^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^ Presented byTTDr*. "3 .^»~^c:?\'Won . Divisiott *>*«»•«< .Tr:f-C^ . SecHon i^..7^« ^' tumw, (k^^/ri, X 6 /LU^^^d^ -eAPTQ 'AOPATQ MONQ GEQ, TiMH KAi ao;h;a, 'EIS TOTS 'AIQNA2 TQN 'AIQNQN. 'AMHN. Cambridge, April 19, 1858. ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. This editioD, which solely owes its appearance to numerous friendly requests that the Sermons should be reprinted, differs very slightly from the first edition. A few trifling alterations in language have been made here and there, and a few verbal modifications introduced in parts of Sermon V., where the kind criticisms that have been passed on that sermon have shown that such were desirable. A few additions have also been made to the authori- ties in the notes, but no attempt has been made to alter their general character, it being felt, on mature reflection, that such notes, though only of the slight and unpretending nature alluded to in the Preface, are, perhaps, better adapted to the speculative sub- jects which they are designed to illustrate, than more elaborate and systematic compilations. Exeter, Jan. 1862. ADVEETISEMENT TO THE THIED EDITION. The present edition is simply a reprint of the second, further alteration not seeming to be now especially called for, nor perhaps, in a slight work like the pre- sent, in all respects desirable. Gloucester, Aug. 1863. CONTENTS. SEEMON I. PAGE The Destiny of the Ceeatuee. — Vanity .... 1 SERMON II. The Destiny of the Ceeatuee. — Suffeeing ... 26 SERMON III. The Destiny of the Ceeatuee. — Death .... 50 SERMON IV. The Destiny of the Ceeatuee. — Restitution . . 77 SERMON V. The Theeefold Natuee of Man 103 SERMON VI. The Communion of Saints 126 Notes 147 ijljUl4f %{ SERMON I. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. — VANITY. Romans viii. 20, 21. The creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, hut by reason of Him who hath subjected the same, in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. rPHERE are a few texts in the New Testament, -^ more especially in St. PauFs Epistles, that seem to point to the deepest and uttermost secrets of creation. Often half isolated from the argument, emerging suddenly from a more restricted context, gathering up what has seemed specific into declara- tions most comprehensively general, they reveal to the reader, at one time, such far-reaching issues, at another, such retrospective dispensations, that the immediate occasion, the unfolding argument, or the applied exhortation, seems lost and forgotten in the majesty of the incidental revelation. All we feel conscious of, is seeing along a vista into the past or the future so mars^ellous yet so di^dne, that all life seems in an instant to acquire a deeper meaning, all the mystery of our being to assume a fresh signifi- B 2 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [serm. cance. The perplexed thoughts of weary years adjust theniselves suddenly into order and coherence ; the long looked for is at last fully seen; the long searched for at last found. Of such a class of passages I could not well have chosen a more striking and notable instance than that which will form the subject of our meditations this afternoon. Few texts are more comprehensive ; few reach further both into the past and into the future ; few afford more serious topics for Christian iieditation. I feel^ indeed, that in choosing such a text I am, in some degree, laying myself open to the charge of presumption, and of intruding into things not fully revealed ; still, in this particular case, I am somewhat emboldened by the remembrance that all the more sober and thoughtful interpreters of the present day are plainly converging to a common explanation of this mysterious passage,^ and are distinctly tending to re-affirm the ancient and tra- ditional interpretation of the early Church.^ And again, I cannot be insensible to the fact that our text carries with it practical applications of no common importance, — applications which, by the blessing of the Eternal Spirit, may become fruitful unto salvation, and may serve to add a reality and solemnity to the common aspects of our daily life. These indeed I cannot hope, on the present occasion, to do more than generally indicate; but I feel that ^ See note A. ^ See note B. I.] VANITY. 3 I am addressing an audience that can readily supply all that may be lacking, and that will perhaps be more benefited by having a few suggestive outlines presented to their view in the compass of a single sermon, than by any attempt to enter into details and enlarge upon applications, which would easily occupy my whole allotted course. I trust, indeed, with the blessing of God, hereafter to discuss kindred and illustrative subjects ; but this, on which we are now about to dwell — the subjection of the creature to vanity — will, I am sure, be most beneficially treated, if reduced to the limits of one sermon, and exhibited at one view in all its characteristic unity and com- prehensiveness. Before entering more immediately upon the con- sideration of the separate clauses, let me call your attention to two facts in reference to our present text : First, — that few passages have tended more distinctly to call out the exegetical or doctrinal pecu- liarities of successive expositors, and consequently, that few passages require us more cautiously to exclude all interpretations that have a subjective aspect, and reflect too strongly the prevailing senti- ments and opinions of the age in which they appeared. Secondly, — that no text has suS'ered more from the arbitrary limitation of the terms in which it is expressed ; and that in no case will it be found more advisable to give boldly to every term the most com- prehensive meaning the context will warrant, and to every clause its fullest and most extended significance. B 2 4 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. The application of these two considerations meets ns in the first clause : ' The creature was made sub- ject to vanity/ On the latitude assigned to the term ^creature/ or, as it may perhaps be better translated_, ' creation/ the interpretation of the passage mainly depends. And here, without occupy- ing your time with detailed reasons, I will venture to assert, that, after most anxious consideration, I cannot doubt that Irenseus and the Greek Fathers were right in giving the term ^ creation' its widest application,^ and in referring it to all creation, animate and inanimate, which stands in any degree of relation to man. I am aware that the great name of Augustine is urged as confining the term to man- kind in their unconverted state j but if you examine the passage where this opinion is maintained,^ you will at once see how clearly his own words show, that he here receded from his usual expansive interpretation of Scripture under the pressure of Manichsean antagonism. I am aware, too, that arguments have been founded on the impropriety of ascribing a feeling of yearning and longing to an inanimate world : these, however, we may be content to pass over in silence, when biblical language supplies so many illustrations, and when the most calm and unimpassioned thinkers have felt no diffi- culty in using words and expressions in a great degree similar and analogous.^ ^ See note C. ^ See note D. ^ See note E. I.] VANITY. 5 Without pausing longer on tliis pointy let us at once pass onward to the mournful declaration that is embodied in the first clause^ — ' The creation was made subject to vanity/ Who can resist pausing on so startling a revelation ? Who^ as he turns his eyes on the wide realms of creation^ does not feel strange queries forcing themselves on his attention^ and demanding of him an answer? Who, as he gazes on the fairer features of nature, the sunny landscape, the sheltering w^oods, the clustered moun- tains, does not feel the force of the inscrutable antithesis ? All so fair, yet all subject to such a destiny ; so beautiful, yet so doomed. Is there one graver thinker among us who has not craved for the solution of a mystery so seemingly inexplicable? ' What ! ' w^e sometimes say, in our deep perplexity, ' what can be the meaning of this law of vanity in reference to creation generally? I can understand the ruin of my own soul, I am forced to acknowledge its corrupting lusts, I can feel its rending passions, I can trace out the slow corrosion of evil habits, the con^allsive movements of sudden sins, — I can mark all this in myself and others ; but these guiltless creatures of God's hand, what have they done? These animals that minister to my wants, and die unrecked of and unheeded, whence come their strange accumulations of sufferings ? This wide-spread plant- world, that contributes to my food, or bears balm to my wounds, — whence comes its often thw^arted development and stinted growth, its palpable subjec- 6 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [serm. tion to something more tlian perishableness, its bondage to something worse than decay ? Is there no answer? Is the attribute of Preserver to be denied to the Creator, or given only under such limitations as make it a very mockery and a bitter- ness ? Verily, is there no answer ? ^ Yes, surely, the text supplies an answer, — deep and mournful, yet, if rightly understood, unspeakably consolatory. The answer is, that it was ' by reason of Him who subjected it.' Not, observe, by Him, simply and directly, but by reason of Him, ^ owing to some determination of His counsels, some interposi- tion of His will. And who was He ? Are we to say with some interpreters, that it was Adam, and refer to a mere man what seems to involve the agency and providence of God ? Are we to say that it was Satan, and introduce conceptions of a destroyer and an adversary in the consideration of a text, which tells alone of the sovereign will of a Creator and Restorer ?^ Can we consistently believe it to be other than God, — God the all-wise and aU-just, who was moved to subject His creation to this mournful law; who, in accordance with the deep harmony that exists between all parts of His creation, was pleased to decree that, along the cloudy paths of suffering and mutability, all things should emerge together into the perfect day ? But who that has deeply considered this subject ^ ^la TOP vTTOTa^avTa : comp. Winer, Gr. § 49. c, p. 356, note. 3 See note F. I.] VANITY. 7 would not fain ask still further, What is the exact nature of this subjection, and, above all, wheii did it take place? Is it coeval with the first dawn of creation, or is it to be referred to an historic era no older than the race to wliich we belong ? These are momentous questions, which no sound interpretation of this text must leave wholly unanswered. With regard to the first, let us be especially careful to bear in mind the peculiar amplitude of the term ' vanity/ It is not said that the creation was subject to death or corruption, though both lie involved in the expression, but to something more frightfully generic, to something almost worse than non-exist- ence, — to purposelessness, to an inability to realize its natural tendencies and the ends for which it was called into being, to baffled endeavour and mocked expectation, to a blossoming and not bearing fruit, a pursuing and not attaining, yea, and as the analogies of the language of the original significantly imply, to a searching, and never finding/ Let us bear this well in mind, lest we find ourselves involved in those difficulties into which nearly all have fallen, who have sought to limit this purely scriptural, but profoundly significant and comprehen- sive term. But fiirther. When did this subjection take place ? Is it, as some of the popular thinkers of our own day would fain persuade us, in consequence of some primal ^ See note G. 8 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [ SERM. > law, that reaches backward into the furthest regions of the past, and that was originally designed to in- clude both us and all mankind in the necessities of a common bondage ?^ Or, is it not rather, — as, indeed, our own hearts already half tell us, and the guarded language of our present text seems not obscurely to indicate, — not the original law, but a counter-law, a judicial dispensation, which opposition to the will of a beneficent Creator served to call forth and to ratify ? In one word, is it not sin that has caused all this, that has cast this shade on creation, and drawn the bar sinister across the broad shield of the handi- work of God? It must be so. And yet it is a plausible hypothesis that refers all to a primal law impressed on the earliest manifestations of creation. It is a startling retrospect that shows us imperfec- tion and incompleteness in the first commencement of being, and discloses to our view evidences of suffer- ings and death in the most remote periods of the earth^s history. Does not science seem to contribute to the decision? Do not the very stones we tread on show to us the hooked tooth, the beak for rending, and the claw for tearing ? Do not the rocks tell of rapine and destruction and death, ages before man was called into existence ?^ Does it not seem, then, that, after all, we must rectify our conceptions, and refer this subjection to some law which existed long anterior to man, to which man must have yielded whether he had sinned or no, and to which his actual 1 See note H. ^ g^e ^ote I. I.] VANITY. 9 sin only added some embitterment and enhancement ? So a popular philosophy would suggest. But, inde- pendently of the strong feeling of our hearts, — inde- pendently of the connexion of sin and death, which the verses preceding the text distinctly imply, — inde- pendently of the reference, in the verses that follow, to the bond that unites the future of man with the future of all the other portions of creation with which he stands in any degree in contact, — independently of the strong presumption, that is thus suggested, of some melancholy past, in which both were united, — independently of all these considerations, can we say that such an hypothesis is in any way compatible with the plain declarations of the text, or with the simplest deductions which are suggested by the analogy of Scripture? Does it not fail in several important particulars ? In the first place, does it not tacitly confound the more generic term vanity with the more specific term death ? In the second place, does it not assume this most unlikely fact, that man, created as he was in the image of his Maker, and framed as he was by the special operation of His divine hands, was to share the lot of creatures called into being under conditions significantly dififerent ; not separately formed, but collectively summoned forth from the secret chambers of a prolific earth ? Is it not, far- ther, almost at variance with the cardinal text, ' Death passed through unto all men f^ not all fic TravTci- nv9ouj7rovr CLii\ftf». 10 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. things but all men, as if it were almost intended to mark, that death was a law and a process that ori- ginally had no existence or significance for man? And lastly, does it not rob of all its real meaning and potency the curse which man's sin brought on the material earth, and by consequence, on all the forms of life to which that earth gave origin : ^ And to Adam He said, cursed is the ground for thy sake ; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles it shall bring forth to thee ; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. '^ Are the theories of a speculative philosophy to lead us implicitly to deny such mighty and such specific declarations ? God forbid I I do not doubt then, brethren, that the counter- law, by which the whole creation has been made subject to vanity, is to be referred to no other epoch than the fall of man. Prior to that time all nature was lovingly obeying the laws impressed on it by God ; the herb was yielding its seed, the animal was bringing forth its kind, each to be succeeded by a more numerous growth of its own species, or to make way for more highly organized types of animal or vegetable life. Decay meant reproduction, disso- lution development, death a return into the general life of nature, which was to be succeeded by a more prolific emergence. All was obeying the beneficent laws of the Creator ; everything was tending, in its ^ Gen. iii. I.] VANITY. 11 own measure and degree, to a final perfection, and — if the speculation be not over bold — to a final annihilation of any evil that might have flowed as a consequence from the fall of angels, by those very fore-ordered processes to which we, in our ignorance, give the names of incompleteness and imperfection. While all things were thus harmoniously fulfilling the law of their existence, while everything was thus stretching forwards to higher measures of perfection, Man, the highest and noblest of God^s creatures, formed out of the elements of the same material world, — yet with the image of his Maker on his brow, and the breath of divine life in his nostrils, — was called on the theatre of Being to lead all things onwards to their highest developments, to act the part of the choragus of creation, and, himself exempted from death and dissolution, to assist throughout the whole development of the mighty working, whereby God was to become all in all. Pause only, brethren, and consider the mystical relation of man to his Creator, and to that earth from which he was taken. Mark how in that won- drous union of body, soul, and spirit,^ man was fitted by his Maker to be a kind of mediator between the Infinite Father and the finite but blameless creatures of His hand. Consider only, how the body of man is the link between the material world and the im- 1 On this subject see Sermon V. 12 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. material soul ; and how the soul is the bond between the body and the spirit ; and how the spirit is that which formed some medium of connexion between the soul of man — the true centre of his personality — and the eternal and infinite Spirit of God. When a being thus constituted^ thus mysteriously related to the material world_, fell from his allegiance to his Creator^ can we readily believe that creation . was a mere uninterested spectator ? Does not every consideration prepare us for what we know from other passages of Scripture, and which our present text seems clearly to confirm, — that man^s voluntary sin produced an effect upon the whole material world ; that it cast its shade over all the realms of nature, and caused creation, involuntarily and reluctantly (what a mournful and suggestive antithesis there lies in those words, ^ not willing'), to submit itself to the effect of an act committed with the full assent of a rational will, and on the deliberate choice of a volun- tary agent ? Yes, let us doubt not that the sin of man wrought all the ruin that we now can trace both in nature and ourselves, and caused the beneficent Creator, in conformity with those counsels sealed in silence from the beginning of the world, to subject all that, of which man was the pre-eminent creation, to purposelessness, vanity, and corruption. Is there in such a dispensation anything so totally inconceivable, so wholly at variance with the analo- gies of things as to make us doubt the possibility of its existence, or to praclude our believing that sin I-] VANITY. 13 is an interposing cloud between us and the Father of Lights, that has cast its palpable shadow on the face of all created things, — that the world since the fall is, as it were, a ivorld without sunshine ? To adopt an illustration from the ordinary appearances of nature; what a difference there is between the aspects of a fair landscape when viewed under a clouded, and under an unclouded sky ! What a real difference, not in sentiment and feeling, but in actual appear- ance, between the darkening mountain, the misty valley, the obliterated distance, and the joy ance and beauty of the same scene when gladdened with sunshine! How shadow enhances substance, how form becomes defined and distance expanded, how each individual object seems subordinated to the general effect, and how the whole scene seems only to suggest continuance and extension, and to be itself only a part of a yet fairer and more radiant distance ! Even so is it now. We cannot, indeed, fully verify the simile ; we know not what the world actually was, still we can form some inferences by observing what it is. Everywhere the same appearance of something that be-clouds and darkens, everywhere the same traces of aberration from appointed ends, the same hints of perverted tendencies, the same tokens of fr'ustration and decay. Even with the acknowledged phenomena of rapine and death in a pre- Adamite world, borne steadily in view and made the most of in argument, set now before your eyes the scarcely doubtful instances of depravation of 14 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. instincts, the exhibitions of wanton cruelty in the lower animals, the occasional glimpses of something worse than ferocity, the traces of a startling malignity, especially in some of the species of more venomons reptiles, which it seems hard indeed to believe was natural and original. Add all these things together, and then finally consider if there be anything really inconceivable in the thought, that the effects of man^s sin are to be traced in the material world, yea, that the whole creation has become subject to vanity owing to the rebellion of its suzerain, and is now, as the Apostle tells us, ever groaning and travailing in its alien and unnatural bondage. But is it to last for ever ? No verily ! The most consolatory, though most mysterious portion of the text now claims our attention. This subjection on which we have been meditating was mitigated by the infusion of a hope, which remains to this day un- changed and unimpaired. ^ The creation was sub- jected to vanity,^ says the Apostle, ^in hope that itself, the creation (for this, I cannot doubt, is the most simple and natural translation of the clause)^ — the seemingly hopeless creation — shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.^ In these consolatory words the point of real and startling importance is the close bond that connects man with the material world, especially ^ See note J. I.] VANITY. 15 in tlie relation of time. With man's sin came at once the curse that fell upon the earth ; thorn and thistle began to germinate the very day that Adam sinned* confusion and discord began at once to work amid the tendencies of created things. And even so shall it be in the restitution. The earnest expectation of the creature waits for no doubtful or chimerical fiiturCj for no ill-defined or uncertain hour of emancipation; it waits, as the Spirit of God here infallibly declares, for no less a sure and certain epoch than that of the manifestation of the sons of God. The restoration of man and the world will be as contemporaneous as their first bondage and subjection. When the num- ber of the elect is complete, when the last of the mystical one hundred and forty and four thousand^ shall receive the seal of God on his forehead, when the last drop shall be added to the brimming cup of the afilictions of Christ/ the last tear shed, the last sigh breathed into the air, the glorification of the creature will have fally commenced, the sunlight of the unclouded presence of God will again irradiate His works, the weary night of creation will at length have passed, the long-looked-for dawn at last come. And now all are longing and all are tarrying ; bound together by the affinities of a common spiritual prin- ciple ; united in ruin, yet still united in hope. While faith, in the form of belief to the Christian, and dim intuitions to the heathen, is the prerogative of the 1 Rev. vii. 4. ^ See Sermon II. p. 40. 16 DESTIiNY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. rational creature, hoj^e is tlie gift that has not been denied to the irrational creation. Hope is common to all : hope binds nature and mankind in a close and enduring union. And so now all are waiting. The Church is waiting ; the souls under the altar are waiting -^ the kindreds of the earth are waiting ; the world of animate things is waiting; the whole realm of inanimate nature is waiting ; yea, more, as the next verse discloses, waiting in self- acknowledged suftering, groaning and travailing as in birth-pains, conscious of a common captivity and a common ruin. Not only we ourselves, the Apostle tells us, the ra- tional and accountable creatures of God^s hand, — not only we, that smaller company who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves," strug- gling for freedom from vanity and corruption, — not only we, the chosen ones, are thus longing and tra- vailing, but with us all creation is blended in that never- quenched aspiration. All the sufferings of the wide-spread domains of nature form a part of that earnest and mournful cry. All that animals suffer at the hands of man, — all that they suffer from one another, all their exhibitions of wanton cruelty, their deep-seated aversions and connatural hostilities ; — all, again, that nature suffers from the hand of man, the poisoned vegetation round peopled cities, the blazing prairie, the desolated forest,^ — all that it suffers from the wildness or churlishness ^ Kev. vi. 9. 2 Rom. viii. 23. ^ ggg Qo^g ^ I.J VANITY. 17 of tlie elements, tlie storm-swept cliampaign, the inundated valley, the convulsed landscape, — all that tells of frustrated growth and retarded progress, untimely violence and freakish change, — all tend to swell that mighty cry of suffering and travail that is now ever sounding in the ears of God, — all serve to call forth the deep longing for the hour when man, the masterpiece of God^s works, shall be clothed with incorruption, when natui'e shall be restored, and the apocalyptic vision of the Apostle shall be a mighty and living reality. ' And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea.^^ And now, to gather up our foregoing meditations into a few distinct statements, it would seem that the investigation of this profound text leads us to the following result. rir,st, the recognition of primal laws mysteriously mse and mysteriously beneficent, of which the cha- racteristics were, providential development and con- servative change, — laws that might possibly have in- volved some reference to the lapse in a spirit-world,^ but in which there was no trace of perverted action, confusion, or vanity. Secondly, that man, by an act of disobedience, brought himself and his race under the alien dominion of suffering and death, and caused all the rest of creation to be subject to a counter-law of Eev. xxi. I. 2 See Sermon II. p. 29. C 18 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [serm. vanity, depraved instincts, perverted tendencies, and injurious change. Thirdly, that this subjection was, nevertheless, mercifully alleviated, — to man, by the blessings of a sure promise, — to the other portions of nature by the infusion of a hope; and that both thus bound together in one common feeling of longing and ex- pectancy, are awaiting that redemption of the body in man which shall be the immediate precursor of the restitution of the world and the consummation of all things in Christ. Such, brethren, are the principal features of a text that has not inappropriately been termed ^ the Evangel of creation / such, a few leading outlines of one of the most comprehensive revelations in the Book of Life. In a subject so elevated, involving so many and such mighty issues, and opening up so many avenues of speculation, I dare not hope to have done more than to have secured a partial or suspended assent : yet if to one of you, my elder brethren, these fleet- ing words have tended to supply an answer to one single doubt that may have tried your spirits, — if in you, my younger brethren, the general subject has awakened any higher aspirations, or aroused you to a truer consciousness of the deep mystery of life, I shall solemnly rejoice, and shall offer up my prayer to Almighty God that He may quicken us all to look forAvard with more longing eyes and more ready hearts to the coming of our Lord. May He make us l] VANITY. 19 feel more vividly tlie power of His resurrection working in our souls, and trace with holy awe, both in ourselves and all things around us, the develop- ment of the mighty counsels of redeeming grace and restoring love. Let me conclude with two out of the many prac- tical reflections, which this present subject seems most especially calculated to awaken. First, let us not fail to recognise the disclosure that is here made of the frightful nature of sin, con- sidered as something spreading and diffusive. If, on the one hand, the intense nature of sin, its blackness and venom, — in a word, its nature in reference to quality, finds its fallest exponent in the awful truths that the Son of the ever-living God emptied Him- self of His glories to redeem fallen man ;— so, on the other hand, the diffusive nature of sin,— its nature viewed in reference to quantity, is nowhere more strikingly disclosed than in the revelation that is now before us. Does not our text imply that sin was such that it spread over a whole creation, marred the harmonies of a world, pervaded the substance and the produce of a fruitful earth, entered into all the varied realms of animal life, — calling out anti- pathies, multiplying sufferings, and giving a new and bitter aspect to beneficent laws of transmutation and change ? And yet how lightly we talk of sin ! How readily we lend an ear to any one who teaches us to think hopefully of this spreading ulcer, that is eating away c 2 20 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [serm. the very heart and life of us and of all things ! The forward thinkers, as they are termed, of our own age are ever too ready to persuade ns that sin, after all^ is only something isolated and external, merely an immoral atmosphere that always remains both in quantity and quality the same. But is it so ? Can we dare, with such a text before us as that on which we have been meditating, cheat ourselves with such hopeless sophistries ? Surely, if there is one truth more than another which our present text tends to enforce and to enhance, it is this, that sin is co- extensive with every development of the animate and inanimate world, — that it is the noxious bindweed which is winding itself round every form of a once fau' creation, ever blossoming into vanity and suffering, ever ripening into the fruitage of death and corruption. But secondly, let us turn to the consolatory reflec- tion, that though the old creation is thus marred and ruined, yet that the new creation has already begun. Yea, doubtless it has already begun. It was ratified on our Master's cross. It was commenced in His resurrection. It has become developed by baptism in His name; His Church is its first fruits; His grace its moving principle ; His love the mystery of its evolution. And that love is pervading all things, yea, why should we fear to say it, not only the inward and spiritual, but the outward and material world. Though we may not be al^lc to dis- tinctly recognise all its plastic powers, — though fools I.] VANITY. 21 may mock, and gainsayers deny, — thongh moralists may tell us that amelioration is a dream, and pro- gress a mere motion in a circle, — though we our- selves may at times doubt our own hopes, — yet if we have eyes to see and hearts to believe, we may still feel some present loosening of the chain that binds all things to the law of vanity and corruption. We may trace alleviations of suffering in many things around us, often in strange and unlooked-for ways; sometimes by incidental discoveries, sometimes by more deliberate applications of the great laws of nature, those so-called mechanical triumphs of which our age is so fondly yet so ignorantly proud. There are commencements everywhere. Though we may not see more than mere beginnings and initial move- ments, though our eyes may fall on sleep before the lights of the coming day have appeared above the still clouded horizon, yet in patience and hope let us possess our souls ; let us quit ourselves like men in the hourly struggle with sin, and remember that every triumph over a temptation in our Redeemer's name, every ^dctory over a warring lust in the power of the Spirit, is an unwinding of a chain of the bondage of vanity, is an act in the emancipation of a world. With such high thoughts as these, with such a lofty destiny before us, can we remain insensible to the solemn and vital call to practical holiness which these meditations cannot fail to supply ? Shall we, my elder brethren, inmates of this ancient seat of 22 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. learning and piety, we to whom God has vouclisafed so large a measure of His grace, forget our high calling of teaching and guiding others, and merge ourselves in apathy and selfishness? Is it for such as us to spend the best days of our lives in dreamy or perverted hopes, to think that this earth is for mere intellectual triumphs and self-glorifying pro- gress, when all around is suffering and travail ? Shall we be narrow and churlish in our love, when every- thing so tends to call it forth ? With such a struggle going on around us, are we to shut ourselves up in our little citadels of fancied pre-eminence, or worse, with a petty spirit of detraction, with unkindly words or mordant satire, to disown our fraternal bond, and imitate the very antipathies of a lower and captive creation? Are we to become daily more unfruitful in our faith, and to think that calm abstractions will lead us to heaven, and a decent apathy avail us in an hour, when nought save the energy of vital belief either can or will fit us to be the co-operators with our redeeming and restoring Lord? Or again, is it for you, my younger brethren, to dally with sin and corruption in its coarser and more repulsive forms, when the suffering voice of nature is telling you how the iron of bondage is entering into its very soul, and is calling upon you in the strength and glory of youth and life, to devote the blessed gifts of a fresh and buoyant heart to the service of the Almighty Restorer ? Can you resist I.] VANITY. 23 tlie summons to join the armies of heaven in their holy war against sin and death, and to be found the loyal and true-hearted skirmishers before the mighty host that is mustering and gathering, unfolding its banners and marshalling its legions, momently awaiting the KeXevcrfia,^ the signal-shout, when He that hath on His thigh and His vesture a name written — King of Kings and Lord of Lords^ — shall go forth conquering and to conquer? In one word, the summary and great practical lesson of all that I have said, is the necessity of per- sonal and individual holiness. Man's sin, yea, one man's sin, cast all this shadow on creation; man's holiness, the holiness of the many, shall co-operate in its restoration. All things join in this call to prac- tical holiness, and shall it remain for ever unnoticed and unheeded ? God our Creator calls on us to be holy ; He has called us, as He himself says by the mouth of His Apostle, not to selfishness, not to un- cleanness, but to holiness.^ God our Redeemer calls on us to follow the steps of His pure and holy life. God the Sanctifier pleads with our hearts, and with groans that tongue cannot tell, calls on us to fulfil our Maker's will — His will, even our sanctification.^ Our sufiering brethren call upon us. Yea, and all Nature mutely joins in that never-ceasing appeal; the animals that gaze strangely and wistfully in our 1 I Thess. V. i6. ^ Rev. xix. i6. ' i Thess. iv. 7. 4 I Thess. iv. 3. 24 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. faces; the sliort-lived and fading loveliness of all things around us, — all are calling on us, consciously or unconsciously, not to put back the hour of their restitution, not to delay the coming of the glorious liberty of the sons of God. And can we resist such calls ? Shall we individually contribute nothing to such mighty issues, or, worse still, shall we arrest the progress that has already been made ? Already new and mysterious forces are at work all around us, silently permeating all forms of life, secretly entering into all elements of the material world. Let us bethink ourselves of our responsibility if we now join with sin and corruption. Let us pray to remember in the hour of temptation that to yield is not only to commit an individual act against our own souls, but to join a triple league that we renounced in baptism, to go over to the adversary, and, as far as in us lies, to arrest the development of the new creation, to rivet the bondage of corrup- tion, — nay, more, to be found fighters against a reconciling and restoring God. From such frightful antagonisms, — from such semblances of the malice of an apostate creation, may He, in the largeness of His mercies, ever turn us and protect us. May He call us, and may we hear. May every soul among us be moved to do his part in a world^s restoration; that so, when the great Restorer's feet shall stand on Olivet, in that mystic day ' when it shall be neither clear nor dark^ I.] VANITY. 25 but in the evening time it shall be light/ ^ we may- be numbered with His faithful ones who have borne the heat and burden of the day, — and to whom there remainetl^ rest for evermore. ^ Zechar. xiv. 4. 26 SERMON 11. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. SUFFERING. Job xiv. i. 3Ian that is horn of a looman is of few days^ and full of trouble. TN our meditations last Sunday^ brethren, we were -*- led, by the solemn tenor of the profound text which I attempted to illustrate, to sad and serious views on the present condition of the creature. We were brought to acknowledge in all that creation with which we have any direct connexion, the working of a mysterious and pervasive counter-law; we were led to contemplate a destiny — if I may use such a term — of all created things around us, startling in its universality, mournful in its evolution, and strikingly suggestive in respect of its origin and early development. Though we were obliged to pass over much that in detail was inexplicable or insoluble, — though there were suggested to us many questions, to which we could only give faltering, and perhaps unsatisfying answers, we did, I trust, still distinctly perceive and acknowledge the existence of laws of perverted action, depravations of instincts, thwarted SUFFERING. 27 developments, injurious change, — all of which, under the generic term of Vanity, were to be referred for their origin to the disobedience and fall of man. We may now suitably and profitably take a step onward. We have contemplated the universal sub- jection : let us now proceed to trace out its more concentrated and specific manifestations in the mystery of suffering, and so prepare ourselves for a future consideration of its more complete develop- ment in the awfid climax of death. Yet let us be careful to order our thoughts soberly and wisely. Let us attempt no comprehensive esti- mate of the various forms and degrees of suffering, but simply, by the light of Scripture alone, endeavour to gain a clear view of the aspects in which it is presented to us both in the Old and in the New Testament. Let us mark the changed relations it assumes, the altered attitudes in which it is found in the two Dispensations, — and then from all, let us, by the help of God, draw such practical consolations as may serve to make us more bravely patient, more hopeful, yea, more thankful, in our sojourn in a world which at every turn flings back on us the shadows of our own disobedience. It is clear that such a mode of treating this diffi- cult subject tends inevitably to limit our meditation to suffering, as seen and felt in our own race. But it must be so. For the origin and import of suffer- ing, considered in its most comprehensive relations, and regarded as the lot of other orders of creation 28 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. beside our own_, involves mysteries_, and apparently points backward to primal dispensations^ which on this side the grave we can never hope to understand, and on which it is fruitless, if not irreverent, to speculate. It is certainly, and it must be acknow- ledged a startling fact, that ages before the sin of man cast the shadow of vanity on the world, suffering in one of its forms, the corporeal, was certainly pre- sent. As I said last Sunday, the very stones and rocks bear witness of it ; the acknowledged presence in the pre- Adamite world of the fierce and fell race of the carnivorous animals,^ renders its past existence a certainty ; and to deny it is as fruitless as to deny its present manifestations and potency. We must distinctly admit it as a startling fact, — a fact of which we cannot venture to give any explanation, but still a fact which need cause us to feel no prac- tical difficulties, and which is in no w^ay incompatible witli our conceptions of God as a just and beneficent governor of the world. Though attempts to explain the seeming difficulty are worse than idle, yet let me offer briefly the two following observations : — First, in every endeavour to view suffering in its most comprehensive and general aspects, we must be especially careful to draw a clear line of demarcation between the corporeal sufferings of the individuals that belong to lower genera unendued with foresight and reason, and the mixed mental and corporeal 1 See note A. n.] SUFFERING. 29 sufferings of a personal and intelligent being, the immediate child and otfspring of God. Between the individuals of races, brought forth by a prolific earth, ^ and the living soul that drew its existence from the breath of God, the difference is really so great that it does not seem either unreasonable or evasive to pause before we refer to a common origin or group in common analogies, the sufferings of two orders of creation thus widely different in origin, relations, and characteristics. Secondly, the scattered hints and speculations of earlier writers, afterwards more fully developed by some of the deeper thinkers of the seventeenth century, that regard the early history of the world and the fall of angels as in some sort of connexion, are certainly not wholly unworthy of our consideration.^ How far the disturbance caused by that fearful lapse was propagated through the other realms of creation, we know not. How far demoniacal malignity might have been permitted to introduce or multiply sufferings in the early animal world. Scripture does not even incidentally reveal. Still, it does not seem utterly presumptuous to imagine that there might have been the same powers of eiil partially and permissively at work in a pre-Adamite world, that at a later period, when man^s sin had wrought a still more frightful confusion, were per- mitted to drive the swine down the steeps of Gennesareth.^ » Gen. i. 24. 2 gee note B. 3 Matth. viii. 32. 30 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [serm. To wliicli let us add by way of corollary^ that if we are here thought to open ourselves to the objection of modern speculation — yiz., that even thus_, under such permissive aspects, we are ascribing evil to God as its remoter origin, we still shrink not from the pressure of such an inference. Let us remember that the Lord has declared twice by the mouths of His greatest prophets, with all imaginable distinctness, that He is the Creator of evil as well as of good^ — yes, unrestrictedly the Creator of it ; and that it is the eternal prerogative of His omnipotence that out of the mouth of the Most High should proceed both the one and the other.^ Let us only be prepared to view the indissoluble connexion of evil, suffering, and sin, and then whether the supposed evil we contemplate be Adamite or pre-Adamite, mundane or ante-mundane, we need fear no Manichsean sophistries, we need seek to shelter ourselves under no spurious views of the Divine benevolence. All, however, we can safely say is this, — that man's sin caused all things to be subjected to vanity; and that one of the outcomings of this vanity was suffer- ing and death to the race of man, embitterment and enhancement of suffering to the races of the animal creation,^ — a signal embitterment, if we take nothing further into account than the accumulation of it which is to be referred to the tyranny, the cruelty, and the perverted wants of the fallen race of mankind. 1 Isaiah xlv. 7. ^ Lam. iii. 38. ^ See note C. II.] SUFFERING. SI But let us leave these difficult questions, and now address ourselves solely to the aspects and significance of human suffering as respectively exhibited by the two Testaments. The contrasts are very striking, instructive, and consolatory. To begin with the Old Testament ; the first thing that cannot fail to strike us is the melancholy and gloomy aspect in which suffering is nearly always presented to our view. It seems ever to reflect the just wrath of Jehovah, ever to be designed as some- thing punitive and judicial. We recognise it dis- tinctly in the first sentence on sin ; we hear it in the language addressed to the first mortal sinners : ' And unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and conception,^^ — ' and unto Adam He said, cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.'^ We trace it in the deepening curse on Cain, in which, beyond all the suffering of ill-requited labour and toil, there appear the more peculiarly mental sufferings of exile from a home of love, the dreary lot of the fugitive and the vagabond.^ We see it further in all the histories of the patriarchs, with whom sorrow and suffering, if not always viewed as the immediate result of sin, were still recognised as belonging to the inevitable condition of sinful mortality : ' Few and evil have been the days of my years.^^ We 1 Gea. iii. i6. ^ Gen. iii. 17. ^ Gen. iv. 12, * Comp. Gen. xlvii. 9. 32 DESTINY OF THE CREATUllE. [serm. may trace it onward tlirougli tlie whole of tlie sacred volume, and wlietlier in the language of history, meditation, or prophecy, we still perceive the same dreary aspects of suffering, the same dark back- ground of sin, the same cheerless recognition of an universal lot, the same sense of chastised dis- obedience. Group together all the more distinct notices of suffering in the Old Testament, and they will ever be found to reflect or to imply one of two things; either a distinct connexion with sin, more especially in its aspect of disobedience ; or, on the other hand, the recognition of a common lot, in mundo pressuram, unalterable and inevitable, untem- pered and unrelieved. Of the first, a striking verifi- cation will be found in the curses from Ebal,^ and the still more frightful denunciations of the 26th chapter of Leviticus,^ — in which every form of mortal misery, mental and corporeal, written and unwritten, is declared as the certain sequel of dis- obedience, with an appalling exactness and circum- stantiality. Of the second, we nowhere find a sadder outpouring than in the words of our text, which, with such a melancholy significance, point backward to its origin, and to the mediate fountain of all its bitter w^aters : ' Man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live, and is full of misery.^ We deny not, indeed, that in the Old Dispensa- tion many of God^s chosen servants were permitted. ^ Deut. xxviii. 15. ^ Ver. 14 sq. II.] SUFFERING. 33 by the gladdening light of Messianic prophecies, to enjoy glimpses of a future when the tears should be wiped away from all eyes/— glimpses of a future that made the present seem more light and endurable. This the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews^ for- bids us to doubt ; this the great cloud of witnesses will not permit us to disbelieve. Abraham that looked for the city that has foundations, — Sarah that judged Him faithful that had promised, — Moses that esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, and endured as seeing Him that is invisible, — all remind us that in every age there were thousands to whom suffering must have worn aspects that were not always clouded with the gloom of retrospect. Still the light was ever ready to fade, the gloom to deepen. The promise seemed far off, the future distant, and perhaps unrealizable. Nothing appeared really sure and palpable save the weary present, and the unalterable past,— the lost paradise, — the cursed earth, — the doomed race, — the heritage of sin, — the lineage of corruption. On this side a painful and joyless birth, on that side Sheol with its sad imagery of forgetfulness and darkness,^ —a darkness broken but by a few rays of quickening light ; and between, a melancholy interspace of life, so bemocked by vanity and beclouded with suffering, that the deep thinker of the early dispensation must often have lost sight of the very prerogatives of his ^ Isaiah xxv, 8. ^ qij ^i, 2 sq, ^ ggg note D. D 34 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. own liumanity, and have cried out in his bitterness with the old world's wisest man, ' Man hath no pre- eminence above a beast ; for all is vanity. All go unto one place. All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. '^ We deny not again that several instances may be collected, especially from the Psalms, in w^hich the more peculiarly evangelical aspects of suffering — its purify- ing and emendatory characteristics — are distinctly to be recognised. Still, even in these, the accurate reader will rarely fail to discover in the context some reference, more or less distinct, to the judicial nature of suflering, or to the immutable principles of divine government, — the awful justice of God, that faithful- ness, that trueness to His own nature and decrees, which the Psalmist failed not to ascribe to his Creator, even when, in His afflictive dispensations, he was enabled to recognise the outlines of a teach- ing of mercy, ^ It is good for me that I have been afflicted, — that I might learn thy statutes.'"^ Nay, more, it does not seem too much to say that the specifically Christian idea of suffering, — as proba- tionary, purifying, or emendatory, seems not to have found an expression in any definite word in the language of the Old Covenant. Nearly every word that presents to us the idea of suffering, trouble, or affliction, has some philological affinity to ideas of burden, pressure, fall, ruin, snare, hostility, terror. \ 1 Eccles. iii. lo, 20. ^ Psaim cxix. 71. 19, 20. II.] SUFFERING. 35 destruction ; more than one term blends cause and effect, and exhibits the ideas of affliction and sin in closest union; while, philologically considered, the most elevated conception of human suffering docs not appear to rise beyond that of bearing injuries rather than of returning them.^ So indelible does this impress seem on the very language of the Old Testament, that the familiar TraOrjjua of the New Testament, with its implied ideas of endurance and grief,^ finds no place in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, just as '^ suffering^ does not, I believe, occur anywhere in our own English Version. Such things can scarcely be accidental ; such hints can hardly be wholly without significance. Such observations on the letter combine singularly with our meditations on the spirit of the Old Covenant, and seem to tell us, that in all its repre- sentations of human suffering, it bears,- both within and without, a startling testimony to its original nature and significance, — chastised disobedience and penal sorrow. But were the aspects of suffering ever to remain unchanged? Was the burden of the curses ofEbal ever to be felt in every afi[iictive dispensation ? Was sorrow only to recall with all retrospective bitterness, sin, and disobedience ? Ah, no ! when God and man were reconciled, when the eternal Son became 1 See note E. ^ ggg ^q^q y. D 2 36 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. marij and shared all man's sufferings^ then indeed all was changed : every feebler discord was lost in the universal harmony. Death became life, and sorrow joy, and vanity hope, and suffering — suffering, that bitter evidence of sin, that embodiment of a primal curse, became a very precursor of salvation, a token of a Father's love, a state that received the Saviour^s blessing, yea, strange and almost awful to say, an enduring bond of union between us and our God. On this mighty change let us spend our remaining thoughts. Let us now turn to the New Covenant, and endeavour humbly and thankfully to estimate the changed aspects in which suffering is exhibited, and, by the help of a few cardinal and consolatory passages, to behold the mystery of its final issues and development. In the Old Testament we have just seen that suffering appears mainly under one of two aspects; either as the -punishment of disobedience, or as the evidence of a common lot, and the token of a common fall. It was in fact essentially retrospective ; its looks were ever turned backwards to the circumstances of its first origin, and to the early issues of primal transgression. Its characteristic was retrospect. But in the New Testament all is reversed. There suffer- ing is essentially j9ro5/?ec/iz;e ; — prospective, as turning the inward eye towards Him, who, after hallowing suffering by taking its uttermost measures on Him- self, is now sitting at the right hand of God, the helper of the labouring and the refresher of the Tl.] SUFFERING. 37 weary; — prospective, as teacliing us to gaze ever more and raore longingly to the city that has foun- dationSj and to the rest that remaineth for the children of God. Prospective is it, as turning the sufferer^s eye to his once suffering but now glorified Lord. For who that has really suffered has not felt that in gazing upward toward the Prince of sufferers, all things become changed in their relations ? The melancholy past merges into the present, and the present becomes lost in a future, — a future of hope, a future of mercy, a future that swallows up all sorrows, stills the cry of all anguish, deadens the edge of all pain. There with Him is all that we have lost, and all that we have mourned for ; there the loved ones that have gone before; there the innocent joys of childhood that soon fleeted by ; there the quick sympathies that soon were checked; there the warm affections that soon grew cold ; there the fair hopes to which disap- pointment brought blight and decay. All are with Him. And to Him, — if our hearts yet remain true to God and to "our better selves, every suffering only tends to bring us nearer and nearer. We gaze only the more earnestly there, where we know we shall find all : 'Where our treasure is, there shall our heart be also.^i Prospective also is suffering as teaching us to look for the final rest. It was this prospective element 1 Matth. vi. 21. 38 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. tliat tauglit the feeble to glory amid their tribulations, and the weak to be strong. Yea, further, this has sustained those who have entered into the more mystic realm of mental and spiritual suffering. This has bound up hearts that have bled with wounds to which time, the boasted healer, could bear no balm. This has taught those who have mourned over out- raged love or wounding ingratitude, who have drunk deep of the Psalmist^s cup of sorrows, and seen the nearest and the dearest — not the open enemy, but the familiar friend — turn against them or forsake them, yet to live on, in peacefulness and hope, patiently though longingly awaiting the time when the Great Shepherd shall call the weary and the way-worn into His everlasting fold. ^ For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen ; for the things Avhich are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.^ ^ But not only in the merely general characteristics of reversed attitudes and changed aspects, can we trace in the New Testament the altered idea of suffering, but in the more special detail of totally fresh relations^ — relations which, when properly and seriously considered, will be found to include every highest form and phase of consolation. Time would 2 Cor. iv. 17. II .] SUFFERING. 39 fail me to enumerate all, but to three of these purely- evangelical characteristics of suffering 1 earnestly desire to call your attention. First. We have authority for saying that a con- dition of suffering, more especially in its purer and holier forms, calls forth the sympathy of Christ.^ On this profound spiritual truth I will not now enlarge, further than to say, that when its full significance is fairly grasped by the mind, we have at once before us one of the most consolatory aspects which our finite powers can conceive it possible for suffering to assume. When we can truly feel that it is even so, that when we suffer we become the objects of a sympathy so vivid and so divine, — a sympathy that unites the two highest conditions under which such a sympathy can be conceived, perfect knowledge of all the miseries which sin has produced, and that perfect holiness which sympathizes without the admixture of a single selfish element, — when we truly realize this, we need no longer marvel that an Apostle could find ground of rejoicing in suffering, yea, and of boasting in tribulation and affliction. Thus considered, suffering becomes one of the most blessed boons which God can bestow in this world on those that love Him. One of the deepest curses of the law has become one of the highest blessings of the Gospel. Secondly y and further ; we may dare to say that ^ Heb. iv. 15. 40 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. not only does suffering in every purer form tend to call forth our Redeemer's divine sympathy, but that even beyond all this it binds us to Him in a strict and holy fellowship, that it draws the bonds of union yet closer between redeemed and suffering man and his redeeming and once suffering Lord. Such asser- tions sound strange and bold ; but have we not the strictest warranty from the New Testament for declaring that they are most vividly real, most unreservedly true ? What else can the Apostle St. Paul mean when he writes from his prison at Rome to his converts at Philippic and tells them that he counts all things but dung, that he may know Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings/ and realize in his own soul and spirit that holy and mysterious bond ? What else can St. Peter refer to, when, in writing to the Christians of Asia, he bids them rejoice in their fiery trial, — inasmuch as thereby they are partakers of the sufferings of Christ?"- Sympathy is a near bond, but fellowship in suffering, drinking with the Lord out of the same bitter cup, and being baptized with His baptism, bearing in body or in soul the semblance of His cross, and entering the penumbra of a sorrow to Avhich the world has seen no like sorrow,^ is a nearer and closer union still, — a union that elevates all pure and holy suffering into all but the loftiest aspect in which it can be contemplated by man. Ch. iii. 10. 2 I Pet. iv. 13. 3 La,m. i. 12. II.] SUFFERING. 41 All hut the loftiest aspect ; for, thirdly and lastly, there is apparently one still higher aspect disclosed to us in the New Testament, under which we seem to recognise relations yet more mysterious, and issues yet more deeply consolatory. Not only is suffering presented to our contemplations as evoking the sympathy of Christ, — not only does it bind us to Him in a close and holy fellowship, but strange and almost awfal to say, there is a text that seems to imply that holy human suffering can so far co- operate with the sufferings of our Redeemer, as to be daily and hourly working towards the consumma- tion of all things, and to the hastening of the hour when the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of Christ. I allude to that profound passage in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, in which, when speaking of his sufferings for the Church, the Apostle uses these weighty words, ' I fill up the lacking measures of the afflic- tions of Christ.''^ The exact meaning of these words has, I am aware, been the subject of much contro- versy : after mature deliberation, however, I can scarcely doubt that the passage was rightly explained by some of the early Pteformers,^ when they under- stood the afflictions of Christ to imply — not the personal sufferings of Jesus, which it were blasphemy to say could admit of any addition or supplement, ^ Yqv. 24, dvTava7c\r]gCJ to. vaTsprj/xuTa tujv 9\i-