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 Reverend George Leon Walker, 
 D. D., 1830-1900 : 
 
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REVEREND 
 
 / 
 
 George Leon Walker, D.D, 
 
 18^0-1900 
 
 
 HARTFORD, CONN. 
 1900 
 
 [PRIVATELY PRINTED] 
 
The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, Printers. 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
From the Hartford Coiirant of March 14, igoo. 
 
 [By WiLLisroN Wai.kek.] 
 
 Dr. Georgk Leon Walker passed peacefully away 
 at four o'clock this (Wednesday) morning at the 
 Walker home on Prospect street. There were gath- 
 ered about the bedside when the end came the doctor's 
 son, Prof. Williston Walker, and his wife; the doctor's 
 brother, Dr. Henry F. Walker of New York ; their 
 sister, Mrs. Boardman, and her husband. Professor 
 George N, Boardman. The immediate cause of death 
 was a severe attack of pneumonia, which had come as 
 a second attack after a previous illness, from which 
 he ralHed. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. George Leon Walker, whose death 
 occurred this morning, came of sturdy New England 
 ancestry. He wa's eighth in descent from Richard 
 Walker, who settled at Lynn, Mass., in 1630, fought in 
 the early Indian wars, and was a member both of the 
 Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of London 
 and of its Boston namesake. His great-grandfather, 
 Phineas, of Woodstock, Conn., was a soldier in the Old 
 French and Revolutionary wars. His grandfather, 
 I,eonard, like many another son of Connecticut, emi- 
 
6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 grated to Vermont just as the eighteenth century came 
 to a close, and settled at Strafford. His father, 
 Charles, born before the emigrant left the Woodstock 
 home, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary 
 in 1 82 1, and married Lucretia Ambrose, daughter of 
 Stephen Ambrose of Concord, N. H., a woman of un- 
 usual talents, whom the subject of this sketch was 
 markedly to resemble in character and features. 
 
 The Rev. Charles Walker was settled at Rutland in 
 the first pastorate of a ministry conspicuous for more 
 than half a century in Vermont when his second son, 
 George Leon, was born on April 30, 1830. The 
 changes frequently incident to ministerial service took 
 the father to Brattleboro when George was four years 
 old, and that town in which he was to live till his 
 seventeenth year was always dear to him as his boy- 
 hood home. The early education of the boy was in 
 the schools of Brattleboro, and he was accustomed in 
 later life to recall with pleasure the inspiration he drew 
 from the teaching of a young master of the village 
 high school, afterward eminent as a librarian of the 
 Boston Public Library, the Hon. Mellen Chamberlain. 
 But the boy's home, with its intellectual and earnest 
 parents and its four keen-minded children — three 
 brothers and a sister — was the most fruitful early in- 
 fluence that came to him. A pastorate of twelve years 
 duration at Brattleboro was followed by the removal of 
 the father to Pittsford, Vermont, which thenceforth 
 became the family residence. 
 
 It was the boy's ambition to go to college ; but even 
 before leaving Brattleboro, a spinal curvature from 
 which he was to suffer all his days had developed, and 
 his prospect of life seemed so precarious that the col- 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 7 
 
 lege course had to be forborne. To one of Mr. Walk- 
 er's energy and strength of will, however, such a de- 
 privation was a challenge rather than a deterrent ; and 
 the studies which he would have pursued had he been 
 able to obtain the coveted college training were fol- 
 lowed out alone, so that he acquired not merely a 
 knowledge of Greek and Latin, but a very thorough 
 acquaintance with philosophy, mathematics, and es- 
 pecially with English literature, toward which his mind 
 Avas always strongly drawn. The classic English poets, 
 most of all, were the companionship and delight of his 
 youth and early manhood. 
 
 In 1850, an appointment as clerk in the Massachu- 
 setts State House, procured by an uncle, the Hon. 
 Amasa Walker, brought the young man a change of 
 scene ; and the next three years were spent in Boston 
 in the duties of his office and in the vigorous study of 
 law during all leisure moments, for Mr. Walker was 
 then determined to make the legal profession his own. 
 These plans were rudely interrupted, A change in the 
 political control of the state cost him his clerkship, 
 and a subsequent attack of typhoid fever deprived him 
 for some months of the use of his eyes and left a more 
 permanent witness of its inroads on his feeble frame 
 in a lameness that necessitated the use of crutches for 
 several years. The young student of law went back 
 to the Pittsford home, in broken health, his prospects 
 frustrated, and his friends discouraged. But he had 
 attained to one certainty in his own mind. He was 
 determined, if possible, to become a minister ; and, to 
 this end, as soon as strength permitted, he began 
 to study theology with the aid of his father's library. 
 His fondness for English literature also continued, and 
 
8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 he labored on a poem of considerable length. The 
 work, though too introspective and reflective of the 
 emotions of this trying epoch to make Mr. Walker ever 
 willing to have it published, showed an unusual skill in 
 the mastery of expression and a genuine poetic feel- 
 ing. This lengthened period of feebleness and disap- 
 pointment, though it failed to break Mr. Walker's 
 courage, left its impress in a sense of the seriousness 
 and the struggle of life, and of the nearness of its sor- 
 rows to its joys, upon him always. 
 
 On August 31, 1857, Mr. Walker was licensed to 
 preach by the Rutland, Vermont, Association ; and, 
 soon after, entered Andover Theological Seminary as 
 a "resident licentiate," studying in that institution for 
 a year. A chance opportunity to take the place as 
 pulpit supply of a professor incapacitated by illness led 
 to a call to the pastorate of the State Street Church in 
 Portland, one of the most important in the common- 
 wealth of Maine. On September 16, 1858, Mr. Walker 
 married Maria Williston, daughter of Nathan Birdseye 
 Williston of Brattleboro, Vt., and on the 13th of 
 the following October he was ordained to his new 
 charge. 
 
 The time of his pastorate was eventful. Most ac- 
 tively of any of the Portland ministers he espoused the 
 union and the anti-slavery causes in the discussions 
 preceding the civil war, and at the cost of considerable 
 criticism : but his remarkable power in the pulpit and 
 his ready sympathy and helpfulness with all in suffering 
 and bereavement speedily won him the affection of the 
 Portland congregation in a marked degree. Here two 
 sons were born to him, Williston on July i, i860, and 
 Charles Ambrose, on September 27, 1861, the latter 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TR^'feuTES. c; 
 
 dying on July 22, 1869; and here, on August 31, 1865, 
 he lost his wife by diphtheria. The death of his wife 
 and his own exertions in connection with the great 
 Portland fire of July 4, 1866, broke down his never 
 robust health. By the spring of 1867 he was once more 
 on crutches and compelled to return to his father's 
 home at Pittsford. It being evident that his ill-health 
 would be somewhat protracted, his people reluctantly 
 released him from the Portland pastorate on October 
 21, 1867. 
 
 A year later when somewhat improved in health, 
 but while still obliged to use crutches and to preach 
 sitting in a chair, Mr. Walker was invited to supply the 
 pulpit of the First Church in New Haven, Connecticut, 
 from which the Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon had then re- 
 cently retired. As a consequence, he was settled over 
 his new charge on November 18, 1868. Here his min- 
 istry met with great acceptance, as at Portland, — a 
 favor that was witnessed by the bestowal upon him of 
 the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Yale University 
 in 1870. On September 15, of the year last mentioned. 
 Dr. Walker married Amelia Read Larned of New Ha- 
 ven, daughter of George Larned of Thompson, Con- 
 necticut. 
 
 But, though conspicuously successful in his chosen 
 vocation and greatly attached to the people of New 
 Haven, Dr. Walker soon found that he had been un- 
 wise in assuming the burdens of the pastorate once 
 more before his health had been fully re-established, 
 and, on May 19, 1873, he had to relinquish the pulpit 
 for a second time. From October, 1873, to November, 
 1874, Dr. Walker sought renewed strength in Europe, 
 living chieflv at Stuttgart and Rome. At the close of 
 
lO REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 the year 1874 he returned to Brattleboro, Vt. For the 
 next four years he dwelt with his father-in-law, Mr. 
 Williston, in the town of his boyhood home, in the 
 house in which he was accustomed to spend the sum- 
 mer thereafter as long as he lived. During much of 
 these four years of continuous residence at Brattleboro, 
 from October, 1875, to January, 1878, he acted as 
 pastor of the Centre Congregational Church of that 
 place, without e\'er being formally inducted into its 
 pastorate. 
 
 From Brattleboro Dr. Walker was called, early in 
 1879, to the First Church of this city, and was installed 
 in its ministry on February 27. The time of his com- 
 ing was one of considerable significance in the history 
 of this ancient Church. The shifting of the popula- 
 tion which was to make its situation essentially "down- 
 town " had begun to affect the congregation, a consid- 
 erable debt rested upon the Society, and a strong and 
 moulding leadership was desirable. Under Dr. Walk- 
 er's efforts the debt was speedily paid, the house of 
 worship renovated, a new organ procured by the gift 
 of a generous member of the Church, and a renewed 
 interest and pride awakened in its history especially 
 through the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth 
 anniversary of the installation of its first ministers in 
 October, 18S3. In connection with that event Dr. 
 Walker prepared a most painstaking and valuable 
 " History of the First Church " that was published 
 in a volume of five hundred and fifteen pages in 
 1884. Assured early of the respect and affection of 
 his congregation. Dr. Walker grew to a position of 
 influence in the city, especially in what concerned 
 the preservation of its memories, illustrated, to specify 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. u 
 
 a sihgle instance, in his interest in the rescue of the 
 ancient biirving-o^roiind and the associated Gold street 
 improvement. 
 
 In the larger affairs of the Congregational body Dr. 
 Walker was a recognized leader. Thus, he served as 
 one of the commission of twenty-five that prepared what 
 has been generally known from the year of its publica- 
 tion as the " Creed of 1883," now widely accepted as a 
 statement of Congregational belief. In 1885, at the 
 seventy-fifth anniversary of the American Board of 
 Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he preached the 
 commemorative sermon. The doctrinal discussions 
 which turmoiled the Board aroused his interest and en- 
 listed his participation as an advocate of moderation, 
 notably at the meetings of the board at Springfield in 
 1 887 and at New York in 1889; and led to his appoint- 
 ment, in the year last mentioned, as chairman of the 
 "Committee of Nine " which formulated the altered 
 policy now pursued by the Board in making missionary 
 appointments. From 1887 to 1899 he was one of the 
 corporation of Yale University. In 1888 he became 
 a member of the " Board of Visitors " of Andover 
 Theological Seminary — an office which he held till his 
 complete disability compelled its relinquishment in 
 1897, being during the latter part of his incumbency 
 the president of that Board. As a "Visitor" he had 
 to pass upon the concluding features of the trial of 
 President Egbert C. Smyth and the questions raised 
 by the Andover theology. 
 
 In all the controversies in which he was engaged 
 Dr. Walker showed himself a fearless, incisive debater ; 
 but he carried a judicial mind and an irenic spirit, so 
 that his judgment was widely trusted and his wisdom 
 
12 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 generally acknowledged. And, as he grew in age, 
 without abating a whit of his fire and energy of con- 
 viction, his sympathies steadily broadened and his 
 spirit sweetened, so that those who were his sharpest 
 opponents in controversy were largely won to personal 
 friendship. 
 
 Dr. Walker's Hartford pastorate, though a period of 
 health compared with his earlier ministry, was not with- 
 out its serious physical disadvantages. In him the spirit 
 dominated over the flesh, as when just before preach- 
 ing a discourse commemorative of the Rev. Dr. Leon- 
 ard Bacon, at New Haven, in 1882, he broke his leg 
 by a fall on an icy pavement, yet insisted on performing 
 the appointed service seated in a chair. His disabil- 
 ities interfered with his work less than similar impair- 
 ments of strength might have with many ; but they 
 were always felt as a serious burden. A journey to 
 Carlsbad, Austria, in 1886, brought him some improve- 
 ment ; but a tendency to attacks of angina pectoris at 
 length attained to such severity and frequency that 
 on June 12, 1892, he was compelled to lay down the 
 pastoral charge of the First Church altogether, though 
 retaining the title of pastor emeritus and performing- 
 occasional service as strength permitted him. A year 
 before his resignation, in 1891, he published a life of 
 Thomas Hooker ; and after his retirement he ga\e 
 himself more than ever to historical studies, especially 
 to the investigation of New England religious history, 
 in which he had always had a deep interest. The 
 fruit of these labors was embodied in a series of lec- 
 ♦ tures on "Aspects of the Religious Life of New 
 England," which he gave before the Hartford Theo- 
 logical Seminary in the winter of 1896. These were 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
 13 
 
 ])ublished in 1897 in a volume that has met with 
 decided acceptance. 
 
 On August 22, 1896, at his summer home in Brat- 
 tleboro, Dr. Walker was stricken with apoplexy, result- 
 ing in a complete deprivation of speech and an almost 
 total paralysis of his right side. These disabilities 
 continued to the end. His mental clearness was not 
 impaired. He continued to enjoy meeting his friends, 
 and the reading of books. He followed with keen in- 
 terest the course of public events as narrated in the 
 daily press. In his wheeled chair he has been a fa- 
 miliar figure on our streets. A great blow came to 
 him in the death of his devoted wife on October 30, 
 1898; but he bore his trials and limitations with sin- 
 gular courage and patience, till he was set free from 
 his long imprisonment by the angel of death. In all 
 the vicissitudes of his lot he showed himself the strong, 
 brave. Christian man. 
 
 Dr. Walker was a man of a good deal of natural 
 shyness and resei've of manner. Forced to husband 
 his time and strength by reason of illness, especially 
 in early life, he had less inclination than many toward 
 the pleasures of social intercourse. But to any in anx- 
 iety, sorrow, or personal suffering, his sympathies went 
 out in a full measure that made his ministrations always 
 welcomed, and rendered him beloved by those to whom 
 he thus showed himself. In his family he was a man 
 of warm affection. In all benevolent causes he was 
 interested and generous. His tastes were strongly at- 
 tracted in several artistic directions. He had much ac- 
 quaintance with engravings, and was, in a very modest 
 degree, a collector of prints. He knew much of colo- 
 nial furniture, and loved to finish or repair an antique 
 
M 
 
 REVEREXD GEORGE LEON WALKER. D.D. 
 
 piece with his own hands. He was interested in colo- 
 nial literature, especially that which bore on the history 
 of Congregationalism, and collected an excellent work- 
 ing library on the theme. He wrote readily and well, 
 and published, besides the three volumes already indi- 
 cated, a large number of sermons, papers, and articles. 
 
 Dr. Walker was undoubtedly at his best in the pul- 
 pit. With few of the characteristic graces of the orator, 
 he had the rare faculty of being able always to make 
 men listen to what he had to say. His message inva- 
 riably bore the stamp of earnestness, directness, and 
 conviction. Its form was fresh and striking, its devel- 
 opment clear and convincing. And through the ser- 
 mon there ran a vein of feeling, sometimes of pathos, 
 sometimes of entreaty, always of positive faith, which 
 touched the heart of the hearer no less than the matter 
 of the discourse appealed to the intellect. 
 
 Dr. Walker is survived by a son. Professor Williston 
 Walker of the Theological Seminary ; by a brother, 
 Henry F. Walker, M.D., a physician of prominence in 
 New York City, and by a sister, Mrs. Anne W. Board- 
 man, the wife of Professor George N. Boardman, long 
 the occupant of the chair of Systematic Theology in 
 Chicago Theological Seminary. 
 
 From the Hartford Courant of March ij, igoo. 
 
 The funeral of the Rev. Dr. George Leon Walker, 
 pastor emeritus of the Center Church, was held in that 
 church yesterday afternoon, at 3.30 o'clock, after 
 prayers by the Rev. Melancthon W. Jacobus, D.D., 
 acting pastor, at his late home on Prospect street. 
 The service was characterized by a simple dignity, and 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. j- 
 
 was very impressive. The pulpit platform was heav- 
 ily set with palms and ferns, and from the desk from 
 which Dr. Walker had preached so many times, there 
 depended an array of lilies, and just below a large 
 shower of white roses, while at the north entrance to 
 the pulpit stairs a large cluster wreath of pink roses 
 completed the floral setting. A large audience of 
 parishioners and many well-known public men of the 
 city were present. 
 
 The service opened with the processional, led by 
 the Rev. Dr. Jacobus, reciting the lines, " I am the 
 Resurrection and the Life," the choir chanting the 
 antiphonal responses. Following him were the Rev. 
 Dr. E. P. Parker of the South Congregational Church 
 and the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell of the Asylum Hill 
 Congregational Church, who assisted in the service ; 
 the ushers, J. Coolidge Hills and Frank G. Smith, 
 and the honorary bearers, Dr. Henry P. Stearns, 
 Rowland Swift, Daniel R. Howe, Dr. George R. Shep- 
 herd, Wilbur F. Gordy, and Solon P. Davis, The 
 casket was covered with loose bouquets of ferns and 
 lilies of the valley, and was borne on the shoulders of 
 six colored porters, and following were the family, 
 friends, and representatives of the Center Church. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. E. P. Parker invoked the Divine bless- 
 ing, the choir sang "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," 
 Dr. Parker reading selected passages from the Scrip- 
 tures. The choir sang " O Love Divine, That Stooped 
 to Share," and the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell offered 
 prayer, at the close of which the body was removed 
 from the church, the choir singing " For All the Saints 
 Who From Their Labors Rest." Benediction by the 
 Rev. Dr. Jacobus closed the church services. 
 
1 6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.U. 
 
 From the Hartford Telegram of March ly, igoo. 
 
 The funeral services of the Rev. Dr. George Leon 
 Walker began with prayers at the house, No. 46 Pros- 
 pect street, at 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon, only rela- 
 tives and intimate friends of the dead preacher being 
 present. Prayers were offered by Professor Jacobus, 
 acting pastor of the church, after which the remains 
 were taken to the Center Church for the public 
 funeral. 
 
 The services at the church, which was filled with its 
 members and friends of the dead pastor, were begun 
 with the funeral chant given responsively by the choir 
 and Prof. Jacobus. The prayer of invocation was of- 
 fered by the Rev. Dr. Parker of the South Church, 
 followed by the hymn, " O God, Our Help in Ages 
 Past," by the choir. The scriptural selections were 
 read by Dr. Parker. Dr. Holmes' hymn, " O Love 
 Divine, that Stooped to Share," was sung, followed 
 by the closing prayer by the Rev. J, H. Twichell of 
 the Asylum Hill Congregational Church. While the 
 last hymn, '• P'or All the Saints Who From Their 
 Labors Rest," was sung, the remains were borne from 
 the church. The benediction was pronounced by Pro- 
 fessor Jacobus. 
 
 The family and a delegation from the church will 
 accompany Dr. Walker's remains to Brattleboro, Vt., 
 for interment, leaving on the 8.04 train, this morning. 
 Relatives who were present at the funeral were Dr. 
 Henry F. Walker of New York, the brother of the 
 doctor ; Professor and Mrs. George N. Boardman of 
 Chicago, Mrs. Boardman being the sister ; Miss Mary 
 M. Walker of Northampton, Mass., cousin ; Ambrose 
 Eastman, Esq., of Boston, cousin ; Colonel D. R. 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 17 
 
 Larned of Washington, D. C, brother of the late 
 Mrs. Walker ; Mrs. Edgar Sherman and daughter, 
 Miss Mary R. Sherman, of New York, sister and niece 
 of Mrs. Walker ; William R. Howe, Esq., of Orange, 
 N. J., nephew of Mrs. Walker ; Mr. Robert Walker of 
 New York, the Hon. and Mrs. Francis Wayland of 
 New Haven. 
 
 An Editorial published in The Congregationalist of 
 March 22, igoo. 
 
 Probably the impression which Dr. Walker made upon 
 most people at first was that of positiveness of character. 
 No one could talk with him two minutes without com- 
 prehending that he had definite convictions and was 
 accustomed to assert them frankly. He had the gift 
 of clearness also. Knowing exactly what he believed, 
 he uttered himself so lucidly that no one continued in 
 doubt unless he meant to leave uncertainty, and then 
 no doubt of that fact remained. He also seemed to 
 be, and was, intensely in earnest. To him life, duty, 
 and influence were serious things, responsibility for 
 which, although not an oppressive burden, none the 
 less was never to be forgotten or disregarded. 
 
 These characteristics, when they accompany such 
 signal, and in some respects unusual, natural ability as 
 his, inevitably render their possessor a leader among 
 men, and this he was conspicuously. Although re- 
 markably free from the spirit of self-seeking, he ac- 
 cepted readily such responsibilities as naturally fell to 
 him, and his sagacity and efficiency were so fruitfu 
 that his services to the church and the world, great 
 and valuable although they were, doubtless would have 
 been multiplied largely had not his physical frailty pro- 
 
l8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 hibited. Indeed, it is surprising that one, much of 
 whose life was a prolonged fight for health, should 
 have left such a record of important and diversified 
 service. 
 
 No one should think of Dr. Walker, however, as 
 lacking the more winning qualities. He could be 
 sharp and severe. He was not to be provoked with 
 impunity. Yet he was as tender and gentle as he was 
 fearless and outspoken. He won love as easily as 
 respect. Although his lack of robustness limited him 
 more than most men to domestic enjoyments, there 
 were few more companionable men, few who contrib- 
 uted more to the genuine, appropriate pleasure of any 
 social occasion which he could attend. In this as in 
 everything else he had a high ideal, and for that very 
 reason he leaves a more precious memory. He was 
 notably considerate and helpful towards the young, 
 especially young ministers, to whom a few words out 
 of his long experience always gave courage, and rarely 
 failed to add illumination. 
 
 In his successive pastorates he won reputation as 
 among the freshest, most forcible, and successful of 
 preachers. In the wider field of denominational work 
 he was a conceded leader. He was concerned promi- 
 nently in the leading controversies of our last twenty 
 years, but with no impairment of his repute for wis- 
 dom, fairness, or kindliness. As a historical scholar 
 and author he also made an honorable name. Although 
 he has been withdrawn from active life for several 
 years, lingering in the twilight of life until his earthly 
 sun should set, he has not been, nor will he be, for- 
 gotten. A great and good, an honored and beloved 
 leader has been called away from us. 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
 19 
 
 A Letter of Rev. Dr. Edwin Pond Parker, of the Sec- 
 ond Church, Hartford, to the Hartford Times of 
 March 14, igoo. 
 The departure of Dr. George Leon Walker from 
 these earthly scenes is another public bereavement 
 added to those which this community has recently sus- 
 tained. Although his residence in Hartford had not 
 been of long duration, it had been long enough to en- 
 able him to identify himself with our public interests, 
 to put himself at the head of his brethren in the Gos- 
 pel ministry here, and to win the respect, the rever- 
 ence, and the affection of our people generally. Al- 
 though for the last four years he has been withdrawn 
 from all participation in public affairs, he has not been 
 withdrawn from the fond and tender regard which 
 his character and services had secured for himself, 
 but has been the object of an ever-deepening love and 
 sympathy. 
 
 Perhaps no one now living in Hartford has so long 
 known him as I have. When I was a student in Bangor 
 Theological Seminary, he came to the pastorate of the 
 State Street Church in Portland, Me., and circum- 
 stances which led me frequently to Portland at that 
 period, brought me also into some personal acquaint- 
 ance with him. At that time his peculiar power as a 
 preacher was fully recognized, and no minister in 
 Maine stood higher in the estimation of his brethren 
 and of the churches. His solid, sound, sterling, intel- 
 lectual qualities were then, as ever since, combined 
 with such a sincerity, depth, seriousness, and earnest- 
 ness of character, as made all his public utterances 
 both interesting, engaging, instructive, and impressive. 
 It need not be said that, as he grew in years and in 
 
20 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 experience, he grew in wisdom and grace and power, 
 broadening and ripening and mellowing through the 
 summer and autumn of his life ; but his distinguish- 
 ing qualities of mind and character were as conspicu- 
 ous in the earlier years of his public ministry as in the 
 later. He never attempted to live or act or speak up 
 to the convictions of other men, but up to his own 
 well-considered and settled convictions. He was 
 immovable in what seemed to him right and best. 
 He was courteous, but frank and courageous and 
 explicit in the expression of his opinions and beliefs. 
 
 I think he was particularly distinguished for the 
 clarity of his thought and of its expression. The 
 stream of his discourse was always perfectly pellucid. 
 Dr. Burton, who became very fond of Dr. Walker, 
 once said to me of him : "His thinking is as clear-cut 
 and definite as if stamped with a die." 
 
 His literary art always reminded me of fine etchings. 
 This, with just a touch here and there of soft color, 
 supplied from a chastened imagination, made his 
 thoughtful discourse or essay a thing of quiet beauty. 
 It was all so clear, pure, luminous, and instinct with 
 earnest feeling. 
 
 Just this clarity, this purity, this tenderness of feel- 
 ing, this color of beauty, this severity of simplicity, 
 touched all the while with subdued emotion, which 
 were so noticeable in his writings, were no less notice- 
 able in all his more private communications. They 
 were grounded in his nature and character, " The 
 style was the man." They who only saw and heard 
 Dr. Walker in the pulpit and only knew him as a 
 ] preacher, might have misjudged a prevailing serious- 
 ness and even solemnity of aspect and manner. He 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 21 
 
 had a holy horror of the sort of wit with which some 
 ministers — usually destitute of real wit or humor — 
 endeavor to enliven their discourses. At an installa- 
 tion service here in Hartford, when a brother minister 
 was lugging into his talk sundry vain endeavors after 
 jocosity, he said to me, groaning with pain, " Oh, 
 Parker, can we never be rid of these wretched 
 attempts to be witty on such occasions ! " But, at 
 the proper time and occasion. Dr. Walker could be 
 deliciously humorous. No one more quickly saw or 
 more cordially appreciated the humorous aspect of 
 things. He was delightful in conversation, genial, 
 suggestive, witty, and sympathetic. 
 
 Last November the General Conference of the Con- 
 gregational churches of Connecticut was held in the 
 Park Church of this city. At the afternoon session. 
 Dr. Walker was present, for he dearly loved his pro- 
 fessional brethren. 
 
 He was wheeled up the side aisle in the chair that 
 so many will remember, to a position not far from the 
 pulpit. When attention was called to his presence, at 
 a given signal, the whole congregation, chiefly com- 
 posed of clergymen, rose together and stood for a few 
 moments, in token of their respect and love for the 
 dear, the pure, the good man, whom they all, I believe, 
 gladly and gratefully acknowledged as the "chief 
 among them." 
 
 In the long line of ministers who have served in the 
 pastorate of the First Church in this city, Thomas 
 Hooker stands first and foremost, I suppose. In my 
 opinion Dr. George Leon Walker stands next to him 
 in the rank of greatness. 
 
 It is with joy in his deliverance out of strangely- 
 
2 2 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 ordered infirmities, but with deep sorrow that we shall 
 see his dear face no more here, that we bid him — a 
 brother greatly beloved — farewell ! e. p. p. 
 
 Extract from a Sermon by Dr. Parker published in 
 the Hartford Com ant for March 26, igoo. 
 
 Dr. Parker's sermon at the South Church yesterday 
 morning was on the words in which St. Paul describes 
 himself, in his Roman captivity, as a " prisoner of the 
 Lord." The general thought Okf the discourse was 
 that Christian men and women are by no means cut 
 off from the possibility of service and usefulness by 
 the various disabilities which may befall them in the 
 course of faithful living — disabilities which are often 
 as great as if they were those of outward constraint. 
 Dr. Parker said : 
 
 " It may be pardonable to cite a case familiar to 
 many of you, which strikingly illustrates my interpre- 
 tation of this phrase. It is now nearly four years 
 since Dr. Walker was suddenly and mysteriously 
 arrested, as by the touch of an unseen authority, and 
 imprisoned. His imprisonment was a strict and dis- 
 abling one. There was a chain upon his limbs, there 
 were fetters upon his lips. His disabilities were, in 
 many respects, far greater than those of St. Paul. 
 
 " But was that dear man of God a useless Christian 
 through those years of restraint and limitation .'' Was 
 he without influence and power in this community 
 during that period of confinement.'' Just because he 
 was all the while 'the prisoner of the Lord,' believing 
 himself to be such, and behaving himself as such, 
 there was a dignity and distinction, as well as pathos, 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 23 
 
 in^his condition that effectually appealed to men and 
 women. Power was with him, and went forth from 
 him, and benediction. Light streamed forth from his 
 comparatively solitary life, and the influence of his 
 faith and courage and patience was continually and 
 widely felt in our city and elsewhere ; so that, when at 
 last he was released and removed, it was universally 
 felt that Hartford had sustained a distinct bereave- 
 ment in his departure. He was continually saying, 
 inaudibly but effectually, * I, the prisoner of the Lord, 
 beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation 
 wherewith ye are called ; ' and perhaps that mute, 
 pathetic, dignified ministration of his was as powerfui 
 as any preaching of the word from any pulpit in this 
 city." 
 
 A Sketch entitled "George Leon Walker in Hartford," by 
 Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of the Asylum Hill Congrega- 
 tional Church, Hartford, in the Congregationalist of 
 March 2g, igoo. 
 
 Within little more than half a year the ancient mother 
 church of Hartford has been bereaved of both its min- 
 isters. August 8 died Dr. Lamson. On the 14th of 
 the present month Dr. Walker, pastor emeritus since 
 1892, when failing health enforced his retirement from 
 active service, also fell asleep. By both events our 
 general community was affected with an unusual sorrow 
 and sense of loss. In the circumstances of the leave- 
 taking in the two cases there was, however, a great 
 contrast. Dr. Lamson's call hence was most sudden 
 and unprepared for. For four years Dr. Walker had 
 lain in a feeble and helpless condition expecting the 
 
24 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 hour of his departure, which he and all knew could not 
 be far off. 
 
 When in a moment Dr. Lamson was gone, we woke 
 to consider, as, naturally, we had not done before, what 
 we thought of him, how large his worth in our esteem 
 and how high his deserved place in our affection. 
 But during the long period in which Dr. Walker, and 
 ourselves with him, were in waiting for his release, we 
 had time to reflect much upon him and to discover the 
 impression of himself — of his gifts, his character, his 
 work — which he had made upon us, and our feelings 
 about him altogether as the result of the previous 
 thirteen years of his fellowship with us. 
 
 One conclusion we reached in consequence, in which 
 we were united, was that declared by Dr. Parker, for 
 forty years honored pastor of our Second Church, 
 when, in a communication to the Hartford Times, 
 the day that Dr. Walker left us, he wrote : " In the 
 long line of ministers who have served in the pastorate 
 of the First Church in this city, Thomas Hooker 
 stands first and foremost, I suppose. In my opinion, 
 Dr. George Leon Walker .stands next to him in the 
 rank of greatness." That was, indeed, saying a great 
 deal, but it was a judgment from a highly competent 
 source, soberly pronounced, and probably will stand. 
 
 From the time of his settlement in Hartford Dr. 
 Walker passed in a remarkable manner into sympathy 
 and communion with its historic memories, and particu- 
 larly under fascination of the personality of his mighty 
 predecessor. No one beside had ever done so much to 
 illumine the work achieved by Hooker in his day and to 
 exalt his title to lasting renown as, incidentally to the 
 quarter-millennial of the old church in 1883, did he. 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
 25 
 
 For intellectual power and independence conjoined with 
 virile force of spirit, he was himself distinctly of the 
 masterful type. 
 
 In matters on which a course was to be taken, it 
 was eminently characteristic of him to think for him- 
 self, to work out his own result, and in simple, uncon- 
 scious courage to order his position accordingly. Ol 
 this his memorable sermon at the seventy-fifth anni- 
 versary of the American Board in 1885, and the part 
 he bore in the strenuous debates that occurred at some 
 of its subsequent meetings, were illustrations. 
 
 But here in Hartford we had already learned that he 
 was a strong man of just that sort, whose mind was his 
 own, and who, where his convictions were concerned, 
 did not shrink from the initiative. To be sure, he came 
 to us in his mature prime and as a man of established 
 reputation, yet, even so, it was extraordinary how soon 
 he obtained in our^ community at large the deference 
 accorded to those felt to be of competent judgment in 
 affairs and wise in counsel. 
 
 In a singularly graceful and appreciative published 
 tribute to Dr. Lamson at the time of his death, Dr. 
 Samuel Hart, an eminent Episcopal clergyman, then 
 professor in Trinity College, speaking of the place that, 
 in the brief period of his residence in the city, he had 
 won in the public regard, said : 
 
 " Dr. Lamson's predecessor in the pastorate had 
 gained an almost unique position among us. I think 
 that in some way we expect one who holds that pas- 
 torate to be our first citizen, taking the lead in matters 
 which have to do with the religious and moral welfare 
 of the community, and holding for it a real connection 
 with all its past history Dr. Walker is still 
 
26 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 among us, and we hope that he knows how universally 
 he is recognized as a man of leading position and influ- 
 ence among us, how gladly we recognize all that we 
 owe to him, and how strong a hold he has upon our 
 affections." 
 
 Few, I am confident, will challenge the justice of the 
 statement that no minister of any Hartford church in 
 modern times has carried the measure of weight 
 as a citizen that George Leon Walker did — Horace 
 Bushnell alone excepted. 
 
 With this strong man came to us a strong preacher, 
 upon which fact there is small need to dwell, for the 
 knowledge of it is not confined to Hartford. Intel- 
 lectually, his pulpit work was of a very rare order of 
 excellence. His sermons were abundantly mixed with 
 brains. There was always a thoughtfulness and an 
 ability in his handling of his subject that compelled the 
 respect of his hearer, whoever he might be. More- 
 over, in point of literary art, his preaching was of a 
 quality equally rare. His style was marvelously lucid 
 and incisive, and exhaled the flavors of culture. Pro- 
 fessor Lounsbury, Yale's most distinguished English 
 scholar, who was wont often to hear him during his 
 pastorate in New Haven, once told me that more than 
 any other preacher he had ever listened to he revealed 
 in his use of language intimacy of acquaintance with 
 the English classics ; that not infrequently he could 
 identify the very mine from which the choice gold of 
 his speech had been extracted. 
 
 But these things concern the secondary elements of 
 his pulpit power only. The principal secret of his 
 eft'ect as a minister of the divine Word of course lay 
 deeper — in the intense conviction of the evangelical 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 27 
 
 truth with which he was penetrated. He believed, 
 therefore he spoke. Regarding him, at least, it was 
 never by any surmised that he did not wholly mean 
 what he said, or that he was keeping back some part 
 of what he thought. His veracity was of the kind that 
 could be felt, and he was transparently fearless. 
 
 In the extract cited from the pen of Dr. Hart there 
 is reference to the hold Dr. Walker gained on our af- 
 fections. A very strong hold indeed, it was, and, it 
 may be allowed, unexpectedly so. Whoever was 
 thrown in with him in the ways of life casually, or only 
 a few times, must probably have judged him rather 
 unlikely — less likely than most, perhaps — to inspire 
 attachment in private social relations. His manner 
 was uncommonly reserved and distant. While this 
 was, doubtless, to some extent due to the ill-health with 
 which from his youth he had contended, it must pre- 
 sumably have been also of his constitutional make. He 
 was naturally undemonstrative. During the five years 
 of his New Haven pastorate, we of Hartford, though 
 we had not infrequently met him, had none of us grown 
 into anything more than half acquaintance with him. 
 And when he entered our circle we expected that, 
 though he was a great addition to us, we should find 
 him socially somewhat indigestible, which we did for a 
 time, but only for a time. It did not take us long to 
 discover that this inexpressive man was as full of the 
 milk of human kindness as he could hold. Little by 
 little, in ways fondly remembered but that it would be 
 difficult to describe, it leaked out that under that 
 severe seeming outside beat a heart of unbounded out- 
 flowing good will and of most generous, appreciative 
 sympathy. 
 
28 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER. D.D. 
 
 I can never forget how, going one day into the study 
 of the late Dr. Burton — ever and to this hour dearly 
 beloved — I was hailed with : " I'm glad you've come 
 in! I've got something to show you — a note from 
 Walker ! " Dr. Burton had just preached the sermon 
 at the funeral of our revered neighbor, Rev. Myron N. 
 Morris of West Hartford, and the note, which he pro- 
 ceeded to read to me, was one Dr. Walker had written 
 to say how thankful to him he was for the manner in 
 which he had opened the theme of that good man's 
 virtues. It was extremely cordial in its tone, and it 
 ended thus : " What a pity there are so few of whom 
 such things can be said, and only one man who can 
 say them." 
 
 "Twichell!" exclaimed Dr. Burton, slapping the 
 note down upon the table, "a Frenchman couldn't 
 beat it ! " 
 
 Well, in short, by one token and another, we were 
 presently made aware that in our new associate was a 
 plenitude of the paternal sentiment toward every one 
 of us, and we all fell in love with him — the more 
 deeply by reaction from our first impression of him. 
 And so it went on thenceforward, our love ever grow- 
 ing, till at last, while he lingered stricken amongst us, 
 called of his Heavenly Father to endure the long, 
 weary trial of strange affliction, it mounted to an infi- 
 nite, yearning tenderness. A soul wealthier by nature 
 and by grace in the tempers of gentleness and fellow 
 feeling and magnanimity than he had never been 
 vouchsafed to our companionship. 
 
 His sympathies and his compassions were wide- 
 ranging, and, though he confessedly had a peculiar 
 skill in ministering- the consolations of the faith to 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
 29 
 
 broken hearts, were not confined to humanity. It 
 was a beautiful disclosure of his inward character 
 and life — of his religion, and as well a notable event 
 in the Christian annals of Hartford — his preaching, 
 as he did in 1891, a splendid sermon, full of pathos 
 and marked by all his felicities in discourse, on the 
 duties we owe to dumb animals. This sermon, enti- 
 tled by him Our Humble Associates, was afterward 
 published as a tract by our Connecticut Humane Soci- 
 ety and has since been distributed by the thousand, 
 nor is it the least worthy monument of its author. 
 
 The quality of mercy was ingrained in his spirit. If 
 I may be permitted another personal reminiscence — 
 it was in June, 1895, (so my note-book tells me,) that I 
 went to him on the unwelcome errand of asking him 
 to give me the facts relative to a certain man's misdeed 
 in the somewhat remote past, with which fact, he, as 
 pastor, had been acquainted. I explained the reason 
 of my request — that it was not a private one, but offi- 
 cial and compulsory. He heard me through, was silent 
 for a minute or two, and then, with more emotion than 
 I had ever seen him manifest before, answered : " Yes, 
 I know all about it, but, Twichell, I will not tell it to 
 you or to anybody. That wrong was repented of and 
 forgiven, and I will do nothing to impart the knowl- 
 edge of it, or to keep the memory of it alive." 
 
 He, however, undertook himself to speak a word in 
 a certain quarter, whereby the object of my coming to 
 him would be served. As I was leaving and we stood 
 in the door, he said, in a softened but very earnest 
 tone : " What should you and I do if there wasn't any 
 forgiveness of sins .-' " 
 
 What wonder that this scene, witness of the thoughts 
 
^O REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 in which he lived before God, has remained with me 
 from that time as representative of the man, and that 
 it came back to me when I looked on his dead face. 
 
 A tribute by Professor George Nye Boardman, of 
 Chicago Theological Seminary, published in the 
 Necrology of Afidover Theological Seminary. 
 
 Dr. Walker was a person of marked individuality 
 from his youth. His tall, slender form, his flushed 
 cheeks and otherwise pallid face indicated physical 
 frailty not needing interpretation. From the age of 
 sixteen it seemed almost certain that pulmonary dis- 
 ease had fastened upon him. It was really chronic 
 pleurisy, from which he was never wholly free. It 
 was at this time that he turned his attention to the 
 subject of religion, and in 1848 united with his father's 
 church at Pittsford. His religious experience was of 
 a somewhat melancholic hue, fostered by the Imitatio 
 Christi and such like books. Later, a typhoid fever 
 left him with a lameness that was never entirely over- 
 come. In after times, on occasions of depressed health, 
 he was forced to resort to his crutches, and sometimes 
 in preaching, notably at New Haven, to occupy a seat 
 prepared for him in the pulpit. The four years suc- 
 ceeding his stay in Boston were spent mostly at his 
 father's home. This was the period of his special in- 
 tellectual culture. Continually threatened with lung- 
 disease, often moving about with crutch and cane, he 
 delved year after year, reading the poets and acquiring 
 that mastery of the English language which enabled 
 him to marshal words in such a way as to make them 
 servants of his thought and will. 
 
MEMORIAL SKETCH AND TRIBUTES. 
 
 31 
 
 Very soon after his settlement as a pastor he de- 
 veloped qualities besides those of a preacher which at- 
 tracted attention. He was a citizen as well as a min- 
 ister. He sent forth ringing utterances in the Civil 
 War, and took active part in questions concerning pub- 
 lic schools. He was often called upon to take part in 
 important councils and in measures and movements 
 connected with home and foreign missions. 
 On a review of his life, his character, as a whole, 
 stands out before the minds of his friends with great 
 distinctness. They are impressed with the power of 
 his intellect, especially its quick and accurate intui- 
 tions ; with the power of his imagination, imparting 
 fervid life to historic scenes as well as natural objects ; 
 with his acute aesthetic sensibility ; with his persist- 
 ency in purpose and effort ; and with the dominant 
 good sense that controlled all his actions. But when 
 all things are considered — the illnesses of early life, 
 the interruptions because of physical infirmities in his 
 professional career, those last three and a half years of 
 disablement from locomotion and speech — his friends 
 are impressed most of all, perhaps, by his courageous 
 and patient endurance. 
 
 From a letter by its Hartford correspondent in the 
 Springfield Republican of March 18, igoo. 
 
 Dr. George Leon Walker, who died Wednesday 
 morning, was too large and fine an intellect to be 
 valued at his real worth by most of those with whom 
 he came in contact. Dr. Parker, in a really admirable 
 article on him, has spoken particularly of the clarity 
 
3 2 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 of his thought. Fully sympathizing with that recog- 
 nition of a distinguishing quality, I am inclined to 
 place his sanity even higher. He was judicious, in 
 the large sense, not always in trifles, because he 
 attached no more importance to them than the law 
 does to the things it includes in the phrase de viini- 
 inis. He came very near to being Goethe's " self- 
 poised" man. Add that he was a genuinely good 
 man, and a kindly, with an intellect as acute as it was 
 solid, and you have the elements of a really remarka- 
 ble character. That he gained the distinction he did 
 was merely incidental to his doing his own work in 
 his own way. Had he sought much more he would 
 have attained it, but he might not have been so large 
 a man. 
 
VERSES. 
 
Dr. Walker, in early manhood, especially during his 
 sojourn in Boston and his years of convalescence and 
 study in his father's home at Pittsford, gave much 
 attention to writing verse — a form of expression 
 which he abandoned after entering on the exacting 
 labors of the pastorate. The following stanzas, all 
 written in the period from his twenty-second to his 
 twenty-eighth year, are here printed as illustrative of 
 his love of nature and of his Christian faith. 
 
 "NOW THE DROWSY YEAR AWAKENS." 
 
 Once more earth's mighty enginery has roll'd 
 
 Round her far pathway, worn with ages old, 
 
 The wheeling sphere. Not with thundering sound, 
 
 Jarring discord, but through the vast profound 
 
 Of desert, void, illimitable space, 
 
 Pealing music, till on the dial face 
 
 Of time, the bounding Spring proclaims again 
 
 The glad resumption of her gentle reign. 
 
 Most lovely Spring, earth welcomes thee, 
 
 A greeting waves in every tree ; 
 
 From every hedgerow, far and near, 
 
 Tumultuous chorals, ringing clear, 
 
 Fling to each odorous gale. 
 
 From warbling hearts, their joyful hail. 
 
36 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 The rustling leaves, with yellow breasts, 
 
 Impatient cast the armor crests 
 
 'Neath which, but little time ago, 
 
 They shrank from Winter's cold and snow. 
 
 Bursting buds their choice perfume. 
 
 Woodland flowers their brightest bloom. 
 
 Jocund brooks their gayest song, 
 
 Twitt'ring birds their merriest throng. 
 
 Dallying winds their gentlest sighs. 
 
 Morning clouds their richest dyes, 
 
 Liquid skies their deepest blue, 
 
 Flaunting fields their greenest hue. 
 
 Joy to give as homage due. 
 
 'Neath the hill-side's shelt'ring lee. 
 
 Where the violet springeth free, 
 
 Play-day bees on lazy wing 
 
 (iossip of the opening Spring, 
 
 (iaudy flies in perk attire, 
 
 ( iold and green, and fring'd with fire. 
 
 Dart and flash, and circling wheel. 
 
 Humming low the joy they feel. 
 
 And joyous is tlie mountain now. 
 
 Though high upon its rocky brow 
 
 A gleaming coronet of snow 
 
 Sheds pearly drops to lakes below; 
 
 But round its wide and wooded sweep. 
 
 Where ancient firs and balsams weep 
 
 Their fragrant tears, the wild-flowers spring. 
 
 And wide the vines their tendrils fling, 
 
 (^r clasp around the rugged form 
 
 Of some scarr'd wrestler with the storm. 
 
 And joyous are the vales below — 
 
 Their varied vestures brightly glow. 
 
 And seem like water's liquid flow. 
 
 So smoothly blend the gorgeous dyes 
 
 In which the flooded landscape lies. 
 
 In blushing morning's level beam, 
 
 In mellow evening's purple gleam, 
 
 Upwreathing in fantastic streams, 
 
VERSES. 
 
 Vapor)- fragrance curling steams. 
 
 And wide around the landscape smokes 
 
 With incense ; while the hoary oaks, 
 
 Towering grim through the cloudy sea, 
 
 In nature's temple seem to be 
 
 Tlie priests of some religion old, 
 
 When earth and man one creed did hold : 
 
 But joining now in mystic rite 
 
 With winds and skies, and air and light. 
 
 f'rom vales and groves and mossy dells. 
 
 F"rom crystal lakes and rocky fells, 
 
 From all things joyful homage bring. 
 
 And revYent offer to the Sorina:. 
 
 INADEOUATENES.S. 
 
 Many be the songs of Spring- 
 Trilled by poets happy-hearted ; 
 
 Half they seem themselves to sing. 
 
 And, wakened by their caroling. 
 Tears of sudden joy are started. 
 
 But never deftest muse may tind 
 Line so gently flowing 
 
 Soft to chime with April wind. 
 
 Through budding boughs of the wildwood blowing 
 
 Lines there are so sweet, they seem 
 
 Summer-laden blossoms springing ; — 
 Yellow cowslips' sunny gleam. 
 Or daisies by the shadowed stream 
 
 Brushed by wild-vine gently swinging. 
 But never subtlest art can frame 
 
 Words so fresh and glowing; 
 Fancy were not put to* shame 
 
 Bv hare-bell blue, in the dingle growing. 
 
 37 
 
^8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Haunt we then the hazel dell? 
 
 Tenderest rhymes be left behind us ; 
 There do softer warblings dwell, 
 And ripe with fuller beauty swell, 
 
 And sweeter poets there will find us. 
 All praise to songs of Summer when 
 
 Winter eves are dying; — 
 Wakens Spring the woods again? 
 
 Then Merlin's song leaves us weary sighing ! 
 
 DAWN. 
 
 The purple banners of the coming day 
 
 Waved broad above the ashen mountain's cone, 
 
 And flushed a shadowy halo up the gray 
 Of lonely heaven, deserted save where shone, 
 Wan with long vigil, weary, sad, alone, 
 
 (^ne fainting star, with slowly-pulsing light. 
 
 Last patient watcher o'er the couch of night. 
 
 North, south, from peak to peak the glory rolled ; 
 A 'wildered cloud, far voyaged, caught up the glow, 
 
 And crowned the western height with rivalled gold, 
 The emulative lake displayed below 
 In ruby tides diffused, the gorgeous show; 
 
 And, as redeemed from deluge waste anew, 
 
 Hill, valley, woodland, radiant rose to view. 
 
VERSES. 39 
 
 AUTUMNAL SONNETS. 
 I. 
 
 Discroivned. 
 
 O'er banks of mossy mould how lightly strown 
 All the wan summer lies ! The heedless tread 
 Awakes no sound, and had not pale leaves tied 
 
 As soft it came, the low wind were not known. 
 
 How strange the sharp and long-drawn shadows thrown 
 From lank and shriveled branches overhead, 
 While from their withered glories spoiler-shed 
 
 The earthv autumn scents are faintly blown. 
 
 Ah ! reft and ravaged bowers, the garish day 
 
 Flaunts through the hidings of your dewy glooms ; — 
 And though in leafy twilights wont to be, 
 
 Shy maid, sweet-thoughted Sadness, come away, 
 And here beneath this hemlock's drooping plumes, 
 With pensive Retrospection, muse with me. 
 
 II. 
 The First Frost. 
 
 The hoar path sparkled in the level beam, 
 
 A frosty shimmer filled the silent air. 
 
 My quick breath curled in cloud lines faint and fair 
 As down the whitened field, along the stream. 
 Through the gray rushes flashing in the gleam, 
 
 Up the steep hillside-way I went, to where 
 
 With the dear wildwood I was wont to share 
 Each joy or pain through all the Summer's dream. 
 A chill fell on my heart. How still on high 
 
 The rimey branches stood against the blue ! 
 
 No voice for me, no motion, nor a breath ! 
 And I stood dumb ; no pitying tear, no sigh 
 
 Of yearning hope, for deep I felt they knew 
 That cold and glitterini; silence told of Death. 
 
4© REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 HOPE. 
 
 Dear Beech, now that thy pale tops tipped with brown 
 Drink softer tints from Autumn's golden air, 
 And not a motion wakes save here and there 
 
 A lonely leaf comes wavering noiseless down, 
 
 I fain would seek why Winter's frosty frown 
 Alone can charm thee all thy state to wear, 
 Alone can light that smile, so dear and fair 
 
 That thy last hour is all the season's crown ! 
 
 Is it that when on us the drear days press, 
 
 Some strength our hearts may glean with grief to cope 
 As memory brings again thy loveliness ; 
 
 Or that beneath those still, prophetic signs 
 The yearning of thy sudden joy divines 
 The truth and promise of a fadeless Hope ! 
 
 FROM THEE COMETH HELP. 
 
 Dear Lord, this world which Thou hast wrought, 
 And with Thine own divineness fraught, 
 
 No fullness has for me; 
 I pine within this fair abode. 
 
 Nor, glad howe'er, content can be. 
 Though from it to my heart has flowed 
 
 A beauty like the sea. 
 
 II. 
 
 The narrow hopes of earthly days, 
 The little hum of human praise, 
 
 Leave hunger in my breast ; 
 Though by her promise oft beguiled 
 
 To follow in an eager quest. 
 Deceiving Hope a moment smiled, 
 
 Then left me void of rest. 
 
VERSES. 
 
 For but with phantoms side by side 
 Through things of time my footsteps glide, 
 
 And like to shadows flee; 
 And beauty that may fill the soul 
 
 Athirst for an Infinity, 
 Springs not where circling seasons roll. 
 
 But lives alone in Thee. 
 
 Ah then ! from out my strivings vain, 
 
 Thou Home of Rest, thou Peace from pain. 
 
 I come to Thee alone ; 
 O Fount of Life — O Life of Day — 
 
 O Fullness of Creation's zone — 
 Lift on my life the quick'ning ray 
 
 That makes me born Thine own. 
 
 DEDICATION HYMN. 
 
 At the opening of the ne%u Cemetery at Pitts/ord, Vt., 
 July 4, 1857. 
 
 O Thou to whose eternal years 
 
 No grief, or loss, or change is known. 
 
 We hallow here our place of tears 
 For death that dwells with us alone. 
 
 Here hearts that bleed will sadly turn, — 
 
 Here Pity fill the drooping eye. 
 And striken Hope with love will yearn 
 
 O'er us who fade away and die. 
 
 Yet we who weep, and they who rest. 
 Alike are known and dear to Thee ; 
 
 And they are dearer to Thy breast 
 Than to our hearts they e'er can be. 
 
 41 
 
A2 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Bless then this spot, where years shall bring 
 Thy loved ones, Lord, to their repose ; 
 
 Spread o'er them here Thy sheltering wing, 
 And in Thy peace their dust enclose. 
 
 So shall this place of tears be made 
 The Hill of Hope, the Field of Peace; 
 
 Here calmly then can we be laid 
 
 To wait the hour when Time shall cease. 
 
 And when these bending skies have flown, 
 And all who sleep shall rise again. 
 
 Be this the garner of Thine own, 
 The harvest of the Precious Grain. 
 
 Take Thou this Hill: It first was thine: 
 From earthly use these bounds we free, — 
 
 To nobler sheaves its roods resign. 
 And give it. Lord, again to Thee. 
 
111. 
 
 PRAYER-MEETING TALKS. 
 
It was Dr. Walker's invariable habit to make elabo- 
 rate preparation for the mid-week meeting, though 
 always speaking from a skeleton outline of his address. 
 These outlines often grew into sermons for Sunday 
 use. Those here presented were chosen because found 
 in his pocket-book at the time of his paralytic seizure. 
 They had evidently been selected by him for future 
 sermonic development. They were used at the prayer, 
 meetings of the First Church, Hartford, in the years 
 appended to each. 
 
 I. 
 
 John VIII : 12. Not zualk in darkness, etc. 
 
 Occasion of Christ's words. 
 Imagery on which founded. 
 Implication with regard to life. 
 Promise ligJit, not darkness. 
 
 But now, as a matter of practical experience, there 
 is a great amount of doubtfulness. We believe, sup- 
 pose, hope. A main reason for this : — we do not 
 follow Christ. Do not take Him as guide. Do not 
 
^6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D 
 
 bring all things to the test of His words and life. Or 
 we do these things imperfectly. Peter followed afar 
 off ; got into trouble. 
 
 How to get light : — follow truth to its consequences. 
 
 I. Christ's loving presence and care. With you 
 always. Think of it. Make effort to realize it. It 
 will grow real and true. But many can't see. How 
 to make the effort. 
 
 n. Duty as a Christian, if perplexed. 
 
 Begin at the sensitive point of conscience. Attempt 
 something every day. Follow. Not all things at 
 once. Progress in Christian living. There is great 
 light in simple surrender to conscience and principle. 
 
 Grandeur in attitude of trust in God, where nothing 
 else can be had : Though He slay me, etc. But that 
 is not the general attitude of life. We need the light 
 of life. The unity which comes through loving obedi- 
 ence, loving following. (1883.) 
 
 H. 
 
 Matthew X : 2-4. Nozv the names of the tzvelve apos- 
 tles are these, etc. 
 
 The variety and sufficiency of Christ's adaptation to 
 men. 
 
 Christ might have done His work without any inti- 
 mate companion ; or He might have had one only. 
 But He had many, and their traits are carefully recorded 
 with some distinctness. 
 
PRAYER-MEETING TALKS. 47 
 
 Why ? One reason is that the Gospel might be vari- 
 ously attested. Many witnesses. But a reason of no 
 less significance is, that the Gospel's adaptation to 
 many might be seen. 
 
 Who were they .'' Some of them. 
 
 1. Matthew, the man of business cares, 
 
 2. Nicodemus, learned in the law. 
 
 3. Joseph of Arimathsea, the man of wealth. 
 
 4. Peter, the impulsive fisherman. 
 
 5. John, the spiritual-minded. 
 
 6. Thomas, the doubting man ; a type of char- 
 
 acter now familiar. 
 
 7. Mary Magdalene. 
 Their mention shows : — 
 
 I. The variousness of Christ's sympathy. He 
 could reach different types of men. He had a real 
 interest in them all. 
 
 n. The variousness of Christ's power to win alle- 
 giance and to satisfy need. The converse true. Un- 
 like men loved Him. Their ideals all met in Him. 
 
 HI. Encourages our trust in and approach to Him. 
 
 (1884.) 
 
 HI. 
 
 II Cor. IX : 8. God is able to make all grace abound 
 toward you, etc. 
 
 A passage for people in view of some of life's diffi- 
 cult places. 
 
 A rich, full passage. It grew, as much of Scripture 
 did, out of local circumstances. Its special occasion 
 was the collection for the poor at Jerusalem. 
 
 It teaches that God is able to supply your need. 
 
^8 REVEREXD GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 A general principle: — all grace needful for one's 
 case can be had. 
 
 I. All needful wisdom in religious things. If any 
 of you lack wisdom let Jiini ask of God. A precious 
 promise, especially at such a time as the present. Di- 
 versity of views, contradictions of opinion, meet us. 
 What is truth ? Where } Perplexing to the young 
 Christian ; to the young minister. God is able to give 
 needful wisdom. He is willing. 
 
 II. All needful strength in bearing what God sends. 
 A precious promise to men in the midst of struggle ; — 
 to sufferers ; — - to those who foresee coming trouble : 
 He will be with me. " He is able " to give strength. 
 
 III. All needful efificiency for work. 
 
 The idea of efificiency in all good works is sharply 
 expressed in the text. Often impressed by Scripture 
 writers. How can my work be most efficient } This 
 one life I have to live. What a problem to any young- 
 person ! To make the most of life. 
 
 Efficiency for special effort : 
 
 He is able to make His grace abound in the particu- 
 lar responsibilities of young ministers; — of Sunday- 
 School teachers ; — of parents ; — of all. (1885.) 
 
 IV. 
 Matthew V : 48. Be ye therefore perfect, etc. 
 
 A controverted passage. Pelagians, Methodist Per- 
 fectionists, etc. 
 
 My purpose does not take into the field of discussion 
 the question whether it is possible to be sinless or not. 
 
 A practical use of the text. Take a high aim. Set 
 
PRAYER-MEETING TALKS. 
 
 49 
 
 God's perfectness as a standard. What Christ had 
 been saying. Vc Jiave heard, etc. A low standard. 
 Christ calls His followers to rise above it. He exhorts 
 them : Be ye tJieref ore perfect even as your Father ivhicli 
 is in heaven is perfect. 
 
 An exhortation and a standard like this is most im- 
 portant, for there prevails very often and enervatingly 
 among men a hopeless view of the possibilities of 
 resistance to evil. 
 
 I. In self. We conclude evil must necessarily be 
 "temper," "weakness," "fault," "infirmity." 
 
 H. In the world. There always has been sin. We 
 conclude that there always must be great evils. 
 
 The result is a practical Manichaeanism. Dual prin- 
 ciples. Permanent. 
 
 Now the Christian doctrine is that evil can be over- 
 come. The Son of God zvas manifested that he might 
 destroy the works of the devil. 
 
 Salvation has two aspects : — Forgiveness, cleansing. 
 
 Christ's work: He shall save His people from their 
 sins. The Lamb of God, ivhicJi taketh away the sins 
 of the ivorld. Titus II : 14. Its object is primarily 
 to overcome sin. 
 
 It makes a mighty difference in his struggle whether 
 the attitude of the Christian is one of hope or of doubt. 
 
 How can sin be overcome .-* A suggestive passage 
 is Romans XII : 21 : Overcome evil with good. Dis- 
 place it by something better. 
 
 {a) In self. Put yourself into other things. Get 
 interested in something more worthy. Make yourself 
 interested. 
 
 {b) In the world. Set good in place of bad. Value 
 of high aims and of co-operative efforts. (1888.) 
 4 
 
^O REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 V. 
 
 Luke XVIII 141. What wilt thou that I shall do 
 unto thee ? 
 
 The blind man had precise knowledge of his need. 
 
 We all pray. We pray often. We use strong lan- 
 guage of importunity. But suppose Christ should ask 
 of each one of us the question : What for thee ? 
 
 Liability to vagueness in prayer ; in confession ; in 
 supplication. 
 
 I. Importance of a knowledge of what we need. 
 
 1. Of particular faults to be rectified. 
 Illustrate by drawing. Elocution. 
 
 2. Of particular deficiencies to be supplied. 
 Physical lacks are a subject of study and of 
 
 protracted efforts to remedy. Spiritual de- 
 ficiencies should be no less so. 
 
 II. Importance of a desire for Spiritual blessings. 
 Hunger and thirst after righteousness. 
 
 III. Importance of co-operation with our prayers. 
 One great cause of their frustration is, that we pray 
 
 one way and go another. Live in accordance with our 
 prayers. 
 
 IV. Importance of expectancy of results. 
 
 The true relation between means and ends. The 
 Gospel hopeful. (1892.) 
 
IV. 
 
 SERMONS. 
 
OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN.* 
 
 Ephesians III: 14, 15. 
 
 " The Father, from whom every family [Greek fatherhood^ 
 ill heaven and on earth is named. " 
 
 I am not certain whether I have ever, at Sunday 
 service, or Thursday lecture, taken these precise words 
 of Scripture as a text for remark or not. Possibly a 
 sufficient rummaging among old manuscripts would 
 enable me to determine. But the question is of very 
 little consequence. If I ever did use them it was well ; 
 if I never did I am sorry. If I were to use them a 
 dozen times it would not be too often. For these 
 words not only bring before us a truth of supremest 
 interest to us all, but they do it in a peculiarly striking 
 and effective manner. 
 
 The general truth that the apostle in this passage 
 affirms is God's Fatherhood of us and of all men. The 
 peculiar presentation he makes of the fact is that the 
 Fatherhood of God is the original type and pattern of 
 all other fatherhood that we know of anywhere. " The 
 
 * Preached on February 9, 1890, on recovery from a severe 
 illness. 
 
54 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Father from whom every fatherhood, in heaven and on 
 earth, is named." God, that is to say, is not simply 
 called the Father of men because there arc traits in 
 Him somewhat like those in earthly parents, and be- 
 cause relations exist between Him and us which have 
 an analogy to those which exist between us- and our 
 children. Perhaps we have sometimes thought of the 
 matter in that way. If so, we have thought of it ex- 
 actly the wrong way round. God's Fatherhood is the 
 original thing ; man's fatherhood is the derived and 
 imitative thing. The human parenthood is but a poor, 
 imperfect image of the Divine parenthood, even as man, 
 whom the Scriptures tell us was made "in God's 
 image," is but a sorry likeness of the being in whose 
 image he was made. 
 
 Now, my dear friends, I do not know exactly how it 
 may be with you, but I confess that for myself there 
 is no fact of this life of ours which grows so in signifi- 
 cance and in value as I go onward in it, as the fact of 
 God's Fatherhood. There is no other truth I can 
 think of, so freighted with hope and comfort for this 
 troubled world, as this of which it seems to have been 
 so primal an object of Christ's mission upon earth to 
 convince men, the Fatherliness of God toward men. 
 How often that word "Father" was on His lips. 
 How continual His use of that tender name, not only 
 in His personal references to His own relationship to 
 God, but in those collective references which embraced 
 others than Himself, — nay, which embraced very sin- 
 ful and imperfect men as well as Himself. When 
 twelve ignorant men, one of whom certainly was ulti- 
 mately apostate, came to Him with the request, " Lord, 
 teach us to pray," what was the address with which 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 55 
 
 He bade them draw nigh to the object of their adora- 
 tion and supplication ? 
 
 Not, O infinite and unchangeable sovereign ; not, 
 supreme and predetermining disposer, but, " Our 
 Father which art in heaven." When, in His conver- 
 sation with the inquiring and scholarly Nicodemus on 
 the object and scope of His mission, Christ gave per- 
 haps the most concise and explicit definition of the 
 origin and intent of His enterprise that He ever any- 
 where expressed, this was what He declared it to be : 
 " God so loved the world, that He gave His only be- 
 gotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should 
 not perish, but should have eternal life." 
 
 The writer to the Hebrews tells us that in old times 
 God spake " unto the fathers in the prophets by divers 
 portions and in divers manners," but that He "hath at 
 the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son." 
 And no fact is plainer in that Son's communication to 
 men than His importunity and reiteration in declaring 
 the Fatherly character of His God and ours. 
 
 And yet how slowly has this Fatherly view of the 
 divine character grown among men ! How much more 
 ready have men been to fasten upon some adjunctive 
 and subsidiary feature of the revealed attributes of the 
 Being with whom we have to do — His kingly power, 
 His unchangeable wisdom, His sovereign purposes, His 
 righteous justice — rather than to reach up toward an 
 endeavor to comprehend something of that Infinite 
 Fatherliness in which, with a great deal beside, all 
 those separate characteristics coalesce and inhere ! 
 
 It has always been an interesting fact to me that as 
 thoughtful men and women grow old in the Christian 
 life — I speak in a general way and with full recogni- 
 
56 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 tion of the existence of exceptional people run in pecu- 
 liarly dialectic or dogmatic moulds — a readier response 
 arises in their breasts to presentations of the divine 
 character and dealings which bring out the Fatherly 
 traits of the divine nature. I cannot think this is alto- 
 gether the effect of the softening influence of age. 
 Not by any means is it to be wholly ascribed to that 
 increased tenderness of feeling which takes its softened 
 coloring from the eye that, as Wordsworth says : — 
 
 " hath kept watch over man's mortality." 
 
 Some such increased leniency of judgment undoubt- 
 edly there is which is the result of experience. Our 
 own failures and faults lead us to be more forbearing 
 toward the faults and failures of others. Our own 
 sense of the need for ourselves of some traits in the 
 divine character other than those of the justice before 
 which we have trembled, or the holiness before which 
 we have bowed ourselves in awful adoration, make us 
 more recognitive as we go on in life, of such character- 
 istics as disclosed and actual in the being whom we 
 worship. 
 
 Youth is proverbially peremptory and severe. Nar- 
 row in self-knowledge, limited in observation of others, 
 it judges quickly and it judges hardly. It knows not 
 how to make allowances. It has little appreciation of 
 what is contained in that sweet saying of Scripture, 
 " He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are 
 dust." 
 
 I had a sweet, bright boy once, lent me for seven years 
 before God took him. Brighter and more generous lit- 
 tle soul never lighted up any household with his mirth 
 and jollity. But he had the peremptoriness and posi- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 57 
 
 tiveness which I have said was characteristic of youth. 
 A natural leader of others, his playmates would gather 
 in a group about him, and from the vantage ground of 
 a box or a chair he would preach them a sermon. I 
 confess that his sermons were of the denunciatory 
 rather than the consolatory kind. He told me once 
 with a voice like a silver bell that he had compiled a 
 code of laws; "fifty-three laws," said he, "and every 
 one of them hanging laws but two." Ah, me! had he 
 lived a little longer the number of the hanging laws in 
 his code would have been smaller, and the sermons he 
 preached would have doubtless taken sometimes more 
 heed of men's need of forgiveness and consolation. 
 
 But though there is doubtless an influence, as \ 
 have said, in increasing age and in widening experi- 
 ence to soften men's judgment of others, and to make 
 them look, in their estimates of the divine character, 
 for those traits which bespeak His grace more than 
 His power, still I cannot believe that the increasing 
 tendency toward more filial thoughts of God, of which 
 I have spoken as belonging to aging piety, is mainly 
 attributable to these causes. On the contrary, it is, I 
 think, much more ascribable to the better understand- 
 ing of God's character attained by growing more like 
 Him. And as it is with the individual, so also is it 
 with the perfecting experience of the Church as a 
 whole. A process goes on in the general Christian 
 mind of the race analogous to that which takes place 
 in the mind of the single disciple. The educated and 
 experienced consciousness of men feels the need and 
 recognizes the reality of traits in the divine character 
 which the ruder and more juvenile periods of human 
 life thouofht not about and cared not for. Put the con- 
 
^8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 ception of God entertained by most of the old Hebrew 
 prophets beside that conception presented by Him 
 who spake as never man spake, and you will sec the 
 contrast which I mean. Not that those old Hebrew 
 prophets spoke wrongly ; but they spoke comparatively 
 youthfully and imperfectly. Not but what there is a 
 true meaning in that which they said about God's 
 being "wroth," and "jealous," and His being "a man 
 of war," and of His "anger with the wicked every 
 day," and of His waiting to see their feet " slide in due 
 time." Far be it from me, either for the interests of 
 my own soul or of yours, my hearers, to disguise the 
 solemn truth metaphorically set forth in a hundred 
 such passages as those. But when such representa- 
 tions are put beside the larger and riper disclosures of 
 the New Testament, and especially of Christ's own 
 utterances, wherein He sets God before us, not under 
 some such figure of kingship or judgeship as naturally 
 appeals to a ruder and more lawless period of human 
 experience, but under His own chosen figure of divine 
 Paternity, we feel if we cannot express, we know if we 
 do not quite dare to acknowledge, that there is a tre- 
 mendous difference. • 
 
 But my object at this time was not so much to argue 
 this fact of a fuller and riper conception of God's na- 
 ture arising from the characteristic presentation of Him 
 to us by Christ as the Father of men, as to call brief 
 attention to some inferences from this conception 
 itself — inferences which it seems to me are full of in- 
 struction and of comfort, while not wanting in sugges- 
 tions of admonition also. 
 
 The necessary limitations of a single Sabbath ser- 
 vice counsel me to say only a very little of what might 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 59 
 
 be said on this subject ; and I shall speak of but two 
 of these apparently necessary deductions from the 
 Fatherliness of God's character of which we are think- 
 ing at this time. 
 
 One of these inferences is the necessary kindliness 
 and generosity of God in dealing with all his creatures 
 — with all of them, I say. I did not say with a cer- 
 tain favored and unalterable number of them, but with 
 all of them. If there is any significance in fatherhood 
 in these poor human lives of ours, it means patience, 
 kindliness, generosity, self-sacrifice, does it not ? When 
 we speak of a "fatherly act," the conception which 
 comes up to mind is one of affection and attempted 
 good doing, is it not .-' 
 
 Now, this conception which we have borrowed from 
 these imperfect relationships of our earthly lives Christ 
 boldly takes hold of and applies to the relationship of 
 God to us. And He does not limit the application of 
 this conception — as some good men since He lived 
 have sometimes done — to such only as recognize and 
 yield to the reality of a heavenly tie. Nay, He expli- 
 citly affirms the existence of the relationship, and its 
 manifestation, too, in the case of others. This is the 
 very ground of Christ's appeal to us in His great Ser- 
 mon on the Mount to become like our Father in 
 heaven, that " He maketh His sun to rise on the evil 
 and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the 
 unjust." The conception of Fatherhood, therefore, in 
 Christ's use of it, as well as in our own poor imitative 
 use of it in these human relationships, which borrow 
 all their significance from that older and diviner rela- 
 tionship from which " every fatherhood in heaven and 
 on earth is named," must involve at least this much — 
 
6o REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 kindness, generous estimate, willingness to do the ut- 
 most possible to be done compatible with wisdom, 
 righteousness, and the interests of all, for the welfare 
 of each one, the very last and least, of all the creatures 
 — all the children, rather — He has made. No room 
 here for some awful doctrines which have found place 
 in certain theologies, as if there were a class of God's 
 children which never were His children ; creatures 
 made for the very purpose of being renounced and cast 
 away. 
 
 The Christian world, under the progressively educa- 
 tive power of the Gospel of Christ's own life and words, 
 is not only passing through that corporate change 
 wherethrough I said the individual man passes from 
 the hastiness and severity of youth to the tenderness 
 and allowance of age; but, beyond that, is, I think, 
 entering more truly into the deeper spirit of the Gos- 
 pel itself and of Christ, the chief messenger of that 
 Gospel. It is drawing its formulating conceptions of 
 the divine character not so much, as it has done in the 
 pa.st, from the ideas of sovereignty and judgeship and 
 power, but from that larger and more divine idea set 
 forth in the message and in the very name of the divine 
 Son — the Fatherliness of God. 
 
 Blessed and auspicious change! Change carrying 
 with it, as one of the two necessary inferences I said 
 were suggested, the kindness and liberality of God in 
 dealing with all his creatures. 
 
 The other inference from that divine Fatherliness 
 which our text assures us is the very type and origin 
 of all other conceptions of fatherliness among men, is 
 the inference that God will always in His dealings 
 with His creatures seek the highest good of each one, 
 
SERMONS. 6l 
 
 and the largest welfare of all. He can forget neither 
 of these endeavors and yet retain that character of 
 Fatherliness which He has taught us to cherish and to 
 imitate in our relations with one another. He must 
 choose for the individual, not what is easiest, perhaps, 
 not what is most comfortable, not what is desirable, 
 judged by some temporary and material, perhaps some 
 earthly and sensual, standard ; but what is best. That 
 is to say, God's Fatherliness must make Him put that 
 supreme which is supreme, the moral and spiritual 
 welfare of each one of His children. Everything must 
 be subordinated to that. If that can be had and other 
 more or less comfortable things can be had also, why 
 then those more or less comfortable things may be 
 expected. But if that cannot be had except at the 
 loss of the lesser good, then the lesser good must go. 
 
 Nor can God forget, any more than an earthly father 
 can forget, the confederated character of His family. 
 He must have in view the welfare of His whole house- 
 hold. He cannot overlook, He cannot disregard, what 
 threatens the common weal. It is not fatherliness 
 here in these little family groups we know about among 
 ourselves, to permit some turbulent and incorrigible 
 member to bring annoyance upon the whole compan- 
 ionship and dishonor upon the entire family name by 
 the exercise of a weak and indiscriminating good nature, 
 and disregard of obduracy and wrong. That is some- 
 times mistakenly called fatherliness. But it is not 
 fatherliness in men. Nor is it in God. 
 
 That God is the Father of men does not at all imply 
 that all government over them suffers lapse, that all 
 discipline of them is dropped into disuse, that all sever- 
 ity, even, in dealing with them is abandoned. These 
 
62 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.U. 
 
 are not thoughts to be cast aside as belonging only to 
 a theory of the divine relationship to men which is 
 entertained no more. If any chance hearer in this 
 house to-day, unaccustomed to the general strain of 
 teachings from this desk, has seemed to gather from a 
 former portion of this discourse that the idea of the 
 divine Fatherhood now inculcated lets open the door to 
 a weak and sentimental view of God's claims and man's 
 responsibilities, the mistake may now be corrected. 
 Indeed, for myself, I can think of no more perfect ideal 
 of thorough, efficient government, of persuasive and 
 effectual penalties, than those existent in a true fam- 
 ily. When I look back on that household group of 
 which I was in childhood the quick-tempered and 
 errant member, and recall the grand, regretful, some- 
 times austere and averted countenance of my father at 
 knowledge of my wrong-doing, and the saddened, dis- 
 appointed face of my patient, heroic mother, I bring 
 up to myself a picture more photographic than any I 
 can discover beside, of the pain there would be in the 
 withdrawment of the Heavenly Parent's smile, and the 
 shutting out from the companionship of the heavenly 
 family. It was not the chastising stroke — though 
 memory of such on some occasions still survives over 
 the lapse of so many years — but it was the sense of 
 fatherliness and motherliness, grieved, wounded, and 
 wronged, which was then, and is increasingly still, after 
 nigh a half century has fled, the keenest factor in the 
 discipline of my trespass on the household weal and 
 law. Ah ! let no one think that the doctrine of the 
 divine Fatherliness is the door-opener to loose and 
 careless estimates of sin. Let it not be imagined that 
 taking Christ at His word and believing that we have 
 
SERMONS, 
 
 63 
 
 a Father in heaven is to make men inditferent to His 
 claims. It is not so. Speak of Him as judge and 
 men may seek to evade His sentence. Represent Him 
 as king and they may try to escape the reach of His 
 power. But let them really believe that God is their 
 Father, in the truest, most literal, most richly-freighted 
 meaning of that precious name, and they will — I do 
 not say that they will certainly turn to Him with con- 
 trition and penitence, for I do not know the possible 
 strength of human sinfulness and perversity — but 
 they will at least feel an attractiveness in His charac- 
 ter which those other titles alone do not suggest, and 
 they will feel a culpability in themselves which cannot 
 arise from the mere contemplation of some single attri- 
 bute personifying Him, for example, as justice or 
 power. Certainly, whatever may be the fact in any 
 actual case as a practical result, nothing can be so 
 divinely suited to bring a sinner to a better mind as 
 the remembrance that all that he knows or can think 
 of in true Fatherliness belongs to and dwells forever 
 in that God from whom those conceptions were first 
 derived, and who teaches us, sinful as we are, to come 
 to Him with the cry, " Our Father which art in heaven." 
 If he refuses the overtures of a Father, what possible 
 rescue can there be for him ? If he conducts himself 
 so that a Father — for the household's sake — must 
 needs shut him out of the family door, what power can 
 ever bring him back again ? 
 
 Yet now, just before I close, it seems to me I hear 
 some one say, " But why, if God is our Father, does 
 the possibility exist that any child of His should ever 
 become alienated from Him ; that sin, trouble, or 
 pain should be found anywhere in a world of which 
 
64 REVEREND GEORGE LKOX WALKER. D.D. 
 
 He is the Creator, and in a family of which He is the 
 parent ? " 
 
 My dear questioning friend, if such a questioner 
 there be here, I do not know. I have never under- 
 taken to answer that problem. There are inquiries a 
 child may make which even a philosopher cannot 
 answer. And before this inquiry why sin and evil 
 were ever allowed to find their way, with all their train 
 of disastrous consequences to individuals and to the 
 race, into this family circle of which God is the Father, 
 the whole world has stood questioning and perplexed 
 from the beginning till now. It is a problem which 
 many a wise theologian has attempted to solve, but the 
 Bible does not make the effort, and the endeavors of 
 men have not had much success. Hotv evil came into 
 this little world the Scriptures try to figure forth to us 
 on one of the Bible's earliest pages ; but wJiy it was 
 permitted to come, I do not find that the Word of 
 God makes the least endeavor anywhere even to hint. 
 But it is here. And being here it does make some 
 difference, I think, whether we think of it as being, 
 with all its mystery, in a Father's family, or in the 
 ranks only of a companionship under the rule of mere 
 intelligence or power. Sin is here, and trouble is here, 
 and bereavement and suffering are here, but it does 
 matter something whether, spite of them all, I can 
 still believe the infinite power above me, whose ways I 
 cannot comprehend, is nevertheless my Father, and 
 not merely my Sovereign and my Judge. 
 
 Ah yes, what a difference ! I cannot understand all 
 my Father's ways, but if I can believe Him my Father 
 still, I can trust Him where I cannot understand. 
 He may frown upon me for my sin; but I shall know 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 65 
 
 — not with less pain indeed on my part — that it is a 
 I'^ather's frown. He may suffer me to be tried and 
 perplexed and bereaved, but while I remember that 
 not blind fate, not mere sovereign power, not justice 
 or holiness, even, apart from parental love, but that 
 Fatherly pity, Fatherly righteousness. Fatherly love 
 are concerned in my welfare I shall not despair. I 
 shall remember the name by which He calls Himself. 
 I shall think that all that I know of fatherliness in this 
 world is but a reflection of what is first of all in Him, 
 and I shall hold on to the belief that He will do for me 
 all that a wise and loving Father consistently can do, 
 till the time comes when, perhaps, some of the present 
 mystery of existing evil and of human trouble may be 
 cleared up, and the day break and the shadow\s flee 
 away. 
 
 Meantime, dear friends, what can we better do to 
 gain strength for present duty, encouragement in pres- 
 ent perplexity, comfort even in any present distress, 
 than to reinforce and confirm in ourselves the assur- 
 ance — so often affirmed in the Word of God — that 
 we have a Father in Heaven to comfort us ; a Father 
 to whom in a truer, deeper, more abiding sense than 
 any we have ever known beside that blessed name 
 belongs, " The Father from whom every fatherhood in 
 heaven and on earth is named ? " 
 
 •'O Father-eye that hath so truly watched. 
 O Father-hand that hath so gently led. 
 O Father-heart that by my prayer is touched. 
 
 That loved me first when I was cold and dead ; 
 
 Still do Thou lead me on with tender care 
 
 « 
 
 Through narrow ways wherein 1 ought to go ; 
 And train me for that home I am to share. 
 
 Alike through love and loss, and weal and woe." 
 
 5 
 
66 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 II. 
 
 DIVINE CALLS.* 
 
 Genesis xii : i. 
 
 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy coun- 
 try^ andfro7n thy kmdred, andfrofn thy father's house, unto 
 a land that I will show thee. 
 
 I Samuel hi: io. 
 
 And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Sam- 
 uel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered. Speak; for thy ser- 
 vant heareth. 
 
 John x : 3. 
 
 And he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. 
 Hebrews hi: i. 
 
 Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, con- 
 sider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ 
 fesus. 
 
 It is not a merely arbitrary association which has 
 gathered these four verses of Scripture together from* 
 the various and widely separated places in which they 
 are found in Holy Writ. 
 
 Not, indeed, but what a good many others might 
 properly have been associated with them, as equally 
 belonging in the same category and as teaching the 
 same truth. But I have selected these four as ade- 
 quately illustrative specimens of their kind. As a 
 mineralogist might take up specimens of malachite 
 
 ♦Written in i( 
 
SERMONS. 67 
 
 or of beryl and say, "This specimen came from Rus- 
 sia; this from Japan ; this from Alaska, and this from 
 Brazil ; but they all belong together, and belong to 
 multitudes of other specimens which might be associ- 
 ated with them, because they have the same structural 
 character and component elements ; " so I take these 
 four wide-sundered passages of Scripture as one in 
 their moral import and instruction to us who read them 
 to-day. And what is that truth of which these various 
 Scriptures tell us ? It is a truth which I fear we have 
 some way come to think a kind of far-off, historical. 
 Scripture-time matter, instead of being, what indeed it 
 is, a matter of most immediate, personal, and practical 
 concern to us all : the truth, that is, of a Divine Call 
 to individual souls. 
 
 We read, for example, of God's call to Abram to 
 leave his country and go out into a strange land ; or of 
 God's call to Moses to leave his sheep-tending in Mid- 
 ian and to go into Pharaoh's palace and command him 
 to let his captive Israelites go; or of God's call to 
 Samuel, or David, or Solomon, or Isaiah, or John the 
 Apostle, or Paul, — and some way we think the majesty 
 of the fact fits in with the dignity of the circum- 
 stances ; and therefore we vaguely assent to the ideal- 
 ity of the alleged event. But when it comes to rec- 
 ognizing the reality of Divine Calls as a part of indi- 
 vidual, present experience ; when it comes to applying 
 the plain implications and statements of Scripture such 
 as "My sheep hear my voice," or " He calleth his own 
 sheep by name and leadeth them out," to the living 
 experiences of living men and women, in the midst of 
 the rush and bustle of our common affairs there is, I 
 fear, some hesitation about the matter. 
 
(38 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Yet, my friends, if the door has ever been open be- 
 tween heaven and earth, why should it not stay open ? 
 If God has ever made personal communications of His 
 Vv^ill to men, why should He not make them now ? 
 Was life ever more perplexed than it often is still ? 
 Were souls ever more in need of heavenly leadershi]:) 
 than they are to-day ? 
 
 And it is not without its mighty and practical sig- 
 nificance in encouraging cind helping us to accept and 
 rely on this fact of Divine communications to men 
 which Scripture everywhere alleges and implies, that 
 the Word of God is so reserved in its statements about 
 the method of those communications of which it spe- 
 cifically tells us in the past. For example, we read 
 concerning the call of Abram : " And the Lord sat'd 
 unto Abram." What does that mean ? Did Abram 
 see a vision .-' Did he hear an audible voice ? In what 
 way was that divine command impressed upon the 
 mind of the patriarch that he was to get out of his 
 country and his father's house .^ We cannot tell. 
 How did God " talk " with Moses at the burning bush .-' 
 What is meant when it is said of the call to Samuel, 
 "The Lord came and stood as at other times " ? De- 
 tails are in all cases suppressed. Had we had in these 
 cases definite, elaborate depictions of how it was that 
 God came to, and made Himself understood by, Abram 
 and Moses and Samuel and Isaiah, we should find our- 
 selves continually trying to test the reality of any pres- 
 ent experiences of heavenly suggestion and call by 
 their correspondence with the outward circumstances 
 and manner, — that is to say, the mere outward acci- 
 dents, — of the historic calls of the past. Grant once 
 that heaven's door is open toward earth ; grant once 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 69 
 
 that God has made communications of His will to men ; 
 and there is no improbability in supposing that His 
 summons come continually. There is no troul^le about 
 the methods of their coming. All possible things may 
 become instruments and vehicles of suggestion and 
 teaching to beings whom God has once undertaken to 
 lead and bless. 
 
 Xhe great trouble about the realization and appro- 
 priation of Divine calls to men is owing to the low and 
 dull views of all spiritual relationships between heaven 
 and earth, between God and men, into which the 
 Church has permitted itself to fall. The great truth 
 underlying the movement in religious history repre- 
 sented two centuries and more ago by the Quakers, 
 and which has been again and again championed by 
 some body of Christian people when the Church has 
 fixed its eyes too exclusively on the Bible as the source 
 of all its spiritual light, and on a historic Saviour as 
 the source of all its life, — the truth that God no%v 
 moves on human hearts, now breathes into and guides 
 His children, that Christ's sheep still hear His voice, 
 - — is a truth which we ourselves need more vividly to 
 realize. It is a truth, however, not so much for intel- 
 lectual assent as for practical appropriation. There- 
 fore, turning away from any further argument about it 
 as a matter to be accepted or set in its proper place in 
 a religious system, let us see for a few practical mo- 
 ments how we ourselves may reasonably expect to re- 
 ceive, and how we ought to treat the calls of God to 
 us. 
 
 How, then, may we expect to hear God's calls .? 
 
 If there were any necessity, in order that intimations 
 of the Divine will should be conveyed to us for our 
 
yo RKVERl'-.ND GEORCE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Spiritual guidance, that a voice from heaven should 
 speak to us, or that a burning bush should attract our 
 notice, why then, I think, all we know of our Father in 
 Heaven and of His substantial interest in our concerns 
 might fairly encourage us to look for some such out- 
 ward visibilities or audibilities as those. But God has 
 hundreds of ways of drawing near to us beside any 
 such. Indeed, it is not too much to say that methods 
 of divine communication to men which in the child- 
 hood of time were best for the solitary patriarch on 
 the Chaldean plains, or for the prophetic child sleep- 
 ing uneasily behind the Tabernacle veil would plainly 
 not be best now. Those were days when life was 
 comparatively solitary ; writing almost unknown ; 
 communication between even adjacent sections of 
 country slow, accidental, unnecessary. Religious events 
 were handed down in tradition ; by oral transit from 
 generation to generation ; or gathered slowly up in 
 some chronicle of Levite or seer, perhaps the only man 
 in a thousand who knew how to write his name. What 
 if, in our day of newspapers and the universal approxi- 
 mation of all places to one another, methods of divine 
 communication we can easily conceive to be suited to 
 such an infancy of society, should be the only possible 
 methods, and the telegraph should tell us each morn- 
 ing of some burning bush in Sumatra, South America, 
 or Italy ; some voice out of the skies heard at London, 
 Berlin, or Paris; some ascension of an Elijah at Mos-- 
 cow, Calcutta, or New York, what a Babel this world 
 would be, even supposing every thus narrated incident 
 were a veritable matter of divine interposal in human 
 affairs ! 
 
 The fact seems to be that — apart from that volume 
 
SERMONS. 71 
 
 of inspired truth which is in great degree a record of 
 God's dealings with men in the past ; and apart from 
 those occasional, personal, immediate persuasions or 
 illuminations of the Divine Spirit which Scripture 
 promises and the Christian experience of almost every 
 devout heart more or less fully confirms, — apart from 
 these things, I say, — the main instrument of God's 
 impression of His will upon men is the providential 
 occurrences of life. He brings Himself near to us in 
 the ordering of events concerning us. That tangled, 
 mysterious, ever-changeful web of "happenings" — as 
 we call them, — by which we are enveloped, and which 
 cannot be explained or unraveled except by the recog- 
 nition of a heavenly hand in matters great or small, — 
 that is the commonest of the instrumentalities which 
 God employs to teach men of Himself. Doubtless He 
 adds (as I only a moment ago intimated) other and 
 more spiritual suggestions of His presence to those 
 who are sensitive to them or watchful for them. But 
 even without these, what a marvellously complex and 
 powerful instrumentality for coming near to men, and 
 making Himself felt by them, that is, which is found 
 in the providential occurrences of life ! Think of the 
 continual unexpectedness of these events of Provi- 
 dence ; of the irresistibility of their power over us in 
 their coming ; of the infinite variety of their character! 
 They range all the way from our keenest joy to our 
 severest sorrow ; from our sweetest hope to our bitter- 
 est disappointment. They lay their guiding or their 
 persuasive hands upon us at every turn, and give us at 
 every moment the opportunity of recognizing the 
 power which is dealing with us, and of considering, 
 at least, the purposes of that heavenly will. 
 
72 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Those of you, my friends, who look back over any 
 considerable pathway of experience, marked by life's 
 common changes and events, — its gains and its losses ; 
 its bestowals and its bereavements ; its births and its 
 burials; its bridals and its funerals, — have you not 
 had reason to recognize the closeness of a divine 
 approach to you ? Did Matthew, sitting at his place 
 of toll, when a passing stranger said " follow me," or 
 Samuel, stirred at midnight by a voice calling him by 
 name, receive a more definite summons to a new and 
 different life, than some of you have met in the touch 
 on your souls of some of life's events which have 
 befallen you ? You have had your heavenly calls, 
 most of you. Not Moses or Jeremiah more surely, 
 however differently. When you buried your father or 
 your child ; when your husband's face was hid from 
 you forever ; when the pleasure or the business suc- 
 cess you thought so close vanished in a moment ; when 
 you were brought into connection with some person 
 whose life gave you a glimpse of a nobler life than 
 yours ; when some flash of divine truth shot in upon 
 you with unwonted power, — then a call, sweet or sol- 
 emn, but personal, immediate, meant for you and 
 intended for your good, sounded in your soul, and gave 
 assurance of One nigh to you as ever God was nigh to 
 prophet of old. Ah ! you have many of you felt this ! 
 And when you — some of you certainly — are able to 
 add to this common general experience of the comings 
 nigh to us of God in His providence. His comings 
 nigh in some measure at least, with those inward sug- 
 gestions of His Spirit, also, which illuminate His 
 Word, or prompt your prayer, what need you more 
 to assure you of a "heavenly call," as a part of your 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 73 
 
 personal experience ? Would sights of a burning 
 bush, or of an axe that did not sink, or of a stick that 
 became a serpent, or the straightening of a palsied arm, 
 really add anything to the substantial persuasion of 
 vour hearts that God had come nigh unto you ? 
 
 Convinced thus, I trust, of the reality of the calls of 
 God to us as a part of actual, and, indeed, in some de- 
 gree of universal experience, the very important 
 further question arises : How are we to treat them ? 
 
 And here it seems to me, the records of old time 
 are exceedingly instructive. There was, (even the 
 meager chronicles of Biblical story show us that,) there 
 was a vast diversity in the way in which the old-time 
 calls came to men. But there was no diversity in tiie 
 moral action consequent upon their reception. Recog- 
 nition and obedience, these were the responses of the 
 devout hearts of ancient story, whose co-operation with 
 the divine will, in some high enterprise of duty or of 
 blessing, has made their lives luminous with instruc- 
 tion for all after times. When Abram on those far 
 Chaldean plains became once aware of the divine will 
 to get him out of his country and from his father's 
 house, he "obeyed and went out," albeit he "knew not 
 whither he went." When Moses received the com- 
 mand to go into that Egypt from which he had fled in 
 peril of his life, he went. When the word of the 
 Lord concerning the captivity of Judah came to Jere- 
 miah, he spoke that word in the ears of the king and 
 princes of Judah, albeit he knew that a dungeon and 
 abuse would be the reward of his fidelity. When the 
 voice came to Peter and Andrew by the Galilean sea, 
 " Come ye after me," they left their nets, and fol- 
 lowed the Master. When the arresting light and 
 
74 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 power of heaven struck down Paul on his way to 
 Damascus, he was "not disobedient unto the heavenly 
 vision," but asked in submission, " What shall I do ? " 
 Not but what, in some most conspicuous instances 
 recorded in Holy Writ, there was hesitation and some 
 degree of self distrust at first, in obeying the heavenly 
 summons. It is told us, and herein I think we have a 
 very tender and beautiful token of the divine consider- 
 ation of us, that the fact is recorded, it is told us how 
 even Moses argued with the Lord his unfitness for the 
 work to which God called him ; and Isaiah protested 
 his insufficiency for the task laid upon him ; and Ana- 
 nias tried to excuse himself from the duty of visiting 
 that blood-thirsty man Saul, whom God told him to 
 seek out and to comfort. 
 
 But the thing to be noticed is that, however any of 
 those old servants of God hesitated or questioned at 
 first, they obeyed. That was what gave them their 
 place in religious history. However conscious of per- 
 sonal imperfection, however overwhelmed with the 
 sense of mighty and well-nigh annihilating responsi- 
 bilities laid on them, when once really convinced of 
 the divine will they yielded to that will ; they made 
 that will their own ; they went forward doing it to 
 the inimortality of earthly history and the immortality 
 of eternal life. Had they done otherwise, had they 
 declined even the seeming-impossible service, never 
 would their names have been recorded for our guid- 
 ance, or written in the Book of Heaven to their own 
 everlasting joy. That they sometimes a moment fal- 
 tered is told us for our consolation in our weakness. 
 That they consecratedly and fully obeyed is told us 
 also, as the condition of their and our welfare. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 75 
 
 All which, my friends, seems to me profoundly 
 instructive as to our treatment of our heavenly calls. 
 The voice of God in His providence does sometimes 
 seem to speak pretty trying things to hear. It directs 
 to duties hard to fulfill. It bids us bear burdens hard 
 to carry ; undertake labors difficult to perform ; endure 
 sorrows wearisome to sustain. To get out of one's 
 own familiar country to a strange land is not altogether 
 an easy matter, even if that familiar country should 
 happen to be Sodom. 
 
 Bunyan's " Christian " had a hard time of it getting 
 away even from the " City of Destruction " and the com- 
 panionship of people who were very shortly to be alto- 
 gether burned up. But, hard or easy, our safety and 
 our joy also is in yielding to the heavenly call. Recog- 
 nition and obedience — these are the attitudes com- 
 mended to us by all the examples recorded in Holy 
 Writ, and by all the scarcely less illustrious or author- 
 itative examples of Christian history since the book of 
 Scripture closed. 
 
 " How can I bear this burden ? How can I take up 
 this responsibility ? How can I go forth on this enter- 
 prise, not knowing whither I go ? " Language like 
 this has been the utterance of many a Christian suf- 
 ferer, many a Christian laborer, to whom the call of 
 God has in some way come. But listening to that 
 voice, submitting to the will which appoints the sorrow, 
 imposes the task, directs the way, courage has come 
 for the enterprise, strength for the toil, patience for 
 the grief ; and the experience of Scripture prophets 
 and heroes has been repeated in thousands of our 
 common lives. 
 
 Which leads easily to one further and most impor- 
 
j^ REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER. D.D. 
 
 tant suggestion concerning this matter of heavenly 
 calls. 
 
 What a satisfaction it is, anyway, even if the provi- 
 dential voice which speaks to us sometimes says things 
 which are hard to hear, that it does speak ! 
 
 How infinitely preferable in that tangled web of cir- 
 cumstance in which we are enveloped and of which 
 we .sometimes seem to be only a helpless part, that 
 there should be tokens of a high and heavenly purpose 
 concerning us, even if manifested sometimes in severe 
 and painful ways, rather than that life should float 
 easily on with us with no proof of a recognizing will 
 above us, and no evidence of a Father's hand in our 
 affairs. 
 
 There may, possibly, be persons so materialized in 
 heart, and so contented with what contents a mere 
 animal, that life has for them no hungers for anything 
 better. But for most of us, I am sure, the thing which 
 makes life a possession of worth and dignity to us, is 
 the tokens of divinity there are in it. It is the evi- 
 dence that I can find in my life that my God is deal- 
 ing with me; caring for me; has His gracious plans 
 concerning me, which keeps me in self-respect and sets 
 a value on my days. Leave me to myself, with no 
 Father above to care for me, and no Spirit of Grace 
 to deal with me, and no sequent and resultant future 
 to which all the present leads on, and what is life 
 worth .'' 
 
 I may have my pleasures as the animals do, I may 
 accumulate my little store as do the squirrels and the 
 ants, I may form one of an insignificant confederacy 
 somewhat higher than the beaver or the ape, with 
 somewhat larger knowledge and somewhat more intelli- 
 
SERMONS. 77 
 
 gent aims, but unless there is the infinite difference 
 of a moral relationship between m.e and God, — unless 
 God is my Father in such sense as He is not to them ; 
 unless He can touch me, and I can go to Him ; unless 
 I can feel that the door is open between me and Him, 
 and that He has purposes of power and grace which 
 He is working out with me and helping me to work 
 out with Him — then — however others feel, I care 
 not how soon the curtain of silence falls on this scene 
 of things. In the eclipse of that great elevating hope, 
 there is nothing that is not eclipsed. What is left of 
 life after that great joy and confidence is gone out of 
 it, is a thing of rags. What we want, my friends, is 
 not less but more of God-tokens in our lives ! The 
 thing we ought to pray for is not fewer but more of 
 the heavenly calls. It is those calls which keep us in 
 mind of our dignity and our destiny. It is by the fre- 
 quent hearing of them that we are kept out of the 
 mire of our selfishness, our vanity, our mere animalism 
 and death. 
 
 More and more to remind us of our prerogative as 
 the children of God and of the high purposes of our 
 Father in heaven concerning us, should we be watch- 
 ful for the voices of God's providence in our lives. 
 Realizing the importance to us, above all things beside, 
 of the consciousness of God's nearness to us, and of 
 His interest in our welfare, we may well make it our 
 prayer, as it was the Psalmist's of old : "Be not silent 
 to me," O God: "Be not silent to me: lest if Thou 
 be silent to me I become like them that go down into 
 the pit." 
 
 ■• Speak to me Lord, Thyself reveal 
 
 While here on earth I rove ; 
 Speak Thou to me and let me feel 
 
 The kindling of Thy love." 
 
•jS REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 III. 
 
 CHRIST'S INVITATION.* 
 
 John vh : 37. 
 
 //! the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, 
 saying, If any 7)ian thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. 
 
 Call up a moment, as far as we can, through the 
 mists of eighteen centuries, the scene when these 
 words were spoken ! 
 
 The place was Jerusalem. The time was the autumn 
 of the year. The occasion was the Feast of Taberna- 
 cles. For seven days, now, the inhabitants of the city 
 and multitudes from the country had been living in lit- 
 tle booths or huts made of the boughs of myrtle and 
 palm and olive trees. These huts were to be seen 
 everywhere. They were on housetops ; in the court 
 of the Temple ; along the street-sides ; wherever nes- 
 tling-place could be found for them. The purpose of 
 the festival of Tabernacles was twofold : it was a 
 thanksgiving for harvest, and it was a memorial of the 
 time when the Israelites dwelt in tents, in their pas- 
 sage through the wilderness. The feast was one of 
 special joyfulness. The people were dressed in their 
 holiday attire. Each carried in his hand the branch 
 of some plant attractive for its beauty or its fragrance. 
 
 * Written in 1871, with large use of a sermon written in i860 
 on the same text. 
 
SERMONS. 79 
 
 The altar in the Temple was dressed out with garlands 
 of willow, of which each worshiper was expected to 
 bring one. The offerings on the altar were more 
 abundant than those of any other festival of the year. 
 
 But the enthusiasm of the occasion seems to have 
 concentrated itself mainly on two transactions, each of 
 them occurring daily. One of these was the pouring 
 out, every morning, in the Temple courts, in the pres- 
 ence of the gathered multitude, of a golden ewer of 
 water brought from the Pool of Siloam, and which typ- 
 ified the water miraculously supplied to their fathers, 
 in the desert, at the rock of Meribah. 
 
 The other was the lighting, in the evening, of some 
 great lamps, which, from their elevation on the Tem- 
 ple-hill, cast their radiance over the whole city, and 
 were intended to symbolize the fiery pillar of the 
 ancient wilderness. 
 
 Both of these incidents, each day repeated, were 
 events preluded by the sound of trumpets, and fol- 
 lowed by singing and general rejoicings. 
 
 It is, however, with only the first of these two cere- 
 monies that we are now specially concerned. But this, 
 on this eighth morning, asks our notice. 
 
 Interest in the festival, and especially in this strik- 
 ing incident of it, has been, as usual, deepening from 
 day to day. And now the last day — what the Evan- 
 gelist calls emphatically the "great day " — of the cel- 
 ebration has come. 
 
 The crowds are gathered in the Temple area. The 
 morning sacrifice is smoking upon the altar. Presently 
 there is a sudden blast from a chorus of silver trum- 
 pets ; and one of the priests advances bearing the 
 golden ewer. He ascends the brazen steps of the 
 
8o REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 altar. In the sight of all the people he pours the lim- 
 pid stream over the altar's edge, as fifteen centuries 
 before, in the thirsty wilderness, the flowing current 
 which had saved the people's life had trickled from 
 the smitten rock. As the water falls into the silver 
 basin at the altar's foot, the multitude breaks into 
 song. It is the one hundred and eighteenth Psalm 
 which they sing, — that Psalm whose constantly recur- 
 ring burden is, " O give thanks unto the Lord ; for 
 He is good ; because His mercy endureth forever." 
 A hush follows the conclusion of the Psalm. The peo- 
 ple's minds have been touched and raised by contem- 
 plation of this memorial of their nation's old deliver- 
 ance from death by thirst ; perhaps some of them have 
 been lifted to the thought of a supply of needs more 
 spiritual ; of wants common to their fathers and to 
 them. 
 
 It is in the hush of this supreme moment, probably, 
 that a clear, sweet voice breaks the silence. It comes 
 not from the priests gathered near the altar. It is a 
 young man standing among the multitudes, on the 
 common floor of the Temple court, whose voice sounds 
 out over the hushed and astonished assembly. And 
 what is it that He says } The words are as startling 
 as the occasion of their utterance. 
 
 " If any man thirst " — this is the strange cry which 
 peals over the astonished multitude — "If any man 
 thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink." More than 
 eighteen hundred years, my hearers, have passed since 
 this saying broke the silence of that autumnal festival. 
 Hut not a day since has gone which has not borne its 
 testimony to the truthfulness and the importance of 
 the announcement there made. 
 
SERMONS. Sr 
 
 Some who heard it first, accepted it there and then. 
 And they said, This is indeed "the Christ." But ever 
 since, in every age of the world, the number has been 
 increasing of those who have heard the invitation and 
 have found its offer true. " Come unto Me and drink ; " 
 " whatever your want, look to Me for its supply " — that 
 was the utterance which sounded over the Temple 
 multitude. And it is an utterance which has never 
 died. From generation to generation it has sounded 
 still, — not merely in men's ears, but in the experience 
 of many of their hearts. 
 
 Christ has been found the supply of need. He has 
 met the deepest wants of men. The thirst of the soul, 
 — that old, spiritual thirst which has taken hold, at 
 times, on every thoughtful individual of our race, — 
 has been satisfied, and may still be satisfied by Christ, 
 as from no other source beside. 
 
 Glance with me a few minutes at some of those 
 common wants of men, — your wants, my wants, — to 
 which the offer of Christ has been found a supply. 
 
 Knowledge, then, is one of these common wants. 
 There is a thirst in the human soul for knowledge — 
 knowledge respecting its own destinies and the rela- 
 tions in which it stands in the universe, which He who 
 said "Come unto Me" can alone satisfy. 
 
 I do not forget that there is a very wide range of 
 important knowledge, to which the faculties of men 
 are, in a sense, competent of themselves. I do not 
 disregard, nor do I underrate, the greatness of those 
 natural powers — divinely bestowed on man — by 
 which he grapples successfully with a thousand diffi- 
 cult problems of the world in Avhich he is. We live in 
 a period of time when the splendor of these native en- 
 6 
 
82 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 dowments of the human intellect is receiving constant 
 illustration. We see it in those unfoldings of physical 
 science which are almost making this a new world, so 
 rich, so manifold are the wonders which are daily re- 
 vealing to our eyes. We see it in that enthusiasm of 
 historic investigation which has shrunk at no toil in 
 order carefully to discriminate and bring before us of 
 this modern time the accurate reality of ages long gone 
 by. We see it in the marvelous dexterity of mechanic 
 art — which is but knowledge discovered and applied 
 to affairs — and whose triumphs of ingenuity are net- 
 ting the earth over with telegraphs and railroads, and 
 dotting the whole globe with factories and laboratories 
 of every name. The power of the human mind to 
 search out knowledge in many of its departments, and 
 by that search wonderfully to enlighten and beneiit the 
 race, is a power we need have no jealousy in acknowl- 
 edging. 
 
 But with equal freedom does it become us to admit 
 that there are other departments of knowledge, — and 
 of knowledge vastly more essential to personal welfare, 
 — to which our natural powers are not competent, and 
 concerning which understanding must come to us, if it 
 come at all, from another source. For the great prob- 
 lems are not those of History or of Science or of Mech- 
 anism. Not to academies, however learned, is it given 
 to supply the deepest necessities of the soul. Science 
 may sound the seas, but it has no plummet to tell us 
 the depth of a man's spiritual want. History may re- 
 veal to us something of the process of outward events 
 in ages past, — but my own future .■* That is another 
 affair on which no History casts irradiating light. 
 God's ways with matter I may in a measure discover ; 
 
SERMONS. 83 
 
 but His ways with me are of more account, and here 
 human speculation leaves me ignorant. 
 
 Where am I to be, a few fleeting years hence .-* 
 What condition is to enfold me, and by what circum- 
 stances is that condition to be modified, if by any.? In 
 what relation do I stand to that Power by whom I was 
 brought hither, and by whom I am to be removed 
 hence .'' How do these inward voices of fear and hope, 
 and these senses of desert or ill-desert, gain their an- 
 swer ? Over against these undying longings or dreads 
 within me, what outward realities are there to justify 
 them .'' What obligations, if any, rest on me .'' What 
 perils, if any, environ me? What hopes,. if any, invite 
 me .-* What destinies, if any, await me .'* 
 
 These are the great questions. It is knowledge on 
 these matters that we most need to have. But on 
 these matters all mere human wisdom is dumb. Sci- 
 ence may " charm her secret from the latest moon " ; 
 but to the inquiry, " What and where is he who died 
 yesterday.''" it has nothing to reply. On all these 
 deepest questions of the soul, whatever real light shines 
 comes, not from History, Art, or Philosophy, but from 
 Revelation. And that Revelation is chiefly in Jesus. 
 
 It is at this point, therefore, that Christ meets us. 
 Here, where, if left to human wisdom, there is nothing 
 but conjecture and uncertainty, He calls to us, say- 
 ing, " If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
 drink." 
 
 It is on these personal problems of destiny and char- 
 acter that He sheds light. Respecting obligation and 
 hope it is, that His are the words which quench our 
 thirst. The import of life, the reality of accountabil- 
 ity, the merely incidental character of death, the cer- 
 
84 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 tainty of a hereafter, and the alternative issues of sal- 
 vation or perdition — these are the questions concern- 
 ing which knowledge without Him is most inaccessi- 
 ble, but upon which knowledge is all-important to 
 gain. In satisfying, therefore, as He has and ever will 
 satisfy, this great want of the soul, Christ vindicates 
 one claim of His invitation, " If any man thirst, let 
 him come unto Me and drink." 
 
 But man has another want beside knowledge. Eager 
 as is man's desire for understanding, his longing is still 
 more for love. 
 
 It is affection which makes about all the true bless- 
 edness there is in this world. It is the heart more 
 than the head which attracts men to each other and 
 renders life worth the living. True it is, indeed, that 
 we occasionally encounter those in whom the loving 
 instincts seem almost dead. All intellect, or all con- 
 science, or all selfishness, affection appears to be a 
 thing they neither need nor give. But it is doubtful 
 whether even such apparent exceptions to that gen- 
 eral law which makes the interchange of kindly emo- 
 tions a necessity to human happiness, are very often 
 absolute exceptions. There is hardly any one so ab- 
 normally moulded but that some juncture of experience 
 reveals the yearning human heart. Nevertheless, even 
 a seeming lack pays its appropriate penalty. The man 
 who neither seems to crave nor give affection goes 
 through life, admired or feared, it may be, but uncared 
 for. Tears are not wasted on his grave. To human 
 nature in general, love is the daily food. Got from 
 some source, given to some object, it must be, or life 
 is emptied of its value. 
 
 How pathetic, sometimes, is the testimony borne to 
 
SERMONS. 85 
 
 this fact in the affection which one frequently sees 
 lavished upon some dumb animal or some insensible 
 plant ! It is, of course, very easy to smile at the devo- 
 tion with which the recluse from society cherishes the 
 dog which companions his wanderings, or the cat that 
 purrs by her chair. But this devotion is only a witness 
 that the human heart, frustrated of its natural objects 
 of love, will yet make channels somehow for its goings 
 forth. Something it must give and gain, even if the 
 natural objects of its giving and receiving fail. 
 
 Does not this thought very vividly remind us that 
 what we have called affection's "natural objects " are 
 always liable to fail .-' Frustration takes hold on them. 
 Friends vanish. Parents die. Associations in life are 
 broken up. Society changes, so that one looks about 
 him, after a little while, and finds himself among stran- 
 gers. Even the philanthropic cause, which one adopts 
 and makes the object of his care, some way seems to 
 shift its bearings and fails to afford an adequate out- 
 going for the heart. Both in giving and receiving the 
 channels choke. It is here that Christ comes to us, 
 saying, " If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
 drink." "I can satisfy an infinite affection. You, I 
 love with an everlasting love. Your love I crave with 
 a longing which will not die." 
 
 Ah ! here is something more to me than knowledge. 
 Christ is truth, and He offers Himself to satisfy my 
 intellectual need. But there are hours when that is 
 not what I want. Little, comparatively — great 
 though the gift absolutely be — little, comparatively, 
 matters it to me that so much knowledge comes to me 
 through Him. What I want is not knowledge but 
 love. He opens to me the life that is to be, it is true, 
 
86 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 as no one else can do ; but what just now concerns me 
 most is the life that is. Is there One who cares not 
 merely for my to-morrow, but cares also for my to-day ? 
 Is there One to stand by me in the hour of some 
 great earthly calamity, some wreck of life and hope ? 
 As I lay the little round head of my child in the silent 
 grave, or deposit in that last resting place the pale, 
 worn face of my mother or my sister, and feel the very 
 heartstrings break as the dust rattles down upon the 
 shut, forever-shut, casket ; or, as I stand paralyzed 
 amid the wreck of life-long business labors and hopes, 
 can I feel that there is a Love, "which this great woe 
 cannot alter ; nay, of which this woe may be but an 
 evidence ? 
 
 My friends, it is just here where Christ's offer is 
 fullest. It speaks to our disappointments as well as 
 to our wants. It comes at the failing-point of all 
 affections beside. For, alas, all beside do fail I I 
 utter no disparaging word of the might of human love. 
 Sublime, noble, precious ; it is the best man can give 
 to man. Yet, to a thoughtful mind, the reflection 
 must often sadly come, how small the place is, after 
 all, that we fill in our fellows' hearts. Even the great 
 and good who have conferred lasting benefits on their 
 kind, how quickly they are forgotten ! Statesman suc- 
 ceeds to statesman. Pastor follows pastor. Friend 
 comes after friend. Time's tide sweeps everything 
 forward, and submerges the memorials of the proud- 
 est or the dearest past. 
 
 How blessed, then, the remembrance that One 
 abides whose love for us changes never ! One who 
 forever gives and forever yearns to receive also ! One 
 who, whatever may fade or alter or die, abides the 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 87 
 
 same. Nay, One who, in His infinite love for us, gar- 
 ners up and keeps whatever is best in our human lives. 
 One who cherishes the objects we have purely cared 
 for, and makes them still dearer to us for His own 
 sake ! One in whom the lost is given back, and the 
 vanished is restored to sight ! Ah ! if ever word was 
 spoken in this world which loving hearts should rejoice 
 to hear, it is this : " If any man thirst, let him come 
 unto Me and drink." 
 
 But there is still one more want to which this offer 
 of Christ addresses itself. 
 
 It is holiness. Greatest of all, this want of the soul. 
 I have spoken of knowledge as one of man's chief 
 necessities. It is so, but it is not so necessary as 
 virtue. I have said that man needs affection. He 
 does, but not so much as righteousness. To be pure 
 is more important than to be wise ; to be worthy of 
 being loved is more essential than to be loved. True, 
 indeed, it is, — and deplorable as it is true, — that this 
 deepest need of man is not always man's deepest 
 desire. The thing which is most required, is not cer- 
 tainly the thing most sought. Yet there is, at times, 
 probably, in almost every breast, some sense, though 
 it may be fitful and dim, of the necessity of holiness. 
 Alienated from God as man is, there still remains in 
 him a feeling of relationship ; and of the obligation 
 which it brings. There are chords in his heart which 
 vibrate yet to touches from above. 
 
 Indeed, looking over the world, there are few things 
 which have left deeper traces on the face of society, or 
 on the history of individuals, than the efforts men have 
 made to get into that moral state, which (under their 
 various forms of faith) they have been taught to sup- 
 
88 KEVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 pose a state of righteousness. It matters nothing to 
 our present purpose that these conceptions of what 
 such a state really is have been often greatly errone- 
 ous. We are speaking now of the fact that a sense of 
 need has been in millions of hearts ; and that some 
 effort, at least, has been made for its supply. And 
 what efforts they have sometimes been ! How intense, 
 how agonized, how terrible have been the expedients 
 by which men have endeavored to solve this problem 
 of becoming right within. They have starved in des- 
 ert caves ; they have swung on iron hooks ; they have 
 given their children to the fire ; they have shut them- 
 selves in monastery cells. No suffering has been too 
 great to bear ; no self-denial too hard to sustain, by 
 multitudes, in the attempt to satisfy the want within. 
 
 Ah ! my hearers, sitting in this sanctuary to-day, 
 rejoicing in what we deem our better way, comes there 
 not even from many of the errors we condemn in such 
 as these, a voice of reproof and scorn ? Out even of 
 Africa's lowest idolatry, out of Christianity's extrem- 
 est perversion, sounds there not a cry which those who 
 are at ease in Zion would do well to hear .-' Not cer- 
 tain is it by any means, that we shall stand as well 
 (with all our light and privilege) in the day when 
 inquest for righteousness will be made, as do some of 
 these who groped so earnestly, but in such darkness, 
 after the answer to the question : " How shall a man 
 be right with God .^ " "How be right with God .-* " 
 That is the great, the awful problem of history. 
 
 Yet observe, how even at this late period of time, 
 and amid what is called the enlightenment of our age, 
 how powerless, even now, is science or philosophy to 
 answer this question ! Philosophy can discourse pro- 
 
SERMONS. 89 
 
 foundly of the origin of ideas. But when I ask, " How 
 can I get rid of this sense of sin ? " she has not a 
 syllable to reply. Science can analyze for me the 
 ray of light which comes from one of Jupiter's 
 moons, but how to unravel the twining fibres of evil 
 that inmesh and make captive my trembling soul, she 
 cannot tell. 
 
 There is only One who can tell. He tells us who 
 stood in that Temple court at Jerusalem, on that 
 eighth day of the festival, and said, "If any man thirst 
 let him come unto Me." He answers the question, 
 always, who ever lives to teach men how to become 
 pure. 
 
 "Come unto Me," He says. "I have the gift you 
 need. I forgive, and I also sanctify. In My death is 
 your absolution ; in My life is your recovery. By my 
 sacrifice I have atoned for you ; and by My rising 
 again, I restore you. Come to Me. My example has 
 in it healing. My holiness has in it purifying power. 
 Rest upon Me ; cling to Me ; trust in Me ; and the 
 purity you need will become yours. My Spirit shall 
 dwell in you. My grace shall transform you ; and the 
 great wants of your soul shall be satisfied ; you shall be 
 holy as I am holy." My friends, this is what that 
 voice said which spoke the invitation so long ago : 
 "Come unto Me and drink." This, nothing less than 
 this, is what it promised and what it has performed in 
 the experience of thousands. 
 
 Are there not those here who are athirst .'' 
 
 Is there not some one in this assembly who, perplexed 
 by the conflicting voices of this jarring time, desires to 
 know the truth .'' To him the invitation comes : " I 
 am the truth, come to Me." 
 
po REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Are there those whose hearts' affections have been 
 rudely smitten ? Those who, wounded or bereaved, 
 or misinterpreted or alone, are reaching outward some- 
 where for comfort and love ? Listen to Him who 
 says : " Come unto Me. Can a woman forget her 
 sucking child ? yea, they may forget ; yet will I not 
 forget thee." 
 
 Is a longing for holiness the desire of any heart 
 here .-' More than knowledge or love, does purity seem 
 a precious thing .-* Better than heaven does it seem 
 to be fit for heaven ? Dearer than salvation is does 
 the righteousness of salvation seem .-' Come then 
 freely to Jesus. He cleanses the most sinful soul. 
 The holiness in Him He makes ours also. " We all 
 beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are 
 changed into the same image from glory to glory." 
 " When He shall appear we shall be like Him ; for we 
 shall see Him as He is." 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 91 
 
 IV. 
 
 CHRIST'S HAPPINESS.* 
 
 HEBREWS XII : 2. 
 
 Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, 
 despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of 
 the throne of God. 
 
 The Christ of the world's most frequent contempla- 
 tion is a humiliated and suffering Christ. On the 
 walls of public galleries and private dwellings the eye 
 meets, at every turn, the depicted story of our Sav- 
 iour's woes. In this picture you behold Him an infant, 
 for whom no room could be found in the inn, lying 
 among the oxen of the stall. In that one, He is a 
 man wearied with His pilgrimage, asking drink of a 
 stranger at a well. Here you see Him weeping beside 
 the grave of His friend Lazarus. There musing 
 sorrowfully from the side of Mount Olivet, upon the 
 fate of obdurate Jerusalem. Here He looks down 
 upon us wearing the crown which Herod's men of 
 war braided for Him ; its thorns lacerating His fore- 
 head. There, pressed to the earth by the weight of 
 His cross, an imploring face appeals to us from the 
 rabble that throngs Him on the way to Calvary. In 
 scores of forms is the crucifixion scene, and the taking 
 down from the cross, and the depositing in the sepul- 
 
 * Written in 1866. .Somewhat rewritten in 1879. 
 
92 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 chre, presented to us. Ancient and modern art have 
 exhausted invention in setting forth, — by sculpture, 
 by painting, by engraving, by mosaic, by fresco, by 
 embroidery, — the narrative of the Redeemer's sorrow. 
 
 In like manner, religious literature has employed 
 itself to a very considerable extent in giving utterance 
 to the same plaintive tale. The ignominy and the 
 sufferings of Jesus are the frequent theme of sermons 
 in our sanctuaries, of volumes in our libraries, of 
 stories in our nurseries. 
 
 But it is not to the image of a suffering Christ that 
 I shall chiefly direct your attention to-day. Though 
 that image is, indeed, a very prominent one in Scrip- 
 ture, and a most profitable one frequently to contem- 
 plate, it is one from which, on this occasion, 1 invite 
 you to turn your eyes away. For it is not a suffering 
 Christ only, who is presented to us in the Book of 
 God. The countenance which looks out upon us very 
 commonly, indeed, from the Scripture page, is one 
 bearing indications of hardship. But there is a gleam 
 of light in its most pensive expression. There is a 
 forecast radiance of joy, even in its saddest hour. It 
 was not sorrow only, which was appointed Him ; there 
 was a "glory to follow." Though the Captain of our 
 salvation was to be " made perfect through suffer- 
 ings," He was to be "made perfect." The day of * 
 suffering was to be ended. And if He was to " endure 
 the cross " and submit to the " shame," there was a 
 "joy set before Him," so great that the shame could 
 be "despised" and the cross could be borne, as He 
 looked forward to the "recompense of the reward." 
 
 Let us contemplate Him to-day as entered into that 
 joy. Not, indeed, that the glory which was to follow 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 93 
 
 our Saviour's days of humiliation is yet made full. 
 On the contrary, it is very far from being complete. 
 There are reserves of that glory of which He has yet 
 received no part. It is to later, to eternal days that 
 we must look if we would contemplate our Redeemer 
 made perfect in His blessedness. No ! it is not while 
 these old heavens endure, and this old earth holds yet 
 in its cold clasp the buried bodies of all His saints, 
 that the fruition of our Saviour's rejoicings will arrive. 
 The hour of that completed glory awaits the vanishing 
 skies, the awakening graves, the descending Jerusalem 
 of our Crowned King. 
 
 Nevertheless, though the day of His perfected bless- 
 edness still delays, and may delay yet many a revolving 
 year, our Saviour has already begun to taste the "joy 
 that was set before Him." Already He begins to reap 
 the recompense of the reward. A happiness even 
 now vast enough to fill His soul with rejoicing, and 
 to task our feeble imagination to measure, is at every 
 moment His. 
 
 Let us try to contemplate that joy. Turning our 
 eyes away for awhile from a suffering, look we to a 
 rejoicing Christ. Let us forget ourselves, — our little, 
 griefs, our petty cares, our earthly burdens, — and 
 lifting our eyes above this dim vale in which we so 
 often sit and weep, get a little vision, if we can, of the 
 happiness of Christ. 
 
 His, then, is the happiness of a finished atoning 
 work. 
 
 There is a satisfaction in completed labor, however 
 humble that labor may be. The husbandman at the 
 close of autumn, and the sailor at the end of his voy- 
 age, look back with gladness ^hat the labors and 
 
94 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 buffetings of another rounded period of their lives are 
 over. The mechanic rejoices to lay down his plane at 
 the end of his protracted work. With a kindred feel- 
 ing of satisfaction the author writes " Finis " on his 
 concluding page. And just in the degree in which 
 any undertaking is high and difficult, in that degree 
 does he who bears its burden rejoice at its close. 
 How welcome to the heart of Washington must have 
 been the last scene of the revolutionary struggle, when 
 the capitulation of Cornwallis brought rest to the worn- 
 out land ! What joy, amid his anxieties, must have 
 come to the heart of the martyred Lincoln, in those 
 last few days which brought him tidings of Richmond's 
 fall and Lee's surrender ; of the Union's established 
 triumph, and his completed work. 
 
 It is, indeed, a great step from matters like these up 
 to that achievement our Saviour wrought when He 
 atoned for human guilt. Yet even things like these 
 may help us to understand His joy when that task was 
 done. For, once, like any human undertaking, that 
 work lay before Him unaccomplished. There it was ; 
 a thing to be done. It was to be the mightiest enter- 
 prise the world had ever witnessed ; and He, Christ 
 Jesus, was to be its fulfiller. The brunt and the strug- 
 gle vv'ere to be His. All its comprehensible and in- 
 comprehensible tasks of effort or endurance. He was 
 to accomplish. From Jordan's baptismal stream to 
 Golgotha's cross-topped hill was one untraversed path- 
 way, overhung by mysteries of conflict and of suffer- 
 ing. The things He was to do by the labors of His 
 hands, by the pleadings of His voice, by His body's 
 lacerated wounds, were to be only dim external signs 
 of the overcomings or endurings of His soul. There, 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 95 
 
 within, where no eye could see, was the strain and 
 severity of His enterprise. The visible facts of His 
 sad story were significant mainly as tokens of the 
 invisible "hardships of a work which once lay all before 
 Him. 
 
 But it lies before Him no longer. Redemption is 
 not now any more a task to be accomplished. Behind 
 Him it lies ; a thing finished forever. There is Beth- 
 lehem, where never again is He to be cradled in a 
 herdsman's stall. There is Nazareth, whose toilsome 
 years will nevermore acquaint His hands with the 
 hammer and the plane. There is Galilee, over whose 
 stony hills, footsore and weary. He journeys no 
 longer on errands of rejected love. Behind Him lies 
 Jerusalem, whose Hall of Judgment saw Him once a 
 prisoner condemned ; and Gethsemane, where He 
 fainted in His spiritual agony ; and Calvary, which 
 lifted Him expiring into the darkening air ; and the 
 sepulchre on its slope where was laid to its brief repose 
 the body of the murdered man. 
 
 There they are : but for Him they are no more. 
 Once, every day brought them nearer to Him ; now, 
 every day bears them farther off. Once, things of an- 
 ticipation and foreboding ; now they are things of mem- 
 ory and reckoning-points of success. He looks back 
 on the whole sad, toilsome, mysterious story, as a thing 
 done completely, victoriously, forever. And now, — if 
 we may compare small things with great, — as a con- 
 queror rests when the field is won, as the swimmer re- 
 poses when he reaches the hard-gained shore, as the 
 man of years' long endeavor gives over his toil when 
 the task is complete, so rests the Redeemer from His 
 finished work. A happy rest ! from labor mightily ac- 
 
gS REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 complished ! A repose whose zest is proportioned to 
 the former pain. A gladness too great for us to meas- 
 ure, who have never fathomed the sorrow, is, and for- 
 evermore will be, the inheritance of Christ. 
 
 Christ's, again, is the happiness of manifested char- 
 acter. It is not an object of unworthy ambition for a 
 man, conscious of unusual capacity in affairs, or of a 
 noble integrity and largeness of soul, to desire opportu- 
 nity to show of what stuff he is made. It surely was 
 not an unfortunate circumstance in the life of the 
 Duke of Wellington, that those five long hours of ter- 
 rible suspense and dogged endurance, while Napoleon's 
 regiments swept down upon him, and Bliicher did not 
 come, gave England and the world a chance to see 
 what material God sometimes puts into a man. The 
 prisons and poorhouses of Europe were woes which 
 haunted the soul of Howard like ghosts which could 
 not be laid. But, had not those wrongs been, mankind 
 would never have known what a great heart lodged in 
 that feeble frame. Florence Nightingale would have 
 died unheard of, had it not been for the Crimean war. 
 And if the battles of Sadowa, Gravelotte, and Sedan 
 had not revealed it, who could have pronounced the 
 Prussian Moltke the first soldier of his age. ^ 
 
 From the days of the primitive martyrdc^ns down to 
 the last sufferer for principle, whether on public or pri- 
 vate stage, the disclosure of character is mainly the 
 office of adversity. As our great dramatist says, " In 
 the reproof of chance lies the true proof of men." For 
 not always is a man's life so cast that he can show 
 what is in him. There are other true souls than this 
 world always hears of. The plaintive words of the 
 author of the Elegy in a Coutitiy Cliitnhyard, mourn- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 97 
 
 ing over those to whom life never gave the chance 
 that might have revealed what, if revealed, would never 
 have been let die, are truer than we always remember. 
 Yes, favoring opportunity is a privilege. The chance 
 to be manifested is one of life's best chances. It is 
 not, indeed, that he may be manifest, that the true 
 man works. It is a felicity which comes to him, if it 
 comes at all, rather in the retrospect than in the per- 
 formance of his task. If he can look back on it from 
 the end, conscious of the integrity with which he has 
 wrought, the fact that his work has permitted him to 
 show that his heart was true, and his motives pure, 
 must be esteemed a happy circumstance. " I have 
 coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye 
 yourselves know that these hands have ministered unto 
 my necessities, and to them that were with me," said 
 the aged tent-maker at Miletus. Would he have lightly 
 sold, or ought he to have lowly esteemed, the possibil- 
 ity of making that humble boast .'' 
 
 Yet all other manifestations of character beside, do 
 they not, even the brightest, ask for a veil of obli- 
 vion forever to cover them, compared with Christ's .■* 
 Among the joys which fill His heart looking back on 
 His earthly history, must not this be one, that His 
 was a record in every emergency, from which nothing 
 needs to be taken, in which nothing needs to be de- 
 plored, to which nothing can be added — the perfect 
 record of the Perfect Man. And this, remember, not 
 because it was passively and necessarily so. No ! un- 
 less the temptations which assailed our Saviour were 
 illusive spectacles, and the hardships He sustained 
 were hollow make-believes, it was not inevitable that 
 the record He left behind Him should be that of the 
 
gS REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 only " spotless soul that ever breathed through human 
 clay." It was by effort He wrote that memorial which 
 blinds our eyes by its brightness. He was what He 
 was, by struggle and conflict. He was put to the proof 
 as no man beside was ever proved. Tried by humilia- 
 tion, tried by suffering, tried by satanic wiles, tried by 
 desertions of His God, He stood steadfast. He proved 
 His character in the furnace flame. He won His char- 
 acter by struggle. 
 
 Now, from the heavenly rest into which He has en- 
 tered, He looks back on the only example earth can 
 show of a sinless character and a perfect life. Not a 
 virtue men prize, but it is there. Not a strength they 
 admire, but it is there. Not a heroism they honor, a 
 self-denial they revere, a beauty they cherish, a grace 
 they love, but it shines — tested to the uttermost — in 
 the character of Christ. To them forever it is an ex- 
 ample too high to attain, but ceaselessly to emulate ; 
 to Him it is a joy the sweetness of which can never 
 die. 
 
 Christ's again, is the happiness of the perpetual dis- 
 pensation of good. 
 
 It was one of Christ's own utterances in the days of 
 His earthly experience, " It is more blessed to give 
 than to receive." Days of His "experience," I say, 
 for those were days when to minister to Christ's ur- 
 gent and painful wants was a possible thing to do. 
 Undoubtedly he spoke out of His experience. To 
 Him it was a more blessed thing to give than to gain. 
 How oftener fell the word of gentle greeting from His 
 lips than it fell upon His ear! How more frequent 
 the stretching forth of His hands to minister to others 
 than theirs to comfort Him ! And yet He knew some- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 99 
 
 thing of benefits received. There were those who gave 
 Him shelter, food, and raiment. One there was who 
 washed His feet with tears and wiped them with her 
 hair. He knew enough of the satisfaction of being 
 helped to be able experimentally to say whether it is 
 better to give or to receive. And He has told us how 
 He found it. He has let us know what, as He tested 
 life, was the best good in it. He has shown whether 
 it was the wiping of another's tears or the drying of 
 His own which was best to Him. The Son of Man, 
 He says, " came not to be ministered unto, but to min- 
 ister, and to give his life a ransom for many." 
 
 And because that was the spirit in which He did 
 His work, and the law by which He died, now that He 
 has entered into His reward. He has become the dis- 
 penser of perpetual good to all the inhabitants of 
 heaven. Not a ransomed soul in all the ranks of the 
 blest, but He is the giver of the joy. Not one of all 
 the innumerable host, but came to those happy seats 
 by Him. As He looks around Him on the throng, He 
 knows there is not one of them that His blood did not 
 buy. His sacrifice atone for, His grace redeem. Not 
 a foot treads the golden pavement which was not 
 guided thither by His care. Not a tongue lifts up the 
 song of praise, but it tells of salvation wrought by 
 Him. The garments of light in which the ransomed 
 stand, the harps of thanksgiving they hold, the inward 
 peace and sense of reconciliation they know, all are 
 His gift. He gives, and none can pay Him again. His 
 bestowals overpass all possibility of requital. Forever, 
 among the multitudes out of every tongue and clime, 
 He must remain the Man most perfectly blest, because 
 most perfect in making blest. Unspeakably, immeas- 
 
lOO REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 urably happy, He lives the example which makes all 
 others dim, of the greater joy it is to give than to 
 receive. 
 
 Once more, Christ's is the happiness of personal 
 fellowship with the spirits of His ransomed ones in 
 heaven. 
 
 Just where that heaven is into which the Saviour 
 entered at His ascension, we cannot tell. Whether 
 the place — for a place it would appear to be since He 
 went thither in His proper body — is the same with 
 that which will be the final abode of the redeemed 
 after their bodies shall have been raised from the grave, 
 there is reason to doubt. Many things in the Word 
 of God would seem to indicate that the place of that 
 final abode of the saints may be this earth where we 
 now dwell, regenerated, transformed, made new by the 
 baptism of purifying fire. But, however that may be, 
 the Scripture seems also to give us intimations that in 
 that same place where Jesus now is, there His disem- 
 bodied saints now are with Him. "To-day shalt thou 
 be with Me in paradise," said Christ to the dying com- 
 panion of His crucifixion sufferings. " Father, I will 
 that they also whom thou hast given me, be with Me 
 where I am," said the Saviour in the same prayer in 
 which He also said, "And now I come to Thee." 
 
 Where Christ now is, there are the spirits of the 
 just. Joined with Him in happy fellowship, they await 
 the hour when the last trumpet shall summon the 
 grave to give up its charge, and the ransomed spirit 
 shall unite with its ransomed and transformed clay. 
 But even now the happiness of that fellow.ship to Him 
 and them, who shall measure ? Certainly it is immeas- 
 urable to them. Many of them left happy homes to 
 
SERMONS. lOi 
 
 enter there ; but not one so happy that the emanci- 
 pated spirit has not learned that, sweet as were any 
 joys of earth, to "depart and be with Christ is far 
 better." 
 
 But to Him also that fellowship is precious. These 
 are those He has redeemed. By His own blood He 
 has bought them. Every grace that shines in them is 
 the product of His care. With rejoicing inexpressible 
 He dwells among them and smiles on them. And 
 His, remember, is a fellowship which is every hour in- 
 creasing. With every revolving day of earthly time, 
 the number of that blissful companionship multiplies. 
 Ransomed ones are welcomed home from every region 
 of the populated globe. Here is one from Syria, land 
 of the Saviour's birth and burial. Here is one from 
 Italy, land of the Roman power which crucified Him. 
 Here is one from Africa, country of the man who bore 
 the Saviour's cross on the way to Golgotha. Here 
 come those from China, Greenland, and America, re- 
 gions unconjectured by even apostolic ken, but en- 
 folded in the purpose of forgiving grace, and gathered 
 in the arms of atoning sacrifice. Every hour they 
 come. Old age and infancy. Wearied with care, or 
 called with all earth's joys before them. From pal- 
 aces, from hovels. Of every color, lineage, tongue. A 
 thronging, multiplying, exultant host. And over them 
 all He sits welcoming, blessing, blessed. 
 
 Faint and inadequate is human speech to utter, even 
 that little the human thought can conjecture of a hap- 
 piness so great ! His work accomplished, His charac- 
 ter made gloriously manifest, the dispenser of infinite 
 good, the rejoicing companion of His redeemed, our 
 imagination falters in the attempt to conceive the 
 
I02 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 height and the depth of a joy no soul in the universe 
 but that of Christ could compass, as none but His 
 deserves. 
 
 But, marvelous as is the happiness of Christ, forget 
 not, my hearers, that to every one of you the privilege 
 of adding to it is given. Yes ! blessed beyond concep- 
 tion as is our Redeemer, you can increase that blessed- 
 ness. Give yourself to Him, if you have never given. 
 Give yourself more unreservedly if you have ever made 
 a partial surrender, and an added joy will thrill through 
 His already rejoicing soul. You will lend a new ele- 
 ment to even the happiness of Christ. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 103 
 
 v.* 
 
 AMBITION FOR NOBLE SERVICE. 
 
 II TIMOTHY II : 20, 21. 
 
 But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold ana of sil- 
 ver, but also of wood and of earth ; and some to hotior and some 
 to dishonor. If a man, therefore, purge himself from these 
 he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the 
 Masters use, and prepared unto ei'ery good work. 
 
 One of the most powerful motives which has ever 
 influenced the minds of men is ambition. And it is 
 not one of the most powerful only, but one of the most 
 pervasive also. It is a motive which, to some extent, 
 affects all minds. The objects toward which this pas- 
 sion is directed, are, indeed, almost infinitely various. 
 It ranges over the whole breadth of human life and 
 action. The distance from the ambition of a Bismarck 
 eager to raise Prussia to the position of dictator in the 
 affairs of Europe, to the ambition of Hanlon equally 
 eager to outrow any other champion of the boating 
 fraternity, only very imperfectly indicates the scope of 
 the sentiment under consideration. For it is a senti- 
 ment which has no limits inside the aims and occupa- 
 tions of universal humanity. Newton's aspiration to 
 solve the mathematic problem of gravity, and the 
 Sioux Indian's ambition to shine in the superior hid- 
 
 * Written in 1869. Somewhat rewritten in 1877. 
 
I04 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 eousness of his red paint, are both illustrations of the 
 same sentiment. Ambition to leave behind him a 
 poem of immortal memory prompted the lofty muse of 
 the blind singer of Paradise Lost. It is equally ambi- 
 tion which incites the schoolboy on the lower bench to 
 conquer the abstruse perplexities of the multiplica- 
 tion table. 
 
 Now this aspiring sentiment, so instinctive and uni- 
 versal, derives its moral quality from the objects 
 toward which it is directed. In itself, and as an ab- 
 stract matter, it is neither good nor bad. It is simply 
 one of the great natural impulses of man, which can 
 be made useful or harmful, right or wrong, by its 
 direction. Just as the physical capacity of moving 
 the arm may be made the instrument, in one case, of 
 an act of benevolence, and in another, of an act of 
 cruelty, so this sentiment of aspiration, equally neutral 
 in itself, derives its moral character from the result at 
 which it aims. 
 
 We are, indeed, very much accustomed to see this 
 impulse of man's nature directed toward questionable 
 or evil objects. Ambition is a motive power too often 
 subverted to Satan's uses. The very name has come 
 to have a kind of sinister sound. But there is noth- 
 ing in the impulse of aspiration itself which involves 
 any necessity of evil direction. Satan has no claim 
 upon it, as belonging characteristically to him or his 
 service. It belongs to God. It is an agency in His 
 service. It has its scope and function in the aims and 
 occupations of piety, as truly as in those of worldliness. 
 
 The Gospel claims this agency. It is one to which 
 it makes continual appeal. Ambition has a place in 
 religion. The aspiration for something rich and high 
 
SERMONS. 105 
 
 and distinctive is an aspiration encouraged in scores of 
 utterances of the Book of God. At the same time, 
 also, that Book defines the proper field, and regulates 
 the right exercise of this sentiment. It stimulates its 
 activity, and it guides its powers. It at once incites 
 and directs. Our text is an example in point : 
 
 But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of 
 silver, but also of wood and of earth ; and some to honor and 
 some to dishonor. If a man, therefore, purge himself from 
 these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for 
 the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work. 
 
 Two things in this passage must at once strike the 
 attentive hearer. 
 
 One of them is the boldness with which the senti- 
 ment of ambition is appealed to in it. The other is the 
 clearness with which it points out the sphere of that 
 sentiment's proper exercise. These two things, then, 
 let us a few moments contemplate. Christian ambi- 
 tion : its object and obligation.^ And first of the 
 object. 
 
 " In a great house " — the Apostle tells us, — there 
 are vessels of many substances and many uses. The 
 materials of some of them are precious and they sub- 
 serve noble purposes. The materials of others are 
 common and they subserve inferior ends. But they 
 are all useful. Even the meanest of them in substance 
 and in intention has its utility. It has a function. Its 
 purpose is for service. So, too, however various the 
 specific aspirations of Christian ambition, they are all 
 shut up under the general requirement of utility. 
 The allowable objects of Christian aspiration are such 
 as relate to service. Personal enjoyment, even if it be 
 of a religious kind, is a thing which the Scriptures do 
 
Io6 KKVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 not give us much encouragement to make the direct 
 object of search. Mere happiness is a thing the Scrip- 
 tures hold very cheap. Usefuhiess, efficiency, are the 
 things they prompt us to. Equipment and capacity 
 for spiritual service, — these are the objects of Chris- 
 tian desire. Ambition for these is a sacred passion. 
 
 But there are differences in spiritual service. There 
 is the use which the earthen vessel may, perhaps, ade- 
 quately serve ; and there is the use which can appro- 
 priately be fulfilled only by the golden urn. In other 
 words, Christian usefulness is a most various matter. 
 It is a thing calling for very dissimilar capacity and 
 refinement in the instruments. There are spiritual 
 functions which can, in a manner, be discharged by the 
 possessors of only a relatively low and undeveloped 
 piety. But they are comparatively unimportant func- 
 tions. While, on the other hand, the functions of 
 noblest utility and benignest benefits, can only be ful- 
 filled by possessors of ardent piety and rich experience. 
 
 The sphere of Christian ambition, then, is in seek- 
 ing these higher endowments to fit for higher service. 
 It is a legitimate object of desire to seek the largest 
 possible capability of use. The widened mind, the sym- 
 pathetic heart, the persuasive tongue, the quick-discern- 
 ing spiritual instinct, — these are to be sought, because 
 these fit their possessor for greater employment in 
 the Lord's work. We can none of us hope to be more 
 than instruments in the Spirit's hands. 
 
 But there is a choice in the instruments, as the 
 various works to be performed are of differing deli- 
 cacy and difficulty. And Christian ambition finds 
 its proper object in fitness for those higher uses. 
 Meetness for the Lord's best work, adaptedness 
 
SEUMOXS. 
 
 107 
 
 of mind and heart and will to the noblest service in 
 which God condescends to use men in this world, 
 this is a Christian's true and highest object of aspira- 
 tion. Compared with this, desire for mere personal 
 religious comfort or security is ignoble. Measured by 
 this longing for endowment for the Lord's use, any 
 longing for simply individual happiness or hope is 
 selfish and mean. That it is religious, makes it none 
 the less so. 
 
 Such being, then, the true object of Christian ambi- 
 tion, turn a moment to consider with equal brevity the 
 obligation of pursuing it. 
 
 The duty of seeking this object arises from the pos- 
 sibility. It is argument enough to urge the obligation 
 of striving after a high endowment for the Lord's serv- 
 ice that a man can strive and that striving has its re- 
 sult. The whole question is settled by the simple fact 
 that equipment for the higher forms of Christian use- 
 fulness is very much a matter of choice and endeavor. 
 Adaptedness of mind and heart to the nobler services 
 of the Gospel is a thing which, to a great extent, falls 
 within the scope of voluntary effort. Of this we have 
 an intimation in the text. " If a man, therefore, purge 
 himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, 
 sanctified and meet for the Master's use, and prepared 
 unto every good work." 
 
 Preparation unto higher work, — sanctification unto 
 more honorable uses, — these are the rewards held out 
 to voluntary endeavor to purge one's self from defiling 
 influences, and to present one's self perfectly to the 
 Lord's service. It is a thing which can be done. 
 Fitness for better and worthier work is the prize of 
 effort and self-consecration. The vessels of the Lord's 
 
Io8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 house are not like those of our own, unchangeably 
 ordained to high or to menial ends. These human ves- 
 sels have a capacity of change. They can alter in 
 character and advance in use. The earthen may be- 
 come golden ; the wood may turn to silver. And with 
 that progressive change will come, also, an enhancing 
 honorableness in the employment to which the Master 
 will put them. 
 
 What transformations Christian experience has seen ! 
 What alterations of substance ! What exaltations in 
 use! Under the power of Divine grace and the high 
 ambition to serve increasingly sacred ends, what earthen 
 vessels have been made golden censers in the Temple 
 of God ! Saul of Tarsus, and Paul the Apostle ; Bun- 
 yan the wandering mender of kettles and pots, and 
 Bunyan the Pilgrim's guide to heaven ; Newton the 
 captain of a slave ship, and Newton the preacher of 
 the Gospel and singer of sweet songs of devotion; Chal 
 mers the formal unconsecrated minister, and Chalmers 
 the great modern Apostle of Scotland, — these illus- 
 trate the marvel of that change by which the wood and 
 earth of our humanity may be fitted to services more 
 sacred than the shining bowls upon the altar of the 
 ancient tabernacle. 
 
 Nay, in the more familiar precincts of church and 
 of household life, how often have we seen this same 
 transformation wrought ! With what distinctness have 
 we beheld the alteration effected by the Divine Spirit 
 in the whole character of some one whom God has 
 touched with the high ambition to become useful in the 
 world. Under the influence of that endeavor, how have 
 intellect quickened, and emotion deepened, and capac- 
 ity enlarged. How has the stammering utterance 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 109 
 
 become eloquent, and the trembling step grown strong. 
 You behold the progressive change. Before your very 
 eyes the earthen bowl of some poor common human 
 spirit becomes a burnished vessel of God's altar, and 
 filled with fragrances of grace, sweeter than frankin- 
 cense and myrrh. Changes like these are open to en- 
 deavor. They are the result and the reward of effort. 
 Christian aspiration can attain to them, and the duty 
 of aspiration lies in that fact. 
 
 I call attention, therefore, in the practical enforce- 
 ment of this theme, to one or two thoughts of a direct 
 and personal character. Especially do I invoke the 
 careful consideration of the young to suggestions suited, 
 I think, to the position of privilege in which they 
 stand. 
 
 One of these suggestions is the duty resting on 
 every person to aim at high and worthy service. It is 
 a Christian privilege, and no less a Christian duty, also, 
 to be ambitious in this matter. The spirit of the Gos- 
 pel encourages large anticipations. There is nothing 
 repressive and narrow about it. It begets a divine dis- 
 content with low attainments and with successes 
 scantier than opportunity. 
 
 To be sure, in prompting to larger endeavors the 
 Gospel does not, as we are too apt to do, underesti- 
 mate and despise little things. No ! it has a great rev- 
 erence for little things, and it looks for an exact and 
 painstaking carefulness respecting them. It requires, 
 also, if one is, in- the providence of God, rigidly shut 
 up to a trivial task and a narrow and unchangeable lot 
 in life, that he be content as well as faithful where he 
 is. Nay, more, that he do his work, however lowly, 
 with an assured confidence that it is accepted work : — 
 
no REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.U. 
 
 work appointed, valued, and honored by Him in whose 
 service it is done. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the Gospel encourages the 
 aim, wherever it can find scope, — and few are the lives 
 wherein it cannot, — for higher endowment and fuller 
 service. It says, in effect, to all of its disciples " Do 
 better things ; do better things ! " Do not be content 
 with trifles. Be not satisfied with but little. Work 
 faithfully in your sphere, and widen it if you can. Go 
 forward steadfastly, and, if possible, go somewhat up- 
 ward, too. Seek for higher labors ; and seek to be 
 qualified for them by being lifted up yourself. The 
 wider mind, the warmer heart, the stronger faith, the 
 more persuasive tongue, seek for these things, that 
 you may use them, on an ever heightening plane, and 
 in a continually widening sphere. And that you may 
 make this progress, use the gifts you now have. 
 
 Suppose they are small. They will grow by exer- 
 cise. Do not be daunted out of your greatest privi- 
 lege — the privilege of growing strong and equipped 
 in the Lord's service. The condition of that growth is 
 present endeavor. Use the gift, and the gift will in- 
 crease. Surely it is not the vessel content to be for- 
 ever the vessel of wood, that ever becomes the golden 
 censer " sanctified and meet for the Master's use." 
 
 There is another suggestion of a very serious char- 
 acter, which arises from the subject now in hand. 
 This is a suggestion as to the danger of base uses of 
 that vessel of the human soul, which a man hopes to 
 present to the service of God. It is a matter of famil. 
 iar observation among the neat-handed conductors of 
 household affairs, that the soundest utensil may become 
 permanently dishonored by the use to which it is, per- 
 
SERMONS. Ill 
 
 haps, accidentally subjected. The firkin is ruined by its 
 contents. The earthen jar, despite whatever efforts at 
 cleansing, gives out the taint which has sunk into it 
 from what it has been made to hold. The casket, air 
 it ever so long, never loses the scent of the musk spilled 
 inadvertently upon it. And in many such cases, a per- 
 manent degradation of function is the consequence. 
 The vessel, whatever it may be, can never again be 
 used for the highest services. Outwardly unchanged 
 and perfect, it is, nevertheless, lastingly unfitted for 
 the best uses. A secret debasement, from which it 
 can never recover, condemns it perpetually to a lower 
 employment and to more menial disposals. 
 
 Now something terribly like this, although the 
 parallel is of course not perfect, takes place also in the 
 spiritual vessels of human souls. There is a peril of 
 permanent degradation lying in too long and too willing 
 subjection to the influences of evil. Sinful habits and 
 appetites carry with them a tremendous and far-reach- 
 ing peril. There is a danger, sad to contemplate, of a 
 lasting incapacity, if not, indeed, for some service, — 
 yet for the highest and best service in the work of the 
 Lord. Earthliness and frivolity are not matters of 
 transient influence. The loss which they sometimes 
 inflict is not limited to those days only in which the 
 individual yielded himself with apparent willingness to 
 their power. It reaches often far beyond. It takes 
 hold upon a time when a far different hope incites him, 
 and an altered spirit impels. So that, even then, when 
 the man, touched by the Spirit of God, eagerly seeks 
 to be of service in God's work, when it has become his 
 ambition to be a vessel sanctified and meet for the 
 Master's use, even then how sadly, oftentimes, does he 
 
112 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 reap the consequences of his long enthralment to a 
 baser service. His soul gives out the scent of its older 
 associations. Cleansed never so earnestly, the taint of 
 the contents it has held so long is in it still. It cannot 
 be of the use it might have been. Not useless need 
 it be, but not a vessel to the highest service. It may 
 fulfil many an important function, but it cannot hold 
 the anointing oil. 
 
 O my hearers ! there is a solemn truth here, which 
 it becomes you to remember. These souls of ours are 
 not so simply wrought, that a moment's repenting, or 
 a determined resolve, nor even the direct operations of 
 divine grace, can wholly wipe out the influences of our 
 past, and enable us to enter on a new life untouched 
 by inheritances from the old. It is not so. What we 
 have been affects what we are to be. You cannot, my 
 hearers, spend a youthtime of idle vanity and then 
 come fitted and sanctified to a Christian's better serv- 
 ice. However sincere your repenting, you must 
 inevitably bear something of the loss of your foolish 
 years. You cannot, O man of business, and I will 
 suppose, professor of religion, too, you cannot immerse 
 yourself in worldly things, and heap up your heart 
 overflowing full with material desires, and then come 
 clean and fit for the best uses of the Lord's altar. 
 Beware, then, of a permanent loss ! There are uses 
 from which the human spirit can never fully be 
 restored. The dishonored vessel can, in this life cer- 
 tainly, never be cleansed to become fitted to the Mas- 
 ter's highest use. 
 
 The word of entreaty comes to all, in whatever posi- 
 tion you now stand. " Purge yourselves to nobler serv- 
 ices!" The past, whatever its character, is unaltera- 
 
SERMONS. 113 
 
 ble. The present, only, is your certain possession. 
 Cleanse yourselves for the best uses that remain. It 
 is no longer now a question what noble uses you might 
 have served. The only question left is, what uses can 
 you serve. And high services remain. There are 
 noble functions to be fulfilled. Aspire to them. Set 
 your mark high. Purify yourselves that you may be 
 fitted for them. 
 
 Ah ! my beloved hearer, especially my hearer in the 
 period of youth, there is a sacred encouragement for 
 you to do this. The alchemy of divine grace does 
 wondrous things. More marvelous are its changes 
 than those fabled of the magic workers of old. The 
 heart early and fully submitted to God can be fitted to 
 most sacred functions. A progressively refining influ- 
 ence adapts it for higher and higher service. Nearer 
 and nearer to the altar it can come ; closer and closer 
 to the glory and the sacrifice. It may be made, among 
 the vessels of the sanctuary, like that which holds the 
 sacramental bread, or the chalice which conveys to 
 longing lips the redemptive drops of Calvary. I com- 
 mend this sacred ambition to you. " If a man, there- 
 fore, purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel 
 unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the Master's use 
 and prepared unto every good work." 
 
11^ REVEREXD GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 VI. 
 YOKE WEARING.* 
 
 Matthew xi : 29. 
 " Take my yoke upon yoji.'''' 
 
 Most men, when they seek to bring others to new 
 opinions or imfamiHar labors, are tempted a little to 
 conceal whatever displeasing aspects there may be 
 about those opinions or labors, and to bring promi- 
 nently into the foreground only the agreeable matters. 
 If a man is attempting to sell you anything, you are 
 pretty sure that its merits rather than its defects will 
 have a full disclosure. It would be a somewhat novel 
 method of solicitation to put into the forefront of the 
 interview the dissuasives from compliance. 
 
 Yet something which seems very much like doing 
 this characterized Christ's way, not unfrequently, in 
 His appeals to men. Our text is an example in point. 
 "Take my yoke upon you," He says. The words are 
 immediately coupled, indeed, with one of the most 
 tender and persuasive of His promises : " Ye shall 
 find rest unto your souls." But that promise, sweet 
 and inviting as it is, is prefaced by this condition, 
 "Take rc\y joke upon you." 
 
 Christ invites us to Himself ; but He has no inten- 
 
 * Written in 1 869. 
 
SERMONS. 115 
 
 tion of deceiving us into coming. He gives us fair 
 notice beforehand of our conditions of approach and 
 our treatment after we are arrived. He lets us plainly 
 know that it is not to any mere holiday acquaintance 
 that He summons us. Matchless as are the blessings 
 He has to give, and tender beyond conception as is 
 the love which prompts His proffer of them to us, He 
 yet never deludes us into mistaking the terms. With 
 perfect and translucent honesty He lets us know 
 the whole case. He prefaces His pledge with its 
 condition. He deals with us squarely, intelligibly. 
 He puts things as they are. "Take my yoke upon 
 you ; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 
 And, after all, notwithstanding the general tendency 
 of men to put the best side out in dealing with their 
 fellowmen, they do like honesty in others. They are 
 glad to know just what they can depend upon. They 
 prefer to touch bottom, even if the bottom be ragged 
 and rocky, rather than to hang over uncertain depths. 
 And so it awakens a kind of confidence in itself, that 
 Christ's invitation comes just as it does. He puts, — 
 if I may say so, — the worst side out. He conceals 
 nothing. He does not use smooth phrases to gloss 
 over rough facts. He chooses plain words, which con- 
 vey the unmistakable truth. 
 
 He tells us that He will give us "rest"; but the 
 condition of it is our bearing a "yoke," Not a badge, 
 not a necklace, not a ribbon, not an epaulet, — but a 
 yoke. Just that lowly, laborious, constraining thing 
 which we bind upon the unquestioning dumb creatures 
 which patiently turn the sward of our meadows and 
 drag home the heavy-loaded wagon of our harvest 
 fields. And yet He tells us that wearing this yoke 
 
Il6 REVEREND GEORGE LEOX WALKER, D.D. 
 
 will bring US "rest." Notwithstanding it is a yoke, 
 we shall find it "easy." 
 
 Let us think of this matter a little. Let us con- 
 sider a few moments just what this yoke-bearing does 
 symbolize and signify. Perhaps we shall find that He 
 who was accustomed to speak "as never man spake," 
 did not depart from His custom even in this case. 
 Perhaps we may come to see how the shortest and the 
 surest way for any of us who are troubled and " weary," 
 to find peace and "rest," is to do just this thing the 
 Master bids us, — put on the yoke of His true disciple- 
 ship. 
 
 Notice as one thing, then, that the yoke of Christ 
 signifies submission. 
 
 True Christian experience has many points of varia- 
 tion. The diversity of men's temperament and of 
 their histories lays the foundation for an almost end- 
 less diversity of detail in the particular items of reli- 
 gious feeling which may characterize equally sincere 
 Christians. But there are a few great points which 
 are substantially identical. Among them is this of 
 submission of self to Christ. 
 
 Inquirers after the religious life sometimes come 
 asking: "Must I have just such an experience as I 
 read of in such a memoir, or hear described by such a 
 brother or sister of the church, before I may regard 
 myself as a Christian ? " " No," I answer, " I have no 
 warrant to affirm that : nor have you any need to delay 
 your hope because your experience does not in all 
 points agree with that of any living soul. But there is 
 one thing you must have. Underneath all possible 
 diversities, true Christian experience does involve sub- 
 mission to Christ. Surrender, — that cannot be dis- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 n7 
 
 pensed with. However various may be other emo- 
 tions, — the sense of guilt, for example, or the fear of 
 retribution, — this feeling, the soul truly taking hold 
 of Christ will have ; a feeling of its helpless need of 
 Him, and an utter giving up of self to Him. Sur- 
 render, yielding, putting on His yoke, that is the one 
 central and essential fact of Christian experience. 
 
 I said "Christian experience," my hearers; but now 
 I say that human experience knows nothing more 
 blessed than just that experience of surrender. Christ 
 said it would bring "rest," and it does bring it. For 
 it is not self-assertion, victory, achievement, which 
 brings us our truest bliss. Our self is too mean, our 
 victories too small, our achievements too pitiable for 
 them ever to be a really contenting satisfaction. Our 
 best joy is in yielding to and reverencing something 
 nobler and better than ourselves. We get glimpses 
 of the blessedness of this submission in the relation- 
 ships of the present. The really filial child is glad- 
 der by far in yielding his ignorant will to the wiser 
 will of his parent, than in blindly asserting his own. 
 Our subtle poet, Tennyson, — writing of the relation 
 of friend to friend in the mere giving and receiving of 
 knowledge, — says : — 
 
 And what delights can equal those 
 That stir the spirit's inner deeps, 
 When one that loves, but knows not, reaps 
 
 A truth from one that loves and knows ? 
 
 So, too, — though on a vastly higher plane, and with 
 a self-surrender infinitely more complete, — there is no 
 one act of possible human experience so full of rest 
 and sweetness as the act of entire self-surrender to 
 
Il8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Christ. Looking out of its weakness to His strength, 
 out of its sin to His holiness, out of its loss to His 
 plenitude of help, and utterly casting itself upon Him, 
 the soul of man is touched with an indescribable calm 
 and joy. The act is an exceeding humble one, but no 
 proud achievements ever brought such results. 
 
 Notice another point. The yoke of Christ signifies 
 restraint. The wearer of a yoke is one under control. 
 He has upon, him the symbol of a government. 
 
 And Christ suffers no one who comes to Him to 
 evade this condition of discipleship. All who are His 
 are under His direction. Let no man make a mistake 
 on this point, and imagine that all that Christ requires 
 of him is some single act of submission, and that after 
 that he is free to make his own laws and go his own 
 way. Christ tells us plainly otherwise when He says : 
 "Take my yoke upon you." That direction means 
 not something transient, not something gone by, not 
 something which can be put off and taken on at choice. 
 It means the constant, life-long control and guidance 
 of a law supreme over personal will, of an authority 
 unquestioned and unquestionable in its claims. 
 
 Now just here, undoubtedly, it is not unfrequent to 
 see an obstinate will make a stand. If it were only a 
 question of momentary homage, of an act done once 
 under the pressure of an intense emotion, and then 
 things were to be as before, such a will perhaps would 
 be inclined to submit. But to enter into a compact of 
 eternal obedience, to enthrone an authority whose 
 legislation shall reach to all events of life, this it hesi- 
 tates to do. And exceedingly stout, sometimes, are 
 the words one hears from that small mote in God's 
 universe called "man," in denunciation of such sub- 
 
SERMONS. 119 
 
 jection to restraint, as "mean," "craven," "unworthy." 
 Yet is submission to rightful authority mean ? Is 
 obedience to wise law craven ? Is it an unworthy 
 thing to do, to yield to a command which withholds 
 merely from evil ? Is a government which constrains 
 a man only to his good, and restrains him only from 
 his harm, just the kind of government against which 
 peremptorily to rebel ? 
 
 It is not so ! It is obedience to wise rule which is 
 the noble thing. It is acquiescence in kind restraint 
 which is the thing of privilege. The freedom to obey 
 behests worthy to be obeyed is the freedom which one 
 needs. 
 
 So when Christ comes to us saying " Take my yoke 
 upon you," He utters a command indeed, but a com- 
 mand which is as sweet as any promise. It is a law 
 certainly. It has all the attributes of a statute. It 
 searches deep, it reaches wide, it is rigorous and 
 escapeless in its control. But it is a law which has a 
 heart. It seeks our welfare more tenderly than does a 
 mother, and not a behest it utters but has its motive 
 in our good. 
 
 And so it is that the man who wears the yoke of 
 Christ is the man at peace. Law, indeed, holds him ; 
 but holds him to the right. The rule of the Master 
 restrains him ; but it restrains him only from wrong. 
 And the more completely he knows himself the more 
 he sees his need of such a law. The main solicitude 
 he feels is to see, not on how few, but on how many of 
 the affairs of life, he may discern that Law of Christ, 
 exercising its restrictive and constraining sway. 
 
 But, as one point more, observe that the yoke of 
 Christ signifies employment. 
 
120 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D, 
 
 The patient yoke-bearers of the ploughing time or 
 of the harvest-days are harnessed thus not to express 
 subjection, but to fulfil service. The end of yoke- 
 wearing is utility. And it is in Christian life as in 
 the tillage of the fields. Christ calls men to take His 
 yoke upon them that they may do His work. He has 
 use for His people. The vocation to which He sum- 
 mons them is one of labor. So far, certainly, as the 
 earthly aspect of His calling of men is concerned, the 
 chief object He has in view is to gain, in every new 
 disciple of His Gospel, a new worker in His cause. 
 
 Here again, doubtless, we find men oftentimes mak- 
 ing a stand. If a submission to Christ's yoke were 
 only a passive matter, — something that could be just 
 quietly experienced, something which interfered with 
 no other plans, and required no strenuous and outgoing 
 endeavors, — there are those who now decline it, who 
 might be not unwilling to put it on. But putting on 
 the yoke is not a matter like that. It is no thing of 
 mere passive experience or holiday pastime. It is 
 equipment for labor. It is a harnessing of the whole 
 man to earnest and lifelong employment. And Christ 
 leaves no room for doubt that it is just to that quality 
 and duration of service that He summons every dis- 
 ciple. He entraps no one into an unexpected method 
 or intensity of occupation. His call is open and un- 
 mistakable : " Take my yoke upon you." 
 
 But in requiring this does He frustrate men's hope 
 of happiness ? Does he make impossible the realiza- 
 tion of the promise: "I will give you rest," which in 
 the self-same utterance He couples with His com- 
 mand ? Oh ! how little they know of the blessedness 
 of Christian servin<r who think so ! How little that 
 
SERMONS. 121 
 
 man can have entered into the secret of self-sacrifice, 
 and the sweet mystery of labor for Christ, who sup- 
 jDoses that yoke-bearing in the Gospel is a sorrowful 
 and dejecting thing ! 
 
 Ask the sun-browned toilers who have gone forth 
 from English and American homes to bear to equa- 
 torial climes the better manners and the purer faith of 
 our Christian lands. Ask the earnest Gospel laborer 
 among ourselves whether in the public or the private 
 sphere, in the pulpit or in the market, in the home-circle, 
 or in the Sabbath-school. Ask your own heart, pro- 
 fessed follower of the Lord Jesus, as you recall the bet- 
 ter moments and the most satisfying actions of your life. 
 There is but one answer: "His yoke is easy and His 
 burden is light ! " The toil of the Lord is blessedness 
 and repose. Though in it the " outward man " may 
 " perish," the " inward man " is " renewed day by day." 
 And when, from the last confine and boundary of 
 mortal life, the departing soul looks backward to find 
 the best of its earthly hours, it will find it in that one 
 in which it bore most patiently and laboriously the 
 Saviour's yoke. Then it will not be the day of self- 
 pleasing and refusal of service which will be the day 
 of happy remembrance, nor will that day be remem- 
 bered as having been the happiest in its passing flight. 
 That place will be filled in memory by the day, — 
 whatever its outward weariness or adversity, — in 
 which you did the truest and hardest service of your 
 life for Christ. 
 
 One practical inquiry comes to us before we end. 
 
 We have seen that the yoke of Christ signifies to us 
 submission, restraint, employment. These are three 
 important, and, as I have endeavored also to show, 
 
122 REVERtND GEORGE LEOX WALKER, D.D. 
 
 three most happy experiences. But when ought they 
 to be experienced ? What time is the best time to 
 take on that yoke of submission, restraint, and em- 
 ployment, to which the Saviour summons us ? 
 
 I will answer first for those of mature years in this 
 congregation. For them the answer is "at once." 
 Now is the time to do it ; and for this plain reason, if 
 for no other, that there is no other time in which it can 
 be done. Life has already largely gone. There is only 
 a narrow margin of earthly duration left. And if the 
 great experience of submission to Christ is yet unmet, 
 there is only a brief fragment of existence remaining 
 in which it possibly can be met. If His restraining 
 and transforming sway has not yet been felt upon the 
 soul, there are only a few more years, or it may be 
 months, in which it can be felt. If employment in His 
 service has never begun, the period of service can at 
 the utmost be but short. The shadow of sunset is 
 already slanting eastward. Therefore now is the time. 
 To the more aged of this assembly, the admonition 
 comes with the solemnity of an injunction which 
 knows no alternative and can admit of no delay. Take 
 the yoke of Christ upon you, and at once ! 
 
 But for the young .? What is the time when the 
 young should come to those experiences of submission, 
 restraint, and employment, which are implied in a true 
 bearing of the yoke of Christ ? For a different reason 
 from that which has just been assigned in the case of 
 the old, but a reason almost equally cogent, the same 
 answer must be given. The time is "now." The 
 yoke of Christ, in all its completeness of meaning, 
 should be taken on at once. 
 
 For, my youthful hearers, if the bearing of the yoke 
 
SKRMONS. 123 
 
 of Christ is, as He asserts, a privilege, an honor, and a 
 satisfaction surpassing all others, then the sooner you 
 assume and the longer and more faithfully you wear 
 that symbol of a true discipleship, the better and hap- 
 pier for you. And why should you delay ? Why 
 should some of you who stand outside the Church's 
 precincts, longer postpone the submission of yourselves 
 to the will of Christ and the yielding of your lives to 
 His guiding and restraining hand? And why should 
 others of you who are numbered of the visible fellow- 
 ship withhold yourselves from the active employments 
 of His service, and decline to press hard and patiently 
 against the yoke you already profess to wear ? 
 
 Why is it so ? Oh ! my friends, it makes a Chris- 
 tian pastor sad and sick at heart to receive the answers 
 to this question which he frequently does receive from 
 the lips of some. You excuse yourselves because you 
 are young. It is offered as an apology for a declina- 
 ture of active and consecrated yoke-bearing for Christ, 
 that you are yet in the morning of life. Of such, it is 
 urged, a full and earnest devotion is not to be expected- 
 To ask for sober and manly and unwavering consecra- 
 tion to the service of Jesus is to expect too much of 
 those so young ! 
 
 So young ! As if Christ's salvation were a salvation 
 for gray hairs alone ! As if Christ's love could enter 
 and fill an aged heart only ! As if Christ's grace was 
 not adapted to renew and empower a man or woman 
 till failing years had sapped the body's vigor and dulled 
 the appetites for earthly joy ! So young ! As if that 
 were not the very reason rather why you might with 
 most appropriateness and success devote yourselves to 
 the honor and the privilege of Christ's blessed service ! 
 
124 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 As if, instead of being a hindrance, youth were not a 
 special argument to urge immediate entrance on a 
 labor so full of an undecaying happiness and reward ! 
 
 Yet if it were possible to regard a certain extremity 
 of youthfulness as, indeed, affording a valid excuse 
 from earnest devotion to Christ's service, is this an 
 excuse which can avail for many of you ? What 
 tokens of devotion to Christ have been given by 
 younger souls than any numbered of this Church ? 
 Younger than any of this fellowship were scores of 
 either sex who won a martyr's crown and burned to 
 cinders at the stake. Younger than any among us 
 have been hundreds of Jesus's followers whose souls, 
 turning in childhood upward to God, have been like an 
 altar-flame of devotion, which no lapses of time or 
 seductions of the world could make dim. Younger 
 than any man of thirty-two in this congregation was 
 Henry Martyn, dying in distant Asia Minor outworn 
 in service in India and Persia, across and across which, 
 — like one incapable of rest, — he had borne the Gos- 
 pel of Calvary. Younger than any man of twenty- 
 seven in this assembly was John Calvin when he 
 sketched the outlines of his immortal Institutes, the 
 fruit of years-long study into the deep things of God ! 
 Younger than any youth of twenty-three in this house 
 was Harlan Page when he could give as one of the 
 reasons of his willingness to remove from one home to 
 another that he " had personally done his utmost, by 
 direct individual endeavor, for the salvation of every 
 person in the town where he lived." Younger than 
 any woman of twenty in this congregation was that 
 girl, dwelling once on the corner of New Haven's elm- 
 surrounded Green ; and afterward the wife of Amer- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 125 
 
 ica's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, when she 
 walked with God, as one who "almost saw Him face 
 to face," and who dwelt in His presence as with a 
 familiar friend. 
 
 And as we look out on to the earnest ranks of men 
 and women in the world about us who are now, — in 
 Church, in Sunday-school, in mission fields, in prayer- 
 meetings, in the highway, at home, abroad, — carrying- 
 on the work of the Lord and wearing the yoke of 
 Jesus, what a proportion of them are of youthful years. 
 From how many thousand such lives, to-day, comes a 
 word of solemn reproof and searching, though unin- 
 tended condemnation, to any among us who, older in 
 years, seem not yet to have learned that existence is a 
 serious business ; and, longer within sound of the Mas- 
 ter's call, have not yet put our shoulder to the yoke of 
 service ! 
 
 Oh ! youthful members of this congregation, redeem 
 the time ! Live not as those who have no higher pur- 
 pose than the frivolities of the hour. Youth-time is 
 precious. Early years are of exceeding worth. 
 Devoted to the Master's service they will be bright 
 with happy usefulness and deathless with eternal 
 rewards. 
 
126 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 VII. 
 
 REDEEMING THE TIME.* 
 
 Ephesiaxs V : 15. 16. 
 
 See then that ye walk circumspectly^ not as fools, but as wise, 
 redeeming the time, because the days are evil. 
 
 The striking figure which Paul here employs con- 
 cerning the treatment of time would be suited, I think, 
 at any period to arrest attention. But it has a par- 
 ticular pertinence to us to-day, standing as we do within 
 a few fast-flying hours of the close of one of those 
 f^reat subdivisions of duration which the order of 
 nature and the common usages of business and of 
 society make it habitual in us to recognize. 
 
 The figure Paul uses is taken from a transaction 
 familiar in all the market-places of the ancient world. 
 That was a world of war and slavery. After every 
 considerable territorial conquest by any successful 
 military power great multitudes of the inhabitants of 
 the conquered districts were seized upon as the chattel 
 property of the victors. The State claimed its share. 
 The commanding general had his apportionment. 
 Officers of less degree, each in his successive rank, 
 took, as a part of the spoils of war, a number, less or 
 more according to the total to be divided, of these 
 
 * Written in 1888, and preaclied on the last Sunday of the 
 year. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 I 27 
 
 human goods for their personal share. Such as they 
 chose to keep, they kept. Such as they chose to sell; 
 they sold. The great market centers once glutted, 
 the smaller towns over the whole empire were sup- 
 plied with detachments, either on public or private 
 account, till the capacities of buyers or sellers were 
 temporarily exhausted. In such a provincial town as 
 Tarsus, for example, in Paul's boyhood and youth, the 
 spectacle must have been familiar almost as the com- 
 ing of morning, of the exposure in the market-place of 
 the city of some group of sad-eyed captives, — men, 
 women, and children, — from Germany, successfully 
 swept by the armies of Germanicus ; from Thrace, 
 reduced, a little before Paul came of age, to the condi- 
 tion of a Roman province ; or even (several years pre- 
 vious to writing the words of our text) from Britain, 
 invaded, and in parts ravaged, by the troops of Aulus 
 Plautius and of Vespasian. 
 
 And there, on any one of those days, might have 
 been seen the transaction which gave Paul the strik- 
 ing metaphor which has attracted our attention to-day. 
 Some one coming into the market-place beholds the 
 groups of bond-slaves there put on exhibition — a stal- 
 wart dark-haired man from Thrace, a blue-eyed girl 
 from Northern Germany, or perhaps a child of that 
 Gallic blood whose gray eyes and dark lashes are the 
 beauty of an occasional modern Irish face. Moved by 
 whatever sentiment, pity, cupidity, or what not, the 
 visitor pays down the price and redeems the captive, 
 redeems him sometimes to liberty, redeems him oftener 
 only to another servitude, but anyway redeems him out 
 of the bondage in which he has hitherto been subjected 
 to a master whose helpless and utter chattel he was. 
 
128 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 So, says the Apostle to the Christians of Ephesus, 
 who must have been perfectly familiar with transac- 
 tions like these, so deal with your time. Take it out 
 of the bondage in which it is, out of its place and con- 
 dition of chattelhood ; and redeem it to its proper and 
 appointed uses. The illustration, borrowed from the 
 slave market, which the Apostle employed is, happily, 
 less familiar than it once was ; though quite within 
 the memory of the majority of us here present to-day 
 it could have been paralleled in a considerable part of 
 our so-called Christian land. But were Paul writing a 
 letter now, rather than eighteen centuries and a quar- 
 ter ago, and to this First Church of Hartford instead of 
 to that prosperous Church of Asia Minor, could he 
 possibly describe the condition of time, as it is with 
 us, by a delineation more truthful than that which 
 depicts it as in bondage ? Could he point out a duty 
 more imperativ^e or more worthy of consideration in 
 these flying moments of the closing year, than its 
 redemption to a Christian liberty .'' 
 
 For, my hearers, is it not, in point of fact, the 
 great and common experience, — certainly of almost 
 all of us who are gathered here to-day, — that we our- 
 selves find that this unique and priceless possession of 
 time is, in manifold ways, bound, mortgaged, capti- 
 vated, — to use a word which has somewhat drifted 
 away from its former significance in its older and 
 etymological employment, — captivated to interests 
 and occupations from which we find it almost impossi- 
 ble to rescue it .'' 
 
 Ask the man of business to give you an hour to pre- 
 sent the claims of some philanthropic enterprise, or 
 requests him to undertake some regularly recurrent 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 129 
 
 service which will demand the setting apart to its use 
 of a small segment of one day of every week, and you 
 are, very probably, stopped on the threshold of your 
 plea by the declaration, — honestly enough made too, — 
 that he " hasn't time " for the hearing you solicit or for 
 the service you propose. Very likely he will give you 
 a contribution for the benevolent enterprise without 
 hearing about it, and will feel a certain pang of regret 
 at peremptorily putting aside your proposal for the 
 hour's weekly employment ; but he puts it aside all 
 the same, for the Philistines of business have him in 
 bondage and he has to grind in their mill, as blind as 
 Samson, almost, to anything beside. 
 
 Ask the busy woman of society for some coopera- 
 tion in a Christian undertaking which cannot but 
 appeal to her both as a woman and a Christian, and 
 she finds the silken bands which the demands of con- 
 ventional obligations have woven about her almost as 
 inexorable as the iron chains of a physical servitude, 
 in laying an embargo upon her assenting endeavor. 
 
 Propose to the appointed officers of a Christian 
 Church, — the illustration must be fresh in the memory 
 of at least ten men in this congregation, — a service 
 strenuously demanded by the fellowship of the 
 churches, or a work in behalf of the Church itself 
 whose ofificers they are, and observe how the declina- 
 tion passes from lip to lip of as good men as can be 
 found in any Church membership of five hundred any- 
 where because of the demands upon their time already 
 existing, and tasking them to the full. 
 
 Ah, yes, what a common experience this is ! How 
 fettered and captivated time is with almost all of us ! 
 No wonder a brilliant woman of a name familiar to 
 
IT^O REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 you all, engaged in a great, though quixotic, literary 
 enterprise, and whose heroic-pathetic story, known to 
 many of us long, is just now more publicly unveiled to 
 the general eye, sighed for a life in one of those tardier 
 moving planets — Jupiter or Saturn — whose slow-re- 
 volving day would give supposedly longer time for 
 work ! For, indeed, when one really thinks of it, what 
 a scanty segment of duration it is between the cradle 
 and the grave that a man has to put into bonds to any 
 kind of continuous endeavor ! Deduct from the nar- 
 row span the irresponsible years of infancy and early 
 childhood ; take out of it the great section continually 
 demanded by sleep ; subtract the large portion inevita- 
 bly employed in whatever is necessary to keep the 
 machinery of existence itself going ; add yet further to 
 this discount side all that is snatched away by illness 
 or pilfered by accident, and then consider the portion 
 incapacitated by old age, and how small a fraction 
 there is left for direct and intentional employment in 
 any endeavor ! I think I have said once in this pulpit 
 before, but no matter, the statement is worth repeat- 
 ing every twelvemonth at least, that a writer pro- 
 foundly acquainted with the history of literary men, 
 Thomas DeOuincey, estimated that, after making the 
 deductions incident to every life, the sum total of 
 absolutely available time the most industrious literary 
 man of seventy can be supposed to have employed in 
 any voluntary literary enterprise is not more than 
 eleven solid years. Mercantile men commonly enter 
 on what may be called the real occupation of life at a 
 somewhat earlier age than do men of a literary pro- 
 fession. But then, they do not generally practice so 
 fully that expedient for lengthening one's days of 
 
SERMONS. I^X 
 
 which Charles Lamb wittily said that it was best 
 accomplished by taking them out of one's nights, so 
 that the practical span of actual endeavor is not much 
 longer. To what narrow compass does that shut up 
 one's history. And when that span is bound to the 
 tremendous, exacting labors of competitive business 
 or professional endeavor, or even of conventional society, 
 how hard it is to redeem any portion out of that servi- 
 tude to any other employment how sacred or impera- 
 tive whatsoever ! 
 
 Nevertheless, the pressing necessity of some kind 
 of emancipatory process in behalf of at least a portion 
 of our time, and in view of interests now suffering by 
 its bondage, is a necessity which comes home occa- 
 sionally, I suppose, to most of us. Very few people 
 look back from a point of advanced or even of middle 
 life over the track by which they have come, feeling 
 anything like complete satisfaction with the propor- 
 tionate employment of their days. Even if the broad 
 outline of their past is reasonably contenting, and the 
 use which they have made of their time is that to 
 which, in great measure, they have been shut up by 
 the circumstances of their days, still the men and 
 women of mature years must be very few who do not 
 wish that they had ransomed and employed some 
 possible portions at least of that now irrecoverable 
 past to other and higher uses than have actually been 
 served. 
 
 And this general and almost instinctive feeling that 
 some such redemptive rescue of time should have 
 marked our vanished days, which is felt by the least 
 considering of men and women, is emphasized for the 
 more thoughtful by remembrances that only increase 
 
1-52 REVER]:XD GKORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 in weight the more they are pondered. For the recol- 
 lection comes home with the added testimony of per- 
 sonal experience, to such a thoughtfully considering 
 mind, that of all possible possessions a man can ever 
 have, it is his possession of time which is most valua- 
 ble. It is this which is the indispensable condition of 
 all others. It is that mysterious inheritance on which 
 all others depend, and on the continuance of which 
 everything else hinges. The highest puipose is fruit- 
 less unless there is time to permit it to bear its 
 intended harvest. The most resolved endeavor and 
 impassioned action are alike frustrate does not time 
 afford them arena for their proper exercise. How full 
 is the memory of any thoughtful man fifty years old, 
 of instances which have occurred under his j^ersonal 
 observation, of noble purposes resultless, and high 
 attempts made vain for lack of time. " O my book, my 
 book" — said poor Buckle, dying at thirty-nine years 
 of age — "I shall never finish my book," — a book 
 the loss of which so competent a judge as Mr. Lecky 
 says is " one of the most serious misfortunes which 
 have ever befallen English literature." And in lesser 
 ways, and over smaller intended undertakings, that is 
 a lament which is forever sounding in the ears of 
 every man not stone deaf to what goes on in him and 
 about him in this world. 
 
 This indispensableness of time as the condition of 
 the fulfillment of any enterprise is just as true in 
 religious things as in any others. How strangely this 
 is sometimes forgotten ! Men seem to think that 
 spiritual welfares and acquisitions are some way exempt 
 from that general law which they recognize as pre- 
 vailing elsewhere, the law that the possession of any- 
 
SERMONS. 1^3 
 
 thing worth having is the fruit of endeavor (some one's 
 endeavor) through prolonged periods of time. The 
 attainment of- knowledge is the result of the indus- 
 trious employment of time. The accumulation of 
 wealth depends on time. But religion can be got in 
 a moment. Piety comes in a kind of instantaneous 
 cataclysm of the soul. The life of godliness in the 
 spirit can be adequately nourished on the scraps and 
 accidental waste bits of duration which fall from a 
 life-history devoted primarily to other employments, as 
 the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's 
 table. Oh ! what a low and disastrously erroneous 
 notion of the spiritual life this is. To what a pitiable 
 piece of quackery and magic does it reduce the divinest 
 experience and the highest acquirement possible to 
 man ! Religion, like everything else worth having, 
 demands time. The attainments of piety no more 
 than the attainments of knowledge can dispense with 
 time. Out of the inexorable conditions of the spirit- 
 ual life, as much as out of those of the physical and 
 intellectual, sounds the urgent declaration that of all 
 possible possessions, none a man can have can be so 
 indispensable as time. Nowhere more than in refer- 
 ence to the needs of the soul is the redemption of 
 time to distinct, purposeful employment, for definite 
 spiritual ends, a condition of the attainment of any 
 satisfying result. 
 
 Yet this worth of time which is so brought to mind 
 by a perception of its indispensability to the securing 
 of the objects which a religious life, as much as any 
 other life, has in view, has always been vividly brought 
 home to my own mind by a consideration of a char- 
 acter somewhat different from that we have iust 
 
134 
 
 r!':\-|':renu george eeon walkick, d.d. 
 
 noted. This is a consideration of what the actual 
 period of duration which we ourselves have had, and 
 have used, — perhaps with a quality and intensity of 
 employment that does not altogether fill us with self- 
 gratulation to-day, — has done for some other men and 
 women in their spiritual histories. All along parallel 
 with our own, other lives have run. Through the same 
 identical moments which we have passed, they passed 
 also. And what lives some of them have been. 
 Marked by what achievements. Heroic with what 
 self-sacrifices. Beneficent with what Christlike deeds ! 
 At the very time when we were idling away our days 
 in slothfulness, or grinding in the mill of a merely 
 material or private welfare, some men here and there 
 were solicitously redeeming those identical moments, 
 
 — for we had the same and an equal number of them, 
 
 — to a spiritual and eternal good. Some of them are 
 in heaven to-day, and surrounded there by souls won 
 thither by their endeavors, because of their employ- 
 ment of the precise hours which we spent in pursuits 
 for which we have perhaps nothing now to show, and 
 certainly nothing to put in comparison with the results 
 of their endeavors. Right alongside of us, embar- 
 rassed by all the difficulties which we encounter, against 
 all obstacles which stood in their path as much as in 
 ours, they redeemed the time, — the time that was 
 once our own, — to ends which will make rejoicings in 
 heaven forever. Ah me ! is there anything which can 
 give us a more vivid sense of the possible worth which 
 may lie in the flying years of one short life, or a more 
 humiliating sense of our employment of those self- 
 same years, than some simple biography of men or 
 women who lived through periods which were in 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 135 
 
 greater or less extent identically and consciously our 
 own ? What they were and did ! what we did and 
 were ! Time must be a priceless thing, since its 
 redemption, by these souls, can bring about such 
 glorious ends ! 
 
 But now having perhaps vivified a little in our minds 
 the sense of that bondage wherein our time is held 
 captive, and having somewhat, I hope, quickened our 
 apprehension of the exceeding worth of that which we 
 are exhorted by the Apostle to redeem to nobler uses, 
 the question comes to us as a most practical one : 
 Can we do it ? How can it be done ? By what 
 means, notwithstanding all the difficulties in the way, 
 can we do something to redeem the time ? 
 
 I suggest as one most helpful means toward redeem- 
 ing time, — the most helpful of any means, — that of 
 making religion absolutely (what we all account it 
 theoretically), absolutely, I say, the uppermost inter- 
 est of life. There is a tremendous power in an 
 uppermost interest. Whatever it be, it swings every- 
 thing round to itself. If a man's uppermost interest 
 is his business, all insensibly and even oftentimes 
 against his voluntary resolves and endeavors, his busi- 
 ness subordinates everything in him and about him to 
 itself. His business goes with him to his bed, gets up 
 with him to every new sunrise, occupies the dreams of 
 his sleeping hours, sits with him at the table and 
 hurries him at his dinner, follows him to Church on 
 Sunday, holds him in a perpetual grip as its bond- 
 slave and thrall. Is a man's uppermost interest the 
 prosecution of some scientific inquiry, or some literary 
 enterprise ? How quickly such an inquiry or such an 
 endeavor puts everything else underfoot. All things 
 
136 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 seem tributary to that. He walks the streets and 
 encounters the most unlooked for confirmations of his 
 theory, or suggestions toward his enterprise. Para- 
 graphs of the daily newspapers, which others read 
 unthinking, are full of significance to him. All winds 
 blow for his scheme, all roads lead toward it. Is a 
 woman's uppermost interest the successes and attain- 
 ments of society .'' What keen preternatural instincts 
 are developed as to what will or will not promote that 
 main end. How sensitive, as if every nerve were on 
 the outside, she is to what seems a slight or an over- 
 looking on some one's part. What a mighty thing an 
 invitation or the lack of an invitation is. How trifles 
 become mountains ; and all things simple, natural 
 and deserving, are changed to something else when 
 seen through fashion's artificial eye. 
 
 A supreme interest, — good or bad, — commands the 
 field. It takes possession of the faculties and brings 
 everything under its control. It especially rules time ; 
 and by its constant vigilant watchfulness and uncon- 
 scious alertness in being always intent on its supreme 
 concern, may almost be said to make time — so little 
 does it suffer to waste from the interests about which 
 it is really and supremely concerned. 
 
 Now, my friends, it is not otherwise with religion. 
 If religion is a man's chief interest, — as every pro- 
 fessedly Christian man professes it to be, — it is master 
 of the situation. It swings everything round to itself. 
 It makes business, pleasure, knowledge, all tributary 
 and subordinate to a higher concern than themselves. 
 It uses every one of them as servants and tools to pro- 
 mote its main concern. It does not discourage dili- 
 gence in business, or attainment in knowledge or 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 137 
 
 enjoyment in society. But with the natural supremacy 
 of an acknowledged master, it subjects them all to 
 that chief end, — the knowledge and service of God, — 
 in which religion consists. It is easy to see what a 
 redeemer of time such a supreme interest in religion 
 must inevitably be. In a profound and comprehensive 
 sense, it redeems all a man's time, — his hours of most 
 diligent business or of his most leisurely enjoyments, 
 — to itself. But besides this, it does in a particular 
 way, and just as any other supreme interest does, 
 redeem time in its subdivisions and particles. It 
 looks out for the fragments of duration. It gives 
 theme and occupation to accidental half-hours and 
 minutes. Minutes and half-hours, because they have 
 been under the supreme interest of scholarship, 
 have sometimes made scholars. Elihu Burritt, out in 
 New Britain, standing at his blacksmith forge, and 
 snatching now and then a glance at his Greek gram- 
 mar, or his Legendre's Geometry, is a sufficiently con- 
 spicuous and near at hand illustration of the truth of 
 that fact. And just so, — because under the power 
 of a supreme interest, — minutes and half -hours have 
 made saints of God. The commanding concern has 
 lent to and found in the small crumbs of duration a 
 value incalculable, and an opportunity for spiritual 
 growth continuous and blessed. I entreat you to 
 make actual that supreme interest in religion which 
 most of you, my hearers, even now profess, as one 
 exceedingly practical method in the redemption of 
 time. 
 
 I conclude by the mention of only one more sugges- 
 tion of a possible way of redeeming time to higher ends. 
 This is by habituating ourselves, — -as I suppose we 
 
138 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.I). 
 
 shall all agree it would be wise in us to habituate our- 
 selves, — to look upon time as provisional and prepara- 
 tory in its character. Time has its main end and its 
 highest use in what comes after it. We are here 
 seventy years ; we are there seventy thousand. We 
 are here a little while ; we are there forever. The 
 bare putting of these facts beside one another is itself 
 a commentary, which hardly needs anything added to 
 it, on the significance of that provisional and prepara- 
 tory character which must belong to time and what- 
 ever time can do. Crowd time full as it may be with 
 interesting and significant events ; employ it grandly 
 as it can be employed in great and important matters ; 
 still the main interest and value of it, from the very 
 nature of the case, must be in what it leads on to and 
 prepares for. But once let a distinct and abiding per- 
 ception of this fact really enter into a man's soul and 
 what a curious alteration it inevitably makes in the 
 whole perspective of affairs. What a shifting and 
 exchange of places and values immediately takes place 
 in the things he looks upon. Those things are worth 
 most — are they not.'' — which most directly affect the 
 quality of one's own and others' future. That is the 
 most important matter, surely, which has the most 
 immediate and moulding influence on what is to be 
 bye-and-bye and forever. But if this is so, how unmi- 
 portant are some things generally regarded as very 
 important here ; how transcendently momentous are 
 some things, which are here deemed of little concern ! 
 Let a man but come to measure all the occupations 
 and interests of life, — I do not say with exclusive ref- 
 erence, or with emotional and excited reference, but, — 
 with calm and reasonable reference, such as becomes 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 139 
 
 the facts in the case, to their bearing on the character 
 of that future to which he is moving on, and for which 
 everything here is fitting or unfitting him now. It 
 will be impossible for him not to sustain a profoundly 
 altered attitude toward the things of life and action 
 about him. A new standard of values will be his by 
 which all things will be measured. How they bear 
 on, or fail to bear, on the welfare which is abiding is a 
 question which, like the touch of aqua fortis on a 
 metal, will show the gold or the brass of moral things, 
 and rate them at their proper worth. 
 
 And time itself, which has in it this preparatory and 
 provisional character, must be, to the last grain of it, 
 a sacred thing. How can any one to whom its worth 
 is apparent permit it to be wasted in careless frivolities, 
 or misused in employments, which, however they may 
 be dignified by high-sounding names, contribute not 
 to the main end for which time was given, or to those 
 abiding welfares of ourselves or others, which will be 
 theirs and ours when "time shall be no more." Listen 
 again to the words of the Apostle, forever seasonable 
 and forever kind : 
 
 •• See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as 
 wise ; redeemins: the time, because the days are evil." 
 
I^O REVEREND GEORGE LEON WAEKER, D.D. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 IMPERFECT CHARACTERS OF SCRIPTURE.* 
 
 Hi;i;kI':\vs xi : 13. 
 
 These all died in fait Ji. 
 
 This eleventh chapter of the Hebrews is a kind of 
 muster-roll of ancient piety. Names which in the reg- 
 ular narrative of Scripture stand separated from one 
 another by wide tracts of time and by many interven- 
 ing generations, are here gathered in one company. 
 Perhaps the figure will be allowable, if it is said that 
 in this passage of his Epistle the writer undertakes to 
 conduct us through a portrait-gallery of the famous be- 
 lieving dead. It is an august and venerable succession 
 that he bids us look upon. The long line reaches back 
 to a remote and almost shadowy antiquity ; yet the 
 moral lineaments of each of those who have been 
 deemed worthy of a place in this gallery of P'aith stand 
 out in lifelike distinctness. Here seem to gaze down 
 upon us the sacred and the great, with whose names is 
 identified the very thought of religion (not alone in our 
 personal understanding of it with which they have 
 been associated from our childhood), but in the actual 
 development of religious history in the world. Here 
 is Abel, first martyr to the cause of pure worshiji, and 
 
 Written in 1S64. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 141 
 
 Enoch, the man who has never died. Here are Abra- 
 ham and Sarah, and Isaac the son of their old age. 
 Here, clothed in his Egyptian robes of authority, is 
 Joseph, the kidnapped child of Palestine ; and Moses, 
 cradled amid the flags of the Nile, to lead the children 
 of Joseph and his brethren back tQ Palestine once more. 
 Here is the venerable form of Samuel, last of the 
 Judges ; and the regal effigy of David, — not the first 
 king of Israel indeed, but the first kingly ancestor of 
 the prince Emmanuel. As we pass along the sacred 
 company we feel the gathering influence of their noble 
 histories ; we sympathize in the exclamation of the 
 writer of the Epistle, " Of whom the world was not wor- 
 thy " ; and are impressed by the remembrance that we 
 are encompassed by "so great" and so majestic "a 
 cloud of witnesses." 
 
 But now, — while still pondering on the constancy of 
 Noah, or the self-denial of Moses, — our attention is 
 arrested by two or three figures in this Scripture gal- 
 lery, respecting whom a half-felt wonder perhaps rises. 
 Why are these men here ? This is a gallery of 
 the saints. Those who are represented in it are set 
 forth as having "obtained a good report." It is testi- 
 fied of them that they "all died in faith " ; that " God 
 is not ashamed to be called their God " ; that they 
 "wrought righteousness, obtained promises," and that 
 God "hath prepared for them a city." We read some 
 of these commendations perhaps with a little surprise. 
 Here, for example, looks down upon us the warrior 
 Gileadite Jephthah, the illegitimate child of a lawless 
 race, born and nurtured in the wild regions of chase 
 and freebooting beyond the Jordan. And while we 
 wonder at his place in this company, we seem to see 
 
142 rever1':ni) geokge leon walker, d.d. 
 
 his hands reddening with the blood of his only child, 
 slain in fulfilment of his rash and ruthless vow. Sam- 
 son, too, — -devoted indeed from birth to the restraints 
 of a Nazarite's pledge of temperance, but in nearly all 
 other respects the most jovial, irregular, unlicensed of 
 men, — we start a little at seeing Samson depicted 
 among the worthies of Scripture. When we try to 
 think of him thus, it is not perhaps strange that his 
 mad expeditions down to Timnath, and the shaving of 
 his hair in the chamber in the valley of Sorek, disturb 
 a moment the reverence of our meditation. So, too, 
 in their degree, of Barak and Gideon ; and in lesser 
 measure even of Jacob, whose crafty supplanting of 
 his brother and base deception of his blind old father, 
 can scarcely fail to occur to us every time we think of 
 this "inheritor of the promises." These are not men 
 whom we should naturally select as devout characters 
 — examples of piety and God-serving. Had we been 
 enumerating the saints of old, and composing a volume 
 for the religious edification of men, it is doubtful 
 whether Rahab and Samson and Jephthah would have 
 found any place in it. Or, if we discovered here and 
 there a trait in the lives even of these which prevented 
 an entire denial of mention in our catalogue of the 
 good, we should at all events carefully suppress many 
 of the facts which now confront us, — sometimes per- 
 haps we think a little uncomfortably, — in the Scrip- 
 ture story. 
 
 Yet these persons are without hesitation ranked 
 among the saints and heroes. The Bible fearlessly 
 challenges for them a place in perpetual remembrance. 
 Their characters are drawn out in full detail. Their 
 imperfections, as well as their virtues, are impartially 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 143 
 
 set before us. The pen of Scripture photographs for 
 us the passionate violence of Ehud and Shamgar, as 
 well as the devotion of Daniel or the zeal of Jeremiah. 
 And then, after having done so, setting before us thus 
 a character in which good and evil are mixed in strono- 
 and contrasting colors, the Word of God says respect- 
 ing some of them, as in the text, "these all died in 
 faith"; these were "persuaded" of the promises; 
 these " confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims 
 on the earth" ; these all "obtained a good report." 
 
 The characteristic of Scripture which comes out so 
 distinctly in this famous eulogy pronounced on the 
 worthies of Old Testament history in this chapter of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews, is a characteristic which 
 pervades to some extent the entire Bible. All through 
 the volume given by inspiration we are in the same way 
 presented with lives of men, — accepted and honored 
 servants of God, — who are marked by painful blem- 
 ishes and imperfections. Characters are held up before 
 us in the most sacred of all associations, and the most 
 trusted of all stations, upon which we behold, without 
 the least attempt to hide the fact from us, the scars of 
 grievous infirmities and sometimes of sins. Where 
 should we look for blameless behavior if not among 
 the immediate disciples of our Lord ? To whom should 
 we turn for flawless correctness of conduct, if not to 
 those who were entrusted by Christ with the duty of 
 sharing His ministry while He was yet on earth, and 
 of recording the Scriptures and guiding His church 
 when He was gone.' Yet even the best beloved dis- 
 ciple sustains a severe rebuke at the Master's lips, for 
 his sinful desire to invoke "fire from heaven " to burn 
 up a whole village which had slighted Jesus and His 
 
144 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 company. Peter lies and blasphemes and treacher- 
 ously denies his Master, though he afterward deeply 
 repents of his wickedness. But repentant Peter is 
 not a perfect man. Paul " withstands him to the 
 face" on one occasion long subsequently, "because," 
 as he says, "he was to be blamed," and was carried 
 away with an unworthy "dissimulation." But even 
 Paul is not without his weak point. On a certain mis- 
 sionary journey with Barnabas, carrying the Gospel of 
 Peace, these two eminent men fall into a controversy, 
 and the "contention is so sharp between them" that 
 they cannot continue to work together, but separate, 
 each taking a different companion and a different field 
 of labor. 
 
 Now, it cannot be for nothing that such facts as these 
 are preserved to us in the biographies of the good men 
 of Scripture. It would have been very easy to have 
 suppressed them. There was no necessity that the 
 writer of the Epistle from which the text is taken, 
 should have added to his catalogue of Abel and Enoch 
 and Noah and Abraham and Moses, the names of Sam- 
 son and Jephthah and Rahab. The catalogue would 
 have been grand and illustrious without these. And 
 yet Holy Scripture has carefully enumerated these 
 among the worthies of Old Testament history, and de- 
 clares respecting them that God " is not ashamed to 
 be called their God." And with equal fearlessness do 
 the Gospels and the Epistles, — while claiming for the 
 Apostolic company an assured place among the re- 
 deemed and the beloved of God, — set forth with im- 
 partial distinctness the frailties of a John, a Barnabas, 
 a Peter, and a Paul. Nay, in the same spirit, are the 
 contentions and backslidings of the primitive Churches 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 145 
 
 brought before us. Large portions of Apostolic letters 
 are devoted to redressing errors and flagrant abuses 
 which, in less than twenty years after their founding, 
 have crept into the Churches of Thessalonica, Corinth, 
 and Galatia. 
 
 Now all this must have its instructions for us. A 
 procedure so contrary to man's way of commending a 
 cause to favorable judgment cannot have been deliber- 
 ately chosen by the Spirit of God, without a deep and 
 sufficient reason. This setting before us of mingled 
 evil and good in the lives of those whom Scripture 
 holds up as saints and heroes, this numbering of Rahab 
 and Samson among those "of whom the world was not 
 worthy," has certainly its uses or it would not have 
 been done. Let us endeavor, therefore, to gain some 
 of these lessons from the Imperfect Characters of 
 Scripture : or in other words, let us seek to know why 
 the faults of such men as David and Jacob find a care- 
 ful record ; and Gideon and Barak are numbered 
 among those who "wrought righteousness" and 
 "obtained promises." 
 
 One reflection, of a somewhat general and prelimi- 
 nary nature, which occurs to us, is this : The record of 
 these Imperfect Characters of Scripture imparts a life- 
 like quality to Biblical history. The narratives of the 
 Book of God come to us wearing an aspect of natural- 
 ness and authenticity derived from the presentation 
 before us of characters beset and often overcome by the 
 familiar passions and infirmities of our nature. As we 
 look around us among men we nowhere behold fault- 
 less perfection. All whom we know are imperfect. 
 The best are but partly good. The most exempt from 
 infirmities are nevertheless only comparatively exempt, 
 10 
 
146 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 It is a good thing therefore, on the mere ground of se- 
 curing our confidence in its truthfuhiess, and in mak- 
 ing Scripture biography real and living to us, that the 
 Bible presents the characters of the men of whom it 
 tells us with all their imperfections and failures. Not 
 like some volumes purporting to be truthful records of 
 the lives of eminent Christian saints is the Bible in this 
 particular. Not like a great deal of biographical litera- 
 ture issued by our religious press, read in our Sunday- 
 schools, wept over by our firesides, is the Book of 
 God. These books of human begetting are rich in 
 tales of the unnaturally and impossibly good ; men and 
 women with fewer acknowledged faults than the im- 
 patient, though beloved John; children riper for im- 
 mortality than that arduous Apostle who was obliged 
 still to keep under his body and bring it into subjection 
 lest after all he should be "a castaway." It is not in 
 this manner that the narratives of Scripture are set be- 
 fore us. These present us men placed in the midst of 
 life's common struggles. Men battered and scarred 
 with rough contact with affairs. Men of like passions 
 with ourselves. Men who find it hard work to do right, 
 and who often fail. Men who battle terribly to keep 
 their heads above water, and who, some of them, seem 
 at times well-nigh swept away and lost. Apostles fiery 
 tempered; Prophets melancholy, impatient, headstrong 
 and humble by turns ; Kings and Judges at once law- 
 less and obedient, reckless and devout, — these are 
 the men who pass before us on the Scripture page. 
 And hence Scripture comes to us as a real record. 
 These are real lives we look upon. The stamp of 
 authenticity is on them. These are men of a kind that 
 we can understand. Biographies like these can help 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 147 
 
 US, for our own lives tell us that they are true and their 
 struggles interpret to us our own. 
 
 Another lesson which comes to us from the Scripture 
 commendations of Imperfect Characters, is that re- 
 sponsibility is proportioned to privilege. Men are 
 estimated according to the light they enjoy. Several 
 of the names mentioned with praise in this eleventh 
 chapter of the Hebrews, Gideon and Barak and Sam- 
 son and Jephthah, belong to the darkest and most tur- 
 bulent period of Jewish history, — that recorded in the 
 Book of Judges, This was undoubtedly the lowest 
 moral era of Hebrew story. As the book itself says, 
 repeating it several times to impress the fact upon us, 
 " In those days there was no king in Israel, [but] every 
 man did that which was right in his own eyes." There 
 was no fixed capital of the nation, no regular sanctuary, 
 no established government. No one tribe had an 
 acknowledged pre-eminence. The rulers which were 
 from time to time raised up to exercise authority, came 
 according to no recognized law, and belonged to no 
 hereditary family. Gideon was of the tribe of Ma- 
 nasseh ; Barak of Naphtali ; Samson of Dan ; Jephthah 
 came from the mixed race in the border country be- 
 yond Jordan, his mother a concubine of the native tribes 
 of Canaan. In this turbulent, ungoverned time these 
 men lived. No public sanctuary gathered them. No 
 recognized law controlled them. The Jewish people 
 were mingled with the original inhabitants of the land, 
 their victory over them not yet established. It was a 
 period unparalleled in the annals of the Hebrew race 
 for its confusion, its dimness of moral perception, its 
 absence of civilization and control. Yet in the mid.st 
 of this disorder these men lived lives which secured for 
 
148 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 them the approbation of the Biblical historian. That 
 they were perfect men is not alleged. That they were 
 very imperfect men is plainly shown to us. No veil is 
 cast over their infirmities. Nevertheless Scripture 
 finds in them something which makes them venerable 
 and sacred. What that "something" was, we shall 
 have occasion speedily to notice. But at present we 
 are remarking on the fact that they were dealt with 
 and estimated, not according to the light they did not 
 have, but according to what they had. Scripture is 
 nowhere betrayed into any expression of apology for 
 their faults. It never defends or sympathizes with 
 their imperfections. It simply narrates them with an 
 impartial hand, and then claims that spite of them all, 
 these men, in view of the dim light that they enjoyed, 
 were good men. In other words, it applies to the 
 estimation of character that plain principle announced 
 by Christ : " To whom much is given, of him will much 
 be required ; " and the converse of it is equally true : To 
 whom little is given, of him will little be required. As 
 a consequence of this principle we see, therefore, as we 
 come down through Biblical story, that though the good 
 men of Scripture are all of them imperfect men, yet 
 their imperfections are continually narrower in range 
 and lighter in degree. As the light which shines around 
 them becomes brighter, they are required to attain, and 
 do attain, a higher moral standing ground, and to be- 
 come more and more faultless. The Bible acknowl- 
 edges the Apostle John to have been an imperfect 
 man ; but the impartial pen records no worse fault 
 against him than a high and imperious temper. And 
 the exhibition even of this fault is, so far as the nar- 
 rative leaves us to infer, confined to his youthful days 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 149 
 
 and the beginning period of his religious life. The 
 plain conclusion, therefore, results from the Scripture's 
 method of dealing with the imperfect characters of 
 which it tells us that accountability is proportioned to 
 light. Men are estimated by their opportunities. Re- 
 ligious obligation advances as religious knowledge in- 
 creases. We are bound to be better men than the 
 primitive Christians by the same law which bound them 
 to be more blameless than the Hebrews of the eras of 
 Deborah and Eli. What was but a fault in them, may 
 be a sin in us. The thing which was but a blemish 
 in them may be to us the ruin of the soul. 
 
 A further instruction afforded by the Imperfect 
 Characters of Scripture is the value of Faith as a prin- 
 ciple of life. 
 
 I said there was something in these men of whom 
 Scripture tells us, in spite of all their faults, which 
 affords a true and sufficient ground for the glorious 
 commendation given them in the book of God. That 
 something was Faith. They believed in God. They 
 confided in Him to do what He promised. They 
 ventured everything on His pledges. He was a real 
 Being to them. And His word was a rock on which 
 they rested. They were accustomed in their hour 
 of need to look to Him, and believe that they were 
 heard. Take but one example, for time will not 
 suffice to mention more than one illustrious in- 
 stance of these exhibitions of belief in God of 
 which the Bible is full. This instance shall be taken 
 from the troubled and morally-darkened epoch already 
 spoken of. The Israelites had been but just delivered 
 from long and exhausting conflicts with the Philistines 
 on the south, and Jabin and Sisera, who had invaded 
 
I^O REVEREND GEORGE LEOX WALKER, D.D. 
 
 from the north, when a new and greater peril threat- 
 ened them. The Midianites and Amalekites came up 
 against them. Like their Arab posterity of modern 
 days they came dressed in scarlet, riding on drome- 
 daries and camels. They drove before them their 
 cattle ; they covered the hills with their tents, an army 
 of conquest and occupation. In this juncture the 
 message of God came to Gideon, a man of a poor 
 household of Manasseh. And as we read in the 
 record, the Lord said unto him, "Surely I will be 
 with thee and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one 
 man." Summoned thus, Gideon assumed the under- 
 taking. He sent messengers and gathered the people- 
 There were assembled to him thirty-two thousand men. 
 These were but as a handful to the host of the invad- 
 ers, but even these were too many for the divine pur- 
 pose. But would Gideon still confide in God if his 
 forces were lessened .'* God tried him. He com- 
 manded him to proclaim in the hearing of the trem- 
 bling Israelites, " Whosoever is fearful and afraid let him 
 depart." Was it not enough to discomfit the leader, 
 that he beheld twenty-two thousand men turn from 
 him and go .-* But still he was not enough tried. Ten 
 thousand were too many. By a still farther process of 
 sifting and separation Gideon beheld his number 
 reduced to three hundred men. Would he still under- 
 take the work } The disparity of numbers was terri- 
 ble, but still three hundred powerful warriors armed 
 with practiced weapons could do something. Nay, but 
 they were not allowed to be armed. The amazed, but 
 still confiding, leader obeyed the command which took 
 away even from the little company left to him their 
 spears and swords, and saw them accoutred for their 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 151 
 
 perilous enterprise each with a trumpet in one hand, 
 and a pitcher containing a burning lamp in the other. 
 Did he falter at the strange injunction which bade him 
 undertake such a housewife-like mode of warfare .'' 
 There is no sign of it. He believed the word which 
 had been spoken : " Surely I will be with thee, and 
 thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man." And 
 when the three hundred had blown their trumpets, 
 and clashed the breaking pitchers, and flashed forth 
 the fitful rays of the lamps upon the midnight dark- 
 ness, and when the Midianites, astonished and fright- 
 ened, had fallen upon one another, and fled hewing 
 each other down in their terror all along the road to 
 Zererath and the Jordan, a thing had been done, by 
 the power of steadfast faith in God, which entitled 
 Gideon to a place among the heroes of religious his- 
 tory forever. We vindicate the writer to the Hebrews 
 as he holds this man up, all rude and imperfect as 
 other parts of his history show him to have been, as 
 an example of trust in God and a light of faith always. 
 
 So too of Samson, when blind and captive and made 
 to do ungainly sport for his oppressors, he felt after 
 the pillars of the temple, and in the earnestness of his 
 patriotism and devotion to his nation he prayed his 
 last prayer : " O Lord God remember me, I pray 
 Thee : and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this 
 once." We forget his wild revels at Timnath, we for- 
 get his shameful loss of his locks. This was a man 
 who believed in God, and knew how to utter the prayer 
 of faith. 
 
 The strong instruction comes to us thus even from 
 the most imperfect of the men whom the Scripture 
 enumerates among the saints, that Faith is the all-im- 
 
152 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 portant principle of life. Belief in God ; belief that 
 God will do as He says ; will save and punish as He 
 affirms He will ; will bless those who confide in Him, — 
 a steadfast conviction of these things is the justifying 
 fact of a life whether it be lived in Palestine or New 
 England ; in the time of the Judges, or Apostles, or 
 now. Indeed, in some respects this lesson is taught 
 us by such lives as those of Samson and Gideon more 
 plainly than by those of Abraham or Paul. For the 
 fact stands more boldly out in their cases that true 
 faith will save very imperfect men. The thing which 
 justifies the soul is its simplicity of trust in God, 
 whatever be the object toward which that trust is sum- 
 moned. It ought to be no harder for a man to believe 
 God is willing to forgive him if he repents, or will punish 
 him if he does not, than it was for the husbandman of 
 Manasseh to believe that his lamps and pitchers would 
 gain him victory. And just so long as a man cannot 
 believe this, Gideon and Samson and Rahab are his 
 instructors. And they are instructors all the more 
 convincing, because their own cases are so vivid illus- 
 trations that faith can deliver very great and miserable 
 sinners. It is not the perfectness of the character 
 which gives the efficacy to the faith. It is faith which 
 blots out the imperfection, and saves Rahab and may 
 save me. 
 
 A still further lesson which comes to us from the 
 depicting before us of the imperfect good men of 
 Scripture is this : We are admonished against over 
 much fault-finding and severity in our judgments of 
 one another. The critical temper which is always 
 rasping at other people's shortcomings, which is always 
 uttering hard speeches if men do not fully meet some 
 
SERMONS. 153 
 
 ideal standard of right conduct which we are pleased 
 to set up, does indeed, in many places in Scripture, 
 receive severe condemnation. " Judge not, that ye be 
 not judged," says the Master. " For with what judg- 
 ment ye judge, ye shall be judged." That is a law, 
 the execution of which might well make many tremble 
 whose tongues are trained to be sharp swords, per- 
 petually hacking and thrusting, and hewing at other 
 people's faults. " None is good but one," said Christ. 
 All beside Him have their infirmities and their sins. 
 And if a man expects everybody to be perfect he had 
 better move out of this world. But this lesson of for- 
 bearance in our judgments, taught us in so many ways 
 beside, is in a very signal manner taught by the narra- 
 tives of the good men of the Bible. It is a very 
 instructive remembrance that there is not one of these 
 good men, whose character is drawn out at any con- 
 siderable length, who is not plainly revealed as having 
 his faults and weaknesses. If absolute perfection is 
 demanded as a safeguard against severe judgment then 
 neither Paul nor John can go free. Then every idle 
 tongue in Corinth is at liberty to twit Paul of his 
 quarrel with Barnabas ; and every garrulous member of 
 a congregation in which the saintly and beloved dis- 
 ciple utters his oft repeated injunction : " Love one 
 another. Love one another," may remind his neighbor 
 of the time when the same lips passionately invoked 
 fire from heaven to consume a Samaritan village. The 
 Bible recognizes all their faults, but says nevertheless 
 of vastly more imperfect men than these : " God is not 
 ashamed to be called their God." If the heart is once 
 made humble and contrite ; if the man is once radically 
 and truly set in terms of acceptance with God and of 
 
1^4 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 confession of wrong to his offended fellow men, Scrip- 
 ture becomes a generous and kindly judge. Peter's 
 backsliding shall not be mentioned perpetually to his 
 confusion, nor even David's flagrant sin, openly con- 
 fessed and agonized over, deny him a place among the 
 honored and the loved. Well would it be for us to pon- 
 der this lesson who draw one another before the poor 
 tribunals of our own imperfect judgments, and perhaps 
 still more imperfect lives, and demand of all a con- 
 formity to what, after all, maybe no behest of morality, 
 or justice or duty ; but possibly only a whim, a fancy, 
 an individual taste. 
 
 A final instruction which we may profitably reap 
 from the record of the Imperfect Characters of Scrip- 
 ture, is a word of encouragement and comfort to 
 imperfect but struggling men. 
 
 I said, a little time ago, that responsibility is pro- 
 portioned to privilege ; that religious obligations ad- 
 vance with increase of knowledge ; that we are in duty 
 bound to be better Christians than those of the primi- 
 tive age. It is so. I would have that lesson solemnly 
 rest upon us as an abiding truth. But, nevertheless, 
 it was not, I think, without its designs toward a right- 
 ful encouragement of men, downcast and troubled 
 because of their shortcomings, that so many of the 
 saints of old are set before us in the posture of delin- 
 quents, and in the manifest need of forgiveness. There 
 is a token of the tenderness of Christ toward the weak 
 and faltering of His flock in the fact that He caused it to 
 be recorded that, even amid the immediate circle of His 
 own disciples, there was a doubting Thomas, a backslid- 
 ing Peter, an angry John. The frailties of the good men 
 of Scripture are no shelter for the man who makes them 
 
SERMONS, 155 
 
 an excuse for remissness in the urgency of his own 
 endeavor. But the man who is with all his heart 
 striving to do the Master's will, and yet who comes 
 consciously very far short of doing what he would be 
 glad to do, — who does watch and agonize and labor, 
 but is yet sometimes overtaken in a fault, may draw 
 an inference of encouragement from the words that the 
 Book of God speaks of men, perhaps, some of them, 
 more imperfect than he. It should comfort us that 
 Christ did not cut off from His companionship a Peter 
 who thrice denied Him, and a Thomas who said 
 " Except I thrust my hand into His side I will not 
 believe." The infirmities of even the Apostolic com- 
 pany were recorded for our cheer. They bid us look 
 up with hope to Him who like as a father pitieth his 
 children, pities them who fear Him. They call upon 
 us to remember that no sense of unworthiness however 
 deep, should bring despair into a soul that clings 
 steadfastly to Christ. An utter surrender of the soul 
 to Him, as the only hope, will hide a multitude of sins. 
 The man who rests on Him alone, and amid perplexi- 
 ties and failures, still follows after Him, will not be 
 rejected. "Though he fall he shall not be utterly cast 
 down." The God who accepted a repentant David, 
 and the Christ who said to a doubting disciple, " Reach 
 hither thy finger and behold my hands," will pardon the 
 infirmities of God's children now, as those of old were 
 pardoned. Press on in labor and in faith, and of us as 
 of Samson, and Rahab, and Jephthah it shall at last 
 be said : God is not ashamed to be called our God. 
 
ic;6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 IX. 
 HEROD AND MANAEN.* 
 
 Acts xiii : i. 
 
 Now there were at Aiitioc/i, in tJic cJnirch f/iat 7vas there, prophets 
 and teachers, Barnabas, ajid Symeon that was called Niger, 
 and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen the foster-brother of 
 Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. 
 
 This thirteenth chapter of the book of Acts marks 
 the great dividing point between the leaderships of 
 Peter and of Paul in the developing Church. Up to 
 this time Peter had been the foremost figure in the 
 Church's story. He led in the election of Matthias 
 to the Apostolate made vacant by Judas's apostacy 
 and suicide. He was the preacher of the sermon on 
 the occasion when three thousand people were 
 "pricked in their hearts" on the day of Pentecost. 
 He pronounced judgment on Ananias and Sapphira 
 for lying to the Holy Ghost. He opened the door to 
 the admission of the Gentiles to the Church by the 
 baptism of Cornelius and his household. 
 
 Yet now through that thus opened door walked 
 another figure who during the rest of the Apostolic 
 narrative occupies the eye as the leading personage of 
 the new stage of events on which the Church was 
 about to enter. This figure is that of Paul, or as he 
 
 * Written in 1890. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 157 
 
 was still called, Saul. This new stage of activity is 
 the first great missionary movement of the Church 
 outside the borders of Palestine and outside the fellow- 
 ship of Judaism. Converts here and there, like the 
 Greek proselytes who sought to see Christ Himself on 
 the last great day of the Passover before He died, like 
 the Ethiopian eunuch converted by Philip on the road 
 down to Gaza, like the household of Cornelius before 
 spoken of, there had, indeed, been previous to this 
 time. But now, for the first time, the experiment was 
 to be made of a direct missionizing endeavor to reach 
 the outside pagan world. There is a distinct pause in 
 the narrative as if of consciousness of the great event. 
 There is an enumeration of forces like that of a com- 
 mander in view of a critical campaign. The scene is 
 Antioch, a city itself a little over the border of Pales- 
 tine toward Asia Minor, whither a number of the 
 disciples of the new faith had fled for safety from the 
 persecution which arose about the killing of Stephen. 
 It was from this point of refuge and of Christian 
 activity that the new grand enterprise was to be 
 undertaken. It is impossible not to recognize a kind 
 of unspectacular but profound sense of the magnitude 
 of the issues involved in the transactions of that 
 memorable hour, in the simple, stately way in which 
 the inspired narrative pauses, as it were, to count up 
 the resources at the disposal of the Antioch Church, 
 and describes the solemn setting apart of two of its 
 teachers to the great enterprise before them. There 
 is no beating of drums or roll of Gospel-wagons to be 
 heard, but there is a simple, humble, consecrated 
 action which has left its impress, not on the Gospel 
 narrative alone, but on the history of the universal 
 
1^8 REVEREND GEORGE LEOX WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Church forever. Let us read the eternally memorable 
 words which record this new departure in Christian 
 history : — 
 
 Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, 
 prophets and teachers, Barnabas and Symeon that was called 
 Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen the foster-brother of 
 Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. And as they ministered to the Lord, 
 and fasted, the Holy Ghost said. Separate me Barnabas and 
 Saul. 
 
 The first-named and the last-named it will be noticed 
 of all the Antioch prophets or teachers. 
 
 Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I 
 have called them. Then, when they had fasted and prayed and 
 laid their hands on them, they sent them away. 
 
 Into the general results of this simply but solemnly 
 instituted missionary campaign, it is impossible at the 
 present time to enter. As I have intimated, all the 
 remaining fifteen chapters of the book of the Acts are 
 in effect but a story of the results of the action then 
 taken and of the call of Saul to a leadership in the 
 enterprise. 
 
 The purpose for which I have brought this critical 
 moment of Gospel-history forward at this time, is to 
 call attention to the participation in it of one man 
 whose name is nowhere else mentioned in the Gospel- 
 story, but whose briefly-suggested experience and 
 whose co()peration in a transaction like this, is suited, 
 as it seems to me, to lead to some interesting and prac- 
 tical suggestions. What a book the Bible is in thus 
 dropping by the way, almost unnoticed in our intent- 
 ness on the main drift of its teachings, suggestions of 
 the richest significance in these scarcely-regarded 
 clauses and expressions ! 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 159 
 
 We read that there was among these original 
 " Commissioners for Foreign Missions" in the Antioch 
 Church, a prophet or teacher called " Manaen the 
 foster-brother of Herod the tetrarch." 
 
 "Herod the tetrarch" — what ugly remembrances 
 that name brings up to mind ! Herod ; the tetrarch 
 was the son of Herod the murderer of the children in 
 all the vicinity of Bethlehem ; massacred in the hope 
 of frustrating the prophecy which spoke of the birth of 
 Jesus in David's town. He was that old Herod's son 
 by one of his, then living, nine wives, Malthace, a 
 Samaritan woman. He was the man who having been 
 appointed by his father's will tetrarch of " Peraea and 
 Galilee," and being married to a daughter of Aretas 
 King of Arabia, had taken a fancy to marry also his 
 sister-in-law, his own half-brother's wife, Herodias. 
 She had accepted his proposals, deserted her own hus- 
 band, brought a war on between Herod and his father- 
 in-law Aretas, and as one indecent and memorable in- 
 cident of this disgraceful episode on her part and her 
 husband's, had caused her daughter, in a drunken 
 revel, to dance before Herod and his boon associates ; 
 and, as there ward for this unwomanly behavior, had 
 secured the murder of John the Baptist, who had 
 objected to the unlawful marriage into which Herodias 
 had entered. Herod the tetrarch was the man, too, 
 who coming down to Jerusalem at the time of the 
 Passover, in the year thirty of our era, had been sent 
 to by Pilate to help him out of a dilemma in which 
 Pilate found himself. A prisoner, accused of rebellion 
 against the Roman authority, had been brought before 
 Pilate for judgment. Pilate could find no fault in 
 Him ; but as the governor had heard Him called 
 
l6o REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 "Jesus of Nazareth " it occurred to him that he could 
 get out of his difficulty by sending the prisoner to 
 Herod, for Nazareth was a town in Herod's tetrarchy. 
 So to Herod he sent Him. We know how the experi- 
 ment resulted. Jesus refused even to answer one of 
 Herod's questions. Whereupon Herod, having first 
 scourged Him, caused Him to be clothed in mock 
 raiments of royalty, with fastastic crown and sceptre, 
 and opprobrious ridicule and abuse, and sent Him back 
 to Pilate in derision and contempt. A few years after 
 this transaction, stirred up by the importunity of 
 Herodias, who wanted him to have the title of " King " 
 rather than that of "Tetrarch," Herod went to Rome 
 to endeavor to get that title conferred on him by the 
 Emperor Caligula, with whom he had had a boyhood 
 acquaintance. Here, however, he was met by accusa- 
 tions of treasonable correspondence with the Parthians, 
 and instead of gaining the new title was deprived of his 
 old one and banished into Gaul, whence he subse- 
 quently went into Spain, dying there in exile ; his wife 
 Herodias — this may be said for her — sticking by 
 him and sharing his downfall to the last. 
 
 This was the man to whom Manaen, a prophet or 
 teacher of the Antioch Church, stood in the relation of 
 foster-brother. 
 
 The word avvTpo^o<i, which our new translators have 
 rendered "foster-brother," and which the translators 
 of King James's version rendered " brought up with," 
 is, perhaps, capable of either significance. It may 
 mean, as the old version suggests, than Manaen had 
 been, according to a custom not unknown in the 
 Roman and oriental world, selected in childhood to be 
 the playmate and companion of young Herod ; being 
 
SERMONS. l6l 
 
 brought up with him for the purpose of having at 
 hand always an associate of his own age. Or it may 
 mean in the stricter sense of the word that the infant 
 Herod and the infant Manaen both nursed at the same 
 breast, — the probability being in this case that 
 Manaen's mother acted as nurse to old Herod's infant 
 child. 
 
 The two views are not inconsistent with one another, 
 and there are some historic facts which give plausi- 
 bility to the idea that they may both be true. Josephus 
 preserves an interesting story concerning an old 
 Manaen, a member of the sect of Essenes, and the old 
 Herod, — father of the Herod of whom we are now 
 speaking, — that may account for one or both of the 
 relationships which have been suggested between the 
 younger Manaen and the younger Herod. When the 
 old Herod, afterward known as Herod the Great, was 
 only about fifteen years of age, a member of the 
 Essene fraternity of religious recluses, some of whom 
 had families and some not, named Manaen, a man re- 
 puted to be of unusual piety and prophetic insight, 
 had met the boy Herod, and predicted for him a great 
 future and the attainment of royal dignity. Herod 
 never forgot the augury, and always manifested, — 
 brutal and wicked man though he was, — a special 
 favor toward the sect of which the elder Manaen was 
 a member. 
 
 Perfectly natural would it have been, therefore, 
 when the exigencies of his household required the 
 ofifices of a foster-mother for his young child, that the 
 elder Herod should have accepted the aid in this 
 capacity of the elder Manaen's wife ; and that so the 
 young tetrarch and the young prophet of the Church 
 
l62 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 of Antioch should have been nursed in their infancy 
 by the wife of the man who a few years before had 
 foretold the elder Herod's greatness. Equally natural 
 would it be that a relationship so established should be 
 continued, so that the foster-brother connection of 
 babyhood should be succeeded by the childhood com- 
 panionship of subsequent years, vindicating tlius the 
 interpretation put by classic custom and by the trans- 
 lators of our older version, upon the word avvrpo^o^, 
 — a child " brought up with " another. Either way, or 
 both ways, — and both ways seem on the whole the 
 most probable explanation of the matter, — we see 
 Manaen, one of the Christian teachers of the Antioch 
 Church and one of the founders of Christian missions, 
 standing in a relation which the Word of God has seen 
 fit everlastingly to put on record, to Herod Antipas, 
 the beheader of John the Baptist, the scourger and 
 mocker of the Lord Jesus, and the disgraced ex- 
 periencer of a Gallic prisoner's obscurity and a Spanish 
 exile's death. 
 
 Well, now, the facts hardly seem to need much 
 elaborateness of comment. The lessons of them, — 
 and we cannot but believe the divinely intended 
 lessons, — stand out with great distinctness on the 
 very surface of the story. And they involve not 
 merely biographical suggestions of wide application to 
 other lives than those two here spoken of, but moral 
 suggestions of deep and abiding importance. It is only 
 with a hasty and undeveloping brevity that we can glance 
 at two or three of the inevitably arising reflections of 
 this recorded association of Herod and Manaen. 
 
 I mention, then, first the lowest and least important 
 of these suggestions. 
 
SICR.MONS. 
 
 163 
 
 How far apart two lives can go which seem once to 
 have been almost the same. 
 
 It is with these mental and moral beings of ours 
 much as it is with the drops of water which fall on the 
 high ridge-land of some great continental dividing 
 mountain range. A little deflection this way or that 
 way makes all the difference between their rolling 
 down the swift descent to the Pacific Ocean, or their 
 tracking all the thousand miles of Missouri's and 
 Mississippi's turbid waters to lose themselves in 
 Mexico's gulf and Atlantic's stormier waves. A drift 
 of cloud eastward or westward, a little accidental 
 barrier of snow, a tree fallen across a rivulet's path, 
 make all the difference between destinies so wide- 
 sundered ! How full human history is of these near 
 proximities ending in such wide asunderments ! 
 From Cain and Abel born into the same primeval 
 household down to the younger Edwards and Aaron 
 Burr, cousins and schoolmates, or, speaking of less 
 sinister contrasts, down to Daniel Webster, the ex- 
 pounder of the Constitution, and Thomas Merrill, 
 pastor of the Church in Middlebury, Vermont, who 
 took the valedictory away from his classmate Webster, 
 these contrasts and sunderments meet us on every side. 
 
 The poets have a hundred times found in this con- 
 tact and separation of human lives some of the most 
 beautiful of their similes, sometimes among the most 
 pathetic of their strains. 
 
 Alexander Smith's figure of two lives meeting: like 
 two ships upon the sea : — 
 
 One little hour, and then away they speed 
 On lonely paths, through mist and clouds and foam 
 To meet no more. 
 
164 REN'EREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 is familiar to us all. Arthur Hugh Clough has put 
 the same idea into more elaborate lines : 
 
 As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay 
 With canvas drooping, side by side, 
 
 Two towers of sail at dawn of day 
 
 Are scarce long leagues apart descried; 
 
 E'en so, — but why the tale reveal 
 
 Of those whom, year by year unchanged, 
 
 Brief absence joined anew to feel 
 Astounded, soul from soul estranged. 
 
 And the still more familiar lines of Tennyson in 
 which he figures forth the divided lives of his departed 
 friend, Arthur Hallam, and himself, under the com- 
 parison of the divided lives of two old playmates and 
 schoolmates of some country village, occur naturally 
 to our thoughts : — 
 
 Dost thou look back on what hath been. 
 
 As some divinely gifted man, 
 
 Whose life in low estate began, 
 And on a simple village green ; 
 
 Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, 
 And grasps the skirts of happy chance, 
 And breasts the blows of circumstance. 
 
 And grapples with his evil star; 
 
 Who makes by force his merit known 
 And lives to clutch the gokien keys, 
 To mould a mighty state's decrees, 
 
 And shape the whisper of the throne. 
 
 And moving up from high to higher. 
 Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope 
 The pillar of a people's hope. 
 
 The centre of a world's desire : 
 
SERMONS. 165 
 
 Yet feels as in a pensive dream. 
 
 When all his active powers are still, 
 A distant dearness in the hill, 
 
 A secret sweetness in the stream, 
 
 The limit of his narrower fate. 
 
 While yet beside its vocal springs 
 He play'd at Counsellors and Kings, 
 
 With one that was his earliest mate ; 
 
 Who ploughs with pain his native lea 
 And reaps the labour of his hands, 
 Or in the furrow musing stands, 
 
 " Does my old friend remember me ? " 
 
 Yes ! this is one of life's commonest experiences. 
 And of this experience on all sides of its possible illus- 
 tration, — social, moral, and eternal, — we could hardly 
 have a more vivid reminder than in these words con- 
 cerning the teacher of the Antioch Church in this 
 first great missionary enterprise, that he was the 
 "foster-brother of Herod the tetrarch." 
 
 A suggestion coming somewhat closer to a distinctly 
 moral and practical principle, in this Scripture-noted 
 association between Herod and Manaen, is the 
 thought that what a man brings with him into the 
 world, brings with him when a helpless infant appa- 
 rently no more self-determining or definite in moral 
 character than a jelly-fish, has a mighty influence in 
 determining what he is to become. 
 
 I used as an illustration a few minutes ago the figure 
 of a drop of water almost accidentally deflected this way 
 or that way in its course to the sea, as typical of the 
 course of human lives. The illustration is partly true, 
 — as I shall have occasion to emphasize further on, — 
 
l66 REVEREND GEORGE LEO\ WALKER, D.D. 
 
 but it is partly not true, as I am concerned to show 
 just now. Men bring with them into the world a good 
 deal of what determines their character in the world, 
 and their history in going out of it. Here lay these two 
 infants, Herod and Manaen, hardly more than a foot 
 long, drawing sustenance by turns from the same mater- 
 nal or foster-maternal source. Who could tell of any 
 difference between them ? What microscope or dis- 
 secting scalpel could have discovered in these two plastic 
 little bundles of physical being the future murderer of 
 John the Baptist and scourger of the meek prisoner of 
 Nazareth, and the future prophet of the Missionary 
 Church of Antioch ? No surgeon or bacteriologist 
 could possibly have discerned that invisible something 
 which, to so great an extent, made each what he was. 
 That something came with the little bundle of humanity 
 which we call a baby into the world. Herod was the 
 child of a bad father, — a father whose name has stood 
 these nineteen hundred years as a synonym for 
 brutality, cruelty, and hate, — by one of his nine 
 wives, a woman of the mixed and uncertain blood of 
 the Samaritans, one of the descendants of the people 
 with whom the Jews were taught to have no inter- 
 course. Manaen was, it seems altogether probable, 
 the child of parents not only pure Jews, but Jews of a 
 particularly strict and ascetic religious order. Behind 
 both children lay histories diverse as their destinies. 
 The generations before which had gone to the making 
 of them had been as dissimilar as the pathways they 
 were themselves to tread. No most observant inves- 
 tigator taking up those two little human midgets by 
 turns could say which was to be the prophet and 
 which was to be the murderer. Yet who can doubt 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 167 
 
 that the solution of the question was even then very 
 largely hid somewhere in those two small lumps of 
 mortal clay ? 
 
 This is only analogous to what we find to be the 
 facts in relation to all other branches of life. You 
 want a good dog. You are not content to see that the 
 puppy which is offered to you is a very good looking 
 puppy. You want to know what sort of a father and 
 mother he had. A member of the sporting fraternity 
 wants a fast horse. It does not answer to tell him 
 that this colt has good points and has shown remark- 
 able speed. He wants to know whether the colt 
 comes of a family in which speed is an inheritance. I 
 am not a horse-man myself, but my eye fell only a few 
 weeks ago on the account of a race whereof the inter- 
 est, — an interest that I have no doubt was felt by 
 more persons in this country than would be concerned 
 about the question of who was president of Yale 
 University, — the interest was whether the Mambrino 
 or the Hambletonian family, represented in the two 
 competitors, would beat in the contest. 
 
 To a great extent, it is so in the history of human 
 life. This is what gives a sweet, true, honest, godly 
 ancestry its priceless worth. That my father was or 
 was not a millionaire is a question almost insignificant 
 to me, save so far as it might express and cast light on 
 the quality' of his character. But that he was a simple, 
 sincere, devout man, who served God and his genera- 
 tion to the best of his powers, is a matter of infinite 
 concernment to me. That my mother wore or did not 
 wear the habiliments of a queen is absolutely beneath 
 consideration. That she was a queen radiant in the 
 light of a pure, true womanhood, and regnant, within 
 
l68 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 her sphere, by the divine right of a noble character — • 
 that is something to the purpose. This is what makes 
 family feeling a justifiable feeling and a matter to be 
 solicitous about. This is what makes the question of 
 matrimonial alliances on the part of young people a 
 question of supremest concern. Are you marrying a 
 man or are you marrying a position, is the question 
 which comes home, if she only knew it aright, to every 
 young bride at the altar. Are you marrying a woman 
 or only a fortune or a fashion plate, is the question for 
 the bridegroom to ponder. Life's happiness for the 
 young people themselves depends on the answer to be 
 given to those questions. Life's result for their pos- 
 terity, also, is largely involved in the reply. Wise and 
 happy are they who in the solution of this great prob- 
 lem of youthful life put that first which is first, and 
 who choose above bonds and mortgages, or pretty face 
 and fashionable connections, character which is true, 
 and lineage which is without a blot on its scutcheon. 
 
 But having said this, which I think is not only 
 justified but compelled by the plain facts of human 
 life, I must suggest that there is, also, another side to 
 the matter which needs as well to be taken into view, 
 and in which the simile of the early deflected water- 
 drop or the early-bent twig has also a place. 
 
 We cannot doubt that however Manaen and Herod 
 may have been "brought up together" there were ex- 
 ternal influences, none-the-less, which diversely co-ope- 
 rated in making them what they became. Herod was 
 the son of Herod and Malthace, and however intimately 
 he was associated with Manaen, it is impossible not to 
 suppose that family instructions and influences had 
 their share in making the son of the slayer of Bcthle- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 169 
 
 hem's children and of the mongrel-blooded Samaritan 
 woman what he became. On the other hand, however 
 closely associated with Herod Manaen may have been, 
 he was still the son of a devout Jew and Jewess, who 
 cannot be regarded as having forgotten their parental 
 obligations in any temporary lending of the mother or 
 of the child to the welfare of the Herodian family. 
 Manaen was not Malthace's son, and it is not possible 
 that his mother ever allowed him to be treated as if he 
 were. She had her own hold on him, body and soul. 
 And, though the details of the story are all lost to us, 
 we cannot doubt from the issue, — since figs do not 
 grow out of thistles, or corn grow even out of good 
 ground without culture, — that Manaen's mother was 
 as another Hannah in her training of her child. And 
 here is where an element of tremendous power and 
 encouragement appears in dealing with youthful life. 
 It is a good deal like the turning of the water-drop 
 westward to the Pacific or eastward to the Gulf. A 
 power stands at the fountain-head of childhood's being, 
 of incalculable potency in determining its direction and 
 quality. Even supposing there are original wrong tend- 
 encies in a child's nature, — the inheritances of a bad 
 ancestry, — who can tell how far these can be cor- 
 rected and neutralized by patience and fidelity in the 
 plastic days of early impression and of formation of 
 habit ? Habit is a tremendous educator. It will 
 accomplish marvelous results, even in the face of in- 
 herited obstacles. And habits of right-doing, and to a 
 great extent of right feeling, are the part of parental 
 privilege to inculcate and secure. This is what lends 
 tremendous responsibility, but also not less measureless 
 privilege, to motherly and fatherly influence over youth- 
 
lyo 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 fill life. That influence can never be calculated. It 
 can work wonders even against inherited odds. It is 
 a true saying: "As the twig is bent the tree inclines," 
 and it is as true of the thorn as of the poplar. 
 
 And in this work of training human lives, if any- 
 where in this world, divine aid may be sought and 
 expected. If God hears the ravens when they cry for 
 food for their nestlings, will He not hear parental 
 prayers for the welfare of children of immortality ? 
 Doubt we cannot, that, if in any undertaking to which 
 a man can set his hand in this universe the sympathy 
 of God is with him, it is in this work of making better, 
 purer, more honest, more Christian, a child's life. It 
 was this co-operant sympathy of God with parental 
 endeavor, may we not believe, which made the foster- 
 brother of Herod the tetrarch one of the teachers of 
 the Church of Antioch and one of the inaugurators of 
 that missionary enterprise which is yet to convert a 
 world to Christ. 
 
SERMONS. 171 
 
 X. 
 
 FILLING UP THAT WHICH IS LACKING.* 
 
 COLOSSIANS I : 24. 
 
 II lio now rejoice in my sufferings for yon, and Jill up tliat luhich 
 is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His 
 body's sake, which is the Church. 
 
 There are some passages of Scripture which are Hke 
 the world's great battle-fields. Contesting interpreta- 
 tions have wrestled over them, as struggling armies 
 wrestled at Waterloo or Gettysburg. This passage is 
 one of them. Reading the words of our text, the 
 Church of Rome claims that she finds in them a sup- 
 port for her doctrine of supererogatory and substitu- 
 tive merit in the sufferings of the saints. She appeals 
 to this passage, among others, in defense of the idea 
 of an efficacy in the lives of good men to atone for at 
 least some kinds of guilt. While ascribing, indeed, to 
 Christ the work of atoning for original sin, she accords 
 to human merit and suffering a power to expiate many 
 actual transgressions. The blood of Christ blots out 
 the native and inherent guiltiness of the race ; but the 
 blood of martyrs and the tears of saints have also an 
 expiatory office. The lesser lapses of the faithful are 
 cleansed by them. The lighter faults are forgiven 
 
 * Written in 1869, about live months after the death of his 
 younger son. 
 
172 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 for their sake. They constitute a reserve-fund ot 
 grace, supplemental to that afforded by the atonement 
 of Christ. This reserved fund of merit is at the 
 Church's disposal. The keys to it are hers. She can 
 apply it to whom she will. Paul, she asserts, was con- 
 gratulating himself on a contribution that he was mak- 
 ing to this fund of supplemental merit, when he wrote : 
 
 Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that 
 which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for his 
 body's sake, which is the Church. 
 
 But such a doctrine as this has not commended 
 itself to the judgment of men where the Bible has been 
 read in the light which the Reformation shed on its 
 pages. P"or nothing can be more repugnant to the 
 whole drift, or to the express statements, of Scripture 
 than the idea of any insufficiency, requiring to be sup- 
 plied from any quarter, in the expiatory work of 
 Christ. On the contrary, that work is uniformly 
 represented as complete in itself. It wants nothing to 
 supplement it. There is nothing which can add to its 
 efficacy. Christ's life and death constitute in them- 
 selves a perfect oblation and atonement for human sin. 
 They afford the only ground for its forgiveness. And 
 no apostle has more frequently or powerfully affirmed 
 this complete and all-sufficient character of Christ's 
 work than has Paul. To imagine any insufficiency in 
 Christ's sacrifice, to conceive of any other sacrifice as 
 needful to make up that deficiency, is not only com- 
 pletely opposed to Scripture as a whole, but, if attributed 
 to Paul, places him in the grossest contradiction with 
 himself. 
 
 Whatever, therefore, Paul did mean in this ]'>assage. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 ^73 
 
 certain it is that he did not mean to imply that his 
 sufferings, or any one's sufferings, were supplemental 
 to the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice. 
 
 But in the recoil from this Roman interpretation of 
 the passage under consideration, another view of it has 
 been taken by many Protestant commentators which 
 seems to me in an equal degree erroneous. That in- 
 terpretation is this. 
 
 Paul, it is said, is simply giving utterance to his 
 rejoicing that he is filling up that portion of suffering 
 which has been appointed to him to endure in the 
 cause of Christ. A certain number of trials and hard- 
 ships had been divinely allotted to him to bear ; and 
 some of them were still unborne. They were yet 
 " behind." The measure was not yet full. But it was 
 filling. It would soon be complete. The last of the 
 trials it was appointed to him to endure in the Chris- 
 tian service would soon be encountered ; and then the 
 work on his part would be done. He rejoiced, there- 
 fore, in his sufferings, as completing that measure and 
 hastening his release. 
 
 This interpretation of the Apostle's meaning cer- 
 tainly contains no heresy. It is quite true so far as it 
 is anything. If anyone can content himself with it, it 
 is quite optional to adopt it. But it is an interpreta- 
 tion which simply empties the passage of all value. It 
 seems not accordant with the context, nor with the 
 great-thoughted man who uttered it, nor with the 
 grand Gospel of which he is here affirming one of the 
 grandest of truths. 
 
 A meaning far deeper and more wide-reaching than 
 this lies in the language of the Apostle. And this 
 meaning has been discerned in it by many of the 
 
1-4 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 wisest of men whose studies liave illuminated for us 
 the Gospel page. I need only refer to Calvin and 
 Melanchthon and Grotius and Bengel, among many 
 others, to indicate that the view of the passage I am 
 about to present is one which has commended itself to 
 some of the best interpreters of the sacred Word. 
 The view, then, which I present is this : — 
 
 And fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in 
 my flesh, for His body's sake, which is the Church. 
 
 What are those "afflictions " of Christ ? What is it 
 which " remains behind" unfulfilled.'' The reference 
 here is not to the sufferings which Christ endured in 
 His single person in His work of expiating human sin ; 
 but to the afflictions which He bears through the trials 
 of the Church which is His body, and by reason of 
 His unity with it. It is worthy of remark that the 
 Apostle does not say " what is behind of the irad^fjuara, 
 the passion, of Christ ; but simply the dXi'xIret'?, the 
 afflictions, of Christ ; affliction being that common 
 term which is applicable to all human sufferings. In 
 other words, Paul, in this passage, contemplates Christ 
 in the same aspect in which he often elsewhere repre- 
 sents Him, as one with His members. He is so 
 identified with His Church, that what affects it affects 
 Him. As elsewhere, this same Apostle, writing to 
 the Corinthians, sets forth the unity of Christ and His 
 Church under the figure of a human body, in which if 
 one member suffers the whole body suffers, so here he 
 contemplates the afflictions to be endured by the 
 Church identified with Christ as the yet-unfulfilled 
 afflictions of Christ Himself. Nor can we forget, in 
 this connection, what a divine warrant, — a warrant 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 175 
 
 even from the lips of Christ, — Paul had for this man- 
 ner of speaking. We do not forget, and surely he 
 never forgot, that word which sounded to him out of 
 the skies above him as he was on his way to carry 
 bonds and imprisonment to the Christians at Damascus. 
 That voice had said to him : " Saul, Saul, why perse- 
 cutest thou Me ? " " Persecutest thou Me ! " His perse- 
 cution of the disciples was persecution of the Master. 
 The woes he inflicted on them were woes inflicted on 
 Him, whose they were. And so was it with all their 
 calamities. Paul never forgot that lesson. He 
 remembered that in all the afflictions of Christ's peo- 
 ple forever, Christ is afflicted. As He suffered once 
 in His own single person for the expiation of human 
 sin, so now He daily shares the sufferings of His 
 people. And much of this kind of affliction remains 
 "yet behind." The sorrows of Christ's members are 
 not complete. 
 
 But, on the other hand, these sufferings are not 
 limitless. They are fixed in quality and amount. The 
 measure of trouble which the whole Church is to 
 endure is determined. God has appointed the sum. 
 And every labor and sorrow undergone in the 
 Church's behalf, diminishes the amount. Each drop 
 of bitterness drained out lessens that which is to be 
 drained. Each trial of one, — such is the commission 
 of the saints ! — takes away something from that which 
 is to be borne by all. It fills up a little of " that which 
 is behind of the afflictions of Christ," in " His body, 
 which is the Church." So the work will go on, 
 through the struggles and sorrows of God's people, till 
 there are wholly "filled up" those measures of trial 
 which are appointed to Christ's body by the eternal 
 
1^6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 plan. Now comes this wonderful Apostle, this simple 
 great soul, and says : "I rejoice in my sufferings for 
 you. I am happy that I may fill up something of 
 what is behind of the sufferings of Christ," which else 
 must fall on some other of His members. Glad am I, 
 that I may thus myself drain some of the bitter drops, 
 which, if I drink not, will be left for other lips. I do 
 it for His body's sake. The more it is permitted me 
 to sustain, the less will be left behind to bear. Grand, 
 generous, wonderful Paul ! These are words worthy 
 of thee, and of the Gospel ! They fit thy character ! 
 They express thy spirit ! They utter forth the truth ! 
 
 Accepting the interpretation of the Apostle's lan- 
 guage which has now been set forth, I turn to some 
 suggestions to which it is suited to give rise. 
 
 Glance a moment, as one of them, at the sort of life 
 which this conception of his relations to others, and of 
 the office of his sufferings, opened to Paul himself. 
 To him it opened the opportunity of a life of vast and 
 indeterminable benefits to the Church. The stream 
 of good which should flow forth from his labors and 
 sacrifices should flow wide and far. The whole 
 brotherhood, whether they recognized it or not, should 
 share in it. For the heavier the burden pressed on 
 him the lighter would be the load left " behind " to be 
 borne. Such was the solidarity of that companionship 
 created by unity with Christ the common Head, that 
 something should be done for each by the endeavor of 
 any. Paul's life was thus made, in a true sense, a 
 vicarious life. It took on the likeness of Christ's life, 
 in that it was a life by the sacrifices and sufferings of 
 which others were to be blessed. It became a life 
 exemplifying that fellowship with the Saviour, of 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 177 
 
 which Christ spoke when He said to the sons of 
 Zebedee : 
 
 "Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with 
 the baptism I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized." 
 
 Yes ! there rose thus before the mind of the great 
 Apostle the conception of a life conformed to Christ's 
 in principle, and similar to His in its benefit to men. 
 And he embraced that conception. He seized upon it 
 with joy. He exulted that such a life was possible to 
 him. He permitted nothing to stand in the way of its 
 complete realization. Hear him as he tells us how he 
 strove after it : 
 
 " But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for 
 Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the 
 excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord ; for whom 
 I have suffered the loss of all things .... that I may 
 know Him, and the power of His resulrection, and the fellowship 
 of His sufferings, being made conformable unto [or sharing the 
 likeness of] His death ! 
 
 How well he succeeded in the endeavor ! How real 
 was that identification ; how wide the benefits to 
 others which flowed from it ! Who is there, of all the 
 millions to whom the Gospel has ever come, who has 
 not been a partaker in them .'' We sit here to-day, in 
 this Christian sanctuary, the wider in mind, the purer 
 in faith, because of the labors and sufferings of this 
 saint of old. The burden presses lighter on us here, 
 because he bore so much of it there. The thoughts of 
 that profound intellect, how they lighten up the Scrip- 
 ture page ! What radiance they cast into the deep 
 places of divine truth ! Strike from the Bible the 
 Pauline epistles, strike from Christian history the 
 
lyS REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Pauline story, how vast, how irreparable, the loss, to 
 the Church and to ever}^ one of us, its members. We 
 owe a debt of thankfulness to that far-off, much-endur- 
 ing soul, that we can hardly estimate and never pay. 
 That energy of self-sacrifice — it is our creditor to this 
 hour! That heroism of courage — it holds a claim 
 against us now ! Those beatings with rods, those 
 bruisings with stones^ they purchased something for 
 us, every one ! 
 
 But I remark, as a second suggestion of the subject 
 before us, that the same principle of unity with Christ 
 and His people in the "afflictions which are behind," 
 has lifted a conception of life, similar to that which 
 Paul had, before many who have preceded us in the 
 Christian service. The filling up of that which was 
 behind of the afflictions of Christ, for His Church's 
 sake, has been the significance of thousands of lives in 
 Christian history. It has been a hope and a glory to 
 them that they might, by their labors or pains, drain 
 out something of the bitterness of human trouble, and 
 make the pathway of Gospel-service easier to those 
 who should come after them. This hope animated the 
 primitive martyrs as they felt the rending fangs of 
 the lions in the amphitheater, or as they burned alive, 
 in pitchy wrappings, in Nero's gardens. It inspired 
 the courage of all that long line of confessors and 
 defenders of the faith, in those stern times when 
 Christianity was waging its battle with Paganism, and 
 so many of its noblest and best died in the conflict. 
 It prompted those who in later times stood up for the 
 simplicity of the Gospel against the corruptions of the 
 Papacy, and so stood at the cost of home and reputa- 
 tion and life. It actuated the fathers of our American 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 179 
 
 Christianity, who, for the sake of truth, and of those 
 who should come after them, left their native land for 
 a wilderness, and the familiar haunts of cultivated life, 
 for the exile's loneliness, and the pioneer's hardship. 
 And it sustained, too, in every age, the patient, un- 
 noticed efforts of thousands of lowly souls, doing no 
 great and memorable thing, but living loyally to Christ, 
 and trying to lift off whatever little burden they could 
 from the hearts of other men. 
 
 These all rejoiced amid their hardship that it was 
 permitted them to fill up something of what was be- 
 hind of the afflictions of Christ. These exulted that 
 it w^as given them to endure a little, for His body's 
 sake. They w^ere glad to think the Church would 
 have less to bear, since they had borne what they did. 
 They were rejoiced to feel that fewer strokes would 
 fall upon other members of the one body because so 
 many fell on them. 
 
 And how true it is that we have less ! We assemble 
 in our free temples of worship. No manacles fetter 
 our limbs or edicts bind our consciences. We go and 
 come on the sweet ground. No lictor challenges our 
 purpose, no inquisitor dogs our steps. We read our 
 Bible in our households. We teach our children the 
 way to Jesus without the intervention of men. We 
 bury our dead in the acre of God, coveting no priestly 
 unction and dreading no priestly ban. 
 
 Why do we do so ? Why are we able so to do .^ It 
 is because those who have gone before us have made 
 us able by the portion they have borne in the unful- 
 filled afflictions of Christ. The price of these things 
 was paid by them. Trace back to whom we owe this 
 debt. You come to the wind-swept graves on Ply- 
 
I So REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 mouth hillside. You come to the discolored soil and 
 buried ashes where stood the stakes at Smithfield. 
 You come to the cell of Luther and to Wiclif's closet 
 at Lutterworth. You follow back the ascending line, 
 from one generation to another, from one witness or 
 martyr to another, till you find that not an age of 
 Christian history has passed since Paul said : " I fill 
 up something of what is behind of the afflictions of 
 Christ," which has not done something to make lighter 
 your burden, and to leave you in debt to its faithful- 
 ness and self-sacrifice. 
 
 Yes ! we are in debt ! The benefits we have are 
 benefits for which we have not paid. We enjoy what 
 we do because other members of the same body have 
 suffered for us. It is because some were found willing 
 to fill up so much of " that which was behind of the 
 afflictions of Christ" that we walk under a load so 
 comparatively light. 
 
 But I remark, as a concluding suggestion of our 
 theme, that the same conception of life which this 
 view of the unity of Christ and His people opened to 
 Paul, and to others who have gone before us, is open 
 also to ourselves. Our greatest privilege in living is 
 in " filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of 
 Christ." If we would but appreciate aright our calling 
 and opportunity, we should rejoice most of all, that we 
 can live "for His body's sake, which is the Church." 
 For the things "which are behind" are yet many. 
 Not yet, — notwithstanding all that He has undergone 
 in the person of His members, — not yet are His afflic- 
 tions full. The Church has trials and conflicts still to 
 undergo. The individual membership numbers many 
 a son and daughter of trouble still. 
 
SERMONS. l8l 
 
 On how many does sorrow press ! How many does 
 penury grip with cruel hand ! What darkness remains 
 to be hghtened ; what woe to be comforted ; what 
 struggles to be aided ; what wanderings to be restored ! 
 And we can alleviate some of that sorrow. Some of 
 that burden we can bear. Our efforts and self denials 
 and, if it need be, our afflictions and pains, can do at 
 least a little of it. This is a vicarious world. Its cen- 
 tral fact is Calvary, and the great law of relationship 
 in it, is relationship through sacrifice. 
 
 Not, indeed, that we are, in any ascetic spirit, will- 
 fully to invent and impose sufferings upon ourselves. 
 Not that suffering is an object in itself. But he that 
 will put his shoulder under the world's great load, — 
 he that will, in any department of labor for his kind, 
 fill up something of what is yet behind, — will do it, 
 must do it, at the cost of many a pain. This world 
 was not lifted to the possibility of salvation without 
 the agony and death of the Son of God ; and it cannot 
 be brought to the experience of salvation realized, 
 without the toils and anguish of many a saint. Re- 
 demption was begotten in sacrifice, and it is perfected 
 only through struggle and pain. But every true 
 Christian effort, — yea, every real Christian tear,^ — • 
 does something to bring that perfection nearer. 
 
 What a thought of cheer for many a humble un- 
 noticed soul there is in this fact ! How much wider 
 was the reach of that soul's sufferings than it knew ! 
 You thought, dear friend, perhaps that your agonized 
 prayer did nothing. You thought your quiet Chris- 
 tian patience in bearing your trouble had no result. 
 When you endured sickness with submission, or be- 
 reavement with quietude, or watched with Christlike 
 
lS2 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 solicitude over a wayward son, or a sinning husband, 
 you had no thought your work reached beyond your- 
 self, and perhaps the immediate object of your effort. 
 Ah ! but it did ! The fellowship of that body in which 
 Christ's members are joined makes it impossible for 
 one to stand alone. Your solitary, hidden grief is not 
 unknown to Him whose very member you are. Some- 
 thing of what remains for Him to fill up, you have 
 been permitted to bear. You have a part in the great 
 fulfillment ! Do not think you are useless or alone. 
 The solidarity of the Christian union secures some- 
 thing of benefit to the whole from the conflict or the 
 suffering of each. 
 
 This presents to us a conception of life we shall do 
 well to ponder. Oh ! not for Paul only, not for the 
 fathers dead, was this conception set before us in the 
 Great Exemplar, Jesus of Bethlehem and Golgotha. 
 That example was set that all might imitate. That 
 life was lived that it might forever inspire. 
 
 My friends, the true problem of life to a Christian 
 man is not how to get the most of ease and the least 
 of pain this world can give. The great object of ex- 
 istence is not to surround oneself with the pleasures 
 of life and to ward off from us its pains. No ! the 
 true object, the Christlike object, is to lift the burden 
 from others' shoulders by taking it on our own, to 
 alleviate others' pains by bearing them ourselves. 
 This is to do as Paul did, and as He did whose example 
 inspired Paul. This is to fill up something of what is 
 behind of the afflictions of Christ. 
 
 And it seems to me, my hearers, that now is a time 
 when it is peculiarly fit that such a conception of the 
 object of life should be presented and thoughtfully 
 
SERMONS. 183 
 
 considered. Wealth increases among us. Life is tak- 
 ing on yearly more luxurious habits. We are sur- 
 rounding ourselves more and more with appliances of 
 ease, and studying with increasing solicitude how to 
 make refined and beautiful our lot. Meanwhile around 
 us sisfhs the burdened world. Meanwhile hands are 
 held out to us from every side. There are mourners 
 to be comforted. There are ignorant to be taught. 
 There are poor to be clothed. There are hungry to be 
 fed. Meanwhile, too, the Church is maintaining her 
 struggle with the world. She needs the effort of every 
 member ; not the cold partial allegiance, but the full, 
 consecrated endeavor of every one who is reckoned of 
 her fold. For vast and arduous is the work yet to be 
 done. The afflictions of Christ are not yet full. Par- 
 takers in His sufferings are needed still. 
 
 O my brothers ; O my sisters : shall we accept 
 the opportunity ? Is there anything in us to answer 
 to the call ? That which is yet " behind " is to be sup- 
 plied. By the struggles of some it is surely to be 
 filled ! Who shall they be .-• Who of this congrega- 
 tion will make it henceforth the purpose of his life to 
 add something to that sum which at last shall be 
 accounted complete ? 
 
184 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WAI.KICK, I) I). 
 
 XI. 
 THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS.* 
 
 LUKE XII : SJ. 
 '■'■ And why even of yo2irselves judge ye not what is right ?^' 
 
 It is a very interesting circumstance connected with 
 this appeal of Christ to the capacity of right judgment 
 in His hearers that it was not addressed to His 
 acknowledged disciples. Our Saviour had been saying 
 some exceedingly important and even mysterious 
 things, apparently in a mixed audience of His own 
 followers and of others. He had spoken of the provi- 
 dential care of God as shown in His provision for the 
 ravens, His clothing of the lilies, and of His greater 
 care of men. And from that point of instruction He 
 had proceeded, after His customary manner, to rise to 
 the teaching of higher and more occult truths concern- 
 ing the nature and near approach of the kingdom of 
 heaven, and the duty of constant readiness for the 
 coming of the Son of Man. 
 
 Peter seems to have been a little doubtful as to just 
 how far this discourse was intended for the public 
 generally, or only for him and his few associates. And 
 he asked the point-blank question, " Lord, speakest 
 thou this parable unto us, or even unto all.-*" The 
 
 * Written in December, 1891. 
 
SERMONS. 185 
 
 Lord answered, " Who then is the faithful and wise 
 steward, whom his Lord shall set over his household, 
 to give them their portion of food in due season ? " 
 His reply is, in effect : " I address whoever has the 
 ear to hear. I am stating facts and principles of uni- 
 versal application and interest. Any man who dis- 
 cerns their truthfulness, and especially who acts on 
 their truthfulness, is My accepted hearer. What I say 
 is reasonable as well as right, and blessed is the man 
 who hears and obeys." But that there might be left no 
 doubt in Peter's mind, or in anybody's mind, as to the 
 broad and inclusive character of His address He turned 
 distinctly to the "multitude" — the "people" who 
 were looking on with uncommitted, and some of them, 
 probably, inimical curiosity — and said to them, in 
 effect, Why do you not exercise your own reason 
 and instructed faculties about the truth or falsity of 
 what I have been telling you ? 
 
 " When ye see a cloud rising in the west, straightway ye say, 
 There cometh a shower ; and so it cometh to pass. And when 
 ye see a south wind blowing, ye say, There will be a scorching 
 heat ; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to 
 interpret the face of the earth and the heaven ; but how is it 
 that ye know not how to interpret this time ? And why even of 
 yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " 
 
 Thus by the strongest of all possible forms of affir- 
 mation, — a direct reproachful challenge for not using 
 faculties they had and could employ, — Christ affirmed 
 an existent power in the minds of even His opponents 
 and enemies to judge concerning the things of which 
 He told them. He appealed to faculties divinely im- 
 planted in them to have some opinion about the truth- 
 fulness of His words. As there were sisrns in nature 
 
l86 REVEREND GEORGE LEOX WAEKEK, D.D. 
 
 which the eye could recognize, and which answered to 
 the truth of things in the physical realm, so there were 
 signs in the spiritual world which might be discerned 
 by one intent and willing to discern them, which an- 
 swered also to the truth of things in matters of that 
 domain. A man ought to recognize such signs. A 
 man could recognize such signs. A man was to blame 
 for not recognizing such signs. Even an opponent 
 might be appealed to with the reproachful and con- 
 demnatory inquiry, — at once a testimony to his capa- 
 city of in some measure judging of the truth in religious 
 things, and of his neglect to employ the capacity which 
 he had, — " Why even of yourselves judge ye not what 
 is right .'* " 
 
 Now it seems to me, as I said at the outset, that this 
 utterance of Christ, addressed confessedly to hearers 
 not His disciples, is an extraordinarily interesting one. 
 It has a very direct bearing upon a question a good 
 deal agitated in theological circles to-day. It casts an 
 illuminating gleam upon one of the great party watch- 
 words of our time. And the brief examination of the 
 Master's saying "to the multitude " which we have 
 now made may, I hope, have prepared the way for 
 some sober and reasonable consideration of what that 
 watchword suggests. 
 
 The party shibboleth of which I speak is what is 
 called the " Christian consciousness." It is used with 
 about equal frequency in both camps of current theo- 
 logical partisanship, progressive and conservative alike. 
 But it is used, of course, with different accent. With 
 the one it is a word of honor; with the other it is a 
 word of reproach. When a writer or preacher, who is 
 understood to be of what is called the more advanced 
 
SERMONS. 1S7 
 
 school of theology among us, makes reference to 
 " Christian consciousness " as one of the sources of 
 light on religious truth, he is at once, by some of his 
 more conservative brethren, accused of elevating human 
 authority to a co-ordinate place with divine revelation, 
 or a place even of superiority to it. When, on the 
 other hand, the phrase " Christian consciousness" is 
 referred to in the utterances of our more conservative 
 divines it is generally in terms which lead their oppo- 
 nents to allege the disparagement or denial of some of 
 the plainest of historic facts, and some of the most 
 obvious of the apparently divinely intended operations 
 of the human intellect. 
 
 Now, is there any necessity of this warfare among 
 brethren .'' Is there any unavoidable need of their mis- 
 understanding and misinterpreting one another ? Is 
 there not some common, fair, middle-ground on which 
 they can stand and use the phrase in question, — which 
 seems to have gotten a pretty secure place in modern 
 religious literature, — in a mutually understood and 
 even mutually acceptable significance ? The question 
 seems to me important enough for me to do what I 
 seldom do in this pulpit, — that is, to call your atten- 
 tion to a particular phase of current discussion in the 
 theological world. 
 
 Now it may, I think, be frankly admitted by those 
 who use this term most frequently that the term itself, 
 " Christian consciousness," is a very ambiguous one. 
 Strictly speaking, what is there which can possibly be 
 more individual and incommunicable than conscious- 
 ness .'' I am conscious of being hot or cold. I am 
 conscious of being right or wrong. But my conscious- 
 ness of these things is not your consciousness. Yours 
 
1 88 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WAEKER, D.D. 
 
 is not mine. Consciousness is a thing not to be 
 confused, intermingled, generalized. When, therefore, 
 the word consciousness is employed, as in the phrase 
 "Christian consciousness," to signify something be- 
 side individual experience ; something belonging rather 
 to collective convictions ; an only moderately strict 
 constructionist in the use of language is bound to 
 admit that the phrase is ambiguous, if not self-con- 
 tradictory. But so are a score of phrases we use in 
 religion and in common life ambiguous. Half the 
 controversies which have ever risen in mental phi- 
 losophy and theology are the result of the ambiguity 
 of the terms employed. Even in politics and general 
 affairs the differences of men largely result from the 
 diversity of interpretation put on the words they alike 
 use. Free-trader or protectionist, for example — how 
 vague and ambiguous the use of these terms in politi- 
 cal affairs is ! Take a high protectionist newspaper, 
 and it calls every man a free-trader, however he may 
 advocate a tariff for revenue, unless he advocates one 
 also for the guardianship of what are called " infant 
 industries." Take an ultra free-trade newspaper, and 
 it calls every man a protectionist, notwithstanding he 
 may ever so carefully discriminate between a tariff for 
 necessary public expenses, and a tariff for support of 
 favored manufactures. And then they go on batting 
 away at each other, largely on a mere matter of ambi- 
 guity of terms. Now I hold no commission to defend 
 the correctness of this phrase " Christian conscious- 
 ness." I certainly did not invent it; nor do I in gen- 
 eral belong to the school or party in recent religious 
 thinking which did invent it and by which it is chiefly 
 employed. Hut I hope I may be fair enough to try to 
 
SERMONS. 1 89 
 
 understand what its users mean by it, and not, — 
 either because of the ambiguity of the word itself, or 
 because of dissent from any of the views of those who 
 mainly employ it, — insist that it must mean something 
 antagonistic to what is true. 
 
 What then, — the ambiguity of the phrase being 
 frankly admitted, — do those who .speak of Christian 
 consciousness really understand by the term .'' So far 
 as I am able to judge from a considerable reading of 
 the religious literature in which the phrase is employed, 
 it means that common concensus or conviction which, 
 under the protracted operation of divine influences 
 upon the minds of men, grows up in the general body 
 of believers. It is a conviction which may relate to 
 things more definitely or less definitely revealed in 
 Scripture, but respecting which, for one reason or an- 
 other, such a general conviction and agreement is 
 arrived at that it may almost be called a common con- 
 sciousness of its reality. 
 
 Now who does not see that in point of fact, — laying 
 aside any question of infelicity in the term by which 
 such a common conviction is called, — that such a com- 
 mon conviction does exist in reference to many re- 
 ligious truths, and exist in such a degree and measure 
 as to be spoken of as something distinct from the 
 materials upon which it is founded .'* For example, 
 there is a common conviction among religious people 
 that God is a loving being. It may be said to be an 
 affirmation of " Christian consciousness " that He is 
 so. ' And when you say that Christian consciousness 
 declares the loving character of God, you do not stop 
 to analyze the growth of that consciousness. You do 
 not say that it is built up from this or that text 
 
jcjo REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 of Scripture; from this or that recorded act of tlie 
 divine behavior. You appeal to it as something which 
 — grown howe\'er it may have done — now stands a 
 substantial commonly accepted conviction, real almost 
 as one's consciousness of life, that God is love. 
 
 But the growth, in this sense, of a common Chris- 
 tian conviction or consciousness is not merely real and 
 powerful in relation to things which are clearly revealed 
 in Scripture ; it is to be discerned also in things 
 wherein the utterances of Scripture are either not clear 
 or are not so clear that they have not in point of fact 
 been capable of various interpretations by Christian 
 men. A most interesting example of the working of 
 this principle is just now held up to our notice in the 
 experience of our brethren of the Presbyterian Church 
 in this country. Our friends of that fellowship are 
 engaged in a struggle for the revision of their creed. 
 Not to mention other points in which they are dis- 
 quieted about it — and there are several — one import- 
 ant point in it which gives them uneasiness is the 
 utterance of the third section of the tenth chapter of 
 their Confession of Faith, which reads thus : " Elect 
 infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by 
 Christ." The Confession does not say what becomes 
 of non-elect infants, and does not even in positive 
 terms say that there are any. But language has no 
 significance if those words do not imply that there are 
 such non-elect infants; nor can we doubt that the the- 
 ological system generally formulated in that document 
 and generally held by its framers and by their prede- 
 cessors, implies that there may be a great many. Why, 
 then, is the Presbyterian body trying to get rid of that 
 phrase to-day ? Why is it just as certain ultimately to 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 191 
 
 be got rid of, by an expurgation from the creed or by 
 a supersedure of the old creed by a new confession, as 
 that to-morrow morning's sun will rise ? 
 
 Can anybody pretend that the change in that body 
 by which that obnoxious phrase and implication will 
 sooner or later disappear, — as it has disappeared from 
 the later doctrinal statements of our own body which 
 formerly held the same creed, — is simply and purely 
 owing to a correcter exegetical interpretation gf the 
 passages of Scripture which bear on the matter of 
 God's dealings with infants ? It is due to no such 
 thing. The conviction which demands such an altera- 
 tion in the creed did not arise in any such way. It 
 arose because of a growing assurance in the heart and 
 mind of the Church that the love and pity of God as 
 revealed generally in His Word and providence, and 
 grace, did not justify any such interpretation of 
 Scripture as requires such a declaration concerning 
 elect-infants, or allows such an implication concerning 
 non-elect ones. The revolution has been a silent 
 growth in Christian consciousness of the significance 
 of God's love and grace to men. It was not born in 
 the study of the grammarian, but by the cradle-side and 
 grave-side of infancy, where consecrated paternal and 
 maternal hearts, fathoming a little of the love of God 
 by the limited plummet line of their own love, revolted 
 from an interpretation of the ways of God with child- 
 hood which did violence to all else that they knew of 
 Him, and which crowded Scripture to the wall in sup- 
 port of a statement against which every instinct of the 
 human heart and every known attribute of the divine 
 protest. 
 
 A somewhat similar illustration of the grrowth of 
 
ip2 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 ofeneral convictions, — what some of our friends call of 
 a Christian consciousness, — may be found in another 
 quarter. It is not so very long ago since advocates of 
 missionary enterprise based their plea almost exclu- 
 sively on the hopeless condition of men outside the 
 limits of Christian enlightenment and civilization. 
 When the American Board was formed eighty-two 
 years ago it was not felt to be an extravagant or abhor- 
 rent statement to represent the whole heathen world 
 as flowing in an unbroken cataract of irremediable 
 doom into the abyss of eternal despair. Such repre- 
 sentations, scarcely qualified by possible exceptions, 
 were common in pulpits and on missionary platforms. 
 Such representations are not made, or very seldom 
 made, now. Why are they not ? For this reason 
 among others. We all know that Christian men and 
 women have sought relief from the terrible idea of the 
 hopeless loss of all the heathen world, in some way 
 compatible with the teachings of the word of God. 
 One of these ways, — and a way elaborately presented 
 in the annual sermon preached before the Board at 
 Detroit in 1 886, — is in a hoped-for greater inclusiveness 
 of the saving grace of God outside the reach of the 
 Gospel, through the light of nature and the operations 
 of the Spirit, than we have always supposed ; and an- 
 other is by the idea, advocated in some quarters, of an 
 opportunity in another life of an offer of salvation for 
 those who never heard of Christ here. 
 
 Now without at all entering here into any argument, 
 as I have on some other occasions done, as to the rela- 
 tive scripturalness of these two different ways in which 
 the difficulty is attempted to be solved, my present 
 point of inquiry is, why was resort had to either of 
 
SER^IOXS. 
 
 193 
 
 these two views? Why did not people just sit 
 down quietly under the conception, so long entertained, 
 of the utter and irremediable loss of everybody outside 
 the limits of historical Christianity ? Was it because 
 of the compellant power of an exacter exegesis ? Did 
 more hopeful views of the reach of God's grace grow 
 out, primarily, of a correcter use of the grammar and 
 the lexicon of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures ? 
 Not at all. They grew out of a softening of the minds 
 and hearts of men under the influence of the Gospel, 
 which led them to ask, " Is there not some way com- 
 patible with the Scriptures which we have read so 
 long without discerning it, whereby the love of God for 
 sinful men and the adequacy of His grace for their 
 help shall not be so frustrated and denied as it is in 
 these views which we have entertained, without ques- 
 tioning, so great a while ? The inquiry started in the 
 mind enlightened by Christian truth and warmed by 
 Christian love. The question was brought to the test 
 of consonancy with the general spirit of the Gospel. 
 It was tried by the Christian consciousness, if one 
 chooses to call it so ; and then Scripture was interro- 
 gated more carefully for an answer. Not in grammar 
 and lexicography first, but in love and pity taught by 
 Christ, did the impelling power lie which put men on 
 interrogating anew the revealed Word, to see what the 
 truth on this matter is. 
 
 But the contrariety of these two answers, which I 
 have said have been given to the same question, con- 
 ducts me to another suggestion respecting this matter 
 of Christian consciousness, so called, very important 
 to be considered. Christian consciousness, — by 
 which I mean, as has been explained, the general 
 
194 REVEREND GEORGE LEOX WALKER, D.D. 
 
 consent of men under the light of the Gospel, — can- 
 not any way supersede Scripture; perhaps cannot 
 always successfully arbitrate between obscure or 
 doubtful revelations of Scripture. Here, if anywhere, 
 is the danger which lies in admitting the enlightened 
 convictions of matured piety to any place in the con- 
 sideration and determination of religious truth. There 
 is danger, constituted as men are, that the power 
 which, as I have tried to show, is divinely lodged in 
 them to judge of religious things, and which experience 
 in religious things certainly tends to make more per- 
 fect in its exercise, should be abused. There is peril 
 lest it should arrogate to itself functions above its 
 proper place, and not merely judge where Scripture is 
 silent or obscure, but decide where Scripture speaks, 
 and sometimes decide against what Scripture says. 
 This danger is real. But what then ? Shall one 
 forego altogether the exercise of a power because it 
 can be abused ? What gift of God is there which 
 cannot be perverted to evil ? Because a grain of 
 calomel sometimes does a man good, are we to argue 
 that half a pound of it would be better ? Or because 
 an ounce of laudanum will kill, shall we say twenty 
 drops of it can in no case be used .'' Do we need to be 
 told that faith is a saving grace, in spite of the fact 
 that some have made an alleged faith to be the shelter 
 for all unrighteousness .'' 
 
 Christian consciousness, despite the infelicity of the 
 name, is something which has a real place in the dis- 
 cernment of religious truth. The collective sentiment 
 of the minds of men under the operations of the Spirit 
 of God does not go for nothing. The practical and 
 important question is. What place has. it ; and within 
 
SERMOXS. 
 
 195 
 
 what fixed boundaries only, if any, has it its proper 
 sphere ? 
 
 There should, I think, be no real doubt on this 
 matter. This is one of the questions which, under 
 somewhat different terminology indeed, came up in 
 the recent trial of Professor Briggs before the New 
 York Presbytery. In that trial, which, as you know, 
 resulted in a dismissal of the charges against the Pro- 
 fessor, — though an appeal was indeed taken to the 
 Synod from the dismissal, — one charge which had 
 been brought against the Professor was that he had 
 declared that there were " three fountains of divine 
 authority [in religion], the Bible, the Church, and the 
 reason"; from which declaration made by him the in- 
 ference was drawn by others that these three were 
 alike sufficient and equal sources of religious light. 
 This inference the Professor denied. He held that 
 while the Church was one source of religious authority, 
 reason and conscience was another ; but when the 
 Bible spoke definitely on any point its utterance was 
 decisive. This answer satisfied the majority of the 
 Presbytery on this point, — I am not now speaking of 
 any other point in what, is called the Briggs case, — 
 and I think it ought to satisfy everybody. 
 
 And, similarly, as to what is meant in the term 
 which I have repeatedly spoken of as an infelicitous 
 one, "Christian consciousness." It is idle to deny 
 that the thing intended to be covered by that phrase 
 is a real thing, and that it has a real place and power 
 in the making up of religious opinions. But when the 
 question asked is. What place has it, and w^hat 
 power belongs to it ? you come to the spot where the 
 danger about it first arises. You come substantially 
 
in6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 to the place to which Dr. Briggs came when asked 
 what reason's function is in religious matters. And I 
 think among fair-minded men the answer which satis- 
 fies us respecting the function of the reason ought to 
 satisfy us with respect to the Christian consciousness, 
 so-called. It has a place among the sources of religious 
 conviction. But, under the necessities of the case, it 
 is a subordinate place. It can speak corroboratively 
 of the things of which revelation distinctly tells ; and 
 this is, indeed, its most frequent utterance, and men 
 have loved to dwell on this phase of its affirmations 
 in all ages, as affording an interesting confirmation of 
 the truth of the written Word. It can speak with less 
 assurance, certainly, but still with a voice deserv- 
 ing attention, in the silences of Scripture ; telling, 
 when revelation does not speak at all, what seems to 
 be accordant with the general trend of the Gospel on 
 any point considered. But it cannot contradict the 
 clearly revealed truth of God in Scripture. It has not 
 authority, and it ought not to be supposed to have, to 
 deny what inspiration has declared. Consciousness can 
 never surpass in its prerogative that Word of truth by 
 whose aid it is mainly that such a thing as Christian 
 consciousness has ever come to be at all. If any one 
 sets up this judge as one of co-ordinate and equal power 
 with the authentic Scriptures of divine truth, I, for one, 
 part company with him at that point. The divine 
 Word is the arbiter and final authority. 
 
 Yet simply because a man refers, even in infelici- 
 tous terms, to Christian consciousness as a source of 
 Christian light, I do not find reason for denouncing 
 him as a heretic or an opponent of the Gospel. The 
 thing he may mean, — let us be fair, — the thing he 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 197 
 
 probably does mean, is a real thing. In certain of its 
 manifestations we, and all the most orthodox of our 
 progenitors, have rejoiced always. The point to be 
 determined is, does he hold the idea in an exaggerated 
 way incompatible with the authority which must belong 
 of course supremely to any veritable "Thus saith the 
 Lord " ? If he does, why then we can have no fellow- 
 ship with that error. Our roads must needs separate 
 at that point. But up to that point we can go in com- 
 panionship ; and it is not kind or Christian to accuse 
 him of going beyond that point without clear evidence. 
 The probabilities are that the things he holds are the 
 things you hold on this matter; just as Dr. Briggs 
 and his Presbytery found themselves, on the question 
 of the place of reason in religion, nearer together than 
 some had suspected. 
 
 While, therefore, I think it is important, — and now, 
 because of the larger hearing given than sometimes 
 before to what Christian consciousness says, especially 
 important, — to emphasize the supreme authority in 
 religious things of the Word of God ; I still think it 
 equally important not to forget also the lessons which are 
 conveyed in such a saying of Christ's as we have been 
 considering to-day, " Why even of yourselves judge ye 
 not what is right.''" Surely the instruction of the 
 Holy Spirit promised to the Church of God to "guide 
 into all truth " has not been eighteen hundred years in 
 vain ! Surely there ought to be an agreement of 
 Christian experience and a consensus of Christian 
 judgment on some points as the result of that tutelage 
 and guidance. And it is pleasant and impressive to 
 consider, both in our individual capacities and in our 
 collective associations, that the nearer we come to the 
 
ipS REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 ]\Iaster, and the closer our fellowship is with Him, the 
 more likely it will be that our convictions will be true 
 and our conjectures, even in points not clearly revealed," 
 will be harmonious with the mind of Christ. It was 
 not any mere man who said it ;'it was the Master Him- 
 self who declared, " If any man will do His will, he 
 shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." 
 
 May that good Spirit of light and truth guide us 
 into all truth; keep us from all error ; open our hearts 
 to the reception of "every Scripture inspired of God "; 
 nor leave us insensitive, either, to those less visible 
 and unrecorded suggestions of that " Spirit " which 
 "searcheth all things," the result whereof, on apostolic 
 testimony, is that "he that is spiritual judgeth all 
 thing-s." 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 199 
 
 XII. 
 
 FROM SCROOBY TO PLYMOUTH.* 
 Psalm cvii : i, 2, 4, 5, 8. 
 
 [As quoted from Governor Bradford's History.] 
 
 •• Let them therfore praise y" Lord, because he is good, & his 
 mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them \yhich have been 
 redeemed of y* Lord, shew how^ he hath delivered them from 
 y' hand of y" oppressour. When they wandered in y des- 
 erte willdernes out of y^ way, and found no citie to dwell in, 
 both hungrie, & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in 
 them. Let them confess before y» Lord his loving kindnes, 
 and his wonderfull works before y* sons of men." 
 
 This Sunday falls upon a memorable anniversary. 
 Two hundred and seventy years ago to-day some of 
 the sea-buffeted voyagers of a little ship which four 
 months and six days before had left the harbor of 
 Southampton in old England, set foot on the shore of 
 the harbor of Plymouth in New England. Boughs of 
 evergreen and running vines of prince's pine were visi- 
 ble to their eyes, sick with sight of Atlantic waves, 
 as they are visible to our eyes to-day. f But under 
 how different conditions of visibility ! Very likely they 
 would not have approved these decorations we see 
 about us this morning. They would have been re- 
 
 * Preached December 21, 1890. 
 
 t The church was decorated for Christmas. 
 
20O REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 minded of experiences which gave them a right to their 
 opinions. If altered conditions of Hfe make the thing 
 pleasant to us, which would have been in their day ob- 
 noxious to them, let us remember it is mainly because 
 of their sturdy adherence to their convictions that it is 
 safe for us to indulge our tastes. 
 
 I intend, in memory of those good men and women 
 of two hundred and seventy years ago, to tell this 
 morning, as briefly as I can, the simple story of what 
 brought them on that December day to the barren 
 shores of Plymouth, and how they fared on the journey 
 and afterward. I do this, not for the benefit of the elders 
 of this congregation, who presumably have the story 
 in mind, but I remember that we have a good many 
 young people growing up among us ; and that young 
 people's time is taken up with a thousand matters, — 
 school, and amusements, and the numberless books of 
 current literature and travel, — and so I think it may 
 be well on this anniversary day to recall a little while 
 an event which had so much to do with the interests 
 of Christ's kingdom in this Western world ; and so 
 much also to do with making us what we personally 
 are who are gathered here to-day. 
 
 When James the First came to the throne of Eng- 
 land, on the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, a good 
 many Christian people in that country who had been 
 oppressed by the legislation enacted under Elizabeth to 
 secure uniformity in the Established, that is to say, the 
 Episcopal Church, hoped for a while that some relief 
 would be accorded to those whose consciences dis- 
 sented from that way of worship, and especially from 
 what they regarded as the Papistic ceremonies con- 
 nected with it. James at home in Scotland was a 
 
SERMONS. 20 1 
 
 Presbyterian ; so that they thought that there was a 
 fair Hkelihood that dissenters from the Episcopal way 
 would at least be tolerated. But they were disap- 
 pointed. James was a learned, conceited, pragmatic, 
 obstinate man, who thought himself a great theologian, 
 and whose head was turned by the sudden accession to 
 him of kingly power, not over the little and poor king- 
 dom of Scotland, where he had for a considerable time 
 more or less comfortably ruled, but over the rich and 
 great kingdom of England. A request was made to 
 him, on his journey up from Edinburgh to London, 
 approved by above eight hundred ministers, and pre- 
 sented by a distinguished company of Puritan scholars, 
 that a little more liberty in methods of worship might 
 be allowed. They were met only with taunts and offen- 
 sive lecturings ; the king winding up the conference 
 with the command to "awaie with their snyvelings," 
 and a declaration that he would " make them conform 
 or harrie them out of the land, or worse." Among 
 the people against whom these threats were uttered 
 were some of the chiefest men of piety and learning 
 in the whole country. There were masters of col- 
 leges, ministers occupying some of the foremost pul- 
 pits of the kingdom, learned and honorable laymen 
 in various professions and walks of business. 
 
 It is doubtful whether, in the consideration of these 
 more prominent dissenters from the requirements of 
 uniformity in worship, any very public attention was 
 turned to a little company of people up in the north- 
 erly part of England near the junction of the counties 
 of York, Nottingham, and Lincoln, who had come to 
 adopt what we now call the Congregational way of 
 church fellowship and worship. They lived in various 
 
202 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 little villages in that region, but held most of their 
 public services in the hall of an old manor-house, since 
 destroyed, at the little hamlet of Scrooby, about forty 
 miles west from the seaport town of Boston in Lin- 
 colnshire. Belonging to this company were the two 
 ministers, Richard Clyfton and John Robinson. Wil- 
 liam Brewster, who was postmaster at Scrooby, was 
 ruling elder of the church ; George Morton and young 
 William Bradford, afterward to be the chroniclers of 
 the enterprise, and the second of them Governor of the 
 Plymouth Colony, were with them. 
 
 The people had to come to the place of worship in 
 the old and somewhat dilapidated manor-house, leased 
 by Brewster, the postmaster, from a wide section of 
 country scattered around, where they were entertained 
 by him "at his greate charge." But neither the ob- 
 scurity of the place nor the semi-ofificial protection ac- 
 corded them awhile by the postmaster could long hide 
 them from the persecution which had been determined 
 on against all Separatists from the Established Church. 
 So, in 1607, after being, as their historian, Bradford, 
 says, "hunted & persecuted on every side," and some 
 " taken & clapt up in prison," while others " had their 
 houses besett & wacht night and day," they concluded 
 to try to get out of the country to Holland. In their 
 first attempt to do so they were unsuccessful. The 
 captain of the ship which took them and their goods 
 aboard at old Boston betrayed them to the authorities, 
 who hurried them, as Bradford says, back to the shore, 
 and " rifled & ransaked them, searching them to their 
 shirts for money, yea even y*^ women furder then be- 
 came modestie; and then caried them back into y^ 
 towne, & made them a spectackle & wonder to y® mul- 
 
SERMONS. 203 
 
 titude." After a month's imprisonment most of them 
 were dismissed, but Brewster, Bradford, and five oth- 
 ers were confined some time longer. 
 
 Their second attempt, in the spring of 1608, was 
 hardly better. The Dutch skipper who had been en- 
 gaged to meet them at a secluded point of the coast to 
 take them to Holland was late in keeping his appoint- 
 ment, and when only one large boat load had been got 
 aboard, was alarmed at the appearance of officers on 
 the shore, and straightway set sail with those he had, 
 leaving the distracted remainder — husbands separated 
 from wives, children from parents, in many cases 
 moneyless and clothingless — on Grimsby Beach, be- 
 hind him. A better endeavor was made, however, in 
 August, and the conclusion of the year 1608 saw the 
 broken families and sundered congregation for the 
 most part reunited in Amsterdam. Here, as Bradford 
 says, "they heard a strange & uncouth language, and 
 beheld y^ differente maners & customes of y*" people, 
 with their strange fashons and attires ; all so farre dif- 
 fering from y* of their plaine countrie villages, . . . 
 as it seemed they were come into a new world. But 
 these were not y* things they much looked on, or long 
 tooke up their thoughts ; for they had other work in 
 hand, & another kind of warr to wage & maintaine. 
 For though they saw faire & bewtifuU cities, flowing 
 with abundance of all sorts of welth & riches, yet it 
 was not longe before they saw the grime & grisly face 
 of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with 
 whom they must bukle & incounter, and from whom 
 they could not flye." 
 
 Finding their situation at Amsterdam for various 
 reasons undesirable, they moved next year — 1609 — 
 
204 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 to Leyden ; where, in reply to their request fov the 
 privilege of residence, they were answered by the 
 burghermasters that all " honest folks " were allowed 
 to live, on condition of submission to the " laws and 
 ordinances." Scattered at this time through Holland 
 were other English congregations. But most of these 
 other congregations were not, like themselves. Sepa- 
 ratists or Independents. They were Presbyterian, 
 either of the English or Scotch variety, and so were 
 in ecclesiastical fellowship with the Holland Presby- 
 terian churches of that order. Hence these Presby- 
 terian churches met a very different reception in 
 Holland from the authorities than did the Scrooby 
 company of Congregationalists. The Presbyterians 
 were accorded places of public worship ; their pastors 
 were generally admitted to the privileges of the 
 universities ; in many instances aid was granted to 
 the exiled congregations from the public treasury. 
 The Separatist Church, under Robinson, fared far 
 differently. There is no evidence that any public 
 recognition was ever given them as a body during the 
 nearly twelve years of their residence there. They 
 worshiped in their own houses ; mainly in the house of 
 John Robinson, their pastor. It is true that after the 
 strife between the Calvinistic party and the Arminian 
 party in the Dutch churches themselves had got hot 
 and tempestuous, and Mr. Robinson had openly taken 
 the Calvinistic side in a public debate, he was tardily 
 — about six years after the beginning of his residence 
 in the city — admitted to the privileges of the uni- 
 versity ; and that several years after the main body of 
 his Church had left for America he had the privilege of 
 being buried, at his own charges, in St. Peter's Church 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 205 
 
 in that city. But the fear of offending King James 
 prevented any public recognition of the Separatist 
 Church by the Netherland authorities, even had they 
 been inclined otherwise to recognize them, of which 
 there is no evidence. 
 
 The sometimes boasted toleration existent in Holland 
 at that time was not the voluntary allowance of diverse 
 opinions in religious matters which we understand by 
 that word ; it was a suspension of hostilities between 
 sect and sect to a certain extent, and on the part of 
 the government against any one sect ; partly in a 
 canny view of the economic advantages of such sus- 
 pended hostilities at a time when Holland needed the 
 full strength of all its inhabitants ; but mainly by the 
 pressure of a national fear of Spain, against whose 
 asserted and long fought-for supremacy over the 
 Netherlands all parties, — Catholics, Protestants, and 
 sects of all kinds, — were ready to combine. 
 
 Here, at Leyden, working at " such trads & imploy- 
 ments as they best could " ; living peaceably among 
 themselves ; growing old as to their leaders, and seeing 
 a new generation rising up amid the temptations of a 
 strange land, which never could be a home, the 
 Scrooby company lived between eleven and twelve 
 years. Slowly but strongly the conviction grew in 
 them that this could not last. They were, for the 
 most part, poor, hard-worked, and hopeless as to the 
 future of any prosperity for themselves or for the 
 cause they represented in that land. So a consider- 
 able part of them determined to emigrate to Amer- 
 ica, — that new, strange country which was then 
 attracting the wondering interest of so many. 
 
 They knew something of the hardships of the under- 
 
2o6 REVEREND GKORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 taking. As their historian, Bradford, says, they 
 knew " they should be liable to famine, and nakednes, 
 & y^ wante, in a maner, of all things. . . . And 
 also those which should escape or overcome these 
 difficulties, should yett be in continuall danger of y" 
 salvage people, who are cruell, barbarous, & moste 
 trecherous . . . not being contente only to kill, 
 & take away life, but delight to tormente men in y'' 
 most bloodie maner that may be ; fleaing some alive 
 with y*^ shells of fishes; cutting of y'' members & joynts 
 of others by peesmeale and broiling on y* coles, eate y^ 
 collops of their flesh in their sight while they live, 
 with other cruelties horrible to be related." How- 
 ever, none of these things moved them, and the}' 
 made up their minds to go. They offered to go to 
 the Dutch American settlements if they could be 
 assured of protection, but the Dutch declined. 
 Ultimately they made ari-angements with a company 
 called " The Adventurers," holding a tract of land to 
 be selected by the planters somewhere in the vicinity 
 of the mouth of the Hudson. 
 
 In July, 1620, therefore, the Leyden congregation 
 held a fast, and had religious ceremonies in view of the 
 great event which was to witness the separation of one 
 part from another among them, and the setting out on 
 the long and perilous undertaking. It was probably 
 in the long summer evening of the same day that both 
 sections of the company were towed down the canal to 
 Delfthaven, fourteen miles away, where the Spccchvcll, 
 a little sixty-ton pinnace, was lying to take them 
 across to Southampton in England. The next morn- 
 ing saw a fair wind pulling at the already loosened 
 SpcedivclV s sails, and on the wharf beside her some- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 207 
 
 what over two hundred men, women, and children, 
 some to go, and some to stay, but all bound together 
 by the experiences of exile in a strange land, and of 
 faith in the same way of religious living for which they 
 had left one home, and were, most of them, about to 
 seek another. They kissed each other, and the pastor 
 prayed with them, and so tender was their parting that 
 even the Dutch wharf-loungers, who could not under- 
 stand their speech, were moved to tears at sight of 
 their pathetic farewells. 
 
 They soon, and without special event, got across to 
 Southampton. Here was lying the Mayflower, a vessel 
 of about one and twenty tons, present mode of measure- 
 ment, — not half as large as some of the coal schooners 
 which come occasionally to our Hartford wharves, — 
 getting ready for the Atlantic voyage. The crowded 
 decks and cabins of the little Specdzvell were relieved 
 of the majority of their passengers. Ninety were 
 assigned to the Mayflower, and thirty remained on the 
 smaller vessel. But they had difficulties about getting 
 away. Thomas Weston, the manager of the " Advent- 
 urers' Company," not himself a Pilgrim, or even an 
 honest man, quarreled with them about the terms of 
 their agreement, which he had connived to have altered 
 without their assent, so that they had to pay the port 
 charges of the vessels, and to do so had to sell a part 
 of their j^rovisions to meet the unlooked-for expense. 
 The money being however at last raised, on the 15th 
 of August the two vessels dropped down the tide at 
 Southampton, and, putting out against head winds, 
 which promised soon to be stormy, set sail for the 
 New World. But four days out the master of the 
 Speedzvell reported his little vessel to be leaking badly. 
 
2o8 REVERKXD GKORGE LEON WALKER, D.I). 
 
 So both ves-sels bore up and entered Dartmouth harbor. 
 Here ten days were spent in discharging and relading 
 the Spccdwc/I, and in examining her from stem to 
 stern, though no considerable occasion for the master's 
 allegations were found. 
 
 Once more the vessels started out in company. 
 Land's End had been sunk out of sight three hundred 
 miles behind them, when the Speedwell again signaled 
 her consort that she was in an almost sinking condi- 
 tion. Again the disappointed voyagers put about, and 
 this time ran into Plymouth, on the southwest corner 
 of Devonshire. Here once more the Specdivell was 
 overhauled, but though no sufficient cause of appre- 
 hension was found, the master and crew so strenuously 
 insisted on the vessel's unseaworthiness that it was 
 concluded to send her back to London. So her passen- 
 gers were divided, — twelve joining the ninety already 
 aboard the Mayjioiver, and eighteen giving up the 
 enterprise. Bradford alleges that this complaint of 
 the SpcedwelTs unseaworthiness was a " stratagem " 
 of the master of the vessel. The ship was probably 
 somewhat strained by being over-masted. But its 
 master and crew had grown fearful over the prospect 
 of remaining the year, for which their contract called, 
 across the Atlantic. And it is not surprising, also, 
 that the courage of a few of the emigrants themselves 
 proved inadequate to further trials. 
 
 However, a third start was made, — this time Septem- 
 ber 1 6th, — the Mayflozver riding over the waters alone. 
 But much time had been lost, and the equinoctial gales 
 had come. In one of these storms "one of the maine 
 beames in y^ midd ships was bowed & craked, which 
 put them in some fear that y'' shipe could not be able 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 209 
 
 to performe y*^ vioage." They had to lie-to for clays, 
 unable to carry sail. However, by the aid of a great 
 jack-screw, which some good carpenter of the Leyden 
 company had put aboard for its expected usefulness in 
 the new country, the big beam was straightened up 
 and supported by braces, and with quieter seas the 
 vessel was put on her devious course again. I cannot 
 pause to enlarge on the various experiences of the 
 crowded, weather-beaten company of men, women, and 
 little children in that long and stormy passage. One 
 "proud & very profane yonge man, one of y*^ sea-men," 
 who, as Bradford says, " would allway be contemning 
 y® poore people in their sicknes, & cursing them," 
 and telling them " that he hoped to help to cast halfe 
 of them over board before they came to their jurneys 
 end," was himself struck with a "greeveous disease" 
 and " dyed in a desperate maner, and so was him selfe 
 ye first y' was throwne overbord." One of their own 
 company also succumbed to the hardships of the voy- 
 age and was buried at sea. But at last, on the morn- 
 ing of the sixty-fifth day after their third and last start 
 from the English shore, they caught welcome sight of 
 land, but not the land to which they were expecting to 
 go. Instead of being in the vicinity of Hudson River, 
 they found themselves off Cape Cod. The captain 
 stood off to sea again, about half a day, but managed 
 to fall " amongst deangerous shoulds and roring break- 
 ers," so that they " thought them selves hapy to gett 
 out of those dangers" and back next day into "y* 
 Cape-harbor where they ridd in saftie." Here, then, 
 just inside the protecting finger of the Cape, the com- 
 ing of November 21st found the vessel at anchor in 
 comparative safety. 
 14 
 
2IO REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 But here was a political dilemma as grave, almost, 
 as the physical ones they had before encountered. 
 The "Adventurers' Company," under whose auspices 
 they had nominally sailed, claimed some sort of right 
 under the Virginia patent. Now, landing up here to 
 the north of latitude 41°, they stood on no definite 
 grant whatever, and outside of all established authority. 
 Yet they were equal to the emergency. They were 
 not law-breakers or freebooters and did not intend to 
 dispense with justice or rule. The adult male mem- 
 bers of the company were assembled into the cabin and 
 the state of the case explained. As a result of the 
 conference the following document was drawn up and 
 signed : — 
 
 "In y name of God, Amen. We whose names are under- 
 writen, the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King 
 James, by y* grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc, & Ireland 
 king, defender of y^ faith, &c. haveing undertaken, for y gloria 
 of God, and advancemente of y" Christian faith, and honour of 
 our king & countrie, a voyage to plant y« first colonie in y« 
 Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly & 
 mutualy in y* presence of God, and one of another, covenant & 
 combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our 
 better ordering & preservation & furtherance of y" ends afore- 
 said ; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such 
 just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, 
 from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient 
 for y' generall good of y" Colonie, unto which we promise all 
 due submission and obedience." 
 
 This document was apparently signed by forty-one 
 names, the first six of which seem to have been John 
 Carver, — the governor of the new little commonwealth, 
 — William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brew- 
 ster, Isaac Allerton, Myles Standish, and John Alden. 
 
SERMONS. 211 
 
 Thus in an hour the Pilgrim company had become a 
 government. But the sandy point of Cape Cod was 
 no place for a colony. The next thirty of the shorten- 
 ing wintry days were employed by the .leaders of the 
 band in exploring in the little shallop brought by them 
 on the Mayflozver, the Cape and the region of the main 
 land across the bay for a proper place for a settlement. 
 The explorers met in these expeditions many curious 
 adventures, and encountered many hardships. They 
 saw several groups of Indians, and had an encounter 
 with one of them, as the result of which they gathered 
 up quite a sheaf of arrows, but fortunately no one was 
 killed on either side. They discovered an Indian 
 mound with baskets of corn of different colors — yel- 
 low, red, and blue — a part of which they took and 
 conscientiously paid for to the owner's entire satisfac- 
 tion afterward, which was of inestimable value to them 
 the following spring when they came to plant their 
 crops. They found and entered some Indian dwellings, 
 temporarily deserted by their owners, and described 
 the contents. William Bradford, afterward the Gov- 
 ernor and historian, got caught by the leg in a deer- 
 snare, but escaped without injury. 
 
 But I have not time to follow in detail the story of 
 the three expeditions of the little shallop in those short 
 and sometimes stormy days of late November and the 
 greater part of December. It must suffice to say that 
 a suitable place, in their opinion, being at last discov- 
 ered, on Monday, December 21st, the shortest day of 
 the year, they sounded Plymouth harbor, " and founde 
 it," as Bradford says, " fitt for shipping; and marched 
 into y^ land, & found diverse cornfeilds, & litle runing 
 brooks, a place (as they supposed) fitt for situation ; 
 
212 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 at least it was y*^ best they could find, and y*^ season, 
 & their presente necessitie, made them glad to accepte 
 of it. So they returned to their shipp againe with this 
 news to y® rest of their people, which did much com- 
 forte their harts." This 21 st day of December then, 
 the short winter-solstice day of the year, when the 
 Pilgrims explored Plymouth harbor and determined on 
 the site of their habitation there, is called the Landing 
 Day, It was not, however, till four days later that 
 the Mayflower sailed from what is now known as 
 Provincetown to the new harbor ; while it was not till 
 eight days later, on December 31st, that by formal 
 vote they determined to make Plymouth harbor their 
 home. Two days after that they set to work, as Brad- 
 ford says, to " erecte y® first house for comone use to 
 receive them and their goods." 
 
 I cannot follow in further detail the story of the 
 settlement of the little colony on that bleak coast, in 
 the middle of winter, or of the terrible mortality which, 
 before the following autumn, had exactly halved the 
 little company. With April's coming the settlement 
 of the living by the town brook-side nearly equaled 
 the settlement of the dead hidden away on Cole's Hill. 
 Nor can I trace the subsequent story of the next few 
 years of continued struggle and varying fortunes in the 
 Plymouth colony. No sadder, no prouder, no more 
 pathetic or nobler story is written anywhere in history 
 than the story of the coming and the early experiences 
 of the Leyden Pilgrims to these inhospitable shores. 
 For various reasons, — mainly on account of the rela- 
 tive inferiority of their numbers and the comparative 
 disadvantageousness of their geographical situation, — 
 the Plymouth colony played a comparatively incon- 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 213 
 
 spicuous part in later New England history, when 
 measured by the Massachusetts Bay colony, which 
 came nine or ten years later and made its central 
 settlement at Boston. The larger numbers and greater 
 commercial advantages of this latter colony left the 
 Plymouth company in a manner side-tracked and out 
 of the line of main New England progress. But the 
 principles of the Pilgrim colony had nevertheless a 
 curious victory over those of the Bay. The Bay set- 
 tlers were for the most part Puritans, not Separatists ; 
 — that is, they wished to purify the Episcopal Church 
 in which they had been brought up, and did not care 
 to separate from it. They did not, most of them at 
 least, intend to separate from it, — only from some of 
 its faults, — when they came over. But being over 
 here, and coming in contact with the leaders of the 
 Separatist Plymouth colony, who had been nine or ten 
 years on the ground, they adopted their principles, 
 and in the organization of the Salem and Charlestown 
 and Watertown Churches accepted their example and 
 subscribed to what was known as the Plymouth Way. 
 This fixed the pattern for all New England, practically, 
 for the next hundred years. A single Episcopal 
 Church was, indeed, organized in Boston in 1686, and 
 a few others slowly followed, here and there. But the 
 current of religious history was set for all New Eng- 
 land into Congregational channels, and that current 
 was directed into those channels by the Separatist 
 fathers of Plymouth colony. Though that colony as a 
 political power waned and faded beside the growing 
 strength of the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New 
 Haven colonies, as a religious power it stamped 
 its impress on them all ; and the Congregational 
 
214 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Churches of New England to-day, — nay the forty-six 
 hundred and eighty-nine Congregational Churches of 
 our whole land, from Plymouth Rock to California's 
 Golden Gate, as given in our last official returns, a 
 number, however, which every month sees increasing, 
 — stand a monument to the principles brought over in 
 the Mayflower to Plymouth, rather than to those which 
 came in the Talbot to Salem, or the Arbella to Boston. 
 The Scrooby exiles and the Leyden patient suffer- 
 ers have had their vindication at the hands of impartial 
 history. The Congregationalist polity of our whole 
 land is their memorial. Baptized with the blood of 
 Coppin and Thacker and Penry and Greenwood and 
 Barrowe, its earliest martyrs ; consecrated by the faith 
 and sufferings of the twelve years of Holland hardship, 
 and lifted into all the world's view by the heroism of 
 the Plymouth forefathers' desperate enterprise and 
 self-sacrificing sufferings, it abides the hard-won trophy 
 of religious liberty and of the right of the people in 
 spiritual things. Into that liberty we have been born ; 
 but those who purchased it for us did it at how great 
 a cost. Shame on any descendant of the Plymouth 
 stock who forgets his father's sacrifice. Let us who 
 have entered into their labors estimate aright our debt 
 of gratitude to their memories. O, wind-swept burial- 
 hill of rocky Plymouth by this December sea, sacredly 
 guard the hallowed dust of those to whom we owe so 
 great a debt ! O, living men and women, youth and 
 maidens, forget not I pray you the exiles of Leyden 
 and the storm-tossed voyagers of the Mayfloivcr who 
 did so much to make life to you what it is to-day ! O, 
 Son of Man, whom this Christmas season celebrates, 
 makes us in our time and place as faithful to conscience 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 215 
 
 and to Thee as they were who, on the bleak coast of 
 this wild, strange land, stood two hundred and seventy 
 years ago, shivering and homeless, but true to God, to 
 their convictions, and to the Christ who was born for 
 our salvation in the manger at Bethlehem. 
 
2i6 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE BREADTH, AND LENGTH, AND DEPTH, 
 AND HEIGHT.* 
 
 Ephesians III: 17, 18, 19. 
 
 That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 7nay be able to com- 
 prehend with all saints what is the breadth, and letigth, and 
 depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which 
 passeth knowledge. 
 
 The most eminent of living theologians of New 
 England has remarked that if Jonathan Edwards had 
 not been the foremost of dogmatic divines he might 
 have been the foremost of imaginative poets. And 
 certainly there are in the midst of Edwards's argu- 
 mentative pages passages, — sometimes of tender, al- 
 most fanciful grace, and sometimes of gloomy and 
 Dantesque grandeur, — which go far to justify this es- 
 timate of him. In a similar way we may speak of the 
 apostle Paul. If he had not been the foremost of Bib- 
 lical logicians he might have been, — nay, we may bet- 
 ter say, he was, — the foremost of Biblical rhapsodists. 
 For the truth is he was both. He was at once a great 
 reasoner and a great mystic. A large part of his writ- 
 ing is cast in the moulds of a rigid argumentation ; but 
 every little while his fervid imagination and intense 
 
 * Preached on April 29, 1894. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 217 
 
 emotion burst all logical fetters and overflow in strains 
 of poetry, and even of fantasy. He loses sight of the 
 requirements of grammatical correctness. He does 
 not pause to complete his sentences. He goes off from 
 the track of a half-uttered thought, struck by the strong 
 impulse of a new conception suddenly rising upon him. 
 He takes you on the stream of his impassioned feeling 
 into regions where words are too inadequate to express 
 his idea, and stands himself, and leaves you to stand, 
 where he and you can only wonder and adore. 
 
 A good illustration of this trait is the passage from 
 which I have taken the text. This whole epistle to 
 the Ephesians is written in a strain of unwonted fervor 
 on Paul's part. It has a great many illustrations of 
 those characteristics of Paul's mind and manner of 
 which I have spoken. But this passage, from the third 
 chapter, beginning with the fourteenth verse, is a quite 
 conspicuous example of the kind. Read it again. 
 " For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ ; of whom the whole family in 
 heaven and earth is named " — see how the thought of 
 God's fatherhood of Jesus Christ sets him off into a 
 declaration of His universal fatherhood in earth and 
 heaven alike — "that He would grant you according 
 to the riches of His glory" — not, observe, the riches 
 of His power or the riches of His m isdom, but the wide, 
 sounding, undefining measure, " the riches of His 
 glory" — whatever that may mean ; "to be strength- 
 ened with might by His Spirit in the inner man ; that 
 Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; that ye, 
 being rooted " — like a tree — " and grounded " — like 
 a building — "in love, may be able to comprehend with 
 all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, 
 
2i8 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 and height," — the breadth and length and depth and 
 height of what ? He does not distinctly say what. 
 He leaves the clause unfinished. He may mean, at 
 least in part, what he calls the divine "mystery" un- 
 known to the sons of men in other ages that God in- 
 cludes the Gentiles in the plans of grace, of which he 
 had just been speaking in the fifth and sixth verses of 
 the chapter ; or he may more probably merge the 
 thought of that "ray stQvy" in the still wider one of 
 which he speaks in the ninth and tenth verses, which 
 he declares had from the " beginning of the world been 
 hid in God" ; a mystery of the whole creation's rela- 
 tion to Jesus Christ; a mystery which "principalities 
 and powers in heavenly places " were studying into, 
 and whose vast reaches of grace and glory were being 
 illustrated in the history of the ransomed Church. 
 This is what he hints, yet he does not complete the 
 clause ; but straightway moves on in his prayer that 
 his Ephesian friends might comprehend the length and 
 breadth and depth and height, and " know the love of 
 Christ" — concerning which love, however, he imme- 
 diately asseverates that it "passeth knowledge" ; that 
 is, if we take the words literally, he prays that they 
 may know the unknowable ; and furthermore, as if this 
 were not hyperbole enough, " that ye may be filled " — 
 poor, ignorant, sinful Ephesian disciples might be 
 "filled" — bold, nay, impossible, though the concep- 
 tion be — "be filled with all the fullness of God." 
 
 Now, it is very plain that language like this is not 
 to be held to the rigid terms with which you interpret 
 a sum in arithmetic, or a physician's prescription in 
 medicine. Great violence has been done to many pas- 
 sages of Scripture by subjecting them to the hydraulic 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 219 
 
 pressure of mere logic and grammar. Very considera- 
 ble edifices of doctrine have been built up, like inverted 
 pyramids, on the small foundation of some one or two 
 proof -texts ; and these very possibly wrested from 
 proper connections, or occurring in the midst of some 
 impassioned and poetic bursts of prophecy or of 
 song. 
 
 "In sin did my mother conceive me," for example. 
 How that fervid, imaginative saying of humbled and re- 
 pentant David has been treated as a grave didactic state- 
 ment of pre-natal sinfulness, in support of the Augus- 
 tinian view of original depravity! Augustine's view 
 may or may not be true ; but it is a wresting of Scrip- 
 ture to quote David's prayer as a proof of it. The wise 
 and right way to deal with such a passage as David's 
 contrite utterance, or with this magnificent emotional 
 outburst of the apostle whose words we are consider- 
 ing, is to throw ourselves into the current of the emo- 
 tion to which they attempt to give expression ; to yield 
 to the strong impulse which throbs in the writer's 
 speech, and let him bear us, or rather let the Spirit 
 which speaks through him bear us, whithersoever he 
 will. 
 
 If we do so, we shall often find our hearts mightily 
 stirred within us by the fervor of an ancient devotion 
 which kindles an answering emotion in our own breasts ; 
 and we shall sometimes be led to even wider concep- 
 tions of the manifold wisdom and grace of God than 
 could possibly have been in the mind of psalmist, 
 prophet, or apostle who first spoke the wor(Js. This 
 wonderful saying of Paul's, for example, a small por- 
 tion of which is our text to-day, if we give ourselves 
 to its leadership, behold to what reaches of apostolic, 
 
220 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 and even more than apostolic, conception of God's gra- 
 cious purposes it leads us on ! 
 
 "That ye may be able to comprehend the breadth," 
 says Paul. The vision Paul had of God's saving plans 
 for men was indeed a wide one. Not merely had he, 
 more than any one else of his day, discerned how the 
 whole story of God's dealings with Israel, — the expe- 
 riences of the patriarchs, the legislation of Moses, the 
 sacrificial system of the priesthood, the teachings of 
 psalmists and prophets, — - led up to and was fulfilled in 
 Christ ; but he discerned first of all the apostolic com- 
 pany, and clearer than any other of them perhaps ever 
 did, that God's plans comprised not Israel alone, but 
 reached over boundaries of other languages and races 
 also. The little hints and suggestions which Isaiah 
 and Amos and some others of the old prophets and 
 singers caught of this truth became in Paul's clear eye 
 a distinct and open vision. He saw it with the dis- 
 tinctness of noonday. Against the advice and remon- 
 strance of his associates on the apostolic board he gave 
 himself to its guidance. He took his life in his hand 
 to promulgate the wider view of salvation for Gentiles 
 also. The "other sheep" not of the Jewish fold he 
 made it his mission to gather. But not only so. 
 Wrapped up, as it were, in a divine contemplation, he 
 saw not only that all men were concerned in the broad 
 manifestations of God's grace to the world, but that 
 the thing was so marvelous as to attract the attention 
 of higher intelligences than man, and that " principal- 
 ities and I powers in heavenly places" were wondering 
 over these manifestations and desiring through them 
 the better to understand the " manifold wisdom of 
 God." The vision was indeed an entrancing one. O 
 
SERMONS. 22 1 
 
 the "breadth"! he exclaimed. "That ye may com- 
 prehend the breadth." 
 
 Yet it i.s no irreverence to say that, wide as Paul's 
 view was, it was but narrow compared with that it is 
 our privilege to have. Other races and continents 
 than Paul ever heard of we see are subjects for, and 
 recipients of, the grace which he wondered over as he 
 beheld it reaching outside of Judaism to a few Roman 
 provinces. Lands and peoples sunk out of sight be- 
 yond enveloping seas ; realms and tribes, of which no 
 conjecture, even, came to minds of voyagers or geog- 
 raphers of old, were included, as we now know, though 
 even an apostle imagined it not then, in the scope 
 of the Gospel of Calvary. 
 
 Moreover, the number of the human family is a con- 
 stantly increasing number. The population of the 
 world is computed to have doubled in the last hundred 
 years. Now, unless we believe in the total loss of all 
 these outlying and once utterly unknown races of the 
 human family, we must believe that He who "tasted 
 death for every man" has had some way of approach 
 to them in their needs ; has had some way of making 
 His sacrifice available for many, at least, among them ; 
 has gathered His "other sheep," is gathering them 
 still, on broader fields than prophet's eye or apostolic 
 vision ever looked upon. Furthermore, what was that 
 universe, as Paul conceived of it, and as it was alone 
 possible he could conceive of it, which was interested 
 in the " manifold wisdom of God " as illustrated here ? 
 It was the heavenly company surrounding this little 
 dot of earth, then thought central and chief of all the 
 creations of God, round which, for its benefit, the sun 
 revolved, the moon trod her nightly circle, and dimmer 
 
222 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 lamps twinkled in remoter distances. Such a world 
 might well have its guardian intelligences ; angels and 
 ministrants of light might well wait upon its Creator, 
 and concern themselves about His doings here. But 
 to us who only just begin to fathom creation's vast- 
 ness, who know our world to be, as it were, but a spark 
 among the blazing suns and rolling systems of a space 
 which every added telescopic power to penetrate shows 
 only to be more populous and unfathomable, — to us, 
 I say, what new significance comes in the thought that 
 what our Saviour is doing here will be of interest to 
 other solar systems and their multitudinous revolving 
 spheres, which may, each in its own way, be illustrat- 
 ing some mighty drama of moral government, unlike, 
 indeed, but analogous to ours, and all destined some 
 time to display in modes apostles never dreamed, and 
 which we, even, can only conjecture and surmise, the 
 manifold wisdom and love of God. If, then, the apos- 
 tle, how much more we, have reason to exclaim. Oh, 
 the breadth ! That we may comprehend the breadth 
 of the grace of God, what a prospect and endeavor ! 
 
 "And the length," Paul loved to trace the develop- 
 ment in history of the revelation of God's grace. He 
 had, in a high degree, what is called the historic sense. 
 If, as some suppose, he wrote the epistle to the He- 
 brews, we have in that treatise an elaborate setting 
 forth, by his pen, of the long, slow, developing process 
 of the divine purposes in God's education and redemp- 
 tion of men. If he did not write that epistle, we have, 
 nevertheless, in many another letter incontestably his, 
 plentiful indications of this habit of his mind to trace 
 backward to its beginnings, and forward to its end, the 
 long story of Christianity. Read the fifth chapter of 
 
SERMONS. 223 
 
 Romans, or the fifteenth of First Corinthians, or the 
 fourth of Galatians, and see how accustomed he was 
 to follow the track of unfolding religious history from 
 Adam to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from 
 Moses to Christ, from Christ onward to the resurrec- 
 tion and the consummation in the kingdom of God. It 
 was a grand and awe-enkindling sequence of events. 
 What a line of august personal characters ; of strik- 
 ing and momentous historical occurrences ; of plain 
 and indicative divine interposals, marked that long, 
 evolving drama! Contemplating the persistency and 
 duration of that purpose which thus reached over gen- 
 erations and epochs, hoW natural for him to exclaim in 
 admiration and wonder : O the length of God's plans ! 
 
 But here, again, the revelations of history and the 
 discoveries of science have vastly enlarged our concep- 
 tions of the application of such a phrase as the length 
 of the grace of God. No absolute chronology, meas- 
 uring out the duration of human life upon this world 
 of ours, is deducible from the Bible. The Bible was 
 not written for this purpose. And the attempts which 
 good men have made to shut the record of this earth's 
 story, or of the story of human life upon it, up into the 
 more or less definite period of six thousand years can- 
 not be accounted a success. The revelations of geol- 
 ogy, and of ethnology, plainly indicate durations of 
 time and conditions of human life undescribed, and in 
 some cases unsuggested, in the narrative of that part 
 of the story of this world and its inhabitants of which 
 the Bible tells. But how about those undelineated 
 periods of human history of which evidence remains to 
 us in the relics of mound-builders, cave-dwellers, com- 
 panions of mastodons, and extinct races of animal life ; 
 
224 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 pre-occupants, some of them it is believed, of northern 
 Europe and America before the great glacial epoch of 
 geologic history ? Take up in the Smithsonian Insti- 
 tute at Washington, or in any of a score of museums 
 in Europe, one of those rudely-fashioned stone imple- 
 ments with which one of those cave-dwellers beat the 
 life out of the bear he was killing ; broke its bones into 
 manageable morsels to handle ; rubbed, perhaps, his 
 firewood into flame ; and knocked out, very probably, 
 the brains of some one he accounted an enemy. Who 
 was that far-off wielder of that heavy stone mallet ? A 
 very low-down sort of man, certainly, but indubitably 
 a man. But if a man, then a b^ing with some account- 
 abilities ; a being with a soul somewhere inside of him ; 
 a being with some kind of relations to his Maker ; a 
 being with some sort of a hereafter ; a being with some 
 possibilities of gracious guidance. And are you going 
 to leave him out of all account because he did not know 
 how to read and write ; because he had never heard of 
 Abraham oi^ Moses, or the Bible Society or the Sun- 
 day-school ? Do you suppose God leaves him out of 
 His account ? Forgets him in his nakedness to re- 
 member you in your fine clothes .'* Ah ! if He is God, 
 He does no such thing. 
 
 " O the generations old, 
 Over whom no church-bell tolled ; " — 
 
 if God is God, He remembers them, and some way 
 fairly and divinely deals with them in procedures of 
 pity and of grace. 
 
 Or, look in the other direction. Paul apparently 
 supposed that the " great day of the Lord," the grand 
 consummation of the kingdom of God, was not very far 
 
SERMONS. 225 
 
 off ; might possibly come in the lifetime of living read- 
 ers of his letters. It is no disparagement of his wis- 
 dom, or even of his inspiration, that he was not ac- 
 quainted with what was really to be the fact, since our 
 Saviour Himself said, "Of that day and that hour 
 knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in 
 heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." So that 
 when we see that perhaps more than fifteen centuries 
 longer duration than ever entered into Paul's estimate 
 have already rolled away ; all freighted full with their 
 various experiences in the history of the Church and 
 the lives of individual men ; all bearing minute, com- 
 prehensive, general, and particular tokens of providen- 
 tial and gracious dealings of God in the world ; and the 
 same story still stretching onward, we know not how 
 far, we cannot tell how long, before the yet delayed 
 but certain consummation of the divine plan is fulfilled, 
 we are lost in an amazement profounder than Paul's 
 could have been, and can only cry out in an astonish- 
 ment greater than his, Oh, the length, the measure- 
 less length of God's grace among men ! 
 
 But "the Depth," says the apostle. 
 
 In his famous first chapter of his letter to the Ro- 
 mans, Paul paints a lurid picture of the sinfulness of 
 mankind. He sets forth the moral consequences over 
 all the earth of the rejection, by men, of the lights of 
 nature and of conscience. He delineates with graphic 
 and powerful strokes the blindness of mind, and the 
 corruptions of the body, to which such forgetfulness of 
 the "eternal power and Godhead " naturally leads on. 
 It is an awful and repulsive portrayal of the results of 
 that unwillingness to "retain God in their knowledge" 
 which culminates in the "reprobate mind," whose pos- 
 15 
 
226 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 sessors he describes as " being filled with all unright- 
 eousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, mali- 
 ciousness ; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malig- 
 nity ; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, 
 proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to 
 parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, 
 without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." 
 Truly a fearful catalogue of moral delinquencies, and 
 one which requires an amazing downward reach of di- 
 vine grace to get underneath, in order to lift men out 
 of such a quagmire of sin and uncleanness. Certainly, 
 in contemplating the adequacy of the heavenly provi- 
 sion made to go down so low in the rescue of men, 
 Paul had reason to exclaim. Oh, the depth, the wonder- 
 ful depth of the grace of God ! 
 
 But it is observable that the picture Paul here draws 
 is a picture of sin, not against grace, but only against na- 
 ture. He is speaking of the consequences of rejecting 
 that revelation of Himself which God has made, even 
 in the midst of darkest heathenism, through the crea- 
 tive and providential works of His hands, and in the 
 sentiment or instinct of righteousness which He has 
 lodged even in pagan breasts. Now, it is one of the 
 plainest of moral principles, discovered by reason and 
 inculcated in Scripture, that the degree of wrong in 
 any act is not so much measured by the act itself, as 
 by the light the doer had in the performance of it. 
 Our Saviour sets this principle forth with the utmost 
 distinctness, when he speaks of the beating with "few" 
 or with "many stripes," according as the tran.sgressor 
 knew or did not know with clearness the Master's will. 
 The application of this principle to human action con- 
 ducts us to the inevitable conclusion that there are 
 
SERMOXS. 
 
 227 
 
 worse transgressors by far than those the apostle tells 
 us of in his epistle to the Romans. It is a deeper and 
 a darker sin to reject the light of revelation than na- 
 ture's comparatively obscure and trembling ray. To 
 do despite unto the Spirit of grace, and to count the 
 blood of redemption of nothing worth, is a greater 
 transgression than for a child of nature, only, to steal, or 
 murder, or corrupt his body with vice. We are apt to put 
 a relative emphasis on bodily sins, an emphasis which 
 the Bible does not. The Scriptures do, indeed, con- 
 demn them, but they condemn still more some spiritual 
 sins which we are apt to pass over with light reproof. 
 Pride, envy, ingratitude, unbelief, insensibility to di- 
 vine love, carelessness about the provisions of heavenly 
 mercy for the help of men ; especially indifference to 
 a Saviour's work and offers in our behalf, how compar- 
 atively easy our judgment of these things, when meas- 
 ured by what we call sins of the body. Our Saviour 
 certainly did not judge so. He told certain outwardly 
 upright and respectable citizens and public instructors 
 in Jerusalem, that the publicans and harlots of that 
 city would go into the kingdom of God before them. 
 
 So that we who sit in the clear light of the Gospel 
 day ; we children of parents whose lives were a witness 
 to the Gospel's saving power ; we who are surrounded 
 by accumulating tokens of the truth and the infinite 
 tenderness of the grace of God, rejecting that grace, 
 or being careless about it, need a depth of mercy in 
 our behalf far more patient and profound than many a 
 cannibal father who has eaten his child, or felon who 
 has swung from a gallows-tree. Oh, the depth of 
 divine grace which we need, my hearers ! How often 
 and how long have we neglected light, and abused 
 
2 28 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 privilege ! Charles Wesley was never what is called a 
 bad man ; but under the light of his opportunities and 
 his shortcomings he felt compelled to cry : 
 
 " Depth of Mercy, can there be 
 Mercy still reserved for me ? 
 I have long withstood His grace 
 Long provoked Him to His face 
 Would not hearken to His calls; 
 Grieved Him by a thousand falls." 
 
 And we, if we understand our own needs, and espe- 
 cially if we humbly hope that those needs have been 
 in some measure supplied by a love of infinite patience 
 and tenderness covering and forgetting all our sins, 
 will surely feel that we have like reason to exclaim. Oh, 
 the depth, the fathomless depth, of the grace of God ! 
 
 " And the Height," the " Height," once more says 
 the Apostle. 
 
 To what lofty end does ail this manifestation of the 
 love of God toward men lead on ? Paul has himself 
 spoken most inspiring and uplifting words on this 
 point. To the Galatian Christians he wrote concern- 
 ing the purpose of this operation of heavenly grace 
 that its object was to make men "the sons of God." 
 In his Roman letter he still further elaborated this 
 thought. " And if children then heirs ; heirs of God, 
 and joint-heirs with Christ;" a conception which he 
 yet more perfectly develops in his first Corinthian 
 epistle, when he says of the effect of this divine pur- 
 pose, " All things are yours : whether Paul, or Apollos, 
 or Cephas, or the world, or life or death, or things 
 present or things to come, all are yours." Or still 
 more explicitly in the Ephesian letter and in close con- 
 nection with our text : " But God who is rich in 
 
SERMONS, 229 
 
 mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even 
 when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together 
 with Christ .... and hath raised us up to- 
 gether, and made us sit together in heavenly places in 
 Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show 
 the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness 
 toward us through Christ Jesus." The adoption of 
 men into divine sonship, with vast and inalienable 
 privileges as God's children, and the manifestation 
 through this gracious work of His own character to 
 the universe, this is the end, as the apostle conceives 
 of it, of the amazing uplift of the plan of God. No 
 wonder he cries, Oh, the height ! 
 
 But it is obvious that in whatever degree our con- 
 ceptions of the greatness of that Being of whom we 
 are made sons is enlarged, the vastness of that inheri- 
 tance of which heirship is promised is proportionately 
 increased; and the majesty of that universe to whose 
 powers and intelligences in heavenly places these 
 things are to be revealed is widened and exalted. In 
 the same proportion, also, the wonder rises that God's 
 grace is so high. Yet, in all these points, we have 
 light the apostle did not have. God is not only great. 
 He is greater with every revolving year. His universe 
 widens every hour. Heirship in it ; sonship to its 
 Head, is a privilege it never was before. 
 
 " The fathers saw not all of Thee." 
 New births are in Thy grace ; 
 Thou God of light, to us reveal 
 Thy glory's hiding-place." 
 
 That prayer is answering every hour. More than 
 prophets, psalmists, or apostles of old, are we privileged 
 
230 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 to see of the length, the breadth, the depth, the 
 height of the grace of God. 
 
 And now the single word in conclusion comes : 
 Brethren and sisters, keep this your glorious privilege 
 and calling in mind ! Let it have its proper effect 
 upon you. Live under its inspiration and its uplifting 
 power. Sons and daughters of God Almighty, 
 remember what are the riches of your inheritance in 
 Christ ! Let nothing deprive you of the comfort of 
 its recollection. Suffer nothing lower, more earthly 
 and trivial, to rival in your affections that which, great- 
 est of all possible privileges in reality, should be great- 
 est and most prized in your estimate of it. Let this 
 word of inspired exhortation abide with you, exercising 
 over you its proper stimulating, restraining, uplifting 
 power : Seeing then that ye look for these things, 
 " what manner of persons ought ye to be, in all holy 
 conversation and godliness." 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 231 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE SEPULCHRE IN THE GARDEN.* 
 
 John xix : 41. 
 
 '■'■ Noiu in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, 
 and ill the garden a new sepulchre.'''' 
 
 I cannot believe it was mere fidelity to history which 
 led John to record that the place of our Saviour's cruci- 
 fixion was in the immediate vicinity of a garden, or 
 that it was in a garden that He was buried. We can 
 none of us forget that more than one of the great 
 events of human sin and human redemption, of which 
 the burial of Christ was but a part, occurred in a 
 similar spot. 
 
 Biblical history commences in a garden. The open- 
 ing chapter of all this world's experience narrates the 
 bliss and beauty of Eden. The Scripture record of 
 God's dealings with men preserves for us the memory 
 of a morning hour of human life spent amid the de- 
 lights of a rural paradise. But a garden is not the 
 scene of human history's happy commencement alone. 
 It is the scene, also, of human nature's fatal temptation 
 and fall. It was in a garden that sin achieved its first 
 victory over our race, and that death received its first 
 
 * Written in 1863, rewritten in 1889, and preaclied on Easter 
 Sunday of that year. 
 
232 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 power. It is to a primeval pleasure-ground, a place of 
 beauty and of joy, — of which every garden is a kind 
 of faded memorial, — that we look back to see where 
 guilt entered and all our woe. 
 
 There is, therefore, a kind of fitness, which we can- 
 not think undesigned, in the fact that it is to a similar 
 spot, also, that we look back for the beginning of the 
 reversal of all this. Where sin and death gained their 
 great victory, there, too, they suffered their great 
 defeat. It was in a garden that Adam was tempted 
 and fell. It was in Gethsemane that Christ agonized 
 and overcame. It was in Eden that Adam received 
 the sentence : " Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou 
 return." It was in a garden on the hillside of Calvary 
 that the second Adam rose from the grave " seeing no 
 corruption." Adam, the first opener of the tomb, dug 
 the burial place of a race in the garden soil of Paradise : 
 Christ, the "first fruits" of those who shall forever 
 live, fell to the ground like a grain of wheat and was 
 laid in a garden sepulchre. The happiest, saddest, 
 mightiest scenes of human story are thus disclosed as 
 having occurred in that spot which is to men a kind of 
 symbol of what is most beautiful and blest, — a garden. 
 
 The narrative which John gives of the crucifixion of 
 his Master introduces us to the garden-grounds of 
 Joseph of Arimathea. We know nothing of this man, 
 save what we learn from the few facts recorded of him 
 in connection with the burial of Christ. Where he 
 had met Christ ; whether he was, as seems probable, 
 one of the Sanhedrin before whom our Lord was 
 brought ; how far he had previously shown an interest 
 in the Saviour's person or teachings, — these are ques- 
 tions there are no certain means for deciding. About 
 
SERMONS, 233 
 
 all that can be definitely afifirmed is that he was rich, 
 and that he stood in some official relation to the 
 government. This wealthy and influential man, avail- 
 ing himself of his privilege as a person of station, 
 gained permission from Pilate to take down the body 
 of Christ from the cross and to deposit it in a tomb in 
 his garden, which lay in the immediate vicinity of the 
 place of crucifixion. 
 
 This garden of Joseph's we may reasonably suppose 
 partook of the characteristic features of such spots 
 among the Jews. Jewish gardens were often consid- 
 erably remote from their possessors' dwelling-places. 
 They were not generally, as ours are, connected with 
 their owners' houses, but were more frequently outside 
 of the city walls, on some sunny hillside, or in some 
 spring-moistened valley. Such a spot the rich coun- 
 sellor possessed on the gentle acclivity of a hill lying a 
 little to the northwest of Jerusalem. It was, probably, 
 after the usual Hebrew custom, a place made beautiful 
 by assiduous culture and care. To it, we may imagine, 
 Joseph and his household were wont to go, — as is still 
 the manner in Oriental towns, — in the morning hours, 
 before the sun had left the top of Olivet, or in the 
 softer light of setting day. It was the household's 
 pleasure-ground. It was a place set apart for happiness. 
 There age might lay aside its years, and manhood for- 
 get its cares, and childhood rejoice as on its native 
 soil. The very end for which its walls were built, its 
 alleys graded, its borders set with fruit trees and with 
 flowers, was happiness. For business, the counsellor 
 could haunt the "dusky purlieus of the law" in some 
 Temple court or Jerusalem street : even for the routine 
 of life's common satisfactions a home within the city's 
 
234 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 walls would do ; but for the free unbending of the 
 heart in its gayer moments, when it cast off business 
 and routine, the rich man had hedged about a garden 
 — the very name a sound of pleasure. 
 
 But for a place thus set apart for joy the spot had 
 one feature apparently inharmonious. In Joseph's 
 garden there was a sepulchre. Close by where flowers 
 bloomed and ripening figs and apricots blushed ; per- 
 haps even clambered over by the grape and festooned 
 with its purpling clusters, rose the somber doorway of 
 a tomb. Whether built by the rich man in anticipation 
 of a need whereof possibly the slow advancing illness 
 of some member of his household had forewarned him, 
 or raised only in view of the grim certainty which lies 
 before every man of a want some time to be experi- 
 enced which only a hiding-place for the tenantless 
 body can satisfy, there it stood, in the spot dedicated to 
 pleasure, a reminder of the hour which puts a period to 
 earthly joy, a silent but eloquent monitor ot mortality. 
 And though it is said that it was a "new" sepulchre 
 "wherein was never man yet laid," yet a man of 
 Joseph's years could not have looked upon it without 
 being reminded, if not of friends laid there to rest, yet 
 of them as laid somewhere, gathered in other graves, 
 hidden from him by doors as massy and darkness as 
 silent as this " new sepulchre's." To him, *therefore, 
 and his household, there was always in the midst of 
 the place devoted to happiness a memento of sorrow. 
 Bright as sun could shine, gay as flowers could blush, 
 there was, — and it could not be forgotten, — the 
 sepulchre. 
 
 But what is thus told us of Joseph and his sepulchre 
 is not so strange after all. The like is true of almost 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 235 
 
 every man. In almost all gardens there is a sepulchre. 
 Let life go with us gently as it may, it is not very long 
 generally before amid the very scene of our joy there is 
 some kind of a tomb. Ever since that day in the first 
 garden when man took of the " tree of knowledge of 
 good and evil," evil has mingled with all our good. It 
 was a sad choice for his posterity which the first father 
 of our race made for us ; but it was made, and we can 
 none of us escape the inheritance to which we are born. 
 Henceforth there was for man a bitter in every sweet, 
 a doubt in every hope, a shadow over every light. 
 Henceforth perfect happiness or peace were found 
 nowhere. In every "garden" came a "sepulchre." 
 
 These sepulchres in men's gardens are, however, 
 very diverse in character. In some lives, the sepul- 
 chre is some form of bodily infirmity. The man is 
 rich, respected, surrounded by friends, but, with all 
 these things, lacks the common boon of health. And 
 so the coarse crust is sweeter to the day-laborer than 
 the dainties of every clime to him, and down is harsher 
 under his restless head than the bare floor to one who 
 sweeps the streets. In other lives, the sepulchre is 
 some form of inward unhappiness ; some memory of 
 sin or error in the past ; some mischance, bringing un- 
 just suspicion on one's good name ; some anxiety of 
 the present or dread of the future, is like a tomb in 
 the garden, a dark spot in all the life. 
 
 Or that which imparts the sombre hue to existence 
 may be the character of a child or of a companion. 
 This is the discordant or tragic note in the household 
 joy. Or it may be a veritable sepulchre which is the 
 sad spot in our lives. Into the happiest of homes the 
 grim messenger who builds such sepulchres enters. It 
 
236 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 is not absolutely true as our Longfellow says, but it 
 comes pretty near being true — 
 
 " There is no flock, however watched and tended. 
 But one dead lamb is there ; 
 There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
 But has its vacant chair." 
 
 The grave may be but a span long, only big enough 
 to hide a curly head and dimpled feet, or it may be 
 wide enough for manhood with hoary hairs to rest in ; 
 but, soon or late, some such are found in all the gardens 
 of our lives. 
 
 And so many and so hidden, oftentimes, from the 
 eyes of others are these sepulchres in the garden, that 
 a man must be either very bold or very foolish who 
 dares to covet another's lot. It is not always the out- 
 ward aspect of a life which bespeaks it truly. It may 
 seem an unusually happy life, very honorable, very 
 enviable, very full of satisfactions; but its possessor 
 might unfold another story about it. While you stand 
 admiring, and wishing such a lot your own, he whom 
 you look upon may be almost dying with some unsus- 
 pected misery, and, if he would, could tell you a tale 
 which would warn you from ever envying any man 
 again till you have seen the sepulchre in his garden. 
 
 When the literary public of Great Britain, about the 
 year 1820, were alternately laughing and crying over 
 the mingled wit and pathos of the essays of Elia, then 
 publishing by an anonymous writer, little did the curi- 
 ous public conjecture that those gems of tenderness 
 and of mirth came forth from the closet of an over- 
 tasked East-India-House clerk, whose chief object in 
 life was to watch over and keep a home for a maniac 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 237 
 
 sister, — a sister who had killed their common mother 
 with her own hand, and who was liable at any moment 
 to burst out in a similar assault against her brother 
 and only friend. 
 
 Few were they who rightly understood, during the 
 closing years of Edmund Burke, how much of the soft- 
 ened splendor, the sweet sad majesty of his later elo- 
 quence, was the fruit of the affliction which robbed 
 England's stateliest orator of his only son, and hid the 
 great man's heart in that grave from which ambition or 
 applause could never tempt it again. 
 
 Many of the jokes and repartees of Rev. Dr. Strong, 
 the witty and able pastor of this church, who died 
 seventy-three years ago, are still current among the 
 stories of this Hartford town. But nothing which I 
 have ever heard of him ever let me so much into his 
 heart as the inquiry he made at the time of the build- 
 ing of the bridge across the river to the East Hartford 
 side, as to just where the bridge was located. Why 
 did he not go and see, do you ask .'' Because on one 
 September evening, his eighteen year old boy, just 
 graduated from Yale College, returning from a journey, 
 fell from the ferry-boat and was brought, some time in 
 the night, a lifeless body to the father's house, just 
 across this street opposite, and never after that day, 
 though years had gone, had the father been able to 
 visit that section of the town which came within sight 
 of that fatal spot. 
 
 In having a sad spot in it, Joseph's pleasure-ground 
 was not, therefore, an exceptional one. The incongru- 
 ous feature is not unusual, after all. A sepulchre in 
 the garden is only what is very common in men's 
 lives. 
 
238 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 But it is time to turn to another aspect of this mat- 
 ter of the sepulchre in Joseph's garden. At first it 
 seemed strange to find it there. It was an unexpected 
 fellowship, — flowers and the grave, a pleasure-ground 
 and a tomb ; but a little reflection showed that the 
 same fellowship is in almost all lives. We are, there- 
 fore, prepared, perhaps, to discover with less surprise 
 that the sepulchre in Joseph's garden was the best 
 thing there was in it. The happiest spot in the whole 
 ground was just that where was the tomb. Joseph 
 found it so. It was that spot which did more for him 
 than all the rest. 
 
 Joseph had come, spring after spring, to see the mys- 
 tery of the awakening soil ; he had beheld the rising 
 of the lily from the mould, and the bursting of the 
 cerements wrapped about the buds on every bough. 
 But now it was the place of death which was to 
 quicken ; the spot set apart for human dust which was 
 to stir with a more wondrous rising again than ever 
 his orarden knew. A crucified man had been laid three 
 days before in the tomb of the generous Arimathean. 
 The new sepulchre had its occupant. No longer a 
 monitor of mortality to be experienced, it was an in- 
 folder of death realized. Doubtless, something of a 
 deeper shadow crept over the garden for Joseph and 
 his household, now that the tomb had its inhabitant. 
 If, on that Friday evening, after the crucified man had 
 been laid in the new sepulchre, we may imagine the 
 family to have visited their garden-ground, we can well 
 believe, that though on that 9th of April, the tokens 
 of a Palestine springtime must have been visible every- 
 where in the enclosure, still the suggestions of the 
 place must have been to them of death, more than of 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 239 
 
 life ; dissolution, more than rising again. The sepul- 
 chre never could have seemed so prominent in the 
 garden before. Never could it have appeared so incon- 
 gruous with the spot. 
 
 But on the Sunday afternoon following .'' On any- 
 day subsequent to that third morning afterward, when 
 two angels sitting in the tomb, said : " He is not here, 
 but is risen " ? What was the place now to Joseph and 
 his household .'' Words cannot tell the alteration of it. 
 Immeasurable the change for Joseph and all his, which 
 had come over their pleasure-ground. For him and 
 them what a book of revelation had been opened there ! 
 To what a new and deeper range of emotion did the 
 spot now minister ! Problems had been there answered 
 over which their hearts and all the world's hearts had 
 ached in vain. The counsellor had prepared the place 
 to lend life a keener zest ; the event which had now 
 occurred spoke not of life but of immortality. He had 
 been wont to go thither to lay aside something of this 
 world's fret and weariness ; when now he went, it was 
 to behold a spot on which had been disclosed another 
 world's reality and blessedness. The sepulchre had 
 been once a reminder, filling him with pensive thoughts 
 of the hour when pleasure and business should alike be 
 over ; it spoke to him now of a time, when, in a better 
 world, every noble activity should be resumed. ,He 
 may have paused sometimes, in days gone by, beside 
 the tomb he had built for his last sleep, and have 
 asked himself, " What assurance have I that I shall 
 not sleep here forever ? " But, after that Sunday 
 morning, one imagines his step must have quickened 
 as he came near the spot, where, for him and for all 
 men, resurrection and life eternal had been brought to 
 
!40 
 
 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 light. No other nook of his garden had a lesson like 
 that. The sepulchre had become the garden's joy. 
 The bed of tulips and lilies was not so beautiful as the 
 stony niche in which the Son of Man was laid, but 
 from which he came forth, the " first-fruits " of all who 
 sleep. 
 
 And as Joseph came, at last, to need the shelter of 
 the sepulchre's roof, and the protection of its close- 
 shut doors, one thinks his aged limbs composed them- 
 selves to a willing rest, and all his mortal flesh re- 
 joiced to lie down in a spot where He who had 
 " abolished death " and conquered the grave had lain 
 before him. Surely of all the garden's precincts that 
 was now the best. It was the hill of hope. It was 
 the haunt of peace. It was a spot making happier 
 every day of this life, with a gladness radiating from 
 the life to come. 
 
 Not unlike this is it oftentimes with the sepulchres 
 in other men's gardens. The careful observer of 
 God's dealings with men sees, frequently, that these 
 places of life's sorrow become the centers of life's 
 best joy. These words vv^ritten of great, blind Mil- 
 ton, — they might almost have been written by him,— 
 well express the not uncommon office of the afflictions 
 of our days : 
 
 " I am old and blind ; 
 
 Men point at me as smitten by God's frown ; 
 Afflicted and deserted of my kind, 
 
 Yet I am not cast down. 
 
 I am weak, yet strong, 
 
 I murmur not that I no longer see ; 
 Poor, old and helpless, I the more belong. 
 
 Father supreme, to Thee ! 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 241 
 
 Thy glorious face 
 
 Is leaning toward me, and its holy light 
 Shines in upon my dwelling place, 
 ' And there is no more night. 
 
 On my bended knee 
 
 I recognize thy purpose clearly shown — 
 My vision hast thou dimmed that I may see 
 
 Thyself alone." 
 
 So, under the dark shadow of affliction, many 
 another soul than Milton's enters into truer communion 
 with itself than it ever had before. It strikes a juster 
 balance between life's seemings and life's substances. 
 It learns how empty and unimportant are many of the 
 objects, which, in the untroubled hours of existence, 
 appeared of great concern. It learns the great lesson, 
 that a garden of pleasure is not all a man wants ; he 
 wants a resurrection-spot for his soul. He wants a 
 place this side the grave where the things of the other 
 side may be seen ; where they may in a manner come 
 forward into the present, and exert the influence which 
 rightfully belongs to them. He wants a solemn re- 
 minder that this life is but a small fraction of his 
 being ; this world ministers but to the smallest of his 
 needs ; and that the great wants as well as the great 
 destinies of the soul are otherwhere. These are 
 facts which are oftener effectually taught us by the 
 sepulchres in our gardens than by all the rest of our 
 lives ; and so they become the best part of life to us. 
 No other part does so much for us ; no other gives in- 
 structions so needed and so profound. We cannot do 
 without the burial-places in our gardens. They give 
 us, — what without them we are slow to find, — a place 
 to unrobe ourselves of earth's vanities, and put on the 
 16 
 
242 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 garments becoming heirs of immortality. It is not 
 the tulip-ground and the summer-house in our days 
 which generally give this ; it is the bereavement and 
 the sorrow. 
 
 Are there those of you, my hearers, in whose gar- 
 dens has never yet been built any kind of sepulchre ? 
 I do not know whether to rejoice or grieve for you. 
 It may be you are learning all the lessons such a spot 
 is designed to teach in some other way. It may be 
 you are living so humble and faithful a Christian life 
 that God sees you do not need trouble. If it be so, 
 the unbroken flow of happiness in your life is an occa- 
 sion for gladness. Happy the man who runs so un- 
 falteringly up the shining way that he needs no spurs 
 of earthly trial to urge him on ! But if this is not the 
 case .'' Then I do not know whether it would be true 
 kindness to congratulate you that your life has in 
 no considerable sorrow, your garden no tomb. There 
 is one word of God, and a very gentle word it is too, 
 which might trouble such a man almost more than any 
 other word beside : " Whom the Lord loveth he chas- 
 teneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." 
 And as such a person perceives the comparative free- 
 dom from the heavenly chastisement which marks his 
 days, and discerns, too, that there is nothing in his 
 superior fidelity to the Lord's service which goes any 
 way toward lighting up the mysterious problem why it 
 is that he is exempt, he may well tremble between 
 these two fears ; the fear that he is one whom the 
 Lord loveth not, or the fear of those days, which, so 
 surely as he is beloved, will see the sepulchre in his 
 garden somewise built. 
 
 But many of you, — nay, most of you, my friends. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 243 
 
 here to-day, — know full well what it is to have a 
 sepulchre in the garden of your lives. You know the 
 shadow that it sheds over all the pleasant alleys and 
 the bordered paths. You need not be told how it 
 changes the place for you into sornething other than it 
 was. So it did for Joseph. The tenanted sepulchre 
 darkened all the ground. 
 
 But friends, there is another aspect of this matter. 
 Joseph found another. This Easter Sunday is a 
 memorial of it. Not a spot in all the enclosure 
 brought him so enduring joy as the very place which 
 he had builded for sorrow. And the sepulchre in your 
 garden may do the same for you. It may be a resur- 
 rection-spot for your soul. Out of the sorrow which 
 wraps you round, you may rise into a purer and serener 
 day. The rolling of the "great stone" to the door 
 may mark the finishing and hiding-away of one por- 
 tion of your Christian life. And the rolling of that 
 stone away on the third morning may be the com- 
 mencement of a new and more consecrated life. And, 
 if this be the case, hen the sepulchre spot in your 
 days will be the most blessed of all. Its joy will reach 
 farther, shine clearer, endure longer, than any belong- 
 ing to the hours when your garden knew no tomb. 
 
 Using your sorrow aright it may teach you, as it 
 has taught many, how to say : — 
 
 " O deem not they are blest alone 
 
 Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep ; 
 
 For God, who pities man, hath shown 
 A blessing for the eyes that weep." 
 
244 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE MANY GATES.* 
 
 Revelation xxi: 13. 
 
 On the east three gates ; on the north three gates ; on the south 
 three gates J afid on the west three gates. 
 
 The Scripture story begins in a garden and ends in 
 a metropolis. It is among the green bowers of Eden 
 that it commences ; it is within the shining walls of 
 the crowded " City of God " that it terminates. Two 
 happy, sinless, unclothed dwellers amid the vines and 
 flowers and trees and streams of Paradise, are the first 
 human beings of whom it tells us ; but it shows us, be- 
 fore its record closes, a company " which no man can 
 number," "clad in white," and thronging the golden 
 streets of the " New Jerusalem." 
 
 Across the wide space from Genesis to the Apoca- 
 lypse, Scripture conducts us in a devious and change- 
 ful pathway. Sometimes the narrative flows forward 
 clear, consecutive ; marked by dates which we can cal- 
 culate and names with which we are familiar. But 
 sometimes, also, there are greit gaps and vacant spaces 
 in the story. It begins again, but does not seem to 
 begin just where it left o f. Unrecorded intervals, 
 undetailed events, unremembered actors, must have 
 
 * Written in 1875. 
 
SERMONS. 245 
 
 intervened, unnoticed in the meager outline of Biblical 
 chronicle. Yet, in spite of all imperfection of detail, 
 it is impossible not to recognize a purpose and a prog- 
 ress. The narrative is fragmentary, it is true, but is a 
 narrative. The story is of something beginning, grow- 
 ing, perfecting, consummating, after a definite and un- 
 defeated plan. And that something is Humanity. It 
 is the history of Man, through the dealings of God with 
 him, of which the Bible is the chronicle. 
 
 The passage of which our text is a part brings be- 
 fore us one of the latest scenes of this wonderful story. 
 It is a delineation of Humanity's perfected state. The 
 condition of the redeemed and glorified is set forth 
 under the emblem of a city, — "the City of God," for 
 which all previous conditions of man's experience have 
 been preparing him, and in the complex and perfect 
 realization of which he will find his ultimate felicity. 
 For we must not forget, my hearers, that though man's 
 primitive and innocent condition is set forth in the 
 idyllic story of Eden with its bowers and solitudes, his 
 redeemed and perfected state is represented as one of 
 companionship and exalted society. There is a "City" 
 of God. The redeemed are not to be set apart from 
 one another in any solitary paradise, however beauti- 
 ful. They are, rather, to be coordinated into that in- 
 timate and wide-reaching relation to one another, of 
 which the complex and elaborately developed life of a 
 city stands, to us, as the completest type. True 
 enough, indeed, it is, that the idea of a city such as has 
 been realized by man on earth contains- much incom- 
 patible with perfectness. There are sights and sounds 
 which offend the delicate sense. There are woes and 
 crimes and squalors which pain the sensitive heart. 
 
246 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Nevertheless, the fact remains that even in our poor 
 conceptions, colored necessarily by our often sad expe- 
 rience, a great and beautiful city abides our highest 
 type of matured and perfected society ; — a condition 
 of human existence wherein the greatest number of 
 welfares can best be secured ; the tastes of most easi- 
 est gratified ; the largest privileges most readily at- 
 tained ; most various activities afforded amplest room. 
 
 Now, it is this conception of a city, — a city glorious, 
 innocent, healthful, perfect, a "City of God," — which 
 the Scriptures employ to symbolize to us the final con- 
 dition of redeemed Humanity. Hints of this concep- 
 tion are dropped all through the Scriptures, even in 
 their older portions. Jerusalem the " City of the Great 
 King " stood an emblem of it to every devout Israelite 
 of old. When he uttered his prayer, " Who shall as- 
 cend into the hill of the Lord ? or who shall stand in 
 His holy place ? " his thoughts looked beyond that City 
 of David to the City of David's King. When Zecha- 
 riah prophesied, " And the streets of the city shall be 
 full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof," 
 the restored earthly Jerusalem in which he conceived 
 that pleasant sight was also a figure of Jerusalem to 
 come. 
 
 But many and striking as are these intimations in 
 the Old Testament, they are still more numerous and 
 explicit in the New. Harmonious with them, nay, in- 
 compatible with any interpretation beside, are those 
 words of Christ, " In My Father's house are many man- 
 sions." "Many," various, adapted, numerous, as are 
 the dwellers there. " No continuing city " here, " but 
 we seek one to come," — that is the delineation, by the 
 writer to the Hebrews, of the very purpose in life 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 247 
 
 which dominated the Christians to whom he wrote. 
 Such, he says, was the faith of the fathers, too. 
 They " looked for a city which hath foundations " ; and 
 they looked not in vain. Their fidelity had its reward : 
 — " God is not ashamed to be called their God," he 
 says, "And He hath prepared for them a city." This 
 is not the portion of the fathers of Old Testament his- 
 tory alone. It is that of all the faithful as well. To 
 all such, wherever they are, he says : " Ye are come 
 unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, 
 the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable com- 
 pany of angels." 
 
 Still, undoubtedly frequent and plain as are these 
 references to a "City" as the type of the ultimate 
 state of redeemed Humanity, it is to the Apocalypse 
 that it is reserved most elaborately to delineate and 
 vividly to emphasize this conception. And how vividly 
 and elaborately it is done ! This whole twenty-first 
 chapter of Revelation, opulent and magnificent in its 
 imagery and language above almost any passage of 
 Scripture beside, is nothing but a description of this 
 City of God. And it is a description which does not 
 content itself with general phrases. It deals with par- 
 ticulars and minute details. How the language labors 
 to bring its glory before us ! There is not a " City " 
 only, — but a "great City"; a "holy City"; a City 
 "lying foursquare," vast, commodious, magnificent. 
 There is not "a wall" only, — emblem to the ancient 
 mind of security and defense, — but a wall " great and 
 high," towering upward a " hundred and forty and four 
 cubits," and built, tier on tier, on foundations of most 
 precious stones. There are "gates," but not three or 
 four. "Twelve" of them are there, and each gate 
 
248 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 "one pearl." Streets are there, but they are paved 
 with "gold." "Light" is there, but it is a glorious 
 light which no sunset ever dims. Inhabitants are 
 there, but thousands do not number them, — "nations," 
 saved, gather in it, and "kings" "bring their glory 
 and honor into it." Pure and salubrious, too, is that 
 City, for " there shall in no wise enter into it anything 
 that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination 
 or maketh a lie." 
 
 But now, in the midst of this glowing symbolic 
 delineation, we find a phrase interposed which possibly 
 we may have passed over almost unnoticed, but which, 
 rightly considered, is, I think, full of suggestiveness. 
 From the general consideration of the characteristics 
 of the heavenly City I shall turn your attention, there- 
 fore, to this special particular. You will find it in the 
 text : " On the east three gates ; on the north three 
 gates ; on the south three gates ; and on the west 
 three gates." We have noticed already that there are 
 gates, — many of them; many and splendid in their 
 pearly radiance. But why this mention of the various- 
 ness of their location .'* Why this careful particulariza- 
 tion that they look northward and southward and 
 eastward and westward, and open on their golden 
 hinges to every point of the compass .-• Perhaps some 
 suggestions lie only half hidden here worth our more 
 careful considering. 
 
 One such which I will mention is a suggestion as to 
 the variousness of men's manner of approach to the 
 heavenly City. The "gates" open in all directions 
 because an almost infinite variety of travelers, journey- 
 ing from most dissimilar regions, are to be gathered 
 there. Said our Saviour to His disciples, whose narrow 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 249 
 
 Jewish conceptions of the possibilities of salvation for 
 any beside Abraham's offspring needed to be widened, 
 "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." 
 The Gospel He proclaimed was not for one nation 
 only, but for the world. And so, too, the New Jeru- 
 salem to which that Gospel points the way must be 
 accessible to men of all languages and lands. The 
 gates of it, which we are told are never "shut," open 
 northward and southward and eastward and westward, 
 for out of all regions of the inhabited earth some are 
 continually journeying thither. They come from polar 
 snows, and they come from equatorial plains. They 
 wear every garb the sun in all his circuit ever shines 
 upon. They draw nigh out of countries the most 
 opposite ; out of climates the most contrasted ; out of 
 languages the most contrarious. 
 
 But it is not this geographical variousness of 
 approach to the New Jerusalem alone which the four- 
 fold aspect of the heavenly gates suggests to us. 
 There is a moral variousness still greater than any 
 geographical one. The people who gather are gathered 
 not only out of unlike regions, but out of unlike faiths, 
 ideas, habits, experiences. Those must needs be, in 
 many respects, very different pathways of approach, 
 intellectually and morally, which are traversed to the 
 heavenly City by one who comes thither out of African 
 ignorance, out of Oriental mysticism, out of Indian 
 savagery, and out of European refinement. That 
 Gospel must be an infinitely adaptable one which can 
 adjust itself to the innumerably diverse conceptions 
 and wants of men so dissimilar as the Caucasian in his 
 < culture and the Mongolian in his backwardness. And 
 to gather men so unlike as these, and a hundred other 
 
250 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 types as distinct and opposite, in one heavenly home, 
 there needs must be a vast variety of approach. The 
 gates are not too many, nor do they look in too many 
 ways. 
 
 Nor are they too numerous if we consider only the 
 variousness of men's method of approach, even in the 
 same land and in the very midst of a Christian com- 
 munity. How unlike, after all, are the dwellers who 
 live door to door in a city like this, or sit side by side 
 in this sanctuary. What diverse dispositions, inclina- 
 tions, experiences, characters. How dissimilar are the 
 motives which constantly actuate them ; the arguments 
 which are likely to have weight with them ; the moral 
 actions they perform ! And in leading men and women 
 so variously constituted to the heavenly Jerusalem the 
 Spirit of God conducts them in most diverse ways. 
 Here is one who arrives thither through the throes 
 and agonies of an experience as stormy as that of 
 Luther or of Paul. He is struck down by a conviction 
 of sin heavy as that which smote the great Apostle 
 from his charger on his bloody errand to Damascus. 
 Here is another whose Christian experience is like that 
 of Fenelon or John. Almost natural it seemed for this 
 man, when he heard the words, " Behold the Lamb of 
 God ! " to turn and follow Him. Here are those on 
 whom in their journey Zionward the sun always seems 
 to smile. Their worldly business prospers ; their fami- 
 lies walk unbroken by their side ; health remains stead- 
 fast, and temptations appear never to assail. Others 
 come, but it is always under a stormy sky. Adversity 
 breaks their strength. They walk among graves. 
 They almost reckon their progress by the tombstones * 
 of those they love. More and more alone as they go 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 251 
 
 forward ; heavier and heavier weighted with suffering 
 and with care, they arrive at last spent and buffeted, 
 like a shipwrecked sailor smitten by a thousand seas, 
 stripped and exhausted at the heavenly refuge. Ah ! 
 the gates are not too many, even for those who are to 
 go in from this congregation ! Well is it that they open 
 northward and eastward and southward and westward ; 
 for various indeed are men's methods of approach. 
 
 Another suggestion of this opposite-looking frontage 
 of the heavenly gates is the unexpectedness of the 
 arrival of many there. As many of the travelers to 
 the City were on their way thither they often seemed 
 to be journeying in different directions. Their path- 
 ways sometimes ran not parallel, but crosswise and 
 even in contrary courses, according as each was led by 
 the good Spirit which guided him to one or another of 
 the opposite gates. And it would not be strange if, 
 while they thus crossed and traversed one another's 
 way, doubt should arise and even controversy as to the 
 probability of one another's arrival. 
 
 And this possibility of a misunderstanding and dis 
 pute we know has arisen. We know true pilgrims 
 heavenward have often fallen out by the way. They 
 have impeached one another's chance of entrance. 
 They have denied that the road in which some of their 
 fellow travelers were earnestly going led there at all. 
 They have insisted that the only entrance was the 
 particular gate that they were going through. How 
 bitter and melancholy have been the controversies of 
 those who have all been going heavenward ! Some- 
 times the road insisted on has been the road of a 
 particular church organization. Only members of that 
 special fellowship could hope to have any admission to 
 
252 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 the New Jerusalem. Salv^ation out of that church was 
 impossible. Sometimes the prescribed pathway has 
 been a particular form of some Christian ordinance. 
 A pilgrim to Zion must, for example, be perfectly- 
 immersed, or his title to a true baptism in the name of 
 the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, would be unfavor- 
 ably scrutinized at the heavenly gate. Sometimes a 
 narrow and local type of Christian experience has been 
 regarded as the only road ; as when one section of our 
 New England theologians taught the doctrine that the 
 only valid evidence of a probability of being saved was 
 a willingness to be lost. 
 
 How reassuring, in view of an almost interminable 
 catalogue of controversies like these, to remember the 
 many and the opposite-looking gates of the heavenly 
 City ! How comforting to know that not one door, 
 but many doors lead thither ! 
 
 What a suggestion this affords of the surprises 
 which will await those who finally enter : the unex- 
 pectedness to multitudes of the arrival of multitudes 
 beside. Coming in through their different gates, and 
 meeting on the golden-floored space before the central 
 throne, how will they in a manner wonder at one 
 another as being alike there ! Godly Romanists who 
 on earth would have piously burned equally godly Pro- 
 testants, greeting one another in that common home ! 
 Arminians and Calvinists, Quakers and Presbyterians, 
 Puritans and the Anglicans who drove them out, surely 
 something like a smile will be on some of their faces, 
 remembering the arguments against one another's 
 admission which they had sometimes used ! Toplady 
 and Wesley, — how they fought in their earthly days ! 
 But they will both be there. Erasmus and Luther, — 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 253 
 
 what bitter words the eager reformer uttered of his 
 scholastic and temporizing compeer. Yet Erasmus 
 did a good work, and we trust has entered into a good 
 reward. Calvin and Servetus, — Calvin conscientiously 
 furthered that trial which ended in burning Servetus 
 alive. But yet, notwithstanding that I am myself a 
 Calvinist, and fully believe that in the doctrinal warfare 
 he was waging Calvin was in the right, I still see no 
 sufficient reason to doubt that when the consumed 
 body of the restless, dogmatic, imprudent Servetus was 
 reduced to ashes there was one Christian less in the 
 world, or that up from those poor charred relics of 
 violence the resurrection morning will bring another 
 glorified form to meet Calvin's in the New Jerusalem. 
 
 Nay, these surprises will perhaps be wider still in 
 their reach. Out of pagan lands, where tidings of the 
 Gospel never went, may come sheep of the true fold, 
 led by ways we know not, and spiritually prepared to 
 greet the true Light of Life whenever it should arise. 
 Saved, not indeed without Christ ; but saved through 
 a working of the Divine Spirit fitting them to the 
 efficacies of an atonement as yet unknown. 
 
 And, — perhaps still harder for us to admit, — there 
 will be surprises from among ourselves. We shall, if 
 we ourselves ever enter that City, be astonished to 
 meet some whom we never expected to see there. 
 Men whose type of religious life we discredited because 
 we did not understand it. Some whom we denounced, 
 perhaps, because they followed not with us, but who 
 followed God through some one of the City's many 
 doors ; astonished themselves, perhaps, to find them- 
 selves within. 
 
 Surprises, too, doubtless, there will be of another 
 
254 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 kind. Unexpected vacancies of places we thought 
 certain to be filled. People looked for, but not found. 
 Men who professed the Gospel, but did not practice 
 the Gospel ; who said, "Lord, Lord," but never came 
 within the gate. 
 
 A further suggestion of this many-doored approach 
 to the New Jerusalem of heaven is the moral unity 
 there is, — notwithstanding much outward variousness, 
 — in all true pilgrims Zionward. There is, as has 
 been plainly indicated, a great deal of superficial dis- 
 similarity in men's method of approach to the heavenly 
 City. Still, the getting there is no accident. It is 
 not a mere matter of happen so. Men do not stumble 
 into heaven by chance. They do sometimes fall, un- 
 considering, on bits of earthly good fortune, — or what 
 they call so, — into property or reputation or office. 
 But they do not get into heaven in that way. There 
 are, underneath whatever variousness of detail, certain 
 unchangeable identities which mark alike the pro- 
 cedures and the characters of a\l those who ever 
 arrive there. There are certain distinct moral traits 
 which belong to them ; a temper of the spirit, a tone 
 of the feelings, an aim of the life, which appertains to 
 every one. So it has been always in the journeyers 
 Zionward. The eleven men of the Apostolic Company 
 were most dissimilar men, yet whoever in all Jerusalem 
 failed to see that they belonged together ? The great 
 guides of Christian history, how diverse they have 
 been ! Language has no terms of discrimination which 
 are not all needed to set forth the unlikeness in occu- 
 pation, speech, and taste, of the leaders of the grand 
 pilgrim companies of every land and age. 
 
 Anthony lives a hermit in the desert. Athanasius 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 255 
 
 sways the decisions of the Nicene Council and holds 
 the turbulent bishopric of Alexandria. Ulfilas goes a 
 missionary to the Goths and invents an alphabet to 
 give them the Bible. Columba carries the Gospel to 
 Scotland. Bernhard and Francis and Thomas Aquinas 
 each labors in his several way to imitate the life of 
 Christ and to set forth His truth tojnen. Arnold of 
 Brescia and John Huss try to purify a corrupted 
 Church and are burned for their efforts. Luther, 
 more successful, enters into their labors, and a Refor- 
 mation comes. Laboring in it are men as wide apart 
 in character and history as Cranmer and Calvin and 
 Melanchthon and Zwingli. Rough John Knox follows 
 in this line, and gentle Richard Hooker also. And so 
 the bright succession runs, down through Pascal and 
 Milton and Butler and Fenelon and Robinson and 
 Wesley to Edwards and Payson of our own land and 
 day. 
 
 Now here, surely, are great distinctions. But the 
 unity is greater than the distinctions. So in the 
 Jerusalem pilgrims it is ever. Unity is a matter of 
 the heart ; and it lives even against the actions of the 
 hand. 
 
 And therefore there are certain moral traits which 
 make the heavenly journeyers really one. They are 
 men who while living in the present state are sedu- 
 lously cultivating the characteristic qualities of the 
 life which is to come. They are men who, going up 
 and down in this earthly scene, garner up with infinite 
 relish and care whatever has the likeness of the City 
 to which they are going. Are purity, righteousness, 
 benevolence, piety, traits of that heavenly home .-* 
 These are the things they hunger for here. Do the 
 
256 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 inhabitants of the New Jerusalem abhor that which is 
 evil and cleave to that which is good ? So do they. 
 Are the dwellers within the City's walls loyal to the 
 City's King, and grateful above words to Him who 
 purchased their entrance there by His sufferings ? 
 So are these grateful and loyal also. Do the inhabit- 
 ants of that City, count it their highest privilege to be 
 employed in their Lord's service .-' These, too, living 
 here, are eager to serve Him also, and attentive to His 
 commands. O ! there is no mystery about their get- 
 ting into the City ! Their faces have been looking 
 that way a great while. They have made it a hope and 
 a purpose to be there. Repentant, humble, obedient, 
 trusting, they are now preparing for a heavenly habita- 
 tion. 
 
 I mention as a final suggestion of the four-fronted 
 gateways of the heavenly City, the amplitude of en- 
 trance offered to all who will make the effort to enter. 
 
 "Twelve gates" — facing, some of them, every 
 quarter where men can dwell. " Twelve gates " — 
 looking off into all the regions where sinning humanity 
 can wander ; and always, from every place where any 
 repenting one " comes to himself," and longs to go to 
 his Father's house, a straight way thither and an open 
 door. None necessarily excluded ! None shut out for 
 want of entrance-way provided ! Doors many enough, 
 and wide enough, and adjacent enough for all. And 
 do not, my dear hearers, in the acknowledgment of 
 this general amplitude of the entrance-way provided, 
 forget your own case. A way opens over against each 
 one of you. A way leads just from where you stand 
 intellectually, morally, socially, experimentally, right 
 into the City's central square. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 257 
 
 Ah ! my hearers, are you all entering ? Are your 
 faces set toward that City as your home ? Do you 
 bear the marks of pilgrims Zionward ? Are you living 
 so that God is "not ashamed to be called" your 
 "God"; so that he cannot do otherwise than be "pre- 
 paring for you a city" ? 
 
 Numbered, or yet unnumbered, of the pilgrim fel- 
 lowship, walk henceforward only in the heavenly path- 
 way. Set your faces Zionward ! So living we shall 
 enter where He is. So living some one of the City's 
 gates will open to us. Suddenly, or on slow hinges, 
 long-awaited, turning, it will open a way for us into 
 the City of God, in the Light of the Lamb. 
 
 In this faith let us labor and wait. 
 
 17 
 
258 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D, 
 
 XVI. 
 
 CHRIST THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN.* 
 
 Revelation xxi : 23. 
 And the Lamb is the Light thereof. 
 
 It is useless for us to attempt to read this twenty- 
 first chapter of the Revelation, with the eye of the 
 map-making geographer or of the date-fixing chro- 
 nologist. The Bible is a very sober book, but it takes 
 us sometimes in tremendous flights, and lands us in 
 regions where our quadrants and compasses are of 
 little service. This passage before us is an example. 
 No one need try to read it who insists on taking his 
 surveyor's chain along with him ; or who undertakes to 
 settle the period of every event by the Gregorian 
 calendar. 
 
 For the strong wing of Inspiration in this passage 
 beats an atmosphere we have none of us ever yet 
 breathed. It bears us into realms no eye of man has 
 yet looked upon. It takes us beyond time, as time is 
 reckoned in these earthly years : beyond death, 
 beyond the resurrection, beyond the judgment. "The 
 old heavens," to which we have looked up, as the 
 very emblem of steadfastness, and the old earth on 
 which we have walked and built, are passed away; 
 
 * Written in 1882. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 259 
 
 and the great rolling "sea" across which have gone 
 the navies of commerce and of war, is " no more." 
 There is a " new heaven and a new earth," but it must 
 be marvelously different from this ; for there is " no 
 night there"; and the inhabitants "hunger no more, 
 neither thirst any more ; neither shall the sun light on 
 them, nor any heat." There is "a City " there; but 
 it is a City where no one dies ; where no one pines in 
 pain ; where crying is unknown. 
 
 Marvelous too, unlike anything we have beheld, is 
 that City's aspect. The stones we gather here to 
 wear in necklace and ring, — jewels of brilliance and 
 rarity, — are that City's foundation walls. The pearl 
 we use as costly mounting for ornaments of luxury is 
 the fabric of its twelve-fold gates. The gold we hoard 
 as the symbol of value, or carefully work into objects 
 of most coveted art, is the very pavement of its streets. 
 
 Obviously we have got out of the region of broker's- 
 bonds, and land-speculator's measurements, and funeral 
 processions, and sick-beds and alms-houses and police 
 regulations, and of about everything with which we 
 are familiar. The sober volume of our devotions 
 is almost delirious in its rhapsodies. We are utterly 
 at a loss to run the line between what we call " real- 
 ity " and "unreality," the literal and the emblematic, 
 here. To say that all this vision of orient streets and 
 opalescent walls, and sunless skies, and days without 
 night, is actual matter-of-fact description, may, per- 
 haps, be absurdity ; but to say that it is symbol and 
 metaphor only, may be absurdity no less. The 
 literalistic spirit which goes through these pages in 
 the temper of an appraiser of an estate or auctioneer 
 of a choice lot of jewelry, may be, after all, very little 
 
26o REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 more out of the way than the spirit which says : 
 " Why this is figure and image, and nothing 
 more ! " I'd as soon take my chances of truth 
 and of happiness, too, with the man who expects to 
 drink from a literal " river " " proceeding out of the 
 throne of God," and to eat of the fruit of a literal 
 "tree of life" growing upon its banks; as to side 
 with the so-called spiritualizing interpreter who sub- 
 limates the " City of God " into the conception of 
 some bodiless and vaporlike society of incorporeal 
 beings ; or who makes the " wiping away of tears 
 from the eyes," and the "tabernacling of God with 
 men," only a condition of the soul. 
 
 And so of this vivid and wonderful phrase of our 
 text — telling of the temple of the New Jerusalem, 
 unto which the nations of the saved shall gather, — 
 " the Lamb is the light thereof." I do not dare to say 
 that is symbol and type alone. I read in those words, 
 "the glory of God did lighten it," an obvious refer- 
 ence, not to the abstract truth that God is glorious 
 everywhere, but to "the glory," the distinctive glory, 
 the Shechinah of His visible presence, when the 
 Temple on Zion's Hill was flooded and ablaze with the 
 light of His entrance there. I do not know, nor does 
 any one know, but that in the New Jerusalem there 
 may shine and burn before all gazing eyes, a like 
 symbol of the Ineffable Presence ; and that this may be 
 what is expressed, or one of the things which is ex- 
 pressed, when it is said : " And the Lamb is the light 
 thereof." 
 
 It will be seen, therefore, that I have no disposi- 
 tion to deny or even to diminish whatever of literal 
 significance may be set before us in this phrase : 
 
SERMONS. 261 
 
 "And the Lamb is the light thereof," if, — instead of 
 attempting any further to delineate what is confess- 
 edly so entirely a matter of Revelation alone, — I turn 
 your attention now to a moral truthfulness of this 
 Scripture phrase, which is, in any aspect of it, of 
 exceeding preciousness. " And the Lamb is the 
 light thereof." Christ the Light of Heaven ; that is 
 a truth which, whatever else this Scripture expresses, 
 is certainly expressed in it in the most vivid and 
 emphatic manner. 
 
 We are accustomed to speak of whatever makes 
 any portion of our life pleasant to us, as its light. 
 The light of our childhood, was it not for most of us, 
 the face of the dear mother whose love and patience 
 was the very sunshine in which we grew and by which 
 alone we seemed to live .-* The light of our home ; was it 
 not the wife or the child whose presence there made all 
 things radiant, and whose departure from us cast all 
 things into cloudiness and eclipse .'' The light on 
 some pathway of labor, was it not the great hope of an 
 honorable and useful success ; the zeal of a self-deny- 
 ing consecration to another's good, which shone like a 
 sunbeam on every step of that pathway, however dusty 
 and long .? 
 
 Ah, yes ! we all know perfectly, by a manifold 
 variety of familiar experiences, what the Lamp of 
 any abode, the Light of any portion of life is ! 
 
 And putting this utterance of Revelation on the 
 very lowest footing on which it can stand, it sets forth 
 this fact, surely, that the brightness and blessedness 
 of heaven is the presence and manifestation of Christ. 
 He is the centre of its pleasantness: "The lamp 
 thereof is the Lamb." 
 
262 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Now, my friends, although the full realization of this 
 fact is something we shall have to wait for till we get 
 over there, yet we have not to get there to know 
 something of it. There are things already known 
 which may teach us that it must be so. Far on this 
 side of the shining walls and the doors of pearl, — 
 while yet we -tread this old earth which bears so many 
 a mark of sin and suffering, — we may begin to see, 
 and see very clearly, too, that in that City to which 
 we go, "the Lamb is the light thereof." 
 
 I ask you to notice that one thing which gives us 
 this assurance, even apart from this sweet declaration 
 of Holy Writ, is the fact that of about all of whatever 
 is best we see around us in the world even now, it may 
 be said, "the Lamp thereof is the Lamb." 
 
 Take for example the Christian Church. Probably 
 we should all agree that one of the most benign insti- 
 tutions, regarded on the very lowest theory of its ori- 
 gin or its authority, which has ever existed among 
 men, is the institution known as the Church. It is a 
 confederacy existing in many lands and in many 
 forms. In outward aspect, and, to a considerable 
 extent, in its inward ordering and action, it is various 
 and diverse. What a history it has been, the history 
 of the Christian Church ! The Christian Church was 
 twelve men sitting round a table in an upper chamber. 
 The Christian Church was three thousand men pricked 
 to the heart, and baptized on the day of Pentecost. 
 The Church was the congregation and elders at Jeru- 
 salem. The Church was the household of Priscilla and 
 Aquila at Rome. The Church hid itself in subterranean 
 catacombs ; the Church ruled from the throne of the 
 Caesars ; the Church said, " Lord teach us to pray," 
 
SERMONS. 263 
 
 and learned, like a child, the formula : " Our Father 
 which art in heaven " : but, taught also of the Spirit, 
 the Church framed the Apostles' Creed, and wrote it 
 in a hundred languages, and lifted up its voice in the 
 majestic confessions of Nicaea, and Chalcedon, and 
 Trent, and Augsburg, and Heidelberg, and Dort, and 
 Westminster, and Savoy. The Church worshiped 
 once in the house of a soldier at Caesarea ; it wor- 
 shiped often in caves and dens of the earth ; it wor- 
 ships still in little cabins of turf or logs on frontier 
 missionary outposts of our own and of other lands ; 
 but it worships also, and has for century after century, 
 in the costliest edifices which human hands have ever 
 built ; and the architectural habitations of its prayers 
 have been made the chief wonders of the world. 
 
 Watching in behalf of individual souls, the Church 
 has reproved the erring, comforted the sorrowing, 
 spoken peace to the penitent, cheered the departing, 
 buried the dead. Rising to the height of her collect- 
 ive charge, the Church has instituted missions for the 
 christianization of nations, and put the sayings of the 
 prophet of Nazareth into the mother-speech of almost 
 every tribe that wears the shape of man. How various; 
 how diverse ; how multiform a thing, the Christian 
 Church ! 
 
 But of it all, what has been the Light ? Whether 
 looked at in the narrowest arena of its being, — as in 
 the twelve of the upper chamber, or the " two or three " 
 of the fulfilled promise met together in some Scotch 
 cave of the covenanters or mining camp of Dakota ; 
 or regarded in the hour of some great jubilee when the 
 vast cathedral trembles with Christmas or with Easter 
 strains, and the crowded aisles take up the burden of 
 
264 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 some universal confession of faith : " I believe in 
 Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost ; the Holy Cath- 
 olic Church ; the Communion of Saints ; the forgive- 
 ness of sins ; the resurrection of the body, and life 
 everlasting"; — in either case what, what alone, and 
 what equally, is the light thereof ? The light of it is 
 the Lamb ! It is just the realized presence and power 
 of the Christ of human redemption, which gives all the 
 joy, nay, all the significance, to the whole. Take Him 
 away and the light has fled. The Church, with all its 
 ministers, creeds, and buildings, is but the lantern 
 through which He shines. Take out the lamp, which 
 is the Christ, and you have left only a dull framework, 
 whose use has utterly departed. Not a soul of man 
 could such a vacated lantern guide amid the bogs and 
 pitfalls of this sinning world. Not a glint across the 
 dark river, except, within, there shines the Light of the 
 Lamb. 
 
 When we speak, therefore, of the Church, with 
 reverence for its history and gratitude for its work, — 
 and well may we speak of it thus, — let us remember 
 always, that what makes it thus an object of love and 
 loyalty is the Christ who is its light. From Him 
 comes its value. All its winsomeness and precious- 
 ness is His own. The lamp of it is the Lamb. 
 
 Similarly is it, — though I have not time to draw the 
 matter out in any detail, — in respect to that whole 
 grand movement pre-eminently characteristic of our 
 age of the world, which expresses itself in the mani- 
 fold forms of organized philanthropy. This might 
 well be called the Hospital period of mankind, or the 
 Orphan Asylum period, or the Emancipation period, 
 or the Free Education period, or the Compassion-for- 
 
SERMONS. 265 
 
 the-Poor period, were it not that no single name, how- 
 ever comprehensive, can express all the various aspects 
 of its many-handed philanthropy. We live in a time, 
 brightened, as no previous time the world has known 
 has ever been brightened, by the zealous and combined 
 endeavors of thousands to lessen human woe and to 
 enlarge human welfare. This is the Lamp of this age. 
 The very Light of the period in which we live,' is this 
 benigfn and radiant feature of it. It is not that this is 
 the age of railroads, and telegraphs, and electric lights, 
 and of floating palaces that throb from shore to shore, 
 with almost the regularity of pendulum beats, across 
 the Atlantic seas, that is the most eminent distinction of 
 our time. That primal distinction is that it is an age 
 of organized philanthropy. 
 
 But of this feature of our time, — the most lovely 
 thing in it, — what is the central light ? Of this bright- 
 ness what is the kindling flame ? The figure of Him 
 who walked Galilee's ways comforting the troubled, 
 healing the sick, and opening the eyes of the blind, is 
 again passing before us. In the person of those whom 
 His example inspires, He is with us in a new appear- 
 ing. Of all these manifold manifestations of human 
 brotherliness, and Christ-like sympathy of man with 
 man, it is only the literal truth to say : " The Lamb is 
 the light thereof." 
 
 But, turning from these outward matters, I ask you 
 to notice a more inward one, which shows even more 
 plainly still how it can be, nay, how it must be, that 
 Christ is the Light of Heaven. The thing which 
 teaches us this fact is this : — Christ is the Light of 
 whatever is best in personal experience. 
 
 The best experiences of these personal lives of ours, — 
 
266 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 what are they ? I am not about to disparage, my 
 friends, those great interests of our human histories 
 which fill so large a place in the lives of each one of 
 us, and which relate to the successes, the hopes, the 
 joys, and the gains of this busy world. Not one word 
 of depreciation am I to speak of the pleasantness of 
 consciously merited applause ; of the satisfaction of 
 honestly acquired wealth ; of the delight of realized 
 ambition ; or the zest of large and scholarlike intelli- 
 gence. Not a word in depreciation of youth's jocund 
 hours of buoyant health, and eager anticipation. Es- 
 pecially, not a word do I suggest in derogation of those 
 best experiences o life, which grow out of the sacred 
 relationship of home, — the love of parents ; the sweet 
 companionship of brothers and sisters ; the unity of 
 marriage ; the mysterious wonder of fatherhood and 
 motherhood ; the love and watch of infancy ; the joy 
 and care of lives that would not have been but for 
 your own. 
 
 Of all these experiences, which reach deep into the 
 soul, and which, — some of them, — take hold on about 
 the best there is of us, too, I have nothing to say, but 
 in recognition of the reality of them all, and of the pro- 
 found significance and worthiness of many of them as 
 well. How close to us do they some of them come ! 
 Into what depths of intensest emotion do they lead us 
 often ! A man who has had the blessing of an hon- 
 ored father and a gentle mother ; who has had a loving 
 wife and filial children ; who has had a reasonable 
 share of success in affairs, and is able, intelligently, to 
 read the books of Nature and of Man, has tasted about 
 as sweet a cup as this world can offer ; and, if having 
 them, he has lost them, about as bitter. 
 
SERMONS. 267 
 
 But close, keen, deep, and sweet as any of these 
 experiences are, sweeter, deeper, keener, closer to the 
 soul, is another experience possible to all, and actual 
 to thousands. It is the experience of Christ's forgiv- 
 ing love. It is the assurance which comes to a soul 
 convinced of sin, that its sin is washed away ; the con- 
 fidence that comes to a soul filled with the sense of 
 need, that all its needs can be supplied ; the gladness of 
 a friendless spirit that it has a Friend who will forsake 
 it never ; the peace of one harassed by burdened 
 memory and foreboding anticipation, at rest, now, in a 
 Saviour's embrace. 
 
 Ah, yes ! we touch an experience here, which makes 
 all others comparatively of small scope and importance. 
 The realization of Christ as a personal possession and 
 an eternal Life in the soul, is a Light by which all else 
 grows dim. When this Light shines there is not much 
 which can be dark. If the Lamp of one's life, as he 
 journeys onward, is the Lamb, he may go through a 
 very darksome pathway, and yet keep a firm and 
 forward-looking road. The presence of Christ can 
 dispense with a great part of what the world calls 
 "needful " beside. If He is in the soul, He makes up 
 for a hundred losses otherwise hard to bear. Sick- 
 ness is less difficult to endure, bereavement is easier 
 sustained, loss of property or of position is not so bit- 
 ter a stroke, age and decrepitude not so forlorn and 
 sad, if the Light in which the soul sits and waits is 
 the Light of Christ's presence. There is a true sense 
 even here that there is " no need of the sun, neither of 
 the moon " to lighten such a life. The sun of this 
 world's prosperity may "be darkened" and the moon 
 of earthly comforts may not " give her light," and the 
 
268 REVERKND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 very " stars " of things familiar and seeming necessary, 
 may " be shaken," but substantial quietude and wel- 
 fare cannot be taken away from the life, when the 
 Lamb is the Light thereof. 
 
 Now, my friends, if these things are true, — and 
 that they are true is witnessed to by the experience of 
 some of you before me, — if these things are true of this 
 realm of the temporal, where we now dwell, so far off 
 from the heaven where He dwells, how certainly and 
 in how much fuller a measure must they be true of 
 that place where He gathers His own, in His very 
 presence, and where they see Him face to face. If 
 now, and in this alien clime, Christ can be so much the 
 Lamp of one's being, not strange is it that there they 
 have " no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to 
 lighten it," for the " glory of God " is its brightness, 
 " and the Lamb is the Light thereof." Whatever else 
 there may be there of things answering to the Apos- 
 tle's vision of the golden floors, and the pearly gates, 
 and the walls of precious stones, and the river from 
 out the throne, and the tree of life with its healing 
 leaves, and the eyes in which there are no tears, and 
 the day which has no night, sure are we that the cen- 
 tral fact of that home of blessedness is the realized 
 presence and friendship of Christ ; and that the best 
 thing we can possibly know of the life we enter there, is 
 this, that the " Lamp thereof is the Lamb." 
 
 A natural, and I think a practical, suggestion now 
 arises that may well have its effect not only on a good 
 deal of the language that we use, but an effec|, also, on 
 the conduct of life. We all want to "go to heaven," 
 as we say. We all speak of heaven as an object of 
 forecast and desire. Very well. It is a good desire. 
 
SERMONS. 269 
 
 It is told of the worthies of Old Testament history as 
 a very distinguishing feature of their experience and a 
 very auspicious trait of their character, that they 
 desired the same thing. These all desired "abetter 
 country, that is, an heavenly," looked for it, greeted it 
 from afar, and " confessed that they were strangers 
 and pilgrims on the earth." Very well ! If we are 
 wise we shall do like them. We shall cultivate this 
 same longing for a country which is "better" ; and a 
 "city which hath foundations" that never will be 
 removed. 
 
 But, let us remember that we can not merely go to 
 heaven, we can bring heaven to us. The characteristic 
 feature of that place is that the light of it is the real- 
 ized presence and friendship of Christ ; and that is an 
 experience which can be translated into and made a 
 part of our present lives. 
 
 The most distinctive thing about heaven may become 
 a very distinctive thing about earth. The light in 
 which we expect to walk may be the light in which we 
 now walk. To an extent increasingly, and almost 
 without boundary, large, we may make the present life 
 a counterpart of the life to come. We may fit our- 
 selves here for that ; nay, we may do vastly more 
 than that, we may practice ourselves in it. We may 
 make it simply impossible that we land anywhere else 
 at last, than in that place for which we are fitted, by 
 longing, by assimilation, by conformity, by anticipatory, 
 but real, experience. Things go where they belong. 
 Men go to their "own place." The Christian soul 
 gravitates to heaven, as a pebble gravitates to the 
 earth's center. 
 
 And if we learn thus how to bring heaven to us by 
 
270 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 making the Lamp of our lives the Lamb, we shall 
 get a good deal of clearness on the best way to bless 
 and help this troubled world. O, the foolish and 
 crazy methods men sometimes try, — even earnest and 
 well-wishing men, — in the endeavor to right human 
 wrong and uplift human depression ! There is nothing 
 in the scope of all this universe which can so uplift a 
 down-trodden soul, and so right the wrongs of an in- 
 jured one, as to bring Christ into contact with it. The 
 true adjustment of the relations of man to man, of cap- 
 ital to labor, of wealth to poverty ; in short, the true 
 redress of all the disorders of society, attends on the 
 fuller illumination of these problems, not so much by 
 statesmanship as by Christianity, the study and treat- 
 ment of them in the light of the example and the spirit 
 of Christ. As fellow-workers in this blessed enter- 
 prise, let us come to the fountain both of knowledge 
 and of power ! We shall work better for our fellow-men 
 in proportion as we ourselves are filled with the life of 
 the Master. For our own sakes, for the sake of the 
 men whom we would help to better things here and to 
 come, let us seek to have it more and more true of the 
 lives we live, that "the Light thereof is the Lamb." 
 
V. 
 
 Dr. Lyman's Tribute at the Unveiling of a Com- 
 memorative Tablet in the First Church, 
 Hartford, January i}, 1901. 
 
DR. LYMAN S TRIBUTE. 
 
 273 
 
 From the Hartford Conrant of Jaiuiary i^, igoi : — 
 
 Tablets were unveiled at the First Church yester- 
 day morning in memory of Rev. Dr. George Leon 
 Walker and Rev. Dr. Charles M. Lamson, former pas- 
 tors of the church, both of whom are now dead. The 
 dedicatory sermon was preached by Rev, Dr. Albert 
 J. Lyman of Brooklyn. He took for his text i Cor- 
 inthians iii : 5, 6, and 8 : " Who then is Paul, and who 
 is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as 
 the Lord gave to every man } I have planted, Apollos 
 watered ; but God gave the increase. Now he that 
 planteth and he that watereth are one." 
 
 The preacher set forth with great clearness and 
 wealth of illustration the central thought of the text, 
 that the vital heart and effective power in the church 
 and its ministry is of God rather than of man. The 
 minister is the agent of a higher spiritual energy than 
 his own. In the temple, under which figure the 
 Church is symbolized, the shaping force from founda- 
 tion to finial is the spirit of Christ. Li the army, by 
 which type the Church is set forth, Christ is the real 
 captain. In the tilled field, to which the apostle com- 
 pares the Church in the text, Paul and Apollos are 
 only husbandmen, while the "increase" is of God. 
 
 Dr. Lyman then said : — 
 
 We render to-day a tribute to rare human genius. 
 Our eyes are wet as we recall the finished charm of 
 pastoral devotion, but above the genius and within the 
 
 1 8 
 
274 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 devotion we see the face and feel the touch of the Son 
 of God. And yet all the more because Christ so or- 
 dained the succession of these ministries, we do well 
 to honor them, to commemorate them, to crown those 
 living yonder, whom we sometimes call the dead. We 
 realize with a nameless thrill that the very power of 
 the Living Christ, invisible and immortal, was upon 
 them, and is among us still. We breathe the fragrance 
 of blooms that cannot fade. We feel the might of ar- 
 dors that cannot die. 
 
 By the pious and reverent affection of this church 
 and of personal friends, two tablets of bronze have 
 been prepared and are now offered and placed upon 
 the walls of this historic sanctuary, bearing the names 
 and inscribed to the honor of two pastors who, in suc- 
 cession, served this church, the former for thirteen 
 active years, the latter for five; so that ever your eyes 
 and those of your children shall see before them here 
 the revered and beloved names of George Leon Walker 
 and Charles Marion Lamson. 
 
 The nature of this occasion and its limitation of time 
 do not permit minute analysis of the record of the two 
 remarkable men whose life is thus outlined. But both 
 justice and love command that some word should be 
 spoken. May the present speaker set formalities aside 
 and out of his own heart lay his poor sprig of laurel 
 upon these tablets to-day. 
 
 Dr. Walker was my senior by fifteen years. Dr. 
 Lamson but two years older than myself. Dr. Walker 
 was the inspirer of my first efforts as a preacher when 
 he was pastor of the Center Church at New Haven, 
 and I a resident licentiate at the Divinity School. It 
 was he whose worn, tense, masterful face looked cour- 
 
DR. LYMAN S TRIBUTE. 
 
 275 
 
 age into my timid eyes when I tried my boyish first 
 sermon in his great pulpit. 
 
 Dr. Walker, great-grandson of a Revolutionary sol- 
 dier, eighth in descent from Richard Walker who set- 
 tled at Lynn, Mass., and fought in the early Indian 
 wars, was himself martial to the core — a soldier of the 
 Truth and of Faith, a true knight of God. Born to 
 physical disability and pain, he was also born to spir- 
 itual dauntlessness in spite of pain. He was a student 
 who steadily and victoriously measured his strength of 
 will against the bayonet's blade of insistent disease. 
 Weakened in frame, half blinded for a time by typhoid 
 fever, he climbed on his crutches the Mount Sion of 
 his vocation. A braver soul never breathed the New 
 England air. Just such a type of moral valor could 
 have been produced nowhere but in New England. 
 A sufferer always, yet always a wrestler, and always a 
 conqueror, the pain and the power over pain both en- 
 tered, like a kind of mingled iron and fire, into the very 
 texture of his thinking, driving all weakness out, burn- 
 ing all dross away — entered into his personal attitude, 
 his pulpit manner and message, entered into his ex- 
 traordinary mastery of vivid and sinewy phrase. One 
 looked at him as at no other man, reverently, through 
 tears. 
 
 cannot but regard him as one of the great pulpit 
 stylists of his time, though his style, as a minister's 
 should be, was more for the whole man in spok^ n 
 utterance, than for the merely written page, and I ^an 
 imagine the half-stern, half-smiling way in which he 
 would put aside all such comment upon style, when he 
 simply felt himself to be standing between Sinai and 
 Calvary to speak to the people. But the union in him 
 
276 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 of an intense, ancestral piety, and a classic sense of 
 perfection in literary form, together with this incessant 
 lash of suffering, and the heroic moral clench that con- 
 quers suffering, produced a unique and vital energy in 
 expression, a strange fascination, an indescribably sub- 
 duing note which I have never heard elsewhere, which 
 sought out your very soul's core and mastered you and 
 won you before you were aware. 
 
 With less of pain, there might have been more of 
 leisurely speculative range, certainly more of buoyancy, 
 but also probably less of spiritual vitality and subtle, 
 half-unearthly pathos. He came into New England 
 and the New England ministry by way of Horeb, the 
 Mount of God, and Gethsemane, the garden of tears 
 and the angels. One could not look at him and not 
 think of the Ten Commandments and the Eternal 
 Throne. When he spoke, you waited in spite of your- 
 self for some Sinaitic flash, and sooner or later it came. 
 He spoke his soul. I thought of him as of a moving 
 pillar, with something of the cloud by day and the fire 
 by night — a living incarnation, beyond almost any 
 other man I ever knew, of the reality and the mastery 
 of the Unseen. 
 
 You know his public service. Independent, cogent, 
 keen, and strong, he exerted a most powerful influence 
 upon current and critical discussions in our denomina- 
 tional life. He loved the heart of orthodoxy, yet loved 
 the freedom which alone gave to orthodoxy its ethical 
 value. He was a power in the church and in the land. 
 He was a wise counsellor as well as public leader, 
 touching nothing but to clarify it and strengthen it. 
 He was a very careful student, a lover of letters, a 
 lover of history. Through his local historical studies 
 
DR. LYMAN S TRIBUTE. 277 
 
 and monographs, he became identified more and more 
 with Hartford. 
 
 When he came to this church he instantly compre- 
 hended and mastered a critical and somewhat peril- 
 ous situation. He created a fresh alignment of church 
 and civil forces, launched the society upon a renewed 
 career, kindled a light in this pulpit which shone like a 
 torch, far and wide, and furthered renovations and 
 works of improvement in the neighboring environ- 
 ment, which, largely through the instrumentality of 
 the devoted hands of the women of the church and the 
 city, have been carried to a beautiful and complete 
 fulfillment. 
 
 At length, in June of '92, he was forced by stress of 
 ill health to resign his pastoral charge. He was at 
 once, by spontaneous insistence of church and society, 
 made pastor emeritus. In '96 came the stroke which 
 left his body helpless, but could no more touch the 
 glowing: and dauntless soul than the frost at the rim of 
 the fountain touches the springing splendor of the 
 fountain's jet. 
 
 New England has never seen a more nobly pathetic 
 picture than the emeritus pastorate of Dr. Walker. 
 Embosomed in a home devoted to him, in the midst of 
 a church and city that revered him, this gallant hero of 
 the Living God, deprived largely of physical power, 
 yet kept alive his eager and loving interest in his peo- 
 ple and in the interests of the Kingdom of Christ on 
 earth, and with his strange inner spiritual fire all un- 
 cooled, waited for death as for an old servant whom in 
 other days he had resolutely bidden to bide his time 
 until sunset, till his master's work was fully finished. 
 Then came the sunset gun, and this valiant knight of 
 
278 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 the New England pulpit smiled across and said his 
 " adsuni " and was ready. 
 
 " Nothing is here for tears, 
 Nothing to wail, to knock the breast, 
 No weakness, no contempt, dispraise or blame ; 
 Nothing but well and fair. 
 And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 
 
 T/ie Tablet. 
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D., 
 
 BORN 1830 — DIED 1900. 
 
 ORDAINED TO THE GOSPEL MINISTRY 
 
 1858. 
 
 PASTOR OF THE 
 
 STATE STREET CHURCH, PORTLAND, ME., 
 
 1858-1867. 
 
 PASTOR OF THE 
 
 FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, NEW HAVEN, CONN. 
 
 1 868-1 873. 
 
 ACTING PASTOR OF THE 
 CENTER CHURCH, BRATTLEBORO, VT., 
 1875-1878. 
 PASTOR OF THE 
 FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, HARTFORD, CONN., 
 1 879-1 892. 
 PASTOR EMERITUS 
 FROM 1892 UNTIL THE DAY OF HIS DEATH. 
 A SCHOLAR AMONG STUDENTS. 
 A COUNSELOR AMONG FRIENDS. 
 A LEADER AMONG ASSOCIATES. 
 A PREACHER OF COMMANDING POWER. 
 A CHRISTIAN OF CONSPICUOUS LIFE. 
 THIS TABLET IS PLACED BY THE PEOPLE OF 
 THIS CHURCH 
 WHOM HE SERVED AND BY WHOM HE WAS 
 REVERED. 
 
VI. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DR. WALKER'S PUB- 
 LICATIONS, EXCLUSIVE OF NEWSPAPER 
 ARTICLES.* 
 
 I. 
 
 The Material and the Spiritual in our National Life, and 
 Their Present Mutual Relations : a Sermon preached in State 
 Street Church. Portland, Nov. 24, 1859. 
 
 Portland, 1859, pp. 30. 
 
 II. 
 
 Anniversary Sermon before Y. M. C. A., in Seventh Annual 
 Report of the Portland Y. M. C. A. 
 
 Portland, 1860, pp. 13-28. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Offered National Regeneration : a Sermon preached in 
 the State Street Church, Portland, Sept. 26, 1861. 
 
 Portland, 1861, pp. 24. 
 
 IV. 
 
 What the Year Has Done for Us : a Sermon preached in the 
 State Street Church, Portland, Nov. 21, 1861. 
 
 Portland, 1861, pp. 16. 
 
 V. 
 
 Ministers and Their Households : a Sermon preached before 
 the Maine Congregational Charitable Society, etc., June 21, 1864. 
 
 Portland, 1864, pp. 12. 
 
 *Dr. Walker kept no list of his publications. The present Biblio- 
 graphy has, however, been compiled with a good deal of care and is 
 believed to be approximately complete. 
 
282 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Address : in " Annual Report presented by the Trustees of 
 the Massachusetts Bible Society, May 25, 1865." 
 
 Boston, 1865, pp. 16-22. 
 
 VII. 
 
 A Look Back and Before : Thanksgiving Sermon, Portland, 
 1865. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Sepulchre in the Garden. 
 
 Boston, 1866, pp. 31. 
 2d ed. Hartford, 1889, pp. 32. 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Present Times Foretold. 
 
 Yarmouth (no date), pp. 4. 
 
 X. 
 
 Charles Walker. A Memorial Sketch. Reprinted from the 
 Congregational Quarterly for July, 1871. 
 
 Boston, 1 87 1, pp. 21. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Sermon, in " Exercises at Dedication of the New Congrega- 
 tional Church, Manchester, Vt., Aug. 23, 1871." 
 
 Manchester, 1871, pp. 3-12. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Sermons preached in the First Church of Christ in Hartford 
 by Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D., LL.D., and Rev. George Leon 
 Walker, D.D., on the Occasion of the Settlement of the Latter in 
 the Ministry over that Church. (" The Church a Home.") 
 
 Hartford, 1879, pp. 19-36. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 A Just Balance and a Just Hin : a Sermon preached in First 
 Church, Hartford, April 11, 1880. 
 
 Hartford, 1880, pp. 17. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 283 
 
 XIV. 
 
 False Ideas of God : Three Sermons preached in the First 
 Church of Christ in Hartford. 
 
 Hartford, 1881, pp. 54. 
 
 XV. 
 
 Discourses by Rev. Prof. Edwin E. Johnson, D.D., and Rev. 
 George L. Walker, D.D., delivered in the Center Church, Hart- 
 ford, at the Seventy-first Anniversary of the Connecticut Bible 
 Society, May 3, 1881. 
 
 Hartford, 1881, pp. 9-16. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 A Sermon on the Death of President Garfield, preached in 
 the First Church of Hartford, Sept. 25, 1881. 
 
 Hartford, 1881, pp. 21. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Sermon Commemorative of Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon, 
 preached in the First Church, New Haven, Jan. 15, 1882, in 
 " Leonard Bacon: Pastor of the First Church in New Haven.'' 
 
 New Haven, 1882, pp. 167-186. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 The Young Men's Christian Association : an Address deliv- 
 ered in the First Church of Christ, Hartford, Nov. 2, 1882. 
 
 Hartford, 1882, pp. 12. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Historical Address, in " Commemorative Exercises of the 
 First Church of Christ in Hartford at its 250th Anniversary, 
 Oct. II and 12, .1883." 
 
 Hartford, 1883, pp. 37-99. 
 
 XX. 
 
 History of the First Church in Hartford, 1633 -1883. 
 
 Hartford, 1884, pp. xii, 503. 
 
284 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Middle Walls Broken Down : a Sermon preached before the 
 American Missionary Association at Salem, Oct. 21, 1884. 
 
 New York, 1884, pp. 8. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 Men and Women of the Church, an Address, in Congrega- 
 tional Church, Pittsford, Vt., " Centennial Observance." 
 
 Rutland, 1885, pp. 44-51. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 The Witness to the Founders' Faith : a Sermon before the 
 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at Bos- 
 ton, Oct. 13, 1885. 
 
 Boston, 1885, pp. 18. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 The First Church. In the " Memorial History of Hartford 
 County." 
 
 Boston, 1886, Vol. I : 277-287. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 Words of Comfort for the New Year, spoken in the First 
 Church of Christ in Hartford, Jan. i, 1888. 
 
 Hartford, 18S8, pp. 14. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 The Growth of the Kingdom : Address at Yale Theological 
 Anniversary, May 16, 1888. 
 
 New Haven, 1888, pp. 15. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 Things of Present Significance : a Sermon preached on the 
 Sixty-second Anniversary of the American Home Missionary 
 Society at Saratoga Springs, June 5, 1888. 
 
 New York, 1888, pp. 16. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 285 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 One Hundred and Seventeenth Anniversary Governor's Foot 
 Guard, Hartford, Conn., Oct. 19, 188S. Sermon. 
 
 Hartford, 1888, pp. 5-15. 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 Ten Years in the Life of a Church: a Sermon preached in 
 the First Church of Hartford, March 3, 1889. 
 
 Hartford, 1889, pp. 24. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 A Church's Thanksgiving : a Sermon preached in the First 
 Church in Hartford, Dec. i, 1889. 
 
 Hartford, 1889, pp. 30. 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 Our Father in Heaven : a Sermon preached in the First 
 Church in Hartford, Feb. 9, 1890. 
 
 Hartford, 1890, pp. 32. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 The Earth Teaches : a Sermon preached in the First Church 
 in Hartford, March 16, 1890. 
 
 Hartford, 1890, pp. 33. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 Tlie Open Door : a Sermon preached in the First Church in 
 Hartford, Sept. 28, 1S90. 
 
 Hartford, 1890, pp. 35. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 Thankfulness for Living Now : a Sermon preaclied in the 
 Finst Church in Hartford, Nov. 27, 1890. 
 
 Hartford, 1890, pp. 43. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 From Scrool^y to Plymoutli : a Sermon preached in tlie First 
 
 Church in Hartford, Dec. 21, 1890. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 40. 
 
286 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 All them that Sail with Thee : a Sermon preached in the 
 First Church in Hartford, Jan. ii. 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891. pp. 30. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 Our Humble Associates: a Sermon preached in the First 
 Church in Hartford, May 3, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 38. 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 As Much as in Me is : a Sermon preached in the P'irst Church 
 in Hartford, June 21, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 33. 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 Remembrances from the Hill Mizar: a Sermon preached in 
 the First Church in Hartford, Sept. 20, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 34. 
 
 XL. 
 
 God's Promises Conditional : a Sermon preached in the First 
 Church in Hartford, Nov. i, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 35. 
 
 XLI. 
 
 Our City's Welfare : a Sermon preached in the Urst Church 
 in Hartford, Nov. 8, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 35. 
 
 XLII. 
 
 Christian Consciousness : a Sermon preached in the First 
 Church in Hartford, Dec. 20, 1891. 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 36. 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 Thomas Hooker: Preacher, Founder, Democrat. 
 
 New York, 1891, pp. vii, 203. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 287 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 William Goodwin: In "The Goodwins of Hartford, Conn." 
 
 Hartford, 1891, pp. 75-94. 
 
 XLV. 
 
 The Perfected Life : a Sermon preached in the First Church 
 in Hartford. Nov. 13, 1S92. 
 
 Hartford, 1892, pp. 30. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 Francis Parkman : a Biographical and Critical Sketch. The 
 Nation. LVII : 365. 
 
 New York, 1893. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 Stephen Ambrose Walker: a Memorial Sketch. Privately 
 printed. 
 
 Hartford, 1893, pp. 33. 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 The Breadth, and Length, and Depth, and Height : a Ser- 
 mon preached in the First Church in Hartford, April 29, 1894. 
 
 Hartford, 1894, pp. 35. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 1 737-1 747? L)iary of Rev. Daniel Wadsworth, Seventh Pastor 
 of the First Church of Christ in Hartford, with Notes by the 
 Fourteenth Pastor. 
 
 Hartford, 1894, pp. 149. 
 
 L. 
 
 Brattleboro North End : in " Picturesque Brattleboro." 
 
 Northampton, 1894, pp. 70-S1. 
 
 LI. 
 He Careth for You : a Sermon preached in the First Church 
 in Hartford, April 21, 1895. 
 
 Hartford, 1895, pp. 32. 
 
288 REVEREND GEORGE LEON WALKER, D.D. 
 
 LII. 
 
 The Capture of Louisbourg : Address before the Connecticut 
 Society of Colonial Wars, May i, 1895. 
 
 New York, 1895, pp. 16. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 Town Loyalty : an Address at the Dedication of the Walker 
 Memorial Building, Pittsford, Vt., Sept. 11, 1895. 
 
 Hartford, 1895, pp. 9-24. 
 
 LIV. 
 
 The Old Hartford Burying-Ground : an Address before the 
 Ruth Wyllys Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution. 
 
 Hartford, 1895, pp. 32. 
 
 LV. 
 
 Some Aspects of the Religious Life of New England : Lec- 
 tures Delivered on the Carew Foundation before Hartford Theo- 
 logical Seminary in 1896. 
 
 Boston, 1897, pp. 208. 
 
Theoloqicil Semm.ify-Spee* 
 
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