LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. BV 4253 .M356 S4 1890 v. 3 McNeill, John, 1854-1933. Sermons Ss^v. ^=^*^ . /txman Preached in Regent Square Peesbyteeian Chuech, London, BY THE REV. JOHN MCNEILL. Text. — Ezekiel xxxvii. 1-14. The detail of the vision is given in the first ten verses. The spiritual counterpart, the spiritual analogue we have read in the verses from the 11th to 15th. This is a repre- sentation, says God, of the whole house of Israel, its then condition, and its prospect through the marvellous operation of His Word, and grace, and providence. I believe that still the vision has reference to the times and the prospects of God's Israel. Still they are a nation scattered and peeled ; still they are not reckoned among the organized, constituted peoples of the earth. And still from such a vision as this gleams of hope shine out as to what God will yet do for them, as to the way in which, manifestly and visibly, even as they have been scattered, so shall they be gathered together again and set up. But my main interest is to see what hope there is here for the condition presented by the whole Church of God in our own land and in our Vol. III.— No. 7. 98 PEOPHESYING TO DEY BONES. own time to-day. Let us turn to it with this thought, this wish, this prayer in our hearts. "We belong to Israel. We are concerned for her. The very despair mentioned — is it not the despair that sometimes rises over our own hearts as we look round and see all the blackness, and weak- ]iess, and misery, how far back we are, and how much is to be done? Do we not sometimes sigh, and say, ** Our bones are dry, our strength is completely withered, our hope is lost, vv^e are clean cut off " ? Let us turn to this vision. Let us assume things to be even at the very worst, Christianity as being worn out, played out, utterly extinct and extinguished as a practical force in the world. Well, even at the worst, were things as bad as this vision represented Israel to be, still let us see how from the very darkest night and deepest pit God's light shines in, and His power is displayed and glorified. " The hand of the Lord was upon me," the prophet said, **and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones." When you are dealing with Ezekiel, it is scarcely worth while to try to get a natural, or, as we might say, a rational explanation or groundwork for his vision. He is so much sid generis, so entirely of his own kind, that the material fabric of his clear dream and solemn vision can scarcely be estimated by us. As some say, it may be that when he with his countrymen was being carried away in the dreary captivity from Jerusalem to the river Chebar in Mesopo- tamia's open plain, they passed through some valley which not long before had been the scene and theatre of con- tending hosts as they fought in battle. No matter which side withdrew victorious from that field, the conqueror Death remained there more than conqueror. He claimed PEOPHESYING TO DRY BONES. 99 his thousands, tens of thousands, and their bones were allowed to lie and whiten in the sun. Perhaps the Israelites had passed some such place on their way to their long and dreary captivity ; and it may be that out of that the Spirit of God found some material basis for this vision and its meaning for Ezekiel. " The hand of the Lord was upon me," he says, ** and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about : and, behold, there were very many in the open valley ; and, lo, they tuere very dry." The first thing that occurs to me to say when I read this is that here the Spirit of God was careful to make the prophet Ezekiel to get the full idea — careful, accurate, just, most despairing and heart-breaking, of the sad condition of things as they actually were in Israel, and as they were before God's own eyes. My friends, how many of us are willing to be led by the hand of the Lord, and by the Spirit of the Lord, into the knowledge into which Ezekiel was led by that clear dream and solemn vision ? Is there not an optimism abroad which is too tranquil, and sunshiny, and hopeful, simply because it has never gone through London, North and South and East and West. It has never dared to face the dismal, damning facts of the situation as they actually are. Therefore it sings its little song; therefore it writes cheery little articles ; and therefore altogether its prophesying is so weak. It is not grounded and founded upon actual knowledge. What we need is to be brave enough and strong enough in the Lord and in the power of His might to walk about our Zion, to go on that dismal round on which Ezekiel went, and on which Nehemiah went. iOO PEOPHESYING TO DBY BONES. when he came back from his captivity, and saw, not in vision, but in reaUty, what this portrays — when he went by night " on stumbhng steed, with sobbing heart," b}^ the burnt gateways and the broken-down walls, and all the wreck and desolation of what had been fair Jerusalem. Before he began his work, he went and estimated what the work was, and what it required. Before the Lord gave to Ezekiel this vision of what He Himself yet would do. He prepared him for the work he had to do by first of all letting him see the true state of things. Have lue seen? What do we know ? Before we lift up our voices and begin somewhat vaguely and vainly to talk — or even before we begin to talk of God's great power in the Gospel, before we begin to sing great psalms and say great prayers — let us go out and see, see for ourselves. If we are true to God, it will not altogether break us down. It will break down our false con- fidence ; it will take away from us all mere over-enthusiasm and cheap cheering ; will deepen, and broaden, and solidify us, and cause us, above all things, to lay hold with both hands on the Lord God Almighty, for none but He will serve the awful problem of the hour. The Spirit of the Lord carried him abroad, caused him to pass by the valley, and to see north, south, east, and west, the whole scope and circumference of the need of his country and of his countrymen. And just when his heart was heaviest, just when all hope was going out of him, there came this voice, ** Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, Thou knowest." Now, if we, in attacking this problem, begin at the begin- ning, here is how we should be led. First of all, we must diagnose the case ; that is the first thing. Then come the prescriptions and remedies, if these can at all be found. PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. 101 So, if we would cease from man, and go and look at things through God's eyes as He leads us by His Word and by His Spirit, as He clarifies our vision, as He reveals to us the aicful havoc, the ghastliness, the misery of our time, it would not lead us to despair, but would lead us away from cheap and false and inadequate views of the disease, and therefore from cheap and false and inadequate views of what will remedy the disease. If we went on this plan, then we should be led substantially and essentially as Ezekiel was. Just when we would be pressed and overpressed beyond measure, out of bounds, then there would come to us, and there does come to us, as there came to Ezekiel, that question, "Son of man, can these bones live?" It is a challenge to us. Here we stand, and there is before us in vision what was before Ezekiel in the same way : all the sin, all the wretchedness, all the misery, all the helpless- ness. A mass of bones instead of a living, glorious, triumphant army. Let us come to the very worst. Let us admit the very worst. Suppose that the Church of Christ were reduced to this — a mass of helplessness hastening to final corruption, still, just at the worst, things begin to mend — and the mending element in Ezekiel's day, and in our day, and in every day, is this : God lives, God is here. Look up, look up ! before we begin in a fretful, feverish way even to work — to do what has almost become a technical phrase, " Christian work " — first of all listen to that voice that comes to you and me. Listen, O brother preacher. Sabbath - school teacher, elder. Israelite, burdened with the problem of to-day, listen, for God speaks. Son of man, yes, things are dark, dismal, desperate. Son of man, survey the misery. An appalling sight ! Can these bones live ? 102 PROPHESYING TO DEY BONES. What is to be our answer to this question ? There are two answers : there is an over-enthusiastic " Yes, praise God I Hallelujah ! " I think that I have heard that, it does not impress me ; it somewhat depresses me. And there is an over-despairing " No " ; it is hopeless, death reigns, hell is triumphant, Christianity is " played out." And we are not to say that either — neither the over- enthusiasfcic, nor the over-despondent. Ezekiel was a man of as big brain, and burning heart, and broad views as any of us, and the most that he could sa}^ will, I think, do for us ; at any rate, God will take it. It was neither the over-enthusiastic "Hallelujah ! " nor an over-despondeut sob of despair ; but it was this, just what I feel, what every preacher feels when he is face to face with the dry bones. In answer to the question, "Can these dry bones live?" looking at the bones I cannot say " Yes "; but looking at Thee, my questioner, I dare not say ** No." That will do ; just stand there. Stand there between God and the devil, between heaven and hell. Stand in the middle ; feel, see, understand the situation. And then, bless God, this is all He asks of you ; do not despond, do not despair. " Can these bones live? " Looking at the bones, " No "; looking at myself, ** No "; but looking at Him I dare not say " No." " O Lord God, Thou knowest." To bring this parable to a point here and now, I can imagine that there is some man sitting in the church. When 'you came in, friend, the very thought of your heart was this, " Preacher, if you knew how utterly averse I am to your evangelical religion ; if you knew what a B.D. I am (that means often bone-dry) — if you knew what a bone-dry I am towards God, towards Christ, towards salvation ; if you knew the absolutely little, the none-at-all of hankering PROrHESYING TO DEY BONES. 103 that I have after your Scriptural heaven, or fear that I have of your Scriptural hell ; why, man, your tongue would cleave to your jaw, and you would faint away from any attempt to preach your Gospel into my face." God knows, my friend, you have spoken just the thought of my heart as well as your own. Yes, I know that is just about the condition of the natural man. He is dead, fallen away from God — that is the condition of the formalist in religion, who has a name to live, but is dead. Never try to empty these awful Scriptural words of one ounce or atom of their tremendous meaning — dead, lost, cut off, dark. Can this be changed? " Lord God, Thou knowest." Hea.venly Father, mighty Saviour, blessed Spirit, some may say one way, some may say another. As for me, I will stand still and see the salvation of God. That is all He asks. "Again He said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus said the Lord God unto these bones." What a blessing it is that Ezekiel said so little as he did. I am afraid that a number of us — and even some of our wisest men, those of us who speak loudest and longest in con- ferences — would have had a great deal to say to the Almighty. We would almost have been His counsellors. We would have contradicted that Scripture in Isaiah : "With whom took He counsel, and who instructed Him, and taught Him knowledge, and taught Him judgment, and showed to Him the way of understanding," and of coping with the London problem — with the world's problem ; we should have forgotten ourselves; we should have waxed wise and eloquent. Ezekiel said nothing but just " Lord God, Thou knowest. I will stand, I will wait, I will 104 PROPHESYING TO DBT BONES. listen, I will be at Thy dictation." The problem of the hour demands the same from all our Church courts at this very moment — less talking. I do not speak scornfully, I speak sincerely — less talking and more listening. " Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus said the Lord God unto these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live : and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live ; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded : and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone." What a night it was for Ezekiel — if this came to him in the night time — when God by visions unseals the eyes of men, and teaches them the deep things of sin and of sal- vation. It was bad enough to see that valley full of rustling bones. It was bad enough to have that awful, probing question put to him, piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and proving a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Puncturing all the wind-bag in him, and bringing him by a round turn to a definite point. " Son of man, can these bones live?" That was hard enough ; but it grows harder still. " Son of man, thou hast answered well. Go on now ! Prophesy unto these bones, dry and white as they are. Stand over them, stand above them ; and against all sense and reason, with earth and hell laughing at you, say to them, " Behold, thus saith the Lord God, I will cause breath, sinew, bone, flesh to come unto you, and you shall stand upon your feet, and be a great army." PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. 105 Was not that a cross which Ezekiel had to bear? Did not that rather crucify his pride of intellect ? — and he was a man who had some intellect, and it almost always carries the pride with it. How would you have liked a night vision like that? It would have driven most of us mad, I am afraid. That is the prophet's cross yet, in London, and all over the earth — to stand in face of the world's sin and awful destitution — to stand in face of its spiritual death, and to utter over it what seem to be merely wild ecstatic incantations, prophesying to bones. But I ask the question, Is the Gospel, is the Word that we preach in God's name, an incantation, or an invocation and an inspiration ? Which ? There are brother ministers here : I ask you, as I ask myself, to stand where old Ezekiel stood, and see this vision. Let us feel it all, and let us remember that God is conducting us as He con- ducted him. This is no dream. This is daylight reality for us. Let us manfully bear the prophet's cross. Let us bear the prophet's reproach. Let us bear the prophet's scorn, as we must do. ^We seem to come to the problem of our time with about the weakest remedy that you could propose : words, words, words, breath, breath, breath. No wonder that men say, " Oh, why do you not give it up ? Why do you not stop preaching these words? Why do you not see that all through the ages it has been a mere incantation and hallucination, and the world has got steadily more rotten while you have been going on ? Do cease from the worship of God, and turn round to the service of man. Distribute blankets; give coals to the poor. Do something for the shivering bones to warm and cover them a little. It is idle, empty mockery, the preaching of the Gospel. Ezekiel, this 106 PEOPHESYING TO DRY BONES. vision is only the result of a disordered and disturbed imagination. How can you as a man, who tries to wear his head above his shoulders, prophesy to bones, and tell them to live ? " We must feel that to-day. It is out of this awful urgency and pressure that the Gospel flies as a bullet from a rifle. It is this pressure from above and beloiv — it is this that gives the Gospel force ; and what is wrong with us preachers to-day is that we have lost what Ezekiel would get that night. He never was greatly lacking it, but he would get it with ten- fold pith and vehemence — the power to utter words that are more than words — to preach and hurl himself along with his message. There is still in preaching the Gospel in any congregation the same seeming weirdness, and uncanniness, and mystery that we see when the prophet stands and prophesies unto the bones. Oh, for this vision ! Oh, to see it and to feel it ! How it would revive the preaching, my brethren ! How it would revive all of what we call, somewhat too easily, our " Christian work," to stand between the living and the dead, unable to go forward for death is there, unable to go back for God is behind us ! If you go back past Him, you go back to perdition. Have mercy, have pity upon preachers, especially those of us who realize the vision a little — what it is to preach, and where we stand when we are in front of you. Cry mightily to God to strengthen us, to stand between the living and the dead. "So I prophesied as I was commanded." Do not run over a single line here, but pause upon each. I cannot do it here, but do it for yourself when you go home. " So I prophesied as I was commanded ; and as I prophesied" — at first, oh, how dry his throat became. PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. 107 At first, oh, how hollow the echoes of his voice would be, as they came back upon his ear, resounding through the valley. How pithless, how hollow, how useless — **but, lo, as I prophesied there was a noise, and a shaking, and a rattling, and a creeping." Mystery upon mystery! Wonder upon wonder ! How intense becomes the interest of the vision. There is a shaking. Bones come together — bone to his bone. *' And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them." And you can imagine that his voice rose in prophesying. How he preached, how he testified, how he repeated and reiterated his message. •Hear the word of the Lord. ** Behold, I the Lord God will do all this, on you and for you." " And the skin covered them above." "But," says Ezeldel, "there was no breath in them." Well said, Ezekiel! This is a vision. In some sense there is something grotesque, something huge, something Titanic about it; but I can see that Ezekiel while glowing like a furnace is cool at the same time. He is not carried away by mere rapture and hallucination. His eye is bright, but it is not over bright. He is no visionary, although he is seeing a vision. He is no mere mutterer in a sleeping dream. His eyes are wide open, for he sees that "there was no breath in them." Again I say, well done, Ezekiel ! I imagine that if I had been there that line would not have been written, " but there was no breath in them." I am afraid that we preachers have not Ezekiel's keen vision. I am afraid we are put off by appear- ances as Ezekiel was not. Oh, how proud and glad he might have been as he saw that change coming over the spirit of his dream — as he saw the bones come together, bone to his bone, and the skin, and the flesh, and the muscle, and all the appearance of manhood, all the 108 PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. appearance of life ; but he had sense enough to avoid being deceived. In all the torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of pro- phetic ecstasy, there was this central calmness. No breath ; no life. You notice that it is not even the Spirit of God that says to him, ** Now, Ezekiel, they are not living yet." Ezekiel is here, seeing it, as it were, of and by himself. ** This is all very grand, but as yet there is virtually nothing done. There is no life." Now, how often we preachers are unlike Ezekiel. Let me repeat that, and come back to it. Sabbath-school teacher. Christian worker, man or woman, who is calling himself or herself a worker for God, and with God, in connection with the awful problem of sin and of salvation, have we got Ezekiel's sight of things? By the preaching of the Gospel, under our efforts, are things changing? This vision does not deny — and the actual facts of to-day do not deny that preaching can make a wonderful change. A man like Eze- kiel, a man of fiery speech, a man of poetic tempera- ment, a man of vivid imagination, a man who was in his preaching like one who had a lovely voice, and could play well upon an instrument — ah ! it tells. Empty churches fill when Ezekiel is prophesying. Empty benches are covered. Empty treasuries are filled with money when Ezekiel prophesies. The dreary, barren wood-yard, it may be, gives place to a large congregation just like this one. x\nd then, alas ! alas ! Heaven help us ! just at that stage the poor preacher has the wool pulled over his eyes, and he says, " What great success ! " What is success in connection with this prophesying, this testifying unto men, the old message, the Word of God, and God Himself in all His power ? What is success in connection with it? — filled pews? a well-organized church? Oh, let me dwell a little in connection with this vision on that thing called ''organization." How splendidly these bodies were organized, and yet with all their appear- ance and all their organization, what were they ? It PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. 109 reminds me of a memory as far back as I can go, the first time that I was ever in the chamber of death, when I heard the old gossips sHpping through the room whisper- ing to each other, " Did you ever see such a bonny corpse ! " Aye, some people can see beauty even in a corpse. With us, I am afraid, spiritually, it contents us if only we get you there in your ranked rows, if only we can use you to a certain extent, although it may need no single throb or pulse of real spiritual life. God help us, we are content, and we begin to talk about success, and achievement, and being triumphant. Not so did Ezekiel. He says — and we can almost see him shake his head, and you can almost see him stop his prophesying as he says, ** but there is no breath in them." I want the question to go round this congregation; it is the burden of my heart to-day. God knows that I am glad to see you in one sense. I am glad to see well-filled pews, so is every Ezekiel, so is every preacher, for while it is very, very difficult, and needs Almighty power to convert sinners, there is no converting the empty benches. You can make nothing of them. We are glad to see it ; but after all what does it mean ? Are you being quickened from the dead, my hearer ? Are you beholding a sight which you never saw before — the Lord God speaking over you, to heal you, and to help you, and change you? Are you only seeing me, and are you only hearing me ? That is a straight question ; it is a hard one for me, and it is a harder one for you. Let us all face the responsibility of it — for if we are only just to look as far forward as our eye sees — if there be not amongst us the power of God Almighty through the grace of His Son, quickening the dead, pulling you up where you sit out of your grave of lust, and worldliness, and covetousness, and flippancy, and frivolity, and formalism, then this church is a joy to the devil, and an offence to God : an organized hypocrisy. " There was no breath in them." Yes, preaching like 110 PEOPHESYING TO DRY BONES. Ezekiel's does perform a certain work. It does go a long way ; but no amount of preaching, no matter how earnest, does go far enough. This might be taken as an illustration of a wonderful word which you have in the Epistle to the Corinthians. God was in this. It was not in vain ; and Ezekiel was brought to this stand, this halt, not because the work had come to an end, not because despair was again to come down, but because God would have emphasized upon his heart and mind, and upon ourselves, that it is all of God, and we must not be misled or take any glory to ourselves, but give it all where all is due. " Howbeit," says the Apostle, ''that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." It may be that that might help us in this controversy as to the worth and result of foreign missions. It may be that we criticize too hastily, because men are not jumping at once into newness of spiritual life. Are they coming at all into connection with the Gospel ? Are they coming at all out of savagery and superstition into the order and organization of God's house and of God's worship ? " That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural," and afterwards the quickening touch, the breath from heaven. " Then He said unto me. Prophesy unto the v/ind, son of man" — or literally, prophesy unto the breath — "and say to the wind. Thus saith the Lord God ; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." Still dead, still slain. " So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army." Our time has gone ; but I must, as briefly as possible, just in one word, try to show how here you have all that wonderful story that we read from the chapter in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts ii.). You have to bring that in, to fill out and to supplement Ezekiel's PROPHESYING TO DRY BONES. Ill vision : " Prophesy unto the breath." Oh, there must be not only outward speaking to men the things of God, speaking them in God's name, speaking them in God's power ; but there must be speaking upward to himself — speaking outward and speaking upward, calling to you, and calling to Him, even the Holy Ghost, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. By these two sharp divisions in His work, God brought it in upon Ezekiel, and He brings it in upon you and me, that without Him we can do nothing. Let not our very success become our stumbling- block. Let that not lead us into deeper darkness, but all the more that we see a change coming, a wonderful change, a movement and commotion, stagnation breaking up, and some sign of life — then is the time to cry mightily to God the Holy Ghost, without whom no soul can draw a single breath of everlasting life. Oh, that was a splendid sight that opened on Ezekiel's mind, that viewless, but magni- ficent procession — shall I call it ? — or congression, from the four winds as there swooped down upon that scene of desola- tion the life-giving Spirit of Almighty God ! We are living in the midst of that very breath to-day. Why, then, is there not more life among us ? Ah ! surely, surely we need to come back to this. Surely, surely we need to rub our eyes and ask ourselves again and again. Have we as yet heard whether there be any holy breath — any Holy Spirit ? Do we believe Him ? Are we depending upon Him and His energy alone ? My words can pierce your ear, my words can go by a certain channel into your natural understand- ing of things ; but they are dull, they are heavy, they are weak. It needs the Spirit of God with all His keen, quick power to go into your heart, and awaken you up from your death to newness of life. Brother preachers, brother Christian workers, let us remember that preaching breath is vain unless there be along with it an equal and an adequate amount of praying breath for the Holy Spirit. 112 PKOPHESYING TO DBY BONES. The antithesis, the opposite of Death is Breath. There is One among us whose name isBeeath. Do we know Him? Are we giving Him honour and glory? Oh, that there may- be, at this very hour, as we are sitting here, seemingly so like the living, but perhaps so ghastly in our death — the breathing, the sweeping energy of the Holy Ghost ! May He breathe upon us, and in that breath may the bonds of death be loosed, and the heaving and throbbing of life begin ! **0 Spirit of the Lord, prepare All the round earth her God to meet ; Breathe Thou abroad like morning air, Till hearts of stone begin to beat." Now and again, from different quarters, some of my readers have gently reminded me that I speak " no little word " at the close of the sermon to my invisible audience. True; and perhaps because it has taken time to convince me that I had such a large (and increasing) company out- side the hallowed walls of Eegent Square. Let me make some amends now; and, as this sermon reaches you on Christmas Day, let me say that I pray for you all, and send to each of you my love in Christ at this glad and sacred Christmastide. Let your response be an earnest prayer that the Word spoken and printed may be blessed of God. Yours faithfully, John McNeill. Hcnd-irson & Spalding, Printers, 3 & 5, Maryleboue Lane, London, W, ^tQcni §qmxt f ul|rit. A HASTY MARCH FROM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. % Btxmmx Pbeached in Regent Square Presbyterian Church, ON Christmas Morning, 1890. REV, JOHN MCNEILL Text. — "And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let lis now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that is come to pass, which the Lord ha^ made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a" manger." — Luke ii. 15, 16. One or two obvious reflections from this old, old story. Surely there never were words more beautifully written than those in this second chapter of Luke's Gospel. Of course, with such a theme who would not be eloquent ? But here, although it is not poetry (it is only prose), yet with what matchless touches, with what skill and grace the Holy Spirit guided the thoughts and the pen of the man who wrote this chapter ! What delicate things are touched upon, and with what delicacy ! What a sense of greatness, gladness, and joy, and yet so quietly and calmly expressed ! There are traditional narratives as to the birth of Christ, and of the incidents connected therewith ; but the moment you lay them alongside Luke's story, you feel at once that they force themselves. They try to make things very eye-opening and wonderful ; they drag in all manner of things portentous ; but you shut out all these apocryphal and spurious records, and turn to this quiet, simple, matter- of-fact, and yet poetical, imaginative, and soul-subduing Vol. HI.— No. 8. il4 A HASTY MARCH FBOM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. way of putting it. We might almost have expected apocryphal and traditional records of this time. It is in human nature to hanker after, trying to put things better than God has put them; trying to get in more, and to know more than God has revealed ; trying to deal with an event like this in a superstitious rather than in a truly religious way ; trying to " Gild refined gold, and paint the lily, And throw a perfume on the violet ; Seeking with taper light the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish.'* But when we are taught of God, and led by His Word and Spirit, how often the written Word becomes wide, broad, and deep, filled with light and with heavenly music, while at the same time outwardly so bare, and bald, and matter-of-fact. "Let us go even now unto Bethlehem," said the shepherds, " and see this thing that is come to pass." They might have said, " But the vision is gone, the angels have vanished, the heavenly music has ceased." God had come to them in a most wonderful way, suddenly, when they were on that memorable night tending their flocks, with no sound round about them, save the bleating of the sheep now and again, the city six miles away in the distance, and all as calm and quiet as a field in the country can be in a midnight hour. Have you ever been out at midnight in the country? Let me ask you dwellers in the city, Do you know anything of this almost heavenly cjuiet and peace? Far from the hum, and roar, and the din, and the sin, and the smoke of cities, out in the quiet, out with God, and with God's works, in the quietness and harmony of God's own world. There they were, quietly sitti.iL', perhaps talking ; perhaps the devout among them, as rliey looked at the stars, talking about the great God, aud the great heaven; perhaps they were waiting for the " consolation of Israel," wondering when it would come to pass; quoting Old Testament Scriptures, quoting the same words as we have them, and A HASTY MARCH FEOM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM 115 wondering, ** Well, now, when is it to be ? " And perhaps, as they talked, one word would lead to another : desire would grow by what it fed on. Bringing one live coal to another the blaze would get up ; and so, as thus, " they that feared the Lord spake often one to another," the Lord was listening. He came nearer, and the wish in their heart was the offspring of the purpose of His own. The very geography, too, would be suggestive. They might be saying, ** Well, this Bethlehem, what a wonderful place ! " Perhaps they were shepherds, too, who tended the sheep for the Temple. The fields around a city even to-day are greatly occupied for the feeding of sheep for the supply of the city markets ; and at Bethlehem they were occupied for the feeding of the daily sacrifice of the Temple : so that the shepherds might have very likely a religious element in their work. They would be saying, '* Well, all around us is a wonderful country ; on these very fields David kept sheep ; on these very fields Jesse, before David, kept sheep ; here Euth had her wonderful history ; here Eachel died by the way." What sacred memories ! As I have often said, God never wastes Himself on nobodies, and maybe He revealed Himself to these men because, although poor, they were rich in faith — men of thought and emotion, of Bible knowledge and Bible hope. Well, suddenly, as they were thus talking together, the silence deepening round about them, the lights in the sky seemed to hang down on little chains of silver, and then the whole concave of heaven was dazzling with a heavenly light. There was glory all around. Voices were ringing in their ears : ** Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to men." If this glorious hght had just come out, and then faded into that of common night, the shepherds might have heaved a sigh, and wondered a thousand wonderings, but have sat still. But they were not ordinary shepherds, they were not ordinary men. They believed the wonderful word spoken to them about the birth of the Saviour, and they 116 A HASTY MARCH FROM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. exhorted each other, and said, '' Come, now, up; and let us go to Bethlehem and prove this thing; let us go and see this thing that has come to pass." Search the Bible all through, and wherever you come on God revealing Himself, you will always find that He does not tel) us everything, and He does not do everything for us. The most startling communica- tions of heaven to earth always leave us something to do ; we have to take to our feet, we have to arouse ourselves, we have a certain amount of faith to exercise. Even here, if there had been no faith, in vain had been the opening of heaven, and the multitude of angels, and the annunciation of Christ's arrival. Is it not so still? How often we preachers, we Gospel shepherds, have to exhort each other and to exhort our people to prove the heavenly vision ! Come, let us go and see if all that is said by prophet and preacher is true ; let us find it out beyond a doubt ; let us give ourselves no rest until we have seen " this thing that is come to pass." Do I speak to any soul this Christmas morning who has not seen ** the thing that is come to pass " ? It is perfectly possible. Alas ! alas ! round about us in London here, the multitudes who in some dim, dumb, numb way understand that God is near, that heaven has opened, that the Son of God has come, but they have stopped there ; they have never proved it for themselves. They have kept by the keeping of the sheep. They have said, " We are too busy, we cannot leave, we will just sit and wait." How many people are waiting thus for Him, and saying, " If it is to be, it will be ; it will drop down into our laps." My dear unsaved one — for I would like to preach the Gospel this morning, it is the justification of our gathering — it will never come that way. You have to leave even legitimate work, and it does not seem a safe thing to tell a shepherd to leave his sheep ; but there are some things which, if you leave, the Lord will look after while you are away. If the shepherd leaves his sheep to go and see this thing which is come to pass, the multitude of angels can surely look after his fleecy charge A HASTY MARCH FROM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. 117 for an hour or two. How many in London have never taken that step ; they have not gone to look for Christ until they have seen Him with the eyes of their own hearts, until, like Simeon, they have held the blessed Babe in their own arms, and have been made to feel, '* Now let the end come, let me depart in peace, for ' Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.'" Come, now, let us exhort each other to leave the things of time, to leave for a little every care and every charge beneath the skies, that we may ''see this thing that is come to pass," and worship and bov7 down before the Lord " And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger." What had come to pass? Christ had been born. How quietly God does His great works ! It is thought that Luke got some of the details from Mary. He has more detail than the others, because he got it from the maiden -mother herself. As some one has said, mothers are the natural historians of the child's infancy ; and it was only the mother, and the mother like Mary, who would tell us so much, and would keep back so much more. If Mary had been other than the great soul she was, how she could have dilated and gratified mere gaping curiosity, and have told us things that would not after all bring Christ any nearer, and would not make the event either a bit more heavenly or human than it is. But there is the gentle concealing in the midst of the revealing; there is the hfting and yet the dropping of the veil. How unlike to the magical, weird stories, the traveller's tales, with which superstition has overloaded this sweet idyll of Christ's nativity. " This shall be a sign unto you : Ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling-clothes, lying in a manger." How unheralded, in one way, how unattended ! Did not I say, a little ago, that whenever God speaks, no matter how clearly, faith is needed ; for faith is reason stiblimed to its highest reach and its loftiest height. What an anticlimax it seemed to be to the heavenly message, "This shall be 118 A HASTY MAECH FROM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. the sign to you": Go, and you shall find Him in a manger, among the stamping, champing cattle. They might have said, "Ah! there is some hallucination. It savours of some wild, visionary impressions and imaginations, that our great and glorious King, v^ho should be born in a royal palace, should appear in this mean, poverty-stricken way." Yet they must have had true faith to go and take this for their sign ; not going with lofty heads, but heads down earthwards, like men looking for something that God has laid pretty low down. Oh ! again I would like to preach Christ to you. Some of us have not found Jesus because we are looking too high. *' Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend? and say not in thine heart. Who shall descend?" We require neither great soaring thoughts of imaginative power, nor do we need great depth and profundity. *' The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart." The Bairn is lying at your feet ; the Saviour is at your door ; you will stumble over Him into destruction if you go on. Do not look high, nor deep, nor far off; but look close, look down — there He is ! And they went away to Bethlehem w^ith this faith in their hearts, and by an unerring instinct it led them to Jesus. If they had gone adding something to the angel's message, they never had arrived there yet — if they had not taken the sign and held on to the sign. *' What we are looking for," they said, *' is a Babe in a manger, wrapped in swaddling- clothes " — hastily done. No fine dresses ready in a score of drawers, and nurses all round about, as when babes are born in our houses; but this suddenness, this almost un- readiness. But angels were there, and God was there, and God is preaching "o us that the barest is enough for Him. Now, do not look too high or too low, nor too far away, but take hold of the sign and do not lose it ; and by this sign conquer all difficulties, and arrive at Christ always. A lowly heart and a literal obedience, Eemember the word, add thou not to His words, "lest He reprove thee, and A HASTY MAECH FllOM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. 119 thou be found a liar unto Him." Take not away from His words, for that is another way of blasphemy ; but simply, as God has spoken from heaven, so believe, and so it shall come to pass. " As we have heard, so have we seen," in the Word, in Providence, in our own experience of salva- tion, and by-and-bye in the city of our God. A little farther on we read, " And the shepherds returned, glorify- ing and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them." There never was anything like the Gospel for the expectation being equalled by the realization. You notice that word I quoted from the Psalms ; it is a word of profound significance in all spiritual things, " As we have heard, so have we seen." The shepherds would say that afterwards ; when they talked about it they would say, "As the angels, yea, as the Lord told us, so we saw ; we went to Bethlehem to see this thing, and the thing we saw just as had been said. We neither added to it nor took from it, we took it as we got it, and it led us to Jesus." It is the same in all interpretation of Scripture and interpretation of Providence, in my own life and in yours, and it will be the same in heaven. When we step inside and see the Lord on His throne, we shall say, "As we have heard, so have we seen, in the earthly and heavenly Bethlehem, the exact glorious accomplishment and fulfilment." How quietly, I say again, Christ was born. Is it not an illustration of the text, " The kingdom of God cometh not wdth observation"? It was late in the evening. Mary and Joseph had come a four days' journey. Other people, swifter of foot, passed on ahead of them, but for reasons we all know dear Mary's step was somewhat heavy, and Joseph and she arrived late. All the places of entertainment were full, this was the only corner that was left, and Mary just got there in time w^hen this wonderful thing happened. A few pangs and pains, keener or lesser anguish, we do not know, and lo, the Saviour of the world was born ! No heralding, no kings or mighty men or women there. Is 120 A HASTY MARCH FROM THE FIELDS TO BETHLEHEM. it not SO with all spiritual birth? Christ '* cometh not with observation." One day, never to be forgotten through all eternity, your pains came upon you, more or less keen, but severe or quiet, it does not matter — a few anxieties, greater or less, longer or shorter in their duration, and Christ ivas horn in you, the hope of glory ! It had come, it had happened, what many a time you wished for, and thought and hoped would come, but never dreamed that it would come in this quiet way. You were thinking that Christ would come to you in some far more striking and wonderful way, but He never came. Ah ! it is a striking illustration and parallel — after a few hours or days, I do not know how long or short it may be, some longer, some shorter, but always the same blessed end, we find ourselves when faith comes "painless and at peace," and the Christ of God, like a glowing coal, lying at our heart, and we bending over Him, as a mother over her first- born. '' My Jesus, my Saviour, my Life, my Lord, my heaven has come " — I am saved. I have found Jesus. He has found me. He is mine and I am His. And just as quietly as that first birth, so God in Christ always comes to these hearts of ours. Now, I only wanted to make a few obvious reflections, and not to go into anything like a sermon ; and it is exactly twelve o'clock. The Lord bless to us all our short service this Christmas morning. Even one short hour (with only a five- and-twenty minutes' sermon) is ample time to take us from the fields of our earthly toil to Bethlehem. In the Master's name, I wish you a Happy Christmas, and may some soul find the Lord at Bethlehem this morning. For the Babe of Bethlehem is also Christ on the Cross, and the Lord upon the Throne. Who would reject a babe ? Come, my hearer, pick up this Heavenly Foundling, and give Him room in heart and home. Let the Cradle as well as the Cross •• abolish the enmity." Amen. Henderson & S^aldikg, Printers, i, 5 and 5, JNIarylebone Lane, London, W. jlegent gqiiaa Jitl|rit. "LAUNCHING OUT," "LETTING DOWN," AND "LEAVING ALL." Preached in Regent Square Presbyterian Church, ON Sabbath Morning, January 4th, 1891. REV. JOHN MCNEILL Text — "Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." — Luke v. 4. This morning, then, in thought and fancy our Lord begins with us in a most pleasant scene ; — a lovely scene to Him, and for His sake, also, a lovely scene to us — the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Having learnt McCheyne's softly-flow- ing lines in early youth (lines which in his Memoir are headed, ** Sea of Galilee, 16 July, 1839 "), one can scarcely refrain from repeating them here. They are an excellent commentary on Dean Stanley's saying that " this is the most sacred sheet of water that the earth contains." *' How pleasant to mo thy deep blue wave, Sea of Galilee ! For the glorious One who came to save Hath often stood by tlico. ** Fair are the lakes in the land I love Where pine and heather grow But thou hast loveliness far above What nature can bestow. Vol. III.— No. 9. 122 " LAUNCHING OUT," " LETTING DOWN," " It is not that the wild gazelle Comes down to drink thy tide ; But He that was pierced to save from h-ell Oft wandered by thy side. " Graceful around thee the mountains meet, Thou calm reposing sea ; But ah ! far more the beautiful feet Of Jesus walked o'er thee." Then our author thinks of how, on its shores, in the villages and towns round about, our Saviour preached the Gospel, did His wonderful works, spake His words of grace, and uttered His awful threatenings : " Thou, Capernaum, exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell ; " and again, " Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, Beth- aaida ! " Surely every faithful minister will share McCheyne's feelings : — " Tell me, ye mouldering fragments, tell, Was the Saviour's city here ? Lifted to Heaven, has it sunk to hell. With none to shed a tear ? '* Ah ! would my flock from thee might learn How days of grace will flee; How all an offered Christ who spurn Shall mourn at last, like thee. " Oh ! give me, Lord, by this sacred wave, 'Threefold,' Thy love divine, Tliat I may feed, till I find my grave, Thy flock — both Thine and mine. " Well, such is the scenery, and such the associated thoughts that surround our subject this morning. Doesn't it touch our hearts, our imagination, and help to bring the Lord and this old time near to us ? But let us come to our subject. " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." You remember what our Lord had been doing. He had been teaching the people out of AND " LEAVING ALL." 123 that boat, and, after His sermon was ended (it is not recorded), He seems at once to have remembered the forlorn state of His followers, the depression they were in. As Simon Peter afterwards told Him, they had toiled all night for nothing. It was scarcely worth while ; He knew already. True, Ho likes us to bring to Him our requests — "In every thing by prayer and suppHcation with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God " — but we can never tell Him news ; He always knows already. He needeth not that any should tell Him, for He knows what is in man, and He knows what man is in. So, thinking of His followers and their forlorn condition. He asked Peter to "liaunch out into the deep, and let down the nets for a draught." Here is a new command. It was so to them ; it is so to us. It required them to stretch themselves, and to find new faith and new obedience in this new-found Lord and Saviour may it do to us to-day. Let it be our motto for the fir Sabbath of the new year : " Launch out into the deep." It could easily have been objected to. Simon was an experienced fisherman, and might have said, " But, Lord, we have toiled through the night, and the night is the orthodox, customary, traditional, proper time to catch fish. The other fishermen will laugh at us if they see us fishing through the day." But the Lord knows better even about catching fish than we do, and we must let Him "domineer" everywhere, and at all times and seasons. Our own wisdom, and our own past experience, whether of a joyful or sorrowful kind, has sometimes to be well-nigh forgotten, if we are to stand to attention, ready for orders. " As the eyes of a handmaid are towards her mistress, so do our souls wait upon thee, O Lord." All the newness, all the fresh- 124 " LAUNCHING OUT," *' LETTING DOWN, ness, all hope of revival is there. It is not in us, or in any new plans we can excogitate and try. Get Him aboard the boat, watch the look of His eye, listen to the sound of His voice, be guided by Him, and we will always be having revivals, and renewings, and refreshings. In the midst of work as common as catching fish there will be surprises. "Behold," He says to us, as He steps on board our boat — "Behold, I make all things new." " Launch out into the deep." Be done with your in- shore fishing, and your little faith, and your walking by sight, and let down your nets for a draught. Oh, if there is anything the Church of God still needs, it is what the disciples got that morning by the lake- shore. What had they made of it ? " Master, we have toiled all night, and have caught nothing." A grand combination — night and nothing. That is where we are come to. It is a familiar road with us — night and nothing; a dismal pair. Nothing and nothing make nothing; but when Christ puts Himself at the head of these two nothings, as the integer, there is 100 ; there is cent, per cent, of profit for our toil. Night and nothing — morning and the Master, morning and the miracle, morning and the overflowing fulness. O Jesus, Master, whose we are, come to all these poor fishing-boats, fishing over these waters of London by the hundred and the thou- sand, toiling and moiling and getting cold and wet and weary and disappointed ; a very, very small take, if any at all. Come, blessed Lord, step aboard, take charge, order us to the right and left, make the biggest of us mere deck- hands. Let the Great Master's voice ring from stem to stern on every ship, " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." No masters, no heutenants, no officers, no *' orders of clergy," everybody just a deck- AND " LEAVING ALL." 126 hand to pull ropes aud shoot nets when He comes. When the Lord's away, oh we play fine games ! We divide the boat into the officers' quarters and the forecastle, and we walk majestically upon the poop, some of us, and spend a great deal of time discussing the different places and positions, and the rules and regulations ; — how far my command is to go, and where it is to stop, and on what chalk line your command begins. But when Christ comes, when the Lord causes His glorious voice to be heard, then — silence ! the Master is come. Shortly after I " came on duty," one raw, bitter morning, at a ticket collecting station, a heavy special train came in. The engine - driver jerked his thumb mysteriously over his shoulder as he drifted past, and the front guard, jumping off, said, " Now, lads, look alive, the su;peri7ite?idcnt's aboard / " Ah ! what an electric shock that gave us all. Tor to us at that distant station he was only a name. And now our work must be done under his very eye ! For there he was, ** the great unknown," actually out on our platform. Would to God 01. ^ text might give us that stimulus, that thrilling sense of the Lord's Commanding Presence in our very midst ! " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." Into the deei). I have indicated already that, for the most part, this fishing was done during the night, and most likely in-shore. This command was a tax on " com- mon sense," as well as a tax on their faith aud obedience. Peter might well have spoken. He did at times take the Lord fearfully in hand — speak back to Him and speak down to Him. I wonder that here he did not go wrong in the same way. It was a great strain on a fisherman to go in broad daylight and revolutionize the whole business, or rather 126 "LAUNCHING OUT," "LETTING DOWN," revolutionize and expand it. Isn't He Baying to us to-day, ♦' Launch out into the deep " ? You have been keeping too close in shore, so that if rough weather came, you could save you lives and hastily scurry back to dry land. Isn't it so very much with the Church of God ? We do not like to launch out ; when the waters get deep and dark and the shore distant, ah ! then we get nervous and timid. Now, the Lord wants us away from the shore, to get us into the deep, where we must either go by faith or quit the business. We need to give up our thoughts and past experiences, and look to Him and trust Him impUcitly. It is grand when the Church of Christ, when the individual believer, gets in this sense into deep waters and out of shallows. "Those that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, they see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep ; " but those of us who are always paddling by little creeks and bays do not see the wonders. Why, I thought I had seen and known a little about the sea ; but a friend who has travelled all over the world and back again, who has dwelt on the mighty waters, told me things the other day in my own house that made me fairly " turn " inwardly with envy. I felt myself to be a mere landlubber or " longshoreman," who doesn't know anything, who is a pretender, in fact, as he told me about great seas, tempests, and icebergs, and astonishing effects of sea, and cloud, and sky. What an education it is when Christ takes us out into the deep water where we are "off soundings," and must, like little children, trust Him altogether. Have you got into the depths of the promise, my friend? Have you got into the depths of the meanings of God's Word ? Have you got into the unexplored depths that lie AND '* LEAVING ALL." 127 to faith and experience in Christ's person, and character, and work ? Then look up to Him this morning and say, * ' Lord, take me out with Thee upon the great deep. Take me farther down and in, away from the land and its tameness. Let me know the fascinations, the mystery, and miracle that are out upon the great deep with Thee." "Launch out upon the deep." And there are deeps — God's Word, God's grace, God's service, God's Christ — why, we only know the shore and the shallows, we poor shrimpers ! Oh that we might this year get to know far more than ever we have known of the depths, the riches, the immensity, the endless surprise ! We shalljbe a little staggered as we feel how frail we are, and how great and mighty is the deep of the Divine will for us and by us. ** Each thought of Thine, a deep it is." The Breton fisherman's prayer may well come into our hearts as we feel the swell beneath us of the immensity of God's love, and God's purpose, and God's promise : " Lord have mercy upon me ; my boat is so little, and Thy sea is so great." Oh, to get out, and down, and in! When we lads were learning to swim, we never would have known that we could really swim, or how much we could swim, unless we had got courageous enough to "launch out." For always when we went in, we went in shallow water; and as we got deeper and deeper, and saw the bottom getting dimmer and dimmer, we kept within our depth, so that if we got scared we could at once put down our feet and stand. I never should have known if I had stopped at that what swimming was, and that on one memorable day I should slog through some three miles of rough open sea. I never would have known that, if it had not been that one day I 128 ** LAUNCHING OUT," " LETTING DOWN," got tired of trifling, and took my boat and went away out where the water was three times deeper than that roof is, and flung myself in. Then I proved that I could swim ; no chance of getting your feet on the bottom there. I had got past all former experiences and calculations. So it is with God's Church, with God's servants, with all God's people. There is more, there is deeper ; and faith is not rashness, faith is not extravagance. Faith discovers that it does not drown when it gets beyond its depth and off its feet. No, bless God, His grace and promise become " a river to swim in, a sea that cannot be passed over." Oh to feel the lift of the brimming ocean when you are swimming — what an exhilaration ! Oh to know the same also in our own experience of the Word and grace of our inexhaustible Redeemer ! We have belittled the whole concern of faith and work for far too long. " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." You remember how Simon obeyed the command : with a big " Nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net." Well, he might have done it better ; but, after all, it is a blessed thing when we do obey the Lord. We may even question or suggest doubts as we do it, but the grand thing is to go. Whether we go gladly, or go somewhat reluctantly and critically, bless God if we go. Still, Simon Peter might have spared himself this sentence, and let down the net, either in silence, or substituting "Hallelujah " for " Never- theless." He might have spared all his wind for working; but he thought it right to say something. It was an occasion, he seems to have thought, for just gently reminding the Lord that " I — I — I know a little about this business of fishing, and if there should be a failure, I shall have something to say later on." Was he AND " LEAVING ALL." 129 giving "notice of motion," I wonder, or quietly recording his protest, as the wise brethren do when something new is proposed in the Presbytery? '* It is due to my know- ledge and past experience that I should not, silently at any rate, and without caveat, agree to this new departure." ** Lord, if it were any other person than Thyself ! But see- ing that it is Thee, I am not the man to stand in the way. Come, let us have them out." Well done, Peter! although it might have been better done. Peter is a going man. When the Lord is there, and the Lord speaks, well, it may be hard for flesh and blood to bear, and it may be strange and new, and many objections could be raised, ** But I will go ; at Thy word I will let down the net." Let us do what Simon Peter did, but let us do it more implicitly. No " nevertheless." Altogether, it would be better for us not to be so saving and cautious, so anxious not to commit ourselves, so that we shall be free to say if a failure should set in, " I told you so." Oh, if there had ! Oh dear me, if the fish had not come, what a mighty man Simon would have been! "Now, that is just what I was going to say, but you — you were so posi- tive. To start this business at this time ! We never did it before. I am sure I never agreed with it all along." And too much of that spirit may prevent the Lord from doing His work. If He sees we are hedging too much, and want to safeguard our reputation as wise men, rather than risk it to honour Him, and save souls, then — " According to our faith, or faithlessness, be it unto us." We cannot deceive Him. " Nay, but thou didst laugh," He says sharply to us, even although He still gives us the blessing, at the promise of which our "wisdom" smiled incredulously — like the grinning fool it is I 130 •' LAUNCHING OUT," " LETTING DOWN,'* Now, I do not want to be severe on anybody but myself, but to all of us Simon Peter here is both an example and a warning. Take care, let your words be few, and let your actions be prompt and whole-hearted. He might well have turned round and said, '* Peter, you don't mean to say you ever thought of doing anything else ? You don't mean to say there is any virtue or merit in doing this new thing AT My wobd ? " At His word the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. At His word the light came, and the heavens were studded thick with stars. "Thus saith the Lord" could lift old Ocean from its bed, and make the hills forsake their ancient seats. " At Thy word we will let down the net. And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes ; and their net," literally, in the Greek, " was at the bursting." So, then, what we are all calling for, times of enlargement, times of success, times of blessing, we might have at any moment, if we would only believe and obey. The revivals are all lying there in the Word. The Lord has made Himself over to us. Add all the New Testament to this miracle, and see how the Lord has made Himself over to His Church and people, and has said to us, over and over again, " Ye are not straitened in Me : ye are straitened in yourselves. According to your faith be it unto you." " When they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes." It is the hardest thing in the world for flesh and blood to hear Christ and obey Him ; but when He is heard and obeyed, the result is always as here. The programme was, " Launch out into the deep with Me. Let Me be skipper this time. Try fishing on My plan." And the result was what He had anticipated — AND " LEAVING ALL." 131 a draught. " They inclosed a great multitude of fishes, WHEN THEY HAD THIS DONE " — uevei' before. When they looked at Him, and He at them, when He commanded, and they obeyed — cause and effect in the spiritual world, 1 had almost said, is more certain, is more discoverable, than in the natural, — " they inclosed a great multitude of fishes, and their net was at the bursting." Ah! that Sea of Galilee, is it not like this London ? Among its other wonders it had this one : it teemed with fish. And there were, at this very time, thousands of vessels on that lake, a piece of water only twelve miles long by five broad. Now, is it not like London? What a seething sea of humanity this is ! And yet there are boats out fishing for souls, and, just like Simon Peter and his partners, toiling all night and catching nothing. There is nothing more uncertain than success in catching fish — nothing except success in catching men. There were multitudes all round about, as these men knew ; the lake teemed with fish, but they could not catch one. And that is just it ; if we go out either to catch fish or men, we need Divine power and blessing. So He comes to us to-day. Now, Sabbath-school teacher, preacher, Bible-class teacher, launch out into the deep this year. In simple faith let down your nets for fish where you let them down before, and failed before. Last Sabbath you sighed and said, " I will give up this mission ; I will give up preaching ; I will give up the Sabbath school ; I will give up Chequer Alley." Our friends there signifi- cantly have re-baptized that work " Hope Mission," instead of the old chequered name. And there is a lesson for us. Give things even new names ; call your work ** Hope Mission," for there is to be a draught, "jl will not give up, 132 " LAUNCHING OUT, ** LETTING DOWN, but I will go back to-day with Christ, and, looking to Him, I shall do the old routine work in a new spirit. If it is to be according to my faith, then here goes! I am surely going to have faith that something is going to come of my teaching." What a Saviour we have ! He has power everywhere, in the spiritual as well as in the material world. I remember in the place where I was brought up there was a bridge over a burn, and how often we lads, with our primitive fishing-rod, and primitive string, ai.d primitive hook — a bent pin — used to lean over that bridge and watch the fish during lovely summer days. Of course, we could not possibly catch them. It was too clear. They are as wide awake as you are, perhaps more so. But we used to bend over and look at them. See that big fellow there, lying stem and stern up and down stream ! And in a minute, in the sixtieth part of a minute— look ! he is here, there, everywhere. What a hundred directions a fish can go in in less time than you can calculate, and yet never ^ never go near your halt. Ah ! how often those who are trying to catch men, to save souls, feel there is much meaning in the expression, " as uncertain, as tricky, as slippery as a fish." Men go in flocks to certain kinds of places; flocking to theatres, flocking to public-houses, flocking to race-courses, flocking to business, to births, weddings, or burials, to all sorts of ** cried gatherings," but the House of God where the Gospel is preached. They are all round about us, and we never catching one ! My God, it is not to be ! It will never do for London, or anywhere else. Give us souls, or we die ! Success ! let me see it. True, the ' Lord does sometimes try our faith, and makes us toil for nothing, but He does not stop at that. It is to bring us AND " liEAVINQ ALL." 133 away from ourselves, and make our weariness, and failure, and disappointment cause us to look round for the living God. There He is in our midst, and in a moment, by His word and blessing, when it is sought, and His word obeyed, weariness gives place to rejoicing, and emptiness to overflowing fulness. May it be so in all the London Fleet. " Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." He has power ; He can control that most incon- trollable quantity in God's universe — the heart and will of a sinner. He can bring men to us, and through us, to Him- self ; and He will do so, when His Church lets Him by her obedience and faith, *' And they beckoned unto their partners, which were in the other ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled both ships, so that they began to sink." I can barely touch on this; but oh, that Begent Square might be filled with anxious souls, that we should need to call in this Baptist brother here, round the corner, and this big Government trawler, the Episcopal Church, at the other corner, to bear a hand in securing the take. For we are partners. In Christ, we are all one body ; we are all in one service and all doing the same work. Let us enlarge our hearts and widen our thoughts, and from this day and forward, wherever we find the name of Christ named, and souls being saved, form ourselves into a grand Evangelical Alliance. They beckoned to the partners who were in the other boat, and they came and they got filled too. Depend upon it, the best way to bring the Churches together is to have a grand ingathering of souls, anywhere. We shall get united then and there, as far as union is worth anything. It's a grand thing when the heap of fish sinks every difference out of sight. The Lord put "the boats" 134 " LAUNCHING OUT," ** LETTING DOWN," out of our sight. We see them and their bareness far too much. To change the figure, when the prodigal comes home, we begin to make merry. " When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me ; for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Simon is not an easy man to measure or reckon at times. Sometimes he is extremely small, and sometimes he is very big. He is sometimes a mere thirty-three and a quarter inches, enough for this degenerate British Army ; but other times, a full forty-two round the heart. This was not little- ness in Simon, it was greatness ; a grand state, after all, to be in. There is a state below this, as Trench beautifully points out, a state that knows itself a sinner, and knows He is the Saviour, but is utterly callous and indifferent. There is a state above it, and this is where I want you to be at the Communion Table this morning. The state that knows its sin, deep, desperate awful sin, but so loves the Saviour that fear is utterly cast out. In a little, with this Bread and Cup in our hands, we will be saying, " I am a sinful man, O Lord " ; but by these tokens our fears are charmed away, and we would rise into the high degree of confident love that says, " He loved me, He gave Himself for me." He did not mean the Lord to depart; of course he didn't. He really meant the Lord to come. Don't you see, when the Lord comes near and blesses us, what a blesssing we get? How we are broken downwards and upwards also. How all the old state is rent, and torn, and deepened, and bottomed, and widened ; and that is what we need. Oh, we are as timid as timid can be ! We think we know about catching fish, and about the Lord, and what prayer is, and what pleading the promises is ; but we do not know any- thing as we might know it, and as by grace we must and AND *' LEAVING ALL." 135 shall know this year. If Christ shall only come, sin shall be black, damned, foul, unspeakable. My sin, yours, my fellow-elder, yours and mine, our iniquities, our corruptions will make us say to Christ, "Thou art too pure; stand back and leave us to our shame and misery." And then the other feeling, " No, no, Christ is so great. His love so boundless. His atoning work so splendid and glorious, that there is no fear; sinner as I am, broken, useless, empty though I be. He speaketh to me, and smileth on me, on me He lavisheth His love." I tell you it will never do to stop at the past ; it will never do in this world, and we must get rid of it to-day. For he was astonished at the multitude of fishes that were taken, Remember, that was a fisherman astonished at a big take of fish. It was not a landlubber who never saw fish coming out of the sea. A man like Peter had often seen takes, and often seen big takes ; but when he saw this, he saw the Lord in it as he never did before. That the Lord should fill his woven willows, that the Lord Himself, after a night of disappointment, should break out upon him, not in judgment, but in mercy, that broke Peter's heart in twain, and then healed it ! May we get that experience, for oh, your preacher needs it, and you need it: that Christ should come to-day as though it were the beginning of days, and make us in the midst of our oldness altogether new. He was astonished, I say. Some of us should be, my hearers. I would not deal with this too spiritually. Has God blessed you temporally ? Look at that great ghttering heap ; look at your piles of wealth. Your efforts ? No, look you, God has multiplied and increased you on every side during past years. Now, stand with the heap before you and tell me, 136 "launching out," "letting down," etc. Who did it ? Who brought it there ? Who gave it to you ? Instead of emptiness, and leanness, and poverty, and distress, He gave to you heaps upon heaps, good measure, pressed down, running over. Down on your knees, I charge you, and say, " I am a sinful man. By Thy mercies, unmerited and undeserved, I see my guilt as never before. Lord, Thou hast killed me with kindness." And then Peter tumbled into the same net as the fish were in, and the Lord got them all. That is the end of it. He was fishing for the fishermen, and He is always doing that. If He is blessing your business, if He is blessing your family, it is to get you ; it is you He wants. He is calling you thus to leave all, that you may find your all in Him. In some cases He brings us to Himself by sorrow and distress, and in other cases He brings us by overflowing goodness. The goodness of the Lord at last makes us break out in penitence, and prayer, and consecration to His service. Now, to-day we are coming to His Table. I invite you altogether; and if you may not come to the Table, you are welcome to stop and look on. Drink only with your eyes; but through them, in faith, enjoy the riches that Christ has brought us. And as you enjoy them pour out your soul before Him, and say to Him, " Master, I will follow Thee. Master, I will be Thine, I will be altogether Thine; for Thou hast so blessed me that I cannot live without Thee. Not on Thy gifts even will I look, but on the pierced hand from which they all come. To be in fellowship with Thee is to be blessed for evermore." Amen. Henderson S: Spalding, Printers, i, 3 and s, Marylebone Lane, London, W. ^t%tnt §qmxt f ulpit THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. Preached in Eegent Square Presbyterian Church, ON Sabbath Morning, January 11th, 1891. BY THE REV. JOHN MCNEILL. Text — Mark ix. from the 14th verse. Evidently it would not have been good for some people if Peter's word on the Mount of Transfiguration could have been fulfilled. " Master," he said, ''it is good for us to be here ; and let us build three tabernacles." There was some selfishness in it, I rather think. Away up there in the inidst of the heavenly glory, it was sweet, selfishly sweet, to forget the fever, and the fretting, and the groaning in the sinful world beneath. But Peter's wish was not obeyed. The Master left the glory. The vision faded. He came with His disciples back again into this weary, sin-stained,, distracted world. Ah ! surely the Lord would have us learn here something of His infinite condescension. The brightness of the heavenly glory on the mountain-top is brought into such swift and sudden contact with the sin and wretchedness at the mountain's foot. How true must Vol. III.— No. 10. 138 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPmiT. be the compassion, how strong and real the love of our God, as seen in Christ Jesus, for the sons of men when He came back again ! Think you how through the night our Lord had been up near heaven. If He had only lifted His foot and made a kind of long step, he would have been off and away ! Here, on the summit of this heaven-kissing hill — if that expression can be applied to any eminence in this world — He was surely near home. Another step, and He could have been in, as I have said. Another step, and He could have saved Himself the agony of the Cross — a word of such meaning to Him as we shall never be able fully to understand. How great His compassion that He came back again ! I don't suppose many people are coming back from warm, genial, sunny climes, from the South of France, or from Madeira, for example, to London just now. You write and tell your friends about the fog, and frost, and bursting pipes, the abounding distress and disease, and I do not think they will come here by the first boat. Now, Jesus, on that mountain-top, met with His Father, and Moses, and Elias ; the first society of heaven was round about Him again ; and I tell you it is a marvel He came back. We don't half thank Him. We look on it as a matter of fact. " Of course He came down ! " Let us never forget He was human, and when He was near heaven might there not have been a strong inclination just to run in, when He was so near. Yet back He came, back into the fog, back into the foul smell, back into the coldness, back into the groans^ and cares, and tears, back into the THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 139 -contradiction of sinners against Himself, back into a world that was sawing the wood and getting ready the nails and hammers that were to fasten Him to the cruel Cross. Surely His delights are with the sons of men. We do not pace step by step along with Him, and try to get into His very heart — the great human-Divine heart of His — or we would love Him better than we do, and help Him more faithfully. In the midst of all the trouble and toil of time we would be glad that we have daily opportunities for walking even as He walked ; the very sin and wretched- ness continually opening up ready occasions for the exer- cise of the spirit of Christ. Our heaven, like His, will keep, while we are accomplishing our allotted task. You remember the scene which the Gospel narrative brings before us. The Scribes and other gainsayers had got the disciples into a difficulty. This man with his lunatic boy has come to the "remnant" of the band. They were bereft of Jesus, and of the "three mighties"; and a small and feeble fragment they felt themselves to be. Still, they were Christ's disciples, and they ought to have had power. He gave power to the whole twelve over this form of evil. More than that, the seventy on their mission had power to cast out devils. This, then, wasn't a new, unfore- seen, or untried difficulty. But they were dispirited, pushed into a corner. Their condition and surroundings make that vivid and immortal picture by Raphael. The Scribes coining crushing round them, the exulting looks on the faces of the enemy, the distressed father and "possessed " boy, the cowed, puzzled, distracted look on the faces of the 140 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. disciplefi. How heartless it is! The Church of Christ is still so beset. Still, anybody can pelt us with questions we cannot answer. It is the easiest thing in the world to look at human nature and society, then point to the Church of Christ, and say, ** Where is your power? Ye be triflers, ye be liars. Ye say ye can cure, and look — look at the East End, and the West End ! Look at human nature everywhere after eighteen centuries of yoiir Christianty ! " It is easy for sceptics to hurl objections, but they seem to forget that we have one way, at least, oi turning the tables. He forgets, our friend the enemy, that here is a problem for all of us. This man, with the lunatic lad, belongs to you, friend, as much as to me. This is a man, a member of the human race, of our own blood. We are all afflicted in his affliction ; and the part of humanity, not to speak of higher considerations at all, ought to be this : that if the Church of Christ has no power, then, so far from a spirit of triumph being shown because she has failed, all men ought to be in deeper distress ; for what looked to be, at one time, a kindly light, has sputtered a while, and then gone out. Who of us is not suffering from the oppression of the devil ? Not one ; not a heart, not a home, not a soul in all God's world. And yet, so subtle is his working, so does he deceive, not ignorant people, but so can he deceive the Scribes, and huckster the Huxley s, that they actually gather round the Church with a look of triumph upon their faces : " Ye are baffled ! Hurrah ! The Church is beaten ! Glory! This Jesus is neither Prince nor Saviour I Ha ! ha I The THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SBIKIT. 141 pulpit has lost its power ! Oh, happy day ! " If it doesn't mean that, what does it mean ? God pity them ! forgetting it was their own sorrow and heart-break, as well as that of the father and the badgered disciples. Oh, what a scene this is ! It was all filled with devil ! The devil in the son, the devil of doubt in the father, the devil of malignant criti- cism in the Scribes, and the devil of unbelief in the disciples' hearts. As London streets and squares, north, south, east, and west, can get packed full of fog till you cannot see an arm's length, and human homes and hearts are as though they were not ; so this world has got full of the mist, and malaria, and miasma from the pit. It has crept up and spread till the stench of it is in every nostril, and the con- tagion of it is creeping like a fog through all the passages and chambers of the soul. I say again, this poor father and son ought to have been the burden of every human being who came within sight or sound of them. " And Jesus asked the Scribes, What question ye with them ? And one of the multitude answered and said. Master, I have brought unto Thee my son, which hath a damb spirit." And he described his affliction. I like that. Let broken hearts tell their own tale. We will have no theorizing and no speculating, if you please, about sin. But let sinful men and women, afflicted and plagued in them- selves, in their families, and beloved friends, stand up and tell their tale. It is rather striking and encouraging that, when the Lord puts the question, "What's the trouble? What's it all about ? " the Scribes did not speak, and the disciples did not speak, but a broken-hearted, white-faced 142 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. trembling man in the crowd says, " Here ! It's this lad of mine." That's right ; speak out, you ! You with the broken heart, speak out. You with the drunken wife, speak out. You with the unclean heart, speak out. It is you we want to hear ; not arguings, and abstractions, and wordy strifes. These men and women know what they are talking about, for sin and the devil to them are awful butchering realities. " See my bleeding breast. See my ruined family — as if a bombshell had landed in the very heart of my home, and scattered death and destruction everywhere." That is the voice God wants to hear, that is the voice Jesus wants to hear — the voice of agony and distress, the voice of reality. For this trouble is real. It is not working up a case, it is not much ado about nothing. There is no getting over stubborn facts ; sin is here, and it is an awful reality; it is no philosophical abstraction, it is a fearful blight in human flesh, in human hearts, in human homes, in a world that God has made. " Jesus answered him, and said, faithless generation, how long shall I be with you ? how long shall I suffer you ? bring him unto Me." There is a mingling here of Pain and Power. I have been talking about the father's grief and the lad, and our own griefs : there is a keener and a deeper. All our sorrow was meeting already on the heart of Christ. " Do not limit to three days the sorrows that redeemed the world." Here already He is bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows. But the deepest pang in His pain is the unbelief, the faithlessness. And, alas ! what are we saying and doing to free Him from that pang to-day? ** O THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 143 faithless generation " — He meant this for His whole time and circumstance, and He applies it to us to-day, for far too forceful is the application still — " How long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?" His was — shall I call it grief, or shall I call it anger, or shall I call it a mingling of both — the anger of a loving heart, the anger that strives with tears, the anger of one who loves to bless us, but is roused by our " thrawnness," by our almost invincible ignorance ? You remember Coleridge's lines : — " To he angry with one we love Dotli work like madness on the brain." *' Judgment ! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason." " faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? — that is the Pain. ** Bring him unto Me " — that is the Power. Or, the one is the angry glare of the lightning across the darkened heaven ; the other, the descending rain upon the thirsty land. "Bring him unto Me." " And they brought him unto Him : and when he saw Him, straightway the spirit tare him ; and he fell on the ground, foaming." You have also the description, in the 18th verse, '* He foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away." Again, in the 22nd verse, " And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters to destroy him." The idea that comes to one here is this : the tyranny of sin. I am thinking of those violent forms of sin that we see all round about us — roaring drunkenness, destroying lust. Ah ! we are apt to turn away from these awful sins 144 THE BOY WITH TEE DUMB AND DEAF SPIKIT. with a feeling of loathsomeness. But let me remind you of the tyranny of sin — of that stage to which any of us might come but for constraining and restraining grace. Oh, the men and women in London to-day who are, like this lad, harried by the devil ! He has mounted them, he has got the reins in his fist, got the spurs on his heels, got the whip in his hand, and " Now ! now ! now ! To hell with you ! " Into the fire ! Into the water I What for ? To destroy him ! That is sin, in you, in me, in the world everywhere. Not a thing, again I say, that you can philosophize about ; but a Jack-the-Eipper among us here, mad, staring, satanic ; more than human ; roots in it that we cannot reach or understand. Oh the tyranny of sin! Am I speaking to any poor soul here lashed with his lusts, mastered by sin ? Dear soul, I pity you ; from the depths of my soul, I pity you. If a touch of Christ's own compassion was only given to us to-day, with what changed eyes we should look upon those who are "possessed." How our hearts would break out at our eyes in floods of tears as we thought not only of their own share, that was the procuring cause of this last state, but, now the stage of possession has come, at their helplessness. There is a man you know, and you get angry with him, and say, *' I thought he was going to change. I thought we had sobered him up. I thought his last outburst would cure him. For it was dreadful. He drank, and drank ; he spent all ; he pawned his wife's clothes as well as his own ; took the boots off the children's feet, and the clothes of their bed, for drink. And I thought that would cure him." And the same thing happened again last week. And you begin to get tired of him. God pity him ! He is driven ; you do not know, I do not know, none but Christ THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 145 knows, how that man turns aside to weep scalding tears — tears that come down the cheeks like vitriol, scoring furrows as they descend. He sees it all ; he knows it all ; he sees what he is doing, he knows what is ahead of him. But the awful thought through it all is, "I will be back again when the dram shops open, even on the blessed Sabbath day." " When I awake I will seek it yet again." '* More -drink ! more lust !" at the back of a storm of tears, and of fierce denunciation of himself for being a brute ! And he is not a brute ; he is a man driven by the devil. Oh, my God ! we are fearfully and wonderfully made ! 'Tis an awful event when a soul is born. For a human heart is so made that it cannot fill itself, and it will either be filled with God or the enemy. It is not sufficient to itself. It must be filled with the seven devils, or the seven spirits of the Holy God. These are lurid places in the Bible, but they are revealing places. Every wise man will stand in the light of them, and bare his own bosom, and let the light stream in. "If Thou canst do anything, have compassion upon us, and help us." That is how to pray. He bound himself with his child. So did the Syro-Phoenician mother when her opportunity came: "Have mercy upon us." And there was only herself standing there. " Have mercy upon us; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil." "Have compassion on us, and help us," said the father. Sabbath- school teacher, preacher, in this sense, make common cause with the sinner. Take that wild lad, take that dangerously giddy girl, take that drunkard, take that harlot, on your very heart in before the throne of grace. Say, ''Have mercy upon lis. My brother, my daughter, my son is grievously vexed with a devil." The cold prayer that rises, either from a pulpit or any Christian worker's lips, about sin and 146 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. sinners in general, never reaches Christ's ear, nor touches His heart. But it is this that tells : ** Lord, that man's trouble is my trouble. Lord, that man's desolation grieves my heart also. Have compassion on us, and help us." And that will come round. Aye, it will come round. Christ's grace will so spread and so leaven, that His disciples hearts will widen. We shall not always need to be told the A, B, C of the tale of the good Samaritan. We will by - and - bye pick it up and work it out instinc- tively. The woes of the East End shall be grievously felt by the wealthy in the West ; and the woes on the Continent shall be as close to us as our own native-born English troubles. The grievances of the poor, harried people in Darkest Africa shall tell on our hearts, and bring to Christ's ears our warm prayers, as if they were our own sons, and daughters, and kinsfolk, and acquaintances. The devil is going to overdo it ; and, instead of tearing us apart, his very virulence, through the grace of Christ, is going to bind us together. We will make common cause by-and- bye. God grant it may be this year as never before. We shall see that a common devil destroys us ; and we shall come together in a common, unanimous throb of prayer that shall rise at once from all around the earth. " Have pity, have compassion upon us, for mankind is clinging to our skirts, and we are coming with ourselves and them before Thy mercy-seat. And thus shall the whole round world everywhere be bound with gold chains about the feet of God." That is how to pray. Something like that. We ought to be done with the coldness, and the distance, and the abstraction, and to take the full burden. Try it to-day, dear Sabbath- school teacher. Try it all through the week, you who are troubled with that drunken neighbour — try it THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 147 after this fashion : make his trouble and misery your own^ and then ** bring him unto Me." " Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe : help Thou mine unbelief." We have got to know now that always our Lord is seeking to open up the avenue of faith in our hearts, along which the blessing may come. But here it gets an emphasis again. ** If Thou canst," said the father. But Jesus restated the problem : " No, no. There is an ' if,' but the ' if ' is not with Me, but with you." Even in this awful scene, where sin assumes its most malig- nant and most heart-breaking form this lad possessed from a child, a case in which the problem is hardest for a good and benevolent God, Jesus is unabashed, undismayed, un- disturbed. He stands at the very centre of this moral cyclone calm and cool, quiet and self-possessed, and in a. moment notices the wrong way in which the case is stated when the cry comes, " If Thou canst do anything." He is quick as lightning: "But if thou canst." He puts back the " if " into its true place. He shows where the knot is on the string. It is with us. There is an " if," but, thank God, it is not on His side. All things are possible to Him, and He says faith so allies us with Him that we become part of Him — the expansion of Divine omnipotence right into the region where the devil's power is reigning in the human heart. Then can we believe ? Am I speaking to any poor sinner now ? The Lord urges you to believe, my friend. Don't say you can't. Sin is wrecking you, although not openly, before the eyes of the world, perhaps ; but you are con- scious that sin is spoiling you, creeping farther and farther 148 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIBIT. into you. Can you believe in Christ ? House yourself to trust Him. " Oh," say so many, " I have prayed. I have heard the Gospel. I have done this thing, and that thifig, and the other thing, and I am no better yet." My friend, you have not done it. Eouse thyself ; call upon thy soul. Hearty faith, living faith, is what is wanted — no mere name of the thing. You don't beheve, you don't grip, you don't hold, you don't hang ; for Christ has the power to cure you and me, and faith is the medium of the blessing, and there is no other. What is hindering the blessing ? for Christ has come in greater power than this ; Christ has died, yea, rather has risen again. He is even now at the right hand of power. If thou canst beheve, O church, individual ! Why is there no water in the pipes of some of our houses just now ? It is not because London has not a water-supply. It is not because the streets are not threaded all through their length from the great reservoirs with a perfect system of piping. It is not that the system of piping does not go right into every house. Then why do I turn the tap in vain in my house, and you in yours ? Because there is a block of ice in the pipe ; because, as we are all saying, *' It is frozen." Why is the blessing not leaping and laughing like bubbling water through London's humanity ? It is not because the great ocean and fountain of fulness is not there. It is not because the links of communication between Divine fulness and our emptiness are not formed. Christ as there, and His Church is here, and all the channels, and tubes, and pipes of prayer, and promise, and supplication are there. What is wrong ? There is ice in the pipe, that is what is wrong. The frost has come on our hearts, that is what is wrong. We do not pray — we are frozen — that THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 149 is what is wrong. How much did you pray last week ? How much did we plead, and ask the Lord last week to relieve at particular definite spots London's dam- nation ? "This kind goeth not forth but by prayer." He will bring you to your knees ; but it is hard to do it. The trouble even for Almightiness is to get the individual and whole Church on its knees. Believing prayer; that is illustrated and called for by what He said to the father, and afterwards what He said to the disciples. I believe we are entitled to put away the word " fasting." It is a gloss, and should not be there. Christ says, '* There is no trick about it. There is no secret about it. This kind goeth not forth but by prayer." Some things you can heal with human sympathy. Some things you can cure, along lower planes. Kindly counsel, loving hearts, the warm shake of the hand, the gentle kiss by a woman upon another woman's cheek, may win, and woo, and heal, and cure some things. Coals, and boots, and blankets, and medicines may do a great deal in their own way. Total abstinence, if it can be adopted, may build up certain weaknesses ; but the last result, the real heart of the trouble, to get out the devil and to get in God and real health, health for the heart, that needs laying hold nakedly of the arm of the Lord, asking point-blank for what you want, and seeing that you get it. "Straightway the father cried out with tears, and said. Lord, I believe : help Thou mine unbelief." Now, dear Sabbath-school teacher, do not stand between your children and the blessing. Preacher, do not stand between the Lord and your congregation, Christian worker, do not be a frozen pipe with a block of ice in the heart of it. But be 150 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. open. Live in communion with God. " In everything by prayer and supphcation with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to Him ; " and then, when you pull the cord of prayer, the streams of blessing will descend on you and yours. "Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief. When Jesus saw that the people came running together. He rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him : and he was as one dead ; insomuch that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up ; and he arose." He always does that. You and I never knew a day of happiness until Jesus took us by the hand. True, it was not done by an Incarnate Saviour, as here. It was not just literally done like this; but the eternal day will show that every soul in Eegent Square that was ever redeemed from the power of the devil and the ruin of an unclean heart was taken in hand, by the hand that gripped the lunatic lad. " Took him by the hand." Blessed Saviour, we love Thee. That is the gospel in the Gospel : not only the word, but the grip — the personal grasp of a personal Eedeemer. Again, I say, we never knew the tingling pulse of real health till Jesus gripped our soul by His hand of grace in the Gospel. May we all have it to-day, the hand of Christ upon us, the power of Christ working in us, through faith and prayer. For we want believing, and better believing. " Lord, I believe ! I believe ! " " And when He was come into the house " — I have anticipated that — " His disciples asked Him privately, Why could not we have cast him out? And He said. This kind goeth not forth but by THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. 151 prayer." To do Gospel work, real work, to cast out sin and impart the saving grace of God, will never do for men such as the disciples then were. A little while before they were showing that they did not really know their Lord ; and in a little after they were disputing " who should be greatest." " Will ever these men cast out devils ? " And it was a stinging word that He said. He virtually said, " Until you give up your petty ambitions, and your taking of Me in hand, and contradicting Me, and being wiser than Me, you will never tell upon the work of the devil — never." Teacher, father and mother, preacher, as long as you are one foot in the world and one foot in the Church, never expect to see drunkards saved, and really bad people made holy. It can- not be done at the price — never. Be prayerful ; live your work ; live your Gospel ; grip the hand of Christ, and never let Him go ; be in fellowship with Him. And then at kirk or market you will save souls. ' Then, wherever you go, Sabbath-day or week-day, streams of blessing will attend you. ** Out of you shall flow rivers of living water." Ye shall do Christ's works, " and greater works than these." Because He was hurrying back to the Father, back to that place of central power, that from that place, having died for our sins, and risen again. He might send down upon a poor, perishing, howling, demented world, through a million pipes and channels, copious floods of His pardoning grace and healing power, through the Holy Spirit. Oh for a praying people ! Oh for a praying minister ! Oh for praying Sabbath-school teachers ! Oh for praying fathers and mothers ! Then everywhere throughout the city, death, and darkness, and old night, would roll away. Christ the Lord in His saving grace 152 THE BOY WITH THE DUMB AND DEAF SPIRIT. would be seen, and felt, and enjoyed in our Sunday schools, in our own families, among those who are near and dear to us, but who just now by reason of sin are being killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter. May God bless His Word. Amen. Hknderson & Spaluinc;, Printers, i, 3 and 5, Marylcboae Lane, London, W. Regent gqwar^ f tilpit. A "TEEEIBLE INFANT." Preached in Regent Square Presbyterian Church. BY THE REV. JOHN McNeill. Text— John ix. 18-23. This chapter is all about the blind man whom Christ healed. It was a notable miracle, and the Pharisees could not get over it, although they tried. I shall deal mainly with the ideas suggested by the 21st verse : " By what means he now seeth, we know not ; or who hath opened his eyes, we know not : he is of age ; ask him : he shall speak for himself." There is a sense in which, of course, that was badly spoken. It was born of the cowardice of the parents. They found themselves all at once in a state calling for thankfulness, for their son who had been born blind was now made to see. But there is no rose without a thorn, and that rose brought this thorn, and a pretty jaggy one it was. The rehgious and civil leaders of the times had already made a decree that if any man called Christ the Messiah — if any man gave Him that great, Divine, shining name— Vol. III.— No. 11. 154 A "TERRIBLE INFANT." that person should be excommunicated ; for " put out of the synagogue " means excommunicated. And that was a sen- tence of no small terror to a Jew ; and rightly so, for it was a severe sentence indeed when it was carried to its extremity. The man was not only cast out of the synagogue, but he was cast out of the society of his fellows. He was " boycotted," which is about the best English word to sum up the matter briefly. So the man's parents were afraid, and finding that they were in a difficulty, said, " Yes, he is our son, and he was born blind. There is no doubt about that " ; but they saved themselves by falling back upon agnosticism for the rest. " How he was made to see, and who did it, we do not know : he is of age ; ask him : he shall speak for himself." In the overruling providence of God this timidity on the part of the parents worked for good to the man, and worked for good for Jesus Christ. It led the man to confess Christ, and, confessing Christ, it led him, as it always does, to a firmer faith, to a more rooted character, and to a fuller, clearer knowledge of this Christ who at once had brought him into so much blessedness and into so much danger. I want, then, to take these words of the parents and put them to the best use. I want to call for certain people. " He is of age; ask him : he shall speak for himself." Are there not those among us here who need to be called out, who need to be singled out ? It is time, my dear friends ; there is a great deal of discussion about Christ, and a great deal of discussion about religion — a vast amount of talking pro and con ; and you could give a most valuable contribu- A " TERKIBLE INFANT." 155 tion to the debate that is going on. If there is any heart in it — if it moves along lines that lead to any profitable result — thou art the man to help the discussion. More than ministers, more than church-going people, considered simply as such, more than anything, we need this fellow. " The man who kens his ain ken," as they say across the Tweed, who has got his own personal item of knowledge. That knowledge is not as big as it might be ; it is not as full, and bright, and clear as it ought to be. He is not yet just an out-and-out disciple, much less is he a preacher of the Gospel ; but there has been a light kindled. Granted it is only a spark ; but if we could get all the people with sparks to come and stand in the wind that is blowing, it would be found that, snell and all as the wind is, it never yet blew out a Divine spark ; it always fans it into a flame. It was said long ago about Patrick Hamilton, when he was burnt at Edinburgh for confessing Christ, that, instead of quench- ing the young Eeformation, his burning had only helped it : the enemies were compelled to say that " the reek of Patrick Hamilton had infected as many as it blew upon." The smoke of his burning had furthered the Gospel more than his living, perhaps, would ever have done. Now, my friends, you are of age. It is time that some of you were standing away from mother's apron- strings, and from father's, and from mine, so to speak, standing out from all shelters and all disguises. Let the battle thicken round you, you will not be destroyed. You will never know how worthy Christ is to fight for until you try. It is time that your feet were put below you, and that 155 A "TEREIBLE INFANT." you showed some use of your own tongue. I cannot fight all the battle of the Christian evidences; and the best Christian evidence vrould be you if you would come out and shine for God. It will be better worth than all my sermon and whole tomes of controversial literature upon either side, if you will stand out and out, and say, " One thing I know : whereas I was blind, now I see "; and if you will face the difficulty, and take your own share to which God and man are calling you in this tremendous campaign betwixt light and darkness, reality and formality, Christ and the god of this world. That man found himself in it all, and tremendously so, and he might have backed out of it ; but if he had he would have done a great ruin to himself and to many more besides. Our subject, then, as you see, is confessing Christ. " He is of age ; ask him : let him speak for himself." I harp on that string again. You are of age. It is not as if you were a mere infant. My friend, you have come to years of understanding. You have settled, very likely, by this time your business career. You have settled your mind upon a great many subjects. You have taken your place as a citizen, or you are upon the point, and the time is ripe, and nobody would hinder you from doing it. Christ claims that. Christ works upon that. It is time that you were showing yourself, and it is time because, as I have hinted already, you have something to tell. I am speaking to those who, in their heart of hearts, know that Christ has revealed Himself to them. Whereas you were blind, now you see. You have a trembling throb within your heart of A "TEBBIBLE INFANT." 157 a personal dealing between you and Christ that never was there before. But it is there now ; you are therefore in blessedness, but you are also in danger ; in blessed- ness if you will come out, in danger if you will be timid, and hide it, and keep it to yourself, and hush it up, and say, ** There is a lion in the street. I had better hold my tongue. The part of prudence is to keep my new-born, new-found joy to myself. If I confess Christ openly, I shall only draw attention to myself, and I am young and blushing. Therefore I will keep quiet." That will not do. "He shall speak for himself." We make our appeal to those who by our preaching already have been brought somewhat from darkness, stone- blindness, ** high-gravel blindness," as Shakespeare says. You have been brought from that to glimmerings of light of a personal, intimate, special, peculiar kind. Christ as a Saviour has had His hands on you. He has been working about you ; and, better than I can explain it, or you either, between Him and you something has happened that was not the case before. Now, come out. I ask for you. I call for all who are of age to come forward. It is a critical hour. You are greatly needed right upon the spot in this very crisis of the debate. Come up, man. For God's sake, come forward ! You are needed ; you are greatly needed. It will be as when Blucher came on the field of Waterloo. Wellington is standing there, and again, and again, and again he sees the emptying saddles and the thinning squares; but, at last, here is Blucher coming up, and WelHngton gives the command, and the thin red line 158 A " TEERIBLE INFANT." swept on to meet the foe. There is the crisis. The Church is beset with enemies on every hand, fiercely disputing this one thing, " Have we got God's last and best? Has the Christ come? " And there is no proof like your proof — the living man standing out four-square to every wind that blows, and saying, '* Here is my stone upon the cairn, my contribution. I say, Yes, yes ; Christ has come, and I know it, and I will stand for Him, impugn whoso list. Father and mother, wife and son may fight shy, and my foes may be those of my own house ; but it is a fire in my bones, I dare not keep silent." *' I dare not keep silent." Oh, how pitiful the conduct of many ! You have gotten this thing that makes life worth living. How would you like — I speak to mothers here — how would you like it if that babe of yours grew up to be a lad, and grew up to be a young man, and grew up to be of age, and yet never spoke? Some have that experience. The time comes when mother put him down out of her arms, and he gets his feet. He can stand ; he can toddle ; he can walk ; and then walk more firmly ; and she dehghts in him. But, lo, this sadness comes across her heart, that there is no articulate speech coming. Some of you are that way. You have been toddling to and from the house of God now a good time, some of you. You have become able to go on foot. You have light enough to come here and go back again. Nobody needs to lead you to the house of God now as used to be. Come, friend, do you know Him? Are you born again ? Are you converted ? Do you think you know Jesus Christ ? Then, " Let the redeemed of the Lord A "TERRIBLE INFANT." 159 say SO, whom He hath redeemed out of the hand_^ the enemy." Then, as you make confession, my friend, see how it works itself out. This man, being appealed to, answered the appeal. When his name was called out he answered, "Here I am." He did not run away. He stood to his ground. He stood to his guns. Now, do not run away. Stand fast. Stand firm. Eun up the colours to the mast- head. Burn your boats, and break down your bridges. No retreat. I know you mean well. Perhaps I am not speaking altogether to young believers, but I am speaking to many who have been in this twilight condition for a good long while ; and you will be in it longer still, and you will never know whether it is dark or light, whether it is morn- ing or evening, whether you are lost or won, and you will never get out of these doldrums until you do what this man did. We must confess Christ. I say that I know that some of you mean well, but a false discretion overtakes you. You are not unlike that soldier who was always discovered, in the shock of battle, betaking himself, without orders, to safe places. The captain at last collared him, and spoke to him, and accused him of having a cowardly heart. " Oh," said the soldier, ** my heart is all right. My heart is as brave as can be ; but whenever a danger comes, I have a cowardly pair of legs that run off with the brave heart." Many of us are like that. Your thoughts are right ; your convictions are right. Away from the moment when con- fession is needed, you are all right ; but in the shock of battle you fail. Remember the danger. " He that is 160 A " TEBEIBLE INFANT." ashamed of Me and of My words in an evil and adulterous generation, of him will I be ashamed before My Father and before His angels." Let us come out for Christ the moment we have anything to come out for, no matter how dim ; though not knowing as much as we hope to know, let us, nevertheless, come out for Him. Take your place and part in this tremendous controversy. Range yourself on the right side ; and this is what will happen : There will happen in your case that which happened in the case of the blind man. See how this man grew and deepened in what I may call insight. You cannot read his story without seeing that this thing that Christ had done for him was far more than simply unsealing the scales of physical blindness. It shot all through him. It was moral and spiritual, as well as physical ; and in a very, very short time, you will find that this man who, an hour before, was nothing to anybody — a blind beggar with his hand held out for whatever would be put into it — was wiser than his teachers. You find him rubbing his newly- opened eyes, and saying to himself, " Now, why should there be this bitterness about that Man, whoever He is, who did this to me ? Why should I be badgered, and hurried, and worried like this? There is a want of fairness somewhere." There was an insight into men, you see. Now, you will never get that insight into the real state of the case as regards the living Redeemer in London to-day, till you take this man's strong stand. Then you will grow, and knowledge and insight will be one of the very first growths. You will not be led any longer by Tom, Dick, and Harry. You will feel A ** TERRIBLE INFANT." 161 the dint and pressure of things for yourself — how they strike you, and what is their direction and momentum ; and the whole meaning of them will strike you as never otherwise. It is not book-learniog that we want, half so much as the teaching of the Holy Ghost given to babes and sucklings when they begin to babble out Christ's praises. Out of the mouth of a suckling like this the Holy Ghost confounded the enemies of the Christ of God, who made their opposition without sense or mense, without head, or heart, or clever- ness, or anything but the spite of hell. We might so reason. To the same pitiful dilemma we might reduce nineteen-twentieths of the opposition to the living Christ to-day, if we would adopt these lines. The Holy Ghost would lead us as He led this babe. This man became, in ten minutes, worth twenty professors of apologetics, as a de- fender of the faith — " fidei defensor." I do not scorn apolo- getics. Not at all. I do not undervalue them. Not at all. I believe in them ; but this is the living apologetic. This is the man in the street ; not the man in the closet or study, but the man at the corner. And it is the man out there that we are needing, because the big battle is in public life. Then there is another thing which you get besides this insight, this unction from the Holy One, by which the blind man gauged the situation. You listen to people, and you say, "Ah! I know better than that. Your tongue says that, but there is something deeper than that behind your tongue. That is not the whole explanation of what you are saying." He said to himself, "Why should these Pharisees 162 A " TERRIBLE INFANT." and Scribes be coming quizzing me, and cross-examining me, and hauling me up in this way? What is at the bottom of it? I guess that there is something up. I suppose that these Scribes and Pharisees somehow or other are getting rubbed the wrong way by this some- body who did the wonderful thing for me ; but I will say my own say. I will say what I know, and think, and feel. I will stick to my text, and see what comes of it." Oh, that we might get this insight ! But there is another thing you will get, and which I have anticipated already. You will get courage. This is what the Scripture calls holy boldness, and I wish to God that we could get it. I wish that this congregation might be baptized with it. We should then be a very Cromwell's Ironside all through next week. When you get this holy boldness, it will enable you to see the frown and to take your life and reputation in your hand. You will see that what Christ said is true, and that the path to heaven is not a primrose path of daUiance. The path to heaven is a pathway of obstacle and conflict. " Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you, and separate you from their com- pany, and revile you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for the Son of Man's sake. Eejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven." Do you not see how that benediction settles on this courageous baby's head? In one sense, "of age"; in another, but newly born ; but what a " terrible infant " he was ! Heaven bends over the head of the confessor of the Christ of God. The Arabs have a saying that heaven lies close in above A "TERRIBLE INFANT." 163 Damascus ; and the Jews have a saying that heaven hes close in above Jerusalem ; and in Scotland, of course, they think " there's glory all around." But I will tell you where it is nearest. Heaven is very close when you, my lad, down in the office to-morrow, in the midst of the ribaldry and the scoffing, the sophisms and the false argumentation which "makes the worse appear the better reason," set forward your best foot in the midst of it all, and testify for Christ. You might almost hear the angels then. If ever heaven is near the earth, it is when a son of Adam stands up for Jesus who died and rose again. And courage will grow by what it feeds on. You have no idea how strong you will be for Christ. You have no idea what powers of argumentation will develop in you. How this man argued, and how, by trying his sword, he grew skilful and fleshed his maiden weapon in the blood of these adver- saries. " Why," he said, "here is a marvellous thing, that you know not from whence He is ; and yet He opened my eyes. Now, we know that God heareth not sinners. You remem- ber David's words, * If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.' God will not hear a sinner; but if any man be a worshipper of God and doeth His law, him He heareth. Since the world began it was not heard that any man opened the eyes of the blind. If this Man were not of God He could do nothing." See how it grows. You see what courage means. Courage is not theramstam, buU-in-a-china-shop kind of thing that many people believe it to be. Lots of folk think that spiritual courage is not an illuminated thing, and there are plenty of people who 164 A "TEEEIBLE INFANT." over-praise discretion because of its wisdom. I can imagine how, when this man stood firm, his breath would become short, as he realized that he was actually " cheeking up " to the Sanhedrim ; and the thought would come upon him, " What an awful fool I am making of myself in daring to talk like this about the controversy of the hour ! " But yet, see his deepening conviction. He had got the whip by the handle. He had got the right end of the stick. He had got the running end of the thread, and, as he pulled, it came splendidly away. Every young convert finds that. Every confessor of Christ finds it. ** Take no thought what ye shall say. In that same hour the Holy Ghost shall teach you." The Spirit of your Father will supply the argument. You are on hallowed ground. You are sur- rounded by the great cloud of witnesses ; departed spirits of the mighty dead are near you. Remember how our poet uses this very sentiment to evoke patriotic courage in the sailor lad — " Wliere Blake and the mighty Nelson fell, Your manly hearts shall glow As ye sweep through the deep, While the stormy tempests blow." The courageous stand which that man made was like the stand which the lighthouse makes. The light- house makes a firm stand in the midst of the breakers and billows, and all the riot and rout of the tem- pest. There stands the lighthouse, rooted in the living rock, tier after tier of solid masonry clamped together by clamps of steel. But there is more than that. If the lighthouse only stood as a great pile of massive stone, what avail would it be? There is the light. There is light as well as strength. There is that shining lantern at the A "TERRIBLE INFANT." 165 top, as well as the pillared strength that holds it up. So with the young confessor of the Christ. You have not only strength, but you have beauty, the clear outshining of the light of an undimmed, unquenched, and unquenchable testimony. And, last of all, what he came to was this— fuller knowledge of Jesus Christ ; and that is the blessing of every blessing — to know Him best, to get more closely to Him, to enjoy sweet fellowship with Him. My Jesus — mine — forme. That is what you get if you begin at once to follow the light you have, and act on what you know. Now, at first this man was not clear. When the actual Son of God came to him, after the Scribes and Pharisees had cast him out. He put the pointed question to him, " Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" The Greek brings out the emphasis on that pronoun, '* thou," as the English cannot. ** Dost tJiou believe on the Son of God?" And the man answered, " Who is He, Lord, that I might believe ? And Jesus said, Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee." And he said, "Lord, I believe"; and he worshipped Him. " The path of the just is as a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day." Have you found it to be like that ? Has your Christian experience been like that ? God be praised, there are some of us with whom it has been so, in His great love and mercy. I am almost ashamed to speak of myself as one. Before I knew very well, so to speak, what had happened to me, I just knew that something had happened. I just knew that a light had come, and had gleamed and broken in, that never was there before. I have told you before that I had to stand up in my village where I was brought up. Christ got no rougher treatment anywhere than in Nazareth, 166 A "TEEEIBLE INFANT." where He had been brought up, and a young disciple finds no harder, stiffer task than to confess Christ in his Nazareth, his own town, his own set. Without getting much time to think about it, I had committed myself to appear at a certain meeting, and, instead of allowing the minister to preach as usual, the minister's two sons and my- self said, "We will take the meeting, and we will speak." It is said that the best of all ways to teach your boy to swim is, if you can swim yourself, to go with him to the sea, and pitch him in. And the best of all ways to make yourself stand up for Jesus is to fling yourself in. Be reck- less. Do not let "I dare not " wait upon " I would like " ; but be reckless ; go in ; put brass into your face. Stand forth. So with this man. So with all of us. We never should have come to anything if at that critical moment we had not been pushed out, and had not felt that destiny was upon us. We dare not turn down the light. We dare not. Take care about turning down the light. The devil may shut it off at the meter. Take care ! Keep it going. Keep it bright. Keep it burning. You will then get clearer light. You will grow in knowledge, until at last you will get to be sure. And I praise God that some of us are sure. I do not see very well how we could now doubt Jesus Christ. We have got so far into the King's country that we do not know the road back to the borders again. Begin ever so lowly, begin ever so obscurely, but testify for Christ, and you will be at the heart, at the centre, in palpitating contact with the great Commander-in- Chief, the head, the heart, the soul of all religion. You will be right in the centre in such light and so committed that the idea of your beginning to doubt, and of your A "TERRIBLE INFANT. 167 becoming an agnostic, is out of the question. A man comes and says to me, " Mr. McNeill, it is a very serious time. So-and-so has written a book denying the miraculous." " Oh ! " " And another man has written a book casting doubt upon the authenticity of the four Gospels." "Oh, indeed!" Somehow the thing does not bite. It goes " like water off a duck's back." These books are too late, somehow or another. These men started too late for you. You cannot take an interest in them. The man might as well begin and say, " Mr. McNeill, there is a man who tells me that there is some doubt about whether you have been born. ' ' Well, I might meet that man's argument — and you would hardly find fault with me if I so met it — with a kind but broad grin on my face. It is too late. We have bowed at the feet of the Son of God. We have discovered the Secret of the universe. We have reached the throne of the Highest. We have got something of the blaze of light that shines from the very throne of God; and we can never, never go back to doubt, and unbelief, and darkness again. It is warp and woof with us. It is in blood, and bone, and brain, and nerve, and sinew. It is the bottom of all our thinking. If you find us casting doubts on Christ, shut us up in a madhouse, for we have gone out of our minds. Poor creatures, we are demented and deranged — it is disease that has overtaken us — if ever you find us going back upon this. Now, my friend, I put that question to you before I let you go : "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" I am not asking about your doubts and difficulties, I push past all that, and it is time I did. Dost thou beheve ? You are of age, and it is time that you should answer that question This man said, " Who is He, Lord, that I might believe ? 168 A "TEEEIBLE INFANT." And Jesus said, You have both seen Hhxi, and He is talking with you." You say, ''Well, preacher, if I had that chance." Do not say that, for many a man saw the Son of God with his eyes, and his heart did not believe. •* Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have beUeved." May that benediction be yours and mine increasingly, for His name's sake. Amen. ::sa::r^ Henderson & Spalding, Printers, i, 3 and s. Marylebone Lane, London, W. Ilegent (Square |3ttlpit. THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. Pkeached in Eegent Square Presbyterian Church, ON Sunday Morning, January 25th, 1891, REV. JOHN McNeill. Text — Genesis xix. 15. Some time ago we read that " slumming " had become fashionable, because some great folks had gone down into the East End to see its misery for themselves. That is, ■ however, a very late date at which to put the ** fashionable- ness" of slumming. Here are augel-slummers millenniums ago ; forerunners also of the Great Slummer, the Lord Jesus Christ ; faint shadows flung out of heaven and appearing on the earth ; adumbrations of Him who was coming to seek and to save the lost. It should help us to look into this narrative, and from these angels learn something of how we ought to rescue the perishing ; for our circumstances, after all, are not so dissimilar. Sodom and Gomorrah were the wickedest cities that ever appeared — until London and Paris, New Vol. III.— No. 12. 170 THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. York and San Francisco came up. I verily believe all the abominations that ever were in Sodom are in our own city at this moment. And I am not a croaker, and you are not to call me a croaker. If you call me croaker, I may turn round and call you cuckoo, sitting on a tree, chirping away at your little song, trying to make out that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is all pleasant, all a sweet April morning — so you think. I am neither an optimist, in the ordinary sense, nor a pessimist. There is a very bright light shining, but there is also a very deep and dense dark- ness. Even the New Testament does nothing to relieve the blackness ; it only makes it blacker. Certainly there is a kind of sin, there is an abomination to-day in London — it may be in your own heart, my hearer — that was not found among the vileness of Sodom ; I mean the rejection of the Son of God. A deeper darkness lies across the land to-day than even then, and a deeper doom impends : " the Lord shall be revealed from heaven in flaming fire, to take ven- geance on them .... that obey not the Gospel of His Son." Then how we ought to work ! " When the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying. Arise, take thy wife." The angels. Well, if angels left their heavenly seats to come to such a work, I think some of us might be beginning to touch it with a long stick by this time. I think it might be a little more your own concern, my hearer — your own affair. If you will allow me to put it that way, it might be still more fashionable than it is. Some of us dearly love to watch great people ; and if great people will turn slummers, we will follow them. If THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. 171 the gentry — for we dearly love the gentry, they are our mark, our way, and our end — if they take an interest in philanthropic movements, in alleviating distress, we will go with them. Here is our mark ! This work is carried on under the auspices not only of angels, but of the Lord of angels and of men. The Gospel heightens and deepens the impression as we watch these heavenly visitors. " This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation : that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." Oh, how strong ought to be the urgency and pressure upon us I How, by every consideration, we ought to be moved out of selfishness and of indifference, and out of relegating thd work to others, to putting our own hand to, if we possibly can. There is no doubt about the sin, if we believe what our eyes see. Even if we turn away from God's Book, the newspapers shall convince us and sadden us. The printed page in the morning almost makes us afraid to let our morning paper lie, lest our children should lift it. There is no getting rid of or minimizing our sin : the gilded sin, the ungilded sin ; the secret sin, and the raging open sin ; the natural, and the unnatural; the ordinary, and the " super- fluity of naughtiness." And there is no minimizing or getting rid of the doom. We believe in God, and we believe in God's "Word ; in Christ, and in His Cross. Therefore we believe at once in the doom of sin, and in the way of escape for sinners. " The damnation slumbereth not." " The Judge is at the door." ** From henceforth the time is shortened." Then how we ought to be up and doing, we 172 THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. ourselves. When angeis came, you might go, my hearer. I sometimes fear lest I have been too tender with some : I have made excuses for you, and have accepted your own ; but when I look at these angel-slummers, I am not sure that I should. When they came, and did not think it any demeaning of their dignity to come, and to lay hold of poor wretches who did not know their own mercies, to hustle them, and bustle them, and hasten them, I think I ought to speak more firmly to this congregation in Eegent Square, those whom I know, and those I don't know. My friend, maybe you are a little too dignified; maybe you are possessed with a notion that earnest rescue work is not for you, but for Salvation Army folks, or brazen-faced men like myself, who stand at any street corner and shout and make fools of themselves. God save you, and strip you of these filthy rags of your so-called refinement. Nay, nay, friend, my words are sharp, but my heart is warm : the urgency is great. We want the brightest, the fairest, the best born and bred and dowered, for the roughest work ; we want the chief sitters in our pews, tha shining ones, the leaders of *' fashionable churches " and " fashionable religion " to show that after all there is only one fashion. One is our Master, even Christ, and all we are brethren ; saved ourselves by grace, that we may hastily and heartily save others. May the angels lay hold of some of us this morning to go out with us to rescue work. Verily we shall be in good company. Eemember, above all, that you go with our Lord and Master Jesus Christ. And you never did a grander or more glorious thing ; you never did THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. i7o anything that better became your silks and satins than going out to rescue sinners. You are not degrading yourself, you are not stepping down; you are stepping up, up, up! All heaven is intensely interested in saving sinners : so interested that it does not stand afar off and nourish itself " in dainty loves and slothful sympathies," but comes down and in to the very darkest and foulest, and lays hold, as here, with its own shining hands. And then notice whom they came to rescue. ** The angels hastened Lot." Lot. Ah ! friend, it's an awful problem, life in a great city. Look at this poor Lot, and think what a sad pass he has come to, that he should need to be hastened. I have been talking about slums and skimmers, and perhaps making you think you are to start off incontinently to some dark and degraded part of the city ; while lo, there is Lot sitting next to you ! Decent man, Lot. Eeligious man. Lot. Well-brought-up man. Lot. And yet he is in imminent danger of the devouring fire. He is becoming steadily part and parcel of Sodom's iniquity ; he, and his wife, and his daughters, and all that he has steadily, steadily being sucked down in its dark and swirling vortex. Not giving up God, not giving up religious profession outwardly; but he is "in Sodom," steeped in it, and it will need a pull and a leverage from the throne of God Himself to hft him out of the bog where he is sinking. It was Lot whom they went to hasten. I speak to Lot this morning, and I would speak warningly and yet encourag- ingly. Ah ! Lot, it was a bad day for you when you parted with Abraham, a bad day when you pitched your tent 174 THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. towards Sodom because there was better grass there, better forage for your flocks. For you not only pitched your tent towards Sodom, by-and-bye we got you living in it. A bad day for some of you when you came to London. You never knew how little religious pith, and stamina, and backbone were in you until you came. Out yonder in a quiet country place you were a decent elder or deacon. You were so shored up yonder, Abraham on the right hand, and some other body on the left hand, that you never knew what a weakling you were. You made a respectable appearance, and show, and muster, for you were well surrounded and held up. You were in a little place, and a great many people knew you. You could not hide yourself, and you and your family were very regular at Church and Sabbath- school. But coming to London — alas ! alas ! you have got on in one way, but you have got fearfully "off" in another way. You are a richer man to-day, you live in a bigger house, your sons and daughters have grown up and got well married and settled, like yourself. But it is all on the surface — in behind, what rottenness ; in behind, what for- bodings ; in behind, what regrets, what yearnings for those poorer but cleaner, holier, and happier days. It is Lot who has to be rescued — Lot who should have needed it, so to speak, no more than Abraham himself. Oh the power of the world ! Oh how it tries us and proves us, as God often said to Israel, '* To show us what is in our hearts, and whether we will walk in His law or no." Now, I do not mean for a moment to say that we are all that way. Abraham grew, Abraham flourished and waxed THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. 175 great, and rich, and mighty. He had faith; his spirituaUty kept pace with his material advantage and increase. But there are many Lots who succeed temporally at the expense of their spiritual welfare; who barter eternity for time; who make the worse appear the better reason ; who go into shady ways and methods, trying to make out that they are not shady, or that they will take the ** shade" off them. " I will stand firm. True, I am going into Sodom, but I will make Sodom serve my ends. I will buy and sell, but I will go no further than buying and selling. I will be true to God, I will set a fence of godly principle about my home and about my business. When it comes to morals, and conscience, and religion, I will be as sound as a bell, as firm as a rock." And have you? Have you? Alas ! alas! how many overrate their strength and underrate the power of common custom and example, and forget that word in the New Testament, " Because of abounding iniquity the love of many shall wax cold." Oh how often that is exemplified by people who come up to London ! They get on outwardly, but they go down inwardly. In all that makes a man a man, in all that makes your house a home, in all that makes for true wealth and success, you are a poorer, cheaper creature than when you came here. May the angels' words to-day stir up and rouse us : " Arise, take thy wife and two daughters : escape for thy life ; look not behind thee, neither stay in all the plain , but flee to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." ** They hastened." Oh for Divine urgency ! Mightn't we take a leaf out of their book in the matter of urgency ? 176 THE ANGEL-SLUMMEES. " They hastened Lot." Even the warmest of us, are we as warm as we should be, as warm as we might be ? Are we not a little afraid almost of earnestness ? Hasn't it become a little unfashionable to plead with people ? The angels were not ashamed to be in earnest. Hear it, hear it, HEAR IT, ye superfines ! The angels were not ashamed of being in dead earnest. Hear it, divinity-students, coming preachers, the angels were not ashamed to be anxious and urgent, and to lay hold of people with their hands. I am afraid we, their successors, are losing our- selves. Now, I do not say that we need to be rough, or rude, or boisterous, but I do say that a large amount of present-day preaching in pulpits, and in missions, and, indeed. Gospel work generally, will never serve the need or do the turn. It is too dainty, it is too mighty fine altogether. The devil can stand it beautifully. He doesn't care how much of it goes on ; it hurries up nobody. There is too much ice and icicle about it— too much of self-consciousness about it, as if the angels had moved about saying, " I wonder what our friends will think when they see us down here among these shady people." They had no self-consciousness or vanity. They only thought of their Lord, and their message, and the dangers. Angels believe in the " terror of the Lord " ; and you will never, never get vulgar if you are in earnest, and you may be most horribly vulgar when you think you are charmingly fine. There is too much — perhaps it is too roughly ex- pressed; but I will risk it — of this damning vulgarity abroad to-day: an earnestness that doesn't plead, that has THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. 177 no tear in its eye, no outgoing hand nor strong warning voice. It is so calm, and writes down its little wordies on a paper, and reads the little wordies off, and never lifts its little voice nor breaks its little rules and proprieties. So correct, and 50 thoughtful, and so refined, while Lot is going to the devil ! I am not against thoughtfulness ; I am not against true culture, true refinement ; but, as God would have me to be an honest man, from the soul within me I am increasingly against the bastard culture, the bastard refinement, the Brummagem thoughtfulness that stands in pulpits and professes to work in mission halls. Hence ! far hence, ye profane ! I know — I admit it ! There is also a kind of bastard earnestness. You can roar, and stamp, and rage, and foam at the mouth, and not be in earnest ; and you can be very quiet outwardly, and very calm, and yet be very intense. So the angels hastened Lot. They put heart into it; they felt the burden. Sabbath-school teacher, there is a word for you to-day. Trying to bring it home to myself, I would like to bring it home to you. A little more heart, please, a little more urgency, a little more earnestness. ** Oh," said one to me, " I find the longer I preach, that I fail in pleading with men." It is grand to make the discovery. " I cannot plead with men," he says. x\nd why? He cannot break away from convention, and routine, and decorum, and, like a living, warm-blooded, earnest man, say, " Flee from the wrath to come. I am afraid of you. Pardon me for leaving my paper, but you are in danger of the everlasting burning, the blackness of 178 THE ANGEL-SLUMMEES. darkness for ever. Worldliness is killing you, formal religion is ruining you, and I want to speak plainly, and hasten you." " They hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife.'* That one word I dwell upon, *' Arise." It is repeated later on, when they said ** Escape," and still further, when they said *' Flee." We, who are coming to do work for Christ in this great city, need to use plain, short, sharp, rousing words. For the last thing men will do is to rise. Ah ! my friend, the distressing thing about you is you are so difficult to lift. Possibly you are sitting here and saying in your heart, ** I like it. I come here because the preacher is un- conventional." You can go to the devil under unconven- tional preaching. The trouble with some of you is you are so pliant. " That's it ! Put it straight ; give it us hot ; go ahead !" But you sit still. If ever you are to be saved, some of you, there will need to be very, very close dealing. There will be need of coming to very close quarters with you. ** While he lingered, the angels laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife." God save you, poor Pliable ! ** You bend to the breeze, and vanquish the breeze by bending to it." Coming and going, coming and going, coming and going ; but no rising, no fleeing, no salvation. O God, make me honest and urgent with perishing men ! Are you saved, my lad ? Are you in Christ ? Escape for thy life. Look not behind thee. Flee to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. Nothing less than angels, I believe, would have availed with Lot ; any- thing less than this urgency, and he and all he had would have THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. 179 been overwhelmed. For you know, though we preach the Gospel, it is only a Gospel at a certain point. The gospel of escape, "Flee for your life," is only a gospel when a man believes he is in danger, not till then. The Gospel that says, " The great Physician now is near," is a Gospel to folks who know they are sick, and will go and put themselves under His care. But there is our difficulty. I believe there was no city in all the world that believed less in fire and brimstone than Sodom an hour before the shower. So with you. I know there are some here who do not believe in this, and they say, '* If you can't move men by love, you will never drive them by force." I believe in this ; I believe the day is coming, and we have all got to pass thirough it, prophesied by Enoch, the seventh from Adam, " Behold, the Lord cometh to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all of their ungodly deeds that they have ungodly committed." The doom is not abolished; the darkness and the terror are but intensified. So I hasten you. We should all be eager, and strenuous, and urgent, avoiding rudeness, avoiding roughness, but filled with loving anxiety, delivered from a mere lip service and formality> using glowing words that come from glowing hearts. " And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters ; the Lord being merciful unto him." This is only a bit of our work standing up here preaching, delivering discourses. In fact, it may have no use at all ; it will have use if we are in earnest, but there is a coming closer stilL That is what I have been hinting at all along — we should 180 THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. get into close grips with our congregations, and with all this London. How many men and women who have resisted sermons have been unable to resist a warm clasp of the hand, the other hand upon the shoulder, the tender, earnest, pleading look right into the face. Try it, my hearer, try it on with somebody to-day. Do not let London go down in its wallowing sin without trying this. And remember that we have an urgency, we have a battery to bring to bear on poor sinners and backsliders that the angels did not have. The angels would have a certain stand-offishness just where we should have a ** standinish- ness." We can go to sinners and say, *' My brother, flee, for I know what it is to be a sinner, and I know what the safety is." The angels could not say that. I read nowhere in the Bible of angels shedding tears. We could shed tears — ** Tears of sucli pure, such deep delight, Ye angels, never dimmed your sight." They never sinned ; we have sinned. We have come back from the mountain of safety to the city only to take others away up with us. Where are you, dear brother, rescued from drink ? Lay hold of some one else. Do not preach sermons at him in the technical, academic sense, but grasp him by the hand, and put the other on his shoulder, and tell him what an angel could not tell him. That is why the angel is not here. Be you his angel, his minister of grace ; be you the vessel of God's mercy to his fainting heart. Tell him what Christ has done for you with an urgency and eagerness that no angel can command. Speak THE ANGEL-SLUMMERS. 181 to him out of your own heart, and out of your own experience to-day. ** Rescue the [)cris]iing, care for the dying, Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave ; Weep o'er the erring one, lift up the fallen Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save." Thank God for that ; that we have a greater tenderness, through grace, that we are greater in urgency than any angel or archangel could be. The Lord gets Himself brought to bear with greater power upon a sinner through a saved sinner than through an unf alien angel. For that we were redeemed, for that we have been plucked out of the fire, that we might pluck others — alas ! alas ! how many of us forget, I have other matters to touch upon, and I must not keep you. I come back to the "thou." I want to reach you to-day, my friend, those of you who stand in doubt, those who are not on the mountain, those who are not outside the circle of destruction and inside the circle of grace and salvation, those who are tempted to look back, those who are held down by worldly considerations, held down by the influence of society, held down by the influence of a cold, formal Church society. Thou singer in the choir, ** Lest thou be consumed," art thou saved? Thou that leadest the praises of the redeemed in this house of prayer, art thou redeemed thyself ? Or are you sitting there a poor, miserable backslider, or worldling, only wearing the clothes of religion, but unsaved, unsanctifled; belonging in heart to Sodom, to London, to its giddiness, its frivolity, 182 THE ANGEL-SLUMMEKS. its Christlessness, its doom? "What!" says Lot, "you don't mean to say God will consume me — me, Abraham's nephew ? Would God actually rain fire and brimstone on a gentleman like me?" Don't smile; some of you think He won't. " Unless ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." *' Lest thou be consumed." " What ! I— I, with a godly father and praying mother ; and coming up and up through Sunday-school and Bible-class— w«? Yes, thou. Eemem- ber Lot's wife ; the wife of a godly man, related to some of the truly exalted of the earth, and she looked back and be- came a pillar of salt. The heart within her belonged to Sodom. Her religion was only an external thing; her doom was just. ** Lest thou be consumed." Where can I get my eye to fasten upon a grey head ? *' Lest thou be consumed." Can I get my eye to fall upon some fair youth, bright, and burning, and eager. In London here, clever, astute, growing in years and growing in worldly wisdom, aye, and growing too in amiability, growing too in culture of mind, growing in manly strength — "Escape thou, lest thou be consumed." Can I make it plainer that your preacher beheves in a real heaven, and an awful destruction, with just time to flee ? Flee from the wrath that is coming, to the mercy that has come before the wrath. The storm is coming, but the ark is here before it. The doom slumbers not ; but the open door of escape turns on its hinges here to receive you. And then just a closing word. It is not only " thou," but I am thinking of all your belongings— your wife, your son, THE ANGEL-SLUMMER3. 183 your daughter, your daughter-in-law, your son-in-law. The angels under God's authority mentioned them all, for this God of ours wants to save us all, all our kith and kin, nearer or more remote. Not a hoof need be left behind ; thou and thy wife, and thy son's wife, they can all go into the ark ; it is a family boat, it is a house-boat, there is room, blessed be God, for us all. Come, husband ; come, wife ; come, father ; come, mother ; come, brother ; come, sister ; come, you to whom we have got related by marriage, ** the wife's folk " ; my husband's folk, come. By means of these marriage ties God is wanting to cast the grappling irons of grace on vessels that otherwise would sweep to the reef of destruction. God grant that something has been said to rouse workers to do better work, and to rouse those who need to be saved to use all dihgence in putting all the space that is needful between them and destruction. And here is all that is needed. "He that believeth shall not come into condem- nation, but is passed from death unto life." Amen, Henderson & Spalding, Printers, 3 and 5, Marylebone Lane, W. ^tqmt §qmxt flulpit, THE PASSIONATE PILGBIM. Preached in Exeter Hall, on January 11th, 1891, BY THE REV. JOHN MCNEILL Text — "And Ruth said, lutreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee : for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."— Ruth i. 16. The strongest thought, the leading idea, the practical idea in my mind in connection with this text, is simply this, that what you have here working between Euth and Naomi is an element between the soul of man and the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to state this idea, and, as the Lord the Spirit shall help me, to work round about it, and to bring it home, and to make a nail of it, so to speak, and, by repeated blows, to drive it in. I take it, therefore, for illustration and application in that direction. I say that what you have here is a true, valid, unmistakable element in religion — this warm, loving, melting, unspeakable tenderness — this whole-hearted, irrevocable decision in an hour or a moment of crisis. Vol. III.— No. 13. 186 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. You remember how Euth came to this crisis in her life's history. Some ten years before this, old Naomi had gone away from Israel into the country of Moab. Some time afterwards her husband died. She had two sons, and they had married two women of Moab. The sons also died, and now Naomi, older, lonelier, more hopeless and helpless and heartless than ever, rises up to wend her weary way back to her own country. She had been driven out by famine years before. She now hears that the Lord has visited His people, and that where there used to be famine there is abundance ; so she comes back again, poor old body, like a shuttle tossed here and there. Is she not like some of our- selves—tossed here and there like a cork on the stream, seemingly the very sport of adverse winds and waves and circumstances? "I came out full," she said; " I go back empty." She is poured out from vessel to vessel, with no abiding rest, and, seemingly, with no prosperity in her life. And when she starts to take the long journey home again to Bethlehem, her own land, her two daughters-in-law, Euth and Orpah, themselves widowed and bereaved, go naturally a bit of the road along with her. We ourselves remember a time when we started out to go on some dis- tant journey, and some loving friend or two accompanied us ; but of course there came the exact point in time and place when the convoy came to an end. We turn round and face each other. We have been talking, and talking, and trying to be cheery, while our heart was very sad; and, at last, in a certain point in the road, we pull up, and our friends say, " There is no use in our going any farther." THE PASSIONATE PILGEIM. 187 *' No," we say, " there is no use." And we face each other, and shake hands, and the last good-bye is spoken, and we part. And, in some such way as that, the old wrinkled body turned round to her two daughters-in-law and said, " Now, turn back. Go back. Thank you for all your kindness in the past. I hope that I have not been unkind to you." ** It will be a pleasant memory," she might have said, " in the midst of the doleful memories that must bide with me as long as I live, that I knew you, and that we parted good friends." And Orpah kisses her, and then goes away back again. But suddenly, Euth, who, perhaps, has been standing apart, flings herself forward, womanlike, and puts her arms round Naomi's neck, bends her head down on the aged breast, and says, " Intreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee : for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God : where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried : the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me." Well spoken, Euth ! Well spoken ! We shall always turn to Euth, and to what she said, with tender, softened, chastened feelings ; and I feel sure you will accuse me of no forcing when I repeat what I said before. I will ask you to come to this position to-night, and to find in these sobbing, throbbing, trembUng tones what ought to be the tone of some hearts to-night in this hour of crisis to One who is worthy of such affection — worthy of this outgushing and swelling of our deepest soul within us, even Jesus 188 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. Christ who stands among us, and gives us the opportunity of a new career, and a boundless, endless life and destiny — boundless, and blessed, and endless as His own. Ay, this is in religion. You know that we are usually evangelistic on the Sabbath evening. I do not know that we are much else at any time ; but on the Sabbath evening we try to harp on this single string, and I trust that we are not getting monotonous. Now, to-night we are back there again ; but sometimes, you know, on Sabbath evenings I am arguing with you ; I am pleading with you ; I am setting forth the rationale of things ; I am addressing your understanding ; I am speaking to you as unto wise men, and saying, ** Judge ye what I say." In these ways I am trying to reach and touch the springs which reached and touched down there in the world, caused you to decide this way or the other way — caused you to adopt this plan and method of life or the other. Now, to-night I would like to try another way. To-night I would like to say that it is time that you had got past that. To-night I would like to bring you before Euth and Naomi on the roadside. I am entitled, or the Lord is entitled, to stand among us to-night, and to get from us something better than a scrimp decision, as if we hardly knew whether this world or eternity is the more preferable; as if we hardly knew whether Christ or the devil was going to be the best choice and the best portion, but calmly and cold-bloodedly, and just at long and at last, we would try Christ's way. Of course, I know that what keeps some of us back is what might have kept back Euth ; and thereby our passage is THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 189 still further illustrated. There was not much to draw her to Naomi from a certain point of view, was there ? Naomi was old and withered — "homeless, ragged, and tanned," I had almost said — poor, lonely, desolate. She had no family ; she was going she scarcely knew whither. None of the things that make life desirable seemed to lie her way. Now, the same thing is in Christ. You remember what we read from Isaiah : ** "Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? " From one point of view that widowed old woman and our Saviour are not unlike each other. To many He is " a root out of a dry ground"; "He hath no form or comeliness"; at the first look that they get of Him, '* He has no beauty that men should desire Him." But look again, my friend : look again. Is Christ so withered? Is He so wrinkled? Is true religion such " a root out of a dry ground " as from certain points of view it seems to be ? Have not some of us within us the secret force drawing us to Christ which Euth had drawing her to Naomi ? Away back yonder, when the great sorrow of Euth's life came, Naomi was a power to her. Naomi knew the God of Israel. In the desolate and lonely hour when Euth's young husband was stricken down from her side, when the light went out of her eyes, and out of her home, and out of her heart, I have no doubt that Naomi appeared to Euth to be a wonderful woman. Naomi knew the true God. When the cold, senseless, dumb, dead idols of Moab could do nothing for a young, bursting, sobbing, breaking heart, then old Naomi would 190 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. come near with the faith of Israel, and with her prayer to the God of Israel. And all that is rushing through Euth's blood and pulsing in her veins, as she stands at this turn of the road and says, " I cannot leave old Naomi. At the thought of parting with her this flashes in upon me. She is more than life, and meat, and drink, and wealth, and every- thing to me. To be with her is life, and to part from her is darkness, and misery, and death." And that is in religion. Let me ring it out again and again. Christ is that, and a thousand times more than that, to hearts that are sitting beside you to-night. Why are we His? Why are we with Him ? Blessed be Thy name, Saviour ; we can say without exaggeration that we are with Thee becautje we are the captives of love. We could not be other than we are, seeing that Christ is what He is and what He has been to us. He was our fathers' God, and we will extol Him — our mothers' God, and our lips shall praise Him. He has been recommended to us by a whole life-time of grace and of mercy ; and at one critical hour on one never-to-be-forgotten day, we were in this crisis in which poor Euth was placed. We made, like Euth, the great, momentous, irrevocable decision, urged forward by a thousand considerations, memory bringing out of past years what those years contained to help us to decision. The present, and the past, and the future, like deep caUing unto deep, all constrained us to put the arms, clinging, warm, of unfeigned faith and love, round the Son of God, and to say to Him, ** Intreat us not to leave Thee, nor to return from following after Thee, O Jesus : whither Thou THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 191 goest, we will go ; where Thou lodgest, we will lodge : Thy God and Thy Home shall be ours also." Ay, that is in religion. More is the pity that we have to stand arguing and arguing and arguing, and talking and talking and talking to people's intellects and heads in this nineteenth century. I have spoken to your heads long enough, and I think that I am justified to-night in, as it were, trying to carry you by storm and making a strong pull to-night upon the heart within you. Can you love ? Can you love your mother? Can you love your wife? Do you ever feel the tug at your heart-strings of powerful, gushing, human affection ? Then I claim you for the Son of God. " No love is like His ; unequalled it is By that of a mother or friend ; AVhat tongue cannot teach, What thought cannot reach, 'Tis love without measure or end." That is Christ. His name is love. If I knew your past, as I do not, I would bring arguments out of your past that would make you, hastily, with all Euth's warmth, and im- petuosity, and splendid abandon, fling yourself, body, soul, and spirit, into the embrace of the everlasting arms. May the love of Christ constrain us to-night. What does that " constrain" mean? It means the love of Christ hurrying us along. Paul could use that word ; Paul could use it justly. Paul was none of your cool men. People often talk about Paul and say, ** Paul was a great man of logic. Paul was a wonderful man to argue." So he was, but never, never, never think of the great Apostle as one of those little poor peddling creatures called 192 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. *' logicians." Logic is a very shrivelling science when there is nothing but itself. Never dream of Paul as being simply one of your argumentative dry logicians. Paul v^as a volcano in a perpetual state of activity. Logic? Ay; but logic set on fire with love to Christ, and with love to the souls of men. And he said, "The love of Christ hurried us along. The love of Christ, like a mighty flood let loose, has got hold of us, and swept us off our old bed, and we are caught and carried in its mighty flood." It was love that bound Euth to Naomi. It was love that made her forget all the risks and all the chances, and all the uncertainties. What will not a man or woman give up for love ? Is not the best literature, is not the brightest song and story, filled with tales of love ? "What he has given up for the possession of her, what she has despised and trodden beneath her feet, to get him and be his before God and man for ever and for ever. And — again I say it, and would God I had the tongues of men and of angels to ring it out — that is in religion. Love to Christ. Give yourself to Him because He has won your heart, and dare to say to the world, " I have made common cause with Jesus, for I can- not do without Him. It has suddenly broken upon me. He is the Day-star in my dark sky. He is the one Being who prevents my life from going down in emptiness, and dark- ness, and bankruptcy for time and for eternity." Oh, for this love, let rocks and hills Their lasting silence break, And all harmonions, human tongues, The Saviour's praises speak ! " THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 193 To quote Pope's lines on a secular love, as they have been altered by Dr. Marsh in just one word : " Not bubbling waters to the thirsty swain, Not rest to weary travellers faint with pain, Not showers to larks, nor sunshine to the bee. Are half so precious as Thy love to me, My Saviour ! " ^ What else does she say? " Whither thou goest, I will go ; where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." That is splendid — the absolute identity of the two of them : " Naomi, Naomi, woman, I will dog you like your shadow. Wherever you are, depend upon it, I will be round about there somewhere, in life or in death." Did not some of us gather in a certain church last Thursday at a quarter past two ? Did we not see our brother stand here ? Did we not see the woman of his choice standing beside him ? Did we not hear the words that he took her, and she took him, " From this day forward, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, for sickness and health, to love, to cherish, to honour and obey " ? Shall man for woman and woman for man so lose each in the other; and shall it be called "rush," and "gush," and "rhapsody," and " rodomontade," if I claim that the same thing should be in our hearts for Him who is " the chief est among ten thousand and the altogether lovely " ? No ; I should turn round upon you, and I should break out with God-given severity both upon you and upon myself, only my heart is too cold to let me. She said, * Where thou lodgest, I will lodge." It is coming almost a 194 THE PASSIONATE PILGIilM, little down ; but let us come down. Understand, my friend, that if you give your heart to Christ, you will content your- self for this world to be, like Him, a wayfarer. He does not dwell here. This is not His rest ; this is not His home. The hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in all its troubles is a wayfaring man. He is a sojourner who turns aside but to tarry for a night. Understand that this Saviour belongs to heaven, belongs to eternity, and that if you give your heart to Him you have to let this world go, with all its seeming wealth, and all its ambition, and all its pomp, and all its vanity. These two widowed women travelled across from Moab to Israel — two lonely women who were all in all to each other. " Who is this that goeth up through the wilderness, leaning upon the arm of her beloved? " What a picture of Christ and His people — Naomi and Kuth travelling together from Moab to Bethlehem in the Land of Promise. So with us. Since w^e have seen Christ the world has changed to us, and, thank God. we do not care for it. Since we have seen Christ, and have become enamoured of Him, we can let the world go by, for * ' All, the Master is so fair ! His smile so sweet on banished men, That they who meet Him unaware, Can never rest on earth again. "And they who see Him risen afar, On God's right hand, to welcome them, Forgetful stand of home and land. Desiring fair Jerusalem." Is that true ? Has the love of Christ weaned you from the world ? And, for Christ's dear sake, in order to make Him THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 195 your portion, and His inheritance your inheritance, have you become like a tramp as regards any settled portion here in this world ? Ah ! then you are on the right road. " Where thou goest, I will go ; where thou lodgest, I will lodge." "Our Lord is now rejected, And by the world disowned, By the many still neglected, And by the few enthroned. But soon He'll come in glory ; The hour is drawing nigh, For the crowning day is coming, By-and-bye." Ah ! then we shall see the splendid choice we made when we turned our back upon the world and upon self, and all its gilt and its smiles, and it will be seen that, notwith- standing, the unlikeliness and the littleness of any hope and prospect — the kind of phantomness and shadowiness of faith in one whom we had never seen — ^we clasped heaven and earth, when, with faith in our hearts, we gave our- selves to Jesus. Would that I could argue with some of you who are ** halting between two opinions." As to Orpah, what do you know about Orpah ? Are you going to play the Orpah ? Are you going to say to Jesus, *'It is all true, but I do not see that I am called this way. You see, preacher, I am not going to be a sceptic. I am not going to denounce Jesus any more than Orpah denounced or renounced Naomi ; but my heart lies the other way. My face is that way ; my drawings are that way ; and I can go my own road. I hope that it will fare all well with Kuth ; and I hope that it will fare all 196 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. well with myself too " ? What do you know ahout Orpah? I think I see her going along and drying her eyes — for these eyes will dry ; and there she goes along and see that old woman and that young one lying on each other's neck ; and she smiles a little, for very likely she had often seen them foolishly fond. And she still sauntered on, and on, and on, and then she looked round again, and they were gone. And she said to herself, •* Oh, Euth will be back to-night. She could not just leave Naomi on the road so soon, and so she will go on another mile or two." Maybe Euth and Orpah lived together. They had had a common joy and a common sorrow. They aad both lost a husband, and those husbands were brotherk And, maybe, Orpah sat up late that night, and opened the door, and went out and wondered. But Euth never came that night, and she did not come the next day, and she did not come the next week, and she never came back. "And, Euth," you say, "well, what did Euth get?" Why, she got everything for this world as well as for the next, by making common cause and destiny with this withered widow. There are different ways of coming to fortune. You may inherit it, or you may achieve it, or you may come to it as Euth did. Like her, although at first only a poor gleaner, you may marry the Laird f And that is the way, the only way, to the true possession. Faith marries us to the Lord of all. You know the tale. Never was a more wonderful story sung by any poet of love. You know how she went out into the fields. No maiden in the church to-night could be wooed and won more THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. 197 honourably than was Euth, although the wooing was scarcely after our Western fashions. And you know how she married, and you know whom she married ; so that if you go away back to the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, and if you try there to trace the genealogy of the greatest Man who ever appeared in the tide of time, the Son of Mary, and the reputed Son of Joseph — if you trace back, and back, and back, you will read that he was the son of this one, and the son of that one, and the son of the other one, and eventually you come back to Euth, the Moabitess. Euth's blood was in Christ's veins. Euth gained that magnificent title and degree, an ancestress of the Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, the King of Israel, and the Saviour of mankind. That is what came her way — that name, that fame, and that bliss for time and for eternity. That is coming, man. Oh, turn your back on the world ! Look upon the world as the seductive temptress that the Bible always represents it to be, and although religion may seem to be, on the surface, a little grim, and not very sweetly visaged, and not very fair, and not very seduc- tive, that aspect of it is all on the outside. The kernel, the inside, is sweet, and fair, and unspeakably rich, and precious, and desirable ; whereas the world, though I grant that it is ofttimes fair on the outside, is like the apples of Sodom. When you put your teeth into it it turns to ashes in your mouth. Now, will we be like Euth? Take Christ. Take Him to-day, and let us understand what we are doing. Man, it is love that your heart is needing. Think of yourself to-night, you young fellow, with all your dreams 198 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. and all your ambitions : think of yourself to-night, when you climb up all those stairs into your lonely lodging. What is it you need? Suppose you had all the wealth of the Bank of England, you lonely people, what could money do to cure loneliness ? What could rank and titles do to feed the famine of the heart ? The famine in the heart is a famine for love, for sympathy, f or " a friend who sticketh closer than a brother," and that is what draws us to Christ. We can go home to-night to an empty house : father dead, mother gone, every human friend departed, no money, it may be an empty cupboard and an empty grate, neither food, nor light, nor fire ; but only allow me to go home to my lonely house and see my Saviour, and I would not change with a millionaire. * ' My Jesus, I love Thee ; I know Thou art mine. For Thee all the pleasures of sin I resign. My gracious Redeemer, my Saviour art Thou, If ever I love Thee, my Saviour, 'tis now." He is rich beyond all telling, who can say, ''My God, my God, The King of love my Shepherd is." Now, are you content to trudge along, sure of it that all that is worth having lies that road — everything as it came to Euth ? Could she ever have dreamt what was coming to her? "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath in store for them that love Him ; but God hath revealed them to us by His Holy Spirit." The fortune, the heavenly riches, lie this seemingly empty and barren way. The dis- appointment, deep, and bitter, and eternal, lies the way of the world. You have heard about that old '* Methody THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. ] 9^ preacher," a lonely old man, who spent his days as a Primitive Methodist preacher. And when he came near to the end of his days, some kind wealthy brother thought that he would make provision for him, and he bought him a little house. All his days previously he had only been a lodger, travelling about from place to place, and taking the people's hospitality for a night ; but now that he had come to old age, the gentleman bought him a house, and made him a present of it, with as much as would keep him. He tried it for a while, and then he came back to the man who had given him the gift, and said, " It will not do. I am not contented. I do not like this way of living. There is too much in it. I never had this before, and I do not take well to it. There is a hymn which I used to sing, which drew out my whole heart to my Master, and to the portion that is waiting for me ; and I have lost relish for that hymn since I have taken the gift of this house." You remember what the hymn was with which he had cheered himself : " Ho foot of land do I possess, No cottage in this wilderness ; A poor wayfaring man, I lodge awhile in tents below, Or gladly wander to and fro, Till I my Canaan gain. There is my house and portion fair ; My treasure and my heart are there, And my abiding home." And in order to sing that hymn with the old sweetness, he gave up the house and took to the tramp again. Well, I do not say anything about his conduct. Maybe, I would not have done it ; and, maybe, he might have held the house and the hymn too. But the man himself must be allowed to be the judge. There is a grand idea in it. If 200 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM. we have got the Lord Jesus Christ Himself into our hearts, then our bread is baked, and it is buttered on both sides ; and that is the end of it. What more could you have than Him who is the Lord of heaven and of earth ? Take Him to-night. As I said at the beginning, so I say again. Take Him, not of constraint, but willingly. I had almost said, " Assume the virtue of heartiness, if you do not possess it "; and, not coldly and drily, but warmly and heartily, take Him by the hand, and say, " My Saviour, my Jesus ! Christ, God, holiness, heaven for me ! Heaven for me ! " Be sure of this, that it is no vain thing. May God decide us with an irrevocable decision for Christ to-night 1 Amen. Henderson & Spalding, Printers, i, 3 and 5, Marylebone Lane, London, W. Regent §qmu ful^jit. "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAE?" % Sermon Preached on Sunday Morning, February 2nd, 1891. BY THE REV. JOHN MCNEILL Text — Genesis xxi. 17, 19. " What aileth thee, Hagar? " said the Voice out of heaven, suggesting to us how near, after all, are heaven and earth — holy, happy, helpful heaven, and parched, withered, wilderness earth. Notice the scene. A dusky woman, an Egyptian, dark of skin, and darker of heart at this moment, sitting in loneliness and bitterness. A bow-shot off, a young lad. At first he was all the hope, but now he is all the trouble. Utterly spent with the heaviness of the way, he has been cast under a shrub, that his mother may not see him die. Nothing all round about but sand, and barren scrub, and beaking rocks, reflecting and beating down more keenly the fierce heat of the sun. A great, over-arching, empty heaven ; if anything to be seen, away yonder in th, distance a black speck or two, which by-and-bye will turn out to be the swift wings, gleaming eyes, and sharpened beaks of the vulture j hastening to their prey. Many Vol. III.— No. 14. 202 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " ' a time they have got a meal here. From afar they scent the feast, and are just beginning to darken the sky. And there — oh, wonder of wonders! — it is writ, there heaven is near, there God is, there salvation is, there the voice of promise, and hope, and revival. It is a wonderful scene, well worth our bending over and looking into. It is an old story, and comes out of a far-off time, and out of ways which to us are strange and awkward, and rather turn us away from the contemplation. But oh, the heart of it ! the trouble, the misery, the death begun, suddenly broken and banished by Heaven, and the Voice from heaven, and the opened eye, and the bubbling spring : these endure from age to age. Concerning thee, O my hearer, may this tale be told. " And the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar ? " What she said is not told or reported — I almost think, because it would not bear reporting. For Hagar had a good case ; and when a women has a good case, as Hagar had, it is apt to lose nothing in the telling. She could have told it well, stingingly. Abraham's ears away off in his distant tent, and Sarah's too, might well have tingled, had Hagar risen dp at God's question to tell the story of what ailed her. On the surface, at any rate, she had been badly used, hadn't she ? And that is where I want to get into sympathy, and to come to practical exposition. "What aileth thee, Hagar? " My friend, Heaven knows you ; HeaViSn knows your name. Precisely who you are, where you are, the whole centre and circumference of your trouble is known where you are apt to " WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAK ? " 203 think it is absolutely forgotten. Not in Abraham's tent, not with him or Sarah, is your help to be found. But the sad thing is that your heart will continually hark away back there, and refuse to believe that that chapter is finished. Dear soul, the sooner you can take your heart out of the past, the better. The sooner you can forget the things that are behind, and the sooner you can reach forth to those that are before, the better — infinitely the better — for you. What aileth thee, my downcast friend ? You can rise up and pour out your story at every pore ; not only at the mouth, but the eyes would fill, and the whole nature would over- flow. You are big with the story of your sufferings, and indignities, and cruel wrongs. Hagar, I think I see her in answer to the question, " What aileth thee ? " She stands up and says, " I am an Egyptian, a bondwoman. I came into contact with the household of Abraham, and was taken into his service. A strange household, I soon found. Their God had spoken a word of promise that did not seem to be fulfilled : a son was to come. Master and mistress were old, and seemingly past hope. They waited and waited, and then my mistress herself devised a plan of her own. Abraham fell in with it, and I — I was but a bond- woman, what could I do but yield ? A son was born to Abraham and me, and I thought he was to be their long- expected Hope and Joy. But as he lived and throve, a shadow came over my brightness. I saw their hearts were not satisfied. They had gone aside from God, even when they thought they were fulfilling His purpose. And another son has come, and they call him Isaac — Laughter ; and I " 204 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " — and her fists clenched, and her eyes burned like coals — " I, not to blame ; I, the poor bondwoman ; first they used me, and then they abused me. Putting a bottle of water on my shoulder, and some bread and fruit in my hands ; I and my son turned off, bundled out, to live or die, as the chapter of accidents may determine." On the surface, I say, she seems to be able to rise up and tell a doleful tale. " Well may I weep ; well may I beat my breast ; well may I be angry and indignant, and say words of sharpness and bitterness about everything and everybody. Was ever life wrecked like mine ? Were ever hopes so cruelly falsified as mine ? Lifted so high, and now plunged so low ! Here in the desert, faint, parched, dying, no eye looking at me save the eyes of the coming vultures." ** What aileth thee, Hagar? " I put the question to you, and as I put it, my hearer. I am especially speaking to those whose hearts are neavy. For it is the same world yet, and it is awfully ill-balanced, and there are things that happen to some of us that will make us fly to extremities, and say, " This world was made for Caesar. It is a world in which the weakest go to the wall, and might is right, let the preachers say what they please. I have found it," you say, in the bitterness of your spirit. " Don't talk to me about lights to dark clouds. I never saw them. Where is the light to my dark clouds ? Where is the star, the one star that specks the blackness that overarches me ? " My friend, I want to say this, and in God's name too. In answer to God's question, " What ails thee ? " tell it — let it out. Our living God is so loving, and tender, and "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " 205 patient, and kind. He puts the question to get a reply. Just tell Him ; don't be dumb or silent. Something has happened you, which, Hke a blast of wind on a vessel, staggers her, flings her over on her beam-ends, and almost makes her careen and go to the bottom. Then, tell God ; unpack you heart with words. Expostulate if you like ; tell Him it's awful ; tell Him it's wrong ; that justice and judgment have left the earth, and you are the dismal proof therof . Anything but silence ; anything but dumb, desolate, inkept grief; anything but nursing and brooding your sorrows all to yourself; anything but pitching this in this corner, and pitching the other in the other corner, and going to the third corner yourself to moan, and groan, and die. Don't die ; fly in the face of heaven, if you like, but " dinna dee," don't die. I would not die if I were you. Never say die, while God's voice, out of heaven, asks so humanly the story of your wrongs. " What aileth thee, Hagar? " Oh, to us who know it all now, what a beginning of salvation is in the very question ! I cannot get over that — that my name is known, your name. Where is your name, and number, and street, and address ? The postman could not find it. Your friends have been writing to you for weeks, some of them for years, and they cannot understand what is the matter, for there is no finding you. When you get lost in London you cannot be found ; the letters are returned to the Dead-Letter Office, scribbled over with all manner of " Try this, try that, try the other place," for there are a dozen streets of that name in London, and you cannot be found in any of them. But what a gleam of 206 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAB?" hope in the darkness and loneUness of this howHng wilder- ness, the angel of God calling out of heaven, naming you by name, sending a message that reaches your own very ear and speaks into your own desolate heart. It is for you. Don*t try to read it through the envelope, but take off the envelope, and take out the message and read it plain and clear. "O, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, I have a message from God unto thee." And I think there is another thought to help us. We might not only expect from Hagar a natural, justifiable out- burst of vehement speech, dictated by a burning sense of injustice ; I not only speak to that and evoke that, but I want to go a little deeper. My friends, especially those who are in sorrow and heaviness, those with whom even Providence seems to be playing a game of contraries and cross-purposes, it is not so ; look a little deeper. There is a " need be " in this. Is not there to be a great use made of the burning sand and the threatened death ? Hagar, that that you dreamed about, you had better give it up. It can never he. Hagar, the empty water-bottle and the burning sand are a grand cure for vain ambition. Hagar, it is not to be. You thought that your son was to take what Sarah's son is to take ; and God is behind Isaac. True, you have been more sinned against than sinning, but it cannot be, and the sooner you get over it the better, and turn your eyes to a new direction. How many people to-day need to have their eyes turned away from a certain direction to- wards God and God's purpose. Cease, vain regrets, cease moping and crying over spilt milk. Cease losing your way ; "what aileth thee, hagar?** 207 pull yourself to your feet, and go on through the burning sand, for God is with you. He who opens rivers in dry places, who makes crooked things straight, who makea darkness light before us, He is the God of Hagar and Ishmael, as well as of Abraham, and Isaac, and Sarah. It is difficult for us to get over ambitions once they get in. Kemember the word that God spake to Baruch in the 45th chapter of Jeremiah : " Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. The Lord saith thus." Do not fly against the Master, do not beat yourself against the bars of a cage. God has you in His hands, God has you in His keeping. He will justify Himself in all His dealing with you that now seems so bitter and harsh. But you must give up your own ambitions, your own thoughts, your own plans ; and, broken and defeated, empty and soured, and embittered and disgusted, and all as you ^xq, falliiito the everlasting arms. What a gospel that would be to some of us to-day! What a gospel to some of us, for we are disgusted. What a gospel, for we are bitter, for we are sour, we are jaundiced, we are bilious, we are atrabilious. We are clean sick of the whole thing, life is gone, " tapsel- teerie." There is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end to it, like a hank of yarn that we began to unwind, and it has run into knots continually. Now, the cure is, the desert, the barrenness, the nothingness ; as we read in the Book of Lamentations, "He hath builded against me ; . . . He hath hedged me about that I cannot get out ; . . . He hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone." Thus God gets us, He brings us to an end of our own way 208 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? that He may bring us to the begmnmg of His. It was a good thing for Ishmael also. Ishmael needed this ; Ishmael was not just a babe ; Ishmael was come to sixteen or seven- teen years of age. And I have no doubt his mother had done her best to spoil him. She had put into him her ow4i hopes, and her own dreams, and her own ambitions, and just as our children will do, he had bettered the lesson. He got fairly intoxicated with conceit, with dignities, with swelling pride, and thoughts of vanity. Young and all as he was, he had notions of what he was to be. And he began to scoff and despise young Isaac, the child of hope and promise ; he that was born of the flesh, and of the will of the flesh, began to persecute the seed of promise. That could not be, and the desert, and the leanness, and the emptiness are a grand cure for that also. Ishmael, I want to speak to you as well as to your mother. The Lord hears your voice this morning where you are, you too smarting, you too saying at twenty years of age, " Life's a failure; all things have gone to the dogs." **The Lord heard the voice of the lad." I cannot just say it was a voice of prayer. Whatever the voice said was reported no more than his mother's voice, for I do not think it would report either. The blessed thing to notice, my young wild-headed, strong, hot-blooded friend, is that God loves you. You went home the other day from the office " just mad " — and I am not speaking exactly to youth, but to those who are double Ishmael's years — you went home mad. You had got a stinging blow to your ambitions right between the eyes ; all your rosy prospects "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " 209 gone ; the light that guided you and led you suddenly disappeared, and darkness and tempest round about you. And you flung yourself down on your bed yonder, in your lodgings, or in your own home, and you could have cried out, but for alarming the house, with vexation and rage. Now, I don't go into the question whether " the governor " was right or wrong in what he did to you. Only, to please you, we'll say he was wrong. My governors, in such cases, always were, in my opinion. But, look iip, Ishmael ! God hears your angry, protesting soul. I tell you He would rather hear that, my friend, than that dumb, dour, dogged silence, or that smug, sleek self-complacency that neither sings nor prays, that never sobs or storms — it could not, there is nothing to sob over. It thanks its own wee self, and sucks its own little sticks of candy, and licks its own little fingers. God would rather have these, a mad woman and a madder boy, lying there, spreading their case, so to speak, in all its extent, right under His holy eye, with their hearts charged and surcharged to bursting. God would rather have that than what I have described. Am I speaking to any Ishmael? I say to you what I said to Hagar. Speak out ; go and tell God, tell Jesus, let Heaven know who you are and where you are, and that trouble, a sore trouble, has come to you. Only learn this, learn this, all of us : that God has His own ways, and just because He loves us and will love us. He allures us and brings us into the wilderness. He likes to get us alone with Himself; and there, when the first tempest and passion of our grief and bitterness is emptied out, then He will come and speak 210 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " comfortably to us. When He has weakened our strength in the way, and seemingly shortened our days of life, then He will revive us, and bring us from the dust and from the opening grave, and give us length of days and prosperity to fill our wildest wish. Back of all that is inexplicable is God ; and God is His own interpreter. Wordsworth interprets Him very well when he exhorts us to believe that "one adequate support for the calamities of mortal life, one only, exists : an assured belief that the procession of our fate, however disturbed, is ordered by a Being whose everlasting purposes embrace all accidents, converting them to good." But Paul is plainer and profounder still : " We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose." Is it a gospel ? Is it a gospel ? And I think I see white heads and old withered faces beginning to fill with the sun- light of heaven, and saying, " Yes, preacher, I could tell you about that. I went out full, and the Lord brought me to emptiness. Yes, preacher, I remember, I could tell this audience my story. Oh, the queen that I was to be ! Oh, the life I that was to live ! And it seemed just to be within my grasp, and there came a crossing, and vexing, and scattering of it all. And I did not die ; I lived. That was my won- derful year ; that is the day to which I look back. I began then to know as never before that God's ways are clean away up out of sight. There is "nae kenning" them. You have to trust Him, just to trust Him, in the blackest night you have to trust Him, to wait for Him, to bear the yoke in your youth. You may kick and chafe like a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke, but God will show you your folly, and take all the kick out of you, and teach you " WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " 211 at last to " take My yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for My yoke is easy, and My burden light, and ye shall find rest unto your soul." " What aileth thee, Hagar ? fear not ; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation." A word of promise. Thank God, my friends, again let me say, remembering this word spoken in the desert. Thank God for all our defeats, and our thwart- ings, and our heart-breaks. They are meant to deepen and widen us. Ishmael got a rough rocking, but God was rock- ing a giant when he rocked Ishmael in this rough fashion. The roughing, it won't kill you ; the sharp, sudden defeat and seeming disaster, why, it will make a man of you if you will only trust in God and yield to Him. Do not be afraid. *• Beware of desperate steps ; the darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have passed away." God can use you. He will use Isaac, and carry on His pur- poses of blessing as He promised. He will use Isaac, but He can step outside of that. The Lord's election is never a narrow, bigoted, spiteful thing. He loved Isaac, and blessed Isaac ; He loved Ishmael, and He blessed Ishmael too. " 1 will make of him a great nation." The end of that is not reached yet. I know no book that is newer than the old Bible. It is later than the last edition of our evening paper. A day is coming when the sons of Isaac will start off after the sons of Ishmael, and bring them into the cove- nant. This world is very young yet ; and they are to come from east and west, from north and south, to sit down with Abraham and Isaac in the universal kingdom of grace. But to return. If you are getting something hard to bear, remember God knows all about it. Do not trouble 212 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " yourself envying other folks, flying out on Abraham, and Sarah, and Isaac, as Hagar might have done. You know what God could have told Hagar to pacify her. You can quite imagine God coming and saying, ** Hagar, dry your grief, my woman. Dry your eyes. Keep yourself more to yourself and Me. Never mind Abraham and Sarah." She was rather a bit of a dowager duchess, was old Sarah, speaking with all respect about her ; she was a tyrannical kind of body when she was wakened up. God might have said, " Hagar, there is a morning coming for Abraham. He had his morning with you two or three days ago, when he sent you off with your lad away here to the wilderness. Hagar, My woman, the day is coming when with a broken heart he will take his own Isaac at My command and tramp with Me a road that will bring his strength into the dust of death. Keep yourself to yourself, Hagar ; I will look after all that." He might have said more : ** Hagar, I have not sent you this road without trying it Myself. Hagar, there is a day coming when I will start with My Isaac into the desert. Abraham will be stopped before the knife goes into his son, but when I start on My day of trial, there will be nobody to stop Me. The day is coming when I will start with My Isaac, My Son, My only Son, whom I have loved from all eternity. And that will be a day, that will be a day of bitterness and darkness such as was never seen or known since time and trouble began, nor ever again shall be." Now, God is saying that to you through my lips to-day. Do not think that nobody was treated as you have been treated. Do not kill yourself thinking of your injustices and hardships. Eemember Abraham, he got his turn. Eemember God, He has gone along that desert. ** God leads us through no darker *' WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " 213 rooms than He went through before." Man, woman, lad. He knows it all : the burning heat and the barren sand, and the scenes of desolation and emptiness and loneliness, and utter forsakenness. Eemember the cry which arose and which still rings through the world, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " Remember that, and hold your peace. Let us take the worst that comes and sing about. " Our light affliction, but for a moment, worketh for us an exceeding and eternal weight of glory ; while we look not at the things that are seen." And that brings me on, for I must be brief. " God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water ; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. And God was with the lad." It is quite obvious to remark that the water was there. This is not a case like those mentioned in the New Testament where Christ Jesus restored a faculty that was withered and gone. This is not a case of giving sight to physically blind eyes. Hagar's eyes were all right, as right as yours : and that was just the trouble, my friends. If you would shut your eyes you would see all the better. If you would shut your eyes you would not see the burning sand, and the rocks, and the spreading vultures. If you would shut your eyes, losing sight of these things, your soul would see God. The well was there all the time that Ishmael was crying. When Job opens his mouth and curses the day that he was born — poor Job ! — God is overshadowing him with blessing. There is nothing so blind as grief ; there is nothing so blind as a sense of injustice. Nothing so pulls down the blinds and puts up the shutters and makes it seen, dark at midday as to be in Hagar's condition of soul. And if you are in that condition, my friends, I am here to-day in God's name to open your eyes — not these, but the eyes of 214 "WHAT AILETH THEE, H AGAR? " the heart. Tothinkthat the well was there, bubbling, bursting ! for I do not think it was miraculously created for the moment, for the special occasion. It was there, had always been there, but just a few yards short of the well Hagar sank under her burden, and she cast Ishmael under a shrub, for she said, " Let me not see the death of the lad." So we are misreading God. My friend, do you believe in God at all ? Dost thou believe in God ? Then do you believe that God would make a desert, and send you through that desert, and not put wells of water in it ? That would be a devil, not a God. I come back, you see, to great fundamental questions and answers. Hagar, dost thou believe in God ? And I wait for a reply, from my own heart and from yours. If there is a God, then there is water. I do not care a brass farthing for burning sands and gathering vultures if God lives. Blessed be God, there is water near. The moment we believe in Him, trust in Him, and listen to the voice from heaven, and call in our thoughts from the burning sand, and the oppression, and the injustice, and harshness, and inhumanity, lo ! there is our God at our feet, ready, waiting. She did not need new eyes, she needed a new heart, a rectified spirit. Now, Borne of us to-day cannot see for crying. Some of us cannot see for just Hagar's bitterness ; some of us cannot hear for the angry murmuring, the howling of our own discontented, disappointed hearts. But when God calls out of heaven, I trust there will come peace, refreshment, revival, renewal. " Fear not, Hagar : 'tis I. Be not afraid." Still God opens blind eyes by means of words of comfort. Oh, my hearer, I do not know what state of mind you have come in to-day, but I can preach this : the refresh- "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAQAR ? " 215 ment is near you. You can go out at that door a new man, a new woman. You have happened to-day upon great supplies. God could not do more for you than He is here at hand to do for every soul of us at half-past twelve this morning. God's purposes were never riper, and life, in God's plan, was never brighter than at this tick of the clock this moment. God is not dead, as you thought He was. God is not a liar, and we almost thought He was. God is not a lie ; because Abraham and Sarah disappointed us Heaven has helped us. The wells are open, wells for the weary. " Stoop down and drink, and live." Before you go back, take your empty leather bottle and fill it now. Go out as full of God as your bottle will hold. Fill your bottle with the refreshing of God's grace, and word, and promise in Jesus Christ. Remember what He says all through our story, ** I have heard," " I have seen," " I will make." Trust Him whate'er betide. It is the explanation of all riddles, the solution of all enigmas. " God lives ; blest be my rock, and let the God of my salvation still be praised." Therefore **I will hope continually, and praise Thee more and more." 'Tis like the Well of Loch Maree in Whittier's song, over which cool shadows lie, and round which are smooth white stones. ' ' And whoso bathes therein his brow, With care or madness burning, Feels once again his healthful thought And sense of peace returning. *' O restless heart and fevered brain Unquiet and unstable. That holy well of Loch Maree Is more than idle fable " Life's changes vex, its discords stun Its glaring simshine blindetli, But blest is he who on his way at Fount of Healing ftndeth ! 216 "WHAT AILETH THEE, HAGAR ? " " The shadows of a humbled will And contrite heart are o'er it ; Go, read its legend — * Trust in God,* On Faith's white stones before it." And Ishmael lives ; and he lives to this day. And God has not done with him any more than with Isaac. And I tell it to you and to myself : God will make us glad according to the days wherein He has afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. And that not far off in heaven, but the word is nigh thee, and the well is nigh thee, even at thy hand and at thy side. I preach the Lord Jesus Christ, that Great Fountain in the desert. He makes the wilderness and the solitary place for ever to be glad. His Grace and Peace are " for ever full, for ever fresh, for ever flowing free." But where ? you say. Look, dear soul, look. Believe ; only believe Him who speaks from heaven. The Living Fountain is beside thee; take thy empty leathern bottle and fill it to the brim. Have God to your heart's need and your heart's content. Be satisfied with not one mouthful less than the slaking of thy thirst and the quenching of thy burning desire. Then delight thyself in God, and He will give thee the desires of thy heart. I have not half said what should have been said ; but I have brought you to the well. God be praised, I have done that ; and it is for you to do the rest. Amen, Henderson & Spalding, Printers, i, 3 and 5, Marylebone Lane, London, W. ^tQtni §qmu f wlpit THE TBIAU and TBIUMPU OF FAITH. % Btxman Preached on Sabbath Morning, February 15th, 1891. BY THE REV. JOHN McNeill Tp:xt — Genesis xxii. The other Sabbath morning, when we were dealing with the story of Hagar, we suggested that it might have calmed Hagar in the torrent-tempest and whirlwind of her grief if she could have but understood that, after all, no strange thing was happening to her. Trial is the common experience of all those whom God takes into covenant with Himself ; they are purified through suffering. She thought, perhaps, that nobody was ever so tried and plagued as she was ; turned out a homeless wanderer with her boy. And we thought how, when the Lord spoke to her out of heaven, it was in His power to have assuaged her grief and cooled her burning brow, by telling her that Abraham's day and Isaac's was coming. And, this morn- ing, we are face to face with Abraham's trial. The day has come when all his cherished hopes and ambitions, just like Hagar's, seem to be smashed into nothing by a bolt out of a blue sky. Vol. III.— No. 15. 218 " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.'' This was a severe and unmistakable trial. You are led to expect that by the way in which the narrative ushers itself in. It was to be a trial in deed and in truth, and no /nistake about it. It is to be no figure of speech. It is not ushered in with " And the Lord said, I will try Abraham, as it were," or " I will try x\braham, so to speak, in a sense," but we are led to believe from the calm, deliberate, matter-of-fact beginning, that there is a calm, deliberate, matter-of-fact trial that shall search Abraham to the very bottom, to the centre and the circumference of his spiritual and moral nature. Was this a real trial ? Commentators, I notice, differ about it. Commentators will differ if they can get a chance ; and although God says very plainly in the first verse what He was going to do, and still more plainly in the second verse shows us the very angle of incidence of the trial, just where the blow struck in upon all the quivering nerves in Abraham's heart, still some of the commentators say, ''Abraham made a mistake. The Lord did not ask him to slay his son. The Lord only asked him to offer his son up; but according to the old Canaanitish heathen practices of immolation and burning of human bodies that were round about him, he thought that God meant it in this way. Abraham needlessly aggravated the trial." What a pity it is that one of the commentators had not been tried instead of Abraham. Por once we should have seen a man going through a great trial on an even keel. By the help of a "Higher Critic" what God said would easily have been turned into any- thing you please. No, no; let us get rid of this idea. Abraham did not excogitate this out of his own soul. As P. D. Maurice says (and he is not always a sure guide, but he is here), this was not a seed that was dropped '* THE TEIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 219 in his mind by accident. God's own hand planted it there, and it was God Himself that made His servant unmistakably understand that He was asking for Isaac to be offered up for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains that He would show him. Asking for Isaac. " And it came to pass, that God did try Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham ; and he answered, Here I am." Then, you know the trial. You know how it is set forth in Scrip- ture. One cannot read it without seeing how the very lan- guage in which the trial is expressed is meant to catch our mind's eye, to stir up our sympathies, and to make us go through the whole story with quick sensibility for Abraham, and with clearly-opened eyes that we may see the dealing of God and understand that as it was with the great Head and Prince of the household of faith, so it is with all his lineage. This honour, this mark, this stamp, this brand have all God's saints. As we can bear it, and according to our individuality, our condition, it comes to pass that God does try every spiritual child of Abraham to see whether he be worthy of his lineage, and says to every one of us in some high, and holy, and solemn crisis of life, ** Abraham, Abraham " ; and we have to answer, "Here am I." We who know the New Testament, we who can see Abraham's trial, the end of it from the beginning, could stand up and encourage him as if it were just to be gone through. We could say to him, " Abraham, count it not strange concerning the fiery trial. Abraham, lose not hope, lose not heart. Abraham, count it all joy when put through a furnace like this ; for the trial of your faith, much more precious than that of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, shall be found unto praise, and honour, and glory at the appearing of Jesus 220 *' THE TBIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." Christ." I say this is a process through which we all have to go. The eternal day will show, when all God's sheep are gathered together, that He branded every one of us with this branding iron. When I read this narrative, I always feel that the trial, the crucifying force of it, lies in a bit of unknown land there — known only to God and known only to Abraham — a bit of unknown land between the second verse and the third. The trial is laid on in the second verse : ** Take thou thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah ; and offer him there for a burnt- offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of " ; and when you come to the third verse the trial is over, virtually, for you read : ** And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of the young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him." " Why," we feel, ** was there any trial here?" — the one verse slips so into the other. '' Was this Abraham flesh and blood ? Did this man feel us other fathers feel? or is there some kind of vague unreality about these Old Testament people ? And then we get the answer : " No, the very best of them, the greatest Of them, were as human as we are." Elijah was a man of like passions with ourselves. Abraham — well, he could sin like us"; he could make slips^ and trips like each one of us ; he could fall all his length in the dirt, and get as dirty as anybody who falls like that. See what a poor show he made in Egypt. And then you come to the trial, and you read it in the second verse ; and the third verse, instead of being filled with expostulations or prayers, or at least asking God did He really mean this *' THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 221 — the third verse is Abraham bundhng, aod packing, and splitting -wood, and making all ready, and taking Isaac with him, and virtually doing the thing in anticipation. You feel, when you get to the third verse, " This thing will be done." You correctly anticipate. This man is not going to falter from the way in which he is beginning. In that unknown bit between the second verse and the third, the time between the moment when it was plain to Abraham's soul, " God is calling me to give up Isaac," and the rising early in the morning to give him up, there was a big battle, I have no doubt, although the record of it is not written. By the fact that Abraham is flesh and blood, and that God is trying him, proving him, you may be sure that he winced, and tingled, and keen, lancing pains shot through the whole of that great, big, grand soul of his. It was only because he was the man he was that God laid upon him the trial that He did. Abraham knew that with the other hand God would uphold him and sustain him, but it cost him something. All alone, all alone, that word would come to him, and all through that night, before he rose early in the morning — was Abraham's Waterloo. Then he fought; then he won ; then he gave up not only Isaac, but he gave up himself in thought, in feeling, in spirit, in resolution ; and, yielding up all to God, he slew Isaac and he slew himself — his own will, his own plan, his own purpose, his own thought. It was done in spirit, and in feeling, and in desire before it was done outwardly. And when you see that calm man stepping out in the third verse, do not misunderstand him. Do not ; and then I will not misunderstand you, and you will not misunderstand me. l\Iaybe, to each other, it does not look as if we were being greatly tried. And perhaps our looks are as deceptive as 922 " THE TEIAL AND TEIUMPH OF FAITH." Abraham's looks on that morning. I do not suppose that on many mornings Abraham looked better than he did when he stepped out in the third verse. He looked wonder- fully fresh, wonderfully calm, wonderfully self-possessed, wonderfully whole-hearted. No wonder. That was his resurrection morning. Overnight Abraham had died, and risen again. Had you ever a night like that ? man, you have gone to bed for little purpose if you have not had a solemn hour, when you became dead to self, and dead to the world, and dead to sin, and dead to self-seeking, and dead to pleasure, and come to life again with a new life of resigna- tion to God and to God's purpose. I say that Abraham died overnight, and had his resurrection. I think that he is a type and picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. Bead the Gospels over, and thread your way along carefully, so as to come to the actual spot, the actual place where Christ made the offering up of Himself a whole burnt-offering to the Father's will. I feel that, just like Abraham, it was not altogether and only on the cross, I think that it was away yonder in the agony of the garden. There He died. There He rose again. There He gave Himself up to His Father, body, soul and spirit, and after He came out of the agony in the garden men and devils might leap and dance upon Him — He was dead to them. He was living again with a life that they could not touch, that no lash, or mockery, or insult, or driven nail could reach. When He said, ** My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pa«s from Me ; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Then, then was the offering up. And I think that, coming back again to our narrative, in his own measure it was the same with Abraham. He, too, between night and morning, had his Gethsemane, and he came out " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 223 of it calm, collected, ready to be offered up, and the time of his departure just at hand. When Abraham rose up early that morning Isaac was as good as dead. All the loves, and hopes, and ambitions that centred round Isaac, he had stabbed them all to the heart fifty times on his bed, he had killed them all : — hear the hammer and nail going into them. And he rose up one of the grandest men who ever lived. He entered into grips, like his son Jacob long after, with God, and found out that to be flung by God, to be crushed by Him, is to be ennobled and strengthened for ever and ever. And then we think that we will find salvation by going to evangelistic meetings, and listening to a warm-hearted preacher, and starting off — * ' I feel like singing all the time, My tears are wiped away ! " Now, just think of it. Take your own bonny boy there in front of you, and then remember all that would gather round Isaac's head when Abraham looked upon him — his son, his only son. His very name was sunshine — Isaac means laughter. Isaac, the child of promise, the child round whom gathered all God's promises. Eemember how long he had waited for him, how long he had wearied for him, and how, at last, he had come by a sheer miracle of God's power. And now there is to be this marring, this jarring, this cutting of the marble column into shivers just when it is rising in all its shapely beauty. Have not some of you been tried in that way ? Let all of us keep very close to God, for we may be tried like that before another twenty- four hours. This God who loves us — this God who sok)ves us that we are never to question His love — is a God who, notwithstanding His love, is coming to His people every day, and taking away the desire of their eyes from before 224 " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." them. Every day He is taking away what seems to be the very Hfe of our hearts, what seems to be the very indispens- able condition of our having any joy, and any comfort, and any brightness here below. To-day He is doing it all through the household of faith — taking the husband from the wife, and the wife from the husband, with all this bare, cruel, crushing, unexplained severity. ** Thy son, thine only son, Abraham. You know the one I mean — not your other son, but this one, Abraham. It is not Ishmael — it is Isaac, thy son, thine only son. Stand from before him. Bring him to the front." " But — but, my God, the child I love?" "Yes, whom thou lovest. Take him — 'tis he I want." God does that yet. The thing you love, your darling — He takes it, and seems to fling it out of your sight ; your son, your daughter, your one ewe lamb — that. He will seem to be a devourer. He will seem to be ruthless — this God who so loves us that, if we are wise, we are never to question Him ! Ah ! there are some hearts here that, even while I am speaking, will know what God's finger is pointing at. You are trying to look at some other thing, and you say, " Here, God, I will give Thee this." " Oh no, for it is this — this — that I want." Oh how we try to give Him something else, anything but this ; and God says, " No, this, this thine Isaac, thine only son whom thou lovest, take him and ofl'er him up for a burnt-offering. Your wife, your husband, your daughter, your son, your money." ** But, my Father, think of what I can do with it. Think of the possibilities and the prospects that it opens out to me." " No, no, it is that. Give it to Me. Offer it up." God is doing it every day. There are people of God living near to God who wake up to-day wealthy, and to-night they are as poor as Job. Ah ! do we understand Him, and do we understand that this is a trial that all God's people have to expect just because He loves them? ** Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off." I have explained to you that, of " THE TKIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 225 course, the severe trial would be wheu the word came to him j&rst, and that he had his battle in the secret place of his own soul ; but still, how prolonged it was. Does it not look as if God were just torturing this poor dear man? If it had been brief and then done with, it would have been bad enough, but it was so long-lengthened out — day after •day, day after day ; and on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and knew that this was the place afar off of which God had spoken to him. I think that we need to learn that lesson. It is not in a day or in an hour. It is in a much longer time. Many times, many times, ay, to the best of His saints, God gives this prolonged trial. What for? Oh, as I have often said, not to destroy us, but to build us up, to see whether we really love Him or no, to see whether we really know Him, and have made Him so much our portion and our heart's desire that we have no fear of Him, but can love Him and believe in Him when His ways are utterly crucifying to flesh and blood. Isaac would be looking up into his face, and talking about the bright morning, and about his future prospects, and €very word going like a stab to the heart of Abraham. Now, that is how Abraham got to heaven. I say that is how he got to heaven, with every fine sensibility of his soul made to twang like a bow-string ; and then we think to " sit and sing ourselves away, to everlasting bliss." No, scarcely. I trust we shall all get to heaven ; but this is the road — self-renunciation, laying one's self on the altar. " If any man take not up his cross, and deny himself daily, and follow Me, he cannot be My disciple," He may do for a church-goer, or a chapel-goer, or an office-bearer, or a preacher, or a great many things in this ongoing called ■" religion," but " he cannot be My disciple." He refuses the furnace, the cleansing. fires, the cross. " On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off." Only learn, then, it will not be for ever. To-day and to-morrow will be trial, like our Master's; but, 226 ** THE TKIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.** like Him, on the third day we shall be perfected. God won't keep us in the furnace to burn us up, but only long enough to do us the highest good. On the third day the sore strain in one sense came to an end. Then I want you to notice further how God's grace sustains us with the one hand while it lays on the burden with the other. There was a great deal in that word in the fifth verse : " Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." See the sustaining power of God's grace in time of trial. With the one hand God seeming to crush us, and with the other hand undergirding us. He delighted to see that this Abraham, whom He had formed for Himself, and whom He is touching finely to fine issues, He delighted to see him standing the trial. I looked the other day with admiration at a street porter carrying what would crush soft people like us. I could not gather my strength below the burden and put the burden just over me on the strength as he did — a man not nearly my weight, but trained ; don't you see ? And that is what God is wanting to do with all of us. God likes to see a big load well carried. Now, my dear troubled brother or sister — you, a widow, lost your husband, five children, and you don't know how they are to be fed, and you think everybody has left you — believe me, God has not more interest in any- body in London than in a widow with five children, and not a friend. It will add to the joy of heaven if He sees you carrying that burden well, back straight, shoulders firm, the burden on, and your strength gathered well, and tight in below. God likes to see it ; it is the grandest sight on His earth. "When He sees you. He looks at Jesus beside Him on the throne, and Jesus looks at Him, because you down on the earth are bravely going along Christ's own path, the great predestined, foreordained track through this world, the track of suffering and trial borne in faith, giving glory ta God, ** staggering not through unbelief." << THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." i^27 I have to go on to the seventh verse : " Isaac spake unto Abraham, and said, My father : and he said. Here am I, my son. And he said. Behold the fire and the wood : but v^here is the lamb for a burnt-offering? And Abraham said. My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt- offering : so they went both of them together." After all, Isaac was not sacrificed. Although there was that altar, well-built and all ready, the victim was not Isaac ; the victim was provided elsewhere. As one has said, "After all, all that we can do is to build altars and arrange them. God Himself provides the Lamb for a burnt-offering." " The world," as another has said, " yea, the Church, Christ's rejecting people, provided the altar. They provided the cross, they provided the nails, and God provided the Lamb, and put the Lamb into their hands." Did Isaac fight and struggle with him? There is no hint of it in the narrative. Isaac was young, Abraham old. Very likely, if it had been a question of physical strength, Isaac could easily have broken away. He had at least equal power with his father. There is no resistance, Isaac meekly allows himself to be laid upon the altar, and asks him this question, showing that at any rate, whatever he was thinking, there was no resistance, there was no misunderstanding. So with God the Father ; so with God the Son. Surely these are the things that the angels desire to look into. Surely it will be part of the unendmg delight, the unending mental and spiritual expansion that are before us to eternally gaze and gaze again into this unfathomable mystery of the Father entering into covenant with the Son for the redemption of poor sinners and the entire harmony and agreement between them. '♦ And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the Angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham : and he said, Here am I. And He said. Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him: 228 " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from Me." The world surely never saw such a sight until it saw Calvary ; when Abraham laid Isaac unyielding on the altar, and hound him, unstruggling, as he would have bound a lamb. And how they bade each other good-bye, God only knows, but it was done. O men and women with sons and daughters, just think of it ! He laid him on, and took his hand, and bade him good-bye, and I am sure he kissed him. He encouraged him, and Isaac encouraged his father back again. And all that, had it not a reference to the cross, to that dateless day in eternity when God the Father and God the Son looked at each other, and each interpreted the other's thought and wish ; and Jesus said, ** I will go "; and the Father said, ** I will give You up" ? From all eternity They perfectly agreed, and in the fulness of time He came. Only just when He got into Gethsemane, He spoke back again to His Eternal Father, and said, " If it be possible — I do not repent what I said in eternity ; but now that I have come into human flesh, and the cross is there, and I know in actual experience what it is — if it be possible "; and the Father stood over Him, and never loved Him more than when He withdrew His face from Him and let Him die. That swallows up all offering, to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, our Lamb of Sacrifice, with head, and heart, and soul ; to stand before God's Christ on the cross, and say, " Lord, I believe," is to have performed the great act of self-immolation, to have renounced yourself and entered into the peace and bliss of faithful Abraham. Now, are we outside, or in it ? This on Abraham's part was faith, to obey God's word up to the very hilt, to the last iota and syllable to believe in God, and this was accounted to Abraham for righteousness. We have cheapened the word " beUeve " ; we have taken the music out of it, and made a poor cheap penny whistle out of the anthems of eternal glory. " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 229 Come back again to Abraham. Come and look at this thing on the human plane, and remember that word, " For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from Me "; and let me ask this question — has God got the same proof from us yet that we are His? He did not give Abraham this certificate until he had done this thing. " Now, I know that thou fearest Me, seeing that thou hast not withheld thine only son from Me." My friend, if we are to be God's, and to get into God's favour and fellowship, and to get all the blessing and strength that comes out of it, let there be an offering up to God. The Lord meets us, and He does not ask from us what He asks from Abraham, but He does ask the same disposition of soul. Now, whatever it is that we love and cling to, come now, and you will encourage me, and I will encourage you. Dig it up out of your heart, though it is like tearing yourself to pieces, and offer it up to God as you are and where you sit. Come, come, fathers and mothers ; offer up your children. Quit your own ambitions, your own purposes, your own plans. Take your children where you are, each one of them, and offer them up. *' Not mine, God : Thine, Thine, Thine ! " Take your business, take your wealth, take whatever is nearest to, and curled and nestled most closely in, your heart. It may be something bad. Take that lust that you love, that you have never given up yet. Offer it up. If you would get this verdict from God — " Now I know " — then this is to be done. What is it ? I once put a man in a great crisis, and, maybe, I will do it to somebody again : for, in God's name, it has got to be done. There was a man sitting before me, and I was preaching like this, and he was a good man, what you would call a God-fearing man. He went regularly to church ; he worshipped God as we do. When the Gospel was being preached just by these same unworthy lips, I have seen his eyes filling every time I just caught him by the heart, and I could squeeze his heart 230 " THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." out at his eyes as you can water out of a sponge. He was an emotional man. He loved to hear the Gospel. But, cutting a long story short, he was a licensed grocer. Do you gee where the Isaac is coming in ? Do you see it ? Well, if ever I preached personally, I preached personally that time. I could not help it. At any rate, I spoke in God's name, not to him — with as much generality as kept it off him — and I saw his eyes kindling, and I made that an illustration. I said, " It may be something in your business, and it is not a little thing. It is the thing that is making your money. It is bringing all to you that money brings, and I am not despising that. To give it up will be a trial, a sore trial. I am not here to denounce you. I am not here to say, ' Surrender ! ' to put a pistol at your head and say, ' Stand and deliver ! ' No, but in deep sympathy I say, as if God Himself had said it, * Take now thy licence and offer it up.' " That man came to me, and he gripped my hand, and he wrung it till the moisture came to my eyes, for it was sore, and he had not a soft hand. He wrung it, and he wrung it again, and he said, "I never understood that Abraham story until to-night. I never under- stood it till to-night"; and he came nearer to me, and he whispered in my ear, " I never understood Geth- semane till to-night." I have to give it up — yes, though it should mean — no matter what it should mean — though from an earthly point of view it may mean distress, though it is like cutting my own throat, nearly." Yes, what did giving up Isaac mean to Abraham ? A desolate house, a desolate home, a place not to be en- dured ever again, for Isaac was out of it. That was what God said to him, and the grand old man would have done it — he would ; for he so got to see that if a man loves God, and if a man yields up all his will, and his purpose, and his plan to God, he has not lost anything. He has gotten everything. Having God, he has everything. '* All things are yours," as Paul said afterwards, " whether Paul, or «« THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." 231 Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come. All are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." That man gave up. That man shut the door on the drink traffic so far as he was con- cerned. It was a great sacrifice to him. Now, my friend, this giving up has got to be done. I cannot let you go until I string you up to this point. Here is the wood. There is the altar before and behind and round about, and there is the God of our salvation, and He points us to the cross, and He says, " See what I gave up. See what My Son gave up." Now, we come to your altar. Lay down on that altar everything legitimate, everything illegitimate. Lay down on that altar your darling lusts. Down with them. Lay them down. Every appetite that is in you, clean or unclean, lay it down there. Lay down everything that you are, everything that you have, and only take back what God gives you back. While I stand, although the hour has gone, I remember another story. Shall I tell it ? It is the story of a decent man, a Christian man, a Christian worker, but — he had a " but "; he had a drawback — there was a secret black spot m his life. It was not that he was either a drink-seller or a drink-taker. He neither made it, nor sold it, nor bought it. He was a teetotaler ; and I want to say this in order to show how little teetotalism can do in this direction. He was unclean. His darling was unholy passion, and he knew it. He was, as we all are, two men in one ; as Abraham was up to this time ; and that other, that un- yielded part of him, hankered and went after this. Many times he had had a struggle, but of late he had ceased struggling. He had said, ** Well, well, this is too strong. God made me this way. God gave me these passions," as Abraham might have said, " God gave me Isaac, mar- vellously gave me Isaac. It is impossible that He can be asking him back again " — " God gave me these passions." But the Spirit of God brought home the Word with 232 ** THE TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH." power, and the Spirit of God reluctantly dragged him up to the altar of sacrifice, the altar of self-immolation, as I am trying to do with you, and the Spirit of God helped him to bring forward his darling lust, and he took the knife and plunged it to the heart of his own sin. He became a new man after that ; he became a power after that ; he became a whole man, a true man, after that ; no longer two men pulled now this way and pulled now that way, but one man, an integer, no longer a fraction or a decimal, but an integer, a whole number, a man sublimed and multiplied by the power of the Holy Ghost. Can we really say that we are His children ? This is the characteristic — a holy people, a people who have yielded themselves body and soul and spirit unto God, with a sweet reasonableness that brings the beginning of heaven into the* soul. Now, do it, my brother ; do it, my sister. God knows that it is hard. God is not so ruthless as He seems. The word seems to be bald, and bare, and pitiless. It is not that. Behind all that seeming hardness and inconsiderateness, there is the great yearning heart of the Lord our God, and the moment that we do it, His arms are round about us, and His kiss is upon our cheek, and His own hand is soothing us, and saying, " Now, My son, I have got you. You were away from Me, Abraham ; Isaac was taking you away from Me, Abraham ; I never gave you Isaac that he might take you away from Me. Abraham, I love you, and you are taking the gift and forgetting the Giver, so I asked him back, for I knew that if I took him you would follow him and come back to Me. Abraham, it was you that I wanted." God will say that to us. He will make it up to us. We have lost nothing except what would have ruined us, for it would have spoiled our communion with God ; and we have gained everything. May the Lord make this to be an hour of searching and of full surrender. Amen. Henderson & Spalding, Printers, i, 3 and 5, Marylebone Lane, London, W. Regent §quare ^Elpit. I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME. % Sermon Preached on Sabbath Morning, January 18th, 1891. BY THE REV, JOHN MCNEILL. Tkxt — 103nl Psalm : " Bless the Lord, my soul." There are six things here, you will notice, for which we are called upon to bless our God. We might make this, with- out being over-fanciful, into a directory, not exactly for public worship, nor altogether for private worship either, but for that element in private worship which belongs to praise and thanksgiving. The worship of God, either in public or private, is, as you know, complex. We have to adore Him ; we have to confess our sins ; we have to ask for guidance and help ; we have also continually to give thanks. And here in these detailed items, as given from the Psalmist's heart and experience, and from the teaching of the Holy Spirit behind that experience, we have something to inform and direct our thoughts — something to help us to rise to the height of this great argument, blessing the Lord our God for personal grace and mercy in the midst of abounding sin and suffering. Vol. III.— No. 16. 234 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." Our Lord was never asked by His disciples to teach them how to praise. He was once asked, " Lord, teach us how to pray ; " and in choice and particular language He led out their hearts and ours in plain, express, worthy petitions. But if He had been asked to teach them how to praise, I do not know that even He — remembering the fountain from which this psalm comes : He would only have been using His own — I do not know that even He would have answered otherwise than in the language before us. ''After this manner praise ye : Bless the Lord, my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits : who forgive th all thine iniquities ; who healeth all thy diseases ; who re- deemeth thy life from destruction ; who crowneth thee w^th lovingkindness and tender mercies ; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's." Verily, here is surely, on every ground, a safe and worthy and most excellent rule for ordering our thoughts, and our words too, in this great matter. I fain would go into the whole psalm, but it is too vast, too broad and deep. It seems to me to be somewhat like a great arch spanning a ravine or chasm, that otherwise there would be no getting across ; a great gulf, fixed, filled with all manner of things awful, and gruesome, and destruc- tive. Here is one of the sides — tJiis side of the arch — per- sonal grace and personal mercy. And the spring and span of the arch — th« real bridge of it — is found in the middle part of the psalm — the covenant Lord our God, the covenant God of Israel : " the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 235 everlasting, to children's children, to such as keep His covenant, and to those that remember His commandments to do them." And this, again, is the far side — the heavenly side — where the spring of the arch gracefully falls to the eternal shore ; when we are called upon, as though we stood in the midst of the heavenly glory, had left the earth, and forgotten the howling ravine : ** Bless the Lord, ye His angels," the redeemed sinner of the earth leading the heavenly choir ; " Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His Word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye His hosts; ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure" — as if, standing on heaven's heights, we saw back through all time and space, through the finite and the infinite, " Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion : bless the Lord, my soul." I, who came on the bridge at the earthly end of it, am still '' I " at the heavenly end ; saying at the end what I said at the beginning, and never forgot all the way across, " My God and me ; my need and His fulness. Bless the Lord, O my soul." Now, let us come back to notice a few particulars. " Bless the Lord, my soul, and all that is within me " — toithln me. That is the prelude, the overture. Here, like some mighty musician, the Psalmist sketches in the two first verses the theme that afterwards is to be worked out in detail, in symphony, and melody, and harmony. He reminds us here, then, that the praise of God is essentially an inward thing. That is the secret of it — its inwardness. I do not think he is discounting, I do 236 '' I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." not think he is opposing, and renouncing, and denouncing these outward forms it takes. It \YOuld have been incon- sistent for David certainly to have done so. He calls for the outward in many a psalm. He asks that God may be praised with a loud voice ; he asks that the timbrel, and harp, and psaltery, and organ, and I don't know what — all, that the full orchestral band may help the soul in swelling out its hymn of praise to God. But here he just forgets these, and by forgetting them puts them in their true, accidental, or merely secondary place, that he may fasten attention on the personalness and inwardness of praise — ** all that is within me." Then each one of us might sing this psalm. It depends not on voice or instrument. We are all invited, and the materials lie at hand. It only depends on this — I will put it almost to the verge of grotesqueness to emphasize it — have you got a " within," or are you all "outside"? Are you truly a living soul ? That is the touchstone, that is the test ; have you got an " inner man " ? Have you an inner life that no eye can see but your own and God's ; that no person can touch, after all, nor understand, save yourself ? — a secret chamber, unknown, unobserved ; the vulture's eye hath not seen it ; the keenest critics know nothing about it. The Holy Spirit, behind the Psalmist, goes to that door. He gives a knock, a ring, to rouse, to call, to evoke the real yo20 inside these muddy vestures of decay, behind this stout framework of walls and windows — He speaks to the inhabitant within. *' All that is within me, bless His holy name.' I might call in the aid of mental philosophy, but " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 237 I won't, in a kind of partial attempt to describe all that is within — the reason, and the will, and the conscience, and the memory, and the affections and desires. What a great life is inside I What a wonderful organ. And the Holy Ghost wishes the breath of thankfulness to breathe through all its stops. What a harp with many strings ! And every one can be thrummed by Divine fingers, can be struck with the plectron of Christ's own hand, can vibrate with this sweet, inimitable, spiritual music : "0 my soul, my soul, bless God; forget thyself, thine outward self, and that clamorous outward world ; dismiss it all, and come inside and draw the curtains close, and turn up the light, and sing thy psalm of praise to thine own God." As we might put it in our braid, auld Scottish tongue : " Sing your ain sang.'' That is what David is thinking of ; only he says it in Hebrew, not in broad Scotch : ** Sing your ain sang, your ain psalm, to your ain Eedeemer." "All that is within, bless His holy name." Is there another point, or am I over- emphasizing it, when he says. His holy name " ? I would set that before mine own mind when I am engaged in this heavenly exercise ; as if the Lord would have me understand that praise has a real "objective," just as prayer has. There is really One there before you, whom you are praising. As I have a name, and that name denotes, and connotes, and shuts me off from you, and you from me, so is it with the Highest. I am speaking to One as personal as myself. One who has a name, with all that a name denotes and connotes of personality. The Maker shall surely have what He has put in me. He that made 238 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." my eye, shall He not see ? He that made my ear, shall there not be hearing in Him ? He that made my heart, my inward heart, that loves and hates and throbs and swells, shall there not be in Him an heart to love and hate ? All things that are personal are in Him. So that when we are prais- ing the Lord, anything that would make us feel misty and hazy is taken away from us by this word, " Bless His holy name." Thou art beside thy God as beside a living friend, who just a moment ago lifted thee out of deep waters, and has set thee wet and shivering, or warm and dry, on the shore. Thou art at the feet of thy Saviour, thyself and He, as if, besides thyself, nor man nor angel lived in earth or heaven. For, you know, in these metaphysical, refining days, we need this little prelude, these few notes touched to- put us right ; to give us the key tones, to show us the lines and spaces of the stave on which our song is set, that we may be sure and certain, and ring out the notes like those who "know their music," and are delivered from faltering, and uncertainty. Modern science is quite uncertain, either about me,, myself, or Thee, Thyself, my God ; quite uncertain ; dumb- and dark. It is quite done with our hymns, either ancient or modern ; and hasn't, as yet, at any rate, published a collection of its own. Professor Huxley will be in no- danger of getting into a whirhng, excited, corybantic state over such " songs without words " as agnostics sing. " Bless the (Blank), Oil, my (blank) " is rather thinnish, I should say ; quite too utterly blank,. " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 239 in fact. But something like that gets into reHgiou, and it seems to be rather more sublime to be hazy and uncertain, to make God so big and vast that we cannot name Him. That kind of teaching never calls Him " The Lord my God." That kind of teaching calls Him the Great Un- known — capital G and capital U. That kind of teaching deifies Him with ctipitals — the Infinite, the Immense, the Unseen. That kind of teaching says, *' Pray ; but, after all, the blessing of prayer is in its reflex action. The prayer goes out of your mouth, and comes back into your ear again, and does you some good that way." But the old teaching of the Bible puts God before me, and makes Him objective and real. I am not shooting at nothing. I am speaking into an ear that is connected with an heart that is connected with an arm that moves the world. '* Oh, yes," says the modern ; " pray; but it is reflex. Ask, seek; but you will never find." As one has said, ** You have lost your child, and you go looking for it. Look for it, and look for it diligently. You will never find your child, but it is a pleasant exercise. Seek, you will never find anything; but it's grand to be seeking ; and by-and-bye you will not want your child." Not so David ; not so, I trust, with you and me. We seek, we knock, and it is opened unto us. The Living One comes forth and says, " I hear you ringing the bell ; what do you want ? " And so in praise, which in many ways is so akin to prayer, we will come with our souls filled with gladness, and tell Him, knowing that He listens, and is dehgbted with the incense and pure offering of a grateful heart. 240 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." One other note that the Psahnist strikes in this prehide leads me right down into the substance of the matter : ti Forget not all His benefits." O my believing friends, the trouble with us lies there. Our best servant to help us in this inward work of blessing and heaping praises on the name of God is a good memory. I think we are sadly defective there. If you are forgetful, you will be silent. Has any soul here been getting dumb towards God in praise? You have been getting careless in the exercise of memory. ''Forget not all His benefits." For we do forget. Partly it is sin — black and base ; partly it belongs to the limitation of our faculties ; but too surely it happens that '* Eaten bread is soon forgotten." We need to take time, like David, place and space, in which we shall, by means of memory, ransack and explore the ways of our God to our own selves, and thus get fuel to put on the fire that otherwise begins to burn itself out even in redeemed hearts. *' Forget not all His benefits." Oh, how many of us must charge our hearts to-day with for- getfulness ! We would not so forget what any human benefactor had done for us. *' How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," and God has many of them, and some of them, I fear, in this very church this morning. And the reason is not a reason of desperate wickedness, or of any great mahgnancy. It is "Evil wrought from want of thought, as well as want of heart." We do not remember. Familiar with the effect, we shght the cause ; and, in the constancy of God's gifts, think it is all a matter of the " reign of law," and this element of throbbing thankfulness dies down in the human heart. The vox Inmiana stop of the great organ of Divine praise gets faint and uncertain for want of living memory. Now " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 241 I ask you to remember. Kemember, first of all, thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee. Kemember all the past years ; let memory bring out of its storehouse all your former blessings ; remember that you are a miracle of mercy, you are a monument of redeeming grace. Why are you here with all things as they are round about you, and the prospects you have ahead of you ; how has it come about ? God, is the explanation ; the covenant, is the explanation ; the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord, that is the explanation of thy life, with all its blessedness in hand, and its infinite blessedness in prospect, through the ages that are to come. Oh for a holy memory ! We need to use memory as the divers use the diving-bell. There is a vessel which has gone down beneath the sea, but not in such depths that it cannot be reached. And the divers come ; they go down into the dark, sullen waters to that vessel, and they explore the hold, and fill the chains with whatever they can pile into them, and those overhead draw them up. Have you ever been there ? It is a strange experience to be on board a pontoon where divers are working. The diver comes with all his peculiar dress ; he steps on to the ladder and away down he goes completely out of sight. And I cannot express how your flesh begins to creep as there comes up there from beneath, from the mysterious, from the hidden, from the unknown, up there comes from his hand working away down there in the depths, treasures which were sunken, hidden, in one sense lost, in the hold of that sunken vessel. And you i-emember what the diver needs, that those up above should continually send down to him currents and streams of fresh air. Ah ! let me not recklessly ask you to remember. Do not go down into the 242 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." diving-bell of memory unless you are in continual com- munication with the fresh " caller " air of God's grace and mercy. For there is danger down there ; there are slimy things away down there in the depths, bad mephitic odours. It is quite safe, it is grand, it is helpful, if you go down carrying the upper world with you — the love of God and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Then remember even the darkest scenes through which you have passed. It wall not harm you, it will "'beet' the heavenward flame." To "forget nob all His benefits" is part of the exercise of heaven. That is why I call for it. This psalm has got to be sung over yonder in very much the same sub- stance by the Universal Israel — all the people of God. And it is time therefore we got ourselves furnished with it down here. The spring is to be a living purified memory. Even w4iile I am speaking, are not some hearts saying, " Well, but, preacher, shall I remember yonder?" Oh, yes, the alchemy of grace will work that for us. In the eternal glory it will be safe and good for us, it will make the fire in our hearts roar like the blast furnace when we are stirred up with " the long pole of memory." '■ AVlifU we reach our (|uiet dwelling On the strong eternal hills, And our songs His praise are telling AVho the whole creation fills — '' When the paths of prayer and^duty And repenting all are trod, And we wake up in the beauty Ot the Holy Lord our God ; " It will never dim the brightness To look back on earth from heaven, It will never mar the whiteness To remember sins forgiven. " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 245 " AVitli lifn's fluttering track Ijeliiud us, And the glory stretching round, Still a tender link sliall bind us To the hallowed pilgrim ground." And that link is memory. Therefore I call for memory. Go down, down beneath the sm-face ; down into the depths of that Lethean stream, that forgetfulness, at the bottom of which are lying whole sunken Argosies of Grace. And now notice the six particulars : " He forgivetli all thine iniquities. He healeth all thy diseases. He re- deemeth thy life from destruction. He crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies. He satisfieth thy mouth with good things. He reneweth thy youth like the eagle's." I sometimes like to put it, that there is something here for every day next week. We will begin, if we are spared, to-morrow. And here is the programme for Monday: " He forgiveth all thine iniquities." That will take you the whole of Monday. It will ? Oh, yes ; the whole day Monday; God thinks it will. "He forgiveth all thine iniquities." Tuesday: "He healeth all thy diseases." That will take a full winter Tuesday ; though some of you, perhaps, think you will run done in ten minutes, if you don't fall asleep. It will take a good day. It will not hinder your clerking, or any outward work ; it will rather help it on if you are busy the whole day long singing this psalm, "He healeth all thy diseases." Wednesday: "He re- deemeth thy life from destruction." A grand exercise for the middle of the week, half-way away from last Sabbath, and only half-way on to the Sabbath coming. " Never fear," it says, "He redeemeth thy life from destruction." Thursday : " He crowneth thee with lovingkindness." Try on your crown, brother. Doesn't it sit softly, and fit well 244 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." your erewhile dishonoured head? Friday: " He satisfieth thy mouth with good things." You will understand that when it comes the length of Friday. You will be able to look back through the week and say, " I have never wanted since Monday, and it opened pretty darkly. And now He has done so much for me, I think I may take it for granted for the rest of the week — " He satisfieth thy mouth with good things." And then for Saturday : ** He reneweth thy youth like the eagle's." The ending day, the Saturday, with its weariness, is God's mending-day; He reneweth thy soul with His unwearied strength. An(3 then slump them altogether on the Sabbath, and say, " Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits." It will make a round, a holy glee, one part chasing the other, and never after overtaking it — no beginning and no end, but delight- fully round and round, singing from day to day the mercy of the Lord our God. Verily, the children's hymn is right — ** I feel like singing all the time." "He forgiveth all thine iniquities." My friend, it is put in the present tense, for it has present sense. While I was speaking of me' -)ry, perhaps too much, I suggested the idea that God's bl dings lay in the past. There is not one of these that 1^ ongs to the past. Our text does not read, " Who forg ve all thine iniquities." That would hardly cause rejoicing in the hearts gathered here to-day ; for your sins are fresh and recent upon you, and God's forgiveness had need to be as fresh and recent as your sin. Here, where we sit, and as we are gathered, tell me the date on which you think it would be safe for God's mercies to expressed to you in the past tense, as being finished. I do not ever want this word here below to be but as it is : " Who forgiveth ; who forgiveth." " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 245 I feel inclined to come to you this morning as Moses came— only without Moses' sinful anger — and say, " Listen, ye rebels. Listen, listen to the present nearness of God's forgiving love to sinners such as we are." " Who forgiveth all thine iniquities." All of them. Not a few of the biggest of them, the roughest of them, the blackest of them, the dirtiest of them, but them all : and not tentatively and ex- perimentally, to see how it will do ; but in the largeness and lavishness of His boundless love and mercy forgiving them all. You cannot take a wife, and marry her for a week or two, to see how she and you will suit. It is ** for better, for worse " ; no parting. So God in His grace and mercy has taken you and me — not experimentally, to see how we will get. on together. But knowing what we are, knowing the drain and strain we shall be upon Him, He has run the risk. He has looked upon us in all our sin, and corruption, and rebellion, and by Himself He has sworn ; unto Himself He hath said it, ** I love them, and I will never leave them, never forsake them. Freely will I forgive them all their offences. My forgiving love shall first pardon, and finally extinguish their sin. This shall be My name and memorial to everlasting days : ' Who is a God like unto Thee ; that pardoneth iniquity ; that delighteth in mercy.'" Aye, He- forgives thee all thine iniquities. Let us pause for a moment that the meaning of it may get into our dull and thankless hearts. '* He healeth all thy diseases " is the second thing. Justification is in the one, if you like to put it theologically ; and sanctification in the other. He has pardoned us, but He has done more than that : He has come to sanctify us, to make us new creatures, obliterating every trace of sin ; and that is coming steadily on with the dawn of every day. 246 " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." That is present also — the persevering persistent energy by which God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are making, or is making — for He is but one God — out of the wreck He took in hand when He took us in hand, a holy, perfect, sinless, human soul. But still, it has a natural, physical sense; and I ask some of you to remember the sicknesses God has taken you from. I ask you to remember the raging fevers that cut off others, but did not cut off you; I ask you to remember the galloping consumptions that went off into the grave with others, and you were spared ; I ask you to remember how to your children trouble came, and your children still survive. I put it naturally, temporally, physically. Of course it has a higher and a farther-reaching sense ; but alas ! as we forget our doctor, so we forget the Great Physician. We put our fee into his hand and bid him good-bye, thankful we will see him no more. It will never do with this Physician ; you need Him as much as ever. Do not misunderstand Him when He calls every day, for it will be a dark day for you and me when the heavenly Physician does not call. And you may so treat Him that He won't. You may so treat Him that He will leave you for awhile, and then when old sins and lusts come back, and old fires and fevers burn in heart and flesh, then you will be brought to your senses. May it not be so. We are in a bettering way, and that is a great deal. We are in the convalescent ward of the infirmary. And oh, how well we look ! How well we are looked after! "He healeth all thy diseases." See the white bed He has made for you ; see the nurses attending you ; taste the medicines that He gives you ; see the ever- lasting arms that turn you in your sickness. Were you ever very sick ? Let me speak to some of the strong and robust " I FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." 247 among you ; and let me remind others to rejnember that, when sick and helpless, one of the greatest blessings is that a strong person should turn you, and make your bed for you. Here is God, the Great Physician, Jehovah-Eophi, the Lord that healeth thee. Again I ask you, remember how He has laid you ; see how beautifully He suggests to you that your case is inside the reach of His skill and care. I do believe He will cure me. Stretch yourself this morning like a man coming out of a delirium or wasting sick- ness. Stretch yourself ; open your poor eyes ; see the brilliant light coming in, and say to yourself, " I am going to live. Bless God, I am going to live. My spring is coming. I was meant for death ; I was meant for destruction. An awful venomous poison possessed me, I thought I was gone ; I went into madness and delirium ; but what is this that has happened?" A friend wrote to me the other day: — "After I left you," he said, ''the other evening, down in the Strand, the first thing I knew was that I was lying in Charing Cross Hospital." And the devil came to you and me one day, he leaped upon us, he rent us, he left us for dead — and he made a big mistake. The first thing we knew was, we came to in the heavenly hospital, lying clean and white, and washed and dressed, and all bandaged and splinted, and angels, and ministers of grace, and nurses all round about us ; ajicl, I do believe, we are going to get better. I believe we shall yet be as well as ever — we shall be better than ever we were. I believe we shall get out of this con- valescent ward, get rid of the splints and bandages, lay aside our crutches, and make a pile of them to the honour and glory of Jehovah-Eophi. I beheve we shall step out into the streets of the new Jerusalem, and the 248 " 1 FEEL LIKE SINGING ALL THE TIME." angels shall gather round us, I had almost said with envy, and say, " Who are ye? Tell us your tale." And we- tell them our tale. As the soldier bares his arms and shows the scars, and is not ashamed. Indeed, his eye lightens, and he fights his battles over again as he shows his wounds, now glorifying scars. So we, when God has healed us, the angels will gather round us, and things about us that would be mars, that would be scars, to the glory and praise of God's grace, there will be a glittering glory about them. We shall point to them and say, "Angel, that was a lust." They will say, " A what? " " That was a lust, that was a foul cancer, a corrupted affection, and grace has made it glorious." Which things the angels will desire to look into ; and won't we let them? He heals my diseases ; He makes me better than ever I was. Praise be to His holy name. There will be something left; but just as a scar is to a wound, so will be these things in the perfect health of the days that are to come. Oh that, even now, our health might spring forth speedily ; meantime, " let us hope continually, and praise Him more and more." " It is the very thing the doctor ordered," as they used to say in our part long ago. But my time is gone. You will need to do as I told you, and take up these notes to-morrow and all through the week. I will not keep you longer, as I have a some- what heavy day before me. The Lord bless His Word, and to His name be all the praise. Amen. Henderson & Bpaldiug, I'rinters, 3