BX 9178 .R35 V5 
 Reid, James, 1877- 
 The victory of God 
 
THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 Rev. JAMES REID, m.a. 
 
1 ritL ( OCT 
 
 VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 REV. JAMES REID, M.A. 
 
 MINISTER OF ST. ANDREW'S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
 EASTBOURNE 
 
 NEW >iSJr YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAOS 
 
 The Victory of God in the Disasters of Life i 
 
 / The Gospel of the Resurrection . . la 
 
 Perfect through Suffering . • • ^3 
 
 The Incomplete Virtue of Resignation . 35 
 
 The Key to Experience . . . .48 
 
 > How God brings Men to Judgment , . 60 
 
 . Behold the Lamb of God ! • • • 73 
 
 > The Overcoming of Death . , , S6 
 The Christian Spirit in Action . . .96 
 An Eclipse of Faith . . • .108 
 The Tyranny of Things . . • ,121 
 
 > How Christ wins His Way . . .134 
 Masterless Men . . • • • i47 
 The Mystery of Temptation , . ,161 
 The Duty of holding Together. . -173 
 The Call of Christ and our Daily Calling . 185 
 The Testing Hour of Liberty . . , 199 
 
 > The Triumph of Faith . . . .211 
 
 The Troubled Life and the Untroubled 
 
 Heart ...... 223 
 
 ▼ 
 
VI 
 
 THE VICTORY OF GOJ) 
 
 When the Brook dries up 
 Peace through Sincerity . 
 The Remaking of Manhood 
 Victorious Gladness 
 The Last Stand of Faith 
 Traffic and Discovery 
 
 rAGB 
 
 235 
 
 247 
 
 259 
 
 271 
 
 283 
 
 396 
 
THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
THE VICTORY OF GOD IN THE 
 DISASTERS OF LIFE 
 
 " And Joseph said, Fear not : for am I in the place of God ? Bu 
 as for you, ye thought evil against me ; but God meant it imt* 
 good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. "- 
 Gen. 1. 19, 20. 
 
 From his youth upwards we recognize in Joseph tt 
 man with a great soul. He has all the marks of it 
 He never falls beneath his best. He is always the. 
 same, whether you meet him in a prison or in a palace. 
 His circumstances, whatever they may be, become a 
 background for his qualities, as the night becomes a 
 background for the stars. In a moment of blindi.ig 
 temptation he is the soul of chivalry. In a prison, 
 where he was kept for years, his greatness makes its 
 mark, and he comes to the front. In the national 
 crisis in Egypt, when they are faced with famine, he 
 takes the situation in hand and saves the country. 
 The stiffest test of a really great soul is the hour of 
 prosperity. "It takes a steady hand to carry a full 
 cup." Perhaps that is the reason why God often 
 sends with the success that may come to us, some- 
 thing to humble us, to steady us, to keep us alive to 
 Him, and open to the movings of His spirit. In any 
 case prosperity only emphasizes the sterling quality 
 of Joseph. In this hour which our story describes, 
 his greatness outshines itself. That is the only way 
 
2 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 to put it ; it outshines itself and reveals, behind him 
 and through him, the face of God. 
 
 It might have been a tempting moment for many 
 another man. His brothers were absolutely in his 
 power. His father, for whom he had a tremendous 
 affection, was dead, and no longer there to protect 
 them or appeal for tenderness. They had all come 
 back from the funeral wondering how it was going 
 to be with them now, when there was no one to 
 stand between them and the wind of their ill-desert. 
 A.nd they came cringing to Joseph, whining for 
 kindly treatment. It takes a great man to forget the 
 wrongs of youth when the iron entered into the soul, 
 yet Joseph did it. It takes a greater man to con- 
 fess to those who have wronged him that the injury 
 they did turned out to his advantage, yet Joseph 
 did that. " Fear not," he said, " am I in the place of 
 God ? As fbr you, ye thought evil against me ; but 
 God meant it unto good, to save much people alive." 
 
 Two motives toward magnanimity are suggested 
 here, two things that helped Joseph to forgive, and 
 it is well that in days like these we should get hold 
 of them. For magnanimity to-day, as then, may be 
 the pivot on which our future turns ; and a day like 
 this the background against which God is giving us 
 the chance to reveal our souls. One of these 
 motives which powerfully moved Joseph was that 
 God was at work upon those who had injured him. 
 "Am I in the place of God, that I should take 
 revenge?" It was as if he said : This work of pun- 
 ishment is none of my business. It is a perilous 
 position for any man to take up that he is the 
 instrument of the judgment of God. There are 
 crimes that are far too big for us to assess. God 
 
IN THE DISASTERS OF LIFE 3 
 
 is working out there beyond us, in the hearts of 
 those who have wronged us as well as in our own. 
 His mills are grinding out resistlessly the judgments 
 of righteousness. The justice of God is a net from 
 which no evil-doer can escape. George Eliot in 
 Romola gives us a terrible picture of a man tracked 
 down by his sin. The father he had wronged 
 becomes possessed by a passion of hate, whose haunt- 
 ing persistence turns the blood cold. It is a terrible 
 thing to fall into the hands of a hate like that. There 
 is only one thing more terrible, and that is to be the 
 hater himself. For hate desolates both wronged and 
 wrong-doer. But the justice of God is far more sure 
 and unerring, for it is the justice of love, a love that 
 will not let men go, but follows them still through all 
 the wandering mazes of their flight from it, till it 
 brings them face to face with sin, that it may bring 
 them to redemption. It is this vision of God behind 
 the scenes that calms the heart and takes away the 
 restless heat of rancour and revenge. When a man is 
 sure of God and has seen a vision of the love which 
 is justice, his soul is swept clean of all bitterness. 
 Has not the time come for us to think of our late 
 foes with something of Joseph's spirit ? Reparation 
 is right and just, but is not the craving to make 
 Germany suffer, in many cases another form of faith- 
 lessness towards God and the moral forces of life ? 
 When we remember Edith Cavell's heroism it is well 
 to remember her magnanimity. " This I would say, 
 standing before God and eternity, we must have no 
 hatred or bitterness toward any one." "Standing 
 before God and eternity." That is where Joseph 
 stood — before God and eternity, seeing the mighty 
 sweep of the moral forces which are the nature of 
 
4 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 things. And it was because he saw God working in 
 and through things, that he was able to forget the 
 past and put it behind him. " Fear not," he said, 
 " am I in the place of God ? " 
 
 But another thing made it easy for him to lay 
 aside the past and rise above the pettiness of a puny 
 revenge. He had seen how God was handling the 
 wrongs he had suffered, to make them work together 
 for good. He had been cruelly treated by his 
 brothers, taken a helpless youth and sold into slavery, 
 but that wrong did not stand alone in his mind. It 
 had become the vital link in a chain of events which 
 had made him Prime Minister of Egypt. He saw 
 again through the mist of years his father's broken 
 heart as he bowed his head to the inevitable and 
 looked into a grave. But that picture did not stand 
 alone. For that mysterious fate that snatched away 
 Jacob's son, swung back in his old age to rescue him 
 from starvation, and bring him to the proudest day 
 of his life. God was working ceaselessly, taking the 
 savage wrongs and building them up into the structure 
 of a mighty purpose for Joseph and for the world. 
 Can you wonder that his soul was lit with gratitude 
 and worship which swept all bitterness clean out of 
 his life? It did not abate in his mind one jot of his 
 brothers* sin. They had done it and done it deliber- 
 ately. They were no mere puppets in the hands of 
 a master who made them dance to his tune. They 
 were no mere helpless tools in the giant grip of God. 
 They were men who thought out their sin and 
 deliberately carried out their design. It was not 
 God's will that they should wrong their brother for 
 his good. They sinned against their brother and they 
 sinned against God. But God took the wrong they 
 
IN THE DISASTERS OF LIFE 5 
 
 did and used it for His purpose, adapting it, out of His 
 loving power, to His great design. Against the back- 
 ground of their treachery, dark and bloody as it was, 
 there shone out a victorious love, riding upon the storm 
 and triumphing through the catastrophe. " Ye meant 
 evil unto me ; but God meant it unto good, to bring 
 to pass as it is this day, to save much people alive." 
 
 Now does not this experience of Joseph throw a 
 wonderful light upon the darkness which shrouds 
 many a life to-day? There is a problem which is 
 ever with us, the problem of the evil of the world and 
 the goodness of God. Sometimes it sleeps for a 
 while, but again and again it awakens and tears at 
 the vitals of some sensitive soul. How can the evil 
 of our life be reconciled with the goodness of God ? 
 Why has He allowed this thing which has happened 
 to us to come to pass ? Why has He permitted this 
 wrong, this sickness, this accident, this savage crime, 
 which has broken into our happiness? There is a 
 whole host of problems here which are too deep for 
 us. But there is light in this word of Joseph. The 
 root of the trouble for many people, when we come 
 to look into it, is a wrong view of Providence. We 
 are still living in Old Testament days, when the 
 blessing of God was bound up with prosperity and a 
 shallow sort of happiness. We think of Providence 
 as a power of love which looks after us as a mother 
 looks after her toddling child, and keeps it out of 
 harm's way. We forget that we are not children any 
 more, but men and women whom God is training to 
 play a big part somewhere, and training to give Him 
 back a love which shall be strong and independent 
 and worthy of His own. That means a hard school 
 and a long schooling. What a tremendous thing is 
 
6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 this love of His — a thing so wonderful that it will 
 use every kind of means to make us what we are 
 able to be, even the graving tool of pain and the 
 hammer blows of misfortune — a love which can 
 adapt anything in the experience of such a world as 
 this to its great designs ! 
 
 One thing too we must be clearer about, and that 
 is God's relation to the evil that happens to us. A 
 good many people have the fixed idea that it is 
 God who is directly behind all that comes to them. 
 " God took him " they will say when their child dies 
 through accident or disease, and they either resign 
 themselves to what they think the will of God in 
 a resignation which brings peace, even at the cost 
 of truth; or else they become bitter and pettish, 
 thinking hard thoughts of God, as if, somehow, He 
 need not have done this if He had had a little more 
 love or been a little more attentive to their case. 
 There is a half-truth here when a mother says 
 of her dead boy, " God took him." God took him, 
 indeed, but only when death had released him, but 
 that is not to say that God engineered the cause 
 which killed him. Calamities come in many ways. 
 Sometimes they come through sheer accident — a 
 storm at sea, a passing sickness, and the like. But 
 when we look into these things, what are they? 
 They are just the other side of the privilege and the 
 joy of living in such a world as this. It is just the 
 possibility of joy that brings the possibility of pain. 
 If we had no nerves which could throb with exquisite 
 pain we could never thrill with exquisite joy. If 
 there were no spice of risk in life there would be no 
 zest of adventure. Two years ago a brave airman 
 flew out across the wide spaces of the Atlantic, 
 
IN THE DISASTERS OF LIFE 7 
 
 making the first attempt to cross. Had he succeeded 
 it would have been a triumph, which would have set 
 the type dancing in all our newspapers. What made 
 the possibility of triumph, but just the chance of 
 death lurking in these wide spaces ? It is a glorious 
 world we live in ; and the sickness, and the risk, and 
 ♦he calamities which happen by sea and land, are the 
 price we pay for the privilege of vital living. 
 
 And there is evil which comes through the sin and 
 malice of others or their callousness and neglect. 
 Are we going to make God responsible for these? 
 If a nurse is careless of her patient, shall we blame 
 God for his death ? If a surgeon's hand is unsteady, 
 shall we accuse God of callousness ? If a nation for- 
 gets the duty of neighbourliness and grows big with 
 lust of power, and fills the air with poison gas, and 
 wrecks the earth with high explosives, shall we call 
 it an act of God ? When Joseph's brothers sold him 
 into slavery, was it God's doing or God's will ? The 
 injury others have the power to do us is the price we 
 pay for those social relationships which make the 
 world fragrant when they are sweet and loving, and 
 poison it with bitterness when they break down. 
 When these things are done you can be sure of this, 
 they are done in defiance of God's will. They are 
 not God's original way. They are not God's plan. 
 They are done in spite of the pleading voices and 
 ruiding light within, by which God seeks to win men 
 to the higher way. And when they are done, they 
 are part of a Cross which God carries in His heart, 
 the Cross of love resisted, of righteousness defied, of 
 truth dishonoured. They are the currents of human 
 passion which run athwart God's gracious will, and 
 threaten shipwreck to His creation. And God's load 
 
8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 is big enough to carry without adding to it ouf 
 reproach or our complaints. If only we could grasp 
 tltat, would it not awaken a new desire to come to 
 God's side, to help Him with what strength we have, 
 against the foes that darken His universe ? 
 
 But there is another thing we need to grasp, and 
 this is the point, God is not helpless amid the wreck- 
 age of His plans. The world is no derelict ship. 
 Our broken lives are not lost though they have been 
 driven from their course. God's love is working still, 
 and He comes in and takes the wrong that was done 
 and the calamity that came, no matter how, and uses 
 them victoriously, working out His wonderful plan of 
 love. That is God's victory. He is always master 
 of the situation. There are no second bests with 
 God for the man who puts his broken life into His 
 hands. There is infinite resourcefulness in the Al- 
 mighty love. There is a divine ingenuity in the grace 
 of God. " Ye thought evil against me; but God meant 
 it unto good, to bring it to pass as it is this day." 
 
 History is full of examples of this very miracle of 
 the victorious Love. How many lives have been 
 redeemed from failure into a splendid success ! Here 
 is a woman whose life has been crippled by sorrow, 
 and she becomes the foundress of a hospital. Here 
 is a man whose career is blasted by blindness, and he 
 gives himself up, body and soul, to work for the blind 
 as if he had been equipped for this very hour and 
 this very work. Sir Arthur Pearson has written a 
 fascinating book upon St. Dunstan's. He calls it 
 Victory over Blindness. His work is indeed a victory, 
 not only for thousands whom he has lifted from de- 
 spair into a new life, but for himself also — and behind 
 all, for God. Could any other man have done the 
 
IN THE DISASTERS OF LIFE 9 
 
 work he has done ? Could his life have been lived 
 to such purpose if he had kept the divine gift 
 of eyesight? Who can tell? No one will dare 
 to say the calamity was predestined, but things 
 being as they are, God took the situation in hand. 
 The result is nothing less than a victory of God, 
 shaping a calamity into an equipment, opening out 
 a cul-de-sac, a dead-end, into a field of glorious 
 service, for which there was no other opening, and 
 setting the man into it wonderfully gifted with 
 sympathy and appeal. Or here is Paul, taken by 
 cruel hands, which would have crushed him as they 
 would have crushed a fly, and flung into a prison 
 at Rome ; and he makes that prison a pulpit from 
 which his words resound through Europe. It was 
 not God who shut him in that prison. But it was 
 God who used that prison. 
 
 And, of course, there is the supreme example, the 
 Cross of Christ Himself. I remember being at a 
 camp meeting where questions were invited on 
 religious problems, and a man immediately spoke up. 
 It was the old question. " How is it," he asked, 
 "that the Bible tells us that Judas betrayed Christ 
 and condemns him for betraying Christ, and yet the 
 Bible also says that Christ, in dying, fulfilled the plan 
 of salvation ? Was Judas a mere tool ? — then why 
 was he condemned ; or was he a deliberately treacher- 
 ous sinner? — then how could his treachery be in the 
 plan of God ? " You see the difficulty. Joseph found 
 out the answer long ago. It is the victory of love. 
 That love of God took up the treachery of Judas and 
 the cruelty of men defying love, and made them the 
 means of a sacrifice by which love conquers the world. 
 They meant it unto evil against Him. It was not God's 
 
10 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 will that they should do it. Let us get rid of that 
 thouf,^ht. It was God's agony. It was God's cruci- 
 fixion ; but God meant it, shaped it, redeemed it 
 unto good to save much people alive. 
 
 But there is a final point we must notice. This 
 victory of God does not always happen. It is not 
 inevitable. Before you can understand it, you have 
 to think of Joseph and see the kind of man he 
 was. If Joseph had got bitter, if he had said to 
 himself when he was wronged, that it was useless 
 trying to do anything with his life which had 
 been so shamefully marred, he would have ended 
 his days a slave. There are people who are the 
 sport of trouble, and have gone under just because 
 they have taken the bitter and pettish attitude to 
 life, or have lost heart, or have given up trying to 
 make anything out of it There are plenty of rocks 
 around for a ship whose captain has left the bridge 
 because he has been driven out of his course. But 
 Joseph stood up to his trouble, and kept his faith 
 clear, and his life clean towards God. He kept him- 
 self in touch with the Almighty love, linked himself 
 up with the Almighty will, and looked for chances of 
 helping out the purpose he was sure God still had 
 for him. And that alertness, that faith, that willing- 
 ness to co-operate with God and to make the best of 
 every situation because he knew God could help him 
 make the best of it, were the means by which God's 
 love at last made him what he became. If God is to 
 be victorious through our broken lives, we must help 
 Him all we can. We must put ourselves into His 
 hands. We must rise to the call of His purpose at 
 every turn that offers. We must, in fact, take every- 
 thing as if it came from Him and see in everything 
 
IN THE DISASTERS OF LIFE 1 1 
 
 the workings of His love. For, indeed, everything 
 does become the working of love when we put life 
 into the hands of God. That is the glorious fact. 
 Everything that comes to us becomes mighty for 
 love's own designs in the hands of God. That out- 
 look changes everything. It changes the effect of 
 trouble upon ourselves. It makes it beautiful. 
 Some one once said to a man whose body was 
 crippled by a disease of childhood, " Affliction does 
 so colour the life." " Yes," he said, " but I propose to 
 choose the colour." That is the point. It is ours to 
 choose the colour ; or, rather, it is ours to choose the 
 Artist, and He chooses the colour. And wonderful 
 beyond description is the beauty which the genius of 
 Christ brings forth in us by the tools of calamity and 
 sorrow, when we put life into His hands. Do I 
 speak to any who are weighed down by some load of 
 grief or handicapped by some trial, who see nothing 
 before them but the slow numbing which the years 
 will bring, or the final release of death from a world 
 which is all upset? Your one hope is in linking 
 up your life with this Almighty will of love re- 
 vealed in Christ. The key to this victory is loyalty 
 —loyalty to the victorious and redeeming will of 
 love. As Mr. Glutton Brock puts it, "Salvation is 
 seeing that the Universe is good, and becoming a part 
 of that goodness"; or. as Paul puts it, "All things 
 work together for good to them that love God." In 
 other words, those who accept the purpose of God in 
 Christ and give themselves to it in loyal faith and 
 service, find there the secret of a continual victory— 
 a victory in which life, with all it holds of joy or woe, 
 becomes subdued to the mighty mastery of love. 
 " And this is the victory that overcomes the world." 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 
 
 " The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged 
 on a tiee. Him hath God exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour." — Acts 
 V. 30. 
 
 The resurrection of Christ is the most challenging 
 fact of history. It is a miracle of such tremendous 
 quality that all the other miracles of the Gospel 
 story pale beside it into insignificance. Time was 
 when a preacher on Easter morning would have given 
 himself to build up arguments for the truth of the 
 resurrection. And, indeed, there are many arguments 
 which could be brought forward. There is the 
 argument of the New Testament book. You 
 cannot account for this book except by the fact of 
 the resurrection of Christ from the dead. And there 
 is the argument of the New Testament men. You 
 cannot account for Peter and Paul — the difference 
 between the men they were and the men they 
 became — except by way of a miracle, and that 
 miracle is the miracle of Christ risen. Their whole 
 life and personality became what they were because 
 their hearts were kindled by the vision of the risen 
 (Christ, as flame is caught from flame. 
 
 But there is not so much need to-day to argue 
 for the resurrection. The outlook of thinking men 
 has widened. Scientific men used to argue against 
 it. They used to close up the universe against the 
 possibility of God and deny any value to spiritual 
 
GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 13 
 
 experience outside their own explanation. They have 
 given up this line of argument to-day. Life is far 
 too wonderful a thing for any man to reduce it to a 
 system and cry to faith, "Hands off!" The very 
 fact that some scientific men are turning to spiritual- 
 ism with such wistfulness shows a new openness of 
 mind toward the wonders of the spiritual world. 
 We are beginning to see that once we admit the 
 fact of Christ and open up our souls to the kind 
 of being He is, anything may happen. Anything 
 may happen when you are in the presence of one 
 like Christ. Healings may happen, and the casting 
 out of demons, and the opening of blind eyes, and 
 there is nothing so very incredible in the fact that 
 Christ should rise from the dead. 
 
 What we ought to be concerned about most of all, 
 then, to-day, is not the truth of this fact but the 
 meaning of this fact. What does it mean? What 
 lay behind it? That was one of the things which 
 the apostles, and especially Paul, set themselves to 
 think out. What tremendous power was it that lay 
 behind the resurrection ? What was it that was 
 happening there in that sealed tomb from which 
 Christ came forth at last glorious in His risen life ? 
 The answer the Bible gives us in phrase after phrase 
 is just this. It was a creative act of God. It was a 
 new revelation of the living power of the living God. 
 That, it says to us, is the kind of God with whom we 
 have to do. We had learned something about 
 Him before. We had learned that He is a God 
 of righteousness, of purity, of truth — of righteousness 
 and truth so unbending that Christ went to His 
 Cross rather than yield one iota before the forces of 
 the world. And we had learned that He is a God 
 
T4 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 of love. That is the message of Calvary. He is a 
 God of love to the uttermost, of love that forgives 
 the vilest, of love that seeks to the very last limit, 
 and goes on loving when everything seems hopeless. 
 Hut when Christ rose again we learned this, that 
 this Spirit of righteousness and love is also the secret 
 of power, able to unlock the gates of death, and turn 
 the forces of nature into an instrument of His Will. 
 This is the final solution of the discussion we have 
 been having these last years about might and right. 
 Now we get it clear. They are both one in God. 
 Go back to God and the source of both is in Him. 
 Might is right, and right is might, when you strike 
 the fountain head. In the last resort love and 
 righteousness are the only might, the only omnipo- 
 tence. A spiritl ike that of Jesus holds the key to 
 every prison house of sin and suffering. He tc^ps the 
 resources 6f God by which every stronghold of evil 
 which has mocked our puny science with its impas- 
 sive walls, is at last overthrown. When He steps into 
 the world, a spiritual factor comes into play which 
 changes the whole situation. Having dominion over 
 sin through His fellowship with God, he had found 
 the secret of dominion over disease and death. For 
 when evil had done its worst and its storm and 
 passion had gathered all its forces — social, military, 
 political, ecclesiastical — to put Him to death, the 
 spirit of love and righteousness laid hold of that broken 
 body in a stone-walled tomb and became triumphant 
 and glorious in the risen Christ. " Whom, therefore, 
 they slew and hanged on a tree, Him God raised 
 from the dead and exalted to be a Prince and a 
 Saviour." 
 
 Now when the apostles set themselves to think 
 
GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 15 
 
 out all the meaning of that fact, they simply could 
 not find words to put it in. Life is not long enough 
 to explore its riches. What may not happen with 
 such a God as that at work in Christ ? Did you ever 
 think of it? Why are we so slow to believe in the 
 possibilities of the spiritual world ? Why are we so 
 difficult to convince of a future life? Why is it that 
 men and women are running to spiritualism to-day 
 and coming back with a handful of chaff and telling 
 the world about " a new revelation " ? Why is it we 
 have so many difficulties and doubts about God 
 and about His ways with men? Is it not just 
 because we have never apprehended the kind of 
 God whom the New Testament reveals? We have 
 never opened our mind and our imagination to 
 the God who is revealed in the Cross and in the 
 Resurrection of Christ. It is a new vision of God 
 we need. We are far too much occupied with our 
 ovvn moods and tenses, our own feelings and fears 
 and difficulties, and all the whispered doubts and 
 objections of a foolish world, which is saying " There 
 is no God " when what it often means is " There is 
 no God for me." Life would begin to blaze for us 
 with all kinds of wonders if only we took time to 
 steep our souls in such a vision of God as we find 
 in the resurrection of Jesus. Listen to the apostles 
 as they look death in the face. Listen to what they 
 say of it because they had seen the glory of God in 
 the face of the risen Christ. He hath abolished 
 death — made it of no account. For them there was 
 no such thing any more. If they had gone to one 
 of our churchyards to-day, or to the battlefields of 
 Flanders, with all their " teeming crosses, row on 
 row," what would they have said of it? Would they 
 
1 6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 not have said what one of our mystics said of a 
 certain city cemetery, when a friend remarked to 
 him how full it was becoming. " Full," he said, " it 
 is the emptiest place in all England!" He hath 
 abolished death. There is nothing in Mts dissolu- 
 tion which can touch the living spirit, nothing 
 in it which can stand between friend and friend. 
 There is nothing in it which can check the vital 
 energy of a man who is living with any breath in 
 him of this victorious creative Spirit of God. " He 
 hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality 
 to light through the Gospel." 
 
 But that did not nearly exhaust the meaning of 
 the resurrection for these disciples. They were more 
 interested in life than in death. There is a kind of 
 faith in the resurrection which turns this life into a 
 mere vestibule to eternity, a corridor to heaven 
 That was not the way in which the apostles looked 
 at it. The resurrection had a meaning for life, and 
 it is this. It meant the possibility of a new life here 
 and now, a risen life, a new quality of being. They 
 saw how the Spirit of God had come forth into this 
 broken body and had changed it and made of it 
 somehow — all marred and wounded as it was — a 
 vehicle for His Spirit. And they said to themselves: 
 If this is the God with whom we have to do, this new 
 creating God, who lives in the risen Christ, what 
 manner of men ought we to be, what manner of men 
 is it not possible for us to be, what manner of life is 
 it not possible for us to live, and what manner of 
 things is it not possible for us to do, with such a Prince 
 and a Saviour ! The world began to palpitate with 
 all kinds of victorious possibilities. Life became 
 romantic with adventure. 
 
GDSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 17 
 
 There are three great new hopes which rise from 
 this resurrection fact and meet us in our world to-day. 
 The first is a new hope for the individual, the 
 hope of resurrection to a new quality of life. As 
 the Spirit of God came into that wounded and 
 broken body of Christ, can not the Spirit of God 
 come forth into our lives, all stained and broken as 
 they are, and raise them to a new quality of being, 
 make of them indeed, a new creation? This was 
 the faith which Paul was always preaching. Christ 
 rose again, he said. Do not hold that far off from 
 you as a fact for some future hour when God shall 
 call forth the dead. See in it a fact for to-day. 
 Reckon yourselves as dead unto sin and alive unto 
 God. Where did he learn it? He learned it in his 
 own experience. That was what had happened to 
 him along the Damascus road. His old life had 
 been left behind like grave-clothes in a tomb, and a 
 new life had come in like a breath of God and taken 
 possession of his nature, making of him a new 
 creation. That too was what had happened to Peter. 
 He had betrayed his Lord. His old life was stained 
 with failure. He was heart-broken with the sense of 
 his own defeat. And when Christ rose again and 
 sent Him a special message as if nothing had 
 come between them, a new life awoke, making him 
 the daring, devoted, convincing, and steadfast apostle 
 of the Crucified, before whose courage men were 
 astonished at the light of Christ that shone in it. 
 
 This is the message of the resurrection for us 
 to-day. It means the possibility of a risen life for 
 every man. It means that God with Whom we have 
 to do can come into our life as He came in the 
 risen Christ. He can take us as we are, stained 
 
1 8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 with sin, broken by sorrow, cowed and crushed by 
 the weight of circumstance, and raise us into newness 
 of life, so that the very scars of sin become purifying 
 fires, and the crippling of circumstance becomes the 
 means of God's enabling, and the wounds of sorrow 
 become transfigured with a light which brings new 
 beauty out just where the life was marred. Is it 
 so strange after all ? Is it so incredible ? The genius 
 of Michael Angelo can take a block of marble out of 
 a scrap-heap, spoiled by a bungler and cast aside, and 
 turn it into a masterpiece, working the very disfigure- 
 ment into his design? Will the genius of God do 
 less for men than that? His Spirit in nature will 
 take the mists that fill the sky and shroud the world 
 in a pall of gloom, and out of them produce the 
 magic-tinted rainbow. Can the Spirit of life that 
 kindled the light in the sky not kindle the light in 
 the heart? Can He not take this nature of ours 
 with all the stuff of daily toil and traffic, and make 
 of it the medium of a finer life, a life spiritual, eternal, 
 beautiful with the beauty of Christ, a life radiant with 
 power and peace, springing from man's inner fount 
 of being, where Christ is enthroned as Prince and 
 welcomed as Saviour. It is this new life, Christ- 
 governed and Christ-created, for which the world is 
 looking to us to-day. The offer of this risen life 
 is the message of the Christian gospel. " Whom 
 men slew and hanged on a Cross, Him hath God 
 raised from the dead and exalted to be a Prince and 
 a Saviour." 
 
 In the second place there is a message of hope for 
 the Church. There are many who have lost hope 
 in the Church to-day. They sec her distracted by 
 divisions and overloaded with a mass of trivialities. 
 
GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 19 
 
 They see her crusted with convention, bound in 
 habits of thought which were once a living creed, but 
 now are grave-clothes about her body. They see her 
 blind and deaf, as it seems to many, to the mightiest 
 movements of our time, and impotent to speak the 
 word of life to nations who war and classes who 
 strive. And men are looking at the Church as the 
 prophet of old looked at the valley of dry bones with 
 this question whispering at their hearts: Can these 
 bones live? 
 
 Now perhaps the picture of the Church's impotence 
 is overdrawn — I believe it is. There is nothing so 
 easy as criticism. The world has never understood 
 how to judge the real life of the Spirit or where to 
 look for the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Do 
 not let any of us imagine that the Church is going 
 to pieces, or that mankind will find some other centre 
 of religious life. The Church is not a man-made 
 institution. It is not the product of the club-instinct 
 applied to religion. It is the product of the Spirit 
 of God seeking and finding and fashioning a society 
 of men and women, in whom His redeeming love 
 could be more perfectly expressed for the saving of 
 the world and the building of His Kingdom. How 
 does the Church get her vitality? She gets it by 
 the awaking to power of the Divine life in her in a 
 kind of resurrection. 
 
 You remember what happened at Pentecost? 
 Pentecost was the corresponding miracle in the 
 Church, to that which happened when God raised 
 Christ from the dead. It was a resurrection. The 
 members had met together. They were poor, isolated, 
 many of them weak in influence, impotent as it 
 seemed against the world of their day. They had 
 
20 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 to keep the doors shut with care for fear the surging 
 mob would take it into their heads to crush the life 
 out of them, as they had tried to crush it out of their 
 Lord. And there came upon them, the Scripture 
 says, the sound of a mighty rushing wind and, as it 
 were, tongues of fire, and sat upon each of them ; and 
 they went out, miraculous personalities, to heal and 
 preach, and compel the world by the sheer power of 
 their witness to the acknowledgment of God in Christ. 
 What was it that had happened ? The Spirit which 
 rose in Jesus had made of that humble company the 
 vehicle of His life. The dominant note in their 
 minds was an overwhelming and all-subduing 
 consciousness of Christ as Lord, raising their whole 
 nature to its highest level, in a response of victorious 
 energies. 
 
 All that is possible again. It is the eternal 
 possibility of such a God abroad in such a world as 
 this. It is for that resurrection we are waiting. 
 Meanwhile let us cast away all depressions and lift 
 up hearts of hope. Let us take a new look at God, 
 as He is revealed in the risen Christ, and the same 
 response of faith will be awakened ; for the faith 
 which makes us mighty is no artificial creation of 
 our own resolve. It is the natural response to the 
 vision of God we see in the risen Jesus. Is any- 
 thing- too hard for such a Lord? Is it beyond the 
 power of the Church to meet victoriously any evil 
 however deeply entrenched, any crusade however 
 stern, any task however big? Is anything beyond 
 the resources of the Church for whom God lives in 
 Christ, raised from the dead and exalted to be a 
 Prince and a Saviour? 
 
 But can we not go even further and say that 
 
GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION 21 
 
 there is a message here of hope for society, for the 
 social order, in which man is bound to man and 
 nation to nation? At present who shall describe 
 the order of society as we see it at home and abroad ? 
 It is chaos. We think of Russia under the heel of a 
 foul and monstrous tyranny worse than that of any 
 Czar. We think of Central Europe, of other parts 
 of the world, frenzied with a fever in the blood. 
 We think of the unrest at home. What are we to 
 make of it all ? Is civilization going down into the 
 dust of ancient barbarism ? Is all this tract merely 
 neutral to God, — this tract of our social and political 
 and industrial life ? Look back through history and 
 what do you see? You see the Spirit of God, who 
 is the Spirit of life, seeking some means of expression 
 like an artist seeking paint and canvas. You see 
 Him make man out of the clay to bear His image. 
 You see Him take a race of slaves and nurse them 
 into freedom and independence that they might 
 reveal His mind and will to the world. You see 
 Him coming into the world in Christ, revealing 
 Himself and His glory in that life and death. You 
 see Him taking new form for His Spirit in the 
 glorified body of the risen Christ. You see Him 
 gathering the Church and kindling there the flame 
 divine upon the altar of men's committed lives. Is 
 it conceivable that it should all end there? Is it 
 conceivable that the process should end before the 
 whole social order in which man lives with man and 
 nation with nation becomes a body for the Spirit 
 of God ? What does the Resurrection say to us 
 looking on such a world as this? Does it not say 
 that there is Power, power of infinite love and grace, 
 able to enter this world and make it beautiful? 
 
2 2 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 There is power of love and goodwill, power of truth 
 and brotherhood, by which society may be lifted 
 out of its frictions and hatreds and conflicts into the 
 ways of righteousness and peace. When we are at 
 the end of our own resources we are only at the 
 beginning of our resources in Him, who was raised 
 from the dead and exalted to become a Prince and 
 a Saviour. 
 
 A Prince and a Saviour — that is what we need 
 to-day. Let us dig deeper into our resources in 
 Him. Let us begin afresh to explore the riches of 
 our inheritance in the glorified Christ. A Prince and 
 a Saviour! There is infinite meaning in that com- 
 bination. He rules and He saves. His rule is 
 salvation. He can only save us in the measure in 
 which we accept His rule. His mastery is a redeem- 
 ing bondage, in which we are delivered from all 
 lower enslavements, to become our highest selves, in 
 a love which makes us completely free. When 
 Jacob Boehme the great mystic was dying, his ears 
 were attuned to the harmonies of heaven. He 
 seemed to be listening to a rapturous strain which 
 filled his soul. " Open the windows," he cried with 
 his last breath, "and let in more of that music." 
 That is the word for us as the old world dies around 
 us. Open the windows and let in more of that music 
 — the music of the Easter hope. And let us give 
 our souls to the rule of that Saviour and we shall 
 see the Salvation of the Lord, 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 
 
 " For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all 
 things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their 
 salvation perfect through sufferings." — Heb. ii. lo. 
 
 One of the standing difficulties of the early Church 
 
 was to reconcile the suffering of Christ and the glory 
 
 of God. Wherever the early preachers went with 
 
 their doctrine, they were met with the same taunt 
 
 of derision. A suffering Messiah, a crucified God ! 
 
 The thing is impossible. It is a contradiction in 
 
 terms. Who ever heard of such a ridiculous thing ? 
 
 The very idea of a cross was an affront to divinity. 
 
 And even the Christians were tempted to feel that 
 
 there was something shameful about the suffering 
 
 of Jesus, like a point in the story of a great life where 
 
 the hero has dipped down into degradation too deep 
 
 for words. It was this way of thinking against which 
 
 Paul flung his great protest when he shouted out that 
 
 the one thing which he gloried in above all else, was 
 
 just this dark and bloodstained Cross of Christ. It 
 
 was this taunt which the early Church had to meet. 
 
 At first it was very difficult. It is far easier to hold 
 
 up one's head against a blow than to face a pointed 
 
 finger of shame. The root of the trouble was, of 
 
 course, their own wrong values. It was in their 
 
 blood to look on suffering as some disgraceful thing, 
 
 which carries a taint of evil or the brand of weakness. 
 
 23 
 
24 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 Pain, for an orthodox Jew, was part of the curse of 
 God. He could not get it out of his head that if a 
 man suffered, it was because God was against him. 
 And the writer to the Hebrews set to work to make 
 them feel that the sufferings of Christ did not touch 
 the honour of God. " By the grace of God," he said, 
 "Christ tasted death for every man"; and then, as 
 if he saw a look of surprise creeping over their faces 
 and a lifting of the eyebrows at this coupling of the 
 grace of God with the horror of Calvary, he went on, 
 " For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by 
 whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto 
 glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect 
 through sufferings." 
 
 There are two things which he makes clear, with 
 one sweep of his pen, about the sufferings of Christ. 
 For one thing, they are quite consistent with the 
 character of God. These loving hands of the Father, 
 shapii.g the life of Jesus, guiding His course, made no 
 mistake in the dark hour of His suffering. He knew 
 what He was doing when He steered that soul of 
 Jesus through those deep waters of His agony. "It 
 became Him," says the writer. Nothing so expressed 
 and set forth with becoming glory the nature of God, 
 as the suffering of Christ It was all in the main line 
 of His purpose of love. Calvary was no side track, 
 no mere bypath, into which Christ was driven by 
 cruel circumstances which were too much for Him. 
 In such a world as this, it was the high road of His 
 great destiny ; it was the true course of the Adven- 
 turous Love. God had a big task on hand. He 
 was bringing many sons into glory, and nothing 
 could achieve it but a Leader equipped through 
 pain. 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 25 
 
 The shameful view of Christ's suffering still lingers. 
 In Mr. Wells' portrait of his " Invisible King," which 
 is only kingly in so far as it is borrowed from Jesus — 
 he criticises Christ for what he calls His weakness, His 
 policy of non-resistance. There he takes his stand 
 with that multitude in the ancient and modern world 
 to whom Christ is still " the great misunderstood." 
 
 It is difficult to realize that what we call Christ's 
 humiliation was His glorification, — until our eyes 
 have been opened. God's glory is in service. That 
 is what God is — a Servant. He never escapes 
 from suffering even on His throne. God's sacrifice 
 is eternal ; if the pain of it is lost, it is only lost by 
 being overcome by a love in which it is swallowed 
 up, as the big deep notes of an organ are lost by 
 being taken up into the fuller and richer music of a 
 noble theme. Christ suffered because it is God's nature 
 to suffer. His suffering was a revelation of an agony 
 which is part of the creative and redeeming love. If 
 Christ had not suffered, there is something in God 
 which would never have been known, because it 
 would never have been uttered. Some of us have 
 stood, perhaps, in a scientist's laboratory and seen 
 him pass a pure beam of white light through the 
 crystal which breaks it up into its many-coloured 
 rays. Without that crystal to break it up, we would 
 never have known the light was so radiant. The 
 Cross of Christ is like that crystal prism. It breaks 
 up the light of the uncreated love, and lets us see the 
 myriad-coloured glory. But for the suffering of Christ 
 we had never seen into the wonder of that love. Like 
 the light, it is all about us, in trees and flowers, the 
 majestic hills, and the smiling joys of every day. But 
 beneath the smile of nature and the gifts of happiness, 
 
26 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 there is a heart that breaks in pain, the heart of the 
 Eternal Father. And in the suffering of Christ, it is 
 isolated, like the great notes of the organ when the 
 lighter strains are hushed. 
 
 °In the second place Christ's suffering too was part of 
 His training, His fashioning. It is something without 
 which He could not have been Himself It was 
 necessary to His completeness of being. The Via 
 Dolorosa was His only path to power. The words 
 are strong—" To make Him perfect through suffering." 
 There is a tendency of the mind, and it has always 
 been there, to look at the spirit of Christ apart from 
 life, as if He passed through the world in a kind of 
 lofty independence, as an actor goes through the 
 tragic incidents of a play without these incidents 
 really shaping his being, or adding anything to his 
 character. We miss the point of the life of Christ if 
 we look upon Him as a ready-made Saviour, to 
 whom life had nothing to give. The words are bold. 
 " Christ was made perfect by His sufferings." They 
 were an essential part of His development without 
 which He could not have been what He was. Christ 
 had to live His life as we live it; He had to find His 
 way about amid its perplexities, as we find ours; He 
 had to meet its temptations, as we fight ours. His 
 nature had to be moulded and His powers awakened 
 through the storm and the stress of life. Life was no 
 sham fight for Jesus. It was a real battle in which 
 everything was at stake and a real victory was won 
 which changed the course of history. He was a 
 living part of a living, struggling world on its way to 
 God. " It became Him, for whom are all things, and 
 by whom are all things, to make the Captain of their 
 salvation perfect through sufferings." 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 27 
 
 One result immediately springs from this changed 
 outlook on the sufferings of Christ. It is a changed 
 outlook on our own. The moment we begin to 
 see a glimmer of nobleness, of some great use of pain 
 in His Cross and His Gethsemane, that moment we 
 begin to see some great uses in our own. Suffering, 
 when all is said and done, is the great problem of 
 the universe. It is the one thing which, above all, 
 perplexes and troubles the religious mind, for it is 
 the religious mind that feels it most. When a man 
 begins to think at all, he begins to question the why 
 and wherefore. And there is no cut and dry answer 
 ready to our hand. There is no theoretical solution 
 to the problem. When all is said, the deepest truth 
 lies still at the bottom of the well. But there is a 
 practical solution, and that is the main point— for we 
 are not here to understand, but to live. The practical 
 solution is in Jesus. He lived this life of ours, faced 
 and bore incalculable suffering, and still found life 
 liveable ; and what is more, the Scripture tells us that 
 this suffering was an element in the making of His 
 Divine manhood. Here is a life which is perfect, so 
 redeeming in its power and quality, that there is not 
 a single soul in all God's universe, however deeply 
 bitten with shame and sin, whose poor heart cannot 
 catch fire at the touch of Jesus and blaze out in a 
 new splendour. Surely, if the Son of God had to 
 suffer to become a perfect Saviour, if He met it with 
 brave acceptance, like a soldier going into the battle 
 for which he has enlisted, there must be meaning in 
 our pain. There must be something noble in it, 
 something enriching, something without which man 
 could not be man, and God could not be God. Pain 
 is more than the dross which we would fling away 
 
2S THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 and forget as soon as we can ; it is the very mould, 
 the very furnace without which the Potter's Hand 
 could not f-^shion us into beauty. One look at the 
 face of Jesus, lit up amid the shadows of Gethsemane 
 by the passion which burns at His heart, will give you 
 more insight into the meaning of pain than all the 
 volumes that ever were written. He did not put it 
 into words. He put it into a life. To look at the 
 facts of pain apart from Christ, is like trying to catch 
 the beauty of a piece of music by reading the manu- 
 script: if you have not the musician's eye, it is 
 nothing to you but a series of hieroglyphics, a set of 
 stupid looking marks upon a paper. But hear a 
 master play that music, translating it into melody 
 through the medium of his own soul, then you begin 
 to understand what glorious secrets of a hidden world 
 are locked up in these crotchets and quavers. Mark 
 Rutherford puts this point finely : " When we come 
 near death or near som^ething that may be worse, all 
 exhortation, theory, promise, advice, dogma fail. 
 The one staff which perhaps may not break under 
 us, is the victory achieved in like circumstances by 
 one who has preceded us, and the most desperate 
 private experience cannot go beyond the garden of 
 Gethsemane." If Christ suffered, shall there not be 
 meaning in our pain ? If God could only make Jesus 
 perfect through suffering, is there any likelihood that 
 He could do anything for us without it ? There is 
 tremendous comfort in this. "It behoved Him, in 
 bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain 
 of their salvation perfect through sufferings." 
 
 Now this light which shines upon the world of pain 
 from the suffering of Christ, does carry us a little way 
 at least into the meaning of pain. It shows us, in 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 29 
 
 some degree, how sufferings do make for perfection. 
 For one thing, the experience of suffering is a means 
 of development. All the experience of life has this 
 power of developing us, of bringing out of us some 
 hidden quality. Life has a cutting edge about it 
 in all its sharper experiences, which sets free some 
 hidden beauty, some buried capacity, as a land- 
 slide which tears and wounds the surface of a 
 smiling hillside may reveal a hidden stratum of gold. 
 A man can no more become a man till life has dealt 
 with him, than a daffodil can burst its sheath till it 
 is put into the grip of the earth. And part of that 
 experience is the experience of pain. There is some- 
 thing in us which only pain can bring out. Francis 
 Thompson describes the making of a child's soul in 
 heaven, with all its gifts and powers. But something 
 was wanting at the end which only earth could give 
 her — a tear. Wherever we may go on our long 
 journey, there is something which only earth can 
 give us to fit us for the larger life. 
 
 Each wave that breaks upon the strand. 
 How swift so e'er to spurn the sand 
 
 And seek again the sea, 
 Christ-like, within its lifted hand 
 Must bear the stigma of the land 
 
 For all eternity. 
 
 It is the stigma of earth, the wound-prints of pain, 
 which, like the thorn-prints on Christ's brow and 
 the nail marks of the crucifixion, bring out some 
 richer beauty. Does it seem blasphemous to suggest 
 that suffering developed Jesus? It is the suggestion 
 of the Scripture. His suffering was real, and it 
 played a real part in the awakening of His Saviour- 
 hood. How it set Him free ! How it touched the 
 
30 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 deep fountains of his compassion ! How it awoke 
 His tenderness ! How it sent Him again and again 
 to His knees to listen through the silence of eternity 
 — brooding like the sky over a pain-racked world — 
 for the interpreting voices of love. You cannot see 
 Jesus until you see Him against the background of 
 life's experience: and you cannot see Him till you 
 see Him most of all against the lurid background of 
 his Agony. Suffering has the power to soften hard- 
 ness, to awaken courage, to bring a tenderness into 
 proud faces which nothing else can put there. There 
 are flowers that grow best in the shadowed places, 
 and these are the flowers with the most delicate tints 
 and fragrance. It is no glorification of pain to say 
 these things or think these things. Physical pain we 
 may get rid of, bit by bit, in part at least ; though it 
 is difficult to see how a man can honourably play his 
 part in sucji a world as this without some cost to his 
 body. Make a universe as smooth and placid as 
 some lotus-land, and there will be fine natures who 
 will break out of it and fling themselves away on 
 some adventurous quest through the sheer need of 
 living dangerously. I cannot imagine a world more 
 near the brink of war and bloodshed, than a world 
 that we have made so smooth and easy and prosper- 
 ous that we revolt against it. Something is wrong 
 with progress if it does not bring more pain instead of 
 less — the pain of souls more sensitive to sin and sorrow. 
 And by that pain we grow. " It became Him to make 
 the Captain of our salvation perfect through sufferings." 
 But again, the perfection of Christ was in His 
 oneness with all men, His sympathy with all men, 
 through which He found the power to save. A man 
 is not really growing whose heart is not expanding in 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 31 
 
 sympathy with others. The great qualities of the 
 soul are those that link us with all mankind. As we 
 rise out of ourselves in devotion to others, we grow. 
 And by suffering, Christ grew into a deeper sense of 
 unity with all mankind, a unity which was the power 
 of His Saviourhood; till His heart became a kind of 
 whispering gallery in which the low murmur of the 
 world's agony cried aloud to God. He gathered up 
 into Himself the world s suffering and bore it ; and 
 by that burden He became the perfect Saviour. 
 
 Give me no counsel 
 Nor let no comforter delight mine ear 
 But such a one, whose wrongs do suit with mine, 
 And I, of him, will gather patience. 
 
 People have often puzzled over the problem why 
 the innocent should have to suffer for the sins of the 
 guilty, and why it is that the pains of suffering are 
 so badly distributed. In protest against this, the 
 doctrine of Karma has come into existence, whereby 
 the suffering of each is explained as the result of 
 something he himself has done in a former life, so 
 that each man's suffering is proportioned to his guilt. 
 If there is a doctrine more devastating to the mind 
 of man in the face of pain, I do not know it. It 
 shuts men up in the isolation of their own souls. It 
 turns a man's place of suffering into a prison, from 
 which he has to burrow his way alone. It breaks 
 humanity up into self-existent units, so that we are 
 no longer a family, suffering together and proud to 
 suffer together, proud if our suffering can help to lift 
 our brothers' weight of pain. Humanity is one. We 
 are members one of another. We are not ourselves 
 till the tendrils of our sympathy have gone out and 
 twined themselves about other lives and we stand 
 
32 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 knit together for good or ill. It is this power of 
 suffering with others, and thereby in our measure 
 redeeming others, that pain brings to our door. 
 Without this, Christ could not have been a Saviour. 
 " It became Him to make the Captain of our salvation 
 perfect through sufferings." 
 
 Now how does this view of things help us ? We 
 may say to ourselves, perhaps, that Christ stood 
 alone. Suffering was all very well for such as He 
 with a great redeeming task ; that was, so to speak,' 
 His business. He needed the character which 
 suffering could give, and most of all the power to 
 save. But as for us, something less will serve. The 
 answer to all this is in a word. We are not saved 
 till we are made like Christ, and this likeness to 
 Christ carries all through. It means likeness to 
 Him not only in the virtues of His private life ; we 
 must be like Him in the qualities which suffering 
 made perfect, and most of all, in the quality of 
 saving sympathy by which we bear in our lives the 
 burden of others' sin and shame and suffering. The 
 difficulty many people have in being reconciled to 
 suffering is their unwillingness to be made like what 
 God would make them, which is like Jesus. That 
 is the crux of the whole matter. Do we want to be 
 made like Jesus ? Or have we some ideal of our own 
 —some rose-coloured vision of ease or comfort which 
 pain is shattering to fragments ? The secret of being 
 reconciled to pain, is being reconciled to God's ideal 
 of life in Jesus. Some people are perilously near the 
 old Roman Church fallacy of two orders of Christian 
 conduct, one of which is for the man in the street 
 the other for the man in the cloister. There is only 
 one order of saved men. It is the order of love ; into 
 
PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING 33 
 
 which a man is brought by Christ ; and that is an 
 order in which he becomes a saviour of others, and 
 his own sufferings awaken in him redeeming quality 
 and power. That is the only way in which we can 
 be saved out of our own suffering. We are not saved 
 till we are saved from self-pity, and find our joy in 
 helping others. And we find that deliverance from 
 our own pain in a great alliance with the loving 
 purpose of Christ. He is the Leader of our salvation. 
 What does that mean ? It means that He comes 
 down into our place of pain and wretchedness to lead 
 us out of it by the way of fellowship with Him. 
 There is no escape from suffering except by the way 
 of a great love and a great vision of the will of God, 
 whereby our suffering becomes redeeming, and the 
 pain is swallowed up in the passion to be and to do 
 what God would have us. 
 
 Our salvation depends on our fellowship with 
 Christ. Our victory depends on our sharing the 
 spirit and the attitude of Christ. One of the Arctic 
 explorers tells in his book how he took part in the 
 hard work of the party, pulling the sledges with the 
 men, suffering with them in all their labours. He 
 talks about the "sympathy of the traces." He 
 describes how the depression, or lethargy, or pain of 
 his men communicated itself to him as he and they 
 held the same cords and toiled bit by bit over the 
 snow and ice. And on the other hand, his courage 
 and faith and hope were transmitted to them through 
 the same sympathy of the traces, so that they were 
 able to carry on. There is no solution for the 
 problem of suffering, except in so far as we let Christ 
 share our burden, by giving ourselves to His task. 
 
 To the man who is out for himself or for pleasure, 
 3 
 
34 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 pain is a horror unrelieved, a disaster, a blot upon 
 the universe, and there is no escape from it except 
 by chloroform of one kind or another. But take the 
 attitude of Christ, put your hand to His task, get 
 close to Him. See life with His eyes, join yourself 
 to His party, and you will feel the subtle sympathy 
 of the traces, the strange thrill of joy and hope and 
 peace. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of 
 Vie, . . . and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 
THE INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OP 
 RESIGNATION 
 
 " Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." — Matt. vi. lo. 
 
 No petition in the Lord's Prayer is so frequently 
 used, and none so frequently misused. This was a 
 petition which was often found on the lips of Jesus. 
 It served Him as the one clear utterance of His need 
 in the hour of His sternest crisis, the hour He spent 
 in Gethsemane. "Thy will be done" is the word 
 that echoes through the solemn stillness of the 
 garden of shadows. "Nevertheless not My will, 
 but Thine be done." 
 
 Yet there is no prayer so frequently misinterpreted 
 as this. It is generally associated in our minds with 
 something harsh and forbidding, something which 
 throws over our life the shadow of a cross. When 
 we take this prayer and set it to music, as we do in 
 several of our hymns, it is generally set to a dirge 
 in a minor key, which lowers the temperature of our 
 soul to freezing-point and brings a kind of chill to 
 the heart. The situations to which we apply it, are 
 generally those which have the tinge and colour of 
 Gethsemane. 
 
 My God and Father while I stray, 
 
 Far from my home, on life's rough way. 
 
 Oh teach me from my heart to say, 
 
 "Thy will be done." 
 
 35 
 
^6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 Is this a true picture of the will of God ? Is this 
 the right kind of suggestion to gather round the 
 will of God — that will which is love, which breathes 
 in the beauty of the earth and shines in the sunlight 
 of the heavens, and smiles to us in the love of litth 
 children and the face of Jesus Christ ? Was it really 
 a sombre thing which Christ had in His mind, when 
 He taught us to pray "Thy will be done"? 
 
 When we use this prayer, what is the attitude'we 
 too often put into it? Is it not merely a kind of 
 pious resignation to a dark fate which we cannot 
 avert? A calamity comes to us. It may be our 
 health is broken, or we meet some staggering loss, or 
 in some way our plans are crossed, and we try to 
 submit to it without too much complaining and 
 conclude that that is the fitting time to pray " Thy 
 will be done." 
 
 Now, is this right? Was Christ merely commend- 
 ing here a spirit of resignation ? Was He merely 
 commending here a kind of baptized fatalism, a 
 stoical patience with adversity, in the name of the 
 will of God. Is there not something braver in this 
 prayer, something bigger, something we can see and 
 desire and consecrate ourselves to, with all our hearts, 
 when life is sunny as when it is dark? 
 
 There are two things which this resignation idea 
 forgets. The first is that God is not the author of 
 many of the things which we are accustomed to call 
 the will of God. Are we going to make God re- 
 sponsible, for instance, for all the sickness and the 
 sorrow that darkens our life and say of it, " It is the 
 will of God"? Is God responsible for the East 
 End of London? Is God the author of our poverty- 
 stricken, drink-polluted slums? Is God responsible 
 
INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 37 
 
 for the war through which we have just passed, with 
 all its heart-breaking sorrows and shattered lives? 
 Is God responsible for plagues which mow down their 
 thousands, or for the sickness and starvation which are 
 desolating so much of Europe ? Is God responsible 
 for the sins which cripple bodies and souls round our 
 doors, and send their poisonous currents of disease 
 and weakness through the lives of men and women 
 to the third and fourth generation ? Are we going 
 to say that these things are the will of God ? It is 
 these which are the root causes of many of the hard 
 circumstances and conditions in which men live their 
 lives to-day. Can these be the will of God ? If it 
 were so, is He a God we could worship ? If this were 
 His will, is this a will we could bow down to without 
 losing our self-respect and the best qualities of our 
 soul ? Is this the kind of thing which Christ had in 
 His mind when He bade us pray, " Thy will be done " ? 
 I have taken exaggerated examples of the kind of 
 thing I mean, but the same problem arises in the 
 smallest ill of life — even a cut finger ! How are we 
 to regard these things, and what cause are we to 
 assign to them ? That is the mystery of mysteries. 
 It goes right down into the problem of evil, into 
 which we can see only a little way. But no man 
 whose life has been touched by calamity dare make 
 God responsible for it, without landing himself in a 
 hopeless problem, and without doing an injury to his 
 own vision of God. Whatever brought evil into our 
 life, it is not of God's sending ; it is not of God's 
 willing ; it is rather the breaking of God's plan. Our 
 hard conditions are the best He could do for us in 
 a world such as man has made it. The difficult lot 
 in which men find themselves is the result of His 
 
38 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 will baffled and spoiled by the conflicting passion 
 and selfishness of men. It is not God's original will 
 
 His divine decree. That would be to turn Him 
 
 into a monster, and His world into a kind of witches* 
 
 cauldron. 
 
 The second thing this resignation idea forgets is, 
 that the will of God is something we have to do. 
 It is not something which is done in spite of us. 
 God's will is only done as we help Him to do it. 
 That is the wonder of our life, that we are given a 
 place in the accomplishment of this will of God. If 
 God's will were a divine decree by which everything 
 is fixed, there would be no sense in praying "Thy 
 will be done." It would be done in spite of us, and 
 there would be little use in praying for resignation, 
 for it could matter little in the long result whether 
 we were resigned or no. God's will is something we 
 must do. It is something in which we have to play 
 our part — a voice we have to hear and obey — a 
 purpose we have to see and carry out — a plan we 
 have to approve and work upon — a line of active 
 love we have to grasp, and link up our lives with it 
 " God mend all," said the workman in Carlyle's story 
 to his master, looking at the ruin of his country. 
 " Nay, but we must help Him to mend it," was the 
 answer. That is what Christ means. He means 
 more than " God mend all " ; he means " but we must 
 help Him." It is a prayer to see the will of God in 
 every circumstance of life, and seeing it, to have 
 strength to do it. This active loyal consecration to 
 the will of God is what the prayer demands. " Thy 
 will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." 
 
 Now, what is the will of God ? What is the active 
 purpose which lies at the foundation of the world? 
 
INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 39 
 
 What is the thing God is seeking in and through 
 our lives, and seeking our help to carry out ? There 
 is only one word that can express it — the Word 
 that "was made flesh, and dwelt among us." Christ 
 is the light in which the mind and will of God 
 become clear. In Christ, God's hidden purpose 
 for your life and mine breaks out of its ancient 
 obscurity, like a secret stratum of gold which 
 emerges at the surface of the hill. Whatever our 
 life may be, God's will for us is to make us like 
 Jesus. That is the model, so to speak, on which 
 every human life is based. That is the final goal 
 to which the race of humanity is tending. That is 
 the passionate hope for every one of us, which sleeps 
 in the breast of God — the hidden dream in the Artist's 
 heart, which sets Him toiling day and night to bring 
 it to birth in a masterpiece. God's will is to make 
 us like Jesus. Never lose sight of that for a moment, 
 through whatever hard way life may be leading you. 
 His will is to make you like Christ, to bring forth in 
 you, cleansed and redeemed by grace, " the peaceable 
 fruits of righteousness." 
 
 And look again, what is the larger purpose for 
 which Christ strove — the purpose which was the 
 driving power of his life by day and by night, so 
 that He was never for a moment out of harness? 
 Was it not the redeeming of the world, of the whole 
 world, to make the lives of men beautiful and strong 
 and true, and bind them together in love and loyalty 
 till they become a kingdom of God, and the world 
 their Father's house. Watch Him as He goes here 
 and there, healing the sick, driving out devils of lust, 
 speaking a cheering word to some downhearted soul, 
 taking men and women and remaking them, and 
 
40 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 breathing into them the breath of love which is the 
 breath of life. That was the will of God taking 
 shape. That was the will of God being done. Tell 
 me, can you see this will of God without loving it, 
 without desiring it, without your whole being going 
 out towards it as the real ambition of life ! Can you 
 see anything greater in life or any greater way of 
 looking at life, than just to realize that you have 
 some part to play in this great purpose, some con- 
 tribution to make to it, that your life may be built 
 up into it, as the coral polyp builds up its little 
 body, out of the shifting waters round it, into the solid 
 rock on which the waves and storms shall beat and 
 break in vain ? It is this ambition which Christ puts 
 into our heart, and bids us make the prayer of our 
 life, " Thy will be done in earth.'* 
 
 Now, what is the attitude to life in its various 
 aspects which this seeking of God's will demands? 
 
 In the first place, there is the attitude of brave 
 acceptance of life's inevitable hardships and sorrows 
 as the condition in which we have to seek the will 
 of God. Notice what this means. It means some- 
 thing more than resignation to a lot we cannot avoid, 
 though it be hard to bear. A sorrow comes to us, 
 and we say, " We must resign ourselves to it as the 
 will of God," and we submit with as good grace as 
 we can to the altered circumstance and the lonely 
 days, and crush as far as we can, the rebellious will 
 and the complaining spirit, and try to say, " Thy will 
 be done." This resignation has come to be looked 
 upon as one of the great Christian virtues. But is 
 this resignation all that the will of God demands in 
 such a situation? And is this resignation such a 
 beautiful Christian grace as we imagine it to be, 
 
INCOMrLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 41 
 
 when it is only resignation. Listen to what R. L, 
 Stevenson says about resignation. He is talking 
 about the garden of the soul, and the various plants 
 which are to be cherished there. " There is a 
 plant called winter green, or Resignation, otherwise 
 known as the False Gratitude plant. It is a showy 
 plant, but leaves little margin for profit. John, do 
 you see that bed of Resignation ? I will not have it 
 in my garden ! It flatters not the eye and comforts 
 not the heart. Root it out — out with it ! And in its 
 place put a bush of Flowering Piety, but see it be of 
 the flowering sort." What is wrong with resignation 
 is, that it does not go far enough. It does not 
 flower, it does not blossom. It is more than resigna- 
 tion that is demanded. It is acceptance of the hard 
 circumstances and the sorrowful way, if these be our 
 portion, as the conditions in which we are to find 
 and to do the will of God. But the conditions 
 themselves are not the full will of God. They are 
 only the terms on which we are to live out the life 
 God would have us live, and play our part in the 
 loving purpose of God, which is salvation for us and 
 for all the world. Not merely to bow our head to 
 the sorrow, but to seek to shape our lives in that 
 sorrow, so that we shall do the will of God and show 
 forth that courage and faith and loving-heartedness 
 which are the nature of Jesus. Not merely to resign 
 ourselves to walk a lonely way or carry a difficult 
 cross, but walking that way and carrying that cross, 
 to find our place in the service of God and fill it to 
 the full — that is to do the will of God. The soldier 
 is sent by his general to a difficult place in the line, 
 or forced to hold a lonely post by the strategy of the 
 enemy. What is his mood? It is not resignation 
 
^2 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 as if his whole duty were to submit to these conditions 
 and refrain from complaining. His duty is more 
 than that. It is to fight the foe, to carry out his 
 orders to take his share in the campaign. So it is 
 with us It is the soldier spirit of alert and vigorous 
 loyalty that is demanded, not the barren mood of a 
 passive resignation. The conditions may be part of 
 God's will, the very best He could devise. Or they 
 may have been forced upon us through some cross- 
 current of sin or circumstance. But our assurance is 
 that therein the will of God may be done. In them 
 we may find some way of living the life to which 
 Christ calls us. There we may find some way of 
 aidincT the purpose of God. It is this mind we seek, 
 this active mind and passion for what God means to 
 make of us and through us. " Thy will be done in 
 earth, as it is in heaven." 
 
 Then again, it is a prayer for the discernment 
 of God's will in the perplexing decisions and hard 
 choices of life. The faith with which the Bible 
 starts in bringing us near to God, is the faith that 
 every man's life is a plan of God. To every man, 
 as some one puts it, there is given " a definite and 
 peculiar confidence of God." If we were in close 
 enough touch with Him, His Spirit would guide as 
 so that at any perplexing moment we would find a 
 directing finger and a voice would say to us in some 
 unmistakable conviction, *' This is the way, walk ye 
 in it." That way for us would be the will of God. 
 This prayer is a prayer for grace to see our way, day 
 by day, clear cut in the light of God, so that in taking 
 that way, we are fulfilling His purpose of God for us 
 and getting His will done on the earth. 
 
 There are many means by which the Spirit guides 
 
INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 43 
 
 us in these perplexing ways. There is the guidance 
 of an inward discernment, a fineness and delicacy of 
 perception which some people have above others. 
 They seem to know what is right as by a sort of 
 instinct. Every man who is in touch with God will 
 be Spirit-led. He will come to feci at certain 
 moments of life a pressure upon his soul, or a 
 shadow falling upon his way, which turns him to 
 this side or that. Or it may come in what we may 
 call the guidance of circumstances. How often it 
 has happened in a man's life that the great choices 
 were in a way taken out of his hands, and that he 
 was led on from point to point, by the directing hand 
 of circumstances I It may be objected that the guid- 
 ance of circumstance is often misleading. So it is. 
 Circumstances are like everything else in life. They 
 take their colour from our own minds. A certain 
 event may say one thing to one man, and another 
 thing to another. But we must bring the right mind 
 to the circumstances. God will not lead us without 
 the use of our own minds. We must apply our own 
 thought to the situation and use the judgment of 
 our own reason. God trains us by forcing us to choose 
 and see our path step by step — even at the risk of 
 mistakes. The great thing is to get into the right 
 attitude of mind, and in that attitude think things 
 out. And the right mind is the mind that seeks only 
 the will of God, the mind that is alert for opportunity, 
 because it is lit with the passion to do the will of 
 God. In a great speech which Abraham Lincoln 
 delivered just before his assassination, he has a word 
 on this matter. He is looking back on four tremen- 
 dous years full of crisis, which might have made any 
 man afraid. And now at last he has come safely 
 
44 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 through. " I have not controlled events," he says. 
 " I would rather say that events have controlled me. 
 But I have met them all with this faith"— the faith, 
 that is to say, in high ideals and dependence on the 
 help of God. No one looking at these events would 
 have said that events had controlled Lincoln. Again 
 and again he seemed to take a line that was totally 
 against the clear pointing of circumstance, and his 
 own Cabinet was often opposed to him. But here is 
 the point. He brought a faith and a passion to events 
 which lit them up and gave them a guiding message. 
 He sought the will of God for his nation and his 
 time, and in the cross-currents and tides of things 
 he found the path mapped out. That is what we 
 need and what we pray for — a mind to see the will 
 of God in our daily life, so that events shall guide us 
 aright, and from day to day we shall do the thing 
 which is the will of God for us in our situation. " Thy 
 will be done in earth, as it is done in heaven." 
 
 Further, it means a spirit of battle and service amid 
 the ills of life and the needs of others. Many of the 
 ills of life have no right to bring us resignation. 
 They should bring into our soul the spirit of rebellion. 
 If God permits them at all, it is for this one reaction 
 upon our souls, to rouse us to a crusade which will 
 sweep them right away as having no proper place 
 in God's universe. This is true of many of the ills 
 of our own life. We have no business to endure 
 them. There is a good deal of ill health, for instance, 
 to which we have no right to resign ourselves. No 
 man has any right to be resigned to ignorance, who 
 has time on his hands and books at his elbow. 
 There is an apathy which is the sin of sins, because 
 it foils God's passion of self-giving. Above all, we 
 
INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 45 
 
 dare not be resigned to any sin or vicious habit 
 which stains our own life. In a recent novel there 
 is the story of a girl, whose early years were spoiled 
 by a vicious temper in her blood which rose and 
 swept over her in gusts of passion. In vain she 
 tried to fight it, and her disappointment began to 
 settle down in a kind of fatal resignation of despair. 
 At last a friend, brooding on her trouble, found the 
 secret, and put his finger on the root. " The mistake 
 you make," he said to her, " is this. You accept the 
 imperfect as a penalty, instead of claiming the perfect 
 as a birthright." How many of us make that mistake ! 
 God's perfect Will is our purity and victory. That 
 Will is our birthright in Jesus. It is our part to 
 claim it through the sufficiency of His grace. To 
 see it in Him and claim it as our right, is the first 
 step out of bondage into victorious freedom. 
 
 If it is so with ourselves, it is abundantly so with 
 regard to others. A man may be resigned to the 
 ills of his own life. No man has any business to be 
 resigned to the ills of others, so far as he can help 
 to prevent them or cure them. The idea that there 
 are certain curses which are in the nature of things — 
 that there will always be war, or there will always be 
 poverty, or there will always be vice — is standing in 
 the way of the kingdom of God to-day, because it is 
 paralysing the hands of people who might help, if 
 only they did not lay this anodyne of false resignation 
 to their souls, when the bitter need of the world 
 comes challenging by. The suggestion is that these 
 things are so, because they have been made so, 
 because they are in some way the will of God. But 
 are these things the will of God ? Surely not ! Was 
 it not against these things that Christ set the whole 
 
46 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 current of His being in an offensive of love which 
 brought Him to a Cross? What does the Cross 
 mean if it does not mean God's indestructible hope 
 for humanity. His will of love is so precious a thing, 
 that Christ was willing to die to make it visible, and 
 to keep it alive in the earth before the eyes of men. 
 Are we to be content with the world as it is, in the 
 name of the will of God ? 
 
 Shall crime bring crime for ever — 
 
 Strength aiding still the strong; 
 Is it Thy will, O Father, 
 
 That man should toil for wrong? 
 No ! say Thy mountains. No ! Thy skies. 
 Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise, 
 And songs ascend instead of sighs. 
 
 That is the note this prayer demands — the note 
 of battle that challenges every wrong, the note of 
 service which seeks every healing and redeeming 
 way. Every scientist who is rooting out disease is 
 doing the will of God. Every man who is seeking 
 to make life sweeter and better, is doing the will of 
 God. Every philanthropist who is trying to assuage 
 the tide of human misery, every politician who seeks 
 to bring in better conditions of life for the people, 
 is doing the will of God. This is a fighting prayer. 
 It is a worker's prayer. It is the prayer of the eager 
 heart, longing for a world in which dwclleth righteous- 
 ness. " Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." 
 
 What does " in heaven " suggest ? Who shall say ? 
 But the heart of it is the spirit to do God's will 
 for the love of it. It means the obedience which 
 comes from the free choice of the heart. God will 
 have no conscripts in His army, but the self-made 
 conscripts of love. To do the will of God on earth 
 
INCOMPLETE VIRTUE OF RESIGNATION 47 
 
 as in heaven means so loving it, that it will become 
 the very choice and desire of our hearts, the very- 
 inspiration of our lives. "Thy statutes are become 
 my songs in the house of my pilgrimage." The 
 songs in which we sing of the will of God, should be 
 the most cheerful songs in our books of praise. The 
 will of God will never be done, till we see it as Jesus 
 saw it — as the one glorious ambition and purpose of 
 life. The will of God must become a battle-cry and 
 a marching song. By such triumphant loyalty the 
 Kingdom will be brought in and the King come to 
 His own. 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 
 
 " And when they were come, and had gathered the Church together, 
 they rehearsed what great things^ the Lord had done for them." — 
 Acts xiv. 27. 
 
 It is a great day, when a man who has been away on 
 some expedition, gathers his friends round him to 
 tell his story. You can tell a good deal about a 
 man's character by the kind of description he gives 
 of such experiences. If a man comes back from 
 a foreign tour, for instance, and speaks of nothing 
 but the quality of the hotels he lived in, you 
 know where to place him at once. Some will tell 
 only of their losses, or their discomforts, or the 
 ills they suffered upon the journey. Some, on the 
 other hand, will describe the beautiful things they 
 saw, the kindnesses that were done to them, and 
 so reveal a vivid interest in God's world and a 
 nature on the outlook for the best. In any case 
 nothing reveals a man so much as the kind of 
 record he keeps in his mind of the experiences 
 of life, no matter how life may have treated him. 
 And nothing better illustrates the kind of man Paul 
 was than this word which describes his account of 
 his first journey as a missionary of Christ. He and 
 Barnabas had been sent away from Antioch some 
 months before, to be pioneers of the gospel in distant 
 
 ^ Phrase translated as in Gospels. 
 48 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 49 
 
 and dangerous places, and break new ground for 
 Christ. When they came back from that journey 
 they gathered the Church together and rehearsed. 
 " what great things the Lord had done for them." 
 
 This is one of those revealing flashes which light 
 up a man's soul. For if you read the account of the 
 journey you will see that Paul might have laid 
 emphasis on a good many other things. It had not 
 been all milk and honey. They had had many 
 trying times. Again and again the fury of a great 
 mob was let loose against them, and they had been 
 driven out of one city after another. There must 
 have been a good deal of hunger and thirst to bear 
 They had doubtless had many a very uncomfortable 
 night. They were often footsore and weary and met 
 with many a cold reception. To crown everything, 
 the people of Lystra stoned Paul, and hurt him so 
 badly, with intent to kill him, that he was drawn for 
 dead out of the city. Many a man could have made 
 quite a doleful tale out of it all, and at least given 
 such a recital of his troubles as would have left the 
 impression that he was something of a hero or a 
 martyr, or both. But that was not Paul's way. 
 When they had done sketching their story, it is the 
 face of God that shines out of the picture. God's 
 love and care were uppermost in their minds, and lit 
 the thorny road they had been walking with lamps 
 of gold. They forgot all the hardships and the 
 weariness in one splendid and glowing memory of 
 the great things which God had done for them. 
 
 Does not this hold a message for us in the inter- 
 pretation of life, and in the outlook we ought to have 
 upon our past and our present experience ? How do 
 we sum up our day, looking back upon it as we do 
 4 
 
50 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 sometimes of an evening when the lights are low, 
 and the noises of the day are hushed ? We can tell 
 a good deal about ourselves from the summary we 
 make of our experiences. How do we sum up our 
 activities as a Church, for instance, when we look 
 back on the past year? What kind of experiences 
 do we lay stress on ? You can tell a good deal about 
 a congregation from reading a Church report if you 
 read between the lines, often far more than the 
 writers meant to say. You can tell what kind of 
 people they are from the things on which they lay 
 stress in the experience of congregational life, whether 
 they are spiritual or unspiritual, whether they are 
 puffed up with outward prosperity, or shining with 
 the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Here, in Paul's 
 report of what had happened on his journey, we have 
 a lesson on the right stressing of life, the right 
 emphasis of life. Does it not suggest to us that if a 
 man have the right spirit, no matter what his experi- 
 ences have been, there will be something good to tell 
 about life, something encouraging, something hopeful, 
 something to raise a song about, even though it be 
 from a prison, even though it be a song in the night, 
 and in the darkest day some light be found if we will 
 look for it ? Does it not suggest that in the hardest 
 and bitterest experience there are rays of hope, and 
 gleams of the comfort and consolations of God ? 
 Some have been passing through the bitterest years 
 of life, filled to the brim with anguish and corroding 
 anxiety and wintry cares. As they look back it 
 seems one long valley of unbroken shadow. But is 
 that the last word ? Is there no silver lining to the 
 cloud, nothing to give a hint of God's care and God's 
 consolations ? Surely if we look again there is some- 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 51 
 
 thing too for which we can thank God, something 
 which, if we once get hold of it, would keep back for 
 a moment the flood of great waters, till we get our 
 feet once more firmly planted upon the rock. What- 
 ever life may have brought us through, there is 
 always enough to thank God for. The care and 
 love of God are never foiled or baffled through the 
 accidents of nature or the malice of men or even by 
 our own sins and blunders. Love always finds out 
 a way into our life. The earth may be torn and 
 blasted by battle; but the spirit of life is undefeated. 
 It breaks out afresh, covering the torn and ghastly 
 earth with flowers. Milton may lose his eyesight; 
 but the love that made him, works inward, giving 
 him keener vision of things unseen. Death may 
 shadow our friendships ; but love breaks out around us 
 in a deeper sense of human sympathy, weaving other 
 ties the stronger. Sin may blast our lives in one 
 direction ; but the Spirit of love draws near in 
 cleansing shame and contrition and braces our hearts 
 for a braver battle. There are always the divine 
 compensations. There is always something left, even 
 amid the ruins — through which God can speak to us, 
 and give us back the light of His face. Stevenson 
 tells of an old sailor's summary of life which he 
 had, worked out in an emblem at each side — "An 
 anchor — stands for hope — and in the middle the 
 word ' Thankful.'" The eye which Christ has opened 
 to life, and given the true perspective, sees only 
 what makes us grateful, and only what bids us 
 hope. Go to a sick bed yonder and you will find 
 one sick unto death, worn and wan with pain. He 
 may begin, if you ask him, by speaking of his trouble. 
 But that will not be the last word. Suddenly the 
 
52 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 key will change from the minor to the major. A 
 new look will come into the eye and you are listen- 
 ing to a story of mercies, of inward joy, of fortunate 
 things and happy incidents, interpreted by love 
 as the workings of Providential grace. Matthew 
 Arnold describes it, poet of melancholy though he 
 was : — 
 
 'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
 Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green; 
 And the pale weaver through his windows seen 
 In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 
 
 I met a preacher there I knew, and said, 
 
 "111 and o'er worked, how fare you in this scene?" 
 
 "Bravely," he said, "for I of late have been 
 
 Much cheered by thoughts of Christ, the living Bread.** 
 
 That is always the last word for Paul and those 
 who have seen Christ Jesus. "Troubled on every 
 side, bur not distressed. Perplexed but not in 
 despair, persecuted but not forsaken, as dying and 
 behold we live, sorrowful yet always rejoicing." That 
 is the last word, the conquering word. Even so they 
 came back out of many hardships, and "rehearsed 
 what great things God had done for them." 
 
 Now this brings us to the point of the whole 
 matter. What is it that gives a man like Paul this 
 kind of optimism and gladness, so that he is always 
 able to pick out the best, and always able in tbi 
 darkest day to see some gleam of lignt from heaven 
 itself? It did not mean that his nature was so con- 
 stituted that he was impervious to trouble. There 
 are some people like that. They are like the sundial 
 with the legend, " I mark only the sunny hours." In 
 a sense that is a good thing to do. It is the very 
 thing I have been arguing for, if we mean by it the 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 53 
 
 faculty for keeping alive in our mind the good and 
 gracious things of life, and making no record of its 
 darker days to hold it up against the universe. But 
 if marking only the sunny hours means that our soul 
 is so callous, so hard, that it has lost the capacity to 
 feel the pain of life, and especially the pain of others, 
 then we have lost the capacity for life's richest, sweet- 
 est, and profoundest experiences, the joy, which, as 
 George Eliot says, is " so like pain that we can only tell 
 it from pain by its being what our souls desire above 
 everything else, because we know that it is good." 
 The deepest joys of life are not found by running away 
 from its painful facts, or shutting out discomfort and 
 hardship. The author of De Profundis traces his fall 
 to the fact that he always chose the sunny side of 
 the street and made a fine art of cultivating pleasure. 
 The deepest joy is a by-product of the life that loses 
 itself seeking and serving God in everything. Shun- 
 ning life and screening ourselves from its ills, we 
 lose, indeed, the capacity to be taught of God ; for a 
 soul that is rich in feeling is a sensitive instrument 
 which catches the finer accents of His message. It 
 was not because Paul did not feel "the slings and 
 arrows of outrageous fortune" that he said nothing 
 about them, and only " rehearsed what great things 
 God had done for him." It was because he had 
 caught and held to his heart God's gracious purpose 
 and made that his own. He had seen that purpose 
 working in two directions, both in him and through 
 him — in him for himself and through him for 
 the world. He had seen that purpose in Jesus, 
 and to his Christ-illumined mind the world had 
 become the sphere of God's creative and redeem- 
 ing action. With that new vision in his heart, he 
 
54 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 had gone out into the world to watch it working 
 through everything, and to ally himself and all his 
 powers of faith and courage and self-sacrifice with its 
 operations. The man who will do that finds himself 
 living in a transformed world. The whole universe 
 of experience, rough or smooth, storm or sunshine, 
 life or death, becomes a mighty conspiracy of the 
 Divine Love. 
 
 Let us try for a moment or two to look with Paul's 
 eyes as he so interpreted his experience, that it seemed 
 full of the great things of God. First, let us see that 
 the great things God does for us are what He does in 
 us. The purpose of God in the world is neither our 
 happiness nor our comfort, but our character. We 
 are here that God may make something of us as 
 moral and spiritual beings. Paul had that fixed 
 deep in his soul. He was here on this earth not 
 for what he could make or enjoy or win from the 
 point of view of material success, but for what 
 Christ could make of him. The moment he had 
 that truth fixed in his soul, accepting it and con- 
 senting to it with all his being, a great change came 
 over the face of experience. Many things lost their 
 significance at once. They simply did not naatter. 
 A few stones falling on his body here or there, did 
 not matter. A few nights' sleep lost, did not matter. 
 What the Jews said about him by way of relieving 
 their minds, did not matter. The thing that did 
 matter was how he bore himself when these things 
 were going on. Did fie keep a brave heart or did 
 he play the coward when they stoned him ? Did he 
 keep his temper sweet and gentle or give way to a 
 bitter and revengeful mood when they flung their 
 jibes at him? Did he stand true amid everything, 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 55 
 
 true to his faith, true to the little company who had 
 chosen him to go and who were praying for him 
 away back yonder in Antioch ? That was the thing 
 that mattered ! And if his courage rose and his faith 
 grew clearer and sweeter, as it did, what was the 
 explanation ? Surely it was God's doing, God's way 
 of giving, blessing, enriching, strengthening with His 
 inward grace. It was just God doing great things 
 for him, working into his soul shining strands of 
 patience and courage and Christian manliness, and 
 working out of it by that same process all taint of 
 pride and self-satisfaction and every sort of subtle 
 selfishness which might have made him of less use to 
 God and men. It was these works of redeeming love 
 which God was doing in him, of which Paul was 
 thinking. Not that he was a prig or a sentimentalist, 
 counting virtues and registering feelings. But surely 
 there is something wholly right and pardonable in 
 any man who wants to be of some use to God, 
 rejoicing to see one dark thing after another losing 
 its grip and slackening its pursuit, as he keeps him- 
 self in the shadow of the Cross — if, as Paul did, he 
 give the glory to God. Is not this the right way of 
 judging life's experiences? The great things God 
 does for us are not the things He does outside of 
 us — His providential guidance, deliverances from 
 danger and the like, the gifts that life is always 
 bringing to us so wonderfully. The great things 
 God does for us are done within us, in the effect 
 of these experiences upon our natures. Do our 
 experiences pass within to do the work which God's 
 Spirit can enable them to do, leaving us when they 
 have gone with some new grace of courage, some 
 larger vision of God, some deeper sympathy with 
 
56 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 man, some surer mastery of life? Or do they only 
 pass us by, recording in our memories the fact that 
 they have come to us, just as a passing tripper would 
 scrawl his name upon a wayside rock ? The test of 
 what we are getting out of life is its reaction upon 
 our souls. An old man once said to a youth set- 
 tin"- out upon the road, " Remember, life will either 
 soften your heart or it will harden it, or else it will 
 break it." There is much truth in this discernment ; 
 and every kind of experience has this varied power. 
 The question of life's success is not what we have 
 made of it, but what it has made of us ! What kind 
 of men and women have we become in the contact 
 with life? What kind of souls have we developed 
 through the stress and strain? Are our natures 
 being deepened, our hearts being softened, our minds 
 growing clearer about the great things, our spirits 
 entering more deeply into the living peace of Christ? 
 Is the vision of Christ growing finer and more radiant 
 year by year, as the face of Beatrice became to 
 Dante, the higher he ascended toward Paradise? Is 
 the increasing experience of life revealing to us ever 
 some new aspect of the everlasting love? Listen! 
 " Then were the disciples filled with joy and with the 
 Holy Ghost." Do we know anything of that experi- 
 ence — the joy of God's presence, the power and 
 freedom of the soul which is increasingly God-con- 
 trolled and God-possessed ? These are the great 
 experiences, the enduring experiences, beside which 
 the things that merely touch our outward life are 
 but debris, of no more real and lasting value than 
 the trifles we bring back from a foreign tour to 
 keep in our cupboards for mementoes of the past, 
 The great things of life are the abiding influences 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 57 
 
 wrought into our nature by the gracious discipline 
 of God. It was these fruits of experience which 
 were in Paul's mind when " he rehearsed the great 
 things God had done for them." 
 
 But again, Paul recognized that the great things 
 of life are the things which God does througJi us. 
 No doubt it was upon these he dwelt even more 
 than the other, how the cripple was healed, and the 
 devils were driven out, and the light of the Gospel 
 message kindled the flame of faith and love in every 
 town he had visited. It is a great story, which thrills 
 us even now as we read it. Is there any greater 
 thing God can do for a man than to make him the 
 channel of inspiration and the instrument of help 
 and healing to the world about him ? There is a 
 phrase used in the business world to describe men 
 whose work is of vital importance to several 
 branches of an industry. They are called " pivotal " 
 men. That was Paul's position. He was a pivotal 
 man upon whose influence and faith the conversion 
 of hundreds revolved, and a whole race of men and 
 women swung into the light of faith and hope. Now 
 that is the position in which every Christian man 
 stands to his fellows in some degree. He is a vital 
 point in the line of God's communications with the 
 world around him. He is a vital link in the chain 
 of God's redeeming purpose. Others are depending 
 on him for the right attitude to life. Others are 
 swinging into the line of God's grace upon the 
 pivot of his influence, consciously or unconsciously. 
 Is there any greater thing God can do for any 
 man than to make him capable of such a post ? 
 Do you remember the noble pleci which Jeanie 
 Deans, in The Heart of Midlothian^ made to the 
 
58 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 Queen after that long journey south to beg for 
 her sister's pardon? "When the hour of trouble 
 comes to the mind or the body, and when the hour 
 of death comes, that comes to high and low, then it 
 isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae 
 dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." 
 It is these acts of blessing which in any true valua- 
 tion of life are " the great things God has done for 
 us." 
 
 Now if this be so, will it not cast a new light 
 upon many of the darker experiences of life — the 
 waste places of sorrow or pain — and make them 
 blossom as the rose ? Would it not reconcile us to 
 much that is very bitter, if we could see in it God's 
 method of equipping us for this task of blessing, and 
 setting us in the place where we could be most 
 useful ? Is not the place of pain in which God sets 
 us with others, a whispering gallery in which every 
 syllable of courage or faith may become vibrant with 
 inspiration and find a ready audience ? Is not the 
 furnace of suffering God's method of shaping us to 
 the higher uses of His grace, 
 
 As iron dug from central gloom 
 And heated hot with burning fears, 
 And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
 And battered with the shocks of doom 
 To shape and use? 
 
 Does not our pain take on a new meaning when we 
 see in it God's opportunity of revealing to our souls 
 that grace wherewith we may "comfort others with 
 the comfort by which we are comforted of Him"? 
 One of Peary's companions in Polar exploration 
 referred to a year of incredible hardship and toil as 
 " the greatest year of my life," because of some new 
 
THE KEY TO EXPERIENCE 59 
 
 values which it had given to it. And surely if we 
 learn to grasp the gracious purpose of God in Jesus, 
 the time will come when we shall look back upon 
 life's experience with a new interpretation, and 
 measure it by the values of the Cross, and say, 
 " The Lord hath done great things. The Lord 
 hath done great things for us, whereof we are 
 glad." 
 
HOW GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 
 
 " When Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world 
 will learn righteousness."— Isa. xxvi. 9. 
 
 These chapters, so far as we can gather, are part of 
 a ^reat cry which went up from the hearts of exiles. 
 The date and circumstances of this prophecy are 
 uncertain, but the language reflects the bitterness of 
 a people, cultured and saintly, torn from their homes 
 and held captive in some foreign land by the clutch 
 of a ruthless tyrant. As Sir George Adam Smith 
 points out, there are many notes in this cry. There 
 is the note of poverty and suffering which had burnt 
 itself into their blood. There is the note of penitence 
 wrung from them by the sense that their own sin and 
 disloyalty to God had helped to bring them where 
 they were. But besides this, there is the longing 
 which has always more or less arisen from the hearts 
 of suffering men, the longing for an act of God 
 which should redress the balance of this misguided 
 world. Here is our enemy, ruthless, proud, and 
 prosperous — that was the sting of it! When 
 will he be brought to a sense of his wicked- 
 ness? It is the common complaint of man baffled 
 by the mystery of an ill-adjusted world ! On the 
 surface, goodness and evil seem to have no relation to 
 material things. It often seems to make little differ- 
 ence how men live so far as their outward condition 
 
 60 
 
HOW GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 6i 
 
 is concerned. It would almost seem as if the way of 
 righteousness were strewn with thorns, while the way 
 of passion and selfishness is smooth-paved and easy. 
 If only God would break in and show His hand- 
 that is the cry of this writer ! If only He would 
 intervene to smite those who are giving themselves 
 to evil, people would begin to reach a respect for 
 righteousness. How can people learn to do right so 
 long as evil-doing seems to pay? Beneath all this, 
 there is a faith to which somehow good men in their 
 worst moods have always clung— the faith that at 
 the bottom the plan of life is just and righteous, and 
 some day there will be compensations. Men of 
 faith have always believed that present distributions 
 of good and ill are only temporary, and in that 
 thought found peace. "The day is coming," the 
 early Christians cried amid their torture. "Faith,"^ 
 says Tertullian, "is patience with the lamp lit." 
 That light of faith and hope has given to the 
 patience of persecuted saints its unconquerable 
 quality. Some day God's judgments will appear and 
 the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. 
 Now in this craving for the visible judgments of 
 God there is some confusion of mind. We have 
 learnt from Christ since then, and have come to see 
 that peace of mind is not dependent upon material 
 reward. A Christian man's faith in goodness has 
 nothing to do with the question whether goodness 
 is outwardly successful or no. 
 
 He that hath light within his own clear breast 
 May sit i' the centre and enjoy bright day. 
 But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts 
 Benighted sits beneath the mid-day sun, 
 Himself is his own dungeon. 
 
62 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 The love of God is a Christian man's own reward, 
 and in the darkest situation he has seen through 
 Christ a light upon God's face which scatters his 
 perplexities. It is righteous men, moreover, who 
 make a righteous world, not any catastrophic inter- 
 vention of God. The real problem is how to bring 
 men to a sense of sin and awaken them to a love of 
 righteousness which shall reflect itself in all their 
 dealings with one another. The only judgment 
 which will change things is the self-judgment of men 
 who come to see their own hearts. How does God 
 bring men to this self-judgment? that is the question. 
 Is it true to say that His righteousness is never so 
 reflected in life that men see it and repent? Is it 
 true to say that God stands back all the time — the 
 great neutral — not even intervening to see fair play ? 
 How does God bring men to judgment? 
 
 One answer is that men are judged in the long 
 run by the reaction on their lives of the moral 
 nature of things. The old picture of God seated on 
 a throne dispensing rewards according to merit, like 
 a judge in a Court of Law, is too mechanical for 
 truth. God's real judgments are in the laws of life 
 which have a moral basis. " Every day is a judg- 
 ment day," says a writer. Every day we are being 
 tested, sifted, settled into our own place by the way 
 in which we deal with life — and it deals with us. 
 Think of purity, for instance. The unclean thought 
 reacts upon the body and sows the seeds of disease. 
 Evil living brings physical disaster sooner or later. 
 The most terrible disease known to medical science, 
 the most prolific of trouble in all directions, comes 
 through the dishonour of life's finest capacity. The 
 garden of our deepest joy and happiness is guarded 
 
HOW GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGEMENT 63 
 
 by an angel with a flaming sword. People may say 
 to themselves that there is no right and wrong — 
 merely foolishness and wisdom. But sooner or later 
 the broken law of purity works out its ghastly 
 revenges. 
 
 Or take the laws which govern national vigour 
 and prosperity. The page of history flames with 
 the judgments of God. Nations that were once 
 strong sink into the dust, and when you track the 
 secret, it is some defiance of the laws of righteous- 
 ness. When reverence dies, the heart of a nation 
 fails. When purity and self-discipline go, a people 
 is on the road to ruin. Out in the deserts of the 
 East, vast monuments have been discovered, which 
 speak of a strength and skill unsurpassed in history. 
 We ask, as we look at them, what could have brought 
 the men who made them down to the dust? Kow 
 did the springs of such a mighty civilization come 
 to dr)7 up ? The secret is some moral failure which 
 spread like hidden disease upon a mighty tree, eating 
 out its vitality, till a breath of wind which once would 
 have made it sink its roots deeper into the earth, 
 brought it to the ground, and its memory remains 
 only in the splendid ruin of what once it was. The 
 struggle of life in such a world as this, deals severely 
 with any weakness, and the final power of survival 
 in a critical hour depends on loyalty to the prin- 
 ciples of righteousness. 
 
 Or think of the world to-day, seething with trouble, 
 with much that is fine and noble falling into ruin. 
 Who will deny that the world has come to this 
 collapse because all the nations were more or less 
 involved in a wrong way of international life, flout- 
 ing the law of brotherhood through national timidity 
 
64 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 and ambitions. The law of love which Christ re- 
 vealed is no mere conception of a dreamer. It is 
 the unveiling of the secret order of reality. There 
 is no life in God's world for nations which find 
 their pride in strength of armies, and power of 
 fleets. The judgments of God have been written — 
 for men who can read them— in flaming fires across 
 the midnight skies, in mangled bodies and roofless 
 homes, in cities cowering under the terror. It is 
 mere blindness in the face of these things to say 
 there is no open judgment, and that it does not 
 matter how we live. 
 
 Or think of those deeper secrets of the soul in 
 which life takes revenge upon the selfishly prosperous. 
 What of the man who finds success at the expense 
 of righteousness? Is he always happy? Is his soul 
 always content? Is there always peace in his heart? 
 How many successful people have a death's head at 
 their table, a skeleton in the cupboard? Is the 
 selfish man really at ease? Is the evil liver who 
 may have escaped the physical penalties of sin never 
 haunted by the memory of what he might have been, 
 stealing like a ghost about his pillow? Mental 
 specialists are familiar with cases where life has been 
 poisoned at the roots by some moral disloyalty away 
 back in the past, forgotten long ago, but still working 
 out its deadly result in the fears and inward conflicts 
 of an unbalanced mind. We have only to read the 
 newspapers with imagination, to see behind the tragic 
 stories of what we call " the broken conventions," the 
 judgments of God. 
 
 The sinister thing in the world to-day is not the 
 failure to apply the principles of Christ. We are 
 faced with a far darker peril, the repudiation of Christ 
 
now GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 65 
 
 altogether as the moral Master of the world. In 
 many cases this creed of moral anarchy is no more 
 than a screen against a secretly protesting con- 
 science, but it is there. More than one of our 
 novelists and playwriters is secretly sapping the 
 foundations of society with ideas that turn men and 
 women into " moral idiots." They play with the 
 notion that if men and women are only sufficiently 
 attracted to each other, that is enough to sanction 
 any kind of breach of the moral law. But the great 
 writers, forced by artistic sincerity, have to tell the 
 truth, and the whole truth is, there is no real peace 
 in any union which breaks the moral laws of life. 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, in one of his pre-war books, tells 
 the story of two people who broke with purity in 
 order to live together. He makes what apology he 
 can for sin, but in the end of the book, because he is 
 true to his art, the truth comes out, and the end is 
 tragedy. They are leaving London together; the 
 woman bursts into tears ; and over the man there 
 sweeps the shadow of remorse. He feels that they 
 are doing each other a deadly wrong. " Why had we 
 done this injury to one another? Why?" They are 
 sinning against the nature of things ; and the nature 
 of things, which is the nature of God, rises up against 
 them in a depression and dispeace which turns the 
 fancied paradise into a desert. 
 
 We may feel we have advanced a long way from 
 the shadow of Mount Sinai with its stern negations, 
 but Mount Sinai stands as one of the great judo-ment- 
 seats of history. Its laws were no mere conventions 
 of a little, obscure nation. They were the revelations 
 of the basic constitution of man's being, which for 
 that moment flamed into the light that he might see 
 5 
 
66 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 his way and learn righteousness. Not for nothing 
 did these commandments follow upon the great de- 
 liverance in which Israel found liberty. They were 
 the inner authority of right without which their new- 
 found liberty would have been a perilous gift. The 
 outward mastery of Pharaoh was shaken off; but 
 there would have been no real progress had the 
 inner reverence not brought them into a diviner 
 bondage. The commandments stand to-day com- 
 pleted in Christ and taken up into His great law 
 of love, — but they stand. There is an old Spanish 
 proverb, " God does not pay on a Saturday, but in 
 the end He pays." Deep in our natures which were 
 created by love, there are reverences we dare not 
 flout. Behind the whole moral order there is the 
 passion of a love that wills our freedom and our 
 peace. Sooner or later, life pulls us up when we are 
 on the wrong road, and the hand that smites, has in 
 it a love that fears for our character, more than it 
 fears for our comfort. " Whither shall I flee from 
 Thy presence? " said the Psalmist. "If I make my 
 bed in hell. Thou art there." What can he mean 
 but this, that the terror and pain of a life gone 
 wrong is a shadow of the Divine presence which 
 will not let us go, loving us too deeply to let us 
 escape the consequences of sin. 
 
 But some one may say, is there no unhappiness for 
 those who take the right way, the way of righteous- 
 ness? Does the higher road not often lead us into 
 difficulties? Does conscience never take man into 
 the desert? Does truth never demand its sacrifices? 
 The New Testament is full of them ; Christ warned 
 His would-be followers that if they were true to Him 
 they would certainly get into trouble. And what of 
 
now GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 67 
 
 those who suffer for the sins of others, bearing in their 
 very bodies the bitter fruit of others' sowing? It is a 
 deep problem, but surely there is all the difference 
 between the suffering of the man whose conscience is 
 clean, and that of the man who knows that he stands 
 condemned and responsible. There is a whole world 
 between the pain of a Christian at the stake, and the 
 torture and suffering of a man on the rack of a vicious 
 body. In the one case there is a joy and peace which 
 make the face shine amid the flames ; in the other, 
 a pain and anguish of the heart which put out the 
 very light of heaven. By the reactions of life in the 
 slow grinding mills of circumstance, God brings men 
 judgment. 
 
 But there is a way far more direct than that. 
 It is the revelation of Jesus Christ. When Christ 
 came into the world, a judgment-seat was erected 
 among mankind. One of the startling facts about 
 Him was that His very life judged men. All 
 kinds of people pass through these pages before 
 Him, and every one stands judged, measured, and 
 revealed by his attitude to Jesus. Every man is 
 self-judged by the stand he takes with regard to 
 Christ ; and by that stand his character is shaped, 
 and his destiny is set, even though his attitude be 
 quite unconscious. Who was the judge when Christ 
 stood before Pilate and the men who brought Him 
 there for trial ? What does history say about them 
 to-day? It was they who were standing at God's 
 bar that morning, lit up by their words and deeds 
 and silence to the dimmest recesses of their souls. 
 History has countersigned that judgment, not only 
 in its opinion, but in its facts. Forty years later, the 
 Temple about which they were i:o anxious was a 
 
6^ THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 mass of ruins, and the majesty of Rome is " one with 
 Nineveh and Tyre." 
 
 Christ is the mouthpiece of God's judgments 
 to-day. He has raised a standard of values which 
 has penetrated the atmosphere. By His light the 
 Church judges the world, and the world judges the 
 Church. There is no higher praise than to call a 
 man "a real Christian." Whatever new standards 
 may threaten the authority of Jesus, His is the last 
 word upon moral questions. He judges the world 
 because His light shows up the wrong things, and 
 brings about their cleansing. Slavery died in the 
 long- run because Christ condemned it. Prison life 
 was reformed because Christ's light shone into it. 
 Our slums meet us to-day with haunting horror and 
 rebuke because Christ in our hearts condemns them. 
 Men feel the injustice of our social system because 
 it conflicts with Christ's standard of human values. 
 The horror of war is uppermost in our minds, amid 
 all its devastation, because Christ has awakened the 
 dream of brotherhood. " That pure light," says 
 Alexander Smith in an essay on Christmas — " that 
 pure light makes visible the darkness. The Sermon 
 on the Mount makes the morality of the nations 
 ghastly. The divine love makes human hate stand 
 out in dark relief. If the Christian is less happy 
 than the pagan, and at times he is so, it arises from 
 the sting of his finer and more scrupulous conscience." 
 The public opinion which Christ creates, is the one 
 irresistible power which makes for justice and kindles 
 the fire in the heart of every reformer which evil 
 cannot put out. So God brings men to judgment. 
 
 But this raises a deeper point. Men do not learn 
 righteousness till they are brought to that self- 
 
HOW GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 69 
 
 judgment which the Bible calls the "conviction of 
 sin." It is one thing for God to set up an external 
 tribunal in the facts of life and the verdict of public 
 opinion ; it is another thing for a man to accept that 
 judgment and bow his soul before it. It is one thing 
 for a man to be convinced in his mind or body that 
 sin does not pay ; it is another thing for him to be 
 convinced in his conscience that sin is wrong. Till 
 that happens, all the suffering in the world will not 
 make men learn righteousness. It is doubtful even 
 whether men learn from their own suffering to any 
 extent. Sometimes a man or a nation will read in 
 the pain and anguish of disaster something which 
 brings them to their knees. For the most part they 
 only learn the expediency of right, which is a very 
 different thing. The discomfort of suffering is a 
 different thing from the horror of sin. The pain of 
 a feeble body is a different thing from the anguish 
 of an outraged conscience. The one may only make 
 a clever strategist devising means to escape the 
 vengeance of life, the other breaks a man down in 
 sorrow and tears and brings him to the feet of God. 
 The judgments of God have not taught a man 
 righteousness, till he has fallen on his knees with 
 the cry, " Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, 
 and done this evil in Thy sight." And it takes 
 more than his own suffering to do that. 
 
 What is the power by which God brings His 
 self-judgment home? It is the Cross. Christ's 
 judgment-bar is not the accusing splendour of 
 His life, though that comes home to us when we 
 are honest with ourselves. The final judgment-bar 
 whose verdict is irresistible is Calvary, where God 
 suffered all the reactions of sin. Calvary was the 
 
70 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 place where justice seemed to reach its climax of 
 outrage; but Calvary has become the judgment- 
 throne. For what does Calvary say to us when we 
 go there with an open mind ? We cannot put into 
 words what Christ put into a Cross, but there the 
 selfishness and sin of the hearts of men came to fruit 
 like a tree in full autumn, and in that broken body 
 of the Son of God, forced to take a criminal's place, 
 there is a vision of sin which can pierce the hardest 
 heart. Men often use soft words about sin. They 
 belittle it, cover it over with webs of self-excusing, 
 which betray the secret protest of an uneasy con- 
 science ; but in the Cross and all it meant for Jesus, 
 the camouflage is torn away. Sin is that dark and 
 tragic thing in the human heart which put Christ 
 to death. They were not specially bad men who 
 crucified Jesus. They were just like ourselves; but 
 such as they were, their sin and selfishness and wilful 
 blindness to the light of truth, combined to make the 
 kind of world in which the Son of God could not 
 live. We cannot track out the motive, and ambitions, 
 both individual and national which issued in the 
 crucifixion of Christ, without feeling a shuddering 
 sense that the taint of these things is in our own 
 blood, and the mark of them in our own dealings 
 with one another and with God. Calvary was a 
 judicial murder for reasons which are still recognized 
 as legitimate in the politics of the world and the 
 struggle of the market-place. But we cannot see 
 how tragic are these things — the self-love and 
 pride which darken the world — till God makes a 
 screen with His own body and shows them up in 
 their reality upon His outraged love. Does Calvary 
 not judge us as we look at it in this light? Looking 
 
HOW GOD BRINGS MEN TO JUDGMENT 7 1 
 
 at Christ's murderers, does it not make us feel as an 
 old saint felt when a man of respected character was 
 found out in some moral failure and flung into a 
 prison : " It might have been me ! " In Masefield's 
 lyrical story of conversion, it is this appeal which 
 brings the sodden drunkard to his awakening, when 
 the little Quakeress lifts up the Cross: 
 
 Saul Kane, she said, when next you drink. 
 
 Do me the gentleness to think 
 
 That every drop of drink accurst 
 
 Makes Christ within you die of thirst ; 
 
 That every dirty word you say 
 
 Is one more flint upon His way, 
 
 Another thorn about His head, 
 
 Another mock by where He tread. 
 
 Another nail, another Cross, 
 
 All that you are is that Christ's loss. 
 
 Calvary is the judgment-seat of Christ. It is there 
 we read God's silent verdict and realize its truth. 
 
 What is this strange process which the suffering 
 Christ sets working in our souls? There is the 
 awakening of the sense of guilt, for one thing, w^hich 
 means the conviction that we are responsible for our 
 sin. Guilt is no mere whimpering weakness of the 
 spirit. The sense of guilt is the charter of our 
 freedom. It is the conviction of our souls that we 
 are not the mere tools of an evil fate, but free and 
 responsible agents. 
 
 And there awakens the sense of a personal relation 
 to God, which in our sin we have broken. " Father, 
 I have sinned," was the prodigal's cry in the hour 
 of his coming to himself. These things are all part 
 of the awakening which is salvation. Our true self is 
 found in our sonship to God, and in the sense of sin we 
 realize it. If there had been no sonship there would 
 
72 THE VICTORY OF GOD . 
 
 have been no sin. Sin is the wrong relationship of 
 the son to God the Father, and the light which 
 reveals our sin is really the light of the Father's face. 
 Have you seen yourself in the light of Christ ? Do 
 you realize in Him what you are, and where you 
 stand, 
 
 The gap between what is and what may be, 
 And into what abyss the soul may sink? 
 
 The Love which shows you yourself is a love which 
 is thereby revealing Himself. Put yourself into those 
 pierced hands! Listen to the love that condemns, 
 and you will hear a voice which welcomes you to the 
 Father's fellowship. " This My son," He will say to 
 you, with your burning conscience — "this My son 
 was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is 
 found." . 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD 
 
 ** Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world.** 
 — John i. 29. 
 
 In these words Jesus Christ was introduced by John 
 the Baptist to a waiting world. Their authentic nature 
 has been disputed by several scholars. They do not 
 appear in any other of the Gospels. It is strange, 
 men have argued, that John the Baptist, who could 
 know nothing about the future death of Jesus, should 
 use words of such tremendous insight. " Behold the 
 Lamb of God." This was, of course, a reference to 
 the lamb which was sacrificed in Jewish ritual to 
 atone for the sins of the people. How did John 
 come to mirror so clearly what came to pass, and 
 what the world has always found in the death of 
 Jesus? Imagination may give us some clue to the 
 secret of this insight. A writer suggests that the 
 moment of Christ's baptism was the moment of the 
 great discovery. John had come to the world with 
 a message like that of the ancient prophets. He 
 carried the fiery cross of a moral challenge, urging 
 the people to forsake their sins and they would find 
 forgiveness. We get some little idea from the few 
 notes of his preaching, of the kind of things John said 
 to them. No Savonarola ever used the scourge of 
 denunciation so forcefully as John. All kinds of 
 evil came under his lash and there was a great 
 
 73 
 
74 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 awakening. Those who came determined to begin 
 a new life, he took down to the water for baptism, 
 which was the sign of their cleansing, and there, 
 before the act of baptism, he listened to their con- 
 fessions. What stories he heard there on the quiet 
 lake shore, we can dimly imagine ! What tragedies 
 of ruined homes and crippled souls and broken peace 
 were poured into his ear ! And to him at length 
 Jesus came for baptism, and would take no refusal. 
 At the moment of confession, John waited and 
 wondered what He would have to say — He who had 
 lived a blameless life these thirty years. And Christ, 
 too, made His confession, but it was not a confession 
 of His own sins. It was the sin of the world that was 
 upon His soul, weighing down His spirit, breaking 
 His heart, filling His fine face with shadows. The 
 world's sin and evil lay upon His soul and poured 
 from His lips in a great flood of vicarious penitence. 
 
 Desperate tides of the great world's anguish 
 Forced through the channels of a single heart. 
 
 As John heard Him speak, his mind lit up with the 
 flash of a great discovery. A veil was lifted at the 
 moment from a great mystery. John had often 
 preached the forgiveness of God — the remission of 
 sins. He believed in God's forgiveness, up to the 
 hilt. For himself, he was sure of it, as sure as he 
 was of his own existence. But forgiveness had its 
 problems for his thoughtful mind. How could God 
 forgive? Such stories of human devilry as he had 
 listened to, stories which had defiled his very ears 
 and scorched his soul ! How could God forgive such 
 people? John was no prig, no self-satisfied Pharisee; 
 but a man does not need to be a prig to listen to 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD 75 
 
 some stones of human sin or to read them in the 
 daily newspapers, and then to ask himself how God 
 can forgive. Henry Drummond once said that again 
 and again after he had spent an evening listening 
 to confessions of sin, the question had been forced 
 from him — How can God bear it ? How can God 
 forgive? Some feeling like this had doubtless been 
 in John's mind as the underworld of human sin had 
 been opened up in confession. 
 
 There was another problem too. He had had many 
 converts, but they did not last. They had confessed 
 and been assured of God's forgiveness and had gone 
 out to live the same kind of life as they were living 
 before. They were bound in the shackles of a moral 
 impotence which his preaching was powerless to break. 
 They needed some stronger dynamic than his poor 
 words could give, some stronger hope, some more pierc- 
 ing vision, to break the fatal spell and set them free. 
 And when Christ stood before him, confessing the 
 sins of the world, with the shadow of an agony falling 
 deep and dark over His soul, in a flash of divine 
 insight John saw a picture which made things clear. 
 He saw a lamb as it had been slain — the poor 
 pathetic patient victim of the Jewish altar, slain in 
 man's age-long effort to get rid of sin. For the 
 moment Christ filled that picture. He was God's 
 own Lamb, God's own Sacrifice, and John cried out, 
 " Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin 
 of the world." 
 
 This word is John's contribution towards the 
 solution of the biggest problem of history — the 
 personality of Jesus Christ. Who was Jesus ? What 
 was His nature? Where do we place Him ? Every 
 otKer great man you can put in some niche, to which 
 
'^6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 he belongs, some compartment of thought or action. 
 He may be a great thinker, or hero, or saint. But 
 Christ stands alone. Try to squeeze Him into a 
 dictionary of human biography and you will leave 
 cut something, something which the scientific historian 
 or literary biographer cannot catch, and that some- 
 thing is everything. What do we make of the 
 problem of Jesus ? The moment we try to classify 
 Jesus we realize His uniqueness. It is not enough 
 to say, " Behold the man " ; we must get deeper. It 
 is not enough to say, "Behold the teacher," as 
 Nicodemus did. It is not enough to say, " Behold 
 the martyr." We do not reach reality in our view of 
 Christ till we can say, " Behold the Saviour of the 
 world." " Thou shalt call His name Jesus : for He 
 shall save His people from their sins." That was 
 the first great word that heralded His coming. We 
 do not see Christ clearly, till we see Him in relation 
 to sin. In the last resort, He has to do with our 
 sin, not with our failure ; with the world's evil, not 
 with its suffering ; with the redemption of humanity, 
 not with its reformation ; with a new heart, not 
 with a better world. Make of it what we will, it is 
 against that hidden rock of sin that the world is for 
 ever making shipwreck. The world needs the gifts 
 of various kinds of men. It needs leaders, teachers, 
 financiers, statesmen. But its deepest need is a 
 Saviour. It is through that need we see the value of 
 Jesus; for the measure of our need is the measure of 
 our vision. The man whose need is deepest finds 
 in Christ most of all. But the man whose need is 
 deepest — most beyond this world's curing — is he who 
 has come to realize his own moral impotence and 
 woi thlessness in the face of God, and has been brought 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD ^7 
 
 into the mood to cry out, " God be merciful to me a 
 sinner." It is to that man, in that mood, and in that 
 dungeon of deepest need, that Christ comes rising 
 upon the darkness, as if " in the midst of a dark 
 night, day suddenly broke." John was bidding the 
 world look at Christ when thus he saw Him go; 
 but more, he was telling the world what to look for, 
 if they would find the real deep secret of Jesus. 
 " Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the 
 sin of the world." 
 
 Let us try to get into the heart of this deep saying, 
 if we can. " Behold the Lamb of God " — that means 
 sacrifice ; it suggests an altar ; it foreshadows the 
 Cross. " Behold the Lamb of God " — it is a suffer- 
 ing Saviour who takes away the sin of the world ; 
 that much becomes clear. That much has always 
 been clear to the heart of the world. The Saviour- 
 hood of Christ has always been associated with His 
 Cross. Christ's power to help us and to forgive us 
 has always been mirrored in Calvary. How does the 
 suffering Christ become Saviour? That is what we 
 want to know. How does the dying Saviour take 
 away sin ? It is true, our salvation does not depend 
 upon our theory of the Atonement. It depends on 
 our experience of Christ's love. There are people 
 who try to pin down the gospel of Christ to a certain 
 theory of why Christ died, or how the death of Christ 
 takes away sin. It does not greatly matter what our 
 theory of the Atonement is, so long as we have the 
 experience. The great doctrines of the New Testa- 
 ment are only efforts to describe experience, not 
 cast-iron moulds into which experience must be run. 
 We are saved not by any doctrine of atonement, or 
 any other doctrine, but through our own insight into the 
 
78 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 grace and love of Christ, awakening our response trt 
 trust and faith. " Not by the works of righteousness 
 which we have done " — nor by the theological doctrines 
 we have believed — "but according to His mercy He 
 saved us." To see Christ in such a way that we 
 experience the redeeming grace — that is the main 
 thino-. But we have minds that crave to understand, 
 and there are prejudices and presuppositions of the 
 mind which stand in the way of our seeing Jesus 
 and obscure the saving vision. 
 
 One of the oldest questions in the world since the 
 death of Christ has been the question — why was it 
 necessary for Christ to suffer and to die? Round 
 that question a theological battle has raged for 
 centuries. Did Christ need to have died? "Ought 
 He to have suffered all these things and so to enter 
 into His glory?" That was the question which the 
 disciples debated. They could not understand it at 
 all. For them, His death was tragic, the last grim 
 horror which brought down the night of sheer 
 despair. The answer is, that in the world of His 
 day, living such a life as He lived, preaching such 
 truth as He preached, it was inevitable that He would 
 be put to death. Various forces concentrated in the 
 crucifixion of Christ, but they all come to one thing 
 in the end. It was sin that slew Jesus Christ. It 
 was because men would not listen to Him, that they 
 rose and swept Him out of their world. This is not 
 to say that Christ died unwillingly. He was not a 
 mere victim of a tragedy. He was always master of 
 the situation. He saw what was sure to happen and 
 gave Himself up to the events that were closing in 
 about His life. He saw that the road led to a cross 
 upon the hill, and chose it. It was a calculated 
 
BEHOLD THE LA^Hi OF GOD 79 
 
 sacrifice. He died because He willed to die, because 
 in such a world as this, it was the inevitable end to a 
 life of truth and love. There is a story of a soldier 
 with one arm, who was standing in the streets one 
 day when an acquaintance canne up to him, and said, 
 " Well, old man, I see this war has taken it out of 
 you." " Oh no," said the other, looking at his empty 
 sleeve ; " I gave it." That is the point of view from 
 which we must begin to look at the death of Christ. 
 Sin took Christ's life, but Christ gave it ; and in that 
 giving. He was more than master of events. For it 
 is the truth of the New Testament, that the sin that 
 put Him on a cross signed with that act its own death- 
 warrant and put into the hands of Christ the mightiest 
 weapon against itself. " Behold the Lamb of God, 
 who taketh away the sin of the world." 
 
 But how does the sacrifice of Christ take away sin ? 
 In the first place, it awakens men to the reality and the 
 consciousness of sin, and that is the first step toward 
 taking it away. No man can get rid of sin in his life 
 till he has faced it, realized its power, accepted 
 responsibility for it, and so nailed it like a false coin to 
 the counter that it shall no more pass into circulation 
 in his life — with his consent at least. Sin must be 
 acknowledged before it can be taken away. It must 
 be faced before it can be cured. In certain forms of 
 mental trouble where patients suffer from various 
 fears, the process of mind-cure by which they are 
 treated, is to bring to their minds and get them to 
 face, the thing which has produced the trouble. They 
 may be quite unconscious of it. It may lie hidden 
 among the forgotten secrets of memory, but before 
 there can be peace of mind, the thing must be dug 
 up and faced, and then it can be put away. Often 
 
80 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the very facing of it will " raze out the written trouble 
 
 of the brain." It is the very san:ie with the soul and 
 
 the dispeace of sin. Sin must be faced and realized 
 
 and condemned. No gospel will do anything but 
 
 touch the surface of life which does not deal with sin 
 
 as a reality. There are gospels of so-called healthy- 
 
 mindedness which bid us believe there is no such 
 
 thing as sin, that it is only a theological bogey, 
 
 creeping out in the twilight of our ignorance like 
 
 shadows that frighten children ; and the thing to do 
 
 with it is just to fill the world with merriment and 
 
 sunshine and to say to ourselves with a brave gesture 
 
 that the thing is not there. The war has helped to 
 
 disillusion us. It has shown us there is that in the 
 
 heart of man which, when the hand of God is flung 
 
 off and the conventions of civilization are broken, will 
 
 awaken to fury and turn him into a beast. But the 
 
 lurid forms of sin are not the worst forms of it. The 
 
 sins that keep life from its power and peace, the sins 
 
 which in the last reality wreck the world, are not the 
 
 sensational sins. They are such sins as pride, and 
 
 jealousy, and greed, and the selfish spirit, and the 
 
 hate and envy which have their seats in many an 
 
 outwardly blameless life. How are men awakened 
 
 to these ? In the last resort, there is one vision alone 
 
 which will bring the revelation of what pride is, and 
 
 selfishness and hatred and jealousy and greed. It is 
 
 the Cross of Christ. For it was these things coming 
 
 to a head which crucified the Son of God. That 
 
 broken body hanging there so limp and wan, of One 
 
 who was the fairest life and the noblest spirit that 
 
 ever breathed this air of time, the very Son of God — 
 
 that broken body was the fruit of sin. That is the 
 
 kind of thing sin is, its nature in your heart and 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD 8i 
 
 mine -it crucified the holy Son of God. Can we 
 look long at the Crucified and not see that? Can 
 we stand long under the shadow of Calvary and not 
 feel it ? It is for this, Christ died, this awakening to 
 the reality and poison of sin ; for there was no other 
 way of awakening the world but to die, to let sin take 
 its full course and come to its tragic culmination m 
 the bloodv Cross of Calvary. And that awakening to 
 its deadliness is the first step to the loosening of the 
 shackles. " Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh 
 away the sin of the world." 
 
 But further, the Crucified Christ sets free from 
 sin, because He reveals the utter love and forgiveness 
 of God, and enables us to realize it and make it 
 ours. Was the Cross a necessity to our forgiveness? 
 Did Christ need to die in order that we might be 
 forgiven ? Did the death of Christ purchase forgive- 
 nesses for us, as the old theology puts it ? There is no 
 warrant for that in the New Testament. John the 
 Baptist preached the forgiveness of sins. Christ 
 blessed men with the pardon of their sins long before 
 He died. Many of the Old Testament saints experi- 
 enced the forgiveness of God. " Bless the Lord, O 
 my soul, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who 
 healeth all thy diseases." " As far as the east is from 
 the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions 
 from us." There it is, and there is no mention of 
 sacrifice. But how many of them realized this for- 
 giveness? How many of them could see the love 
 that forgave ? Think of the sacrifices which made 
 the Jewish altars reek with blood. Why these sacri- 
 fices? Why these reeking altars? Because there is 
 something in the heart awakened to the fact of sin 
 which makes it terribly difficult for us to realize the 
 6 
 
82 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 forgiveness of God. We cannot forgive ourselves. 
 How can God forgive us — the Holy God — the Light 
 in whom there is no darkness, whose light searches 
 our secret hearts to the last fragment of our motives 
 and desires? Turn to the great stories of literature, 
 The Scarlet Letter, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and a 
 host of others by the really great masters whose 
 books mirror the deep places of the soul, and you 
 will find this sense of the unforgivable thing lying 
 foul about the guilty conscience. To bring the assur- 
 ance of forgiving love, Christ died. For the Cross 
 reveals a love which loved on, amid the bitterest 
 shafts of human hatred, amid the scorn and jeers of 
 traitors, and in the very agony of death cried, " Father, 
 forgive them ; for they knov/ not what they do." 
 
 That vision of Christ upon His Cross brings 
 home the amazing reality of the divine forgiveness. 
 " Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as 
 wool " ; it is an easy thing to say that. It is the most 
 difficult thing to get people to believe it, as those ot 
 us know who have tried. And Christ found the same 
 difficulty. The world would not realize the sin which 
 darkened it, and having realized it, could not get 
 rid of its fatal blight and guilt till men came and 
 stood before the Cross, where they saw both things 
 together, the reality of sin and the assurance of 
 forgiveness. Sin cannot remain before that vision of 
 love. And that vision of love is the only thing that 
 can put sin away. There is something in us all, 
 when sin comes home to us, which refuses to be 
 content with a cheap and easy forgiveness. There is 
 something which can find no peace save in a pardon 
 which comes through sacrifice and a broken heart. 
 The blame which Christ reveals in us is the unpardon- 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD 83 
 
 able thing which cannot be smiled away by any 
 genial gospel. The forgiveness which brings peace 
 is the assurance of the love of God coming to us, as 
 it were, over the dead body which is sin's darkest 
 deed. " Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away 
 the sin of the world." 
 
 This is not the way, perhaps, in which some of us 
 would interpret the experience of the Atonement. 
 Every view of the Cross of Christ — and there have 
 been many views of it — is just man's feeble attempt 
 to put into words what Christ put into His Cross, 
 the love of God which passeth knowledge, that love 
 which is able to redeem the worst and to forgive the 
 vilest and to raise the crippled life and to turn the 
 very scars of sin into a purifying memory by which 
 the heart is kept soft and suppliant and alive to 
 God. If we are sure of that love, if we are seeing 
 into its depth and splendour, it matters little by what 
 theory we try to explain the miracle. If the Cross 
 strikes home to the heart, with the love and forgive- 
 ness which cleanses and redeems, and brings peace 
 to the soul, and power to the will, we can use what 
 words we may to describe what Christ has done, 
 provided we say nothing which will conflict with the 
 character of God. 
 
 On the other hand, some who take the more 
 modern view are apt to disparage the message of the 
 Cross of Christ. I do not care how you state the 
 meaning of the Cross : if you do not see the love of 
 God there, you are missing the heart of the Gospel. 
 The late Dr. Denney was once talking to his students 
 of the tendency of some Protestants to minimize the 
 Cross, and he said, " If I had the choice between 
 such a one and a Roman priest holding up the Cross 
 
84 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 to a dying man and saying, ' God loves like that,' I 
 had rather be the priest." There is the point— God 
 loves like that ! That is the message of the Cross. 
 Our sense of God's love will depend on what we see 
 in the Cross of Christ in relation to our own sin and 
 our own need and the need of the perishing world. 
 " Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin 
 of the world." 
 
 It is just here that so many people fail of the 
 great salvation, the full deliverance which sets them 
 free. "Taketh away" the sin of the world — what 
 does that mean? The word in the Greek is the 
 same John used describing how the women went 
 to the sepulchre and found the stone taken away, 
 the stone which hid their Lord and kept Him in the 
 grave. The taking away of the stone was the prelude 
 to the fellowship of Jesus. It was the prelude for 
 them to the new life of union with Christ and of 
 miraculous service for Christ, which brought down 
 the power of heathendom and made a new world. 
 There is wonderful illumination in this picture of 
 what it means to take away our sin, for the taking 
 away of sin is nothing if it be not the means to a 
 new life and a recovered fellowship with God. Christ 
 rolls away by the vision of Calvary, the thing that is 
 keeping our spirit from resurrection and from power. 
 He takes away sin's power to deceive us, to blind us, 
 to drug our spiritual sense. He takes away the 
 power of sin to hang round our necks a chain of evil 
 memories. He takes away the power of sin to blight 
 our hopes and to enfeeble us by despair. To see 
 there the love of God, rebuking, awakening, forgiving, 
 is the secret of that risen life which is a new creation. 
 Here, gratitude wells up like an everlasting spring. 
 
BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD 8$ 
 
 The knowledge of that forgiveness is the master- 
 motive, the kindling point of Christian enthusiasm. 
 Walter Pater describes with great imaginative insight 
 the gathering of a little Christian Church of the early 
 centuries in a house in Rome. One of the things he 
 pictures is a certain look upon the faces of them all 
 — the expression of "a wonderful sort of gladness, 
 the look of men upon whom some all-subduing 
 experience had wrought heroically and who still 
 remembered a great deliverance." The knowledge 
 that we are forgiven men and women is the abiding 
 secret of power for character, ever renewed and 
 deepened, as we keep our lives open to the vision of 
 Calvary. Whatever springs dry up in the weary 
 ways of life, that spring never fails. And more, it is 
 the dynamic of all great service. The socialist groups 
 have a Sunday school and a hymn book of their 
 own, and in it they have put Matheson's great hymn, 
 " O Love that wilt not let me go." But they have 
 left out the last verse. They sing of love, and joy and 
 light, but of the Cross through which these things live 
 to the world, they know nothing, and will have noth- 
 ing to do. The defect is fatal. To miss the Cross 
 in our penitence and the Cross in our service, is to 
 meet the evil of the world with a sword which has lost 
 its edge and to stand powerless against the plague of 
 our own hearts. It is to face the suffering earth with 
 a soul devitalized. There is no life except by death. 
 There is no resurrection save through Calvary. 
 
 Cross that liftest up my head, 
 
 I dare not ask to fly from Thee ; 
 
 1 lay in dust life's glory dead, 
 
 And from the ground there blossoms red, 
 Life that shall endless be. 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH 
 
 ** Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and hath brought life and 
 immortality to light through the gospel." — 2 Tim. i. lo. 
 
 The Easter message is like a diamond with many 
 facets. It flashes its glory into our life in all 
 directions. The more we look into it the deeper we 
 see ; the more it scatters the darkness which gathers 
 upon our perplexing way. But the central light and 
 heart of glory is its message about death, and its 
 message about death is the message of all light about 
 darkness — the discovery that it is not there. The 
 sun rises and the darkness which looked so solid and 
 impenetrable has gone. It has lifted from our spirits, 
 as the night is banished from the landscape when 
 the dawn breaks over the hills. Jesus Christ hath 
 abolished death. 
 
 This statement was more than faith ; it was 
 experience. For three days Christ had been lost to 
 His disciples in a grave, but Easter had brought Him 
 back stronger and more radiant than ever. So far 
 as their friendship with Christ was concerned, death 
 had ceased to count. The world in which they 
 walked with Him was a world from which death had 
 disappeared. For the future, it did not enter into 
 their calculations. They did not reckon with it when 
 they made their plans. Perhaps you will say there 
 is nothing so very uncommon in this recklessness of 
 death. There are countless people who have lost the 
 
 86 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH 87 
 
 fear of it. When a great challenge or a great duty 
 stirs the blood, it sweeps our hearts clean of the 
 fear of death ; but it is one thing not to fear it, and 
 another thing not to believe in it. It is one thing to 
 shut our eyes to it ; it is another thing to face it and 
 see through it. That was where the New Testament 
 men stood. 
 
 Christ had annihilated death for them, He had 
 abolished death. That is the great Christian victory, 
 and it has penetrated very deep into our lives. One 
 hardly ever meets a bereaved soul, man or woman, 
 who in the first shock of grief is troubled about the 
 problem of death. Grief covers the sky with a pall of 
 cloud, but in most cases there is a triumphant feeling 
 that behind the cloud the light is shining. 
 
 This world of ours is pagan in many respects, 
 but it is lit with the after-shine of the resurrection. 
 The Easter fact is in our blood, part of our Christian 
 inheritance. In the Old Testament there is hardly 
 any reference to immortality. The hope of it had not 
 yet emerged. And if you turn to the inscriptions on 
 the ancient tombs of the heathen dead, you will find 
 such inscriptions as this, " To the sweetest babe whom 
 angry gods committed to eternal sleep," or this, " I 
 lived while I lived well, now my story is finished." 
 Walk through one of our modern burying-places, and 
 you will find here and there, it is true, the broken 
 pillar and the note of unavailing sorrow, but for the 
 most part faith breaks out in such triumphant words 
 as these, " Asleep in Jesus," " Because I live, ye shall 
 live also." Our churchyards to-day are resonant 
 with the music of life. Those who set up these 
 memorials may show little sign of any great faith 
 through the daily routine, but deep in their hearts 
 
«8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 this hope is buried, and when sorrow comes and stirs 
 the depths it rises to the surface and becomes a 
 raft which saves them out of the wreck. It is part 
 of Christ's great contribution to life. He hath 
 abolished death. 
 
 How is it done? Paul goes on to tell us. It is 
 done in the only way in which death can be abolished 
 — by the revelation of life. He hath brought life 
 and immortality to light. 
 
 Stevenson tells of a lad who was shipwrecked on 
 an island in the West of Scotland. He was not 
 very far from the mainland, which lay mocking him 
 with its little homesteads and its look of smiling 
 comfort, while he wandered on the islet — a prisoner 
 — with the great deep closing him in. One day, 
 when near the very depth of despair, he hailed a 
 passing boat expecting to be taken off. In reply the 
 fishermen only smiled and shouted some message 
 which he found it difficult to catch, but at last the 
 truth flashed into his mind. He ran to where the 
 shore came nearest to the mainland, and found that 
 the sea which had looked so deep was now sunk at 
 low tide to a mere trickle of water across which he 
 waded with ease. In a moment the sea's ugly threat 
 of separation was abolished. The terror was only 
 make-believe. What looked an impassable sea was 
 really a ford. In the same way death is a small thing 
 when you have seen Christ's vision of life. It is only 
 a gateway to a larger world — a passage where our 
 feet 
 
 Fall on the seeming void 
 And find the rock beneath. 
 
 Now let us go deeper. How does Christ bring 
 immortality to light? It is the same process as 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH 89 
 
 occurs in the making of any great discovery, of such 
 a physical fact, for instance, as electricity or wireless 
 telegraphy. The first thing that happens is the 
 quickening of a desire. The heart must be awakened 
 to need it and to demand it. The first thoughts of 
 wireless telegraphy, for example, came to man's mind 
 a century ago, but the demand for it did not arise 
 till ordinary telegraphy had advanced some distance 
 and the world had come to depend upon it. A 
 break took place in a cable and business was thrown 
 out of gear. In desperation they sought to send mes- 
 sages which they found reached spasmodically from 
 one broken end of the cable to the other and made 
 a continuous current; and the minds of the scientists 
 were sent exploring in a new world waiting to be 
 conquered. The same thing happened to Columbus 
 in the discovery of America. He saw a plant on the 
 shore one day that quickened his mind and sent his 
 heart out dreaming of some farther coast which he felt 
 must be across the water. As some one says of him, 
 "The instinct of another continent burned in his 
 blood " ; the world he lived in became too small for 
 his enlarging mind. 
 
 That is what Christ does for us with re2:ard to 
 immortality. The instinct is in our blood and Christ 
 awakens it. We were made for a higher sphere 
 than this death-girt island we call earth. Christ 
 awakens the dormant instinct for the infinite. How 
 does He do it? For one thing He quickens our 
 sense of the value of our own personality. When 
 Christ comes in, we begin to count for something. 
 We begin to count "one." We become a soul, a self, 
 with a value which is infinite. It becomes unthink- 
 able that we should die, should perish, should pass 
 
90 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 down into the dust of decay and extinction. He 
 awakens the same instinct by increasing the value 
 of the great things of life — our love, for instance, to 
 one another. He enriches the vital human affections 
 which are the very salt of life. The man who loves 
 Christ will love his children with a finer tenderness, 
 and that deepened love demands immortality. 
 
 If I were drowned in the deepest sea, 
 
 Mother o' mine, 
 I know whose love would come down to me. 
 
 Mother o' mine, o' mine. 
 
 A love like that demands a sphere beyond the 
 limits of this narrow world. With such a passion, 
 the soul stands by the barrier of death and 
 "cries like a Captain for eternity." And Christ 
 awakens the instinct of immortality by setting us 
 tasks which we cannot half see finished, which, in 
 fact, with only one life before us, it seems hardly 
 worth beginning. Cecil Rhodes was no orthodox 
 believer, but life had touched his soul with the glory 
 of a great task, and his last words were these, " So 
 little done, so much to do." That is the protest 
 which Christ awakens in us. When He comes into 
 a man's life, however dull and dispirited, the first 
 thing that happens to that man is that he becomes 
 aware of a motive for living which earth itself cannot 
 supply. All that, was what happened in the case of 
 the disciples. They had thought very little of the 
 after-life till Jesus came. Bit by bit as His task and 
 His friendship possessed their souls, the need awakened 
 in them, till their last great craving when He was 
 on the point of leaving them, was the demand for a 
 future. It was this hunger, Christ saw leaping up in 
 their hearts and looking out of their troubled eyes. 
 
 I 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH 91 
 
 which made Him say, "Let not your heart be 
 troubled ; in My Father's house are many mansions." 
 By awakening the instinct in us, Christ brings im- 
 mortality to light. 
 
 The second thing which needs to be done in 
 making a great discovery, is to open the mind to 
 believe in it. A man will not seek long for anything 
 if his mind can make no room for it. Some time 
 ago a well-known scientist came into full possession 
 of the Christian faith. For years he had longed 
 to be a Christian. Jesus Christ drew his heart like 
 a magnet ; his soul demanded faith, his life cried 
 out for it, but he could find no room in his mind for 
 miraculous Christianity. He describes himself as like 
 a man standing on the brink of a river looking for a 
 way to cross and watching for some thought which 
 might become a bridge. When the outlook came, 
 which removed the difficulty in his mind, he crossed 
 over in gladness to give himself to Christ. The same 
 thing holds with regard to immortality — the mind 
 must be open to take it in. Here Christ comes to 
 our aid by the fact of the resurrection. Doubts have 
 been cast upon the story by many people in the last 
 1900 years, but the fact has persisted — and why? 
 We may dispute the empty grave and certain details 
 in the story ; one thing we cannot dispute — the fact 
 that the disciples were changed by something which 
 was big enough to make them utterly different men. 
 Think of their change of mood from grief to gladness, 
 from utter gloom and depression to sheer triumph 
 and victory. Is there any explanation, of this change 
 which can be found in the narrow compass of mental 
 science? Here is a fact which meets the mind, 
 " enough for fifty hopes and fears to rap and knock 
 
92 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 and enter on the soul," before which the bi;;^gest 
 sceptic may begin to doubt his unbeHef. Or is there 
 any other explanation of the moral change? Their 
 uhole personalities had suffered a reaction. Some 
 of them were cowards before. One of them could 
 not face the laughter of a group of servant girls who 
 taunted him with being a follower of Christ, and he 
 went out to face wounds and death and the ridicule 
 of the whole world. How do you explain it, if it 
 were not due to a presence whom they could know 
 and feel more real than all the threatening world 
 around them. What spiritual power was behind 
 their new-made lives ? The explanation is that life 
 was brought to light, and death was shattered. Il 
 there is one who finds it difficult to believe in the 
 future life because of his view of the universe, here 
 is a plain fact challenging the mind. What are we 
 going to hiake of it? If our scheme of things is one 
 that will not hold Jesus — risen and living — it is time 
 our mental world were smashed in pieces and rebuilt. 
 There is only one outlook on the world which is 
 valid to-day, or worthy of a thinking man facing 
 the facts of life. This little world of physical force 
 is but a fragment of a great spiritual universe where 
 Christ is Lord, and death a door that leads to a larger 
 room in the great mansion of life. We need to 
 revise our ideas and find an outlook that is big 
 enough to take in the risen Jesus. The more we 
 look at Him, the closer we come to Him, the m.ore 
 He will make a place for Himself which is all His 
 own. By the fact of His rising, Christ brings 
 immortality to light. 
 
 But lastly, there is the possession of the final 
 secret, the assurance of the man who is brought 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DExVTH 93 
 
 to say, " I know." How does Christ make us sure 
 of immortality? It is a spiritual secret. The final 
 assurance of immortality is not an argument of the 
 mind ; it is a conviction of the heart — the experience 
 of a life already victorious over the tyranny of earth. 
 It is reached through faith by those who will trust 
 Christ and let that experience bring its own con- 
 clusions. The scientist has to make experiments 
 before he can be sure of his discovery, and not only 
 once but again and again, till bit by bit the results 
 pile up and the thing can be put upon the market. 
 Even he has to use faith, to take a certain risk of 
 wasting his time and his money. There is no other 
 way to final certainty of any great truth but the way 
 of practical experiment. The man who takes no 
 risks discovers no certainties. The assurance of 
 immortality is a product of experience of the love 
 of God which comes through trusting Christ ; and 
 trusting that love means committing our life to its 
 promises and its challenges and its rebukes. What 
 happens then? Our souls break into life as a tree 
 into leaf in every bough with the coming of the 
 spring sunlight. And the life which is eternal is 
 born in our souls. 
 
 This life brings its own assurance. It stirs the 
 conviction that in the love of God revealed in Jesus 
 we are in contact with a love and care which is 
 eternal. That is the only final guarantee. Im- 
 mortality is a spiritual fact, and you cannot prove 
 a spiritual fact except by spiritual perceptions. The 
 real assurance of the future life lies not in deeper 
 explorations of psychic marvels, impressive though 
 these may be. It lies in exploring in daily fellowship 
 with Jesus the marvel of the love of God. No man 
 
94 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 can interpret for another in what ways this assurance 
 will come to him. There are certain well-defined 
 ways — the sense of peace, the assurance of forgive- 
 ness, bubbling up sometimes like a fountain, in tears 
 of thankfulness. Varied experiences of God come 
 through the changing weather of life. We know the 
 love of God in our own deep souls as we know 
 the sun in the sky — sometimes by the light and 
 sometimes by the shadow. But the full secret is 
 indescribable in words. Can any lover tell a stranger 
 by what subtle tokens he interprets the signs of 
 answered love? If he could, they might mean 
 nothing to a stranger. But the essence of the 
 matter is that in this love which we know, we find 
 our assurance of immortality. It has a value, a 
 quality like great music or great art, to which we 
 give the name " eternal." Fellowship with God has 
 in its very heart, the hall-mark of an imperishable 
 union. ^ 
 
 In a Sussex novel there is a story of a man of 
 sordid life who had been seeking God and at last 
 found Him in the glory of a summer morning when 
 he had come to the end of himself and had gone out 
 to make an end. God rose that morning in the 
 beauty of those flowers and grasses as Christ rose 
 from the dead, and broke into his soul with the 
 unutterable sense of a living personal love. Not long 
 after, he lay dying as the result of an accident, but 
 there was hardly any tinge of sadness in his outlook. 
 " It seems to me," he said, " that when I go to God, 
 I am going into the very middle of all that's alive ; 
 seems to me that when I go to God, I can never 
 lose the month of May." That is the final assurance 
 — the knowledge of a love which is the secret of 
 
THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH 95 
 
 everything that makes life precious, and it comes to 
 us focussed in Jesus Christ. 
 
 There is no other way of certainty except what 
 comes through faith. We " could wish for more " like 
 Dr. Johnson. But no more comes, except what faith 
 brings. If more were given us, we would lose that 
 struggle of faith which keeps us alive. All living 
 faith is something for which we have to do battle 
 with what we call the facts of life. And the certainty 
 of immortality is one we have to live for and may 
 have to fight for. It is a living certainty which grows 
 bit by bit and changes its face and sometimes dies, 
 only to be reborn if we keep on fighting for it, 
 trusting it ; for " faith," says Chesterton, " is the per- 
 petually defeated thing that survives all its con- 
 querors." It is a "moral certainty" in the full sense 
 of the term — a certainty we cannot have, except on 
 the terms of a moral surrender to Jesus Christ and 
 a life of obedience and trust. 
 
 Is there one who has lost it? Begin again with 
 the life of trust in Christ, launching out on the ocean 
 of life in that mighty fellowship. As you sail through 
 the mists into the far horizons, you will begin to 
 descry the land that is very far off. Bit by bit the 
 spiritual world will become your world, taking you 
 up into itself, till at last death will be only the 
 " Golden Gate " which opens upon everything — upon 
 life and love and God. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN ACTION 
 
 "I beseech thee for my son Onesimus." — Philemon lo. 
 
 This little letter of Paul to Philemon lies hidden 
 
 away in a quiet corner of the New Testament. It is 
 
 almost obscured from sight among the longer letters, 
 
 but the New Testament would have been as poor 
 
 without it, as the woods without violets. It tells in 
 
 its own artless way and in the story which lies behind 
 
 it, how Christ comes into a man's life, not merely to 
 
 answer his problems and settle his doubts — all that is 
 
 important. But it also tells this, which is just as 
 
 important, how Christianity sweetens the relations 
 
 between man and man, how Christ steps in to dissolve 
 
 the bitterness, to soften the misunderstandings, to put 
 
 us right with one another in the little things in which 
 
 we often go wrong, and finally to set our varied 
 
 relationships on such a footing that our little circle 
 
 of friends or associates shall become part of that 
 
 blessed society of souls which is the Kingdom of God. 
 
 We must begin with the story. We only gather it 
 
 in outline, but it is as romantic as any tale of fiction 
 
 and far more beautiful than most, and it has the merit 
 
 of being true. There are no such wonderful and 
 
 beautiful things in all the world as those that happen 
 
 to men and women when they come into touch with 
 
 Christ Here, then, is the story. Philemon was a 
 
 rich and prosperous citizen of Colossse, and he dwelt 
 
 96 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT L\ ACTION 97 
 
 there with Aphia his wife and Archippus their son. 
 When Paul was preaching in that district, Philemon 
 was converted, and his wife and son as well. There- 
 after he became, like many of Paul's converts, a firm 
 friend of the apostle : he was moreover a leader in the 
 little church. Like every well-to-do citizen, Philemon 
 kept slaves. They did not know any better till the 
 new leaven of Christianity began to work in their 
 lives and they found that these things could not go 
 on. Onesimus may have been a good slave or a bad 
 one. The story suggests that he had his faults. 
 How could anyone make a man a slave and then 
 expect from him anything else but slave morality? 
 A slave who was also a saint would be a miracle, and 
 nothing shows the marvel of the grace of God more 
 than the fact that it produced that kind of miracle. 
 One day Onesimus ran away from his master, taking 
 with him various things of value. Driven no doubt 
 by a guilty conscience, and the better to hide him- 
 self, he made for Rome, which was like many great 
 modern cities — the sink into which the worst char- 
 acters in the land gather, in order to be lost in the 
 stream. Then a strange thing happened. In the 
 very place where he had fled to hide himself, Onesimus 
 was discovered, not by Philemon or the trackers of 
 runaway slaves, but by a greater pursuer. The 
 Divine love followed Onesimus. Conscience pursued 
 him. The Spirit of God sought him out. How it 
 happened we do not know. Perhaps his past suddenly 
 flashed upon him in a face from the crowd, as in the 
 case of Tito in George Eliot's Romola. Tito had run 
 away from his duty, which was to free his benefactor 
 from slavery, and was climbing up the ladder of 
 fashion and position by means of the money which 
 7 
 
98 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 had been entrusted to him for this sacred duty. He 
 plunged into the stream of Hfe at Florence imagining 
 he was safe from pursuit, except in the haunting 
 voice of conscience which in time he hoped to stifle. 
 But just when he was getting along famously and all 
 was merry as a marriage bell, he caught a glimpse of 
 a face in the crowd one day and eyes looked into his 
 for a moment that seemed to scorch his very soul. 
 It was his benefactor, escaped and mad for revenge, 
 burning with a remorseless scorn and hatred. There 
 is no place in all this world big enough to hide a man 
 from the pursuit of conscience and the harrying of 
 guilt. For whether it come in vengeance or in shame 
 or in sorrow, the thing that haunts and tracks us down 
 is the love of God seeking to win us, to find us, to 
 hold us with the passion which never lets men go. 
 
 Still with unhurrying chase 
 
 And unperturbed pace, 
 
 Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
 
 Came on the following feet and a voice above their beat, 
 
 Nought shelters thee who wilt not shelter Me. 
 
 So it is ever in life. There is no use in seeking to 
 get away from God, for the very things we do to get 
 away from Him, are playing their part in bringing us 
 back to Him. The very roads by which we flee, the 
 sorrowful road, the lonely way, the primrose path, 
 lead to the places where He will meet us by and by. 
 We do not know what it was that brought Onesimus 
 under the influence of Paul in his prison. A chance 
 meeting with one, perhaps, who had been with Paul 
 in Colossae and was with him now in Rome, and 
 whose very face, as Onesimus met him on the street, 
 let loose a flood of recollection and broke him down, 
 till he allowed himself to be led to Paul and there 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN ACTION 99 
 
 found Christ. But we do know that this man, fleeing 
 from shame and conscience and God, ran straight 
 into God's arms. 
 
 It is such a fine story that one would like to linger 
 over it, and let one's imagination play with it, and 
 brood for a little longer on the marvellous inescapable 
 love. But we are to think of one or two things in 
 the letter, and the story just brings us to the point 
 where we can understand these. 
 
 Onesimus was not very long a Christian before he 
 found himself faced with a strait gate and a narrow 
 way. That is a common experience, and Christ led 
 us to expect it — the strait gate and the narrow 
 way, and over them the shadow of the Cross. For 
 Christ creates just as many difficulties as He removes. 
 He sets just as many problems as He solves ; though 
 the difficulties Christ brings by His demands upon 
 us, are not the sordid, miserable difficulties that we 
 make for ourselves in the entanglements of selfish- 
 ness. They are clean difficulties — the steps of the 
 ascent by which we climb to God and by which God 
 makes it possible for us to climb. For every difficulty 
 conquered is a step upward'^ every strain is an offer of 
 strength. So Onesimus had to face his difficulty, his 
 narrow way. He had to go back to Philemon and put 
 himself at his disposal. Slavery was wrong, though 
 Onesimus did not know it. But in any case he could 
 not make a right by doing a wrong. He had to go 
 back and ask forgiveness for the theft, and put himself 
 in the hands of Philemon, risking the hardship he 
 might have to suffer and facing the sneers and the 
 shame of the little community. He had to learn, to 
 put it in another way, that the forgiveness of God 
 does not mean the cancelling of consequehces. The 
 
100 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 forgiveness of God does not cover any wrong. We must 
 stand up to the situation into which sin has brought us, 
 facing it with the help of God. Where it is possible 
 for us to make amends, it is our business to do it. 
 
 Let no man who reads this letter say that Chris- 
 tianity does not hold out for absolute straightness 
 of dealing between man and man. Onesimus the 
 slave, crushed and downtrodden it may be, had grace 
 enough to know that he could never look Christ in 
 the face without sorrow till he could look his brother 
 man in the face without shame. That truth lies at 
 the very heart of Christianity. Christ came to 
 make us terribly sensitive in our dealings with our 
 brother man, demanding straightness, honesty, fair- 
 ness. The fellowship of Christ is a circle which is 
 not complete till it includes our relationships with 
 others. A flaw in our contacts with men is like a 
 fault in the electric circuit ; the current is broken 
 through which our own souls are lit by God's love. 
 And there is nothing that hides the face of God from 
 us so much as the stupid grudges and bitternesses 
 that we feel and nurse toward others. "If then," said 
 Christ, " thou art come to the altar to offer thy gift, 
 and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought 
 against thee, first go and be reconciled to thy brother, 
 and then come and offer thy gift." It is as serious as 
 that ! There is no peace in the house of God, no 
 peace in God's friendship for any man, till there is 
 peace between him and his brother so far as he 
 can put wrong right. So back goes Onesimus to 
 Philemon. We can imagine how, when the decision 
 was taken and he set his face eastwards towards 
 Colossae, there came into his soul such a glory of 
 light and peace, that it must have seemed as if the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPHITT LN ACTION loi 
 
 dawn had risen upon a night of darkness and troubled 
 dreams. 
 
 But it was going to be just as hard for Philemon ; 
 and that is the meaning of the letter. He too had to 
 face his strait gate and his narrow way. For Christ 
 was going to demand this of him in the name of his 
 faith, that he should forego all the penalties which a 
 master exacted of a runaway slave and put him back 
 in his old place and forgive the debt. Now we are 
 not honest with ourselves if we do not realize that 
 that was to be a very hard thing for Philemon. He 
 was not only to deny the human passion for revenge, 
 for what men often call, or miscall, justice. The 
 whole social order would be up against him. They 
 would tell him it was a direct encouragement to 
 rebellion among the slaves. They would call him 
 sentimental and foolish. And further, there would be 
 the humbling to his own pride. For notice what Paul 
 is asking of him in the name of Christ. He is asking 
 of him this terribly hard thing, not only to wipe off 
 the past and let the debt go, but to receive this man 
 not as a slave, not even as a reformed slave, but as a 
 brother beloved, a kinsman in Christ, a man with an 
 equal place and right in the love of God. That is 
 unspeakably difficult — it looks like folly. But it 
 had to be done. It was the Christian way, and one 
 of the Bible names for a Christian is "a fool for 
 Christ's sake." Christ was calling him to bridge over 
 that chasm of which Coleridge speaks, that wound 
 which goes so deep that nothing can heal it, and of 
 which " neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder," nor any 
 of nature's processes can take away the hurt and 
 scar. Some one remarks that a man never realizes 
 what it is to be really Christian till he has stood before 
 
102 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 one whom he has wronged and asked forgiveness for 
 his sin. That is the humbling which, in the eyes of 
 Christ, is exaltation. But it seems to me that a man 
 never realizes what it means to be really Christian, 
 really forgiven, till he has stood before one who has 
 greatly wronged him and held out his hand. For at 
 that moment he knows a pain in hands and head and 
 heart such as came upon One who hung upon a 
 Cross. It is a simple lesson, the duty of forgiveness, 
 the forgiveness that is willing to look upon the man 
 who has wronged you, if he repent, as your redeemed 
 brother, your kinsman in Christ, and to trust him 
 again even at the risk of his deceiving you, yet it is 
 the only way to a high understanding and an 
 abundant entrance into the forgiving love of Christ. 
 We never know the sweets of forgiveness till we 
 have learned by our own pain what it means to be 
 angry with a man and suspicious of him, and yet 
 forgive him and trust him a second time. We 
 never get even h little glimpse into what it cost 
 Christ to forgive us, until we come to know 
 something of what it costs us to forgive others. 
 This free forgiveness Christ demanded of Philemon, 
 and this, I am persuaded, is what He is demanding of 
 our Christianity to-day — facing us with a narrow gate 
 by which we will either pass into a larger kingdom, 
 or stand outside drinking our own bitter cup of 
 revengeful memories. 
 
 We do not know whether Philemon rose to the 
 occasion. Tradition tells us that he did. It is 
 difficult to see how he could well refuse this tender 
 and winsome appeal of Paul. For Paul does not 
 speak in the tones of a spiritual overlord. He speaks 
 with persuasion. There is just a gentle hint here and 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT L\ ACTION 103 
 
 there, a hint of the Cross and of what the Christian 
 society will expect of Philemon, just enough to 
 suggest the beautiful way, and yet leave him the 
 right to feel that he has done this thing of his own 
 free will. 
 
 We can be certain that Philemon did take Onesimus 
 back. And the letter gives us a glimpse of a curious 
 situation which was very common in these early days 
 of Christianity. It suggests a master and a slave 
 bound to each other by the most cruel and unchristian 
 of ties which men ever forged for their fellows — the 
 chain of slavery — and yet regarding each other not 
 as master and slave only, but as brothers in Christ, a 
 deeper thing than even blood brotherhood, the deepest 
 and divinest thing in heaven and earth. That curious 
 situation tells us one or two things about Christianity 
 which I want to put in a word. 
 
 For one thing, it tells us that Christianity brings 
 the best out of all the relationships of life, whatever 
 they may be. Their new relationship as Christian 
 men did not make either of them, and was not meant 
 to make either of them, scornful of their duties as 
 master and slave, or callous to their responsibilities. 
 Onesimus would be the best slave any man ever had, 
 true and devoted and obedient and respectful, to the 
 last ounce that was in him. And Philemon would be 
 the best master a slave ever had, tolerant, kindly, 
 considerate to the very last degree. When Onesimus 
 went away, Philemon had lost an indifferent slave, 
 whom, in fact, he was better without. When he came 
 back after having passed into the hands of Christ, he 
 was a slave to whom duty was music, whose work was 
 lit witli love. Christ enriches the relationships of life. 
 A servant may have a bad master, but Christianity 
 
104 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 never gives him an excuse for being a bad servant. 
 A man may have a bad servant, but no slackness or 
 any other thing will excuse him for being a bad 
 master. The conditions of life may not be good, and 
 the relations in which we stand to one another may 
 not be ideal, but Christianity, when it is real, will 
 make them as good as they can be. When Christ 
 comes in, the whole outlook of life and work and 
 service is lifted above the narrow horizons of our own 
 pleasure, or even of the accepted standards, and 
 becomes centred on Christ. A Christian man ought 
 to be the best master, the best servant, the best friend, 
 the best lover — ^just because he belongs to Christ. 
 
 There is a second thing, Christianity overleaps 
 the mechanical and often artificial relationships of life. 
 Here were Philemon and Onesimus, master and slave, 
 and yet deep in their hearts, all that was forgotten. 
 It was not the main thing. They became brothers, 
 sons of God, equal in God, with the brand of the slave 
 and the dignity of the master alike overcome by the 
 lustre which came to them both from the shadow of the 
 splendour of the Cross. When they were nearest to 
 Christ, when they knelt at prayer, when they took the 
 sacrament, that common feeling and faith submerged 
 the barriers till they forgot them altogether. That is 
 the next highest thing Christ does with our social 
 differences. He brings in a love, a sympathy, a 
 respect, a kinship, which transcends them altogether. 
 Paul rose to it in its fullest range. You remember 
 what he says somewhere about women speaking in 
 churches, and there are one or two other hints that 
 there is something just a little inferior in the gentler 
 sex. But he gets over all that. There are relations 
 in which the differences must stand, and each must 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN ACTION 105 
 
 be its best and develop its own function, the glory of 
 manhood and womanhood. But in Christ there is 
 "neither male nor female" — these distinctions go — 
 ''neither male nor female, neither bond nor free, 
 neither Jew nor Greek," yes ! and He would have 
 gone further to-day, neither British nor German, but 
 all are one before God, with all surface differences 
 gone — only the naked souls capable of pain and sin 
 and sorrow and redeeming joy. So Christianity leaps 
 over the artificial frontiers of life. 
 
 But there is a third thing. It is not in the story, 
 but it sprang out of a situation like this. When 
 Christ comes into any human relationships, He not 
 only makes them the very best of their kind, and 
 gives us grace to disregard all barriers which would 
 keep us from being our best to each other : He does 
 more. If the relationships are wrong, He changes 
 them, breaks them down at last, as a stream 
 which is rushing full and strong, breaks down the 
 narrow banks and makes new channels of its own. 
 This is what happened with slavery. What was it 
 that abolished slavery? It was Christianity. There 
 are people who wonder why Paul seems to take 
 slavery for granted, and there are some who used 
 to argue that as there was slavery in the New 
 Testament there will always be slavery, just as they 
 argue that because there is war in the New Testament 
 there will always be war. It was Christianity that 
 broke down slavery, swept it out. And how did it 
 do it — by means of a situation like this portrayed or 
 suggested in this letter. Fifty years ago slavery was 
 abolished in America. How was it done? It was 
 through one man of genius carrying into his politi- 
 cal life the logic of this principle of brotherhood, 
 
io6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 and risking everything upon it. There is a passage 
 in Mr. Drinkwater's fine play, Abraham Lincoln — 
 which portrays the very same situation. During the 
 Civil War an old negro preacher, Frederick Douglas, 
 pays a visit to Lincoln, who holds out his hand and 
 bids him take a chair. The old negro, schooled by 
 habit, refuses to sit down. " But I am black," he says, 
 " and you are white." '' No, no," says Lincoln, " we 
 are just two old men talking together." There it is, 
 neither black nor white, but just two old men, each 
 with a burden on his soul, facing the common 
 challenge of Jesus. That is Christianity in action. 
 When a master and slave became Christian they 
 became brothers ; they saw each other in Christ against 
 the background of the Cross — the only way to look 
 at a man if you want to see the very truth about him. 
 That kind of relationship went on for a while, but 
 after a bit they began to see that it could not last. 
 The relation of master and slave was too narrow and 
 gross and cruel a thing to hold the river of this 
 Christian love. It became intolerable to look at a 
 man in the light of Christ and love him in Christ and 
 at the same moment put chains on him and make 
 him a slave. The thing could not stand, and it broke 
 — Christianity broke it by creating and inspiring the 
 right spirit, the Christian spirit, and the Christian 
 outlook, in master and slave alike. There are many 
 things in our relations to-day between man and man 
 and class and class which are wrong and unchristian. 
 Even as they are, Christianity can sweeten them. 
 But the way to put them right is not to break them 
 down from without, by any hammer stroke of revolu- 
 tion. There never was revolution yet, which did not 
 create as much injustice as it pretended to abolish. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT IN ACTION 107 
 
 The way out of it all is to bring in the new spirit. 
 There is no social Utopia of our dreams which can 
 come in any other way. It is the living breath of 
 Christian goodwill we need to-day. Nothing else 
 will heal the division between class and class, between 
 man and man, between nation and nation. The 
 lack of it has been the ruin of every effort that 
 men have made to create heaven upon earth. Let 
 in the new spirit and it will make the new channels. 
 
 Perhaps the very crisis of things will bring 
 this home to us to-day, just as it took the violent 
 separation of Onesimus and Philemon to bring them 
 together as brothers. Surely, a deeper reconciliation 
 is one of the things God is seeking to bring out of the 
 strifes and conflicts of these days. He is calling to us 
 across the chasms of our separation, to seek in Christ 
 the spirit which shall bring us together as never 
 before. When all the bitterness is over, through God*s 
 hand at work upon us, it may be said of us and of 
 those from whom we have been separated by mis- 
 understanding, or class interests, or national hostilities, 
 " perhaps they were parted from us for a season, that 
 we might receive them for ever." 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 
 
 "Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another?"— 
 Matt. xi. 3. 
 
 Many great voices have spoken to the world from 
 a prison. The explanation is simple. The world 
 has always tried to silence its saints and its prophets 
 by shutting them up. But because truth is a thing 
 which cahnot be silenced, the prison has become a 
 pulpit, and the word spoken in a dungeon has re- 
 verberated to the ends of the earth. 
 
 It was not a very stirring word, however, which 
 John spoke in the prison of Machaerus. It was a 
 question — a doubt. What a contrast between this 
 question and his striking testimony to Jesus, " Behold 
 the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the 
 world." There, he had bidden the world look at 
 Christ and see in Him the central Figure of the 
 ages, the long expected Redeemer. Now his mind 
 seems to have changed, he is overcast with doubt. 
 " Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for 
 another ? " 
 
 The contrast makes a problem which many people 
 have found very difficult. How are we to explain 
 this descent from the sunny height to the dark 
 valley ? Some have tried to say that the first great 
 saying is unhistorical, and that John had all along 
 
 been in doubt — which is the line of least resistarx^e. 
 
 J 08 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 109 
 
 Others have tried to argue that John himself was 
 not in doubt, but that he was concerned to build up 
 the faith of his disciples — sending them to Jesus 
 to find their own evidence. But any man who 
 knows the moods of the mind in the long fight 
 with faith will understand. It was a temporary- 
 eclipse. Once, in a time of clear insight, John had 
 seen Christ in His glory. Then the clouds had 
 returned again, and for the moment there was dark- 
 ness. It is easy to see how it may have happened. 
 With his conscience aflame for righteousness he had 
 stood up to Herod, denouncing his private life, and 
 had been flung into prison. There, in the darkness, 
 a reaction had come upon him ; a kind of paralysis 
 of faith had set in. Every man has his black hour ■ 
 in which he cannot see in anything the face of God." 
 Sometimes, in the first dumb hour of a great sorrow 
 the light of faith seems to be quenched ; the spiritual 
 voice is silenced ; earth with its walls of savage and 
 brutal fact, closes in about us, and heaven is shut 
 out. We have to wait for the spirit to recover its 
 tone, and regain its wings, and begin to soar above 
 the prison house. It is never altogether easy to keep 
 faith. In Browning's phrase, doubt is always more 
 or less alive, like a snake wriggling beneath our foot. 
 There is always the last grim uncertainty every now 
 and again flinging its challenge in our teeth. Some 
 moments we are quite sure and never a doubt finds 
 tongue ; but ever and again the questions start and 
 have to be dealt with. It is a conflict all through, 
 though a conflict through which faith gains and 
 enlarges and keeps alive. If the facts of faith were 
 assured, patent to the world, they would soon become 
 as dull in their interest as any accepted fact of 
 
no THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 science and pass into the limbo of the commonplace. 
 But every now and again something happens to stir 
 the waters, and faith has to meet a new threat to its 
 security. Science cast doubt, for instance, upon the 
 first chapters of Genesis and men had to find a 
 larger faith to meet the challenge. The war breaks 
 in and for the moment faith totters and seems buried 
 in the debris of a shattered world, but out of the 
 ruins it rises again, richer, deeper than ever, and 
 stands more surely upon its feet. The experience 
 of faith and its insight into the heart of God is 
 the one thing which cannot be destroyed in all 
 this perishing and changing world. But an eclipse 
 of faith such as may come to us all, troubled John. 
 Who can doubt but that, had he lived long enough, 
 it would have passed ? Meantime, out of the night 
 that covered him, he sent the message, big with 
 question, to Jesus, " Art Thou He that should come, 
 or do we look for another ? " 
 
 But there is more in this question than a doubt. 
 There was an unquenchable hope, a burning heart of 
 aspiration. " Art Thou He that should come ? " 
 If John had stopped there, we might have felt 
 the light had gone completely. But he adds a 
 word that rallies us like a trumpet call, " Or do 
 we look for another?" John is still a seeker, still 
 out on the search for God. He may have been 
 baffled and disappointed for the moment. He thought 
 he had found in Christ the end of his quest, and 
 now it seemed as if he had been wrong. It seemed 
 as if Christ did not fit the picture he had carried 
 in his heart all these years, waiting for the face to 
 fill it. But nevertheless he is going on. There is 
 something fine in this word, " DO we look for 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH iii 
 
 another?" Must the seeker take up the long trail 
 again? Must the watchman get back to his tower 
 and begin afresh to look over the plains for the 
 coming of God's relief? A prison is a poor 
 look out, but nevertheless John is going on. The 
 ship may be sinking, but the flag is still flying. 
 The storm may rage and all hope seem dead 
 to every one else, but his lamp is still in the 
 window. 
 
 There is all the difference between John and 
 many another disappointed seeker. How easily 
 we give up the spiritual quest ! Andrew Carnegie 
 had pinned all his hope to the prospect of world 
 peace. It was the great dream of his life. And 
 when war broke out and shattered his dream to 
 pieces, he had no higher hope on which to fall 
 back. It was the end of everything, " Henceforth 
 he was never able to interest himself in private 
 affairs again. Many times he made the attempt 
 to continue writing but it was useless. He died of 
 a broken heart." So writes his widow. He himself 
 wrote in his diary these last words. " As I read 
 this to-day, what a change ! (1914). The world 
 convulsed with war as never before. Men slaying 
 each other like wild beasts. I dare not relinquish all 
 hope. In recent days I see another ruler coming 
 forward upon the world stage, who may prove to be 
 the immortal one." But had he lived, would not 
 that hope have been shattered too ? " Trust not in 
 man," says the Psalmist, " whose breath is in his 
 nostrils." 
 
 Some people lose their hope because they have 
 no staying power. How small a thing will turn 
 some men from the quest of Christ ! " Once find 
 
112 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the truth," says a writer, "and then objections are 
 nothing." But before we find the truth, a stone 
 in the path will turn the weary feet aside. Talk 
 with men who have given up their faith and you 
 will find out what little things are blocking their 
 vision. They never had much faith. Some one they 
 trusted betrayed them, and they flung over religion. 
 They were cold-shouldered in a church, and they 
 will have nothing more to do with Jesus Christ. 
 Think of John, disappointed, flung into a dungeon, 
 his hope in Jesus shattered, yet he is going on. 
 " Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for 
 another? " 
 
 This Messianic hope of the prophets is one of the 
 most wonderful things in history. Through long 
 centuries, a nation dreamed of the coming of a great 
 prince of God who should bring their nation out of 
 obscurity and exile and put things right. This 
 hope rose high at times, and at times burned low. 
 When they were prosperous, their hope often faded 
 like a smouldering wick, but when the night of exile 
 came upon them, the little candle of their hope in 
 God flamed out, to become the light of all their day. 
 It was a crude hope in many ways. They were 
 waiting for a prince, a judge, a conqueror. But 
 even so, the hope stood for a great thing. It was 
 their refusal to be reconciled to a universe without 
 God. It was a faith that God would never have 
 showed them so many mercies and taken them so 
 far on the highroad of a great destiny, without taking 
 them further. It was their assurance that life would 
 never have lured them on with so many promises 
 and then left them desolate, like a man who follows 
 a mirage. It was their faith that good is bound to 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 113 
 
 triumph, that evil and unrighteousness are not the 
 last word. Somehow, God will find means to come 
 to the rescue of the tried and tempted. Some day, 
 God will come over the hills to relieve His be- 
 leao-uered garrison. At bottom the universe is not 
 material but spiritual, based on a spiritual order 
 which is bound to rise into the light and reveal itself 
 with judgment for its foes, and triumph for its a.iies. 
 What a brave thing is this hope of John ! He was 
 sure in the end, God was not going to disappoint 
 him. "Art Thou He that should come, or do we 
 look for another ? " 
 
 Now a hope like this is the greatest heritage of 
 life. It is the finest thing in our souls, even though 
 we have not yet found the fulfilment of it. It 
 keeps the windows open that the dawn may shine 
 in. It keeps us sensitive to the approach of God. 
 Even if we have nothing else, let us cherish it. 
 Even if v*'e have not found in Christ all we had 
 expected, let us never give up hoping. Despair is 
 the deadly thing. Despair of God, and of what He 
 is seeking to give us and to make us, is the end of 
 everything. 
 
 God will forgive thee all but thy despair. 
 
 Have we been tried beyond measure, with one thing 
 failing us after another, till there seems nothing else 
 to live for? Never let us give up hope. Have we 
 been tempted, and fallen again and again, till we feel 
 there can be little reality in religion ? Never let us 
 give up hope ; we have not found the key, that is all ; 
 we have not seen Jesus. Have we been misty about 
 religion, perplexed, finding no sense of reality in all 
 the experience of which others speak? Something 
 8 
 
114 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 is there, we feel, but it is not for us, and we are 
 beginning to settle down to things as they are, and 
 to a life without the friendship of God. No ! Never 
 give up the quest. Never let doubt harden into 
 despair. Some day God will lead us into the great 
 secret if we keep the mind alert and watchful for His 
 coming. 
 
 No cloud across the sky but passes at the last, 
 And gives us back the face of God once more. 
 
 Now, of course, if John had lived long enough, 
 he would have come to realize that his great hope 
 was really fulfilled in Christ. We cannot imagine 
 John who had hailed Christ, with that wonderful 
 insight, as the " Lamb of God," drifting into a back- 
 water while the stream of God's grace ran by. We 
 cannot imagine him holding on for ever to the form 
 of his hope so that he missed the substance. For 
 that is what the men of his time were doing. There 
 are various reasons why people become disappointed 
 in Christ and fail to find in Him the answer to their 
 spiritual hunger. One of them is that they are misled 
 by wrong views of Christ, by conventional pictures, 
 by misunderstandings of His real character. They 
 will not go and discover Him for themselves. Jesus 
 Christ must be a man's own discovery, as he searches 
 the gospel with the eyes of his own need. God meets 
 men on the plane of their own individual need, not 
 through some need which is not theirs. One of the 
 secrets of religious unreality lies just here, does it 
 not ? We try to force ourselves into the position of 
 others, and seek for experiences which can never be 
 ours till life brings us where they have been ; and 
 one day, when we are frank with our own souls we 
 find ourselves out in a game of make-believe. No 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 115 
 
 man has a faith at all which is not a faith of his own. 
 " Christ comes to each man," says George MacDonald, 
 " down his own secret stair." 
 
 When I am most perplexed it may be there 
 
 Thou mak'st a secret chamber, holy, dim. 
 
 Where Thou wilt come to hear my deepest prayer. 
 
 We may not see in Him what others see, but if we 
 look closely, we will find in Him the real fulfilment 
 of the deepest hopes and aspirations of our souls, as 
 life awakens them day by day with its challenge, and 
 its longing, and its rebuffs. There is no need to look 
 for another. All of God is there for us in Jesus. 
 
 There is another reason which brings disappoint- 
 ment with Christ The fact that John was in prison 
 gives us a glimpse of it. It is a misunderstanding 
 of what Christ came to do, and how He works. John 
 had been brought up on the great advent hope, and 
 the advent hope was material, not spiritual. It was 
 the expectation of a God who would come in judg- 
 ment, smiting evil, breaking to pieces the oppressor, 
 and setting the humble and obedient in high places. 
 But Christ had come, and here was John, His herald 
 — flung into a prison by the decree of a licentious 
 king — and nothing happened ! The tyrant world 
 rolled on its way unrebuked. Rome, with her 
 legions, held Palestine, "God's own country," in a 
 massive grip all the more galling because it was 
 benevolent. The Messiah went on teaching and 
 preaching, and working cures on sick bodies. Is it 
 any wonder that with so crude a view of the advent 
 hope, John should ask, "Art Thou He that should 
 come"? 
 
 How many people are missing Christ to-day, 
 because of crude views of what Christ will do! 
 
ii6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 They see the world going on its own old way. Evil 
 seems to flourish ; wrong and selfishness seem to pay. 
 Christianity appears to work neither very quickly nor 
 very powerfully. And we say to Christ, " Art Thou 
 He that should come, or do we look for another ? " 
 It is a wrong view of Christianity which is at the 
 root of all this disappointment. For Christ comes 
 in love, to win the world through love, because there 
 is no other way of winning it. Not even God can 
 rush a man, or drive a man into the Kingdom. No 
 man is in the Kingdom who has not seen for himself 
 the love of God in Christ and made A free response 
 to it. As for the distressed and the burdened, Christ 
 did not come in the first place to 5ft their burdens 
 from without. He came to bring the new spirit in 
 which burdens would become bearable, a new attitude 
 to life which would bring a constant victory. Not to 
 take John out of prison, but to awaken the spirit of 
 faith and courage by which the prison would become 
 something else — a church, as it was for many of the 
 early Christians; a pulpit, as it was for Paul; a 
 picture gallery, as it was for Bunyan ; the vestibule 
 of heaven, as it was for John the apostle. Such 
 is the victorious power of the love of God, the doors 
 of the prisons have been opened, and the prisoners' 
 bands been loosed. It is through that victory of 
 the spirit that tyranny has been destroyed. For 
 tyrants have learned that it is no use putting men 
 like Paul or Bunyan into prison. They escape every 
 time by turning the prison into something else. 
 Then a thing is seen these tyrants never saw before, 
 and they begin to ask themselves whether these 
 are indeed the kind of men who ought to be in 
 prison. So the spirit of the Kingdom has been the 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 117 
 
 most shattering and revolutionary force in history. 
 That spirit Christ revealed, and led men into its 
 secret. It is not by any stroke of miracle or super- 
 natural force He saves us. It is not by lifting our 
 troubles ; it is by saving us in our troubles from 
 despair, from defeat, from bitterness, from the mind 
 that looks on difficulties as foes. There is no other 
 way of saving us than by saving us in our world. 
 It is by that victory of the spirit that the world itself 
 comes to be redeemed. 
 
 But Christ is disappointing to many people be- 
 cause they are not finding in Him all He can give. 
 They are not entering to the full into the Christian 
 experience. It is startling to read the New Testa- 
 ment and ponder the words of Christ : " The 
 Kingdom of God is at hand " ; " The Kingdom of 
 God is within you." What did He mean ? Did He 
 not mean that the power of God is here at our very 
 hand for the conquest of evil and sin and the 
 changing of the world, if only we have faith enough 
 to use it, if only we would utterly trust Christ as He 
 trusted God. The belief in the second advent of 
 Christ which many people hold, the belief that Christ 
 is at hand and that He is returning to the earth 
 in the near future, misses this point. It is a great 
 thing to have such a hope, if we do not become 
 tied to the form of it. It is a great thing to keep 
 the soul awake to the fact that God will not leave 
 us to despair, or to the mercy of events, or the sport 
 of evil. It is a great thing to believe that this world 
 is God's and that eventually He is coming to reign 
 in it. But the form of this advent hope may be 
 cheating some of us out of the substance, which is 
 the immediacy of God in Christ to every need, to 
 
ii8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the overcoming of evil, to the conquest of sin. 
 We long for some new appearing of God. But He 
 is here ! Is there any other manifestation which 
 could hold more of God than Jesus does? Is there 
 any appearing of God which could make Him more 
 accessible to us than He is in Jesus? Would Christ 
 be any nearer to us than it is possible for Him to be 
 to-day, if we met Him walking down the street to- 
 morrow morning? It is our spiritual grasp of Him 
 which counts, not the material handshake. It is our 
 attitude to His truth, not the bowing of the knee and 
 the lips that call Him " Lord " ; it is our knowledge 
 of His mind that matters, not the vibrant challenge 
 of His voice. Why need He have gone away at all, 
 as He Himself said, if it were not to bring Him 
 nearer, shaking us free of His material touch, to 
 compel our spiritual apprehension. 
 
 The truth is that for all of us, Christ is very largely 
 an unexplored possibility. John Newton, the hymn 
 writer, tells a story of a preacher friend of his, who 
 had given only a cold superficial consent to the 
 truths of the gospel. He was reading one day in 
 the Ephesians, when he was arrested by that great 
 word of Paul — "the unsearchable riches of Christ." 
 "The apostle," he said to himself, "uses most re- 
 markable words. He speaks of heights and depths 
 and lengths and breadths of things that are un- 
 searchable. Now I have known nothing of this in 
 Christ." And he began to study and search, till the 
 words of Paul and of Christ became alive with reality. 
 Is not this very much the case with those who are 
 disappointed in Christ, or who are longing and 
 hoping for some salvation beyond what comes 
 through faith in Him? Why does the Kingdom 
 
AN ECLIPSE OF FAITH 119 
 
 tarry? Why need it tarry? There are infinite 
 marvels in the physical world waiting for the open 
 eye and the open mind. They are there at our doors, 
 knocking. They are there in the tubes and under 
 the microscope, as a research scholar said to me the 
 other day. Is it different with the spiritual world, 
 the world of divine forces ? Have we been to the 
 depths of the inexhaustible resources of Christ? 
 
 Most of us have listened to the common complaint 
 that Christianity has failed, till we are sick of the 
 phrase. It has become the cant of many, who say 
 it with a triumphant sneer, which ill conceals the fact 
 that they never wanted Christianity to succeed. 
 Yet the phrase stands for a confession that the war 
 has found us out in much religious unreality. If 
 Christianity has failed, it is because there are depths 
 in Jesus that have never been explored. The war 
 has uncovered our failure, not His — our failure to 
 be true to His trust. And its message is a call to 
 move out. 
 
 It is a larger, braver spirit of adventure we need, 
 if we are to make a deeper discovery. I remember, 
 some years ago, a fleet of torpedo boats was anchored 
 in Oban Bay. How safe they looked in that land- 
 locked haven, in the calm of a sunny afternoon • 
 But at night a storm swept down the Sound and 
 immediately there was great confusion, the play of 
 searchlights, the shriek of sirens, and one by one 
 they left the safe anchorage and steamed out to 
 sea. What had happened ? This : their short cables 
 were safe enough for calm weather, but in the narrow 
 bay these could not hold the ships when the storm 
 was up. The only place of safety and freedom was 
 the wide deep sea without. That is the mess-ige for 
 
120 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 our time, with its confusion and strain. The narrow 
 sea of our restricted religion, and the short cables of 
 our mechanical attachments to Christ are not only 
 useless ; they are dangerous to faith. We must 
 move out into the deeper ocean of His love and the 
 wider tasks of His Kingdom, if we would find Him 
 afresh. Our faith must strike once more the great 
 notes of trust and adventure. Then life will fill with 
 the music of His love. 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 
 
 "Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: 
 but one thing is needful : and Mary hath chosen that good part, which 
 shall not be taken away from her."— Luke x. 41. 42- 
 
 This story has raised more controversy than any 
 other in the Bible, except perhaps the case of Esau 
 and Jacob. In spite of the Bible estimate, most 
 people have a sneaking fondness for Esau, while 
 Jacob is almost universally despised. In this 
 case most people have the feeling that Martha, 
 the practical housewife, has been a little harshly 
 
 judged. 
 
 The story is one of those familiar incidents which 
 are part of our everyday lives. With a little 
 imagination we can see the whole thing happening 
 before our eyes. The sisters lived together and Christ 
 was their great friend. One day He made a sudden 
 visit to their house, probably accompanied by other 
 friends. Hospitality demanded that they should be 
 given a meal. Martha set about getting it ready, 
 and soon there was great commotion in the kitchen. 
 But Mary, on the other hand, lingered in Christ's 
 presence, and finally settled herself at His feet, 
 drinking in His words till her mind became absorbed 
 and dinner was forgotten. For a while Martha said 
 nothing, but at last her irritation mastered her and 
 she exploded on the company in righteous indigna- 
 
122 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 tion. *' Lord, dost Thou not care that my sister hath 
 left me to serve alone? Bid her come and help me." 
 But Jesus turned on her with a gentle rebuke, smiling 
 the while, " Martha, Martha, thou art careful and 
 troubled about many things : but one thing is needful : 
 and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall 
 not be taken awa3r from her." 
 
 Our first instinct is to feel that Christ has hardly 
 done justice to Martha. She was the practical 
 woman whose love finds an outlet in caring for what 
 we call the " creature " comforts. After all, we would 
 not get on well without a housewife in the kitchen, 
 especially with guests in the house. If all women 
 were Marys, who would cook the dinner? Does 
 Christ do full justice to Martha's womanly instincts, 
 not to speak of her self-denial, for she, as well 
 as Mary, must have been longing to listen to His 
 talk? 
 
 Some people solve this problem by talking of 
 two temperaments. Mary was the thoughtful and 
 mystical type with no head for practical details 
 and no taste for housework. Martha was the kind of 
 person who is never so happy as when she is busy 
 about a house. The one makes the poetry, the other 
 the prose of life, and neither can be turned into the 
 other. Mr. Stephen Graham sees these two tempera- 
 ments illustrated in Russian and English religion. 
 The Western type is business-like and practical in its 
 religion — the Eastern type is mystical and contem- 
 plative, caring for no pain or discomfort while the 
 soul dreams of hidden things. But the problem is 
 not so easily solved as that. Christ was an Eastern, 
 but His mind was universal. No one was ever so 
 perfectly balanced in nature so harmoniously blended 
 
THE TYRAxNxNY OF THINGS 123 
 
 as Jesus. What did He mean by this rebuke to 
 Martha? 
 
 The answer is simple and gets to the root of many 
 of the troubles of life. It was a clear case of the 
 tyranny of thiiigs. Things have their place in life. 
 We live in a material world. Our nature has its 
 physical side. Right through, life is a traffic in 
 things which our hands handle and our bodies wear. 
 Our most spiritual fellowships have their medium in 
 material things — gifts, words, smiles, caresses. All 
 these on the material side are things. The dearest 
 word of love is only a vibration in the ether striking 
 upon a sensitive bit of nerve. The finest violin music 
 is on the material side only " the scraping of hair 
 upon catgut." Life is one long piece of symbolism. 
 The trouble comes when things take the first place 
 and lose their meaning by becoming an end in 
 themselves. Then life is materialized and we lose 
 it through absorption in the mechanism of living. 
 This was what was happening to Martha. The 
 tyranny of things was getting hold oi her. It was 
 this Jesus rebuked. " Martha, Martha, thou art care- 
 ful and troubled about things-, but Mary has chosen 
 that better part, which shall not be taken away from 
 her." 
 
 There are two suggestions here. In the first place 
 it was a warning, and a plea for simplicity in the 
 material things of life. Christ did not mean that the 
 guests should go without their dinner. The body 
 must be fed. No man can live the highest kind of 
 life on a starvation diet. He did not expect His 
 message to get home to people whose bodies were 
 weary with toil and bitter with need. That is what 
 we often forget. Some people would deal with otiicis 
 
124 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 as if they were pure spirit. There is no such being-— 
 on this planet at least. There are people in our own 
 land who are physically incapable of listening to any 
 gospel of love which eloquence of persuasion can 
 utter. They are sunk in a death-struggle for exist- 
 ence which takes up all their thought and leaves them 
 nothing over. It is difficult not to be a materialist 
 when a man is starving. The body must be satisfied 
 before the soul can rise into the contemplation of 
 higher things. There are people to whom you can- 
 not carry the gospel in any other form than a loaf 
 of bread — to them the only sacramental medium of 
 the love of Christ. 
 
 But that is far from saying that we are to swing to 
 the opposite pole. The trouble is we so readily drift 
 into an artificial standard of what is necessary for 
 life. Christ's demand was very simple. He did not 
 want an elaborate meal, only a simple dish, which 
 Martha could have prepared without much trouble or 
 any strain to her spirit. But Martha had her own 
 ideas. She had doubtless a reputation for hospitality. 
 What would people think if she did not rise to the 
 occasion? So the process of elaboration went on, 
 till the dinner became the end and object of her 
 care instead of the medium of her friendship. Her love 
 lost itself in seeking too fine a way of expressing 
 itself, and her mind became overloaded with worries 
 which clouded her spirit and filled the whole house 
 with unrest. " One thing is needed," said Christ. 
 It was a plea for simplicity. Do not let things 
 become your master. Do not let your life be so 
 burdened with things that its meaning is lost Do not 
 let the means of living become the master of life. His 
 warnmg and His call come home to us to-day. How 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 125 
 
 many people, for instance, begin life with certain 
 necessities. As their income grows they add luxuries, 
 and feel aggrieved if they cannot get them. They 
 climb into a higher social scale which demands 
 a larger house, greater spending, more elaborate 
 entertaining. So the tyranny of things grows, while 
 all the time, if only they knew it, they are losing peace 
 and freedom and opening their souls to a thousand 
 petty anxieties and disappointments. How many 
 people to-day imagine they possess a house while in 
 reality the house possesses them ! How many are 
 there who spend their days following a fashion which 
 in their hearts they despise, making calls in which 
 there is no friendship, giving their days to rounds of 
 social duty and fashionable entertainments which bore 
 them to extinction, but from which their artificial 
 society gives them no release. 
 
 They con the ritual of routine 
 
 With minds to one dead likeness blent, 
 
 And never even in dreams have seen 
 The things that are more excellent. 
 
 We can become the victims of plenty as well as the 
 victims of poverty. We can be sunk in a mansion as 
 well as in a hovel. When " the thing to do " becomes 
 more important than the rightness of the man who 
 does it or the spirit he puts into it, life is being lost 
 in seeking it, and the car has begun to run off with 
 the driver. 
 
 The real truth is that half of the things we 
 call necessities are not necessities at all but super- 
 fluities, and we should be a good deal happier without 
 them. We speak of our burdens and difficulties, our 
 troubles and cares. How many of these are legiti- 
 mate ? How many of them did we find in the track 
 
126 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 of a shining purpose, and how many have come 
 in the pathway of some shallow ideal which had no 
 right in our souls at all. One of Christ's greatest 
 words is His recipe for care, " Your Father knoweth." 
 How sweetly it falls on the ear ! But dare we take 
 it to our hearts in some of our self-created troubles ? 
 Dare we go on to apply it to our souls when we are 
 struggling and straining to carry our self-imposed 
 load of superfluous things or burdensome conventions. 
 "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of all these 
 things ! " No ! the word for such a case is more likely 
 to be the word of the husbandman about the useless 
 tree, " Cut it down. Why cumbereth it the ground ? " 
 That word " cumber " is indeed the very word which 
 the Scripture uses of Martha, " She was cumbered 
 with much serving." Apply the parable and the real 
 danger of the tyranny of things becomes clear. Like 
 a fruitless tree in a garden, taking up room which 
 might have been given to something fruitful, so were 
 Martha's troubles in the rich soil of her mind and 
 spirit. They were draining her strength and poison- 
 ing her peace and making her life empty in pretence 
 of filling it. 
 
 There is even more in the tyranny of things than 
 this. It loads our own lives with cares that need 
 never be borne, but it also makes life harder for other 
 people. It tries to pull Mary into the stream. It 
 creates a false standard for others. Who taught 
 the munition girls the disastrous extravagance that 
 made them spend their money on the fur coats and 
 gaudy jewellery which were a load instead of an 
 enrichment? It takes little children at school and 
 cheapens life for them, dwarfing and cramping their 
 souls at the very sta'-t and turning them into mal- 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 127 
 
 formed products of convention, and mean ambitions. 
 And it intensifies the struggle for others. It is only 
 partly true that where there is great prosperity for 
 some, others have a share in it, picking up the crumbs 
 from the rich man's table. The false demand for 
 luxuries on the part of some keeps others out of their 
 fair share of life's necessities. A civilization over- 
 loaded with luxury at the one end always has a sink 
 of stark and debasing poverty at the other. And 
 what creates this bitter struggle and raises this false 
 standard is the tyranny of things over souls 
 which have lost sight of the meaning of life in the 
 struggle to live. 
 
 In all directions we can see the baleful hand of this 
 tyranny. The man who judges of sin by its external 
 consequences is under it. Lately the world has been 
 greatly concerned about the spread of social vice. 
 And there is grave cause for alarm. But the gravest 
 thing in the whole campaign is the fact that we are not 
 concerned with the sin, but with the physical results ; 
 not with the danger of moral pollution, but only with 
 the danger of physical contamination. When we so 
 deal with evil we are under the tyranny of things. 
 
 You can see the same tyranny in religious matters. 
 Creeds are necessary to express our experience of 
 God. But at the best a creed is only a thing, not 
 the reality. The reality is our contact with God in 
 Jesus Christ. But there are people so careful about 
 many things in the intellectual baggage of their 
 religious life, that they miss the living Jesus. The 
 same is true of ritual worship — even of the sacraments. 
 These are necessary, but they are things. They are 
 meant to assist our spiritual vision. But how soon 
 they begin to take up the whole field till we cannot 
 
128 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 see the glory of our Lord for the things which are 
 meant to reveal Him ; and Christian love, which is 
 the vital reality of our common life in His service, 
 becomes dissipated in a quarrel about things. 
 
 Or again, there are even deeper tragedies — 
 tragedies on a wider scale. Our civilization has 
 seen a marvellous increase in the materials of life, 
 but is the sum of human happiness any greater? 
 To what has it all led ? Look back a year or two. 
 Many causes are given for the late war. The 
 overweening ambition of one nation lit the spark. 
 But the progress of civilization had created a 
 machine which was too big for our moral power 
 to direct, and it took control and smashed up. 
 Had we not all lost sight of the real object of 
 national prosperity, which is to serve humanity? 
 The idols of material success had usurped the 
 throne. The growth of wealth and inventive skill 
 had choked out religion, and humanity without 
 faith is like men shut in a mine ; they become 
 asphyxiated with the products of their own unin- 
 spired breath. 
 
 The warning of Christ is clearly needed, and His 
 call is, in the first place, for a new simplicity. It is 
 the effort to escape from the tyranny of things and 
 find freedom, for the soul to see its way and live its 
 own life, which has sent hermits into the desert and 
 monks into the cloister. Their instinct is sound. If 
 we are to be ready at God's call we must be free, and 
 we must cultivate the spirit of detachment. For this 
 freedom we must pay the price of self-denial, and 
 keep a guard upon the encroachment of material 
 things, lest in gaining the world we lose our souls. 
 When we lose the pilgrim spirit, and forget that we 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 129 
 
 are strangers on the earth, we lose the earth itself. 
 Only the man who is detached from the world can so 
 use the world as to possess its real joy and satisfac- 
 tion. When Garibaldi was an exile in South America, 
 he employed his time in freeing the little republic of 
 Rio Grande, and was successful. But he himself lived 
 as a poor man. During his absence his wife was so 
 reduced in circumstances that she had not even a 
 candle to light the house at nightfall. After the 
 campaign was over, the citizens offered the hero 
 lands, money, rewards of all sorts. But everything he 
 steadily refused for himself and his companions, lest 
 it should tempt them to settle down and forget their 
 life-task of freeing distant Italy. He refused to be 
 enslaved by the tyranny of things and so miss the 
 purpose of life. He would not be entangled in the 
 shadows and miss the substance. Christ calls us 
 all to a new grasp of the meaning of life and 
 the things we do and possess, that the care and 
 trouble of things may not cheat us out of joy and 
 peace. 
 
 But there is a second call in Christ's words ; it is a 
 call to find the secret of reality. " Mary hath chosen 
 that good part, which shall not be taken away from 
 her." What was that good part? She was listening 
 to His talk about life. She was penetrating through 
 things to the meanmg of things. She was learning 
 what life is ? Life is not in things ; but in the mean- 
 ing of things. Life consists in the love of beauty, 
 not in a houseful of pictures. Life consists in 
 knowing truth ; and we may have a whole library 
 of books and miss that real culture which is found in 
 touch with great and living minds. Life consists in 
 love and friendship, and we may have many fine 
 9 
 
130 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 friends and miss the friendly spirit. As Bacon says: 
 " Faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but 
 a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." Life 
 consists in the service of others, not in the position 
 we hold or the wages or profits we earn. We need to 
 get back to Christ's standard of values, back to His 
 estimate of good and evil. The man who sees things 
 with the eyes of Jesus is delivered from their tyranny 
 into the management and mastery of things. 
 
 We must get back to realities, which means getting 
 back to God, for His is the love and fellowship which 
 breathes through all things. 
 
 What is fullness of life when you get to the root of 
 it ? It consists in the exercise of all our capacities. 
 If there is one vital instinct which is repressed or 
 unawakened, there is an inward strain which fills us 
 with fretfulness. Many people carry in their breasts 
 a conflict which they try to suppress. They pretend 
 they are happy, but their lives give the lie to their 
 words. That was what was wrong with Martha. 
 She was absorbed in things, but the things did not 
 satisfy her soul. She had a soul above mere dinners, 
 but her soul, seeking for expression, was baffled 
 and overloaded, till the strain within broke out in a 
 storm of irritation and bad temper. There is some- 
 thing in us all which will not be satisfied with things. 
 For you and I are not things. The root of unrest at 
 the top and bottom of the social scale lies here. On 
 the one hand, the soul is denied the things by which 
 to express itself; on the other hand, it is choked in a 
 superfluity of things like a river which is lost in mud 
 and sand. We must find ways of living which shal' 
 liberate our souls or we are running upon disaster 
 And most of all, we must express our instinct for God 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 131 
 
 which of all our instincts is the deepest, and realize that 
 loving fellowship with the Father in which all life's 
 activities find a place, for " there is no rest for us till 
 we find our rest in Him." Life is mere wrestling 
 in the darkness till it has yielded up its meaning 
 in the knowledge of God's love. Then the sun 
 rises upon us in a world which is our Father's. In 
 his book. The Great Hunger, Johan Bojer tells of a 
 young and clever engineer, with boundless ambition 
 but without any faith, who gave himself to his pro- 
 fession with all his nature: "Into this world of fire 
 and smoke and glowing iron, racing wheels and 
 steam hammers, he thrust his way, intent on one 
 thing— to learn, and learn, and ever learn." In time 
 he made a fortune and retired. But he could find no 
 peace in a country life. The steel called him, and he 
 set to work upon an invention which baffled him. 
 He failed, and tried again, spent all his money and 
 kept spending, for the steel had got hold of him. 
 His mind then began to give way. One night he 
 imagined he saw a dim shape in his workshop which 
 said to him, " It will do no good to pray. You may 
 dream yourself away from these things, but you must 
 offer yourself to them at last. You are bound fast to 
 these things. Outside of them your soul is nothing." 
 The tyranny of things was complete. A broken 
 man, he crept away to a quiet spot in the hills and 
 there he lived out his days with shattered nerves. 
 But he found the way of peace at last. It was in 
 o-iving way to a fine impulse of his soul. His child 
 was killed by the dog of a surly neighbour who was 
 very poor, and the father seemed to have reached the 
 last abyss of pain. Then one night he rose up, took 
 a bag of seed and sowed it in the neighbour's empty 
 
132 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 field. " I went and sowed seed in my enemy's field 
 that God might exist," he wrote to a friend. It was 
 a strange way to put it. But he was falling back on 
 the last reality of love and forgiveness which in the 
 abyss had risen out of the darkness to find him. He 
 had come back to reality and found it, not in things, 
 but in God. Life at its deepest is love, for love is 
 God. " When people love," says an Eastern proverb, 
 " they dig a fountain down to God." Christ's name 
 for the springing waters of that fountain is " eternal 
 life." 
 
 The way to learn this secret and find this life 
 awaking in our hearts, is to give ourselves up to Jesus. 
 That w^s what Mary was doing. Listening to Him, 
 loving Him, she was reaching contact with God. In 
 His presence her values were changing. She was 
 seeing life through, seeing through the surface of 
 things — fashion and money and what men miscall the 
 solid realities — through to the tender and loving face 
 of God. In His presence, too, the purpose of God in 
 Christ laid hold of her heart, and with that purpose 
 in her soul she broke a path through all the entang- 
 ling maze of things into a new world of joy and peace. 
 She was learning from Christ that art of handling 
 things which makes them truly ours, working for our 
 good and making us of larger service to men. Could 
 any but Mary have taken the costly alabaster box of 
 ointment and seen its true value in breaking it and 
 pouring its costly contents over the feet of Jesus? 
 She had found escape from the tyranny of things into 
 the possession of life. 
 
 Our deepest need to-day is to get back to Jesus 
 and give ourselves up to Him to learn His secret. 
 For that, we must find time to hold the door against 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 133 
 
 the tyrannous invasion of the world. Our trouble is, 
 we have allowed the world to force its false values 
 upon us till truth is lost in the deceit of appearances. 
 Lately we read of an artificial pearl which has found 
 its way on the market, deceiving the unwary. But a 
 way was found of detecting the fraud ; the X-rays 
 showed it up — the rays that pierce through things. 
 That is the power of Jesus. When we take our life 
 out of the garish day and lay it open to Him, its real 
 treasure opens up. Are we being tricked with false 
 pearls in the market of life, or have we found the 
 pearl of great price? Are we gaining the spiritual 
 mind which sees through things to find God every- 
 where? Or are we passing through God's world 
 without meeting with God ? Then let us seek Jesus, 
 praying the prayer, "Lord, open mine eyes that I 
 may see " — and the tyranny of things will be lifted 
 in a great experience, which, as Drummond says, is 
 " like the breaking of a chain or the waking from a 
 dream." 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 
 
 *' And Zaccheus said, Behold, the half of my goods I give to the poor ; 
 and if I have taken aught from any man by extortion, I restore him 
 fourfold." 
 
 ♦' And Jesus said, To-day is salvation come to this house, forasmuch 
 as this man also is a son of Abraham."— Luke xix. 8, 9. 
 
 The city of Jericho is famous in Scripture for two 
 social outcasts who found salvation there — the harlot 
 Rahab and the publican Zaccheus. They were the 
 last people one would have expected to reach a place 
 in the ranks of faith. Yet Rahab's name is found 
 in the nth of Hebrews among the honourable 
 company of spiritual pioneers ; while Zaccheus had 
 from the lips of Christ Himself the assurance that 
 he had come into the Kingdom. He had Christ's 
 own guarantee of His standing with God, " To-day 
 is salvation come to this house." 
 
 The story of his conversion is one of the clearest 
 illustrations of the method by which Christ wins 
 men. It is a description of the love of God in 
 action. The method He used throughout had His 
 characteristic touch. It was the method of saving 
 friendship. The great difficulty in saving and help- 
 ing people is the difficulty of jetting alongside. We 
 may have a message we yearn to speak ; the problem 
 is to find men in the mood, or bring them into the 
 mood, where they will listen. Christ's way was the 
 method of a friendship which broke down barriers 
 
 134 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 135 
 
 of resistance and suspicion, and made a way for a 
 love which was at once the messenger and the 
 message. Men can never be brought into the 
 Kingdom by any other power than a persuasive and 
 winsome love which is God's only way. Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes compares a human heart to a 
 house with two doors — a front door and a side door. 
 "The front door is on the street. Some keep it 
 always open ; some latched ; some locked ; some 
 bolted — with a chain that will let you peep in, but 
 never get in ; and some nail it up so that nothing 
 can pass its threshold. The front door leads into a 
 passage and then into an ante-room. The side door 
 opens at once into the sacred chambers. ) There is 
 at least one key to this side door." Christ carried 
 no key to the human heart but the key of loving- 
 friendship ; and that is not a key at all in the sense 
 that He will turn the lock of any man's secret soul 
 and force an entrance. His power in point of fact 
 Is just that He has no key! His way is to knock 
 with such appeal of truth and love to the heart of 
 the man within, that he is won at last to unbar 
 the door and fling it wide. Where His friendship 
 fails, God fails. Let us be clear about it; there is 
 no such thing as omnipotent and irresistible grace 
 which takes a soul by storm and overwhelms it. 
 However strong be love's persuasions, they are always 
 persuasions, never compulsions. God's method is the 
 love that knocks and waits and knocks again, enduring 
 slights and rejection with a meek endurance v^^hich is 
 love's only weapon to break the hardness of men's 
 hearts. This story is a clear example of how Christ 
 won His way into a man's life through all his 
 defences and brought him into the Kingdom. 
 
136 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 There are three stages in this story, three steps 
 in the taking of this fortress of man's soul. Let us 
 look at them one by one. 
 
 The first was the breach in the outer wall of 
 indifference. Zaccheus was a publican, and that 
 means much. He was a tax-gatherer for the Romans, 
 who occupied the country. His business was to 
 collect the taxes from his own people and hand 
 them over — after deductions — to the Roman rulers, 
 a post which could hardly be held by a man 
 who was very sensitive to his nation's honour. He 
 was, so to speak, working for the enemy. Besides, 
 he did what most of such men did and took 
 advantage of his position to screw as much out of 
 the people as he could without regard to justice. 
 A publican was generally a mercenary who was 
 out to make money by fair means or by foul, one 
 who would stick at no scruple to wring it from 
 the flesh and blood of those who were not strong 
 enough to resist. No doubt Zaccheus managed to 
 square his conscience and maintain a kind of peace. 
 I remember seeing the books of a commercial 
 company of 300 years ago which revealed quite 
 openly a system of petty fraud. At the foot of each 
 page, as a kind of sop to conscience, there was written 
 " May God forgive this little extra ! " And all these 
 things made Zaccheus a problem for Jesus. 
 
 But Zaccheus was not comfortable. That was 
 betrayed in his curiosity which sent him climbing a 
 tree to see Christ when He came. For one thing 
 society was against him, and made him feel it. He 
 could feel the very stab of their scornful eyes in his 
 back as he walked along the street. He was not 
 only treated as a social outcast, but as a moral 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 137 
 
 outcast who had forfeited his rights to a place in the 
 kingdom of the faithful ; and that rankled in his 
 soul. It hurt him to the quick, and made him more 
 of an outcast than ever. That is what all exclusive- 
 ness does. When will we learn it ? These barriers 
 which society sets up against the open sinner are a 
 self-protecting instinct w^hich seems legitimate enough, 
 but they are due to fear; they are a confession of 
 weakness. They are a sign that our goodness is 
 not strong enough to receive the sinner, and both 
 judge him and save him by our friendship. So we 
 cast him out like a leper. And every one know^s, who 
 is honest, that our standards of exclusion are merely 
 superficial. We can detect the wrong deed ; we 
 cannot detect the wrong desire. There are people 
 entertained in society drawing-rooms whose influence 
 is far more poisonous to society than some of those 
 who are shut in our prisons or outcast in our 
 streets. The only way to deal with the sinful is by 
 a love strong enough to condemn their sin Lnd to 
 seek them and save them through friendship. 
 Society will have to come to the same way of 
 dealing with its moral outcasts as it does with its 
 physical wreckage, which is to love them back to 
 health. 
 
 Doubtless Zaccheus was growing outwardly harder 
 all the time, but in his soul there was a craving for 
 fellowship, for being counted as a man. That was 
 what drew him to Jesus. He had heard that Christ 
 was a friendly person whom no artificial barriers of 
 society, nor even the repute of sin, could keep from 
 being friendly. He had heard that Christ ate with 
 publicans and sinners, that He was a companion of 
 outcasts, meeting every one without pride or contempt 
 
138 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 or any feeling of superiority. The thought struck 
 him that perhaps Christ would be a friend to him. 
 At least it would be good to see the kind of man who 
 was ready to sit at everybody's table and never took 
 any man at his face value or demanded a certificate 
 of respectability. So the first defence — the barrier 
 of indifference — in the soul of Zaccheus was down, 
 and he went out to see Jesus for himself 
 
 The second stage was the stage where Christ won 
 His way to the inner citadel and made a conquest. 
 Christ pursued the offensive in a great adventure of 
 friendship. " Come down, Zaccheus, for to-day I 
 must abide at thy house." Zaccheus was delighted, 
 and they went home together. What they spoke 
 about we do not know, but all the time the love 
 of God was finding its way into his soul, making 
 tremendous changes. We have all had the experience 
 of being in the company of one who took us into a 
 different world. He might be a great traveller, 
 describing some picturesque and wonderful country 
 across the seas. For the moment, he brought us 
 into that world. Under his spell, our grey and 
 commonplace surroundings filled us with discontent. 
 It was something of that kind that happened to 
 Zaccheus. Christ brought him for a moment into 
 His world ; but more, He made him realize that he 
 belonged to it, like an exile whose blood is stirred 
 into strange longing by pictures of home. The 
 closer he came to Christ, the more his real self awoke 
 in him, the more his outlook was changed. His 
 values were altered. Money became nothing to him. 
 All in a flash he saw something which put his 
 wealth into its right place, made it a trust of God or 
 else a heap of dust. He came to see his extortion 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 139 
 
 for what it was — a sin against God and man, a 
 denial of human brotherhood, an outrage on God's 
 children. All these thoughts began to pass through 
 his mind, as Christ and he sat talking together. 
 Christ had brought Zaccheus into His world, the 
 spiritual world, because He had given him the 
 changed mind. That is what we call conversion. 
 It is giving a man a new mind, a new outlook which 
 means new interests and new desires. He thinks 
 new thoughts about God. He has a new place for 
 duty. He has a different value for money. His 
 attitude to others is changed. He is " renewed in 
 the spirit of his mind " and therefore his world is 
 changed, for our mind is the maker of our world. 
 A man is converted when he is brought out of the 
 selfish man's world with its false standards, its 
 material ambitions, its hatreds and fears and prejudices 
 towards others, into Christ's world where we look on 
 things and deal with things and people in Christ's 
 way. Till that new mind comes, whatever a man's 
 emotional experience may be, he is not saved. 
 
 But there was still another step. It was the step 
 of Zaccheus' own will. He began to live in Christ's 
 world. He took his place there and began to settle 
 down in it and make such changes as were needed 
 in the life of a man who is living in this new 
 world. " Lord," he said, " the half of my goods I 
 give to the poor ; and if I have taken aught frcMi any 
 man falsely, I restore him fourfold." Have we 
 imagination enough to see what that means? Can 
 we penetrate what was going on behind that resolu- 
 tion ? The man was putting into effect his new 
 valuation of money. He was looking on it as a 
 trust. He was going to turn it into the coinage of 
 
140 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 love, making it a channel to others of God's grace. 
 He had found his ambition changed. He no longer 
 sought to make money, but to serve the world 
 "The half of my goods I give to the poor." The 
 glory of life is not getting but giving, not grasping 
 but sharing. He was going to take that position. 
 A new attitude and compassion had been kindled 
 in his soul towards the needs and sufferings of 
 others. The poor were there not to exploit, but to 
 serve. 
 
 And he faced up to the light which Christ cast 
 upon his crooked life, looking the past straight in 
 the face and determined to put it right. " If I have 
 taken aught from any man falsely, I restore him 
 fourfold." Fourfold was the amount a thief was 
 required to restore if he were convicted of fraud. 
 This man had been convicted by Christ of being a 
 thief, a fraudulent profiteer, and he was going to stand 
 up to it. In his great story The Scat-let Letter ^ 
 Hawthorne tells how a man who had wronged a 
 woman was so torn with shame and a guilty 
 conscience that he went out and stood in the market- 
 place on the platform where adulterers were pilloried 
 — that he might find peace for his soul. Zaccheus 
 was going to do that, not in order to find peace for 
 his soul, but because he had found peace for his soul. 
 He was a thief whom Christ had turned into an 
 honest man, and out of his new-found peace and 
 forgiveness, in his new character, he was going to 
 "face the music," standing in the world for what he 
 knew himself to be so far as the world was concerned 
 with it. For the light he had seen was love, and 
 being seen as love, it had lost the power to terrify 
 him. What did the world's opinion matter, when 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 141 
 
 Christ had searched his soul — in spite of everything, 
 had forgiven him ? The man who knows himself 
 judged and forgiven by God is lifted into a world 
 where society's verdict does not hold. Can you 
 wonder, with this revolution wrought in this man's 
 life, that Christ signed his passport to the Kingdom 
 and recorded his place in the great order of the new 
 humanity: "This day is salvation come to this 
 house." 
 
 What was it that had saved him ? Let us try to 
 realize the power which had wrought this wonderful 
 change. It was not some magic communication of 
 an omnipotent grace submerging his pe'sonality, 
 stampeding his will. The man was changed by 
 something he had seen and grasped with his mind, 
 and responded to with his whole being. The only 
 magic was the magic of the Divine love which had 
 come forth to meet him in Jesus. I do not think he 
 had any theological explanation of it, though the 
 whole of theology is in it. The chances are he did 
 not recognize the change, at first, as the work of God 
 at all. Afterwards, no doubt, he would sit down to 
 think it over and find the real explanation, which is 
 that he had met with God in Christ. But at first 
 he was only conscious of a real and personal love. 
 And there were two things about it which were 
 clear. 
 
 I. This personal love was seeking him as an 
 individual. Christ had picked him out and marked 
 him down in all his need ; and this love had sought 
 him as he was, and for what he was, not because 
 some one had spoken a good word for him, not 
 because he was rich or in good standing, for this 
 love condemned his illgotten riches, and he had no 
 
142 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 standing in the eyes of his fellows any more than a 
 lost dog of the streets. Christ had sought him for 
 himself, just because he really loved him as a friend. 
 That was the wonder of it ! And that fact lifted him 
 up, gave him a new reverence for his own soul. He felt 
 as a jewel might feel which has been kicked about 
 the dust of the streets and is found at last by its 
 owner and set in its own place in his breast, or like 
 a wandered child for whom no one cares, who has 
 been found by his mother and recognized even in 
 filth and rags, and restored to his home. 
 
 The vision of the love of God is the vision that 
 saves us, once we have taken it in. His is a love 
 which is personal to each one of us, seeking us 
 as we are, and just as we are taking us into His 
 friendship. 
 
 He did not wait till I came to Him, 
 
 But He took me at my worst. 
 He needn't ever have died for me, 
 
 If I could have loved Him first. 
 
 Is there one of us who doubts this personal seeking 
 love which seeks us as we are? Do we feel the 
 shame of our own sin so deeply that we cannot 
 believe it? Or has the world despised us till we 
 have accepted its verdict and sunk into the dust of 
 self-contempt? Or have we been tempted to feel 
 that we are just bits of flotsam and jetsam on a great 
 uncharted ocean. Get close to Jesus; see how He 
 sought men one by one, offering them friendship. 
 That seeking personal love is the seeking personal 
 love of God. All that Christ ever was, abides. The 
 methods of Jesus are the ways of God. The love 
 that shone in Him is the heart-beat of the Father. 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 143 
 
 Get close to Him. Open your eyes, and the closer 
 you get, the more you will feel the power of that 
 love stealing out to you and filling heaven and earth 
 with its glory. To give yourself to that love, to 
 what it asks of you, accepting what it offers you, is 
 salvation. 
 
 2. But again : Zaccheus saw that love as suffering 
 for him. He saw that the other people hated Christ 
 for this very act. Jesus defied society in seeking 
 Zaccheus. He had to pass through the fire of their 
 disapproval, which flamed from their very eyes and 
 would fain have burned Him up. Zaccheus felt their 
 scorn, heard their slanderous whispers, " Birds of a 
 feather flock together." He saw that Christ had 
 taken on Himself the scorn of a society which would 
 yet pay Him back with interest and do to Him 
 what they would fain have done to himself. Making 
 a friend of Zaccheus he made Himself " of no reputa- 
 tion." It was a love that suffered for the sake of 
 friendship, suffered to fill his lonely life with love, 
 suffered to make him an honest man. What a love it 
 was! The more he looked on it, like Christian at 
 the Cross, the more he wondered "till the springs 
 that were in his head sent the waters down his 
 cheeks " in tears of penitence and gratitude. His 
 crooked soul was shot through with a light which 
 showed up every twist and shadow and made him 
 shudder with loathing and shame. From that moment 
 the past was dead, and Zaccheus was a new man 
 living in a new world, which was lovelit and love- 
 mastered from end to end and turned upside down. 
 
 That is the vision that saves us, breaking our 
 hearts, and making us hate evil like nothing else 
 on earth. The love which changes men is a 
 
144 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 wounded love which suffers and will go through 
 anything to save us. That is what God is — suffer- 
 ing Love. There is no other power that can 
 change the world. We are hoping and longing for 
 a revival and some people expect it to come in a 
 great and startling revelation of Divine force. But 
 the one thing which will bring revival is not any 
 sudden descent of an Almighty power from heaven. 
 It is such a new vision of God's love in Christ, seeking 
 us through everything and suffering with us in every- 
 thing, that it will awaken a response of penitence and 
 faith rising up in a new and victorious manhood. 
 
 When Tennyson was dying, some one asked him if 
 there was anything he wanted. " Yes," he answered 
 faintly, "a new vision of God." A new vision of 
 God — that is what this dying world needs. That is 
 the secret of all resurrections and revivals. We need 
 a new vision of God, and yet not a new vision, but 
 the recovery of the deep, deep truth of the vision 
 of God in Jesus which we have lost amid the drift 
 of life and the superstitions which gather in the 
 empty mind to take revenge upon us for our cold 
 altars. What is the true vision of God ? It has its 
 heights and its depths — but its central fire is a love 
 which suffers everything, and loves on, and has no 
 power to break down our resistance but the power 
 to suffer and endure. Let that vision sweep out the 
 old grim thought of a punishing God who is always 
 seeking to get even with us for our sins. Where 
 shall we see it? We can see it everywhere if we 
 have the eyes to look. Three years ago the earth 
 was scarred and torn with the wounding of man's 
 hatred. To-day the scarred lands are green with 
 beauty and decked with flowers. Is there no love 
 
HOW CHRIST WINS HIS WAY 145 
 
 there? One of our modern poets finds in those fresh 
 springing flowers a forgiveness which is with such 
 unplumbed depths of loving almost too awful to 
 receive. 
 
 I could not face 
 The scourge of God's forgiveness ! I could bear, 
 Amid the world's red guilt and black despair, 
 Thy wraih, I cried, but not Thy mercy, Lord. 
 O spare me from the year's unfolding grace, 
 For every flower is a two-edged sword. 
 
 But if you want to see it clearest, you must go to 
 Calvary. You must see it in that Friend who came 
 seeking men, and whom they called a traitor and 
 made an outcast, and numbered Him with the 
 criminals, and smote him with their blustering hatred ; 
 yet could not destroy His friendship. He rose from 
 the grave to love men still. 
 
 Are you waiting for God's power to take you by 
 storm with the grip of an almighty force ? He has 
 no other might with which to win you but the power 
 of loving. But that suffering love is His omnipo- 
 tence. It is the final, irresistible thing. 
 
 Are there some who see this love, but fear to step 
 into the great friendship to which it calls us ; fear the 
 change, fear the righting of the wrong, perhaps ; fear 
 the service to which it calls ; fear the new life 
 because of some weakness which like an old wound 
 may find us out and bring us down in shame? A 
 Mohammedan once put the difficulty thus, "Jesus 
 of Nazareth invites me, but I need the power 
 to live in His world." It is good if you fear it, 
 for it means that you take it seriously. No man 
 has seen the love of Christ who has not seen its 
 terrible relentlessness toward selfishness and sin. 
 There was no fear in Zaccheus. He was confident 
 
 10 
 
146 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 that he was going to be able to live in this new 
 world. And why ? Because he knew that this Friend 
 was with him. In His presence he felt, as Paul 
 felt, equal to anything, and he knew that in this 
 friendship he had found something which was eternal. 
 That makes all the difference. The friendship of 
 Christ is no fairy light which shoots up in our souls 
 for a moment and is gone, leaving life darker than 
 before, luring us into a world in which it is impossible 
 to live. His love is the revelation of the abiding 
 reality, the final fact of the universe. In His love, 
 there is the power of infinite victory so long as we 
 keep bringing our lives, with their temptation and 
 difficulty, ever and again into His presence and open 
 to the searching and the guiding of His love. 
 
 Perhaps we made an acquaintance once with an 
 interesting and clever person — a man, it may be, 
 with a fine mind and a high outlook. For the 
 moment our life was quickened and lit with glorious 
 possibility as by a beam of sunlight in a cloudy 
 day. But the stranger passed on his way, leaving 
 only a lingering trail of brightness in the memory. 
 Jesus Christ abides. That friendship is eternal. The 
 love that brings us into the Kingdom can keep us 
 there. The Friend who lifts us into His world can 
 give us power to live in it. 
 
 One Friend in thy path shall be 
 To secure thy step from wrong, 
 One to count night day for thee 
 Patient through the watches long, 
 Serving most with none to see. 
 
 His name is Jesus. Will you trust that Friend? 
 To-day He says, " I would fain abide at thy house." 
 Answer Him, " Even so; come, Lord Jesus ? " 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 
 
 ** And about the eleventh hour He went out, and found others stand- 
 ing idle, and saith unto them. Why stand ye here all the day idle? 
 They say unto Him, Because no man hath hired us." — Matt. xx. 6. 
 
 It is a standing rule with the parables of Jesus that 
 we must not stretch their meaning beyond the point 
 they were meant to illustrate. Yet such was the 
 genius of Christ that there is hardly a parable of His 
 but in phrase after phrase illuminates with unerring 
 insight some tract of life and shows us how it looks 
 under the light of God. This Parable of the Vine- 
 yard is a case in point. It was meant to set forth how 
 God rewards our work, not according to the surface 
 measure of its amount, but according to the secret 
 standards of grace, taking into consideration all sorts 
 of things, which 
 
 the world's coarse thumb 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account. 
 
 Yet as Christ passes on to this conclusion, He 
 
 illuminates, by the way, what must be to-day a 
 
 burning question for every honest Christian mind. 
 
 It is the great number of those who stand outside 
 
 the Kingdom of Christ who have never been won 
 
 by Christ or by any great spiritual loyalty. Make 
 
 Df it what we will, these people form a large and 
 
 147 
 
148 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 increasing section of our population to-day. They 
 own no ideal, though they may have one which they 
 serve unconsciously, and they stand aloof from Christ 
 in a bitter hostility or a tragic indifference. In 
 feudal days most of the men of the country were 
 attached to the great barons to whom they had sworn 
 their service in return for certain rights. But there 
 was always a number who had no such allegiance — 
 masterless men they were called. They roved here 
 and there at their own free will, doing what they 
 liked, attaching themselves to this or that master for 
 a time, as expediency demanded. Countless people 
 to-day from the spiritual point of view might be 
 described as masterless men. They may dabble in 
 theosophy, or have an interest in spiritualism or other 
 forms of the occult. They may have a few cut-and- 
 dry formulas by which they claim to rule their lives, 
 such as doing the best they can and letting the 
 future take care of itself; or, as one prominent man 
 described his — getting as much happiness out of 
 life as he could without interfering too much with 
 the happiness of other people. But for the most 
 part there is no fixed light within, no definite 
 ideal, and, above all, no sense of a leader in life's 
 journey, a captain in the fight. They are master- 
 less men. 
 
 This fact explains many of the sinister things in 
 the public and private life of to-day. Why do many 
 people begin to drift downward when home ties are 
 broken ? The reason is they have no inward loyalty 
 of their own. They have been living upon second- 
 hand inspirations. Such virtue as they had, has been 
 a dependent thing propped up by the scaffolding of 
 others' example or influence, and when the ties were 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 149 
 
 broken the building went down like a house of cards. 
 This masterless condition is the sinister thing in our 
 social and industrial life. The masterless man is 
 liable to be caught by the passion of the moment, to 
 become the slave of a catchword, to follow the biggest 
 crowd and become the tool of the mob spirit. It is 
 these masterless men who have brought Russia to 
 her fate to-day. When the hand of the autocrat was 
 suddenly cast off, they found their opportunity before 
 the mass of the people had time to think things out, 
 and for the moment they are giving the land over to 
 pillage and massacre. It is the masterless men who 
 are the standing danger of every democracy. 
 
 Why is it that after so many years of enlighten- 
 ment and especially of Christian teaching, so many 
 have not been won for any definite Christian ideal ? 
 Why is it that Christ has not got them ? Why do 
 they still stand outside the Kingdom and defy 
 Christ, or at least ignore Him? That is the question 
 which the parable asks. The answer is striking; 
 it sends a shaft of light into a very dark place 
 and brings us face to face with one or two salutary 
 truths. " They say unto Him, Because no man hath 
 hired us." 
 
 One thing is clear. The reason does not lie in 
 the nature of the men themselves. These men 
 outside the vineyard were all men who might 
 have been inside, if only they had been asked. 
 They would have been valuable. They had it in 
 them. Christ gives no colour to any idea that some 
 people are by nature capable of appreciating His 
 message and being won by His appeal, and others 
 are not. No man is exiled from God by any dis- 
 qualification of nature. The truth lies all the other 
 
I50 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 way. As John Masefield puts it on the lips of the 
 Widow in the Bye Street speaking a last word to her 
 prodigal son : 
 
 God dropped a spark down into every one, 
 
 And if we find and fan it to a blaze 
 It'll spring up and glow like — like the sun, 
 
 And light the wandering out of stony ways. 
 
 No one can fail to feel that there is a vast amount 
 of splendid human material going to waste, because 
 it has not been captured for the Kingdom of God. 
 Who can read of the kind of manhood revealed by 
 war, its heroism, its sacrifice, its amazing loyalty, 
 without feeling cut to the heart that so many of 
 these have not been won for Christ? It is not 
 enough to say that it is sin which keeps so many out. 
 That is merely to evade the point. For much of the 
 sin that shocks and saddens us, is but the result of 
 this masterless condition. It comes from an empty 
 mind, an untenanted soul, which inevitably goes 
 to ruin like an unoccupied house. There are sins 
 whose very strength is drawn from fine loyalties 
 which should have been Christ's, but have been 
 captured by the seven devils. Why stand they all 
 the day idle ? Let us face the answer : '' Because no 
 man hath hired us." 
 
 The first conclusion which suggests itself is that 
 they have never had the call. This is the simplest 
 answer. May it not be true? How little there is of 
 the spiritual note, let alone the definitely Christian 
 note, in the appeals made to the masses and classes 
 in our country by many of our leaders. A little 
 reflection will remind us. The note of patriotism 
 has been sounded often enough during these last 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 151 
 
 years, and the appeal to fear. Many of our leaders 
 show little trust in the power of anything deeper 
 than these, when they address the people in a crisis. 
 Indeed it is often an even more selfish chord which 
 is struck — the appeal to personal advantage, to the 
 pocket, to mere selfishness, and settlements have been 
 grudgingly made on that basis and the crisis just 
 tided over, when a deeper appeal — the appeal to the 
 highest — might have awakened an overwhelming 
 response. I do not stay to ask the reason why this 
 lower note is so persistently sounded. It betrays a 
 lack of faith in goodness which is a confession of 
 spiritual bankruptcy ; or a cynical measure of man's 
 nature which is a denial of the vision of Jesus. One 
 cannot help feeling that masses of our people are 
 derelict to-day because they have never been reached 
 by any breath of higher inspiration. We have not 
 got them for the highest, because we have systemati- 
 cally approached them on the lower side of their 
 nature. No man hath hired them. 
 
 Or think of Christian preaching. One would 
 imagine there had been plenty of that, and there are 
 many who tell us cynically that there is too much of 
 it. But is this true ? How many thousands are there 
 who pass our church doors without the faintest idea 
 of what the Church stands for, and what the message 
 of the evangel really is, because they have never 
 heard it? They hardly know the name of Christ, 
 except as an echo from a distant Sunday School. 
 As a writer says : " The tragic thing is not that men 
 knowing what Christianity is, will reject it. It is that 
 not knowing what it is, they will have nothing to do 
 with it." There is abundant ground for asking our- 
 selves, whether the Church of to-day is not failing in 
 
152 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the mission of the evangel toward large masses of 
 our people. If they will not come to us, we must 
 go to them. What we need to-day is a gigantic 
 Crusade, a new and widespread proclamation of the 
 evangel. Why is it that we do not have it? Is it 
 that we are losing the evangelical note, the authentic 
 note of the gospel ? Has the gift of Christ to our- 
 selves lost its wonder and its power? Have we lost 
 the passion for souls? Are we losing sight of the 
 tragedy of sin? Is the inward fire dying down? 
 We cannot all be preachers, but do we not need to 
 follow Christ in so loving men that we shall love them 
 into the Kingdom, seeking doors of friendship and 
 social fellowship through which we shall be ready to 
 enter with a message ? Surely the Kingdom of God 
 is something to talk about when the way is open — 
 far more worth talking about than the thousand and 
 one topics of ordinary conversation. Above all, the 
 way is clear to-day for a great campaign up and 
 down the land ; for a combined assault upon the 
 strongholds of sin and unbelief in the name of Christ. 
 There are signs that we are beginning to realize it. 
 The world is waiting for it with a pathetic wistful- 
 ness. It is watching for some message, like those 
 who look for the dawn after a night of weariness and 
 futile wandering. 
 
 But there is more. We need the authentic note in 
 our Christian lives, I speak to Christian people. 
 Has there been any appeal in our lives for Christ, 
 anything that would strike through the crust of in- 
 difference and make men wonder? If we were to 
 ask some of those who stand outside, would they not 
 be apt to reply that there is nothing in the lives of 
 many Christian people which really attracts them, 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 153 
 
 nothing extraordinary, nothing which speaks of God. 
 It is a common claim by many who stand outside 
 that their lives are just as full of Christian quality as 
 the lives of most Christian people. We need not 
 stay to argue the point or to discover the secret 
 source of what the Spectator calls " godless goodness." 
 AC goodness is of God, though it may not be con- 
 scious of God. But surely in this claim there is the 
 demand that somehow there ought to be a difference 
 in our goodness, some lustrous quality which is able 
 to reveal to men's dull minds the face of God. 
 Walter Pater, in one of his books, tells of a Roman 
 lad who was attracted to a young Roman soldier of 
 his chance acquaintance because of a certain some- 
 thing in his life which drew him strangely and 
 touched a deep chord in his soul. He found it 
 difficult to explain. It was like a fragrance, a delicate 
 perfume. It was like the shining of a very beautiful 
 light. It touched and moved his very soul. It 
 made him wonder. As they drew close together he 
 asked what it was, and he found that this soldier 
 lad was a Christian and bit by bit, in spite of his 
 superstition, he was drawn toward Christ — drawn by 
 that accent of Christian character which called to him 
 as deep calls to deep. Is there that accent in our lives 
 which makes men wonder, that gleam of a better 
 country which lays them open to the appeal of Christ ? 
 Or is our Christianity a mere convention, a system of 
 negations, mere criticism of other men's pleasures, 
 and not the welcome to a fellowship and a service 
 in which to find life completed and glorified with 
 richer meaning and joy. What we need to-day is to 
 stop living on an old tradition of what it means to be 
 a Christian. We need to rediscover Christ for to-day 
 
154 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 and to recover Christianity out of the mass of tradi- 
 tions and conventions which have hidden its real 
 nature. There was a time when it meant going into 
 a monastery and shutting oneself off from many fine 
 and noble things, because that was the only effective 
 protest which men who wanted to live for Christ could 
 make against the profligacy and sin of their age ; but 
 it does not mean that to-day. There was a time 
 when it meant going out to the hills to worship, and 
 being hunted and harried for the sake of spiritual 
 freedom ; but it does not mean that to-day. We 
 have got to find out what it means to be a Christian 
 man or woman in this age in which we live, with all 
 our pressing problems. What kind of men would 
 Christ have us to be to-day ? What kind of life does 
 He demand? That is what we have to discover. 
 We can be sure it is something so strong, so fine, so 
 heroic, so tender, that it would win hundreds of those 
 who stand aloof because they have never been 
 touched by the note of the authentic Christian spirit 
 — the note that sings like music and challenges like 
 a battle cry. "Why stand they all the day idle? 
 Because no man hath hired them." 
 
 But there are those who have never been won for 
 Christ, because they have not realized there was 
 anything they could do in the vineyard. Perhaps 
 they did not know the Kingdom of God, into which 
 He was calling them, was a vineyard. They had 
 imagined perhaps, it was only a fold, a place of 
 shelter from the storms of life. It is quite true that 
 is a picture Christ gives of the Kingdom. The 
 picture of the Good Shepherd and the sheep, has 
 many tender and welcome suggestions. It speaks 
 of rest and peace, of pleasant pastures and still 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 155 
 
 waters ; and when the soul is storm-beaten and 
 weary with the struggle of life, or torn and bleed- 
 ing in the thickets of perplexing temptations, that 
 is an infinitely comforting picture which reveals the 
 Shepherd who folds us safely in His keeping and 
 binds up the wounded and broken-hearted. But it 
 is not the whole truth of the gospel. There is a way 
 of reading Christ's message so as to suggest that He 
 came into the world to lead a host of spiritual cripples 
 safely to a better land. We have to take other 
 pictures if we are to have it complete. He is a leader 
 of infinite variety of appeal. And His call is not 
 always to the softer side of our nature, to its invalid- 
 ism and its fears. He appeals to our strength. The 
 Kingdom is a vineyard, a place of work, a field of 
 battle. He is a Master who has made a world in 
 which He wants things done, wants it redeemed from 
 waste and wildness, built up, made perfect. " Why 
 stand ye here all the day idle? " 
 
 Professor Gilbert Murray, discussing in a pamphlet 
 what it was that sent so many of our young men 
 out to the front at the beginning of the war, and 
 sent them so gaily, so buoyantly, gives this answer : 
 that for the average man to find something to do 
 which he can do, and spend his whole life in doing, 
 is the secret of a very high happiness. Christ holds 
 the key to that happiness. The final secret of a 
 satisfying life is in Jesus. He wants something done 
 which we can all do, and into which we can put every 
 ounce of our being. He wants the Kingdom of God, 
 the kingdom of righteousness and purity and love 
 brought into being by us. And the Kingdom can be 
 realized in and through the relationships of ordinary 
 life, and the work and business of ordinary days. 
 
IS6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 That is where many people miss the point of Christi- 
 anity. Religion is not a special compartment of our 
 activities. Religion is life taken up into the fellow- 
 ship of God. Christianity demands no special gifts. 
 The qualities that make a man a good husband, a 
 good father, a faithful workman, an honest merchant, 
 a true friend, are the qualities which equip us for 
 the service of God. There are, of course, special 
 means which have to be used for bringing in the 
 Kingdom. There is special work that wants doing 
 — work among the children, for instance — and it 
 needs the best men and women to do it. There is 
 no finer soil for growing the seed of the Kingdom, 
 than the mass of young life which is rising all around 
 us. The hope of the new world lies there, at what 
 George Meredith calls " the malleable moment." And 
 there is the work of preaching, which is all the more 
 needed if it have fallen into something of disfavour. 
 Or look farther afield, and what of the task of the 
 Christian evangel in foreign lands, where great 
 multitudes are reaching undreamed-of power without 
 the faith to direct it for the good of the world or 
 their own ? 
 
 But that is only a part of the sphere of Christian 
 service. Christ came to inaugurate a service of 
 God which shall be as wide as the whole range 
 of healthy human activities and to enable us to 
 go out on the daily round, the common task, and 
 capture these for God. He bids us go out and 
 build up the Kingdom all about us ; in every home, 
 in every business ; to transform every relationship 
 with His Spirit. He says to every man who goes 
 out in the morning to his task, " Go, work to-day in 
 My vineyard." We were told again and again in the 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 15^ 
 
 days of war, that all service which is clean fs national 
 service. We need that outlook in our Christian lives. 
 All service is Christian service if it be done for Him. * 
 The voice of Christ has new urgency to-day, when 
 the foundations of the old world are rocking and old 
 prejudices are being broken down. He is calling for 
 volunteers to step in and claim this No Man's Land 
 for Him while it is still unclaimed. 
 
 Sin worketh, let me work too. 
 Sin undoeth, let me do. 
 Busy as sin, my work I ply, 
 Till I rest in the rest of eternity. 
 
 Death worketh, let me work too. 
 Death undoeth, let me do. 
 Busy as death my work I ply, 
 Till I rest in the rest of eternity. 
 
 The one vital question for every man is the question 
 how he is going to make his contribution to life 
 What are we going to put into life to leave the world 
 better than we found it? There is an idea that 
 progress is a kind of stream which moves onward 
 and upward by some secret tendency of good which 
 is independent of ourselves, and we have only to 
 swim with the stream to find ourselves farther on 
 The war has killed that idea, let us hope, for ever^ 
 a stream can never move upward of itself. God's 
 only way of breaking into life is by com'ing into 
 our hearts. His only way of moving the world is 
 by moving men. The power of all progress is in 
 our wills given up to work the will of God wherever 
 we are situated. The dynamic of progress is victorious 
 personality. The greatest contribution we can make 
 to life is just ourselves, redeemed and vitalized by the 
 
158 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 touch of Jesus. The Kingdom grows, in the measure 
 in which each one of us individually lives in the 
 order of sonship to God through all life's traffic and 
 business. What kind of personality are we carrying 
 into the world from day to day ? That is the vital 
 question. Stevenson's biographer sums up his life 
 by saying, " To do the work he did was a great 
 achievement, but to be the man he was, was an 
 achievement no less great." That is the point. 
 Whatever our work, the manhood we reach is always 
 our greatest achievement. And the secret of true 
 manhood is the mastery of Jesus. 
 
 Perhaps there are some who stand idle to-day 
 because they have never recognized the voice of 
 Christ. The voice is powerless because it is to them 
 unreal. At best it is second-hand ; and a leader whose 
 personality never touches the lives of his men wins no 
 allegiance. As Napoleon put it, " When I was in my 
 prime I could get thousands to follow me, but I had to 
 be there!' It is the personal touch that does it. And 
 perhaps you cannot feel that Christ comes near you 
 with a personal touch upon your life. It seems all 
 unreal — this appeal — an echo from distant centuries 
 which does not reach the heart to-day. But are you 
 sure that you have listened for it ? If there is anything 
 in the Gospels, it is a message of a living Christ — a 
 Christ who is with men — the same to-day as yesterday, 
 in closer touch even than when He walked with His 
 disciples in Galilee. The essence of the resurrection 
 is that Christ has been liberated from the bonds of 
 space and time to become an ever-present Master. 
 
 That is what He meant when He told the disciples 
 that He was going away. " It is expedient for you 
 that I go away : for if I go not away, the Spirit will 
 
MASTERLESS MEN 159 
 
 not come unto you ; but if I go away, I will send 
 Him unto you." He meant this amazing thing: 
 that if He were to be able to be with them always, 
 and with each one of them. He would have to go 
 away, so that His Spirit might be free. And they 
 learned afterwards when He was really gone, that it 
 was true. Peter and John were as sure that Christ 
 was with them then, as when He was with them in / 
 the flesh. And He is here to-day. Time does not 
 limit Him. Space does not confine Him. He is 
 here. Have you ever gone away to listen for His 
 voice, to give Him a chance to meet you ? In the 
 midst of the cannon roar the larks were singing, but 
 you could not hear them till you trained your ear 
 and listened in the intervals for the sweet shrill note. 
 Have we ever gone away to listen for the spiritual 
 voice of Christ ? Have we ever cultivated that inner 
 ear "which is the bliss of solitude," with which 
 Wordsworth listened to the voice of nature ? How 
 does Christ speak to-day ? Not by a voice we can 
 hear with the outward ear, though some have claimed 
 to hear Him speak as vividly as the speech of a 
 friend at their elbow. There was Paul, for instance, 
 and St. Francis, and Joan of Arc who died rather 
 than disown the voices she was sure were divine 
 These heard it so, because their spiritual natures were 
 keyed up to a pitch at which spiritual voices become 
 more real than earthly realities and spiritual visions 
 more vivid than the light of day. 
 
 How does Christ speak? He speaks within, in 
 the shame that touches conscience, in the remorse 
 that follows sin, in the ideals which attract us like 
 the stars, in the great words of truth which once fell 
 from His lips and which to-day strike home to our 
 
i6o THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 souls with an authority and power we cannot deny. 
 He speaks in the wrongs that touch our chivalry, in the 
 causes which call for our help, in the broken-hearted 
 whom we long to heal. He speaks in the desperate 
 longing for a higher life and a finer world to live in 
 —a world which calls to us to-day from the very 
 horror and ruin of our war-worn earth. How is it 
 that these things awaken in us such feelings and 
 make such appeals ? Why is it that these impulses 
 haunt us so that we cannot get rid of them ? Read 
 the New Testament and you will find them incar- 
 nate in Christ, so that the more you think of Him 
 the stronger do they become. And when you give 
 yourself up to them there will steal in upon you the 
 feeling that He is with you, a Comrade, a Friend. 
 And that feeling will deepen into knowledge and 
 conviction. It is this fellowship with a present Christ 
 which keeps Christianity alive. It is a message ever 
 renewed to us by One who speaks from heart to 
 heart, and who is Himself "the Way, the Truth, and 
 the Life." To listen for that message is to feel a 
 new life taking possession of our nature and rising 
 within us — a life which He begins to live in us and 
 we begin to live through Him, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPTATION 
 
 •Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."— Matt. 
 
 ^1. 13- 
 
 It is not surprising that in His great prayer Christ 
 should have included a petition about temptation. 
 « No man," says William James, " has matriculated in 
 the university of life till he has been well tempted." 
 We do not go very far along the road before we are 
 faced with suggestions of evil which make appeal to 
 something in our nature. It is part of the genius of 
 the Bible, born of a sure insight into life, and won out 
 of sad experience, that the first thing that happens 
 tc a man when he steps upon the stage of the world 
 is a great temptation. The peace of the Eden garden 
 is broken by the insinuating serpent with his subtle 
 suggestion to sin. That is one of the best pictures 
 of t'^emptation in all literature. All the elements of 
 temptation are there— the call of appetite, the appeal 
 to curiosity, the deceitful glamour with which we are 
 self-blinded to the nature of evil. Put a man where 
 you will, you cannot shut out the voice of temptation. 
 Make his circumstances as favourable to purity and 
 goodness as they can be made, he cannot escape 
 the choice which is our peril. The voice which makes 
 the lower appeal may awake spontaneously in our 
 own souls in face of the suggestions of the world 
 
 II 
 
1 62 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 around us ; or it may come in the persuasions of some 
 real or fancied friend. Many a man has been tempted 
 by the foolish fondness of those who loved him best, 
 making it doubly hard for him to resist. 
 
 But however it come, temptation is a power to 
 be reckoned with. It is the one thing a mother 
 fears for her boy when he goes out into the world. 
 She does not fear open sin without disguise, for 
 that would only disgust a fine nature ; she fears 
 the sin which comes in the glamour of temptation. 
 Every man has need to treat his temptations with 
 respect. 
 
 How is it that this force comes into our life ? Why 
 has our path been so beset with these traps of the 
 devil's baiting? How did the serpent get into the 
 garden ? It is a great mystery and we naturally 
 expect from our Lord some help in penetrating it. 
 But when we turn to this prayer, " Lead us not into 
 temptation," we are perplexed. For the mystery 
 deepens. The suggestion seems to be that it is 
 God who leads us into temptation, making the world 
 such a place that temptation is inevitable. Surely it 
 is unthinkable that the drunkard who goes down 
 before his passion, should have been sent into that 
 fiery furnace by God Himself. Surely it cannot be 
 that God weaves this glamour about our sins so that 
 they hypnotize conscience into sleep and work their 
 will upon us. If this were so, it would be little 
 wonder that some cry out upon such a God and 
 disclaim responsibility for evil. 
 
 Oh, Thou who dost with pitfall and with gin 
 Beset the road I have to wander in, 
 Thou wilt not with predestination round 
 Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPTATION 163 
 
 There is a mystery here which adds to the confusion 
 of our tempted souls. We are faced by a great 
 dilemma. Is God responsible for our temptations? 
 Is it God who sends us out to meet them? If 
 it be God who sends us to meet them, then surely 
 there must be something good in temptation; but 
 if there be something good in temptation, why 
 should Christ teach us to pray, " Lead us not into 
 temptation " ? 
 
 The way to clear up many of these difficulties is 
 very simple. It is to get a clear grasp of one fact — 
 the fact that there is no sin in being tempted. " 'Tis 
 one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to 
 fall." There is no sin in temptation in itself. No 
 man, as Spurgeon said, can keep the birds of passion 
 from flying about his head ; the trouble is when he 
 allows them to begin building nests in his hair! The 
 sin is when we begin to give way to temptation, to 
 dally with it, to give it a chance to find a lodgment 
 in our thoughts and imaginations till it gets power 
 to master us in the secret places of our being. 
 There must be many people to whom that simple 
 thought will bring relief. You have been meeting a 
 temptation continually which shames you even to 
 think of, and you are haunted by the suggestion 
 that you are more or less of a sinner because you 
 have it at all. Part of its strength indeed may have 
 been drawn from your own nature, because you have 
 allowed it to master you in the past, like the camel 
 in the legend which poked its nose into the tent, then 
 its head, then its whole body, and finally turned on 
 the man and crowded him out. It may be that the 
 evil thing has got right inside and is meeting us 
 day and night because once we gave it lodgment 
 
1 64 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 there. As Oliver Wendell Holmes says, a drunkard's 
 temptation may be his punishment. It may come 
 to him as the vengeance of life upon an empty 
 mind because he has not taken measures to keep his 
 nature in control. He may have contracted the habit 
 whose grip upon him becomes his temptation. But 
 let us get hold of the fact in spite of this, that there 
 is no sin in being tempted. Temptation may be a 
 consequence of sin ; it is not the sin itself. The sin 
 is when we consent to it and give way to it. 
 
 What then, is temptation ? There are two parts in 
 it. There is first of all some impulse or suggestion 
 which we know to be evil. It may come in the voice 
 of our own passions, the suggestion of the natural 
 appetites and desires of the body threatening to take 
 control. It may come in some suggestion of selfish- 
 ness, bidding us seek things for ourselves in defiance 
 of the needs and claims of others. It may come in 
 the voice of fear, the fear of suffering, or the scorn of 
 our friends suggesting to us escape by a lower way 
 of living, or by some compromise with evil. 
 
 But there is another element in temptation. There 
 is God's part in it — the voice of our better self God 
 is in every temptation challenging us to fight, warning 
 us that the thing is wrong. There would be no 
 temptation if there were no voice of God, for we 
 would not be conscious of any dilemma. Some people 
 have so suppressed the voice of God in the inward 
 challenge of their souls that they never hear it. 
 These people are never really tempted. There is no 
 glint of fight in them. They are enslaved, the bonds- 
 men of vice and dishonesty, whose sin has become 
 second nature. They have given themselves over, 
 body and soul, to the devil — automatic sinners whose 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPTATION 165 
 
 vice is as mechanical as a wound-up clock. God 
 help the man who has sunk to that depth ! 
 
 Temptation has God in it — His challenge to fight 
 the evil, His call to build up a character out of the 
 crude passions and impulses with which our nature 
 is equipped, His crusade to slay some dragon where 
 it steps across the frontiers of our life, and challenges 
 the rule of some high purpose. God's appeal is to 
 choose the highest in a world where we are free to 
 do either good or evil. For our freedom is the basis 
 of our temptation. It is because we are free, we are 
 tempted. If there were no freedom, there would be 
 no temptation. And without freedom, there would 
 be no value in goodness, thus we cannot become 
 strong men without temptation. Even Christ had 
 His temptations, which were very real. His battle 
 was no mere panorama set out for our instruction 
 like a shadow-piece upon a screen. Some people 
 read the Gospels as if the temptation scenes were 
 merely a play in which Christ was acting a part. 
 But His temptations were real because there was 
 something He could not be without passing through 
 that fire. He had to reach character as we reach it. 
 He had to choose between the higher and the lower 
 way, and when the lower way rose before Him it had 
 a glamour of its own, drawn though it was from His 
 pityj for men. He was tempted like as we are, yet 
 without sin ; and through that temptation He won 
 the power to become our spiritual leader and the 
 helper of all tempted men. 
 
 Why then, if temptation be the way of strength 
 and the opportunity of our manhood, did Christ pray, 
 "Lead us not into temptation "? Some temptations 
 come through our very vitality of body : is a man to 
 
1 66 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 pray for a weak body lest his vitality should break 
 out in ungovernable passion ? Some temptations 
 come through our friendship : is a man to shun love 
 and all its tender guiding because he may be tempted 
 to be a shirker, or desert his post ? Some temptations 
 come through a high position or a great success : is 
 a man to pray for a humble position lest he should 
 be tempted to pride? The answer lies on the face of 
 the question. To pray for a life without temptation 
 is to pray for a life that is no life at all. " I cannot 
 praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised 
 and unbreathed, that never sallies forth and seeks 
 her adversary, but slinks out of the conflict where 
 that immortal garland is to be fought for, not without 
 dust and heat." So wrote John Milton in words that 
 echo the Spirit of Christ. 
 
 For Christ was a man of the open air. He never 
 shirked the offer of life whatever it might bring. 
 And he never expected His disciples to shirk life 
 because there might be poison in it, or shelter them- 
 selves in a dug-out all their days because there might 
 be bullets in the air. The end He was out for, was 
 the will of God, the life God would have Him live. 
 It mattered not what devils lay in the path or what 
 siren voices might call. He would go — and He would 
 have us go. 
 
 Why then should He pray, "Lead us not into 
 temptation"? The secret is that this is the expres- 
 sion of a shudder in the soul without which we are 
 not safe from temptation. There is a sensitive plant 
 which shrinks from the most delicate contact and 
 shrivels up at the slightest approach of anything that 
 might hurt its life. That is what a man's soul ought 
 to be in the face of evil wherever it meets him. No 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPT ATKXN 167 
 
 man is safe from the contamination of evil without 
 that armour of the sensitive spirit. The Christian 
 man is a " Happy Warrior" who never shrinks from 
 duty or from life, or lets danger cast a shadow over 
 his spirit or spoil his joy, but he goes into life with 
 his soul on guard. Christ is not advocating in this 
 prayer the fear of life. He is warning us to be afraid 
 of sin. That fear is the only fear which should have 
 any real place in a strong man's heart. That fear 
 Christ is seeking to set up as a sentinel in our soul. 
 Temptation is not a thing to make us shirk the way 
 of a virile and vigorous life ; but it is not a thing to 
 meet with a swagger, much less is it a thing to go 
 out to meet. The man who deliberately walks into 
 temptation which he might avoid, is imperilling his 
 soul. That is the outlook of this prayer. There are 
 temptations that put an illegitimate strain upon the 
 grace of God. Moral conflicts come to us all in the 
 path of life and try us to the very soul. But God 
 keep us all from meeting these without a certain 
 ':rembling and a certain fear which will creep into 
 Dur prayer, " Lead us not into temptation." 
 
 Christ does not, however, stop with this clause of 
 the prayer. If it is God's will that we should go into 
 the place of moral conflict, it is our business to face 
 it. So Christ concentrates on the main part of our 
 business, which is the way through. " Deliver us 
 from the evil." This petition in itself brings en- 
 couragement. It means that deliverance is possible. 
 God never yet allowed any man to be put into a 
 position where there was no alternative but to sin. 
 No man was ever yet born into the world, dark as 
 some of its circumstances are, foredoomed to moral 
 disaster. There is a limit to the power of temptation ; 
 
1 68 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 that limit is the grace of God. What is the way of 
 deHverance? This prayer suggests it. It is to be 
 delivered from the evil. And where is the evil ? It 
 is not in the materials of our life — the tempting 
 things. It is in our own wills. The wrong desire 
 which would make of something in God's world an 
 instrument of selfishness or passion, is the secret of 
 our temptation. And the way of deliverance is the 
 release from the grip of the base desire which uses 
 the very strength of our own nature and the very gifts 
 of God to lead us into the wilderness. 
 
 And how can we be delivered from the base desire ? 
 The key to desire is interest, and interest is awakened 
 by attention. The will follows in the track of the 
 wind of desire, as this is awakened by the things to 
 which we give our mind. This is where prayer helps 
 us. Prayer, in the first place, is fixing our thoughts 
 upon God. The moment the mind is opened up 
 to Jesus Christ and kept open to Him, the whole 
 situation becomes victoriously changed, His presence 
 fills the field of our conscious mind, dominates our 
 outlook and influences our will. As Mark Rutherford 
 put it, " Time and again I have known moments of 
 temptation, when I would have gone under, but the 
 pure, calm, heroic image of Christ confronted me, and 
 I succeeded." 
 
 We can trace two consequences of that Divine 
 invasion. 
 
 I. The tempting thing loses its attraction. The 
 spell is broken which held our will in its fatal hypnotic 
 grip. The glamour passes from the evil thing, what- 
 ever it be, as the tinselled glory of a gaudy room is 
 gone when you let in the daylight and all its 
 tawdriness appears. The whole outlook is changed. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPTATION 169 
 
 No man can see sin in its reality till he has seen it in 
 the light of Christ, and the moment he sees it there 
 its ugliness is plain. The thing which makes us 
 shudder at sin, and on the other hand draws us to 
 goodness, is no mystic influx of supernatural power. 
 It is the simple power that comes from seeing things 
 as they are. No man with any of the Divine nature 
 left in him, can see evil unmasked and not hate it. 
 Its power over us is the artificial glamour which is 
 cast around it by our own insincere dealing with 
 ourselves, and sin's way of blinding our eyes. 
 William James says that a drunkard never drinks 
 with the thought in his own mind that he is a 
 drunkard. He drinks because he is hot or cold, or 
 because he is depressed or joyful, to help him out of 
 his trouble, or to make him a sociable being ; so his 
 mind weaves a fancy dress round the tempting thing 
 which conceals its real nature. The more he realized 
 himself a drunkard, James means, the more he would 
 find himself free, loosed from his bonds by the 
 sword-edge of reality. Men go down before a big 
 temptation because they meet it only in the stifling 
 air of their own shuttered souls. Open the windows 
 when you are tempted and let in the light of Christ 
 and the bracing breath of His purity ! The longer 
 we dally with the thought of evil, the more it gets 
 a strangle-hold upon us. The only way to break the 
 spell is by fleeing from it into the presence of Christ. 
 And the method of that saving flight is the way of 
 prayer. 
 
 2. This concentration on Christ delivers us from 
 evil by rallying in our souls new reserves of moral 
 purpose and purity. A soul-compelling thought of 
 Christ has the power to organize the forces of our 
 
170 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 better nature for resistance to evil. Many things 
 increase the power of our personality. A great 
 love will do it, or a great purpose which fires the 
 imagination. That is how some weak men have 
 done strenuous work in the world, and braved incred- 
 ible hardships which would have beaten many a 
 stronger man. For half his life Nelson was ailing, 
 often sick, with only one eye and one arm, but 
 he was possessed by a great patriotism, and his 
 personality became a fountain of marvellous energy 
 and courage so that he could stand up to any situa- 
 tion. But nothing can increase the power of our 
 personality like faith in Jesus Christ. He can unlock 
 the secret chambers of moral power. He can awaken 
 every noble impulse to stand up against evil, and 
 bring all our reserves into action. When a man 
 prays this prayer he brings Christ into his life, and 
 at His touch all his better nature is quickened. 
 
 There is an incident in John Inglesant which 
 illustrates this great deliverance. He found himself 
 shut up with a great temptation through the scheming 
 of an enemy. A poisonous mist seemed to fill the 
 air and deaden all finer feeling, when suddenly there 
 came a rustling breeze which seemed to him like a 
 whisper of heaven reminding him of his better self. 
 Memory began to awake. The life of other days 
 streamed back into his mind, "the sacramental 
 Sundays, the repeated vows," the light of heaven he 
 had once seen, the chapel at home. Under the 
 power of such thoughts " the reason and affections 
 rallied together, and, trained into efficiency by past 
 discipline, regained the mastery." He was like the 
 demon-haunted child in the gospel story, and, as in 
 that story, the demon was expelled. The writer of 
 
THE MYSTERY OF TEMPTATION 171 
 
 the novel writes down the conclusion. " It is not so 
 easy to ruin him with whom the touch of Christ still 
 lingers in the palm." All this has happened to 
 countless souls and can happen again to any man 
 who, in the evil hour, will lift his soul into the 
 presence of God and pray, ''Deliver us from the 
 
 evil." 
 
 But one thing we must be clear about. We cannot 
 expect the Divine deliverance save as we are yielding 
 life up to the Divine purpose. There are people who, 
 in their better moments when sin comes back to 
 take its toll of remorse, loathe the evil which laid 
 them low, and long to be free from it. They give 
 themselves to prayer, but all seems unavailing. 
 Again and again some ugly passion returns. They 
 spend their days in alternate defeat and poignant 
 regret till, it may be, they give up praying altogether 
 and surrender themselves to a lower way of living at 
 the expense of a deadened conscience. The secret of 
 their failure is clear. They are not wholly surrendered 
 to the purpose of God. They do not pray, " Thy will 
 be done," and "Thy kingdom come" at the same time 
 as they pray, " Deliver us from the evil." They are 
 really seeking to exploit the resources of God in the 
 interests of a selfish life. They merely want a self- 
 respect which will enable them to be just in their own 
 eyes and hold up their heads before the accusing 
 voice of their own souls. It is not righteousness they 
 are after, but only self-righteousness. They are not 
 asking to be made strong and clean for the sake of 
 the Kingdom, but only for the sake of their own 
 health or reputation. There is only one way to a 
 great salvation, only one way in which we can be 
 delivered from evil. It is by losing all thought of 
 
172 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 self in seeking the purpose of Jesus. God mends no 
 lives for people to further their own ends. We must 
 learn to pray the whole Lord's Prayer and live in the 
 spirit of it, before we can expect any one of its 
 petitions to be answered. Only in the channels of 
 Christ's great service can our nature find escape from 
 evil, by being delivered into goodness. Victory over 
 sin is a by-product of the life which is caught up 
 into Christ's great love. Seeking to help others we 
 find deliverance for ourselves. Flinging ourselves 
 into Christ's crusade against evil, we escape from the 
 power of it. The strength which wrecks men in 
 passion becomes the means of life's power and 
 enrichment, when the will is harnessed to Christ's 
 tasks. His recipe for victory over passion is the 
 same as for victory over fear and care, " Seek ye first 
 the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be 
 added unto you." 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER 
 
 "And as the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they 
 had let down the boat into the sea, Paul said to the centurion and to 
 the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." — 
 Acts xxvii. 30, 31. 
 
 In short compass, this is one of the most fascinating 
 
 of sea stories. It is the only place in the Bible 
 
 where the seamanship of those days is described in 
 
 detail. The story has the note of personal experience. 
 
 It had evidently made an indelible mark on the man 
 
 who wrote it. We can see the desperate efforts of 
 
 the crew to avert disaster. We can hear the rush 
 
 and roar of the tempest. We can picture the wild 
 
 confusion and panic, and the dastardly attempt of 
 
 the sailors to save their own skins and leave the 
 
 ship and passengers to their fate. The traditions of 
 
 seamanship have changed since then — our own nation 
 
 has led the way. The story of our mercantile marine 
 
 in the years of war is a record of selfless devotion 
 
 which will never die. It is a sailor's business — and 
 
 he never dreams now of anything else — to stand by 
 
 the ship till the whole company is safe. That is the 
 
 heroic law of the sea. 
 
 This story has several suggestive things to say to 
 
 us who live on land, as well as to those who go down 
 
 to the sea in ships. It has very interesting parallels 
 
 with our life — with our present situation. A ship is 
 
 like a State. It is a little republic, a miniature nation. 
 
 173 
 
174 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 It is a self-contained community with its own laws 
 and regulations. Every member of the company is 
 responsible to some extent for the safety of the whole 
 ship on her voyage from port to port. The parallel 
 teems with suggestions for our life together. We 
 frequently speak of the " ship of State." " The ocean 
 of life " is a hackneyed phrase which lives because of 
 its truth. 
 
 And the paramount duty that faces a ship's company 
 is to hold together. It is this duty of which I want 
 you to think — the social duty that meets us on every 
 side of life where we come into relations with one 
 another — the duty of co-operative living and co- 
 operative service. Except we hold together, we 
 cannot be saved. 
 
 This duty becomes clear when we consider the 
 basis on which we live our life. Paul put it strongly, 
 later on, in connection with the Church. " We are 
 members one of another," he said. The moment 
 a man or woman comes into the Christian Church, 
 he is in vital contact with others whose lives begin 
 to influence him, and are in turn influenced by 
 him. No man or woman, for instance, comes into 
 a worshipping congregation, without bringing a 
 certain mood or spirit into the atmosphere which 
 affects the devotion of all the rest. Some people 
 will be better because we are in the spirit of prayer. 
 Some one is being helped into a new view of life from 
 their very contact with us. Or it may be some one 
 will be weaker, poorer, more deaf to life's music 
 because our spirit is out of tune, or because we have 
 brought a cynical mood into the house of God or 
 depressed the atmosphere with some chilling dis- 
 couragement — " for we are members one of another." 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER 175 
 
 But our dependence upon one another is not merely 
 a fact of our religious intimacy. It is the basic fact 
 of life. We sometimes speak of an isolated in- 
 dividual ; there is no such person. You do not 
 describe a man fully by telling all that can be seen 
 about his outward life; you must know his home, 
 his friends, the whole environment of his personal 
 relationships. Our life is a social unity in which 
 we are bound together below the surface, like the 
 tangled roots of forest trees. And this dependence 
 has an even wider range than our home-circle or 
 acquaintanceships. It takes in the whole world. 
 The bread we eat was grown on the plains of 
 America and made by some one we never saw. The 
 clothes we wear have passed through countless hands 
 in a chain that may stretch across the world. The 
 whole earth gathers about our doorstep to minister to 
 our comfort and our pleasure. The ship's company 
 did not realize how close was their dependence, till 
 the storm arose and Paul saw and pointed it out ; 
 and we never know how deeply our lives are knit 
 together till some industrial or national catastrophe 
 disorganizes our life. A strike in a vital industry 
 brings the whole machine to a standstill and homes 
 are fireless and there is never a street without women 
 and children feeling the pinch of hunger. One of 
 the useful things which a great trade stoppage does 
 for us, is to make us think. Our temptation is not 
 to think at all of these things, till comfort is touched 
 and conscience awakes and we realize that we belong 
 to a social unit for whose welfare each one shares re- 
 sponsibility. The same thing came home to us during 
 the war, when an assassin's hand in Central Europe 
 struck at the heart of the world and made it bleed 
 
176 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 with a wound from which it will take years to 
 recover, and will leave its scars for generations. The 
 world is one big family. Every day it is being linked 
 the closer. The great inventors are still concentrating 
 on the problem of annihilating distance and making 
 the world one neighbourhood. More and more, com- 
 merce and science are making men and nations like 
 a ship's company, who are out together on the same 
 voyage. Everything is driving home the conclusion 
 that we must hold together if we are to get through. 
 
 For this very nearness has two great consequences. 
 It has its dangers. There is the danger of friction. 
 When people become intimate, temperaments may 
 clash, purposes may cross, tempers may rise. It is 
 a risky thing to make a friend. You may raise a 
 devil, either in yourself or in the person you claim 
 for friend. The biggest test of character is for two 
 people to go and live together. There is nothing 
 that can make a heaven like home, and there is 
 nothing that can make such a hell. Strikes cannot 
 paralyse a nation except in a complicated society. It 
 is our very interdependence that makes the strike a 
 tragic blow to the life of the community. It is the 
 same with war. Three hundred years ago there was 
 plenty of fighting but only on a small scale and only 
 among one or two nations. The conflagration was 
 easily limited. But modern war, by the very nature 
 of our nearness, involves the whole world. 
 
 There are other dangers — the spread of disease, for 
 instance. If the practice of medicine had not kept 
 pace with the growth of the community, our very 
 nearness would induce diseases that would destroy the 
 world. And there is a worse danger than disease — 
 there is social sin and social crime. There are sins 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER 177 
 
 for which no individual is responsible, but in which 
 all have a share. Some people who would scorn to 
 underpay their own workers, have shares in companies 
 where conditions are bad. Crimes which individuals 
 would shudder to commit, are done unconsciously by 
 the community through the system which has so far 
 evolved. When the next revival comes, it will come 
 like all others, in a wave of repentance, but it will 
 be not only our own personal sins of which we will 
 repent, when the light of heaven floods our life; it 
 will be the social sins in which we share — the national 
 pride which breeds wars, the poverty we permit to 
 exist, the conditions we condone which a live social 
 conscience would sweep away. No man can find a 
 real peace with God for his own soul, without facing 
 the social sins in which he shares. For "we are 
 members one of another." 
 
 But this life together has its own opportunities. 
 Toil can be lightened for thousands by the wise 
 action of the community. Burdens which no single 
 individual can bear for others, the community can 
 carry. There are the poor who are beyond our 
 individual help, but we can explore together some 
 of the sources of poverty and dry them up. There 
 will always be room for the good Samaritan picking 
 up the man by the wayside. Communal philan- 
 thropy, which sacrifices that personal touch, will lose 
 almost more than it gains. There is nothing that 
 can be so soul-destroying as a system where the 
 human touch is lost ; but what a good Samaritan 
 to thousands the community itself could be if only 
 we held together and realized our strength ! There 
 are tremendous resources lying unused which will 
 only come into play as we get together. There are 
 
 12 
 
1/8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 powers in our souls which will never be fully tapped 
 till we have learnt the fellowship of service. For 
 the strength of a community is more than the united 
 strength of separate individuals. Inspirations awaken 
 in a common struggle which one man alone can never 
 find. Union means reinforcement of individual 
 power. Faith kindles faith. Fellowship awakens 
 enthusiasm. In spiritual arithmetic two and two 
 make more than four. They make a body with a 
 new life which finds its roots in God ; for Jesus said, 
 " Where two or three are gathered together in My 
 name, there am I in the midst of them." 
 
 But if we are to hold together, the question at 
 once arises, what is the condition on which we can 
 so live together, overcoming the dangers and finding 
 the strength? We must find the common spirit, the 
 spirit of fellowship. We must learn the secret of 
 combination, if life is to be team-work. We need to 
 get the spirit of the family; our trouble is that we 
 have become a family, and have never caught the 
 family spirit. To take a familiar illustration from 
 the late coal dispute, the owners objected to the 
 pool because they were afraid it would lead to in- 
 efficiency. And why? Because they could not 
 depend on a loyal spirit that would make every 
 one work together for the good of all. They may 
 have been wrong. We may be called to a great 
 adventure of faith in the way of fellowship, trusting 
 that when we step out of the chill air of self-interest 
 into the warm atmosphere of common service, depths 
 of unselfishness will awaken that can never be re- 
 vealed in any other way. For a great faith is 
 created ; it has the power to produce new things. 
 
 The fact is clear that before men can hold together 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER 179 
 
 fully or whole-heartedly, they must possess the 
 communal spirit. We cannot shut our eyes to the 
 fact that there are people who talk a great deal 
 about the community, who show very little real con- 
 cern for the community. We shall have to get the 
 right spirit before we shall get the ideal community. 
 That is what many people forget. There are idealists 
 who would make a neat and tidy world with every- 
 thing in it arranged — on paper ; but even if they got 
 their Utopia they would find that it would go to 
 pieces, as other attempts at Utopia have gone to 
 pieces — for lack of the spirit to work it. We cannot 
 get away from the moral factor. Many people who 
 dream of better conditions and a new system to 
 make a new world, forget that this new world when 
 we have it, will be a very difficult place to live in. 
 It will demand spiritual resources which at present 
 we have not got. It will demand tact, and temper, 
 and unselfishness, and mutual sacrifice, which, as 
 things are, seem beyond us. We cannot run a 
 system based on spiritual lines without a spiritual 
 dynamic. We cannot make an ideal world by force, 
 any more than we can make any other spiritual 
 thing by force. Every beautiful thing takes love to 
 ffiake it. We cannot create anything except in the 
 measure in which we put love into it. A writer 
 describes the little garden of his early home which 
 his mother used to keep. " She used to say that 
 in the growing of flowers, love was as necessary as 
 water. That seemed foolish to us. But somehow 
 when she went away, flowers ceased to grow there." 
 A new world is a new creation. It is a creation of 
 the spiritual mind. We cannot make a new world 
 except by the measure of love we are willing to 
 
i8o THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 put into it. We cannot hold together in a common 
 life which shall be strong and progressive; on the 
 principles of the class war ; or the temper of social 
 superiority, which is the same thing camouflaged. 
 
 Now, here the spiritual man comes in and the 
 Apostle displaces the mechanical expert. His message 
 is the vital message of to-day, for it is the message 
 of a love which alone can make fellowship. When 
 will we come to see it? We are living in a world 
 which God has given us on the condition that we 
 put love into it, in all our relations with one another ; 
 without love it will go to pieces in strife and war and 
 social sins that will turn life into a civilized jungle. 
 It is love which has led men out of the jungle habits 
 in which they used to live and made them peaceful 
 citizens. It is love we need to run the machinery 
 of this complicated modern world. Hum.anity is 
 starving in every direction and stands broken and 
 crippled on the march, for want of the spirit of love 
 which alone can hold us together. It is no use 
 blaming the capitalist alone. He needs love brought 
 into his system, even though it changes the system ; 
 but the labourist needs it just as much. You can 
 read pamphlets of communist societies which have 
 "love" plastered all over them, but the spirit that 
 oozes from every page is the spirit of black hatred 
 of all classes except one. No new world can be 
 brought into being by force, or kept running by 
 force, without breaking to pieces in unspeakable 
 disaster. "Though I have all gifts," wrote Paul, 
 "and all power" — be a gifted speaker, a clever 
 worker, a successful organizer, a talented manager— 
 "and have not love., it profiteth nothing" for the 
 kind of life God has given us to live. It is the spirit 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER i8i 
 
 of fellowship which alone can make men comrades 
 in a common cause, in a common purpose, can bring 
 the ship to port. Except we hold together, we 
 cannot be saved. 
 
 What qualities does this common life demand ? 
 There is the spirit of sincerity, of frank and open 
 dealing. Where love reigns, the black cloud of 
 suspicion is not allowed to gather. And there is the 
 spirit of forbearance. We must learn tolerance of 
 others* faults. We must cultivate patience. We 
 must have the kindly judgment. How much good 
 breath would be saved if men would only give others 
 credit for good intentions, even though their methods 
 seem to be wrong ! 
 
 And we must put ourselves in the place of others. 
 We must think ourselves into their situation. We 
 must sit where they sit. We must learn to feel their 
 grievances and enter into their burdens. We have 
 found ways of insulating ourselves against the shock 
 of others' troubles by soft pads of comfort ; or by 
 the callous heart, till the world's agony which makes 
 the air electric with unrest, leaves our conscience 
 unmoved. We must change all this. Sickness and 
 sorrow and the sufferings of others are our great 
 opportunity of binding others to us in a sympathy 
 that would quicken the pulse of the whole community 
 with a new life. 
 
 And the common life demands self-sacrifice. It 
 will mean loss to individuals, for it will have to be 
 translated into terms of money. The poor will be 
 richer, and the rich will be poorer. We will need to 
 learn to pay our income tax with the same good 
 grace as we give a large subscription to a charity. 
 We will need to put our hearts into the payment of 
 
1 82 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 our common dues. A tax can be as dear to God as 
 the offering we make to the collection plate or the 
 subscription we give to a charity, if we have the spirit 
 of the community. Sacrifice is part of the price we 
 pay for the privilege of our common life. 
 
 Where are we to find this spirit? We can only 
 learn it from Jesus. Part of the pathos of the whole 
 movement of our time is, that many are trying 
 to be Christian without Jesus. They are trying to 
 learn love without the power of the great Lover. 
 We cannot learn to love men till we have learnt to 
 see Christ in them. We cannot learn the spirit of 
 forbearance toward others, save as we catch it from 
 Christ's forbearance toward us. We cannot develop 
 the spirit of trust, save as we know what it means 
 to be trusted by Christ with the great trust of His 
 friendship. We cannot learn the spirit of sacrifice, 
 save at the Cross which is the fountainhead of all 
 self-giving. How are we to get rid of the hatred 
 and suspicion and selfishness which break out in 
 strife, setting man against man ? How are we to get 
 rid of self? — that is the problem. There is only one 
 answer. It must be crucified and slain in a great 
 surrender to the Christ who masters us in the 
 subduing discipline of His fellowship. 
 
 With a great wistfulness which is half-unconscious 
 of itself, the world is seeking for the spirit which 
 Christ brought in. Again and again, our very failures 
 reveal the fact that the principles of Christ are no 
 mere dreamer's visions from a far-off sphere without 
 application to our life on earth, as they seem to 
 many people. On the contrary, they are the revela- 
 tion of the unseen order of reality which is the 
 basis of the universe and the only secret of life and 
 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING TOGETHER 183 
 
 happiness. Christ reveals in His principles the only 
 ground on which we can hope to live together in 
 happiness and peace. The laws of the spiritual life 
 which He lays down, are the laws of human life in 
 its reality; and we cannot expect either power or 
 peace except as we live in harmony with these, any 
 more than we can expect a healthy body in defiance 
 of the laws of health, or a well-built house which 
 disregards the law of gravity. The reason why 
 Christ's principles seem impossible is that we look 
 at them apart from Jesus. When Christ gave that 
 teaching to His disciples, the thing that made all the 
 difference was that He was there. They were in His 
 company. They heard His voice. They felt the 
 power of His friendly love. His spirit alone can turn 
 what look like impossible commands into practical 
 politics. From Christ alone we catch the spirit which 
 is the cement of society. It is what we draw from 
 Him and put into life, that will bring us together 
 and keep us together, bridging our differences and 
 solving our problems. Some time ago a book was 
 published containing an account of a Communistic 
 experiment which was made in Patagonia. A band 
 of people under a leader, went there to set up a new 
 State, but the one thing on which he had made 
 up his mind, and they with him, was that there 
 was to be no religion. Christ was to be left out of 
 the ship, as He is being left out to-day by many of 
 the advanced Communists. This little society went 
 on well enough for a time, till the first impulse was 
 exhausted ; then differences began to creep in. The 
 power was gone, " the Spirit was departed," selfishness 
 broke out with all its accompaniments of vice and 
 sin. At last, in sheer despair, the leader invented a 
 
1 84 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 god of his own and went preaching this caricature of 
 a deity, with disastrous results. In the end, the whole 
 society was only saved from utter collapse by the 
 advent of a man who preached Christ and brought 
 the flame of faith to kindle their hearts into reverence, 
 and purity, and brotherhood. It does not really 
 matter what kind of political state we set up, pro- 
 vided it is Christian. No one knows in what external 
 ways the spirit of love will organize the world and 
 take shape in our common life. To pin our faith to 
 one system rather than another, in the meantime, is 
 to set the emphasis in the wrong place. It looks 
 like tying the hands of the Spirit of God. But one 
 thing is sure — disaster lies ahead for any state which 
 is based on selfishness and materialism, whether it 
 be of the classes or the masses. There is but one 
 Captain of the ship who can hold us together. His 
 rule is love. His commands are justice and righteous- 
 ness. His men are comrades, forbearing one another, 
 serving one another. Except He abide in the ship, 
 we can none of us be saved. 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST IN OUR DAILY 
 
 CALLING 
 
 " He, trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt Thou have me 
 to do ? " — Acts ix. 6. 
 
 The conversion of Paul is one of the most remark- 
 able things in history. Explain it as we will, it can 
 never be explained away. Critics have dealt with the 
 outward signs, the light and the voice and the other 
 accompaniments, and some have tried to belittle 
 them. These are not the important things. The 
 thing which is important is the life which resulted 
 from the experience, and that is the thing which will 
 not dissolve in the acid of criticism. In the last 
 resort the outstanding miracle is not Paul's conversion 
 — it is Paul's career. A new day dawned for Europe 
 with its outworn civilization when Paul flung his old 
 life dead at the feet of Christ and rose new-made. 
 
 One of the outstanding things in the conversion 
 itself is the completeness of Paul's surrender to Jesus. 
 His whole opposition to Christ collapsed like a great 
 fortress whose foundations have been undermined. 
 With many people, conversion is a long and gradual 
 process. When Christ comes upon the soul, said 
 John Owen, " He hath no quiet landing-place." He 
 finds a foothold in one part of the nature, but it 
 often takes years before He has consolidated His 
 victory and won control of every part of the citadel. 
 
1 86 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 Many men are Christian in their sentiments but 
 they are not Christian in their thinking; they are 
 Christian in their home but not in their business ; in 
 their private life but not in their social relationships ; 
 and often they do not realize it. Paul could do 
 nothing by halves, even when he was trying to ex- 
 terminate Christianity ; and the very strength of his 
 nature, organized and disciplined against Christ, went 
 immediately over, with all its developed power, to 
 Christ's control. Doubtless the ferment of Chris- 
 tianity had been working secretly in his unconscious 
 mind. Down in the depth of his nature the conflict 
 had been going on for long. The light (of unresisting 
 love) on Stephen's dying face had struck deep into his 
 soul and stirred a nest of uncomfortable suggestions. 
 But however it was, there was nothing half-hearted 
 in his surrender to Christ. It was a case of perfect 
 abandonment. And he fell on his face, trembling 
 and astonished, and said, " Lord, what wilt Thou 
 have me to do ? " 
 
 These words, on the surface, suggest a man whose 
 life has been brought to wreck and ruin around him, 
 and who is at his wits' end — the condition, as the 
 Psalmist tells us, in which a man is ready to make a 
 beginning with God, and God is able to take charge 
 of his life. But there was more in the cry than sheer 
 despair, for Paul was not in the habit of using words 
 rashly. There were two things in it to which we 
 ought to give our minds. 
 
 There was the instinct for action, and the acknow- 
 ledgment that religion demands activity. " What 
 wilt Thou have me to do ? " Like everything else, 
 Christianity must find expression in action, for 
 genuine life produces activity. Every living thought 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 187 
 
 blazes a path for itself in words or deeds. Every 
 deep emotion must find a channel. There is very 
 little Christianity about a man if it is not making him 
 do something. There is very little fire in the loco- 
 motive if it is not transforming its energy into motion. 
 When God sought to reveal His highest thought, He 
 put it into a /t/e. Real religion is not a theology to 
 be argued about, it is a life to be lived. The trouble 
 with many people is that they use worship as a 
 lightning conductor for religious emotion to pass 
 harmlessly away, instead of finding some contact 
 with life's tasks or duties in which that emotion can 
 become vital and dynamic. 
 
 Further, religious activity is the activity of the 
 whole life directed by Jesus. The whole man must 
 be in it — the praying man, the loving man, and 
 the working man. When Paul said, " Lord, what 
 wilt Thou have me to do ? " he put his whole life at the 
 disposal of Jesus. He gave into the hands of Christ 
 the steering-wheel and the engine control and stood 
 by to obey orders. He made Christ Master of the 
 ship. He hailed Christ Lord of his whole personality. 
 His thinking was to be guided by Christ for in 
 Christ he recognized the truth. His ambition was 
 to be directed by Christ for in Christ he had found 
 life's glorious objective. He would take up whatever 
 work Christ bade him do. He was ready to scrap 
 all the old life, work and friendships, career and 
 habits, in order that Christ might reconstruct his life 
 from its foundations. Everything was flung into the 
 melting-pot, to be run into the moulds and reshaped 
 by Christ. Other men since his day have done the 
 same thing, and made a completely fresh beginning. 
 Francis of Assisi left behind him the whole furniture 
 
1 88 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 of a rich man's life and went out to found a new order 
 of Christian service. Brother Lawrence, after being 
 a footman and a soldier, put his life at the disposal of 
 Christ and found his sphere of labour in the kitchen 
 of a Carmelite Monastery. However impossible such 
 revolutionary changes of calling may seem to us in 
 our own situation, they light up the meaning of 
 Christianity, which is a life set at the disposal of 
 Christ. " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? " 
 
 This brings before us the whole question of the 
 call of Christ and our daily calling. The truth faces 
 us at once from this cry of Paul, that a man's daily 
 calling must be part of the expression of his Christian 
 life. There, as elsewhere, Christ must direct and 
 control. Christianity is not an affair of leisure 
 moments — an emotion we can express in the special- 
 ized activity of worship or devotion. To cut Chris- 
 tianity out of our daily work whatever that may be^ 
 and find no room there for Christian service, is to 
 divide life into two conflicting parts, which in the 
 long run will bring the whole structure of character 
 to the ground. To shut the office door or the factory 
 gate upon Christ, is to deny the mastership of Jesus 
 in the most essential part of our life. For a Christian 
 man, the phrase that " business is business " in the 
 meaning some give to it, is a denial of Christ's right 
 to rule. " I mean to live," said a man once, " and 
 to have no gaps of death in the middle of my life." 
 We dare not tolerate patches of selfishness in the 
 middle of our Christianity. Life has no neutral 
 territory where Christ is King. 
 
 We cannot close our eyes to the fact that this opens 
 up a good many difficulties. For one thing, if our 
 work is to be Christian, we must be sure we are doing 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 189 
 
 the thing Christ wants us to do. We must be sure 
 we have a task which can express a Christian person- 
 ality. That is where the shoe pinches. Can we fulfil 
 this condition as things are to-day? Many people 
 will tell us that as the world is now organized it is 
 not possible. Who will dare to say that the right 
 men are always in the right places ? Most men and 
 women find their work already cut out for them. 
 The struggle for existence demands that they take 
 the first thing which opens up as a means of earning 
 a living. Thousands are flung by the pressure of life 
 and an imperfect education into blind-alley employ- 
 ments, where they must drudge through life as best 
 they can. There is no waste in the community so 
 startling as the waste of its man power. Countless 
 people are doing manual labour whose capacities are 
 worthy of far wider opportunity. Countless others 
 have found privileged positions which are far too big 
 for their powers. Some tell us that the very conditions 
 of their daily work are such as to stultify their souls 
 and make the elementary Christian principles next 
 door to impossible. There is a whole host of 
 businesses which are unchristian both in their methods 
 and in their results. Can a Christian man possibly 
 find a legitimate calling in providing degrading 
 entertainments, or unworthy literature, or make a 
 profit out of trades which are poisonous to the moral 
 and physical well-being of those who are engaged in 
 them ? The problem for a man in such a situation 
 is one which he will have to face for himself by the 
 light of his own conscience. It may be his duty to 
 go out of a calling or business which offers a per- 
 petual rebuke to conscience, if he is unable to change 
 the conditions. Many of the early Christians had 
 
190 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 precisely that problem before them. They found 
 themselves in tasks which ministered to idolatry, for 
 instance, and their work became a menace to their 
 faith. Dr. R. T. Glover tells with charming tender- 
 ness the story of a sculptor in these early days 
 who was converted to Christ. As the light broke 
 gradually into his life, it came home to him that 
 he could no longer make images of the gods for 
 heathen temples. He could not put a Christian soul 
 into a heathen image. Very reluctantly, but with 
 conviction, he gave up that handicraft with all its 
 appeal to the artistic sense, and took to a mason's 
 calling, shaping stones, squaring and cutting — a 
 prosaic occupation, but one at least which he felt 
 was not inconsistent with his faith, and where he 
 could find a useful way of serving his fellows. But 
 the artist in his soul demanded expression in his 
 work, and he conceived the idea of making a statue 
 of the Good Shepherd with the lost lamb upon His 
 shoulders. People criticised the truth of the statue. 
 The Good Shepherd of the tenth of John has no lamb 
 upon His shoulders; but the answer was that this 
 was his experience of what Christ had done for him. 
 He had been found by the Shepherd, lost and 
 wandering, and the truth of Christ in his own soul 
 demanded outlet in his craft. 
 
 That is the point. The truth of Christ in our souls 
 must find outlet in our calling. Every part of life 
 must give expression to the mind which has been 
 touched by the redeeming power of Jesus. If we are 
 His, our work must show it. It may be, the right thing 
 for us is not to leave our post but to stay there and 
 work steadily for changing the conditions, bringing a 
 new conscience into a degrading business to sweep 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 191 
 
 it clean of all that is unworthy of truth and love. 
 The business of a Christian society is to create a 
 conscience about bad conditions and unworthy occu- 
 pations. But the path for each individual is the path 
 that opens up in answer to that surrender to Christ, — 
 to that cry, " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " 
 There are two classes of people, however, who are 
 not affected by what I have said. There are those 
 who have still the power to a certain extent to choose 
 their life-work. The world lies open with various 
 doors of opportunity, and the question is, " What shall 
 we be ? " As we scan these doors we must pray, 
 "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" What 
 is the line of life in which we can serve Christ 
 best through our daily calling? We must lift the 
 whole matter into the light of Christ. What is the 
 calling in which we can be surest of His fellowship 
 and direction ? What is the calling in which we can 
 exercise our gifts to the best advantage for Him and 
 for His world ? How can we best express a Christian 
 personality, with such gifts as we have, or such limita- 
 tions as we have, and find satisfaction for what is 
 deepest in our nature? There is a hymn very dear 
 to the Christian mind which assures us that — 
 
 The daily round, the common task. 
 Will furnish all we ought to ask. 
 Room to deny ourselves, a road 
 To lead us daily nearer God. 
 
 There are two fallacies in this view of a great truth. 
 Our business is not to find room to (3?'^;y/ ourselves ; 
 it is to find room to express ourselves. And the main 
 purpose of our life is not to lead us daily nearer God; 
 it is to carry the world nearer God, to make it a 
 sweeter place to live in, a place in which people will 
 
192 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 find it easier to believe in Him — though the one 
 includes the other. 
 
 The word " calling " here involves the whole ques- 
 tion. People use it freely without thinking what it 
 means. We cannot choose a calling ; we have to be 
 called to it. People speak of their trade or profession 
 as their calling, though in reality they have had no 
 call and have sought no guidance, but have gone into 
 it with a view of doing something which they felt 
 would be congenial and in which they could earn 
 their bread and butter with as little discomfort as 
 possible. Our calling is something to which we have 
 been called by the Spirit of God in the guidance of 
 life. It means a task through which we can best 
 exercise our will to serve Christ with all our gifts. 
 We speak of a minister's call. For a Christian man 
 every trade may be a calling as sacred as the ministry. 
 A man may be called to build houses or bake bread, 
 or sell clothes to the glory of God, as truly as a 
 preacher to preach the gospel. What makes the 
 service of Christ sacred is not the kind of work we 
 are doing, provided it is honest — it is the spirit in 
 which we do it, and the possibility of putting our 
 whole self into it. The world is in sore need of men 
 and women in definite Christian service at home and 
 abroad, but the world is dying for men and women 
 who will find in their work a sacred call and see 
 in it a means of expressing their loyalty to Christ. 
 What we need to-day, as some one says, is "the 
 spiritual mind in the man of the world." Our 
 choice of a profession must not be governed by the 
 money we can earn or the profit we can win. The 
 money pull in industry is the root of half our troubles. 
 When the quality of work is confused with the 
 
 I 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 193 
 
 quantity of wages and our service is determined by 
 our rewards, the devil gets into the business and our 
 life goes off the rails. I have known men and women 
 who made the choice of their destiny in the choice of 
 their life-work. They saw a path of service, which 
 they knew was the very call of God for them, where 
 they could have done magnificent work, but another 
 path tempted them with the promise of an easier life 
 and a higher material reward. They chose the lower 
 path, and ever after, the worm of dissatisfaction v/as 
 in their souls, eating into their happiness, while "that 
 great talent which were death to lose, lodged in them 
 useless." God does not want any man to be any- 
 thing else than himself He does not want an artist 
 to be a commercial man, or a man who would have 
 made a first-rate clerk to become an indifferent 
 minister. So far as we can, if the choice is open, we 
 must find the place where we can best use such gifts 
 as we have. How shall we hear the call ? To some 
 extent circumstances may guide us, but the whole 
 matter must be lifted into the light of Christ, with 
 the world's need open before us. We must begin 
 by putting ourselves at His disposal, and bit by bit 
 as we think the matter out in the spirit of a complete 
 surrender, circumstances will shape for us an open 
 door, and we will see our duty as clearly as a beckon- 
 ing hand. 
 
 But what of those who have no choice, or have 
 made their choice before they became alive to Christ, 
 and now find all other doors are shut? It may be 
 we are in a situation where, in the light of some new 
 experience, we should like to change our calling. 
 Many have already drifted into their niche by com- 
 pulsions not of their own making. What are we to 
 13 
 
194 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 say to them ? The word for them is surely this, — 
 that the compulsions of life must be accepted as the 
 call of God. If we are in a place from which there 
 is no escaping, that place is for us the place of our 
 calling. It is the place in the meantime where God 
 can help us to serve Him. The great thing is to take 
 our work and our gifts and put them at His disposal 
 there. Perhaps our work seems to give little scope for 
 the expression of our souls and we have to find the 
 full expression outside of it. Thousands are doing 
 routine tasks where they become mere machines, 
 working a lever or tending a loom the whole day 
 long, year in and year out. Their whole personality 
 is so depressed in those hours of labour that their 
 temptation is to fly to some excitement when their 
 work is done ; and one of the tasks that face us is so 
 to educate men that when routine work is over they 
 will be able to find an outlet for their minds in some 
 useful creative task or hobby. 
 
 But even in tiresome work there is room for the 
 triumph of a -Christian spirit. There is room for faith- 
 fulness and for honesty, and for doing the utmost 
 we can, putting our best effort into a dreary task. 
 These are the homespun virtues on which the world 
 moves. These are the foundation virtues on which the 
 happiness of the community is built, the very rock- 
 bottom of all prosperity and peace. Many a task is 
 dreary just because men are not putting their best 
 into it. The point of joy is always the point of 
 sacrifice. " When the sacrifice began, the song of the 
 Lord began also with the trumpets." Poor work 
 loses the power to produce the song in the heart. 
 Nothing takes the zest from labour like half-hearted 
 effort. " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, * labour 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 195 
 
 it up to the point of honour.' " All work can serve 
 Christ if it is useful to humanity. We put a notice 
 board at the church door stating that Divine Service 
 begins at eleven o'clock. The church door has no 
 right to a monopoly of that word. Above every 
 office door, shop, and factory, a Christian man will 
 read that notice illuminated by the inner light of the 
 Kingdom in his soul — Divine Service begins here at 
 seven o'clock or nine o'clock, as the case may be. 
 *' One is your Master, even Christ." The word still 
 holds, and holds of every activity of life. 
 
 What industry needs to-day is a new baptism of 
 the mastership of Jesus. Are there no changes we 
 can make in the quality of our work, if not in the 
 form of it? Would it not make a difference to the 
 whole standard of life's comfort and the prosperity 
 of our fellows if we took Christ into the workshop 
 with us and made our toil a fellowship with Him ? 
 Would it not change the dingiest workshop into some- 
 thing like a temple, if we knelt in spirit at the bench 
 at the day's beginning, like a priest at his altar, and 
 sought to consecrate our gifts and our tools to Christ. 
 
 Our work, whatever it be, is only a channel. The 
 task of a Christian man is the revelation of Jesus 
 That is our business. Paul had to leave his early 
 calling and scour the face of Europe with his gospel 
 to do it. He revealed Christ with his mind, his 
 tongue, his method, his friendship. He revealed Him 
 in the helping hand he held out to others, in the 
 courage and patience of his great soul liberated by 
 faith amid a tangle of difficulties in victorious service. 
 There is no part of our life in which the light of 
 Christian character may not break through some 
 chink or cranny. So far as we are Christian we 
 
196 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 are translating Christ to the world in everything we 
 do, as Christ revealed something of Himself in every 
 situation. And a man can translate Christ to his 
 fellows in the language of a finished piece of work, in 
 its limited degree, as clearly as he can in a book or 
 a poem or a sermon. The artist, the musician, the 
 carpenter, the business man may all reveal Jesus in 
 their conflict with the materials of their life. Dr. John 
 Brown tells how Thackeray and two friends were 
 walking out one night near Edinburgh while the red 
 sun was setting over the hills. They came to a quarry 
 from which a builder's crane stood up, with its cross 
 beams in relief against the evening sky, lit by the 
 dying splendour of the sun. They stood for a 
 moment gazing at it, while the same thought struck 
 them all, finding expression in one whispered word, 
 " Calvary." There is a sacrifice in all true labour in 
 which the spirit of man, at its best, shines out; as the 
 soul of Jesus was revealed upon the black and bitter 
 Cross. Have we ever seen in the drudgery which life 
 demands, the possibility of a Calvary in which our 
 souls may suffer to the point of pain, seeking to serve 
 the Kingdom with our best — and suffering, may 
 shine? 
 
 In these days in which we live, every calling has 
 larger opportunities than lie upon the surface. There 
 are men and women with whom our daily work brings 
 us into the closest contact. There are great problems 
 which every master and every man has some share in 
 solving. There are tasks facing every employer 
 to-day far greater than even the task of getting good 
 work done ; and every manual worker has business on 
 hand far greater than securing a minimum wage and 
 shorter hours. Every man has his opportunity, how- 
 
THE CALL OF CHRIST 197 
 
 ever small, of putting something, through his labour, 
 into the making of the new world towards which life 
 is leading us. What kind of spirit are we bringing 
 into the industry with which we are connected? 
 What spiritual quality is being liberated through the 
 calling in which we serve the world ? Is it the spirit 
 of goodwill, of unselfish labour, of fellowship? By 
 that spirit alone our industrial order will be brought 
 into peace and harmony, and that spirit is the spirit 
 of Christ. How many difficulties would vanish if 
 every master looked on his men as Paul looked on 
 those to whom he went to preach, " my brother, for 
 whom Christ died," men with personalities of their own 
 and qualities of soul craving expression in a worthy 
 life; and not as mere instruments of production ? How 
 many problems would be solved if every workman 
 looked on his employer as a man with his own task 
 and burden, caught often against his own will in the 
 toils of a system for which he is not responsible ? 
 
 The great thing is to get away from all thought of 
 rewards, into a sense of God's need of our labour and 
 our direct responsibility to Him. The early Chris- 
 tians had a great picture ever before their eyes, the 
 judgment-seat of Christ. No one stood between them 
 and God ; He came right into their life. It was He 
 in the last resort with whom they had to do. They 
 were fellow-labourers with Him in the great creative 
 and redeeming task. They were helping God to 
 finish His creation. In Him, amid the world's 
 censure and disappointment, they found their peace. 
 
 If there be good in that I wrought, 
 Thy hand compelled it. Master, Thine: 
 Where I have failed to meet Thy thought 
 I know, through Thee, the blame is mine. 
 
198 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 One instant's toil to Thee denied 
 Stands all Eternity's offence. 
 Of that I did with Thee to guide, 
 To Thee, through Thee be excellence. 
 
 Who, lest all thought of Eden fade, 
 Bring'st Eden to the craftsman's brain, 
 Godlike to muse o'er his own trade. 
 And Manlike, stand with God again. 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 
 
 **So when they had further threatened them, they let them go, . . , 
 And being let go, they went to their own company." — Acts iv. 21, 23. 
 
 This incident marks the passing of the first perilous 
 
 hour of the Christian Church. Up to this point it 
 
 had not been tried. It had been in the nursery, 
 
 living within doors, a quiet and secluded company 
 
 cherishing its sacred memories and lofty hopes in 
 
 prayer and fellowship. There was just the chance 
 
 that this faith might prove to be a kind of hothouse 
 
 plant which the breath of persecution or the freezing 
 
 contempt of the outside world would wither into 
 
 nothingness. And this chapter tells of the first flame 
 
 of that searching fire which leaped out upon them 
 
 and through which they had to walk till every bit of 
 
 shallowness and insincerity had been burnt out of 
 
 their faith. How well they stood this test before the 
 
 Council ! Unlettered though they were, they found 
 
 the gift of tongues. Dared to speak in Christ's name, 
 
 they made answer that they dared not be silent. 
 
 Threatened with every sort of dark and terrible fate, 
 
 they had a fear in their hearts which made them 
 
 proof against all other fear. 
 
 That hour before the Council was a revelation of 
 
 character of the great shining depths of affection and 
 
 loyalty to Christ which gleamed out of their rugged 
 
 souls. " When they saw the boldness of Peter and 
 
 199 
 
200 THE VICTORY OF GOD "" 
 
 John, they marvelled." But that is not the revelation 
 of which I want to speak. They had another test to 
 pass through — the hour of liberty when the long 
 strain was over and they stood in the street once 
 more. They were free to go where they liked and 
 to do what they chose — and they went to their own 
 company. In its own way this was a revelation of the 
 sincerity of their faith. It was a declaration of their 
 secret souls. It revealed where their treasure was, 
 and the things they valued most in life. Where did 
 they go? They went to Stephen the martyr, and 
 Mary of Bethany, and Matthew the Publican, and 
 all the rest of that band of shining spirits — the very i 
 aristocracy of Christ. Could there be a clearer i 
 picture of the kind of men they were than this ? 
 When they let them go, they went to their own i 
 company. 
 
 To-day we think m.uch of liberty, and speak much 
 of liberty. All the currents of our time are flowing 
 in the direction of a freer life, fewer hours of labour, 
 less bondage of convention, less restrictions of any 
 kind. Time was when men dared not say what they 
 chose, or print what they wrote, or worship as their 
 hearts bade them. We have moved from that 
 bondage long ago. To-day, one after another, the 
 old conventions are breaking. There is our way of 
 spending Sunday, for instance; for good or ill, the 
 old set ways of quietness and restricted pleasure are 
 passing. People have different ways of looking at 
 this drift toward liberty. Some are afraid of it ; they 
 look on it as a danger. There are those who tell us 
 we have too little of that State control of our indi- 
 vidual lives which made Germany before the war so 
 efficient, its people so docile in their bravery and 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 201 
 
 their brutality, so easily driven to daring or devil- 
 ment. Others, on the other hand, look on liberty as 
 a glorious privilege, and a positive good in itself what- 
 ever it may lead to. For the moment let us look on 
 liberty as this incident suggests — a test of character, 
 a gift which reveals as nothing else can do, the kind 
 of men and women we are. The hours of freedom are 
 the searching, self-revealing hours of life. What we 
 do then, think then, seek then, shows us what we are. 
 When we are let go, we go to our own company. 
 
 There are numberless illustrations of this. To 
 begin with, the hour of liberty from labour is a self- 
 revealing hour. No one will deny that looking at a 
 man's work, you can tell something about him. 
 Character tells in the way we work and the kind of 
 work we do. Slipshod work means shoddy character. 
 Thorough work means a patient soul. Ruskin in his 
 Stones of Venice describes a statue high up in a 
 Venetian church, which to the outward eye was 
 finished with exquisite skill, but if you climbed up to 
 examine it more closely you had a rude shock, for 
 the back of the statue, hidden from the spectator's 
 eye, was left in its rough state — the work of a man 
 who wrought only for appearances and cared little 
 for the best. But ten years later, as Ruskin tells, 
 having looked up the records, that man was banished 
 from the city for forgery. There was a flaw in his 
 character which ran all through. A man's person- 
 ality is a unity. " The heart," says Emerson, " cannot 
 be hid." Is there a streak of baseness somewhere 
 about a man, is there a vein of gold among the dross, 
 then it will run all through like a stratum in the rocks. 
 You will meet it cropping up in his home life, in his 
 friendships, in his worship, if you can look deep 
 
202 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 enough ; but the place where that streak of baseness 
 or that vein of gold will show up most is the hour of 
 leisure. When the clock strikes six, where does the 
 mind travel, where do the feet begin to move ? 
 What are the pleasures we naturally seek, when 
 we are absolutely free to use time as we please? 
 What kind of thoughts do we think in the off-hours 
 when we have no need to concentrate on the business 
 in hand ? What castles in the air do we build in the 
 hour of the liberated imagination ? What friends do 
 we seek, and having found them, what is the trend 
 of conversation when there is no absorbing topic of 
 the moment? Does it run up or down? These 
 things are judging us, showing us if we will only 
 open our eyes, something, at least, of the kind of men 
 and women we are at heart. 
 
 Or again, character is tested and revealed by the 
 things men do when the leading strings of youth fall 
 off. There is a perilous time in the life of every 
 young man or woman, like this time in the early 
 Church. It is the hour when the angel-guidance 
 leaves us, as the angel left Peter, and we go down 
 the big wide street of life alone. A young man's 
 character will be seen in the way he treats his parents, 
 when there is no longer need to obey them, in the 
 deference he pays to their counsels, to their demands, 
 even when these are querulous and galling. And the 
 thing that reveals it best is the first hour of inde- 
 pendence when a young man is on "his own." What 
 customs does he fling off then ? How do his affec- 
 tions, his tastes develop ? Is he true or false to the 
 principles he held — or thought he held? Has the 
 fireside teaching reached his blood or only his brain ? 
 It is then he will learn, if he will, how much of his 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 203 
 
 cToodness has been real and vital, and how much 
 has been skin-deep; what of his principles have been 
 his own and not merely a borrowed light ; how much 
 of his character has been a solid building and not a 
 ramshackle structure kept standing by the props of 
 others' compulsion and example. 
 
 There are people who speak of the first taste of 
 dissipation, in phrases that try to take the taint from 
 it • as the inevitable stumbling before men find their 
 feet • as the sowing of wild oats before men settle 
 down • as a careless abandon due to the first intoxi- 
 cating taste of liberty. The truth is that every 
 temptation which lures us at the moment of liberty 
 is revealing something in us which responds to it. 
 There is no temptation in all God's wide world the 
 sucraestion of which does not touch some chord in 
 ourown sensitive souls that maybe we have never 
 known was there till then. The hour of liberty hfts 
 the curtain from the inner life and shows us what 
 is lurking within. 
 
 This word has a very real bearing upon our 
 national life. For five years our nation was in the 
 chains of a noble effort. Some were chained to 
 munition work, some to hospitals, to the Army or 
 the Navy— and there is no bondage so careless of 
 personality as that— but the hour of freedom came. 
 How are we using it? We have hardly had time 
 to recover from the rebound and the question is still 
 unanswered. But the next few years will be the 
 clearest revelation of the national character we have 
 had for long. We speak of war as a test, and it has 
 been a test, but the years of war brought their own 
 exhilarations, and its power to reveal our character, 
 our real character, will be nothing to that of these 
 
204 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 hard-won, blood-bought years of liberty. We often 
 spoke of what we were learning in war; the years 
 that face us will reveal the depth and seriousness of 
 the lesson. The question before us to-day is the 
 question of how we are going to use our liberty. 
 What defilements will we cleanse away ? What bonds 
 of custom will we break ? How will the national life 
 shape itself? In what direction will we let loose our 
 energies ? The years ahead will test us, and by that 
 test we will stand or fall. 
 
 Now it may be said we have been speaking of 
 liberty as a perilous thing, and some one may ask 
 the question why it should have been looked upon as 
 so precious} Why have men been willing to suffer 
 and die for it ? Why has the whole urge of noble 
 manhood carried us out toward wider liberties? 
 Why has God Himself inspired these struggles for 
 liberty? For, remember, there is no great struggle 
 for freedom which has not religion at the back of it. 
 It is a common habit to think of religion simply as a 
 binding force, and some people fling it off as a kind of 
 shackle. Yet there is nothing which has broken so 
 many bonds, nothing that has given man such power 
 to crush tyranny, as faith. A man never knows what 
 a stifled, imprisoned life he has been living till he 
 begins to breathe the air of faith. " Faith is the 
 highest of high explosives." How many liberties 
 came in with Jesus! What is forgiveness but the 
 gift of freedom, the grace of a second chance, a glad 
 new day for the man who has been sunk in some 
 degrading bondage. Why, then, has God inspired 
 this struggle right down through the ages, and 
 awakened this desire of liberty ? Why is liberty so 
 precious to God if so perilous to man ? 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 205 
 
 To begin with, the hour of liberty is piecious 
 because it is the hour of self-determination. It is 
 the hour of the making of manhood and womanhood. 
 The old beautiful story in the first chapters of Genesis 
 tells of the gift of liberty God gave to man at his 
 birth. He made him free of all the trees in the 
 garden except one, but he put no fences round that 
 tree ; man could eat of it if he chose. And why were 
 there no fences there? Because, only through choice, 
 through the crisis of decision, through the freedom 
 to take his own way, could man rise into manhood 
 and struggle into power. You will never turn a 
 child into a man by keeping him in leading-strings. 
 Do not mistake me. There is far too little bondacre, 
 reasonable restriction, in the home-life of to-day. 
 No man is fit to use his liberty till he has spent his 
 opening years doing exactly as he is told, where the 
 hand of compulsion is wise, and where in every 
 possible case parents will give him a reason and 
 enlist his will through his mind. Such wise com- 
 pulsion will teach habits that cannot be learned any 
 other way. It will train the wild shoots at the time 
 when they are liable to riot, and give the tree the 
 best chance of growing straight. But a point comes 
 where these bonds must fail, must be cut, if the tree 
 is to flourish into its best. No man can grow into 
 manhood save by the struggle and the travail of great 
 decision made, by himself and for himself, in the lonely 
 spaces of his own unfettered soul. It is by that 
 struggle and stress we grow. 
 
 The things we do in this perilous and precious hour 
 of liberty make or mar us. It is the friends we choose 
 of our own free affection that have the keeping of our 
 souls, not those that are forced upon us. It is the 
 
2o6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 decision we make when we are free, that determines 
 our destiny. It is the deeds we do when the chain 
 is off, that stamp upon our nature the marks of doom 
 or glory. It is the worship to which we give our- 
 selves in the freedom of our aspiration, the prayers 
 that start out of the heart's agony, though they be 
 but a sob, which bring us the peace and the power 
 of God's presence. An old writer on liberty, when 
 the first glory of religious freedom began to dawn in 
 England, set down his reason for religious toleration. 
 " I may grow rich by a word I take no delight in. I 
 may be cured of some diseases by medicines I have 
 no faith in ; but I cannot be saved by a religion I 
 detest or a ritual I abhor." There is no real goodness 
 which does not come from the goodwill. Christ 
 Himself refuses a love which is forced, an allegiance 
 which is not free ; in point of fact there is no such 
 thing. 
 
 But there is another reason for the preciousness of 
 liberty. It is God's faith that if a man be free, really 
 free — there is something in him deeper than anything 
 else, something in the very centre of his being, which 
 will start out and lead him straight to God. Take 
 it for granted : a man is not at home till he has 
 found his home in God. And the hour when bonds 
 break and he is alone, unfettered, brings the awaking 
 of home-sickness. Not when he was living in the 
 household with all its regulations did the prodigal 
 awake to the blessedness of home ; but in the far 
 country when, one after another, his false friends 
 had cast him off. Bit by bit, the spell of sin was 
 broken and he was alone in the desert. Then his 
 heart turned back to home, and the prayer broke out 
 like water from a long choked fountain, " I will arise, 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 207 
 
 and go to my father." When he was let go, he went 
 to his own company. Men have sometimes kept an 
 imprisoned bird for a year or two, giving it now and 
 again its freedom under the delusion that they could 
 tame it, so that it would never crave its native air. 
 But one day the window was left open and it hopped 
 into the sunshine, looked around, tried its wings, and 
 was off to return no more. Nature and the wide sky 
 and the company of its own kind called it because it 
 belonged to these, and in freedom it found itself. 
 
 Nothing can finally force a creature — man or beast 
 — to be content with an alien bondage. Some day 
 in the hour of freedom it will seek its own, or long to 
 seek it, with a longing which nothing in its sheltered 
 surroundings can quite repress. Hawthorne has a 
 weird story of a birthmark which marred the face of 
 a very beautiful woman. She married a husband 
 who adored her, and to make her still more beauti- 
 ful he sought and found a chemical which would 
 remove the birthmark. He used it and the mark 
 disappeared like the stain of the rainbow fading 
 out of the sky ; but that day the woman died. A 
 strange tale ! What does it mean ? We can make 
 our own interpretation. It might suggest that in the 
 most perfect attachment, for the discipline of our 
 forbearance, there is always something which love 
 has to live down — some imperfection to make us love 
 one another, as Mrs. Browning puts it, " for love's sake 
 only," and not for some pretty touch of manner or 
 surface beauty. But on the other hand, it might 
 suggest that on every one of us there is a birthmark, 
 the mark of our origin in God, and you cannot 
 remove that mark without destroying the man 
 himself. It is in us, as the rainbow is part of the 
 
208 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 sky. Deeper than all conventions, deeper than the 
 stain of sin, deeper than any pressure of tyranny to 
 slay or smother, it belongs to us ; and it is God's faith 
 for you and me, that in the hour of freedom we shall 
 seek and find our own in God. 
 
 Here, then, is the safeguard of liberty — to see it 
 in this light. All liberty is God's gift — our free 
 hours, our free lives, the freedom which is our 
 heritage to-day. Freedom is not safe for any one 
 of us till we see it as a sacred trust. It is God's 
 trust, and His purpose by the gift of it, is to draw our 
 lives to Him. In point of fact, our only real freedom 
 is the freedom to choose our master, and only as we 
 choose God for our Master do we keep our liberty. 
 Life's revenge upon us for misused liberty is always 
 to bring us under some darker bondage. 
 
 The end of the war has brought freedom to us in 
 many ways. For some people it has come in the 
 uprooting of the old life so that they are free to make 
 a new beginning. For others it has meant a recovery 
 of their manhood and the discovery in themselves of 
 powers unrealized — courage, and comradeship, and 
 energy, which war has awakened and used and then 
 released. For some of us freedom has come in ways 
 that are shadowed and dark. Old ties are broken. 
 Ambitions we cherished for some we loved are 
 shattered. Avenues of hope are blocked. We have 
 been detached and set free. Yet in this freedom, is 
 there not a call of God? Can we not find, even 
 in the sorrow which has closed some doors, a way 
 opening up to a larger usefulness, which but for 
 this sad liberation had been impossible? If death 
 has loosened anchors, is it not a call to launch out 
 upon God's tide, to use our lives for some purpose 
 
THE TESTING HOUR OF LIBERTY 209 
 
 which is more directly vital to His Kingdom ? Is 
 there no one we can help, for instance, with the 
 money we would have lavished on the boy who died 
 for country, no work for Christ that waits to fill the 
 empty hands? 
 
 And freedom has come to our nation, old ideas are 
 fading, old prejudices are breaking down, old customs 
 are dying, the dark shadow that has threatened us 
 for a generation has been rolled away. How shall 
 we use our freedom ? That is God's call to us to-day. 
 Patriotism as a national ideal is not enough for a 
 nation such as ours, with our power of spiritual 
 leadership among the nations. There is only one 
 safeguard for us. It is to remember that our liberty 
 is a trust, a trust from God. The blood of struggling 
 saints and heroic soldiers is in it. The shadow of the 
 Cross of Calvary, within which every sacrifice takes 
 its rise, is over it. We are not our own, we are 
 bought with a price. Our freedom is not our own. 
 It is theirs. It is God's. Wherefore, in the new 
 free days that lie before us, " let us glorify God with 
 our bodies and our spirits, which are God's." 
 
 14 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH I 
 
 "^ 
 
 " By faith the Israelites passed through the Red Sea : . . . which 
 the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned." — Heb. xi. 29. 
 
 Nothing can teach us so much as history, if we 
 read it aright. There is only one way to read it 
 aright — by the light of God. That is what the Bible 
 does for us ; it gives us history read by the light 
 of God. It illuminates the events of life in their 
 spiritual significance which is their only real and 
 final significance. 
 
 This sentence is a lightning sketch of a great his- 
 torical event seen in the light of God. Here are 
 two bodies of men facing the same difficulty. They 
 have gone out on the same road, the one pursued, the 
 other pursuing. There is very little to choose between 
 them so far as the eye can see, except that we 
 would imagine the Egyptians had the best chance of 
 overcoming the impasse. Yet the one failed and the 
 other succeeded. The Israelites got over dry-shod, 
 while the Egyptians were swamped in the waters and 
 were utterly lost. Wherein lay the difference? That 
 is what the writer explains in our text. He is not 
 dealing with this matter from the scientific point 
 of view. His business is not with the mechanical 
 process by which the Red Sea was crossed. He is 
 concerned with the spiritual secret which in the end 
 lies behind all physical processes — the final root of all 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 211 
 
 victorious achievement even in the brute struggle of 
 life. It was more than a coincidence, more than mere 
 bad luck. The secret lies deeper. It lies deep down 
 in the roots of the soul, in the attitude with which 
 they were facing life. By faith, says the writer, the 
 Israelites crossed over the Red Sea. And faith is 
 the spiritual attitude to life. It is the attitude by 
 which men see life's meaning in God, and launch 
 themselves out upon the hopes and promises and 
 promptings which rise within the soul when we get 
 face to face with God. There lay the difference. 
 The one set had the spiritual attitude to life ; they 
 were obeying a spiritual instinct ; they were giving 
 themselves up to the challenge and call of God within 
 their souls. The others had no faith. They were 
 out only for their own advantage; they were living 
 for the moment ; for the pleasure and prosperity of 
 the hour. They saw nothing in this upheaval of 
 the Israelites except a movement of rebellion which 
 was going to deprive them of the source of their 
 wealth and comfort. There lay the difference, and 
 when it came to a crisis, the one set survived, and the 
 other went down. By faith the Israelites passed 
 through the Red Sea : which the Egyptians assaying 
 to do were drowned. 
 
 Now this is a tremendously suggestive way of 
 putting things. It sends its light into the life, 
 to-day, both of men and nations, in many directions. 
 There are two things which lie upon the surface. 
 The one is that it is not circumstances that count in 
 life; it is the men who face them. In other words, 
 it makes all the difference in any situation what kind 
 of man is facing it. The key to events lies in the 
 men and women who play their part in them. Some- 
 
212 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 times a difificult problem arises in politics or engineer- 
 ing, and a tremendous task has to be faced. Can it 
 be done? men ask, and they get to work upon the 
 circumstances, figuring things out and making calcula- 
 tions. They make up their minds perhaps that on 
 the facts the thing is impossible ; and then some one 
 defies all their calculations and does the thing in 
 spite of them. One man will succeed where a dozen 
 of others will fail. One man will quell a stormy 
 meeting with an argument which would only arouse 
 laughter if it were used by another. When David 
 Livingstone stood facing the Kalahari desert and 
 looked longingly across to the other side, he was 
 warned on every hand that it was no use attempt- 
 ing it, for others had tried better equipped than he, 
 and their bones lay white on the desert sand. But 
 Livingstone went and got through. There is only 
 one explanation ; he was David Livingstone, and 
 they were not. The secret of success or failure does 
 not lie in circumstances. It lies in the spirit of the 
 men and women who tackle the difficulty, and in the 
 secret roots of personality from which their strength 
 is drawn. These two sets of people went out to 
 meet the same barrier under the same conditions. 
 There was no reason in nature why the Red Sea 
 should have yielded to the one and not to the other. 
 The difference lay within themselves. The one set 
 were Israelites and the others were Egyptians. 
 
 The second thing which lies upon the surface is 
 this, that the vital difference between one man and 
 another lies in the possession of faith, or the want of 
 it. The secret of triumph is victorious personality, and 
 that is the product of creative faith. Faith is always 
 creative. It puts that into a situation which changes 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 213 
 
 everything. On the surface, the Egyptians should 
 have won. They were far better equipped. They 
 had the advantage of civilization and the gift of a 
 hundred vanished arts. They were highly skilled 
 and efficient in many departments of life, as we 
 know from their ancient monuments. The Israelites 
 were a race of slaves, cowed in spirit, petty and 
 shortsighted, wearied out with years of drilling and 
 tyranny. But they had faith and the others had 
 not. It was only a spark of faith they had, a mere 
 germ which a chance visitor would hardly have 
 detected. But faith is a thing of infinite possibilities. 
 As Christ has told us, even though it be small as a 
 grain of mustard seed it lays open to us the resources 
 of God. It links men on with the strength of the 
 eternal. It brings into life the powers of the unseen 
 world. There is nothing to which it cannot grow, 
 and nothing in life which will not yield to it, if only 
 it be real. It is the final secret of all efficiency, 
 even in the things of this world. Zinzendorf the 
 Moravian mystic, was fond of riding and could 
 master the wildest horse in his father's stables. 
 Some one remarked on his efficiency in horseman- 
 ship and wondered how it could exist in a man of 
 his unworldly mind. His answer was that only the 
 man who is living above the world is the master of 
 the world. 
 
 There are people who imagine that faith is a mere 
 fancy, a kind of additional grace added to life, a thing 
 of taste or temperament. It is the greatest of mis- 
 takes. Faith is the one vital thing in life, the one 
 thing which makes the real difference between one 
 man and another. It is high time we Christian 
 people realized the vital value of our faith in God 
 
2 14 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 There never was a time when we needed more to 
 insist on the difference between a religious man and 
 an unbeliever. The truth is, that in the last resort 
 faith is the one thing that counts. The thing that 
 really measures and judges a man, is what he is in 
 the deeps of his spirit in relation to Jesus Christ. 
 How do we stand toward Christ? that is our real 
 standing in the world. What place does Christ take 
 in our lives ? That is the real test of life's efficiency in 
 such a world as this. That is the heart of everything — 
 the secret of personality, by which we make our mark 
 on things in the long run. It may not appear on the 
 surface at first ; but it is the root of everything — our 
 influence, our power, our character, our service ; and 
 in the long run it determines our destiny. Every- 
 thing comes out of that hidden fountain of person- 
 ality of which our secret life is attuned to God, and 
 to the purposes of His Kingdom. 
 
 So from the heights of Will 
 Life's parting stream descends. 
 And as a moment turns each slender rill 
 Each widening torrent bends, — 
 
 From the same cradle's side. 
 From the same mother's knee, 
 One to long darkness and the frozen tide, 
 One to the Peaceful Sea. 
 
 It was the moment when their souls were lit with the 
 spark of faith and hope and they gave themselves up 
 to its light and leading, which decided the destiny of 
 these Israelites, and their souls reached the power to 
 master circumstances and bend them to their will. 
 
 Now if we want proof, that the religious man is the 
 master of all things and has the power of shaping 
 life, we have it in one familiar fact. We are for ever 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 215 
 
 being forced by the very necessities of our life, into 
 situations where we cannot do without God, and the 
 power which faith brings into Hfe. When we take it 
 seriously, life is always carrying us into circumstances 
 which we cannot meet and master without the help 
 of God. Here is a young man who is forced out into 
 life by the necessity of his career. He goes from his 
 quiet home into the wider world, to a great city, it 
 may be to a foreign land. In a moment he finds 
 himself up against strange and intoxicating tempta- 
 tions, where he is in constant peril of being carried 
 off his feet. It comes to him that if he is to meet 
 these things fairly and keep his footing, he must find 
 something to hold on to, something big enough to 
 quell the illusion of temptation that is for ever laying 
 its spell upon his soul. He is up against a situation 
 in which there is no help for him except in a new look 
 at Jesus Christ, strong enough and vivid enough to 
 bring into his soul the glory of redeeming grace. 
 Through faith he can meet these things, without faith 
 he will go down. 
 
 Or take the fact of sorrow. Sooner or later we are 
 forced up against it. A big cloud swoops down upon 
 us like a thunderstorm in a summer sky. All our 
 life is in ruins. That is a common situation. How 
 are we to meet it without going under? We may 
 try one thing and another, but before long it comes 
 to us that we cannot meet it without God. The 
 ordinary commonplaces of comfort are not enough ; 
 they are insipid ; they are an insult to a broken heart. 
 Spiritualism is not enough ; though the very craze 
 for spiritualism is one of the best testimonials that 
 was ever given to the spiritual nature of man. It is 
 a confession that in the hour of sorrow we are up 
 
21 6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 against a situation which we cannot meet without 
 drawing upon the resources of the Unseen. When 
 a great singer lost his only son in the war, he said to 
 a friend, " When a man comes to a thing like this, 
 there are just three ways of it. There is drink, there 
 is despair, and there is God; and by His grace, it's 
 God for me." By faith, in such an hour, we shall get 
 through and keep our footing and our hope ; without 
 faith we shall be drowned ! 
 
 Perhaps it is the necessity of the world's need 
 which sends us out to a difficult situation. God 
 knows it is oftentimes harder to see others suffer than 
 to suffer ourselves, and especially to see the suffering 
 of those we love. On the impulse, we rush in to help. 
 We yearn to take some sinking soul, and lift him up. 
 We long to save some one from the grip of a habit 
 which is dragging him down to the depths. Is there 
 anything more baffling, more disheartening, anything 
 which throws a greater strain on our patience, on 
 our faith in humanity, than to look at the world as 
 it is in many places and to try to do some service in 
 it? The world is full of people who have tried to 
 meet its need and have gone under, finding their own 
 faith swamped in wave after wave of cynicism and 
 despair which came over their souls. There is only 
 one way in which a man dare meet the need of the 
 world, dare face its crushing burdens and sins, — by a 
 new and victorious faith in God and in the amazing 
 potency of grace. Sooner or later we must come to 
 that, or go down. I have known students for the 
 ministry who left their college, after training, with a 
 very feeble faith, riddled with intellectual doubts — 
 they were, of course, only cutting their wisdom teeth. 
 But when they went out and faced the bitter needs 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 217 
 
 of the world, it came to them that they must find a 
 living Christ, a divine and radiant Saviour, or else have 
 no message that would meet the need of to-day and 
 renew the miracles of the New Testament. By a full 
 and passionate faith, they could get through and go 
 on ; without it, they must have gone under in despair. 
 These are but passing illustrations of this great 
 fact that we are out in a world where there is no help 
 for us but in God. We may cry out as some men 
 do upon such a world as this. There is a picture by 
 a great artist, which depicts God in the act of making 
 His world. As the vision of it, with all its terror and 
 tragedy, looms up amid chaos, there is one who says 
 to Him, " If about to make such a world as that, 
 stay Thine hand." This is how we all feel sometimes. 
 But the truth is, the world was never meant for the 
 man who would live in it without the power and hope 
 of a living faith. We have no right to meet life 
 without God and then complain about it ! Life is a 
 spiritual adventure which we can only face upon the 
 terms of faith. The love that made the world, alone 
 can give us power to live in it. The God who made 
 us free, has resources in His grace enough to meet 
 every situation — even those we create by the abuse 
 of freedom. That is a great word of Paul's, that in 
 God we live and move and have our being. What 
 does it mean but just this, that the whole order of 
 things is a spiritual order. It is from God's hand we 
 take it, and we dare not take it without God any 
 more than a captain dare face the ocean without that 
 contact with the magnetic current by which his 
 compass is directed, without the sun and stars by 
 which he steers. Without God and the contact with 
 Him which comes by faith, life is a vast meaningless 
 
2i8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 ocean swept by tides and tempests which have us at 
 their mercy, so that we become derelict. In God we 
 live and move and have our being, and it is only as 
 we keep our being in God, that we can live and move. 
 ^ This incident has a very special application to our' 
 time and to its needs. Life has forced us in these 
 days upon a very difficult adventure. We are moving 
 into a time in which we shall need more faith than 
 ever men had before. 
 
 There is the international situation, for instance. 
 How is that to be met? One thing is certain, we 
 must get out of the old place in which we have lived 
 so long, into a land of new relationships between the 
 nations. God is calling us, by the very shudder in 
 our soul and the ghastly experience of war, to find 
 a new way of living. It is unthinkable, in spite of 
 the prophecies of famous generals, that we should 
 begin to plan our life afresh on the basis of future 
 wars. God is calling us to such a new way of life as is 
 foreshadowed in the League of Nations. To be sure, 
 that has its difficulties. So had the journey to the 
 promised land for the Israelites ; it had its difficulties. 
 There was the Red Sea to begin with, and if they 
 had waited till everything was clear, they would never 
 have gone out at all. The League of Nations has 
 its difficulties and its risks. It means a pooling of 
 interests. It means a call to sacrifice and to un- 
 selfishness. It means exchanging the old securities 
 for the forces which are awakened by a great-hearted 
 faith in God and in one another and in the power of 
 justice and righteousness— to hold the nations together 
 and bring them into a way of peace. There is no 
 going back ! And there is no going forward without 
 this faith and all that proceeds from it. The League 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 219 
 
 will be what we make it by the spirit we breathe into 
 it. It will have the power we put into it, and the 
 power by which it can stand is the power that comes 
 from the vision of the Kingdom. By faith we shall 
 cross over, without faith we shall go down. 
 
 And there is the national situation to-day. Here 
 again we are being forced out into a new world. 
 The old world of self-interest has become too narrow 
 for the growing soul of democracy. Put it as we like, 
 that is the inner meaning of it. Great classes of men 
 are moving out to demand a new voice in the direction 
 of their own affairs. They have caught a vision of 
 a promised land, the whole nation has caught that 
 vision — the vision of a new Britain — and we are out 
 to find it. But the way is full of peril. There are 
 rocks ahead and barriers which must be overcome. 
 The Red Sea was a trifling obstacle to the Israelites, 
 compared with the transitions which we are facing 
 to-day. And the question is, how are we facing them. 
 Have we faith enough in God and in one another ? 
 Is there vision enough in the rising democracy to 
 lead it clear of the swamps of sheer materialism and 
 class-selfishness ? Is there vision enough in the stal- 
 warts of the old order, to let the past go at the right 
 moment, as men on the harbourside let go the cables 
 when the ship is ready to start out. The crux of the 
 matter is, that we are being forced into a new way 
 of social and economic life, which demands spiritual 
 qualities — goodwill and unselfishness and loyalty to 
 one another. Do we realize that these can only come 
 from faith in God and a new vision of His Kingdom? 
 
 We shall never get through till we all bring the 
 mind of Christ to bear upon the situation. It is an 
 hour when the nation needs men of faith and vision 
 
2 20 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 at the helm of State, men who will steer by the stars 
 and not grope from point to point with the rush-light 
 of expediency. In 1652, when things were going 
 badly with this nation in the war with Holland, the 
 great John Owen preached to Parliament, " You take 
 counsel with your own hearts. You advise with one 
 another. You hearken unto men with a repute of 
 wisdom, and all this doth but increase your trouble. 
 You do but more and more entangle and disquiet 
 your own spirits. God stands by, and says, * I am 
 wise also,' and very little notice is taken of Him." 
 Does not that strike the note of our need. God 
 stands by, as He stood by the Red Sea ; God stands 
 by. Are we going to bring in His wisdom, the 
 guidance that comes through prayer, the faith that 
 comes by seeing men and things with the eyes of 
 Jesus. Ours is a fatal situation for anything short of 
 a full and vital and wide-hearted faith. 
 
 And there is a message here for the Church of 
 Christ. What is the secret of the Church's weakness, 
 in the life of to-day? For we cannot deny that 
 weakness, in some respects at least. Let us get to 
 the root of it. Are we living up to our resources in 
 God? Are we meeting the tasks of life with the 
 requisite faith? Are we staying our souls on the 
 mighty forces which are in Christ ? Are we drawing 
 from Him to give to the world what He has to give? 
 Is the witness of our daily life clear and shining? 
 Are we reaching a personal victory over sin and 
 circumstance, by redeeming grace? Spiritual tasks 
 demand spiritual men. Are we facing the tasks of 
 the Kingdom in the spirit of the Kingdom ? Have 
 we put on the whole armour of God ? We cannot 
 live the Christian life, or make the Christian witness 
 
THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH 221 
 
 which our day demands, on a starvation diet of narrow 
 views of God, and anaemic hopes of what Christ can 
 do for us. To put the question in another way, are 
 we working up to our strength ? Are we facing the 
 tasks we ought to face? Is there any Red Sea in 
 our experience ? Are we coming up against any 
 insuperable difficulty? Have we gone out to do 
 anything so hazardous, so big, that failure means de- 
 struction, and defeat means the loss of everything? 
 That is the kind of task to which God calls the 
 Church in all the ages. He calls us to attempt things 
 which are impossible on the face of them, where 
 failure means calamity. But that is just God's way 
 of leading us, His way of discovering Himself. 
 We speak sometimes of a desperate situation. That 
 is the very kind of situation in which the Church may 
 become alive ! When we are on the biink of despair^ 
 we are really on the edge of a victo7'ious faith. Is not 
 part of the reason of our poverty this — that we have 
 not been living on levels of service where we must 
 have God — or die? It is told of a famous Edinburgh 
 preacher that when he felt himself losing grip of a 
 vital gospel, he took a walk through the worst slums 
 of the city on a Saturday night. What he saw there 
 sent him back to his knees and to his Bible, to explore 
 afresh the redeeming reality of Jesus. 
 
 Beside every impasse God stands till we come up 
 to it, waiting to work the miracle, waiting to reveal 
 Himself in the endowment of power. God never 
 gives any man power in reserve. We live only by 
 the grace we are forced to use. In the Pilgrim's 
 Progress, Bunyan puts this very clearly. Christian 
 went out at the secret bidding of his soul with his 
 face to the light, went on till he fell into a slough 
 
22 2 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 that lay just across the road ; and being in it went on, 
 still with his face to the light, though he could see no 
 way of getting out. Then, and not till then, did he 
 see the stretched-out hand of Help, who mysteriously 
 came and mysteriously went — none other than the 
 Holy Spirit Himself. Only when we face tasks in 
 His name which put a strain upon our faith, only 
 then will rise within us the strength of God. 
 
THE TROUBLED LIFE AND THE 
 UNTROUBLED HEART 
 
 "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. . . . Let not 
 your heart be troubled." — ^John xiv. 27. 
 
 The word " peace " falls on our ears to-day with the 
 sound of far-off music. For years we have longed 
 and prayed for peace. To-day it seems farther off 
 than ever. The years since the Armistice have been 
 the most disappointing years in the last half-century. 
 We are living through a time of so many disillusion- 
 ments, that hopefulness has almost become the kind 
 of thing of which a good man is half ashamed. Miss 
 Underbill, in an article in the Hibbert Journal^ 
 describes the civilized world to-day as " living under 
 a cloud. Like a neurotic man whose sickness has no 
 name and few definite symptoms beyond general 
 uneasiness and loss of hope, it is incapable of the 
 existence which it feels to be wholesome and com- 
 plete. Impotent and uncertain of aim, society is 
 becoming more and more querulous and less and less 
 reasonable. Sometimes it seeks violent and destruc- 
 tive changes as the only cure for its state. Some- 
 times it tries grotesque and superstitious remedies. 
 Sometimes it relapses into apathy." That is a true 
 description of the malady of the age. . It is easy to 
 
 say that we are suffering at present from the inevit- 
 
 223 
 
2 24 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 able reactions of war, and comfort ourselves with 
 reading history. It is true, that in a sense we are 
 suffering from unhealed wounds, and that some day, 
 if we have patience, the wounds will heal and we shall 
 recover our wonted buoyancy. But unhealed wounds, 
 as every surgeon knows, are dangerous. They may 
 become septic, or make a gathering point for a deep- 
 seated poison which is seeking some outlet. And 
 all the while we are talking about leaving the cure to 
 time, it may be that deep-seated poison in the system 
 which needs to be dealt with and got rid of, before 
 the wounds will heal and the body have peace. 
 In any case we can be sure that if the secret of 
 peace is to be found, it is Christ alone who has the 
 real prescription. The key to peace is in His hands 
 
 the peace of the heart and the peace of the world. 
 
 " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. 
 Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
 
 afraid." 
 
 Now what is the nature of this peace of Christ? 
 He describes it as " My peace ... not as the world 
 giveth." He knows, as we all know, that there are 
 various ways of finding peace. Some find peace by 
 an escape. They run away from the things that 
 trouble them. They find means of diverting their 
 minds and of insulating their lives, so that no live 
 wire of outside trouble can bring any shock to their 
 self-centred system. There are people, indeed, who 
 contrive to take advantage of situations which bring 
 trouble to others. Never a ship is wrecked but some 
 one will be waiting to gather up the debris and build 
 a house out of it to keep himself warm from the 
 storms in which others go down. But, however we 
 may find peace, no honourable man can accept it at 
 
THE TROUBLED LIFE 225 
 
 the expense of ignoring the facts of life, or sheltering 
 himself against the troubles which are threatening 
 others. When the world is racked and bleeding all 
 around us, a true man will even ask himself the 
 question whether he has any right to peace of mind 
 at all. Can we take peace even from the hands of 
 Christ, and be loyal to a world in which God has 
 made us one family ? Dare we find peace, even in 
 religion, if it means running away from life ? There 
 were many great souls among those who went into 
 the cloisters in olden days. They went there to keep 
 the fire of faith alive and to make their protest, by a 
 holy life, against a world grown so vicious that there 
 seemed little hope of saving it from without. But we 
 cannot help having the same kind of feeling about 
 the man who finds in devotion and prayer a selfish 
 security from wind and storm as we would have felt 
 about any of the Allies if during the war they had 
 made a separate peace. If there is a peace of God 
 for you and me to-day, amid the trouble around us — 
 and this is the offer of Christ — it must be a peace 
 which will not drug our soul or side-track us from 
 the main road of the struggling world. It must be 
 a peace within the storm, not outside of the storm. 
 It must be a peace which faces facts, not a peace 
 which puts on blinkers against realities. 
 
 It is that kind of honourable peace which Christ 
 offers us. " My peace," He said. Think for a moment 
 of the circumstances in which the offer was made. 
 He was at the very storm-centre of a world seething 
 with hatred and unrest. Black tempests were gather- 
 ing around Him. He was facing the ordeal of His 
 Cross. He was bowed down beneath a load of 
 suffering and grief and disappointment which nearly 
 
 15 
 
2 26 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 crushed Hiir;. He was hiding nothing of it all from 
 Himself. Even on the Cross, He refused the myrrh 
 which would have soothed His senses and clouded 
 His mind. Browning catches the kind of spirit in 
 which He faced death: 
 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 
 No, let me taste the whole of it. 
 
 Even religion was no opiate for Jesus. There is no 
 wai rant in Christ for the charge which the Bolshevists 
 are said to make against Christianity, that " religion is 
 the opium of the poor." Out of that very maelstrom 
 which was sucking Him down to death, He spoke of 
 His peace. 
 
 What, then, is His peace? True peace is the 
 harmony between our nature and our environment. 
 Unrest comes from a clash between a man's nature 
 and the world in which he lives. But here is the 
 point. Our true environment is spiritual. If there 
 is conflict in our souls, it is because we have chosen to 
 live in a narrow world in which there is no room for 
 our souls to find freedom. There is a Will that beats 
 through everything, a Mind that thinks in everything, 
 a Heart that loves through everything. When we are 
 in accord with God, we find peace. How can a man 
 be at peace whose being is out of tune with the 
 nature of things, whose will is at cross purposes with 
 God? As well expect health in a body where all 
 the physical laws are broken. Track down the 
 unrest of our time, whether it shows itself in classes 
 or in individuals, and you find friction between the 
 souls of men and the nature of things, which is the 
 
THE TROUBLED LIFE 227 
 
 will of God. This unrest may show itself in various 
 ways. It may appear in a constant strain, in the 
 jarring machinery of industry, in hollow dissatisfac- 
 tion which keeps us ever seeking and never finding, 
 — in restless activities which wear us out and achieve 
 nothing. Many people are like a clock which has 
 lost its pendulum. You wind it up and off it goes 
 at a furious pace of whirring wheels which is soon 
 finished and played out. But attach the pendulum, 
 and the result is a movement which is peace — stable, 
 restful, calm, purposeful. What has happened? 
 The law of gravitation has come into play — the law 
 which rules the resistless tides of ocean, and guides 
 the majestic stars in their courses. The little clock 
 with its feverish heart has been taken up into that 
 mighty movement and there is peace. That is what 
 our lives need. They need to be linked on to God. 
 There is inner conflict, because the deepest and most 
 vital instinct of our nature is being repressed — the 
 instinct for the divine. We are born to take our 
 part in a movement which is far larger than ourselves. 
 While our lives are moving in the orbit of selfishness 
 there is sure to be confusion. There was no shadow 
 between Christ and God. There was perfect under- 
 standing between Him and His Father, and where 
 there are no shadows between a man and God, no 
 earthly troubles can break this deep and final peace 
 of the spirit ; and out of that peace comes power to 
 meet whatever life may bring. It is this peace He 
 offers to us all, the peace of a heart at rest in God. 
 " Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto 
 you." 
 
 How did this harmony with God show itself? Let 
 us look into the nature of this peace more in detail. 
 
22 8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 In the first place, it showed itself in a divine valuation 
 of life, which puts things in their true perspective. 
 That valuation set Christ beyond the reach of many 
 of the things which trouble us. Loss of property, for 
 instance, did not trouble Him, or the fear of it, for 
 He set no store by money for its own sake. The 
 scorn of men or the withdrawal of their esteem did 
 not trouble Him, for He set no value on the smile of 
 popular favour. It is a wrong valuation of the good 
 of life, which creates much of our unrest and lays us 
 open to the torment of fear. " The love of money," 
 says the apostle, " is the root of all evil," and among 
 its evils he shrewdly puts his finger on this, that the 
 man who sets out to be rich falls into many a snare 
 and pierces his heart through with many sorrows. 
 The more we sink our roots into the earth, the more 
 our lives are shaken with every tremor of passing 
 earthquakes. The more we become dependent on 
 material things, the more we are exposing our hearts 
 to anxiety and disappointment and all the things 
 which bring dispeace. One reason why some 
 people are so dangerous to the country to-day is that 
 they have nothing to lose by a violent upheaval. 
 There are few sensitive points at which discomfort 
 and loss can touch them. The man who is thus 
 detached is in a strong position. That was part of 
 the strength of the early Church; she had nothing to 
 lose. And the world will only be set right by men 
 who value principles above possessions, who are 
 detached enough from the treasures of earth to be 
 undeterred from righteousness by the pistol point of 
 life's ills. The man who has accepted Christ's values 
 is free. There are troubles he discounts at the very 
 start. There are events which never cause him a 
 
I 
 
 THE TROUBLED LIFE 229 
 
 tremor of fear. He has not staked his life on 
 possessions, or position, or popularity, or any of 
 these shifting foundations. He has sunk the base of 
 his Hfe down to the solid rock. He wants what 
 Christ wants, and sees that that is best. What care 
 we give ourselves by pinning our life's success to the 
 little things instead of the big things, to the accidents 
 instead of the essentials ! The great Dr. Chalmers 
 made a speech to the Assembly of the Church of 
 Scotland about ministerial training in which he gave 
 the story of his own changed mind. He had been 
 a distinguished student of mathematics in his day; 
 but that was poor preparation for a preacher of the 
 gospel. " Strangely blinded was I/' he said. " What 
 is the object of mathematical science? Magnitude 
 and the proportion of magnitude. But then, sir, I 
 had forgotten two magnitudes, the littleness of time 
 and the greatness of eternity." It is the eternal 
 values which make life great, and fill it with joy and 
 satisfaction. Peace is the possession of the heart 
 which has found the secret of reality in Jesus, and is 
 lifted above the cruel mercy of life's tides of fortune 
 or favour. " Peace I leave with you. My peace I 
 give unto you. . . . Let not your heart be troubled." 
 But again, Christ's peace was rooted in a right 
 relation to men, a relation which sprang from His 
 oneness with God. If a man is really one with 
 God, that harmony will make itself felt in a right 
 attitude to men. Much of our dispeace comes from 
 a wrong attitude to others. The dark heart of the 
 world's unrest to-day is full of such things as hatred, 
 suspicion, jealousy, spite, contempt of man for man. 
 These are the ingredients of the devil's cauldron 
 which brews the deadly spirit. There is no peace in 
 
230 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 any heart till it is emptied of these or lifted above 
 their reach. 
 
 It is not a pleasant thing to be hated, but the dis- 
 peace comes when that hatred is allowed to stir the 
 dust of our own passion. We lose our peace — not 
 when others hate us, if there is no lurking suspicion 
 that it has been deserved ; we lose our peace 
 when we hate others. To hate another, or suspect 
 another or despise another, is the root of dispeace in 
 our own hearts. It spoils our own spirit; it opens 
 the door to a perfect storm of unrest. That was, in 
 part, what Christ meant when He spoke of loving our 
 enemies. He knew that there is nothing so fatal to 
 peace as the spirit of hatred and revenge.| Look at 
 Christ lipon His Cross. When their hatred was 
 seething round Him, at the very moment when He 
 was being overwhelmed. He cried, " Father, forgive 
 them." There was no dispeace in His soul. No 
 man was ever so bad but Christ could love him, 
 none so evil but Christ could find a reason for pity- 
 ing him. Taunts and criticism drew from Him 
 nothing but compassion. The worse people were, 
 the more they were in need of God. The more they 
 hated, the more they were in need of love and guid- 
 ino-. They were sheep that had gone astray, or had 
 been led astray, and the cruelties which they were 
 heaping on His poor body were really wounds they 
 were making in their own souls. They stabbed His 
 heart with the spear, but they could not break His 
 peace, because they could not change His love. 
 
 Part of the secret of peace is this loving attitude 
 towards others, " Fret not thyself about evildoers," 
 says the Psalmist. Do not let the wrongs of others 
 overthrow the balance of your own soul. Say the 
 
ItiE TROUBLED LIFE 231 
 
 worst you can about the things men do, there is 
 always something about a man if we could see 
 him with the eyes of Christ, which would draw tears 
 of compassion instead of curses of anger. And 
 these tears in the long run will break down barriers, 
 which are armour-plated against the thunderbolts of 
 wrath. All the great souls have had this love, this 
 forbearing outlook on others, and it has kept them 
 strong amid a thousand peering littlenesses. You 
 remember the oft-quoted speech of Lincoln, just after 
 his second election as President. Things had been 
 said and done that would have broken many a man's 
 heart. The country was bleeding from civil war. 
 But it never broke Lincoln's peace, for his own 
 attitude was right. " With malice toward none, with 
 charity for all, with firmness in the right as God 
 gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the 
 work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds" — 
 including, of course, those of their enemies — " to care 
 for the widow and the orphan, to do all that may 
 achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace for our- 
 selves and all mankind." There is no pettiness there, 
 no bitterness, no grudge. And that spirit of peace, 
 Christ's peace, can reign even in such a day as this. 
 
 But how does this peace come ? It comes from a 
 perfect surrender and response to the love of God in 
 all its challenge and all its security. And the love 
 of God is a challenging thing. The love of God, if 
 we take it in, throws our souls open to the assault 
 of countless needs and ills, and to a tempest of 
 rebuke We have made too much of religion as a 
 safety device for the soul, too much of it as a quiet 
 haven of rest into which we retire and find peace. 
 The price of Christ's peace is war. The cost of 
 
2 32 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 Christ's rest is struggle. " My peace," said Christ, 
 *' I give to you." What lives the disciples led after 
 that gift ! There was scarcely a day when they were 
 free from trouble. It was the condition of their 
 peace. Had they stayed in the cloister, like the 
 monk in the story when the world's need rapped at 
 the door, instead of moving out to the challenge of 
 love, they would have lost the gift by cultivating it. 
 
 The honourable peace which this utter surrender 
 to the love of God brings is thus a twofold thing. 
 It calls us to battle. There is no peace we can 
 accept for ourselves so long as the world is full of 
 the sin and suffering which make the lives of others 
 unhealthy and unholy. There is no rest from mortal 
 fight for any of us so long as our hearts are tainted 
 with selfishness and pride. For the man who loves 
 with the love of Jesus, and who enters into an alliance 
 with Him, there is no languorous ease, no sheltered 
 garden where he can slink out of the dust and heat. 
 The love of God is a tide which will carry us out 
 into the lives of others, and give us over to the throb 
 of the world's agony. 
 
 But it means moving out too, in response to the 
 assurance of God's love. The security which God 
 gives is the assurance that He will never see us 
 beaten. We shall be equal to every situation into 
 which love may bring us. There is no dilemma into 
 which faith carries us but there will be a way out. 
 There is no trouble which meets us, if we have com- 
 mitted our lives to this love, which shall not turn to 
 our advantage as His children. 
 
 Is there any calm like the calm of resting in this 
 almighty love? It is the peace of the full river, 
 glorious, unresting yet unhurried. It is the deep 
 
THE TROUBLED LIFE 233 
 
 assurance that love will conquer in the end, and 
 already, through the victory of Christ, the situation is 
 in the control of those pierced hands. Stevenson s 
 grandfather tells of an incident when the Bell Rock 
 Lighthouse was building. The boat which held 
 the workers was moored near the rock when a violent 
 storm arose. The danger was lest the mooring-rope 
 should break and the boat be carried out to sea, or 
 smashed to pieces against the rock. For many hours 
 they were in jeopardy, while the passengers sat 
 trembling in the cabin unable to venture on deck 
 for the heavy seas, and knowing nothing of what 
 was going on around them, but fearing the worst. 
 Then'' a little boy, who afterwards related the story, 
 crept up on deck and there he saw what dissipated 
 all his fears. The storm seemed, to his eyes, as 
 bad as ever, but on the deck lashed to his post 
 stood the watchman— and there was a smile upon 
 his face. That smile of victory changed the whole 
 situation, and brought back peace. There amid 
 our troubles is our only secret of peace. Through 
 the storm we may catch in Christ the smile upon the 
 Captain's face, and know that all is wel^ with the 
 ship, if only we are faithful. God'sjoye knows no 
 eclipse except through our own fears and faithless- 
 ness. No storm can sink the boat which has Christ 
 on board. You remember the story of Christ and 
 the disciples upon the lake ; how they trembled and 
 gave themselves over to panic as the great waves 
 lashed the sides of the boat and the whole sea raged 
 in conflict. He rose and stilled the storm, the 
 I Scripture tells us. But it was not His highest way of 
 I giving them peace. It was not the way He would 
 ' have preferred. He would rather they had trusted 
 
234 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 
 Him enough for the storm within to be stilled, while 
 they struggled with oars and sails to bring the boat 
 to harbour. That is the true figure of God's peace, 
 the heart at peace amid the storm, knowing the 
 presence of Christ, sure of victory, and in the power '^ 
 of that peace struggling and fighting to bring' 
 the vessel through. That is the kind of peace He 
 gives through the surrender to a great love. The 
 early Church had it. Listen, "Troubled on every 
 side, but not distressed ; perplexed, but not in 
 despair; cast down, but not destroyed; dying, and 
 behold we live; having nothing, yet possessing all 
 things." That is the peace Christ gives through 
 ^ faith in Him and fellowship with Him, and that is 
 ^:^-''' the peace we are called to reach and make our own 
 J^ to-day — the only kind of honourable peace. We 
 reach it through a faith that rests on the resources of 
 our amazing Lord, while we follow Him out to battle. 
 It is to that toiling, suffering, invincible faith that 
 Christ calls us— not to the faith that confuses peace 
 with ease and the untroubled life. His peace is found 
 in a service and a fellowship which gives us together 
 the troubled life and the untroubled heart. 
 
 I ask no heaven, till earth be Thine, 
 
 No glory-crown while work of mine remaineth here. 
 
 When earth shall shine among the stars. 
 
 Her sins wiped out, her captives free — 
 
 Her voice a music unto Thee — 
 
 For crown, more work give Thou to me, 
 
 Lord, hsre am I. 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 
 
 .« And it came to pass, after a while, that the brook dried up, because 
 there had been no rain in the land. And the word of the Lord came 
 unto Elijah, saving, Arise, get thee to Zarephath, which belongeth to 
 Z^on, and dwell there: behold, I have commanded a widow woman 
 there to sustain thee."— i Kings xvu. 7-9- 
 
 WE know very little of the life-story of some of the 
 greatest prophets. They often spring full-armed, as it 
 were, into the light, to flash their message in a dramatic 
 way on the situation which has summoned them. 
 Here and there the curtain is lifted and we get a 
 glimpse behind the scenes, where God is training them 
 for the role they are to play in the limelight. Part 
 of that training-ground is generally a desert. Moses 
 heard his call in a desert. Amos was a herdsman 
 from the hills. John the Baptist nourished his soul 
 in those lonely quiet spaces. Jesus Himself was led 
 of the Spirit into the wilderness, to find His way 
 through the populous world. And it came to pass 
 that God said to Elijah, "Go, hide thyself by the 
 brook Cherith." There is a revelation that comes 
 through silence, clearer and deeper than all speech. 
 There^ is a companionship we meet in lonehness 
 which no human friend can give. We reach it only 
 when we are " alone with the Alone." The man who 
 would be of most use to men must know what it is 
 to be led away from mep. Before we can become a 
 
 21 e 
 
2 36 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 live wire of God's communications we must find our 
 own deep contact with Himself. 
 
 This desert experience of Elijah was unusual. It 
 was complicated with famine, in whose relentless grip 
 the land was slowly dying-. How or why this famine 
 came the Scripture does not dogmatize, though it 
 suggests a connection with Ahab's disloyalty to God. 
 Famine is a periodic visitor to the East, where parch- 
 ing drought is one of the dreaded foes of nature. 
 The important thing is not its cause but its message, 
 for everything has a message for the ear that is tuned 
 to catch life's meaning in God. 
 
 There was a message in it for Ahab. Elijah's 
 business was to help him to read it. It was to bid 
 him thihk deeply and see if this calamity was not 
 finding him out in a wrong relation to God. Christ 
 has taught us better than to look at calamities of 
 nature as the vengeance of an offended God dealing 
 out disaster. But calamities have their place. They 
 can startle us and make us think, and perchance 
 bring home to us some sin or moral twist, or reveal 
 some deep dispeace of our souls, which was hidden 
 from us under the placid waters of our life. Why is 
 it when a great earthquake swallows up a city, or a 
 mighty ship goes down, or a world-war sweeps 
 nations into its vortex, the first thing people do is to 
 ask questions about God? Some of them get no 
 further, but even that is significant. It is the emerg- 
 ence into life of the fact of God. That is part of 
 every man's consciousness, though often sunk fathoms 
 deep under a load of trivial interests, and it only 
 needs something big enough to stir the depths, for this 
 thought of God to be released and bring us face to face 
 with Him. But some people do go farther. They 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 237 
 
 begin to think not only of God but of themselves. 
 When that happens, the central question of life is up 
 for settlement — the question of our relation with God. 
 The secret of all rightness lies there. Nothing is 
 ever right for any man who is not right with God. 
 
 In the desert, amid the tightening grip of famine, 
 God was speaking to Elijah. Part of the message 
 was the loving care of God. " Get thee hence, and 
 hide thyself by the brook Cherith ; and thou shalt 
 drink of the brook ; and I have commanded the 
 ravens to feed thee there." So far so good. But it 
 came to pass, after a while, that the brook dried up, 
 because there was no rain in the land. What about 
 the care of God now? That was what Elijah was 
 going to learn. And the word of the Lord came to 
 him, saying, "Arise, get thee to Zarephath, which 
 belongeth to Zidon, and dwell there : behold, I have 
 commanded a widow woman there to sustain thee." 
 Elijah obeyed the message, and then follows that 
 remarkable story of the barrel of meal and the cruse 
 of oil which never failed, till rain fell on the burnt-up 
 pasture, and life held out a full hand once more to 
 the starving nation. 
 
 Now, what had this experience to say to Elijah ? 
 It was a message, surely, of the need of deeper 
 resources than the surface world can supply, and of 
 the call to trust them. Living by the brook Cherith, 
 drinking its waters, and fed by the ravens was one 
 stage of existence — the natural stage. These were 
 the direct and simple supplies of the earth. In a 
 sense he depended on nature for his security ; though 
 nature, for Elijah, was never less than God's hand at 
 work. He had won the secret of life, which is to see 
 God everywhere ; the sable wings of the birds bring- 
 
238 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 ing food had the glint of angel pinions. But the 
 brook dried up. What did it mean ? His eyes 
 were to be opened further to the ingenuity of God's 
 love. His faith was to be quickened into deeper 
 levels of dependence. The anchor of his trust was to 
 be cast into a deeper ocean of God's care. " Arise, 
 go to Zarephath ... for I have commanded a widow 
 woman there to sustain thee." God was going to 
 use a finer instrument, but one less apparently 
 dependable — a starving woman's faith and love. Is 
 there any one who, on the surface, would have given 
 much for it ? Faith and love are the biggest things 
 in the world for a man who has seen Jesus, but they 
 seem frail indeed in the face of famine. There is 
 nothing like hunger to take all that is fine out of the 
 heart. It can reduce people to the jungle level, and 
 especially a mother watching the red glow of health 
 die out of her children's cheeks. But Elijah trusted 
 God's guiding, and went to make his strange request. 
 He is almost ashamed to make the appeal. He 
 brings it in as a kind of after-thought. Yet the 
 woman rises to the appeal of faith and love which 
 somehow Elijah awoke in her, and brought him into 
 a little fellowship in which the problem was solved 
 and the famine was kept at bay. The secret is that 
 through faith and love they had made a circle through 
 which God could work. 
 
 It seems to me there is a message here for us even 
 about the material problems of our life. There are 
 crises which can never be met, save as we meet them 
 in fellowship, where faith and love are brought into 
 play. Take the famine at our doors, for instance. 
 The word is unreal to most of us, perhaps. It is the 
 most real word to thousands in Europe and in our 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 239 
 
 own land at this moment. It stares them in the face 
 in letters red-hot with agony. The loudest voice in 
 all Europe to-day is the echo of this woman's hoarse 
 cry, " I have but an handful of meal in a barrel : and, 
 behold, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in 
 and dress it for me and my son, that we may eat it, 
 and die." What are we to make of such problems ? 
 It will not do to say they are extraordinary, and 
 leave it at that. Times of depression come, like these 
 recurrent famines in Israel, but we have not won the 
 power to manage our common life till we have won 
 the mastery over these. Scientific skill has found 
 the way to counter Nature in many of her wild 
 moods. But this and other kindred problems demand 
 something more than scientific skill or human dexter- 
 ity. They are human problems, rising out of the 
 life we live together. And the message of this story 
 is that they cannot be solved save by faith and love. 
 As a writer puts it, " The only possible advance in a 
 world like this is by ways which are only open to 
 faith and love." Nothing will meet the complexities 
 of our modern world but the deeper qualities of our 
 nature called into play and working in fellowship. 
 That is the message which is ringing through our 
 land to-day, and we are all coming to see it. All 
 sorts of people, disillusioned and baffled by selfish- 
 ness and brought to a standstill, are demanding a 
 new adventure of goodwill and industry — the spirit 
 which sees beyond the shadow of a man's own narrow 
 life into the lives of others. What many people do 
 not see, who are afraid to launch out, is that this 
 faith and love are more than the ingenuity of our 
 baffled wits. They are the impulses of the Spirit 
 offering to us the resources of God. 
 
240 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 But the incident applies to other spheres of our 
 life. Take our human affections, and the love which 
 makes life rich. People find their happiness in each 
 other's company and set up a home together. They 
 have common interests ; the world is good to them ; 
 and life goes along smoothly and pleasantly for a 
 while. But the time comes when things are more 
 difficult. They have to meet strain together, or 
 health is not so robust and tempers become peevish, 
 or the surface attractions fade. They come to 
 the end of the temporary and often shallow things 
 which first drew them together. The brook dries 
 up. What happens then? They drift apart, it 
 may be keeping a brave face to the world while the 
 home is starving in a famine of love. We can see it 
 happening in case after case around us to-day. We 
 call it misunderstanding, or a misfit, and the human 
 problem becomes the subject of Royal Commissions 
 and the theme of the realistic novel or the shallow 
 play. But the real root of the trouble is spiritual. 
 There are plenty of lives which have come to strain 
 and friction, and then have found the way c ut in 
 deeper levels of living and finer springs of a love 
 which is real. Love and friendship are of God, and 
 they cannot be sustained apart from Him and the 
 faith and unselfishness, which are the deeper currents 
 of our being. You cannot make a home anything 
 more than a glorified lodging-house, except as it is 
 built upon the foundations of trust and self-sacrifice. 
 You cannot found a friendship which will last, on any- 
 thing less than trust and forgiveness and goodwill — 
 those gifts which have their origin in God. As Lord 
 Rosebery says, in his studies of the great men of the 
 last century, "The base of everything is character"; 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 241 
 
 and all character is rooted and grounded in some 
 vision of God, deep enough and strong enough to 
 carry us over those unlit patches when life grows 
 weary, and the surface motives fail, and the brooks of 
 self-interest dry up. 
 
 The same thing holds true of service and philan- 
 thropy. It is easy enough to be kind and charitable 
 when things are going well. There are moods when 
 a kindly spirit seems to be in the air. We become 
 well-disposed to other people ; we long to help the 
 under-dog ; social service becomes the fashion. But 
 dull times come. People we try to help grow un- 
 interesting, sometimes disagreeable; it may be they 
 turn and rend us. This may not be mere ingratitude ; 
 there is a root of independence about most people 
 which sometime or other makes them resent favours. 
 They kick against the necessity which brings them 
 to need our help, and we get the brunt of it. But 
 sometimes it is sheer blindness to our motive and our 
 goodwill. The very people for whom Christ poured 
 out His heart's blood turned at last to crucify Him. 
 He had a time of popularity when they gathered 
 about Him with cheers and wanted to make Him 
 king. But the brook dried up. What then ? 
 Have we ever had that experience ? Have we ever 
 sought to help men who turned on us with base 
 reproaches ? What then ? Had we resources enough 
 to carry us through ? Have we the kind of stamina 
 which will keep us going on, helping people who hate 
 us and misunderstand us and would even crucify us, 
 if it were the kind of thing which is done to-day ? 
 No man can do Christ's service to men without 
 His own deep resources. Only the hands which 
 are willing to be pierced and go on helping, can 
 16 
 
242 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 touch the human sore with heah'ng. And for that 
 we need His compassion, His love, His fellow- 
 ship. The best of human unselfishness is not proof 
 against the kind of thing which crucifies — either by 
 the recoil of ingratitude, or the bitter insight into 
 life's appalling pain and need. The most kindly- 
 human temper will not serve in the hour of dis- 
 appointment when the brook of man's faith in man 
 dries up. 
 
 The same is true of what we usually call the 
 Christian life. There are moments when it seems 
 easy enough to follow Christ. We have resources in 
 ourselves for what it seems Christ wants us to do. 
 The example of others or the common decencies 
 of life caVry us through the ordinary temptations. 
 When the kindly faces are round us, it is not so 
 difficult to be true. And we read of the agony of 
 the saints and their cries to God and all the extrava- 
 gant language of the New Testament with amaze- 
 ment. What does Paul mean when he pleads with 
 men to " put on the whole armour of God." What 
 can it mean to " resist unto blood " ? Does all this 
 language not seem a little hectic and strained ? But 
 the brooks dry up. What then ? When things go 
 against us, and the kindly faces are gone, or when 
 we go to a strange land or some great city, where we 
 are flung into a maelstrom of unbelief, and things we 
 were taught to hate begin to speak to dim instincts 
 in the blood, and there is a quiet smile for the man 
 who takes religion seriously, what then? Or when 
 we come up against the cruel facts of life and our 
 faith begins to burst into question marks, what then ? 
 When we begin to see what faith really means and 
 some big call to sacrifice meets us, clear as the dawn, 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 243 
 
 and red and cold with warnings of a troubled day, 
 what then ? Or when some wind strips off the fair 
 garment of our own good opinion and we see our- 
 selves with all our hypocrisy laid bare before the 
 challenging eyes of Christ, and the shelters of our 
 pride are down, what then? Then we must strike 
 deeper into the resources of our faith, or perish. We 
 must explore the knowledge of God, or die. We 
 must find a vision of God big enough to meet the 
 big problems or make us willing to accept perplexi- 
 ties. We must face the question whether Christ is 
 a reality we can trust all the way. We must find 
 that love which is a refuge not from the storm, but 
 from our own fears and our own ease-loving hearts, 
 and trust Him with all the abandon of faith. We 
 must make a new venture in the life of prayer. The / 
 Christian life is a miracle or it is nothing ; it is a new • 
 creation, ever renewed and renewing itself in God ; it 
 is a " root out of a dry ground," as the prophet said 
 of God's Servant. You cannot explain it, or sustain 
 it, through any mere contact with its environment. 
 There are plants that can live through a drought in a 
 desert. They have various ways of doing it. Some 
 of them live by holding in their leaves or surface 
 roots enough sap to carry them over an average time 
 of drought ; nature is wonderfully ingenious in its 
 mechanism for meeting the struggle of life. But 
 some of them have no such visible resources, and men 
 wonder how they live at all. Their secret is that 
 their roots go down twenty and thirty feet, or more, 
 and tap some perennial spring hidden in the crevices 
 of the strata. No blight or drought above can reach 
 their foundations. They are in contact, so to speak, 
 with the very basis of the world. That is the way 
 
244 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 with the life of a Christian man ; it is a hidden life, 
 " hid with Christ in God." 
 
 Time and again the Church has come to live a 
 surface life and to rely upon prestige, or power, or 
 her standing in man's favour. Then has her real 
 power decayed. It was a poor boast which one of 
 the Popes made once to a friend, "No more can the 
 Church say, like Peter, * Silver and gold have I none.' '* 
 The reply came swift and cutting deep, " And no 
 more can she say to wearied and broken men, * But 
 such as I have I give unto thee. Rise up and walk.' " 
 Christianity cannot be sustained in a world like this 
 upon the fickle fountains of popularity or social 
 prestige. We cannot keep the inner life alive with 
 the power which shall save ourselves and redeem 
 the world, but by striking our roots deep into the 
 inexhaustible fountain of Christ's own passion 
 for men. Our deepest life is in our union with Him 
 who won a constant victory over the world, defy- 
 ing its winds to blight His Spirit, or its cruelty to 
 slay His love, and rising from a grave into newness 
 
 of life. 
 
 Perhaps the truth which flashes from this incident 
 is one we have never grasped — our real life is 
 spiritual, not material. Christ put it in a word for 
 Himself when hunger faced Him in the desert and 
 tempted Him with the desperate need of bread. 
 " Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." We 
 learn that lesson in various ways. Sometimes we 
 grow up into the knowledge of Jesus as the flowers 
 rise up from the cold enveloping soil to find the 
 sunlight. Our very instinct would teach men their 
 need of God if only they would heed the voice of 
 
WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP 245 
 
 their own deep nature. A modern scientist, dis- 
 cussing the evolutionary process by which the fish 
 developed the power to live on the land and the 
 reptile found the power to fly, suggests the secret of the 
 great adventure. " We are forced to recognize a kind 
 of unscientific trustfulness which seems to be engrained 
 in all living things." By faith they launched out 
 from what seemed their only possible environment, 
 and in launching out into the larger world found the 
 power to live in it. Faith is not unreasonable. It 
 is the most common of all the instincts. What is 
 repressing and overlaying this instinct for God ? Is 
 it our pride of knowledge, or the cares and riches 
 of life which are checking the finer shoots of the 
 soul, or choking our roots like a pot-bound plant? If 
 only we would let the soul speak ! 
 
 There is another way by which men learn to seek 
 for God. Life teaches them. Something happens 
 sooner or later to break this slumberous content. It 
 comes to pass that the brook dries up. Money 
 takes wings and flies away. Business grows diflicult. 
 Those we love are taken from us one by one. Cold 
 famine meets the heart where once there were streams 
 of friendship. Health passes and nature withers in 
 the once strong frame. Or what is just as bad, the 
 blight of disillusionment falls on our once pleasant 
 world, and old joys lose their power to charm. And 
 at last death threatens us ; life passes like the shadow 
 of a dream, forcing us into a strange universe, 
 alone. The brook dries up. What then ? Can 
 we not see in all this process something so in- 
 evitable that it must be the very pressure of God 
 forcing us, for very life, to strike our roots deep 
 into the soil of some abiding reality? It is His 
 
246 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 ministry of detachment breaking ties, that we may 
 stretch forth the tendrils of faith and find links with 
 the eternal. 
 
 All which I took from thee I did but take, 
 
 Not for thy harms, 
 But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 
 
 At a recent meeting of the British Association a 
 speaker pointed out that there was " not much hope 
 for civilization, so long as men were obsessed with 
 the idea that progress came only through fuller 
 stomachs." It is a crude way to put a great truth. 
 The way of selfishness is a side track, and nature ever 
 and again along the road puts up the barrier whose 
 name we call disaster, saying, " No road this way. 
 Is life growing greyer for any of us ? Do the brooks 
 drv up? Have we come to some valley where life 
 is parched and bare? Listen! There are springs 
 running underground, and God is striking a si ence 
 through your life that you may hear the trickling 
 music of the stream. " There is a river, the streams 
 whereof make glad the city of God." Be still, amid 
 His desolations. Be still, and know that He is God. 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 
 
 ** Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and 
 in whose spirit there is no guile."— Ps. xxxii. 2. 
 
 Though we find these words in the Old Testament 
 there is no better definition of the peace of a 
 Christian man. We might take them out of their 
 setting and transplant them into the middle of the 
 New Testament and no one would know they had 
 not been uttered by some Christian saint out of his 
 experience of the grace of Jesus Christ. It is the 
 genuine doxology of redeemed souls everywhere, 
 telling the world what God has done for them. 
 
 Lifted from its context it looks like a picture of 
 what we call the upright man whose conscience holds 
 no reproach. " The man to whom the Lord imputeth 
 not iniquity" would seem to suggest one at whose 
 life even God cannot point an accusing finger. But 
 the context forbids a picture like that. The whole 
 tenor of the Psalm is against it. It is written 
 evidently by a man who has had much to hide and 
 has indeed been hiding much, both from himself and 
 from God. It is supposed to have been written by 
 David after the great fall which flung a shadow over 
 his life and brought him into a moral tumult. His 
 sin shattered his self-complacency, flung down the 
 barriers of pride and self-respect which had been 
 sheltering him from reality ; there is nothing which 
 
 247 
 
248 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 can " stab the spirit broad-awake," in Stevenson's 
 words, like what he calls a " killing sin." His soul 
 was exposed, shuddering and naked, to the piercing 
 rays of God's purity. When a stone is lifted, letting 
 in the light, the creatures which live under it begin 
 to wriggle and twist, making the most desperate 
 efforts to escape from the blinding rays which strike 
 upon every sensitive nerve. That was David's con- 
 dition at first. It was a state of hell, the hell of the 
 raw conscience which can find no peace and no 
 protection. He describes the experience. " Day 
 and night Thy hand was heavy upon me. My 
 moisture is turned into the drought of summer." 
 Pitilessly fell the rays, like a sun upon a treeless 
 landscape, till they were like to shrivel his very soul. 
 Then he took another line. He faced the light which 
 was beating down upon his conscience. He opened 
 his life to God, seeking no shelters of his own, 
 making no excuses, offering no satisfaction, looking 
 his sin straight in the face with all God's light upon 
 it. " I acknowledged my sin unto Thee, and mine 
 iniquity have I not hid." Then came peace. The 
 very love from which he had tried to hide became his 
 shelter. The very light which hurt his wound had 
 healing in it. The reproach that stung him was 
 really burning with the fire of love. " Thou art my 
 hiding-place, O Lord. Thou wilt compass me about 
 with songs of deliverance." 
 
 Ah, faintest, blindest, weakest, 
 I am He whom thou seekest, 
 Thou dravest love from thee 
 Who dravest Me. 
 
 And he took up the song and sang it — the song of 
 the redeemed, " Blessed is he whose transgression 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 249 
 
 is hidden, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man 
 to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in 
 whose spirit there is no guile." 
 
 The Christian experience has many roads into it. 
 The city of God has many gates. Bunyan in his 
 great allegory describes only one. He tells how a 
 man living in the city of Destruction suddenly awoke 
 to his sin. There was nothing remarkable about him 
 as a sinner. He was just an ordinary man whose 
 soul had given him no trouble. He had committed 
 no dreadful crime. But one day reading in the Bible, 
 which is God's mirror, he had seen himself and his 
 surroundings set in the eye of God, and a strange 
 weight fell upon his spirit as real as a load upon the 
 back. He fled from the city, leaving everything 
 behind him, to find deliverance from his burden. 
 Bunyan describes the experience as if it were the 
 only path into the Christian way. There are other 
 ways, of course. We may come to know Christ 
 through our need of a friend, or the need of some one 
 to captain our soul in a great fight with the long odds 
 of circumstance. Some men come to Christ as 
 masterless men of the olden time used to gather 
 round a leader, seeking some splendid and heroic 
 quest. God forbid that we should rule any one out 
 of His Kingdom because he has not come in by our 
 door ! But whether it be soon or late, the hour will 
 come when the mysterious burden will appear. The 
 glory of that city, which is the light of Christ's own 
 face, will reveal the stains upon our garments. Peter 
 did not realize his sin till he had been a disciple for 
 some time. As he saw deeper and deeper into the 
 nature of Jesus, he saw deeper and deeper into his 
 own, till one day he came to cry, " Depart from me, 
 
2 50 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 for I am a sinful man, O Lord." The farther on 
 Christ led him, the more life taught him his own 
 weakness, till the very crisis in which his loyalty was 
 most needed revealed a streak of baseness in his 
 blood, suddenly cropping up like a fault in a mine 
 and bringing to ruin the golden promise of his new- 
 found friendship. One of the perplexing things 
 about Christianity is that Christ's demands are 
 pitched so high, they seem to invite our failure. 
 The call of His discipleship draws us into an 
 intimacy in which His love humiliates as well as 
 comforts. The heights are bracing; the sunlight is 
 stimulating; but it is difficult to keep our footing 
 there. How shall we bear the searching and the 
 challenge of that love whose very splendour seems 
 to condemn us in the moment of its attraction ? It 
 is almost like the moth with the candle ; there is a 
 brightness which fascinates the creature, but in the 
 centre of that blazing glory there is a flame whose 
 touch is the crippling of its wings. Here is the 
 problem of redemption — how a sinful man can be 
 without guile, exposing his soul with utter sincerity 
 to the light of God, and yet be conscious of a 
 peace which is blessed, a heart of joy that over- 
 flows with music — " a man to whom the Lord 
 imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is 
 
 no guile." 
 
 This word " guile " is a very suggestive word. It 
 suggests the common way of dealing with a reproach- 
 
 o o 
 
 ful conscience. The common way is to deal with it 
 by guile, by some stratagem of the mind. It is an 
 almost irresistible temptation to the best of us to 
 put up shelters for ourselves against the blinding 
 judgment. And there are many kinds of shelters 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 
 
 " :> 
 
 into which we creep for the security of our souls and 
 try to find a kind of unsettled peace. 
 
 There is, for instance, the way of self-excusing. 
 We say to ourselves that we are not so bad as our 
 own conscience would have us think. We take 
 refuge in phrases about the frailty of poor human 
 nature. We are erring creatures at the best, and 
 God who knows us through and through will not 
 demand more of us than we are capable of being, 
 and will not judge us harshly. After all, we are all 
 in the same boat. And on the whole perhaps we 
 convince ourselves that in our gloomy self-reproach 
 we are taking our sin too seriously. 
 
 Or we build the shelter of good works. We scan 
 the other side of the ledger where memory has 
 recorded this good deed or that in our favour. Or 
 we give ourselves to good works, determined to make 
 up for the past by doing all the good we can. This 
 kind of strategy is at the root of the whole system 
 of penance wherewith men and women have tortured 
 their lives, seeking by the pain of the body to cleanse 
 the stain of the soul. " In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret 
 closet, kept under lock and key, there was a bloody 
 scourge. Oftentimes this protestant and puritan 
 divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing 
 bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much 
 the more pitilessly because of the bitter laugh. It 
 was his custom, too, to fast, not as a means of purifying 
 his body and rendering it more fit for heavenly 
 illumination, but rigorously as an act of penance." 
 So Hawthorne describes his penitent putting up his 
 shelter of self-inflicted pain against reality. But it 
 was all the strategy of guiljC, seeking a peace through 
 evasion of the light. 
 
252 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 There is another kind of shelter too, in which we 
 take refuge. It is the thought of what some other 
 has done for us, even God Himself The most 
 blessed truth of all knowledge is the truth that 
 Christ died for us. Toplady's old hymn has that 
 truth in it which is the one anchor of our hope: 
 
 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in Thee. 
 
 But there is a way of stating that truth and resting 
 in it, which may be a mere evasion, a mere shelter 
 from a sin we refuse to face. We may lift up the 
 Cross of Christ between us and the thought of sin 
 so as to hide us from the sting of sin's reality. One 
 man may die for another, taking on himself some of 
 the consequences of the other's sin — for the deepest 
 consequences are within the soul of the sinner himself; 
 but can any one carry our responsibility for our own 
 deeds and leave us in a moral world ? The innocent 
 may suffer for the guilty, and continually do, but are the 
 guilty any less guilty? Can any one who has faced 
 his sin accept a peace of conscience in the thought 
 that another has died for him, without so lowering 
 moral value as to work havoc in his own soul? 
 There is a way of looking at the sacrjfice of Christ, 
 and accepting the sacrifice of Christ, which may 
 lessen the sense of sin and make us take a lighter 
 view of its horror and shame; so opening the path 
 for future sinning. Such a view may break down 
 barriers which conscience sets up between us and 
 the evil thing. It may close the wound without 
 purging the poison. In Paul's words, it makes the 
 Cross of Christ of none effect, and puts Him to an 
 open shame. 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 253 
 
 Whatever happens, we must face the truth of sin, 
 without shelter and evasion. We must look into the 
 face of accusing purity without guile. There is an 
 honourable and a dishonourable peace, and there is no 
 peace with honour in the face of God which comes 
 through evasion or self-excusing. 
 
 How, then, are we to find this peace which comes 
 with utter sincerity? All our evasions are rooted in 
 a wrong view of God and His relation to us and to 
 our sin. If we track them down, we will find they 
 come from the thought of God as a stern judge or 
 a ruthless creditor who demands the uttermost 
 farthing. So long as our relations with God are 
 seen in the terms of the law-courts and the counting- 
 house, so long will this demand for some kind of 
 shelter remain, and so long will we continue to find 
 no peace there. But that view of God is the very 
 view from which Jesus came to deliver us. He came 
 revealing the unseen order in which God stands to 
 us. It is not that of a judge in the courts, or a 
 merchant with his account books; it is that of a 
 father in the home — a relationship of love. Turn 
 to the story of the Prodigal Son, and you find there 
 the very heart of God's attitude towards us. When 
 the prodigal comes back, he expects to find a judge 
 or an angry man he has defrauded, who will only let 
 him return on certain strict conditions — which, how- 
 ever, he is willing to fulfil. " I will say unto him, 
 ' Make me a hired servant.' " Let me work off my 
 indebtedness by the sweat of my brow. But to his 
 surprise, he finds a father waiting to receive him in a 
 welcome of love, which will let no shadows from the 
 past cloud the "glad confident morning" of hope. 
 
2 54 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 This is the essence of forgiveness. It is not the can- 
 celling of the past; for the past can never be can- 
 celled. The consequences of sin will remain. The 
 money is spent, for one thing. Nothing can ever 
 bring it back. And the disgrace of sin remains ; 
 there will be the whispering tongues of the scandal- 
 mongers who will find the story of his sin a spicy 
 morsel of gossip, and will take many a chance to cast 
 up to him his own misdeeds. And there will be 
 habits to overcome and lurid pictures from the past 
 rising to fill his mind with tempting suggestions in 
 days of dreary drudgery. We cannot get rid of the 
 past by any jugglery of the mind. " The scars 
 remain," Gough used to tell his audiences, warning 
 the unwary. The scars remain ; forgiveness is no 
 magic means of erasing them. Forgiveness means 
 restoration to the fellowship of the Father, who 
 takes us back to our own place in His love. His 
 welcome is the call to step back, "just as we are," 
 into full and unclouded sonship. He does not demand 
 the repayment of any debt, before He takes us back. 
 If there are debts to be paid as part of the con- 
 sequences of sin, they will be paid out of the blessed 
 peace and power of that forgiveness. 
 
 For this fellowship is the only power which can 
 enable us to stand up to the consequences of sin. It 
 gives us power to face them, by giving us the right 
 attitude to them. It enables us to accept them as 
 God's appointment, turning the very scars of sin into 
 a means of humbling and tenderness of spirit, and 
 making of our bitter memories an angel with a flaming 
 sword, to keep us from going back. So the very 
 consequences of sin, faced and borne in loving 
 obedience, become built into the structure of a new 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 255 
 
 character, like a house built out of ruins. As 
 Phillips Brooks says: "The only way to get rid of 
 :he past, is to make a future out of it." 
 
 In this task God stands in with us. To face the 
 situation into which sin has brought us, is as much 
 a divine task as any great service which meets us ; 
 and God comes into it to help us through, with all 
 the resources of His grace. Amid the shadows of 
 moral failure we may be as conscious as anywhere 
 else of "the Hands which reach through darkness, 
 moulding men." No doubt the son would insist on 
 telling the whole story to his father, hiding nothing, 
 screening nothing, while the father listened with a 
 breaking heart which filled his eyes with tears. But 
 here is the point. Nothing in all that sad story 
 was suffered for a moment to bring a shadow between 
 them. It was full and free forgiveness, pardon to 
 the uttermost. There was no imputing of iniquity. 
 Nothing in the past was allowed to stand for one 
 moment between the son and the completeness of 
 the father's fellowship, which is salvation. O the 
 measurelessness of the Divine forgiveness ! " As far as 
 the east is from the west, so far hath He removed 
 our transgression from us." This is the peace of the 
 unsheltered soul. It is the peace of the man who, 
 facing his sin and all its consequences with utter 
 sincerity, finds God utterly and only love. 
 
 Some people feel that the story of the Prodigal 
 lacks something of a full gospel, because there is no 
 " cross " in it. But is there no cross in it ? Can 
 we read it with any imagination without seeing the 
 Cross printed on the father's heart, as he lingers on 
 the brow of the hill morning after morning, hunger- 
 ing for the boy's return. For what is the Cross, so 
 
2S6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 far as we can see into its depths with our purblind 
 eyes, but the mighty assurance through all our wan- 
 dering, that God loves us still. Calvary was the great 
 moment in human life, when through the heaving 
 tides of passion the waters swept back and there 
 stood out uncovered and indestructible the rock of 
 God's eternal love. This love, indeed, cannot be true to 
 itself, in the face of our sin, save at the cost of agony ; 
 but it is this love, seeing our sin with the piercing 
 insight of love, which is the secret of our forgiveness ; 
 and not any stratagem of our reproachful conscience. 
 What does this peace demand of us. It only 
 demands that we step into the order of love. It 
 asks only that we should accept the place of a son, 
 taking our new life as the gift of God's mercy. 
 This is the great message of the gospel which broke 
 into music in the soul of Luther, and set the half 
 of Europe singing, "The -just shall live by faith." 
 Salvation is there, for us, in that restored fellowship 
 with God. We have nothing to do but take it. 
 And out of that fellowship springs the power to 
 change life to the roots, and make the whole world 
 new. Only we must be utterly sincere, not seeking 
 in this fellowship any escape from sin's reproach or 
 consequences, save by God's victory over them in 
 enabling us to meet them victoriously. It is God's 
 love we need. To know that is salvation. His 
 fellowship is the heart of everything. And the 
 self-excusing which hides from the pain of God's 
 light, hides from the healing of God's love. The 
 shelters we put up against the truth are the barriers 
 we set up against the Divine forgiveness, " If ye walk 
 in the light ... as He is in the light, . . . the blood 
 of Jesus Christ His son cleanseth you from all sin." 
 
PEACE THROUGH SINCERITY 2^7 
 
 D/ 
 
 It is not an easy thin^, this utter sincerity. 
 Forgiveness is free, but it is not cheap. Penitence 
 is no passing- moment; it is the permanent attitude 
 of the forgiven Hfe. We dare never lose the penitent 
 spirit, or we risk losing that sensitiveness by which 
 we are aware of the wonder o{ God's love, for the 
 peace and power of God's forgiveness is like the pearl 
 in the oyster ; it grows only in the heart which is kept 
 sensitive to its own wound. 
 
 The acceptance of forgiveness means stepping into 
 the order of love — and not only to God ; for love has 
 no limits. It means coming into the order of love 
 in all life's relationships. It means the attitude and 
 way of love all round. That is the meaning of the 
 Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor. His own debt 
 was cancelled, but he went out refusing to do the 
 same for his creditors, and found to his dismay that 
 forgiveness was therefore denied to himself. Surely 
 the deep meaning of this is plain. God forgives us 
 by lifting us and calling us into an order of love, 
 in which we have to live our lives all round. It 
 means opening our hearts from day to day to all the 
 demands of love in daily contact with our fellows, 
 in all our outlook on the world's need. The Christian 
 world is ansemic to-day, because we will not face the 
 logic of God's love and open our eyes to the reality 
 of its dem.ands. What will this love demand of us 
 in relation to the sinful, the sick, the heathen, the 
 people who hate us and have done us ill, those whose 
 lives are in our power? It is not an easy thino- to 
 be forgiven, to be lifted into this order of love which 
 is our peace. There is nothing in it of what Myers 
 calls "the torpor of a foul tranquillity." It is the 
 kind of peace which Christ found on His Cross, in a 
 
 T7 
 
258 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 heart made sensitive by fellowship with God to the 
 sin and suffering of the world. 
 
 Heart, are you great enough for love, 
 
 For a love that never tires? 
 O heart, are you great enough for love? 
 
 I have heard of thorns and briers. 
 
 These high levels were beyond us, were it not for the 
 assurance of a love which only awakens need to 
 satisfy it, and only sets a task to give us power to do 
 it. It is a terrible thing to rise into the grasp of this 
 " tremendous Lover " ; but the peace He gives is the 
 only peace in which a son of God can rest. It is the 
 only peace the world cannot break, for it is founded 
 on the indestructible reality of the love of God in 
 Jesus Christ 
 
THE REMAKING OF MANHOOD 
 
 ** Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none ; but such as I have 
 give I thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and 
 walk." — Acts iii. 6. 
 
 We can hardly read these chapters of the Book of 
 Acts without a certain sense of wistful regret. It 
 was a time of miraculous things. Thousands of 
 men and women were literally made anew. Long 
 crusted habits of sin were broken, and a new fresh 
 life begun which filled the soul with happiness and 
 power. It seems to us as we read these chapters, 
 that there has passed away a glory from the earth. 
 Inevitably the question arises in our minds — Has 
 the touch of Christ still its ancient power ? May we 
 expect such marvellous changes to-day? People 
 have talked much of the failure of Christianity. Is 
 it true that it is a failure to-day? Is it true that we 
 cannot recapture, in these days of knowledge and 
 wisdom, the early glory? Is its power gone, so that 
 we must look for a different gospel? And indeed 
 there are many new gospels which are springing up 
 everywhere, some of them fungus growths arising 
 out of the despair and darkness of men's hearts. 
 
 The story raises the whole question of how we 
 may expect Christianity to get to work upon our 
 lives. It is all very well to use great swelling words 
 about the power of Christianity. No one disputes 
 
2 6o THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the fact that a vital faith in Christ, widespread in the 
 community, would penetrate our life in every direc- 
 tion, and bring a wonderful transformation. But the 
 practical question is, where the power of Christ is 
 applied and how it gets to work ? A great deal of 
 the disappointment that some people feel with regard 
 to Christianity arises because they are expecting, in 
 a way, too much from it; or rather that they are 
 looking for its results in the wrong quarter. We 
 jare expecting the fruit without the root. We are 
 looking for external results instead of making sure 
 of that inward contact with Christ in the remaking 
 of the soul which is the secret of all other transforma- 
 tions. There are people, for instance, who tell us that 
 the Christian faith ought to be the healing power for 
 our bodily sickness. For them the test of faith is, 
 whether it can take a man who is lamed by some 
 (disease and set him on his feet again without the aid 
 of doctors. The prosperity of the medical profession 
 for them has grown up around the failure of Christi- 
 anity ; the doctors are able to live because Christianity 
 is dead. They take the Apostle Paul to task with 
 his thorn in the flesh, and tell us that he had no 
 business to endure a bodily weakness, that if only he 
 had had enough faith he might have been rid of it ! 
 It is true, one of the effects of the Christian challenge 
 to this man at the Gate was the healing of his body. 
 He was lame ; he had to be carried by other people, 
 and the first thing the grace of God did for him was 
 to make it possible for him to walk on his own feet. 
 That kind of miracle happens; it has happened to 
 other people besides this man. But it was not the 
 essence of his cure ; it was only one effect of it. His | 
 weakness, so long continued, was not a weakness in 
 
THE REMAKING OF MANHOOD 261 
 
 his muscles only ; it was due to some failure deep 
 down in the roots of his life. The man was im- 
 potent within. And when Peter touched that weak- 
 ness within the will, the man got strength which 
 overflowed his weakness and carried it away, and 
 he went out walking and leaping and praising God. 
 
 There are people, again, who are looking for the 
 effects of Christianity in an addition to their comfort 
 — in new conditions of physical life. If we had more * 
 Christianity, they tell us, we should not have the 
 slums of East London, or any other slums ; we 
 should not have people working for a starvation 
 wage; every one would have enough to eat and 
 enough to wear. They would turn Christ into a 
 great philanthropist and Christianity into a propa- 
 ganda for social reform. There are men and women 
 who are crying out for better conditions for whom 
 practical Christianity is summed up in the gift 
 of a living wage and a decent house to live in. 
 And these things will be part of the fruit of vital 
 Christianity. There is no other way of bringing 
 them in. The new world of which we dream will 
 come in when Christ comes in, and not till then. 
 The better world of our dreams is the creation of 
 the Christian mind and imagination. The New 
 Jerusalem vision was born in heaven, and from 
 heaven it must come or it will not come at all. 
 " Direct Action " will never bring it ; the devices and 
 schemes of men, however beautiful, will never bring 
 it ; class interest will never bring it ; self-interest will 
 never bring it. As a writer says: "You cannot 
 make a permanent society by tying a bundle of 
 selfish folk together with some rotten string of class 
 or self-interest." Christianity alone has the power 
 
2 62 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 of social betterment. But the truth is, it is not 
 comfort Christ offers us in the first place ; it is the 
 mind to work for some other body's comfort. It is 
 not higher wages He comes to give us; it is the 
 spirit which works for something higher than wages. 
 It is not security He offers us, not relief from hard- 
 ship; it is, in the first place, the courage and faith 
 which conquer hardship and rise above it, to win 
 over it a victory of the spirit. Turn to this story. 
 The man was lame. He was a beggar. He had 
 been a stretcher case all his life. He had been living 
 amid ill conditions. His case touched Peter to the 
 quick, as he looked up with hunger in his eyes. 
 But Peter saw beneath the surface need and the 
 pitiful weakness of the man begging for a dole to 
 keep body and soul alive — right down to the real 
 trouble, which was a trouble of the soul. His first 
 act was to refuse material help. ** Silver and gold 
 have I none," he said. " Do not expect these things 
 from me. But I have a gift for you. In the name 
 of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk on 
 your own feet. Bring your will into action. Over- 
 come your weakness by putting forth the strength 
 you have. Become a new man, renewed in the secret 
 fountains of your being. That is what I can do for 
 you. " Such as I have I give unto you. In the name 
 of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." 
 
 Now what did the apostle do for that man ? The 
 solution of all our troubles lies in getting a real 
 grasp of what it is that Christianity can do for us, 
 and setting its power to work in our lives to-day. 
 In this incident we get an illustration of how Christ 
 works, and what His power is able to achieve. 
 
 In the first place, He works within the man himself, 
 
THE REMAKLNG OF MANHOOD 263 
 
 the individual man. That is His first point of attack 
 upon the evil of life everywhere — through the heart 
 of man. And He works by renewing man's nature, 
 thereby transforming the character from within. 
 This is not to say that better external conditions 
 will not help. There are people who can never be 
 reached till they are attacked through some change 
 in the conditions of their life. They are so sunk 
 and embittered that their mind and soul are almost 
 incapable of listening to any Christian appeal, much 
 less of responding to it. When Moses came to the 
 children of Israel with his great emancipating 
 message of God, " they hearkened not unto him for 
 anguish of spirit, and cruel bondage." If it were 
 for nothing else but to get home with a message for 
 God, it is the task of a Christian society to attack 
 the evils which desolate the human spirit and keep 
 it in bondage. But better conditions will not work 
 the real miracle of a remade manhood. They will 
 not change the man, nor brace the impotent will. 
 They will not alter the wrong desire, nor renew the 
 fountains of vitality. We speak of giving man a 
 richer life, a larger life, and that is right. But what 
 if there be no life at all ? What if the will be weak 
 and the soul sodden under evil habit, and the whole 
 nature set upon things that are unworthy? What 
 if the man's soul be poisoned with selfishness so that 
 his homelife is a wreck — and that happens when 
 there is plenty of comfort, in a mansion as well as 
 in a slum. What if there be no life? You can 
 change a common bee into a queen bee by feeding 
 it upon a certain kind of diet, but it takes more than 
 diet to change a man's moral nature; it takes the 
 grace of God in the heart. How many people are 
 
2 64 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 there about us to-day, whose first need is not more 
 comfort, but more character ; not more pleasure, but 
 more heart for Hfe's battle ; not a larger house, but 
 a sense of eternity and a new relationship with God. 
 The root of all things in heaven and earth is there — 
 What is our will like ? Do we will the things that 
 are highest? Do we will the things which make a 
 man happy and strong, and brave and true, the things 
 that make life " life indeed " and not merely existence. 
 And are we able to carry out what we will ? Are 
 we master of our own house ? Are we able to direct 
 our life to the things which God gives us all to see 
 as the best ? Do we will, day by day, the things for 
 which Christ lived and died, and can we carry them 
 out? It is this will of ours which is the secret of all 
 effective manhood and womanhood. And it is in 
 this secret place of being that Christ works to 
 change us and renew us within. "What was it that 
 happened to this man, when that spring was touched ? 
 He became a man and not a helpless thing. He 
 was able to direct his life, able to enter into happy 
 relations with others, able to make his own con- 
 tribution to life, able to use his life in the interests 
 of Jesus Christ and for the purposes of His Kingdom. 
 His whole personality was remade. And he went 
 walking and leaping and praising God. 
 
 Now that is what Christ can do for men to-day^ 
 and that is our greatest need. What is more, He 
 can do it now. That is where all other reforms fail ; 
 you have to wait for them. You will have to wait 
 twenty, thirty years till the slums are effectively 
 dealt with, and the housing conditions made fit for 
 men and women to live in. Social reform must come 
 gradually ; but Christ can take a man living in these 
 
THE REMAKING OF MANHOOD 265 
 
 present conditions, at this moment, and make him a 
 new man, victorious over his surroundings. It may 
 take years to get the public-houses closed ; Christ 
 can take a man sodden in drink, with a public-house 
 at his door, and turn him into a sober self-respecting 
 man, master of himself It will take years to bring 
 in a new system of things, to make business life more 
 Christian, and social life more brotherly ; but Christ 
 can take a man in any business, and give him the 
 power to live to the full a straight, clean, brotherly 
 life, saved and endowed by grace. There are people 
 who often say to us that it is impossible to be a 
 Christian man, or to live a Christian life in present 
 conditions. Here is a man in a slum-dwelling 
 with filth and squalor on every hand. How can he 
 live a Christian life in a place like that ? It is hard 
 — God knows how hard. It is a miracle, a moral 
 miracle, but it is just the kind of miracle that Christ 
 can work when He gets into the heart. There were 
 saints in Caesar's household, according to the New 
 Testament, and the worst conditions of to-day can 
 hardly prove a bigger handicap than the environment 
 of Nero's palace. Yet there were saints there, saints 
 by the moral miracle which God works within the 
 soul, renewing a man in the depths of his being, to 
 goodness and purity and love. 
 
 To take up the position that a man cannot live 
 a redeemed life in certain evil conditions, is to deny 
 what the New Testament stands for, which is 
 "Eternal life in the midst of time" — in the midst of 
 any kind of circumstance — " by the strength of God, 
 and under the eyes of God." To deny the redeeming 
 power of God in any circumstances, is to give up that 
 faith which is the only leverage by which God can 
 
266 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 raise the world. Christ can do this for a man — any 
 man, anywhere: He can produce that eternal life, 
 that new vitality from which everything springs — the 
 desire to change things, and the power to change 
 things. " Silver and gold have I none/' said Peter, 
 "but such as I have I give unto thee. In the 
 name of Jesus of Nazareth rise up and walk." 
 
 Now how did this miracle come about? Can we 
 trace the process by which this man was endowed 
 with spiritual manhood and made fit for life? It 
 was a case of what people call suggestion — the means 
 by which an idea is induced in a man so strongly 
 and powerfully, that it takes hold of his being and 
 awakens his will to carry it out, or to believe in it. 
 But what was it that gave the power to the sugges- 
 tion. It was the name of Jesus. " In the name of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, I say unto you rise up and 
 walk." It looks like magic, but it was not magic. 
 Doubtless the cripple knew something about that 
 name. The whole district, the whole world in which 
 he lived was ringing with it. The very air was 
 radiant with the afterglow of the resurrection. The 
 name of Jesus was not a mere name. It suggested a 
 whole series of things. It called up a picture, a story 
 — " Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, whom God 
 raised up," as Peter put it to the magistrates. And 
 doubtless there was that in Peter himself, born of the 
 secret presence of Christ shining in his soul, which 
 conveyed something of the very presence and power 
 of the Master, so that to hear Peter speak that name, 
 and to be in touch with him, was to be thrilled and 
 moved by a sacred influence. Christ shone in those 
 eyes of tenderness; Christ spoke in those tones of 
 courage and hope ; Christ so overshadowed Peter that 
 
THE REMAKING OF MANHOOD 267 
 
 his whole personality conveyed the atmosphere of His 
 presence. Perhaps that is where we fail to-day. It 
 is because there is so little of Christ in us that when 
 we speak the name, it is only a word which falls to 
 the ground like an autumn leaf, a fluttering, feeble 
 thing, with no vibrant appeal of the Christ throbbing 
 in our tones, no Christ accent, no splendid compassion 
 and faith. Perhaps that is where we fail with men 
 who know nothing of Christ. We do not carry the 
 impression of Christ Himself— a living presence, a 
 redeeming spirit, with the print of the nails upon 
 Him, and the lustre of the resurrection, able to bring 
 back into the world the power of all He was and did 
 when He lived in Palestine of old. The great need 
 of the Church to-day is to recover the power to 
 suggest Jesus, to think with His mind, to speak with 
 His voice, to use His methods, and employ the tactics 
 of His love. The men of the Navy used to speak 
 of "the Nelson touch"— that way of doing things 
 which would embody the best traditions of the 
 service. It is the Christ touch which will make 
 the Church victorious in her cam.paign. At the 
 suggestion of that name two or three things happened. 
 In a moment the cripple saw a picture of the man 
 he might be, walking and leaping and living in the 
 fulness of his power. That vision came to him at 
 that moment as a possible thing. As it took hold 
 of his imagination, his doubts and fears were scattered 
 and the burden of impotence was lifted from his 
 
 will. 
 
 We have been learning, of late, that the real 
 obstruction which keeps the will weak is something 
 in the mind. " We can, because we think we can.'* 
 The great achievement of Jesus was that He made 
 
26^ THE VICl^ORY OF GOD 
 
 * 
 men believe the new life was possible and set the 
 
 will free to live it. Perhaps this man had been in 
 
 the depths of despair. Every time he would rise to 
 
 walk, his weakness came to his mind and hypnotized 
 
 him into defeat. How many people are there like 
 
 that to-day ? They have a weakness ; they have 
 
 failed ; they have gone down in days gone by. And 
 
 their very failure hypnotizes them into defeat, so 
 
 that they cannot rise when they would, and are 
 
 flung back against every movement of their souls 
 
 into the old dungeon of despair. 
 
 Or perhaps it was custom which had lain heavy 
 upon him. He had grown used to his weakness. 
 He had always been so, and time and habit had 
 softened the calamity. But custom had become a 
 tyranny, a chain. He had no expectation of being 
 better, and that very dullness and apathy had settled 
 down upon his soul, preventing him from trying to 
 rise. That is the case with some people too. Those 
 who try to lift their fellows out of some evil plight 
 tell us that there is nothing so hard to battle with 
 as apathy. Its victims cannot be roused to better 
 things. They are stupefied, hardened, chilled, so that 
 no enthusiasm can kindle a spark in the eye, or bring 
 a flush of hope to the heart. 
 
 Or perhaps this man was quite satisfied with his 
 condition. He had got used to it, got to like it, and 
 to find a certain security in it, till the world where he 
 would have to work became a terrifying place de- 
 manding more energy than he was willing to give. 
 There are slaves that grow afraid of freedom. There 
 are prisoners who get so comfortable in their prison, 
 that the wide world becomes full of fears, and liberty 
 loses its attraction But when this vision of Christ 
 
THE REMAKING OF MANHOOD 269 
 
 shone in upon his soul, awakening the desire of a 
 fuller life, and bringing the hope of it, these chains 
 were shattered — these weights of despair, and custom 
 and fear which had settled down upon him were 
 lifted, and the will was free. Are there some of us 
 who are down ? We have gone under, and lain 
 down to our sin or our circumstance. We despair 
 of the new chance, or the fuller life. Let us get 
 close to Christ and listen to the spiritual suggestions 
 which He breathes into the soul. There is pardon ; 
 there is peace ; there is redemption. " Sin shall no 
 more have dominion over you." " I am come to seek 
 and to save that which was lost." " Him that cometh 
 unto Me, I will in no wise cast out." It is all there 
 in Christ. Silver and gold has He none. Comfort 
 and security He does not promise. "In the world 
 ye shall have tribulation." Life is a fight, but it is 
 a fight on terms which will make it victorious for 
 the man who will listen to Christ, and dwell in Plis 
 presence. It is said that when Cromwell rode 
 over the field where his men were being flung back, 
 his very presence brought back such courage and 
 hope, that their souls were renewed to a victorious 
 energy. The very air was palpitating with new 
 possibility, with the sense of mastery and victory. 
 So it is when Christ comes into the field. The whole 
 situation is changed. Will you open up your life 
 with all its impotence and weakness to Him — the 
 hard conditions in which you have to live, the close 
 dungeon of your mind, where you fight with tempta- 
 tion? That is the secret of victory. He will not 
 carry you ; Peter did not carry tliis man. He will 
 not make your conditions easy; Peter gave this man 
 nothing to smooth the path for his crippled limbs. 
 
270 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 But He will give you something better, the clasp of 
 His own strong hand, the contagion of His radiant 
 Spirit. He will touch the spring of your will. He 
 will speak to your heart a word of power and 
 courage. He will say to you, "Rise up and 
 walk," and at the magic of that voice you will have 
 strength to obey. The whole universe of God's grace 
 is waiting to back you, waiting for that act of faith, 
 waiting for that step into the light, and love, and 
 splendour of the new life. 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 
 
 ** And at midnight Paul and Silas sang praises unto God : and the 
 prisoners heard them." — Acts xvi. 25. 
 
 The power of song is proverbial. There is a magic 
 in it which can charm the heart out of its most sullen 
 moods. There are songs that have won battles. 
 There are songs that have led crusades, gathering up 
 into them the spirit of the movement and giving it 
 the power to renew the heart. A nation's character 
 is expressed, if not in part moulded, by the songs it 
 sings. " Give me the making of the nation's songs," 
 says some one, " and I care not who makes its laws." 
 
 One man with a dream at pleasure 
 Shall go forth and conquer a crown, 
 
 And three with a new song's measure 
 Can trample a kingdom down. 
 
 But never more wonderful results followed from a 
 song than from this of our text, " At midnight Paul 
 and Silas sang praises unto God : and the prisoners 
 heard them." And then the Scripture goes on to say, 
 " and the prison-doors were opened, and the prisoners' 
 bands v/ere loosed." 
 
 It appears a trifling thing for the writer of this 
 story to mention, that the prisoners heard them. How 
 could they help hearing them when the song of Paul 
 and Silas rang through the quiet prison chamber at 
 
 271 
 
272 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 midnight ? The difficulty, one would imagine, would 
 be not to hear them ! It seems so trifling that we 
 feel the writer of the story would not have put it 
 there at all unless there had been something remark- 
 able in the fact. The exciting events of the night — 
 the earthquake, and the bursting prison doors, and 
 the conversion of the jailer — would all have hidden 
 from the writer's mind a little fact like this if he had 
 not felt it worth noting. 
 
 " And the prisoners heard them." When we look 
 into it we find there is a deeper meaning. It does 
 not mean a mere casual hearing, a mere sensation. 
 The word has the sense of " listening." Whatever it 
 was that struck them in Paul's singing, they were 
 interested ; they were listening with their minds en- 
 listed, giving themselves up with attention. That is 
 the meaning of the word. And it has still a deeper 
 meaning. In the Greek of the Bible it is only used 
 in one other place — where Samuel charges Saul with 
 his want of perception of the voice of God. Can 
 we not draw the conclusion that these prisoners 
 were listening as men listen to the voice of God, with 
 their hearts attune for some message of God, with 
 their conscience quick for some word of truth ; in a 
 word, with all the secret barriers down by which men 
 are accustomed to shut out God ? Is it too much to 
 suppose that conversions followed from that singing 
 and changed lives? And is it drawing too much 
 upon the imagination to suggest that Luke got his 
 information about this incident from one and another 
 of the prisoners themselves, when in the little meetings 
 of the Christians, they told how the grace of God 
 came in a song at midnight and found them in a prison 
 and won its way into their heart ? At all events, the 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 273 
 
 picture Luke draws is worth thinking about. ** At 
 midnight Paul and Silas sang praises unto God : and 
 the prisoners were listening to them." 
 
 To begin with, it is worth noting that they sang in 
 the prison at all. It is about the last place one 
 would have chosen to sing in, the last kind of time to 
 sing, and the last kind of attitude for singing. They 
 had been flung into this prison to keep them from 
 preaching, and soundly beaten, and their feet locked 
 fast in the stocks. And in that condition, and at 
 midnight, Paul and Silas sang praises unto God. I 
 always look on that as one of the most triumphant 
 moments of New Testament Christianity. The same 
 kind of thing must have often happened. These 
 people were accustomed to sing in all kinds of 
 situations. And that is what faith ought to do for 
 us ; it ought to give us the power to sing in all sorts 
 of devastating and difficult circumstances. It is easy 
 enough to be happy in pleasant circumstances when 
 life is sunny and bright and everything is going well. 
 The man who cannot rejoice in the beauty of the 
 world around him and the glad and gracious gift of 
 life, when the sun is shining and he has home and 
 work and friendships, is a churlish creature — or there 
 is something far wrong with his health. But to sing 
 in a dungeon, and at midnight, when happiness is a 
 victory and cheerfulness is a miracle, that is the special 
 gift and grace of Christianity. " For we glory in 
 tribulations also." " Count it all joy when ye fall into 
 divers trials." "As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing." 
 That is a Christian secret — the serenity and gladness 
 of faith ; and more, the exuberance and buoyancy of 
 faith, so that it can sing in a dungeon, even joke on a 
 scaffold, and shout a challenge into the face of death. 
 18 
 
274 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 That kind of spirit is a characteristic product of the 
 Christian faith. Though one could hardly say it is 
 showing that product to-day. Some of us have got 
 into the doldrums in spite of our Christianity — some, 
 one fears, because of their Christianity — mistaking 
 solemnity for seriousness, and a careworn look for a 
 deep interest in the salvation of others. Here were 
 two men who had given up everything because Christ 
 had filled them with a passionate longing to preach 
 the gospel to all sorts of people they had never 
 seen ; these people took them and flung them into a 
 prison, and their faith so kindled in that prison that 
 they burst into singing and were indeed joyfully 
 triumphant. Let us get hold of the fact that this is 
 the genuine spirit of New Testament Christianity. 
 " The true saint is always hilarious." Faith in Jesus 
 Christ is able to make a man independent of circum- 
 stances and superior to his surroundings. He escapes 
 not from the prison in the first place, but in the 
 prison. " At midnight Paul and Silas sang praises 
 unto God." 
 
 " And the prisoners were listening to them." They 
 had an unseen audience. They did not know the 
 prisoners were listening They were not thinking of 
 the prisoners at all. They were thinking of God 
 and His goodness and His unconquerable and all- 
 providing love. But all the time the prisoners were 
 listening to them. 
 
 Our unseen audience is one of life's most familiar 
 facts. We cannot do anything, say anything, but 
 others are watching us, noting our bearing, taking 
 stock of our conduct and our whole attitude to life. 
 We may not know it ; they may not know it them- 
 selves. Consciously or unconsciously the one half of 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 275 
 
 the world is playing eavesdropper to the other half. 
 It is the basis of that tremendous fact of influence 
 whereby something is always going out of us, if not 
 to mould the lives of others, at least to shape the 
 world in which others have to live. When a great 
 politician addresses a meeting, be it large or small, 
 he knows that his biggest audience is beyond him, 
 among people he has never seen, who are waiting none 
 the less for his message. It is with this responsibility 
 in his mind that he speaks, or ought to speak. But 
 this is true of every one of us. We have all our 
 unseen audience. There are people taking their cue 
 for life from us. There are some whose attitude to 
 the highest things is partly being decided by us. 
 There are people who are taking their view of Jesus 
 Christ from what they see in us, not consciously 
 p irhaps, but by the secret process which goes on all 
 the time. We cannot " break the bonds which God 
 decreed to bind." We cannot insulate the current of 
 our influence on others. 
 
 Furthermore, what gave this unseen audience the 
 hearing ear and made them listen so keenly was the 
 fact that they were fellow-prisoners. They were 
 suffering the same fate; they were chafing under 
 the same bonds. That suffering gave them a quick- 
 ened interest They were keen to know if Paul 
 and Silas had any light on the situation. They were 
 eager to learn what it was that made them so 
 cheerful in the prison — what the secret of that 
 strange victorious thrill in their singing? It was 
 more than curiosity that made them listen; it was 
 need and sympathy. It matters not what be our lot 
 of hardship or trouble, we are never alone. There 
 are always our fellow-prisoners, and their fellow-feeling 
 
276 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 keys up their interest till the slightest suggestion that 
 touches their trouble will set their heart-strings 
 throbbing. Have you ever noticed how a man who 
 has some illness will listen if you tell him of just such 
 another case as his? In one of Mark Rutherford's 
 letters he tells how after writing his autobiography — 
 a book which relates a sad and depressing story of 
 tragic experiences — there came thousands of letters 
 from people who told him he had described just their 
 case. He had his audience, unseen, of fellow-prisoners, 
 and that fact made them listen to him. It matters 
 not what be our difficulty, or temptation, or loss, we 
 are never alone ; there are others all around us in 
 the same prison-house of sorrow or gloom, and that 
 fact makes them listen to us. It opens their ear. 
 It focuses their interest. What a chance this reveals 
 to us of helping others ! What a bracing challenge 
 it throws to us in our suffering! What a noble 
 responsibility ! Whatever hardship life gives us to 
 bear there are others round us whose ears are tense 
 with interest and whose hearts are sensitive with pain. 
 They are looking to us to catch the inspiration of our 
 spirit. Have we a besetting temptation ? There are 
 others with just that fight to make, and they are 
 watching us to see how we carry ourselves. Are 
 we mourning? Here is another in tears, and he is 
 looking for some strong hand to lead him through the 
 valley of the shadow. Have we a cross to bear? 
 Some other is near us on that stony path, looking for 
 the light upon our face. In whatever prison life has 
 put us, we are never alone. The prisoners are listen- 
 ing to us. 
 
 Now this is surely, to begin with, an argument for 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 277 
 
 a cheerful spirit. If Paul and Silas had done nothing 
 by their singing but to put heart into these men they 
 would have done good service. To make the prison 
 ring with melody, to bring gladness into tired eyes 
 and new hope into sullen and discouraged lives — 
 surely that is a great ministry, the very ministry of 
 Jesus Christ. None of us probably realize how much 
 we can do for the world about us just by sunny 
 gladness and a cheerful spirit. " The day was dark 
 and gloomy," some one once wrote in the Boston 
 Herald, " but Phillips Brooks came down Newspaper 
 Row and all was bright." There are people whose 
 very presence can chase the clouds away and scatter 
 gloom. They go about "lighting fires in cold 
 rooms." Stevenson was sunk all his life in one of 
 life's darkest dungeons — the dungeon of ill-health — 
 and he took it as his mission in life to turn his 
 dungeon into a lighthouse. He made a task of 
 happiness. " This is our post," he said of the place 
 of trouble, " and our business is to make happiness for 
 others." I put it to you, if it would not change the 
 face of life for many people if we learned to say of 
 our dark or difficult situation, "This is my post; I 
 am on duty here, on duty by the appointment of God, 
 and my business is to make happiness for others." 
 One of the very subtlest temptations that can come 
 to good people is the temptation of self-pity, and of 
 all depressing people there are none so depressing as 
 those in whom the divine gift of sympathy and pity 
 runs inward, making a luxury of misery. Whatever 
 happens to us, let us try to fling off the weeds of self- 
 pity and put on the King's uniform of self-forgetfulness, 
 exchanging " the garment of praise for the spirit of 
 heaviness," and, unconscious to ourselves, the midnight 
 
278 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 gloom will be shattered for some other afflicted ones, 
 even as Paul and Silas sang praises unto God, and 
 the prisoners heard them. 
 
 But this was not merely a song of courage ; it was 
 a song of faith. That was why it had such a thrilling 
 effect on the prisoners. It is a good thing to preach 
 courage to men who are facing the storm, the simple 
 duty of setting their teeth and going through with it. 
 But there is no gospel in that, and it may sometimes 
 be taken for an impertinence. The gospel comes in 
 when you tell them of the presence with them in the 
 storm of the Lord God. That is the secret of the 
 difference between the Stoic and the Christian. In 
 The Cloister and the Hearth — one of our greatest 
 novels-^the hero, sore downcast, is going through 
 a perilous forest and is cheered every now and 
 then by his stout-hearted comrade with this word, 
 " Courage, comrade, the devil is dead ! " The phrase 
 served its purpose. It is as good as anything else to 
 express the heart that is not afraid of shadows. But 
 true courage has its source in faith, and the secret of 
 faith is not pretence that the devil is dead, but con- 
 fidence in a living and victorious God. The word 
 that sets our pulses leaping is not the word that tells 
 us to shut our eyes to difficulties. It is the word that 
 tells us how difficulties can be overcome, and hard- 
 ships vanquished, and sorrow transfigured, and all 
 things made to work together for good. That was 
 the song which Paul and Silas sang in the prison ; 
 and being what it was, born of the consciousness of 
 God's presence, it filled the prison with the thought 
 of God, and set free His love and grace in such a 
 way that the crust of sin and indifference in these 
 men's hearts was pierced and God broke in. 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 279 
 
 It is the same kind of story Browning tells in " Pippa 
 Passes." The little Italian girl, a silkworker in a 
 factory, has a holiday — her one holiday in the year — 
 and for sheer gladness she goes out singing a song. 
 But it was a song of faith, " God's in His heaven." 
 And as she went along the street all unconscious of 
 anything but her own glad heart and the loving 
 goodness of God, the words and music floated into 
 casements here and there and changed lives at critical 
 moments. There were two people living in sin whose 
 hearts were awakened to clean shame and real hunger 
 for goodness. They touched the soul of an artist 
 who was about to give himself up to an angry passion, 
 and set him free. They reached the heart of an 
 anarchist who had made up his mind to kill the king 
 and stirred his buried patriotism. And the girl went 
 home and slept her sleep, unconscious of what her 
 song had done and her spirit had wrought by bring- 
 ing to people a message that suggested God. 
 
 It is for this faith the world is listening, in spite 
 of all appearances. As a writer puts it in a recent 
 novel : " It may be true that men shall not live by 
 bread alone, though there are multitudes who are 
 doing it and doing very well on it. But I tell you 
 that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every 
 man's soul, there is a hunger for better food than this 
 earthly stuff." How is the world going to become 
 convinced of God? That is the great problem. 
 How are men going to be brought to see Jesus? 
 Life does its part, by taking people sooner or later 
 and bringing them into some kind of prison-house. 
 For a time comes when life takes the man who shuts 
 out God and walls him up in his own godless world 
 with his own unillumined soul. Life plays its part ; 
 
2 8o THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 that is the one side. But when people are brought 
 into the prison-house ? That is where our task comes 
 in. " Ye are My witnesses," said Jesus. *' Ye are the 
 salt of the earth. Ye are the light of the world." 
 Are there any more startling challenging words than 
 these? Christ meant them, as He meant every word 
 He said. It is a very extraordinary thing that when 
 Jesus left the world, He left no other custodians of 
 His truth and His message than twelve men whose 
 hearts were kindled into a radiant faith — no books, 
 no parchments, no monuments, nothing but a few souls 
 with the inner lamp lit. And from those lamps the 
 flame spread because it was the living fire of God, till 
 Paul and others were kindled by it and went out to 
 carry the flame. 
 
 Now how does faith shine ? It has many beams. 
 But one of its incandescent points is just this clash 
 with circumstances, where the spirit becomes victorious 
 in a serene and confident gladness which sings in a 
 prison. There is something tremendously convincing 
 in a spirit that can thus rejoice in trouble and sing a 
 song of praise to God out of a dungeon. It suggests 
 a secret spring, a hidden treasure. It makes men 
 feel that somehow this man is in possession of a secret 
 storehouse of vitality. It makes people wonder, and 
 when people begin to wonder they begin to explore 
 and are already on the threshold of some divine 
 discovery. But more than that, such a spirit carries 
 the contagion of its own radiant vitality. It suggests 
 Jesus. Dare we say it does more. Dare we say it 
 brings people into touch with the very Spirit of Jesus ? 
 For every Christian man is a Christian spirit who is 
 alive in his being with the Spirit of Jesus. Have we 
 never met with people, in whose bearing there was 
 
VICTORIOUS GLADNESS 281 
 
 something that so powerfully suggested Jesus, that 
 when they went — leaving with us a lingering bright- 
 ness and peace, which quieted and exalted our spirit 
 — it suddenly came to us that we had been in touch 
 with Him? For a moment His Face had looked in 
 upon our troubled way. " Ye are My witnesses," said 
 Christ. A witness is one who reflects something he 
 has seen ; and a Christian man, according to Christ, is 
 one who gives his life to seeing something in Christ 
 which he reflects to the world in a life which is 
 victorious with cheerfulness in the most depressing 
 circumstances and with love to the most discouraging 
 people. 
 
 That is how the world is going to be redeemed. 
 Men are not going to be argued into goodness ; they 
 are going to be won into it. They are not going to 
 be lectured into the Kingdom ; they are going to be 
 " called " into it, called irresistibility by the worth of 
 lives which are the product of faith in Christ. Perhaps 
 our prison is deep and dark, our case is bitter, and 
 our life is lonely. How can we reach this faith which 
 sings in a dungeon? How do we get this plant 
 which blossoms in the dark ? " How can we sing 
 the Lord's song in a strange land ? " The great secret 
 is a new look at that love of God in Jesus which is 
 ours in Him, a love which is victorious over every- 
 thing, a love which appoints our every situation and 
 gives us grace to find in it some redeeming task or 
 some deepening experience and some new discovery 
 of His truth and love. There is no strange land for 
 the man who has discovered that God is love and 
 God is everywhere. The surface look of things may 
 be depressing, but the same challenging, comforting 
 voice is still in our ear, the same purpose is at work. 
 
2 82 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 And the deeper the darkness, the sterner the circum- 
 stances, the more opportunity there is for the triumph 
 of faith, and the more perfectly will we be able to help 
 others whom suffering has swept within the orbit of 
 our influence. 
 
 One thing is sure, if we live near to Christ and 
 catch His Spirit in everything, we will never lack an 
 audience whatever our limitations or our defects ; and 
 what is more important, we will never lack an in- 
 fluence. Never a life lived in the Kingdom, never a 
 brave word spoken, never a true stand made but finds 
 its mark in God's good time, in His own way. 
 
 I breathed a song into the air : 
 
 It fell to earth I know not where, 
 
 For who has sight so keen and strong 
 That it can follow the flight of a song ; 
 
 But that song at last, from beginning to end, 
 
 I found again in the heart of a friend. 
 
 " My word shall not return unto Me void," saith 
 the Lord God. 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH " 
 
 " And they answered and said to the king, We are not careful to 
 answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God, whom we serve, 
 is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace ; and He will deliver 
 us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O 
 king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image 
 which thou hast set up." — Dan. iii. 16-18. 
 
 The Book of Daniel is a story with a purpose. It 
 
 was written to steady the hearts of patriotic Jews who 
 
 were passing through one of the severest persecutions 
 
 for their faith that ever men have passed through. 
 
 The story is one of those beautiful things that 
 
 crystallize out of the furnace of man's pain, to become 
 
 a star in his sky and cheer him and his successors, 
 
 whenever, on their way to God, the darkness falls 
 
 upon them. 
 
 There is no need to dwell on the circumstances of 
 
 the time when it was written, even though we knew 
 
 the precise date. The stage is set for any period of 
 
 time, for every trial of faith has the same elements. 
 
 There is always, for instance, the golden image. 
 
 Where will you find a better symbol of the material 
 
 world and all its glittering appeal to the human 
 
 heart ? And there is always a burning fiery furnace 
 
 — the threat of loss or suffering for those who will 
 
 spurn the worship of the world and follow conscience. 
 
 It is a picture of the eternal temptation, which comes 
 
 in many different forms, to give ourselves to the 
 
 283 
 
2 84 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 things that are seen, to money and fashion and what 
 men call the solid realities, and fling away our faith 
 in the unseen, which in the eyes of men looks merely 
 so much folly. That temptation is the crux of re- 
 ligion. The final question of our loyalty to God is 
 not intellectual, though we may persuade ourselves 
 it is so. God meets us, not with a problem for the 
 mind, but with a moral challenge in actual life. The 
 question, really, is whether we shall bow down our 
 manhood before the appeal of pleasure or sense and 
 adopt the selfish standards of the world, or whether 
 we shall be true to the inward voices of our souls and 
 trust them as the whisper of God. That choice meets 
 us all in small things as in great, and it meets us 
 time and again. We may settle the question once for 
 all in what we call the choice of Christ, and ever 
 after it is easier ; like a man going along a road with 
 a fixed goal we have settled our direction, and it is 
 merely a matter of going on. But even so, life meets 
 us every now and then, as it did Jesus, with some 
 crisis where we have to reaffirm our faith and say to 
 ourselves whether we are going on. Or a day comes 
 when the guiding light in the soul seems to burn dim. 
 We become perplexed and are brought to a stand- 
 still and have to fight like Christian in the Valley of 
 Humiliation with one or other of ApoUyon's tribe, for 
 the very life of our spirit. Few men who face life 
 seriously in the name of Christ but have to meet this 
 conflict, especially in a day like this. No man is 
 properly equipped for the Christian way who has not 
 found a method of meeting the last dark question of the 
 soul and knows how to plant his feet upon the rock, 
 when before him there stands the golden image and 
 the burning fiery furnace, and he has to choose. 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 285 
 
 The message of this story, as I read it, and the 
 picture of these three men, give us the right position 
 and the final answer. Their stand is the stand of 
 faith with its back to the wall, and theirs is the one 
 stand which cannot be shaken. There are three 
 stages in it. 
 
 To begin with, they did not shrink from the choice 
 or try to evade the issue. " We are not careful to 
 answer thee in this matter." They were not going 
 to try to make the king think better of them than 
 he did, or to burke the choice by any back door 
 of skilful argument. They were clever men, and if 
 they had cared to use their eloquence they might 
 have found a way of getting out of the trap without 
 either publicly denying their God or doing any dis- 
 respect to the golden image. Neither were they 
 going to do any juggling with their own consciences 
 to bow down to the image, for instance, with some 
 private reservation of their own. Some people might 
 have argued that it was better in the long run to save 
 their lives that they might serve God in Babylon, 
 even at the cost of a seeming surrender, than to let 
 their influence be lost for a trifling scruple. There 
 was a Mr. Facing-both-ways in the Pilgrim's Progress, 
 you remember, and Mr. Facing-both-ways is a very 
 familiar character. It is terribly difficult to be in the 
 world and yet not of the world ; it is fatally easy to 
 be of the world's spirit though not in the world's ways. 
 Some men never take a stand if they can help it, and 
 then are careful to see they are in a good majority. 
 There is a method called compromise, which is often 
 only a way of settling big questions without either 
 bowing down to the golden image or getting too close 
 to the burning fiery furnace. This way very often 
 
2 86 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 attracts us when we come up against the hard choices 
 of life. Sometimes, however, we cannot avoid the 
 issue. Let us thank God if we cannot. For with 
 every choice God is meeting us with a chance to 
 reveal our manhood and forcing us to take a step in 
 vital living. Every choice is the Divine pathway of 
 self-determination. "Choose Thou my path, I do 
 not ask to see," may seem sometimes a very beautiful 
 sentiment. But we dare not forget that this hymn of 
 Newman's was written of that Church which treats 
 her children like babes in a nursery, and discourages 
 the use of man's own insight. In the long run 
 there is no other method of finding our way except 
 by choosing it. It is the Providence of God, His 
 way of training us, to make us choose. The biggest 
 hardship about the slave system, a writer tells us, 
 is not the cruelties which are practised on the slaves, 
 for in some cases the slaves were not badly treated ; 
 the deepest hardship of the system is that it takes 
 away " the blessed luxury of choice." Freedom is a 
 gift of God, but true freedom is only fully ours as we 
 win it and exercise it in the choices of life. The 
 insight to see our way is our most precious possession ; 
 it is the inward vision by which we see God. But 
 insight only grows by meeting and making decisions 
 for ourselves. Thank God if life forces upon us a 
 choice between right and wrong or faith and no faith, 
 which cannot be evaded. The worst thing that can 
 happen to us is to find ourselves adrift upon an ocean 
 so easy and calm it never brings us up against a 
 situation where we have to grasp the helm and settle 
 where we are going. The great thing is to face a 
 dilemma squarely and seriously, seeing it with open 
 eyes for what it is, without camouflage or evasion. 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 287 
 
 If we see it and face it fairly, the choice is as good as 
 made. For no man can see evil with the naked soul 
 and love it, and no man can see goodness with the 
 open eye and shun it — if in the depth of his being he 
 is ready to take God's way. So Daniel's companions 
 faced the choice unmasked. " We are not careful to 
 answer thee in this matter." 
 
 But now we come to the foundations of that faith 
 on which they took their stand. First of all they 
 took their stand trusting in what we call Providence. 
 "Our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from 
 the burning fiery furnace." They believed that God 
 would see them through and would not let them 
 down. After all, they said to themselves, this world 
 is in the control of God. However strongly the 
 game may seem to run in favour of evil, there are 
 other moves open to God by which the plans of evil 
 may be checkmated. The devil may set the world 
 on fire, but " the framework of the universe is fire- 
 proof." Wrong cannot heat a furnace which God 
 cannot put out. 
 
 Whatever we may think of this ancient view of 
 Providence as the benevolent interference of God — 
 and the war has somewhat shaken it — it is well to 
 keep an open mind. How the spiritual and the 
 material are related we do not know. Wonderful 
 forces can be set in motion, through prayer and faith, 
 which defy explanation. The popularity of faith- 
 healing and spiritualism, for one thing, are a revolt of 
 the human soul against the crude dogmatism of matter. 
 Whatever the laws may be that govern the world, they 
 have a moral root. In the long run the universe is on 
 the side of the man who is on the side of God. Deep 
 down at the base of things, love fashioned the earth in 
 
288 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 the interests of the Kingdom of God. Evil may play 
 fast and loose with the world for a while, but only 
 for a while. Sooner or later the men who kindle the 
 fiery furnace are consumed by the product of their 
 own evil genius. They who use force to crush right- 
 eousness are met and destroyed by the very forces 
 they have called into being. Or what is better still, 
 as Christ has taught us, the very suffering they create 
 sets free the love which will smite them to the heart 
 with shafts of shame and compel them in sore con- 
 trition to lay their weapons at God's feet. 
 
 Are some of us faced with an unpopular way for 
 conscience' sake? Are we meeting loss in business 
 because we have followed the clean way of honour? 
 Then let us pluck up heart. Our way is still in the 
 keeping of God, and He knows all about it. Count- 
 less people can tell of cases where a brave stand in 
 the face of hopeless odds suddenly changed the situa- 
 tion even to their material advantage. There are no 
 promises to that effect in the New Testament, else 
 religion would be turned into a choice of the best 
 bargain, and the teaching of Christ into "a handy 
 book for the successful merchant," to use Stevenson's 
 caustic comment on Pepys's version of seeking first 
 the Kingdom. What God wants is the spirit that 
 does not care for these things, but leaves them all to 
 Him. The paradox of the Kingdom is that He does 
 care for the material things of those who give up 
 caring for them. That has often happened. Con- 
 sequences are God's department. '' Our God, whom 
 we serve, is able to deliver us from the burnmg fiery 
 furnace; and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O 
 
 king." , . 
 
 But the faith of these men did not rest there, tor 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 289 
 
 • that standing-ground is not deep enough to meet the 
 facts of life, in the tempting moment. We do not 
 know what happened at this point. Perhaps they 
 heard a titter, or saw a sneering look on the faces of 
 those who were standing round ; perhaps they heard 
 a cynical whisper, " We shall soon see." And it flashed 
 upon them— What if God did not deliver them! 
 What if they did perish after all ! Where would they 
 be then ? What would be the good of it all ? And 
 just as suddenly the assurance of God's love and care 
 shone up in their soul. Even if God did not deliver 
 their body, His love was stronger than death or hell. 
 The finest passage in the whole range of English 
 literature, according to Professor Saintbury, is the 
 famous lyric about love, " Love is strong as death." 
 What gave that passage its lyrical beauty was just 
 the overwhelming sense of love's power and precious- 
 ness, its victorious endurance. Shall the love of God 
 who' put it in man's heart be less than the love it 
 created? When Luther was making his last brave 
 stand they sent an emissary from Rome to brow- 
 beat him. The messenger drew a picture of all the 
 forces against him, kings and nobles in all their 
 glittering array of pomp and powder. "Where will 
 Pou be then, little monk, in the face of all these? 
 " There, as now," was his answer, " in the hands of 
 Almighty God." Was it a vision of this almighty 
 love which flooded the hearts of these men as they 
 made their stand? Did they realize that to do His 
 will and keep His love in a great loyalty, is its own 
 reward? Was it a glimpse of His Face that shone 
 upon them which made them " endure as seeing Him 
 who is invisible." Was it this that taught them the 
 noble answer, " And if not, be it known unto thee, 
 19 
 
290 THE VICrOHY OF GOD 
 
 O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship 
 the golden image which thou hast set up"? 
 
 Or is there another view ? Were their hearts visited 
 by a dark doubt ? There is a lingering doubt of God 
 which haunts the footsteps of faith, seeking some 
 moment when our hearts are off their guard and 
 sorely tempted, to get in with its treacherous sugges- 
 tion. Show us how your God works and we will 
 believe in Him. How do you know that this religion 
 of yours is not a great illusion ? How can you be 
 sure that there is a God at all, or that in this universe 
 there is anything else except blind chance or some 
 soulless power in whose eyes we are of no more value 
 than the leaves that fall from the trees in autumn ? 
 How do you know ? Where is the proof? 
 
 That is the kind of suggestion which the man of 
 faith has to meet tim.e and again out in the world and 
 in the lonely spaces of his own soul. I wonder if any 
 of us, though we may have been all our lives pro- 
 fessing Christians, are ever visited by the question 
 whether there be a God at all, and whether our experi- 
 ence is not just some cruel illusion. Are there some 
 of us perhaps who have been vexed by the suggestion 
 that we have nothing to answer the sneer of the 
 world and no real grip of faith at all? These 
 moments meet nearly every man. Is there a faith 
 which cannot be shaken ? Is there any stand which 
 we can take which is irresistible, which, if we take it 
 and hold on, will God hold us fast in the strongest 
 current ? 
 
 This brings me to my point. There is, in the 
 last resort, no proof of religion by argument, though 
 faith has its intellectual buttresses. But deep down 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 291 
 
 below all arguments the proof of religion is a vision 
 of something which you see to be supremely good, of 
 something for which, in fact, you discover you are 
 willing to die. That was the position of these men. 
 They were losing their faith or losing their lives, 
 faced with the choice between faith and the furnace, 
 and they suddenly discovered that loyalty to God 
 and purity and reverence were things for which 
 they were willing to die, things which were far better 
 than prosperity and riches, the favour of kings and 
 and even life itself. " If not, if we have to die, be it 
 known unto you, O king, that we will not serve thy 
 gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
 set up." What is that thing which they had seen ? 
 F. W. Robertson has a well-known passage in which 
 he makes the same point, " When everything is 
 wrapped in hideous uncertainty I know of but one 
 way in which a man may come forth from this agony 
 scatheless. ... If there be no God and no future life, 
 even then it is better to be generous than selfish, 
 better to be chaste than licentious, better to be brave 
 than a coward." But what is a man doing who is 
 staking his faith on that inner value ? He is staking 
 his life on God, or to put it in terms of Jesus, he is 
 taking his stand for the things for which Christ stood, 
 the precious things which grow up and bloom in the 
 shadow of His influence — for when we stand for 
 Christ we are standing for these things, or we are not 
 seeing Jesus at all. That allegiance of our souls in 
 the moral crises of life to goodness, and purity, and 
 love is the reality of our allegiance to Jesus. All we 
 need to do is to recognize it and to ask whether the 
 life that shone in Jesus be not the heart of the 
 universe. 
 
292 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 In any case this is the last stand of faith, the faith 
 which cannot be shaken. It is the deep assurance, 
 striking the spirit with a gleam of heaven's own light, 
 that goodness and righteousness have a value which 
 no earthly standards can measure. They belong to 
 the realm of the priceless. They shine by a light 
 which borrows nothing from the world's rewards and 
 which cannot be dimmed, though sun and moon 
 withdraw themselves. These men had reached rock- 
 bottom. Even if they were burned up in the furnace 
 and all their dreams were mist and their faith a 
 pathetic illusion, still they knew it was better not to 
 worship the golden image. That was their confidence, 
 and no power in earth or hell could shake it. He who 
 takes that stand in a dark hour is unassailable. And 
 he has his reward. For the truth he holds with his 
 feeble hand will turn out one day to be a Hand which 
 holds him. The light he sees will grow till he finds it 
 none other than the Face of God. Standing with his 
 back to that wall he will discover that the wall is the 
 pressure of God's love. 
 
 So Daniel's brave companions found it. God re- 
 sponded to their faith, as He always does. The 
 response was of two kinds. On the one hand it came 
 in the kind of men it made of them and their larger 
 influence for God in the community. They were 
 bigger men afterwards and every one felt the deepened 
 power of their victorious personalities. It is true 
 the writer of the story represent them as having been 
 miraculously saved in the furnace. The Old Testa- 
 ment people were always looking for this kind of 
 marvel. They were alwa}'s hoping for some miracu- 
 lous intervention of God ; it was their view of justice. 
 But God's miraculous entry into human life, as we 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 293 
 
 know in Jesus, is through the miracle of a victorious 
 man, whom faith in Him makes more than conqueror. 
 How do you explain the life of Jesus ? It was the pro- 
 duct of a soul living in perfect faith, with undimmed 
 consciousness of God the Father. A life like His is 
 the clear proof of faith. For His courage. His peace, 
 His serenity, His loving-heartedness, are God's re- 
 sponse to the man who will stand where Christ stood 
 and for the thing for which He stood. Agnosticism 
 cannot create a personality like Jesus. The denial of 
 God cannot create a life like His. Only faith in 
 Christ and in the God who comes to meet us in Him 
 can produce the same kind of life, the same quality 
 of loving, the same victory over sin and suffering, and 
 hatred and death. That is the proof of faith. It 
 touches springs of power which can remove mountains. 
 It awakens love in loveless hearts. It comes into a 
 crippled soul, to make it strong, and a man in 
 bondage, to set him free. The triumph of these men 
 in the furnace was a miracle, but their spirit was a 
 greater miracle, and that miracle was the creative act 
 of God responding to their faith. 
 
 But there is another response — the consciousness of 
 a Divine fellowship. There appeared in the furnace 
 with them, " One like unto the Son of Man." God's 
 great answer to our faith is the assurance of what we 
 call His presence. We may not realize it in feeling, 
 but we know. All kinds of men have had it who 
 have made the great stand and taken the adventurous 
 way. Read the simple autobiography of Dr. Wilfred 
 Grenfell of Labrador. His faith was very elementary 
 at first. He tells us he stood for Christ because 
 the one shining reality in his life was his mother's 
 unselfish love. That was the thing which was 
 
294 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 priceless, the thing for which he would have been 
 willing to give his life. But as he followed the great 
 adventure and stood for his faith through years of 
 hardship and self-denying service on the wild coasts 
 of Labrador, he says : " God strengthened the founda- 
 tions on which my faith stood till Christ now means 
 more to me as a living presence." Paul had the 
 same experience. " Who shall separate us from the 
 love of Christ?" That was his way of putting it. 
 Some people may call it fancy, but it is idle to cast 
 doubts on the experience of men till we have been 
 where they have been. 
 
 The sense of Christ's presence does not always 
 come to us in the same way. But in some way 
 it comes, the deep, sure consciousness that He and 
 we are one. And it comes when we go out to 
 stand for Him and with Him, out beyond the little 
 interests of our own life to where love meets the 
 sin and suffering of the world in the shadows of 
 Calvary. F. W. Robertson was once talking with a 
 lady who was taking him to task for his views. She 
 ended by saying she would have to inform the 
 authorities. He replied, " I don't care." " Do you know 
 what happened to ' Don't Care ' ? " she asked. " Yes," 
 was the answer, " He was crucified on Calvary." There 
 is a deep meaning in that. For all who go out to 
 follow truth and right in their naked faith will come 
 to a cross, but there they will find Christ and in 
 that shadow know the brightness of His presence. 
 
 Faith is a rock whose foundations strengthen only 
 as we stand upon it. It brings its own certainty only 
 as we are willing to trust it. We cannot keep faith 
 alive by merely trying to preserve it, any more than 
 we can keep the leaves of last year's summer alive by 
 
THE LAST STAND OF FAITH 295 
 
 keeping them in a glass case. Faith lives and grows 
 as we live by it out in the world. It awakes at first 
 in various ways. The stirring of some chance word, 
 a mother's love, will bring it ; most of all it awakes 
 as we open life up to Jesus and listen to the voices 
 of the soul which rise to call Him Lord. Have 
 you felt the movings of that Spirit within ? Go and 
 live for the things He bids you stand for out in the 
 world. Stand for Him through everything, and one 
 day you will find that He is standing beside you. 
 
 I give you the end of a golden string, 
 
 Only, wind it into a ball : 
 It will lead you at last to Heaven's gatc^ 
 
 Built in Jerusalem's walL 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 
 
 "They that go down to the sea in ships, and do business in great 
 waters ; these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the 
 deep." — Ps. cvii. 23. 
 
 This was a great confession for a Jew to make. By- 
 nature, he hated the sea ; there was nothing of the 
 seaman in his blood. The sea was his favourite 
 symbol of unrest ; it was the mark of separation 
 from his beloved land. In the picture of the perfect 
 world of his dream which came to John in Patmos, 
 all the secret distrust of his nature comes out in one 
 pregnant line — " And there was no more sea." 
 
 But the men of the Old Testament, though they 
 hated the sea and never ventured forth unless they 
 were driven by necessity or drawn by the lure of 
 gold, had to admit that the ocean voyager knew 
 secrets which did not come to men in the shelter of 
 their farms and quiet villages. The ocean came to 
 be looked on as the stage for God's most thrilling 
 and awesome unfoldings. "Thy way is in the sea, 
 and Thy path is in the great waters." They who 
 would see God's work and wonders at their best must 
 "go down to the sea in ships, and do business in 
 great waters." 
 
 This is a very literal truth. The sea seems to 
 leave a special mark upon the nature of the men 
 who sail it. There is something unique about a 
 
 sailor at his best which life in a cramped world at 
 
 296 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 297 
 
 home is not able to produce — a generosity, a charm, 
 a blithe cheerfulness and ready resource which are the 
 sea's own special gift. And further, the sea seems 
 to leave its mark upon the deeper nature in its 
 outlook upon God. Mix with the fisher folk around 
 our shores who daily battle with danger to win the 
 harvest of the sea and you will often find a deep 
 reverence, a sense of wonder, and a generous faith, 
 which men in other callings tend to lose. In an 
 article on the work of our fishing fleets during the 
 war there is a tribute to this quality. " Nor have 
 they forgotten," says the writer, " to see the ancient 
 works and wonders in the deep. Many of them 
 drink and curse, but more of them are quiet God- 
 fearing men, with a Bible in their kit, and a fist of 
 iron for the face of the wicked." Part of it is due, 
 no doubt, to the larger field of experience. The sea 
 is never the same. It can change in a moment from 
 calm to storm, from the glory of unimaginable 
 beauties which overwhelms the soul to the misty 
 shroud which shuts life up in an eerie silence. If 
 God is to reveal Himself fully He must have a stage/ 
 that is roomy enough for His grand effects. 
 
 But there is more. There is something in this 
 voyaging which quickens the nerve of spiritual 
 perception. The tragic thing about a life of dull 
 routine with the same grey walls round us, is that it 
 deadens the power to feel and see, and keep our 
 touch with God. Some people never seek God till 
 they are at the end of their own resources. There is 
 a divine conspiracy in life, when we take it seriously, 
 to force us out of scepticism into prayer. 
 
 And lips cry, "God be merciful," 
 Which ne'er cried, " God be praised." 
 
298 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 But in the ways of ordinary life we become immersed 
 in things which never make any deep call upon the 
 spirit. Life goes past in the pursuit of what we some 
 day recognize as shadows. We take our fill of 
 shadow pleasure and tease ourselves with shadow 
 troubles, till one day some big experience touches 
 a deeper chord ; and then 
 
 the dream 
 Is broken which had held us unaware, 
 And with a shudder we feel our naked soul 
 In the great black world, face to face with God. 
 
 The Psalmist describes the experience to the letter 
 with all the vividness of life amid a storm at sea. 
 " They reel to and fro. They stagger like a drunken 
 man, and are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto 
 the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out 
 of their distresses. They that go down to the sea in 
 ships, and do business in great waters; these see 
 the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep." 
 A word like this has always meaning beyond its 
 literal truth. If men have met things at sea which 
 they did not meet on land, the reason is not that 
 these experiences could not be found at home, but 
 that the grapple with the sea awakens the mind 
 which can meet them ; and with that mind we can 
 meet them anywhere. Life itself is often spoken of 
 as a sea. A man who is at his wits' end in the 
 confusions of ordinary living, will confess he is "at 
 sea." Like the sea, life has its mystery of the 
 unknown, its changing experiences, its risks and its 
 dangers. No one knows what may meet him any 
 morning, even without going a step from his own 
 door — what soul-stirring moment, what tide of joy, 
 what wave of trouble. On this sea of life there is 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 299 
 
 one experience which is open to us all, the crowning 
 point of life — to see the works of the Lord and His 
 wonders in the deep. But who are the men who 
 find this meeting with God ? Not they who hug the 
 shore or seek the sheltered haven like some timid 
 craft which fears to put out to sea. It is they who 
 hear the call of life with all its possible risks of pain 
 and sorrow and strain and death, and go out facing 
 life bravely to take what comes. But more, we 
 must face life in the interest of some high purpose — 
 some call of the Spirit. Plenty of people meet 
 life with a certain reckless swagger, boasting that 
 they are ready to take what comes and are afraid of 
 nothing. But they are not sailing the seas of life to 
 do business. They are out on pleasure or following 
 the track of self-interest. And the point about such 
 purposeless voyaging is that it does not lead us into 
 great waters, except as by accident we happen to be 
 caught in a storm. Many a man engaged in what 
 the world calls big business is sailing very shallow 
 seas. Selfish interests never take any one out into 
 great waters. The selfish man shuns them and 
 shrinks from anything in the nature of generous risk, 
 and so he misses God, whose path is in the deep. 
 No man can find God save as he is going God's way. 
 Look in the Gospels for the occasions on which Christ 
 revealed Himself most wonderfully to the eyes of 
 the disciples. It was in the places of strain and 
 trouble where they found themselves because they 
 had followed Him, regardless of risk. One was a 
 lonely road, where two men walked with the hope of 
 their lives in ruins, because they had staked every- 
 thing on Him. Another was an upper room where 
 the disciples had withdrawn themselves, expecting 
 
300 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 every moment that the mob would break in on them 
 with fury to hale them forth to death. Still another 
 was a storm at sea, where the waves ran high and 
 they were beginning to think that everything was 
 over, when the sleeping Christ awoke, and revealed 
 His power in works and wonders on the deep. Once 
 Christ came upon the disciples by the lake shore and 
 found them dispirited after a night of fruitless fishing. 
 His cure was not soft words of comfort, but a new 
 challenge to effort. " Launch out into the deep," He 
 said, and His words are a parable. 
 
 Perhaps there are some of us whose trouble is their 
 narrow acquaintance with the deeper things of religion. 
 Many of the hymns we sing, it may be, tell of dis- 
 coveries we have never made and lay a heavy toll on 
 our sincerity. Why is there so little depth in our 
 adoration, so little uplift in the music of our praise? 
 There may be various reasons for our disappointment. 
 One reason may be that we are expecting God to 
 appear to us in some heart-swelling emotion which 
 will send us into ecstasy. If so, it is well we are 
 disappointed, for there is nothing so irreligious as 
 some forms of what passes for religious feeling. 
 God comes in the truth made clearer, the heart made 
 braver, the spirit made more loving. He appears in 
 that deeper consciousness of His love in Jesus which 
 changes the face of life and fills the common sky 
 with wonder and gives the wayside flower the power 
 to take the heart with beauty. But perhaps we 
 have never found God near because we have never 
 launched out on His business or given ourselves to 
 His tide. We have never cut ourselves adrift from 
 the bonds of calculating prudence, or let go in a great 
 faith before some task in His service. 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 301 
 
 There is an idea that religion is supposed to meet 
 the fear of death. The thing which religion came to 
 meet is not primarily the fear of death, but the fear 
 of life. That is the fear which grips some people 
 most. They spend half their time and ingenuity 
 making securities against its risk and danger and 
 keeping out of the reach of trouble. One of the 
 commonest lines of comfort when children die is to say 
 that they are better out of it all, and we sometimes 
 pity the children as they romp at play, thinking of 
 what awaits them. It is a slur upon the love of God 
 who made us and put us here, in such a world as 
 this. The only man who is to be pitied is he 
 who faces life without God — which means to face it 
 without a whole-hearted acceptance of some great 
 meaning in it and some great service through which 
 that meaning becomes vital. Pain and trouble are 
 the price of knowledge. If there is a heap of trouble, 
 there may also be an exceeding weight of glory in 
 the cargo we carry home to port. Stephen Graham 
 has a great phrase describing the Russians with their 
 patient acceptance of all that comes. " They have," 
 he says, " acquired the habit of saying ' Yes ' to life." 
 Only by the brave and blithesome way of holding 
 out both hands to life, can we have them filled with 
 the gold of the Spirit. " They that go down to the 
 sea in ships, and do business in great waters ; these 
 see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the 
 deep." 
 
 There are various tides which seek to lure us out 
 on life's ocean. There is the instinct and call of love 
 which seeks ties of friendship and makes us set up 
 homes and undertake responsibilities. Very few 
 people, I imagine, reflect when they make a home, to 
 
302 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 what possible sorrows they are baring their hearts, 
 what wearing hours of burden and responsibility they 
 will have to meet if they are not to shirk the burden. 
 Every true home where children are growing up is a 
 perfect sea of adventure. It has been the fashion 
 among some to look with a superior smile upon those 
 who are struggling through life with the care of a 
 large family, as if this loving bondage were a kind of 
 folly. I wonder if any of us amid the inevitable 
 sacrifices of home and the harassing cares or toil 
 of children have been tempted to ask ourselves 
 whether we were right to put forth on such an 
 ocean. This word is a great tonic for such moments. 
 There are wonders in those deeps which are found 
 nowhere else. What light of heaven is seen in the 
 starry eyes of children ! What sense of God's 
 Providence through the perplexing ways! What 
 wonderful comforting in the bitter pain! What 
 knowledge of the Father comes through the sharp 
 anxieties of the daily traffic of love ! Where shall 
 we go to seek for God's wonders ? 
 
 Let us go, we have been long blind, 
 
 To a place that is almost too near to find, 
 
 A place that is Heaven, and Heaven's at home. 
 
 Mark Rutherford gives us a picture of such an 
 unfolding. His wife was ill and everything seemed 
 hopelessly dark. "I was like a man shipwrecked 
 and alone in a polar country, whose existence depends 
 upon one spark of fire which he tries to cherish left 
 glimmering in a handful of ashes." But he made his 
 discovery. For his step-child who had been some- 
 thing of a trial to him before, rose to unexpected 
 heights of devotion and seriousness which became 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 303 
 
 to him nothing less than a revelation of God. " Fool 
 that I was/' he says, " not to know that the messages 
 of God are not to be read through the envelope in 
 which they are enclosed." How many people are 
 trying to read God's messages through a sealed 
 envelope which it will take the rough hands of life 
 to break open, and at the same moment are shirking 
 the very cares or fearing the very burdens which 
 would do it, unveiling God like a wind that 
 scatters a mist. "They that go down to the sea 
 in ships, and do business in great waters ; these 
 see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the 
 deep." 
 
 There is another tide — the tide of Christ's great 
 purpose of loving service. Faith is a great adventure, 
 or it is nothing. Can we wonder that people miss 
 God, whose lives are filled with trivial interests which 
 bring a host of trifling, irritating troubles ? There are 
 cares that ennoble the spirit and make room for God, 
 but there are cares that shut God out, cares that 
 choke the heart as grain is choked with weeds. 
 The gospel of Christ is a great medicine for care, 
 but His way of dealing with some cares is to take 
 us into a world where these cares do not reach us, for 
 the spiritual climate does not breed them. Half the 
 troubles of the world are born of petty interests which 
 have no place in a large heart. The mind which 
 is set on God's tasks and "does business in great 
 waters " will have cares, but they will be such cares 
 as a great purpose brings, such cares as fell on the 
 soul of Jesus in the shadow of a Cross. For these 
 there is God's own comforting. His own wonderful 
 fellowship. Are we vexed and troubled about many 
 things ? Are they such cares as are worthy of one 
 
304 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 who is living for Christ ? Are they such troubles as we 
 find on the way of selfishness or on the way of faith ? 
 We have simply no right to the serenity of faith till 
 we have found our place in the adventure of faitht 
 The comforts of religion to a self-seeking life is 
 merely a drug for a deep-seated disease which 
 really needs the surgeon's knife. We cannot expect 
 to see God's works and wonders till we have 
 " launched out into the deep " and are " doing busi- 
 ness in the great waters " of His service and His 
 compassion. 
 
 Are we out for the Kingdom ? Are we seeking to 
 open our souls to the troubles and trials of other 
 lives? Are we bearing something of the burden 
 of a world gone wrong, and seeking to right it? 
 We must get out into these great waters — the 
 ocean of human need and suffering where Christ 
 developed His unique consciousness of God. Prayer 
 means nothing to us till we know something of His 
 weary soul, strained and bleeding in a ministry 
 among the sick and suffering. Worship is "a dull 
 mechanic exercise" to the man who has found 
 nothing worthy to ask of God because he has done 
 nothing to need His Divine restoration. Till we are 
 driven by sheer pressure of the world's agony to find 
 the power of God, life will hold no miracles of His 
 grace. The Book of Acts is being continued to-day ; 
 it is the one book in the world which is never finished. 
 We wonder why we cannot see such miracles to-day. 
 It is because we need to repeat the faith and the 
 daring, and the adventure of the men who did the 
 acts. Then we would see them as some men are 
 seeing them still. The slums of London are alive 
 with such works and wonders : but the men who 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 305 
 
 see them are those who go down into these deep 
 v^aters. General Booth tells the story of the ad- 
 venture of faith which sent him there. " I hungered 
 for nell," he says, as he went through these murky 
 waters. " 1 pushed into the midst of it, I loved it 
 because of the souls I saw." Then he went home 
 to his wife, and said, " I have given myself and you 
 and the children to the service of these sick souls." 
 That is the kind of man who is never troubled 
 by questions of the existence of God ; he has the 
 evidences in his contact with men and women whom 
 God has redeemed. His memory is a Book of Acts. 
 It is the same with the missionary in foreign lands. 
 Every great missionary biography is a record of 
 wonderful deliverances and miraculous providings, 
 and of soul-moving cases of degraded and sinful 
 people won, and mastered, and moulded by redeem- 
 ing grace. Read the description of Uganda to-day 
 and Uganda fifty years ago. It is a revelation of 
 the works and wonders of the Lord. Why have 
 we never met such wonders ? Because we have never 
 allowed the love of God to carry us into such 
 straits. Why have we never seen such miracles? 
 Because we have never tackled such problems. 
 They belong to the men who " do business in great 
 waters." 
 
 The truth is God needs a wider stage than that of 
 our individual souls. *' The field is the world," says 
 Jesus. " His path is in the sea," says the Psalmist. 
 To-day the waters of life are troubled with unrest 
 in every direction. There are problems facing us 
 which can only be solved by faith and love. Is 
 the Church to stand back from the critical social 
 confusions of our time and merely hold the ring for 
 20 
 
3o6 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 contending parties to fight it out? Is she merely to 
 be the umpire accepting the present rules of the 
 game in international and industrial matters, or is 
 it her business to declare the rules according to the 
 mind of Jesus and insist on having them brought 
 into play in all our relations with one another ? Is 
 she to be content with a message to the individual ? 
 It is in the individual soul, of course, that reformations 
 are born ; the new man makes the new world. But 
 the new man is made, in part, by the vision of the 
 new world calling to the depths of his nature and 
 by the challenge of the tasks through which it is 
 brought in. For Christianity stands for a love to be 
 applied to life in all its relationships. 
 
 These are deep waters, some people say. Better 
 keep out of them. You will get lost in the perplex- 
 ing currents of economic theory for which you have 
 no chart. You will get into difficulties, provoke re- 
 sentments, rouse storms, risk rocks. Is the Church 
 to hoist the flag of " Safety first," which never carried 
 a true man anywhere except into a back-water? 
 The Church is out in the world to change the world 
 She has something to say even in the region of 
 economics, for in all economics there is a human 
 factor, a spiritual factor, which needs to be taken 
 into account. Our present economic theories are 
 based upon a low view of human nature and the 
 selfish motives by which it works. A new spirit 
 would change things. Let the tides of faith and 
 hope lift you and carry you ; never mind where they 
 take you. They will certainly take us into deep and 
 often bitter waters ; for that is where they carried 
 Christ. They carried Him to a cross, but there He 
 revealed the works and wonders of the Lord. The 
 
TRAFFIC AND DISCOVERY 307 
 
 Cross is the method of God's love in action, and 
 His love has no other apocalypse of glory. The 
 Church will begin to conquer the world when she 
 makes the world hate her for her loyalty to Christ, 
 When she begins to do business in great waters she 
 will find God in the deep. 
 
 But last of all, this word has something to say to 
 us about the great adventure of death. There is a 
 Christ-created instinct which tells us* death is only 
 another bit of the great voyage of life. It leads to 
 no still haven, but to a wider ocean of unimaginable 
 adventure and discovery. This is Tennyson's view 
 of death. It is not reaching a harbour, but putting 
 out to sea. (Our thought of the after-life as a quiet 
 harbour is a view which has alienated countless active 
 and vigorous souls. It is the last word of a religion 
 of comfort which vital souls reject.) And the fear of 
 death is of the same nature as that fear of life which 
 turned Hamlet's career into a tragedy of indecision, 
 so that he would neither live nor die. The man who 
 in Christ has mastered the fear of life has lost the 
 fear of death because he knows a Love who is 
 Lord of all things, making the unknown spaces a 
 sphere for His deeper disclosures. When Christian 
 in the Pilgrim's Progress reached the great waters he 
 was timid and shrinking. " Be of good cheer," cried 
 Hopeful, so he plucked up courage and went on. 
 '1 hen he brake into a loud voice. " Oh, I see Him, 
 and He tells me, ' When thou passest through the 
 waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers, 
 they shall not overflow thee.' " So they crossed the 
 river and entered the City and their raiment was 
 transfigured, and all the bells of the City rang for 
 joy. Do some of us fear this experience for our- 
 
3o8 THE VICTORY OF GOD 
 
 selves or for those who have gone from us through 
 great waters into the deep? They have gone to 
 do business there, and there they see the works and 
 wonders of the Lord. 
 
 For though from out this bourne of tirr\e and space 
 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to see my Pilot face to face. 
 
 When I have crossed the bar. 
 
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