of goods that 
 falleth to him, no business but to enjoy them to 
 the uttermost capacity of his stomach. 
 
 2. We come, then, to the second view, — what 
 I call the manly view of life. "Nay; but I will 
 verily buy it for the full price." These are the 
 words of David to Oman concerning a piece of 
 land which David was to purchase in order to 
 erect upon it an altar to Jehovah. The land was 
 Oman's threshingfloor. " Grant me," said David, 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. H 
 
 " the place of this threshingfloor, that I may build 
 an altar therein unto the Lord." Now, when Oman 
 learned the purpose for which David designed the 
 land, he offered it to him without price. He would 
 be happy to make him a present of the lot. "Take 
 it to thee, and let my lord the king do that which 
 is good in his eyes : lo, I give thee the oxen also 
 for burnt offerings, and the threshing instruments 
 for wood, and the wheat for the meat offering ; I 
 give it all." But David was a man of large nature 
 and lofty spirit ; he did not choose to get property 
 for the Lord in that way. 
 
 Perhaps he was over-scrupulous. If a Christian 
 society at the present day, about to build a church, 
 should have an offer of a piece of land to be given 
 them for that purpose, I fancy they would not hes- 
 itate long to accept the gift. But David felt dif- 
 ferently. He was a proud man, and he declined 
 the gift. "And king David said to Oman, Nay; 
 but I will verily buy it for the full price : for I will 
 not take that which is thine for the Lord, nor offer 
 burnt offerings without cost." And he gave him 
 what he held to be a sufficient price. 
 
 You observe here a principle of action involving 
 an entirely different view of life from that which 
 we have been considering, and which I called the 
 childish view. It is that view which regards life 
 as an obligation, not as a claim; as a dispensation 
 
12 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 of tasks and duties, and not of gratuitous favors ; 
 which regards the world as a seed-field where each 
 must dig and plant for himself, and where personal 
 effort is the just and necessary equivalent for every 
 advantage, and not as a storehouse of goods where 
 all have free access and may help tliemselves to 
 such things as they like, — or rather as a safe, of 
 which some favored few have the key, and may 
 take the portion of goods that falleth to them by 
 special grace. 
 
 Of this view observe, first, its essential agreement 
 with the nature of man, its fitness in relation to 
 the human constitution. Every nerve in our body 
 is an argument for it. Man is made and consti- 
 tuted a working being. It is only by labor that he 
 can realize what is in him, — the measure of his 
 powers, the measure of his joys, full development, 
 full stature, full satisfaction. He must work not 
 only to be truly happy and at peace with himself 
 and the world, but he must work to be truly human. 
 And if any one thinks to thrive without work, he 
 will find erelong that Nature has not been consulted 
 in that arrangement. One faculty after another 
 goes to sleep, one satisfaction after another dies 
 out, one hold upon the world after another gives 
 way, and at last there remains only the human 
 automaton, with all its life reduced to one or two 
 senses, and all its consciousness concentrated in 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE, 13 
 
 a half-waking dream of self. We read of a Ro- 
 man who vegetated after this fashion, and was 
 treated as one dead by his acquaintance. They 
 wrote upon his house, as on a tomb : " Here lies 
 Servilius." 
 
 Observe, next, the agreement between this view 
 of life and the constitution of the universe consid- 
 ered as a system of legislation, where everything 
 has its price, where inexorable law has establislied 
 a fixed ratio between income and outlay, and pro- 
 portioned the worth of every product to the price 
 it costs, — that is, to the labor and care involved in 
 its production. We need not search far to find 
 evidence of such a law, or to trace its operation in 
 nature and life. A glance at the universe shows 
 how all things are conditioned, and how no real 
 good can spring from the bosom of Nature or 
 the mind of man without its equivalent outlay of 
 faculty and labor. There is no luck in Nature, but 
 a rigorous legislation extending to the minutest 
 particulars and last details of life. Take any 
 product of the vegetable world. Examine an ear of 
 corn, and study its law. There was only one pos- 
 sible way in which that ear could grow, having pre- 
 cisely that character and no other. That way 
 includes unnumbered details, some of which you 
 can trace, and many of which you cannot trace. 
 Form, color, size, everything pertaining to it, de- 
 
14 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 pends on antecedent conditions ; and if one of 
 those antecedents had failed, that particular ear 
 of corn could never have been. So exact are the 
 laws of the natural world. 
 
 Do you suppose that the laws of the moral 
 world are less so? There, too, there is no hap. 
 It is all legislation, law. On every good that life 
 offers a price is set. For every advantage that 
 man wins there is a just equivalent ; and for every 
 indulgence that a man steals there is also a just 
 equivalent exacted by immutable necessity. You 
 may think to have your portion of wordly goods 
 without paying for it ; but pay for it you must, 
 somewhere and somehow. There is no evading the 
 universal law, subtle as light and hard as adamant. 
 You may pay the price before or after, as you see 
 fit, — before with adequate effort, after with inevi- 
 table reckoning, — but pay it you must. You are 
 caught in the coil of this dilemma, and shall in no 
 wise come out thence till you have paid the utter- 
 most farthing. In the way of action or of suffer- 
 ing you must render an equivalent for all that you 
 have received of talent, opportunity, gifts, and 
 goods. The true wisdom is to face the fact with a 
 resolute acceptance of your position and responsi- 
 bilities, to front the world with a full understand- 
 ing that you can have nothing without paying for it, 
 and a fixed determination to take nothing without 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 15 
 
 paying for it, to pay as you go, and to pay the full 
 price. 
 
 Consider, lastly, the intrinsic justice of this view 
 in relation to society. The well-being of society 
 requires that each individual should contribute his 
 quota to the common stock. If one may ask for 
 the portion of goods that falleth to him without so 
 contributing, then all may; and if all were to wait 
 for what falls to them, there would be no portion 
 for any. We owe it not only to the present well- 
 being of mankind to render as we receive ; we owe 
 it to the past. We are debtors to the race, and 
 that to an extent which we can but imperfectly re- 
 pay at the best. Compare your position in the 
 present condition of society with that of primitive 
 man. Think of the countless blessings of civilized 
 life, from the roof which shelters to the book which 
 enlightens or entertains you, to the religion which 
 elevates and saves you, — blessings which are life 
 itself to the civilized man, which could not be abol- 
 ished without loosening the bands of society and 
 sending each individual, a solitary savage, into the 
 wilderness, — think of these, and consider whence 
 they are derived. What we call civilization is the 
 product of slow millenniums of faithful toil, the 
 gradual contributions of millions in times past of 
 such as did not ask for the portion of goods that 
 might fall to them, but said, " Nay ; but I will 
 
16 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE, 
 
 verily buy it for the full price," and often paid 
 more than the price for the portion which fell to 
 them of worldly good. 
 
 Do you feel no call to emulate their example, 
 and out of your ability to pay back at least some 
 small fraction of the infinite debt to society ? You 
 may not be able to impart any gift or create any 
 value which shall cause your name to be inscribed 
 among the benefactors of the race. Well, then, 
 impart what you have, give what you can of your 
 want, as these of their abundance. Your faculty 
 such as it is, your time, your good-will, the work 
 of your head or your hands, your earthly life, your 
 uttermost, whatever it is, — out with it, and in with 
 it into the common stock ! Let it go for what it is 
 worth, and be sure it will count in the great re- 
 sult, — the ground edifice of society, where so many 
 myriad lives and works are fitly framed together 
 and compacted by that which every joint supplieth. 
 Every effort tells. It was well said that he who 
 causes two ears of corn to grow where only one 
 grew before is a benefactor to society. The unit 
 of your labor, be it never so insignificant, is an 
 integral constituent in the sum of things. 
 
 3. I can only glance, in conclusion, at the third 
 and highest view of life, which I term the heroic, — 
 the view implied in the saying, " It is more blessed 
 to give than to receive ; " the view of those who not 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 17 
 
 only disdain to receive their portion of goods 
 without an equivalent, who not only expect and 
 desire to pay for what they get, but who do not 
 even expect to get the equivalent, in any market 
 sense, for what they give ; who do not think of 
 remuneration in kind, who are willing to labor and 
 to give, hoping for nothing again. These are the 
 heroes of society, without whom, alas ! how poor 
 and barren our earthly life ! What a world it 
 would be on which we are cast, if nothing had ever 
 been done in it without pay ! How large a portion 
 of the dearest blessings of life would be wanting to 
 us at this moment but for those who were willing 
 to spend and be spent without hope of reward, — 
 those hero priests who have sacrificed, each in their 
 day, at the altar of human weal, and whose sacrifice 
 was their life 1 The grandest things that have 
 been done in this world have been done without 
 pay, for this reason, if no other, that the world 
 was never rich enough to pay the doers of them. 
 There was never money enough coined to satisfy 
 their just demands. When Moses placed himself 
 at the head of his people, and led them forth, and 
 humanity with them, from the bondage of Egypt, 
 through all the perils and privations of the desert, 
 to the land of promise, he had not been hired for 
 that work by the job nor by the day. When the 
 Christian confessors of the first three centuries 
 
 2 
 
18 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE, 
 
 built up painfully, out of their labors and their sor- 
 rows, their lives and their deaths, the stupendous 
 fabric of the Christian Church, they did not sit 
 down first and consider, Would it pay, was it labor 
 well invested ? When Gregory the Great adminis- 
 tered, in the stormy time on which he was cast, 
 amid the agonies of a dying world, the perplexed 
 affairs of the Roman see, he did not do it by con- 
 tract. When Clarkson toiled and planned and 
 struggled and contrived ; when, baffled and disap- 
 pointed, he still returned to the charge, and 
 struggled on, through twenty long years, for the 
 abolition of the slave-trade, — he did not do it on 
 speculation. When Eliot, with incredible pains, 
 translated the Bible into Indian for the use of the 
 natives of Massachusetts, he did not work for so 
 much a page, and had no thought of literary fame. 
 What shall I more say ? The time would fail me 
 to tell of countless others who, by reason of the 
 faith that was in them, and the dutiful zeal, and the 
 mighty love, " subdued kingdoms, wrought right- 
 eousness, obtained promises, out of weakness were 
 made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to 
 flight the armies of the aliens." Thank God for all 
 such ! Blessed are ye, heroes, victors, glory-crowned 
 in the good fight of faith! Blessed in all the 
 heavens of your renown, blessed in the fruit of your 
 works, blessed in the memory of all generations ! 
 
THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 19 
 
 And, oh, ye shining ones, " our betters, yet our 
 peers, how desert without you our few and evil 
 years ! '* 
 
 The heroic view of life is not urged as a duty, 
 but only commended as a lesson and illustration of 
 what is in man, and what may come of him when 
 the spirit obtains complete ascendancy over the 
 flesh. Thus much, at least, we may learn from 
 it, — to think more of giving than of receiving, 
 more of the work than the wages in our scheme of 
 life. Happy they who know their calling and pur- 
 sue it, whose hands have found their proper work 
 and do it with their might, rejoicing as a strong 
 man to run a race ! It is manly and good to tax 
 one's self to the uttermost for personal advantage. 
 It is better and heroic to tax one's self to the utter- 
 most, without regard to personal advantage, from 
 pure devotion to the calling to which we are called, 
 the work or craft that employs our powers, and a 
 generous zeal for the common good, asking not 
 what portion of goods may fall to us of grace, nor 
 even how much we can buy by paying the full price, 
 but how much by loving industry and unwearied 
 pains it may be in our power to contribute to the 
 world's riches and the world's growth. And as 
 such a life is noblest in itself, so it is in the end 
 most profitable to those that engage in it. No labor 
 so productive as that which we give to an object 
 
20 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 
 
 for its own sake. The more we forget ourselves in 
 our doings, the greater the returns they will yield. 
 The more we are willing to lose our life in our pur- 
 suit, the more surely we shall find in it the fruit of 
 our works. 
 
II. 
 
 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 He taught them as one having authority^ and not as 
 the scribes. Matt. vii. 29. 
 
 'THHERE are still, and always, these two kinds 
 of teaching, — the teaching of authority and 
 the teaching of scribes. We all have felt the dif- 
 ference without perhaps defining it to ourselves. 
 Some men speak to us with authority by word of 
 mouth or by books ; others, with equal or even 
 greater attainments, and so far as we can judge, 
 with equal purity of purpose, want that authority 
 as speakers or as writers. Whence this difference ? 
 
 What constitutes authority in a teacher ? The 
 answer is. Competent testimony, original observa- 
 tion by a qualified witness. 
 
 In secular science the majority are dependent on 
 the testimony of experts, not having the means of 
 verifying the facts for themselves. The ship-mas- 
 ter at sea ascertains his longitude by the aid of cer- 
 tain tables in his nautical almanac. These tables 
 
22 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 are based on astronomical calculations, and embody 
 the results of those calculations for years to come. 
 It is not necessary that the ship-master be an astro- 
 nomer ; it needs only that he have the testimony of 
 competent witnesses in that science. He receives 
 their testimony as authority, and relying on that 
 authority traverses the pathless ocean without other 
 way-mark, and can tell at any moment how far the 
 forces that impel his vessel have borne him east or 
 west. Relying on that authority, I believe the sun 
 to be ninety -five millions of miles from the earth, 
 and I expect an eclipse of that body at the mo- 
 ment indicated in my almanac. 
 
 But what constitutes authority in religion ? Who 
 is the qualified witness of moral and spiritual trutli ? 
 Here is a kind of knowledge accessible to all. " The 
 word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." 
 Yet here too, as well as in questions of science, we 
 feel and acknowledge the weight of authority. We 
 listen to one teacher, and, though what he says is 
 undeniably true, and his manner of saying it unex- 
 ceptionable, he makes no impression ; we do not 
 dispute his statement, but we are not persuaded by 
 it. It provokes no dissent, and it carries no con- 
 viction. He teaches as the scribes. We listen to 
 another who says substantially the same thing, 
 and immediately a new world is open to our per- 
 ception, a new day shed abroad in our minds. It 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 23 
 
 is nothing new that he propounds, but it comes to 
 us with the force of a new revelation. Before it 
 was a truism, now it is a truth. 
 
 What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount 
 — that which made his hearers astonished at his 
 doctrine — was not new; the scribes had said sub- 
 stantially the same ; but the spirit with which it 
 was said was new, and that new spirit made the 
 Christian evangel a new creation, so that history 
 dates from that teacher's word. 
 
 In the multitude, which no man can number, of 
 teachers who have spoken from age to age on the 
 same eternal themes, — the being of God and the 
 destination of man, — there has been but here and 
 there one whose word was a power in the world, 
 here and there an authority in a world of scribes. 
 The recorded words of Jesus and of Paul take very 
 little room, and may be read in a couple of hours ; 
 but the writings to which they have given rise in 
 the way of comment and controversy and discourse, 
 if preserved from the beginning and collected to- 
 gether, no man could read in a lifetime. The 
 greater part of these have perished, and the rest 
 will follow. Not a hundred volumes, not fifty, of 
 those so-called Bodies of Divinity whicli cumber 
 the shelves of old libraries, will maintain a per- 
 manent place in the literature of religion ; while 
 the little volume which has fui'nishcd the topic of 
 
24 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 SO much discoursing is likely to endure, and be 
 read and received as authority until some new 
 convulsion of the globe shall sweep every vestige 
 of existing civilization from the face of the earth. 
 This is Humanity's verdict on the relative value of 
 these two classes of teachers, — the authorities and 
 the scribes. 
 
 Authority is adequate testimony, the word of a 
 competent witness. We call it revelation. And 
 what is revelation ? Let us free our minds from 
 a certain confusion which seems to mystify this 
 term. Revelation is not a voice from without, but a 
 voice within ; not a prodigious communication out 
 of the skies, a doctrine appended to the tail of some 
 portent, but the intuition of a rapt soul that has 
 met the Spirit of God in its meditation. The 
 teacher with authority in religion is the qualified 
 witness, he who has had direct intuition of the truth 
 he affirms. The scribes but restate the testimony 
 of others ; they add nothing to the truth, they 
 ratlier weaken it by repetition and inadequate 
 statement. He only speaks with authority who 
 tells what he has seen with his own independent 
 vision, the truth he has reproduced in his own 
 mind, the truth which flesh and blood have not 
 revealed, but the living God. The truth thus ob- 
 tained is not necessarily new, in the sense that the 
 like had never been said before ; but it is new in 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 25 
 
 the sense of having been new-born in the thought 
 of him who declares it. That makes it as fresh as 
 the morning, the ever-new surprise of a new day. 
 
 Such teachers we call "seers," signifying thereby 
 that they see what they teach. Of such seeing the 
 lirst and most essential condition is unconditional 
 surrender to the truth. With the scribe the first 
 consideration is not what is true, but what is writ- 
 ten, vouched, accredited, or else what is profitable, 
 what is best fitted to build up our denomination, to 
 strengthen our church ; not what saith the Spirit 
 speaking to me this day, but what says the confer- 
 ence, what says the platform, the covenant, the 
 catechism ; what has credit with the churches, what 
 is good ecclesiastical stock. But they whom God 
 has destined to be his witnesses — authorities not 
 for a day or a sect, but for all time — listen to no 
 secondary teaching. They settle on no platform, 
 they stop at no intermediate stage ; they go straight 
 to the Fountain, and listen in their souls to what 
 God shall declare to them concerning himself. 
 They believe that God will speak to them also, if 
 they really wish to hear ; that is, they believe in 
 a present, living God, not merely in the God of 
 long ago. They deliver themselves up without 
 reserve to the truth ; they open mind and heart to 
 God's teaching, asking not what is profitable, what 
 say the scribes, but what saith the Spirit. " Speak, 
 
26 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 Lord, for thy servant heareth," is the constant 
 frame of their waiting souls. 
 
 No teacher acquires authority by his thought 
 alone. No mere philosopher, however accepted in 
 his day, can be permanent authority for the mass 
 of mankind. Those old Greek sages, who said so 
 many wise and beautiful things about duty and 
 God, and were so conspicuous in their generation, — 
 Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest, — what 
 are they now ? What can they be to the multitude 
 in every age but a vague impression of something 
 far off and sublime, beyond the appreciation of 
 ordinary minds, like those dim stars in the upper 
 deep which astronomers tell us are luminous 
 worlds, the centres of unknown systems, but which, 
 so far as our senses can discern, are only faint 
 specks requiring often artificial aid to make them 
 perceptible. 
 
 What the world requires in its spiritual leaders 
 is not intellectual acuteness, but truth incarnate in 
 the life. Such a leader, a teacher with authority, 
 the Christian world acknowledges in its Founder. 
 It finds him pre-eminent in those respects in which 
 philosophers and philosophy fail. 
 
 1. Universality. Jesus represents no school or 
 epoch or race. He speaks a universal dialect, the 
 dialect of the heart ; addressing liimself not to a 
 few select and disciplined natures, but to universal 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 27 
 
 man. " Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are 
 lieavy laden, and I will give you rest." " Whoso- 
 ever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, 
 shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall give 
 him, shall be in him a well of water springing up 
 into everlasting life." " He that believeth in me, 
 though he were dead, yet shall he live." 
 
 There is no philosophy here ; but what conscious- 
 ness, what authority ! Wlio else ever uttered words 
 like these ? Translatable into every idiom and 
 losing little or nothing by translation, the words 
 w^hich were uttered so long ago in the solitudes of 
 Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem are household 
 words to-day in the remotest corners of the globe, 
 endeared by daily use and consecrated by centuries 
 of faith and worship, wholesome as daily bread, and 
 still revered as bread from heaven. 
 
 2. Next, the Christian world cherishes in Christ 
 the element of stability. Other teachers arise and 
 vanish with the rolling years. The sure foot of 
 advancing time overtakes them, supplants them. 
 New systems are demanded by new generations. 
 The oracles of one age are dumb to the next. The 
 voyager soon misses the familiar coast-lights that 
 light him along his native shore. A few hours' 
 sail withdraws their friendly blaze. But Sirius and 
 Orion accompany him through all the meridians. 
 Such arc the lights of philosophic speculation, and 
 
28 ' AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 such the eternal truths of the Spirit to the journey- 
 ing soul in its life-long voyage. The guides which 
 seemed so infallible once have ceased to be in- 
 fallible now, have ceased to edify. We have 
 shifted our point of sight, and what was once a star 
 has become the solitary candle of some plodding 
 student no wiser than ourselves. We liave as- 
 cended into new regions, and what seemed to be 
 celestial radiance as we looked up to it from be- 
 neath, is meteor and mist as we look down upon 
 it from above. We come to doubt at last whether 
 any thought of philosopher or sage will continue to 
 feed us, whether any light in literature will con- 
 tinue to light us to the end. It is sad to lose our 
 faith in teachers, but that is the price we pay for 
 our growth. One by one we outgrow our idols, we 
 come up with them and pass on. They were wise 
 in their generation ; but the soul is wiser than all 
 generations, and the Word from everlasting is 
 wiser than the soul. 
 
 3. Furthermore, the Christian world perceives in 
 Jesus that Word made flesh. It is not the peculi- 
 arity of the doctrine, but the quality of soul and the 
 quantum of life in the Teacher, that makes him 
 authority, and explains the epithet, " Son of Man." 
 There was no new doctrine taught by Jesus. The 
 Gospel contains no precept so peculiar, no moral 
 so sublime, that the learned will not find you chap- 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 29 
 
 ter and verse of some Eabbi or ethnic philoso- 
 pher where the same thing has been said before. 
 The doctrine was not new, but the life was, — that 
 wondrous life, so sharply relieved on the world's 
 history, yet so intimately, ineradicably blended with 
 it ; so near the ground, yet so lifted above the 
 earth, in its humiliation drawing all men unto it; 
 so exalted above human weakness, yet so pro- 
 foundly sympathizing with it; so homely and so 
 shining, so human and so di\dne ! 
 
 Such was the authority of that one example that 
 succeeding ages have been steeped in its baptism, 
 and taken its name and confessed its law. Christen- 
 dom with all its attainments, with its forces still 
 growing, still unfolding, — the kingdom as wide as 
 the circuit of the sun, — is the growth of that life. 
 The history of Jesus is the history of one who sur- 
 rendered himself entirely to the Truth. He gave 
 himself without measure to the Spirit, and therefore 
 without measure the Spirit was given to him. And 
 because in him no care of self, and no infirmity of 
 prejudice, and no bias of time or custom or institu- 
 tion, and no view to present effect, and no fear of 
 consequences, and no mere curiosity of the intellect, 
 no conceit or fancy such as in other men wise and 
 good, as in Plato and Swedenborg, mars the recep- 
 tivity of the soul, — because in him nothing of this 
 sort, no slightest barrier of privacy, hindered the 
 
30 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 influx of the Spirit, — because the Godhead found 
 in him a wholly permeable, translucent subject, — 
 therefore he was absorbed in God, and God imper- 
 sonated in him, so that he and the Father were one; 
 and virtue and divinity went out of him when he 
 acted and spoke, and his action was miracle and 
 his word revelation, and act and word have sacra- 
 mented succeeding ages, and the piety unfathomable 
 of that one life still floats the world. 
 
 On a lower plane, in a lesser degree, other spirits 
 in diverse times have impersonated some truth or 
 doctrine, have identified themselves with it, so that 
 it has come to be the meaning and idea of their life. 
 So Paul inclined his ear to the Spirit, and heard God 
 say to him that the ceremonial law of Judaism had 
 been fulfilled and superseded in Christ. Accord- 
 ingly the life of Paul means deliverance from ritual 
 bondage. In a later age Luther, meditating the 
 errors and corruptions and spiritual wants of his 
 time, received in himself the assurance that pen- 
 ances and pilgrimages and fasts have no saving 
 power ; and the life of Luther means salvation by 
 faith. The life of George Fox means the gift of the 
 Spirit to all who believe. The life of Swedenborg 
 means the correspondence of natural objects with 
 spiritual truths. The life of Channing represents 
 the dignity and sacredness of human nature. 
 
 On the whole, we may say that truth is the only 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 31 
 
 authority. He only speaks with authority who has 
 that, and has it at first hand, who shows me the 
 truth I had never seen before, or who makes me 
 see it as I had never seen it before. And truth 
 once seen may be safely left to its own operation. It 
 needs no rhetoric to set it off ; it needs no enforce- 
 ment to giA^e it effect. When the geometrician has 
 demonstrated his proposition that the angles of a 
 triangle are equal to two right angles, he does not 
 proceed to enforce it by appeals to sentiment and 
 passion, he uses no rhetoric to set it off. What 
 should we think of the geometrician who should 
 conclude his demonstration by addressing our sym- 
 pathies, and earnestly adjuring us by every motive 
 of interest, of self-respect, of good-will to mankind, 
 to admit that things are as they are. His only argu- 
 ment is the fact which he proves. Why may not 
 moral truth in like manner be left to itself ? What 
 can be so powerful as just itself ? All that we can 
 do for it is to make it appear. " Show us " the 
 Truth, " and it sufficeth." 
 
 But let us understand that truth is progressive, — 
 I mean, truth in religion. The truths of geometry, 
 which express the immutable relations of space, 
 are unchangeable. A proposition in mathematics 
 which was true six thousand years ago is just as true 
 now, and will be six thousand years hence. The re- 
 lations of angles and curves are tlie same from age 
 
32 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 
 
 to age. But the relations of spirit change. The 
 world of spirit advances, and as it advances brings 
 new points of view ; and with new points of view come 
 new views of the same objects, differing from the 
 old, yet equally true, — I should say, more true than 
 the old are now. The objects are the same, but are 
 differently seen, as the same fixed star has a differ- 
 ent relative position as the earth advances in its 
 annual course. Propositions in theology need to 
 be reconsidered from time to time ; the creed which 
 was true for the ninth century is not true for the 
 nineteenth, and many who spoke with authority 
 then have ceased to be authority now. And yet 
 the genuine teacher, speaking not from the plane 
 of current beliefs, but out of the fulness of the 
 Spirit, speaks with authority to all time. There 
 are voices which never can become mute. There 
 are forces over which time has no power ; for time 
 did not make them, but they time. Existing 
 forms, organizations, creeds may become obsolete. 
 Once they were new ; now they are old. But the 
 Spirit which gave them birth, though older than 
 the oldest as measured by the scale of earthly 
 years, is newer than the newest, and can never be 
 outgrown. It was in the world before it took the 
 Christian name, and will never be out of it what- 
 ever name it may take. Christian it will always be 
 in the true and eternal import of that name. For 
 
AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 33 
 
 the ever-living Spirit, and not an historic individual, 
 is the true Christ, — the same yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever. Systems pass, theologies slide, and au- 
 thorities whose sphere and function were merely 
 dogmatic, the authorities of the schools, are author- 
 ities no longer. But goodness is the same in all 
 generations. The authority of a good life can 
 never become obsolete, can never fail to teach with 
 effect. Let us not think so poorly of the business 
 of teaching as to fancy it confined to word of mouth 
 or the written page, or deem that they only in- 
 struct and admonish and persuade who speak with 
 words of wisdom and rhetorical art. 
 
 If we trace the influences which have acted most 
 powerfully on our moral nature, we shall find that 
 it is not the teachers by profession that have done 
 the most and the best to shape our life, but the 
 characters we conversed with, the daily life and 
 conversation of our fellow-men. And the best 
 influences and instruction have come from those 
 beneath us, quite as often as from those above us 
 in culture and understanding and the social scale. 
 The most diligent student of us all will confess, I 
 think, that he has learned more from life than from 
 books, — from public and private examples of use- 
 fulness and worth. The conscientious and labori- 
 ous father of a family, the patient, self-sacrificing 
 wife and mother, the devoted child, the faithful and 
 
 3 
 
34 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES, 
 
 painstaking servant in our employ, — these are 
 our teachers, better than all homilies, more con- 
 vincing than any treatise. Authorities they are, 
 unquestionable and commanding. Xot quotable in 
 literature, inasmuch as teaching by word was not 
 their function, but authority such as the soul that 
 considers them cannot choose but accept. I con- 
 fess the majesty of unconscious goodness in some 
 obscure individual has more impressed me than 
 any page of Jeremy Taylor or Saint Augustine. 
 Compared with this silent authority, my favorite 
 teachers were but scribes. And I sometimes think 
 what a different standard of authority and dignity 
 the angels may have from that received among 
 men. You remember whom Jesus pronounced 
 authorities on three separate occasions, — in the 
 matter of practical well-doing, the unknown citizen 
 of a country held in abhorrence and contempt ; in 
 the matter of liberality, a poverty-stricken widow ; 
 in the matter of spiritual greatness, a little child. 
 
 It is truth alone that teaches with authority, 
 whether bodied in words or deeds. Be obedient to 
 the truth which you see and know ; live that truth, 
 be that truth, and you will be, so far as that truth 
 is concerned, authority to all who come within your 
 sphere. Without word-wisdom or excellency of 
 speech, you will preach more impressively than 
 sermon or book. 
 
III. 
 
 THE LESSOK OF ELOWEES. 
 
 Consider the lilies of the field, how they groiv ; they 
 toil not^ neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you 
 that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
 one of these. Matt. vi. 28. 
 
 TF the Bible were struck out of existence to-mor- 
 row and not a copy of it left to any library 
 or any household, there are sayings of Jesus which 
 would long survive in the memory of Christendom ; 
 and this is one of them. No saying is more likely 
 to survive than this which speaks to the heart with 
 such a winsome grace ; it brings the great Teacher 
 so near, so domesticates him in the natural world 
 of our experience, — the out-door world which the 
 spring is now transfiguring with a new dispensa- 
 tion of rejoicing life. 
 
 How touching this benediction of natural beauty 
 from the Son of Man, — the Spirit's tribute to 
 Nature, his great ally ! For who so in league with 
 Nature as Jesus ? Who ever owed less to books 
 and the past ? He used these only to prove to 
 
36 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS, 
 
 those who assailed him with their traditions how 
 they missed the spirit of the Scripture in their 
 worship of the letter. With simple and unpreju- 
 diced hearers he reasoned always from actual life 
 as it passed before his eyes. His scriptures were 
 birds and flowers, earth and sky, men, women, and 
 children, objects and interests new as the dawn, 
 and older than all the traditions of the world. He 
 spoke as a living man to living men, with no school 
 doctrine, but in lessons gleaned by a fresh, clear 
 eye, which made the world seem fresh about him, as 
 if he were the first that had appeared in its scenes. 
 When the people looked for dogmas, he gave tliem 
 things ; when they looked for forms, he gave them 
 spirit ; instead of the past, he drew from the pres- 
 ent. The first object that met his eye, the fact of 
 the moment, was his theme. All Nature was trans- 
 lated into parable for their instruction. Whatever 
 he handled became, by the mark which he put upon 
 it, a new creation. His hearers could not analyze 
 the charm of his teaching ; they knew not the se- 
 cret of his power. The only account they could 
 give of it, comparing him with other teachers, was 
 that " he taught them as one having authority, and 
 not as the scribes." What scribe or doctor of the 
 Law would have deigned to discourse of lilies, un- 
 less it were the carved ones of the Temple col- 
 umns ? The scribes and doctors were too intent 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 37 
 
 on their phylacteries to think of flowers, or to find 
 any comfort in their immunities and splendors. 
 They could talk of the glory of Solomon far away 
 in the past, for that was in their books, — a part 
 of the national tradition ; but the glory all around 
 them, the glory of the flowers of the field, had no 
 meaning or charm for them. One jot or tittle of 
 the Law was more to them than all the beauty of 
 earth and sky. 
 
 The Hebrew people have been charged with a 
 want of appreciation of the beautiful in Nature, 
 in which it is said they differ from the Greeks. 
 The difference, I suspect, is not so great as has 
 been represented. The fact is, none of the an- 
 cient nations had that feeling for Nature so char- 
 acteristic of the modern mind, — the feeling which 
 breathes from the canvas of Turner and the strains 
 of such poets as Wordsworth and our own Bryant. 
 This feelino' is essentially modern, Christian ; due 
 in great part to the Christian sense of the imme- 
 diate presence of God in Nature. It is true, how- 
 ever, that the Hebrew mind had apparently less 
 sympathy with the beautiful in Nature than with 
 the awful and sublime. Rugged cliffs and craggy 
 mountain-peaks seem to have best suited those 
 stern spirits, with their abrupt monotheism. With 
 the exception of some passages in the Psalms and 
 the Canticles, there is no expression of delight 
 
38 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 in natural beauty in their scriptures. The more 
 remarkable and all the more welcome is this ex- 
 pression from the lips of Jesus, the consummate 
 flower of the Hebrew race, — proof of the more 
 than Hebrew spirit that dwelt in him, of the mind 
 transcending all nationality, comprehending the 
 sympathies of universal man, and illustrating the 
 fitness of the title " Son of Man." 
 
 Consider the lilies, how they grow ! The lilies 
 had been there from the days of the conquest, but 
 where the heart to feel and the mind to interpret 
 their beauty ? Year after year they liad come in 
 their season and starred the fields with their briglit 
 array, but who had thought them worth consider- 
 ing ? Kings and chiefs returning from slaughter 
 had stalked remorseless through their ranks, war's 
 unheeding foot had trod upon their cups, priest 
 and Levite had passed them by, and none ever pon- 
 dered how they grow, or paused to study their 
 hidden moral. But when Jesus came he exalted 
 the neglected wild-flower, and set it above the 
 splendor of courts. 
 
 " And in the bosom of its purity, 
 A voice he set as in a temple shrine, 
 That life's quick travellers ne'er might pass it by 
 Unwarned of that sweet influence divine." 
 
 The flowers which Jesus praised, — not lilies, as 
 we understand that term, but a gorgeous wild- 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 39 
 
 flower which still enamels the plains of Palestine, 
 — the flowers which Jesus praised are not native 
 to our clime , but the same Nature from which the 
 great Teacher drew is present here and lovely 
 here, if not so luxuriant as seen under Syrian 
 skies ; the flowers which gladden our own fields, 
 if not so gay, are as dainty and as full of signifi- 
 cance as those of Palestine. And now that we are 
 once more comforted and blessed with these yearly 
 visitants, now that spring-blossoms glorify the 
 landscape once more, I am moved in the spirit of 
 this Scripture to draw from Nature for our in- 
 struction, and to follow the Master in a lesson 
 of flowers. 
 
 Consider the lilies, how they grow ! Consider 
 first their essential beauty, the delicate texture of 
 their silken petals, their varied forms of grace, the 
 tender promise of the folded bud, the faultless 
 rhythm of the full-blown flower, the splendor of 
 their tints, and the grateful incense of their balmy 
 breath. Beautiful they are; but why are they, 
 and what is their use ? The answer is, Beauty. 
 Beauty is for us all their being's end. Their only 
 or chief function, so far as man is concerned, is 
 to please the eye, and through the eye to refresh 
 and make glad the heart. Here is a lesson for 
 the Christian moralist ; here is a revelation of the 
 mind of God. Beauty is use, and an end in itself. 
 
40 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 Beauty is divine. This is a truth which theology 
 has yet to learn and apply. Something of the 
 Hebrew sternness and alleged indifference to nat- 
 ural beauty has passed into Christian theology. 
 The saints of the Church have looked on beauty 
 as idle vanity or carnal satisfaction. The early 
 painters rejected it from their portraits. The 
 Fathers of the desert ruled it out of their scheme 
 of life. The less of beauty, they thought, the 
 more of holiness, the more of spirit. The English 
 hermit in his island fastness walled up the win- 
 dow of his hermitage, shutting out the magnificent 
 prospect which disturbed, he said, his communion 
 with God, — as if God were less present in liis own 
 creation than within the walls of a cell. The Jes- 
 uits of Granada boasted of their father Sanchez, 
 that though the monastery in which he lived had 
 a beautiful garden, he never looked at a single 
 flower. Calvin in romantic Geneva cherished his 
 doctrine of despair, and exhibits no trace in his 
 writings of any influence on his heart of the Al- 
 pine glories which surrounded him, no sign that 
 his spirit had ever been soothed by the contem- 
 plation of Lake Leman, or kindled at beholding 
 the snow-peaks blush and glow in the rosy light of 
 sunset. Christian theologians have written books 
 to prove that Nature is blasted and corrupt, a de- 
 formity and ruin, accursed by God in consequence 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 41 
 
 of man's transgression. I find nothing in the 
 sayings of Christ that gives countenance to such 
 a doctrine. Surely Jesus knows nothing of a 
 blasted Nature. Nature to him is no ruin, but 
 the realm of order and peace and blessing, the 
 vestiture of spirit, the very presence of the infinite 
 Father. Every flower that blows refutes the impi- 
 ous doctrine of a ruined Nature with its eye of 
 grace. Every flower bears witness of law and 
 order and loving obedience. 
 
 The first lesson taught by flowers is the sacred 
 significance of beauty, — the place which beauty 
 occupies in the scheme of things. They teach that 
 " beauty is its own excuse for being," that the 
 world is not a system of bare necessities and dry 
 utilities, that man is not to live by bread alone. 
 What would the world be if all the flowers were 
 out of it, if all the graces and charms of life were 
 expunged ? Civilization is based on the love of 
 beauty more than on the grosser satisfactions of 
 life. The savage has meat, clothes, fire, under 
 normal conditions enough to eat and drink, a shel- 
 ter from the cold, a place to lay his head, and all 
 the grosser satisfactions of life. What has the 
 cultured prosperous citizen that the child of the 
 forest has not ? First and chiefly, beauty. Animal 
 satisfaction is common to both ; the accompanying 
 grace is peculiar to the former. Instead of the 
 
42 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 rude wigwam, the tapestried drawing-room; in- 
 stead of food snatched from the hearth where it 
 is cooked, the service of the table ; instead of the 
 shaggy hide and unkempt locks, the decent robe 
 and the comely, trim array. These principally 
 distinp^uish the civilized man from 4h^ savao^e. 
 To brute necessity civilization adds grace. The 
 greater part of the callings and business of society 
 relates to the maintenance and perfection of this 
 grace. The sense of beauty is the mainspring of 
 civilization. Take away this and you abolish the 
 difference between the troglodyte and the gentle- 
 man. God implanted the sense of beauty in us to 
 be our educator and civilizer. Through the sense 
 of beauty he says to us perpetually, " Come up 
 higher! " And he feeds that sentiment by his own 
 benign action with all that is beautiful in his crea- 
 tions, and most of all with flowers. In them we 
 have a subtle proof of divine beneficence. They 
 express the riches of that Love which provides for 
 the fancy as well as the flesh, and while nourish- 
 ing the body with necessary food entertains the 
 mind with ethereal bread. A love less tender 
 ■^ould have given the needful fruits without the 
 superfluous flowers. These are the finer expres- 
 sions of the Infinite good- will, the dearer tokens of 
 the Father's love. 
 
 But this is not all that their beauty teaches. 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 43 
 
 That is a partial and narrow view of creation 
 which considers it as destined only for the use of 
 man, and all the wondrous and beautiful things in 
 it as ministering only to human enjoyment. Are 
 there then no flowers but those which mortals see ? 
 Did the earth first take her robe of beauty to grat- 
 ify her human offspring ? Was there no Eden till 
 man was placed in it, and none after man was 
 expelled ? Were the prairies of Illinois naked 
 loam till the children of the new world looked 
 on their vast expanse ? Had Massachusetts no 
 mayflowers till the Pilgrims landed ? Did the 
 peerless Victoria, resting her broad leaves on the 
 Amazon, delay to blossom till Humboldt and 
 Schomburgk were there to see ? Doubtless there 
 were flowers before the birth of man. Doubtless 
 the Creator has his own delight in these creatures, 
 and has planted them far from mortal ken, in 
 mountain rifts and inaccessible rock clefts where 
 only the chamois and eagle see, on desert islands 
 and in secret nooks where no eye but his can re- 
 joice in their beauty, and would have planted them 
 none the less if the human race had never been 
 called into being, if Adam and all his progeny had 
 been omitted from the scheme of things. They 
 are his fancy, his sport, the exuberance and frolic 
 of the spirit. Tliey express the deep joy of God in 
 his creative energy. Man, never sufficient to him- 
 
44 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 self, vain man requires the stimulus of recognition 
 and admiring response. He will not do his best 
 unless he can count upon witnesses, eye-witnesses 
 or ear-witnesses, present or to come. Imagine even 
 Shakspeare composing a drama that was never to 
 be acted or read, or Handel a chorus that was 
 never to be sung. But Nature craves no admirers, 
 solicits no witnesses, and works as cheerily and as 
 wondrously in the heart of the wilderness as in 
 public haunts. She even multiplies her choicest 
 products in secret dells and pathless wilds, surpris- 
 ing the chance wanderer with unexpected marvels 
 of beauty, but not caring that any wanderer should 
 find her out. An admonition to man, that of 
 human products also, the choicest and fairest are 
 the fruit of retirement. The best that life yields, 
 the dearest blessings, flourish in private. They are 
 crushed in the sharp collision, or frittered away in 
 the long attrition of public converse. The high- 
 ways for business ; the city and the court for glory 
 and gain, for the race of ambition and the chase of 
 fortune. But the flower of contentment blooms, 
 if at all, in private gardens, in the bosom of home, in 
 the solitudes of the spirit. Sought thus and there, it 
 springs for all, and often most luxuriantly in scenes 
 of the poorest promise. The apparent difference 
 in the human condition is monstrous ; the actual 
 difference, the difference in solid satisfaction, is 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 45 
 
 comparatively small. There are none so ill pro- 
 vided but life will occasionally yield them flowers. 
 Wherever there is a healthy nature, wherever there 
 are innocence and kind affections, there are flowers. 
 The same all-present bounty that gave to the trop- 
 ics the cactus and the palm, has clothed our 
 northern hillsides with the anemone and the vio- 
 let ; and the same beneficent law which gives to 
 genius glory and fame, appoints for the meek and 
 lowly peace. 
 
 Of flowers consider, further, the infinite variety, 
 — a variety no science can express and no text- 
 books exhaust. Botany enumerates classes and 
 orders ; but the species how diverse, and no two 
 individuals even of any one species exactly alike. 
 Consider this, ye pedagogues and system-makers, 
 and from it learn how futile, how contrary to all 
 the analogies of Nature are all your attempts 
 to make human beings think and act alike. This 
 seems to be the aim of most of the systems of edu- 
 cation and of church polity which have been pro- 
 pounded and gained acceptance in the world, — to 
 make men think and act alike. Such systems 
 mistake the true method of growth and the end of 
 life. The method of growth is not the same for all ; 
 and the end, which in one sense is the same for 
 all, — that is, the unfolding of each one's better 
 nature and progress in all good, — is not to be 
 
46 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 accomplished in the same way by all. If vegetable 
 nature without the power of self-determination ex- 
 hibits such diversity, what ought to be expected of 
 human nature with that additional element ! The 
 truth is, there are needed as many systems of edu- 
 cation as there are beings to be educated ; and 
 God, the supreme educator, pursues a different 
 system with each. Preposterous the demand that 
 every individual shall be a reproduction of some 
 approved model, though it were the highest. As 
 well demand that every flower shall be a tulip 
 or a rose. Had it been the Creator's design that 
 human nature in all should conform to a given 
 model, the same endowments would have happened 
 to all, and a single pattern would have been or- 
 dained by which men should mould in all respects 
 their character and life. But as no such copy has 
 been set, — for the highest, even Christ, is a model in 
 principle only, not in detail, — as no such copy has 
 been set, and as no such uniform endowment ap- 
 pears, it is evident that God intended the same 
 variety in the rational world which pervades the 
 irrational ; he intended that man should differ from 
 man as one flower differs from another in glory. 
 There are good and evil qualities, there are true 
 and false styles, as in Nature there are wholesome 
 and noxious plants. The evil and false must be 
 rooted out; but within the limits of health and 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 47 
 
 truth there is infinite scope for self-determination 
 and individuality. Each individual has his own 
 proper type, and the best development for each 
 is that which accords with his individuality. A 
 perfect society is not one in which all attain the 
 same growth and exhibit the same aspect, but one 
 in which, like the flowers of the field, each is devel- 
 oped according to his type. Moreover, as each has 
 his own individual nature, so in each there is a 
 nature common to all, — the moral nature, which 
 connects him with the highest. This each is 
 bound to unfold in his life ; and as every flower 
 represents the whole of Nature in miniature, so 
 every finite spirit should aim to represent the uni- 
 versal Spirit, to express the divine idea of man, to 
 enact the divine-human in his proper sphere. 
 
 Let our contemplation of flowers consider, lastly, 
 the law of their being, — " how they grow." What 
 distinguishes the life of plants is closeness to Na- 
 ture, expressed in tenacity of place. They have 
 their root in the earth ; they are fixed to the soil, 
 and perish if divorced from the sod. Man has a 
 larger scope in his power of locomotion and choice 
 of place ; but man too is a child of Nature, and can 
 flourish only by strict adherence to Nature's hold. 
 We too are bound to earth. Spirits though we be, 
 we have our root in the clod. We are animated 
 earth, and though not bound to a given spot we 
 
48 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 
 
 are bound to the parent mass by indissoluble ties. 
 We can act only by means of the organism with 
 which we are endowed, and that organism is apt 
 and available only in strict accordance with Nature's 
 law. Close to Nature is the rule for man as well 
 as flower. Just so far as we depart from Nature 
 in our methods and aims, we lose our way and 
 miss our end. 
 
 I have followed the leading of the Gospel and 
 the season in attempting to interpret the lesson of 
 the flowers. Some of their aspects I have sought 
 to represent, but who can translate into speech the 
 bloom of Nature or formulate in words the glory 
 and savor of the wood and the field ? Nature to 
 be known must be studied face to face. The single 
 flower is of brief duration ; the single blossom is 
 more transient still. The flowers that now glad 
 the eye are not the same with those which breathed 
 the annual greeting of other years, reminding us 
 sadly of human flowers, the beloved of our heart, 
 the joy of our life, that have perished from us with 
 the autumn leaf and come not again. But God is 
 faithful : he takes much, but he gives more ; and 
 Nature reproduces herself continually. Think what 
 changes have passed over Palestine since these 
 words of Jesus, " Consider the lilies," were uttered 
 there. The Jewish theocracy with its sumptuous 
 ritual has gone out ; the Jewish temple, the pride of 
 
THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 49 
 
 Zion, has been levelled with the ground. Roman 
 and Greek, Saracen and Frank, have occupied in 
 turn the land of sacred story " over whose acres 
 walked those blessed feet," and planted their faiths 
 and altars there. Hardly the curious traveller de- 
 tects here and there some doubtful trace of the an- 
 cient time. But the lilies of the field, the same in 
 kind that blossomed in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 are there still, fresh and glorious as when Jesus 
 praised their shining raiment ; and still they preach 
 to thoughtful minds the same moral which Jesus 
 drew from their silent beauty. Man and man's 
 doings appear and vanish ; momentary bubbles on 
 tlie great world-stream, — they were and are not. 
 But Nature is constant, — the ancient of days, still 
 young in her age's lateness as in creation's prime ; 
 still, in all her varying phases, the same from age 
 to age ; the image of eternity ; the visible presence 
 of the Invisible, who in her and through her speaks 
 to us still, as spoke his beloved Son, and by all the 
 beauty and all the marvels of his creation and all 
 the graces and beatitudes of life, is seeking only and 
 always to win us to himself. 
 
IV. 
 
 NOTHING TO DKAW WITH. 
 
 Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is 
 deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? 
 
 John iv. 11. 
 
 LIVING water meant one thing to the woman 
 of Samaria and another thing to the Son of 
 Man. Such different associations have different 
 minds with the same objects, the same words. 
 What a different thing is this visible world to dif- 
 ferent classes of its occupants ! To one it is a series 
 of phenomena which come and go like pictures in 
 a diorama, and mean nothing more. To another it 
 is a round of personal experiences, important only 
 as thej affect him pleasantly or otherwise. To a 
 philosopher like Newton it is a chain of causes and 
 effects expressive of natural laws. To a Spiritual- 
 ist like Jacob Boehme or Swedenborg it is a book 
 of parables, or a manual of symbols and corre- 
 spondences expressive of spiritual truths. 
 
 Day by day the sun rises and sets. The common 
 eye sees nothing but a shining ball pervading the 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 51 
 
 heavens, a convenient arrangement for lighting and 
 warming our earthly day ; Laplace saw a world 
 on fire ; King David saw a divine commandment, 
 " enlightening the eyes and rejoicing the heart ; " 
 Zoroaster saw Divinity itself enthroned in light. 
 
 Jesus and his companions were seated at table. 
 The disciples saw nothing but bread and wine ; the 
 Master saw the flesh and blood of a new age. 
 
 And so by the well of Sychar, where the woman 
 of Samaria can see no living water but the cooling 
 element that sparkles in her bucket, the Son of 
 Man is conscious of a spiritual element springing 
 up into everlasting life. 
 
 The scene at Sychar is daily renewed. Life is 
 that well where spiritual and worldly meet to- 
 gether in a common necessity. To some it is a 
 well of temporary refreshment ; to some of everlast- 
 ing satisfaction. Some thirst for one thing, some 
 for another ; but all thirst, — all seek satisfaction 
 of one or another kind. And satisfaction is neces- 
 sary to all. So necessary is it to the sustentation 
 of life, that the soul must perish if that nutriment 
 be long withheld. So necessary is it, that the soul 
 creates it for itself in the way of hope when denied 
 it in the way of reality. So necessary is it that 
 when in the lot of another no satisfactions are 
 visible to us we are puzzled to know how such a 
 one lives. He has nothing that would nourish or 
 
^2 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH, 
 
 comfort us, — nothing to draw with that we can 
 see, — and yet he is happy. Whence has he that 
 living water ? 
 
 Let no man measure another's resources by the 
 contents of his own dipper. When the Son of 
 Man came weary and thirsty, and sat down in his 
 humility by Jacob's well, he seemed no doubt a 
 pitiable object to the woman of Samaria who came 
 thither to draw water. She thought herself the 
 more fortunate of the two. " Sir, thou hast noth- 
 ing to draw with, and the well is deep." But a 
 little conversation undeceived her ; she found their 
 relative position reversed. The need was hers ; 
 the fulness his. 
 
 Life is a well where all in various ways seek 
 comfort and delight. The satisfaction we find in it 
 will depend on what we bring to it, on the nature of 
 the good we seek, on our views and expectations of 
 life, on what we draw with. He who brings nothing 
 but selfish appetite will find nothing else. He will 
 find it an everlasting thirsting again ; unsatisfied 
 desire will be his lot. For when was appetite ever 
 satisfied ? " Enough " is a word unknown in the 
 vocabulary of desire. Whatever the direction and 
 special object of desire, if private advantage be the 
 only end contemplated, disappointment will be the 
 end experienced. The result will be no enduring 
 satisfaction, but increased thirst. 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 53 
 
 The lowest object wliicli desire can propose to 
 itself is pleasure. Pleasure is one of the goods of 
 life, but an incidental one ; it comes in the train of 
 other good, like the fragrance which attends a 
 wholesome fruit ; it is not to be had by making it 
 a special object of pursuit, and he who has nothing 
 to draw with but love of pleasure will soon cease to 
 draw even that. Our capacity for enjoyment — I 
 mean sensational enjoyment — is the most limited 
 of all our capacities. It is limited by the constitu- 
 tion of our own being on one side, and the constitu- 
 tion of external nature on the other. We can have 
 but so many pleasant sensations in a given time ; 
 so many and no more compose our daily bread. 
 By no art or device, by no resources of wealth, by 
 no felicity of circumstance, can the number be made 
 to exceed in any considerable degree what is ordi- 
 narily experienced by healthy natures, with no ad- 
 vantage of fortune and without seeking. And 
 limited as is our capacity in that kind, the appetite 
 for pleasure is oftener dulled by satiety and baffled 
 by disgust than satisfied by an adequate amount of 
 realized enjoyment. For this is remarkable in man, 
 that with an appetite " like fire or like the grave," 
 his susceptibility of pleasure is dependent on two 
 or three bundles of nerves of fragile texture and 
 very precarious service, good for so much and no 
 more in the healthiest state, and sure to give out 
 
64 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 if overworked. Of sensual enjoyment the fact is 
 notorious. Here the limits are proverbially close ; 
 pleasure indulged to excess impairs the organs 
 through which pleasure is derived. The nerves 
 are unstrung, the senses are jaded, the members 
 refuse to perform their function ; all relish de- 
 parts out of life. We read of a royal voluptuary 
 who offered a reward to one who should invent a 
 new sensation. I am not aware that the prize 
 was ever claimed. Many a despot who figures in 
 history has been reduced to this strait, — a king- 
 dom and nothing to draw w^ith ; a thousand ser- 
 vants at command and no satisfaction to be had ; 
 lord of unlimited wealth, and not a drop to drink ! 
 The cynic who threw away the useless luxury of 
 a cup on seeing a beggar drink from the hollow 
 of his hand had a better command of the well 
 of life and richer draughts from its depths 
 than the emperor whose suppers impoverished 
 nations. 
 
 Life is poor when used in this way, — poor as a 
 draught of selfish satisfactions. There is no aim, 
 I say, which a man can propose to himself so im- 
 practicable as the effort to make existence an unin- 
 terrupted series of enjoyments. When we reflect 
 how many things must concur to furnish a single 
 day of unalloyed pleasure ; how every string in the 
 many-stringed instrument of the human frame 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 65 
 
 must be tuned to the exact pitch of pleasant sen- 
 sation ; how the slightest irritation of a single nerve, 
 an aching tooth, or a mote in the eye may convert 
 recreation into torture ; how all the accidents of 
 time and place, the faces and spirits of our compan- 
 ions, and all the elements of the circle in which we 
 move must conspire to aid or not to molest, — the 
 wonder is that ever a day of unqualified enjoyment 
 should fall to the lot of man. " It is in vain that 
 a man says to himself, ' Go to now, I will prove thee 
 with mirth/ The order of Nature has not been con- 
 sulted in that arrangement, nor is it considered 
 how small a portion of our enjoyment depends on 
 our own wills, and how much on the will of God, 
 who often says, ' Go to now, I will prove thee with 
 plagues and sorrows.' " * Nature consults the hap- 
 piness of the individual no further than the hap- 
 piness of the individual consists with the good of 
 the whole. Regardless of individual wishes, in- 
 exorable and immutable, she pursues her appointed 
 course, giving us often clouds for sunbeams, drought 
 for rain, famine for plenty, and tumult for rest ; 
 frustrating our wisest plans, disappointing our 
 fondest hopes, making us pine with sickness and 
 writhe with pain, taking from us our dearest, — 
 goods and friends and all the promise and joy of 
 life, — and hurrying us on to the grave with a 
 
 * Sydney Smith. 
 
56 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 power which no prayers can avert and no wisdom 
 stay. 
 
 Life is niggard of private and far-sought delights. 
 The best and surest satisfactions are those which 
 are common to all, and which come without seek- 
 ing, — the perennial feast of Nature, the golden sun- 
 light, the balmy air of summer days, the pleasant 
 face of earth and sky, books and friends, and the 
 sweet consuetudes of daily life. These are man's 
 common, natural food;' and all attempts to re- 
 fine upon these or to supersede them with more 
 exquisite enjoyments are a search after the impos- 
 sible, and impoverish at last, instead of enriching 
 our mortal estate. Add to all this the secret self- 
 upbraidings which even the most frivolous cannot 
 wholly escape, — the latent conviction that life is 
 not the Vanity Fair they have sought to make it, 
 that life was given for quite other purposes than 
 selfish gratification, and that he who has nothing 
 but amusement to show for his opportunities has 
 lived in vain. 
 
 This is the lesson taught by that melancholy 
 book, — most melancholy of all time, the Book of 
 Ecclesiastes. We have there a picture, after the 
 life, of the jaded and disappointed voluptuary. No 
 vulgar pleasure-seeker, but a thoughtful, curious, 
 critical voluptuary is portrayed. A monarch fur- 
 nished with the amplest resources of fortune, a 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 57 
 
 philosopher endowed with the largest gifts of mind, 
 goes deliberately about to satisfy a craving appetite, 
 and devotes all his genius and all his vast means 
 to discover the secret of happiness, " till I might 
 see," he says, " what was that good for the sons 
 of men." He fails, as all before him and all since 
 have failed, to find the satisfaction thus sought, 
 and records the story of his failure in the sad con- 
 fession of a wasted life. " Nothing to draw with, 
 and the well is deep," is the doleful record and 
 everlasting moral of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 Appetite has other objects than the love of 
 pleasure. Let us view it in its nobler manifesta- 
 tions ; for example, in the love of knowledge. 
 The pursuit of knowledge is certainly a worthier 
 aim than enjoyment, and less likely to disappoint 
 the seeker. But when knowledge is sought in the 
 way of private satisfaction, with no motive but 
 curiosity, with no view to the supreme truth and 
 good, with no lofty aspiration, with no reference to 
 human weal, it is but a selfish appetite, after all, 
 which prompts that pursuit, more rational and re- 
 fined than the love of pleasure, but subject to the 
 same law and liable to the same doom. Like all 
 other appetites, it is insatiable, and though free 
 from the weary satiety which follows sensual enjoy- 
 ment, it is equally incapable of supplying a perfect 
 and enduring satisfaction. It is not living water, 
 
58 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 of which whosoever drinketh shall thirst no more ; 
 on the contrary, it is but a temporary satisfaction, 
 which one may relish to-day and be none the hap- 
 pier for to-morrow. 
 
 I do not find that learned men and philosophers 
 have been particularly blessed above all others. I 
 do not find that with all their discoveries they have 
 hit upon the secret of multiplying pleasant sensa- 
 tions, or what is more to the purpose, of avoiding 
 painful ones. I know of no geographer or scientific 
 traveller who has found in either of the five zones 
 that happy valley in which he could set up his ever- 
 lasting rest. I know of no astronomer who could 
 find a heaven for himself among the heavenly bodies 
 which he knew and named, or secure the perihelion 
 of an uninterrupted peace. I know of no chemist 
 out of whose crucible has come the alkali that 
 would discharge the disfiguring stains from mortal 
 life, of no philosopher who could rid himself of his 
 own shadow. I do not find that philosophers have 
 been more able than other men to escape the bur- 
 den of the common lot, or less ready than other 
 men to throw off the burden and the grief by laying 
 violent hands on themselves, and putting an abrupt 
 period to their tale of woe. I find here an ancient 
 sage anticipating his end because he is old and 
 maimed, there a scholar deliberately walking out of 
 life because of a humor in his eyes. The immortal 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 59 
 
 Newton, a great sufferer in his latter years, could 
 find no comfort in those discoveries which had 
 been the aim and glory of his life. Lagrange at 
 one period was plunged in profound melancholy, 
 and lost all relish for scientific pursuits. D'Alem- 
 bert, who was similarly afflicted, pronounced exist- 
 ence a misfortune. Boyle was driven to the verge 
 of suicide by religious doubts. The learned and 
 beautiful Maria Agnesi, the finished linguist, the 
 profound mathematician, the most learned of 
 women, sought refuge in a convent from a burden 
 of gloom which no science could relieve. Hum- 
 boldt gave vent to the unsuspected mortifications 
 of daily life in the acerbities of private correspond- 
 ence ; and Hugh Miller cut short with a pistol-shot 
 the thread of a life imbittered with vain attempts 
 to solve the problem of creation and to reconcile 
 geological strata with the Book of Genesis. 
 
 Here, too, the sad Ecclesiastes confirms our hom- 
 ily : " And I gave my heart to seek and search out 
 by wisdom concerning all things that are done un- 
 der heaven. ... I have seen all the works that are 
 done under the sun ; and behold, all is vanity and 
 vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot 
 be made straight : and that which is wanting can- 
 not be numbered. ... In much wisdom is much 
 grief : and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth 
 sorrow." 
 
60 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 When moreover we reflect how little is known in 
 comparison with the boundless unknown, how vast 
 the realm of inquiry, how infinitesimal the province 
 yet conquered by man or conquerable, and how 
 all our discoveries amount to nothing but a little 
 prying and peeping, glimpses through telescopes 
 and microscopes, — what the Apostle calls seeing 
 through a glass darkly, — there seems something 
 tragic in science itself quite aside from the for- 
 tunes of those who pursue it. The most learned 
 have felt most profoundly their ignorance ; the 
 most philosophic their incompetence. This one 
 had only attained to know that he knew nothing, 
 and that one had only picked up pebbles on the 
 strand of an unexplored deep. 
 
 The seeker after knowledge, no less than the 
 pleasure-seeker, will often sit weary by the well, 
 unsatisfied and forlorn. To science also the well is 
 deep, and learning has nothing to draw with equal 
 to craving Nature's need. 
 
 And if knowledge will not satisfy the thirsting 
 soul, still less can that thirst be assuaged with fame. 
 The fame which most men seek is the idlest wind 
 that blows. There is a fame, indeed, which savors 
 of eternal life. The desire for that fame, the thirst 
 for true glory and immortality, the wish to live and 
 shine forever in the firmament of elect souls, is a 
 rare and sublime passion which only minds of the 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 61 
 
 highest order are capable of entertaining. It is 
 found only in connectionwith extraordinary powers, 
 and is itself an earnest of immortality. I speak not 
 of fame in this sense, but of present distinction, of 
 popular applause. The ambition which contends 
 for such prizes is born of vanity, and ends in vanity 
 and vexation of spirit. This is a thirst which is 
 never satisfied, and which has this peculiarity distin- 
 guishing it from other passions, that its aim is not 
 only selfish, but exclusive; it not only seeks its own 
 regardless of others, but it seeks what others may 
 not share, and is pained at others' success. Its own 
 successes lose all their relish the moment another 
 has more. And this is its everlasting penalty, — 
 that when it thinks to secure its prize, behold, an- 
 other has more. If merit were the gauge and con- 
 dition of success, ambition would have at least an 
 honorable career, if not a worthy aim. But this is 
 a contest in which the race is not to the swift, nor 
 the battle to the strong. Distinction is dear if 
 honorably sought, and dearer still if obtained at 
 the price of self-respect, but cheap enough to those 
 who have no self-respect to compromise. It is 
 easy to make one's self a name, if with ordinary 
 powers a man will cast aside all scruple of delicacy 
 and right, and strive for coarse effects. An uncriti- 
 cal public is always ready with its breath to fill 
 the sail that courts it, and to crown with its huz- 
 
62 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 zas the hero of the hour. And so the hero of to- 
 day is replaced by a new hero to-morrow. There 
 never was an age when popular favor was dealt in 
 the measure of desert, when the highest honor was 
 secure to the highest excellence, when the faithful 
 and laborious student, the able statesman, the con- 
 summate artist, the thorough and conscientious 
 worker in whatever department, could be sure of 
 the recompense due to superior merit. It is not 
 the wisest voice, but the loudest, — not the thinker, 
 scholar, seer, but the shallow declaimer, — that 
 wins the public ear. It is not the work of genius or 
 profound learning, but the book that aims at popu- 
 lar effect, that brings the largest and surest re- 
 turns in public report. It is not the scientific 
 physician, but the quack, whose cures are cele- 
 brated. It is not the learned civilian or devoted 
 patriot, but the noisy demagogue, whom the people 
 choose for their representative and leader. Notori- 
 ously in our American politics, it is not the fittest 
 candidate, but the most available, whom parties 
 designate for the highest place in the land. 
 
 But suppose the race successful, and the prize, 
 whatever it be, secured, what does it profit in the 
 way of conscious enjoyment ? What amount of 
 solid satisfaction is realized in it ? No good which 
 mortals chase after is so purely imaginary as this 
 " fancied life in others' breath." 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 63 
 
 *' All that we feel of it begins and ends 
 In the small circle of our foes and friends." 
 
 Let a man work well for worthy ends and content 
 himself with self-respect, with conscious excel- 
 lence, with the favorable verdict of his peers, and 
 his reward is sure ; but if he seek it in public honor 
 and popular applause, he pursues a phantom and 
 embraces a shadow. 
 
 So whether it fail or whether it succeed in its 
 special and immediate aim, the thirst which seeks 
 satisfaction in distinction and applause, like every 
 appetite that aims at private satisfaction, is a thirst- 
 ing again. Whatever satisfactions attend it, they 
 are not the living water that makes glad and se- 
 rene, conscious of imperishable riches and craving 
 nothing. 
 
 Whence, then, has any soul that living water? 
 Appetite has nothing to draw with, and the well is 
 deep. What is the secret of that happiness which 
 all crave as their proper nutriment and natural 
 right? The Latin moralist made it to consist in 
 health. The object of a wise man's prayer, he 
 says, after showing the folly of all other wishes, 
 should be a sound mind in a sound body. Un- 
 questionably, health in that large sense which em- 
 braces the mental with the bodily functions is the 
 greatest of temporal blessings ; but health is not a 
 thing which man can always command, or which 
 
64 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 God will always vouchsafe to prayer, and when 
 vouchsafed for a time, it is not an impregnable, 
 imperishable good : it is liable to countless acci- 
 dents ; a little thing may undermine it, — a little too 
 much heat, a little too much cold, the exigencies of 
 duty, unavoidable exposure, or an untoward event. 
 And if it escape for two or three scores of years 
 the manifold contingencies of life, it must yield at 
 last to the slow decay of age. To the healtliiest 
 and most vigorous the time must come when the 
 pitcher will be broken at the fountain and the 
 wheel at the cistern, and when failing nature will 
 have nothing to draw with, yet will feel as keenly 
 as ever that the well is deep. Here then is a 
 limit to the sovereign efficacy of health, beyond 
 which the heathen moralist did not reach with 
 his prescription. 
 
 Another solution of the great problem is given 
 by the Hebrew teacher already referred to in an- 
 other connection. Ecclesiastes ends his melan- 
 choly story with this " conclusion of the whole 
 matter: Fear God, and keep liis commandments: 
 for. this is the whole duty of man." Yes, a life 
 of virtue, if one could accomplish it, a life of un- 
 swerving obedience to divine commandments, — that 
 is real, that is vital. Yet who by an effort of the 
 will can lead a life of unswerving obedience ? Who 
 even by taking heed thereto can wholly cleanse his 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 65 
 
 ways ? Who by sheer force of dogged resolution 
 can fear God and keep his commandments ? Who 
 can be saved by the works of the Law ? To this 
 end obedience should be perfect and entire, wanting 
 nothing. But "no man liveth and sinneth not;" 
 and the greatest legalist among Christian teachers 
 declares that '^ whosoever shall keep the whole law, 
 and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." But 
 granting the ability, granting a possible salvation 
 by works, this is not the salvation which satisfies 
 man's deepest need ; it is not a draught that reaches 
 the bottom of the well. I can suppose that one 
 shall lead a blameless and virtuous life, and yet 
 not know supreme content. For though it is true, 
 as sages have taught and saws declare, that without 
 virtue there is no happiness, it is not true that 
 virtue in this sense is the highest and perfect 
 blessedness. 
 
 In what, then, consists that blessedness which 
 neither health nor virtue can supply ? Where and 
 what is that living water that answers to nature's 
 uttermost need ? Tell us, some greater than Solo- 
 mon, what to draw with ; for the well is deep. And 
 a greater than Solomon has spoken : " He that 
 loseth his life for my sake, shall find it." For my 
 sake, — that is, for truth's sake, for duty's sake, for 
 the sake of any real, permanent good. The secret 
 of a blessed life is that we lose ourselves in some 
 
 5 
 
66 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 
 
 worthy cause or work. The root of all unhappi- 
 ness lies in the thought of self. All desires that 
 terminate in self, whether animal, intellectual, or 
 even moral, renew and increase the everlasting 
 thirst. It needs that desire be turned away from 
 self and fixed on something without us, — something 
 which is loved and sought for its own sake. The 
 greater the object, the greater and more enduring 
 the satisfaction. To lose ourselves in an infinite 
 object is everlasting life. Can a man do this by 
 simply willing it? Surely not; nor can the will 
 to do so originate in a theoretical conviction. It 
 needs something more than a true perception and 
 a right resolve to bring about the union between 
 the individual and an object worthy his deepest 
 devotion. That is a marriage which is made in 
 heaven. Only the grace of God can wed the soul 
 with the absolute good. Yet it is something even 
 to see the truth whose realization is everlasting 
 life, and to know at least the self-delusion we are 
 practising when we seek to quench with temporal 
 satisfactions a thirst which only divine satisfac- 
 tions can allay, although in our helplessness we 
 continue to practise it. We are near awaking 
 when we dream that we dream. 
 
 The well is deep; but every unselfish pursuit 
 dips into it, draws from it, and can never exhaust 
 it. Happy the man who has an object in life, — 
 
NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 67 
 
 a work, a mission, which takes him completely 
 out of himself. He has living water, and who- 
 soever drinketh thereof shall never thirst. Of 
 such objects there is no lack if one listens to the 
 voice which speaks to every soul, " Go work to-day 
 in my vineyard." Do you ask where the vineyard 
 is in which the good Father bids us work ? It is 
 no reserved spot, no plot set apart, fenced in and 
 select ; it is man's ubiquitous abode. The vineyard 
 is wlierever good can be done or devised, — in the 
 streets of the city, in its stores and counting-rooms 
 and banks. It is on the decks of ships, in the sol- 
 dier's bivouac, in the logger's camp, in your house 
 and mine, in every scene of human life, wherever 
 moral fruit can be gathered, wherever moral seed 
 can be sown. They who are called to be laborers 
 in that vineyard are the human family, one and 
 all, — whoever is capable of teaching a lesson, of 
 helping a neighbor, of speeding the world's work, 
 of advancing the world's weal, of relieving a want, 
 of imparting a joy. The call to labor is every fac- 
 ulty we possess, every gift received, every privilege 
 conferred, every opportunity offered. The call to 
 labor is the fact of life. The hours of work are 
 morning and evening, noon and night. The season 
 of ingathering is summer and winter, spring and 
 autumn. The harvest is human progress, the sum 
 of earthly well being from age to age. 
 
V. 
 
 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 Blessed are the jpure in heart: for they shall see God. 
 
 Matt. v. 8. 
 
 TT is always a figurative use of speech when we 
 talk of seeing God. As the Jews understood 
 the figure, it meant to behold the face of a sover- 
 eign, to bask in the light of his countenance, 
 to be blessed with his peculiar favor. As we 
 understand it, to see God is to apprehend him, 
 to be conscious of his presence, to enjoy his 
 idea. The beatitude, as we understand it, is not 
 a benediction radiated from the face of a sov- 
 ereign, but the growth of tlie spirit into a fuller 
 sense of the divine, — a freer, nearer commun- 
 ion with God. In other words, the blessedness 
 assured to the pure in heart is not a passive 
 reception of divine favor, but a vivid conscious- 
 ness of Godhead. 
 
 The pure in heart shall see God ! Our percep- 
 tion of Deity is commensurate with our moral 
 development. As we are ourselves, so is the God 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 69 
 
 we apprehend. As we change ourselves, so God 
 changes to our apprehension. With every change 
 that comes over our character we shift our point 
 of view. We know how differently sensible objects 
 appear as the point of view varies from which 
 they are beheld. The mountain is one thing seen 
 in the far distance robed in the azure hue flung 
 over it by atmospheric illusion, and another to the 
 wanderer who climbs its shaggy sides. The even- 
 ing star is one thing to the naked eye, and a dif- 
 ferent thing when viewed through the telescope ; 
 how different still, we may suppose, to the dweller 
 whose being is cast on that radiant orb ! So the 
 invisible objects of the mind, the everlasting ideas 
 of the mind, vary with the character and culture 
 of the mind that views them. The idea of God is 
 held with what different modifications by different 
 ages and minds ! It has never been wholly want- 
 ing to the race. The lowest stage of humanity 
 betrays some glimmering of this celestial light, 
 though broken into strange refractions by the 
 mists of ignorance. The highest culture can 
 never outgrow its illumination. The progress 
 of Humanity may be traced and measured by 
 the character which this idea has assumed in 
 different periods, nations, and faiths. The first 
 gods were the misgrowths of Superstition. 
 
70 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 " She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray 
 To Power unseen and mightier far than they. 
 She from the rending earth and bursting skies 
 Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise ; 
 Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes : 
 Fear made her devils, and weak Hope her gods." 
 
 The conceptions which men formed of Deity 
 when the gods of Greece were the highest models 
 of divine greatness and the supreme objects of 
 religious homage, attest the low condition of moral 
 culture from which they sprung. For the votary 
 can hardly be supposed to be better than the god 
 of his devotion ; and just in proportion as men 
 advance in moral refinement they rise to higher 
 conceptions of godhead, — from the gods of the 
 Pantheon to the Jehovah of Judaism, from the 
 Jehovah of Judaism to the Father in heaven of 
 the Gospel and those sublime conceptions, " God 
 is Light," and " God is Love." 
 
 What is true of nations, periods, and religions is 
 true of individuals. We repeat the course of social 
 development in our individual experience. The 
 purer we are ourselves, the greater our moral re- 
 finement, the better the God of our conception, 
 the freer from every taint of mortal imperfection. 
 It may be objected that our idea of God is tradi- 
 tional ; it is not our own conception, the growth of 
 our own minds, but something which is given us 
 in the doctrines of our religion. But that idea, 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 71 
 
 though given, cannot he our idea until we make 
 it ours by personal experience. Our religion may 
 teach that God is Love ; but we shall not so appre- 
 hend him until in our moral development we have 
 reached that stage of refinement, and consequently 
 that point of view, from which God can be recog- 
 nized as Love by us. If we consult the history of 
 our religion, we shall find that the Christian idea 
 of God as given in the New Testament, has not 
 been the prevailing idea of the Christian world. 
 Scarce a trace of this idea is apparent in any prom- 
 inent actor in the long line of the Christian ages. 
 There stand the immortal words " God is Love." 
 When has this idea been practically acknowledged 
 and embraced? In what church symbol or con- 
 fession has it been set forth ? What creed, from 
 the Athanasian to the Westminster Catechism, 
 contains it? By what Christian Council, from that 
 of Nicaea to that of Trent or the Vatican, was it 
 ever enjoined? Was God believed to be Love 
 when the heretics of Piedmont were hunted like 
 wild beasts for endeavoring to restore the pristine 
 faith of the Gospel ? Was God conceived to be 
 Love when Huss and Jerome of Prague were burned 
 at Constance ? Was it this idea that kindled the 
 fires of Geneva and of Smithfield ? Was it the 
 perception that God is Love that prompted the 
 slaughter of the Huguenots and the tortures of 
 
72 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 the Inquisition ? The idea is given, it is incul- 
 cated by apostolic authority ; but men are inca- 
 pable of receiving it until they reach the moral 
 elevation from which it flowed. 
 
 If we consult our own experience we shall find 
 that our idea of God is variable, — that we ap- 
 prehend him differently according to our mental 
 states ; that though theoretically we receive the 
 highest idea of God, our apprehension of that idea 
 is not equally clear at all times ; that our appre- 
 ciation of it depends on our moral condition. If 
 at any time we have consciously transgressed the 
 law of God, and the sense of that transgression 
 weighs heavily on our souls, then we think of God 
 as avenging Justice. If we have put our transgres- 
 sion from us and are clear of that stain, God seems 
 to us the loving Father once more. The more we 
 seek to conform ourselves to his will and to per- 
 fect his image in our lives, the more clearly we 
 apprehend the saying, " God is Love." 
 
 It is a matter of comparatively little importance 
 what metaphysical conceptions we form to our- 
 selves of the Godhead, — whether we conceive of 
 him as a triune existence or as simple unity ; but 
 it IS of vast importance what ideas we entertain 
 of his moral character, — whether righteousness or 
 vengeance, mercy or wrath, predominate in our 
 conception, — whether we apprehend God as Force 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 73 
 
 or as Love. And again, it matters little what our 
 theory is about God, our speculative belief ; but 
 it matters infinitely what our feeling is, and the 
 practical persuasion of the heart. Men are some- 
 times better than their theories, and sometimes 
 worse. There are those who profess a stern the- 
 ology, — a God inexorable, unrelenting, breathing 
 vengeance, and inflicting endless pains, — who nev- 
 ertheless, in their own character and commerce 
 with their kind, are mild and merciful, full of 
 love, always ready to forgive injuries, never will- 
 ing to avenge. Mothers I have known who would 
 bear forever with a froward child, infinitely pa- 
 tient with real sin, while professing a God who 
 punishes infinitely imputed sin, and who were alto- 
 gether so much better than their creed that one 
 knew not which more to admire, — the power of 
 tradition in perverting the natural judgment, or the 
 power of a beautiful nature to resist the petrifying 
 influence of such a doctrine. What shall we say 
 of such cases, in which there would seem to be no 
 correspondence between the idea of God in the 
 mind and the moral life in the heart ? I say, 
 the God professed in such cases is not the God 
 believed ; that far down beneath the crust of 
 theology and beneath the rubbish of tradition 
 there lives and works in that soal an idea of 
 God which is worthy and true, which nourishes 
 
74 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 it, and makes its practical religion better than 
 its nominal. Here, too, the pure heart sees God 
 — the true God, the God of the Gospel, the 
 God of Love — under all the disguises of a false 
 theology. 
 
 On the other hand, there are those who profess 
 belief in a loving, paternal God — a God of infinite 
 compassion, a God who pities as a father his chil- 
 dren — who have such an impression of God's 
 mercy that they will hear of no retribution or 
 penalty for sin, but who themselves are charac- 
 terized by traits the very opposite of those they 
 profess to adore, — harsh, impatient, tyrannical, 
 vindictive, indifferent to others' good, with more 
 of hatred than of love in their composition, — and 
 who, if they possessed the power, would exercise 
 a government the reverse of that which they as- 
 cribe to Deity, would persecute their enemies with 
 unappeasable hatred, and crush all who refused 
 obedience to their arbitrary will. In this case, I 
 say again, the God professed is not the God who 
 is really present to the heart. Such characters 
 can never see such a God; they can never truly 
 believe him. 
 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see 
 God." We have found this saying true so far as 
 the right apprehension of God is concerned. But 
 not only is our power of appreciating the divine 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOB. 75 
 
 attributes proportioned to our moral development ; 
 our consciousness of God, the feeling of his all- 
 presence, is subject to the same condition. The 
 greater our moral refinement, the more God dwells 
 in us and we in God. In one sense, indeed, tlie 
 Divine Presence does not depend upon us or on 
 anything out of itself. We conceive of God as 
 present to every point of space and to every state 
 of mind. But we must also conceive that the 
 presence of God is one thing as it respects his own 
 consciousness, and a different thing as it respects 
 ours. There is a limit to the omnipresence of 
 God. The individual consciousness, — that is a 
 charmed circle into which even God does not enter, 
 except so far as the individual is made receptive 
 of God by moral and spiritual development. We 
 know with what different degrees of proximity 
 finite beings approach us, independently of all lo- 
 cal relations. When is a human being near to 
 us ? When we think of him, when we dwell on 
 his idea. Tlie friend whom I love is present to 
 me at the distance of the earth's diameter. The 
 individual who converses with me is not present 
 if my heart and thoughts do not accompany his 
 discourse. God is present to us only when we are 
 conscious of him, when we converse with his idea ; 
 and though he never for an instant withdraws 
 from any one of us, he is infinitely removed from 
 
76 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 those whose consciousness excludes him, who never 
 draw near to him with mind or heart. In propor- 
 tion as. our moral nature is unfolded we draw near 
 to God by moral gravitation ; we see him. There 
 is nothing between us and God but our own im- 
 perfections, our selfishness, our impiety and sin. 
 It needs but a heart purified from worldliness and 
 self, from mean and degrading associations, to see 
 God as truly, though not in the same way, as we 
 see the objects about us. For then everything 
 which we see will be full of God. His presence 
 will be seen to inform all Nature. It will smile 
 upon us from every form of being, and pass before 
 us in every aspect of life. Then we shall see all 
 beauty to be his beauty, all power his will, all 
 intelligence his inspiration, all creatures his ideas, 
 all Nature his organ, all spirit his life. Why is it 
 that popular superstition in time past removed 
 God from the earth and enthroned him above the 
 skies ? Why should it ever have occurred to man 
 that any other region was a fitter residence for 
 Almighty Power than his own planet ? Because 
 man was impure and could not see God in his own 
 sphere, but conceived him infinitely removed, and 
 thought he should honor him the more, the more 
 he increased the distance between God and him- 
 self. The popular theology still conceives of God 
 as afar off, though it speaks of his omnipresence. 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 77 
 
 He is thought to be more present to some other 
 sphere than to this. Hereafter, it is supposed, we 
 shall be translated to that sphere, and then first we 
 shall see God. Would that men might learn once 
 for all that there is no change of sphere for man 
 except by change of mind and heart ! If you 
 should die to-day, your sphere would be the same 
 for all that. But change your mind, your heart, 
 and the world is changed. Only a new heart can 
 ever transport us to a new sphere, and only a pure 
 heart can ever transport us into the presence of 
 God. " We sometimes complain," says Martineau, 
 " of the conditions of our being as unfavorable to 
 the discernment and the love of God. We speak 
 of him as veiled from us by our senses, and of the 
 world as the outer region of exile from which he 
 is peculiarly hid. In imagining what is holy and 
 divine we take our flight into other worlds, and 
 conceive that there the film must fall away and all 
 adorable realities burst on our sight. Alas ! what 
 reason have we to think any other station in the 
 universe more sanctifying than our own ? . . . 
 The dimness we deplore no travelling will cure ; 
 the most perfect of observatories will not serve 
 the blind. We carry our darkness with us, and 
 instead of wandering to fresh scenes, and blaming 
 our planetary atmosphere, and flying over creation 
 for a purer air, it behoves us to sit by our own 
 
78 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 wayside, and cry, 'Lord, that I may receive my 
 sight!'" 
 
 The difficulty of seeing God lies not in him, 
 but in us. His invisibility is an attribute of 
 our nature, not of his. We can only see as we 
 are. It is only our impurities that separate us 
 from him. As fast as these are removed, the 
 Divine nature will open upon us, will fill up our 
 whole field of vision, and convert all things into 
 itself. The pure in heart not only see God, but 
 they see nothing else. Everything they behold is 
 charged with his idea; every appearance reveals 
 his essence ; every event accomplishes his provi- 
 dence. They behold all things in God, and God 
 in all things. Blessed are they ! Blessed in this 
 beatific vision, this angelic theory, far beyond the 
 blessedness which the Jewish mind connected with 
 seeing God ; blessed in the fulness of spiritual life ; 
 blessed in the consciousness of an immortal destiny. 
 Who of human kind has been most blessed in our 
 apprehension ? Of all who ever trod this earth, 
 the most blessed was he who first uttered this beat- 
 itude. And yet what a lot was his ! Not happy 
 surely, in the vulgar sense of that term ; not happy, 
 judged by earthly standards of felicity ; yet su- 
 premely blessed, seeing God face to face. He 
 saw him not only in the aspects of nature, in 
 the lilies of the field, in the fowls of the air, in 
 
THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 79 
 
 the innocence of little children, and the course 
 of events, but he saw God in himself; he saw 
 himself in God. He saw that there was noth- 
 ing between God and him ; that he and the Father 
 were one. 
 
 May we ever look to enjoy a vision and a blessed- 
 ness like this ? May we ever look to see God as 
 Jesus saw him ? May we hope to be conscious of 
 Deity as he was conscious ? Will the time ever 
 come when we too can say, without blasphemy, I 
 and the Father are one ? Are we sufficiently pure 
 in heart even to desire this consummation ? Does 
 it seem to us the most desirable that can be ? If 
 not, let us ask ourselves what is desirable ? What 
 would we have if unbounded power were given us 
 to have and to be what we would ? Paint to your- 
 self a destiny that would quite satisfy your crav- 
 ing. Imagine a condition that would content you 
 wholly and forever. If you follow your imagina- 
 tion to its end, you will see at last that there is no 
 destination that can satisfy all your desires, no 
 condition that would content you wholly and for- 
 ever, except it be one that is bringing you nearer 
 to God and giving you a more adequate vision and 
 a more intense enjoyment of his idea. 
 
 Nearness to God or estrangement from him will 
 be found at last to be the gauge and criterion of 
 blessedness and misery for moral natures. The 
 
80 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 
 
 purity of heart, the perfect unfolding of the moral 
 life which shall make us see God, which shall 
 make us one with him, — all reasoning and all 
 experience point to this as the supreme good for 
 man ; and to alienation from him as the crowning 
 evil. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 
 
 Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy 
 name. Psalm cxlii. 7. 
 
 'T^HIS Psalm was supposed by some Hebrew 
 commentators to have been composed in the 
 cave of AduUam, in which the author secreted him- 
 self from the machinations of Saul. That cavern 
 experience being the nearest approach to literal 
 imprisonment to be found in the history of David, it 
 was foolishly concluded that the cave of Adullam 
 must have been the prison he meant. Surely, there 
 were many passages in the life of David, and many 
 experiences of David's heart, which might be so 
 designated with more propriety than that tempo- 
 rary retreat. To him, I suppose, as to other noble 
 and endowed natures, and indeed to most mortals, 
 there were moments when life itself seemed a 
 prison, — when the soul confined in its own con- 
 sciousness tasted all the bitterness of bondage 
 without its forms. 
 
 6 
 
82 THE sours DELIVERANCE. 
 
 There are many experiences which take this 
 character and produce this effect. There are pas- 
 sages in every life which involve this captivity. 
 Who of us all is so fortunate as not to have 
 tasted at times of the bondage of bodily or men- 
 tal suffering ? Is there one who has not been the 
 prisoner of disease, of headache or heartache, or the 
 prisoner of doubts and fears, — the prisoner of do- 
 mestic calamity and disappointed hopes, — a pris- 
 oner to hours of sharp distress, — "a prisoner long 
 
 In gloom and loneliness of mind, 
 Deaf to tlie melody of song, 
 To every form of beauty blind." 
 
 But waiving these special instances, there is one 
 universal experience which claims to be noticed in 
 this connection, — one species of confinement com- 
 mon to all who rise above the level of a merely ani- 
 mal life. I mean the conflict we all experience 
 between the ideal and the actual, between desire 
 and fruition, our conceptions and our attainments, 
 our designs and our acts. We all have our ideal, 
 our dream of prosperity, perhaps of desert, our vis- 
 ion of a blessed life, — at least occasional convic- 
 tions of the inadequacy of our present being and 
 doing, and aspirations after something better. 
 Could we only reproduce this ideal, could we only 
 realize these aspirations in the life ! But who does 
 this ? What hero or saint ever makes his actual 
 
TFIE sours DELIVERANCE, 83 
 
 life correspond with his ideal, his practice equal to 
 his vision ? There is this discrepance, this contra- 
 diction, between the two parts of our nature and 
 between the two realms of our life, — the ideal and 
 the actual, the theoretic and the practical. Our 
 seeing is always in advance of our being. It is so 
 in the sphere of physical experience as well as of 
 the mind. A glance of the eye shows us objects a 
 hundred millions of miles removed; but a radius 
 of a very few feet bounds the uttermost reach of the 
 hand, and the earth's diameter at farthest bounds 
 the uttermost range of locomotion. What wonder 
 if with our mental vision also we see farther than 
 we can reach, and see better than we are ! What 
 wonder if glorious possibilities dance before our 
 eyes, while sordid realities trail by our side, — if 
 our theory sees the heavens open, while our practice 
 crawls in the dust! 
 
 This, then, is the prison to which I especially in- 
 vite your attention. This is a prison in which we 
 all have been confined, — the feeling of incapacity, 
 the insufficiency of life, the conflict between the 
 ideal and the actual ; on the one hand a dissonance 
 between our desire and our destiny, and on the 
 other hand a discrepance between our theory and 
 our practice. Life disappoints our wishes in what 
 it brings, and it disappoints our purpose in what it 
 accomplishes. 
 
84 THE sours DELIVERANCE. 
 
 1. Our destiny does not correspond with our 
 desire. Our kingdom of heaven is always com- 
 ing and never comes. Imagination dreams of 
 blessedness which reality never knows, and we 
 soon learn that life has nothing so fine as its 
 dreams. The difficulty is not that this or that 
 particular prize to which we aspired has not been 
 attained, that this or that possession which the 
 heart coveted has proved impracticable. It may 
 be that all we wished has been accomplished. In 
 most cases I believe it is accomplished, and often 
 more than we wished. The projects which we 
 planned have been achieved ; the prizes we pursued 
 have been won. Success in that sense is all but 
 sure to vigorous effort and patient toil. What 
 youth craved, old age has its fill of. But that 
 which should accompany success — satisfaction, 
 peace — comes not. Instead thereof, care, vexa- 
 tion, weariness of spirit. Riches, fame, love, prove 
 other in possession than they were in prospect and 
 desire. The fruit that looked so tempting on the 
 tree is insipid to the taste. The mountain top 
 which drew the longing eyes from afar, and which 
 cost so much pain and toil in the ascent, when 
 reached at last is found to be barren rock or eter- 
 nal snow. If it lifts above the rest of the world, 
 it isolates and chills in proportion as it raises. 
 They who gather most can enjoy no more than be- 
 
THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 85 
 
 longs to one, and they who possess most are most 
 apt to be as though they possessed not. The most 
 successful are often those who feel most deeply the 
 burden of the great tragedy, the insufficiency of 
 life, the distance which separates our destiny and 
 our desire. " As a worm," says Taylor, " creeps 
 upon the ground with her share and portion of 
 Adam's curse, and lifts up her head to partake a lit- 
 tle of the blessings of the air and opens the junctures 
 of her imperfect body, but still must return to abide 
 the fate of her own nature, and dwell and sleep in 
 the dust ; so are the hopes of mortal man. He 
 opens his eyes and looks upon fine things at a dis- 
 tance, and shuts them again with weakness because 
 they are too glorious to behold. And the man re- 
 joices because he hopes fine things are staying for 
 him, but his heart aches because he knows there 
 are a thousand ways to miss of these glories ; and 
 though he hopes yet he enjoys not, he longs but he 
 possesses not, and must be content with his portion 
 of the dust." Thus life imprisons us by its limita- 
 tions, by its inadequacy to our desire. It becomes 
 a prison to the soul whenever and in proportion as 
 that inadequacy is felt. 
 
 2. Life disappoints our purposes in what it ac- 
 complishes or in what we accomplish by it. The 
 same distance intervenes between our conception 
 and our attainment as between our destiny and 
 
86 THE SOUUS DELIVERANCE. 
 
 our desire. We conceive in our meditations an 
 idea of excellence which is never realized ; we ima- 
 gine a perfection in our works and pursuits which 
 is never attained ; we propose to ourselves models 
 of character and life which our practice belies. 
 " See that thou make all things according to the 
 pattern showed to thee in the mount ! " The earnest 
 soul is forever haunted by a vision of what might 
 be and should be. " The pattern in the mount ! " 
 Could we only abide in that mount of vision ! 
 Could we only abide in our conceptions, and not 
 be compelled to bring them to the test of action, 
 what heroes and saints we should be ! When the 
 vision is on us we feel it is good for us to be there, 
 and like the giddy disciple on the Mount of Trans- 
 figuration, would fain build our tabernacle to fix 
 and perpetuate the ideal glories which pass before 
 the mind. But destiny forbids. The world claims 
 us ; we must quit the mountain and come down to 
 real life. That coming down from the mountain, 
 how hard it is ! How abrupt and trying the de- 
 scent from theory to practice, and how soon the 
 first contact with the world explodes our dream, 
 and melts our heroism into thin air! There, on the 
 mount, the most arduous seemed practicable ; here, 
 on the level of every-day life, the most trivial is a 
 burden. There our virtue was impregnable ; here 
 the first temptation causes us to offend. There we 
 
THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 87 
 
 were ready to be offered for duty's sake ; here a pin- 
 prick provokes our impatience. We propose to 
 ourselves some work to be accomplished by our in- 
 dustry, some worthy achievement which shall be a 
 witness of our quality and a blessing to the world. 
 It stands so complete in our conception, — the exe- 
 cution will be but sport, a brief and easy labor of 
 love. We lay hand on our task, and soon find that 
 our conception has outrun our faculty. We faint 
 beneath the burden we have taken upon ourselves ; 
 the sweat of our brow and the strength of our 
 hearts are scarce sufficient for the work. In labor 
 and sorrow we bring forth at last. We accom- 
 plish something, — the work is done ; but how faint 
 and poor compared with the archetype we saw in 
 our vision ! Our weary days are in it, but our 
 ideal is not there. Our noblest products, how wide 
 of the pattern showed us in the mount ! Thus life 
 disappoints our intent and baffles our endeavor, 
 and thus it becomes a prison to the eager soul in 
 the conscious limitation of our powers. What 
 bondage more galling to quick and aspiring minds 
 than this sense of limitation, of inadequacy, the 
 disproportion between our conceptions and our 
 powers, — this contradiction of boundless desires 
 and small satisfactions, heroic purposes and feeble 
 works, — tliis everlasting conflict between theory 
 and practice, between the ideal and the actual. 
 
88 THE SOWS DELIVERANCE. 
 
 between the visions of the mind and the realities 
 of life ! 
 
 Whether it was this which extorted from David 
 the prayer, " Bring my soul out of prison," I know 
 not ; but seeing that David was a man of like na- 
 ture with ourselves, it may be presumed that he 
 too shared the universal burden, and that this sup- 
 plication of his expressed the same feeling of the 
 insufficiency of life which oppresses all sensitive 
 and reflective minds. It is this that has prompted 
 similar expressions from men of note in every age. 
 It was this that wrung from the patriarch Jacob 
 the sad confession, " Few and evil have been the 
 years of my life." It was this that dictated the 
 words ascribed to Moses : " Thou carriest them 
 away as with a flood ; they are as a sleep. All 
 our days are passed away in thy wrath : we spend 
 our years as a tale that is told. The days of our 
 years are threescore years and ten ; and if by 
 reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is 
 their strength labor and sorrow ; for it is soon 
 cut off, and we fly away." It was this that spoke 
 through the lips of Job : " Man that is born of a 
 woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He 
 Cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down : he 
 fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." It 
 was this that inspired the sullen music of Eccle- 
 siastes : " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity. What 
 
THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 89 
 
 profit hath a man of all his labor ? " It was this 
 that made Christian Paul say, on the very thresh- 
 old, as he supposed, of the heavenly kingdom : '-The 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain to- 
 gether until now. And not only they, but ourselves 
 also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even 
 we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for 
 the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." 
 And again more emphatically, " To will is present 
 with me ; but how to perform that which is good, I 
 find not. For the good that I would, I do not: 
 but the evil which I would not, that I do. ... 
 wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me 
 from the body of this death ? " 
 
 The time would fail if I were to cite the secular 
 testimonies which bear on this point, — if I were to 
 attempt to bring before you the poets, the heroes, 
 and the sages who in one form or another, in the 
 way of confession or supplication, have echoed the 
 prayer of David, *' Bring my soul out of prison." 
 " Help my insufficiency, take away the burden of 
 infirmity, redeem my life, make it equal to my in- 
 tent and desire." Humanity with one heart con- 
 fesses the experience implied in this petition. 
 Humanity with one voice says, Amen ! to this 
 prayer. 
 
 I cannot say whether or no the prayer has been 
 fully and satisfactorily answered to any in the flesh. 
 
90 THE SOUUS DELIVERANCE. 
 
 But this I say, that divine Providence vs^orking in 
 human history has not left us without guidance 
 and without hope in this radical and universal 
 need. The answer has been suggested at least, if 
 not realized. The way of escape from this prison 
 of our infirmity has been indicated in one recorded 
 life, in which the conflict between the ideal and the 
 actual has been done away ; the life of " that man 
 whom he hath ordained," the divine man, whom 
 with some dim sense of this service his adoring 
 disciples have named their Redeemer and their 
 God. And this to me is the great significance of 
 the life of Jesus. I see in it the reconciliation of 
 the ideal and the real. This is the true historical 
 atonement in Christ. This is the meaning which 
 lies in the ancient dogma of the Church, — the 
 dogma of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, 
 God manifest in man. Jesus expressed, as no 
 other has done, his conception in his life ;. he real- 
 ized his idea and turned it into fact, and made it a 
 part of the history of man. 
 
 The greatest of Christian painters, the immortal 
 Raphael, has figured this marriage of the real and 
 the ideal in the life of Jesus, in his painting of the 
 Transfiguration. The upper half of the canvas 
 represents the transfigured Christ, the Lord of 
 glory, with Moses and Elias by his side ; the lower 
 exhibits the melancholy scene which immediately 
 
THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 91 
 
 followed, — that sad passage of real life into wliich 
 the Master entered immediately on his descent 
 from the mountain, — the dumb and lunatic child 
 with his helpless and sorrowing parents and friends, 
 who have come to implore the Rabbi in his behalf. 
 Superficial critics have blamed the artist for bring- 
 ing these two scenes, so different in character and 
 scope, into one view. They would rather that each 
 should be depicted on a separate canvas. But the 
 instinct of the artist has proved in this instance a 
 better guide than the judgment of the critic to the 
 true unfolding of the Gospel story. So near to- 
 gether are vision and action, theory and practice, 
 the glory and the task, the ideal and the real, the 
 God and the man, in the life of Jesus ! He could 
 pass at once from the vision to the deed, and be 
 equally true and equally great in the one as in the 
 other. He knew how to come down from the 
 mountain with undiminished power and glory ; he, 
 after converse with the eternal and beatific dreams, 
 could enter at once on the scenes of active life, and 
 accept the first and humblest occasion that offered, 
 without leaving the better part of his being behind 
 him. He has solved in his life the old contradic- 
 tion, and done away the discrepance between here 
 and there, between the spiritual world and the 
 actual, " he hath broken down the middle wall of 
 partition, ... to make in himself of twain one 
 
92 THE sours DELIVERANCE. 
 
 new man," presenting thus the example of an ab- 
 solute man, where there is neither flesh nor spirit, 
 but where flesh is sublimed into spirit, and spirit 
 is realized in flesh. 
 
 And if it be asked how this was effected, — by 
 what hidden path, by wliat mystic discipline, the 
 divine man perfected his humanity and entered 
 into glory and into Godhead, — putting out of 
 view the providential side of that wondrous life, and 
 looking only at the human, we may take for answer 
 the solution given in the Scripture : " Who, being 
 in the form of God," that is, made, as man, in the 
 image of God, " thought it not robbery to be equal 
 with God," or, more correctly rendered, " thought 
 not by robbery to equal God," that is, did not at- 
 tempt divinity by ambitious striving beyond his 
 appointed spliere, " but made himself of no reputa- 
 tion, and took upon him the form of a servant, 
 and was made in the likeness of men : " that is, 
 lived and labored like other men, " and being 
 found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and 
 became obedient unto death, even the death of the 
 cross." That was the way by which Jesus rose; 
 that was his discipline and method, and his deifica- 
 tion. " Wherefore," the writer continues, " God also 
 hath highly exalted him, and given him a name 
 which is above every name : that at the name of 
 Jesus every knee should bow . . . and every tongue 
 
THE sours DELIVERANCE. 93 
 
 should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the 
 glory of God the Father." In other words, Jesus 
 accepted the conditions of his lot, externally one of 
 the humblest, and exalted himself and it, and made 
 his life divine by perfect obedience to those condi- 
 tions. He did not aspire to the place of command 
 to which his people gladly would have exalted him, 
 but abode in his native humility and walked with 
 his peasant companions, and found the topics of 
 his duty among the halt and blind and publicans 
 and sinners, and preached his gospel to the poor. 
 He did not seek to transcend his sphere externally 
 by self-aggrandizement, but was satisfied to fill it 
 completely, casting into it all the fulness of his 
 royal nature. Thus he brought his soul out of 
 prison, — the prison of low and bounded reality, — 
 by ignoring its bounds, living wholly in the eter- 
 nal. Making the will of God his first, sole object, 
 his meat and his drink, he laid hold on eternal life ; 
 and thus by one shining example of self-emancipa- 
 tion, by one perfect instance of a liberated life, he 
 preaches still to spirits in prison the world over, to 
 whom the gospel of that life has come. Let all 
 who pine in conscious captivity of mind and heart, 
 all who feel themselves immured in stony negations, 
 and beat with impotent longing against the walls of 
 their lot, let them take to heart the lesson of that 
 life. The walls will dissolve and disappear as fast 
 
94 THE sours DELIVERANCE. 
 
 as the truth which it teaches breaks in upon their 
 night. Do we sigh with the Psalmist, *' Bring my 
 soul out of prison," let us know that humble and 
 perfect obedience is the key which unlocks the 
 prison of the soul, and leads it forth from the 
 stifling atmosphere of its discontent into broad and 
 liberal day. Accept the actual in which you are 
 placed. Put away selfish and sickly ambition, and 
 find yourself in your appointed conditions. Adjust 
 yourself with the terms of your lot. Instead of 
 seeking to lift yourself above it by uneasy efforts, 
 seek rather to fill it out by throwing into it the ful- 
 Hess of your faculty and your life. It is the error 
 of indolent natures to think that happiness and 
 virtue and opportunities of well-doing belong to 
 certain conditions : that they could be useful and 
 blessed, if anywhere else than where they happen 
 to be, — if the climate were different, or the time, 
 or place, or company. Be equal, first, to your own 
 sphere. Do full justice to that ; satisfy perfectly 
 the present occasion, fulfil to the uttermost each 
 successive task and demand of the place and the 
 hour. It is only by being faithful in that which 
 is least that we prove ourselves equal to higher 
 trusts. 
 
 Cuvier, the celebrated naturalist, whenever his 
 pupils came to him with some new anatomical 
 theory, would bid them test it by dissecting the first 
 
THE sours DELIVERANCE. 95 
 
 insect that came in their Tvay. If your theory of 
 well doing will not apply to your present sphere, if 
 it will not apply to the humblest instance, you may 
 be sure it will not hold in relation to any other. 
 Here we are ; that is our first concern. Let us see 
 that we be truly and wholly and beneficently here, 
 with all our faculty and heart. It may seem 
 brighter elsewhere, but that is an optical illusion ; 
 here, too, it is good to be. God is here, and man is 
 here, and the calls and topics of daily duty. And 
 duty is everywhere the same thing, everywhere suffi- 
 cient and divine. " Give me where to stand," said 
 the Greek. Stand where you are, is the nobler pos- 
 tulate ; stand where you are, and move the world. 
 Heaven's zenith is perpendicular to every spot on 
 the earth's round. This is the lesson which comes 
 to us from the life of Christ, who united the truest 
 vision, the noblest service, and the highest glory 
 with the lowest lot. The only way to bring our 
 soul out of prison is to find ourselves in that which 
 we call and make a prison by our misdirected long- 
 ing, to throw ourselves into it with all our heart 
 and all our strength, to fill the God-given mould 
 with the fulness of our life. This no one entirely 
 succeeds in doing ; but every approach to it is 
 progress in the right direction. With every step in 
 that path our redemption draweth nigii. Just so far 
 as we attain in this direction, our prison enlarges 
 
96 THE sours DELIVERANCE. 
 
 and disappears. The Kingdom of Heaven is here 
 or nowhere. Duty is the key that unlocks it to all. 
 Only so far as we succeed in making the will of 
 God our meat and our drink, can we ever lay hold 
 on everlasting life. 
 
VII. 
 
 EESERVED POWER. 
 
 He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful 
 also in much. Luke xvi. 10, 
 
 T TUMAN life is made up in large measure of 
 "^ -*• humble tasks and petty offices, which, how- 
 ever indispensable in their places, are strangely 
 disproportioned to the powers and capacities of 
 those who perform them, and which seem out of 
 keeping with the dignity of man, considered as a 
 child of God and an heir of immortality. There 
 is no man so humble in ability or station that he 
 is not greater than the work he is called to per- 
 form ; and most earthly work seems trivial when 
 compared with the higher calling of the human 
 soul. For the soul in this present is often a Sam- 
 son in bonds, captive to coarse Philistine taskmas- 
 ters, shorn of his strength, bereft of eyesight, set to 
 grind for daily bread. Of the greatest and wisest 
 of human kind, how many have toiled in lowly 
 places and mechanical tasks ! Carpenters, tent- 
 makers, shoemakers, lens-grinders have been the 
 lio-hts of the world. 
 
98 RESERVED POWER. 
 
 We think the smaller the function the smaller 
 the capacity required for its performance ; and 
 when we consider the kinds of labor which make 
 the world's work, how much drudgery and me- 
 chanical routine, what servile and pitiful tasks 
 compose the sum of human affairs, we are tempted 
 to say that man is too great for his work ; that a 
 race of creatures less splendidly furnished, less 
 finely organized, less curiously and variously en- 
 dowed, — something between brute and man, — 
 would be quite adequate and better fitted for such 
 employment. What need of immortal powers, of 
 beings made in the image of God, to carry on the 
 buying and selling, the chaffering and tinkering, 
 the nameless, tasteless taskwork of daily life ? 
 
 To this view of life, very natural but very super- 
 ficial, a truer wisdom opposes the maxim, " lie 
 that is faithful in that which is least is faithful 
 also in much ; " he shows himself equal to higher 
 spheres and nobler tasks. In other words, it mat- 
 ters not what the work is which is given ns to do. 
 All work requires faculty and fidelity and consci- 
 entious care for its best performance. All work 
 tries and tests these qualities, and educates them. 
 And moreover the qualities required and proved 
 by faithful performance of that which is least, are 
 the same with those which qualify us for success 
 in that which is greatest. This is the Christian 
 
RESERVED POWER. 99 
 
 doctrine concerning work, — a doctrine abundantly 
 and signally illustrated in the life of Jesus. He 
 who by virtue of his transcendent endowments 
 might have claimed exemption from the com- 
 mon lot, was conversant from first to last with 
 ordinary scenes and things. His ministry, if we 
 consider the sphere in which it was exercised, its 
 topics and occasions, was one continued act of 
 self-humiliation. His extraordinary gifts were ap- 
 plied to ends very different from those which 
 might have been expected to furnish the topics 
 and occasion of so divine a mission. They pro- 
 duced no splendid achievements such as a worldly 
 ambition might propose to itself. They were exer- 
 cised in lowly offices of love wliich had no aim 
 beyond the immediate comfort they afforded to 
 some private circle or some individual sufferer. 
 The objects of those charities, we all know, were 
 not the noble and the rich, but the obscure and de- 
 spised, the little ones of earth, the poor villager, the 
 contemned foreigner, the cripple by the wayside, 
 the paralytic at the well. Such was the sphere 
 in which Jesus wrought, and such the offices of 
 which his ministry was composed. A true son, 
 in this as in all things, of the heavenly Father, 
 who also worketh in secret and obscurity, and in 
 places and things that are counted vile ; as active 
 in the processes of corruption as in the sublimest 
 
100 RESERVED POWER. 
 
 growths of time ; bestowing the same care in ad- 
 justing the articulations of a worm as in settling 
 the balance of a w^orld. Throughout the life of 
 Jesus we behold this disproportion between the 
 actor and his sphere. We might feel pained at 
 the incongruity, — we might think that so kingly 
 a nature should have had a more conspicuous 
 arena than the villages of Galilee, and more wor- 
 thy objects than the peasants who inhabited them, 
 — did we not see that the true sphere of Jesus 
 has proved to be the whole world of humanity in 
 which his word and his example live and work to 
 this day. 
 
 It is a great mistake to suppose that the more 
 insignificant the task the smaller the capacity 
 required to perform it, and that those who are 
 poorest in culture and endowments are best fitted 
 to discharge satisfactorily the humbler offices of 
 life. Alas for us if we are not greater than our 
 work ! It can never be done as it should be done, 
 unless we bring to it more wisdom, ability, and 
 virtue than it seems to require, than we can man- 
 age in most cases to put into it. Beside the 
 specific degree of power and goodness which may 
 seem to be requisite for a given sphere or work, 
 there is needed a power and goodness which are 
 not always or often expressed, which do not ap- 
 pear to the superficial observer, but which serve 
 
RESERVED POWER. 101 
 
 to give completeness and effect to daily tasks and 
 the commonplace drudgery of life. 
 
 In saying this, I but state a principle whicli 
 pervades the whole economy of Nature. Whatever 
 product of Nature we examine, we see at once that 
 it could not be what it is were it not a great deal 
 more than it seems to be, did there not lie behind 
 it a hidden magazine of inexhaustible power and 
 riches which only minute analysis can detect. A 
 flower or leaf when decomposed exhibits a few sim- 
 ple elements combined in certain definite propor- 
 tions. A little carbon, a little oxygen and hydrogen, 
 compose the whole glory of the vegetable creation. 
 But the meanest flower that blows, the most insig- 
 nificant leaf that springs in the depth of the forest, 
 is predicated on infinite resources, and presupposes 
 the whole immensity of Nature as the background 
 of its fragile life. In the animal creation thei'e 
 slumber instincts which in ordinary cases never 
 come into play. But let a sufficient exigency 
 occur, and a new faculty starts up at the right 
 moment to rescue the animal from impending de- 
 struction. In the economy of the human frame 
 there are stored up forces which are not needed 
 for the common occasions of life, and many a life 
 passes without giving the least hint of their exist- 
 ence. But let the system sustain an important 
 lesion, as in the case of a broken limb, and watch- 
 
102 RESERVED POWER. 
 
 ful Nature then takes up her hidden power, and 
 calls into action the healing virtues of her invisible 
 dispensary to knit the fractured parts ; and all 
 that medical art can do is to follow reverently the 
 first intention of the great Physician. 
 
 And so human life, the voluntary life of toil and 
 action to which as human beings we are called, 
 not less than the involuntary life of the animal 
 economy, must contain within itself, and would 
 be miserably defective did it not contain, a reserved 
 power wherewith to meet the unforeseen exigencies 
 to which every sphere and almost every life is 
 exposed. And apart from these exigencies, the 
 daily tasks of life are ill performed, its ordinary 
 duties ill provided for, unless there is more of 
 faculty and virtue than they seem at first to re- 
 quire. Experience will show that the greater the 
 ideas with which Ave are conversant, and the wider 
 our sphere of vision, and the more profound our 
 views of life, and the richer our talent, and the 
 more extensive our acquirements, the better pre- 
 pared we are for the meanest offices, which cease 
 to be mean when ennobled by such conditions. 
 Drudgery is no longer drudgery when such powers 
 and resources engage in it, when Faith and Love 
 stoop down from their heavens to perform a ser- 
 vant's work. Unless we have more than enough, 
 we have not enough tor the claims that are on us. 
 
RESERVED POWER. 103 
 
 In the matter of education you would think the 
 teacher but poorly furnished for his function who 
 should know no more than he was called to teach ; 
 who should barely have gone over the ground 
 which his pupils are to go over, whose acquire- 
 ments should be but a few steps only in advance of 
 their lessons. You would say that the teacher to 
 be efficient and successful must know a great deal 
 more than his pupils, a great deal more than he 
 is required to teach. The uttermost of knowledge 
 and ability ever possessed by man would not be 
 superfluous. Though it might not be called into 
 action in the way of direct instruction, it would all 
 go to illustrate the subject taught. It would give 
 to the mind of the teacher that compass and ele- 
 vation, that perfect accuracy and fulness of detail, 
 which acts like inspiration on the mind of the 
 pupil. In some way or other the pupil would 
 be enriched by all the stores of knowledge the 
 instructor might bring to his task. It has been 
 well said, that " the child's elementary instruction 
 would be best conducted, if possible, by omnis- 
 cience itself." You would think your representa- 
 tive in the national council but poorly fitted for 
 his post, who should know no more than the aver- 
 age of his constituents. Other things being equal, 
 you would choose for this purpose the best in- 
 formed, the wisest and ablest that could be found. 
 
104 RESERVED POWER. 
 
 You would have him possessed of stores of knowl- 
 edge, and a wealth of funded power which in ordi- 
 nary cases might not be elicited ; which session 
 after session might pass without calling into ac- 
 tion ; but by means of which he would be able, on 
 the sudden, to meet any occasion that might occur, 
 and to concentrate the study of many years on 
 some constitutional or international question of 
 difficult arbitrament and momentous issues. 
 
 But not to insist on great emergencies, the 
 ordinary duties of every calling require for their 
 successful performance more ability and knowl- 
 edge than appears outwardly in their respective 
 products. The plea of an advocate at the bar, 
 the prescription of a physician, nay, the material 
 product of the artisan, imply a far greater range 
 of knowledge, longer and more various studies, 
 than they exhibit, than those who are served by 
 them are apt to suspect. They could not be what 
 they are, were there not a great deal more behind 
 them than appears. It would be easy to show that 
 in every department of life the amount of skill vis- 
 ible to the vulgar eye, in the effect produced, is a 
 very small part of that which is actually required 
 to produce it. 
 
 Apply this principle to those thousand nameless 
 tasks which belong to no particular calling, but 
 which nevertheless comprise so large a part of 
 
' RESERVED POWER. 105 
 
 every life, — offices which are held in such light 
 estimation, and yet are so essential to human 
 comfort and well-being. They require no great 
 measure of technical skill ; they involve but little 
 knowledge or art ; but they demand what is more 
 than these, — they demand for their faithful dis- 
 charge a moral discipline and a moral elevation ; a 
 conscientiousness, I may say, a heavenly minded- 
 ness with which they seem, at first glance, to have 
 no connection, which it may even seem extravagant 
 and absurd to name in connection with them. 
 Jesus, I think, indicated this connection, when on 
 one occasion he laid aside his garment and girded 
 himself as a menial to wash the feet of those rude 
 men, so incapable of understanding the exquisite 
 refinement, the divine exaltation of his nature. 
 He has taught us a lesson which we have learned 
 but imperfectly, if we do not perceive its broad 
 application to all the drudgery of life. He has 
 taught us to call nothing unworthy or degrad- 
 ina: which the necessities of human nature and 
 human life have imposed ; to think nothing vile 
 but sin ; to disdain no office which life may re- 
 quire at our hands ; to esteem nothing beneath 
 our dignity which is necessary to be done, and 
 which it is well to do. 
 
 In Jesus we behold the highest degree of spirit- 
 ual elevation linked with mean conditions, and 
 
106 RESERVED POWER. ' 
 
 taking upon itself the form of a servant, — a heav- 
 enly soul in a lowly sphere ; a strange contrast of 
 humble offices and sublime ideas. In every son 
 of man there must be an elevation of spirit above 
 the ordinary level of life, to meet with dignity its 
 ordinary demands and satisfactorily to fulfil its 
 humblest duties. 
 
 As in every work of art and in every profes- 
 sional service there is more of skill and ability 
 than appears on the surface, so in every good act, 
 in every duty well performed, in every hard or irk- 
 some and distasteful thing which is done for con- 
 science' sake, there is more of goodness than 
 appears, more than it is possible to compute. It 
 is impossible to compute how much of moral dis- 
 cipline and religious faith, how much of heroism 
 and self-sacrifice may enter into the composition 
 of a character, whose greatest visible achievement 
 consists in simply bearing and forbearing as daily 
 occasion demands. 
 
 Life is poor and pitiful if we look only at its 
 material results. So much toil and care to keep 
 the house in order and the body whole. We often 
 think with the sceptic in the play, " How stale, 
 flat, and unprofitable are all the uses of this 
 world!" We must look to its moral issues if we 
 would know the true significance of life. We 
 must think that these things are topics of duty 
 
RESERVED POWER. 107 
 
 and means of discipline and growth, that they 
 answer that purpose as well or better than if the 
 All-wise had made us " rulers over many things," 
 and set us to govern states or create worlds. 
 We may indulge our fancy with a state of being 
 and a sphere of action better adapted to the wants 
 and capacities of a rational soul, where there shall 
 be nothing common or mean, no drudgery, no irk- 
 some and distasteful tasks, where all our labors 
 shall be regal and stately, and every duty have a 
 lofty and romantic cast. But a little reflection 
 will convince us that this is all a delusion. Just 
 so far as duty ceases to be irksome it ceases to 
 be discipline. Like Christ, the Master, we must 
 take upon ourselves the form of servants, if ever 
 we would reign with him in glory. Let us not 
 complain that the soul is too great for its dwelling, 
 but make room as we can in the mortal tabernacle 
 for the immortal guest, and think how much bet- 
 ter it is that the soul should be greater than its 
 sphere, than that the sphere should be too great 
 for the soul ; and how poor we should be, if, in- 
 stead of having more than enough for our daily 
 tasks, we had not sufficient wherewith to perform 
 them. 
 
 Never fear that the heir of immortality will 
 squander his inheritance among the trivialities and 
 commonplaces of his low estate, that the soul will 
 
108 RESERVED POWER, 
 
 belittle itself witli its small tasks, until at last it 
 becomes " subdued to what it works in." Not 
 small tasks belittle, but small aims and petty views 
 and fears. The Son of Man sacrifices nothing of 
 his dignity, but only adds to it when he stoops to 
 anoint the eyes of the beggar and to wash the dis- 
 ciples' feet. And the soul should be as the Son 
 of Man, — a regal nature in a mean environment, 
 always greater than its office, yet never disdaining 
 the meanest office that comes in its way, thinking 
 no trifle of earthly details too small for its care, 
 while it deems no prize of earthly greatness suffi- 
 cient for its reward. " He that is faithful in that 
 which is least, is faithful also in much ; and he that 
 is unjust ill the least, is unjust also in much." 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 
 
 Is not this the carpenter's son ? . . . Whence then hath 
 this man all these thiiigs ? Matt. xiii. 55, 56. 
 
 'T^HE countrymen of Jesus did not by this ques- 
 -*■ tion intend to disparage his hereditary calling, 
 or to intimate an incompatibility between the car- 
 penter and the prophet, but only to express their 
 astonishment that this particular carpenter's son — 
 their own fellow-townsman — should come to be 
 a teacher of divine truth. The presumption was 
 not against the craft, as if that were inconsistent 
 with the widest knowledge and the highest wisdom, 
 but against the fact that one who was born in their 
 own midst, whom they knew all about, should arrive 
 at such eminence in that capacity. " Is not his 
 mother called Mary, and his brethren James and 
 Joses and Simon and Judas ? And his sisters, are 
 they not all with us ? Whence then hath this man 
 all these things ? " It was just the old inveterate 
 prejudice, not yet obsolete, against home-born 
 genius and worth, — the prejudice which fancies 
 
110 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 
 
 that wisdom must needs be a foreign product, that 
 all good and divine things must be imported, that 
 by no possibility can recent and native growths 
 compare with those which come to us from ancient 
 time or distant lands. Against this prejudice it 
 would seem that Jesus himself found it vain to 
 contend. He said unto them, " A prophet is not 
 without honor, save in his own country, and in 
 his own house. And he did not many mighty 
 works there, because of their unbelief." 
 
 There was no presumption, I say, on the part of 
 the countrymen of Jesus against the carpenter's 
 craft or any other mechanical employment as in- 
 compatible with the highest intellectual and spir- 
 itual eminence. The Jews had none of those 
 prejudices as to the comparative capability and 
 respectability of different pursuits which prevail in 
 modern society. The Jewish polity, theocratic as 
 it was in its civil theory and constitution, was very 
 democratic in its social principle. It had kings 
 and priests by divine right, but no aristocracy in 
 our sense of the term, — no aristocracy founded on 
 employment, but only an aristocracy of age. In 
 fact, so great was the estimation in which the use- 
 ful arts were held that, according to the Talmud, 
 all parents were required to have their children 
 instructed in some trade or craft which they might 
 or might not practise in after years. " The high- 
 
THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. H] 
 
 est rank in the estimation of the people," says a 
 recent authority, " was not reserved for the priests, 
 but for the learned ; and many of the most emi- 
 nent of these were tradesmen. They were tent- 
 makers, weavers, sandal-makers, carpenters, tan- 
 ners, bakers, cooks. A newly elected president of 
 the senate was found by his predecessor, who had 
 been ignominiously deposed for his overbearing 
 manner, all grimy in the midst of his charcoal 
 mounds. Of all things most hated were idle- 
 ness and asceticism. Piety and learning them- 
 selves received their proper estimation only when 
 joined to bodily work. ' Add a trade to your 
 studies,' was one of their sayings, ' and you will be 
 free from sin,' ' The tradesman at his work need 
 not rise before the greatest Doctor.' ' Greater is 
 he who derives his livelihood from work than he 
 who fears God.' " Wise doctrine and wise uses are 
 these ; their adoption and practice by us would 
 prove the best safeguard of our national pros- 
 perity. The national prosperity suffers from the 
 general aversion to manual labor, which turns 
 the young men of the country away from agri- 
 cultural and mechanical employments, and drives 
 them in excess to those pursuits which add noth- 
 ing to the real wealth of the nation, but which 
 hold out the lure of city life, and tempt with the 
 distant chance of a fortune to be obtained by adroit 
 
112 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR, 
 
 speculation rather than by patient and productive 
 industry. The chance is distant, but by it a large 
 portion of the brain and muscle of the nation is 
 seduced from the paths and works that most sorely 
 need it. Labor in the way of production is com- 
 paratively scarce ; labor in mercantile life is redun- 
 dant. Let the public prints advertise for a clerk 
 in a counting-room, and straightway a hundred ap- 
 plicants present themselves as candidates for the 
 vacant office. Had these waiters on the chances of 
 trade been instructed in some useful handicraft, 
 they might have been profitably employed in need- 
 ful service instead of suing for the crumbs which 
 fall from the table of commercial prosperity. 
 
 The disinclination to mechanical labor arises not 
 from indolence alone, but is due in part to the false 
 and pernicious conceit that somehow the business 
 of selling is more respectable than that of produc- 
 ing, the work of the counting-room than that of the 
 mechanic ; and that sacrifice of gentility is involved 
 in the use of the axe or the spade or the trowel or 
 tlie plane. The origin of this fallacy dates from 
 barbarous ages, when fighting was considered to be 
 the real business of life, when the only respectable 
 employment was thought to be that of the warrior, 
 and the useful arts and all the necessary work of 
 society was assigned to slaves. The servitude 
 once associated with every kind of mechanical labor 
 
THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 113 
 
 I suppose to be the real source of the still prevail- 
 ing prejudice against it. The prejudice, I need not 
 saj, has absolutely no foundation in reason. No 
 man in his senses will pretend that it has, — that 
 any useful and productive art can degrade the 
 workman employed in it. What constitutes re- 
 spectability in any pursuit is, first, its utility, and 
 second, its difficulty. Skilled and profitable labor, 
 — that is the only true standard by which to esti- 
 mate the merit and consequently the respectability 
 of any craft or pursuit. Is it useful ? In answering 
 that question regard must be had to the kind and 
 degree of utility, — the final use being increase of 
 life. Whatever increases the quantum of life is 
 useful in the measure in which it does tliat. Useful 
 is all which ministers to the life of the body ; more 
 useful is that which ministers to the life of the 
 spirit. In one way or another we look for use. A 
 work may be very difficult, but is not on that ac- 
 count alone entitled to respect. The performance 
 of a rope-dancer is difficult, but being attended with 
 a minimum of use to those who behold it, cannot 
 rank very high in the scale of human pursuits. On 
 the other hand, a work may be very useful, but if 
 it be one which requires little training and involves 
 no skill in the operation, we hold it in less esteem 
 than works of more difficult attainment. The indi- 
 vidual engaged in it may have our highest respect 
 
 8 
 
114 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 
 
 for the moral qualities which he brings to his task, 
 for being faithful in that which is least ; but the 
 occupation itself we cannot rate very highly. The 
 able and skilled workman in whatever craft or call- 
 ing — mechanical or commercial, literary or scien- 
 tific — is worthy of honor in the ratio partly of the 
 skill and the rarity of the skill which he brings to 
 his work, and partly of the value of the product. 
 Reason acknowledges no distinction, and custom 
 should acknowledge none in the honorableness of 
 human employments which is not based on this 
 criterion, — difficult to do and important to have 
 done. 
 
 Why should the exercise of a moderate degree of 
 talent through the pen be more considered than the 
 same amount of talent acting through the instru- 
 mentality of the saw or plane ? Why should a 
 second or third rate writer take precedence in so- 
 cial esteem of a clever mechanic ? For my own 
 part, I would rather be able to do something really 
 useful with the hand than produce something of 
 ephemeral and doubtful value witli the brain. I 
 would rather be the maker of a good pair of shoes, 
 or a coat, or a creditable piece of joiner's work, than 
 of most of the stories and poems and editorial es- 
 says that pass current under the name of literature. 
 Our literature so called is altogether in excess of 
 the useful arts. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 115 
 
 It will seem, I fear, a vain undertaking to com- 
 bat the views and uses of society in this particular. 
 And certainly an immediate or speedy revolution 
 of opinion and practice in relation to this matter is 
 not to be expected. The only way in which, so far 
 as I can see, the needful reform can be effected, is 
 through the medium of education. Our present 
 system of education is faulty in that it seeks and 
 contents itself with a very one-sided development. 
 We educate the brain, and except in the use of the 
 pen, and perhaps, to a certain extent, of the pencil, 
 we do not educate the hand. In some of the pub- 
 lic schools of Massachusetts the girls are taught 
 the use of the needle. That I consider a very im- 
 portant step, — the most important that for many 
 years has been taken in a right direction. Better 
 than all the philosophy and rhetoric with which it 
 has been the fashion to cram their minds, more 
 educating than most of the studies pursued at 
 school, is the use of the needle. But the boys, for 
 the most part, at school and at college acquire no 
 manual art but the use of the pen. Arrived at the 
 age of twenty without having learned any other 
 art, were there even no prejudice preventing, they 
 will not be likely to turn to mechanical pursuits 
 for a livelihood, but seek it in the use of the pen. 
 It seems to be taken for granted that the sons of 
 the rich and the well to do will not choose to em- 
 
116 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 
 
 brace such pursuits ; and those on the other hand 
 whom circumstances seem to have destined to a 
 life of mechanical labor are taken from the schools 
 at too early an age, and bound to their destined 
 trade with unfurnished minds and a knowledge only 
 of the merest rudiments of intellectual training. 
 Here is a double evil. The sons of the rich, the 
 well educated, are virtually cut off from mechanical 
 employments, even if their taste incline in that di- 
 rection; while those who follow such employments 
 — mechanics, artisans, who need to be thoroughly 
 educated in all branches of polite learning as a 
 counterpoise to a destined life of manual toil — 
 grow up in comparative ignorance of all but the 
 rules and relations of their particular craft, and 
 thereby in part are defrauded of social estimation 
 and converse with the highly educated which might 
 otherwise be accorded to them. 
 
 Answering to these evils, the two reforms most 
 needed to establish a balance of industry and cor- 
 rect the undue preponderance of sedentary and 
 mercantile pursuits, are, first, that the sons of the 
 rich without losing caste should be free to adopt a 
 handicraft as a means of livelihood ; and second, 
 that every mechanic should have the best education 
 which the schools and universities here or any- 
 where can give. I am fain to believe that these 
 ends are in the order of social progress and among 
 
THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 117 
 
 the events of coming time ; that the false system of 
 education which separates intellectual from manual 
 labor, denying to one half of mankind the highest 
 culture of mind and manner, and consigning the 
 rest to a weak and luxurious existence, rendering 
 them unable in case of need to support themselves 
 by their own handiwork, will be replaced by a 
 broader discipline, embracing the whole man in its 
 scope and aim. Those who have pondered these 
 matters most deeply are agreed that man was made 
 to labor with the hand as well as with the brain ; 
 that unless he so labors he cannot fulfil the pur- 
 pose intended in his physical organization ; and 
 that, conversely, man is called to intellectual 
 progress as well as to manual labor, and that 
 unless his mind is disciplined and cultured, he 
 fails of the purpose intended in his mental endow- 
 ments. I am fain to believe that the time will 
 come when the children of the rich as well as of 
 the poor shall be trained to manual toil, when the 
 children of the poor as well as of the rich shall 
 have the opportunity of the highest culture, and 
 when it shall be equally rare to be unskilled in 
 some mechanical art and to have a barren mind. 
 
 Among the cant phrases that vex the ear of the 
 time is the often recurring expression, " the coming 
 man." What the coming man is to be and to do, 
 and not to be or to do, is a topic of frequent specu- 
 
118 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 
 
 lation of a harmless if not very profitable kind. 
 My prophecy is that the coming man will be a 
 working man. Whatever else he may drop or take 
 up of old or new ideas, he will drop the conceit 
 that there is anything degrading or prejudicial to 
 gentility in manual labor, and take up the faith 
 that the skilful and profitable use of the hand by 
 man or woman is a truer patent of nobility, and a 
 worthier passport to the best society than lordly 
 lineage or heraldic device. And such a result will 
 be but the consummation of a process which began 
 with the first enfranchisement of labor, when Eu- 
 rope emerging from feudal darkness began to per- 
 ceive that industry is a better guaranty of national 
 wealth than the sword. The course of history ever 
 since has been a growing recognition of the rights 
 of labor, and in spite of prescription, of hereditary 
 privilege and aristocratic prejudice, a gradual ele- 
 vation of the laborer. From a state of villenage 
 he advanced to one of personal independence, then 
 from personal independence to the point now at- 
 tained of civil emancipation, from which the next 
 step, that of social emancipation, is inevitable, 
 when thorough education shall give the mechanic 
 that inner emancipation which frees the soul from 
 the bondage of circumstance, that wide and com- 
 manding outlook which atones the inequalities of 
 fortune, and that self-respect which compels the 
 
THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 119 
 
 respect of mankind. Social prejudices are not to 
 be conquered by force ; they can only cease by 
 being outgrown. The prejudice which undervalues 
 manual labor will cease wlienever it shall appear 
 that manual labor is entirely consistent with the 
 highest culture. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 And Jesus, icalking hy the sea of Galilee, saw two 
 brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, 
 casting a net into the sea : for they were fishers. And 
 he saith unto them, Follow me, and I icill make you 
 fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, 
 and followed him. Matt. iv. 18-20. 
 
 A IjL great and permanent reforms, especially all 
 •^ ^ religious movements that win for themselves 
 a permanent place in the world, originate with 
 " the people," — I mean, with the hmnbler classes, 
 the uncultured poor. All religions have had this 
 origin ; they have risen from beneath ; they have 
 struck their roots in the lower strata of society, 
 and gathered to their symbols the masses of the 
 people, before winning the assent of the learned 
 and the great, who at last are dragged in in spite of 
 themselves, and swept away by the overpowering 
 current of popular opinion. Confucius complained 
 that the princes of his day rejected his doctrine ; 
 but the doctrine of Confucius became the State 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 121 
 
 religion of China, and has been so for more than 
 two thousand years. Zoroaster found an ally in 
 the King of Iran ; but the Magi and the courtiers 
 and the men of influence in the land were leagued 
 against him. Buddhism stooped to the vile and 
 despised, and won its great triumph by its great 
 condescension. Mohammed was spurned by the 
 pride of the Koreish, and found his first disciple 
 in a slave. 
 
 Of this humble origin of wide-spread religions, 
 Christianity is the supreme instance. When Jesus, 
 by private exercises of the Spirit and by providen- 
 tial leadings, had become persuaded of his high 
 calling, and moved to undertake his saving mission, 
 he deemed it necessary to associate with himself 
 some trusty companions, to whom he could impart 
 his mind and purpose, and who should assist in 
 disseminating his doctrine. It was a matter of 
 prime moment what manner of persons should be 
 selected for this office. The first thought of an 
 ordinary reformer would have been to draw to 
 himself men of high position and commanding 
 influence, to secure to himself the interest and 
 prestige of rank and power. In our da}^, when a 
 project is started which aims at social and moral 
 reform, it is judged expedient to gain over people 
 of mark, — the accredited leaders of society, — and 
 to give the new movement all the authority which 
 
122 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 social distinction can secure. It appears that Jesus 
 had received overtures from men of this stamp, but 
 gave them no encouragement. When a ruler of 
 the Jews undertook to treat with him, he told him 
 plainly. It is in vain for you Pharisees to think you 
 can enter this new kingdom, which I proclaim, on 
 the strength of your old position ; you have got to 
 be born again. Your aristocratic traditions will 
 avail you nothing here ; you must throw aside all 
 that, forget all you have learned, and begin anew. 
 And so he turned from the leaders of the nation to 
 its humblest citizens. The first whom he chose for 
 his associates in this great work were two fisher- 
 men ; then two more of the same craft ; then a 
 tax-gatherer ; and so on, — obscure men, poor, 
 unlearned, rude. 
 
 Why did Jesus select such before all others for 
 his disciples ? Why peasants of Galilee, rather 
 than educated Pharisees and Sadducees, — mem- 
 bers of the Council, the aristocracy of the land ? 
 He might have had such for his followers, had he 
 chosen to accept the advances they made. Why 
 not such, — men who by virtue of their command- 
 ing position would make an impression on the pub- 
 lic mind, and authorize a strong impression in 
 favor of the new doctrine, would give it forth as 
 from a height, that so, the heights being gained, 
 the plains and valleys might be overawed and se- 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 123 
 
 cured ? It is impossible to say how much of pru- 
 dential calculation there may have been in this 
 selection. I rather suppose that Jesus followed a 
 divine instinct which taught him that these rude 
 men were the fittest instruments for the work as- 
 signed to them. He perceived in them something 
 which especially qualified them for that vocation. 
 Had the purpose of his mission been a system of 
 theology such as after-ages have extorted from the 
 gospel, he would, it is likely, have chosen men of 
 erudition and intellectual discipline to be its mis- 
 sionaries. Then scribes and Pharisees would have 
 been the fittest expounders of his doctrine. But 
 this was not the mission with which his disciples 
 were charged. This was not the object which 
 Christ had in view. He did not want teachers of 
 theology, but competent witnesses, faithful report- 
 ers, — men who were open to receive, and likely to 
 deliver as they received, the truths which he taught. 
 This was what Jesus required in his disciples ; and 
 for this, Galilean peasants were better instruments 
 than phylacteried Rabbins. They possessed one 
 quality at least — the natural fruit of their condi- 
 tion — which the learned and the rulers would have 
 lacked, and which was very essential to constitute 
 a competent minister of the New Testament; 
 namely, simplicity, freedom from prejudice and 
 self-conceit. Had Rabbins undertaken the charge 
 
124 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 of the gospel, they would have made of it a Rabbini- 
 cal affair, would have overlaid it with their tradi- 
 tions, would have perverted it to uses and issues 
 very wide of its original import. These men had 
 no prepossessions of their own which would color 
 or mar their testimony. They were unsophisti- 
 cated. If they had much to learn, they had com- 
 paratively little to unlearn. They needed not, as 
 Christ said to Nicodemus, to be born again to for- 
 get their prejudices ; they needed not to become as 
 little children before they could see the kingdom of 
 God. They were already in that condition ; they 
 possessed this qualification in perhaps as great a 
 degree as could be expected of any who were other- 
 wise fit for the work. 
 
 We see the same thing in every new manifesta- 
 tion of the Spirit. The most apprehensive of new 
 truths are they who are least preoccupied with 
 theories of their own. And it seems, as I said, to 
 be the law of all reforms that they originate with 
 the unlearned, and grow, as the plant grows, from 
 an obscure root in the earth, — grow gradually up 
 into power and greatness, instead of descending 
 from the heights of the world. Humanly speaking, 
 it would have been well if all the fathers of the 
 Church had been men of this stamp. We should 
 then have had at this day the pure Christianity of 
 Jesus, instead of that compound of dogmas and 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 125 
 
 speculations, of Jewish and Gentile traditions, 
 which has borne the name and honors of the gos- 
 pel, and in which it is so hard to sift the wheat 
 from the chaff. I say, humanly speaking ; for 
 there is another view of this subject, — a providen- 
 tial historical view, — according to which the 'very 
 additions and foreign speculations and uses which 
 have gathered around the evangelical nucleus, have 
 had their value and fulfilled their part in the 
 scheme of Divine education. Pure Christianity is 
 perhaps too pure, too ethereal, too spiritual, to act 
 as a social organized power, to constitute a visible 
 Church, without that body of extraneous matter 
 which it gathers to itself from the various cir- 
 cumstances, spheres, and minds amid which it is 
 planted ; as the seed which is put into the ground, 
 in order to appear an organized body, must take to 
 itself something which is foreign to itself from the 
 earth and air which surround it. The seed still 
 maintains its proper type, and modifies these for- 
 eign elements more than they modify it. And 
 Christianity, though somewhat qualified by the me- 
 dium of ecclesiasticism in which it works, on the 
 whole subordinates that medium, and makes it the 
 instrument of its own peculiar power. Indeed, all 
 healthy, efficient organism is a compromise be- 
 tween the ideal and the caricature of the principle 
 embodied in it. 
 
126 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 Such were the two brothers, Simon and Andrew, 
 whom Jesus summoned from their fishing to help 
 evangelize the world : " Follow me, and I will 
 make you fishers of men." "And straightway 
 they left their nets, and followed him." There 
 was no magic in this. It is not necessary to 
 suppose that this was the first meeting between 
 Jesus and these brethren. In all likelihood they 
 had often met before, and were mutually ac- 
 quainted. Jesus had seen something in these men 
 which marked them for his own ; and they had 
 known him as a teacher and prophet, — had looked 
 to him, perhaps, as the promised Messiah. There 
 is nothing wonderful in the readiness with which 
 they accepted the summons, " Follow me." 
 
 But what did they understand by it ? What 
 views and expectations did they connect with it ? 
 I suppose they thought very much as the rest of 
 their countrymen did of the national Messiah. 
 They saw in him a reformer indeed, and one who 
 would rebuke the sins of the people ; but they saw 
 in him also a potentate and prince who would over- 
 throw the foreign usurper, and restore and occupy 
 the national throne. In following him, they fol- 
 lowed a victorious leader, who would not fail, when 
 he came in his glory, to reward his own. We shall 
 do them no injustice if we suppose that they obeyed 
 an impulse of personal ambition in accepting the 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 127 
 
 call to become fishers of men. Vague visions of 
 Messianic prizes were floating before their minds. 
 When they tliought of the goal of their disciple- 
 ship they clothed it in purple, and saw themselves 
 in imagination sitting at the right and left of roy- 
 alty. Little did they know or suspect of the real 
 issues of that future which took such rosy promise 
 in their imagination. Had they dreamed of tlie 
 doom which their mission had in store for them, — 
 the disappointment of their cherished hopes, the 
 life of persecution and the martyr-death to which 
 the Master was calling them, — they would hardly 
 have been tempted to quit the old fishing-ground, 
 and the safe though humble profits of their vocation. 
 They would have been as prompt to reject the call as 
 they were to accept it in the light in which they saw 
 it. They accepted it in one sense ; it was inter- 
 preted to them in a very different sense : they ac- 
 cepted it as the earnest of future triumphs ; it was 
 interpreted to them as a martyr's crown. And yet, 
 when the real nature and result of their calling was 
 revealed to them, they met it without shrinking. 
 With the trial came the courage and the strength. 
 Step by step each coming event brought its own 
 preparation and support ; and they welcomed at 
 length the martyr-death of tlie Christian confes- 
 sion with the same alacrity with wliich they would 
 have taken their places by the side of the con- 
 
128 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 queror's throne, had such been the lot appointed 
 for them. 
 
 A significant picture of human life is set before 
 us in this example ; significant lessons are taught 
 by it. Our condition is essentially that of these 
 Galileans. We begin our career like them with 
 expectations which are never to be realized in the 
 way we had fancied, but in a way very different, if 
 at all. We seek a kingdom, how different from 
 the true one ! Our kingdom of heaven, — we may 
 not call it by that name, — the good which we seek, 
 by whatever name we call it, we see postponed from 
 year to year. It comes not ; but instead of it, comes 
 to patient continuance in well-doing a good which 
 we did not seek, and could not understand till it 
 came. Our expectations are not fulfilled in form, 
 but they are fulfilled in the spirit to all who merit 
 success. The highest good, as we understand it, 
 that in which all our hopes and wishes centre, is 
 the kingdom of heaven for us. Our life is an ex- 
 periment to find that kingdom. The young man 
 ruslies on the future which tempts him with its 
 prizes ; he sees profits, honors, social satisfactions, 
 — external advantages of every sort. These at first 
 are his kingdom of heaven, and these accordingly 
 he pursues. God permits us to indulge in these 
 pursuits to our heart's content ; he has placed no 
 caution at the entrance of these paths, and all 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 129 
 
 things lure us onward. We follow trustingly the 
 temporal Messiah in hope of a temporal kingdom. 
 We delude ourselves with a dream of happiness 
 which flies before us as we pursue, and will not 
 suffer itself to be clutched. But the pursuit has 
 not been vain ; the time spent has not been lost. 
 If it has not brought the satisfaction we desired, it 
 has benefited us in a way we did not expect. It 
 has served to educate us, to call forth our powers, 
 to school our affections, to discipline our hearts. 
 The industry and intellectual vigor to which it has 
 trained us ; the habit it has formed of seeking hap- 
 piness in action ; the trial it has furnished to our 
 virtue ; the power of endurance it has brought out 
 in us ; the lessons of patience and renunciation 
 which have come to us from its very failures and 
 disappointments, — these are the prizes which have 
 come to us from our pursuit. They did not enter 
 into our calculation when we engaged in it. We 
 were tliinking of quite other things. We followed 
 a temporal Messiah. It may be we have attained 
 those other things also, but we have not found 
 what we sought in them ; they have not yielded 
 the looked-for satisfaction. It is not from them 
 that our peace has come. What looked so tempt- 
 ing in the distance has turned out to be something 
 very different when grasped. We may call it ours ; 
 but we cannot appropriate it with any such fruition 
 
 9 
 
130 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 as it promised in the pursuit. The temporal Mes- 
 siah has disappointed us ; but the true Messiah 
 has been revealed. The kingdom which we had in 
 our minds at the outset has failed. It never ex- 
 isted but in our imagination ; but instead thereof, 
 an entrance has been administered to us into an- 
 other and better kingdom, — a kingdom of enlarged 
 insight and ripe experience, of self-command and 
 kind affections, of patience and of peace. 
 
 The calling of these fishermen teaches that the 
 life of the privileged, of the eminent, of those who 
 are called in a special sense, is not a happy life, 
 as happiness is commonly understood. It is not 
 a life of ease, but of hardship. Those who are 
 called to power and honor are called to toil and 
 struggle. The greater our privileges, the harder 
 our lot. 
 
 No doubt these fishermen seemed to themselves, 
 and were thought by their countrymen, to be pe- 
 culiarly favored in being made the intimate com- 
 panions of him who was expected to restore the 
 kingdom to Israel. They were so, indeed, but not 
 in the way which they had conceived. What 
 seemed to them an omen of dignity and splendor, 
 proved to be the herald of hardship and suffering. 
 We are apt to look upon distinction as so much 
 enjoyment. We think tlie most eminent, the high- 
 est-placed, the loudest-called, to be the happiest. 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 131 
 
 They are so in one sense ; since the highest hap- 
 piness for man is the most thorough education and 
 the most intense action of his powers, the most 
 complete development of all that is in him. But 
 if happiness means enjoyment, then eminence, so 
 far from being synonymous with happiness, is sy- 
 nonymous with sorrow. For every privilege which 
 God confers, he imposes a corresponding burden 
 of care and toil. The higher we ascend in the 
 scale of being, the more life ceases to be enjoy- 
 ment, the more difficult it becomes, the more of 
 trial and of conflict it involves. 
 
 Happiness is the property of children, the gift 
 of God's love to that period of life, but not the des- 
 tination of man. The destination of man is to 
 labor and endure, to strive and produce. The 
 higher his position, and the greater his privileges, 
 and the more distinguished his endowments, the 
 more apparent this destination becomes, the more 
 sensibly it is felt, the more certainly it fulfils it- 
 self. It is written : " All dignity is painful. For 
 the son of man there is no crown, whether well 
 worn or ill worn, but is a crown of thorns." 
 
 Who have been the most eminent in the world's 
 annals, — the heroes of history? We find them, 
 for the most part, among the great sufferers of 
 history ; and the more we learn of their private 
 life, the more we find it to have been a life of 
 
132 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 conflict and sorrow. Their private confessions, 
 ^here they have come down to us, show them to 
 have been often weary of life, and to have felt 
 their burden greater than they could bear. Even 
 from the strong and high-hearted Luther escapes 
 not unfrequently the sigh for the rest of the grave. 
 The hero of our own history, the most honored of 
 our countrymen, is said never to have smiled dur- 
 ing all the period of the war which established our 
 national independence. 
 
 Need I remind you how strikingly this trait was 
 exemplified in Him who stands in our grateful and 
 affectionate reverence for all that is sublimest, as 
 well as for all that is holiest, in man ? An immor- 
 tal sadness clings inseparably to his idea. All the 
 representations of him, in the paintings of the 
 old masters, show how universal the impression, 
 perhaps we sliould say the tradition, of this trait. 
 And so intimately is this sadness associated with 
 the idea of Christ, that Christianity has been 
 termed, by those who have reflected most pro- 
 foundly on its spirit, " the worship of sorrow," as 
 exhibiting one who devoted himself to privation 
 and suffering and death in the service of man, as 
 the price of man's highest and eternal good ; and 
 as calling on the followers of Christ to follow him 
 in this also, — willing, if need be, to suffer with 
 him, that so they may reign with him ; " bearing 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 133 
 
 about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that 
 the life also of Jesus might be made manifest" in 
 them ; seeking their life, not in comfort and ease, 
 but in toil and sacrifice. This is the doctrine of 
 Christianity, — a doctrine for the most part peculiar 
 to Christianity. For though traces of it, as of all 
 great truths, may be found in the ancient philoso- 
 phies, yet the spirit of those philosophies, on the 
 whole, was eudaemonism, was Epicurean ; it made 
 happiness the highest good. And this, I appre- 
 hend, whatever their theory, is still the practi- 
 cal philosophy of the greater part of mankind, — 
 not the worship of sorrow, but the worship of 
 enjoyment. 
 
 Enjoyment is the childish ideal of good. It is 
 this that floats before the mind at the entrance of 
 life, and with many during its entire course. Even 
 where ambition prompts to unwearied exertion, and 
 persuades renunciation of present ease and sensual 
 satisfactions for honors and possessions in the dis- 
 tance, which seem more desirable than present 
 enjoyment, it is still enjoyment in one shape or 
 another which they pursue. It is still some phan- 
 tom of future independence and ease, or of future 
 mark and consequence, which beckons them on, 
 and which renders endurable the sacrifices it de- 
 mands. And not only does worldly ambition look 
 to this end, but how often is religion itself de- 
 
134 TEE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 graded to a worship of enjoyment by the repre- 
 sentations which are made of its ends, and the 
 motives by which its obligations are urged ; enjoy- 
 ment with which some future state is to reward 
 the toils and sacrifices of this ! Men are taught 
 to worship enjoyment under the name of heaven ; 
 and the popular doctrine has been, that, after 
 suffering the inconveniences of righteousness in 
 this present life, we are to take our ease in the 
 life to come. 
 
 Long time is required to correct this false ideal 
 in religion and in all the pursuits of life, and to 
 teach us that enjoyment is only a phantom with 
 which God permits us to delude ourselves for 
 a while, until we learn the deeper meaning and use 
 of life, — until we learn that labor is the end of 
 labor ; that its use is to educate us for further and 
 endless toil ; that when we have done well, the 
 reward of well-doing is the power and the privilege 
 of doing better ; having been faithful in few things, 
 to be made rulers over many ; not with additional 
 comforts and ease, but with additional responsi- 
 bilities, care, and toil. If we have been sharply 
 tried, and have borne our trials well, the rew^ard 
 is new trials, which multiply so long as we are 
 able to bear. 
 
 God teaches all this by gradual discipline, if we 
 are open to instruction. He has his ends with us 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 135 
 
 quite distinct from our own. We set out with a 
 theory which we have to unlearn ; we amuse our- 
 selves with plans which we have to renounce. We 
 mean to labor for a given time, and then take our 
 rest. But God does not mean that we should rest 
 so long as we are capable of labor. He keeps us 
 at work; and the more we do, the more he lays 
 upon us. If we have toiled for money, he does not 
 permit us to sit quietly down and enjoy our gains, 
 but keeps us at work as his stewards, or takes our 
 riches from us that we may begin our work anew. 
 If we labor too covetously, he makes the care of 
 money at once our punishment and his treasurer. 
 If we have done well, and earned credit in any 
 undertaking, he does not permit us to sleep upon 
 our laurels, but goads us on to new undertakings. 
 If he sees in us a patient, brave, and self-sacrificing 
 spirit, he does not afflict us once and then dismiss 
 us, but heaps trial upon trial. At every turn he 
 baffles and disappoints us, and yet wrings from us 
 at last the strange confession, "Though he slay 
 me, yet will I trust in him , " and, correcting our 
 false ideal, teaches us to find in brave and efficient 
 service the kingdom of heaven, which we once 
 sought in selfish enjoyment; instead of getting 
 the uttermost, to seek our satisfaction in doing 
 our best. 
 
 So it fell out with these poor fishermen, who left 
 
136 THE LOT OF THE CALLED, 
 
 their nets to follow the call of Jesus, not knowing 
 whither they went. They embraced that call with 
 buoyant heart and high hopes, seeing conquest and 
 glory and golden crowns in the distance, and find- 
 ing at every step disappointment, privation, dan- 
 ger, and ending with a martyr-death. Assuredly 
 the life of the called is not a happy life, in the 
 ordinary sense of the term. The greater our priv- 
 ileges, the harder our lot. The more we have and 
 can, the more we are called to do and to bear. 
 
 But courage! The God who appoints the disci- 
 pline and the task is the same God who worketh in 
 us to will and to do. The internal support is 
 equal to the outward pressure ; and as our day, 
 so is our strength. Had Andrew and Peter fore- 
 seen the trials in store for them, how would they 
 have spurned the Master's call, and shrunk with 
 terror from such a life ! But they did not shrink 
 when the trials came ; they found the strength 
 where they found the call. And though one of 
 them, in a moment of weakness, was tempted to 
 deny his discipleship, he amply atoned for that 
 weakness by his subsequent life, and, according 
 to tradition, by his heroic death. Wherever there 
 is a call to do or to bear, there is strength cor- 
 responding to that call ; and what seemed impos- 
 sible once, will seem easy and natural as we grow 
 up to it by the gradual discipline of life. " It 
 
THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 137 
 
 would not do for me to enlist," said a young man 
 of feeble health and delicate organization, at the 
 breaking out of the war, " I should prove a coward 
 on the field of battle." But he did enlist, impelled 
 by the irresistible call of patriotism, and showed 
 himself, when the trial came, as brave as any vet- 
 eran on the field ; and cheerfully, in the supreme 
 hour, paid the tribute of his life to the sacred 
 cause he had espoused. 
 
 The life of the called is not a happy life, if hap- 
 piness consists in selfish enjoyment; nevertheless, 
 it is a blessed life, if blessedness consists in con- 
 sciously filling a place in the army of the faithful, 
 and the fellowship of that spirit which animates 
 all the brave and good. The limits of enjoyment 
 are soon reached, the season of enjoyment is soon 
 past; but life and blessedness have no bounds. 
 The time is near when the having possessed a little 
 more or a little less of this world's goods, the hav- 
 ing experienced a little more or a little less of 
 earthly delights, will be no longer matter of pleas- 
 ure or regret. But the consciousness of having paid 
 with our best for values received, of having borne 
 our share of the common burden, and contributed 
 something to the general good, will be rich com- 
 pensation in view of all the past, and ample sup- 
 port in view of all the future ; will be a satisfac- 
 tion which we can take with us to our final rest. 
 
138 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 
 
 assured that the sundering of soul and body cannot 
 wrest this treasure from our life, and that wher- 
 ever, in the Divine economy, our waking may be, 
 it will find us sound and furnished and girt and 
 ready for the new career. 
 
X. 
 
 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHEIST ; OR 
 REFOEMERS AND HUMANITY. 
 
 He must increase, hut I must decrease. 
 
 John iii. 30. 
 
 TOHN, the Baptist, had awakened in his country- 
 men an immense expectation of a greater than 
 himself, about to appear, whose perfect work would 
 eclipse his own initiatory doings, " the latchet of 
 whose shoes," he said, " I am not worthy to un- 
 loose." He may be in the midst of us, — that great 
 Unknown ; for who knows the possibilities of his 
 own sphere ? " There standeth one among you, 
 whom ye know not ; he it is, who coming after 
 me is preferred before me." In accordance with 
 this prediction, there appeared one day, among 
 those who flocked to the baptism of John, a youth 
 on whose radiant brow the manifest spirit of God 
 had set its seal. The heavenly signature did not 
 escape the penetrating eye of the Baptist. He 
 looked upon this new-comer, and recognized in his 
 kinsman Jesus the greater than himself who was 
 
140 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 
 
 to come. " This is he of whom I said, After me 
 Cometh a man which is preferred before me, for 
 he was before me." 
 
 Not many days after there came a message : 
 " Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to 
 whom thou barest witness, behold, the same bap- 
 tizeth, and all men come to him." In a mind 
 less pure and disinterested than John's, this an- 
 nouncement might have kindled a spark of jeal- 
 ousy, though it did but verify his own prediction. 
 He, the greatest prophet since the great Elijah, 
 saw himself already eclipsed and receding into the 
 shadow of a name. Young as he was, he had had 
 his day. Another coming after him was preferred 
 before him. But John saw in this the divine au- 
 thentication of his own mission. He knew that no 
 vulgar caprice, but a higher claim, had caused this 
 diversion of tlie popular favor. Grandly, as became 
 his loyal nature, he submitted to be outdone. " A 
 man can receive nothing, except it be given him 
 from heaven. . . . He that hath the bride [that is, 
 the popular consent] is the bridegroom : but the 
 friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and hear- 
 etli him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bride- 
 groom's voice : this my joy therefore is fulfilled. 
 He must increase, but I must decrease." 
 
 Of all the brave words recorded of John the Bap- 
 tist there are none braver than these. There 
 
OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 141 
 
 are plenty of reformers who can raise their voice 
 against the corruptions and evil-doers of their 
 time ; how rare the reformer who knows his place, 
 his limitations, and is willing to subside when his 
 work is done, content to be the waiting paranymph 
 of the ever-coming eternal bridegroom ! The Bap- 
 tist and the Christ ! There are always these two 
 parties and powers in the world, — the aggressive 
 reformer and the Son of Man ; the uncompromising 
 radical who would lay the axe to the root of the 
 tree, and the spirit of humanity latent in all men, 
 continually advancing, as the years roll by, toward 
 the full stature of a perfect man, — the stature of 
 " the fulness of Christ." This must increase ; that 
 must decrease. They differ in their ideals, and 
 they differ in their methods. The reformer's is 
 non-conformity, everlasting protest against the 
 world and its ways, asceticism with its rigors and 
 its frown. The Christ's ideal is the life of society, 
 with its kindly sympathies and reciprocities, its 
 genial fellowships and its sweet humanities, its 
 obligations and responsibilities, its marriage feasts 
 and its houses of mourning, its Canas and its 
 Bethanies, its graces and its burdens, its hilarities 
 and its cross. The Baptist's ideal seduced not a 
 few of the choicest spirits of the early Church. It 
 drew Christendom into the wilderness, and threat- 
 ened for a while to supplant the genuine gospel 
 
142 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 
 
 with the mystic glooms of Indian devotion. Sin- 
 cere as it was in the purpose and practice of the 
 early Christians, sublime as it was in its stern pro- 
 test against the vices of a pampered, self-indulgent 
 world, asceticism is not the true ideal of life. 
 
 The ideal Christian is man in society, freely 
 mingling with the world, partaking in its innocent 
 uses while contending against the bad ; bearing its 
 burdens, encountering its temptations and overcom- 
 ing them, and honoring its just demands. This 
 is the life that best promotes in the end the moral 
 welfare of society. The life of dissent may be freer 
 from temptation, but it is less fruitful. That must 
 decrease. The voice in the wilderness passes, but 
 humanity endures. The reformer's mission is 
 transient ; he fulfils his course, utters his protest, 
 and disappears in the stream of time. Advancing 
 humanity renders back the protest in due season, 
 accepts what truth there is in it, discarding what 
 is false, and embodies it in that ever-progressing 
 incarnation of divine ideas which constitutes the 
 history within the history of human kind. 
 
 They differ in their methods. The aggressive 
 reformer proceeds by agitation. He strives and 
 cries, he agonizes, he plots and he schemes, calls 
 conventions, canvasses votes, intrigues, proscribes, 
 legislates. Some good, no doubt, is accomplished 
 in this way. Agitation is good in its measure and 
 
OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. I43 
 
 place, but not for all things and times. It is not 
 the method which permanently benefits society. 
 Not agitation, but attraction, is the force that 
 finally and forever redeems the world. All thor- 
 ough and lasting reforms are due to the strong 
 attraction of individual character ; and character 
 acts by simply being. It needs no organ, but its 
 own victorious nature. It reforms evil as the sun 
 in the fable slew the dragon, by the glance of 
 its eye, as Paul said Christ would destroy the 
 " man of sin " by " the brightness of his coming." 
 Other agencies may stop the present demonstra- 
 tions ; but they do not reach the root of the evil, 
 they do not reach the heart. The pressure of 
 opinion, coalition, legislation, may hold vice in 
 check, but it cannot turn the bitter waters into 
 sweet. No external pressure can do this, but only 
 personal influence, the flowing into us of another's 
 soul. Interrogate your own experience. What 
 have been the agencies by which your moral nature 
 has been most quickened and fructified ? They 
 have not been palpable and loud, not outward com- 
 pulsion, but the irresistible attraction of some char- 
 acter whose manifestations you have witnessed, some 
 relative or friend or public functionary whom you 
 respected and loved. From such sources as these 
 our healing has come, and not from those who seek 
 by force to bring us into their way and rule. 
 
144 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 
 
 The mightiest forces that we know, forces that 
 sway the universe, are shod with silence. There is 
 no speech nor cry ; their voice is not heard. No 
 sound accompanies the undulations of the light 
 which reaches the bounds of being. The snow 
 and the rain fall silently on the waiting earth, and 
 ripen the harvests that feed mankind ; the earth 
 herself, a quiet wayfarer, awakes no echoes on her 
 starry road. Such a force is character, of a piece 
 with the light and the rain and the revolving year. 
 What we call Christianity, apart from its politics 
 and creeds, is but the character of Jesus as pre- 
 sented in his life ; that immortal life which has 
 written itself with indelible scriptures on the 
 heart of the world, — a continuous galvanic cur- 
 rent from that divine, inexhaustible battery. The 
 Christian Church with all its ages is the self- 
 perpetuating power of a human example. 
 
 The impression of that example on Jesus' con- 
 temporaries is indicated by certain anecdotes 
 which make what is called his biography. These 
 anecdotes are not his life, but only sparks struck 
 out by its contact with the world. They do not 
 explain the influence of his spirit on human so- 
 ciety ; they only illustrate it. The recorded acts are 
 not the ministry of Christ ; they are only its signs. 
 The immediate results of his action were tran- 
 sient. The eyes of the blind which he opened, soon 
 
OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 145 
 
 closed to open no more on the scenes of this world ; 
 the feet of the lame whom he made to walk, soon 
 stumbled on " the dark mountains ; " the dying 
 w^hom he snatched from the grave were soon re- 
 manded to the sleep of death ; but the spirit of 
 divine beneficence displayed in those works re- 
 mains. This must increase, and glorify itself with 
 ever-increasing sway. 
 
 It is not what we do, but the spirit with which 
 we do it, that tells. The immediate results of all 
 our action are inconsiderable. The glory of all 
 human achievements is as the flower of the grass ; 
 " the wind passeth over it, and it is gone." The 
 spirit with which we work alone endures. That lives 
 when our work is done. Believe in the silent force 
 of character, in the indestructible efficacy of a life 
 spent in the daily discharge of unnoticed offices of 
 love, — not unnoticed : God giveth his angels charge 
 of such ; the heavenly hosts are commissioned to 
 gather up that wayside seed, and to propagate it 
 forever and forever. 
 
 The professed reformers have a mission to 
 destroy, but not to build up. They may by the 
 blessing of God abate existing evils, but they can- 
 not replace them with positive good. The good, if 
 it come, must be a product of humanity flowering 
 in its season to meet this want. This is not said 
 by way of disparagement, but only as defining the 
 
 10 
 
146 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 
 
 work of reform. God knows how essential and 
 divine a thing it is to destroy the bud, to bruise 
 but one head of the old hydra that has wound itself 
 with a ninefold coil about the heart of the world. 
 Still, that work is negative, and therefore transient. 
 The serpent can be finally crushed only by the 
 positive forces of a higher civilization, — a civiliza- 
 tion which has drunk more deeply of the blood of 
 Christ. As the coming of the first man displaced 
 the saurian monsters of the old creation, so the 
 ever-new coming of the second man will in due 
 time suppress the moral monsters of the human 
 world. No aggressive reform, but only redeeming 
 love, can replace with new verdure and a better 
 harvest the desolation they have made. 
 
 Aggressive reform must decrease because of the 
 impurities it inevitably contracts in the prosecu- 
 tion of its ends. Reform in its first stage is simply 
 protest against some prevalent mischief or vice ; a 
 voice in the wilderness crying, " Repent ! " to all 
 who are guilty in that kind. So long as it abides 
 in that first stage it is pure and purifying. These 
 early reformers are true sons of God. Happy are 
 they who hear the word and receive it. But there 
 follows often a second stage in which reform has 
 parted with something of its original purity, and 
 got itself mixed with foreign elements. The re- 
 former quits his station in the wilderness, and 
 
OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 147 
 
 rallies his forces in organized bodies, hoping by 
 that means to secure the more rapid suppression 
 of the evil he condemns. Organization for moral 
 purposes may sometimes be expedient, but reform 
 loses something of its simplicity thereby. The re- 
 former is no longer single-minded ; he has a second 
 object beside his original one, — namely, the strength 
 and success of his party. To this he must some- 
 times sacrifice his individual convictions, giving 
 implied sanction to measures he does not approve, 
 that the union and integrity of the party may not 
 suffer by his dissent. He no longer trusts in the 
 power of simple truth, but relies on numerical 
 force. He would conquer by the multitude of 
 voices, instead of persuading by the influence of 
 example. He contends more for victory than for 
 truth. 
 
 When the organization takes a political direction 
 and presents itself as a party at the polls, reform 
 undergoes still further diminution of its moral 
 character. Its weapons have become carnal; the 
 political element absorbs the moral. Moral aims 
 are confounded with political ends and subordi- 
 nated to them ; philanthropic zeal is merged in the 
 struggle for power political. Suppose the party 
 with which the reformers have allied themselves 
 to succeed in carrying the popular vote, and secur- 
 ing as legislators and magistrates the professed 
 
148 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 
 
 representatives of their cause. How far will that 
 success effect the abolition of the evil to be re- 
 formed ? Legislation may control the means of 
 vicious indulgence. It may make illicit what be- 
 fore was legal. But legislation can only deal with 
 what is overt; it cannot reach the private home, 
 still less the private soul. The evil fruit it may 
 for the time suppress, but the corrupt tree remains. 
 I do not say that suppression of the overt evil is 
 not a good work, or that the reform which seeks 
 that suppression is not needed, but only that it 
 works no radical cure. Make the tree good if you 
 would have good fruit ; abolish the demand for 
 vicious indulgence, if you would once for all cut 
 off the supply : there is no other way. 
 
 The world is not permanently reformed by legis- 
 lation. Pliilanthropists may wail over it, politi- 
 cians may tug at it and tinker it ; but history will 
 have its course. It obeys the law impressed upon 
 it by divine rule ; and only the gradual unfolding of 
 the good seed which God originally implanted in 
 the human breast, and has nourished by successive 
 revelations of the true and the right, will effectu- 
 ally reform society. "He must increase." Every 
 aspiration which has the well-being of man for its 
 object, every dream of philanthropy, is bound to 
 become a reality in the fulness of time. There is 
 no good which reform has contended for tliat 
 
OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. I49 
 
 time and advancing humanity will not one day 
 render to our patient hope. The strong years are 
 laboring for us and with us. They will not hurry 
 and they will not stay. They keep the seed en- 
 trusted to them ; they keep it and they rear it, and 
 their harvests fail not. 
 
 " 1 must decrease." Reformers pass ; humanity 
 remains. With Christ for its head and God for 
 its method and its goal, it must increase forever. 
 Transcending and subordinating all partial re- 
 forms, it takes from each whatever it can appropri- 
 ate, and casts aside what is incompatible. Greater 
 than all individuals however gifted, purer than all 
 cultures however refined, it receives into itself the 
 contributions of every land and time. It feeds it- 
 self with streams from east and west and north 
 and south, and grows stronger and purer the far- 
 ther it flows. Science cannot trace its beginning, 
 nor predict its issues ; but faith knows that a spirit 
 greater than itself is co-present to every stage of its 
 course, and is guiding it by infallible methods to 
 immortal ends. 
 
XI. 
 
 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 And they shall come from the east, and from the 
 west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall 
 sit down in the kingdom of God. Luke xiii. 29. 
 
 TT 7E all know how utterly and astonishingly 
 ^ ^ this prediction was verified in the first cen- 
 turies of the Christian Church, which is what is 
 here meant by the kingdom of God. Fifty days 
 after the death of Christ, in whose tomb it was 
 seemingly extinct, and whose resurrection was 
 then the private persuasion of a few friends, the 
 soul of that kingdom burst forth again with irre- 
 pressible vehemence at Jerusalem. It swept the 
 city with a rushing mighty wind from heaven, and 
 a demonstration of fiery tongues, inaugurating the 
 new heavens and the new earth of the Christian 
 ages. Three thousand souls sat down in the 
 kingdom by invitation of Peter that day. East, 
 west, north, and south were all represented. For 
 there were dwelling at Jerusalem at that time 
 Jewish proselytes "out of every nation under 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 151 
 
 heaven," providentially gathered to the feast of 
 the tribes, — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, from the 
 east ; people from the parts of Libya about Cyrene, 
 strangers of Rome, Cappadocians, Phrygians, from 
 the west and the north ; and dwellers in Mesopota- 
 mia from the south. When this rushing mighty 
 wind struck them it lodged a seed of the kingdom 
 in their souls, which they took with them to their 
 proper homes, and sowed in their several lands, 
 where it grew to be a heavenly plantation, a spir- 
 itual oasis amid the perishing polytheisms of 
 the Empire and the droning synagogues of the 
 Dispersion. 
 
 These plantations were replenished and rein- 
 forced from time to time by missionaries, apostolic 
 and other, from the old centre and the neighbor 
 lands. Paul went to Arabia and Asia Minor and 
 Greece and Italy, some say to Spain, — to what 
 was then the uttermost vers-e of the West. 
 Thomas, according to tradition, went to the utter- 
 most verge of the East. Philip, by mediation of 
 a household officer of the Queen of Meroe, whom 
 he baptized on the road to Gaza, planted the word 
 far down in the South. Others, most likely dis- 
 ciples of Paul, carried it to Britain, high up in the 
 North. The plantations grew, and flourished, and 
 spread. The Empire writhed under them, and 
 made desperate efforts to throw them off ; and no 
 
152 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 wonder, for they rode the Empire as a green and 
 histy parasite rides some huge bole of a thousand 
 rings, the monarch of the forest, which, vast and 
 robust as it is, must finally succumb to the stealthy 
 encroachment. 
 
 The plantations grew and spread till they ran 
 together into a kingdom of God, which covered the 
 earth, the known and travelled earth, of that time. 
 Cosmas, the great navigator of the sixth century, 
 found Christianity established in Malabar ; he 
 found Christian churches and bishops in Ceylon, 
 whose " spicy breezes " had pleaded, and not in 
 vain, with the saints aforetime, as they pleaded in 
 saintly Heber's day, for missionary effort. Al- 
 ready from uttermost China, jealous then as now 
 of her own productions, the Emperor Justinian 
 had received, through Christian missionaries, the 
 secret of the silkworm ; and thus, as sceptic Gib- 
 bon confesses, a Christian mission had accom- 
 plished what secular commerce had labored in vain 
 to effect, — the introduction of the silk culture into 
 Europe. There were Christians at the mouth of 
 the Ganges, Christians in " distant Aden," Chris- 
 tians in Ormuz and in Abyssinia. Saracen hordes 
 from the heart of the great desert had listened to 
 Saint Simeon from the top of his prison column, and 
 received the gospel at his hands. In Persia, Chris- 
 tian bishops had overthrown the temples of the 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 153 
 
 sun. On the slopes of the Caucasus a Georgian 
 king and queen, themselves instructed by a Chris- 
 tian slave, had succeeded in evangelizing their 
 people. Meanwhile, at the other extremity, Ire- 
 land, converted by holy Patrick as early as the 
 fifth century, was known as the " Island of Saints," 
 the school of Christian Europe, and a centre of 
 spiritual light. The savage Goth was tamed into 
 a peaceful confessor of the Gospel of peace, and, 
 German-like, must have the word in his native 
 tongue. Learned Jerome, in his cell at Bethle- 
 hem, translating the Bible into Latin, is aston- 
 ished by a message from two Goths inquiring the 
 true meaning of certain passages in the Psalms. 
 " Who would believe," he says, " that the barbarian 
 tongue of the Goth would inquire concerning the 
 sense of the Hebrew original, and that, while the 
 Greeks were sleeping, the Germans would be in- 
 vestigating the Word of God ? " A very significant 
 fact it is, that the first translation of the Scriptures 
 into German, the language of a rising world and of 
 modern thought, was contemporary with the first 
 authoritative translation into Latin, the language 
 of mediaeval thought and a dying world. 
 
 So mightily grew the Word, and prevailed ; and 
 so it was that geographically east and west and 
 north and south sat down in the kingdom of God. 
 And in our day, though other religions may num- 
 
154 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 ber more disciples, there is none so widely diffused 
 as the Christian, — none that can vie with it in 
 geographical extent, — none which embraces so 
 many latitudes and longitudes and differing na- 
 tionalities. A few meridians include the boasted 
 millions of Hinduism and of Islaraism. When 
 daylight dies along the waves of the Caspian, it 
 disappears to all the worshippers of Buddha ; 
 when " sets the sun on Afric's shore, that instant 
 all is night " to the followers of Mohammed ; 
 but Christendom is a kingdom on which the sun 
 never sets, where east and west and north and 
 south sit down together, and earth's extremities 
 join hands. 
 
 But the prophecy of our Lord has another mean- 
 ing and fulfilment besides the geographical one we 
 liave been discussing. The kingdom of God has 
 other distinctions and relations, divergences and 
 approximations, than those of space. The spiritual 
 horizon has its polarities as well as the material. 
 There are cardinal points of the spirit, as decided 
 in their peculiarities as east and west and north 
 and south, and, like these divisions of the compass, 
 organic constituents of the spiritual world, neces- 
 sary each to its orbed completeness and indispen- 
 sable to its very being. Viewing the prophecy in 
 this light, it expresses the spiritual completeness of 
 the kingdom of God, or the Christian Church, as 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 155 
 
 well as its geographical extent. East, west, north, 
 south, ma}^ be regarded as typifying different ten- 
 dencies and qualities of the spirit, — the east, sta- 
 bility, conservatism ; the west, mobility, progress ; 
 the north, internal activity, the inner life, ideal- 
 ism, mysticism ; the south, exterior productiveness, 
 ritualism, symbolism, ecclesiastical organization. 
 
 All these tendencies and types of spirit were 
 represented in the primitive Church, — the Church 
 of the Apostles. We find them all in the New 
 Testament. The element of stability — the con- 
 servative element — was impersonated in Peter, 
 and still more decidedly in James, first Bishop of 
 Jerusalem, — in general, we may say, by that first 
 Jerusalem church, which adhered so strongly to 
 the Old Covenant, to Moses and Mosaism, that in 
 fact it was only a Jewish sect, — a synagogue dif- 
 fering from other synagogues only in the one tenet 
 that Jesus was the Christ. The antagonist princi- 
 ple of progress, how perfectly it was incarnated in 
 Paul, the daring innovator, founder of cosmopoli- 
 tan Christianity, who burst the bonds of Judaism, 
 cut loose from the moorings of the Old Covenant, 
 and carried the New to the Gentile West. 
 
 If we look for traces in this age of the idealistic, 
 mystical spirit, we find them clear and decided in 
 the Gospel and First Epistle of John, whose author 
 thought more of the invisible Church than of the 
 
156 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 visible, and less of the Jewish historical Christ 
 than he did of the eternal Christ, the Divine Word 
 incarnated in him, whose God was not the Jehovah 
 of the Jews, but light and love, and who in his in- 
 wardness and ideality is the prototype of the mys- 
 tics and qiuetists of later time. 
 
 Finally, the ritual and symbolical side of reli- 
 gion was also represented in the primitive Church 
 and in the New Testament. The Epistle to the 
 Hebrews finds in all the ceremonial of Judaism the 
 foretype of Christian sanctities ; and the Book of 
 Revelation under the figure of the New Jerusalem 
 contemplates a Christian church which is some- 
 thing more than the spiritual fellowship of believ- 
 ers, — a close organization, a compact, corporate 
 institution, with the powers and functions pertain- 
 ing to such a body. 
 
 What is true of the primitive Church and the 
 undeveloped Christianity of the apostolic age, how 
 much rather is it true of every subsequent age of 
 the Church! When Eastern and Western Chris- 
 tendom divided in the irreconcilable antagonism of 
 their views and claims, in spite of the geographical 
 separation, the spiritual compass remained unim- 
 paired and complete. The Western Church, with 
 which our Protestant Christendom more immedi- 
 ately connects itself, had still its spiritual east and 
 west, its north and south. Through all the period 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 157 
 
 of the Middle Age these types are present, and 
 these tendencies at work. Take the culmination 
 of the Roman hierarchy. The period of the great- 
 est consolidation and seeming uniformity was also 
 that of the greatest internal divergency. If con- 
 servatism reigned undisputed on the seven hills, 
 reform was triumphant in the gorges of the Jura 
 and the valleys of Provence ; if ritualism was ram- 
 pant in one quarter, idealism had reached its cli- 
 max in another. Peter the Venerable is oracle 
 here ; Peter de Bruys is oracle there. The mighty 
 Innocent in his pride of place is constrained to 
 approve the beggar from Assisi, whose ominous 
 career he would fain have suppressed, but that 
 policy finds the popular preacher less dangerous 
 within the Church than out of it. While Thomas 
 Aquinas is seeking to perpetuate the past, and to 
 fix the sum of theology in inexpugnable and irre- 
 vocable dogmas, Raymond and Oliva and others 
 are proclaiming the " Everlasting Gospel " of hu- 
 man progress, and announcing a new age and a 
 new dispensation of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 If now we come to the world of our own time, 
 to the Protestant Christendom of to-day, we find 
 there also — regarding Protestantism externally 
 and historically as one movement — a complete 
 church, in which east and west and north and 
 south are all represented. Protestant Christen- 
 
158 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 doin is bounded on the east by the Rocky Moun- 
 tains of immovable Orthodoxy, on the west by the 
 River of Free Inquiry, on the north by the White 
 Sea of Mysticism, on the south by the Gulf of 
 Prelacy, which divides it from the Church of 
 Rome. In other words, Calvinism at one extrem- 
 ity, and Universalism at the other, Quakerism and 
 Spiritism on this hand, and Episcopacy on that, 
 define this spiritual kingdom and attest its com- 
 pleteness. But though Protestantism as a whole, 
 externally and historically considered, exhibits 
 this compass and variety, it is one of the evils of 
 Protestantism that, internally and practically, it is 
 not a whole, but a chaos of disunited, independent 
 states, having no ecclesiastical fellowship with 
 one another. The Protestant Christian, however 
 catholic his own temper and views, is practically 
 shut up within the fold of a sect which, if liberal, 
 is excluded by all the rest, and which, if illiberal, 
 excludes them. If a native of the east, it is not 
 lawful for him to sit down with them of the west ; 
 if he come from the west, he is an offence to the 
 saints of the east; if inclined to the north, he is 
 cut off from the sympathies of the south ; if 
 reared in the south, he is early imbued with a holy 
 horror of the north. The only way to obviate this 
 evil in each particular communion is by individual 
 tolerance to strive for completeness within that 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 159 
 
 fold. Each sect should seek, so far as practicable, 
 to be a catholic, complete church. A sect is then 
 in a healthy state when a due admixture of con- 
 servatism and liberality, of speculation and activ- 
 ity, of idealism and formalism, answering the 
 condition and satisfying the necessities of different 
 minds, supplies all the elements of ecclesiastical 
 edification, and completes the spiritual horizon. 
 East, west, north, and south must unite in every 
 kingdom of God, and every sect is in theory such a 
 kingdom. 
 
 1. Every church must have its east. The east 
 is the region of steadfastness, of perpetuity. The 
 terrestrial east, the geographical east, the old 
 Asian world, has had historically this character, — 
 the home of aboriginal, imperishable light, of eter- 
 nal dominion and unchangeable custom. Every 
 church must have its conservative side, its point 
 of resistance, its fixed fact, its morning sun of un- 
 changeable verity, — something eternal, immu- 
 table, sufficing. And what should that be but the 
 Christ, God's Christ and our Christ, the same yes- 
 terday, to-day, and forever, the spiritual sun of 
 our human world ? Fundamental and indispen- 
 sable to every true church is the idea of Christ, — 
 not the moral teacher and philosopher, a Jewish 
 Socrates or Confucius, but Christ, the Son of man 
 and the Son of God, impersonation of the divine- 
 
160 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 Imman, never as a name and a sanctity to be set 
 aside or superseded, however the doctrines and 
 views connected with that name may change and 
 disappear with the course of time. In fact, that 
 name is the only one of a veritable, historical per- 
 sonage, that has had the power to organize his- 
 tory, — not the history of this or that tribe, but 
 the world's history, — to thread the nations and 
 the ages on the string of an idea, and to bind them 
 in oecumenical relations to the throne of God. It 
 was this that laid hold of the New World, and — 
 what commerce and conquest could not do — at- 
 tached it to the Old, and gave to these States the 
 spiritual results of the past without the tedium of its 
 processes. No name has spanned such chasms and 
 schisms of thought and life. None carries with it 
 such pledge of perpetuity. What changes may yet 
 pass upon society, what revolutions, political, eccle- 
 siastical, moral, may toss and convulse and remodel 
 the Church and the world, surpasses the sagacity 
 of man to predict. But of this be sure, — this, 
 even amid the darkness and the deeps, the uncer- 
 tainty, perplexity, and agony of time, through 
 Avhich humanity is now groping its perilous way, 
 we may venture to affirm, — that the name of 
 Christ and its sacred import will surmount all and 
 survive. All the tempests that sweep society will 
 not pluck the idea of divine humanity incarnate in 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 161 
 
 Christ from the soul of man and the path of history. 
 So long as the sun whicli makes our natural day 
 shall rise in the east and hasten on to the west, 
 that diviner sun which makes our soul's day will 
 continue to rise on each successive generation and 
 accompany each to their rest. 
 
 Other ideas there are, necessarily connected 
 with that of Christ — ideas of man's nature and 
 calling and destiny, of reconciliation and atone- 
 ment in Christ, — ideas underlying, but by no 
 means identical with, the dogmas of the sects, 
 which are also original constituents of the Gospel, 
 and therefore necessary elements in a true Chris- 
 tian church. Every church is bound to respect 
 them, and in virtue of them every church must 
 have its conservative side, its cardinal east, the 
 eye of its horizon, the salient principle and start- 
 ing-point of its spiritual life. 
 
 2. Then, secondly, each church must have its 
 west. The west, in our interpretation of this 
 Scripture, stands for mobility, variety, progress. 
 Our own west, this young continent, with its rapid 
 and amazing growths, its spreading populations, 
 its ever-multiplying ways of communication, its 
 endless traffic, and its shifting customs, suggests 
 this use of the term, type as it is of mobile and 
 progressive life. Every church should be flexile 
 and plastic enough in doctrine and discipline to 
 
 11 
 
162 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 allow of growth ; it must not assume to have all 
 truth and all knowledge in its traditions, to be 
 " perfect and entire, wanting nothing," nor think 
 to confine the action of the mind, to limit the 
 progress of inquiry, and to tie Christianity forever 
 to its creed. Christianity, though bound to a 
 given idea and to certain immutable truths, is 
 not, for the rest, a fixture, but a movement and 
 a growth ; not a divinely established system of 
 views and institutions and immutable forms of 
 thought and life, but a flowing demonstration of 
 the spirit in such forms and aspects and embodi- 
 ments as each successive age required, or was 
 fitted to apprehend and to profit by, — a series 
 of evolutions in which truths and principles un- 
 changeable in their essence are variously expressed 
 to differing minds in different times, — a progres- 
 sive revelation of God in Christ. That such is 
 the true and providential character and destiny 
 of our religion is evident in the writings of the 
 New Testament, when we compare the statement 
 of Christianity in the first chapters of the Acts 
 with the statement of it in the Epistles to the Co- 
 rinthians and the First Epistle of John. We see 
 there the immense stride which the Church made 
 in the age of the Apostles, and in their hands, 
 from Jewish Christianity to universal Christianity, 
 from a national polity to the faith of mankind. 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 163 
 
 The march thus inaugurated did not stop for 
 nearly a thousand years, and then only slackened 
 in the darkness and storm of the feudal niglit. It 
 has never really stopped to this day ; when in one 
 organization it found itself hampered and brought 
 to a stand, it burst into schism and resumed the 
 movement in a new. The Holy Spirit, wliose body 
 is the Church, does not bind itself to uniformity 
 of doctrine or rite, but adapts itself to different 
 minds and times. The spirit is one ; but there are 
 differences of administrations and diversities of 
 gifts, divergent views and dissentient tongues, one 
 Lord and many confessions, unity in variety. This 
 is the method and law of the Church universal; 
 and each particular church and connection should 
 respect in this the mind of the Spirit, not seek to 
 impose a uniform system of belief, not insist on a 
 single solution of every question, but open itself 
 to free discussion, tolerate dissenting views, allow 
 full scope to philosophic speculation within the 
 limits of the Christian idea, and maintain an open 
 and liberal west, as well as a close and steadfast 
 east. 
 
 3. And further, every church must have its 
 north. The north I have designated as the region 
 of idealism, which, in religion, soon turns to mys- 
 ticism. The terrestrial north, with its atmospheric 
 peculiarities, its magnetic mysteries and auroral 
 
164 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 splendors, indicating as it were a nearer com- 
 merce with the skies, may seem to warrant this 
 designation. The Puritan genius of our Ameri- 
 can churches has no affinity and little patience 
 with what is called mysticism, inclining rather to 
 literal interpretations and surface views. But 
 mysticism is a very important element in religion, 
 — a feeling after God, "if haply we may find him.'* 
 It is that by which religion lays hold of the invisi- 
 ble and enters into fuller, that is, more conscious 
 and intimate, communion with the spiritual and 
 heavenly world. Without it there is danger that 
 the Church will lose the consciousness of God, and 
 become a distant province of God's kingdom, — 
 an outlying colony, governed by deputies, instead 
 of that kingdom itself, with God in Christ for its 
 present and conscious home-government and head. 
 When the Church in ages past had become that, 
 or was threatening to become it ; when the Roman 
 hierarchical polity had slipped its holdings, cut it- 
 self off from the invisible by its eartliliness and 
 secularity, and set itself up for an independent 
 kingdom, with Rome for its heaven and a pope for 
 its God, there arose in the order of Providence the 
 great mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centu- 
 ries, the new fathers, not inferior to the old, who 
 restored the Church to the fellowship and com- 
 munion of the Holy Spirit. Who can read with 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 165 
 
 attention the Gospel of John, and not see how a 
 tincture of mysticiKsm deepens and quickens and 
 intensifies what is best and holiest in religion ! 
 How much more profound the Christianity there, 
 than that of the other Gospels ! How much more 
 intimate the author's communion with the soul of 
 Christ, and his appreciation of Christian truth ! 
 The other Evangelists give us a prophet; the fourth 
 gives us the Word made flesh. If we were to 
 strike from the library of Christian literature the 
 writings which could best be spared, they would 
 be the folios of systematic theology, the Bodies of 
 Divinity, so called, — those weary compilations in 
 which massive and useless dogmatic edifices are 
 reared on the oldness of the letter, with no ap- 
 parent apprehension in the writers of the deeper 
 import which the letter conceals. But if we were 
 to select from the writings of the Church the 
 works which we would not willingly let die, the 
 works to be preserved and handed down, they 
 would be those mystic compositions of the Roman 
 and Protestant communions, which, though little 
 read by the flighty readers of this time, are felt to 
 be given by inspiration of God, and to be invalu- 
 able for suggestion and reproof and " instruction 
 in righteousness," — the writings of Anselm and 
 Thomas a Kempis and Tauler and Fenelon and 
 Jacob Boehme and William Law, — inexhaustible 
 
166 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 treasuries of fructifying thought, and celestial mon- 
 itors of heart and life. Something of mysticism is 
 inseparable from devotion. Every prayer which 
 we breathe, which is not a formal offering or a 
 begging for temporal good, but a genuine aspira- 
 tion, a gushing up from the deep heart, a yearning 
 after God, is a mystical act, and if analyzed and 
 referred to the fundamental principle involved in 
 it, will be found to point to mystical theories of 
 man and God. I say, then, that mysticism in this 
 sense is a necessary element of religion, and can 
 never be wanting in a true church. It is this that 
 keeps the heavens open, and God near, and the soul 
 awake. Nature holy, the word significant, and life 
 divine. Every church that is sound and flourish- 
 ing will welcome gladly and cherish kindly tliis 
 mystic northern light, whose very eccentricities 
 and dancing meteors, the sportive gleams and wild 
 coruscations which seem so unpractical, confess at 
 least a sublime aspiration, prophetic, it may be, of 
 a better life, when heaven and earth shall meet 
 in eternal day. 
 
 4. Finally, the Church must have its south. 
 A church requires a ritual, requires symbols and 
 sacraments, — something outward as the exponent 
 and medium of ecclesiastical life. The teeming 
 and exuberant south, with its tropical luxuriance, 
 fertile of forms, abounding in varied and organic 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 167 
 
 life, may serve to typify this side of religion and 
 the Church, — its organism, — by which term I 
 comprehend whatever pertains to worship and 
 communion and corporate action. The necessity 
 of organization to a church, the necessity of ritual 
 or sometlung corresponding thereto in the way of 
 worship, and of some description, however simple, 
 of ecclesiastical polity, is proved — if the nature of 
 things and the laws of life are not sufficient for 
 that purpose — by the case of the first, the abo- 
 riginal church, and the example of the Apostles. 
 Jesus prescribed no form that we know, and none 
 was needed so long as the Master himself was 
 present, the fountain-head and lord of life, to fill 
 and to bind the Church of his disciples. Its or- 
 ganization was then spontaneous ; life from the 
 living source pervading the whole, a flowing artic- 
 ulation from moment to moment of thought and 
 love. But no sooner was the Master withdrawn 
 than his followers began to organize at once both 
 worship and life, and we find them in those first 
 days joining in litanies, choosing officers, assigning 
 functions, establishing a commonwealth, and hold- 
 ing councils. The Holy Spirit which was poured 
 upon them took to itself an organic body, . and 
 became articulate in forms and rites. And from 
 that time to this, formal worship, liturgical devo- 
 tion, and ecclesiastical organization have been co- 
 
168 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 ordinate, or nearly so, with the Christian name. 
 Whatever exceptions there may be but confirm 
 the rule. If any movement of dissent from the 
 doctrine and practice of a given church has failed 
 to organize devotion and action, it has passed 
 away, or is passing ; it has been absorbed, or is 
 destined to be absorbed, by other sects, in which 
 the vital principle is more energetic and organific. 
 A church without a ritual, without symbols and 
 sacraments and a corporate organism, as a per- 
 manent institution, is an impossibility, a contra- 
 diction in terms. The religious sentiment, it is 
 true, is spontaneous and eternal ; in one form or 
 another it will always exist where man exists ; 
 but this spontaneous religion, unfixed and uncer- 
 tain, may so degenerate as to become an evil rather 
 than a good. There is no absolute religion for 
 man, but only particular, given religions. And 
 any particular religion, as the Christian, for exam- 
 ple, preserves its identity by means of symbols, 
 without which what is Christian this year may 
 turn to heathen tlie next. Religion craves expres- 
 sion, — a permanent religion, a stated expression ; 
 a common religion, a common worship and com- 
 mon rites. In other words, religion requires a 
 church for its exponent ; and a church requires a 
 ritual for its medium, and a corporate organism 
 for its conservation. The individual may feel no 
 
THE BROAD CHURCH. 169 
 
 want of symbol or sacraments, and no satisfaction 
 in them. It is because the religious sentiment in 
 him is imperfectly developed, or not of the genuine 
 Christian type. And though the individual may 
 do without them, a church cannot. A fatal weak- 
 ness inheres in the church that wants or neglects 
 them ; its doom is writ, its dissolution is sure. 
 A true church with other requirements and be- 
 londnss will have and cherish this southern side 
 of ritual worship, this southern principle of organic 
 life ; and however its antecedents and its exigen- 
 cies may forbid the tropical luxuriance of the 
 Churcli of Rome, where ritual runs to mummery 
 and organization to despotism, it will reverence at 
 least and hold fast whatever in tlie way of sym- 
 bol and rite belongs by tradition to its proper 
 constitution. 
 
 These four, represented by and representing the 
 fourfold completeness of the spiritual horizon, east, 
 west, north, and south, — stability and progress, 
 ideal and ritual, — are the cardinal constituents of 
 a true church. To which we must add, as the com- 
 plement and crown of the whole, the Charity which 
 binds and pervades and harmonizes all, — that 
 supreme grace of the Christian dispensation, Love 
 manifest in works of social reform, in ministra- 
 tions to the poor and suffering, in health to the 
 sick, and light to them that sit in darkness, and 
 
170 THE BROAD CHURCH. 
 
 the opening of the prison to them that are bound. 
 The church in which these elements unite is a 
 broad church, though numbering its disciples not 
 by millions, but by hundreds or by tens. A holy 
 catholic church it is, though the smallest sect in 
 Christendom, and excommunicated by all the rest. 
 I believe in the Broad Church thus defined. Ac- 
 cording to the creed of the Fathers, " I believe in 
 the Holy Catholic Church," — not that which con- 
 sists in masses and indulgences, in manipulations 
 and genuflexions, and infallibility and a broaden 
 God, but that which consists in faith and progress 
 and devotion and love. Let each churcli labor in 
 its place and kind to develop and assert this catho- 
 licity, and the boundary lines which divide the sects 
 shall be washed clean out in the gracious life that 
 shall flood them all, and fuse them all into one pre- 
 vailing kingdom of God, whose unshut gates shall 
 exclude none that desire to enter, and where east 
 and west and north and south shall meet in peace 
 and join in praise. 
 
XII. 
 
 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 Owe no man anything^ hut to love one another. 
 
 Romans xiii. 8. 
 
 'T^HE first clause of this precept, taken by it- 
 "^ self, demands an impossibility. We may dis- 
 charge our pecuniary obligations for meat and 
 clothes, we may pay rent and taxes and the ser- 
 vices of all whom we employ ; but that does not 
 exempt us from all indebtedness to our kind, it 
 does not make us independent of our fellow-men. 
 We talk of an independent fortune ; but indepen- 
 dence is no gift of fortune. A man can no more 
 be independent of others in that way, by favor of 
 fortune, than a limb or a muscle can be indepen- 
 dent of the rest of the body. In society we are 
 members one of another, and every member needs 
 all the rest. You may have what you call an 
 independent fortune. But suppose all about you 
 were as rich as yourself ? Who then would till 
 your garden, harness your horses, make your gar- 
 ments, cook your food ? If all were rich, none 
 
172 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 would be so in the way supposed. As society 
 is now constituted, your wealth may generally 
 command the service of others, but it does not 
 make you independent of that service. Inequal- 
 ity does not cancel obligation. For suppose again 
 the poor and dependent, for some reason or other, 
 should refuse to render you the needful service ? 
 Such cases have been, and may be again. What 
 becomes of your independence then ? Is the lady 
 housewife less dependent on her cook than the 
 cook is on her ? Ask the housewives of your 
 acquaintance, — those especially whose defective 
 knowledge or defective muscle renders them inca- 
 pable of performing the cook's function, — ask 
 them what is their experience in that regard ? 
 The rich manufacturer is sometimes deserted by 
 the hands he employs ; they combine and revolt ; 
 they organize what is called " a strike." With 
 large contracts on his hands and a waiting mar- 
 ket, his wheels are blocked, his spindles pause, 
 his engines sleep, his business is stopped. He 
 must come to terms with his operatives before his 
 mill can resume its action and fulfil its purpose. 
 If they depend on him for place and bread, he 
 depends on them no less for what to him is dearer 
 than bread, commercial position, the credit of his 
 liouse. So far as we may judge from recent in- 
 dications, from the increasing solidarity of the 
 
LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. I73 
 
 laboring classes, and the movement known as 
 labor reform, the dependence of the rich on the 
 poor, of the employer on the employed, is likely 
 to increase in a swifter ratio than its converse, — 
 the dependence of the employed on the employer, 
 of the servant on the master. 
 
 It is in vain for any class or individual to think 
 of escaping indebtedness to others. A man must 
 make his lodge in the wilderness to do that even in 
 a proximate degree. There are obligations which 
 we cannot avoid. Who of us shall say, I owe no 
 man anything? We owe men everything. We owe 
 them our position in society, which we hold by their 
 permission. We owe them the protection of their 
 laws, the benefit of their institutions, the results 
 of their labor, the aids to improvement, the stores 
 of knowledge, the wealth of thought, with which 
 they have ministered and do forever minister to 
 body, mind, and soul ; everything, in short, whereby 
 civilized Christian man in this late time is elevated 
 and blessed above the naked son of the forest who 
 has nothing but the God-given earth and skies. Say 
 not, imagine not, that you have paid for all this, 
 that indebtedness is cancelled and obligation 
 annulled by discharging the nominal pecuniary 
 cost by which your share in these benefactions 
 has been obtained ; that the price of living, as 
 by these services you are enabled to live, has been 
 
174 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 paid by you in currency or coin, or can be so 
 paid ; that the thousands of dollars which you 
 disburse every year makes you quits with the 
 world. Owe nothing, do you say ? Paid for all ? 
 You may pay your tradesman for his wares, you 
 may pay your tailor for your coat, your butcher 
 and your cook for your meals. But what have you 
 paid Arkwright and Watt for your cotton ? What 
 have you paid Kepler and Newton and Laplace 
 and Bowditch for your ocean commerce ? What 
 have you paid Sir Humphry Davy for your coal ? 
 What have you paid Carver and Bradford and 
 Winthrop for your New England heritage ? What 
 have you paid George Stephenson for your rapid 
 journey to New York ? What have you paid 
 Franklin and Oersted and Morse for your tele- 
 grams ? What have you paid Gutenberg and 
 Faust for your books ? The world in which you 
 live is a mass of benefactions you can never in 
 that way requite, — a debt you can never dis- 
 charge with money. Ages of labor and sacrifice 
 have made it what it is. You cannot stir without 
 encountering obligations which no conceivable 
 amount of silver or gold can ever compensate. 
 You send your son to college, and incur heavy 
 charges for the four years' course. Do you fancy 
 you pay the entire cost of his education by the 
 fees of tuition and other fees you are called to 
 
LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 175 
 
 disburse ? Do you fancy you pay Harvard and 
 Hollis and the rest for the means of instruction 
 there enjoyed ? A distinction is made between 
 beneficiary students and those who pay the full 
 price of the course. But in fact every student 
 in that university is a beneficiary; he owes his 
 education to charities and gifts, — a debt whose 
 amount the richest can never refund. 
 
 And to mount from worldly and intellectual ob- 
 ligations to spiritual, — from that which is least to 
 that which is highest, — who shall repay the proph- 
 ets and martyrs of sacred truths for the light they 
 have shed on our mortal path, and for the hope of 
 immortality ? Who shall satisfy the debt incurred 
 by their testimonies and sacrifices, the dangers 
 braved, the pains endured in the cause of mankind ? 
 Who shall pay for deliverance from the bondage 
 of the Church of Rome ? Who shall pay for de- 
 liverance from heathen superstition, from sacrifi- 
 cial burdens, for all the liberty wherewith Christ 
 hath made us free ? For a being so endowed, so 
 deluged with benefactions, to talk of indepen- 
 dence, to boast his release from obligations to his 
 kind, is monstrous ingratitude, is overweening, 
 presumptuous pride. Whatever he may think, 
 every son of man is a debtor to his kind for the 
 larger part of all that he possesses, or can by any 
 possibility acquire. A compound and accumulated 
 
176 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 debt has devolved upon his head, — a debt of which 
 a fraction of the interest is all that with lifelong 
 effort he can hope to discharge, — a debt contracted 
 in part before he saw the light, multiplied by all 
 the years of childish imbecility and childish depen- 
 dence, and consummated by drafts on years to 
 come. Past, Present, and Future are his creditors. 
 Let them make up their audit, and all that is in 
 him shall not suffice to cancel the immense obliga- 
 tion of life, if life be strictly reckoned on a debt- 
 and-credit basis, so much rendered for so much 
 received. 
 
 It is clear that to owe no man anything is im- 
 possible in the ordinary sense of obligation, im- 
 possible on a market estimate of the goods of life. 
 It is not in man to clear himself of the obligation 
 he owes to his contemporaries even, to say nothing 
 of his predecessors, if all he can give is weighed 
 in market scales against all he receives. It needs 
 another view than the mercantile, debt-and-credit 
 theory of life and society to free us from the 
 weight of obligation, the overwhelming burden of 
 indebtedness, which the thoughtful and conscien- 
 tious mind must feel, regarding the subject of ben- 
 efits received and ability to pay in that Light. 
 
 And that other view is given in the other clause 
 of the precept before us, " to love one another." 
 A societv based on that principle, on mutual lov- 
 
LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 177 
 
 ing service, each for all and all for each ; a society 
 such as Paul contemplated, such as Christianity 
 would make of mankind, — would know no obliga- 
 tion in the sense described. Such a society would 
 be literally what the apostolic figure represents, — 
 one body and many members, an organization com- 
 pact as the animal frame, a union in which equality 
 of interest precludes the sense of indebtedness and 
 relieves the irksomeness of obligation. Suppose the 
 human organism were endowed with self-conscious- 
 ness in every part, — each member, each muscle, 
 each organ, distinctly conscious of its place and 
 function in relation to every other part and to the 
 whole, would there be, do you fancy, any sense of 
 indebtedness of part to part, or any superior claim 
 of this over that, any feeling of obligation of the 
 hand to the brain or the brain to the hand, of 
 the heart to the liver or the liver to the heart ? 
 Would not each be conscious as well of the neces- 
 sity of all to it as of it to all ? " The eye cannot 
 say to the hand, I have no need of thee;" nor 
 can the most active and conspicuous member 
 say to the most obscure, I have no need of you. 
 "Nay, much more those members of the body 
 which seem to be more feeble, are necessary." 
 Now, society as the Gospel desired and designed 
 it, would be essentially such an organism, so 
 compact in its structure, so complete in its 
 
 12 
 
178 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 union of part with part, of each with all, so 
 penetrated with one life, so divorceless and in- 
 separably one. It is true, society never has been 
 such, not even primitive Christian society in the 
 very flush of its newness, except here and there, 
 spasmodically, in single churches. But I am 
 speaking now of ideals, and I say that whenever 
 and so far as these ideals shall be realized, when- 
 ever and so far as society shall be what Christianity 
 would make it, the precept, "Owe no man anything," 
 will be fulfilled. Men will literally owe no man 
 anything, but in mutual love will lose all feeling 
 of indebtedness, all consciousness of claim on one 
 side and obligation on the other. 
 
 In every case of social union which at all ap- 
 proximates to this ideal, we see this immunity 
 realized. Wherever two beings are bound to each 
 other by reciprocal, equal, and perfect love, all feel- 
 ing of obligation or indebtedness one to the other 
 ceases ; there is no question of claims or dues be- 
 tween them, though all the giving, the technical, 
 ostensible giving, has been confined to one side 
 of the union and all the apparent receiving to 
 the other. The two have given each other them- 
 selves, their entire self, the uttermost that any 
 can give. And that gift is so transcendent, so con- 
 summate and complete as to neutralize all other 
 giving, and to cancel all obligation. In a case of 
 
LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 179 
 
 friendship, fervent and true, between two large- 
 hearted men, if one happens to be in want and 
 borrows, and the other happens to abound and 
 lends, although there is a technical and legal 
 indebtedness of the borrower, there is no obliga- 
 tion between them, or if any, it is the lender's 
 quite as much as the borrower's. Does the father 
 of a family in the tug and strain of his efforts to 
 maintain his dependants in decency and comfort, 
 dream of any other obligation than his own obli- 
 gation to do just that thing? Does the thought 
 of their indebtedness enter into his view of the 
 relation ? Not unless he is wanting in natural 
 affection. The family is one, and in the unity of 
 that relation there is neither creditor nor debtor. 
 
 Now, oivil society, as I have said, is not, as at 
 present subsisting, the embodiment of an equal, 
 mutual, and perfect love ; it is not the exact 
 counterpart of the animal organism, it is not a 
 union of consenting souls, it is not one family. 
 To view it as such does not make it such. Still, 
 the precept holds good. To owe no man any- 
 thing, we must love one another. You wish to be 
 independent ; all men wish it, — with right or 
 wrong views, with true or false sentiment touching 
 the desired good. But the thing is impossible in 
 the way in which most men seek independence. 
 It is impossible in the way of haughty insulation. 
 
180 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 impossible in tlie way of self-sufficiency, of immu- 
 nity from forced tasks and toil for bread, impos- 
 sible in the way of wealth or social position. The 
 only way to be independent is to be baptized in 
 the element of love, to live in it and work in it, — 
 giving yourself with good will and good works to 
 your kind. On the market theory independence 
 is impossible, — owing no man anything is out of 
 the question ; you are under obligations, immense, 
 inextinguishable. You owe a debt you can never 
 discharge with money, though you coin your life 
 for the purpose. 
 
 Discard, then, the market view of life, and rise to 
 the heroic. " Owe no man anything but to love," 
 is the apostolic precept ; do the best you can for 
 your kind, and you will owe no man anything. 
 Your legal debts for market values being paid 
 with their legal equivalent, the elder, larger debt 
 to society, of which I spoke, can only be dis- 
 charged by devotion, giving yourself with what 
 of faculty there is in you to the service of your 
 kind, in the way of your profession, or in whatso- 
 ever way you choose to work, by living and work- 
 ing in that spirit in which the great benefactors 
 of humankind did their work, that is, for the 
 work's sake, not anxiously considering what profit 
 in the way of material gain might accrue to them 
 from their labors. The great benefactors are not 
 
LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 181 
 
 to be paid with coin ; they can only be paid with 
 gratitude and love, and an answering spirit. There 
 may or may not be a nominal compensation for 
 the time employed in the public service ; there 
 may be awarded to them the amount of their con- 
 tract ; but the thought, the genius, the patience, 
 the conscientious fidelity they put into their work 
 are not to be requited with gold. The Treas- 
 urer of the United States could pay to George 
 Washington the stipulated sum for military ser- 
 vices rendered in the War of the Revolution ; but 
 the United States was not rich enough then, and 
 is not rich enough now, were he living, to pay in 
 money what the nation owes to that man's charac- 
 ter and work. The most memorable things, the 
 most prized, tlie most fruitful of blessing, that 
 brave and good men have done in their day, have 
 been done without compensation. Moses received 
 no pay for bringing Israel from the house of bond- 
 age, nor Sakya-muni for delivering his followers 
 from the yoke of caste. David received no pay for 
 his Psalms, nor Isaiah for his Prophecies, nor John 
 for his Gospel. Their pay is the reverent heed 
 with which millions through all these centuries 
 have received their word. How poor and barren 
 this world would be if nothing had ever been done 
 in it without stipulation ! How large a portion of 
 the dearest blessings of life would be wanting to 
 
182 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 
 
 us at this moment, but for those who were willing 
 to spend and be spent without hope or thought of 
 material reward, — those hero priests who have 
 sacrificed, each in their day, at the altar of human 
 weal, and the savor and fruit of whose sacrifice 
 has come down to ours ! If we reckon by service 
 rendered and value received, wliat a weight of 
 obligation they have rolled on our heads, what a 
 claim on posterity is theirs ! And yet the hum- 
 blest individual, the most poorly endowed, in the 
 most obscure corner of the earth, who lives and 
 works in their spirit, who out of a good heart, 
 with dutiful zeal and uncalculating love, pours 
 forth his life in the service of his kind, though 
 nothing comes of it that history knows and hu- 
 manity celebrates, — he owes these heroes nothing ; 
 their moral peer, he is quits with the foremost of 
 them all. He too has loved ; he has given himself. 
 Have the greatest benefactors done more ? 
 
XIII. 
 
 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 And wished for day. 
 
 Acts xxvii. 29. 
 
 nr^HESE words are from the curious and unques- 
 "*■ tionably faithful narrative of Paul's and his 
 companions' shipwreck off the island of Malta, on 
 their way to Rome, whither Paul was bound as 
 prisoner, on his own appeal to the imperial court. 
 
 Apart from the high personality concerned in it, 
 the narrative is markworthy as a picture of ancient 
 manners, and as perhaps the best report extant of 
 the state of navigation in that day. The story of 
 a voyage from Cbesarea in Palestine to Puteoli in 
 the Bay of Naples, in the middle of the first cen- 
 tury, is a literary curiosity which, if just discovered 
 in some old manuscript, would be eagerly studied 
 by the learned. 
 
 In the course of this voyage in a" ship containing 
 not far from three hundred souls, when drifting 
 one night before a strong gale in the sea of 
 
184 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 " Adria," the voj-agers found themselves rapidly 
 shoaling their \yater, and in imminent danger of 
 running ashore on some unknown coast. In this 
 emergency, we read, " they cast four anchors out 
 of the stern, and wished for day." 
 
 I well remember that when, as a child of nine 
 years, I studied the Greek Testament with a ven- 
 erated teacher, the late Dr. Oilman, of Charleston, 
 the good man called my attention to the beautiful 
 simplicity of that expression, €V)(ovto rj/jiepav yeve- 
 oOat^ — " they wished it would be day." The phrase 
 thus impressed on the mind of the boy has often 
 recurred to me in riper years, with many appli- 
 cations both of its literary and its moral import. 
 I have often contrasted its sublime brevity, its 
 calm and continent tone, with the labored descrip- 
 tions and tumid phrase of so many modern w^riters 
 who, not content with stating the fact or the feel- 
 ing they have to present, give all its reflections 
 and refractions, the coloring it takes in their con- 
 ception, and ransack the vocabulary for fitting 
 terms by w^hich to effect a sensation equal to the 
 theme. Think how such an one would agonize in 
 recounting a scene like this, — how he would di- 
 late on the racking suspense, the tortures of expec- 
 tation endured by that storm-tossed company 
 through the weary hours of a night which threat- 
 ened instant destruction, on the momentary dread 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 185 
 
 of the shock which should shatter the frail bark 
 and engulf her devoted crew, on the angry billows 
 that hungered for their prey, on the vision strained 
 to catch the first glimpse of returning dawn, — ■ 
 all w*hich the writer of the Acts conveys in the 
 single phrase, " and wished for day," leaving to 
 the reader's imagination to conceive what, after 
 all, no language can paint, and not overwhelming 
 him with a flood of words, which arrest rather than 
 stimulate the action of the mind. 
 
 Such is the rhetoric of the Acts, a book which 
 recounts in a few pages some of the greatest events 
 that have ever happened on this planet, and some 
 of the sublimest situations ever witnessed by man. 
 A severe simplicity pervades the story ; the tone is 
 uniformly calm and even. There is no heat, no 
 swell, no straining to place the characters and 
 objects in a striking light, no aiming at effect, no 
 magnifying or eulogizing of the champions of the 
 gospel, no denunciation of their adversaries, no 
 partisanship, no attempt to enlist the sympathy of 
 the reader. The events are given without note or 
 comment. There are the facts. The reflections 
 you may make to suit yourself. 
 
 To return to the phrase, " They wished for day." 
 How often in human life that wish recurs, — the 
 wish for day in its literal or its metaphorical sense, 
 — light to the bodily eye or a day of redemption and 
 
186 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 consolation to the over-burdened, suffering soul ! 
 How many voyagers since Paul, in dark, tempestuous 
 nights, betwixt the horrors of a raging sea and a 
 lee shore, having done all that in them lay to guard 
 themselves from impending danger, have sat down 
 powerless, and wished for day ! How many a be- 
 nighted wayfarer in lonely and uncertain paths, 
 how many a weary watcher by the bed of the sick, 
 how many a sentinel pacing his round benumbed 
 with cold, how many a soldier left bleeding on the 
 field when the battle and the day were done, how 
 many a dweller amid Arctic snows, where the sun 
 dips down for a night of months, has longed 
 with intense desire for returning light ! The 
 Psalmist makes this particular longing the type 
 of all intense desire, — "- My soul waiteth for the 
 Lord more than they that watch for the morn- 
 ing ; I say, more than they that watch for the 
 morning." 
 
 The alternation of day and night is felt to be a 
 merciful provision of Nature for the needs of body 
 and mind. Unbroken day would dry up the spirit, 
 and exhaust the energies of life. We need the 
 relief of darkness and inaction. The harder the 
 life, the greater that need. The child to whom life 
 is a holiday regrets the setting sun ; but " a ser- 
 vant," says Job, "earnestly desireth the shadow, 
 and a hireling looketh for the end of his work." 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 187 
 
 When the night therefore fails of its legitimate 
 function, when rest is denied, is become impos- 
 sible, then darkness becomes an intolerable bur- 
 den. And so most pathetically Job continues, 
 painting for all time the sufferer's unrest : " Wea- 
 risome nights are appointed to me. When I lie 
 down, I say : When shall I arise and the night 
 be gone ? I am full of tossings to and fro, unto 
 the dawning of the day." 
 
 There is a night which is not determined by 
 sunrise and sunset, nor measured by watches of 
 human appointment, — a night which confounds 
 in one gloom the hours of sunlight with those of 
 natural darkness, and often invests the former 
 with a darkness deeper than Nature knows, — the 
 night of sorrow. What life that reaches but half 
 the accepted term has not at some time been over- 
 taken with it, has not been overshadowed and 
 ingulfed by it ! Who has not passed through sea- 
 sons of depression and gloom, when the world 
 to his vision was a hopeless blank ; when the 
 brightest sky was lead, and the greenest landscape 
 a waste, and life a burden and disgust ; when the 
 night which might bring temporary oblivion was 
 better than the day, and returning day, as it called 
 him back to a world of death, was new night to 
 the mind ; when the sunken and submerged spirit, 
 with the feeling that all the waves and billows had 
 
188 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 gone over it, seemed to itself powerless to contend 
 with the flood, and, with longing more intense 
 than that of Paul and his companions, " driven up 
 and down in Adria," wished for day ! 
 
 That we are not to have and enjoy forever, that 
 suffering is a necessary ingredient of life, is a 
 lesson which cannot be learned too soon. *' The 
 morning cometh, and also the night." The pleas- 
 ures of youth, the joy of success, the tongue of 
 fame, whatever charms the senses or cheers the 
 heart, is a flower whoso root is ever in its grave. 
 Alternate giving and taking is the course of Provi- 
 dence ; alternation of joy and pain is the lot of 
 man. There is no exemption from the universal 
 doom. It is given to no child of man to pass 
 through life unacquainted w^ith grief. Loss and 
 pain are appointed for all. There are some who 
 seem to be exceptionally fortunate and blessed. 
 Do not believe that they are exempt ; that the 
 sufferings which do not appear do not therefore 
 exist. The nearer we come to our fellow-men, 
 the more we find them troubled and tried. The 
 most fortunate have some private sorrows which 
 ask no sympathy and know no relief, which are 
 kept from the common eye like the miser's gold, 
 to be told over and brooded over in lonely hours 
 and secret places. 
 
 Evil is a fixed fact; the seeds of it are sown 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 189 
 
 thick among all the choicest flowers of life. It 
 ripens with fatal luxuriance where the smiles of 
 heaven shine most benignly. It treads on the 
 heels of abundance, it follows in the wake of suc- 
 cess, it waits on youth and health, it is bound up 
 with the choicest treasures of the heart. It comes 
 in the form of disease, racking the body with aches 
 and pains ; it comes in losses and reverses of for- 
 tune, dissipating substance and threatening want ; 
 it comes in bereavements and disappointments, in 
 trials of the affections invading the family circle 
 and casting us out there where we had garnered 
 up our heart, where either we " must live or bear 
 no life." Somehow, at some time, it inevitably 
 comes. Let us try to believe that it comes with 
 wise meaning and to blessed ends. Let us try to 
 believe that unchanging prosperity is no more con- 
 ducive to the health of the soul than unintermitted 
 day is conducive to the health of the body. Evil 
 when present seems a needless interruption of 
 the peaceful flow of life, a sharp sword thrust in 
 without purpose and without mercy between us 
 and our joys. But let any one look back on his 
 past life and see if there is one disappointment, 
 one painful experience, that has not brought its 
 blessing, if in no other way, by the contrast it fur- 
 nished to the good which succeeded. God does 
 with us as the vintner does with the overladen 
 
190 A^'D WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 vine ; he removes a portion of the growing fruit, 
 to perfect the remainder and preserve the plant. 
 " I had been ruined," said Themistocles, " had I 
 not been ruined." Our happiness has its root in 
 our unhappiness, and pain is the parent of joy. 
 " Put this question to thyself," says a German 
 moralist : " If the inscrutable Infinite, who is en- 
 compassed with gleaming abysses without bounds, 
 were to lay immensity open to thy view, and reveal 
 himself as he distributes suns and worlds, great 
 spirits and little human hearts, our days and some 
 tears in them, wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust 
 against him and say, ' Almighty, be other than 
 thou art'?" In the moral creation, as in the 
 natural, harmony is a resolution of discords. 
 What seems harsh dissonance when heard by it- 
 self has meaning and music for ear and heart 
 when heard in connection with the whole. All 
 earthly wail is a necessary stave in that eternal 
 symphony in which all creatures and all worlds 
 unite, and whose complex harmonics have but 
 one theme, which the spirit interprets, — God is 
 love. 
 
 All this docs not prevent nor greatly mitigate 
 present suffering. It does not prevent evil from 
 being evil at the time, nor make pain seem any- 
 thing but pain. It is in vain to talk of the need 
 and blessings of darkness to one who, in doubt 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 191 
 
 and fear and much weariness, watches for the 
 light. When the night of affliction is on us, we 
 chafe at the darkness and fervently wish for day. 
 
 And day comes with its revelations and reliefs, 
 its new vigor and newness of life, as the natural 
 day, in due season, replaces the longest, darkest, 
 heaviest night. Day came to the seamen in that 
 night-foundered ship which bore the Apostle on his 
 destined way. It brought deliverance to every 
 soul in that company, although the ship ran 
 aground and " was broken with the violence of the 
 waves." It comes at length, though long delayed, 
 to the ice-bound voyager in Arctic seas, whose 
 eyes for months have not beheld the face of the 
 sun. And the moral day, the day of consolation, of 
 compensation, comes at length to all who sit in the 
 shadow of affliction, to all whose hearts are dark- 
 ened with grief, to all who are troubled and sorely 
 . tried. No man goes mourning all his days, though 
 days of heaviness and wearisome nights, in the 
 order of God's providence, are appointed for all. 
 When a great calamity overtakes us, we think, in 
 our first transport and confusion of spirit, we shall 
 never be happy again, and perhaps, in our rebel- 
 lious mood and strong resistance to God's chasten- 
 ing, resolve that notliing shall tempt us to believe 
 any more in life and joy. We embrace Grief as 
 our chosen companion, and refuse to be com- 
 
192 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 forted. " Sister Sorrow, sit beside me ! " But 
 life and joy are strong, and life without some por- 
 tion of joy cannot long subsist. The grieved and 
 angered child hides his face in his hands, and 
 will not look into liis mother's eyes, and spurns 
 her proffered caress; but the mother, with wise 
 adaptation to the cliildish mood, surprising his 
 attention and diverting his thought from himself, 
 at last prevails. The little recusant first peeps 
 from his covert, then withdraws the blockade of 
 the uplifted arm, and gradually surrenders and 
 breaks into smiles. So the great Mother Nature, 
 or so the divine Comforter, prevails at last over 
 all the obstinacy of cherished grief. Life and joy 
 are strong ; consolation will gradually steal into 
 the heart. " The light of smiles will beam again 
 from lids that now overflow with tears." 
 
 The heart is rich in resources and medicinal 
 virtues and recuperative powers, and is seldom 
 crushed beyond recovery while life endures. Where 
 one flower withered, another springs in its place. 
 When one fountain is dried up, another gushes 
 and fertilizes and makes glad the heart. Cher- 
 ished possessions are rent from us, but new and 
 better treasures are amassed. Old comforts per- 
 ish, but the Comforter is always near ; and though 
 hope after hope is extinguished, hope springs eter- 
 nal in the breast. We cannot wear sackcloth all 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 193 
 
 our years. The wished-for day of consolation 
 comes to all who mourn, to all who are tried, if 
 not in the way of restoration and escape, then in 
 the way of resignation and the peace " that passeth 
 understanding" which resignation brings. Every 
 one in battling with adversity uses the means 
 which Providence has placed in his power. When 
 our vessel is stranded, we all seek safety in the 
 way which instinct prompts, or necessity com- 
 pels, or wisdom or religion dictates. Some seize a 
 plank from the wreck, and endeavor to secure 
 themselves with a remnant of their fortunes. 
 Some join hands and find support in mutual coun- 
 sel and consolation. Some beat the waves with 
 desperate strength, and find forgetfulness in ac- 
 tivity. And some yield themselves up with pas- 
 sive endurance, and float with face toward heaven, 
 till heaven shall send them succor. The last 
 method, if it does not always bring deliverance, 
 will always bring peace, — the peace which springs 
 from perfect trust. 
 
 Verily, the light is sweet. There are those to 
 whom the face of the natural day is denied. The 
 blind behold not the pleasant light of the sun, and 
 there are prisoners immured in penal cells which 
 no ray from without can pierce. But the moral 
 day, the day of comfort and compensation, is per- 
 manently denied to none. No darkness so intense 
 
 13 
 
194 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 
 
 that it will not illumine, no wall of sorrow so tliick 
 through which it cannot find its way. It comes to 
 all, if not from circumstance and external relief, 
 then from the inner, mysterious recesses of the 
 mind musing till the fire burns. It comes, — first 
 the faint dawn of an uncertain, trembling hope, 
 then the rosy flush of rising morn, and finally the 
 perfect day. Whoever looks steadfastly within 
 will find day, will find the power which is given 
 to man over circumstance and all the contradic- 
 tions of earth and time. There remain to all the 
 satisfactions of duty. There is no situation with- 
 out its duties, and no duty so humble that has not 
 its reward. In the very struggle with the power 
 of evil there is a blessedness beyond the gifts of 
 fortune. 
 
 For all that live there is good in store, — no 
 wound so angry or so deep, but all-healing time 
 will bring its balm. Say not, I shall carry this sor- 
 row to the grave, I shall never be happy more. It is 
 not so written in the book of fate. From the foun- 
 dation of the world, it is ordained that sorrow and 
 joy shall alternate in the lot of man. Say not. 
 There is no day for me ; but look up from the 
 wreck of perished hopes and see to what a world 
 you belong. See written upon every creation of 
 God the primal gospel of love. All things exhort 
 to hope ; the blue sky bends over all. Day after 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 195 
 
 day, the sun goes forth rejoicing and giving joy. 
 Night after night, the stars look down from their 
 tranquil seats and smile on man's estate. Year 
 after year, the constant seasons bring their gifts. 
 Nature comes and goes, and all things are full of 
 beauty and blessing. Is this a world to dash 
 against with our impatience and bedim with our 
 tears? Would you overcome evil and extract its 
 sting, look it fairly in the face and seek to compre- 
 hend it, and know that whatsoever thing you have 
 seen through and thoroughly dissolved in your 
 comprehension can harm you no longer. Evil is 
 evil only till it is understood. Then it is lifted 
 up like the serpent in the wilderness, the remem- 
 brance of injury without its bitterness. 
 
 The day of redemption comes to all. There is 
 no situation in human life that can shut it out. 
 Imagine a condition the most forlorn the mind 
 can conceive, — the case of a prisoner immured 
 for life in a solitary cell. The first feeling of one 
 so doomed would be utter despair. But if life 
 can withstand the pressure, if the light of the 
 mind go not out in idiocy or madness, the day even 
 there will dawn at last. The wretch, cut off from 
 the world and all hope of redemption from without, 
 would be thrown upon himself, upon the inner world 
 of the mind. And there he would find w^hat all find 
 who seriously commune with tlieir own heart, — 
 
196 AND WISHED FOR DAY, 
 
 the presence of that God whom no prison can ex- 
 clude, and with whom no edict can forbid commu- 
 nication. And though the God so found might 
 seem at first a merciless, pitiless power, seeing he 
 could leave a human being so forlorn, persistent 
 thought and the teachings of the spirit would cor- 
 rect that judgment, would disentangle the tough 
 knot of fate ; and then the presence of that solo 
 companion would dispense a delicious solace, would 
 people the deep solitude with holy, happy thoughts, 
 would supplement the shrivelled world of the 
 dungeon with his own sufficiency, would give the 
 freedom which man had denied, would pierce 
 the solid walls with heavenly transparencies, and 
 shed exceeding day on the soul. No miscliance 
 can close against us the door of prayer. Wher- 
 ever we may be, into whatever deepest abyss of 
 sorrow we may be thrown prostrate and bleed- 
 ing, it needs but an effort of thought, and we 
 rest in the bosom of the Father and feci our- 
 selves girt about with his protection as with a 
 garment. We think of Omnipotence, and our 
 weakness is made strength ; of unerring wisdom, 
 and perplexity is no more ; of infinite love, and 
 sorrow is blessing. 
 
 Rightly considered, the wish for day is the deep- 
 est, dearest wish of the human heart. For is not 
 all that is dearest in life symbolized by it ? Day 
 
AND WISHED FOR DAY. 197 
 
 is victory, day is redemption. Freedom, action, 
 aspiration, growth, guidance, courage, safety, 
 liealth, belong to the day. Limitation, bondage, 
 obstruction, danger, fear, disease, are children of 
 the night. The author of the Book of Revelation, 
 depicting the city of God, the New Jerusalem of 
 Christian expectation which he saw in his vision, 
 says, " There shall be no night there." Mortal 
 infirmity bound to an intermittent, spasmodic life, 
 requires alternation of light with shade, — requires 
 intervals of darkness, temporary oblivion, tempo- 
 rary death. But the new-born spirit braced by the 
 air of heaven is figured capable of eternal noon. 
 Eyes without heaviness, action without weariness, 
 fruition without satiety, life deepening as it flows 
 into life more abundant, are supposed to be the 
 habit of the heavenly world ; and that vision of 
 the seer from age to age has been the mark 
 and prize of Christian faith. Of life and light, 
 faith fears no excess. But who can bear the 
 thought of eternal night ? Who so surfeited with 
 day as to face, without a pang, the idea of sink- 
 ing down, down, into endless darkness and dream- 
 less sleep ? To the wish for day, all hearts re- 
 spond. In the universality of that wish lies a 
 presage of immortality. Well, then, may our faith 
 in the day be as broad as our desire ! Next to 
 faith in God, no faith is more essential than faith 
 
198 AND WISHED FOR DAY, 
 
 in to-morrow, — faith that no night can ever fall 
 that shall not bear a morrow in its train, that 
 even the great night, which bounds our earthly 
 days itself is bounded by a morrow that is not 
 of this world. 
 
XIV. 
 
 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEK 
 
 I am made all things to all men, that I might by all 
 means save some, 1 Cor. ix. 22. 
 
 ^T7ITH this phrase, Saint Paul designates a 
 policy of compromise, of concession to the 
 weaknesses and prejudices of his contemporaries, 
 which he saw fit to practise in the exercise of his 
 mission. 
 
 How far, for mankind in general, is such a 
 policy lawful or wise ? 
 
 Compromise in some things, to some extent, is 
 unavoidable. A straight course is not always 
 practicable, and, when practicable, is not always 
 the best course. There are concessions which we 
 have to make, whether we will or not, to obstacles 
 beyond our control. In crossing a rapid stream, 
 the boatman does not strike a straight line from 
 shore to shore, but effects his landing by a middle 
 course, conquering so much by muscular force 
 and yielding so much to the sweep of the current. 
 
200 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 
 
 So, in the world of society, we cannot always go 
 straight to our mark ; we have to content our- 
 selves with an indirect action. A man proposes to 
 himself a certain end, in the prosecution of which 
 he encounters obstacles. Opposing forces cross 
 his path, and prevent liim from accomplishing all 
 that he designed. But he accomplishes some- 
 thing, his efforts do not entirely fail ; he achieves 
 at least an oblique success. 
 
 In this sense our mortal life is a perpetual com- 
 promise, the resultant of two conflicting forces, — 
 our own will being one, and circumstance the 
 other, — a compromise between the ideal in our 
 mind and the pressure of our lot. No man's life 
 is all that he aims to make it. We gain some- 
 thing by our efforts, and yield something to the 
 force of the stream. We describe a diagonal be- 
 tween the direction of our idea and the push of the 
 time. Then there are compromises of courtesy, 
 concessions to custom and convention, in matters 
 in which no moral principle is involved. No wise 
 man will make himself conspicuous by oddities of 
 dress or behavior, for the mere satisfaction of 
 having his own way. No man living in society 
 and keeping friendly terms with society, can in- 
 dulge his private taste without limit where his 
 private taste is in violent conflict with the com- 
 mon use. 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 201 
 
 But now we come to compromises of another 
 sort, — compromises in which men yield up their 
 own convictions of truth and right to the prejudices 
 of others, concessions to the errors and weaknesses 
 of our fellow-men. 
 
 This is the kind of compromise which Paul ac- 
 knowledges when he says, " To the weak became I 
 as weak ... I am made all things to all men." It 
 is impossible not to respect the motive by which 
 the Apostle was actuated in the concessions he saw 
 fit to make, but it may be questioned how far the 
 principle on which he acted is a safe one for usT 
 And this we may be permitted to say, — contem- 
 plating Paul's history from this distance of time, 
 without disparagement of his inestimable ser- 
 vice, — that this accommodation to the weakness 
 of his countrymen is not the feature of his charac- 
 ter w^hich claims our highest regard and attracts 
 us most strongly to the story of his life. It is not 
 as the dexterous navigator between the jutting 
 headlands and frowning incompatibilities of Jewish 
 and Gentile customs, it is not as the compromiser 
 between old tradition and the new creation in Jesus 
 Christ, but as the conscientious and unhesitating 
 champion of the truth he had once denied, as the 
 never-flinching and never-wearying w^itness of 
 Christ in the face of persecution and death, that 
 we venerate that sacred memory. It is not the 
 
202 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 
 
 Paul who knew so well to adapt his conduct to the 
 prejudices of his contemporaries, who could humor 
 the weak and be all things to all men, but the 
 Paul who counted all things but dross for the ex- 
 cellence of the knowledge of Christ ; the Paul 
 w^ho went to Damascus the scourge of the Chris- 
 tians, and returned their leader, not disobedient to 
 the heavenly vision ; the Paul who, in spite of 
 warnings and entreaties, pressed on to Jerusalem 
 to meet his doom, not counting his life dear unto 
 himself, so he might finish the ministry he liad 
 received of the Lord Jesus, — this is the Paul 
 whom we canonize in our regard. 
 
 Paul knew very well that the ritual of the law 
 must come to an end, and had already come to an 
 end in principle for tlie followers of Jesus ; yet he 
 was willing to practise it for his own part in the 
 presence of those who fancied it binding. To 
 those who were weak enough to be troubled by 
 its neglect, he became as weak, and conformed to 
 a standard other than his own. I do not presume 
 to arraign the policy of Paul in so doing. Who of 
 us is competent for that ? Yet it has seemed to 
 me, viewing the matter at this distance, that if 
 Paul had continued to the last to maintain, as he 
 did in his letter to the Galatians, the sufficiency 
 of the gospel without the works of the law, or, 
 rather, if he had uniformly exemplified that posi- 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 203 
 
 tion in practice as he asserted it in theory ; if he 
 had planted himself immovably on the Christian 
 idea of a spiritual religion, where neither circum- 
 cision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, and 
 had said to the claims and traditions of the law : 
 " Get you hence, ' beggarly elements ' ! Vanish ! 
 Become extinct ! More than a thousand years we 
 have had of your hard service, — a yoke which nei- 
 ther our fathers were able to bear nor we ; and 
 now that we have come into the liberty wherewith 
 Christ hath made us free, we will be no longer 
 entangled with the yoke of that bondage. See, we 
 have done with you forever : " — if Paul had taken 
 this stand in relation to Judaism, it has seemed to 
 me that the progress of Christianity would have 
 been no whit retarded in the end, while an exam- 
 ple would thus have been given of inflexible resist- 
 ance to spiritual bondage, which is quite as much 
 needed as examples of compliance. Turn to the 
 Acts of the Apostles, and see with how pathetic 
 a retribution this policy of compromise miscarried 
 at last to a fatal ending. It was an act of compli- 
 ance, instigated by his Jewish friends on his last 
 visit to Jerusalem, that proved the occasion of his 
 
 arrest, his long captivity, and death.^^,,^— " 
 
 " I am made all things to all men." The world 
 is indebted to Paul as to few others in its book of 
 worthies. For many a strong word of divine wis- 
 
/ 
 
 ^ 
 
 204 AI^L THINGS TO ALL MEN, 
 
 dom and many a brave act, we have to thank him ; 
 but this is not one of them. Apostolic authority 
 was not needed to sanction a compliance to which 
 human weakness so readil}^ tends. Unhappily, no 
 saying of Paul is more readily quoted than this 
 confession, and no practice of Paul more often put 
 forward than this accommodation. How often 
 have we heard some politic person, in whom was 
 no strong conviction of any moral or political truth, 
 and no aim in life but personal success, whose 
 chief care was to slip through the world without 
 friction, without conflict of opinion, without im- 
 pinging on any man's prejudices, — some bland 
 companion who always consents and concedes, is 
 always of the same way of thinking as those he 
 converses with, and has no negative in his mental 
 repertory, — how often have we heard such an one, 
 with spirit and purpose as far from Paul's as the 
 children of this world from the children of light, 
 quote Paul's authority for being all things to all 
 men, and really seem to take credit to himself for 
 this oily accommodation, as if it were some ex- 
 quisite grace by virtue of which he had come to 
 stand in apostolic succession ! 
 
 It needs no apostle to teach accommodation. 
 Non-conformity is not the vice of society. It is 
 the vice of here and there a churl, whose angu- 
 lar nature refuses to adjust itself with any other 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 205 
 
 nature, or any usage or convention, but rubs 
 and grinds in all its intercourse with the world. 
 Some impracticable recusants there are, whose 
 ungracious temper bristles with objections, and 
 can only exist in an atmosphere of hostility. But 
 it is not the vice of society. It is not smoothness 
 that society lacks, — smooth enough already for 
 the moral health of those who compose it, — not 
 
 smoothness, but conscience, conviction, sincerit;^; 
 
 It sounds wise and humane to talk of being all j 
 things to all men, after the example of Saint Paul, i 
 But see if you have the same motive which Paul / 
 had in his concessions. Is it that you may win 
 men to the truth and their own eternal good ? Or 
 is it that you may win them for yourself, and make 
 them auxiliary to your success ? Is it that you 
 may be useful to your fellow-men or only that you 
 may be popular ? It is easy to be all things to 
 all men for one who has no strong convictions and 
 no fixed principles of his own. But what does it 
 amount to, — this universal complaisance, — and 
 what is the end of it ? It ends in being nothing 
 to any man ; in representing no truth, no principle, 
 no fact, nothing that any one can grasp and lay 
 hold of, and feel that he has hold of something 
 substantial. It ends in being a nonentity, so far as 
 any fixed position or personal influence is con- 
 cerned, — not a man standing upon two feet and 
 
206 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 
 
 filling so much space, be it more or less, with 
 solid substance, but an apparition, a thing without 
 a backbone, which a man can pass his hand through 
 and feel no resistance. Your business is not to be 
 all things to all men, but to be something to some- 
 body, — to stand for something definite, to repre- 
 sent some idea or principle, so that men may count 
 upon you in that one thing, and set you down good 
 for so much. " He who does not withstand," says 
 Coleridge, " has no standing place." 
 
 Compliance is amiable, it makes social inter- 
 course easy ; but non-compliance, harsh and 
 crabbed though it seem, would often be healthier 
 for your brother and you, — healthier for your 
 brother, for men are not served by humoring their 
 weaknesses and prejudices. We make them no 
 stronger by so doing. We do not take their weak- 
 nesses and prejudices out of them, and put health 
 and reason into them. We rather confirm them in 
 their prepossessions. It may be that these are the 
 very things in their mental condition which most 
 need to be cast out of them, and which unless they 
 are rid of they can never reach their full stature 
 and occupy their talents with the best effect. It 
 may be that what they most need is to encounter 
 opposition, to have their prejudices shocked, to 
 experience a revulsion, to be arrested in their 
 humdrum, traditionary, taking-for-granted way of 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 207 
 
 looking at things, to be set a-thinking, if haply a 
 new vision of spiritual verities may dawn on their 
 souls. -- — 
 
 Healthier for ourselves is non-conformity with 
 views we do not approve. It was possible for Paul 
 to become as weak to the weak without sacrificing y fAj 
 anything of his manhood thereby. But it needst/' 
 the strength of Paul to practise this conception 
 without being harmed by it. The danger is that, 
 in making ourselves weak to them that are weak 
 for a given exigency, we stay weak when the 
 exigency is past. 
 
 Paul practised on a certain occasion a rite which 
 he did not regard as binding, " because," as we 
 read, " of the Jews which were in those quarters." 
 But, for us, I think we do not wisely when we act 
 contrary to our own views, " because of the Jews 
 which are in those quarters," — for fear, that is, of 
 what may be thought of us by those who are not 
 of our party or sect. There are always " Jews in 
 those quarters," when men are disposed to seek 
 tlieir rule of action out of themselves ; and if once 
 we set ourselves to square our conduct with a for- 
 eign standard, we shall make but little progress in 
 any mission of our own. Twist not your lips to 
 catch the charm of a strange shibboleth, however 
 it may charm in others. 
 
 To this effect, I read the example and the life of 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 
 
 Christ. And when, in view of a timid and accom- 
 modating policy, I wish to refresh my faith in a 
 contrary course, I bring before me the example of 
 the Master. I call to mind how he, so meek and 
 gentle, refused to comply with the rules and tradi- 
 tions of the elders when they clashed with his own 
 conceptions of truth and right ; and how, with no 
 human authority to back him, he drove the plough- 
 share of his word right through the conventions of 
 his time, and made him a straight furrow in a 
 crooked and evil world. Pure and devout as no 
 other before or since, he incurred the reproacli of 
 being a Sabbath-breaker, a friend of wine-bibbers 
 and sinners. Said one of his disciples, " Knowest 
 thou that the Pharisees were offended after they 
 heard this saying ? " The answer was, " Every 
 plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted 
 shall be rooted up." 
 
 Among the minor martyrdoms which he must 
 be prepared to undergo who means to be true to 
 his own convictions, to follow his own idea, is the 
 pain of being misunderstood and misjudged, looked 
 upon with suspicion and mistrust by those whom 
 he respects, whose good opinion he most values. 
 Nowhere is this martyrdom, the penalty of moral 
 independence, more likely to be incurred than in 
 this boasted land of liberty, where deference to 
 opinion, social, political, ecclesiastical, imposes a 
 
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 209 
 
 restraint as real as the constitutional forms of 
 oppression and suppression in other lands, and 
 where Siberias of informal banishment — what we 
 call " left out in the cold " — await the dissenter 
 from the platform of his party or sect. 
 
 Not to be as weak to the weak and all things to 
 all men, but to be strong, if possible, in the inde- 
 pendent exercise of our own judgment, in the 
 power to obey our own vision ; not afraid to call 
 our souls our own, and to exercise the right of 
 property in them, — is the rule, not only of self- 
 respect, but of final success. 
 
 I have all along supposed that we act conscien- 
 tiously, that we follow the law of right as it is 
 WTitten in our hearts. If any one thinks to draw 
 from this doctrine a license to follow a lawless 
 impulse, regardless of right or wrong ; if any one 
 uses it as a dispensation to affront the wholesome 
 uses of society for the sake of contradiction or self- 
 ish ease, — he perverts it to his own damnation. 
 My doctriiie is not that a man be wilful, but self- 
 governed ; not that he be singular, but that he 
 judge for himself w^hat is right. If the wrong way 
 is none the less wrong, so, too, the right way is 
 none the less right, because many walk in it. If 
 we may not follow the multitude to do evil, there 
 is no reason why we should not keep them company 
 in doing good. We will rejoice in their fellowship 
 
 14 
 
210 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 
 
 so long as we can walk together with safety to 
 ourselves ; and when our ways divide, we will 
 part company in peace. The world is wide ; and 
 many thousand are the paths that track its spread- 
 ing plains and bridge its huge chasms and tunnel 
 its everlasting hills, all worn smooth by custom, 
 trodden, beaten, paved, and sinning. But in the 
 moral world only one path, and it may be a path 
 that is yet to be made, can ever lead us to light 
 and peace. 
 
 Ah ! grant me, Spirit of Truth, to find that way, 
 and to know that I have found it ; and I will walk 
 in it, trusting and rejoicing, though I walk alone, 
 knowing that I am not alone, because the Father is 
 with me. 
 
XV. 
 
 STEENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 For when I am iveak, then am I strong, 
 
 2 Cor. xii. 10. 
 
 TDAUL spoke from the depths of his private ex- 
 perience when he said this ; but this personal 
 experience of his is a universal experience, or ex- 
 presses a truth of universal application. 
 
 A "thorn in the flesh," some bodily infirmity, 
 or it may be some temptation, the true nature of 
 which it is impossible to determine, was given 
 him lest he " should be exalted above measure." 
 He besought that it might be taken from him, 
 but was comforted with the assurance that the 
 power of Christ — that is, the power of the spirit, 
 the highest moral power — was perfected, dis- 
 played to perfection in that very weakness. " Most 
 gladly, therefore," he said, " will I rather glory 
 in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may 
 rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infir- 
 mities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecu- 
 tions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I 
 am weak, then am I strong." 
 
212 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 Certainly, if ever man deserved to be called 
 strong in his own might, in the indomitable force 
 of his own character and will, it was Paul, — a 
 man of unquestionable power, and a very rare kind 
 of power, and one which in its kind has never been 
 surpassed ; a man to whose insight and energy 
 and toil and self-sacrificing spirit the establish- 
 ment and promulgation of Christianity, as we un- 
 derstand it, is mainly due, and without whose 
 efforts, so far as we can see, the confession of 
 Christ would have been nothing more than a spe- 
 cies of Judaism, and as such, would have perished 
 with the dissolution of the Jewish State. See 
 what a different thing Christianity becomes the 
 moment Paul takes it in hand, — how from a local, 
 sectarian creed it becomes a universal, cosmopoli- 
 tan faith, ample as the heavens, and like them em- 
 bracing all tongues and climes in its world-wide 
 scope ! See with what prophetic daring he bursts 
 the bands of the Past and the miserable confine- 
 ment of Judaism which were choking the infant 
 "Word, and leads it forth from the walls of Jeru- 
 salem into the world's broad day to shine equally 
 like that for Jew and Gentile, bond and free. 
 Divest him of those sacred associations which the 
 Christian Church connects with his name, judge 
 him by the standard of pure humanity, and Paul 
 must be acknowledged to be one of the strongest 
 of the sons of men. 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 213 
 
 He does not affect to disclaim the service he had 
 rendered to the Christian cause by his efforts ; he 
 is deeply conscious of the worth of his work. " I 
 labored," he says, "more abundantly than they 
 all." But he makes less account of his active 
 efforts, of the strength displayed in his activities, 
 than he does of that passive and divine strength 
 which was manifest in his trials and sufferings. 
 He felt that the power which works in us to will 
 and to do in our activity may be even more sig- 
 nally shown in our passive states, — made apparent 
 to the world in our power of endurance, or re- 
 vealed to ourselves in those internal experiences 
 of which the world knows nothing, but which nev- 
 ertheless constitute the more important part of 
 our life. 
 
 There are seasons of infirmity which happen to 
 all ; there are passages of suffering in every life, — 
 they may be of the body or they may be of the 
 mind, they may spring from outward pressure or 
 internal defect, — which furnish the topics and 
 occasion of a strength unwitnessed in action, and 
 which action alone can never impart. How great 
 and glorious soever the strength exerted in action 
 by the able and the strong, a more impressive, 
 more effective and divine strength is that which 
 is sometimes manifest in weakness, in depression, 
 and suffering. The apostolic paradox is as true 
 
214 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 of all the truly great and good as it was of Paul, 
 — when they were weak, they were strong. I know 
 of no higher test of greatness than this, no better 
 criterion by which to discriminate the true from 
 the false. 
 
 To this class of strengths which are perfected 
 in weakness, belongs pre-eminently the strength of 
 the martyr, — the strength developed in noble na- 
 tures by persecution and suffering. This martyr- 
 power is specifically the mightiest agent that has 
 ever wrought in human affairs. It is the prime 
 condition of the moral world. All civilization is 
 founded upon it. Every step in the progress of 
 society is based on martyrdom of one or another 
 kind and degree. For when was there ever a new 
 truth proposed, or a new impulse given to society, 
 that did not provoke persecution. And the im- 
 pulse given, and the good gained, has generally 
 been proportioned to the suffering endured in its 
 behalf. We need not look far for illustration. 
 Our own New England, so favored in all social 
 and moral advantages, rich beyond most parts of 
 the earth in all that is most essential to human 
 well being, is the fruit of martyrdom, — a fruit 
 whose seed was sown in weakness and want and 
 hardship and death, to be raised in power and 
 glory, — the fruit of the persecuted Puritans, in 
 whom a divine strength of the spirit was perfected 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 215 
 
 in civil and material weakness. We are living on 
 their sorrows, we are nourished bj their blood. 
 Universal Christendom, with all the unspeakable 
 and incalculable blessings which connect them- 
 selves with the Christian faith, is the product of 
 martyr lives and deaths. Planted in weakness, 
 and watered with tears and blood from age to age, 
 it has grown to be the strength and hope of the 
 world. To trace the progress of Christian truth 
 is to call up before us an interminable series of 
 brave and patient spirits who have offered up their 
 lives in its service. Each individual in that sacred 
 host wrought well in his place and was strong in 
 action; for the power to bear implies the power 
 to act, as the greater implies the less. But their 
 greatest strength, that by which they have become 
 the leaders and saviors of the world, was born of 
 
 weakness and perfected through suffering, the 
 
 strength of the tried and the persecuted. As the 
 highest instance in this kind, the Church adores 
 the Leader of that band,— the divine man in 
 whom this strength was supreme. In the life of 
 Christ are recorded many wonderful works, mira- 
 cles of beneficent action, words and deeds of im- 
 mortal power and worth ; but where does the 
 Christ appear most divinely great and strong ? 
 In what phase and attitude of his life does he 
 put forth the greatest effect? What passage in 
 
216 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 his history has contributed most to bless and re- 
 deem the world ? Is it when discoursing on the 
 mountain, or healing the sick, or opening the eyes 
 of the blind? The unanimous voice of the Chris- 
 tian world declares that the Christ was greatest 
 and strongest when all power seemed to have 
 departed from him ; when, helpless on the cross, 
 he suffered the will of his Father and the power 
 of his enemies. It is the crucified Christ that 
 exhibits most clearly the divine. It is the cru- 
 cified Christ that discloses the wondrous deeps 
 of the spirit, that draws all men after him, and 
 fills the world with his matchless idea and his 
 saving love. 
 
 There are crosses in every lot, and those crosses 
 are or may be the occasion and condition of a 
 power more effective for the good of others and 
 our own than any we have exerted in action. 
 
 I say for the good of others. We often contri- 
 bute most effectually to the good of others when 
 we seem incapable of contributing anything, when 
 we require aid and support ourselves, and are not 
 in a condition to give. It is not those who do the 
 most, or not necessarily they, who accomplish the 
 most. If we look around us, if we study our- 
 selves, we shall find that we are as much indebted 
 to the sufferings of our fellow-men as we are to 
 their action. Indeed, if we inquire what it is that 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 217 
 
 lias done the good which is supposed to have been 
 done by those who have labored most devotedly 
 and most effectively for human weal, we shall find 
 that it is not so much the acts performed and the 
 works completed, as it is the spirit which was man- 
 ifested in them. And that spirit may be mani- 
 fested in suffering as well as in doing. The spirit 
 that is in us outlives all our works ; it is that alone 
 which gives them any real value and lasting effect ; 
 it is that alone which tells in the sum of things. 
 The life of many a renowned person, the record 
 of whose action fills large volumes, has left no 
 permanent trace and effected no permanent good, 
 because the true spirit was not there to quicken 
 and bless. The life of Christ is contained in a 
 few pages, may be read in a couple of hours, but 
 what length of time can ever efface the stamp of 
 his spirit from the world ? 
 
 I said we may contribute most effectually to the 
 good of others when we seem incapable of contri- 
 buting anything. Let me take you to the sick- 
 room of some poor invalid, who for the greater 
 part of his life has been confined within the four 
 walls of his chamber and for many years has been 
 unable to employ his hands in any useful work. 
 A shallow utilitarian would say that an individual 
 in that condition is a very useless being, and that 
 such a life is no benefit, but a burden, to society. 
 
218 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 It may be so in some cases, but more often, 
 I believe, if such things could be weighed and 
 measured, that passive invalid would be found 
 to have contributed more abundantly and more 
 lastingly to the good of his fellow-creatures than 
 many a one who toils unceasingly at his daily 
 task, and who never through illness has lost a 
 day's work. He has taught without intending, 
 without knowing it perhaps, to some bystander or 
 attendant a more important lesson ; by the seed 
 he has unwittingly dropped in some receptive mind 
 or heart, he has wrought a more beneficent work 
 than others have done by the action of a whole life. 
 And so he has been stronger in his weakness than 
 the strong man in his strength. I will suppose 
 that he has quickened but one soul and sent it for- 
 ward with new impulse in the path of life, and I 
 will suppose another to have labored without ceas- 
 ing, to have amassed a large estate, and never per- 
 haps to have committed a crime, but to have lived 
 and labored always in a mean and selfish spirit, 
 without reverence and without love ; and I say 
 that the good done to that one soul in the former 
 case outweighs all that has been accomplished in 
 the other by a whole life of what is commonly 
 called useful toil. The world is very much in the 
 dark as to what' is useful, or often greatly mis- 
 taken in its standard and measure of utility. If 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS, 219 
 
 we leave out of view the moral in man, if we leave 
 out the fact of spirit in our estimate of things, why 
 then a bale of cotton or a shipload of iron is worth 
 more than the noblest act or life which yields 
 no material product, then the invention of the 
 steam-engine is incomparably a more useful gift 
 to the world than the gospel of Christ. But trace 
 those material products and agents to their last 
 use, and you will see that they are useful only so 
 far as they promote human well-being. What- 
 ever promotes human well-being is the true util- 
 ity. The agent most conducive to that result 
 is the education and perfection of the moral na- 
 ture. One pure example, one noble life, is worth 
 more than all the material agencies at work, or 
 that ever have been at work, in the world. I tell 
 you, if there be in this community one really good 
 man or woman, and but one, that individual, 
 though it should be the humblest citizen amono- 
 us, is a greater good to this community, and is 
 doing more good every day than all its industry 
 and its traffic and all the hands it employs. The 
 formation of the moral character is a work of more 
 real importance than the whole business so called 
 of this community, of this nation, than the wliole 
 material universe apart from its bearing on the 
 moral life. The formation of the character is the 
 real business of this world ; and all the other busi- 
 
220 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 ness that is done in the world, the buying and the 
 selling and the making, is of no importance except 
 as in its final bearing and result it promotes that 
 work. The material universe has no significance 
 and no true being except as the topic, means, and 
 arena of that work. The material universe exists 
 only as the ground and topic of the moral. 
 
 If our weakness, as we have seen, may be made 
 strength and good to others, how much more to 
 ourselves ! Who has not experienced at times that 
 weakness which underlies our ordinary powers, — 
 the superficial every-day strength that just suffi- 
 ces for every-day tasks ! It is as if the coat of 
 mail in which we had been fighting the life-battle 
 were stripped off and we were left powerless and 
 defenceless without it. You are stricken with ad- 
 versity, you are made weak with affliction, — bodily 
 disease or the loss of your dearest. Disqualified 
 for labor, indisposed to exertion, you feel as if all 
 strength and virtue had gone out of you. In the 
 dull prostration and cheerless night of that expe- 
 rience a strength is springing up in you which as 
 yet you know not of, and which you had never 
 found in action. The upper layer of superficial 
 strength has been removed from your life and a 
 stratum of weakness succeeds ; but underneath 
 that weakness a more exceeding strength appears, 
 — the primary formation of the soul. Like the 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 221 
 
 fabled Titan, whose strength was renewed by 
 touching the ground, man needs to be thrown 
 back from time to time on the native soil of his 
 own breast. The night has come, and you sink 
 down worn and weary ; but the night which pros- 
 trates for a while, invigorates in the end. You 
 needed this experience to make you acquainted 
 with yourself, to give you new sight of your means 
 and aims. In that new discernment there lies 
 already a new power ; and now that you are weak 
 you are strong, — strong with new insight and 
 strong with new hope. And if the lesson of that 
 time has not been lost upon you, when you rise 
 from your temporary prostration you will go forth 
 with new vigor to new and better works. 
 
 Or again, you are stricken in your conscience, 
 you are convicted in your soul of grievous wrong ; 
 you have sinned against the incorruptible judge 
 within. You are weak in the consciousness of 
 having fallen from truth and duty. The season 
 of contrition is also a season of power. You see 
 now how hollow and without foundation was the 
 fancied strength which you had before you fell. 
 A breath has overthrown it. It needed this fall 
 to discover you to yourself, to teach you your im- 
 potence, and to lay anew the foundation of obe- 
 dience in the soul. When you thought you were 
 strong you were weak ; now that you know your 
 
222 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 weakness you are strong. We must learn to think 
 humbly of ourselves before the Divine strength can 
 be perfected in us. There is a truth in the old 
 saying, that we are nearer to God when we have 
 sinned, for then God is revealed to us anew in his 
 law. And after all, it is not by our works that we 
 are saved. " God needeth no man's goods ; " * we 
 are saved by faith. 
 
 The result of the whole is the old secret which 
 the heart long since whispered to itself, that God 
 alone is strong. There is no strength but his ; 
 we are strong only as we come into his order and 
 are filled with his life and moved by his Spirit. 
 All the truly great and good have felt this, have 
 expressed it. " Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, 
 but unto thy name give glory," has been their con- 
 fession and their triumph when they have acted 
 wisely and well. They felt themselves possessed 
 by a higher power. " Not I, but the grace of God 
 which was with me," said Paul. "I can of mine 
 own self do nothing," was the word of Christ. 
 
 So let us learn to think little of our action when 
 we have seemed to do best, yet work as we can in 
 our place and calling, — work as talent and oppor- 
 tunity are given us. Our work is nothing in itself; 
 but if the Spirit of God be in it and in us, that 
 Spirit will bear fruit in its season. And when we 
 
 * Non egct bonis tuis. — Saint Bernard. 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 223 
 
 are weak and helpless and suffering, let us not 
 feel that we are forsaken ; let us not feel that we 
 are emptied of God ; rather that we are emptied of 
 our own imagined strength, and that God is flow- 
 ing in to fill up the void in the breast. Let us 
 look that his strength be perfected in our weak- 
 ness, knowing that the deeper the abasement the 
 greater the exaltation, and that when we are weak 
 we are strong. 
 
XYI. 
 
 SPIEITS m PRISON. 
 
 By which also he went and preached unto the spirits 
 in prison. 1 Peter iii. 19. 
 
 'T^HE " Apostles' Creed," an ancient symbol, 
 though not a document actually emanating 
 from the hands of the Apostles, contains the note- 
 worthy article at which modern theology somewhat 
 hesitates, — that Christ after death descended into 
 hell, that is, the place of departed souls. The 
 dead were supposed by the ancients — Jews as 
 well as Gentiles — to have their abode in a region 
 in the hollow of the earth inaccessible to the light 
 of day. This hold was called a "prison," and 
 rightly so ; for those who were in it, both good and 
 bad, were supposed to be detained there against 
 their will. Tliey sighed in vain for the upper 
 world from which they had descended, and to 
 which it was impossible evermore to return. A 
 dismal idea those ancients had of the future state. 
 It was a melancholy life which they pictured to 
 themselves, — the life of the departed, — compared 
 
SPIRITS IN PRISON. 225 
 
 with the life in the flesh. Even in Elysium, in 
 Valhalla, in Abraham's bosom, the future state to 
 them was loss, not gain ; not enlargement, but con- 
 finement more close than before. The departed, 
 in their conception, were less alive than when 
 clothed with earthly bodies, instead of more alive 
 as we conceive them. They went down into that 
 underworld, and there they were forced to remain. 
 If not tormented, they were held in durance. They 
 would gladly have returned to this world's light. 
 Elysium was no compensation for the loss of the 
 earthly life. They were " spirits in prison." Ho- 
 mer represents Achilles in Elysium as saying he 
 would rather be a day-laborer on the earth than 
 king of all the dead. It is necessary to under- 
 stand these ancient views of the future state in 
 order to appreciate the full blessing of tlie Chris- 
 tian revelation in this particular. So true it is 
 that Christ " brought life and immortality to light," 
 that he " burst the bonds of death " and " led cap- 
 tivity captive." This deliverance is figured in that 
 beautiful fancy of young Christendom, that Jesus 
 after death, before his ascension into heaven, de- 
 scended into hell, or, as our text has it, went and 
 preached to the spirits in prison ; that he gave to 
 the dead also his divine gospel, — preached in the 
 underworld, as he had done in the upper, — salva- 
 tion and the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 15 
 
226 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 
 
 Such was the belief of the early Church, very 
 faintly intimated in the New Testament, — the only 
 distinct allusion to it being the passage I have 
 quoted, — but made an article of faith in the Apos- 
 tles' Creed, and dramatically set forth in the apoc- 
 ryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which probably repre- 
 sents the current belief of the Christians of the 
 second century. 
 
 It is not my intent, however, to discuss the 
 doctrine of Christ's descent into hell. I have 
 nothing more at present to say on that topic, 
 but I seize on that expression, " spirits in prison." 
 It is very suggestive. The spirits of the under- 
 world are not the only ones included in that 
 category ; the upper world, the living human 
 world of our experience, is full of them. They 
 are all about us, and we perhaps are of the num- 
 ber. Spirits in prison, — I scarcely know of any 
 other. Where shall we look for spirits out of 
 prison, for spirits wholly free ? What spirit but 
 in some way is fettered and trammelled and dis- 
 qualified for being and doing all that a spirit might 
 and should be and do. We call ours a free coun- 
 try. We have no hereditary sovereign over us ; 
 we choose our own rulers and make our own laws. 
 We think that a great privilege ; a good deal of 
 rhetoric is annually expended in celebrating it. 
 But I am not aware that spirits are more free in 
 
SPIRITS IN PRISON. 227 
 
 these States than in other countries equally en- 
 lightened. I have sometimes been tempted to think 
 they are less so, — that public opinion, fashion, 
 caste, the fear of what people will say, are more 
 imperious and binding here than in other lands. 
 Be that as it may, it is certain that political liberty 
 does not necessarily lead to spiritual emancipa- 
 tion, does not take out of prison the spirits of those 
 who enjoy it. It rather establishes and tightens 
 one of the prisons in which spirits are confined, 
 
 — the prison of party. The American politician 
 is constrained to become a member of a party ; 
 he must act with his party to act with political 
 effect. But the party inevitably becomes a prison 
 in time to those who act with it. It shuts them 
 up to certain prescribed methods ; it limits their 
 judgment of men and things. When I see a man 
 sacrificing his private convictions, however judi- 
 ciously, heroically, to the party he serves, assent- 
 ing to measures whose wisdom he questions, voting 
 for the candidate whose fitness he doubts, or re- 
 fusing to vote for the candidate of another party 
 whose qualifications he approves, I acknowledge, 
 it may be, in such action a political necessity, but 
 I certainly recognize in the actor a spirit in prison, 
 
 — a spirit trammelled by expediency, cramped by 
 association, — a spirit that cannot do the best that 
 it sees, that cannot square its action with its vision. 
 
228 SPIRITS IN PRISON, 
 
 Aside from politics there are social connections 
 that hold us all in iron bonds. No man belongs 
 entirely to himself, and no man is quite original. 
 Our profession, our age, the community in which 
 we live, exert an inevitable influence over us. 
 They form a constituent part of our being; our 
 opinions, sentiments, principles, habits are given 
 us by the atmosphere in which we live. We in- 
 hale them, we absorb them, they are in our diet 
 and in our blood. Our Christianity, our Protes- 
 tantism in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is 
 not the result of investigation, but the accident of 
 birth. It is a part of our heritage, a part of our 
 constitution. No man so insulated or so original, 
 who is not to some extent the product of society. 
 No doubt we are helped by these connections. 
 On the whole, we are more helped than hindered 
 by them. But some impediments and bonds they 
 inevitably lay upon us. They forestall our judg- 
 ment in many things. There is a prison of preju- 
 dice more or less close around each of us. The 
 light of truth does not come to us straight from 
 the fountain, in full and unembarrassed effusion, 
 but deflected, refracted, colored, through the me- 
 dium of our position and our time. Lord Bacon 
 was a zealous reformer of the methods of science, 
 but he could not quite disengage himself from the 
 prepossessions of his age. In direct contradiction 
 
SPIRITS IN PRISON. 229 
 
 of his own fundamental principle he rejected the 
 Copernican astronomy as a visionary hypothesis, 
 and held fast to the old belief that the sun re- 
 volves and the earth stands still. Luther was a 
 zealous reformer in religion, he gave up papal 
 infallibility, he thundered against indulgences, he 
 renounced purgatory, renounced the Mass, dealt 
 very freely with the Fathers and the New Testa- 
 ment, but he clung to the Devil, — a belief one 
 "would say to be got rid of if possible ; but he clung 
 to it. Next to Christ, the Devil was the foremost 
 article in his creed. Sir Thomas More was one of 
 tlie bravest, most independent and intelligent men 
 in English history. Contemporary with Erasmus 
 and Luther, he knew their views ; but, as Lord 
 Macaulay says of him, he was ready to die for the 
 truth of the dogma of Transubstantiation, — the ex- 
 treme and most questionable point of Romish doc- 
 trine. Sir Matthew Hale was wise and conscientious 
 and merciful and just, and one of the most intelli- 
 gent men of his time ; but he did not scruple to hang 
 women for witchcraft, declaring that the reality of 
 the thing was unquestionable, — for, first, "the Scrip- 
 tures had affirmed it ; and secondly, the wisdom 
 of all nations had provided laws against it." Sir 
 Thomas Browne, an enlightened philosopher and 
 distinguished physician, whose medical studies one 
 would think might have taught him better ; and 
 
230 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 
 
 Cudworth, author of the " Intellectual System," — 
 adhered to the same faith. 
 
 Here are cases of brave spirits and true, among 
 the most enlightened the world has known, who 
 yet must be classed as spirits in prison, hopelessly, 
 irretrievably fixed, incarcerated, immured, in the 
 prejudices of their time. 
 
 Such examples may well give us pause. How 
 do we know that the great authorities of the pres- 
 ent day, the teachers on whom we chiefly rely, to 
 whom we listen with the greatest confidence, — 
 how do we know that they and we ourselves are 
 not shut up and fast locked in some opinion or 
 belief as baseless as the doctrine of witchcraft or 
 the dreams of alchemy ? Prejudice is not all on 
 the side of belief. There is a prison of unbelief 
 not less tenacious. Let us not for a moment ima- 
 gine that confinement and limitation are the pro- 
 duct of creeds, are proper to conservatism, and 
 unexampled beyond the conservative pale. I have 
 known radicals so called whose prison, though 
 new, was as narrow, the walls of it as thick, and 
 the bars as close as those of any time-gray and 
 weather-rusted stronghold of conservatism. Here 
 is a radical in social reform. He bears on his 
 heart the wrongs and woes of society ; he burns 
 and strives to have them abolished, — all vice and 
 evil at once and forever he would do away, — not 
 
SPIRITS IN PRISON. 231 
 
 by moral influence and gradual growth of the 
 good, but by mechanical force. He insists on im- 
 practicable measures, and thinks to establish vir- 
 tue by dint of stringent legislation. In short, he 
 is an absolutist in morals ; and absolutism is a very 
 close prison to the spirit possessed by it. Here is 
 a radical in speculation, a despiser of traditions, 
 a come-outer. The past is nothing to him, author- 
 ity is nothing, he is bound by no forms. Here 
 surely is a spirit out of prison. If absence of 
 any positive belief constitutes an emancipated 
 spirit, he may claim that distinction. But when I 
 listen to his discourse I perceive that negations 
 may create as close a confinement around a man 
 as affirmations. This man is so shut up in his 
 theory of the uniformity of natural events, of the 
 impossibility of anything out of the common, of the 
 impossibility of any existence of which Science 
 furnishes no proof, — he has built around him, with 
 this theory, such a thick wall of negation as to ren- 
 der himself inaccessible to any spiritual illumina- 
 tion, to any influx of knowledge through other 
 avenues than those which it pleases him to keep 
 open. One half of the life and experience of man 
 is closed to him by the wilful assumption of its 
 nullity in which he immures himself. There is no 
 window in his prison which opens on that side. 
 He passes for a very enlightened and free spirit ; 
 
232 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 
 
 he seems to me narrow and bound. I see the 
 truth there is in his negations. I desire to see it, 
 I respect it. He does not try to see the truth there 
 is in my beliefs ; he does not care to see it, he is 
 blind on that side. Such is my experience of the 
 limitations of even the gifted and the good. In 
 my intercourse with men I have found that the 
 two rarest qualities in human nature are liberality 
 and justice. Genius is rare and holiness is rare; 
 but show me a thoroughly liberal and fair mind, 
 and 1 will show you a spirit intellectually as nearly 
 out of prison as any spirit in human flesh may 
 hope to be. 
 
 I say intellectually ; but the prisons in which 
 men's prejudices immure them have often a moral 
 ground, — dislike of those who differ from us, con- 
 tempt for those whom we regard as inferior, impa- 
 tience of opposition, hatred, and ill will. Every 
 passion which men indulge is a prison to the soul 
 possessed by it, and the deadliest prisons in which 
 spirits languish are those which we build for our- 
 selves by our faults and crimes. Whoso commit- 
 teth sin is the slave of sin. A sinful habit grown 
 into the life, — what a bondage is that, and how 
 fast it grows ! Our natures are so constituted as 
 strongly to incline in a given direction, to do per- 
 force what we have often done before. Our actions 
 grow to habits as easily and imperceptibly as 
 
SPIRITS IN PRISON. 233 
 
 youth shoots up into manhood, or manhood de- 
 clines into age. Then comes the experience of 
 that law of which Paul speaks, which compels a 
 man to do what he hates. The very hatred shows 
 the strength of the prison in which the spirit 
 pines. The spirit does not will to sin, the spirit 
 yearns to the moral law, it thirsts after righteous- 
 ness ; and still the old complaint, " When I would 
 do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in 
 the law of God after the inward man : but I 
 see another law in my members . . . bringing me 
 into captivity to the law of sin. ... wretched 
 man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the 
 body of this death ? " Happy they, if any there 
 be, who know nothing of this conflict, to whom 
 all this is a foreign tale, like a story of ro- 
 mance or high-wrought tragedy, who experience 
 no contradiction in themselves, no obstruction in 
 their will, and none in their members, that hin- 
 ders obedience to the highest law their minds 
 have sight of ; with whom the law in the members 
 is one with the law in the mind ; with whom to 
 see is to will, and to will is to perform. Wherever 
 this perfect obedience is found, there is Christ 
 preaching to the spirits in prison and aiding their 
 deliverance. We are all spirits in prison, more 
 or less bound by accidents of time and place, by 
 our connections and prepossessions, by our preju- 
 
234 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 
 
 dices and passions, our infirmities and sins. The 
 flesh itself becomes a prison when it ceases to 
 answer the demands of the spirit. And there 
 comes a time to most when the spirit calls on the 
 flesh in vain, when sickness and infirmity lay hold 
 of us, and we " groan within ourselves, waiting for 
 the adoption, to wit, redemption of our body." 
 Spirits in prison, let us learn to be very patient 
 with our brother and sister captives in their sev- 
 eral cells, patient of one another's bonds and limi- 
 tations, not too confident of our own emancipation, 
 but hoping for the time when the Father-Spirit, 
 that preaches to us continually if we will but hear 
 his voice, shall deliver us all into " the glorious 
 liberty of the children of God." 
 
XVIT. 
 
 THE SPIEIT'S KEST. 
 
 Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laderi, 
 and I will give you rest. Matthew xi. 28. 
 
 'T^HE sublime self-assertion expressed in these 
 words is peculiar to Jesus among the teach- 
 ers of men. What other teachers affirm of their 
 doctrine he affirms of himself. Other teachers 
 have propounded their views as the truth of God ; 
 he declares himself the Truth and the Life. Other 
 teachers have vaunted the peace which their sys- 
 tems afford; he offers himself as rest to the soul. 
 
 A true religion fulfils the double office of stimulus 
 and rest, — incentive to action and relief from the 
 pressure of cares and pains. The soul needs both 
 in varying measure, according to its state and mood. 
 When life flourishes, — when peace and prosper- 
 ity, health of body and health of mind, domes- 
 tic comforts and social satisfactions, abound and 
 shed their light about us, — when pursuits that 
 interest us absorb our thought, and the current 
 of our life flows smoothly in its providential chan- 
 
236 THE SPIRITS REST. 
 
 nel, — we need instruction, warning, it may be 
 reproof. When, on the other hand, weakness, in- 
 capacity, pains of body or pains of mind, losses, and 
 afflictions interrupt the calm flow ; when perplex- 
 ity and tribulation break up our rest, and breed 
 storms in our sky, and wrap us in deep shadow, 
 we crave the supports of the immortal Comforter, 
 we cling to whatever of eternal promise is within 
 the reaches of the soul, and feel after all divine 
 consolations. It needs the night to bring out the 
 stars. We believe in the stars, we know they are 
 there in the heavenly spaces, but we do not see 
 them " when brightly shines the prosperous day," 
 we do not heed them until the sun is withdrawn 
 and the night with its damps encamps about us. 
 " Then darkness shows us worlds of light we never 
 saw by day ; " and science teaches that those far- 
 off worlds so minute in our experience are also 
 suns to those who are near enough to see their 
 splendors. 
 
 Seasons of great tribulation are exceptional, 
 but all men are burdened. The load of life 
 which we do not feel in ordinary circumstances 
 any more than a healthy body feels the weight of 
 the earth's atmosphere, presses heavily at times, 
 and seems greater than we can bear when occa- 
 sional disturbance and sorrow of heart make us 
 conscious of its weary weight. There are times in 
 
THE SPIRITS REST, 237 
 
 all men's experience when consciousness responds 
 to the cry of the ^' heavy laden," and confesses the 
 need of rest to the soul. All men's burdens are 
 not the same, but all are burdened, — some in their 
 thoughts, some in their affairs, some in their con- 
 sciences, some in their affections. Let us see how 
 the Spirit meets these several occasions, and what 
 is the rest it offers to souls thus tried. 
 
 There are burdens of thought, — doubts, per- 
 plexities, speculative and religious, grave ques- 
 tions concerning the dark problems of provi- 
 dence and destiny, of the soul's relations with the 
 unseen, our calling in the present, our portion 
 hereafter. This is a burden which weighs un- 
 equally on different natures, according as their 
 mental constitution inclines them to speculate and 
 solve these problems for themselves, or to rest in 
 hearsay and accept without demur the traditions 
 of their time, or without hesitation to put them 
 aside as old-world stories, outgrown and effete. 
 The majority of men are little troubled with these 
 questions ; they receive the current belief of their 
 communion, but hold it so externally, so blindly, 
 that their minds never come into contact with it, 
 and have no spiritual property in it. Or perhaps 
 under different influences they reject the current 
 belief, but as undiscerningly as those who pro- 
 fess it, and without accounting to themselves for 
 
238 THE SPIRITS REST, 
 
 their unbelief, or attempting to replace the old 
 confession with a new interpretation of the facts 
 of life. 
 
 Others there are who are haunted by these ques- 
 tions, persecuted by them, like Paul and Justin 
 Martyr and Augustine and Fox and Luther, driven 
 into the wilderness, vexed and tortured and torn 
 with doubts. To all such life is a problem which, 
 as often as they ponder it, perplexes and confounds 
 them with its liidden import. They cannot choose 
 but strive with it, till they find relief in some 
 adequate solution, or else in a final and clear con- 
 viction that no such solution is possible to intellec- 
 tual investigation. The soul asks. What am I and 
 whence, and what is this nature which surrounds 
 me ? Tradition answers with words and names 
 which offer to clear the mystery, but which compli- 
 cate it with new perplexities. Tradition affirms a 
 divine order, by which all things are working to- 
 gether for good; but we see all around disorders and 
 disasters, woes and crimes, which seem incompat- 
 ible with that all-wise and beneficent rule. We 
 are taught to believe in moral obligation. That 
 implies entire freedom to will and to do. But we 
 see men everywhere the victims of circumstance, 
 impelled by forces which sway their wills and con- 
 trol their action. We are told of an immortal 
 existence and a world to come illustrious with all 
 
, THE SPIRITS REST. 239 
 
 perfections. But we see the lamp of life go out ; 
 the undiscovered country withliolds its secret, and 
 suffers no emigrant to recross its frontiers. 
 
 To minds perplexed with these contradictions 
 the Spirit addresses its invitation, " Come unto 
 me, and I will give you rest." The proffered rest 
 is not a scientific solution of these problems, not 
 a logical demonstration of every question the in- 
 tellect may put, but the lifting up of the soul into 
 a region of intuitions, where the understanding 
 may follow, indeed, but cannot lead, and where 
 demonstration is superfluous. It is the answer 
 of faith, which reconciles where philosophy had 
 seemed to contradict, and restores what philoso- 
 phy had seemed to destroy. 
 
 There are different stages of mental experience 
 in relation to spiritual truths. The first is the 
 childish one of passive reception and implicit faith, 
 the stage of authority ; in that we receive without 
 question and without hesitation what teachers and 
 books and popular tradition impart. Belief, in 
 this stage, is acquiescence, not conviction ; it rather 
 accepts than apprehends. The next stage is that 
 of criticism. Here the understanding asserts it- 
 self with exaggerated and often hostile activity. 
 It doubts and cavils, and contradicts and denies. 
 We are no longer satisfied with authority, we must 
 try and test and judge for ourselves ; we question 
 
240 THE SPIRITS REST, 
 
 and criticise and cross-question, and either end in 
 total unbelief, or else pass on to the next and 
 highest stage, which is that of faith, of spiritual 
 insight, — that plane of the spirit where mere 
 authority no longer avails except the authority of 
 truth itself, that is, of immediate divine communi- 
 cation, but where also doubt and contradiction are 
 done away ; where intuitions supply the place of 
 analysis, and groping inquiry is translated into 
 vision. Let us, therefore, understand that what 
 the spirit proposes as rest to mental perplexity and 
 doubt is not a doctrinal system, but impulse and 
 aid to the soul, enabling it to overcome or forget 
 its critical scruples, and to rise above the region 
 of argumentation into primary relations with the 
 living Truth. It is not dogmatic authority, but 
 spiritual attraction and elevation. 
 
 We come next to the burdens of earthly affairs, 
 — the cares of subsistence, the care of to-morrow, 
 and all the worry of the flesh and the world. 
 
 No earthly good comes to us unconditionally. 
 On everything we use a price is set. Our very ex- 
 istence is not a gratuitous gift, but requires in the 
 vast majority of cases a constant effort to main- 
 tain it. But who of us is satisfied with bare sub- 
 sistence ? Who limits his wants to a minimum of 
 means ? Who accepts the anchorite's or cynic's lot ? 
 We all include in that term " subsistence " com- 
 
THE SPIRITS REST. 241 
 
 forts exceeding absolute necessity, superfluities 
 more or less, according to the social standard of 
 our time. Moreover, we live not to ourselves 
 alone, we are connected with others who de- 
 pend upon us for their support. Hence, of neces- 
 sity, all-engrossing, never-ceasing labors and cares 
 which have temporal subsistence for their only 
 end. It is hard, we sometimes think, this depend- 
 ence on the flesh, hard for immortal spirits to 
 wear the yoke of material necessity. The end of 
 life, we say, is not meat and drink, but intellectual 
 and moral growth, the unfolding of the image of 
 God. It might therefore seem best that mere 
 bodily subsistence should be furnished to all with- 
 out care or pains. But the Wisdom that appointed 
 our earthly lot has otherwise determined our neces- 
 sities. There would be no labor if subsistence 
 were secure; and if no labor, then no discipline, 
 no training, no growth. The labor expended on 
 earthly things is a way of approach to heavenly 
 things. Every man's calling is a school out of 
 which the door opens into everlasting life. The 
 graduate of earth's industrial establishments ac- 
 quires the freedom of the city of God. Were we 
 not compelled by stern necessity to toil and strive 
 for material good, we should not, it is likely, strive 
 at all, but dream away a useless existence, and 
 end life no wiser and no better than we began it. 
 
 16 
 
242 THE SPIRITS REST. 
 
 Therefore life itself is conditioned. Its price is 
 labor, — ceaseless effort not only to live well, but to 
 live at all. But life so conditioned gives birth to 
 a brood of cares which not only incite but fret the 
 soul. Subsistence to most is a difficult problem ; 
 their uttermost exertions scarce suffice for them- 
 selves and those committed to their keeping. The 
 little they possess is insecure ; accident may deprive 
 them of that little, and plunge them and theirs into 
 helpless dependence and distress. To all who are 
 thus burdened, the Spirit calls : " Come unto me, 
 and I will give you rest," — not rest from labor, 
 but rest from harassing anxieties and cares ; rest 
 from the agonizing doubts and fears which afflict 
 the soul devoid of faith ; rest in the thought that 
 God omnipotent reigneth, that eternal Wisdom 
 and Mercy rule ; rest in that beautiful thought of 
 the Gospel, — the Providence that feeds the fowls 
 of the air and clothes the grass of the field, shall 
 it not feed and clothe you ? — rest in the belief 
 that He who called us into conscious being, and 
 cast our lot on the hard necessities of earth and 
 time, can have no other purpose in our being, 
 and no other end in all hardness and trials, but 
 our own exceeding good. 
 
 Turn we now to another ingredient in this mor- 
 tal load. 
 
 There are burdens of conscience, — the sense of 
 
THE SPIRITS REST. 243 
 
 unworthiness, the self-iipbraidings of the heart for 
 remembered transgressions, painful recollections 
 of violated law, neglected duty, self-indulgence, 
 the unsubdued appetite, the ungoverned passion, 
 worldly concupiscence, the heart estranged from 
 truth and God. These are reflections which some- 
 times rise in judgment against us and fill the soul 
 with deep unrest. We feel that we are not what 
 we should be and might be. There shines the 
 pure, unchangeable law ; here grovels our recreant 
 life. How can we collate our poor doings, our 
 wandering and sinful ways, with those ideals of 
 heavenly sanctity and heavenly love which are 
 set before us in the books, wliich are given in our 
 own consciousness, and not feel ourselves abased 
 and abashed, convicted and judged before the tri- 
 bunal of God in the soul ? How shall we escape 
 from the burden of this unworthiness ? Who shall 
 deliver us from the body of this death ? For these 
 sorrows and distresses of the burdened conscience 
 the old religions had no resource but the priestly 
 sacrifice, which, however in the faith of the wor- 
 shipper it might seem to atone for the past, af- 
 forded no pledge for the future. If it expiated 
 foregone actual crimes, it furnished no redemption 
 from the bonds of sin, it ministered no healing to 
 the festering hurts of the soul, it provided no 
 escape from the fatal entanglements of guilt. 
 
244 THE SPIRITS REST, 
 
 Christianity meets the wounded spirit with such 
 revelations of the infinite Love as show the very- 
 penalties of sin resulting from natural and moral 
 laws to be means and methods of spiritual growth, 
 and sin itself, — repudiated and disowned by the con- 
 trite heart, — the opportunity of grace more abound- 
 ing. In its great and distinguishing doctrine of 
 salvation by faith it ministers reconciliation to the 
 conscience struggling with the crushing sense of be- 
 setting sin, and opens heaven to all wlio truly desire 
 and trustingly embrace the proffered gift. 
 
 We have yet to speak of the burdens of affec- 
 tion. All men live more or less in their affec- 
 tions. No part of our nature is more fruitful 
 of blessing, and none inflicts such poignant sor- 
 row. If we weigh together all that we enjoy 
 with all that we suffer from this source, it is hard 
 to say whether one or the other, the good or the 
 evil, preponderates in our experience. The deepest 
 wounds which the heart receives in the battle of 
 life, the most incurable, are the wounds of affec- 
 tion. Love in its very nature has an element of 
 sadness. When happiest in its object and least 
 disturbed by the accidents of life, its consciousness 
 is sombre, there is something of a sigh in its very 
 fondness. And every affection in proportion to its 
 fulness and intensity exposes the subject to im- 
 minent anguish. Every affection contains a hope 
 
THE SPIRITS REST. 245 
 
 which is liable to bitter disappointment. It may 
 fail of an adequate return, or the object of it may 
 prove unworthy, or death may interpose with its 
 message of doom and rend the loved one from our 
 embrace. Each of these fatalities is a matter of 
 daily occurrence ; they are all familiar experiences 
 of life. The amount of suffering involved in these 
 experiences will differ with different individuals 
 in the measure of their sensibility and self-con- 
 trol ; but none are so insensible, none so entirely 
 masters of themselves, as not to be painfully af- 
 fected by them. Most mortals suffer more from 
 this source than from all other causes of sorrow 
 combined. To all so wrung, to all wounds of the 
 heart, the Spirit advertises the balm of its rest, — 
 rest in the thought that no unselfish' affection is 
 wasted, however its object may disappoint, for love 
 is of God and leads to God; that though hearts 
 perish, "hearts' loves remain," and that what 
 affection sows in tears it is sure to reap in beauty 
 and in joy. 
 
 To all who are burdened, to all who are stricken, 
 to all who mourn, the Spirit speaks to-day in the 
 words of its immortal legacy, as in old Judaea in 
 the far-away past it spoke through the lips of the 
 flesh, -:- " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 
 
 But mark what follows, observe the condition 
 
246 THE SPIPdTS REST. 
 
 annexed to this rest, — " Take my yoke." Will it 
 mock us, then, instead of relieving, will it give us a 
 stone when we looked for bread, impose new bur- 
 dens in addition to the old ? On the contrary, this 
 yoke is one which makes all others bearable ; which, 
 freely assumed and faithfully borne, imparts a 
 magic and miraculous peace. The yoke of duty, — 
 only they who take that upon them take rest to 
 their souls. Only tliey who are harnessed with 
 dutiful purpose and work in the traces of moral 
 obligation can bear unmoved the burden of life. 
 Duty is the one unfailing panacea of ultimately 
 sure and blessed effect. There is the solution of 
 every doubt ; there is your balm for every wound, 
 your refuge in all distress. Are you a seeker after 
 truth, endeavoring to fathom the reason of things 
 and gravelled in the effort ? Answer the call 
 which is knocking at your soul to do the duty of 
 the day, and you shall find the answer you seek. 
 Do the will and you shall know of the doctrine. 
 Are you troubled in your affairs, perplexed with the 
 care of to-morrow ? Do the duty of to-day, and the 
 morrow will take care of itself. Are you wounded 
 in your affections, disappointed in your hopes? 
 Has it fallen to your lot to part with your dearest ? 
 Sacrifice to duty, and solace shall descend like dew 
 from the very first offering which you lay upon 
 that altar. 
 
THE SPIRITS REST. 247 
 
 What next? "For I am meek and lowly." 
 Humility is rest. How much of our vexations, 
 our disappointments and sorrows, springs from our 
 conceit, and the wild demands and disproportionate 
 expectations which that conceit engenders ! What 
 is it that our wishes, if we let them speak out, are 
 ready to crave ? The uttermost of worldly good 
 that ever fell to the lot of man, — uninterrupted 
 prosperity, undisturbed peace, unbroken health, a 
 perpetuity of earthly enjoyments. This is the 
 secret purport of our desires. What presumption 
 lurks in these unconscious cravings ! What right 
 has any of us to uninterrupted happiness, or in- 
 deed to any happiness at all ? What title can we 
 show to the good we desire ? Let us learn to 
 think little of ourselves, to moderate our claims, 
 walk humbly and bring our expectations down to 
 our deserts, as we hope to find rest to our souls. 
 
 Whether or not we will suffer in this world it is 
 not for us to say ; it has once for all been so or- 
 dained. But how we will suffer, whether slavishly 
 or freely, — whether we will take up the cross which 
 life brings, in the spirit of patience and meek sub- 
 mission, or have it forced and fastened upon us hy 
 inexorable destiny, — it is for us to determine ; and 
 on this determination it depends how heavy our 
 burden shall be, and how far it shall answer the 
 ends of discipline. The world has burdens for all 
 
248 THE SPIRITS REST. 
 
 who live in it. Necessity, sickness, frustrated pur- 
 poses, disappointed hopes, perplexities, mortifica- 
 tions, losses, and bereavements, — who can escape 
 them ? These are the stuff of which life is made. 
 To be human is to suffer. The Spirit does not 
 promise immunity from pain ; it does not say, 
 " Come unto me and you shall suffer no longer, 
 but have good times forevermore, and revel in 
 unalloyed and unbroken satisfactions," as if it were 
 some garden of soft delights to which it calls us. 
 What it says is, " Learn of me, in meekness and pa- 
 tience and steadfast devotion, to do and to bear ; 
 and though laboring and heavy-laden, across all 
 the burdens and pains of mortality a rest divine 
 shall stream into your souls." 
 
XVIII. 
 
 THE EELIGION OF THE EESUEEECTION. 
 
 That I may know Jiiin, and the power of his resur- 
 rection. Philippians iii. 10. 
 
 'T^HERE is a religion of tlie resurrection which 
 the Christian world has never known. The 
 creed of Christendom thus far has centred in the 
 crucifixion. Ciiristians in all these ages have been 
 taught to die with Christ, but not to rise with him. 
 The religion of the cross, — Christendom has had 
 its fill of that. Through long centuries the doctrine 
 of the Church has sought to disparage this earthly 
 life in view of a promised heavenly life to come. It 
 has taught men to look beyond the bounds of time 
 and beyond the dissolutions of death for the better 
 world of Christian hope. I cannot so interpret the 
 sense of the New Testament. Heaven and earth, 
 as contrasted in those writings, are not different 
 places of abode divided by death, but different lev- 
 els of human life. When the apostle says, '^ Set 
 your affections on things above," he means. Strive 
 to realize the Christian ideal in the here and now. 
 
250 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 to make something better than has yet been made 
 of this earthly life. The old religion thought to 
 lay hold on heaven by disdaining and repudiating 
 earth; but the true way to possess heaven is to 
 find it in earthly conditions. If you would realize 
 your ideal, you must learn to idealize the real. 
 
 The religion of the resurrection, — let me try to 
 unfold to you some of the characteristics of such a 
 religion as contrasted with the fading ideas and 
 worn out methods of the past. 
 
 1. The religion of the resurrection is spiritual 
 emancipation. The religion of the past has been 
 one of constraint, — " the spirit of bondage again 
 to fear," instead of the spirit of adoption with its 
 infinite trust. It has dogmatized and threatened 
 and coerced. Its God has been a jealous God, 
 jealous of his glory, all his action having that for 
 its end. The French communist, being questioned, 
 declared that he believed in no God ; if he did he 
 should feel it his duty to oppose and wage war 
 against *' the almighty tyrant." That was the idea 
 he had got from the teaching of the Church. The 
 old religion presented itself as an enemy, not as 
 a friend, — a frowning monitor confronting you at 
 every turn, a foe to all the humanities. The world 
 grew dark in its shadow wherever it prevailed. 
 The Sunday with its stern requirements, its Puri- 
 tan austerities, — what a weariness it was to the 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 251 
 
 children of a former generation ! If I should paint 
 religion as presented to me in my childhood, it 
 would be the figure of an executioner with uplifted 
 lash. Instead of tempting the religious sentiment 
 into free unfolding of itself by impressing the 
 young heart with the beauty of truth and the ten- 
 der sympathy of God, there went abroad a perverse 
 notion that religion must be forced on the unrecep- 
 tive and the disinclined, as Charlemagne forced 
 Christianity on the Saxons by the pains of an 
 unrelenting war ; as Cortez would convert the 
 Mexicans at the point of the sword. You must 
 be religious ; whether by nature so inclined or 
 not, you must be religious, you must love the God 
 whom we preach on pain of eternal damnation, — 
 is what the Church has said and says. But who 
 can love a God who is painted so unlovely ? Only 
 that which attracts and delights can any man truly 
 love. "Constraint," said a Christian Father, "is 
 the Devil's method." 
 
 2. Let us say, then, that the religion of the res- 
 urrection is spiritual attraction ; the free inclina- 
 tion of the heart to the Highest ; worship of divine 
 truth and love, enforced by no law, required by 
 no precept, but prompted, elicited, magnetically 
 evoked by their own sufficient and irresistible at- 
 traction ; worship of God in Nature and God in 
 man for his own transcendent beauty's sake. And 
 
252 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 he who has never felt the beauty of Godhead and 
 basked in it with admiring, longing love, has virtu- 
 ally no God. He may be religious in the sense of 
 faithful compliance with the forms and require- 
 ments of his church ; that is well so far as it goes. 
 Still it is the religion of the Law, not the religion 
 of the Resurrection ; it is the religion of a soul 
 which the shadow of God has passed over and 
 sobered with its gloom, not the electric response of 
 the heart which the vision of God's beauty kindles. 
 I emphasize this distinction between attraction 
 and compulsion in religion. When religion is pre- 
 sented* as obligatory, the moral order is mistaken 
 for the spiritual. Man's relation to the moral 
 order is one of obligation. The voice of duty 
 speaks in the imperative : Thou shalt, and Thou 
 shalt not. To the spiritual or celestial order, on 
 the contrary, the true relation is one of mutual 
 attraction. The voice of religion is one of invi- 
 tation, like the voice which the seer heard in Pat- 
 mos, saying, " Come up higher." Religion invites ; 
 morality commands. There are things which de- 
 pend on the will, and may therefore be required 
 of the will. There are others which depend on 
 native gift, on inspiration, on the grace of God, 
 and cannot be put as unconditionally binding. Re- 
 ligion I reckon one of these. In the matter of 
 physical decorum we may bid a child be clean, we 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 253 
 
 cannot bid him be beautiful or graceful. So in 
 things appertaining to mental behavior we require 
 a man to be just and honest, we cannot require 
 him to be generous or brave. Nor can we, against 
 the grain of his nature, demand of a man that he 
 shall be religious. We may say with truth that 
 religion is the height of human nature, — that with- 
 out it the uttermost of power, beauty, goodness, and 
 blessedness can never be realized, — but we can- 
 not say that a man is bound to be religious in the 
 same sense in which he is bound to be upright and 
 true. It is a mischievous exaggeration to say that 
 religion is the one thing needful ; there are things 
 more needful than that. Religion must be appre- 
 hended as a grace, a charm, a beauty, a happy 
 privilege, instead of a burden and an obligation, 
 if Christendom is ever to rise with Christ and to 
 know the power of his resurrection. 
 
 The Church of Rome in the midst of her cor- 
 ruptions developed one conception in which unwit- 
 tingly the true nature of religion was symbolized, 
 had the Church but understood her own svmbol- 
 ism, and practically embraced the religion she 
 symbolized. Among the sanctities which shine 
 conspicuous in Catholic mythology the foremost 
 figure is the Virgin Mary ; and the power of that 
 sanctity consists in its grace, — it is pure attraction. 
 Other sanctities may overawe, but the heavenly 
 
254 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 Virgin, combining the beauty of the maiden with 
 the mother's tenderness, can only attract. There 
 is nothing in it which can terrify ; there is nothing 
 wanting in it that can win, encourage, and console. 
 Christian art has produced no face of Christ so 
 expressive of the characteristic grace of Christian- 
 ity, so emblematic of the religion of the resurrec- 
 tion, as the face of the Virgin in the pictures of 
 Andrea del Sarto, of Correggio, of Raphael. It 
 has given us the Christ of the Last Supper, the 
 Teacher and Master ; it has given us the " Ecce 
 Homo," the immortal Sufferer symbolizing the 
 religion of the cross ; but when we seek an equal 
 symbol of the religion of the resurrection we 
 must look to the Sistine Madonna, — the Virgin 
 with the babe in her arms ; an infinite beatitude 
 in the mother's eye, an infinite pramise in that 
 of the child. 
 
 3. The religion of the resurrection is self-sur- 
 render, which is something very different from the 
 self-abasement and self-crucifixion enjoined or com- 
 mended by ancient standards of devotion. There 
 we seem to see always a taint of self-seeking, a 
 bargain with Heaven in which penance and volun- 
 tary hardship and self-inflicted crosses are to be 
 accepted as the price of future, eternal rewards. 
 The idea of reward, of a heaven of rewards, with 
 which Christian literature is saturated, has com- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 255 
 
 pletelj eclipsed in the common mind the true and 
 radical idea of religion as a free embrace of the 
 Eternal. The best thing in religion is the oppor- 
 tunity it offers of deliverance from self; emanci- 
 pation from selfish, howbeit unworldly, cares and 
 fears, from all concern about the hereafter of the 
 soul ; such a sense of the eternal, such enjoyment 
 of it in the here and now, as shall drive these cares 
 clean out of the mind. Instead of seconding this 
 offer and this relief, the religion of the past has 
 sought to increase that concern, to make men espe- 
 cially anxious about themselves, about the salva- 
 tion of their own souls, as if that were the one sole 
 end of being. What is the first and chief question 
 to which religion has invited attention? "What 
 must I do to be saved ? " That is to be made the 
 chief study, and the answer to that the guide of 
 life. If I rightly understand the heart of the gos- 
 pel, the question, " What must I do to be saved ? '* 
 is not the question which most demands to be con- 
 sidered. The dwelling on that question, if per- 
 sisted in, cannot fail to have an injurious effect. 
 There are cases, there is a time, when this question 
 is a very legitimate one, and not to be put by. 
 But on the whole, whatever draws attention to self, 
 whatever sets men to thinking about themselves 
 and worrying about themselves, has a tendency to 
 foster narrowness and to make religion a kind of 
 
256 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 self-seeking, — self-seeking, it is true, in an un- 
 worldly sense, but still self-seeking. Religion offers 
 deliverance from self, and that is religion's hap- 
 piest office. For what is this self which we want 
 to save, and cherish so fondly, as if it were our 
 chief possession ? If we were wise, we should see 
 that safe though it be, it can never satisfy ; that 
 the best we can do with it is to forget it. There 
 was no self in that mythical Eden before the Fall. 
 There will be no self in the Paradise regained of 
 the perfected spirit that ever beholds the face of 
 the Father, and never separates itself from God. 
 That which we call self exists only by derivation 
 and limitation ; it has no independent being, it can 
 never attain to independent being, but on the con- 
 trary, if true to its calling, will lose more and 
 more the conceit of independence, and count it all 
 joy to hide itself in the infinite Self, — the " rest " 
 that remains " to the people of God." 
 
 That old self-questioning religion, the religion 
 of fear, the religion which spent itself in anxious 
 inquiries, " What must I do to be saved ? " has 
 lost its hold on cultivated minds. The religion of 
 the resurrection, with new perceptions of human 
 destiny and a new interpretation of the meaning of 
 life, must restore the power of the Spirit now in 
 abeyance and re-establish its sway in human life. 
 For Spirit is the rightful Lord of this earth, and 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 257 
 
 spiritual power is that which reaches deepest into 
 the heart of the world. The first superficial view 
 of human life presents material industry as the 
 leader and ruler of society. It shows trade as the 
 God of this world, ubiquitous, untiringly active, 
 compelling all other agencies to toil in his service, 
 setting countless hands at work in mines and mills, 
 breathing hot vapor from countless iron throats, 
 piercing the ear of night with the agonizing scream 
 of the steam-whistle, out-speeding the wind, putting 
 the lightning in harness to go on his errands, en- 
 gaging the human race to furnish his merchandise, 
 and sending it into every remote corner of the hab- 
 itable earth. All this thousand-fold activity with 
 which the world palpitates, flashes, and thunders 
 from shore to shore, which every year grows noi- 
 sier and more confusing, is born of traffic and prop- 
 agates traffic, forever multiplying its progeny as if 
 human nature had no other end. 
 
 This is what the first view presents ; but look 
 again, look deeper, and you will find that these 
 activities so conspicuous, so engrossing, owe their 
 first impulse to something higher than themselves. 
 Trade is the offspring of civilization, and civiliza- 
 tion, if we trace its origin, will be found to have 
 derived its quickening breath from religion. Every- 
 where religion has been the pioneer, and indus- 
 try and commerce have followed in her steps. 
 
 17 
 
258 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 She has sent her missionaries to the ends of the 
 earth, and the ends of the earth have exchanged 
 with each other their products and their arts. 
 Material forces are everywhere at work, they fill 
 the whole field of immediate vision, but the powers 
 that most profoundly sway the world and recreate 
 society are spiritual powers. Moses and Zoroaster 
 and Christ and Mohammed have originated the 
 great social movements which age after age reflect 
 their image and celebrate their name. These are 
 the mountain peaks whence gush the rivers that 
 make glad the earth and bear the seeds of civili- 
 zation from land to land. 
 
 The religion of the resurrection will recover the 
 spirit that gave birth to the Christian ages, will 
 manifest that spirit by casting off the abuses and 
 corruptions and effete traditions of the Church, 
 will reproduce the life-giving power of the early 
 gospel, and become once more a prevailing force 
 in the world. New born of this spirit, the Church 
 will no longer know Christ after the flesh, but 
 know him in the power of his resurrection, and 
 knowing him thus, will cease to dogmatize about 
 his person or to dogmatize at all ; will rid itself 
 of all compulsory dogmas and enforced beliefs, of 
 sectarian barriers and ecclesiastical separations, 
 of all forms from which the spirit and the life 
 have departed ; will make the Christian confession 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 259 
 
 identical with love to God and man and the ser- 
 vice of God in man, of the Father in the Son ; 
 will make mutual aid and edification the limit and 
 bond of Christian fellowship. 
 
 4. I add, as the last and crowning grace of the 
 religion of the resurrection, spiritual sanity. Of 
 true religion I know no trait more characteristic 
 than perfect health. There is a kind of piety — 
 the history of religion abounds in such — which 
 suggests disease ; religion with the downcast look, 
 moping, fearful, sad. I spoke of tlie Virgin of 
 the Romish Church as the symbol of a free and 
 gracious faith. The opposite type of morbid piety 
 I find in Saint Clara of Assisi, of whom it was said 
 that she never but once lifted her eyelids so much 
 as to show the color of her eyes, and that was to 
 receive the Pope's blessing. Shall we praise those 
 downcast eyes? Rather with the Psalmist, "I will 
 lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence Com- 
 eth my help," — to those heights of Humanity 
 where live the sacred memories of all the risen, 
 and testify of the vast possibilities of life. 
 
 True piety feels everywhere the immediateness 
 of the divine presence, and has that joy in Nature 
 and life which only the deep consciousness of God 
 can give. And though it sees that the world is 
 full of sorrow and crime, it sees also compensation 
 and redemption for all. It carries its own heaven 
 
260 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 into all the hells that lie in its way, and, like Jesus 
 in the legend, comes forth from the underworld 
 unscathed, leading captivity captive. " Tlie faith- 
 ful in the resurrection," says the Mohammedan 
 seer, will wonderingly ask, " Did not our way 
 hither lead close by the brink of hell ? How is it 
 that we saw neither smoke nor flame?" And the 
 answer will be, " You came by that way indeed ; 
 but what to others is hell and the abyss, to you 
 was paradise." 
 
 The religion of the resurrection is perfect health, 
 and therefore joy evermore, — not the joy of fit- 
 ful excitement, the effervescence of a lawless spirit 
 which sparkles and hisses for a moment like the 
 foam in the wine-glass, and like that evaporates 
 and is gone forever, but resembling rather the 
 constant juices of the earth which produce the 
 wine in its season and duly replenish the cup of 
 life ; an indestructible joy in being, joy in the as- 
 surance of the everlasting order, joy in the con- 
 sciousness of the everlasting Friend, joy in the 
 dear consuetudes of life, joy in the present with 
 all its benedictions, joy in the future with all its 
 resurrections. 
 
XIX. 
 
 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 Love is of God. . . . God is Love. 
 
 1 John iv. 7, 16. 
 
 THE doctrine of God's omnipresence in crea- 
 tion — the great truth that God is not out- 
 side of the world, but in the world, enfolding it, 
 pervading it — is the dearest conquest of modern 
 thought in the province of theology. The mani- 
 festations of divine agency in Nature may all be 
 summed under two heads, — Intelligence and Love. 
 It is the latter of which I am now to speak. 
 
 Writers on natural theology have labored to 
 demonstrate the love of God by reckoning up the 
 various provisions made for human well-being in 
 the animal structure, and the apt arrangements of 
 the world on which the animal is cast. I confess I 
 am not much impressed with the cogency of these 
 proofs. Say that life on the whole is a blessing, 
 and you have said about all that can be fairly 
 urged, all that it seems to me discreet to say on 
 that head. For when you insist on the many 
 
262 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 sources of pleasure in human life, animal and 
 social, I am driven to think of the many sources 
 of pain, of the aches and ails, the griefs and woes, 
 the devastations and horrors, of which human 
 existence is so largely composed, and the bitter 
 experience of which has raised in thoughtful minds 
 the question whether evil or good preponderates in 
 the lot of man, 
 
 But what does impress me and assure me, as an 
 ever new proof and illustration of the love of God, 
 is the love which God has implanted in his crea- 
 tures, — the love by which they subsist, which one 
 generation transmits to another, which peoples the 
 earth and binds the units of humanity in social 
 wholes. Do you ask what is beautiful in Nature ? 
 It is the love of the brute mother for her offspring. 
 Surely this love is of God, — the truest illustration, 
 to my mind the most convincing demonstration, of 
 that divine love which theology affirms. Is there 
 any figure of rhetoric in the New Testament so 
 touching as that of the hen gathering her chickens 
 under her wings ? Is there any fact in zoology so 
 resplendent as that of the fiercest of beasts, the 
 tigress, offering her body as a target to intercept 
 the missile which would pierce her cub ? Call it 
 blind, unreasoning instinct, if you will ; all the 
 more do I see in it and admire and adore in it 
 the present God. 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 263 
 
 If any one thinks to invalidate the force of this 
 idea by contending that the brute's ferocity is just 
 as instinctive and therefore just as divine as the 
 brute-mother's love of her offspring, I answer that 
 though love is of God, it is not the whole of God ; 
 or rather, perhaps, I should say that these so ob- 
 vious and beautiful manifestations of that love are 
 not its only manifestations. A profounder theo- 
 logy than we find in our text-books may, instead of 
 blinking and slurring them over, as the custom has 
 been, learn to interpret the instinctive fiercenesses 
 and fightings of the animal world in evident in- 
 telligible accordance with the infinite Love ; may 
 find the middle term which shall resolve this dual- 
 ism of nature, its beatitudes and its horrors, its loves 
 and its carnage, into that deeper unity which piety 
 divines, and which it is a moral necessity of our 
 nature to believe. 
 
 Meanwhile, if Nature and life are not all love 
 let us hold to the truth that what love there is is 
 of God, — in Nature and life the divinest thing. 
 By love understand not any single affection, but 
 that principle in human nature which draws us out 
 of ourselves and makes us forget self in the service 
 of our kind. In the human sphere, — this is the 
 point to which I now call your attention, — in the 
 human sphere it is love that makes society possi- 
 ble, and without love society could not be. Not 
 
264 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 by self-interest, not by mutual necessity, not by a 
 contract originating in that necessity, as Rousseau 
 feigned, but mainly by the binding power of love 
 does society subsist. 
 
 It might seem that enlightened self-interest 
 should draw men together and band them in one , 
 but no such band would satisfy the social needs of 
 mankind. Something more than self-interest is 
 required to shape and propagate civil society. 
 Imagine a world in which self-interest should be 
 the only motive-power, and suppose it never so 
 enlightened, a world of pure intelligences if you 
 please, and you will find, if you dwell on that idea, 
 that something would be wanting to constitute a 
 commonwealth. Such a world would be an aggre- 
 gation of private wealths, but no commonwealth. 
 Self-interest, however enlightened, possesses no at- 
 tractive force, it has no principle in it of perma- 
 nent cohesion. 
 
 It is not the coming of many together that makes 
 society, but the social instinct in the heart of man, 
 that causes the coming together. Men talk of the 
 social contract as if society originated in that way, 
 but society existed before any contract. The first 
 contract we read of was one of separation, not of 
 union. Abraham said to Lot, " Let there be no 
 strife, I pray thee, between thee and me ... if 
 thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 265 
 
 right." Society is not a product of the human 
 will. It is not a thing which we originate by com- 
 pacts and covenants. On the contrary, it origi- 
 nates those compacts, and has its own origin in 
 aboriginal man. God made society. It is the 
 last and divinest of his creations. And in it he 
 lodged a spark of that love in which he and his 
 heavens have their being. For love is of God, and 
 God is love. 
 
 The fire then kindled has never gone out. 
 Through all the revolutions of time, its births and 
 its deaths, the rise and fall of empires and reli- 
 gions, through old and new ages, it has burned 
 and burns, unquenched and unquenchable. The 
 child that is born this day inherits it, is nour- 
 ished by it, subsists by it, and would inevitably 
 perish without it. It glows in the breast of every 
 mother who folds her little one in the covert of 
 her arms. It sparkles in young eyes that seek each 
 other with that elective affection of youth and 
 maiden which song and story celebrate, — the 
 fairest flower of time. It is a motion in the blood 
 of kindred hearts, a yearning in the thought of 
 consenting minds. It is courage and consecra- 
 tion in the martyr's soul. It is aspiration and 
 sounding praise in the temples of all faiths. 
 Every offering of pure self-sacrifice is kindled by 
 it ; every blow that is struck for freedom and man 
 
266 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 is nerved by it ; and when ages degenerate and 
 faiths corrupt, it is this that purifies and redeems 
 the world. 
 
 Of this fire there is no waste. The most pre- 
 cious thing beneath the sun, it is the only thing 
 that needs no husbanding. In lavishness consists 
 its true husbandry. The more it is expended, the 
 more there is left. The heat of the sun, which for 
 so many ages has supplied the life of the material 
 world, and which has suffered no appreciable 
 diminution within the limits of recorded time, is 
 nevertheless subject to diminution ; and science 
 from that diminution predicts a time when vege- 
 table and animal life must cease from the earth. 
 And if the fire of the moral world, if the love 
 which God first kindled in the bosom of society 
 were found to be a diminishing quantity, however 
 slow the rate of decrease, a time must come when 
 society would dissolve and humanity perish through 
 loss of this radical heat. Is love in the world a 
 diminishing quantity ? History answers. No ! If 
 it languishes in one place, it abounds in another ; 
 if it smoulders here, it burns with irrepressible 
 fervor there. There have been periods in the 
 world's history when love seemed to be dying out 
 from the heart of man, when egoism and depraved 
 ambition acquired such ascendency in human af- 
 fairs as to threaten the dissolution of the social 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 267 
 
 state and a general lapse into barbarism. There 
 was a time when the world seemed decrepit and 
 chill with age, and about to drop into the palsies 
 of death. The weight of empire still cumbered 
 the earth, but the soul of the civilization which 
 reared it was extinct. Patriotism had come to be 
 a phantom of the brain, religion the dream of a 
 bygone age, and honor a breath that no longer 
 refreshed. The family hearth had lost its sacred- 
 ness ; marriage was a temporary convenience, no 
 longer a permanent bond. The public altar still 
 palpitated with the offerings of custom, but no 
 longer glowed with the sacrifice of faith. A ram- 
 pant selfishness had established itself in rite and 
 office, in government and home, and had scared 
 the traditional sanctities and old affections from 
 all their haunts. Such was Rome in her decline, 
 and Rome embraced the larger portion of the civ- 
 ilized world. 
 
 But all this while, through all the years of 
 this decay, in a corner apart the sacred fire was 
 still maintained. Fanned by the Holy Spirit, it 
 burned a still and reverent flame. Often stamped 
 upon by a jealous state, but never stamped out, 
 it burned in crypts and cells, and private stead- 
 fast souls, till the time came when the veil 
 could be removed and the fire blaze freely in 
 the face of day, and defying the winds of per- 
 
268 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 secution, flame all the fiercer for every adverse 
 blast. Whereby at last the old world and the 
 works that were therein were burned up, and a 
 new heaven and a new earth, attempered to the 
 flame and quickened by it, replaced the old. The 
 life and fire of humanity were then all concen- 
 trated in the Christian Church. The love which 
 had almost disappeared from Gentile civilization 
 was stored and cherished in Christian breasts. 
 " How these Christians love one another ! " said 
 the wondering Gentiles, when high and low, free- 
 man and slave, were seen to embrace each other 
 in the public street. From the Christian Church 
 as a centre, from the sacred heart of Christ, the 
 centre of that church, new tides of love were 
 diffused through the world. 
 
 The continued existence of society is proof suffi- 
 cient that love on this earth is not a diminishing 
 quantity. Is it an increasing one, or only constant ? 
 This is the question of questions ; it concerns the 
 destiny of society. On the latter supposition so- 
 ciety will endure, but will never be better than it 
 now is. The heat of the material world is thus 
 far a constant quantity. Every expenditure of it is 
 compensated by its just equivalent in some other 
 of the forces of material nature. The lump of coal 
 which burns on your hearth to-day gives out so 
 much heat, and no more than it took from the 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 269 
 
 Sim in some remote age when it grew as vegetable 
 substance on the surface of the earth. And the 
 heat it gives out is not lost. It turns into motion, 
 it is represented by one or another form of elemen- 
 tal action, it passes on from state to state of ma- 
 terial existence, until in due course it fulfils its 
 circuit and turns into so much heat again. In 
 the form of heat or motion there is always so 
 much force at work in the universe, — no more 
 and no less. Heat in the material world is a con- 
 stant quantity ; and Nature endures, but does not 
 improve, from age to age. 
 
 But the heat of the moral world, we are fain to 
 believe, is an increasing quantity. The fact of this 
 increase is indemonstrable. Its strongest proof is a 
 whisper at the heart that it must be so, if humanity 
 has not been fashioned in vain. Belief in the grad- 
 ual but ceaseless growth of good until good shall 
 vanquish and subdue the evil that is in the world, — 
 this, if not a sure conclusion of the understanding, 
 is a necessary article of faith. And if love is an 
 increasing quantity, slow though the increase be, 
 the condition of humanity in ages to come will 
 exhibit the effects of that increase in a new and 
 better system of social life. Friends of humanity, 
 dreamers of philanthropic dreams, may expect the 
 realization of their visions from that increase, and 
 that alone. Social science cannot give it, though 
 
270 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 social science may do a good work in pointing out 
 the measures and methods by which love is to 
 operate, and in directing its applications. No social 
 reform can be relied on as stable, but that which 
 springs from a radical and substantial growth of 
 human nature in moral life, — that is, from an in- 
 crease of love. A very slight increase of this or- 
 ganic force would accomplish wonders of social 
 reform, as a slight difference in the trend of the 
 ecliptic would make a difference of climate repre- 
 sented on the one side by the glacier, on the other 
 by the palm. Without social science, a little more 
 love in the heart of society would give us paradise. 
 The abolition of how many wrongs, the reduction 
 of how much misery, the extinction of how much 
 sin, the growth of how many graces and charities 
 and tropical affections, would attest and reward the 
 ameliorated climate of the soul ! A little more 
 love, and the New Jerusalem would drop from the 
 heavens like dew, and a socialism without pedan- 
 try or calculation would readjust the polities of 
 earth to the new ideal of a blessed life. 
 
 Meanwhile for us individually, the first and near- 
 est concern is not the increase of love in the world, 
 but its growth in ourselves. Are we wise enough 
 to desire that growth ? Have we sufficient belief 
 in love really to covet it ? How many things we 
 covet, misled by their tinsel lustre, that are infi- 
 
LOVE IS OF QOD. 271 
 
 nitely less essential to well being. Gifts of for- 
 tune, gifts of person, gifts of mind, riches, beauty, 
 learning, wit, — how they charm us! How blessed 
 we can fancy ourselves with these endowments! 
 These are the things we would select if some 
 good genius, like the fairies of nursery lore, should 
 offer a choice of gifts and goods. One would 
 choose wealth, one genius, another empire; a 
 fourth, more modest, the return of love. Who 
 would choose love without thought of return,— 
 love not for one, but for all mankind ? We read 
 of a Hebrew king who chose wisdom for him- 
 self out of all tliat God in a vision presented to 
 his choice, but I know no story of one who chose 
 love. Yet sure T am that no fairy gift would so 
 richly contribute to one's own, not to speak of 
 others' well being, as a heart full of love. The 
 Hebrew king chose wisdom, and became an idola- 
 ter, became a libertine. His wisdom could not save 
 him from this egregious folly. And the land which 
 he ruled, demoralized by his vices, fell asunder 
 after his death, never to be united again. Had 
 love instead of wisdom been the monarch's dower, 
 the chronicles of Israel might have told a different 
 tale. It might have been a story of a prosperous, 
 united, and progressive nation, instead of secession, 
 captivity, and shame. 
 
 The best that society has received or can re- 
 
272 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 ceive from the All-Giver is a fresh dispensation 
 of this celestial heat. More than genius, more 
 than intellectual achievement, it promotes human 
 progress by reinforcing the motive power on which 
 all progress depends. Genius is a thing to be 
 admired, not imparted. Like a splendid constel- 
 lation in the nightly heaven, we must look up 
 to it in order to be aware of its presence. But 
 love is a sunbeam, a piece of the universal Love 
 which has struggled down to us from the ever- 
 lasting Fountain tlirough all the mists and chills 
 of earth. It comes unsought into our dwellings. 
 We need not go forth in quest of it ; it finds 
 its way through narrow chinks and windows be- 
 grimed with smoke and dust into the lowliest hut, 
 and flings a heavenly glory on rude walls and the 
 squalid scenes they enclose. And like the sun it 
 is as indispensable as it is glorious. We can do 
 without genius or wit, but what would the world 
 be without love ? We live in the words and acts 
 of our fellow-men. Examine the record in your 
 memory, and see how the life which you lead is 
 something reflected to you from all with whom you 
 come in contact, and how much your comfort is 
 affected by your intercourse with others, and how 
 it seemed like basking in the sun when at any time 
 you conversed with one who showed you kind- 
 ness in word or deed, the simplest word or deed. 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 273 
 
 I may seem to indulge in unpracticable rhap- 
 sody. Of what use is it to enlarge thus upon any 
 sentiment ? Can we by commanding will it into 
 being? Alas, no ! love is of God. It is a talent, a 
 gift ; it cannot be forced into being where it is not, 
 nor where it is scant can it be greatly increased 
 by an effort of the will. Only by use and constant 
 use of what there is of it in any heart, can it wax 
 in fervor and power. In the order of Providence 
 it is very unequally distributed. In some it is a 
 strong and overcoming fire, in others a feeble 
 spark that refuses to burst into flame. Whenever 
 in any soul an exceptional measure is lodged of 
 that miraculous force there begins a new era in 
 human affairs. From the heart so endowed a vir- 
 tue goes forth which purges away the old corrup- 
 tion and inaugurates a new heaven and a new 
 earth. And thus, though unequally distributed as 
 cause and originating power, the issues of love are 
 equally diffused, and its mission is as broad as life. 
 From time to time God sends into the world a lover 
 of his kind whose affections are bounded by no pri- 
 vate ties, whose brothers and sisters are all who 
 consent with him, and whose bride is society. 
 Then it is as if a new sun were created and set 
 a-blazing to illumine and bless the earth. We 
 subjects of the Christian dispensation are living 
 on the love of our great Brother, who cast his 
 
 18 
 
274 LOVE IS OF GOD. 
 
 divine self into the life of the world, and made it 
 richer and sweeter for all succeeding time. Then, 
 and not before, the idea of humanity dawned upon 
 the world, — mankind one family in God, an or- 
 ganic, corporate whole, — many members and one 
 body ; and Paul, the most far-sighted of the early 
 disciples, anticipating social science, uttered the 
 great word so strange to Jewish and Gentile ears : 
 " There is neither Jew nor Greek, tliere is neither 
 bond nor free, there is neither male nor female : 
 for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." 
 
 We are members one of another. The idea is 
 received ; but to feel its import, to live and work 
 in its spirit, is a stage of progress which Christian 
 civilization has not attained. That it will be at- 
 tained, I hold it an essential part of Christian 
 faith to believe. Its attainment would be the com- 
 ing of the kingdom for which, as taught by the 
 Master, the Church through so many ages has 
 prayed. Can it be that the prayer so commended 
 is a vain aspiration, the formal utterance of an 
 idle dream ? To suppose it is blasphemy ; to be- 
 lieve it is despair. 
 
 " Thy kingdom come " is the first prayer our 
 mothers teach us ; it is the last whose import we 
 fully realize. Infant lips all over Christendom 
 have stammered or will stammer this petition to- 
 day. If ever the time shall come when manly 
 
LOVE IS OF GOD. 275 
 
 hearts all over Christendom shall breathe it in 
 sincerity, when manly wills all over Christendom " 
 shall adopt it in sincerity, the prayer will be an- 
 swered, and Christendom will be as beautiful as 
 the dream of John the divine, when he dreamed of 
 the crystal river and the day without night. 
 
XX. 
 
 OUE LIFE IS IN GOD. 
 
 In him we live, and move, and have our being. 
 
 Acts xvii. 28. 
 
 T TERE is a view of the Divine nature very dif- 
 fercnt from that of the current theology, — 
 a vievr which inchides what truth there is in the 
 doctrine known as pantheism, and yet is not pan- 
 theism as commonly understood. Pantheism as 
 commonly understood means that nothing exists but 
 God ; that all other being, all rational as well as 
 irrational existences, are merely states and modes 
 of the divine. Paul does not mean this. He does 
 not say that all being is God, but that all being is 
 in God. We may concede to pantheism that all 
 finite existences partake of the substance of God, 
 but not that all agency is God's, not that all action 
 is divine. The main point is, that God is not to 
 be conceived as an insulated individual being, hav- 
 ing only a governmental connection with the world. 
 The vulgar conception separates the Creator from 
 his creatures, insulates him, enthrones him in soli- 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 211 
 
 tary grandeur in a region of his own far away in 
 unknown space ; it supposes the omnipresence as- 
 cribed to him to be a presence by knowledge and 
 will, not a substantial presence, not a presence in 
 person; it supposes that God governs the world 
 not by immediate action, but by deputy, or by a 
 prescribed, self-working constitution. Paul, on the 
 contrary, conceives that God is himself the con- 
 stitution of things ; that he governs by immediate 
 action on every part ; that he is not in any partic- 
 ular place, because all places are in him ; that, as 
 Newton says, he is everywhere present, not by his 
 power alone, but present in substance, and is every- 
 where eye, ear, hand ; that the life which we lead, 
 the will by which we act, are embraced in his 
 essence ; that all our acts are comprehended in the 
 sweep of his will, all our experience in the scope 
 of his design, and finally, that we realize our being 
 only, and have the true enjoyment of it only as we 
 find it in him. 
 
 "Live, move, and have our being," — these terms 
 may be considered as indicating three points of 
 connection, three distinct relations of man with 
 God. They are named in ascending order, and so 
 present a graduated scale of human experience. 
 Let us take them in the order in which they are 
 given. 
 
 1. " In him we live." We are animated beings. 
 
278 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 
 
 The first and lowest in human experience is the 
 animal life. This we have in common with the 
 brute creation, and this lowest in our experience 
 is perhaps the most miraculous. What is so mi- 
 raculous as life ? In its simplest, meanest form it 
 marks a difference which is infinite between the 
 creations of man and of God. Take the cunning- 
 est engine that ever man invented, — and he has 
 invented some that aptly mimic the functions of 
 Nature, — place it by the side of the simplest ani- 
 mal organism, a worm or a moth, and see what a 
 gulf divides the living creature from the most in- 
 genious inanimate thing. Compare your watch, 
 the consummate product of human skill, with the 
 meanest reptile. In that little instrument the 
 science and the art, the crafty invention and pa- 
 tient elaboration of successive ages are represented. 
 But let the watch run down and it has no power in 
 itself to renew its function ; the helping touch of 
 man must be repeated, or all the labor bestowed 
 upon it is vain. It has no self-motion. That 
 which the meanest reptile possesses is wanting to 
 it, — the miracle of life. The reptile may lie tor- 
 pid like the watch run down, apparently dead, 
 but within the seemingly lifeless form there is 
 something going on ; the miracle of life continues, 
 which by and by will cause the creature to awake, 
 and without the aid of any finite agent to resume 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 279 
 
 its functions, unwind its coils, lift up its head, and 
 crawl again. And when the animal really dies, 
 as we say, when the individual perishes, when that 
 organism is dissolved, the miracle of life continues 
 still ; the atoms which composed it survive in new 
 combinations, new forms of vegetable and animal 
 nature spring from its ruins, and others again will 
 spring from theirs ; and thus in an endless succes- 
 sion of forms the undying principle endures. 
 
 The individual perishes, but the life that was in 
 it does not. Here is a difference which is infinite. 
 No work of man's device can ever of itself give birth 
 to another, nor can the particles which compose it 
 without human aid take on new forms and incor- 
 porate themselves with new creations. It is within 
 the reach of human ingenuity to fabricate exact 
 imitations of animal organisms. But no conceiv- 
 able advance of art through endless ages will ever 
 succeed in breathing into tliose fabrics the breath 
 of life. If we ask what it is that thus broadly 
 distinguishes divine from human creations, we find 
 ourselves facing an impenetrable mystery. We 
 call it life, and that is all we can say about it. 
 Recent science has sought to derive the multifold 
 species of plant and brute from certain rudimental 
 forms, which in process of time are supposed to 
 have given rise to all the varieties of vegetable 
 and animal life which now overspread the earth. 
 
280 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD, 
 
 But the life itself, its first beginning in those abo- 
 riginal forms, no naturalist by operation of natural 
 causes could ever explain. No physical laws, no 
 material agents, no action of heat and moisture, 
 no favoring conditions of soil and clime, could 
 ever supply the desired link, could ever bridge the 
 portentous gulf between an inanimate and a living 
 thing. For the origin of life all thoughtful, honest 
 science must assume a supernatural cause, must 
 look to a Power beyond the horizon of material 
 nature, — that Power which religion knows and 
 adores as God. 
 
 But more than this is implied in the saying, " In 
 liim we live." It is not enough to derive from God 
 the beginning of life on the earth, to suppose that 
 creative Power first started and then left to itself 
 the current of animated being, which ever since 
 has flooded the world, " and still keeps flowing on." 
 What physical laws could not originate, they can- 
 not maintain. Every new birth of animated being 
 is as much a miracle as the first. Not an individ- 
 ual in all the realms of Nature is born into the 
 world to-day but has its life direct from God, as 
 much so as the first animalcule or the first man. 
 And not only so, but the preservation, the contin- 
 uation of that life from day to day, from moment 
 to moment, is as much a divine operation as its 
 first beginning. For life is not to be conceived as 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 281 
 
 something detached from its parent source, which 
 being imparted to any subject persists by its own 
 inherent virtue and by generation propagates itself 
 from one to another, but rather as a. constant flow 
 into countless forms of one undivided power. It 
 is a childish conception which supposes that the 
 creature is first made, and that when completed the 
 life is breathed into it. Rather, the life takes on 
 the form, and lays it aside when it lists. For still 
 it is the form, the individual, that perishes; the life 
 endures. And that life is from God, is in God ; in 
 fact, it is the ever-living God himself who presents 
 these forms, reveals himself in them, holds them 
 up for a while, and lets them drop when his pur- 
 pose in them and through them is answered. And 
 this is what is meant when it is said, "In Him 
 we live." 
 
 2. We pass to the next point in Paul's statement, 
 which is, that in God we " move." Not locomotion, 
 for that is included in animal life, but intellectual 
 and moral action, is to be understood as intended 
 by this term. Not only is the power to act the con- 
 tinuous gift of God, — a power which would cease 
 on the instant if God for an instant could cease to 
 impart it; but all human action is comprehended 
 in the scheme of God, in that divine process, that 
 steady onward movement by which individuals and 
 the race are led to their predetermined goal. A 
 
282 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 
 
 superficial view of life discovers so much of seem- 
 ing irregularity and accident, of fatality and luck, 
 that one is tempted to deny any meaning or pur- 
 pose in human events, and to fancy that the world 
 is abandoned to chance. But a moment's reflec- 
 tion corrects this illusion. It is just as incredible 
 that the world is governed by chance as it is that 
 the world was made by chance ; that the course of 
 events has no method or purpose, as it is that cre- 
 ation has no plan or end. And if the world is not 
 governed by chance, if the course of events as a 
 whole is divinely determined, then the action and 
 the destinies of each individual, as parts of that 
 whole, are also determined ; then all private voli- 
 tions are embraced in the onward sweep of the 
 parent Will, all private fortunes included in the 
 scheme of divine rule. 
 
 You have had perhaps your own life plan, but 
 have not succeeded in accomplishing your ends. 
 Unforeseen or unavoidable disasters, the fatality of 
 circumstance, the opposing elements, the enmity or 
 treachery of your fellow-men, or perhaps your own 
 weakness, have caused the miscarriage of your cher- 
 ished schemes, and made utter shipwreck of your 
 fortunes. You look back on the years that are past, 
 and seem to yourself to have labored in vain, to have 
 spent your strength for naught. Your bravest ven- 
 tures have miscarried, your fondest hopes have been 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 283 
 
 rebuffed. Read in the light of your early dreams, 
 your life appears to you a failure. It is no such 
 thing. It matters comparatively little ; and when 
 the eyes of your spirit are opened you will see and 
 acknowledge that it matters but little whether your 
 schemes concerning yourself have been adopted by 
 God and have tallied or not with his designs con- 
 cerning you. Your way of life as you planned it 
 has failed, has deviated widely, to your feeling sadly, 
 from the path you had marked out for yourself ; but 
 it has not deviated one hair's breadth from the path 
 which God, in whom we move, had prescribed for 
 your goings. You may have seemed to yourself 
 to be failing, falling, losing your hold of life and 
 peace, but all the while you were moving in God ; 
 he has held you in his embrace ; you could not 
 sink, or but sink into him. Your life plan has 
 failed ; but he has had his own plan concerning 
 you, and that has been fulfilled to a tittle. Believe 
 that his plan was the wisest and best. It is sel- 
 dom, I suppose, that the life plan which any one 
 devises for himself coincides with the plan of God 
 concerning him. That higher plan may disappoint 
 or it may transcend our present expectation ; but 
 who that believes in God can doubt that his plan 
 in the end will be found to surpass the wisdom of 
 the wisest, and that the goal to which it leads will 
 transcend the most sanguine hopes ? In the final 
 
284 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 
 
 result, it will appear that we gain as well by our 
 disappointments and failures as by our successes ; 
 all human experience leads to ultimate good. In 
 the beautiful fable of the poet, the wounded crane 
 is left bleeding on the strand, while the rest of the 
 flock pursue their annual flight to the milder clime 
 of their desire, 
 
 "And speed with sounding wings, and scream witli joy." 
 
 The maimed bird moans and despairs of the goal ; 
 but she has lighted on a raft of lotus leaves and is 
 borne gently on by wind and tide, while the long 
 rest heals her wound, and so reaches at last the 
 desired haven. 
 
 The moving in God which thus verifies itself in 
 the destiny of each individual, is still more con- 
 spicuous in the destiny of nations, in tlie history of 
 universal man. Viewed in its details, contem- 
 plated at any given point of its annals, the world's 
 history seems a confused jumble of meaningless 
 events. One revolution succeeds another ; nations 
 rise and fall ; wars civil and foreign, wars of ven- 
 geance, and wars of invasion desolate the lands. 
 Scarcely a year passes but in one or another 
 quarter there is tumult and fighting and distress. 
 What does it all mean, and whither does it tend ? 
 Why cannot men live peacefully side by side in 
 their native and providential neighborhoods, till 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 285 
 
 the earth, exchange their products, respect each 
 others' rights and the brotherhood of man ? Why 
 need there be any history, since wars and revolu- 
 tions make history ; why any other history than 
 the annals of the house ? It is a simple question, 
 and the answer is equally simple : Because man 
 is man ; because these things are constitutionally 
 in him ; and, being in him, must have their way. 
 Moreover, they are in him, we must think, for 
 some good purpose ; and we shall find, if we study 
 their operation, that the growth of man is promoted 
 by them, — growth in knowledge, and through in- 
 crease of knowledge growth in good. If these 
 things were not, the world would remain station- 
 ary ; but the world moves, and it moves in God. 
 He has drawn the lines of his world plan around 
 and through all this confusion and strife, and is 
 working out by it the final triumph of his kingdom 
 in the world. There is no accident in history ; it 
 has its method, and the method is God's. In every 
 war, each battle that is fought, whether lost or won 
 for this or that army, is won by God. Every bat- 
 tle that is fought, however disastrous for the party 
 defeated in the conflict, is a victory for man. In 
 every conflict, whoever else may lose, whatever 
 else may suffer, humanity wins. Through the 
 seeming injustices of time, the overthrow of king- 
 doms, the failure of races, the extinction of hopes, 
 
286 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 
 
 through all violence and sacrifice, humanity wins 
 at last. For humanity is God's ; his supreme will 
 is co-present to all its movements ; in him is its 
 foreordained path ; in him its sure and sufficing 
 goal. 
 
 3. Finally, in him we " have our being." What 
 does that mean, as distinct from the living and 
 moving in God already discussed ? What is it to 
 have our being ? Evidently something more than 
 simply to be. To have a treasure is consciously to 
 possess it. All creatures that exist have not their 
 being, do not possess it with a conscious hold, re- 
 joicing in it on its own account. Such having is 
 possible only through the consciousness of God, in 
 whom and whose our being is. To have our being 
 is to refer it to its source, to receive it as divine, 
 to cherish it as such, in spite of all cares and 
 pains to feel it a blessing and a joy to be. There 
 are times when the pressure of life with its worry 
 and vexation and sorrow of heart seems greater 
 than we can bear; and when, if there were nothing 
 but the fear of death to restrain us, we would 
 gladly fling it away as a weary, worthless thing. 
 At such times we have not our being; we exist, 
 but possess not ourselves; we have lost our hold 
 of the Eternal. We feel ourselves, as it were, 
 cut off from the parent tree and flung aside as a 
 severed branch to wither. It is only by recurring 
 
OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 287 
 
 to our fixed roots, by casting ourselves on our eter- 
 nal belongings ; it is only by thinking ourselves in 
 God, — that solace and strength and the courage of 
 life can return to us again. What matters it if 
 to-day and to-morrow we chafe and suffer and bend 
 beneath the storm ? To-day and to-morrow may 
 rain their plagues and sores on our defenceless 
 heads ; but are not ours the eternal years ? Have 
 we not a reserve of undecaying strength ; have we 
 not exhaustless resources in God, who is our home ? 
 That home abides through storm and wreck, and 
 in the thought of it we can feel secure when the 
 earthly home is broken up and the ground on 
 which we tread is slipping from under us, know- 
 ing that neither time nor space, nor life nor death, 
 can separate us from Him in whom we live and 
 move and have our being. 
 
XXL 
 
 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 It is expedient for you that I go aicay : for if I go 
 not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; hut if 
 I depart^ I will send him unto you. John xvi. 7. 
 
 'T^HE Comforter, indeed ! What comforter could 
 "^ Jesus send to those bereaved followers of his, 
 that should make good his place when he was gone ; 
 and not only so, but should be so much more to 
 them than his ])odily presence as to make it ex- 
 pedient that he should depart ? Surely no foreign 
 agency was equal to this. They would suffer no 
 third person to come in, as comforter, between 
 them and their Master. Only Christ could replace 
 Christ in their hearts. 
 
 The Comforter that Jesus was to send to com- 
 fort them, after his departure, was his own spirit. 
 " I will not leave you comfortless : I will come to 
 you." The Comforter was himself, — the spirit 
 that dwelt in him, — his idea, his influence, the 
 power of his word and life. We are accustomed 
 to think that personal presence, if not the indis- 
 
THE COMFORTER. 289 
 
 pensable condition, is at least the best medium of 
 personal influence ; that a man acts most power- 
 fully when he is in the body. But Jesus declares 
 that his influence would be greater after his depar- 
 ture than it could be during his earthly life ; that 
 in fact his true influence could not begin until 
 after his decease. " It is expedient for you, that I 
 go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will 
 not come unto you ; but if I depart, I will send 
 him unto you.". He would be nearer to his own, 
 and he was nearer to them, after his departure, 
 than he was in the flesh. He is nearer to every 
 true disciple now, than he was to those who con- 
 versed with him. The departed Christ exerted, and 
 exerts, an influence which the personally present 
 Christ could not. The person had to disappear be- 
 fore the spirit could come and take possession of the 
 soul. This is no exceptional case. The influence 
 of any teacher, the influence of any good person, 
 all moral and spiritual influences, are enhanced by 
 death. They are greater, after the departure of 
 the individual from whom they proceed, than they 
 were, or could be, during his life. Death, which 
 dissolves the form, disengages the idea, and pre- 
 sents it pure, unmixed with foreign elements and 
 qualifying personalities. 
 
 We do not cease entirely, even for this world, 
 when removed from it by death. The spirit that 
 
 19 
 
290 THE COMFORTER, 
 
 was in us, that made itself manifest in our life and 
 action, remains behind us when we go hence. And 
 not only so, but if it be a good spirit that wrought 
 in us, it acquires from our very going such in- 
 crease of meaning and of power that it seems to 
 be a coming again, a new message from the spirit 
 world, a power and comforter which we send after 
 us to comfort and instruct the world we have left. 
 Death is a giver, as well as a destroyer ; it gives 
 us the idea of our departed with added influence 
 and transfigured beauty. We know them better, 
 we appreciate them more justly, we are more influ- 
 enced by their example after their departure, tlian 
 during their bodily presence among us. So that, 
 considering the better influence that goes forth of 
 them when they have put off their mortality, it 
 might seem expedient that they should go away, in 
 order that the spirit which was in them may come 
 to us and act upon us as it could not come and 
 act when thcv were with us. 
 
 If ever it has happened to you to lose a near and 
 valued friend, whose character commanded your 
 respect, — one valued for his or her moral quali- 
 ties, as well as endeared by relation and friend- 
 ship, — and especially if such a friend was taken 
 imexpectedly and seemingly prematurely from your 
 side ; if ever this experience has been yours, you 
 will bear witness that the character of the de- 
 
THE COMFORTER. 291 
 
 ceased never seemed to you so worthy of respect, 
 nor ever so strongly impressed you ; that you 
 were never so disposed to be guided by it and to 
 act in the spirit of the departed ; that you never 
 felt that spirit so near as when withdrawn from 
 your senses by the putting off of the mortal form 
 through which you conversed with it. " God," 
 says a contemporary, " only lends us the objects 
 of our affection ; the affection itself he gives us in 
 perpetuity. In this sense instances are not rare 
 in which the friend or the parent then first begins 
 to live for us when death has withdrawn him 
 from our eyes and given him over exclusively to 
 our hearts. I have known a mother, among the 
 sainted blest, sway the will of a thoughtful child 
 far more than her living voice ; brood with a kind 
 of serene omnipresence over his affections, and 
 sanctify his passing thought by the mild vigilance 
 of her pure and loving eye. And what better life 
 could she have for him than this ? " 
 
 Such is, or may be, the influence of the departed 
 in the sphere of the family. But most of us have 
 other relations to our fellow-men than that of the 
 family. We occupy, with our word and action and 
 example, a wider sphere than the household life. 
 An influence goes forth of us to all with whom we 
 are connected, to all with whom business or acci- 
 dent brings us in contact, and even to those who 
 
292 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 know us only by report. • And when we decease 
 from the sphere of this world, our influence does 
 not decease, but stays behind us as a second self, 
 an invisible presence to counsel and to cheer, — if 
 in us, while living, there was anything from which 
 counsel or cheer could come. It may act more 
 powerfully through our memory than it could do 
 through our person. Especially is this the case 
 when a friend or fellow-citizen has been removed in 
 the vigor of his years, and in the midst of works 
 and promise, and when the death was sudden and 
 attended with circumstances peculiarly painful and 
 impressive. These serve as a background from 
 which the character of the departed derives a 
 stronger relief, and his influence an added force 
 in the circle in which he moved and wrought. 
 Such deaths we term untimely, and they are apt to 
 suggest questions of God's providence and doubts 
 of that supreme wisdom which piety claims for the 
 course of things. We think, with impatience, how 
 many worthless beings, whose existence is a bur- 
 den and a plague to society, are permitted to live 
 on ; while the active citizen, who lived but to bless, 
 the Christian philanthropist, whom society cher- 
 ished as a necessary element in its organism, is 
 stricken from the civic roll, and swept from the 
 family circle, — leaving, instead of a vital and be- 
 neficent force, a miserable blank behind. But if 
 
THE COMFORTER. 293 
 
 we view these cases calmly and hopefully, we may 
 find in them that which shall justify the ways of 
 God to the understanding, as to faith they are 
 already justified. We may find in the heightened 
 impression and added value which such departures 
 give to the character and life of the departed, and 
 the consequent accession of moral influence which 
 comes from their idea to those who rejoiced in 
 their presence and who lament their going, — we 
 may find here a reason why it was expedient for 
 them to go away, seeing they could send such a 
 spirit and comforter after them to replace their 
 person and requite their loss. 
 
 A complete life, according to the common idea, — 
 that is, a lengthened life of active usefulness, gen- 
 tly subsiding into old age, and gradually terminat- 
 ing in slow decay, — would seem to be the order of 
 nature. Such a life we regard as the true ideal of 
 human existence. It is the violation of this order, 
 the contrast with this ideal, that makes a shortened 
 life, abruptly closing in the midst of its years, so 
 impressive. The feeling of incompleteness which 
 attaches to such a life, the indefinite possibilities for 
 which we gave it credit, the promise (now never to 
 be fulfilled) of great achievements which we dis- 
 cerned in it, — all tend to bring out and to glorify 
 the idea of the individual so doomed, and to make 
 its action on us more effective- than perhaps it 
 
294 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 would have been if the course of nature had been 
 fulfilled. We indemnify ourselves for our disap- 
 pointment in the actual, by devoutly cherishing 
 the ideal. We enthrone the departed in our hearts, 
 and make him one of the comforters and lights of 
 our life. 
 
 " It is expedient for you that I go away." Meas- 
 ured by earthly standards, the life of Jesus was sin- 
 gularly incomplete, singularly abrupt and untimely 
 his departure. After one or two years devoted to 
 popular instruction and active beneficence, in his 
 thirty-second or thirty -third year, — as is commonly 
 supposed, — at an age when most men have scarcely 
 arrived at tlie full maturity of their powers, or be- 
 gun to act with marked and appreciable effect on 
 their time, he is snatched from the world by a 
 violent and awful death. According to human 
 calculations, what a failure was here, and how 
 much better it would have been had such a life 
 been spared, and permitted to complete the ordi- 
 nary term of mortal years. If in two or three 
 years so much was accomplished, what might not 
 a ministry of thirty years have done for mankind ? 
 So we reckon, vainly thinking to measure moral 
 results by material quantities, and to gauge the 
 spirit of God by calendar years, as if the salva- 
 tion of man were an arithmetical problem, — so 
 many saved by a two years' ministry, how many 
 
THE COMFORTER. 295 
 
 would thirty years save ? The issues of spirit are 
 incommensurable with sections of time or with 
 any finite measure. A truer appreciation of spir- 
 itual laws and divine methods will teach us that 
 Christ accomplished more in the shorter term than 
 he would have done in a longer ; that he accom- 
 plished more by his death than he would have 
 done by a lengthened life. 
 
 If we attempt to imagine to ourselves a different 
 issue from that ordained and historic one; if we 
 conceive of Jesus as happily escaping the machi- 
 nations of his enemies, and finally outliving their 
 hostility, persisting in his work of instruction and 
 healing, travelling from place to place with wise 
 counsels and kind deeds, living on from year to 
 year, growing old in that ministry of love, and pass- 
 ing away at last in extreme age, — if we imagine all 
 this, instead of the judgment-hall and the cross, we 
 have certainly a more agreeable picture for the 
 mind's eye to contemplate. But the more we dwell 
 upon it, the more we shall feel its inadequacy, con- 
 sidered as a means to the great end of the world's 
 redemption by Christ. The more we shall miss in 
 it the element of strength that lay in that very 
 shock which the cross inflicted on believing and 
 loyal hearts, the miraculous impulse which came 
 from the sense of outraged justice and love, the 
 inspiration breathed by the terror and the grief 
 
296 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 of Calvary, the haunting presence and pressing 
 admonition of the " Master's marred and wounded 
 mien," coupled and contrasted with the bursting 
 joy of the resurrection ; we shall miss the divine 
 fury which possessed those disciples, which in- 
 fected their hearers and spread its fierce contagion 
 fi'om the Persian Gulf to the foot of the Pyrenees, 
 which made the Chlirch a consuming fire to burn 
 and purge the world. These are the influences 
 which made the Gospel to prevail, and planted a 
 heavenly kingdom on the earth. And for these 
 the world is indebted to the cross, to the early 
 and painful termination of the ministry of Christ. 
 All this would have been wanting to the milder 
 fate, which we have supposed, of a lengthened 
 life and a peaceful close. It is no mere figure of 
 speech which the Christian world makes use of, 
 when it ascribes its salvation to the death of 
 Christ. It was his death that interpreted his life, 
 — that gave to his idea its just relief, its true im- 
 port and rightful influence. It was his death 
 that, interposing at mid-tide, when life was at its 
 flood, threw open the sluices of that life to water 
 the earth ; that delivered the spirit of Christ from 
 the narrow confinement of a person and made it 
 an impersonal and prevailing power. We see how 
 expedient, in this sense, his going was. It was 
 God's expedient for securing his triumph. Hav- 
 
THE COMFORTER. 297 
 
 ing gone as an individual, he was to come again as 
 the spirit of truth and love. 
 
 And he did come, — with what effect let the 
 spread of his name and the triumphs of his truth 
 in Christian ages declare. He came to the early 
 Church, in their day of weakness, when an upper 
 chamber in a private house was large enough for 
 all Christendom to assemble in. He visited them 
 with those pentecostal inspirations, which opened 
 their lips with power, and overflowed their hearts 
 with joy. 
 
 *' He came in tongues of living flame, 
 To teach, convince, subdue ; 
 All powerful as the wind he came. 
 As viewless too." 
 
 He came to Saul, on the way to Damascus, and 
 poured himself into that chosen vessel to be car- 
 ried by him round the world. He came to his 
 own, — how often in the long agony of persecuting 
 centuries, — and his own did receive him ; and as 
 many as received him, to them he gave power to 
 become the sons of God. He came to them in 
 stripes and bonds, and replenished them with the 
 comforts of the Holv Ghost. He made them bold 
 to face an empire's wrath, and strong to bear an 
 empire's rod. Through him they " subdued king- 
 doms, . . . stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the 
 violence of fire, . . . turned to flight the armies of 
 
298 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 the aliens." He still comes to all who will receive 
 him. He comes in every strong conviction, in 
 every earnest purpose, in every holy aspiration 
 which visits believing souls. Wherever good men 
 and true are gathered together in his name, — in 
 the name of Christian truth and righteousness, — 
 he is with them to the end of the world. 
 
 " If I go not away, the Comforter will not come 
 unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." 
 The person must depart, that the indwelling spirit 
 may come in all its purity, and act with its greatest 
 power. For tliough the person is a necessary me- 
 dium of spiritual influence up to a certain point, — 
 that is, until the spirit it represents is introduced 
 to the world, — when once that spirit is planted 
 and started, the person may be only a confinement 
 and a hindrance, occasioning confusion between 
 that which is personal and that which is spiritual, 
 between the accidental and the absolute, the partial 
 and the universal. There are Christians who still 
 confound these distinctions in the case of Christ, 
 after so long^ a lapse of years, for whom Jesus the 
 person has not yet gone away, and the Comforter 
 not yet come ; who see in him only what is partial 
 and historical, and regard not the absolute and 
 universal truth for which he stands, — the eternal 
 Word' incarnated in him. 
 
 What is true of our theology, is it not also 
 
THE COMFORTER. 299 
 
 true of our human relations ? We think too much 
 of the person and too little of spirit. We anchor 
 our existence on the perishing forms in which 
 God has embodied his everlasting ideas ; and 
 when the form is withdrawn, we feel as if noth- 
 ing were left, as if our moorings were cast, and 
 we adrift on the merciless flood. Yet let us re- 
 member that what is valuable and lovable in a 
 friend is not the visible which perishes, but the 
 invisible which remains ; not the form in your eye, 
 but the idea in your mind. Was there anything 
 noble, winning, lieroic, or saintly in the being now 
 deceased from your eyes? It is still here, and 
 more truly here, more broadly and intensely pres- 
 ent and active than before; a spirit, about and 
 within ; a thought in the mind ; a whisper at the 
 heart ; a motion in the will ; an image in your 
 dream. 
 
 And so we are surrounded by spirits of the 
 departed, — not in the coarse sense of personal 
 entities lurking in the air, but in the sense of 
 memories, ideas, immaterial comforters and guides. 
 I said surrounded, — I should have said we are 
 made up of them. Our life is composed of many 
 lives, — myriads of spirits are absorbed in ours. 
 All who once have lived in this world are still here. 
 They have bequeathed an idea, they have left a 
 spirit, which humanity has, consciously or uncon- 
 
300 THE COMFORTER. 
 
 sciously, appropriated, assimilated, and made a part 
 of its complex life. And we, when we go hence, 
 must add our contribution, be it good or evil, to 
 this vast sum. The spirit that was in us, the idea 
 which we represent in our life, will remain when 
 our person has vanished from the scenes of time. 
 It will remain when our memory has perished 
 from the mind of man. May our word and act 
 be such, that the spirit which we leave behind us 
 shall be a living and beneficent power to society. 
 When we go away in person, as soon we must, 
 may we come again in spirit, and be as comforters 
 to those that remain and to those that come after ! 
 
XXII. 
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 I ivould not have you to be ignorant, hretJiren, con- 
 cerning them which are asleep. i Thess. iv. 13. 
 God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. 
 
 Matt. xxii. 32. 
 
 npmS day, this second of November, in many 
 ■^ parts of the Christian world is devoted to the 
 commemoration of the dead. On the day preced- 
 ing, — on the first of November, "All Saints' Day," 
 — the Roman Church celebrates the memory of the 
 " Saints, " distinctively so called, — the heroes and 
 elect of Christian history. To-day the celebration 
 embraces, in the way of affectionate remembrance 
 if not of praise, all our departed friends. On 
 this day, in Catholic countries, surviving kin- 
 dred visit the graves of their beloved, and while 
 renewing the wreaths on their sepulchres, renew 
 the memory of a friendship which death could not 
 conquer, and confess the still subsisting force of 
 ties which the grave does not sever, of obliga- 
 tions which the grave does not cancel. In the 
 
302 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 gayest of modern cities, in Paris, the capital of 
 pleasure, the world of fashion adjourns this day 
 from boulevard and saloon to the place of the 
 dead, and with tender recollections and offices of 
 love holds spiritual converse with the spirit 
 world. 
 
 For what converse with spirits is possible to man 
 in the flesh but that of thought and feeling, of 
 memory, aspiration, love, — the fellowship of the 
 'spirit. The fellowship of the spirit is unbroken; 
 the soul's relations with souls remain. Whether 
 lodged in the flesh, or however housed, — in si)irit 
 they are not divided. There is a bridge, though 
 idle curiosity has found none, — a bridge from 
 the world of sense to yonder side. Memory and 
 Love are the high pontiffs that span the gulf 
 and maintain unworded communications between 
 the two. 
 
 All souls are concerned in this mediation, and, 
 it may be, are moments and articulations of it. 
 Physical science suggests the existence of a subtle 
 ether pervading space and permeating all the sys- 
 tems which space enfolds, thus furnishing the 
 necessary medium of communication by which light 
 and other influences are transmitted from world to 
 world ; for science will have no waste void. The 
 spiritual world is no more a void than the mate- 
 rial ; not a vacuum is it, but a plenum, — a world 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY, 803 
 
 all filled and filling all. God and his spirits, oc- 
 cupying all with all fulness, — they in him, and he 
 through them, — are the circulating and pervading 
 medium by which thought and feeling are con- 
 ducted and transmitted from soul to soul and from 
 sphere to sphere. Wherever we may be in space 
 the world of spirits is with us, and we should see, 
 if the eyes of the spirit were opened, as the servant 
 of Elisha saw when the armies of the Syrian con- 
 founded him. "Fear not," said Elisha, "for they 
 that be with us are more than they that be with 
 them." "And the Lord opened the eyes of the 
 young man ; and he saw : and behold, the mountain 
 was full of horses and chariots of fire round about 
 Elisha." The visible associates with whom we 
 converse, the dwellers on this earth, are not the 
 only companions of our being. Everywhere the 
 army of the unseen encompasses us; and not an 
 individual in the countless host but is in some way 
 connected with us, — if not related in the bonds of 
 personal friendship, yet still related in humanity 
 and in God. 
 
 The feast of All Souls is a recognition of this 
 bond and fellowship of spirit, which not only an- 
 nuls all distinctions of caste and creed and clime, 
 but reaches beyond the bounds of time, transcends 
 this mortal life, and connects us dwellers in the 
 dust with departed souls. It invites us to consider 
 
304 ^I^L SOULS' DAY. 
 
 our relation with the dead in its threefold aspect 
 and degree as one of friendship, of gratitude and 
 debt, and of spiritual affinity. 
 
 1. Our relation with the dead is one of friend- 
 ship. We are bound to departed souls by personal 
 affections. Our own kindred are of that number ; 
 for who can advance many steps in life without 
 sending from the circle of his own some loved and 
 loving representative as his forerunner and media- 
 tor with the invisible ? We know not, we cannot 
 divine, in what form and fashion the spirit survives 
 that has put off this material by which we con- 
 versed with it, or whether in the course of our 
 immortal career there shall be a renewal of that 
 converse, face to face, with mutual remembrance 
 of former relations. But this we know, — that the 
 soul which was bound to us by a true relation of 
 mutual love and loyal friendship, which has 
 wrought on our souls with enduring influence, is 
 bound to us forever. The parent who trained our 
 childhood, the child who has trained our maturer 
 years, the trusting friend whom we held to our 
 hearts with a trusting embrace, — these can never 
 be lost to us ; they can never be entirely divorced 
 from our souls. And though we may never, in 
 the ordinations of Eternal Wisdom, meet again 
 with mutual recognition, yet what they have been 
 to us has so inwrought itself into all the texture 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY. 305 
 
 of our being, has become so essential a constituent 
 of our nature, that no lapse of time, nor remote- 
 ness of place, nor diversity of fortune, nor inequal- 
 ity of development, nor the dissolutions of death, 
 nor the sundering of soul and spirit, nor the wear 
 and tear of ages, can ever rend that experience 
 from our lives or sever the being so related to us 
 from our thought. So long as we remember our- 
 selves, that being will remain a fixed idea in our 
 minds. And though we should cease to remember 
 our present self, though unforeseen convulsions of 
 Nature, or the friction of time, or the ever unfold- 
 ing life of the soul should erase the past from our 
 recollection, and this earth-life with all its expe- 
 riences should vanish like a dream of childhood 
 from our thought, still the consequences of that 
 connection, its influence on our character, its re- 
 sult in our destiny, will endure, a fixed fact, an 
 indestructible element of our being. I say, then, 
 that our relation to the dead is first a relation of 
 friendship and personal affection. 
 
 2. In the next degree it is one of gratitude 
 and debt, of benefits conferred and received, of 
 service on one side and obligation on the other. 
 The dead belong to us by their works; we are 
 living on the fruit of their labors. Our life is 
 rooted in and nourished by the past ; and the past 
 is only a name for the thoughts and efforts and 
 
 20 
 
306 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 products of those who have gone before us in the 
 march of humanity, and left traces and fruits of 
 their being and doing behind. The departed are 
 our teachers, our counsellors, our benefactors. 
 The arts by which we live, the cities we inhabit, 
 the books which instruct us, the very language by 
 which we communicate with our kind, — all these 
 are so many links which connect us with the dead. 
 Not a day passes but we avail ourselves of their 
 ministry, and bring into requisition the works and 
 devices of a countless multitude whose names in 
 part have come down to us and in part are lost to 
 us forever, but whose benefactions have passed into 
 the treasury of human life and become inalienable 
 possessions of the race. They have labored, and 
 we have entered into their labors. We are living 
 on the dead ; our life, like the coral islands reared 
 by insects from the bosom of the deep, is made 
 up of the contributions of myriads of minds and 
 hands that have toiled for us in the fields of this 
 world, and made it fruitful for all who come after. 
 Our whole civilization is a bequest, and by it 
 and in it we stand related to the army of the un- 
 seen, — a countless host of teachers, benefactors, 
 saviours. We come to the participation of their 
 thought; we are made partakers of the heritage of 
 their example and the fruit of their labors. 
 
 3. Our relation to the dead is a relation of 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY. 307 
 
 affinity, — the bond of one nature, of a common 
 humanity. The dead are our fellow-men, still 
 our fellow-men. In removing from this visible 
 world they have not withdrawn from the great 
 family of man. On the contrary, they are more 
 truly human — I speak of the glorified dead — than 
 before. Humanity in them is more fully devel- 
 oped; the image of God in them more perfectly 
 brought out, more fitly expressed. We are related 
 to them as men. For the same reason that we are 
 taught to regard as brethren all men, of every 
 zone and nation, of every tongue and kindred and 
 religion, for the same reason should we recognize 
 as brethren the departed who belong to the same 
 spiritual household, the same moral brotherhood 
 with ourselves; and with even greater reason, 
 because, as I have said, they are more truly hu- 
 man. If Christian sentiment will not suffer the 
 intervening ocean to be a barrier to our sympa- 
 thies, if it bids us extend the right hand of brother- 
 hood to the dwellers in a distant clime and to 
 cultivate friendly relations with our antipodes, how 
 much rather should we fold in our regard and 
 comprehend in our heart's embrace the departed, 
 whom not the wide ocean but the narrow stream of 
 death, the thin film of mortality, divides, or, it 
 may be, does not divide from our communion ? 
 How much nearer to us are the dead whom we 
 
308 ALL SOULS' DAY, 
 
 know through their history, with whom we have 
 conversed through their works, with whom, it may- 
 be, we once conversed face to face, — how much 
 nearer through their idea which remains to us, 
 which haunts us still, — than the mass of our 
 contemporaries, who are separated from us not only 
 by interjacent space, but by faith, country, lan- 
 guage, by all those habitudes which are most char- 
 acteristic of our respective states, and who for 
 the most part are to us as though they were not ? 
 While, then, we cherish the thought that all men 
 on all the face of the earth are our brethren, we 
 will feel also that all the spirits of the departed in 
 all the mansions of God are our brethren also. 
 We will make room in our affection for all souls. 
 
 Our relation to the dead is that of a common na- 
 ture. We are related to them by a common intelli- 
 gence, by the joint possession of those truths which 
 we hold in common with all intelligent natures, 
 whether in the body or out of the body, whether in 
 this mundane sphere or wherever they may have 
 their abode. There are not two kinds of intelli- 
 gence. It is one and the same universal reason 
 which pervades and informs all orders of being 
 from intelligent man to the highest archangel. 
 Whatever is truth here, is truth in every sphere of 
 being. The spirits who have preceded us in the 
 order of time, who are now, it may be, exalted 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY. 309 
 
 above us in the order of being, — they too are in- 
 formed by the same Wisdom, and fed from the 
 same Fountain of divine illumination. As intelli- 
 gent and moral beings we are related to all the 
 dead; we belong to an innumerable company of 
 angels, all irradiated by the same intelligence, all 
 amenable to the same law, all confessing the same 
 high calling. There is not an angel of the heavenly 
 host but shares with us the same essential human- 
 ity, but relates to us, ay, and appeals to us by that 
 common nature which has the heavens as well as 
 the earth for its use and unfolding. 
 
 " ' Mortal,' the angels say, 
 * Peace to thy heart ! 
 We too, mortal, 
 Have been as thou art. 
 
 Ye too,' they gently say, 
 ' Angels shall be ; 
 Ye too, mortals. 
 From earth shall be free. 
 Yet in earth's loved ones 
 Still shall have part, 
 Bearing God's strength and love 
 To the torn heart.' " 
 
 When we say man, we include the whole family 
 in heaven and on earth — angels and mortals — 
 in one designation. We include in that name the 
 chosen Son of Man, " of whom, " says the apostle, 
 "the whole family in heaven and earth is named." 
 And so we may call our relation to the dead a 
 
310 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 Christian relation. Humanity, terrestrial and ce- 
 lestial, is one body in Christ, the ideal Head, sub- 
 ject of one divine dispensation of truth and grace 
 which embraces all, both mortal and angel, in one 
 calling and hope. Mortal and angel are equally 
 heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ in the heritage 
 of glory. This Christian fellowship transcends all 
 other relations. In Christ we are first divinely 
 one, as being one with God, in whose unity all 
 difference is reconciled and all contradiction 
 solved. 
 
 And this fellowship we believe embraces not 
 those alone who are technically called Christians, 
 who called themselves such on earth, but the loyal 
 and loving of all religions, of all time. The true 
 Church is the largest communion of man with 
 man, — the fellowship of the spirit, the league of 
 all souls that love the truth and seek the right. 
 
 So then, by ties of affection, by social obliga- 
 tions, by human affinities, by spiritual fellowship, 
 we relate to the great congregation of the dead. 
 Such are the terms of that society which embraces 
 all souls in its capable communion. 
 
 The contemplation has a practical significance 
 and tendency for those who entertain it. It tends 
 to expand the horizon of the heart. It stretches 
 our sympathy to a largeness which takes in the 
 whole family of man in heaven and earth, — of man 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY. 311 
 
 in all the relations of life, in all stages of being. 
 It makes ridiculous the paltry distinctions of caste 
 and clique, the sorry limitations of calling and 
 custom, which tether our affections. The world 
 is large, and the human family is large and catho- 
 lic, if we would but see and understand how large 
 it is, and not bind ourselves to that infinitesimal 
 portion of it with which we are connected by the 
 accidents of life. We shut ourselves up in little 
 circles of our own, of which calling and fashion 
 and prejudice describe the circumference, and keep 
 the keys. We associate in clans, and forget what 
 a world it is to which we belong. We are not 
 worthy to live in this great wide universe if we 
 isolate ourselves in separate folds, and have no 
 communion with our kind beyond the conventional 
 walls in which custom and accident have immured 
 us. We may venture to affirm that in heaven 
 " there are no clans or cliques, no exclusive circles, 
 no vulgar and respectable, no high or low. " There 
 is but one distinction which crosses the grave ; that 
 is the distinction of good and bad ; that pervades 
 all orders and stages of the moral world. It 
 bisects the universe; all other distinctions are 
 merged in it. Let us learn the full significance of 
 that distinction, and we shall rate at their true 
 value the lesser and subordinate distinctions which 
 divide man from man. Let us feel how small a 
 
312 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 thing is class or calling, how small is even country 
 and race compared with the great household of 
 spirits in which all these are comprehended. Let 
 us feel how great and glorious a thing it is to be 
 of that household, to be truly man, a rational 
 soul, an undying spirit; and let our triumph be 
 this, — that we are called to join that innumer- 
 able company in the unwalled city of God, to 
 sit down at the feast of all souls in heavenly 
 communion. 
 
 Again, our contemplation of the departed re- 
 minds us how insignificant a circumstance is that 
 which we call death in the annals of the soul, how 
 little it can affect the soul's destiny in the great 
 results of immortal life and illimitable time. 
 When we read a book that interests and instructs 
 us, when we study a character that moves and 
 quickens us, it matters little, we hardly ask, 
 whether the author of that book and whether that 
 character is in the body or out of the body. They 
 are living to us and equally present, whether they 
 belong to that part of the host which has crossed 
 the flood or to that which is crossing now. Nay, 
 the flood itself disappears, the narrow stream has 
 dried up, the two banks have met and closed while 
 we thus communed. And the oftener we thus 
 commune, the more we shall feel that death is of 
 the body and not of the spirit, — that for the spirit 
 
ALL SOULS' DAY. 313 
 
 there is no this world and that world, no here and 
 there, no now and then, but one unbroken life, an 
 everlasting now. We can easily conceive that the 
 spirit should be unconscious of the body's death, 
 so slight is the influence of a merely physical oc- 
 currence on the spirit's life. 
 
 The contemplation of the dead is a stimulus and 
 motive-power to the living. It teaches the legiti- 
 mate use of life ; it supplies new motives to faith- 
 ful endeavor and earnest pursuit of the highest 
 ends. What is it that survives of the dead where- 
 in and whereby they still live and speak ? It is 
 not the accidents of their condition, it is not their 
 possessions or enjoyments. Death has stripped 
 them of all that was extrinsic. Nothing remains 
 but their character and works. Through these 
 alone we know and commune with them. Accord- 
 ing to these they "take rank in our regard. Ac- 
 cording to these they are classed and graded on 
 the scale of time. Those who have wrought well 
 have made mankind their debtors, and emblazoned 
 their names on the heart of the world. Grateful 
 posterity has registered an innumerable company 
 of heroes and of saints who have blessed the world 
 with their lives and made it fruitful with their 
 deeds. They call to us, with all the voices of their 
 renown, to follow in their steps, to use well the 
 golden opportunities of life, to offer up ourselves a 
 
314 ALL SOULS' DAY. 
 
 living sacrifice, that we may come in the lustre of 
 useful and beneficent lives to the city of the living 
 God, to the general assembly and Church of the 
 first-born, and to the spirits of the just made 
 perfect. 
 
XXIII. 
 
 COKSCIENCE. 
 
 Their conscience also bearing ivitness. 
 
 Romans ii. 15. 
 
 TVrO question which the human mind can pro- 
 ^ pose to itself is more momentous than that 
 which concerns the grounds and authority of the 
 moral law. "We have the ideas of right and wrong, 
 of moral obligation, of moral good and evil as 
 distinguished from material. What is the origin 
 of those ideas ? Not external Nature, whence 
 most of our ideas are derived. Nature knows 
 nothing of any moral law. " The deep saith. It is 
 not in me. " The heavens, which are said to de- 
 clare the glory of God, convey no whisper of a 
 righteous Lord. Nature is unfeeling, unmoral ; 
 no sympathy with innocence, no preference of vir- 
 tue, is manifest in all the world of sense. The 
 sun shines as benignly on tragedies of violence 
 and strife as on scenes of peaceful industry ; smiles 
 as serenely on battle-fields reeking with carnage 
 as on corn-fields ripening to the harvest. Tlie 
 
316 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 same breeze propels the pirate's craft and the 
 missionary's sail. Nature knows no right and 
 wrong except as reflections of the hmnan mind. 
 These ideas come from within. 
 
 There is a faculty in man — an inborn faculty, 
 I think we may call it — which manifests itself 
 in three distinct functions: (1) It distinguishes 
 between right and wrong, — in fact, creates that 
 distinction ; (2) It commands the right and forbids 
 the wrong, independently of any immediate loss 
 or gain accruing from the one or the other ; (3) It 
 punishes disobedience with suffering more or less 
 acute, according to the moral development of the 
 individual. Moral perception, moral obligation, 
 moral retribution, — these are its three co-ordinate 
 functions. There is no one word which fully ex- 
 presses this faculty. We call it conscience, — 
 a word which properly signifies "accompanying 
 knowledge;" an inadequate designation, but we 
 have to use it for want of a better, — conscience, 
 or the moral sense. 
 
 Reflecting on this faculty, I find in it the 
 strongest proof of the being of God, — the God of 
 religion, the only God whom it greatly concerns 
 us to believe in. The old demonstrations of the 
 being of God have lost their cogency in the light 
 of modern thought, — notably, the argument from 
 design. The old theologians, possessed with the 
 
CONSCIENCE. 317 
 
 idea of God, carried that idea into Nature, and 
 found what they carried and what they would never 
 have found had they not first had it in themselves. 
 All that theology can honestly infer from Nature 
 is almighty, intelligent power, with so much of 
 beneficence as suffices to make life on the whole 
 a blessing, and thereby to perpetuate animal 
 existence on the earth. But granting — what all 
 will not grant — that the universe must have had 
 an intelligent author, that author in all that the 
 material universe reveals is known to me only as 
 a mighty, incomprehensible Power with which I 
 have nothing to do but to take what it brings in 
 the order of Nature of which I am part. An 
 undiscriminating, inexorable Power, regardless of 
 good and evil, is all that Nature shows of God. 
 But this is not what we mean by God ; there is 
 nothing here of the Father and Friend, and noth- 
 ing of the moral Ruler and Lord. But conscience, 
 the feeling I have, and which all men have, of moral 
 obligation refers me directly to a higher order 
 than that of the visible creation, which is often 
 apparently in conflict with it, favoring the wicked 
 (where no physical conditions are violated) and 
 afflicting the good; it refers me to a Supreme 
 Law, as the head and source of that higher 
 order; it is a feeling of accountableness to that 
 Supreme. 
 
318 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 We find a law in our minds which commands 
 and forbids without regard to any visible advantage 
 to be gained by doing or abstaining. Whence that 
 law ? Whence that feeling of obligation ? Shall 
 we say it is a mental illusion ? But how explain 
 the universality of that illusion ? Shall we say it 
 is the creation of our own wills ? But it often 
 requires us to do violence to our own wills, to put 
 restraint on ourselves, to act against the grain of 
 our natures, — that is, our natural instincts and 
 desires. It commands our wills, not our wills it. 
 Shall we say it is a social tradition, a device of 
 governments, hierarchical or secular, whereby to 
 rule more securely ? But we find it prior to all 
 priestly or civil codes and institutions. The rudest 
 savage knows, without any instruction to that ef- 
 fect, that there are things he must not do, and he 
 feels compunction in doing them. Besides, if the 
 moral law were the invention of governments, un- 
 conditional obedience to government would be the 
 universal dictate of the moral sense, the funda- 
 mental axiom of the moral code ; but the dictates 
 of conscience are sometimes found to contradict 
 the decrees of governments, they sometimes en- 
 join disobedience to the powers that be. Or shall 
 we say what some philosophers, ancient and 
 modern, have maintained, — that the moral sense is 
 resolvable into the sense of utility, that experience 
 
CONSCIENCE. 319 
 
 of what is useful and what is hurtful to society 
 has taken the shape of law and assumed its au- 
 thority ? But the study of ethnology will show 
 that the feeling of moral obligation precedes all 
 experience of utility; and cases may be named 
 where utility and morality seem to conflict, — 
 for example, the practices of exposing infants and 
 putting to death the aged might seem to be use- 
 ful to society ; while a well-developed moral sense 
 forbids such acts. 
 
 Turn the matter as we will, we are forced to the 
 conclusion that the feeling of moral obligation in 
 man is no illusion, or human invention, or govern- 
 mental device. We are forced to the conclusion 
 that the moral law is the voice of a higher than 
 ourselves or than any earthly power. What else 
 can it be ? What is it in us that says so impera- 
 tively, speaking as by divine right, " Thou shalt " 
 and " Thou shalt not, " — which orders us one way 
 while every passion of the soul and every nerve in 
 our body is drawing and driving us in another 
 direction, and which punishes with the pangs of 
 remorse disobedience to its behests ? We feel, we 
 know, that its right to command is divine. Call 
 it by what name we will, this uncontradictable, 
 unbribable autocrat in human experience has more 
 of the essence of Deity, is a surer witness of God, 
 than anything else that man on this earth can 
 
320 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 ever know. You have heard of the saying of a 
 great philosopher, that two things above all others 
 filled him with profoundest awe, — the starry 
 heavens above and the moral law within. Both 
 are sublime ; but to one who can free himself from 
 the sensuous illusion of size, of mere material 
 magnitude, the action of the moral law is, I think, 
 the grander of the two. The martyr, obeying his 
 moral convictions in the face of persecution and 
 death, putting his single will against the world, 
 defying Nature, surrendering his flesh to the rack 
 when a word might set him free, is to my mind a 
 more amazing spectacle, a grander object of con- 
 templation than suns and systems, than all we 
 see or conceive of material grandeur, stretch our 
 thought as we will " from star to star, from world 
 to luminous world, as far as the universe spreads 
 its flaming wall." The material universe, take 
 conscience out of it, is a film, nothing more ; and 
 " we are such stuff as dreams are made of. " The 
 moral alone gives meaning to life. 
 
 We have next to consider the relation of con- 
 science to human well-being. I utter a truism 
 when I say that social order is not only dependent 
 on moral conditions, but is the product of those 
 conditions. When men come together in com- 
 munities, they enact laws for mutual protection. 
 Those laws presuppose and appeal to the moral 
 
CONSCIENCE. 321 
 
 sense for their observance. Every one sees that 
 if moral considerations were universally disre- 
 garded and set aside, if no respect to right and 
 wrong, or what we term such, determined or 
 controlled the conduct of men, if mankind were 
 governed by appetite and passion alone, if so- 
 ciety were composed of individuals whose only 
 aim was to make the rest of mankind subser- 
 vient to their wants without regard to others' 
 rights, — every one sees that if this were the 
 character, and such, and such only, the governing 
 forces of society, there would soon be an end not 
 only of social well-being, but of social existence ; 
 a complete disruption of the social state, univer- 
 sal fighting of each against all, and chaos come 
 again. Every one sees that there must be a cer- 
 tain amount of conscientiousness, of what we call 
 moral qualities, of honesty and good-will, of chas- 
 tity, sobriety, truth, and honor, to make society 
 possible. 
 
 But a question may be raised and has been raised, 
 — whether conscience is the real agent in this 
 work ; whether the supposition of a separate moral 
 sense, distinct from reason and understanding and 
 all other intellectual faculties, is needed for this 
 purpose ; whether the same results may not be at- 
 tained by complete intellectual development which 
 shall lead to clear discernment of what in the long 
 
 21 
 
822 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 run is hurtful and what beneficial to individuals and 
 society, — in other words, by enlightened selfish- 
 ness. It is maintained, as I have said, that moral- 
 ity is only another name for utility, — that what we 
 call the moral law is the sum of the axioms de- 
 rived from men's perception of what is useful and 
 what is pernicious. I believe, on the contrary, 
 that without the moral sense as a guide, the 
 moral utilities, the advantages accruing from right 
 conduct would never have been discovered, or if 
 discovered, would have furnished no motive suffi- 
 ciently strong to counteract the temptations of 
 selfish passion. Intent on material gain or sen- 
 sual satisfaction, pursuing those ends alone, men 
 would never have learned that justice and con- 
 scious integrity and purity and self-restraint yield 
 greater satisfaction and are more conducive to 
 happiness than ill-gotten wealth or ill-gotten 
 pleasure. The righteousness which is found to 
 be so essential to prosperity will never be sought 
 for the sake of that prosperity. A man may be 
 never so strongly convinced on reflection that 
 moral integrity is necessary to the preservation 
 of the social order and personal well being, yet 
 if destitute of moral life, he will not be induced 
 to obey the moral law by any such considera- 
 tion. The selfish instinct is too imperative and 
 too self-confident to be controlled by any theo- 
 
CONSCIENCE. 323 
 
 retical conviction. It will seek a shorter path 
 to its goal than the strictness of the moral law. 
 It is a true saying, that honesty is the best policy. 
 It is equally true that policy without honesty 
 would never have arrived at that conclusion. 
 Selfish cunning does not take righteousness along 
 with it as an aid to its ends, and such righteous- 
 ness as now exists in the world did not come by 
 the way of intellectual enlightenment and shrewd 
 calculation of uses and gains. It is the product 
 of that conscience which is not an intellectual 
 perception but an independent principle of life, 
 and is the only ingredient in the compound nature 
 of man which can save it from ruin and secure its 
 perpetuity from age to age. 
 
 We are accustomed to say that the stability of 
 our republican institutions depends on popular 
 education. Educate the people and the republic is 
 safe. The truth of that saying depends on what 
 is meant by education. Reading and writing, 
 grammar and arithmetic, will do very little for 
 the preservation of the State. Intellectual attain- 
 ments though they be of the highest, science devel- 
 oped in all its applications, knowledge universally 
 diffused, — there is no efficacy in these, however 
 desirable for refinement and the comfort of life ; 
 there is no efficacy in these to save a nation or 
 avert its downfall. If conscience decays while the 
 
324 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 intellect ripens, the rottenness will spread till it 
 eats out the heart of the nation's life and prepares 
 the way for the triumph of brute force, or, what 
 is the same thing, of unscrupulous demagogisni 
 over liberty and right. Moral training is the 
 crying want of the time. The one thing needful 
 for the safety of the State is that the education 
 of the moral sense in the young keep equal 
 measure with intellectual discipline. By what 
 means this moral education is to be accomplished 
 is a question too wide for present discussion. 
 Suffice it to sa}^ that where there is an adequate 
 conviction of its necessity the means will not be 
 wanting. 
 
 Passing now from the State to the individual, 
 we find in conscience the true custodian and only 
 sure safeguard of individual well-being; a faith- 
 ful monitor, whose voice if obeyed is a guaranty of 
 peace under all external calamity, if disobeyed 
 an avenger whose punishments countervail all 
 external prosperity, — punishments which the 
 Greeks figured as furies pursuing the transgressor 
 with scorpion stings. The greatest suffering of 
 which the human mind is capable is remorse. 
 So intolerable has it proved that in some cases 
 criminals undetected have been known of their 
 own free will to surrender themselves to justice, 
 preferring the utmost penalties of the law to the 
 
CONSCIENCE. 325 
 
 pangs of uncxpiated guilt. Others have sought 
 refuge in suicide. A defaulting paymaster in the 
 service of the United States wrote in his letter of 
 confession : " It is a relief to me to be discovered, 
 for I have been in a hell on earth for years." 
 Would this man have used such language if con- 
 science were merely an intellectual perception of 
 the fit and the unfit ? Had he embarked his pri- 
 vate property in a losing speculation and become 
 bankrupt, the mistake might have caused suffer- 
 ing; but how different such suffering from the 
 anguish caused by the conscious guilt of a violated 
 trust ! 
 
 On the other hand, it cannot be denied, not 
 only that conscience is less active in some na- 
 tures than in others, but that in some it seems 
 to be altogether wanting. It has been found pos- 
 sible to suppress this unwelcome monitor, to si- 
 lence its protest, to ignore absolutely the moral 
 law. Napoleon I. declared that the moral law 
 did not apply to him. He deliberately ruled it 
 out of his calculations. Others have done the 
 same, and by stifling conscience have won a seem- 
 ing success. The question arises : Has the moral 
 law in their case been defeated ? Have they 
 outwitted eternal Justice ? So it would seem if 
 worldly success is synonymous with well-being, 
 if riches and rank are veritable exponents of 
 
326 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 the inner life. But what is the test ? What is 
 happiness ? What is well-being ? What is it 
 that at bottom we all are seeking, — the scrupu- 
 lous and the unscrupulous alike, — that to which 
 all other seeking is but means to an end ? I 
 will call it, in one word, self-possession. To pos- 
 sess ourselves completely, secure from all inward 
 and outward annoyance, — that is the best that 
 life can yield. All else that is desirable resolves 
 itself into that. Without that all other goods yield 
 but a partial and uncertain satisfaction. Which 
 is the surest road to that full possession of one's 
 self, — conscientious living or unscrupulous greed? 
 is a question which answers itself. And therein 
 lies the answer to the previous question, Has the 
 moral law been defeated by prosperous iniquity ? 
 
 Deeper yet, truth of all truths, the moral 
 law in man is the present God, — absolute being. 
 It follows that violation of that law is so far loss 
 of being, interior decay, rottenness, death. Does 
 any one think by stifling conscience to sin with 
 impunity ? Let him know that the world on which 
 we are cast is projected on moral principles and 
 cannot proceed nor subsist on any other. It re- 
 ceives and refunds according to its kind our every 
 act. Our life goes out of us industry and comes 
 back to us bread, it goes out of us caution and 
 comes back to us safety, it goes out of us duty 
 
CONSCIENCE. 327 
 
 and comes back to us peace; or else it goes out 
 of us negligence and comes back to us loss, it 
 goes out of us wrong and comes back to us shame, 
 it goes out of us sin and comes back to us 
 death. 
 
 The most perilous of moral states is that in 
 which a man persists in evil courses and feels no 
 pain in so doing. Remorse is bad and shame is 
 bad, but a more pitiable evil is unconsciousness 
 of the latent enemy which is secretly consuming 
 the soul. Of that state Archbishop Whately, in 
 his notes on Lord Bacon, finds a striking symbol 
 in insect life. There is an insect called the 
 ichneumon fly which sometimes pierces the body 
 of the caterpillar in its larva state, and deposits 
 eggs which are hatched and feed as larvae on the 
 inward parts of their victim. A singular circum- 
 stance connected with this process is that a cater- 
 pillar thus attacked goes on feeding and apparently 
 thriving quite as well during the whole of its larva 
 life as any other insect of its species. For by a 
 wonderful provision of Nature the ichneumon does 
 not injure the organs of the larva, but feeds only on 
 the future butterfly enclosed within it. It is im- 
 possible to distinguish a caterpillar which has 
 these enemies in it from any other until the close 
 of the larva life. And then the difference ap- 
 pears ; for while those larvae which have escaped 
 
328 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 the parasites assume the chrysalis state and emerge 
 as butterflies, of the unfortunate caterpillar that 
 has been preyed upon nothing remains but an 
 empty skin. Is there not, the Archbishop asks, 
 something analogous to this in human life ? May 
 not a man have a secret enemy within his own 
 bosom, destroying his soul without interfering 
 with his earthly well-being ? 
 
 " Conscience also bearing witness. " Saint Paul 
 affirmed this of the Gentile nations over whom the 
 Law of Moses had no control, — subjects of a law 
 which transcends all written codes. With wonder 
 and awe I contemplate that witness, old as human 
 nature and as indestructible, — conscience, that 
 power in man which reared the heavens of our 
 truest hope and dug the hell of conscious guilt, 
 which voiced by Christ caused the old heathen 
 world to shrivel like a scroll, which stirred by 
 Luther rent Europe in twain, — conscience which 
 sent our fathers across the deep, and gave us this 
 land of our inheritance. 
 
 Respect that witness, listen to that oracle, heed 
 its testimony, all who wish well to yourselves and 
 mankind! Let no earth-born philosophy impugn 
 its significance ; for as God liveth, his word is in 
 it, and on it hangs the salvation of the world. 
 
XXIV. 
 
 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 It doth not yet appear what we shall he. 
 
 1 John iii. 2. 
 
 /^F all the received doctrines of our religion 
 there is none concerning which such crude 
 ideas have prevailed and still prevail as those 
 which respect the future immortal life; there is 
 none regarding which the views of Christians have 
 more widely diverged, none whose determinations 
 by Church authority have so little warrant in 
 reason, and yet there is none in which the light 
 of reason is more needed. 
 
 The oracles of the New Testament but faintly 
 illustrate the subject. The views entertained, 
 the imagery used by the early Church, belong to a 
 period when the knowledge of the material uni- 
 verse was yet in its infancy ; when this earth, of 
 which a comparatively small portion had been 
 explored, was regarded as the whole of animate 
 Nature, — sun, moon, and stars being only the 
 greater and lesser lights thrown in for the use of 
 
330 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 man; when the sky was conceived to be a solid 
 dome enclosing these ; when God was supposed 
 to have his dwelling in a fixed locality above, 
 whence he looked down to behold the children of 
 men; and when the ground beneath our feet was 
 believed to be the cover of a pit where the souls 
 of the departed were confined, those only excepted 
 whom Christ had raised up to dwell with him in 
 the heights. 
 
 Science has exploded the old traditions. The 
 scientific mind refuses to believe in a prison of 
 souls under ground; it refuses to believe in a 
 simultaneous resurrection of the dead on a certain 
 day announced by the blast of a trumpet; it re- 
 fuses to believe in a local heaven above the skies. 
 The old representations of heaven and hell by 
 Christian poets are no longer admissible even in 
 fiction. But what has science established in 
 place of the old traditions ? Nothing satisfac- 
 tory, nothing that reason and hope alike accept. 
 "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." 
 Still we persist to inquire if haply we may lift a 
 corner of the veil. Nor is it wholly an idle curi- 
 osity that seeks to explore the unknown future. 
 But little is gained by wild conjecture peeping 
 through imaginary " gates ajar, " and finding what 
 it wishes to find, while verifying nothing. The 
 fact of a hereafter of the soul being granted, the 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 331 
 
 nearest approach we can make to a rational theory 
 concerning it must begin with eliminating error, 
 and not with dogmatic assertion. 
 
 One error which still lingers in the popular 
 mind is that of locality. Men dream of migrating 
 to some new place, some unknown region of the 
 universe where the spirits of the blest are to have 
 their abode. Paul speaks of a third heaven in 
 accordance with the Jewish conception of three 
 celestial stages, — the first being the region of 
 the clouds; the second, the starry firmament; 
 the third, the dwelling-place of God and his 
 saints. The latter is the heaven of Christian tra- 
 dition. No enlightened person nowadays be- 
 lieves in any such locality. Nevertheless, as I 
 have said, there abides the popular impression of 
 a local heaven, some new dwelling-place to which 
 the soul is transported after death, — as if any 
 region of the universe were better adapted to 
 moral and spiritual uses than this. And these 
 uses are all that really concern us in this con- 
 nection. What need of migration to give us all 
 that other worlds can supply ? Why not suppose 
 that the soul disencumbered of the flesh may read 
 in God whatever is or passes in any remote world, 
 and through the divine ubiquity be there in sym- 
 pathy, perhaps in effect, without personal presence ? 
 Have you a friend at the opposite end of the earth, 
 
332 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 you may at any moment be sympathetically with 
 him; in the twinkling of an eye may transport 
 yourself to him in thought, while the lightning 
 loiters on the telegraphic road. What to a soul 
 in the flesh is mere subjective experience, mere 
 thought, may to a soul unconditioned by fleshly 
 limitations be real communication through union, 
 as I said, with the omnipresent Mind. There are 
 stories which tell of the appearance of the dying 
 to distant friends. I am forced to believe in the 
 possibility of such apparitions. They may not be 
 an actual presence of the object, but only a vision 
 begotten by one soul on another, showing however 
 the possibility of a communication of soul with 
 soul independently of place and time. 
 
 Another error is that which supposes the here- 
 after to be for all who escape damnation a state of 
 unqualified and endless happiness. This is what 
 heaven means in the vulgar apprehension. I can- 
 not but think it a misfortune that the grand doc- 
 trine of a future life should have come to be re- 
 garded as a question of happiness or unhappiness, 
 as if that were the supreme interest of the soul. 
 It is not an elevating view of man's immortal 
 destination which makes enjoyment a synonym of 
 heaven, — makes that the main thing, the all in all. 
 Enjoyment is needed in this life to relieve and 
 complement low conditions of humanity ; but even 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 333 
 
 in this life the higher we rise in the scale of being 
 the more sober life becomes. Beyond the bounds 
 of this mortal must not the law be the same ? 
 The spirit's growth is the only thing in the here- 
 after worth considering, — the only object for which 
 an eternal existence is wanted, for which a wise 
 man would care to live again. To settle down in 
 a view of immortality in which this is not su- 
 preme; to conceive of heaven as an endless holi- 
 day, good times and no trouble, an eternity of 
 sweets, — degrades the whole subject. And when 
 I hear people talk of going to heaven as a place 
 of entertainment, and of life in heaven as a social 
 reunion, I am reminded of the Japanese fable of 
 the frogs who climbed a hill and raised them- 
 selves up to view the country beyond of which 
 they had heard ; but standing on their hind legs 
 and having their eyes in the back of their heads, 
 saw only the country they had left behind. It is 
 labor, effort, ay, conflict, suffering, that give dig- 
 nity to life! If the life hereafter is to have 
 none of these, but only pleasure, then I say it is 
 less respectable than the life that now is. Theo- 
 logians have discussed to satiety the question of 
 endless suffering; when will theology face the 
 question of endless happiness ? When will reason 
 explode those saccharine dreams of heaven which, 
 I fancy, are more demoralizing than the fear 
 of hell ? 
 
334 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 A third error which needs to be eliminated from 
 the vulgar conception of heaven is that which 
 makes it a finality, — which conceives that the 
 disembodied soul passes at once from the wreck 
 of death to a world to which there is no beyond, 
 is "fixed in an eternal state," where fear and hope 
 alike expire because there is nothing to gain or to 
 lose. This view, which if not dogmatically af- 
 firmed is tacitly assumed and seems to be implied in 
 all popular discourse of the future state, contradicts 
 the analogies of Nature, our surest guide in these 
 inquiries. That the life of the rational soul has 
 but these two epochs, — the one embracing the few 
 years of earth, the other the sumless ages of eternity ; 
 that our little earth-life, say the life of a child that 
 dies in its fifth or its first year, and, compared 
 with what follows, the years of the octogenarian 
 are of no more account, — that this little earth- 
 life, I say, is the prelude and introduction to a 
 life that has no end, is a view which affronts alike 
 the understanding and the moral sense. I will 
 rather suppose that as this life is prelude and 
 preparation for the one which succeeds, so that 
 again is prelude and preparation for another, and 
 that for still another, and that no existence of a 
 finite immortal can be absolutely final. How far 
 the interstices which separate these successive ex- 
 istences or stages of immortality may resemble 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 335 
 
 death I do not care to inquire ; but I believe that 
 breaks and interruptions answering to the death of 
 the body may be needed to divide the vast reaches of 
 infinite time, in order that the soul, refreshed by 
 sleep and forgetting, may resume with new-born 
 vigor and hope its endless road. I see not how 
 else a finite soul can bear the burden of its past 
 or obtain the needful renewing of its life. 
 
 If then we strike out from the popular concep- 
 tion of the life to come the local heaven, the 
 perennial entertainment, and the final goal, what 
 remains to rational faith and Christian hope of the 
 doctrine of immortality ? The one point of prime 
 importance, that for which the belief in immor- 
 tality commends itself to universal reason, is 
 progress, progressive development by altered con- 
 ditions and new experience. All that a future 
 existence can yield beyond the capacity of the 
 present may be summed under three heads, — 
 three heavens we may call them. They repre- 
 sent an ascending scale of beatitudes, adjusted 
 to the growing wants of the soul, — Rest, Vision, 
 Action. 
 
 1. Rest. The first and lowest heaven may be 
 indicated by the word " rest. " Under this name I 
 include all that is merely passive in the heavenly 
 life, all that is given us by new conditions of 
 being, the immunities appertaining to the better 
 
336 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 world of Christian hope, and which mere release 
 from the flesh and from fleshly wants may be ex- 
 pected to yield. No word brings heaven so near 
 to the weary soul as that word "rest." After a 
 day of wearing toil and harassing care, our wishes 
 are apt to concentrate in the thought of utter 
 repose, of a long, unbroken, dreamless sleep. 
 And there are moments when the whole of this 
 earth-life wears such an aspect of stormy dis- 
 quietude, vexation, and suffering that all we 
 covet is release, — ■' as the hireling longeth for 
 the shadow ; " discharge from the warfare and 
 ceaseless friction of mortal life, — to "shake the 
 yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied 
 flesh.'* 
 
 Accordingly, the word most often employed by 
 Scripture and hymn to denote the satisfactions of 
 the life to come is "rest." The Hindu religions 
 pursued this idea beyond the scope of Christian 
 thought. Starting with the doctrine that exist- 
 ence as such is an evil, that for even the most for- 
 tunate and blessed it were better not to have been 
 born, and that therefore the penalty for the sins of 
 this life is to live again in some other body, and 
 still again until mortal sins are all wiped out, 
 they arrived at the logical result that the supreme 
 good, the heaven which awaits the finally emanci- 
 pated soul, is Nirvana^ absorption in God, and with 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 337 
 
 it cessation of individual conscious life. The 
 "rest" of the Christian heaven stops short of this, 
 although, as sometimes presented, it borders on 
 Nirvana, and contains, if rigorously analyzed, a 
 character of nihilism; as where good Dr. Dod- 
 dridge sings, — 
 
 ** Fain would we quit this weary road, 
 And sleep in death to rest with God." 
 
 The rest contemplated by Christian believers 
 does not mean the rest of unconsciousness, but 
 release from mortal harms and plagues, immunity 
 from all disquietude and tribulation, existence 
 without struggle or friction. This is the supposed 
 rest 
 
 " That for the Church of God remains 
 The end of cares, tlie end of pains, " — 
 
 very soothing, very consoling, very needful per- 
 haps, in certain moods of the storm-tossed mind, 
 but, let us confess, not very uplifting, not very 
 inspiring, not sufficing to our best aspiration, not 
 equal to the highest idea of immortality. Let 
 us leave this lower heaven and ascend in our 
 thought to the next above it, the heaven of — 
 
 2. Vision. One of the noblest, the most persis- 
 tent and inappeasable cravings of human nature 
 is the thirst for knowledge, the desire to penetrate 
 all mysteries, to pierce to the innermost heart of 
 truth, to see face to face, to know as we are 
 
 22 
 
388 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 known. This want the old theology met with the 
 promise of the "Beatific Vision," to which the 
 perfected soul was admitted as the last reward of 
 faitlifulness, the consmnmation of all blessedness, 
 the joy of contemplating absolute Truth, the ec- 
 stasy of knowing all that can be known, — all that 
 the curious mind, forever baffled in its search, 
 vainly tugging at the veil which shrouds the mys- 
 tery of things, had failed to discover while bound 
 by mortal limitations, — all "that the angels de- 
 sire to look into ; " of knowing it, not by uncertain 
 report, but by reading its idea in the mind of God, 
 gazing with rapt contemplation on the Uncreated 
 Light in which all truth is revealed, — this the 
 mediaeval theology figured as the last and highest 
 heaven. Dante, who represents that theology and 
 sings that heaven, says, — 
 
 " It may not be that one who looks 
 Upon that Light can turn 
 To other object wiUingly his view. 
 For all the good that will can covet, 
 There is summed, and all, elsewhere 
 Defective, found complete." 
 
 No doubt, to see and know is consummate bliss. 
 I can imagine the soul to bask unwearied, to bask 
 forever in the joy of contemplation, seeking, 
 dreaming of nothing beyond. But viewing the 
 matter in the light of practical reason, I ask my- 
 self: Are seeing and knowing, after all, the su- 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 339 
 
 preme thing, the highest that thought can imagine, 
 the uttermost to which will can aspire ? Contem- 
 plation is passive, and it seems to me that if the 
 beatitude of vision is the goal where all the yearn- 
 ings of the soul and all its strivings and all its 
 discipline end, such a consummation would have 
 but little advantage over the Nirvana, or absorp- 
 tion in God, of the Buddhist faith. Across all 
 these ecstasies of vision, as I think of them in my 
 musing on the future of the soul, I hear a voice 
 saying, " Come up higher ! " Vision is divine, but 
 there is something diviner. 
 
 3. Action. The third and highest heaven, as I 
 gauge the souPs destiny, is action. That which 
 we most adore in God, is not the omniscience 
 to which all things are manifest, but the love- 
 power which manifests itself in all things. It 
 is not his word, but his work, in which the God- 
 head is complete. And if we may speak of the 
 joy of God, who for a moment will compare the 
 joy of beholding with the joy of creating ? Who, 
 if such works were possible to finite being, would 
 not rather be able to create the smallest flower, 
 to give life to the simplest creature, than to 
 know every secret of Nature ? Great is the joy 
 of the seer in his vision; greater the joy of 
 the artist in his work. The Easter song in 
 "Faust" speaks of the risen Christ as "near to 
 
340 THE FUTURE LIFE, 
 
 creative joy." That seems to me the climax of 
 all blessedness. I can figure to myself no greater 
 ]oY than that of co-operating with creative Intelli- 
 gence, if he with whom being and creating are 
 one shall choose to confer that privilege on his 
 elect. But whether or not this special privilege, 
 the joy of creating, shall be vouchsafed to the 
 more advanced stages of spirit life, beneficent ac- 
 tion in one or another mode, beneficent action by 
 every agency possible to finite natures, I conceive 
 to be an essential feature and the supreme element 
 in the blessedness of heaven, — a blessedness tran- 
 scending even the Beatific Vision. Without in- 
 tensest and ceaseless action the life to come would 
 want, in my view, its crowning joy. In this house 
 of our mortality the lagging will, the exhausted 
 nerves, the feeling of utter weariness, and often 
 of incompetence and failure in our utmost effort, 
 may fmd relief in the anticipation of perfect rest; 
 but our truest thought and highest mood will seek 
 in action the beatitude nearest to God, in fellow- 
 ship of work with the Ever- working its highest 
 heaven. 
 
 To the question where in the universe of worlds 
 this heaven may be found, I answer, Here. And 
 by "Here" I mean wherever the question may 
 arise, — on this earth or in the farthest star. 
 Death is not a locomotive by which the soul is 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 341 
 
 transported to some distant sphere, but a drop- 
 ping of the veil of flesh which hides the spiritual 
 world from our sight. With the dropping of that 
 veil the seen and temporal melts into the eter- 
 nal. When the sun sets, new suns come forth; 
 and when the material world fades from our 
 bodily eyes, the vision comes of the immaterial 
 which underlies and overlies and pervades and 
 upholds it; and with the vision will come, let us 
 hope, the new-born will and the new career. 
 
 THE END. 
 
Date Due 
 
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