'* NOV 23 1907 * 
 
 Division BS24/8 
 Section . • T" 7 o 
 
NATURE, 
 THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
Nature^ 
 The Mirror of Grace 
 
 STUDIES OF 
 SEVEN PARABLES 
 
 ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON, S. T. D. 
 
 " Know ye not this parable? and how shall ye know all the parables?" 
 Mark iv : 13. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 
 
 1907 
 
Copyright, 1907, 
 
 by the Trustees of the Presbyterian Board of Publication 
 
 and Sabbath -School Work 
 
 Published, March, 1907 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Light 3 
 
 II. Life 19 
 
 III. Sheep 41 
 
 IV. Food 53 
 
 V. Touch 69 
 
 VI. Sowing and Reaping 85 
 
 VII. Upward iii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The language used by our Lord with regard to 
 his own teaching by parable implies that there is 
 a correspondence between the facts of nature and 
 those of grace, which his people are to find a profit 
 in studying. Such a correspondence is assumed 
 throughout the Scriptures of both Testaments. 
 It is implied in the terms by which spiritual 
 truths are expressed, as these are derived from 
 natural objects and transferred to the truths of the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 We generally speak of the parables as meaning 
 those which our Lord employed in the Gospels. 
 He uses this method of teaching more directly 
 and frequently than is done in any other part of 
 the Bible, but not with the assumption that he is 
 exhausting the analogies with which he is dealing. 
 Mark tells us that when the disciples were puzzled 
 by the parable of the Sower, and asked its mean- 
 ing, he said to them : "Unto you is given 
 the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto 
 them that are without, all things are done in par- 
 ables . . . Know ye not this parable? and how 
 shall ye know all the parables?" This seems to 
 say that it is the mark of his people not to rest in 
 
 vii 
 
NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 LIGHT 
 
 "I am the light of the world : he that followeth 
 me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
 light of life." These words, with which Thomas 
 a Kempis begins his "Imitation of Christ," refer 
 to the moment in the Feast of Tabernacles at 
 which the two great candelabra, unused at other 
 times, were lighted up in the court of the temple, 
 so that the light they gave shone over the whole 
 city. Our Lord takes them as a symbol of his 
 own position as the giver of spiritual light to man- 
 kind. He says in effect : *T am the light, not of 
 your city only, or of your nation alone, but of the 
 whole earth. He that followeth me, in whatever 
 corner of the world, shall he not stumble as one 
 that walks in the darkness. He shall have the 
 light he needs to live by — the light that gives life." 
 
 The parable is not a new one. Light as a 
 
4 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 symbol of a spiritual blessing is recognized in all 
 the religions of the world, especially that of 
 Persia. In the Old Testament, notably in Job, 
 Isaiah, and the Psalms, light is thus used. It is 
 more spoken of in the Gospel of John than in any 
 other part of the New Testament, and with one 
 exception (v. 35), always as connected with the 
 personality of our Lord and his influence upon 
 men. Both the evangelist and our Lord himself 
 find in light the natural fact which most resembles 
 that divine activity, by which he was working 
 upon his own people and upon the world at large. 
 
 It was as a symbol of this divine influence that 
 light itself was created. It was the firstborn of 
 creation, for God said, "Let there be light !" before 
 he called order out of chaos. It was even then 
 the visible symbol of that divine word of God, 
 by whom "the world was framed," of him with- 
 out whom "was not anything made that hath 
 been made." The Fourth Gospel, with that Genesis 
 narrative kept in mind throughout, describes our 
 Lord as the spiritual sun, sustaining a relation to 
 the spirits of men as universal as that of the 
 natural sun to the physical life of our planet — as 
 "the true light, even the light which lighteth every 
 man, coming into the world," although too often 
 shining in the darkness and not apprehended. 
 
 Natural light is a many-sided fact, and it is 
 
LIGHT 5 
 
 worth while to study its functions to see what help 
 they give us to understand the workings of that 
 divine light which it symbolizes. 
 
 I. The nature of the natural light was a 
 mystery to those who first investigated it. They 
 supposed it to be a very subtle substance, poured 
 into our planet from the sun ; but this we know to 
 be impossible. The most refined material sub- 
 stance, if hurled upon our planet at the rate light 
 moves — ninety-five million miles in eight min- 
 utes — would destroy it utterly. This more 
 material conception has been replaced by the view 
 that light is a subtle force, transmitted in waves of 
 an all-pervading ether, and reaching every part of 
 the universe, from the great centers of light and 
 heat we call suns. 
 
 Our Lord's association of light with life cor- 
 responds to the natural fact. It gives force and 
 vitality to vegetable existence, and health and joy 
 to animal existence. It circulates in every vein 
 and tingles in every nerve of the animal world. 
 Take it away, and the plant dies ; the animal wilts. 
 So the nature of both plant and animal craves the 
 light. There are, indeed, fish in the Mammoth 
 Cave of Kentucky, which never have had a ray of 
 light fall upon them, and their eyes have all but 
 disappeared, having been "atrophied through 
 disuse." But they are a poor kind of fish, 
 
6 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 degenerate descendants of those which lived in the 
 light of day. Those of us who have tried to live 
 and work in rooms, whose windows open only to 
 the north, find how needful the direct light of the 
 sun is to physical health. 
 
 The vegetable world illustrates this craving of 
 life for light in very striking ways. I once went 
 into a darkened cellar, which the light pene- 
 trated at but one small window, darkened by cob- 
 webs. At the other end of that cellar lay a few 
 potatoes, which had budded and sent out long 
 runners, some twenty feet in length and ghastly 
 white, toward that distant window. It was as 
 pathetic a sight as the vegetable world could fur- 
 nish, and a parable too palpable for anyone to 
 miss. 
 
 The spiritual Light of the world is the subtlest 
 and most pervasive of the forces which act upon 
 humanity. Like the light of day, he moves 
 through men's lives silently, swiftly, with no 
 blare of trumpets or prancing of processions, but 
 as gently as the dew falls upon the grass, or the 
 sunlight shines into the opening flowers. He 
 does not cry aloud In the world's market places, 
 nor is he heralded In Its newspapers ; but he passes 
 to and fro, in ceaseless and unmeasured energy 
 among the hearts of men. His knock at the door 
 is as quiet as the sunshine which awakens them 
 
LIGHT 7 
 
 every day from sleep; but if any man open unto 
 him, there he dwells in lasting and life-giving in- 
 fluence, making his home. 
 
 Our natures were made for this Light, and they 
 crave it as pathetically as those potatoes craved 
 for the light of day. As Tertullian says, "The 
 soul is naturally Christian," for we were made for 
 him, and can have no lasting satisfaction apart 
 from him. But we are not bound to him by the 
 compulsion of natural law, for we have the fatal 
 power to choke and deny our craving for him. 
 "They will not come unto me that they may have 
 light," he himself said of his own countrymen. 
 He can be no more to us than we choose to have 
 him be. He knocks at the door, but it is ours to 
 open. If we refuse to open it, we are shutting 
 out the health of our spirits ; for the holiness he 
 brings is the health of the heart. It is walking in 
 the light, and living the true life in the true way. 
 
 11. Light is the parent of color, and color is 
 the natural symbol of joy. We have come to 
 know what color is through the study of light. We 
 now know that nothing has color in itself, but only 
 through the fitness of its surface to absorb some of 
 the rays of which light is composed, and to re- 
 flect the rest. "All cats are black in the dark," it 
 has been said. So are all flowers; so are all 
 people. It is only under the light that differences ' 
 
8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 in color exist. What would have been a dull, 
 colorless, and cheerless world, is arrayed by light 
 in all the colors of the spectrum. 
 
 So in the human world, joy is the child of the 
 light. Counterfeits of joy there may be without 
 it — amusements, diversions, pastimes, and dis- 
 tractions. But, as each of these words confesses 
 by its first and strict sense, these are but devices 
 to kill time, and to keep us from thinking with the 
 gravity and sincerity which befit human beings. 
 It is impossible that they should fill our hearts or 
 satisfy our inborn craving for joy. We are so 
 made that the whole world, apart from God, is 
 not enough for us. That is our glory and our 
 pain. That is the hunger which devoured the 
 heart of the prodigal in the far-off land of riot 
 and waste. 
 
 God means joy for us. He does not mean us 
 to accept what George Macdonald calls "the gray 
 look of life" as the true one. It is not for a col- 
 orless and cheerless existence, even of duty, that 
 he has made us, but for gladness and happiness. 
 So his Son is the joy-bringer. He established a 
 kingdom, which is not only "righteousness and 
 peace," but "joy in the Holy Ghost." The truth 
 of this is seen in the lives of the first Christians, 
 who had very little of what the world calls wealth, 
 who stood daily in peril of their lives; who were 
 
LIGHT 9 
 
 despised by their fellow-men as little better than 
 mad. There is no body of literature in the world 
 that is pervaded by such an uplift of a great joy 
 as is the New Testament. They abounded in 
 joy, and even "took joyfully the spoiling of their 
 goods." 
 
 III. Photography shows that there are rays of 
 color in the spectrum both above and below those 
 which our eyes can distinguish. In some, the 
 vibration of the waves of the ether is too rapid for 
 our eyes to follow; in others too slow. If our 
 eyes had a wider range, we should discover in the 
 natural world a wealth of color, as real as our 
 reds, blues, and greens, in addition to that which 
 we now see. When we get better eyes than we 
 now have, we will see them. 
 
 So in the spiritual world, we are told, there 
 are heights and depths of joy of which we in this 
 life can know nothing. We cannot even imagine 
 them, the apostle says after having had a glimpse 
 of them (I Cor. ii:9). But as the color we see 
 suggests and makes credible to us the color which 
 is beyond our seeing, so the joy we already have 
 makes it possible for us to believe in a gladness and 
 a delight beyond our experience, and we come to 
 look for a rapture of peace and contentment bet- 
 ter than earth has at its best. "Enter thou into 
 the joy of thy Lord," are the words which 
 
lo NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 welcome faithful servants into the life beyond 
 death. What that joy is we are able to guess from 
 the language of our Lord, when he speaks of "joy 
 in the presence of the angels of God over one 
 sinner that repenteth." It is the joy of lifting up 
 the fallen, comforting the sorrowful, welcoming 
 the lost — the rapture which lights up heaven with 
 a fresh gladness to its uttermost bounds, when the 
 Father welcomes back a lost son. In that great 
 fellowship of joy and service, the boundless yearn- 
 ings, and the unsatisfied capacities of our human 
 nature, will find their fit satisfaction — 
 
 "New senses, new rewards of sense, 
 The spectrum filled, all dark lines bright." 
 
 IV. It is through light that we learn the real 
 magnitude of all things in our natural life. We 
 are dependent upon sight for our sense of size 
 and distance. The baby grasps at the plaything 
 either too far or too near to catch it, until he 
 learns to measure distances by focusing his eyes. 
 If we waken in a dark room and try to find the 
 door, especially if the room and its contents be 
 not familiar to us, we seem to go miles in search 
 of it. It is through light that we perceive the 
 bulk of things. 
 
 It is in the Light which Jesus Christ is and im- 
 parts that we learn the true magnitudes of life, 
 
LIGHT II 
 
 and discover the smallness of the small and the 
 greatness of the great. Very much of our Lord's 
 own teaching is directed to this difference. He 
 labors to bring his hearers to discern what is great 
 enough to be worthy of their attention, and what 
 is small enough to be a negligible quantity. This, 
 for instance, is his leading purpose in the para- 
 bles of the precious pearl, and of the treasure hid 
 in the field. He applauds the business man's sense 
 of what is best worth having, and his acting 
 promptly and without reserve on ascertained 
 values. On the other hand, he warns us all 
 against the mistake of assuming that the best 
 worth our having is what the world counts as 
 such, and rebukes men for taking the measures of 
 the market place for those which really test suc- 
 cess in life. Not the honor of men, but the ap- 
 proval of God; not the meat and clothing which 
 cherish material life, but life itself, which is more 
 than a living; not the "much goods laid up in 
 store," but the riches a man can carry beyond 
 death, he insists are worthy of our aroused atten- 
 tion. "True religion," says Jonathan Edwards, 
 "is nothing but to know small things to be small, 
 and great things to be great, and to act on that 
 knowledge." 
 
 V. The natural light not only moves on 
 straight lines, but is reflected and refracted into 
 
12 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Spaces it would not reach directly. If it were not, 
 there would be entire darkness wherever the rays 
 of the sun did not fall. The electric light has 
 very Httle power of refraction, so the shadows it 
 casts are very deep, and it is necessary to clear 
 away the branches of the trees on streets lighted 
 by it, where these come in its way. The sunlight 
 shines around corners and into rooms whose 
 windows face only to the north, though not so 
 clearly or healthily, as I found from using a room 
 of that aspect for a library. 
 
 The spiritual rays of the Light of the world are 
 reflected and refracted in much the same way, to 
 the spirits of those who turn their mental windows 
 away from him, but who are living in a Christian 
 community, where his presence and his influences 
 are welcomed by others. It is sometimes ob- 
 jected that the Christian virtues cannot be de- 
 pendent upon faith in our Lord, since such people 
 as John Stuart Mill and Francis Power Cobbe ex- 
 emplified many of those virtues while rejecting 
 his claim to be the Light of the world. Let us 
 not forget that they lived in a society pervaded by 
 the influences of the Christian gospel, and in in- 
 timate relations with those who cherish those lofty 
 ideals of character which are realized in the per- 
 son of our Lord. It would have been otherwise if 
 they had lived in a community which shared their 
 
LIGHT 13 
 
 denials;* and they would have been better and 
 happier if they had lived ''by faith upon the vSon of 
 God." They lost much and gained nothing by 
 having the windows of the mind turned to the 
 cold north of unbelief, and by being dependent 
 upon others to reflect to them that which they 
 should have received directly from the Son of 
 man. 
 
 VI. In the natural world, as we see it on the 
 surface of our planet, light and darkness appear 
 to balance each other. We get more light in 
 summer, and more darkness in winter, but taking 
 the round year they seem to be equal. But this 
 is a delusion, due to our being badly placed for a 
 true observation of the matter. On the earth's 
 
 * "When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has 
 hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the 
 existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human 
 society, and has found a place on this planet ten miles 
 square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, 
 and security, supporting and educating his children un- 
 spoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, 
 infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood hon- 
 ored, and human life held in due regard — when skeptics 
 can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where 
 the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, 
 and laid the foundations and made decency and security 
 possible, it will be in order for the skeptical literati to 
 move thither and then ventilate their views." — James Rus- 
 sell Lowell. 
 
14 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 surface the darkness seems to equal the Hght, and 
 yet it is but the shadow of our planet, which di- 
 minishes and dwindles as it passes out from the 
 sun until it vanishes, and the light passes beyond 
 it to meet the light of other suns. Jakob Boehme 
 says that the planets, as God made them at the 
 first, cast no shadow, and darkness was not. 
 The shadow, he says, came with sin, and is part 
 of the anguish from which creation is to be re- 
 deemed. 
 
 We are equally liable to be misled in our judg- 
 ment of the relative extent of spiritual light and 
 darkness. In our less hopeful moods we are dis- 
 posed to think that moral evil exceeds goodness 
 in our world's life, and sin is more abundant than 
 the grace which is fighting against it. We even 
 incline to think it always must be so in this world 
 of ours. Here also we need to be lifted above our 
 common level, to get the right position for a judg- 
 ment. That position is by the riven tomb of the 
 risen Saviour. His rising again from the dead 
 is the symbol, and more than the symbol, of his 
 triumph over the powers of spiritual darkness. It 
 is the proclamation that life is mightier than death, 
 good than evil, grace than sin. It is the earnest 
 and the prophecy of the final and substantial vic- 
 tory of the kingdom of light over all antagonistic 
 influences. Without it, hope would have to be 
 
LIGHT 15 
 
 struck from the list of the Christian virtues, as 
 having no basis in truth and reality, and as being 
 but a make-believe. 
 
 In our age, Christian hope has arrayed against 
 it the pessimism which is almost the intellectual 
 atmosphere of the time, and which seduces us into 
 an unchristian estimate of the worth of human 
 life and its outlook on the future. It proclaims 
 that man is a contemptible creature, governed 
 only by the lowest motives, and perennially ca- 
 pable of lawless crime, as well as of selfish cow- 
 ardice. It echoes Satan's estimate of us, "All that 
 a man hath he will give for his life" — a lie which 
 is contradicted on every page of human history. 
 To escape this insidious anti-gospel, we must re- 
 member how poorly placed we are for a true esti- 
 mate of the spiritual facts, and how much more 
 readily we come into knowledge of the evil in life 
 than of its good. We must have faith, in spite of 
 any appearances to the contrary, that the good 
 cause is forever advancing, that grace is always 
 gaining ground upon sin and will "yet more 
 abound," and that the light is vaster and mightier 
 than the darkness. For that is involved in our 
 faith in our Lord and Master, the Light of the 
 world, the conquering King, who is subjecting 
 all things to himself. 
 
II 
 
 LIFE 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LIFE 
 
 The things which we are most familiar with 
 and which lie the nearest to us, are generally those 
 we find the hardest to define ; that is, to state the 
 class they belong to, and how they differ from 
 other things of that class. What, for instance, 
 is life ? We look to science for an answer, and we 
 get no better than a relative definitiop. We are 
 told that life is sensitiveness to environment. The 
 dead body has lost that sensitiveness. The sun 
 shines on it without heating it. The cold wind 
 blows upon it without adding to its chill. No 
 strange sound avails to awaken it to attention. It 
 is irresponsive to all that is round it; and this is 
 death, as its power to respond was life. 
 
 Although the definition is superficial, it is not 
 worthless. It answers, after a fashion, to some of 
 the uses of the word in the Scriptures, where life 
 is spoken of relatively. We are made "alive 
 unto God in Jesus Christ," when the Son makes 
 the Father more real to us, so that this greatest 
 of all the facts in our environment enters into our 
 experience, and ceases to be a notion of the mind. 
 
 ' 19 
 
20 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Natural life having so much that is mysterious 
 about it, we may expect spiritual life to be a mys- 
 tery. But the one mystery casts light upon the 
 other, especially through their resemblances. 
 
 I. Prof. Drummond emphasizes the fact that 
 life is derivable only from life. The spontaneous 
 generation of a living being from dead matter is 
 unknown to science, although some have believed 
 it possible, and a very few have claimed that they 
 witnessed it. In all such cases we have reason to 
 believe that the difficult task of eliminating living 
 germs from the substances in which the experi- 
 ment was made was not complete. In the latest of 
 them, the evidences that life resulted are too faint 
 and feeble for even a materialist to pin his faith 
 to, however anxious he might be to believe this. 
 That this spontaneous and natural transition from 
 dead matter to the living organism, without the 
 intervention of any living agency, creative or gen- 
 erative, is necessary to complete the materialist 
 theory of the world as it stands, is warrant enough 
 for us to exact the most decisive proofs from those 
 who tell us they have observed such a transition.* 
 
 * Professor Tyndall, in his Belfast Address (1874), de- 
 clared that matter possessed the promise and the potency 
 of all forms of existence. But he rejected every alleged 
 instance of spontaneous generation of life, as do almost 
 all the thinkers of his school. Haeckel is the notable 
 exception. 
 
LIFE 21 
 
 The transition from the dead to the living, from 
 the inorganic to the organic world, cannot be 
 traced to any operation of dead forces. It must 
 have had its commencement in a creative act, 
 v^hich made a new beginning. The existence of 
 life in even its humblest forms implies a living 
 Creator, shaping his works in an increasing like- 
 ness to himself. Life is a perpetual challenge to 
 the materialist, for the forces his theory recog- 
 nizes and implies would have left the world with 
 no higher organization than the rock crystal. 
 
 A still more direct challenge is found in the 
 presence of moral life in the human species, with 
 its sense of right and wrong, of duty and of sin. 
 As Professor Huxley said in his "Romanes Lec- 
 ture on Evolution and Ethics" (1893), nature 
 knows nothing of right and wrong, and has no 
 place for ethical distinctions. Their origin must 
 be sought elsewhere. That they are real, implies 
 the activity of a creative will, which has raised 
 our race to an honor above the beasts, and has 
 clothed us with a dignity and a responsibility 
 which are supernatural. In making this conces- 
 sion, the author of "Man's Place in Nature" 
 (1863), admitted that man has a place above na- 
 ture, of which natural science can give us no ac- 
 count. 
 
 II. This is as true of the restoration of life as 
 
22 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 of its inception. That the race of men came down 
 from the first level of their created dignity by a 
 fall or apostasy, which has implanted what Kant 
 calls ''a radical evil in human nature," is the teach- 
 ing both of the Bible and of manifold Gentile tra- 
 ditions. It is pecuHar to the Bible that it shows 
 that God did not consent that this fall should be 
 the law of human life, but undertook to retrieve 
 it by renewing the spiritual life of mankind. 
 Here again there was a new beginning, through 
 the birth of a divine life into the world in the in- 
 carnation of the Son of God. Our divine Lord is 
 a new vital force added to the spiritual resources 
 of the world. We cannot resolve this force into 
 any felicitous combination of elements already 
 existing in human history. Skeptical historians 
 and critics have attempted again and again to 
 show that nothing radically different from the 
 previous course of affairs took place in Palestine 
 at the beginning of the Christian Era, that Jesus 
 was a happy blending of Hebraic and Hellenic 
 elements into a novel combination, that the facts 
 as to his life and his acts have been obscured by 
 wondering disciples, and so forth. After all these 
 efforts, he stands out against the background of 
 the world's history as a unique and original spirit- 
 ual fact, a "new thing" which was added to the 
 spiritual forces of the world at the opening of that 
 
LIFE 23 
 
 era from which the greatest peoples count their 
 years. If the whole New Testament were annihi- 
 lated, or had never been written, the reach and the 
 scope of the influence he exerted upon men of his 
 own age and of every age since his ascension, 
 would present to the unbelieving critic just the 
 same puzzle as they now have to solve. It is 
 through the existence of the apostolic records that 
 we and they are furnished with the only key to 
 that puzzle. They tell us that the new life that 
 dawned upon the world came from the life of the 
 Son of God, who came that we "may have life, 
 and may have it abundantly." 
 
 Parallel with the redemption of the race is the 
 regeneration of the individual. The deadness and 
 insensitiveness to spiritual facts which sin has 
 produced in us not only has no remedy in nature, 
 but is itself of the nature of a "law of sin and 
 death," by which we are sunk farther and farther 
 in evil through the evil already admitted into our 
 wills. It is a law of reaping as we have sowed, 
 by which ever-increasing harvests of wrong are 
 gathered in our experience. Science, philosophy, 
 and the world offer us no remedy for this. They 
 speak only of the certainty that every cause will 
 work on to its natural effects, and every reaping 
 must be after the fashion of the sowing. They 
 may bring us alleviations, but no cure. Apart 
 
24 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 from the gospel of Jesus Christ there is not the 
 smallest reason for us to expect that any bad 
 man will ever become a good one, or that the 
 canker of sin will ever cease to gnaw into the life 
 it has once attacked. Nothing less than the im- 
 partation of a new life will suffice to stop the pro- 
 cesses of spiritual destruction already begun in 
 us, and to make us so alive unto God that we shall 
 live in holy obedience to his laws, and in the en- 
 jo3mient of his peace. For the individual man as 
 for the race, it is life from life. 
 
 III. Life is the great unifier. It builds 
 up its organisms by gathering into one 
 the lifeless particles of inorganic matter, and 
 shaping these into tissues and organs which no 
 skill of human manipulation can reproduce. 
 Whether in vegetable or animal form, it effects 
 combinations which cannot be repeated by the 
 most skillful mechanisms or chemical manipula- 
 tions. We recognize its products as standing 
 apart from all that are not the result of the play 
 of vital force, and as constituting unities of a 
 higher order than either physics or chemistry can 
 furnish. 
 
 Henry Brooke, in his curious book, "The Fool 
 of Quality" (1760-1777), has an admirable state- 
 ment of this truth : — 
 
 "Every particle of matter has a self, or distinct 
 
LIFE 25 
 
 entity, inasmuch as it cannot be any other particle 
 of matter. Now while it continues in this state of 
 selfishness, or absolute distinction, it is utterly 
 useless and insignificant, and is to the universe as 
 though it were not. But w^ien the divine In- 
 telligence hath harmonized certain qualities of 
 such distinct particles into certain animal or vege- 
 table systems, each yields up its powers for the 
 benefit of the whole, and then and then only be- 
 comes capable and productive of shape, coloring, 
 beauty — flowers, fragrance, and fruits. This 
 operation in matter is no other than a manifesta- 
 tion of a like process in mind; and no soul ever 
 was capable of any degree of virtue or happiness 
 save so far as it was drawn away in its affections 
 from self ; save so far as it is engaged in wishing, 
 contriving, endeavoring, promoting, and rejoic- 
 ing in the welfare and happiness of others." 
 
 So long as man stands aloof in the isolation of 
 a spiritual atom, with his thoughts all centering 
 in himself, under the influence either of his selfish 
 propensities, or his more selfish pharisaic pride, 
 he is spiritually dead. When he is got off his 
 own center, is brought under the influence of a 
 life that lies beyond himself, and finds a center 
 which is not in himself, he comes to life, and 
 through that life is bound to his fellowmen. 
 
 Our Lord did not come into the world merely 
 
26 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 to save individual sinners from their sins, and to 
 fit them for heaven. He came to set up a king- 
 dom or order of human Hfe under an unseen 
 King, in which men should live in more natural 
 and human relations with each other than ever 
 before. This kingdom finds its highest expres- 
 sion in his church, but it embraces the family 
 and the nation in its scope, as institutions divinely 
 established for the welfare of mankind. It brings 
 to these the "life that working strongly binds" 
 man to man more closely than ever before. 
 
 (a) He has made the family a new thing 
 within the sphere of his influence, abolishing 
 polygamy, lifting the wife to her rightful place 
 of honor, purifying the affections and refining the 
 manners of all Christian households. He has 
 turned the hearts of the fathers to the children 
 and of the children to the fathers, emancipating 
 the child from the virtual slavery of the old order 
 and securing him the rights of a human being. 
 
 (b) His influence upon the life of the Christian 
 state has been less fully recognized, as being less 
 palpable, though not less real. Outside of 
 Christendom there is little sense of the brother- 
 hood which binds a nation in one, so that all the 
 members suffer when one is wronged or prostrated 
 by disaster. Mr. J. Talboys Wheeler, in his 
 "Short History of India" (1880), describing the 
 
LIFE 27 
 
 apathy with which the natives regarded the hor- 
 rors of the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756), re- 
 marks : 'This utter want of political ties among 
 the masses of India is the cause of their depres- 
 sion. Individually, they are the kindest and most 
 compassionate people in the world, but outside 
 their own little circle of family or caste they are 
 utterly heedless of what is going on. Within the 
 last few years there has been a change for the bet- 
 ter; the famines have enlarged their sympathies, 
 and the political future of the Hindu people is 
 more hopeful now than at any former period of 
 their history." It has been through two hundred 
 years of contact with Christian ideas that they 
 have changed for the better, and have begun to 
 realize that they have a share in the sufferings 
 of their countrymen. 
 
 So the awakening of China to this sense has 
 found expression in a general refusal to have any 
 dealings with our own country, because of the in- 
 dignities to which their countrymen have been 
 subjected in visiting America. The leaders in this 
 movement are those who have imbibed Christian 
 ideas on the subject through an education in west- 
 ern science and literature, and who have become 
 editors of the popular newspapers of the coun- 
 try. They are bringing the hundreds of millions 
 of Chinamen to feel that they are wronged in 
 
28 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 every wrong inflicted upon a countryman of 
 theirs, as they are one body poHtic. 
 
 It is especially in Christian nations that this 
 feeling has the largest scope and finds the fullest 
 expression. Through it a new stage of political 
 development has been reached, in which the whole 
 strength and power of the state is brought to bear 
 in defense of the rights of the humblest citizen. 
 The Christian state has become the organized 
 unselfishness of the whole people for the protec- 
 tion of every member of the body politic. Nor 
 does it stop with the assertion and maintenance of 
 rights. As Mazzini well says, nations do not ex- 
 ist by the maintenance of rights merely, but 
 through heroism, and through self-sacrifice. It 
 is through their citizens being willing to "go the 
 second mile" that they maintain their existence 
 and their authority. Their history is the story 
 of great deeds done for the common weal, where 
 mere rights were not at stake. 
 
 (c) In what might be called the biological pas- 
 sages of his epistles (Romans xii:4-9; I Corin- 
 thians xii: 12-30; Ephesians iii:6; iv:4-i6; 
 Colossians i: 17-24; ii: 18, 19; iii: 15), the apostle 
 Paul applies this principle to the church, and illus- 
 trates the nature of our fellowship with our Head 
 and with each other from comparison with the 
 human body. It is his favorite form of 
 
LIFE 29 
 
 declaring that our Lord came to establish a king- 
 dom among men, and he anticipates modern 
 sociologists in the use of this analogy to explain 
 the social unities and functions. "We, who are 
 many, are one body in Christ, and severally mem- 
 bers one of another." 
 
 IV. Growth is a characteristic of life. Dead 
 things never grow. They may enlarge by the ac- 
 cretion of dead particles, as do the stalactites in a 
 lime cave; but these particles have no organic 
 unity, so that none of them renders any service to 
 the whole, or fills any place which the rest could 
 not. A tree adds to its bulk year by year, by add- 
 ing each year a fresh layer of woody fiber to its 
 trunk, and by extending its old branches and put- 
 ting forth new. These additions are parts of its 
 organism, and sharers of its fortunes as an or- 
 ganism. With its decay, they would show a 
 diminished vitality, and with its death they would 
 die. It is only the living tree that goes on adding 
 to its bulk. 
 
 So in the spiritual life : its reality is shown by 
 its growth. In a memorable passage of his 
 "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (1864), the late Cardi- 
 nal Newman says: "The writer to whom 
 (humanly speaking) I owe my soul was Thomas 
 Scott of Aston-Sandford ... I used almost as 
 proverbs what I considered the scope and issue of 
 
30 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 his doctrine, 'Holiness before peace/ and 
 'Growth, the only evidence of life.' " The dis- 
 position in Thomas Scott's time was to rest the 
 proof of the possession of the Christian life upon 
 a single experience, called "a. hopeful work of 
 grace." He justly insisted that this can be no more 
 than the first step in Christian living, and that 
 "growth in grace" is the demand of the gospel, 
 equally with repentance unto life, and personal ac- 
 quaintance with God. Dr. Trumbull tells of 
 hearing a man say, "All my class is converted 
 now, and I look upon my work as done." It had 
 but begun, for the training of those young Chris- 
 tians all lay before him. So we see now, for we 
 all agree with Thomas Scott, that real life will 
 find its expression in growth. 
 
 We all, indeed, are growing inwardly as well as 
 outwardly, but, as Henry Ward Beecher says, it 
 is of great importance to observe what it is that 
 grows most in us. Is it our intimacy with God, 
 or the affairs and pleasures of the world? 
 Is it our vision of what lies on a level with our 
 eyes, or of what lies above that level? Is it the 
 interest in the things that we must leave behind us 
 at death, or in what we can carry into the life 
 beyond death? 
 
 V. Along with growth goes continuity. The 
 tree is the same tree year after year, and even 
 
LIFE 31 
 
 century after century. The big redwood on the 
 slopes of the Sierras carries on its inner layers the 
 brand left by a fire before the days of King Solo- 
 mon; and it is just the same tree that then spread 
 its branches over the remote ancestors of the bears 
 and coyotes which range those mountains today. 
 It is the longest-lived of all the living things 
 known to us, but it has not lost its organic identity 
 through the lapse of millenniums. 
 
 So with our bodily life. We do not leave it 
 behind us, whatever the changes it undergoes. It 
 may be that every physical particle which once 
 constituted the body has been eliminated and re- 
 placed by another. Yet it retains the same char- 
 acter throughout all changes. We carry to our 
 graves the scars of injuries we received in early 
 infancy. Our hair retains the same hue, our eyes 
 the same color, our faces the same physiognomy, 
 as when we were children. Our photographs 
 taken at different ages show marked resemblances, 
 along with the differences the years have brought 
 us. 
 
 So of our inward life: we are still the same 
 selves that we were when we first "found our- 
 selves," as conscious human beings. We lose 
 nothing of our identity with the lapse of years. 
 When I was a small boy, I threw a stone at a 
 robin redbreast, and broke its leg. I was ashamed 
 
32 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 of it then ; I am ashamed of it now. Although I 
 beheve it has been forgiven me by the Maker of 
 the robin, I shall never forget the wanton cruelty 
 of the act. It has kept me from doing anything 
 that would hurt a bird during the years which 
 have elapsed since then. I know it was I who 
 did it; that I was, and am, the small white- 
 headed scamp who picked up that stone and flung 
 it with all his might, and — for once — did not 
 miss the mark. So of many a worse act or neg- 
 lect in the intervening years : I am the one 
 who did or omitted to do these things, and 
 never can I escape the identity or the respon- 
 sibility. 
 
 "Upon me lies a burden which I cannot shift," 
 says Frederick Maurice, "upon any other human 
 creature — the burden of duties unfulfilled, words 
 unspoken, or spoken violently and untruly; of 
 holy relationships neglected; of days wasted for- 
 ever; of evil thoughts once cherished, which are 
 ever appearing as fresh as when they were first ad- 
 mitted into the heart; of talents cast away; of 
 affections in myself or in others trifled with; of 
 light within turned to darkness. So speaks the 
 conscience; so speaks or has spoken the con- 
 science of each man." 
 
 It is just this unbroken identity which is the 
 most terrible fact of an evil life, as it is the basis 
 
LIFE 33 
 
 of the remorse which darkens its present, and 
 may forever darken its future, with despair. 
 Memory is terribly faithful in its record of evil 
 things; how faithful has been shown to some at 
 moments of extreme peril, when the whole past, 
 with all its details, has been flashed as in an in- 
 stant upon their mental vision. It is from such 
 experiences that we come to understand the state- 
 ment that when the dead stand before God, there 
 will be an opening of the book for each of the 
 human race, and that the dead will be judged out 
 of the things which are written in the books 
 (Revelation xx:i2). Unless there be some 
 cleansing power which can efface the dreadful 
 records kept by the heart, then a future of re- 
 morse and misery is all that is possible to every 
 one who has defiled his conscience with sin. "If 
 we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have 
 fellowship one with another, and the blood of 
 Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we 
 say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, 
 and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, 
 he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, 
 and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (I 
 John i : 7-9). Without that cleansing, there is no 
 gospel for men. 
 
 There is, however, a joyful side to this truth of 
 the continuity of life — it is that we need leave 
 
34 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 nothing behind us that is worth taking along with 
 us. It is, indeed, our duty and our right to lay 
 aside the limitations which cramp each age of life, 
 and yet to carry with us all that belongs to the 
 strength and the insight of that age. The apostle 
 says that when he became a man, he put away 
 what was childish; but he did not lay aside what 
 was childlike in his nature. The true Christian, 
 whatever his years or his experience, never ceases 
 to be a child in all the qualities which bring the 
 child near to the gate of the kingdom. Our Lord 
 told Nicodemus that to b' born anew (or from 
 above) is the prerequisite for entering the king- 
 dom (John iii : 3, 5) ; and he told the apostles that 
 "whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God 
 as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein" 
 (Luke xviii : 17). The birth from above renews 
 us into childlikeness, jvist as we were born into 
 natural childhood by natural birth. And to em- 
 phasize the relation, he set a little child in the 
 midst when he set forth the nature of regenera- 
 tion. 
 
 Some people have been puzzled to see how 
 children are saved. The gospel says the difficulty 
 lies in getting grown people to become children 
 for their salvation. To do that, they must lay 
 aside their hard worldly wisdom ; their dullness in 
 the sense of right and wrong ; their fretting about 
 
LIFE 35 
 
 to-morrow; their lack of simple dependence upon 
 our Father in heaven; their unreadiness to trust 
 him for the grandest things he promises; their 
 want of any sense of the wonder in the world and 
 in life; their resentful malice toward those who 
 have injured them. Our Lord himself, in his 
 growth into manhood, left nothing behind him 
 that belonged to a perfect child. It would have 
 been better if the revisers had left untouched the 
 passage in which the church speaks to the Father 
 of "thy holy Child Jesus" (Acts iv:3o), for 
 while the Greek word has also the sense of 
 "servant," yet its primary meaning cannot have 
 been far from the thought of the apostle. 
 
 Wordsworth, the first modern poet who has 
 opened the book of childhood to us, gives expres- 
 sion to the Christian idea : — 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky: 
 So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man; 
 So be it when I shall grow old, 
 
 Or let me die ! 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each in natural piety. 
 
 VI. Nature, to a superficial view, seems to fore- 
 tell death as the end of life. The living thing 
 dies and passes away in the dissolution of the 
 
36 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 organism into its elements; the dead thing alone 
 remains the same. 
 
 Nature, however, abounds in intimations that 
 life may pass through and survive deathlike 
 changes, v^hich open upon another and a nobler ex- 
 istence. One of these is the transformation which 
 insects undergo in passing from the chrysalis 
 stage of their existence to that in which they at- 
 tain the full growth and freedom. This trans- 
 formation helped the Greeks at least to believe in 
 a life after death. They gave the name Psyche 
 (soul) to the butterfly, because they saw in its 
 passage from a creeping grub to a flying thing a 
 parable and prophecy of the change death would 
 work upon themselves. 
 
 Mrs. Alfred Gatty, in one of her beautiful 
 parables of nature, takes as an instance the 
 larva of the dragon fly, whose life is spent under 
 water until he is overtaken by languor and pain, 
 and is driven to climb the stalk of some water- 
 plant toward the surface. His kindred follow 
 him with pity and sympathy, and think of him as 
 lost and gone, when he emerges from his shell, 
 and changes into a swift and strong master of 
 flight, whose "four gauzy pinions flash back the 
 sunshine." Nor can he return to the state in 
 which he had lived, to explain to his brothers the 
 change he has undergone. They go on mourning 
 
LIFE Z7 
 
 his loss, while the empty shell that had contained 
 him clings to the stem by which he had climbed. 
 
 In other cases the larva buries itself in the earth 
 when the period of change approaches, and rises 
 from its grave to the higher existence. Mrs. 
 Trumbull-Slosson makes a beautiful use of this 
 in one of the stories of her "Seven Dreamers." 
 
 While there is no simple organism which does 
 not look forward to the change we call death, 
 there are complex organisms, each with a life of its 
 own, whose nature implies immortality. The 
 nation is one of these, and the church is another. 
 
 Some theorists have run the parallel so far be- 
 tween the life of the individual man and that of the 
 nation as to predict a time of necessary decay and 
 a final death for every one of them. Nations, 
 however, die only by suicide, through a general 
 selfishness displacing public spirit, and the love 
 of country perishing out of the hearts of the peo- 
 ple. History, as Dr. Elisha Mulford, in his great 
 book on "The Nation," says, is not a series of 
 funerals. England has seen a thousand years of 
 national life, and is as full of vitality as at any 
 earlier stage of her existence. 
 
 The church also is a deathless organization. 
 She came into existence when Peter, in the name of 
 the Twelve, uttered the great confession; and in 
 that moment our Lord pronounced the grand 
 
38 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 promise that the gates of Hades, the power of 
 death, should never prevail against her. At times, 
 she has seemed to fall into a sleep that might have 
 proved deadly ; but always she was quickened into 
 a fresh life by the indwelling Spirit, roused to a 
 new sense of the work she had to do for God, and 
 equipped with new instruments to do it, in the per- 
 sons of prophets and reformers, preachers and 
 singers. So she lives on through the ages, an 
 immortal organization, with part of her member- 
 ship in this world of conflict, and part in the 
 world of triumph beyond death, but all gathered 
 under the one Head which is Christ (Ephesians 
 i: lo). 
 
Ill 
 
 SHEEP 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SHEEP 
 
 The Bible has more to say about sheep than any 
 other animal. There were no cats in Palestine, 
 and the dogs were outcasts. Horses were very 
 few and exotic. Asses, sheep, and oxen were the 
 domestic animals, and of the three the sheep were 
 by far the most numerous, and came closest to 
 man. The way in which the prophet Nathan 
 speaks of the poor man's ewe lamb, which ''grew 
 up together with him, and his children," and 
 which "did eat of his own morsel, and drank of 
 his own cup, and lay in his bosom," is an indica- 
 tion that sheep were household pets in the place 
 now filled by cats, dogs, and other animals. The 
 apostle Paul, indeed, never mentions either sheep 
 or shepherds ; but he was born and brought up in 
 Cilicia, where goats took the place of sheep, and 
 where he was taught to make tents from the coarse 
 cloth made from goats' hair. 
 
 The sheep played a very important part in the 
 history and discipline of the elect people. From 
 the time of Abel down to the giving of the law at 
 Mount Sinai, the keeping of sheep was their work. 
 
 41 
 
42 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 When any of them turned aside from this to till- 
 age of the soil, trouble always followed. So it 
 came upon Noah, after he made his vineyard ; and 
 on Jacob, after he built his house on the parcel of 
 ground he bought in Shechem. Through those 
 centuries, whether spent in Palestine or in Egypt, 
 the Hebrews were shepherds and nothing else, de- 
 pending upon the animal which supplied them 
 with both food and clothing, and for whose sup- 
 port they must move from place to place in most 
 of the localities where they sought a home. Even 
 when they obtained possession of their own coun- 
 try, and became a people of city-dwellers, with 
 fields and vineyards of their own, the care of 
 sheep remained a chief industry. The tribes who 
 settled beyond Jordan had no other employment; 
 and as much of the hill country of Judaea was unfit 
 for tillage, but supplied grazing for sheep and 
 goats, the majority of the people even west of the 
 Jordan seem to have been sheep-owners, if not 
 shepherds. 
 
 There was a wise purpose in this. The keep- 
 ing of sheep exercises a refining influence upon 
 character. The life of the hunter, which Esau 
 preferred to it, tends to make men savage and 
 cruel. The shepherd's work teaches them to be 
 humane and kindly. He who is to live by sheep 
 must care for sheep. He must keep them on his 
 
SHEEP 43 
 
 mind at all times, as their protector against wild 
 beasts, and their provider, to lead them to the 
 green pastures and the still waters. In more 
 northern countries he must plan to protect them 
 against sudden storms, and burial under the snow- 
 drifts. It is well known. The London Times once 
 said, that those who invest in sheep simply to make 
 money out of them are sure to lose money. They 
 must have another motive if they are to get on 
 with them, or at least they must employ as shep- 
 herds those who have that motive, and who will 
 be always planning for the sheep, often against 
 the indifference of the owner.* The mere hire- 
 ling, who does not make the sheep his own in his 
 interest in them, is useless in every way. 
 
 The calamity of America before Columbus was 
 that it had no sheep, except one wild and un- 
 tamable species of mountain sheep. Not only 
 was the refining influence of the shepherd's life 
 wanting to the aborigines, but they had nothing to 
 carry them over the transition from the life of the 
 savage hunter to that of the settled farmer. When 
 
 * It illustrated this from the experience of those who 
 employed convicts on the big Australian sheep-walks. The 
 pickpockets made the best shepherds, because they had been 
 accustomed to watch closely those they meant to rob. Men 
 of better education, who had been transported for forgery 
 and similar crimes, were of no use at all. 
 
44 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 General Miles, in 1886, brought the hitherto un- 
 tamable Apaches to terms, he secured for them 
 from the national Government a supply of sheep 
 and cattle. They soon became shepherds and 
 cowboys, and never went on the warpath again. 
 
 God had a further purpose in keeping his 
 people to the work of the shepherd. It enabled 
 them to understand better his own relation to 
 them, as their Shepherd. Just as they had to 
 keep on their minds the flock of silly sheep they, 
 tended, so he was caring for them, providing for 
 their wants, defending them against their enemies, 
 and showing them his goodness through all their 
 lives. He was teaching them to say, "The Lord 
 is my shepherd," and to recognize him as ''the 
 Shepherd of Israel," as well as of each single soul 
 among them. That is the meaning of that won- 
 derful Twenty-third Psalm, in which the shep- 
 herd's care of his sheep is recognized as a parable 
 of God's care of his people. Alongside it stands 
 the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to 
 John, in which our Lord takes the place of the 
 Jehovah of the Old Testament as the Shepherd of 
 the spirits of men. 
 
 It is, however, not the shepherd, but the sheep, 
 that is my subject. There are points about this 
 animal which are suggestive, in connection with 
 the use made of it in Bible teaching. 
 
SHEEP 45 
 
 I. The sheep is a mountain animal. Man has 
 brought it down to the plains for his convenience ; 
 but it belongs to the hills, and it acquired its habits 
 there. Its thick fleece was given it as its de- 
 fense against the cold winds of the hills. It still 
 shows an instinct to seek the hills. If you turn a 
 number of lambs loose in a field, which has a 
 hillock in it, they will make for that hillock, and 
 fight each other for possession of it, and find hap- 
 piness in perching on it. The mountaineering 
 habits of their remote ancestors find vent in this. 
 
 As God's sheep we also belong to the hills. We 
 are native to a higher level than that on which we 
 find ourselves, and all that is best in us yearns for 
 that level. In our noblest moments we have 
 glimpses of it, and we know that there the pulse 
 beats more strongly, and we breathe quicker and 
 more joyfully, than in the damps and mists of the 
 lower plains of life. Like the lambs, we climb 
 joyfully any petty hillock that suggests our right- 
 ful height. Even our worldly ambitions are often 
 an expression of our restlessnesss on the plains, 
 and our eagerness for what corresponds to our 
 origin on the heights, however mistaken the means 
 we use for this. 
 
 II. As the sheep comes from a level on which 
 mud and mire are unknown, it is a clean animal. 
 On the plains it often falls into the mire, but it 
 
46 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 never stays in it. It always struggles to be out 
 of it and to be clean again. The pig belongs to 
 the lower level, and has no dislike to mud and 
 mire. It enjoys them, and returns to its wallow- 
 ing, if you clean it (II Peter ii : 22). 
 
 As God's sheep we yearn for cleanness. We 
 also may fall into the mire of sin and uncleanness, 
 but we find no rest there. We struggle to get out 
 of the filth, and long to be clean again, as did 
 David, when he wrote the Fifty-first Psalm : — 
 
 Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: 
 Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 
 
 He was badly defiled when he wrote that, hav- 
 ing fallen into two of the worst sins a man can be 
 guilty of. But by the help of God's Spirit he was 
 taught the way and the speech of a true repent- 
 ance, and has been teaching these to the world 
 ever since. An American poet, the Rev. John B. 
 Tabb, gives expression to this truth in a poem he 
 calls "The Difference" : — 
 
 Unc' Si, de Holy Bible say, 
 
 In speakin' ob de jus', 
 Dat he do fall sebben times a day: 
 
 Now, how's de sinner wuss? 
 
 Well, chile, de slip may come to all; 
 
 But den de diffe'nce foller, — 
 For ef you watch him when he fall, 
 
 De jus' man do not waller. 
 
SHEEP 47 
 
 III. The sheep, as a mountain animal, found 
 safety on those craggy heights, and escaped from 
 its foes by the swiftness of its leap from rock to 
 rock. When brought down to the plains it leaves 
 behind it its means of safety, and becomes the most 
 helpless and defenseless of animals. It has 
 almost no courage, no means of swift flight, and 
 generally no weapon of defense. It must find its 
 safety in the shepherd's care for it ; and he must be 
 one who takes all the risks for it, even to laying 
 down his life for it if need arise. 
 
 God does not pay us the compliment of saying 
 we are either wise or resourceful, when he calls us 
 his sheep. He knows we are always in peril on 
 the lower levels of life, and must lift up our eyes 
 to the hills to seek our safety. We must find it in 
 him who came down to take us into his care, and to 
 lay down his life for his sheep. 
 
 "Of all the sheep that are fed on earth," says 
 Frederick Pease, "Christ's sheep are the most 
 simple. Always losing themselves; doing little 
 else in this world but lose themselves ; never find- 
 ing themselves ; always found by Some One else ; 
 getting perpetually into sloughs, and snows, and 
 bramble thickets; like to die there, but for their 
 Shepherd, who is forever finding them and bear- 
 ing them back, with torn fleeces, and eyes full of 
 fear." 
 
48 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 IV. It was from the heights that the sheep 
 brought the habit of following its leader. On the 
 hills the leader must see for all, and if any do not 
 jump where he does, they are likely to go headlong 
 down some chasm. So if you hold a stick before 
 the bellwether, and make him jump it, every sheep 
 in the flock will jump when it comes to that spot, 
 even though the stick has been taken away. 
 "Like a flock of sheep," has become a proverbial 
 expression for the way in which a crowd or mob 
 of men do just as their leaders do, without any 
 thought of their own. A class of little girls were 
 asked, "If there are six sheep resting under a wall, 
 and one of them gets up and jumps over it, how 
 many will be left?" Most of them said there 
 would be five left, but one girl, a farmer's daugh- 
 ter, said : "There will be none left. If one goes, 
 all the rest will follow." 
 
 In those also whom God calls his sheep there is 
 the instinct to seek a leader and to follow him. It 
 often leads to perverse and foolish choices of a 
 leader. It makes us run after quacks and mis- 
 leaders, if we have not found the right Master. 
 Some sort of master we must have. We were not 
 born to be masterless and independent beings. "It 
 is always a choice of masters," says Phillips 
 Brooks, "to which Christ is urging men. It is not 
 by striking off allegiance, but by finding your true 
 
SHEEP 49 
 
 Lord, and serving him with a complete submis- 
 sion, that you escape from slavery." Some one 
 we must serve and follow, and we often show it 
 by submitting to a yoke which is bondage. ''Other 
 lords have had dominion over us," because our 
 hearts craved the true, wise, liberating leadership 
 of the True Shepherd, who goes before his sheep 
 and calls them by name. 
 
 But it is to no blind following that he calls men 
 as his sheep. They are children of light, and of 
 the day, and are called upon to judge of them- 
 selves what is right (Luke xii:57). What he 
 asks of us is not thoughtless acquiescence in au- 
 thority or tradition, but the roused and active ex- 
 ercise of our powers of intelligence, in the as- 
 surance that the more men think the more they will 
 thank — the more they use their powers of discrim- 
 ination, the more they will discern the truth of 
 his claims to their allegiance. The Scriptures, as 
 Coleridge says, distinguish themselves from all 
 other books which claim to disclose the mind of 
 God to men by the frequency and the urgency with 
 which they call upon us to exercise our powers of 
 thought, and by their assurance that this will bring 
 us not to denial or rejection of the truth, but to 
 acceptance of it. 
 
IV 
 FOOD 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 FOOD 
 
 In many if not most of the forms of worship 
 known to us, food holds a place, through some 
 sort of feast being recognized as a symbol of the 
 relation between the worshiper and the object of 
 his worship. In most cases this is a feast in which 
 they both partake, and in which the deity accepts 
 the relation of host and protector to his guest, 
 with all that belongs to the obligations of hos- 
 pitality. He is thus pledged to a perpetual good 
 will and helpfulness. Commonly, the matter of 
 the feast is a sacrifice, first given to the god and his 
 official representatives, and divided among all 
 concerned according to recognized rules. An at- 
 tempt has been made to explain in this way the 
 sacrifices and feasts of the Mosaic system. But 
 this is to misconceive the biblical conception of the 
 relation of Jehovah to his covenant people. That 
 relation is strictly conditioned upon their ob- 
 servance of his law, and has nothing of the abso- 
 lute character of the obligations existing between 
 either kinsman and kinsman, or between host and 
 guest. 
 
 In the Mosaic law feasts hold a very outstand- 
 
 53 
 
54 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 ing place. Three great feasts every year drew the 
 people of all parts of the land to the center of the 
 nation's worship, but it was in that of the pass- 
 over that the people's feeding upon a sacrifice was 
 the central fact. It was a symbolic statement of 
 the truth that the life of the human spirit is as de- 
 pendent upon what it gets from God, as are the 
 life, health, and growth of the human body upon 
 natural food. Yet there are few passages in the 
 Old Testament in which this is brought into clear 
 view. In the Thirty-fourth Psalm the exhorta- 
 tion is found : — 
 
 Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good: 
 Blessed is the man that taketh refuge in him. 
 
 And the prophet Amos (viii: ii) says, "Behold, 
 the days come, saith the Lord Jehovah, that I will 
 send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, 
 nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of 
 Jehovah." 
 
 It is in the New Testament that not only is food 
 used symbolically, but the truth that food in one 
 of the great parables of God is insisted upon. It 
 is especially in the sixth chapter of the Fourth 
 Gospel that our Lord does this, by presenting the 
 spiritual reality to which it corresponds. 
 
 But let me observe first of all that our Lord 
 seemed to find an especial pleasure in the feasts of 
 
FOOD 55 
 
 his countrymen, and not only in their solemn reli- 
 gious festivals, but in their social feasts, to which 
 neighbor invited neighbor. He seems to have 
 thought these the most innocent of their social 
 usages, and the best fitted to develop in them the 
 generosity, the courtesy, and the cheerfulness 
 which became the children of the kingdom. While 
 the rest of their life was based upon the Mammon- 
 ite principle of "nothing for nothing," their feasts 
 were given and not purchased, and therefore like 
 the grand generosity of their Father in heaven. 
 While elsewhere they stood upon their rights, and 
 made the most of their claims upon others, those 
 who came to a feast in the spirit of it would be 
 thinking more of others than of themselves. In 
 the fourteenth chapter of the Third Gospel he 
 holds up the ideal of feast-making and feast-tak- 
 ing, and contrasts with this the self-seeking which 
 spoils the feast, the rivalry which would convert 
 it into an exchange of favors, and the joyless, 
 worldly spirit which would put feasting out of life, 
 and would substitute the enjoyment of personal 
 possessions in its place. I am not speaking here 
 of the spiritual significance of the teachings of 
 that chapter, but of their social bearings. 
 
 The next thing we have to notice is that when he 
 came to establish the two symbols or sacraments of 
 his kingdom, as he took one of them from the 
 
56 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 purifications of the Old Testament, so he took the 
 other from its feasts. In each case, he takes an 
 immemorial and almost universal usage, in which 
 are employed the simplest elements of our human 
 life, and sets them in such new associations, and 
 surrounds them with such new sanctities, that they 
 become new things to us. He could be original 
 without affecting novelty. 
 
 Luther rightly says that the sixth chapter of 
 John does not speak of the Lord's Supper, but of 
 that of which the Lord's Supper speaks. It pre- 
 sents to us the mystery of spiritual nutrition, in 
 its parallel to the mystery of natural nutrition. 
 For both are mysterious, and not one alone. We 
 can trace the steps by which food is digested into 
 chyle, and chyle is transformed into blood, and 
 blood in its circulation through vein and artery re- 
 places the waste caused by every exertion of our 
 bodily powers. But to know these steps is not to 
 know how the vital force transforms dead sub- 
 stance into living tissue. 
 
 How can the mute unconscious bread 
 
 Become the living tongue, 
 And nerves, through which our pleasures spread, 
 
 And which by pain are wrung? 
 
 Can lifeless water help to form 
 
 The living, leaping blood. 
 Whose gentle flow, in passion's storm 
 
 Becomes a ruffled flood? 
 
FOOD 57 
 
 Thomas Toke Lynch writes in "The Rivulet." We 
 can escape all sense of the wonder in this by dull- 
 ness of mind, or through never giving it thought ; 
 but otherwise we must feel that we are in the 
 presence of a mystery in our daily bread. 
 
 Our Lord in the synagogue of Capernaum in- 
 sists on the spiritual process, to which our daily 
 bread corresponds. There are three steps in 
 his presentation of it: (i) That he, the Son of 
 man, can give those who hear him bread which 
 will endure unto everlasting life, whereas the 
 natural bread perishes in our use of it. (2) 
 That he himself is the bread, which comes down 
 from heaven for the life of the world. (3) That 
 this bread of life is his flesh, and his blood; 
 that is, his humanity as the Son of man, 
 in which the spirits of men are to find their 
 nourishment as spirits, unto a life everlasting. 
 It is not his example, or his teaching, or his in- 
 fluence, which is the spiritual food of men, but 
 himself. It is through a union with him, as 
 close and appropriating as that which their bodies 
 sustain to their food, that they are nourished 
 into spiritual life, health, and growth. 
 
 1. The first point in the parable of food is 
 that it teaches us the dependence of man. We 
 are not little gods, to stand alone and supply our 
 own strength. We are so constructed that our 
 
58 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 bodies are undergoing a constant destruction 
 and renewal. Every act, every thought, every 
 emotion, works to the destruction of animal tis- 
 sues, leaving an effete matter, which is elimi- 
 nated by various organs, and through appropriate 
 channels. If this elimination were not accom- 
 panied by a replacement of what is lost, we 
 should perish of exhaustion. When some or- 
 ganic failure makes the replacement impossible 
 or insufficient, we waste away through innutri- 
 tion, and our bodies die. To our ordinary con- 
 sciousness our bodies are permanent solidities. 
 They are, however, in a state of flux, like a 
 river, whose bed would be left empty if the 
 onflow of its waters were not replaced by a con- 
 stantly fresh supply. It is from the world with- 
 out us and beneath us that we are constantly 
 replacing our bodies in the shape of food. 
 
 Unlike our bodies, our spirits are not built up 
 of separate particles which can be destroyed and 
 replaced. But in their case also, constant nutri- 
 tion is required to their true life and growth. 
 We live only by the reception of life from the 
 Son of man. He is made unto us wisdom, and 
 righteousness, and sanctification, and redemp- 
 tion, and power, and whatever else our spirits 
 call for. We have none of these things of our 
 own, but only a capacity to receive them from 
 
FOOD 59 
 
 the Son of man. From him come our faith to 
 grasp, our strength to resist, our wisdom to 
 guide our lives. We have these only by our 
 incessantly receiving them. 
 
 "To keep the lamp alive 
 
 With oil we fill the bowl; 
 'Tis water makes the willow thrive, 
 And grace that feeds the soul. 
 
 "Man's wisdom is to seek 
 His strength in God alone; 
 And e'en an angel would be weak 
 Who trusted in his own. 
 
 "Retreat beneath his wings, 
 And in his grace confide ! 
 This more exalts the King of kings 
 Than all your works beside. 
 
 "In Jesus is our store; 
 
 Grace issues from his throne; 
 Whoever says, T want no more,' 
 Confesses he has none." 
 
 II. The fact that we are hungry when we 
 have not been fed at the usual or right time is 
 a part of the parable. Natural hunger is a benefi- 
 cent arrangement. The human race would 
 perish but for hunger, which impresses upon us" 
 painfully the necessity of replacing the waste of 
 our bodies. Without it we easily might carry 
 our abstinence to a point from which there would 
 be no recovery. 
 
6o NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 There is the same beneficence in the hunger 
 of the human spirit for God. We can still and 
 silence it for a time. The prodigal did so, when 
 he was busy with his waste of his substance; 
 but there arose a mighty famine in that land, 
 and it reached him as well as others. He flew 
 for help to man, and found only degradation 
 and disappointment. He envied the very swine 
 their fullness and their satisfaction, but could not 
 share it. He could not, because he was a son, 
 with a father's house in the distance, and plenty 
 of bread for him there if he would seek it. When 
 he came to himself, after being beside himself, 
 that is insane, he did seek it, and found it. 
 
 The essential misery and unrest of a godless 
 life is but the hunger of a disinherited spirit for 
 the bread at the Father's table. Even the par- 
 oxysms of men's sinning are, sometimes at least, 
 proof of their failure to find true satisfaction 
 in life. It is our grandeur, as it is our pain, 
 that our hearts are too large for the whole world 
 to fill them, and that only the bread that comes 
 down from heaven for the life of the world can 
 do so. As Carl Spencer says : — 
 
 Whoso the downward paths hath trod, 
 The wrecks of human life to scan, 
 Must write, "This creature, being man, 
 
 Was ruined having less than God." 
 
FOOD 6i 
 
 But hunger is not always the paroxysm of 
 starvation. It is the daily and pleasant experi- 
 ence of wholesome natures. The saint hungers 
 after God as well as the sinner, but with no 
 despairing anguish. It is the preparation for 
 a fresh enjoyment of what is always within 
 the reach of his faith. And as the absence 
 of natural hunger before we partake of food 
 is a proof of inferior vitality, so is it in the 
 spiritual life. "Blessed are they that hunger 
 and thirst after righteousness : for they shall 
 be filled." On the other hand, there is a 
 false satiety, a self-satisfaction with what we 
 are, which was the sin of the Pharisees : 
 ''Woe unto you, ye that are full! for ye shall 
 hunger." 
 
 III. This parable of nutrition is like all the 
 rest in that it does not 'Svalk on all fours." The 
 correspondence between the two kinds is not com- 
 plete and absolute. The body is nourished on 
 what is lower than itself, and accomplishes this 
 by assimilating its food to itself. We use for 
 this only impersonal, selfless things, which we 
 may treat as means to our ends. The horror of 
 cannibalism is common to all races which have 
 risen to the point of discerning what human per- 
 sonality means, and grows out of the fact that 
 the victim is a personal self equally with us. 
 
62 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Those races which ascribe selfhood to animals 
 have a horror of eating them. 
 
 The human spirit, on the contrary, feeds only 
 upon what is above itself; but by the law that 
 the higher assimilates the lower, it is assimilated 
 to its food. "He that eateth my flesh," says the 
 Saviour, "and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
 life; and I will raise him up at the last day . . . 
 He . . . abideth in me, and I in him. As the 
 living Father sent me, and I live because of the 
 Father ; so he that eateth me, he also shall live be- 
 cause of me." This great saying has been fulfilled 
 in millions of lives, in that they have been fed, 
 nourished, and comforted out of this one life. We 
 can see in a wooden fashion what the intercourse 
 between man and man may attain to. We have 
 glimpses of the possibility of two human spirits 
 almost transcending the limits which inclose per- 
 sonality, and living in and for each other. Jesus 
 calmly says, "Abide in me, and I in you!" and 
 although we know not what it means or how it 
 is possible, we discover that it is the most real of 
 human experiences. 
 
 IV. With the exception of a few savage races, 
 mankind are agreed in making mealtimes occa- 
 sions of social reunion, of at least the family. It 
 has been shown that our Saviour gave his ap- 
 proval to this aspect of the social life of Judaea, in 
 
FOOD 63 
 
 his presence at their feasts, his suggesting the 
 finest way of keeping them, and his use of them in 
 his parables as symbols of the kingdom of God. 
 So in the second great sacrament of the church, he 
 bids his people come together for a social feast, 
 and every direction he gives with regard to its 
 proper observance is addressed to them in 
 the plural. *Take, eat . . . Do this in re- 
 membrance of me . . . Drink ye all of it." 
 He speaks to them as a Christian congregation, 
 and the apostle quotes to the congregation in 
 Corinth those very directions, as applying to them 
 also. Not one person present at the supper is 
 treated as having no share or interest in it, and 
 its observance by one or two communicants in the 
 presence of a congregation is a palpable subver- 
 sion of its meaning and purpose. 
 
 To eat with any one implies good feeling 
 toward him, according to the usage of the East, 
 in which the Bible was written. The Psalmist 
 ( Psalm xli : 9) , makes his complaint : — 
 
 Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, 
 
 Who did eat of my bread, 
 
 Hath lifted up his heel against me. 
 
 Especially the eastern host shows a marked good 
 will by singling out a guest, to whom he will give 
 some favorite morsel. So our Lord did with 
 
64 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Judas, giving him the sop which he had dipped in 
 the dish; but on his receiving it, "Satan entered 
 into him." 
 
 Both these points are applicable to the Lord's 
 Supper. It is a social feast, to be observed by 
 all the Christians present, and not by a few. It is 
 a feast of charity, to which we are to come in 
 good will to all men, and especially those who sit 
 at meat with us. It is the Lord's Supper, and he 
 is present as the host; and we, in accepting his 
 invitation, profess that we believe him our friend, 
 and that we are determined to be his friends. He 
 is not present "in, with, or under" the elements. 
 Neither does he confer in this feast any grace or 
 benefit which he withholds at other times and on 
 other occasions. The great mystery of eating his 
 flesh, and drinking his blood, is not confined to the 
 sacrament. It was shared by myriads who lived 
 before his Incarnation, as by the Psalmist king, 
 who wrote : — 
 
 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine 
 
 enemies : 
 Thou hast anointed my head with oil; 
 My cup runneth over. 
 
 But the sacrament is an occasion when the 
 Lord "keeps tryst" with his people. He never is 
 absent when the two or three gather in his name. 
 
FOOD 6S 
 
 But he aims at making us feel and realize his be- 
 ing with us at this feast, and he has chosen the 
 elements and the acts which will aid us in this. 
 Sense weighs heavily against faith at other times, 
 even in the worship of God. In this service, it is 
 enlisted on the side of faith. The bread and the cup 
 are there, and we behold them, knowing that in 
 every year since he sat down with the apostles in 
 the upper room in Jerusalem, that bread has been 
 broken, and that wine poured out, and that he 
 has been present with every company of his peo- 
 ple who have kept the feast, and has blessed them 
 in their reception of it. And that blessing has 
 been that, while they ate of the earthly food, their 
 spirits were nourished by that which came down 
 from heaven for the life of the world. Whatever 
 they may have added to the feast as he made it at 
 the first, and whatever they may have taken away 
 from it, if they have kept the essentials, and have 
 looked to him in faith, they have found him 
 present, and have fed upon him. 
 
 His presence is not in the elements nor upon 
 an altar, but in the Christian congregation. "I 
 am in the midst of you.'' So the right posture 
 for the Christian minister is not that which turns 
 him away from the people, for in so doing he is 
 turning his back upon his divine Master, what- 
 ever may be the thing toward which he is turning. 
 
(^ NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 The shekinah, the dwelling-place of God, is 
 *'with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they 
 shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with 
 them, and be their God." 
 
V 
 TOUCH 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 TOUCH 
 
 "Touch is the sense which love employs/' It 
 means the annihilation of distance between one 
 who loves and that which he loves, so that mere 
 nearness is replaced by contact. Our sense of the 
 significance of touch finds expression in such 
 phrases as "getting into touch/' or "living in 
 touch" with people. They stand for sympathetic 
 contact, the sympathy which seeks contact, and 
 does not keep others "at arm's length." Children 
 learn it in their mothers' laps, and are never con- 
 tent to be merely near those they love without 
 actually touching them. 
 
 The Old Testament uses the word "touch" 
 mostly in an adverse sense. It stands for an 
 aggression of an enemy rather than the approach 
 of a friend. It occurs in the many prohibitions of 
 contact with unclean things and persons. It is 
 one of the forbidding terms of the Mosaic law. 
 When the apostle rebukes those who would con- 
 vert Christianity into a sort of Judaism, he 
 charges them with setting up ordinances, "Handle 
 not, nor taste, nor touch" (Colossians ii:2i). 
 
 69 
 
70 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 The only favorable sense the word has in the 
 Hebrew Scriptures is where one in authority 
 touches an inferior to confer power. So in 
 Isaiah's vision in the temple, one of the seraphim 
 flew to the prophet, and touched his mouth with a 
 live coal from the altar. Similarly, Jeremiah tells 
 us that ** Jehovah put forth his hand, and touched 
 my mouth; and Jehovah said unto me. Behold, I 
 have put my words in thy mouth." So Daniel 
 says of Gabriel, that "he touched me, and set me 
 upright. And he said. Behold, I will make thee 
 know what shall be in the latter time of the in- 
 dignation." 
 
 The spirit of the new covenant is that of near- 
 ness, while that of the old was that of distance. 
 The latter laid its emphasis upon the separateness 
 of God and man, that it might guard the elect 
 people from idolatry, and from the unseemly 
 familiarity with God which leads to idolatry and 
 even worse things.* Its lesson was the awfulness 
 
 * There is permanent need of both modes of the divine 
 disclosure. Through our human frailty we are liable to 
 lose sight of the greatness of God, in the sense of his 
 nearness and his helpfulness. It has been remarked of 
 the Japanese converts to Christianity that they are too apt 
 to think of God simply in relation to their own needs, and 
 with too little awe of his divine majesty. But, as Mr. 
 Jowett of Birmingham says, it is only through communion 
 with a great God that men become great Christians. Rev- 
 
TOUCH 71 
 
 and the transcendence of God; and that truth 
 must be learned before the world was prepared to 
 enter the next stage of its education, and learn of 
 his immanence and his nearness. 
 
 I. The Incarnation opens the new stage, and 
 its symbol is the touch by which the Son of God 
 expresses his love to men. He "lived in touch" 
 with those he came to save. He got as near to 
 them as possible, although this shocked many who 
 cherished the spirit of separation, from which the 
 Pharisees took their sectarian name. They mur- 
 mured, saying, "This man receiveth sinners, and 
 eateth with them." They said in Jericho, "He is 
 gone in to lodge with a man that is a sinner." The 
 Pharisee, in whose house the sinful woman 
 washed his feet with her tears, said to himself, 
 "This man, if he were a prophet, would have per- 
 ceived who and what manner of woman this is that 
 toucheth him, that she is a sinner." They 
 
 erence lies at the foundation of a godly character, and the 
 lack of it is one of the sins of our time. It is of reverence 
 (theosebcia) that the apostle writes that it "is profitable 
 for all things, having promise of the life which now is, 
 and of that which is to come." The word is not found 
 in any of his earlier epistles, but it occurs nine times in 
 the first to Timothy, and once in the second, and in that 
 to Titus. Did this enrichment of his vocabulary grow out 
 of experiences among his converts, such as are recorded 
 about the new Christians of Japan? 
 
72 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 thought he was breaking down the distinction 
 between good and bad among men, by failing to 
 keep the bad "at arm's length," as they did. They 
 even suspected his own holiness in seeing the com- 
 pany he kept, and applied to him such proverbs as 
 "Touch pitch and be defiled;" "Birds of a feather 
 flock together." Nor is it clear that we have the 
 right to cast stones at them, for what would we 
 have felt when we saw him accepting invitations 
 from men whose occupations we thought dis- 
 graceful and immoral, and sitting at meat with 
 men and women whose characters were un- 
 questionably bad? Would we not be afraid of 
 compromising our reputations if we did so? 
 Would we not talk of lowering the truth, or of 
 effacing the line of distinction between us and the 
 world? But he let nothing stand between him- 
 self and those he was seeking to save. 
 
 II. In the simplest and most literal way he 
 ministered by his touch to human needs. When 
 Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a great fever, 
 "he came and took her by the hand, and raised 
 her up; and the fever left her" (Mark i: 
 31). When he came to the house of Jairus, the 
 ruler of the synagogue, he stopped the noisy 
 lamentations over the dead girl, and "taking the 
 child by the hand, he saith unto her, Talitha cumi 
 . . . Damsel, I say unto thee. Arise. And 
 
TOUCH 73 
 
 Straightway the damsel rose up, and walked" 
 (Mark v: 41, 42). As he left the house of 
 Jairus, two blind men besought him to heal them. 
 **Then touched he their eyes, saying. According 
 to your faith be it done unto you. And their eyes 
 were opened" (Matthew ix:29). When they 
 brought him a deaf and dumb man in the coasts of 
 Decapolis, *'he took him aside from the multitude 
 privately, and put his fingers into his ears . . . 
 and touched his tongue . . . and saith unto hnn, 
 Ephphatha, that is. Be opened. And his ears 
 were opened and the bound of his tongue was 
 loosed, and he spake plain" (Mark vii: 32-35). 
 At Bethsaida, a blind man was brought to him, 
 "and when he had spit on his eyes, he laid his 
 hands upon him," and gave him sight ( Mark viii : 
 23). As he came down from the Transfigura- 
 tion, they brought him the demoniac boy, for 
 whom his disciples could do nothing, and the evil 
 spirit rent the boy until "the more part said. He 
 is dead. And Jesus took him by the hand, and 
 raised him up; and he arose" (Mark ix: 26, 27). 
 When Peter smote off the ear of Malchus, serv- 
 ant to the high priest, Jesus "touched his ear, 
 and healed him" (Luke xxii:5i). 
 
 In none of these cases, so far as man can judge, 
 was it necessary for him to touch those he healed. 
 He did fully as much in other cases, where he did 
 
74 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 not use his hands in this way, and in some cases 
 he healed those who were at a distance (Matthew 
 viii : 13). It seems to have been as the expression 
 of his sympathy with the sufferers that he touched 
 them, just as we lay our hands on the shoulders 
 of our friends when we want to speak to them out 
 of our hearts. 
 
 Especially noteworthy are two cases, in which 
 he incurred ceremonial defilement by this use of 
 his hands. One is that of the son of the widow of 
 Nain : "He came nigh and touched the bier" (Luke 
 vii: 14), although he thus insured legal defilement 
 (Numbers xix: 11), for having to do with a 
 dead body. More striking is his healing of the 
 leper, as he came down from the mountain of the 
 great sermon: "He stretched forth his hand, 
 and touched him'* (Matthew viii 13), although 
 the law of Moses shut the leper out from all con- 
 tact with other men (Leviticus xiii:45), ^^^ ^^ 
 break this law was to incur uncleanness. Never 
 shall I forget hearing Dr. Alexander Maclaren 
 preach on this miracle : "Why did He touch him, 
 even before he healed him? Because he saw 
 that the first need of that poor soul, shut off for 
 years from his kind, was sympathy — that, even 
 before healing. He must have been a loathsome 
 sight, and probably more so to our Lord's senses 
 than to those of other men. But he put forth his 
 
TOUCH 75 
 
 hand and touched him, as the expression of his 
 pity and sympathy. And was not that what he 
 did in the Incarnation itself, drawing near to us in 
 our utter defilement, taking hold of us, as he did 
 of that poor leper, putting forth that gracious and 
 mighty hand to touch us ?" 
 
 III. This view is confirmed by his use of his 
 hands for other gracious purposes than healing. 
 When the mothers brought the little children to 
 him, ''he took them in his arms, and blessed them, 
 laying his hands upon them" (Mark x: i6). It 
 was a visible expression of that interest in child- 
 hood, and love of children, which is notable in the 
 gospel story. His every word about them, except 
 perhaps his rebuking parable about the children 
 who would not play at either wedding or funeral 
 (Matthew xi: 17), is one of joyful affection. 
 
 Along with this in spiritual beauty is the scene 
 in the upper room, where he ate the passover with 
 his disciples. When they came in, there were 
 the ewer full of water, the towel, and the basin. It 
 was some one's work to wash the feet of the com- 
 pany from the dust of the highway, if they were 
 to enjoy the feast without distraction; but none 
 of them would. One looked up at the ceiling, 
 and another out of the window, pretending they 
 did not see the ewer and the basin. They made 
 for their places at the table, each of them thinking 
 
'](i NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 it beneath his dignity to stoop to such a service, 
 and finding the best reasons why some other of 
 the Twelve should do it. Then the Master arose, 
 poured the water into the basin, and girded him- 
 self with the towel, and stooped to serve them 
 with the loving touch of a cleansing hand. It 
 was the truest humility, which means getting 
 down to the ground (humus) because God has 
 something for one to do there that cannot be done 
 anywhere else. 
 
 IV. As love evokes love in return, so our 
 Lord's touch encouraged others to touch him. In 
 Galilee, "wheresoever he entered, into villages, or 
 cities, or into the country, they laid the sick in the 
 market-places, and besought him that they might 
 touch if it were but the border of his garment : and 
 as many as touched him were made whole" (Mark 
 vi:56; Matthew xiv:36). An outstanding in- 
 stance of this is the woman who came behind, him 
 in the throng and touched the hem of his garment, 
 and was healed of the disease which had been 
 weakening and impoverishing her for twelve 
 years. But it was out of himself, and not out of 
 the garment, that the power had passed which 
 wrought the cure. The hand got nothing, and 
 the garment gave nothing, but her faith had 
 brought her into contact with the Saviour, and 
 thus made her whole. 
 
TOUCH n 
 
 Apart from demands upon his power to heal, 
 his friends show their affection by touching him. 
 The woman which was a sinner breaks through 
 the bonds of pharisaic propriety and follows him 
 into the house of Simon, the Pharisee, "and stand- 
 ing behind at his feet, weeping, she began to wet 
 his feet with her tears, and wiped them with 
 the hair of her head, and kissed his feet" (Luke 
 vii:38). Dr. Melanchthon W. Stryker suggests 
 that there is as much of affection as of doubt in the 
 demand of the apostle Thomas, "Except I shall 
 see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my 
 finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand 
 into his side, I will not believe" (John xx:25). 
 He thinks this was an expression of his sincere 
 love for the Master, which asked for the touch that 
 is more intimate than sight. May we not say 
 that the substance of the speech shows doubt, but 
 the form of it affection? "That disciple, whom 
 Jesus loved" especially, is the evangelist who re- 
 cords for us the saying of Thomas, and it recalls 
 his own language in the opening words of his 
 great epistle : "That which was from the begin- 
 ning, that which we have heard, that which we 
 have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, 
 and our hands handled, concerning the Word 
 of life . . . declare we unto you also, that ye 
 also may have fellowship with us: yea, and our 
 
78 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 V. When our Lord is about to pass from the 
 region of sense to that of faith, he assures his peo- 
 ple that they are to lose nothing by the change. 
 He will still be "in touch with them." The 
 Comforter is not to take his place, but to take 
 what is his and make it known to them. What 
 otherwise might have been mere facts of history 
 in their memories, are to become the present, liv- 
 ing truths of their Christian experience, and not 
 theirs only, but of all who believe on him to the 
 end of time. For the Spirit's work is to make 
 Jesus Christ more real to us than he was to those 
 who saw his works and heard him speak. 
 Through his ministry, those years of our Lord's 
 ministry, with his sacrificial death and triumphant 
 resurrection, become a part of all true Christians' 
 lives. 
 
 The gospel calls upon us to "live in touch" with 
 the God whom Jesus reveals as his Father and 
 ours. We are not called to submission to a dis- 
 tant and unlovable deity, like the Allah of the 
 Moslem ; nor to a chilly adoration of a philosophic 
 absolute, who can be described only in negative 
 terms; nor to the worship of an infinite rabbi, 
 such as the later Jewish theology presents. We 
 are brought to a living communion with a gracious 
 
TOUCH 79 
 
 Friend and Father, whose love to us is reflected 
 in the affection of all who have been dearest and 
 kindest to us among men. He is nearer to us 
 than these could be, nearer than our very selves. 
 As F. W. Faber says, '*God never is so far off as 
 only to be near." No language that does not break 
 the bounds of our finite personality is too strong 
 to express our closeness to him "in him we 
 live, and move, and have our being." 
 
 It is the Incarnation which makes this intel- 
 ligible to us. The Old Testament presents God 
 and man in contrast and antithesis, as many 
 Christians still speak of them, though not in 
 Christian fashion. Such language was necessary 
 in the lower classes of God's great school, because 
 any other would have led men to error and idol- 
 atry. It is not without its uses still, when the 
 thought of the nearness of God obscures his 
 awfulness to us. But God after speakuig ''to 
 the fathers in the prophets in many parts and in 
 many manners, hath in the end of the day^ 
 spoken unto us in his Son" (Hebrews i: i, 2) 
 fully and clearly; and that not so much by what 
 the Son said, as by what the Son is. In him our 
 human nature is exhibited in its true character, 
 that which was in the thought of God when he 
 said, "Let us make man in our own image." Our 
 humanity stands up in Jesus Christ, a thing pure. 
 
8o NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 spotless, and splendid; and it is in him that we 
 are to see and estimate it, and to be changed to 
 that image by the vision and the fellowship (II 
 Corinthians iii:i8). We are to regard as in- 
 human all that falls below "the measure of the 
 stature of the fullness of Christ." It is not true 
 that "to err is human;" nor should we speak of 
 "the infirmities of human nature," but with 
 Paul, of the infirmity of our flesh ; that is, of the 
 perversion of our human nature by sin. 
 
 VI. Working "in touch" is the method of the 
 kingdom of God. Jesus shrank from no con- 
 tact with the men he sought to save, although he 
 must have felt their degradation as we never can 
 feel it. There was no "submerged tenth" too 
 deeply sunk for him to follow it into the depths, 
 that he might lift it up to goodness and forgive- 
 ness. Men have tried to do his work while stand- 
 ing afar from those they sought to benefit ; but to 
 little result. The greatest who have followed in 
 his footsteps, have followed him in this as in other 
 things. The Moravians who offered to become 
 slaves, that they might be allowed to reach the 
 negro slaves in the West Indies, and who made 
 their abode among the lepers, knowing what that 
 must end in, that they might reach that class, 
 were illustrations of his method, and of his un- 
 resting pity for lost men. 
 
TOUCH 8i 
 
 Our own generation has seen a notable amount 
 of return to his method, even among those who 
 are not working in his name. Social reformers 
 are discovering that they can do little good for 
 people of any sort, while they hold them at arm's 
 length. "I have learned," says a worker in one 
 of the University settlements, "that you can get 
 access to the people who need you only by living 
 with them. They will not come to you ; but Jew 
 and Gentile will make you welcome if you come to 
 them. Our meetings for their benefit are a 
 failure. Our personal intercourse with them, 
 man to man, has been promising great good. It 
 is of no use to come once or twice to see them; 
 you must live with them, if you are to do anything 
 for them." 
 
 So Thomas Chalmers gave up his wealthy par- 
 ish in Glasgow, and took charge of one in the 
 "wynds," that he might get near to the poor, and 
 find some way of relieving their wants without 
 pauperizing them by either public and unloving 
 assistance, or heedless giving! So Caroline Hill 
 took charge of the wretched court in East Lon- 
 don, which rarely had missed mention for a day 
 in the police reports, and by living among its 
 people was able to change it into a place of 
 sobriety, thrift, and honesty. "Not alms but a 
 friend," is the motto of the new charity, which 
 
82 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Chalmers began, and which Miss Hill revived. 
 The man or woman who would help the poor must 
 give himself to them. Anything short of that is 
 cheap, and likely to be mischievous. The touch 
 of a loving hand may be worth more than all the 
 "gifts with which you may fill it. 
 
 We are learning to cease patronage of the poor, 
 and to follow Jesus Christ in his ministry of touch 
 and sympathy. The love which does not shrink 
 from contact with what often must be re- 
 pulsive, is that which follows in his foot- 
 steps, and interprets him to men. But 
 the love must be there. The loveless gift, as 
 Chalmers said, degrades the recipient. Nor is 
 anything more repulsive to the poor than to be 
 approached with insincere phrases, and shallow 
 professions of interest in them and their needs. 
 No eyes are keener than those which have been 
 sharpened by want, and they have learned to meet 
 insincerity with insincerity. None who approach 
 them in the spirit of the divine Master need fear 
 being misconstrued or repelled. 
 
VI 
 SOWING AND REAPING 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 SOWING AND REAPING 
 
 It was not until the Hebrew people came into 
 possession of the land promised to their fathers, 
 that they were able to take up the tillage of the 
 soil as the means of their support. From Abra- 
 ham to Joshua, a period of at least five centuries, 
 they were exclusively shepherds, and generally 
 without any settled habitation. The conquest of 
 Palestine enabled them to become farmers, and 
 lay aside their nomadic habits. The change was 
 much greater than appears on the surface of 
 things. The life of the shepherd was one of hard- 
 ship and exposure, through want of homes and 
 their equipment. It was one of constant peril, as 
 it admitted of no permanent defense against 
 marauders. It was a life of great monotony, 
 without interruption of routine except at lambing 
 and shearing time. It was commonly a life of 
 painful solitude, and thus exposed to the melan- 
 choly which isolation from other men breeds. 
 
 The life of the ancient farmer was not that of 
 a man living in a farmhouse apart, but that of a 
 resident in a walled city, who went out to till his 
 
 85 
 
86 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 fields. It was therefore more wholesome for the 
 mind, and of greater safety, as well as brightened 
 by closer social association. The work was more 
 varied, and the rest more cheerful. Time could 
 be found for festivals, and especially for a weekly 
 Sabbath, such as the shepherd never knew, be- 
 cause his work must be the same for every day of 
 the week. Hence the silence of the Old Testa- 
 ment as to the observance of the Sabbath before 
 Moses and the giving of the law. The more 
 strenuous employments of the new age and its 
 more rapid societary movement demanded the 
 alternations of rest; and this need has grown 
 greater with every century since that time. 
 
 By becoming farmers, the Hebrew people moved 
 to a higher level of the world's social develop- 
 ment, while those peoples that did not make the 
 change remained on a lower. The difference 
 grew originally out of a higher faith in the fixed 
 laws which govern the world, and especially the 
 law that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
 also reap." It is difficult for us, after millen- 
 niums of uniform experience, to realize the un- 
 certainty with which primitive man must have 
 faced this problem of sowing and reaping. He 
 would not have found it incredible, if told by any 
 one claiming knowledge of the matter, that the 
 sowing of wheat would produce a crop of spelt or 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 87 
 
 tares, or no crop whatever. The races which 
 found it hard to reach any certainty, unless 
 driven on by necessity, clung to more palpable 
 ways of getting their food by hunting and fish- 
 ing, while others got as far as keeping sheep or 
 cattle. In the Bible story, Esau is the type of the 
 distrustful races; while Jacob, with his crop of 
 red lentils, stands for those which had courage to 
 risk their seed in sowing, in the faith that the har- 
 vest would be of the same kind, and abundant 
 enough to repay the risk. 
 
 It is in the Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of the 
 ancient Persians, that the antagonism of the two 
 kinds of peoples comes out most clearly. The 
 Persian was a tiller of the soil, and regarded it as 
 a sacred thing, not to be profaned by the burial of 
 corpses in it, while it repaid this reverence by the 
 gifts of the harvest. Their savage neighbors, 
 the Turanians, to the north of Persia, despised 
 agriculture, and the Zend-Avesta makes the con- 
 trast between the two modes of life almost identi- 
 cal with the distinction between good and bad 
 men. The Turanian justified this by his readi- 
 ness to plunder the harvest-fields of his indus- 
 trious neighbors. A similar situation existed in 
 America before the Spanish conquests. The peo- 
 ple of the warmer parts of the continent had been 
 driven by necessity to the cultivation of maize and 
 
88 NATURE. THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 manioc. Their harvests were plundered by the 
 more savage tribes to the north, who also killed or 
 enslaved the cultivators. The Navajos named the 
 months of their calendar from the animal they 
 most hunted in each, and one was "Mexican 
 month." 
 
 In the long run, the tillers of the soil have come 
 to the front as the masters of the world, because 
 of their wealth, their social coherence, and their 
 trained intelligence. The taproot of their suc- 
 cess was their faith in the beneficent order which 
 controls the world. They have learned also that 
 the same great law of the harvest pervades the 
 whole of human life. The Greek poet Hesiod, 
 the Latin orator Cicero, and the Hebrew apostle 
 Paul express this in almost identical terms. They 
 apply to the moral life of men the saying, "A man 
 reaps as he sows," meaning that we here touch a 
 natural law, which has its exact parallel in the 
 life of man as a responsible being. 
 
 The Scriptures recognize a double cor- 
 respondence here. The Old Testament, for the 
 most part, finds this in the reaping of what we 
 sow in the conduct of our lives. The New Testa- 
 ment applies the analogy more commonly to the 
 labors of our Master and his servants for the wel- 
 fare of mankind. Let us look at some of the as- 
 pects of this great parable. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 89 
 
 I. God and man work together in the tillage 
 of the soil, and the ingathering of the harvest. 
 Man avails himself of God's law of increase, by 
 which the scanty seed grows into the abundant 
 harvest, supplying seed to the sower and bread to 
 the eater. He casts himself upon the established 
 order of God in the creation, when he risks his 
 seed in the earth. However well he may plant 
 it and tend it, he cannot of himself make one grain 
 germinate, or bring forth one blade out of the 
 earth, as Luther says. Along with his faith 
 goes hope. He looks to see sunshine and rainfall 
 given in due measure, also as part of God's order. 
 
 We lose a right sense of this through the blunt- 
 ness of our perceptions. We have allowed our- 
 selves to grow used to the wonder of God's work- 
 ing in these common things, until all wonder has 
 ceased out of the world for us. We think of na- 
 ture as a big piece of machinery, which works 
 apart from the presence and will of its Creator. 
 So we find it hard to pray, as his Son bids us, 
 "Give us this day our daily bread." We have 
 allowed the constancy of its coming to hide God's 
 hand in the giving. His Son, however, never 
 took a piece of bread into his hands without bless- 
 ing the Father who gave it. There must have 
 been something distinctive in his way of doing 
 this. The two disciples did not recognize him 
 
90 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 during their walk of five miles with him to 
 Emmaus, but knew him at once when he "took the 
 bread and blessed; and breaking it he gave to 
 them." Must he not have taken it as though it 
 came right out of his Father's hand, as we also 
 should do? 
 
 Even the heathen acknowledge this truth in 
 their way. Every pantheon had a deity of the 
 harvest, who was worshiped while the crops were 
 growing, and especially when they were gathered. 
 The only native American idol which has sur- 
 vived the zeal of the Christian missionaries repre- 
 sents the Mexican goddess of the maize plant, and 
 in her honor more festivals were held than for any 
 other. The apostle therefore appealed to a uni- 
 versal belief, when he told the heathen people of 
 Lystra that the "living God, who made the heaven 
 and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is 
 . . . left not himself without witness, in that 
 he did good and gave you from heaven rains and 
 fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and 
 gladness." It is upon this truth that our coun- 
 try bases her observance of Thanksgiving day, 
 when the whole nation acknowledges God as the 
 giver of our harvests. 
 
 When we pass from the natural to the spiritual 
 order, we find this fact of man's dependence upon 
 God not less evident. We find it so, as the Old 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 91 
 
 Testament teaches, in the conduct of our Hves. 
 We are in the presence of moral laws as distinct 
 as that by which the seed germinates "after its 
 kind," and bears its own fruit. 
 
 We all, indeed, are sowing seed of some sort, 
 and thus submitting our lives to the operation of 
 the law of growth ; and we all will have a harvest 
 of some sort. It may be a bad one. We may 
 "plow iniquity, and sow trouble," and "reap the 
 same" (Job iv : 8) ; or "sow iniquity and reap 
 calamity" (Proverbs xxii : 8) ; or "sow the wind" 
 and "reap the whirlwind" (Hosea viii:/). But 
 this is more often and properly the neglect of till- 
 age, which leaves the weeds of evil to spring up 
 and possess the soil. It is not the conduct of life, 
 but throwing the reins on the neck of our animal 
 passions and our baser instincts, and bidding 
 them take us where they will. 
 
 All real conduct of life is a laying hold of 
 divine help, and working with God. It starts 
 from him, and not from ourselves. We are in- 
 deed to work out our own salvation with fear 
 and trembling, because he has worked it in, be- 
 cause he worketh in us to will and to work, for 
 his good pleasure. There can be no good in us, 
 either in germ or in fruition, which is not from 
 him. It is he who implants in our hearts that 
 incorruptible seed, which liveth and abideth, 
 
92 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 and which makes us fruitful in the virtues and 
 the activities of a Christian Hfe. Here it is that 
 Qiristianity parts company from the paganism 
 even of Hesiod and Cicero. The latter, in his 
 dialogue "On the Nature of the Gods," makes one 
 of the speakers remark that men thank the gods 
 for all sorts of external benefits — for prosperity, 
 for safety from perils, for fair children, and beau- 
 tiful houses; but that no one ever thanks the 
 gods that he is virtuous, honest, chaste, generous. 
 And quite rightly, he thinks, since a man owes 
 these to himself. Christians know that it is just 
 for these that they are most bound to give God 
 thanks. 
 
 We find this equally true, as the New Testa- 
 ment teaches it, in the spiritual harvest which is 
 gathered from efforts to do good to men. The 
 greatest and most fruitful workers have been 
 those who felt most clearly their dependence upon 
 God. *T planted," says Paul, "Apollos watered; 
 but God gave the increase. So then neither is 
 he that planteth anything, neither he that water- 
 eth; but God that giveth the increase." Man's 
 part, he says is foolishness — ''the foolishness of 
 preaching" by which God "is pleased to save them 
 that believe." 
 
 It is indeed foolishness to expect sinners to give 
 heed to a message which runs counter to all their 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 93 
 
 natural inclinations, humbles their pride, and calls 
 upon them to do what is beyond their power. It 
 is a mere waste of words unless God be in it, and 
 make men welcome what is most distasteful, and 
 enable them to believe what is incredible, and to do 
 what is impossible to flesh and blood. It is just 
 this that makes the preaching of the gospel a 
 thing apart from all other speech of man to men. 
 It is a message from God, with the assurance 
 that a divine power attends it, making it possible 
 for sinners to believe and obey it. 
 
 The human instrument, indeed, God will not 
 dispense with. "How shall they believe," says 
 the apostle, "in him whom they have not heard? 
 and how shall they hear without a preacher? and 
 how shall they preach, except they be sent ?" God 
 has committed this ministry to men, and not to 
 the angels, for the good of men. He draws us 
 "with cords of a man, with bands of love" 
 (Hosea xi:4), in speaking to us through the 
 heart and the voice of a fellow-man, just as in the 
 Incarnation he meets us as one of ourselves — 
 
 "So through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, *0 heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
 Thou hast no power nor mayest conceive of mine, 
 But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
 And thou must love me who have died for thee.' " 
 
94 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Nor is the true preacher a mere Hfeless trum- 
 pet, through which a message is sounded in our 
 ears. His fitness for the work is through the 
 training he has had from the Spirit of God. The 
 life of the Spirit in his heart gives him an entire 
 assurance of the truth he brings, a lively sense of 
 the need of those he addresses, and a yearning love 
 to reach and touch them. Thus it is made manifest 
 that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." 
 
 11. The farmer proceeds upon the conviction 
 that the law of growth will operate uniformly in 
 every case where the conditions are fairly favor- 
 able. We as a people risk hundreds of millions 
 of dollars every year upon that conviction, and 
 the labors of millions of men besides. All this is 
 risked upon something unseen, intangible, and 
 yet real. The gains of the hunter and the herds- 
 man are much more tangible from the outset, but 
 those of the farmer are greater. When Eu- 
 ropean settlement began, the entire population of 
 our country was about a quarter of a million of 
 Indians. They had all the resources of our na- 
 tional area at their disposal, but they lived mainly 
 by hunting and fishing. They suffered from 
 hunger very often, and died of famine in many 
 years. We are feeding nearly ninety millions at 
 home, and we send the food for millions across 
 the Atlantic. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 95 
 
 The spiritual law of seedtime and harvest is 
 just as certain, but we are far slower to learn its 
 truth. We even fancy sometimes that we can 
 evade it by our cleverness, although we would not 
 venture upon that with the natural law. By no 
 sort of tillage would we seek a crop of wheat 
 where we had sown only spelt or rye. 
 
 The religions of the world are in some cases 
 little else than devices to escape the law of reap- 
 ing as you have sown, by bribing the divine pow- 
 ers to show favoritism. There are erroneous 
 forms of Christian teaching or believing, which 
 have the same purpose. The notions that some 
 ritual observance, or wearing of a scapular, or 
 an emotional experience which left the life un- 
 changed, or a rigid orthodoxy of the head which 
 has nothing to do with the heart, will serve as a 
 substitute for holy living, are subtle forms of An- 
 tinomianism, which reappear in every age. The 
 apostle's doctrine as justification by faith without 
 the works of the law, in the Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians, has been as much abused in this way, and 
 wrested by the ignorant and the unsteadfast to 
 their own destruction (II Peter iii: 16), as any 
 other part of the Bible. It is, however, in this 
 very epistle that he gives us the solemn warning : 
 "Be not deceived ; God is not mocked : for what- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. 
 
96 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the 
 flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto 
 the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life." 
 God 'Vill render to every man according to his 
 works" (Romans ii : 6). "Follow after peace with 
 all men," says the Epistle to the Hebrews, ''and 
 the sanctification without which no man shall see 
 the Lord." John saw the dead before the 
 Throne, "and they were judged every man ac- 
 cording to their works." 
 
 This spiritual law commends itself to our judg- 
 ments and our consciences in the most forcible 
 way. It fits into all that we know of the universe, 
 as exactly as does the natural law of gravitation, 
 and we have just as good reason for acting upon 
 its truth. There is nothing that is either fac- 
 titious or arbitrary about it. The fruits of our 
 lives are the corresponding outcome of what we 
 have been planting and sowing in the conduct of 
 our lives; and in the nature of things they can- 
 not be otherwise. Yet no sinner ever gathers his 
 armful or barnful of thistles and darnell and wild 
 mustard without grumbling at its not being 
 wheat. 
 
 Even good men fall short here, though in a less 
 degree. Robert Bruce, the great Scottish 
 preacher, was an eminently good man. When 
 pressed to declare his full belief that the Earl of 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 97 
 
 Gowrie had made a treasonable attempt on the 
 Hfe of King James, he said they were asking of 
 him a "persuasion of the fact which he could not 
 get for the articles of his belief." "What !" said 
 Lord Kinloss, "are you not fully persuaded of 
 the articles of your belief?" "Not, my lord, as 
 I should be. If you and I were both persuaded 
 that there were a hell, we would do otherwise than 
 as we do." If we felt, at every instant of life, the 
 reality of the spiritual laws which govern life, we 
 would rise to heroic heights of obedience and en- 
 durance. Then we would be earning the praise 
 our Lord gives to the pearl-trader, who realized 
 that the one pearl was worth more than all he 
 possessed, and who acted with businesslike 
 promptness on that knowledge. And we would 
 not be falling under that sorrowful rebuke, that 
 the children of this world are wiser after their 
 sort than the children of the Light. Those go 
 to their object as straight as the bird flies, while 
 these hesitate, shilly-shally, and compromise. 
 
 III. This stern law of reaping as we sow has 
 a gracious and gospel aspect, in respect to the 
 abundance of the harvest, whether natural or 
 spiritual. Our Lord especially Insists upon this. 
 He says that the seed which fell upon good ground 
 bore fruit "thirtyfold, and sixtyfold, and a hun- 
 dredfold." May we not suppose that he had been 
 
08 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 counting the gains in a wheat ear, and saw in this 
 the beneficence of the law of growth, and a 
 prophecy of nature as to the growth of his king- 
 dom? This natural multiplication goes far be- 
 yond what we should have expected. It is in- 
 crease after a divine measure, rather than the 
 human. Our Lord sees another example of this 
 in the mustard plant, which grows from one of 
 the tiniest of seeds, but within the year mounts up 
 into quite a branchy bush, the biggest of the gar- 
 den herbs of Palestine, and affords rest and shel- 
 ter for the birds. The Talmud quotes a Rab 
 Simeon, who said he had one in his garden so 
 large that he climbed into it. A third of his illus- 
 trations is the diffusion of the morsel of leaven 
 through the six gallons of meal, which we now 
 know to be another instance of vegetable expan- 
 sion. 
 
 To the truth which these illustrate, he con- 
 stantly returns in his teaching. He tells us of the 
 surprise which awaits us, when we see the great 
 results which will oome from seemingly small 
 causes. A cup of cold water, if given in the name 
 of Christ, or even in that of a disciple, shall not 
 lose its reward. The giver may forget it, but not 
 he. Whoever makes sacrifices for Christ's sake 
 and the gospel's "shall receive a hundredfold, 
 and shall inherit eternal life." He who is 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 99 
 
 found faithful in the handHng of five talents or 
 ten, shall be called to bear rule over as many 
 cities. In the day of judgment those who minis- 
 tered to the needs of his hungry, naked, sick, or 
 imprisoned brethren, will have the same measure 
 of joy as if they had done this to himself. Thus 
 he lifts the law of growth into a very gospel of 
 growth. 
 
 His teaching is confirmed by the experiences of 
 even the life that now is. In the conduct of life 
 we are all tempted to despise the small crosses he 
 sends us, the small openings for kindness and 
 self-sacrifice the day brings us, and the petty duties 
 and burdens which fill up our humdrum exist- 
 ence. When we meet these faithfully and nobly, 
 we have our reward on a grander scale than we 
 could have expected. Burdens grow to wings, 
 crosses to crowns, faithful endurance to triumph ; 
 and from each discharge of duty we acquire the 
 power to meet the next with efficiency. ''We see 
 dimly in the present what is small and what is 
 great," as Lowell says. We are blinded by the 
 illusions of life, and take the great for the small, 
 because it is not the big. Our small victories in 
 the face of temptation are won over obstacles and 
 spiritual enemies of the highest rank, and are 
 won to the shaping of our characters, the 
 strengthening of our wills, the purification of our 
 
100 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 vision, and the increase of our faith and joy. 
 Prof. Wilham James suggests that to do each day 
 of Hfe some one thing we know we ought to do, 
 but do not want to do, would have the result of 
 making us wiser and braver men, and more fit for 
 great things if these fell to our share. 
 
 On the New Testament side of the parable, it 
 is the joy of those who work for others to have a 
 present experience of this law of increase. We 
 who teach have it in a lower sphere. Our ^*boys" 
 come back to us in their manhood and say, "I 
 never forgot what you said to us one day," and 
 go on to quote something which has escaped our 
 memories completely. Every day of earnest and 
 honest work in the schoolroom or the college class 
 reaches some with a touch which helps to shape 
 lives in the years of their plasticity. There is, 
 however, one teacher who far surpasses us in 
 this. It is she who has the first word with her 
 child, before any other can reach him, and who is 
 molding him in ways which neither she nor the 
 child can see. It will take heaven to show what 
 the work of Christian mothers has been in build- 
 ing up the kingdom, and it will be a joyful sur- 
 prise to many a mother, perhaps to all of them. 
 
 The minister of the word already shares in the 
 joy of his Lord, which is depicted in the fifteenth 
 chapter of Luke's Gospel, in the parables of the 
 
SOWING AND REAPING loi 
 
 lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. As is there 
 said, it is the joy which lights up heaven with a 
 new gladness, because a sinner has turned to God. 
 The effort the preacher puts forth is trifling in 
 comparison with the vastness of the result which 
 is achieved. As our Lord told his apostles, he is 
 but reaping where others have sown in most 
 cases. The best environment of the man's life 
 has been working toward grace. As George Her- 
 bert says : — 
 
 Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round! 
 
 Parents first season us : then schoolmasters 
 Deliver us to laws ; they send us bound 
 
 To rules of reason, holy messengers, 
 
 Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, 
 Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, 
 
 Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in. 
 Bibles laid open, millions of surprises, 
 
 Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, 
 The sound of glory ringing in our ears ; 
 
 Without, our shame; within, our consciences; 
 Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. 
 
 All these have entered into the plan of the 
 man's life, who at last is brought by the preached 
 word to submit his will to God. And with all 
 these has been the divine Sower, whose work 
 underlies every good influence which touches any 
 human life, whether effectually or not. Yet the 
 
IQ2 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 reaper, who gathers the harvest, is not the less 
 blessed. "He that reapeth receiveth wages," the 
 Lord tells his apostles, "and gathereth fruit unto 
 life eternal; that he that soweth and he that 
 reapeth may rejoice together." In his very first 
 epistle the greatest of apostolic reapers tells how 
 he thus rejoiced with his Lord. Paul writes to 
 his Thessalonian converts : "For what is our hope, 
 or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye, 
 before our Lord Jesus at his coming ? For ye are 
 our glory and our joy." 
 
 IV. Harvest is naturally and everywhere a 
 time of rejoicing. The risks of tillage being be- 
 yond man's wisdom or strength to cope with, 
 when these perils are past, men's hearts grow 
 lighter. The Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles was 
 their harvest festival, and the spirit which ani- 
 mated it finds fit expression in the Eighty-first 
 Psalm. When Isaiah would describe the deep 
 and hearty joy of the reign of the Prince of 
 Peace, he says : — 
 
 They joy before thee according to the joy of the harvest. 
 And as men rejoice when they divide the spoil, 
 
 binding together two of the situations in which 
 social joy overflows into festivity. 
 
 Who that was brought up on an old-fashioned 
 farm, will ever forget the harvest-home? The 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 103 
 
 last handful of wheat was cut with care, bound 
 with bright ribbons, and carried home by the 
 reaper to grace the fireplace in the farm-kitchen. 
 Then came the feast, at which master and men, 
 with their households, ate at one huge table. 
 After hunger and thirst were satisfied, there were 
 cheerful talk of the season just passed, merry 
 jesting about its incidents, singing of old ballads, 
 and games for the younger folk. Honest joy and 
 mirth drew all together, and if any were kept away 
 by sickness, their share was sent them. When- 
 ever I read that verse in the ninth chapter of 
 Isaiah, it takes me back to the Ulster farm of my 
 boyhood, and calls up the kind faces and warm 
 hearts which gathered at its harvest-home.* 
 
 The spiritual life, like the life of the farm, is 
 one which reaches its joys through its toils and 
 even its anxieties. It is a steady transition from 
 the sadder to the brighter side of things. **The 
 evening and the morning were the first day ;" and 
 the shadows of the one passing into the bright- 
 ness of the other have been present in every spir- 
 itual day since the first. As Lord Bacon says, 
 
 * Harvest-home is still kept in many parts of America, 
 notably in New Jersey, where the farmers of a neighbor- 
 hood unite in a common celebration. The grounds of the 
 Presbyterian Church of Dayton, N. J., have been thus used 
 for years past. 
 
I04 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 adversity is among the very promises of the New 
 Testament. It tells us of tribulations in the world 
 to be endured; of chastenings which seal us as 
 the sons of God; of reproaches for the name of 
 Christ ; of sharing in his sufferings ; of daily bear- 
 ing of our cross. Our Lord allowed his disciples 
 to cherish no delusions on this point, declaring 
 that he sent them forth "as sheep in the midst of 
 wolves," and warning them to expect at men's 
 hands no better treatment than he himself re- 
 ceived. 
 
 It is part of that intimate communion which 
 Christians have with their Lord, that they should 
 suffer in the presence of sin and shame as he did. 
 We must taste of the bitter of his cup, as well as 
 of the sweet, and learn why he was "a man of 
 sorrows, and acquainted with grief." The sight 
 of the world's evil was a burden to him at all 
 times; the vision of its shamefulness pierced his 
 heart. They who are his desire to share his 
 estimate of human life, and to "know the fellow- 
 ship of his sufferings." Paul went farther than 
 we can see our way, when he spoke of "filling up 
 that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ." 
 The saying indicates the closeness of his sym- 
 pathy with his Master. 
 
 This is one side of the Christian's experience, 
 but the Scriptures always conjoin with it the joy 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 105 
 
 of the harvest. "Blessed are ye that weep now : 
 for ye shall laugh." "Blessed are they that 
 mourn : for they shall be comforted." "Ye shall 
 be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned 
 into joy." These two notes, in this order, always 
 run through the New Testament, as describing 
 the blessedness of the saints. It is in exact har- 
 mony with them that the Christian's last expe- 
 rience in this world should be emergence through 
 the shadow of death into the light of the life 
 eternal. 
 
 The same alteration from sorrow to joy runs 
 through the life given to the service of men. Our 
 Lord went before his disciples in this experience 
 also. He knew what it was to toil in vain for the 
 spiritual elevation of those who heard him. He 
 mourned over the blindness of the cities by the 
 Galilaean lake, which saw his mighty works, but 
 did not repent. He went over Jerusalem, saying, 
 "If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the 
 things which belong unto peace! but now they 
 are hid from thine eyes." To his countrymen at 
 large he said : "Ye will not come to me that ye 
 may have life." "Few there be that find" the 
 way to life. 
 
 The success of our Lord's ministry, if meas- 
 ured by the number of the disciples he made, was 
 far from remarkable. At the end of three years 
 
io6 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 he had but a handful, and not one of them stood 
 by him in the dark hour. So has it been with 
 many of his most spiritual servants. Henry 
 Martyn toiled to small result among the Persians ; 
 Keith-Falconer sowed the good seed on stony 
 ground among the Arabs ; James Gilmour labored 
 for a lifetime among the Mongols without a con- 
 vert to show. Even those who have had marked 
 success have had to endure the heartache of pro- 
 longed failure before it came, as Robert Moffatt 
 did among the Bechuanas, feeling **as if he were 
 trying to lift a mirror by taking hold of its face." 
 Where the sowing has been without the har- 
 vest during the life of the laborer, it yet may have 
 a brighter and better result for the world in the 
 long run. Dr. W. Robertson Niccoll suggests that 
 there is a prophecy of the final success of mis- 
 sions, which have seemed to fail, in the words of 
 the Twenty-second Psalm : — 
 
 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto 
 
 Jehovah ; 
 And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before 
 
 thee. 
 
 The seed fell into the ground and seemed to die — 
 in a sense did die — ^but it brought forth much 
 fruit. 
 
 So, as our Lord predicted, it proved true of his 
 
SOWING AND REAPING 107 
 
 own work. He gave the world the best that could 
 be given it, and it gave him the cross. Men 
 wrote ''Failure!" on that sealed tomb, and turned 
 lightly to their affairs of ritual piety, or money- 
 making, or politics. But he who had said, "Give, 
 and it shall be given unto you; good measure, 
 pressed down, shaken together, running over, 
 shall they give into your bosom," was not to 
 receive less than he promised to those who heard 
 him. The grandest powers of mankind have been 
 used in his service — the eloquence of the orator, 
 the speech-mastery of the poet, the meditation of 
 the philosopher, the artistic skill of painter and 
 sculptor and architect, the statesmanship of the 
 ruler. All these are but the summit-peaks of a 
 land ruled by his memory. Millions and hun- 
 dreds of millions have lived for him, repressing 
 the evil passions and brute instincts of their na- 
 ture, laying aside their violent tempers, purging 
 themselves of their impurity, rising above their 
 covetousness, and toiling in honest ways for them- 
 selves and others. They have cut off the right 
 hand and plucked out the right eye at his bidding, 
 and carried their daily cross that they might fol- 
 low him. Myriads have died for him, and in no 
 century so many as in that whose close we have 
 witnessed. More love him to-day than yester- 
 day, and more will love him to-morrow than 
 
io8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 to-day. His influence, unlike that of other great 
 men, at once deepens and widens with every year 
 since his death, showing it not to be subject to 
 that law of limitation which binds all finite things. 
 Of him especially may we say : — 
 
 "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. 
 He that goeth forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, 
 Shall doubtless come again with joy, bringing his sheaves." 
 
VII 
 UPWARD 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 UPWARD 
 
 Man's erect attitude is the mark of his dignity 
 as the highest form of life on our planet. The 
 lower vertebrates have their spines either parallel 
 with the surface of the earth, or forming an acute 
 angle with it. Man alone stands at right angles 
 with its plane, as though to intimate that he alone 
 must rise above it to live his true life. His is the 
 attitude of aspiration. 
 
 In the human body the higher organs lie in the 
 upper part of its structure. Normally we are 
 more alive, sensitively, intellectually, and morally, 
 in that quarter. It is only in an abnormal con- 
 dition that our vital activity finds any lower 
 center than the head and the heart. It is a de- 
 cline toward the mere animal. 
 
 The law of gravitation makes it hard to rise 
 and easy to sink. It is proverbially easy to "fall 
 off a log." That in us which seeks to be master 
 of circumstances, to overcome difficulties, and to 
 assert our dignity as men, relishes a climb, just 
 because it demands effort and persistence. The 
 Alpine clubs, which attack every unsealed height 
 
 III 
 
112 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 and are turning to the Caucasus and the Hima- 
 layas after exhausting Switzerland, represent a 
 profound instinct in our human nature. Their 
 achievement in itself has small value, but the 
 achieving brings exhilaration. On the other 
 hand, a fall which passes the bounds of our con- 
 trol is a most unwelcome experience. Whoever 
 has taken a great and involuntary plunge will 
 never forget the horror of it, and probably 
 will recall it as a nightmare in his sleep for 
 years. 
 
 For these reasons, and perhaps others besides, 
 the human race has come to treat motion upward 
 and downward as symbols of moral advance or 
 retrogression. Uprightness itself, apart from 
 movement, it accepts as symbolic of manly in- 
 tegrity, while it describes the vile things of life as 
 low, base, despicable; that is, fit to be looked 
 down upon. And as forms of faith in the un- 
 seen seek there what is morally superior, man 
 looks up for his gods, and not downward, the 
 only exceptions being those which reign in the 
 regions of the dead, as Pluto among the Greeks, 
 the dei inferni of the Romans, and the heli of the 
 Norse mythology. 
 
 These analogies have entered so deeply into 
 our thought and speech that even when we come 
 to recognize that upward and downward are 
 
UPWARD 113 
 
 purely relative terms, and that what is upward to 
 us is downward to our kindred in Australia, we 
 continue to think and speak in the old groove, and 
 to talk of heaven as above us, and of hell as be- 
 neath us, as did the Roman poet : — 
 
 "Facilis descensus Averni, 
 Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, 
 Hoc opus, hie labor est." 
 
 This form of thought had much to do with the 
 shaping of the religions of the world. At every 
 point in their history we find men looking upward 
 for an object of worship, but looking higher and 
 yet higher as they toil after the unseen. These 
 religions, indeed, may be defined as man's efforts 
 to climb upward to God, while the gospel is the 
 stooping of God to man. 
 
 I. A very early form of paganism looks up to 
 and worships the tree. This is connected with 
 the fact that the tree was the first home of man, 
 throughout a large part of the world. Mr. 
 Landor found tree-dwellers in the Philippines. 
 The ordinary type of house in Burmah, and most 
 of the islands southeast of Asi?., is evidently a 
 modification of that which was built in the 
 branches of a tree, on a platform above the reach 
 of wild beasts and wilder men. In the west we 
 find that houses planted on the solid earth were. 
 
114 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 in many instances, built around a tree. It was 
 thus with the home of Ulysses in Ithaca. In the 
 Volsunga Saga, the royal hall of the Volsung 
 king is built around a great tree, into whose trunk 
 Odin drives the sword, which is to be the property 
 of the hero who can 'draw it out. This shows that 
 even in the north the tree may have been the first 
 home. 
 
 The tree thus inhabited was a sacred thing, 
 and an object of worship as the protector of the 
 home and its occupants. In some cases it fed and 
 clothed them. It retained its sacred character, 
 and was looked up to as something divine, even 
 after the house had come to earth for its founda- 
 tion. Two forms of this tree cult are found in 
 the idolatry which the Hebrew people sometimes 
 adopted from their neighbors. The "ashera" or 
 "grove" was a row of wooden pillars (trees with 
 the roots cut off, but their branches probably re- 
 tained) which were planted beside the altars of 
 the moon-goddess Astarte, "the Queen of heaven." 
 Besides this, as the prophets tell us, they wor- 
 shiped false gods "under every green tree." The 
 sacred oak grove of Dordona is the monument of 
 a similar worship in early Greece. Caesar says 
 that in his days the Germans had no temples, but 
 worshiped their gods in sacred groves, and offered 
 human sacrifices by hanging men on the trees of 
 
UPWARD IIS 
 
 the grove. Sacred trees played a great part in 
 the Druidic worship of the British Islands, and 
 survivals of this are found in sacred oaks and 
 thorns, now under the protection of the fairies, 
 who are said to send disaster upon any one who 
 cuts down one of these trees. 
 
 II. The tree might perish by the lightning 
 stroke, or by natural decay, and the heart craves 
 an imperishable deity. The next objects of man's 
 reverence were the "everlasting hills," as the 
 loftiest and most unchanging features of the 
 earth's surface. On their summits there reigned 
 a peace and a silence which awed those who 
 climbed them. There the air blew free and pure. 
 They lifted up their protecting bulks between the 
 valleys and the storms. They were the most 
 ancient landmarks, which sundered tribe from 
 tribe, and kept the peace between them. To the 
 wanderer, they pointed out the location of his 
 home, and they reminded him of the days of his 
 childhood, when they had seemed an appendage 
 to his father's house. Fusi-yama is thus invested 
 with an especial sanctity in the eyes of the Jap- 
 anese. It is reproduced in every garden, and 
 introduced into every landscape. One of my 
 Japanese students told me he could not restrain his 
 tears when it came into sight, as he was return- 
 ing for the first time from America. 
 
ii6 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Nor was this sacredness of the mountains ob- 
 literated when the conception of the gods as per- 
 sonal beings, existing in human form, displaced 
 the early worship of natural facts and forces. In 
 the summits of the mountains the gods made their 
 home. Olympus, in Thessaly, close by the scene 
 of the first union of the Hellenic tribes for a com- 
 mon defense, came to be regarded as the home 
 of Zeus and the other deities of Greek worship. 
 In the mountain gorge at Delphi was the shrine 
 where Apollo gave out the oracles, which directed 
 the whole movement of the Greek people, until 
 the self-seeking of its priests undermined confi- 
 dence in its utterances. 
 
 III. Higher still were the visible heavens, and 
 the heavenly host — sun, moon, and stars. The 
 worship of the sky itself had begun before the 
 Aryan race broke up into its Asiatic and Euro- 
 pean branches. Dyaus-piter, Zeus-pater, Jupiter, 
 in Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, mean "Father- 
 heaven;" and while the first holds a very subor- 
 dinate place in the Indian Vedas, the second and 
 third stand at the head of the deities of the west. 
 The worship of heaven is one of the most solemn 
 functions of the Emperor of China, whose highest 
 title is "Son of Heaven." The calm and the 
 purity of the firmament, its wondrous shapes of 
 beauty and tints of color, its peace under most 
 
UPWARD 117 
 
 conditions, and its scope as embracing all things, 
 suggested divine honors for it. 
 
 The Semitic race, however, was drawn more 
 to the worship of the heavenly bodies. Their ex- 
 istence in the silence of the great celestial spaces, 
 the grand order of their movements, their benefi- 
 cence as givers of light and heat, their control of 
 the succession of the seasons, their freedom from 
 decay, and the belief that their conjunction fore- 
 tokened, if it did not procure, the fates of those 
 who were born at that instant, all seemed to 
 identify them with the Intelligence which con- 
 trols the affairs of men. Tradition fixes upon the 
 open plains of the Euphrates and Tigris Valley 
 as the earliest home of astronomy and astrology ; 
 and the worship of the host of heaven would be a 
 natural resort for those who had no mountain to 
 look up to, especially if they had been removed by 
 a sudden and forced emigration from their homes 
 in the upland country, and from their ancient 
 sanctuaries of tree and hill. 
 
 The Semitic mind, however, demands a per- 
 sonal god as the object of its worship, and through 
 this demand we find Baal (or Moloch) the sun 
 god, Astarte (or Ishtar) the moon god, and 
 Chiun (Amos v:26) the Saturn god, standing 
 out as distinctly marked personalities, without 
 any loss of their position in the sky. These gods, 
 
ii8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 made in the image of man, shared in his baser as 
 well as his better instincts, and the latter were sub- 
 ordinated to the former. Their worship became 
 an orgy such as Elijah witnessed on Mount Car- 
 mel, or an indulgence of sensual passions, or a 
 sacrifice of human beings to propitiate their favor. 
 Sabaism, or the worship of the host (Tsabaoth) 
 of heaven, is the Semitic form of paganism, 
 traceable from Uz in the south to Syria 
 in the north, and from Assyria in the east to 
 Carthage and Cadiz in the west. It was there- 
 fore the form of idolatry to which the Hebrews 
 were especially tempted, both because of their 
 mental affinity with those peoples, and through 
 their proximity to the religious centers where 
 this worship was practiced. 
 
 Their first contact with Sabaism occurred 
 toward the close of their wanderings in the wilder- 
 ness, when the Moabites and Midianites, appar- 
 ently at the suggestion Balaam, enticed them 
 to join in the worship of Baal-peor, through the 
 unchaste orgies which characterized Semitic 
 Sabaism. From this time to the captivity of 
 Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, a period of a 
 thousand years (with the exception of the two 
 centuries between Samuel and Ahab), we find this 
 vile and cruel form of idolatry appearing and re- 
 appearing among the Hebrews. It won a great 
 
UPWARD 119 
 
 victory through the marriage of Ahab with Jeze- 
 bel, but reached its height during the apostasy of 
 King Manasseh, Avhen altars to Baal and Ashta- 
 roth stood in the very courts of the temple, and 
 the Valley Hinnom was profaned by human 
 sacrifices. Jeremiah, its greatest enemy after 
 Elijah, scourges it in his prophecies, declaring 
 there were as many altars for it as there were 
 streets in Jerusalem, and that the people had for- 
 gotten the name of God even in their oaths, and 
 substituted that of Baal. Stephen reminds the 
 Jews of this as the sink of idolatrous iniquity into 
 which their fathers had sunk, quoting the prophet 
 Amos. Yet Mosaic worship survived it, and it 
 disappeared after the Exile. As Andrew Lang 
 says, the unique thing in Hebrew history is 
 that the people encountered every temptation 
 which had degraded primitive faith into super- 
 stition in other peoples, and overcame these 
 through the influence exerted by their inspired 
 prophets. 
 
 The Scriptures discredit all attempts to find 
 God through this looking upward to natural ob- 
 jects, whether tree or hill or sky. But just as 
 they use freely the language which treats upward 
 and downward as symbols of the noble and the 
 vile, so they employ the cognate symbolism of 
 nature in speaking of divine relations. 
 
120 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 I. It is remarkable how prominent the tree is 
 in the earHest chapters of the Mosaic record. 
 Whether the tree of knowledge of good and evil, 
 and the tree of life in the midst of Eden, are sym- 
 bols or facts, they fit into the primitive mode of 
 thought, but to correct its errors. The tree is not 
 put forward as a sacred thing in itself, but as the 
 instrument by which a divine Being higher than 
 itself deals with men. 
 
 Throughout the early history of the elect peo- 
 ple we hear nothing, indeed, of tree-worship, but 
 of the constant selection of the tree as the back- 
 ground of home, and also of sacred acts. Abra- 
 ham made his home under the oaks of Mamre, 
 the Amorite, his friend as well as neighbor. 
 Jacob hid the teraphim *'under the oak which is in 
 Shechem." The angel which called Gideon to 
 judge Israel "came and sat under the oak which 
 was in Ophrah," and after their interview "Gid- 
 eon built an altar there unto Jehovah, and called it 
 Jehovah-shalom." After his death, and the mur- 
 der of all his legitimate sons but Jotham, "the 
 men of Shechem . . . made Abimelech king, by 
 the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem" — the 
 same tree as was standing "by the sanctuary of 
 Jehovah" in Shechem, when Joshua set up under it 
 a great stone as a witness against all who de- 
 parted from the words of God's law. 
 
UPWARD 121 
 
 II. The prominence of the mountains and hills 
 in the Bible cannot escape any attentive reader. 
 The story, from Sinai to Olivet, from the giving 
 of the law to the Ascension, may be said to run 
 over the mountains of Palestine, with the excep- 
 tion of the seventy weary years of the Captivity 
 on the mud-flats of the Tigris Valley. The last 
 book of the Canon is placed on the island of Pat- 
 mos, one of a group of mountains half sunk in the 
 ^gean Sea; and for its last vision the apostle is 
 carried "in the Spirit to a mountain great and 
 high," that he may behold the holy city. 
 
 It seems to have been the divine purpose to take 
 the mountains as the fitting background for the 
 great scenes of sacred history. On Sinai (or 
 Horeb), which rises about seven thousand three 
 hundred and seventy-five feet above the Red Sea, 
 the law was given ; Elijah received the impressive 
 lesson that divine power differs in kind from 
 physical force; and Paul studied out the prob- 
 lems of law and gospel (Galatians i: 17; iv:25). 
 From Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, after the con- 
 quest, the blessings and the curses of the law were 
 proclaimed to the Hebrew people. The taber- 
 nacle was set up by Joshua at Shiloh, on a hill 
 which rises two thousand three hundred and 
 thirty feet above the surrounding plain. 
 After the capture of the ark by the Philistines, 
 
122 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 the tabernacle seems to have been removed to 
 Nob, a city of the priests, which overlooked 
 Jerusalem (Isaiah x:32) from the north. This 
 was superseded when David brought the ark 
 from Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem, and Solomon 
 built the temple on Mount Moriah, about two 
 thousand five hundred and fifty feet above 
 the sea level. Moriah and Zion were the 
 twin mountains of the Holy City, the latter the 
 home of the house of David, while the former 
 was the place of the divine presence. They 
 might be said to stand for church and state, and 
 much is missed by a popular confusion of Mount 
 Zion with the site of the temple. 
 
 The site of Jerusalem as a sanctuary among the 
 hills and built upon the hills, was especially dear 
 to the devout Hebrews. They were under no 
 delusion as to its relative height. The difficult 
 Sixty-eighth Psalm contrasts Jerusalem with the 
 loftier heights of Hermon and Bashan, and says : 
 
 Why look ye askance, ye high mountains. 
 
 At the mountain which God hath desired for his abode? 
 
 In their eyes it was "the mountain of the 
 Lord;" "the mountain of the Lord's house;" "the 
 holy hill" of Jehovah, where they were called 
 to worship his holiness, and a symbol of his pro- 
 tection of his people : — 
 
UPWARD 123 
 
 I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: 
 From whence shall my help come? 
 My help cometh from Jehovah, 
 Who made heaven and earth. 
 
 They that trust in Jehovah are as mount Zion, 
 Which cannot be moved, but abideth for ever. 
 As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, 
 So Jehovah is round about his people. 
 
 It is a recent discovery of the Egyptian Ex- 
 ploration Society that the Tel-el- Yehudiyeh, or 
 "Mound of the Jews," in Egypt, is the ruin of the 
 Jewish temple erected by Onias, son of the high 
 priest Onias III., about 160 B. C, with permission 
 of King Ptolemy VI. ; and that it was mounted on 
 an artificial hill, raised by human labor some 
 sixty-eight feet above the flat land of the delta, 
 and secured by a wall of brick some twenty feet 
 thick. It reproduced the temple at Jerusalem on 
 a scale of one half the size. The Jews in Egypt 
 seem to have felt that it would be no house of 
 God, unless they could say, "Let us go up to it." 
 
 In the New Testament, there is the same choice 
 of the mountains as the fitting scene of gi'eat 
 events. Our Lord preaches the great Sermon of 
 the Foundations on a mountain side, coming 
 down to meet the multitude, which came up to 
 hear him. In that, he compares his church to a 
 city set on a hill, which cannot be hid, just as 
 
124 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Jerusalem was. He was transfigured before the 
 three disciples on an unnamed mountain, meeting 
 the great representatives of law and prophecy, 
 whose story is bound up with the mountains. 
 When he spent the night in prayer to his Father, 
 he "went out into the mountain" for that purpose, 
 and when he was crucified it was on Mount 
 Calvary, the 
 
 .... green hill far away 
 Without the city wall, 
 
 of Mrs. Alexander's hymn. After the Resurrec- 
 tion, "the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto 
 the mountain where Jesus had appointed them," 
 and met him there. "From the mount called 
 Olivet, which is nigh unto Jerusalem," he as- 
 cended to his Father, and passed from the region 
 of sense to that of faith. 
 
 Yet while our Lord made use of the mountains 
 as the fitting scene of great transactions, and em- 
 ploys the associations which they offer, he warns 
 us that this is relative and even temporary. The 
 woman of Samaria, who stood in sight of Mount 
 Gerizim and was jealous for its honor, said, "Our 
 fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, 
 that [on Mount Moriah] in Jerusalem is the place 
 where men ought to worship." Jesus answered, 
 "Believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this 
 
UPWARD 125 
 
 mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the 
 Father . . . The hour cometh, and now is, when 
 the true worshiper shall worship the Father [who 
 is a Spirit], in spirit and truth." This was the 
 great proclamation of the spirituality of the pres- 
 ence and service of God. Local associations and 
 backgrounds have their use, but they are not final- 
 ities, and shall cease when men get beyond the 
 need of them. 
 
 III. Sometimes the Scriptures seem to speak of 
 the visible heavens as the home of God, but 
 always with rejection of the notion that they are 
 worthy of our worship. Especially, they put him 
 forward as the creator of heaven and of earth, in 
 a way unknown to any other ancient literature, 
 and subordinate the heavenly bodies to him as 
 their maker and master. He is Jehovah of hosts, 
 never one of that host. He has given to sun and 
 moon their place in the heavens, and they are the 
 witnesses of his greatness and his wisdom. His 
 throne is in the heavens, and from heaven looks 
 down upon the children of men. By this local- 
 ization, men are enabled more easily to feel his 
 personality, and to recognize his rule. 
 
 On the other hand, we find along with these 
 statements others which correct their imperfec- 
 tion as expressions of God's greatness. *'The 
 heaven of heavens cannot contain thee," says 
 
126 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Solomon in the prayer at the dedication of the 
 temple. The Psalmist says: — 
 
 Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 
 
 Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 
 
 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : 
 
 If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 
 
 If I take the wings of the morning, 
 
 And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
 
 Even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 
 And thy right hand shall hold me. 
 
 The greatness of God in comparison with the 
 littleness of the creature, as it is stated in the 
 fortieth chapter of Isaiah, is one of the sublimest 
 themes of Hebrew poetry, and the heavens are ex- 
 pressly included in the list of the things which are 
 dealt with after his pleasure. 
 
 The New Testament uses the same language, 
 for the most part, as the Old in this regard. Men 
 are forbidden to "swear by heaven, for it is God's 
 throne." They are bidden to pray to "Our Father 
 in the heavens," to distinguish him from human 
 fathers upon the earth. The Son of man "came 
 down from heaven;" he "beheld Satan fallen as 
 lightning from heaven;" he will come to judg- 
 ment "on the clouds of heaven with power and 
 great glory;" he is "the high priest, that hath 
 passed into the heavens." Heaven and earth 
 shall pass away, to be replaced by a new heaven 
 
UPWARD 127 
 
 and a new earth. How are we to understand 
 these expressions ? Not of the visible sky, which 
 we know to be a mere appearance of a celestial 
 roof, produced by the water suspended in our 
 atmosphere. Many understand them to mean 
 that there is, at some distance not ascertained, but 
 above us and beyond the range of our sight, a 
 place which is the especial center or focus of God's 
 presence, and to which he will welcome his people 
 after death. They believe that if one left this 
 earth and proceeded for the right distance and in 
 the right direction, he would find heaven, just 
 as if he went in the direction of the star Alpha 
 Centauri the twenty billions of miles which 
 measure its distance from us, he would reach that 
 star. 
 
 When this belief is stated distinctly it arouses 
 in us a certain repugnance, which is not removed 
 by any qualifications as to the omnipresence of 
 God. We feel that we have lost something by 
 putting heaven to an immense distance from earth, 
 and bringing all intercourse between them to a 
 form of celestial telegraphy at an inconceivable 
 distance. Nor does it correspond to much that 
 is said in the New Testament about the relations 
 of the two. We are told by Peter that "the 
 heaven must receive" our Lord "until the times 
 of [the] restoration of all things ;" but the same 
 
128 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 apostle had heard our Lord say, "Where two or 
 three are gathered together in my name, there am 
 I in the midst of them." 
 
 There is a series of passages in the New Testa- 
 ment which seem to bring heaven near to our 
 human hfe, and to exclude the idea of its im- 
 mense distance from us. At our Lord's bap- 
 tism "the heavens were opened to him," or "rent 
 asunder," and "a voice came out of the 
 heavens," which was the voice of the Father de- 
 claring his delight in his Son. We find that the 
 same voice "out of the bright cloud" bore the 
 same testimony at the Transfiguration; and that 
 it came a third time as Jesus taught in the tem- 
 ple — "a voice out of heaven" to declare before 
 Gentile and Jew that the Father's will was in per- 
 fect accord with that of the Son (John xii : 27- 
 32). We learn that at Pentecost the "sound as 
 of the rushing of a mighty wind" came from 
 heaven; that Stephen in sight of the martyr's 
 death was permitted to see in heaven, and beheld 
 his Lord "standing on the right hand of God;" 
 and that Saul's conversion at the gates of 
 Damascus was through "a light from heaven, 
 above the brightness of the sun," and the voice 
 which won him to obedience and commissioned 
 him for his work. And John in Patmos, after re- 
 ceiving the messages to the seven churches, saw, 
 
UPWARD 129 
 
 and beheld a door open in heaven, wherein a 
 throne was set, and One sitting upon the throne. 
 
 These are the passages which come the nearest 
 to disclosing to us the relation of heaven to earth, 
 and its influence upon the lives of men. None of 
 them suggest that our inability to behold the con- 
 tent of heaven is due to its vast distance from us, 
 and not to our spiritual imperfection. They 
 seem to teach that heaven is shut to us because we 
 are not yet fit for the vision of its spiritual 
 realities, and will be "opened" to us when we at- 
 tain to that which the Master promised to 
 Nathanael and Philip : "Ye shall see the heaven 
 opened, and the angels of God ascending and 
 descending upon the Son of man" — the true 
 Jacob's ladder, which binds heaven and earth. 
 
 An opposite error to that which removes heaven 
 to an immense distance, is that which makes it to 
 exist only in the human spirit, as a personal ex- 
 perience. This notion has been very common 
 among the Mystics. Thus Johann Scheffler 
 writes : — ■ 
 
 How far is it to heaven? Not very far, my friend; 
 A single hearty step will all thy journey end. 
 
 Hold there! where runnest thou? Know heaven is in thee; 
 Seekest thou for God elsewhere, his face thou'lt never see. 
 
 The same view also commends itself to ration- 
 alists. "Are we still, like children," says Orville 
 
130 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 Dewey, "fancying that heaven is a beautiful city, 
 into which one needs only the powers of locomo- 
 tion to enter? Do we not know that heaven is 
 in the mind; in the greatness and elevation and 
 purity of our immortal nature?" Heaven is a 
 thing more real and objective than is any state of 
 the human spirit, and lies without us as well as 
 within us. So we are taught by the disclosures of 
 the New Testament about it. It was not a state 
 of the spirit which was opened to our Lord at his 
 baptism, or to Stephen in his death hour, or to 
 Paul in his conversion. In the last case especially 
 we see the inadequacy of this subjective notion of 
 heaven. The persecutor's inner state was not in 
 harmony with the light and the voice from 
 heaven, but was to be made such through them. 
 
 I find the view I have tried to present in the 
 writing of some of our Christian poets, while in 
 most of our hymns the more material conception 
 of a distant region beyond the skies is dominant. 
 Mr. T. D. Bernard writes : — 
 
 Not in some distant world unknown, 
 
 Not in the lofty skies. 
 Not o'er the ocean vast and lone, 
 
 God's kingdom lies. 
 
 As near its unseen presence comes 
 
 As air that circles round ; 
 Along our paths and in our homes 
 
 Its voices sound. 
 
UPWARD 131 
 
 Mrs. A. T. D. Whitney writes of the angels of 
 the children : — 
 
 The world is troublous, and hard and cold. 
 And men and women grow gray and old ; 
 But behind the world is an inner place, 
 Where yet their angels behold God's face. 
 
 Susan Coolidge (Miss Woolsey) asks as to the 
 soul leaving the body: — 
 
 Does it travel wide? Does it travel far, 
 
 To find the place where all spirits are? 
 
 Does it measure long leagues from star to star? 
 
 With a rapture of sudden consciousness, 
 I think it awakes to a knowledge of this — 
 That heaven earth's closest neighbor is. 
 
 That 'tis but a step from dark to day, 
 From the worn-out tent and the burial clay, 
 To the rapture of youth renewed for aye. 
 
 And that just where the soul, perplexed and awed, 
 Begins its journey, it meets the Lord, 
 And finds that heaven, and the great reward 
 Lay just outside its prison! 
 
 Samuel Longfellow dwells on a natural 
 analogy : — 
 
 The sea is but another sky, 
 
 The sky a sea as well; 
 And which is earth, and which the heavens, 
 
 The eye can scarcely tell. 
 
132 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 So when for us life's evening hour, 
 
 Soft passing, shall descend, 
 May glory born of earth and heaven 
 
 The earth and heavens blend. 
 
 Flooded with peace the spirit float. 
 
 With silent rapture glow, 
 Till where earth ends and heaven begins 
 
 The soul shall scarcely know. 
 
 Harriet Beecher Stowe feels the nearness of 
 heaven in her sense of her nearness to those 
 who have left her by death : — ■ 
 
 It lies about us like a cloud — 
 
 A world we do not see; 
 Yet the sweet closing of an eye 
 
 May bring us there to be. 
 
 Its gentle breezes fan our cheek; 
 
 Amid our worldly cares 
 Its gentle voices whisper love 
 
 And mingle with our prayers. 
 
 Sweet hearts around us throb and beat, 
 
 Sweet helping hands are stirred. 
 And palpitates the veil between 
 
 With breathings almost heard. 
 
 The silence, awful, sweet, and calm. 
 
 They have no power to break; 
 For mortal words are not for them 
 
 To utter or partake. 
 
 If the conception of heaven as a part of space, 
 and that of heaven as a state of the spirit, be both 
 
UPWARD 133 
 
 of them inadequate and misleading*, what is the 
 central thought as to its nature which will avoid 
 these faults ? It is that of heaven as a fellowship 
 or society, which unites God and his sinless or re- 
 deemed creatures. It is our Father's house be- 
 cause the Father is there. It is the Saviour's 
 purpose, *That where I am, ye may be also," 
 which foretells its blessedness to his people. 
 Heaven is the full realization of that "fellowship 
 with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ," 
 which John sets forth as the inmost life of the 
 church of Christ. It is the central spiritual fact 
 of the whole spiritual universe, which knows no 
 distance from any man's spirit except that which 
 he makes by sin, and which even breaks through 
 the bounds sin has set, to seek and find the lost. 
 
 This fellowship we cannot but think as in space, 
 that being the "form of thought" into which we 
 put all our pictures of what is outside our minds. 
 Heaven must be something vague and indefinite 
 to us, unless we think of it as being as concrete and 
 placed, as was the home we were born into. Yet 
 we must guard against a localization, which shuts 
 God out of immediate relation to all existences. 
 We call this relation his omnipresence, but the 
 word is not a happy one, and does not correspond 
 to scriptural usage. Rather than conceive of God 
 as present ever3rwhere, and thus diffused like a 
 
134 NATURE,, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 
 
 vapor through all space, we should think of all 
 things as present to him, Coleridge says. Thus 
 we escape a tendency which may land us in pan- 
 theism. 
 
 Heaven on man's side, is the loyal and loving 
 realization of the fellowship to which God invites 
 all his rational creatures. His will is our peace; 
 his service our liberty; his presence our heaven. 
 
 "Thou art the source and center of all minds, 
 Their only point of rest, Eternal Word! 
 From thee departing, they are lost, and rove 
 At random, without honor, hope, or peace. 
 From thee is all that soothes the life of man. 
 His high endeavor and his glad success. 
 His strength to suffer and his will to serve." 
 
Date Due 
 
 /;S^ 
 
 
 
 
 * - 
 
 
 
 
 -T^ficiffl *" *'*** 
 
 
 
 
 ■ U iWHWit*; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 
 
 
 1