CHRIST THE LIFE OF MEN 
 
 H. M. STEPHENSON 
 
^ OCT 8 1890 -f 
 
 x^' 
 
 :*o/. 
 
 BR A5 .H84 1888 
 Stephenson, H. M. 
 
 Christ the life of men 
 
CHRIST THE LIFE OF MEN. 
 
Sontion : C. J. CLAY and SONS, 
 
 CAMBEIDGE UNIVEESITY PKESS WAREHOUSE, 
 
 AVE MAEIA LANE. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. 
 LEIPZIG: F. A. BROCKHAUS. 
 
CHRIST THE LIFE OF MEN 
 
 THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR 1888 
 
 BY 
 
 The Rev. H. M.' STEPHENSON, M.A. 
 
 VICAR OF BOURN, CAMBS. 
 
 LATE HEAD MASTER OF ST PETER'S SCHOOL, YORK, 
 
 FORMERLY FELLOW OF CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1890 
 
 [All Rights reserved.] 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 X FEEL that I ought to apologise for the title of 
 these Lectures, which are really only fragments 
 of experience in the direction indicated by the 
 title. But a book must have a name, and a long- 
 winded one is inconvenient, an obtrusively modest 
 one, revolting. 
 
 H. M. S. 
 
 Bourn Vicarage, Cambs. 
 January, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Christ the Divine consciousness in men ... 1 
 
 II. Christ the Source of living conduct . . . .16 
 
 III. Christ the key to the sufferings of life . . .30 
 
 IV. Christ the judging power in men 42 
 
I. 
 
 CHRIST THE DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 
 
 Philippians I. 21. 
 
 To me to live is Christ. 
 
 I CANNOT help thinking that it would sound very 
 strange if not quite unintelligible to us nowadays to 
 hear a man say that to him to live was another man. 
 Modified in some way or other the phrase might sound 
 intelligible, possibly even natural. "To me to live is to 
 study, imitate, expound, venerate another man " — that 
 would be intelligible. But even with this modification, 
 the phrase could probably only have a partial or tem- 
 porary application or meaning. The word " to live " 
 must itself probably have a limited sense. It could 
 hardly mean the whole life in its whole length and 
 breadth. No man would say of another man tliat that 
 man occupied his whole existence, and would always do 
 so, even if he only meant by that expression that the 
 man in question in some way filled his thoughts. But 
 
 '- S.L. 1 
 
2 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 to say of a man barely and without qualification, *he is 
 life to me,' 'to live to me is he,' would I think seem so 
 strange as to be almost inexplicable. 'To me to live is 
 Moses, Socrates, Luther,' seems a phrase which could 
 hardly be used at all by any one with respect for 
 language, in order to convey an intelligible sense. At 
 any rate the utmost that could be conveyed by it 
 (assuming it to be intelligible at all) would be some- 
 thing of this kind: 'without the presence of one of 
 these men in my mind as an object of thought, or 
 as exciting emotions of some kind within me, my life 
 would be something different from what it is.' It would 
 be, I think, at best a loose way of saying ' at the present 
 time such and such a man occupies a large part of ni}- 
 thoughts.' Now assuming that the expression could 
 be used merely to mean this much, are we justified 
 in thinking that that is what St Paul meant by it ? 
 Or rather are we justified in thinking that that is all 
 that he meant by it ? 
 
 St Paul's words no doubt include all that would be 
 meant when one man said of another that thoughts 
 about him occupied his mind at all times. They no 
 doubt mean that St Paul lived to preach Christ, to 
 make Him known, to study Him in order to make the 
 knowledge of Him more and more perfect, that all 
 St Paul's life was coloured by his knowledge of Christ, 
 all his actions motived by the thought of Christ. But 
 can that be all that he meant ? Would he, if that was 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 3 
 
 all he meant, have used that very remarkable expres- 
 sion, ' to me to live is Christ ' ? When he could have 
 expressed himself more naturally in some other way, 
 such as 'I live only to preach, or serve or magnifv 
 Christ,' would he use a loose or hyperbolical expression 
 which was not necessary ? Would he use an expression 
 which had probably never been used before, only to 
 mean that which required no new expression to convev 
 it? 
 
 In estimating the answer to these questions, we 
 ought I think to consider (1) the circumstances under 
 which he spoke the words, (2) whether he uses words 
 of similar import in other places and (3) lastly the 
 context of the words in this place. 
 
 (1) Now at the time when St Paul spoke these 
 words he was, and probably must have had grave 
 apprehensions that he was, on the eve of departure 
 from this life. If we dismiss what appears to be the 
 untenable theory of his subsequent travels in the west 
 of Europe, he must have been at this time awaiting the 
 trial which resulted in his execution. This is not, one 
 would say, a time when a man indulges in highfiown 
 or fanciful or exaggerated expressions about himself. 
 
 (2) On the second head I will refer only to one 
 remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Colossians 
 (iii. 21). There urging the Colossians to act on the 
 belief that they had died with Christ, and risen with 
 Him and to let their thoughts rise up to the level of 
 
 1—2 
 
4 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 that belief, and seek to live with Christ in heaven, he 
 encourages them to believe that the truth, the reality, 
 the intrinsic grandeur of that life hidden with Christ in 
 God, will one day be fully established. And in doing 
 so he uses the following words 'when Christ lulio is our 
 life shall be manifested, then shall you also be mani- 
 fested with Him in glory.' 
 
 (3) Lastly, as regards the context of these words 
 the sense of the whole passage, in which they occur, 
 seems to be in substance as follows : St Paul is certain 
 that what is happening will result in salvation, which 
 perhaps we might render better negatively, in no loss of 
 life (awTTjpia) to him. His old fearless outspokenness 
 will not fail him, he will not be put to shame : but 
 Christ will be magnified in his person, (not, observe, 'he 
 will magnify Christ' but 'Christ will be magnified in 
 him') whether he continue in the world or be sent out 
 of it. 'As far as I am concerned' he continues 'life 
 here or elsewhere to me is Christ : only life out of this 
 world will perhaps be fuller Christ : personally I would 
 rather go to that fuller fruition of Christ : for your 
 sakes it would perhaps be better that I should stay 
 here.' This appears to me to be in substance the 
 meaning of the passage in which the text occurs, 
 though in giving it thus concisely I have perhaps 
 anticipated somewhat, and assumed without stating, 
 what I take to be a fact about St Paul's use of the 
 words life and death. By death St Paul appears to 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 5 
 
 mean simply the state which is the result of conscious 
 sin, or separation from God. Life without God is 
 death. Life with GoD is life. Physical Hfe and death 
 are quite subordinate in his mind to this real life 
 and death, mere accidents of them, external conditions 
 or expressions or perhaps even symbols of them. The 
 physical life with the living intercourse, the com- 
 munion which it necessarily implies, is the symbol of 
 that communion in which the real life consists. The 
 separation and isolation implied in physical death iden- 
 tifies it with the separation which makes the real 
 death. So completely is this the case, so completely in 
 St Paul's mind are physical life and death embraced 
 within the real life and death, that he is not at pains 
 to distinguish them sometimes, where the distinction 
 would have made his meaning clearer, but passes 
 insensibly from the one meaning to the other quasi 
 desultorias in the same passage, thinking now more of 
 the physical aspect of death, now of the spiritual, of 
 resurrection now as the continuation of consciousness, 
 now as the recovery from a state of separation from 
 God. As an example of this I would point (besides 
 the passage in which the text occurs) to the very 
 remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Romans v. 
 12-15. 
 
 If this be a correct statement of the meaning which 
 St Paul attached to life, and he says that to go on 
 living in the body is to him Christ, he must surely 
 
6 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 mean that Christ to him is life in the only full sense he 
 recognised, that is, communion with God, union with 
 the Father- Spirit, that Christ in other words is the 
 Word of God to him, that Being by whom all the 
 words of God come to men, the Bread of life on which 
 alone their life can be supported, the Being through 
 whom men's spirits come into harmony with the Spirit 
 on which all true existence depends, the Being through 
 whom the spirit of man is led into all truth. It would 
 seem then that St Paul believed (1) not only that it is 
 possible for the human spirit to be consciously united 
 to God, therefore to know God, but (2) that such union 
 is possible through Christ, that (to put it as he puts it) 
 Christ is to men that union with God. This seems 
 to be a mere truism, a platitude of the flattest, a 
 commonplace of theology. But yet there is, I fancy, 
 some tendency nowadays to avoid it, to gently ignore it 
 in its naked proportions. There is, I fear, a tendency 
 on the part of Christians to acquiesce in a sort of 
 orthodox agnosticism (if I may venture to use a word 
 which has been appropriated by extra- Christian philo- 
 sophers, assuming of course that such a Protean word 
 can be said to be appropriated at all). The tendency 
 of ordinary Christian thought and (if I may use the 
 term) of the ordinary pulpit seems rather to deal with 
 Christianity than with Christ, to dwell on the Gospel 
 as the revelation of a higher morality rather than as 
 the revelation of the source of all morality, as the 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 7 
 
 revelation of a scheme of redemption for a lost world, 
 rather than as the revelation of the redeeming GoD, as 
 a certain amount of knowledge about Himself revealed 
 through Christ and by Him entrusted to a church for 
 the guidance of men, a regulative revelation, an im- 
 proved Law in fact, rather than the absolute unveiling 
 of Himself in the Word made flesh. 
 
 The large occupation, the almost concentration of 
 theological study on what I venture to call the lendings 
 of the Gospel, the critical study of documents, of 
 contemporary literature, of historical and geographical 
 detail connected with it, of general ecclesiastical history, 
 of church politics, seems likely to assist the tendency I 
 speak of. GoD forbid that I should impugn the use- 
 fulness of those studies — it would be absurd to do so — 
 or that I should fail to acknowledge that some of the 
 most distinguished leaders in those branches of study 
 are at the same time profound theologians in the true 
 sense, men penetrated with the deepest conviction of 
 the full and absolute nature of the revelation of God in 
 Christ. But there may be a temptation to give too 
 exclusive attention to these studies, and this may draw 
 away from the inner fact of the Gospel itself, from the 
 actual voice of the Word of God speaking in it. That 
 may be especially a temptation in days when super- 
 natural religion is much more easily tolerated by the 
 world if it keep clear of reason, when a revelation 
 which merely prescribes a rule of conduct, the grounds 
 
8 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 of which are veiled in mystery, is treated with much 
 more respect by logicians and philosophers than one 
 which claims to declare the mind of GoD to finite 
 creatures. But if this tendency should prevail, it would 
 mean that we should have to be content with a religion 
 which is divorced from reason, with a revelation which 
 only declares the necessity for certain conduct of 
 thought and action under pains and penalties for 
 disobedience, and has nothing to say to the faculty in 
 man which searches for truth, a revelation which 
 forbids search into the nature of that which is revealed, 
 a religion which lets men speak to GoD only through 
 one small chink opened they know not why, a revelation 
 which reveals not the express image of the Father, but 
 a glimpse of the purposes of GoD, mysterious and 
 inexplicable, outside the human reason, a religion which 
 declares the search for theologic truth to be something 
 different in kind from the search for scientific truth, a 
 revelation not explaining, but excluding all other reve- 
 lations. This would be but a melancholy remnant of 
 Christianity such as St Paul knew it. It would be 
 almost better to give up Christianity altogether than be 
 content with such a tantalising phantom of revelation 
 as such agnosticism would vouchsafe us. For if Christ 
 is to be our life as He was St Paul's, it is surel}' 
 essential to that view of our relation to Christ, it must 
 form the basis of that relation in our minds, that we 
 should believe that through Him we know God. We 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 9 
 
 must surely be allowed to see in Him the revealer of 
 the Father; more than that, the image of the Father, 
 the Word- God speaking with man, not simply the 
 principal actor in a scheme of redemption, the doler 
 out of such scant portion of knowledge of the purposes 
 of God as may be sufficient to regulate men's conduct, 
 a seeing leader of the blind, guiding them in all igno- 
 rance. We shall ask to be allowed to see in Him the 
 discloser of the mind of the Father towards the sons of 
 His creating, the giver of a Spirit which leads into all 
 truth, truth of human nature and outside nature, as 
 well as truth of human conduct. It is difficult to see 
 how we should be satisfied with less. For those who 
 look to find in the Gospel the revelation of a Father in 
 a Son must look to find in the nature of the Father 
 there revealed the key to those truths which ' in man- 
 hood darkly join,' to find reason, for example, why right- 
 eousness does tend to happiness for men, and why men 
 tend on the whole to righteousness; why self-sacrifice is 
 the highest happiness of human nature; why suffering is 
 good and not evil, whether it be suffering for our own or 
 others' sins, or whether it be suffering in pursuit of truth. 
 Let me confine myself to the first of those questions 
 which I have exemplified as questions which the 
 Christian looks to the Gospel for help to answer. Why 
 does righteousness tend to the happiness of men and 
 why do men tend on the whole to righteousness rather 
 than unrighteousness ? 
 
10 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 There is, as it seems to me, one philosophic theory 
 that seems to touch the root of this truth (if we may 
 a-ssume it to be a truth), one that seems to go below 
 the surface, to give our belief some hold in solid ground, 
 not leave it planted rootless and insecure, one which 
 seems to give us security that this truth may not be at 
 any time reversed, that it may not be declared a false- 
 hood and the tendency of men's thoughts and actions 
 set the other way. The theory that does this for us, 
 unless I am mistaken, is that which claims relation 
 between man's consciousness and an eternal conscious- 
 ness, between man's spirit and the Spirit which is GoD, 
 A theory this, which has shown great vitality, which 
 has survived the most deadly shocks, and revived again 
 and again from exhaustive philosophic extinction, a 
 theory which but lately found one of its ablest expo- 
 nents in a member of the sister University whose 
 premature loss so many earnest hearts who knew his 
 guidance have deplored \ The other and more popular 
 philosophies to one who seeks firm footing for thought 
 and conduct, who asks for a foundation on which to 
 plant his belief, seem all to fall short just where he 
 wants most to go on. When it comes to the question, 
 why should man be capable of any knowledge at all, 
 why should he be capable of righteous conduct, what 
 has he in virtue of which he can use the terms 'right' 
 and 'wrong,' what has he to assure him that they are 
 1 T. H. Green, 'Prolegomena to Ethics.' 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 11 
 
 what he thinks they are, what has he to assure him 
 that their significance may not be changed, that evil 
 may not at any time be enthroned in the place of good, 
 and all the suffering for what we now call righteousness 
 sake be proved after all to be so much wasted pain, 
 when it comes to this question, they seem to have 
 nothing to say. In fact all that they can do is to tell 
 us that we can know nothing for certain about such 
 matters, and to rebuke the presumption of even seeming 
 to try to get to the bottom of things. Xhe spiritualist 
 theory does offer an answer to such questions. It 
 seems to prove in what direction the true answer to 
 those questions lies. 
 
 Showing that the consciousness in man alone makes 
 a world of experience possible to a man, because it 
 alone can hold together those relations of which all 
 experience must consist, it infers that that consciousness 
 must be something quite different in nature from the 
 phenomena, out of which it forms its experience, that it 
 cannot come into being as an affection of those organs 
 which convey the phenomena out of which the con- 
 sciousness forms nature for itself, that it must have an 
 independent existence, an eternal existence independent 
 of time and space, as that to which related phenomena 
 and successive events are present together. The very 
 existence of nature for us, inasmuch as it exists for us 
 only through the consciousness, implies that that 
 consciousness is not natural nor the product of nature. 
 
12 CHKIST THE DIVINE 
 
 It cannot be the result of the processes which itself 
 originates. However much it may be materially con- 
 ditioned, however much it may need the body which is 
 organic to its functions, it cannot be material, or derived 
 from its material conditions. To derive it out of that 
 which has no existence without it, is to derive it out of 
 nothing. Further, if men are capable of any knowledge 
 at all, it must be by learning to perceive a single and 
 unalterable order of relations. As error consists in 
 mistaking one set of relations for another, so knowledge 
 is the apprehension of the true relations between things, 
 which true relations form an unalterable system of 
 relations, the same always under the same conditions. 
 an eternal order of things. But how can such an 
 unalterable order of relations exist ? It can only exist 
 in virtue of a principle which, like the consciousness in 
 man, can hold plurality in unity, hold the many together 
 in one, make a whole out of many parts, and so consti- 
 tute relations. And this consciousness, if it is the 
 cause of a single and unalterable order of relations, 
 must be itself one and unalterable, the same yesterday 
 to-day and for ever, an eternal Spirit, other than the 
 nature which exists in virtue of its creating power. 
 And if knowledge of what is real is to become acquainted 
 with this eternal and unalterable order, how is it 
 possible, except by strict affinity between his conscious- 
 ness and that eternal consciousness, by the imparting 
 of that Eternal Spirit to man ? One in that essential 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 13 
 
 jDower to hold together in unity the different elements 
 of relations, man's consciousness must be akin to that 
 eternal consciousness. But inasmuch as it is conditioned 
 by material conditions, inasmuch as it must learn to 
 know that unalterable order through a distorting haze 
 of sensuous perceptions, the communication cannot be 
 complete as we are constituted here. But communica- 
 tion there must be or we should be incapable of the 
 simplest act of human learning. This theory seems to 
 give some hope to the human being that he may really 
 know in a proper sense of the word, offers him reason 
 why he should so hope, offers him reason why he may 
 hope that the idea of good to which men seem to be 
 struggling, will, when completely realised, prove absolute 
 good ; and that being human beings, sharers of the 
 Eternal Consciousness, they are bound to struggle on in 
 the same direction. 
 
 But surely this theory needs completing, wants 
 humanising (if I may use the term slightly out of its 
 ordinary sense). If that Eternal Consciousness is im- 
 parted to man, surely there must be some Being in 
 whom it is so imparted, some Being akin to man in 
 whom men, if they know Him, recognise that conscious- 
 ness working under conditions of human organisation, 
 and working perfectly. Surely if the Eternal Conscious- 
 ness, of which man partakes, is GoD the creator, the 
 Eternal Father, there must be a Son-GoD, and GoD- 
 Man, in whom man partakes of that consciousness, who 
 
14 CHRIST THE DIVINE 
 
 is that consciousness in every man, who, when mankind 
 have reached their high ideal, the image in which they 
 were created, will be all in all men. And if a man 
 appeared on earth the story of whose life we are told on 
 at least respectable authority, authority as good as 
 most of that on the strength of which we feel calm 
 about the facts of all but quite modern history, if a man 
 appeared on earth who claimed to be such a being, 
 who said of Himself 'I and my Father are one,' who 
 said ' No man knoweth the Father save the Son and he 
 to whom the Son will reveal Him,' who said 'The 
 Father hath delivered all judgment to the Son,' who 
 told His disciples that He was going to His Father 
 who is greater than He, and that if He went away He 
 would send to them the Spirit that should lead them 
 into all truth ; if a man appeared upon earth, who (as 
 men, who cannot have been fools, apparently believed) 
 possessed mastery over the hidden processes of nature, 
 to whom the truths were open secrets which science 
 slowly reveals, — science which owes to Him the inspira- 
 tion of fearless truth-seeking, by which alone it can 
 effectually work (for if there had been fearless truth- 
 seekers before Him, there had been none that could 
 inspire fearlessness) — who on the showing not of His 
 friends, but His enemies, at least anticipated some of 
 the final triumphs of medical psychology, and lit uj) 
 meteor-like the path along which that science alone 
 can travel to success ; if a man appeared upon earth 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEN. 15 
 
 who, to one possessed of the profound insight with 
 which the writer of the Fourth Gospel appears to have 
 been endowed, seemed to show evident tokens that in 
 Him dwelt the glory of the only-begotten Son of GoD, 
 of whom St Paul in spite of the prepossessions and 
 prejudices of early training believed that He was 'in 
 the Form of GoD ', that there was in Him that which 
 made Him GoD, though He took on Him the nature of 
 man, a servant of GoD; if a man appeared upon 
 earth who by His death has been ever since drawing 
 men up to Him, whose influence has profoundly modi- 
 fied the thought and conduct of civilised peoples, and 
 modified them in the direction of the higher self- 
 sacrificing type of manhood, whose influence shows 
 itself in those who deny His claims, who cannot accept 
 His divinity but have received from Him a humanity 
 which they never could have had without Him; — if 
 such a man appeared on earth, is He not the Being in 
 whom was made manifest the Eternal Consciousness, the 
 Eternal Righteousness, which is Divine and Human 
 too ? 
 
II. 
 
 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF LIVING CONDUCT. 
 
 Philippians I. 21. 
 To me to live is Christ. 
 
 Last Sunday I suggested that, if Christ is to be 
 the life of men now, as St Paul said He was his life, 
 it is absolutely necessary, in order to realise that 
 relation between Christ and us, that we should be 
 able to recognise Him as the revealer or the revelation 
 of God, as the Being in whom the Eternal Spirit, the 
 self-existent Consciousness who makes the Universe 
 possible, is communicated to men, as the giver of the 
 Spirit which leads into all truth. That seems to me to 
 be a necessary preliminary and essential condition of 
 finding life in Christ, that we should regard Him as 
 the Being through whom men become conscious of 
 God, become conscious of a divine life, which is outside 
 of them and within them, a life which is, so to say, its 
 own knowledge, which is known in working it out 
 
CHRIST THE SOURCE OF LIVING CONDUCT. 17 
 
 uuder the material conditions in which men exist, in 
 aspiring to fuller and ever fuller union with Christ. 
 
 Assuming this as the basis of all realisation of our 
 life in Christ, I would venture to suggest today another 
 aspect of that life, a practical aspect. I would 
 venture to point out a fact of our everyday lives with 
 which the truth of life in Christ may help us to deal, 
 a difficulty which it may help us to confront, possibly 
 to master. The fact I mean, is the difficulty which 
 most, if not all, of us find in really living our lives, in 
 keeping ourselves morally and spiritually alive, not 
 allowing ourselves to sink into a state of torpor, or at 
 best of somnambulism broken only by intervals of 
 active and conscious moral and spiritual life. To 
 everyday human beings it is a real difficulty to sustain 
 their conduct at the aery level of active, conscious, 
 moral life, to prevent its sinking into the dull earthy 
 atmosphere of passive and monotonous routine. Tlie 
 everyday life of everyday mortals does tend so terribly 
 to routine, to mere reflex moral action. Even the 
 formation of habits so absolutely necessary to virtuous 
 conduct exposes us to this danger more or less. 
 
 The constant repetition of the sights and sounds 
 which is involved in the formation of a habit deadens 
 the impressions that these sights and sounds made on 
 us once, and should make on us always, if we are really 
 living our lives. As Bishop Butler in his Chapter 
 on moral discipline says: "From our very foculty of 
 s. L. 2 
 
18 CHRIST THE SOURCE 
 
 habits, passive impressions by being repeated grow 
 weaker: thoughts by often passing through the mind 
 are felt less sensibly : being accustomed to danger 
 begets intrepidity, i.e. lessens fear: being accustomed 
 to distress, lessens the passion of pity, to instances of 
 others' mortality, lessens the sensible apprehension of 
 our own ". And again : " Perception of distress in 
 others is a natural excitement passively to pity and 
 actively to relieve it : but let a man set himself to 
 attend to, inquire out and relieve distressed people and 
 he cannot but grow less and less sensibly affected, with 
 the various miseries of life with which he must become 
 acquainted: when yet at the same time benevolence 
 considered not as a passion, but as a practical principle 
 of action, will strengthen: and whilst he passively 
 compassionates the distressed less, he will acquire a 
 greater aptitude actively to assist and befriend them ". 
 The point that Butler here is speaking to is of 
 course different. He is discoursing on the necessity for 
 active exercise in order to form habits, to qualify 
 ourselves for states of life, for which we were before 
 unqualified, and on the uselessness of mere theorising 
 or contemplation, which tends rather, by the familiarity 
 which it begets, to render us more and more insensible 
 to moral considerations. Still the other inference holds 
 good, that the very formation of habits which make us 
 capable of prompt and steady moral action, whenever 
 occasion calls for it, tends to kill in us that living 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 19 
 
 sympathy with nature, or with men which we have 
 when we begin to form the habit, tends to lessen the 
 sensitive capacity for the impressions which nature and 
 mankind produce in the untrained mind, tends there- 
 fore to make our action spontaneous reflex action, the 
 action of moral machines, rather than of living beings 
 throbbing with the excitement of a quick and living 
 sympathy. The very means by which we save our souls 
 the detriment of too much friction, the systematic action 
 which prevents the wear and tear of the spirit felt by 
 the novice who is forming his habits by daily new 
 experiences, these at the same time that they save life 
 destroy it. Because we do not die daily, we do not live 
 fully. Because our souls no longer sink under the awe 
 which nature once struck into us, because we have 
 learned to master the weakness which others' vveakness 
 used to stir in us, because we no longer burn when 
 others are offended, because in a word we have cooled 
 and hardened the feelings that used to be warm and 
 soft into the solid material of active habits and syste- 
 matic practice, we have thereby lost part of our life. 
 The student of nature who has formed his method and 
 habits of research through familiarity with the inex- 
 haustible wonders that nature constantly reveals, tends 
 to lose in the friction of a throng of details the fresh 
 and living sense of wonder, the religious awe which 
 those marvels would once awake in hiin. Those 
 whose profession, or whose sense of duty engages 
 
20 CHRIST THE SOURCE 
 
 them in efforts to ameliorate the condition of their 
 fellowbeings, by constant familiarity with the scenes 
 which furnish the materials of their benevolent habits 
 and their philanthropic system — scenes of all kinds, 
 from the scenes of large city-life with its morbid 
 inflammatory activity, to those of village life with its 
 fenlike stagnation of mind and spirit — are in danger of 
 losing the vivid sense of pity which such phenomena 
 should excite, even while they are learning to attack 
 successfully the evil of them. Even as they learn 
 their business as practical philanthropists they tend to 
 regard human life as a matter of business, as material 
 mainly for philanthropic organisation. 
 
 Thus may even our best habits be the means of 
 weakening the principle of spiritual livingness within 
 us. And if this is true of our disinterested and bene- 
 volent habits, if familiarity tends to turn the exercise 
 of them into routine work, how much truer is it of 
 those necessary duties of our everyday life, of that more 
 or less necessarily self-regarding work, livelihood work, 
 which makes up such a large portion of the lives of 
 most of us. There are two reasons of course why such 
 w^ork constantly tends to become lifeless, to lose all life 
 and energy, to become mere dead second-hand work, 
 reflex action only, not the result of conscious impulse 
 within us, of moral energy, but the dead w^ork of a 
 machine that works without head or heart. (1) There 
 is the same reason that is at work in the formation of 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 21 
 
 our benevolent habits. The constant repetition of the 
 same actions tends to dull the interest of them and 
 even the sense of responsibility in performing them. 
 We get to perform them better and more easily, but as 
 they require less effort to perform, so do we tend to 
 bestow no conscious effort upon them. We all know 
 the difference it makes when we begin new work, enter 
 on new duties, how keenly alive we are to their require- 
 ments, how we rouse our energies to perform them. 
 And we know hiow different it is apt to be when that 
 new work has become old work, how much we are in 
 danger of losing heart in it, performing it lifelessly, 
 losing interest in it, letting it work itself, as a wheel 
 turns round after the force that set it going is removed. 
 (2) And the second reason is that such routine work 
 is in the main self-regarding work only ; in so far as it 
 is livelihood work, we have only ourselves to consider 
 in it. We are obliged to do it for the sake of its 
 results : we must do it or else either forego the neces- 
 saries of life, or surrender our independence. Now if in 
 the case of those disinterested and benevolent habits, 
 in our self-imposed duties, familiarity and repetition 
 have a tendency to deaden, to rob us of quick and 
 living responsiveness to the sights and sounds of uni- 
 versal nature, ten thousand times more so is it the case 
 with the routine of necessary duties, with the purely 
 
 biotic life. 
 
 The life of disinterested and benevolent duties 
 
'22 CHRIST THE SOURCE 
 
 though it may lose some of its vitality and living force, 
 can never be killed outright, it can never absolutely 
 die, simply because it is disinterested. It has a prin- 
 ciple of life in its altruistic aim that will always prevent 
 its stiffening into dead routine. But the livelihood 
 work is continually in danger of becoming wholly self- 
 regarding, egoistic, selfish, wholly dead therefore as far 
 as any conscious moral life, any living solid addition to 
 the life of the worker is concerned. For it is, I take it, 
 a well-known law of human work that if it is not to be 
 mere chaff and draff, mere refuse encumbering not 
 helping, choking not feeding the soul, it must be done 
 for its own sake and the sake of the objects of it, not 
 for the sake of what is gained from it. Work done 
 merely to gain bread or avoid punishment is of no solid 
 value to the worker, contributes nothing to his real 
 life. He who works merely to live, is dead while he 
 lives, is self-condemned ' propter vitam vivendi perdere 
 causas '. 
 
 Now such death as this will no doubt be prevented 
 by having some disinterested work (the work being 
 of course important and useful in itself) of our choice, 
 some work we love for its own sake, which we cannot 
 love for external reward to be got from it, whether it 
 be reward of money or reward of praise or reward of 
 power. For experience, I think, shows that having 
 some such preference work, if it be genuine and rightly 
 used, acts as a leaven on the whole life ; that it forms 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 23 
 
 a principle which pervades all the life's work and 
 assimilates it to that work of love. Those who can 
 keep their routine work most alive, who do it most 
 unsordidly and best, are those surely who cherish and 
 keep by them some work of their own love and choice, 
 in which their minds can always find rest and freedom. 
 And the proof that this is genuine and self-rewarding 
 work is found in its effects on the rest of the life and 
 on the routine livelihood work. We most of us unfor- 
 tunately know people who can do any work better than 
 the work they are paid to do, who must shirk or slur 
 the work of their vocation because their genius will 
 carry them fluttering after almost any other work. But 
 nothing can be more conclusive proof that that other 
 work is an aifectation or a dilettantism or a selfishness 
 or a sham, than the fact that it has no effect on the 
 rest of the life's work, or rather has a baneful effect, that 
 it deadens instead of giving life. No ! so surely as a 
 little leaven leavens the whole lump, so surely will any 
 genuinely self-forgetful and self-rewarding work of love 
 react on the whole life's work and make it more or less 
 like itself. The antidote then to the narcotic influence 
 of the livelihood routine work would seem to be to 
 have some work of choice and love, some disinterested 
 work, done at least for itself and not for external 
 reward, not for pence or praise, whether it be students' 
 work of research and speculation into truths which it 
 concerns men's welfare to know more and more of, not 
 
24 CHRIST THE SOURCE 
 
 truths which it pays to learn by heart ; or whether it 
 be active work in the midst of men and women, practical 
 work of helping others to rid their lives of falsehoods. 
 Some such work as this hidden in the soul will leaven 
 the life and spread its reality over all the conduct, 
 making all like itself; like leaven it will fill the whole 
 with vital air, like salt it will save the whole from 
 corruption ; a guardian work it will be to keep watch 
 over the rest, and save it from the attacks of death. 
 
 ' Sed quis custodiet ipsum custodem ?' who or what 
 will guard the guardian work itself against the attacks 
 of the powers of death ? what will keep it ujd to its 
 own high level ? what will preserve it wholly alive ? 
 what will guard it against weariness and ambition ? 
 what will answer the questions that those two will 
 suggest : ' why should I go on working to weariness ? 
 where will it end ? on what is it based ? what is my 
 guarantee that it is not all a mistake ? a subjective 
 delusion ? How do I know that there is any truth 
 beneath it all ? How do I know that it is not a mere 
 fancy that such work may bring its own reward ? I 
 know that sometimes I find satisfaction in it. But 
 more often I find disappointment, vexation of spirit, 
 loneliness, as the result of work. Why should I not 
 give up an ideal which only makes me feel my own 
 weakness ? Why should I not work for what seems to 
 make others happy ? For money, for place, for power, 
 for applause ? why should I believe that it is best to 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 25 
 
 live for an idea? why should I not fall back on the 
 material life of comfort, pleasure, excitement ? what 
 can answer questions like this ? what can guard us 
 against the deadening effect of repetition on our higher 
 lives ? what can keep us alive to all those impressions 
 on which the habits of our higher lives are formed '. 
 what can keep our hearts soft ? prevent their harden- 
 ing as our habits of action grow settled and solid ? 
 
 And above all, what is to save us from the load of 
 irresponsibility that weighs upon us, if we attempt to 
 live the higher life, to work the disinterested work 
 that is to keep our lives alive ? What can answer, for 
 example, such thoughts as these : " I cannot do this 
 work by myself: other men can help me by advice, by 
 example, by encouragement : they may stimulate me 
 by the knowledge of their needs, by the sense of what 
 they may gain if I exert myself : but this is not enough 
 for me : I can work Avith them : I can work for them : 
 but I cannot work under them in this my own life's 
 work. They cannot bear that burden for me : ' every 
 man must bear his own burden': and I cannot work 
 under myself: I cannot be my own master: I cannot 
 offer my work to myself: I cannot seek my own 
 perfection to satisfy myself: for then I have nowhere 
 to lay my imperfections : no possibility of rest : nowhere 
 to acquiesce. But a master I must have or give up my 
 life's work : some one who claims my utmost and my 
 best, and yet will take my ragged fragments for what 
 
26 CHEIST THE SOURCE 
 
 they are worth : some one who demands my work, yet 
 is the greatest reward that work can find, one whose 
 approval I can receive as freely as I receive my own 
 without loss of independence, self-respect, or disinte- 
 rested aim, some one who will yoke me, harness me, 
 control me, guide me, be responsible for me, in whose 
 mastery I can find repose " ? 
 
 I believe there is an answer to all these perplexities 
 in St Paul's words ' To me to live is Christ '. 
 
 If He is the Being through whom the eternal truth 
 is conveyed to man, if He is the revelation of GoD who 
 makes all things what they are, then His manhood is 
 the truth of all manhood. His life upon earth seen by 
 men and recorded by respectable authorities, is the true 
 life of all, the pattern life guaranteed by the Incarnate 
 Truth. And what do we find in that life ? We find 
 a continuous and unexhausted energy of beneficent 
 and disinterested action combined with quick and living 
 sympathy. A life always sustained up to the same 
 level, undisturbed by ambition, weakness, or mono- 
 tony : a life intensely real in every part of it : full 
 and fresh and continuously creative in every action, 
 marvellously free from all that is second-hand or 
 adopted in thought or action ; we find the sustained 
 living energy of one who not only never tired of His 
 high ideal of communion with God, but rested weary 
 limbs and fed a hungry frame with prayer, we find the 
 vital enthusiasm of one whose every action was instinct 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 27 
 
 with life from a living law within, an enthusiasm which 
 burst into a flame of resentment at all unreality, all 
 formulated second-hand conduct that came across its 
 path ; we find the living unresting intellect that never 
 ceased gazing into the real conditions and relations of 
 things and grasped and knew the secret of creation. 
 We find a marvellous energy overwhelming in its 
 greatness — more than human we should say, but that 
 He in whom it was, was man. And when I speak of 
 energy, I need not, I think, in this congregation ask 
 not to be misunderstood or warn my hearers that I do 
 not mean the spurious thing that in the general world 
 sometimes goes by the name of energy. There is 
 such a spurious thing. A restless morbid craving to 
 be seen working or seeming to work, a fluttering 
 egotism that can do nothing quietly or in secret, 
 that desires above all things the reputation of working, 
 and will work if the reputation is not to be other- 
 wise acquired, a diseased convulsive activity, a sort 
 of moral chorea. This of course is not true energy. 
 That is essentially calm and self-contained. It is to the 
 moral or mental constitution what perfect health is to 
 the physical, the highest development of the moral and 
 mental force, ever at work performing its natural 
 functions but without self-consciousness, as the healthy 
 body is unconscious of its health. We find, I say, a 
 marvellous energy of sustained thought, action, and 
 sympathy in the man Christ Jesus. And this man 
 
28 CHRIST THE SOURCE 
 
 is the pattern man, the type of true humanity revealed 
 by God in a man. 
 
 But He is more than that, if St Paul's words are 
 true and He is the life of men. He is the Divine 
 manhood in men. He is the knowledge of GoD in 
 men. Through Him the eternal consciousness is im- 
 parted to men. He is the author of the faith in men 
 by which they see God, see Him in the divine life, the 
 Christ life, of which they are certain that it is the true 
 life because it is the Christ life, which they live by 
 hiding their life with Christ in God. And more, He is 
 the sender of the Spirit from the Father, the Spirit of 
 adoption, the Spirit which makes men feel themselves 
 sons of God, brothers of the God man, the Spirit by 
 whom the Father and the Son enter into a man, and 
 make their abode with him, the Spirit who makes a 
 man feel his sonship to the Father in partaking of the 
 will-surrender of the Son, and feeling his sonship long- 
 to be at one with the Father in the Son, long to feel 
 his sins continually remitted in the effort after peace 
 and union with the Father. 
 
 And lastly, He is the King of men. His revelation 
 of the Father was the revelation of a kingdom which 
 is not of this world, the kingdom of the Heavens. He 
 is a King who exercises over His subjects the all 
 powerful control of a will perfectly surrendered to 
 His Father in Heaven ; who exercises a mastery over 
 them, which makes them independent, sets a yoke on 
 
OF LIVING CONDUCT. 29 
 
 them, which eases their shoulders, imposes service oii 
 them, which is perfect freedom. For He gives His 
 subjects the means of obedience in offering them the 
 means to a self-surrender such as His, He gives them 
 His flesh and blood to eat and drink, that they may 
 lose their lives in Him, in Him be united with the Father 
 and find Eternal life. 
 
 I cannot conclude today without reference to the 
 event which was occupying our minds so recently last 
 Sunday, the death of the Provost of King's. 
 
 It is a question I suppose whether a life on earth so 
 long as his is a blessing to be craved or not. In many 
 instances, life so far prolonged beyond the ordinary 
 human term, can only be a burden. But if there were 
 a case in which it could safely be pronounced enviable, 
 it would surely be his who was privileged to watch 
 over at College the sons and sons' sons of those whom 
 as boys he had helped to train and form at school, who 
 lived to see reforms in his College initiated by himself 
 bear rich fruit, who, above all, retaining to the end the 
 full use of a highly cultivated intellect found in his 
 later years the weaknesses of extra-normal age strength- 
 ened and solaced by the loving mhiistrations of devoted 
 children, and knew that, however long deferred the end 
 might be which should bring to him the gain of fuller 
 life in Christ, it would, when it came, make a gap in 
 the lives that ministered to his, and steal an occupation 
 of love from those he loved. 
 
III. 
 
 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE SUFFERINGS OF LIFE, 
 
 Philippians I. 21. 
 To 7iie to live is Christ 
 
 There is one fact which meets all of us in the 
 conduct of life, a fact we need some help to live 
 against. It is a fact which sometimes staggers and 
 baffles us in our attempts to live. I mean the exist- 
 ence of suffering in the world, especially of what may 
 humanly speaking be called innocent suffering. That 
 is I suppose an obvious distinction of suffering, into 
 guilty and innocent, suffering, that is, which is appa- 
 rently the result of transgression and conscious offence, 
 punishment-suffering in a word, and that which cannot 
 be traced to such a source. Both naturally divide 
 themselves again into two classes, bodily and mental. 
 But the latter of the two, innocent suffering, may 
 otherwise be divided into two classes of suffering. 
 There is suffering that comes from within, that comes 
 
CHRIST THE KEY TO THE SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 31 
 
 from a man himself. There is suffering that comes 
 from without, comes from others. The suflfering that 
 comes from within arises from the very condition of the 
 human soul. It is the suffering of a being capable of 
 longings and aspirations which it is incapable of ful- 
 filling and satisfying. The suffering that comes from 
 without comes not always in the same way. It may 
 come directly from others, as when it comes in the 
 shape of inherited weakness or inherited propensities; 
 or when it comes from the conduct or fortunes of 
 others, which owing to special circumstances of con- 
 nexion, kinship, proximity of any kind, necessarily 
 cause pain and trouble to us ; when for example 
 those, who are bound to us by the closest ties that 
 link human beings together, fall into dishonour or 
 calamity, or are suddenly and prematurely torn away 
 from us. Suffering from without may come less 
 directly, as when the general tendency of the con- 
 duct of those among whom we move is to put 
 obstacles in the way of high moral action, to make 
 moral progress difficult, to obscure the beauty of the 
 higher life, to depress our spiritual ambition and ' luing 
 a weight upon our heart in its assumptions up to 
 heaven'. Less directly still, suffering from without 
 comes when our sympathies and experiences widen, 
 and the sins and misfortunes of others beyond (»ui- 
 own narrower circle become part of our burden, oppress 
 us with the sense of shared distress, not perhaps witli 
 
32 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE 
 
 the keener pangs of kindred shame, kindred privations, 
 or kindred bereavement, but still with real suffering 
 and suffering which becomes more real the more our 
 benevolence widens and deepens. For this is perhaps 
 one of the most mysterious facts about mental suffer- 
 ing, without the revelation of Christ a staggering and 
 hopeless fact, that the capacity for it increases with the 
 nobleness of the suffering mind. This is true of all 
 mental suffering innocent or guilty. The pain of 
 remorse is in inverse proportion to the animalism of 
 the being who feels it. In the purely stagnant ox-like 
 nature it can hardly be felt. The pain of bereavement 
 is proportioned to the power of loving, the sense of 
 kindred shame to the keenness of the sense of honour. 
 But it is more essentially true of what may be called 
 vicarious suffering, the suffering which comes by sym- 
 pathy with the sufferings of others, by feeling as our 
 own the sufferings which from any cause come upon 
 others. It is more than ever true of this kind of 
 suffering. The nobler, purer, wider and stronger the 
 philanthropy of a benevolent soul, the greater is its 
 capacity, the larger (if I may say so) its demand for 
 suffering. And as at present at any rate the supply 
 seems inexhaustible, the larger therefore will be the 
 amount of suffering such a soul will endure. So that 
 assuming no alteration in the law of human progress, 
 it would almost seem that, if suffering is ever to cease, 
 it must be by all from the lowest natures upwards 
 
SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 33 
 
 being trained and lifted through who knows what 
 experiences to the highest capacity for the highest 
 suffering. For then suffering would merge in the 
 universal sympathy of noble souls. 
 
 This suggests, I think, an exception that may be 
 taken to what I have been saying. It may be urged 
 that, though all these classes of suffering are called by 
 the same name, they really differ in kind. For ex- 
 ample the suffering (it may be urged) which may be 
 called vicarious, though related to guilty suffering as 
 product to producer, is yet essentially different from it, 
 as different as ether from the alcohol and acid that 
 generate it. This is probably true ; or true so far as 
 this, that there is a suffering which is not strictly 
 speaking punitive nor disciplinary, suffering which 
 belongs to the highest condition of which the human 
 soul is capable, which takes a man away from himself 
 and seems inseparably connected with the highest ideal 
 of human conduct of which the mind is capable. May 
 I by way of illustrating this briefly review some of 
 the views about suffering held by two representative 
 peoples of antiquity, the Greeks and the Hebrews ? 
 
 In the earlier subjective poetry of the Greeks we 
 find this phenomenon recognised, the existence of 
 unmerited suffering in its various forms. This recog- 
 nition finds expression either in pure pessiniisiu, or in 
 bewildered complaints about the divine government of 
 the world; or sometimes there is a half heroic, half 
 S. L. 3 
 
34 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE 
 
 sullen acquiescence in what seemed the caprice or the 
 indifference of the ruling powers ; but combined with 
 this a dogged determination, when at their best, to 
 persevere in what seemed to be the better course in 
 spite at least of ordinary injustice or ordinary selfish- 
 ness on the part of the controllers of men's destinies. 
 " Best of all for denizens of earth not to be born at all, 
 never to see the rays of the piercing sun. Next best 
 when born to speed us with all haste through the gates 
 of death". "0 Zeus I wonder at thee: Lord of all thou 
 art, sovereign potentate in thy own right ! Thou 
 knowest the heart and mind of every man and thy 
 power is supreme : how then dost thou reconcile it 
 to thy mind to treat sinners and the just alike, 
 those whose mind's current sets to temperance and 
 those who incline to excess and trust in evil ways?" 
 "No certainty is vouchsafed by heaven to man, not 
 even to know what path of conduct is pleasing to 
 the gods ". " The thoughts of men are vain : they 
 know nothing. But the gods bring all things to pass 
 at their will : but yet the good man must endure and 
 bear all that comes ". 
 
 In the earlier dramatists we find the same pheno- 
 mena still fully recognised. Especially prominent in 
 their thoughts is the mystery of inherited crime and 
 consequent suffering. The mystery of martyi^dom is 
 also fully recognised. In one notable case we have 
 portrayed a divine or at least more than human 
 
SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 85 
 
 martyr. But in the treatment of the subject now, 
 we find more attempt to justify the ways of GoD to 
 men. The inherited curse and the suffering it brings are 
 in a sense unmerited. But then whenever the suffer- 
 ing comes, it comes as punishment, punishment for sin 
 born of the lawlessness which is the essence of the here- 
 ditary crime. Even in the person in whom the curse 
 ends, whose suffering expiates the original guilt, whose 
 sufferings might seem truly innocent, if not vicarious, 
 even in him there is some irregularity, some human 
 weakness, some want of absolute acocjipoaui'T], some 
 ignorance of the law of nemesis which provokes wrath 
 and retribution. He shows as it were expiring flashes 
 of the old u/3/)t9 ; he takes the counsel of an inferior 
 deity which jumps with his own human passion : he 
 takes the retribution of heaven into his own hands, 
 though it is the retribution of heaven ; he chooses to 
 act too willingly as a human Erinnys, aud so brings 
 the divine Erinnyes in full cry upon himself. 
 
 And in the case of dramas of martyrdom, whether 
 of the demigod martyr, or the maiden-martyr, the 
 suffering is not allowed to be quite innocent. The 
 Titan is the noble and unselfish benefactor of human 
 beings, the ignorant debased helpless and h()i)ek'ss 
 victims as it seems of the new sovereign of the ^ods. 
 Unable to bear the sight of such oppressed misery 
 he risks the wrath of Zeus and gives to mankind the 
 necessaries of self-elevation, the raw material of civili- 
 
 3—2 
 
36 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE 
 
 zation. But in the way he does it, he shows a spirit 
 which gives a crook, as it were, to his benevolence. 
 He shows a self-will which makes his heroism one- 
 sided. Indifferent to the will of Zeus, careless to 
 know his purposes, proud of possessing a secret about 
 Zeus' destiny which Zeus himself does not share, he 
 as hastily as stealthily assumes the role of tyrant 
 opposer and champion of the oppressed, thwarting 
 he knows not and cares not what far-reaching designs 
 of Zeus and bringing on himself the necessary wrath 
 of the thwarted king. And the maiden-martyr, the 
 noblest creation of dramatic art, the sister who defied 
 the law which did dishonour to her dead brother, 
 the woman who appealed to the sovereign of the 
 universe against the tyranny of man, to GoD against 
 conventions, even she is not blameless of her own 
 martyrdom. She is not free of offence against nemesis. 
 She shows the '^kwr^x wfxov ef wfiov 7rarp6<; : her 
 womanhood has something fierce in it which sins 
 against the Greek religion of /jirjSev dyav. And in a 
 sense she brings her doom upon herself, because how- 
 ever much she seems forced to do it, she takes her 
 purpose by storm, takes the law of heaven into her 
 own hands. 
 
 To put the matter summarily, the facts of suffering 
 are fully recognised as a mystery, a mystery which 
 there is some attempt to explain. At any rate there is 
 attempt to justify the apparent injustice implied in 
 
SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 37 
 
 suffering. But the justification involves special plead- 
 ing. It proceeds in a vicious circle, because it assumes 
 the offender to be born an offender, yet punished with 
 suffering for committing the offence he was born to 
 commit, the only escape from this being a vague sense 
 of human free will which is rather felt than definitely 
 conceived or expressed. 
 
 Turning to Hebrew teachers we find the same 
 phenomena recognised, but naturally treated from a 
 somewhat different point of view. In the very earliest 
 time of the nation, we find the mystery of inherited 
 suffering recognised. But it is not regarded as the 
 effect of apathy or caprice on the part of the deity. 
 Nor is it the effect of an offence produced by the 
 originally begotten offence. It is the result of the 
 government of a God who is related to the nation, 
 between whom and the nation there exists a rela- 
 tionship of love. For the visiting of the sins of parents 
 on children to the third and fourth generations is 
 ascribed to the jealousy of God, the feeling of a 
 Being who will not let those whom He has brought 
 out of bondage revolt from Him, discard His allegiance, 
 commit fornication against Him, without punishing 
 until His offended justice has purged the tainted 
 blood. And so it was accepted as a truth that the 
 sins of parents must be expiated by their descendantsi 
 and the truth was regarded as final and embodied 
 by after generations in a proverb. But the truth was 
 
38 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE 
 
 simply acquiesced in, misused as an excuse for deli- 
 berate sin, or recognised as the expression of the will 
 of the jealous delivering God, according as his de- 
 scendants could or could not keep fresh in their minds 
 the teaching of the great legislator. 
 
 Later we have innocent suffering in its most 
 general aspect treated as the subject of a religious 
 drama, and the upshot of that treatment put briefly 
 is (1) that suffering is compatible with innocence of 
 life and (2) that it is a training and testing through 
 which God puts His faithful servant, (3) lastly that 
 it is beyond man's power to know the ways of that 
 God, or to know the meaning of the discipline of 
 unmerited suffering. He must be content to know 
 that it is discipline and that it comes from the Father 
 of all creation. But in the latter days of the kingdom 
 and in the exile we begin to find the phenomenon of 
 vicarious suffering recognised. In those latter days 
 a sharp contrast developed between the faithless mass 
 of the people (or perhaps more correctly the faithless 
 worldly and corrupt upper part of the people) and 
 the small remnant of Jehovah worshippers. This rem- 
 nant suffers acutely from the sins of the faithless and 
 suffers more acutely than they do, because it suffers 
 all that they suffer, and besides that, suffers from the 
 sight of their faithlessness, a pain to which they are 
 insensible. This remnant moreover is destined to 
 carry on the life of the nation, to be the vehicle of the 
 
SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 39 
 
 unfailing promises of GoD, is the true Israel. Out of 
 this contrast seems to emerge the conception of the 
 representative of the nation, the personification of the 
 true Israel, the Son of the nation, the man of sorrows 
 bruised for the transgressions of Israel, afflicted for the 
 sins of those who set him at naught and despised him, 
 yet carrying the life of the sinning nation through 
 the fire of the wrath of GoD, till it reajipears purified 
 on the other side. 
 
 Thus in two representative peoples we find this 
 mystery of suffering exercising the minds of those 
 who cared to reflect on human destinies. We find 
 some common elements in these speculations : we find 
 the same acknowledgment that suffering may be 
 unmerited, that it comes on people from the faults 
 of others. We find the recognition of martyrdom in 
 both: we find suffering regarded by both as a means 
 of purification. But there is an essential difference. 
 The Greek apparently never recognised suffering as 
 possibly something in itself divine. Sufferers of all 
 kinds were subjects of the sovereign GoD Himself 
 exempt from suffering. In his highest conception of 
 the highest sufferer, when he has got beyond the crude 
 idea of a capricious deity who delights in human 
 suffering, he still finds the cause of suffering in the 
 human weakness, the human circumstance of each 
 sufferer. Suffering to him is entirely human. The 
 Hebrew through the suffering of his nation, in which 
 
40 CHRIST THE KEY TO THE 
 
 he seemed to see an innocent sufferer bearing the 
 sins of offending kindred, found his way to the idea of 
 divine suffering. This innocent sufferer for the sins 
 of his nation grew in his mind into the divine Messiah, 
 the man of sorrows anointed by God to bear the sins 
 of many. 
 
 And so the Hebrew realised partially the truth of 
 divine suffering. He realised that there is a suffering 
 which is not simply a choice between two evils, the 
 evil of suffering and the evil of giving up a high ideal, 
 which is not simply good as punishment, not simply 
 good as discipline, not even simply good as evidence of 
 the paternal government of God — but which is good in 
 itself as something which raises a man, something 
 which the divine in man demands. 
 
 And we surely with the revelation of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ in our hands — we cannot fall back on 
 hedonism to help us in this matter. If we are to find 
 life in this world we must surely find it in Him who 
 revealed that God can suffer, that suffering is a part 
 of the highest life that man can live. If to live is 
 to know God, and we know Him in a suffering Son, 
 we know that there is a suffering which is divine, that 
 there is a suffering with Christ which is resurrection 
 with Christ, we know that there is something in the 
 highest nature of us that demands to die daily that it 
 may live, something which reconciles us not only to 
 suffering that comes to us from within ourselves but 
 
SUFFERINGS OF LIFE. 41 
 
 to suffering brought upon us by others, however it 
 be brought. And not only reconciles us to it, but even 
 brings us to rest and peace in bringing us into union 
 with Christ, in bringing us to share His self-surrender, 
 in bringing us to eat His flesh and drink His blood. 
 We know that suffering to save others from suffering 
 or to diminish the sum of human suffering, is the 
 highest triumph of the Christ within us, an earnest of 
 the Universal Triumph of Christ in all. 
 
ly. 
 
 CHEIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 Philippians I. 21. 
 
 To me to live is Christ. 
 
 On the three Sundays past I have suggested three 
 difficulties of human life, three problems that must 
 more or less confront a human being tr3^ing to live 
 what has always seemed to be the truly human life, 
 which appeared to find solution in the belief that 
 Christ the Son of God and the knowledge of God 
 is the life of men. I should like to suggest one more 
 fact on which this truth (if we may assume it such) 
 seems to throw light, and to clear the path of practical 
 men in their way through life. Now there is consensu 
 omnium something in man by which he decides what 
 is right and what is wrong, what he ought to do and 
 what he ought not to do. Whether we are to call 
 it moral sense, sense of obligation, sense of duty, or 
 conscience is a question which must be left, I suppose, 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 43 
 
 where it has lain for some time, with those who 
 are competent to decide it. The other questions 
 connected with this thing ; whether we are to call 
 it a faculty, or a function of the reason, whence it 
 derives, whether it is to be traced to the desire to 
 avoid pain and possess pleasure, whether this motive 
 acts directly, or indirectly, through the pains and 
 rewards dispensed by the majority of the society into 
 which a man is born, or whether it is something 
 which belongs to a man as such and is evoked and 
 evolved in contact with his fellowmen ; whether the 
 sense of right and wrong has become more or less 
 instinctive through the hereditary transmission of the 
 habit of identifying one's own interests with those of 
 the majority, or whether it is part of the nature of the 
 human being as organised to receive the inspiration of 
 the eternal consciousness ; these are questions which it 
 would be presumptuous on my part to attempt to deal 
 with before an Academic congregation. I will leave 
 therefore what I may call the philosophical questions 
 connected with this subject ; I will say nothing to the 
 question whether the remotest ancestor of the con- 
 science was fear of a whipping or of a toothache, I will 
 pass by the difficulty of understanding how likes can 
 produce unlikes, how the desire to avoid pains and 
 penalties can develop into the sense of the duty of 
 sacrificing one's own pleasures for the benefit of a 
 community, how the desire of reward can develop into 
 
44 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 the feeling that one must bear any pains rather than 
 assent to the wrongdoing of a majority, how fear of 
 punishment can produce indignation at wrong, how in 
 a word selfishness even crossed with tender emotions 
 so called (themselves reducible ultimately to selfish- 
 ness) can produce enthusiasm ; I will leave, I say, 
 these speculative and philosophical aspects of the 
 subject to those who are competent to deal with them, 
 and I will only speak shortly on two purely practical 
 aspects of this fact of conscience (for so from predi- 
 lection as well as for convenience sake I should prefer 
 to call it) and see whether or how far it connects itself 
 with the fact that St Paul enunciated when he said 
 that to live to him was Christ. 
 
 Now this conscience, whatever it is and whence- 
 soever it derives, is something which, as it now is, 
 belongs absolutely to the individual. Without the 
 first personal pronoun it could hardly be conceived of 
 as existing. At the same time it cuts the ' I ' in two. 
 When a person says 'I ought to do this', or 'I ought 
 not to have done that', he sits in judgment on himself; 
 approves or condemns himself as the case may be. 
 Moreover this judgment proceeds according to an 
 authoritative standard of its own. Sometimes that 
 standard coincides with the standard of the majority of 
 the consciences with which the individual has been 
 brought into contact ; but sometimes it does not. 
 Sometimes it agrees with only a small minority. 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 45 
 
 Sometimes it is in a minority of one. If this indi- 
 vidual standard did not exist it would seem impossible 
 for moral progress to be made. For, however much 
 the general conscience (to use an intelligible and 
 convenient, but, I suppose, probably an unmeaning 
 term) may be tending towards a new standard of 
 opinion or feeling, however rapidly that new standard 
 may be adopted when once it is expressed and 
 formulated, it is individual consciences that really 
 introduce the new belief, thereby setting up a standard 
 different to the standard of the majority. Every step, 
 for example, in the progress from the establishment of 
 tribunals of justice to the abolition of duelling (the 
 progress which by the way is going on before long to 
 the abolition of duelling between nations which is 
 called war), every step in this progress must have been 
 a protest against the standard of action of a majority 
 in different places. Some one must have begun to say 
 ' I ought not to fight, because I am a man and not at 
 present a tiger'. This being so, seeing that in some 
 most important cases the conscience is shown to be 
 wholly the individual's own, not a borrowed portion 
 of some general conscience, the standard it sets up 
 its own standard, not the standard of the majority, 
 it is a fair conclusion surely that this is so always: 
 that however much it may be educated by contact 
 with other consciences, however much it may gain 
 from such contact, what it gains is not borrowed but 
 
46 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 appropriated, not loan or trust but gain of trading, 
 that the individual conscience is the individual's own, 
 that it judges him according to its own standard, has 
 jurisdiction of its own, a court of its own. pronounces 
 judgment upon him from which there is no appeal. 
 And does it then pronounce judgment in its own 
 cause ? The answer to that question is I take it 
 both ' yes ' and ' no '. Inasmuch as the ' I ' and the 
 conscience are one, it does. But then (I speak only 
 as a practical man, out of such experience as a 
 practical man trying to live his life must get) these 
 two are two as well as one. I need not apologise 
 in this university for quoting one of its greatest 
 sons, the prophetic man, who spent so fearlessly and 
 ungrudgingly his vast resources of head and heart 
 in winning souls to Christ. Prof Maurice in his 
 lectures on the conscience says " How can I know 
 myself? Are there two creatures then, and I myself? 
 It does sound monstrous. But monstrous or not these 
 words [consciousness and conscience] involve that 
 duplicity, they associate it with all my acts and 
 thoughts, they remind me that I am stooping to 
 the condition of a brute, not asserting my rights 
 as a man, if I disavow it. For they are not w^ords 
 which belong to the inarticulate nomenclature of the 
 savage : they are like the ' I ', characteristic portions 
 of organic civilised language ; they appear in the 
 discourses which have exercised most influence over 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 47 
 
 bodies of men, as well as in those which discover 
 the fears conflicts hopes, that belong to the secret 
 chamber ". And this division of the ' I ', the duplicity 
 of which Prof. Maurice speaks is a mystery, but a 
 mystery of which those who must live their lives 
 must find some sort of solution, at least some solu- 
 tion that will set them free to act. I find myself a 
 being liable to passions desires propensions appetites, 
 anxious to seek what is agreeable to me, to shun 
 all that is painful to me. I find that the fact of 
 living in a society checks these propensions to a 
 certain extent, checks some and not others. Compels 
 me in some cases to do what is painful, but allows 
 me in others to indulge some of my worst propensities, 
 especially, for example, my inclination to moral coward- 
 ice. But I find another power, within me, which is 
 myself and yet not myself, which is continually telling 
 me 'I ought to do this, not to do that. I ought to 
 indulge this feeling, check that feeling: I ought to 
 incur this pain rather than do what is necessary to 
 avoid it'. I find this power continually thus judging 
 me, putting me on my trial in spite of myself, convict- 
 ing me of wrong when I want to think myself right, 
 making right clear when I want to think it wrong. I 
 find it judging me and punishing me, passing sentence 
 of shame and remorse upon me, when it has brought in 
 a verdict of guilty against me. 
 
 This is one very practical aspect of this thing 
 
48 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 conscience, that it divides a man when it is present 
 against himself, that it speaks to him with an au- 
 thority he cannot dispute, when it does speak and he 
 listens, judging him, approving or condemning him 
 and always satisfying him, at least when he is listening 
 to it at his best, that its verdict is a true one. 
 
 There is another aspect equally practical. This 
 conscience, this judging power may lie apparently 
 dormant in a man. It may be like an unused faculty : 
 it may be apparently absent from him. A man may 
 go on living for years, for the greater part of his life 
 even, without ever being taken to task by himself, 
 conscienceless in fact. And yet quite unlike an unused 
 faculty or instinct, which perishes by want of use, 
 this judging power will revive, reappear in full force at 
 a moment's notice, suddenly, generally unexpectedly : 
 and when it reappears it will light up the whole life 
 from one end to the other, rouse long forgotten events 
 and feelings out of their obscurity and bring them into 
 the full light of present facts and feelings. Professor 
 Maurice instances as illustrating the power of con- 
 science to bind the different parts of man's existence 
 together the story of GEdipus and Laius. He points 
 out how the consciousness of what he had really 
 done when he killed Laius only awoke in (Edipus years 
 after he had committed the murder, how the conscious- 
 ness of the act he had done so long before rose up 
 years after to convict him of parricide. In this case of 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 49 
 
 course there was not an apparent absence of the 
 power of conscience generally in the life during a long 
 interval followed by subsequent reappearance which is 
 rather the point which I have ventured to suggest as 
 important. Perhaps as good an illustration as any of 
 this may be found in Shakespere's Richard III. A 
 character drawn by him I may assume, I suppose, to be, 
 however historically incorrect, humanly consistent and 
 true. Here we have apparently a perfectly conscience- 
 less man, one who has carried out a purely selfish 
 purpose in life regardless of any ' I ought ' or ' I ought 
 not'. But just at the end of his life when he seems to 
 want the fullest and most concentrated selfishness and 
 consciencelessness, to save himself from failure, this 
 conscience revives in him, raises trial within him, 
 judges, condemns him, and strikes him powerless. It 
 seems to light up all the disregarded facts of his life 
 which now are raised up against him as present facts, 
 parts of his existence linked together by the conscience 
 newly sprung upon him to judge him. 
 
 'O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! 
 My conscience hath a thousand several tongues 
 And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
 And every tale condemns me for a villain'. 
 
 'I shall despair. There is no creature loves me. 
 And if I die, no soul shall pity me. 
 Nay wherefore should they, since that I myself 
 Find in myself no pity for myself. 
 
 Perhaps I may be allowed to quote anotlier illus- 
 
 S. L. 4 
 
50 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 tration from another master of human nature, one of 
 our own time, a man of true prophetic insight and true 
 Christian belief in human nature, Charles Dickens. 
 Among his earlier sketches is one called ' The hospital 
 patient', a sketch from nature apparently. A girl has 
 been terribly injured by a lowlived ruffianly paramour. 
 In consequence of a question raised as to the identity 
 of the prisoner, it is arranged that he shall accompany 
 the magistrates when they go to take the woman's 
 deposition. At the time arranged he is taken to the 
 hospital and to the bedside of the patient. The girl as 
 soon as she saw him with one convulsive eff'ort started 
 up : then falling back on her pillow and covering her 
 scarred and bruised face with her hands burst into 
 tears. * The man ', says the author, ' cast an anxious 
 look towards her, but otherwise appeared wholly un- 
 moved'. Then the oath was administered, and she was 
 asked to make her statement. But instead of doing 
 this, she broke out into wild protestations of the man's 
 innocence. 'I did it myself: it was an accident: he 
 didn't hurt me : he wouldn't do it for all the world '. 
 Then turning to the man and addressing him by name, 
 'You know you wouldn't'. But he knew he had, and 
 knew now on a sudden what it was that he had done. 
 ' For ', continues Dickens, ' brute as he was, the man 
 was not prepared for this : he turned his face from the 
 bed and sobbed'. It was not fear now that moved 
 him, which I suppose was the meaning of that anxious 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 51 
 
 look mentioned before. Fear does not make a man 
 cry. There was something came upon this man and 
 raised a feeling which overpowered every other feeling, 
 subdued every selfish fear and filled him with an 
 overwhelming despair. It was conscience that sud- 
 denly revisited him, lighted up his life and fetched 
 out of dark places old feelings long forgotten, which 
 confronted him each with a several tongue condemning 
 him. 
 
 Now these are two facts of everyday practical life, 
 (1) that there is a power in us which is capable of 
 dividing us against ourselves, which has an authority of 
 its own whereby it puts us on our trial within our own 
 minds, judges us, and passes sentence upon us ; (2) that 
 this power though it seems able, as it were, to disappear, 
 to lie in abeyance for a length of time which would 
 materially impair the force of any ordinary faculty 
 of the mind or soul, will reappear in full vigour, 
 exercise all its functions with unimpaired force, and 
 when it reappears not only sets up a sudden unex- 
 pected tribunal, but lighting up the whole life will 
 bring into court a thousand dark forgotten facts to 
 speak as living present witnesses against us. 
 
 Now with two such facts as these continually 
 facing him, what is a practical man to do ? If he were 
 watching life out of study window, he might be content 
 to speculate about possible human origins of this power 
 of conscience. But if he is living his life in the midst 
 
 4—2 
 
52 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 of men and women, obliged to be perpetually facing 
 cases of conscience, as they are called, obliged to take 
 the verdict of this inward judge ; if he is obliged 
 sometimes to take a verdict about his own conduct 
 which sets him in opposition to the opinion of the 
 majority of those about him, forces him, it may be, 
 to oppose the embodied traditions and beliefs of 
 society ; can such a one be satisfied to live with such 
 a power, as this conscience is, at work about him, 
 unless he can believe that it is something, which, if it 
 is himself, is something more than himself, something 
 outside himself as well as within himself, something 
 human and not human, a union within him of the 
 human and the divine ? Will he not demand that such 
 an authority, if he must obey it, as it seems he must, 
 should be the authority not of a development, a 
 function, a faculty, or of any abstraction, but of a 
 person, a master, in whose control he can find freedom, 
 a master who will never let him quite loose from his 
 control, who if a man forgets Him, ignores Him, and 
 makes of His master's dwelling-place a house of his 
 own, will visit him in an hour that he knoweth not ? 
 Will he not fall back on St Paul's words in regard 
 to this matter as to others, and find that he cannot 
 live his life unless he finds his life in Christ ? If with 
 St Paul he believes that life is knowledge of God, 
 consciousness of union with God, he will surely like 
 St Paul look to find that knowledge in Christ. For 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 53 
 
 desiring the word of GoD and reading the record of the 
 life and death of Jesus Christ he will surely jump the 
 difficulties of historic or philosophic doubt. He will say 
 ' here is what I want to enable me not to philosophise 
 but to live : here is the word of GoD given to men in 
 a man : here is the GoD-man, the Son of God, master 
 of men. And if he persuades himself of this, then, 
 I suppose, the conscience, the power that divides 
 him, sifts him, tries him, will seem to him a power of 
 Christ, of Christ the Judge to whom the Father has 
 committed all judgment ; Christ the patient Judge who 
 stands at the door and knocks and if any one will open 
 to Him will enter in and dwell with that man, holding 
 His court in his heart ; Christ the Judge, who, if a man 
 will not hear and open to Him, will suddenly visit His 
 temple and will show to that man a day of the Son of 
 man, when the light that lightens every man that 
 Cometh into the world, suddenly illumines the whole 
 heaven to him, flashes from one end of his life to the 
 other and judges him down. Thus I fancy will the 
 man, who can persuade himself that Christ is life to 
 him, satisfy himself about this conscience, this judging 
 power. He will regard it (whatever its philosophic 
 origin) as a living present fact, of which the living 
 present explanation is the life of Christ. 
 
 In discharging the duty entrusted to mc of 
 Christian preacher for this year I have tried to show 
 
54 CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 
 
 that the revelation of Christ answers some of the 
 most anxious life-questions which force themselves on 
 human beings living in the midst of the active life 
 of the world. The description of the duty of the 
 Christian Preacher, viz. ' to show evidence for Revealed 
 Religion ', seemed to leave practically open to me 
 only one of two alternatives, either to deal with 
 external and objective evidence of the historical truth 
 of the records of our religion, or with the subjective 
 evidence of it, the evidence for it existing in human 
 nature. To attempt the former in a University bristling 
 with Biblical teaching and criticism, would have been 
 out of place in an outsider. In confining myself to 
 the connexion between the wants of human nature 
 and the offers of the Gospel, I have been able to 
 speak out of that experience which must be each 
 man's own. And I have gained an opportunity of 
 adding my humble testimony to a fact which I think 
 needs to be borne in mind as much now as ever, 
 viz. that (to put it concisely) no amount of external 
 testimony to the genuineness of the Christian records 
 can ever produce Christian faith : that valuable as 
 such evidence is to a believer he must be a believer 
 before it is valuable to him ; that Christian faith must 
 spring from the testimony of the human heart to 
 which the Gospel irresistibly approves itself I cannot 
 express my meaning half so well in my own words as 
 in the words of one to whom I have referred before in 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGING POWER IN MEN. 55 
 
 my first Sermon, 'Ad assent to propositions on evidence 
 is no intrinsic element in Christian Faith : its object 
 is not past events but a present reconciled and in- 
 dwelling God. Its interest in the work of Christ 
 is in this as a finished work, i.e. in present relations 
 with God which Christ's work is thought to have 
 rendered possible. It is no doubt historically con- 
 ditioned ; but it is not on an intellectual estimate 
 of its own conditions that it depends for being what it 
 is. Without the Christian tradition it would not be 
 what it is, but a judgment as to the authenticity of 
 that tradition is not essential to it as a spiritual state. 
 Controversy compels the faithful to justify their faith. 
 In its true nature Faith can be justified by nothing by 
 itself. 
 
 Cambridge: printed by c. j. clay, m.a. & sons, at the university press. 
 
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