1 ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^ Presented by~V^r(SS\C>^^r^V~V?:A^-Vo^^\ BV 4249 .B13s Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, 18 -1907. The simplicity that is in I THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHEIST SERMONS WOODLAND CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA BY I LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY LONDON 1 892 TORONTO NEW YORK All EigTds Eesertfd Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1886, By FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at "Vyashington, D. C. H AnAOTIII H EII TON XPIIT0X.—2 Cor. xi. 3. The. Simplicity that is in Christ. (A. V.) The SiMrLiCTTY that is toward Christ. (R. Y.) LETTER DEDICATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. To THE Congregation of the Woodland Church. My Dear Friends: I present to you herewith a volume con- taining some of the sermons which I have preached during the brief time in w^iich it has been my priv^ilege to fulfill among you the duties of a pastor ; and with the volume, I beg you to accept the renewed expression of my love, and my willing devotion to your service in the gospel. ****** Thus I wrote a few months ago, when I was first pre- paring this volume for the press. I hoped then that it was to be an aid and reinforcement to my ministry among you. And now that it proves to be rather a memorial of a min- istry broken oif and ended, I have nothing to change in these words of affection and willing service. " It is in my heart to live and die with you." And if, instead, I seem to be withdrawing from you, it is for your sake that I do it, as I would for your sake far more gladly remain and serve with you. It is a frequent and good reason for the printing of ser- mons, that the public interest in them has been proved by a great concourse of hearers. Let us frankly confess that 1 2 LETTER DEDICATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. there is no such excuse for this volume. My reason for printing would be just the opposite — that the arguments and persuasions which have been heard with deep attention by a few, might have a wider and more deliberate consid- eration. In the larger congregation whose attention I would fain engage, I hope to renew the satisfaction of hearing of those who find in these words light upon dark places, and help over hard places, and the pointing out of a plain path where the ways had seemed confused. Withal, something seemed to be due to those persons who have manifested an eager desire to find something to complain of in my preaching, but have had little or no opportunity of hearing it. It has been my misfortune that, while those who have been constantly attendant on my ministry have seemed generally to approve of it as salutary and good, some of those who know nothing about it should be dissatisfied, not to say aggrieved at it, and much disposed to find fault with it. To such, it seems an act of kindness to offer them some material for their fraternal labors. I am afraid that they will be disappointed in the book ; but they may be assured that they were considered in the selec- tion of sermons for it, with an honest purpose of giving them such as they would most enjoy being displeased with. You who have been of my habitual hearers will recog- nize the title of this book as indicating a characteristic of the Woodland pulpit. It has been my constant purpose to go back of systems, confessions, traditions, conventional phrases, to '^ the simplicity that is in Christ.'^ It is away from simplicity that corruption commonly tends, and toward it that good reformation returns. A very common and self-complacent mistake on the part of dogmatists is this : when perplexed, unintelligible or unreasonable state- LETTER DEDICATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. 3 ments of doctriue are found to be unacceptable to thoughtful people, to set it down to the charge of "the carnal mind." But in fact, if anything is clearly taught by the history of religious corruption, it is this, that the carnal mind likes its doctrines tough ; is not content, in religion, with things easy, direct, simple, intelligible, reasonable ; finds no virtue in receiving w^hat is clear, or believing what is proved ; finds plain gospel quite insipid without a flavoring of meta- physics or a garnish of tradition. The carnal mind is much addicted to the building of systems, and fertile of material 'for filling the gaps therein. The carnal mind knows a great deal, and knows it with uncommon positive- ness and precision. The carnal mind Ikis found out the Almighty to perfection. Two evil tendencies vex the church in every age : without is agnosticism, and within is hypergnosticism ; and either of the twain abets the other. You will miss some of the sermons for which, since this volume was announced, I have had repeated requests ; and you W'ill be at a loss, perhaps, to discover the principle which has governed the selection. But there has been a principle, in favor of which I have been willing to sacrifice your wishes and my own notions of literary value. The book " waits upon teaching.'^ The sermons are chosen rather for their doctrinal contents than for their rhetorical interest ; and broken parts of several series have been given, in order that the book may be representative of the course of my preaching. Since the way of salv^ation is this, to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, the essence of the preaching of the gospel is mainly summed up in these two points : 1. What is be- lieving on ? 2. Who is the Lord Jesus Christ ? and to these two points — " the simplicity that is toward Christ " 4 LETTER DEDICATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. (to quote the text correctly) and " the simplicity that is in Christ " — the earlier and larger part of the book is devoted. The three ^'sermons of Natural Theology/^ with the four sermons that next follow them, have to do with ques- tions now very widely under discussion. The last sermon in the volume is of special interest to the Woodland Church ; and it gives a means of understanding my views concerning " the church, the com- munion of saints/^ to some who have misunderstood them. One point which I hope to gain by this publication is to discover, through the good offices of my critics, whether or not I am of ''the new theology." For it is confidently and sometimes plaintively asserted that there is such a thing as " the new theology ; " otherwise we might not have dis- covered any fact more serious than tliis, that there are sundry theological Avriters more or less diverging from each other, and from their predecessors — certainly no novel phe- nomenon, but one common to every Annus Domini of all the eighteen hundred. If any one could compute the resultant of these diverging forces at any given period, I suppose that would be " the new theology " for that time. If it should appear from such computation that " the new theology " of our time consists mainly in these three ten- dencies: 1, to concentrate study upon the life and person of Jesus Christ ; 2, to accept with a docile mind the teaching of the Bible concerning itself; 3, to subordinate sectarian and provincial theologies to the fellowship of belief in the church universal ; — then I would gladly count myself on the side of the new theology, — or count the new theology to be on my side. LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON. Philadelphia, March, 1886. CONTENTS. Letter Dedicatory and Ixtroductory, 1-4 Salutatory and Valedictory. Motives for publishing. Corruptions in religion tend away from simplicity. The heresy of hypergnosti- cism. Selection of materials for this volume. The author and " the new theology.'' THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS TOWARD CHRIST. Sermon I. The Simplicity Of Eepentance. Acts xx. 21, , 15-23 The two cardinal words of practical Christianity are current in perverted meanings. History of the word Repentance. Proposed substitutes for the word. Two forms of false repentance: 1. External reformation; 2. Inward agitation. True repentance, the turning of the mind. Sermon 11. The Simplicity of Faith. Actsxvi. 31, . . . 24-3S The question What is Faith ? one of the open questions of theology. Four tests of the right meaning of the word:— 1. It must be the common, plain sense of the word, as used by common people. 2. It must be a sense ajjplicable to the Scriptural examples of faith. 3. It must describe a voluntary act. 4. It must describe an act which practically involves repentance, love, holiness. Four false definitions of Faith:— 1. That it is the assent of the intellect to truth. 2. That it is a peculiar quality or intensity of intellectual assent. 3. That it is a confident assurance of one's personal salva- tion. 4. That Faith consists of Faith plus a certain sequence of experiences. The true definition : To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to trust in him. 6 ■ CONTENTS. Sermon III. The Open Door of the Church. Acts viii. 37, . 39-47 Contrast between the Apostolic and the Modern Church in respect to tlie Open Door. The point of divergence from apostolic usage. Les- sons to be learned from spurious texts. Those things which God appointed for our Helps, are turned by men into Hindrances. 1. Rites. 2. Experiences. 3. Doctrines. Sermon IV. The Outside Christian. John x. 16, . . . . 48-57 Ecclesiastical jealousy of the largeness of Christ's hospitality. The Outside Christian an abnormal Christian. Causes of his self- exclusion. 1. Revivalism. 2. Unworthy conceptions of God. 3. Imprudent cautiousness. 4. Unfaithfulness in the church. 5. The multitude of sects. These mingle with baser motives. What he loses. 1. Strength. 2. Joy. 3. FelloW'Ship. 4. Comfort in the Lord's Supper. The harm he may do. The good he might do. THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Sermon V. Man's Question about Christ. Matt. viii. 27, .-58-67 The Gospel method of teaching Christ an inductive method ; in con- trast with the theological method. The return of theology to the method of the gospels. Christ's perfect manhood Jbeing admitted, the question arises how to re- concile to this the facts which seem out of harmony with it. Sermon VI. Christ's Question to Men. Matt. xvi. 15, . . 68-79 The natural way, and the biblical way, of coming to the knowledge of Christ is also the logical way. The authority of apostolic declaration or church definition depends on antecedent admission of the authority of Christ. The statement of his perfect manhood not sufficient to include all the facts. The series of facts which it' leaves out. The question left pending ; but in no anxious suspense. Sermon VII. The Mystery Manifested. 1 Tim. iii. 16, . . 80-90 The question on the reading of the text. The meaning of the word mystery. CONTENTS. 7 What is the missing fact, or comprehensive statement, which shall reconcile the seeming discordances in Christ's life ? In the apostolic writings, the semblance of discrepancy is rather in- creased than diminished. An analogy to the discrepancy in the life of Christ is found in the per- son of man. This analogy helps us, if not to understand, at least to receive, " the mystery of godliness." Further than this it is not profitable to go. CHRIST TEACHING BY MIRACLES. Sermon VIII. The Purpose of the Miracles of Healing. Mark ii. 10, 91-101 Why so many miracles of healing? I. The obvious answer, that the works of healing had their object in themselves, as conferring happiness and diminishing suffering, is liable to conclusive objections : 1. The deduction from the sum of human misery is insignificant. 2. The arbitrary interruption of the general course of human suffering is not in itself desirable. II. The real answer declared in the text — " That ye may know that the Son of man hath power to forgive." III. The miracle of healing is a visible exhibition of salvation : 1. How God confers it. 2. How man receives it. Sermon IX. The Healing of the Palsied. Luke v. 24, 25, 102-112 The miracle is a parable: 1. Of divine power and love. 2. Of human faith. Looking at the human aspect of it, we consider: 1. The paralytic's prayer. 2. The answer which he received : — (1) The substance of what he had asked, but not the form. (2) A greater thing than he had asked. (3) At last, the identical thing which he had asked. Sermon X. The Prayer of the Heathen Mother. Mark vii. 24-30 ; and Matthew XV. 21-28, 113-122 The story told in these two gospels is the simplest of dramas, having two persons and a chorus. The scene of it. We fix our attention on the person of the heathen woman and note : 1. Her trouble. 2. Her faith, not (1) a superstitious credulity ; nor (2) a hesitating experiment. 3. Her reward. 8 CONTENTS. Sermon XI. The Healixg of the Heathen Girl. M^^tthew XV. 23, 123-132 We turn our attention now to the other person of the story, the Lord Jesus. Looking on him as the model of human duty and the expression of the divine nature, we find in this story things amazing and perplexing. What are we to learn from them ? 1. The perplexities in the life of Christ are like the perplexities in the government of God. 2. The incident exhibits Christ gazing inexorable, for a time, on human suffering. 3. His apparent unkindness is only apparent. 4. His blessing is already given, while yet the supplicant is unaware of it. Sermon XII. The Gadarene Demoniac. Mark v. 6, . . 133-142 Demoniacal possession in the New Testament. Questions and difficulties. 1. It was not mere lunacy or epilepsy. 2. It was not mere wickedness. The symptom of a double and discordant consciousness. This is analo- gous to the inward discord wrought by sin. A dominant passion becomes like a possessing demon. One thus possessed may, at the same time, both seek Christ and repel him. What hope is there for the soul that is in such a case ? Sermon XIII. The Gospel among the Gadarenes. Mark v. 17, 143-153 The report of the swineherds: — 1. Concerning the things that had befallen the demoniac. 2. Concerning the swine. The kingdom of heaven cannot come without inflicting some loss on personal and vested interests: — 1. By its institutions. 2. By its charities. 3. By its reforms. 4. By its laws of personal morality. He who is ready to receive the kingdom of heaven, on the whole, not- withstanding all drawbacks, has already entered therein. Sermon XIV. The Apostle to the Gadarenes. Mark v. 18, 19, , 154-163 Perplexing diversity of our Lord's instructions as to making known his works and person. CONTENTS. 9 The settled method of his ministry was to exhibit the facts and let men frame their own conclusions. The command to the Gadarene demoniac is a solitary exception to our Lord's instructions in like caae. A strange paradox, teaching sundry lessons : 1. The path of duty which God has marked out for us may run counter to our best wisdom and our holy desire. 2. Duty is to be preferred above privilege. 3. Duty thus preferred becomes the highest privilege. HOLIDAY SERMONS. Sermon XV. The Sign of the Swaddling-Clothes. A Christmas Semion. Luke ii. 12, 164-173 The swaddling of infants as described by J. J. Rousseau. The sign of the Christ was that which was common to him with all the new-born infants in Judea. The swaddling-clothes are a type of the limitations and hindrances by which Jesus was beset throughout his education and his life. 1. The narrowness of Galilean village life. 2. The cramping traditions of the elders. 3. The constraint of the synagogue-discipline. 4. The misappreciation of the disciples. Jesus is not the product of his age, but its antithesis. Sermon XVI. The Children in the Temple. A Palm-Snnday Sermon. To Children. Matthew xxi. 9, 174-182 The anniversary of the passover-moon. The procession into Jerusalem. The children in the temple. Two questions: — 1. What became of all this crowd of shouting follow- ers during the week ? 2. How came it that this beloved Man should be pursued to death by popular clamor ? The witness which the days of the Passion Week bear against those common sins which slew the Lord. Sermon XVII. The Petition of Certain Greeks. An Easter Sermon. John xii. 20, 21, 183-195 Sundry questions that arise on the first reading of the story. 10 CONTENTS. These Greeks were representatives of that great class of " devout per- sons," who were prepared for the gospel, and by whom the gospel entered in to its triumph in the Roman world. Their .petition was an invitation to Jesus to carry the gospel to the Gentiles. Jesus renounces this, and remains to die ; so rising again to draw all men unto him. This is the law of the kingdom of heaven. SERMONS OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. Sermon XVIII. Creation. Genesis i. 1, 196-206 1. The traditionary view of the origin of the world ; contrasted with 2. The modern speculative view, I. The speculative view does not weaken the argument of Natural Theology. II. It does not conflict with the religious teaching of the Scriptures. III. It corrects traditionary misreadings of Scripture, by compelling us to recognize the work of creation depicted in Genesis, as 1. Pro- tracted. 2. Gradual and methodical. 3. Proceeding by means of material and natural causes. Science is transfigured in the light of faith. Without faith, its light is as darkness. Sermon XIX. A Corollary of Evolution. Eccl. i. 13, . 207-218 Evolutionism as a theory of the universe. Its Probabilities. Its Difficulties. All forces of the universe, according to this theory, are convertible into thought, emotion and volition ; and ex hypothesi reconvertible. Corollary: The original form of existence of the universe may have been the form of Infinite Thought, Emotion and Volition — Wisdom, Love and Might: — Which is equivalent to saying that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Sermon XX. The Natural Theology of the Spleen. Colossians i. 16, 219-231 The old argument of Natural Theology, from fact to cause, and from the nature of the fact to the nature of the cause, recapitulated ; — the argument from the adaptation of an organ to its known function and use. CONTENTS. 1 1 The Spleen is an organ the tise and function of which are unknown, and have been sought for by physiologists for two thousand years. 1. Why suppose that the Spleen has any use? 2. Why suppose that it has an adequate use ? 3. Why suppose that it has a beneficent use ? The principles of Natural Theology are presumed in the methods and postulates of science. The unknown testifies of God, like the known. SERMON ON THE SCRIPTURES. Sermon XXI. The Scriptural Doctrine Concerning Scripture. John V. 39, 40, 232-248 The Bible a phenomenon to be accounted for. Its influence in the world, described by Theodore Parker. Whether the power of the Bible is a power in the book, or a power behind the book is indifferent to our argument. In either case it is divine, and is a divine sanction to the look. A book divinely sanctioned is presumably divine in all its details. But this presumption may be disavowed or confirmed by the obvious facts and characteristics of the book. Manifest imperfections in the book are, so far forth, a divine disclaimer of divine responsibility. 1. Do the facts of Scripture disavow a miraculous preservation of the text? 2. Do they disavow a divine freedom from error in facts of science ? 3. Do they disavow a divinely perfect exactness of historical statement ? 4. Do they disavow an absolute freedom from error in predictions ? 5. Do they disclaim absolute freedom from error in mor.d judgment ? The Bible itself suggests and invites these inquiries, and it alone fur- nishes the means of answering them. SERMONS OF THINGS TO COME. Sermon XXII. Eesurrection in Christ. 1 John v. 11, . 249-257 The present prevalence of doubt concerning a future life is- a new thing in the history of Christendom. It results from the habitual restin,!:( of the hope of the life to come on arguments now found to be fallacious. 12 CONTEXTS. The notion of man's natural immortality is not grounded in reason, noi in Scripture. Our hope of resurrection and immortality is in the risen and immortal Christ. Sermon XXIII. Eesurrection of the Unjust. Psalm cxxxix. 8, 258-266 Old Testament language concerning the life to come. The Biblical teaching on this subject illustrates two characteristics of the Bible: 1. The progressive method of revelation. 2. "The alternative character of the gospel." The announcement of a resui- rection of the unjust proceeds pari passu with that of a resurrection of the just. The doctrine of the Scriptures is given with disdainful disregard, and implied rejection, of the doctrine of natural immortality held by the heathen teachers. The doctrine of Scripture not less a warning than a promise. Sermon XXIV. God's Equitable Justice. Luke xii. 47, 48, 267-276 Christian doctrine has suffered as much from overstatement as from understatement. Especially the doctrines of sin and punishment. This text declares the gradation of guilt and of punishment. Tlie gradations of the guilt of unbelief: — 1. In th se who have not heard. 2. In those who have not reached an intellectual conviction. 3. In those who, instructed and convinced, refuse to commit themselves to God. The bearing of this doctrine on the preaching of the gospel. CHARACTER-SERMONS. Sermon XXV. Jacob and Esau. Koraans ix. 13, .... 277-287 What may we learn from God's loving Jacob and hating Esau ? 1. That God's judgment of men is not determined by their natural qualities. 2. What is God's way of salvation ? Sermon XXVI. Herod Penitent. Mark vi, 20, : . ; . 288-298 The Herod family. CONTENTS. 13 IIer,)J II. ill liis better moments. What is his moral condition? 1. In doing many riglit things, he does nothing right. 2. In such repentance as Herod's there Ls no stability. Sermon XXVII. The Fall and Kisixg Again of Simon Peter. Matthew xvi. 18, 23, 299-308 1. The Infirmities and the Fall of Simon as illustrating the magnr.- nimity and patience of Christ. 2. The Worthiness of Simon, and the Promotion of him to the foremost place in the kingdom of heaven, as illustrating tiie wisdom and redemptive power of Chris:t. Sermon XXVIII. The Judgment of Judas Iscariot. John xiii. 27, 309-317 '•Tljat thou doest, do quickly." The intent for which Christ spake this. 1. Perliaps to secure privacy from the traitor. 2. Perhaps in utterance of Christ's eagerness to accomplish his suffer- ings. 3. More obviously, that he might reach the heart and conscience of Judas. SERMOX ON THE INDWELLING GOD. Sermon XXIX. The High and Lofty One, Dwelling with The Contrite Spirit. Isaiah Ivii. 15, 318-328 The apprehension of the infinite illustrated from the analogy of vision. God enters into the human soul: — 1. By the Intellect. 2. By the Affections. 3. By Spiritual Communitm. SERMON ON THE CHURCH. Sermon XXX. Church, Sect and Congregation. Preached to the Woodland Church, May 25, 1884, on occasion of an invitation to be installed as Pastor. 1 Timothy iii. 15, 329-339 The preacher s unreserved willingness to serve this c'lurch so long as his service is needed and desired : and to withdraw at once when his withdrawal is deemed expedient for the church. 14 CONTENTS. Certain reasons for declining to be formally installed : — 1. Installation adds no real and desirable element of permanence to one's ministry. 2. It would be taken to indicate that one allied himself with the emulations and exclusions and propagandisms of a sect. 3. It seems to be exacted, as a condition, that one give assent to certain prescribed questions without giving, at the same time, a full state- ment of his reservations and qualifications. THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. I. THE SIMPLICITY OF REPENTANCE. tUcpcntoncf towaxt) ©ob, anlt foitlj toimub cur fori) ^csii3. — Acts xx. 21. Here are two brief phrases in which, in his touching valedictory to the beloved church of Ephesus, Paul the apostle summed up his three years' preaching among them. He declares that he had kept back nothing that was profitable to them. He takes them to witness that he had not shunned to declare God's whole counsel. But of the matter of his preaching there are no points that he cares to rehearse but these : that he testified the gospel of God's grace ; that he proclaimed the reign of God, and that to all men, Jew or Greek, he testified repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. It is something more than a coincidence of language, it is a significant and instructive fact, that the words which sum up thus the preaching of this most advanced apostle, as he looked back thoughtfully on his career in that great city where he had sat in the school of a philosopher instructing inquisitive minds of various race and nationality with such arguments as he has himself recorded in many a profound epistle, — should be the identical words that sum up the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom of God by the apos- tle's Lord and Master, when he went forth with his simple but startling message to the unlearned peasants of Galilee : 15 IG THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. " The time is fulfilled ; the kingdom of God is at hand ; repent and believe the gospel." The two words mark the practical unity of the gospel. There are diversities of ministration. We trace them not only down the divergent streams of church-history ; we find them in the words of the earliest promulgators of the king- dom. Paul, James, John, Peter — how unlike each other in temperament, in habit of thought, in habit of expression ! How unlike them all was Christ, who "spake as never man spake!" But the preaching of each of them is practically summed up in these same words — " they testified repentance and faith." Begin where they will, this is the point toward which they converge and in which they unite. Whatever the contents of their discourse — prophecy, narrative, exhortation, argument, — everything bears down on this conclusion, that men should repent and believe. These two are the cardinal words of practical Christianity. Everything in the Christian life hinges on them. To them is affixed the promise of salva- tion. No two words are of such import to all men as these two and their representatives in the various languages. And yet by what Satanic machination has it been brought to pass (for it is impossible to ascribe it to any human design) that these two words have been turned aside from their simple, transparent meaning, and have become current, in the Chris- tian languages, in a perverted sense ! The practical corrup- tions of the religion of Jesus Christ might almost be narrated in the form of a history of the perversion of these two words. Take the former of these words, repentance : it is a question which has been much debated, what word ought to be used in English as the equivalent of the Greek word commonly so translated in the New Testament.* That the word repentance * See Dissertation on the proper translation of Meravoia^ in Campbell on the Gospels. Also, Dr. Chalmers on " The Nature and Seasons of Repentance," published as a tract b^ the Am. Tract Society. THE SIMriJCITY OF REPENTANCE. 17 is not in itself suitable hardly admits of debate. For the idea which this word carries with it is one that is not at all con- tained in the word which it stands for. The root of the word is the same that we have in pain or pen-alty. The idea which it carries is that of suffering or sorrow for sin — an idea of which there is not the slightest trace in the word used by our Lord and his apostles. And yet this word repentance has, in the principal languages of Europe and America, got itself foisted into the place of one which means something else. And its own meaning has stuck by it in such a way as to cast a shadow over the New Testament. * The instructed preacher wnll do what he can to bend the word around to the New Testament sense, representing that Repent should be taken to mean simply Change your mind, but after all he finds that as soon as he lets go of the word it springs back to its proper meaning again. Accordingly, some scholars have recommended another word. The word Repent, he somj, indicates a passive state of the feelings, they say, whereas the Gospel Avith its word summons us to an act. The word repent represents sorrow as an end, whereas the Scriptures never commend sorrow except as a means to an end. They go on to say (and I do not see how anybody can answer them) that if repentance and godly sorrow had been the same thing, Paul never ^A slight aggravation of this mistranslation, which excites much virtuous horror among Protestant readers of the Eoman-catholic trans- lation of the New Testament, is the rendering " do penance " for '• repent." The history of this rendering is curious, and not specially discreditable. The Latin verb unhappily chosen by Jerome or his predecessors to represent the Greek Msravodv was an impersonal verb, poenitet, defective in its inflections, for which, in the infinitive and imperative moods, it was necessary to construct the periphrastic form, agere posniientiam j and this went over naturally enough into the Eng- lish form "do penance." But the principal mischief was done in the introduction of the word penitence or repentance, in which Protestants and Roman-catholics have agreed. 18 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. would have told the Corinthians that " godly sorrow worketh repentance." * So they propose to substitute the word Reform. " The time is fulfilled ; the reign of God is ready to begin ; reform, and believe the gospel." " The Son of man is come to call sinners to reformation." " Godly sorrow worketh reformation unto salvation." f But to this there is an objection of the opposite sort. If the former word relates merely to the inward feelings, this word relates only to the outward act — a change of form, not of substance. Christ's word means Changing your mind. Sorrow may work this — in which case blessed be sorrow. The goodness of God may lead to it % — in which case doubly blessed is God's goodness. In all cases the reform of the out- ward act is sure to follow after it — works meet for the change of mind. § The two one-sided notions of the duty to which Christ sum- mons us, that are expressed in these two words, reform and repent, correspond to two types of religious delusion which many of us have encountered. There is that delusion which is expressed in an outward reformation without any turning of the mind ; and that which is expressed in inward agitation of the mind without turning. 1. Of the former it need not be thought strange if we are at a loss for historical examples ; for it is the error of a light sort of character such as is apt to fade out of history. He may be a person of amiable qualities, not incapable of per- ceiving moral distinctions, but looking leniently on his own faults of character, and even for sins, manifest and acknowl- edged, having no very profound feeling of regret — none that goes to the core of his soul. And yet he has a measure of regret for his sins. He is not without self-respect ; and he * 2 Cor. vii. 10. t See, in addition to former references, sundry remarks by DeQuincey, vols. ii. 435 ; viii. 15, 222. Ed. 1877. X Rom. ii. 4. I Matt. iii. 8. THE SIMPLICITY OF REPENTANCE. 19 finds them degrading to his nature. He is sensitive to other peoples' opinion ; and he finds that they bring him into con- tempt. He is ambitious of success ; and knows some of his traits and habits to be unprofitable and unpopular. ' He has an eye on the future ; and is convinced that, soon or late, wrong-doing is followed by ill consequence. Or he has come to know that his friends are feeling grieved and anxious about him, and he does not like — good-natured, kindly dis- posed man — to give trouble to anybody. And so for one reason or another — for his own sake, or his friends' sake, but not in the least for God's sake, or out of any hatred for the sin as sin — he says to himself, and perhaps to others, " I am going to reform ; I am going to break off this and that habit, and train myself to overcome this or that trait of character." Perhaps he says, " I mean to make thorough work this time ; I'll join the church ; you will see a complete change in me.'* And possibly we do see what looks like it. But as for any substantial change of the man's mind — convictions, feelings, purposes — respecting wickedness or respecting God, there is none, and he does not pretend that there is any. You know what commonly becomes of this fine plan of reformation. It is a plan for hacking away at twigs and branches, leaving the roots in the ground. It is a reformation of the behavior, not of the character. As long as the root is there, the poi- sonous shoots will keep coming to the surface. What a myriad of examples like this has been furnished during these forty years by the course of the Temperance Reformation ! Base, guilty drunkards have been made to feel, not that they were base and guilty — quite the contrary, that they were very unfor- tunate, the victims of a too generously impulsive temperament, and of some other man's wickedness; that their vices were unprofitable, and ridiculous, in short, that it would pay better every way to reform. So Belial has been cast out by some other devil — by Mammon, perhaps even by Momus — a change which has made a vast difference in the man's social relations 20 T^E SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. and in the comfort of his family, but only an outside differ- ence in the man. And presently the deyil that has been cast out to wander in dry places comes back to his old home, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. 2. I haye showed you what reformation may mean, — an outward improvement without any turning of the mind. Now observe what repentance may mean, — an inward sorrow with- out any turning of the mind. You will find examples enough of it in connection with this same vice of drunkenness. Here is a young man just released from the watchful influences of a Christian home, exposed to the temptations of a great city, and dazzled by the fascina- tions which evil company, the organized seductions of society, the lures of vicious poetry, have thrown around bacchanalian debauchery. Ah ! it was so gay last night ! the lights glittered so garishly, and the songs of love and wine rang around so cheerily, and the shouts of laughter welcomed the quick jest, and the wine bubbled in the glass, and the brain swam in a delirious ecstasy. But how is it with him this morning? He has come to himself, on the bed where they laid him last night, drunk. He is surrounded with the evidences of his wicked folly. The filth and vomit of his debauch are on his garments. The sun looks in on him reproachful, and he turns his lack-lustre eye to meet it, and quickly turns away again. He is tormented by a splitting headache, and miserably un- toned by the reaction from his fierce excitement. His eye falls on some token from home — the Bible that his father gave him, the photograph of his mother on the wall, the little ornaments and comforts that his sisters wrought for him when he was leaving home — and he thinks of what he used to be, and W'hat he meant and hoped to be — prayed to be, perhaps. And there in his solitary room, he turns himself on his bed toward the w^all, and weeps aloud. " Good ! " you say ; " he repents of his sin. It will all come right after all." Repents ! Well, no doubt that is what the word means — he has pain in THE SIMPLICITY OF REPENTANCE. 21 looking backward. But is this whicli we see the thing which Christ demands ? Wait, and we shall know, perhaps. We will watch for the result the next time that temptation comes to him and sinners entice him, and we will look whether there be signs of the turning of the mind, or whether he goes right on in the path of guilty pleasure that has brought him to this woe, and will bring him to worse woe. Perhaps his life is going to be spent in these alternations of sin and of remorse, as so many a wretched life is spent ; with now and then some spasm of reformation, some half-effort of prayer, but on the whole no progress and no hope, the sorrow of this world steadily working death. The capacity of sorrow is growing less, as diseased nerves sometimes ache themselves to death. Or remorse is settling down into sullen despair of doing better; and this is death. We can not but recur to that classical instance of sorrow for sin without repentance from it, — Lord Byron. There is a violent reaction nowadays from the extravagant admiration of the last generation ; and it is easy for us to detect the falsehood of many of those wild affectations of his that imposed upon our fathers. But there was no sham about this, that he was miserably unhappy. To apply to him the words which he wrote of another, he was : " Th' apo?tle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence." And his misery was because of his wickedness. He felt it ; he confessed it. " For he through sin's long labyrinth had run." He was " sore sick at heart." He felt " that settled, ceaseless gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore, That will not look beyond the tomb, But cannot look for rest before. 22 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. " Through many a clime 'twas his to go, With many a retrospection curst, And all his solace was to know, Whate'er betide, he'd known the worst. " What is that worst ? Nay, do not ask I In pity from the search forbear 1 Smile on, nor venture to unmask Man's heart and view the hell that's there." This was sorrow for sin. If ever sorrow, by its intensity, could have claimed the promise of forgiveness, surely it was this. But how different from that godly sorrow that worketh a change of mind ! For all the while it was working death. Like a sulking child, he grew bitter against himself and morose toward his fellows, and hardened his heart toward God, kicking against the goads that drove him. We contrast this picture with that of another great poet, constituted with a poetic temperament no less susceptible of deep feeling and intense suffering, and no less endowed with the gift of utter- ance in song. His odes are filled with laments over a personal distress not less profound than that which overflows the stanzas of Childe Harold. For he too, like Byron, had sounded the foulest depths of wickedness and planted in his own bosom the seeds of remorse ; and the utterances of his sorrow for sin are among the few supreme lyric poems of the world's litera- ture, — as when he writes — " I acknowledge my transgression, And my sin is ever before me. Hide thy face from my sins, And blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a right spirit within me. O Lord, open thou my lips ; And my mouth shall show forth thy praise." Here is sorrow after quite another sort — a godly sort. Here is sorrow that is good for something — sorrow that work- THE SIMPLICITY OF REPENTANCE. 23 eth a change of mind. Here is repentance that looks forward as well as back — not only repentance froin, but repentance toward. This is the turning of the mind about-face, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand — because God is all ready- to take up and carry on the government if you will but suffer him and join with him. Does this explanation of the word already begin to make clearer things in Christian truth and duty that have some- times perplexed you? Have you sometimes pondered the summons of the Gospel, with its ample promises and its awful alternative, and felt an honest embarrassment over the ques- tion how that just Judge who cannot but do right should invite, urge, command us to a state of the emotions that is not to be had by a resolution of the will ? Has it seemed strange that God should seem to command that for which human languages sometimes fail to furnish any imperative mood? Have you been tempted to fall back into a passive attitude of mind, alleging yourself incompetent to God's exactions of sorrow, and saying to yourself, " I will wait until, in the sweep of some prevailing religious excitement, the requisite agitation of the feelings shall overtake me"? and thus, wdth an uneasy sense that you are not right nor doing right, have you rested in the wrong, and yet reassured your conscience in your inaction ? Look now once more, in the light of this day's study, on the word of God in the Scriptures, and this darkness shall begin to be light about you. Turn about toward God, not in the reformation of the outward life only, but in the inward purpose of the heart. Turn your mind to God and trust in Christ to see you safe. This is repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus. Is not this a plain way into the kingdom of heaven, by which a little child might enter in — by which you may enter in, if you will but become as a little child? II. THE SIMPLICITY OF FAITH.* iSdictie 0n t\)c £ovtf Jesus (jrijrist ttn& tljou sljalt be siuieb.— Acts xvi. 31. I INVITE you this morning to the sober study of a graye subject. I am not afraid but that it ^vill be interesting to those who seriously want to know the word of God concern- ing the salyation of men. To the rest, I think it will be dull. Those who haye come to church to be entertained with fine talk Avill go away disappointed and say, " Ah ! he is not the preacher we took him for." I pray for diyine grace to be a dull preacher to such, and an interesting and helpful preacher to those who want to learn God's truth and man's duty. The question which I propose to discuss this morning is this : What is Faith ? or, in other words, What is it to belieye on the Lord Jesus Christ ? For strangely enough it is a question to this day among Christians, among theologians, What is this thing to which is giyen the promise of eternal salvation ? Not that there is any active controversy on the subject. No, alas, that is the pity of it, that there should be diversity of opinion on the meaning of the great cardinal Avord of practical relig- ion, and no controversy at all. There ought to be controversy. Why isn't there controversy ? Where are our professors of " This Sermon, wliich was too much like a theological treatise to begin with, was presented, for substance, to the Presbyterian Ministers' Asso- ciation of Philadelphia ; and some of the notes and other additions which were more specially suited to that professional audience are here retained. 24 THE f^IMPLICITY OF FAITH. 25 polemics — of fighting theology? What are such Avarriors good for, if they are not found at the front when questions like this, so vital, so practical, are still undecided, and plain people may be at a loss to know not only what is true, but even what is orthodox? Don't talk of the blessings of theological peace ! What is peace, compared with truth ? First pure, then peaceable, is the wisdom that cometh from above. There is not the slightest difficulty in determining the mean- ing of this word in the New Testament. There are four tests by which the true meaning of it may be proved : 1. The word is not a word peculiar to the Gospel, to carry a new idea, but an old word, in common use already, among those to whom the Gospel was first preached. Now when the Gospel says to plain, common people, in plain common words. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, the words are to be taken in their plain common meaning, or the Gospel is a fraud. It won't do to say to people who have ac- cepted the oflTer and claimed the promise, " Oh, but we were using the words in a technical sense of our own." 2. The act of faith is illustrated by multitudes of instances throughout the Old Testament and the New. The true defi- nition must be one that describes an act that is common to all these believers. 3. To the act of faith, men are exhorted in the Scriptures, with the exhibition of rewards and penalties. Therefore the true definition of it must describe a free act, to which men may be induced by motives, and the neglect of which may be charged as a sin. 4. The act of faith is named in the Scriptures as the indis- pen'sable condition, and the sole condition, of salvation. " Who- soever believeth shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life." But certain other things are also named in the word of God as indispensable conditions of salvation, such as Repent- ance, Obedience, Love, Holiness. We can not reconcile this 26 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. difficulty, unless our definition of Faith describes an act which practically involves all these others.* What now are the various definitions of Faith that are offered to us by Christian theologians and preachers ; that we may bring them up, one by one, and try them by these tests ? The first and most generally current of these definitions is this : that Faith is the Assent of the Intellect to Truth. Faith in Christ is the holding of Christian truth. Faith in God is to account as true propositions submitted to the judgment on God's authority. This is the definition given by all Roman Catholic writers, and by many Protestant writers. Dr. Chal- mers, for instance, admits in faith " nothing more than the intellectual act of believing" — " a simple credence of the truths of revelation " — "just a holding of the things said in the gos- pel to be true." f Is this the true definition ? Let us try it by all the tests. (1) Is this the natural, common meaning of the word as it stands in the gospel ? It does look so, doesn't it ? AVhen you believe a thing you hold it to be true. When a man says " I believe the world is round " or " I believe the doctrine of limited atonement," there is no doubt what the words mean. They mean that he holds these things to be true. Suppose he *As John Owen says: ("On Justification," p. 84. Ed. Presb. Board of Publication.) "We allow no faith . . . but what virtually and radi- cally contains in it universal obedience." t Notes on Hill. Ed. Harpers, 210, 422. See also John M. Wilsoyi, annotation in Eidgley's Body of Divinity, p. 124. Ed. Carters. Archibald Alexander, Practical Sermons, p. 150. (Presb, Board of Publication.) Archibald Alexander, Pel. Experience, p. 154. (Ed. Pr. Board.) Ashbel Green, Lectures on the Sh. Catechism vol. II., pp. 295 sqq. (Presb. Board of Pub.) Pearson on the Creed. London, 1835, p. 16. Abp. Tillotson, Ser. on Heb. xi. 6. Alex. Carson on the Atonement. THE SIMPLICITY OF FAITH. 27 says " I believe in the existence of God," he uses a form of speech never found in the Scriptures, but he means by it that he is convinced, in his understanding, that God exists. And when he says " I believe in God," " I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ" — what does he mean then? That he is con- vinced of certain propositions — that he holds certain tenets to be true ? I think not. I do not believe you will find that phrase "I believe on" or "I believe in" used in any such sense in all the Scriptures, nor in the Greek language of their time. The Scriptures speak of believing certain facts or certain truths, but not of believing in them.* When the Scriptures speak of Faith in God, or of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, it is a different matter, as we shall see as soon as we apply the other tests of a true definition. (2) Try it by the examples of faith in the Scriptures both Old and New. There is a long roll of the heroes of faith given in Hebrews xi. What are the truths that have been held in common by all those who have been saved by faith, from the * The use of language in the early creeds is significant ; and equally significant the later corruption of their text. Calvin remarks with emphasis, Instit. IV. i., ^ 2. " Ideo credere in Deum nos testamur, quod et in ipsum ut veracem animus noster se reclinat, et fiducia nostra in ipso acquiescit : quod in Eccksiam non ita conveniret, quemadmodum nee in remissionem peccatorum aut carnis resurrectionem. He refers, on this point, to Augustine and other early writers. But then this is one of the points on which Calvin was not much of a Calvinist. The same point is strongly put in the ancient Waldensian catechism, long before the Keformation. "A dead faith is to believe that there is a God, and to believe those things which relate to God, and not believe in him." " Qu. Dost thou believe in the Holy Catholic Church ? ^'Ans. No; for it is a creature ; but I believe there is one." — Milner's Church History, Cent. xiii. ch. 3, It would be very shocking, did we not make allowance for modern corruptions of language, to hear worthy people talk of believing in human depravity, or believing in falling from grace, or even believing in the devil ! 28 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. days of righteous Abel until now, and the holding of which is the condition of salvation ? One party says it is the doctrine of limited atonement. Another says it is the doctrine of the atonement in general. Another says it is the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. The Athanasian Creed (so called because Athanasius never heard of it) declares that it is a certain scholastic statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, " which if a man believe not, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." * The Roman Catholic Church, which always knows its own mind on points of this kind, declares it to be the whole sum of revealed truth. Presbyterian writers are commonly more lib- eral, and agree to let you off with " certain essential doctrines or fundamental truths," to use the language of Ashbel Green and the Presbj'terian Board. And this author then submits a little syllabus of dogmas of his own composition, as being " the special object of saving faith." f But it is constantly observed that when a theologian of this stripe gets on the com- mittee of a Tract Society or an Evangelical Alliance, his dog- matic "object of saving faith " undergoes a visible shrinkage ; so that it is difficult to agree upon a single dogma or group of dogmas which a man is saved by holding and lost by rejecting. The one doctrine that comes nearest to uniting modern Christians as the saving doctrine the acceptance of which is the condition of salvation, is the doctrine of Atonement for Sin by the Vicarious Death of Christ. Observe them as they go through the Bible from chapter to chapter trying to read this in between the lines, and to make out that all the old heroes of faith held this tenet of Christian theology. Adam *That genial tlieologian, Nathanael Emmons, demonstrated that "it is absohitely necessary to approve of the doctrine oC reprobaticn, in order to be saved." — H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, p. 219. t Lectures on Shorter Catechism, II., 295 sq. So Dr. C. Hodge speaks of " the doctrines which the Scriptures present as the objects of faith." Theology, I., 179. THE SIMPLICITY OF FAITH. 29 and Eve were dressed in skins — they must have been sacri- ficing animals as a type' of Christ! Abel's offering was accepted and Cain's refused — this must have been because Abel held and Cain denied that without shedding of blood is no remission. Rahab the harlot let down a scarlet thread from her window — scarlet is blood-color, and this was a prefiguring of the Atonement. And so on with Gideon, and Samson, and Barak, with Jephthah, also, and others wiiom time would fail me to mention. " These all died in faith." Did they all accept the doctrine of Vicarious Atone- ment — whether general or limited? Or is there any other tenet of Christian theology that they agreed in ? When we are trying these painful operations on the simple, straight- forward stories of the Old Testament (and the New Tes- tament too, for that matter) are we not engaged in put- ting something into the Scriptures, instead of drawing from them the instruction that is there?* This definition of Faith, then, that it is the Assent of the intellect to Truth, does not correspond with the examples of faith given us in the Bible. (3) Try it by the third test. Faith is spoken of in the Scriptures as if it were a voluntary duty. Men are entreated, urged to it with the promise of reward ; the neglect of it is solenmly charged upon them as a sin. Is " the assent of the intellect to religious truth," of this nature ? Do men hold their opinions by an act of the will ? Is the balancing judg- ment brought to a decision upon doubtful questions of truth by offer of reward or threat of punishment ? Does the intel- * It is a curious fact which I have observed in the course of theologi- cal reading, that just in proportion as a theologian sets out with extreme views touching the infallibility and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures, he practically shows, before he gets through, how insufficient he finds the Scriptures to be until they are supplemented by an extensive system of his own guess-work. For my part I am very well content with the Bible as it stands. 30 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. lect give judgment according to evidence, or is it to be bribed by considerations of expediency ? To ask these questions is enough. We need not stop to answer them. (4) We come to the fourth and final test. Faith, accord- ing to the Scripture meaning of it, is something which carries with it Repentance, Obedience, Love, Holiness. For each one of these is named, on the authority of God, as a sufficient con- dition of salvation, and each one of them as an indispensable condition. The only conceivable explanation of this is that these things always and inevitably go together. Faith in Christ, then, as the Bible uses the word, is something invaria- bly associated with Obedience, Love, Holiness. Is this true of the holding of sound doctrine? Take whatever standard of sound doctrine you choose, — however strict, however liberal, — is it true that every man that has ever held it has been holy, loving, penitent, obedient ? And if any such man has been unholy, unloving, impenitent, has he been saved ? And if not, is this holding of sound opinions the faith to which is given the promise " Whosoever believeth shall not perish, but shall have everlasting life " ? The fact is that you have here the Roman definition of Faith. And if you accept the Roman definition of Faith, you would do much better to take with it the Roman doctrine of justifi- cation. For man surely is not justified by faith alone, if by faith you mean orthodoxy. To hold the Protestant doctrine of Justification with the Roman definition of Faith is putting new" wine into old bottles. The wine runs out, and the bottles perish. II. It is doubtless the feeling how dangerous and demoral- izing it may be to announce forgiveness and salvation tis promised simply to those who accept certain truths with the intellect, that leads many conscientious preachers to qualify the offer of divine mercy to " whosoever believeth " by cautions and limitations of their own, and to give us a new definition of " saving faith," as being a peculiar quality or intensity of THE SIMPLICITY OF FAITH. . Si intellectual assent, different from ordinary belief " Whoso- ever believeth " witli saving faith "shall have eternal life."* We need not give a second thought to any such limitations and qualifications as these. No man has a right to interpolate them into the divine promises. This is not the way Christ speaks, not the way the gospels speak, not the way the apostles speak. They take a common word with a plain meaning, and say in all languages " whosoever believeth on him " — " believe and be saved." And for us to amend their words for them, and say that they did not mean them in the common sense in which men use them and understand them, but in a special sense, a theological sense, a spiritual sense, is to accuse them of practicing a fraud on mankind. The difference that the Bible makes between saving faith and other faith is not in the nature of it, but in the object of it. III. But now here is a third definition which has sometimes found great favor with theologians, and is to this day some- times urged upon us with great zeal and importunity. It is this, that Faith consists in the undoubting assurance of one's own salvation. Justifying faith is assuredly believing one's own self to be justified. To believe on Christ is to be confi- dently sure that you yourself are saved by him.f This definition fails on every test. (1) It is not in any sense the natural meaning of the words Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. *Thns that excellent preacher, Dr. J. W. Alexander (Sacrl. Ser. 222) after stating the dogma which he holds to be "the object of saving faith," adds, " the man who believes this, vxith a spiritual apprehension oj what he believes is a saved man." . 1 1 have been stoutly assured, by people who thought they knew, that this fantastic and pernicious notion has never been held in the Presby- terian churches; whereas for three generations, and those the most formative in the history of Protestant theology, it was the generally accepted Presbyterian orthodoxy ; as may best be seen in Principal Cunningham's essay on "The Reformers and the Dcctrine of Assurance," 32 . THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. (2) It does not correspond with the facts in the lives of believers ; for some of the most divinely approved examples of faith are the examples of believers who suffered under many misgivings concerning their personal salvation. (3) The state of mind which it describes is not invariably associated with repentance and holiness. On the contrary it is very common among impious and immoral fanatics. (4) But when you come to this final test : Is it a free act to which a man may be exhorted as a duty, and for failing in which he may be condemned as for a willful sin, the absurdity and folly of this definition become apparent. To exhort an unbeliever to this sort of faith — to tell him Believe that you are saved, and then you will be saved, is to tell him to believe a lie so as to make it true. And to condemn him for unbelief, under this definition, is to hold him guilty for not believing what the very fact of his condemnation proves to have been false. This definition represents the gospel as a cruel Sphinx set- ting insoluble riddles to all passers-by, and devouring them for not furnishing impossible answers. IV. And here is one more mistaken definition of faith — that faith consists in a succession of states of mind and feeling and action such as constitute what men call " experiencing religion " — that faith means faith and something else. I take this statement from a tract of the American Tract Society : (No. 357.) " What is it to believe on Christ ? It is to feel your need of him ; to believe that he is able and willing to save you, and to save you now ; and to cast yourself unreservedly on his mercy, and trust in him alone for salvation." That is, to in " The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation," p. 119. It is by no means extinct at this day ; although it is far less common in this country than in some others, to have people rush at you with the ques- tion, " Have you a perfect assurance of your own salvation ? " — as if this was the point of duty and the essence of Christian faith. THE SIMPLICITY OF FAITH. 33 believe on Christ is first to feel something, and then to believe something, and then to do something, and then — what ?, Why- then — to believe on Christ. Why not say that to begin with and to be done with? Doubtless one does often come to this act of trusting in the Saviour through such successive stages of emotion, and conviction and action. But to confuse these together as parts of the act of trust itself is a misleading, perplexing, mischief-making thing. It is not justified by the plain, common use of words in the Gospel. And when we remember that faith is enjoined on all men as a duty — a voluntary act, to which they are exhorted under force of inducements, and with the alternative of personal guilt, — then the mischief of a bemuddled definition in which the antecedents and incidents of an act are not distinguished from the act itself, becomes apparent. You entreat me to experience certain emotions ! You urge me to entertain cer- tain convictions! But you cannot procure a state of the emotions by oflTering a reward for it. You cannot produce a conviction of the understanding by threats of damnation. What bungling processes of ours are these! How unlike " the wisdom of God to salvation ! " When God wants to convince an intellect he does it in the only way in which an intellect was ever yet convinced, — by reason and evidence. When he would move the feelings, he does not order a man to agitate himself, but he brings to bear upon us those appliances of love and sympathy that aflfect the heart. And when the question is on the free choices of man's will — will he ? or will he not ? — he throws into the scale the tremendous sanctions of his government, and uses the announcement of infinite reward or infinite loss to sway the free determination which may not be constrained. Of course the question will be put, — " Since these conditions are constant antecedents of faith, is there any practical harm in including them in the definition of it ? " Well, is there any good in it, of any kind ? When you 3 "J4 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHillST. have gone through with your description of these antecedents of faith, you come, in your definition, to the word trust, to which all these things are just as necessarily antecedent as they are to faith: so that your definition has tangled up within itself an endless coil of antecedents, through whicli a logical mind would never get at the thing itself, to all eternity. And the practical harm of it is this: it perplexes plain minds by a' complex definition of a simple act. It encourages men in computing the evidence of their faith by the intensity of their preliminary experiences, rather than by their daily life of faith and acts of faith. It takes off from the unbe- liever the burden of guilt for refusing his plain duty, to comfort him with the complacent fieeling that he is an unfor- tunate person, not altogether to blame for not having happened to get hit by a religious experience. We have reached the true definition at last. To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to trust in him. It is so simple that words of explanation would only darken it. We may only try this definition by the several tests, and it will answer to every one of them. (1) It is the natural and obvious meaning of the words as they would be understood by those to whom they were preached. What else could they mean ? What is this object of faith — • " the Lord Jesus Christ " ? It is not a doctrine concerning his person ; not a theory of his atonement ; not a series of fundamentals in theology ; not a system of religious truth ; and yet they who misunderstand the first part of this com- mand are compelled to substitute one or another of these tilings as the object of Christian faith for the Lord Jesus Christ himself.* * 1 mfght quote again my favorite theologian, Ashbel Green ; or, better, the orthodox Wilson, annotator of Ridgeley. Eidgeley had said that faith was an " act of trust or dependence on him who is its object. ' To which Wilson replies: " The object of faith is NOT A person, but a proposition or a statement. Trust, on the other hand, has reference THE SIMIMJCITV (JF FAITH. 35 (2) The act of Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ does involve in itself, of its own nature, Repentance, Obedience, Holiness, and Avhatever things beside arc demanded in the Scriptures as conditions of salvation. The act of obedience is the act of faith. The life of holiness is the life of faith. It is " in well- doing" that we '' commit the kee])ing of our souls to a faith- ful Creator."^ So in the classical instance of faith, it is written of Abraham, father of believers, *' he believed in Jehovah," — not merely he rested on him, but — '^'^'^ |'".^^ — he built on him. Not merely that he thought probable, or felt certain, that the promise would come true, but that he ventured himself upon the Lord. In the great trial of his life, all his three days' journey to Moriah, he rested all his weight on God. As he climbed the hill with Isaac, his faith was not his convic- tion what God would do, nor his own pur2)ose of what he would entirely to a person. The difference 1 etween it and faith, in fiict, is just that the one has a person anl tlie other has a statement for its object." II, 125. The Wesleyan theologian, Watson, is very sound an ] judicious ( n this snliject. There is a very curious illustration of how completely the tra- ditionary theological i(l?a of faith,' now so rarely m(t with outside of the theological systems, had, almost to our own day, occupied the mind of the church to the exclusion of the New Testanient iJea. Never was an honest sermon so searched for hen-sies as Albert Barnes's sermon on " The Way of Salvation " ; and yet of all its gainsayers, no one thought of objecting to the mistake that lay patent on the surface of it. The preacher, drawing out in ample argument his views of the method of the divine government, of atonement, and of rejjeneration, exclaims with impassioned earnestness, " Fly to th'.s scheme !" " Co)nmit your eternal inte.ests to this p.ani" Upon whi.h Di-s. Junkin and Breckenri.lre reply, with equal earnestness, "Don't do anything of the kind! Don't fly to Mr. Barnes's scheme — to the New England plan ! Fly to our scheme — commit yourself to the Scotch system, or the Dutch ! " — and never saw that the gospel ''Way of Salvation" was, not to commit one- self to anybody's "scheme," but to "commit oneself, in well-doing^ to a faithful Creator." * 1 Peter iv 19. 36 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX OHEIST. do ; it was, moment by moment, what he did. In his acts w^as his faith perfected. Having trusted God, he trusted him to tho end. In his great surrender, he cast forth upon God's hands the treasure of his heart, the hope of his race, the pledge of God's promise. He flung himself, with his whole weight, on God's faithfulness and love. Herein his faith was made actual. You see, then, that it is by works, by the act of faith, that a man is justified, and not by faith which does not act, — which is 7iot faith, except in the sense in which a dead man is a man. (3) This principle of personal trust in God is the one prin- ciple common to all saints from antediluvian Enoch and Abel down to the latest of those who through faith have obtained a good report. In this view, the practical religion of the Old Testament and the New are one and the same. Consult your Cruden's Concordance ; in the Old Testament, the word trust occurs two hundred and twenty-five times, — it is the synonym of piety and acceptableness with God. In the New Testament it is hardly found at all. In the Old Testament the words faith and believe are only met with a few times ; in the New Testa- ment they occur seven hundred times, and stand as the syn- onyms of holiness. It is not because God has changed, or that the conditions of his favor have changed ; but simply that in our translations we have shifted a w^ord. There is but " one faith ; " and " the Catholic faith is this." (4) The condition of salvation, thus defined, is a voluntary act and therefore a practicable and reasonable demand to be made of any man. Demanding this, God is no longer presented to the world as one who would bribe or terrify the intellect into a partial or biased decision of questions of evidence ; nor as one who would extort the instantaneous exercise of involun- tary emotions ; but only as the stern enforcer, the infinite re- warder, of every man's simple duty toward a faithful Creator.* * There is no point on which the splendid "progress in theology" which has marked the history of the Presbyterian Church during the THE SIMPLICITV OF FAITH. 3/ That is a sharp criticism upon modern preaching, that instead of teaching men tliat they must " be converted and become as little children," it has taken to teaching little children that they must become converted and become like grown folks. But the criticism loses its cutting edge when the faith which we preach is the child's own faith — the lean- ing of the weaker on the Stronger, of the fqolish on the All- wise, of the sinful on the infinitely Merciful, of the w^avering on him that is Faithful and True, — the faith to which the wise and mighty find it hard to bow themselves, but which suffers little children to come unto the Lord, and in the mouths of babes and sucklings doth perfect his praise. Sal- vation by this faith is a salvation for every one, at all times. AVhen the mind is w^eak and ill-instructed and cannot " under- stand all mysteries and all knowledge," it can yet trust, and so be saved. When evil habits have seized and bound one, and imperious passions do so dominate the will as to leave no hope in oneself of successful struggle against them, — wdien life is shortening up, moment by moment, and the issues of eternity are compressed within the compass of an hour, — when the sick and bewildered brain swims and the intellect staggers in the vain attempt to grasp new thoughts and argu- ments, then this gospel " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved " — " Fear not ; only believe " — comes last forty years is more commendable than the point considered in this argument. The view that the act of faith is trust, and the object of faith not dogmas but a person, has grown to be so ortliodox that many are surprised to find how lately it ceased to be a heresy. One of the best utterances on the subject is by a man with whom, on some subjects, it was a pleasure to disagree : " Believe, only believe ; not opinions, but on a personal Saviour; not a creed, but on a Christ." [Discourses on Kedemption, by Stuart Robinson, p. 341.] For some of the most dis- tinct statements of the truth, in honorable inconsistency with the hurt- ful errors of earlier publications, see some of the more recent issues of that wisely progressive body, the Presbyterian Board of Publication ; — for example, " Plantation Sermons," by A. F. Dickson, p, 82. 38 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. to US, to every man, bringing great salvation. Having this promise, in the utmost conscious weakness and ignorance and sinfulness, one can rest confident in the everlasting arms of Him who " is made to us wisdom and righteousness and sanc- tiiication." Having this, the frightened soul that is shudder- ing on the giddy verge of eternity may compose itself U perfect peace, and unperplexed with difficult and painful thoughts may lean the aching head upon the bosom of the Lord, "And breathe its Ufe out sweetly there." Thanks be to God for so great salvation, accessible to every creature ! How shall we escape if we neglect it ? III. THE OPEN DOOR OF THE CHURCH. IDIjat tfotl) Ijinicr nu ?— Acts viii. 36. As you read this story — in fact, as you read the whole New Testament — you get the impression that the way into the kingdom of heaven, in the days of our Lord Christ and his apostles, was a very obvious and straightforward way to any who was willing to enter it. It might cost one an inward struggle to consent, but to one consenting, the way of entrance was plain, even if it was not easy. Such an one might find difficulties in himself; but he would have no hindrances put upon him in the name of the Lord — nothing but helps and encouragements. There were trials, self-denials, persecutions, even, incident to entering into the way of life, but no obscuri- ties. How wide open "the happy gates of gospel grace" did seeni to stand, in those days, to be sure ! Daily they gathered into the church such as should be saved. Daily ? — thousands in a day ! And what a simple business they seemed to make of it! Not a word said about a judicious deliberation and delay in the case of these new converts ! Not a word about preparing them b}' catechising, or taking them awhile on pro- bation, or about examining them on their religious experience. " What shall I do to be saved? " asked the jailer of Philippi, at midnight, in the midst of the terrors of the earthquake; and " that same hour of the night " he was baptized, and all his, immediately. Here is this stranger from the upper Nile, reading his Greek translation of Isaiah as he rides, and ask- ing Philip to step up into the chariot and explain it to him. 39 40 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. And right there by the desert road to Gaza, as they come to some roadside stream or fountain, he says, " Here is water ; what hinders me from being baptized? " — as if to one who had learned about Jesus Christ and wished to be his disciple and follower, it was the most natural thing in the woild. And at once the evangelist seems to answer, " Of course ; Avhy not ? " He never thinks to say : " Oh, this is very sudden and pre- mature. There are a great many things to be thought of first. It is a very serious and solemn matter ; you had better take some time to think about it, and be sure that you know your own mind. How long had you been under conviction before I saw you in the chariot ? " Or, " I do not like to assume the re- sponsibility in this case.' Let us go on to some place where there is a church that shall decide about your admission. Or at least let us wait for some suitable and appropriate occasion, when this rite of baptism may be performed with due solemnity, and in the presence of witnesses." But no. Right then and there, by the roadside, as if it had been the most natural and matter- of-course thing in the world, he baptized him. And at once they jDarted. The Ethiopian, now a confessed Christian^ going on his desert way to Gaza, rejoicing, and Philip disap- pearing from his sight and coming to Ashdod. And when we read the story in the form in which Luke wrote it, dropping a few words that do not belong in it but have been added to it in later copies, our impression is deep- ened. There is so much to be learned from the occasional interpolations and changes that have been detected in the text of the New Testament ! They are not always due to blunder or slip of the pen. Very often indeed they are deliberately meant for improvements ; — they indicate wherein the earlier Christians were not quite satisfied with this Scrip- ture as they received it — felt, perhaps, that it was not quite safe as it stood, — thought they could better it by adding a word or two. So when we come to one of these interpolations that have been detected by the astonishing insight of modern THE OPEN DOOR OF THE CHURCH. 41 criticism, it shows us in a most interesting and emphatic way what it was that the first witnesses of the gospel distinctly retrained from saying, but which some of their followers in the first three or four centuries wished they had said, and thought they ought to have said, and thought it would be no great harm to add or alter a word or two so as to make tl\em say it. These variations and additions (some of which gained such currency that they are actually included in our common English New Testament) point out the spots at which the early church began to diverge from the standard of the apos- tolic faith, and put us on our guard lest we stray in the same by-path. Now here we have a specimen of one of these ^tamperings with the story. The whole of the 37th verse [" And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God "] is an addition not found in the best and most ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. The words were added, perhaps, in order to make the passage correspond with some early ritual of baptism, and with the idea that they would make a much safer sort of Scripture than that which represented Philip as receiving this new convert at once to baptism without asking any questions or exacting any formal profession. Undoubtedly it began very early to be felt, what there is a strong disposition to feel even now, that the exact scriptural practice was rather a lax and incautious and unsafe practice ; and so they mended it in their f isliion. But the exact story, as it was written by the hand of Luke, was simply this : " As they journeyed along the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, Behold water ; what hindereth me from being baptized ? And he ordered the chariot to halt, and they both went down into the water, both Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him." The difference, at this point, between our ways and the ways of the New Testament was deeply impressed on me 42 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. when, in my boyhood, I was going over the very track of the apostles in company with some of their successors. For never, I believe, have there been truer successors to the apostles, in faith and zeal and all long-suffering, in their daily lives of preaching, and in the very circumstances of their work, than our own missionaries in those same lands of the East. To ride for a day's journey alongside of Eli Smith, or Henry Van Dyke, hearing their discourse with one eager group of listeners after another on the question What shall I do to be saved ? — was like the privilege that Luke or Silas had, in attending the missionary journeys of Paul. It was a daily commen- tary on the book of the Acts of the Apostles. There were the same names, the same scenes, like costumes, languages, manners ; and the essence of the work was the same — to make men feel in their consciences that they were sinners, and lead them to turn from all wrong-doing and trust the mercy and love of God in Christ to save them. Thus far it seemed so like ; but at one point, how different ! — and that was the long delay, hesitation and caution of the missionaries in receiving those who declared themselves ready to go with them as fellow- disciples in Christian faith and obedience. " There, over on the flank of the mountain, is a village where they have ex- pressed a desire to be received into our communion ; but we have told them they had better wait a year." '* Here is a family in which the grace of God is manifestly working ; but we think it advisable to keep them on probation for awhile." " In this town, many have openly received the Gospel, and after careful examination have been gathered into a church ; but we do not quite venture to leave them yet, and so one of our missionaries stays with them as a pastor, though he is sorely wanted in the regions beyond, where they have not so much as heard the Gospel." It sounded cautious, pru- dent, worldly-wise — it sounded everything but scriptural and apostolic. You will not think it strange that I should have come back from that great mission-field to begin my ministry THE OPEN DOOR OF THE CHURCH. 43 in America, Avith this contrast deeply, inefTaceably impressed on my mind ; and with the solid conviction that the foolishness of God, in the large, wide-open hospitality of his church, is wiser than all the timid precautions and hesitations of the wisest and best of men. This Book of God, this code of holy examples, is a safer standard to go by than any men's church theories or traditions of administration. I love the noble imprudence of Christ's first apostles. I delight in that wise " foolishness of God." And I mistrust, sometimes, that what we account to be our advanced wisdom, in the affairs of the kingdom of heaven, may be quite as justly set down to the account of our diminished faith. When we have learned to renew " the boldness of Peter and John " and Paul, in declar- ing the simplicity of the Gospel, w^e may hope to renew their triumphal progress. In this last century of modern missions, if we had had faith and courage to follow the apostolic way and as fast as the seed had sprouted in one field had pushed forward to the regions beyond, already the ends of the earth should have seen God's salvation, and once more it should have been fulfilled which is written in the Psalms : " Their line is gone out into all the earth. And their words to the ends of the world." Returning, now, to the personally practical question, What doth hinder me? — What doth hinder you? — from entering into the peace of God and the fellowship of Christian believers, — I beg you to observe that while our Lord himself sets up no hindrance in the way of any willing, consenting, trusting soul, the hindrances which we encounter are very apt to be constructed out of the very material which is meant, by God's goodness, for helps and encouragements. God lays stepping- stones over the hard place, and men pull them out of place and set them so high as to make them stumbling-stones ; if, indeed, they do not build them square across the way into a 44 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. barrier. His word points out to us certain simple conditions of forgiveness and peace ; and it really seems as if the world, not to say the Church, had received them in the temper of Naaman the Syrian general. *' What, wash in Jordan ? Will the prophet deal so lightly wdth my case as that ? I'll not go I " " But, my lord, if he had bidden thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it ? " We had far rather do some great, difficult, imposing, elaborate thing, and when we look at the simplicity of Christ, we cannot be quite con- tented with it, and at once set to work to make up something very much finer and more formidable. Three points on which this tendency has been most strik- ingly illustrated are these : I. Bites. II. Experiences. III. Doctrines. Each has been meant for a help. Each has been converted into a hindrance. I. Bites. Our Lord, providing for the need which his be- lieving followers would have of some way of declaring their discipleship in visible form, named two ordinances — sacra- ments we call them (though he did not), from an old word meaning an oath of military allegiance. And what were they ? The commonest acts of common daily life — the daily bath and the daily meal. The bath, by which one coming to Him signified his putting away, from that time forth, of the sinful, defiling service of the world, and his new, clean life of consecration to the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit ; and the supper, in which he remembers his Master and Friend, declares his dependence and allegiance, and shows his Lord's death until he come. So simple and so easy that men said " That can't be all : that is not enough." And so to-day, among the majority of Christians, baptism is overlaid w^ith various w^ell-intended ceremonies — with oil, and salt, and spittle, and a stole and a candle, and various incantations and exorcisms, because men want to do some great thing, even though the Lord has only bidden them do a very little and easy thing. And the Lord's evening meal, the eating and drinking THE OPEN DOOR OF THE CHURCH. 45 in remembrance of him, has been metamorphosed in all our sects, more or less, into an awful mystery from which simple- hearted believers are driven away in terror. Thus the rites which were meant as helps to us, by men's own faults and blunders have been changed into hindrances. II. And as with Rites, so with Experiences. Needless, it should seem, to declare that the experience of other discij)]e3 was meant to be a help and encouragement to each one of us in our way into the heavenly kingdom. And so, read aright, it is. Such a lesson it teaches us of the plainness of the way ! Looked at in any large and reasonable way, the lesson from the vast diversity in the spiritual history of true and holy Christians is a lesson of unbounded encouragement. It shows us, among these " disciples whom Jesus loves," men and women of the most diversely variant inward temperament and out- ward surroundings ; the story of whose spiritual history, in their coming into conscious discipleship with Christ, is more diversely variant still. And the great and liberal lesson of it is this : that he who is the Way, and the Door to the way, does not care by what path we come up to him, if only we do come. Some come up scourged by sorrows, and some whom the goodnesss of God has led to repentance ; some in the calmness of solitary reflection, and some amid the fervid agitations of a prevailing revival ; some with a loving obedi- ence that has grown within them from before their earliest memory, and some with revulsions of feeling tearing them- selves away from a life of inveterate selfishness and worldli- ness ; yet all received with like welcome by the one Saviour, and sharing alike in the bounteous gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit. How happy the assurance which we ought to gather from all this — that the question through what vicissi- tudes of feeling we are brought to Christ is an unimportant question, so long as the main question, do we come to him, is settled aright. This is part of the comfort that we ought to draw from the large privilege of "the communion of saints." 46 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. But see how miserably we abuse it aud ourselves, when from the conspicuous and exceptional character in some religious biography, or from the prevailing type of religious personal history in some period of peculiar spiritual exaltation, we select a standard of what w^e consider to be a normal Chris- tian experience, and begin to judge ourselves thereby, and, what is worse, to judge one another ; — to turn God's friendly helps into hindrances — his stepping-stones into stumbling- stones. III. And as with Rites and Experiences, so with Doctrines. Surely the teachings of God's word were meant to lighten our way to him not to darken or perplex it. These teachings were meant as our helps to salvation ; but we talk of them some- times as if they were the hard and rigorous condition of it. And it seems sometimes as if we were bent on making them hard and dark so that we might do " some great thing," some high feat of intellectual toil, or perhaps of the mortification of the intellect, as an appropriate condition of God's great gift. Now God's truth is very plain ; it is very easy ; and oh, how helpful ! What confidence it gives you toward him ! As he declares to us the great fact of the reconciliation of the world to himself in Christ, how it wins us to trust in his plain, faith- ful promise, and to rest in the perfect peace of him whose mind is stayed on God! This is such a plain, easy, happy thing! But is this all? Is this enough? Ought there not to be required something more as a fit condition of so great a gift ? — some " sacrifice of the intellect," some believing of tilings incredible or unintelligible, with which sacrifices God should be well pleased? Be assured, dear friends, that if such be the craving of your " natural heart," it is a demand which will never fiiil of its supply. The same genius which has enriched Christ's simple outward ordinances with curious rit- ual traditions, and mystified them with scholastic theories ; and which has ordained its elaborate programs of emotion and agitation in religious experience ; the same will be ready THE OPEN DOOR OF THE CHURCH. 47 also with its codes of " fundamental doctrine," labeled " essen- tial to salvation," among which you need not despair of find- ing things hard enough to satisfy the utmost craving of the soul that would fain find " some great thing " to do, rather than the " easy and light " thing which God requires. But all the while "the foundation standeth sure;" "God's word abideth faithful ; " his promises " in Christ Jesus are Yea, and in him Amen ; " and " whosoever believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall not perish but shall have everlasting yife." IV. THE OUTSIDE CHRISTIAN. ®tl)cr flljecp J Ijatic, lul/icl; arc not cf tl/is folii.— John x. Id. This is a word of indispensable comfort to good men ; and yet a word which good men of the very churchly pattern, tend- ing to exalted notions of the organized kingdom of God as they understand it, are reluctant to take in its full and happy mean- ing, and are disposed to quote very timidly and with caution- ary explanations, lest some should get too much comfort from it, and so have their sense of the importance of the Church impaired. In fact, the words of our Lord are pretty safe words, if we would only trust them. We do not better them much with our caveats. There are none of us theologians that are not now and then made aware of this or that divine utter- ance that is not just what we would have it, and which we do not like to read without qualifying it a little. But after all, the foolishness of God is wiser than any of us. And this en- during word of Christ is much safer than what we, in our anxiety for the dignity of the Church of God, might have put in the place of it. But those that heard this word did not think so. At once there was a new division and debate among the Jews who were listening to the Master. And we need not go out of our way and imagine malignant motives for the party in opposition. The story is a clear one without any such conjectures. Never were there men who had better reason to consider themselves representatives of the true Church of God than these very people ; and when this Galilean openly teaches, perhaps in the 48 THE OUTSIDE CHRISTIAN. 41) hearing of some of the Gentiles themselves, that there is sal- vation outside of this true fold, is it not high time for them to protest against such dangerous doctrines? It was just so, a little later, with the Hebrew Christians, when they heard of Peter's baptizing Cornelius, and Paul's preaching to the Gen- tiles. And in fact, all down through the history of Christian- ity, it would be amusing, if it were not so pitiful and painful, to see this anxious jealousy on the part of one party of Chris- tians or another, who conceived themselves to represent the visible church, for fear it would be thought that some would be saved from outside of that fold ; and to read the awful lan- guage in which they denounce the idea that any will be saved from among the untaught heathen, as " pernicious and to be detested." * And yet, when you look at it calmly, there is no need of any mistake about it — this "pernicious and detestable" thing is the very teaching of Christ himself. In that solemn discourse in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, "all the heathen " f are to stand before the Judge, and those among them who well had loved and served their fellow-men are going to be surprised when they are called forth and placed at the right hand of the Judge, and told that in comforting the poor, the sick, the starving, they unconsciously had been serving the blessed and glorious Saviour w^hose name they had *See Westminster Confession, x. 4. It is sometimes an important duty of the preacher, when by searching he is able to find some point at which to differ from this excellent formulary, to indicate it plainly, and so clear himself of any suspicion of holding that there be two infal- lible rules of faith. But no humane person should refuse his sympathy to those whose official duty it is to maintain that this document is falli- ble in general, but infallible in all its particulars; and who have been at times embarrassed, at this and other points, by the necessity of show- ing that it does not mean what it says. ■j- UdvTa TO. idvT}, verse 32. Is it quite out of the question that there should be any etymological connection between the Greek word and the English ? 4 ' 50 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. never known. And Christ's doctrine on this point has not failed to get itself asserted even in the hardest and narrowest times. Says Augustine, "there are wolves within the fold, and there are lambs Avithout." The Roman Church, when it has been severest in declaring that out of its own pale is no salvation, has always had plenty of theological expedients by which honest and pious heretics and heathen could be pro- vided for. And the narrowest sects of Protestantism, wdio have held that salvation was a peculiar privilege, not only of the fold, but of their own compartment of the fold, have generally relaxed their rigor at the voice of their fellow Christians, however unsound and erratic in doctrine, naming the name of Christ in love and duty and discipleship. Let us freely take all the comfort that there is in the assTn-ance that Christ has other sheep, outside the fold. It seem& sometimes as if our faith would fail without this assur- ance. The world of men is so great, and the fold is so small, and within the fold are so many who are not of the Lord's own sheep, that we cling to this word of his, spoken in that dreadful age when the world was at its Avorst, that he has other sheep besides these who are visibly his own ; and we wonder whether from among those sordid, foul, depraved communities of which Paul wrote to the Romans, thei'e were not many, even then, who without law were doing the things contained in the law, and who would be surprised in the judgment-day to find themselves justified and saved by the grace of a Saviour whose name they had never heard. And I think that no one who knows how to compare the different ages of Christian history will doubt that it is quite as true in our days as it was in Augustine's days and in the days of the Lord himself, that "there are lambs and sheep outside of the fold, as well as wolves in sheep's clothing within it." It was a profound and painful impression that was made on me when I began to grow acquainted with my first country parish in Litchfield, Connecticut, and found that THE OUTSIDE CHRISTIAN. 51 some of the truest Christians in all the community, humble, diligent, charitable, believing, devoutly spiritual, — were out- side of the communion of the church. One face I remember as if it were photographed before me at this moment — a sad, saintly face, never absent from the Sabbath worship, always before me with such serious earnestness at the school-house prayer-meetings on Chestnut Hill, the face of a woman, as her life declared, " full of faith and of the Holy Ghost," full of love for all Christians, and all Christian work, — and yet never once written down in the number of the disciples, nor gathered with them at the table of communion. And none of my boyish arguments or persuasions could ever overcome her shrinking scruples, mistaken as they were ; and I presume that she died in the same meek and trembling faith, and in the same lack of the name and badge of discipleship, the same strange misgiving about counting herself in that number of Christ's followers in which there was not one who followed nearer and more constant than herself. Do not think, because I speak of this instance which so deeply impressed me as a young pastor, that I judge the out- side Christian to be presumably a very exemplary Christian. On the contrary, the outside Christian is an unnatural growth, and commonly a stunted and distorted growth. This saintly woman that I have spoken of would have been twice the saint that she was, for being a happy, openly confessed believer, in the communion of the church. The abnormal position out- side, not only tends to defects of character, but grows out of defects — defects of knowledge, or of faith. Such cases as I found in Litchfield among the older people of the congre- gation seemed to me to have much to do with the succession of great revivals which had characterized the history of the church under the tremendous ministry of old Dr. Lyman Beecher, and under some of his successors. I do not mean that it was revivals that wrought this result, but revivalism — the unhappy notion that it was the sole business of the church 52 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. to have revivals, and that nothing important could be done except by means of revivals, and that the only way into the kingdom of heaven was by being awakened, and convicted and converted in a revival. This is one thing that results in the position of the outside Christian. And the second is like unto it — the notion that our Master is a very captious Master, not content with simple, honest, straightforward faithfulness in his service, and not the con- siderate, forgiving Master and Saviour that he declares him- self to be — forgiving till seventy times seven times, and wishing that all should be saved ; as if there was something more in his requirements than the simple language of them implies, — as if there were some sort of mental reservation in his hearty promises to those who trust him and try to serve him, and as if he were always on the lookout for some pretext for not keeping them. 3. Then, for another reason, the outside Christian shrinks from counting himself among his fellow-Christians because he mistrusts his own stability, and is afraid that if he allows himself to be called by the name of Christ, he may fall, and bring scandal on that name, and so be a harm to others iristead of a help. He shrinks from it for Christ's sake, and for other men's sake ; withal he shrinks from it for his own soul's sake ; for he dreads the sin and peril of presumptuous- ness, and says to himself "it is not safe for me to indulge myself in a joy and peace that may be delusive, lest I break down in my overconfidence. I must walk cautiously and with constant self-suspicion if I would walk safely. In mis- trust of myself is my strength ; and self-examination and anxious care will keep me." Poor man ! he has never learned "the joy of the Lord is thy strength," and "the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ." 4. Sometimes the outside Christian stands without because of the unworthy and false disciples that he sees within, and doubts whether it be his r'uty to go where he will be brought THE OUTSIDE CHRISTIAN. 53 even into apparent and external fellowship with such. — And forgets his Master's parable of the tares amid the wheat ; and forgets that of his Lord's own original church, of the twelve members there was an eight per cent, of treason, and an awful amount of defection under trial. "). I suspect that there are outside Christians who hesitate on the threshold of the Church of Christ, with the doubt "what church, among so many, ought I to join?" — and do not discover, underneath these surface variations and divi- sions, that there is really only one church, and that is the Church of Christ, so that he who joins himself to any congre- gation of believers as a Christian disciple, does thereby declare his love and fellovrship, not toward one congregation or one sect, but toward the whole company of believers, both here and elsewhere. If it were implied, in numbering oneself with the communion of a particular congregation of disciples, that one thereby connected himself only with the Methodist sect, or the Presbyterian sect, or the Episcopalian sect, there would be many more outside Christians than now, and I should beg the privilege of being one of them. But when my joining myself to the Christian fellowship of this Woodland Church is practically the declaration of my common faith and hope with the whole communion of Christ's people in the city and the world, and my love to all the brethren — then this reason for standing outside the threshold is taken away. But I sus- pect that there are those who stand outside and do not see that it is taken away. Observe that these considerations Avhich certainly do work, in one conscientious mind and another, to keep them outside of any visible connection with Christ's Church, are very far from implying any unworthy motive in the mind. But ob- serve, also, how easily they mix with unworthy motives, and furnish a cloak for them. This shrinking mistrust of oneself, how humble and modest it looks! — but it may be the plausible expression of your unwillingness to trust God to keep you. 54 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Your innvillingness to incur the risk of putting scandal on the church in case you should fall into wrong-doing^ — it seems like a moyi honorable and unselfish scruple ; but under it, may lurk ta un^Yillingness to make it as hard as possible for yourself to go astray, — as you ought to be glad to make it. Your hesitaiing to join yourself to a church in which there are unworthy members, how easily it may slide into a habit of making self-conceited and complacent comiDarisons of your own superior scrupulousness with other people's laxity ! In fact, this is a temptation that easily besets those who conscien- tiously separate from the rest — those are two such easy steps, from conscientiousness to self-righteousness, and from self- righteousness to ccnsoriousness. We have seen, now, how The Outside Christian comes to be outside— sometimes for motives, however mistaken, how- ever mixed, which are not in themselves unworthy of respect. But we are bound, at the same time, to observe that however conscientiously he comes to this position, it is an unhappy and unsafe position to rest in, both for himself and for others. See what he loses for himself: 1. He loses the immense strength that comes from an openly avowed allegiance to Jesus Christ. When Hedley Vicars, a young officer in a British regiment in the Crimean war, consecrated himself to be a soldier pf Jesus Christ, his first act was to set up a Bible, open, in a conspicuous place in his tent, so that every man coming in would be sure to see it. Tlie young fellows of the staff and line would drop in, and seeing it, would chaff him about it. " Yes," Vicars would say, " those are my colors ; I propose to stand by them." It brought him some annoyance, at first ; but what safety, what exemption from a multitude of temptations such as beset the way of one whose position in the great controversy betAveen God and wickedness is in the least uncertain or indefinite! Of all men, the man of a modest, self-mistrustful mind, con- scious of his ovrn iustabilitv, is the verv last who ought to THE OUTSIDE CUKLSTIA?^. 00 excuse liimself from the most positive, manifest taking of sides in this ureat controversy. There are many ways of letting the world know which side he is on; but none so obvious and so effective as that of connecting oneself by distinct act of adhesion with the right party against the wrong. The Out- side Christian is in all the more danger, because he will not give this public notice to the temptations of the world to stand off and let him alone. 2. He loses the joy and peace of believing — of believing on God wholly, unreservedly ; — for the half-hearted trust in God, which is sincere as flir as it goes, but does not go so far as to cut quite free from the world and give up all thought of keeping open the lines of retreat, is not the sort that brings settled joy and peace, but rather draws the soul into turmoil and unrest and controversy with itself. But what Christian can afford, as a mere matter of security, to lose the joy of the Lord, which is his strength ; or the peace of God, which keeps the heart and mind ; or the hope which is like an anchor, and like a helipet ? 3. He loses the fellowship of good Christians — I mean that unreserved full confidence that goes out freely toward those who are unmistakably committed to our own side, and iden- tified with us in our efforts and struggles against sin within us and round about us. And he can not afford to lose it. For if he is a Christian at all, he loves these men and women who are with him in like repentance from sin, and in like precious faith, and in earnest longing for the good kingdom. He needs counsel and society from fellow Christians, and is lonely with- out it, even though he may not be very clearly conscious what it is that he lacks. He feels weak without it, and he is weak, for God never meant us to stand alone in our faith and love, but to stand by one another and strengthen each other. 4. The Outside Christian loses the comfort and strength that are given in the Communion of the Lord's Supper. He does not- know what it is that he loses ; and if we tell him wJiat tlie 56 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Lord's Supper means to us, he will reply — " Well, I know and feel that already." And yet he does need to come with his fellow-disciples and eat the bread and drink of the cup which shew the Lord's death until he come. He does need the very presence of the Lord as it is made known to the believers in the breaking of the bread. In staying away he is wronging his own soul, — and yet he does not know it. So much the Outside Christian loses for himself. But think how much, all the time, he may be losing for the cause and the Master that he loves. By just as much as, by his standing outside, he secures the name of Christ from scandal in case of his fall, — by just so much he takes all the honor away from Christ, in case of his faithful and blameless walk. Nay, it is a doubtful question whether every good thing in his life and character will not be used in disparagement of the name of Christ, and to the detriment of his cause — whether his name will not be quoted to show how well a man can live without prayer, without faith, without hope, without God in the world, and how little need there is of any salvation by Christ. We love this Outside Christian, but we are afraid for him, and we are afraid for the cause of God and of man because of him. If only the Outride Christian would come inside, what joy it would be ! — joy to us all, — joy and peace to his own heart, and a new invitation and welcome to other hearts still outside. It does seem as if a new advance of the kingdom of God would begin from the hour that these lingerers on the threshold should come within and let the world know, and the church know, that they are wholly and irrevocably on the Lord's side. And now I know what some of them will be all ready to say — that this is a very serious matter, this coming into the fellowship of the church of Christ, and not to be decided on hastily ; and so on the pretext that it is a serious matter it will be deferred, and deferred, as it has been in the past. No, dear friends, whom we love, and whom the Lord loves, THE OUTSIDE CHRISTIAN. 57 if that is what you mean by a serious matter — an affair to shrink from, and shirk, and postpone — this is no serious affair at all, but a glad and joyful thing that you should come to eagerly as to a festival ; as indeed it is a festival. If you would know what is a serious affair indeed, from which you should recoil with a sense of solemn awe and dread, it is this: when the gentle voice of Jesus the Master is heard saying " take my yoke upon you," that you should halt for a moment and seem to listen, and then pass on and give him no answer. This is a very grave and serious responsibility to take. Are you prepared to assume it ? And when he shall bid you again to the table of his own remembrance, and in his pierced hands shall reach out to you the broken loaf and the cup of salvation and say, " Do this in remembrance of me," — for you to turn upon your heel and go your way and make no answer — is not this a pretty serious thing — a responsibility which you are not williuo: to assume ? MAN'S QUESTION ABOUT CHRIST. Mi)at mannfr of man is tijis ? — Matt. viii. 27. - This is a sort of question ^vliich is very much asked in the gospels, and very much oftener asked than answered. On this occasion, it was asked by the fishermen in the boat wdth the Lord, as he crossed the stormy little lake of Galilee, and as they saw him make the sea a calm so that the waves of it were still. At another time, it was asked by scribes and learned men, partly amazed and partly shocked that he had said to a paralytic man, " Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins are forgiven thee." " Who is this," they asked, " that speaketh blasphe- mies?" On the Palm Sunday, w'hen the strange procession came marching and shouting down the mountain to escort him into the temple, " the whole city w^as moved " to ask the ques- tion " Who is this ? " Sometimes he squarely put the question himself He perplexed the learned theologians of the temple by asking them, " What think ye of the Christ? Whose son is he ? " He demanded of his disciples, " W^lio do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? " And then, " Who say ye that I am ? " He puts the question, but he rarely answers it. John the Baptist sends to him from his prison, wondering at the long delay of the coming kingdom, with a tone of something almost like despair in his message, asking, "Art thou he that should come ? " But even then the Master ansAvers never a word, but goes forward with his works of grace and might, and bids the messengers " go tell John what you have seen." He does not seem even to wish others to answer for him. 58 man's question about CHRIST. 59 When men know him not, the evil spirits know and fear, say- ing, " We know thee who thou art ; " but he will none of their testimony ; he rebukes them into silence, and will not suffer them to say that they know him. And when at last the fore- most of his disciples attains to an answer to this question, the Master strictly charges his disciples that they tell no man that thing. As if, perhaps, he preferred that men should keep on questioning until with much asking they should receive, and seeking they should find, and knocking it should be opened to them ; rather than they should be spared the pains and trial of the quest a)id come to the results without going through the processes. And this method of Christ himself is the method of the New Testament. It begins with a genealogical table, on the first page of Matthew, and goes forward through all the first three gospels with the facts of a marvelous biography which set us wondering and questioning at every page. Not till the church has well learned Christ thus, from hearing the plain facts of the story, docs that later gospel of John come to the church declaring w^onderful mysteries of godliness, but even then answering not so many questions as it raises for us to answer — or not to answer, as the case may be. It would seem as if the Bible was meant to give us theology in the method in which the creation gives us science — throwing down before us facts in bewildering profusion, and questions that task our utmost powers, and bidding us arrange, classify, theorize, inquire and conclude. Certainly it does invite us, with great welcome, to study into these things into which angels desire to look. But ccTtuinly, also, it does not make our salvation or our accept- li^ce with God to turn on the success of our theologizing. We fiud in these Scriptures (which are in nothing more wonderful 51 nd more divine than in the things which they do not contain) no plan of salvation by scholarship, nor of salvation by logic, nor of salvation by orthodoxy, but a plain Avay of salvation by faith. Take the little gospel of Mark. It is a whole gospeL 60 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. It was originally meant to stand alone. It is able to make wise to salvation. But there is not much doctrine in it. In fact, there is not much of anything in it besides a Saviour, — his life and death and resurrection. And we are given to under- stand that it is safe to trust all our anxieties to him, who caretli for us ; and that the man who trusteth in him shall never be con- founded. Of course to one who has thus trusted in him, knoAv- ing him and loving him from the story of his holy and blessed life, the further study of the question " AVhat manner of man is this?" becomes thenceforward one of the most profoundly im- portant and interesting questions that can possibly occupy the thoughts. But thenceforward, also, it can not be a life-and-death question. The question of life or death is settled. I know enough of this mighty and gracious one to take him for my teacher, the guide of my conduct, the keeper of my conscience, the forgiver of my sins, my Saviour to eternal life ; and what he has offered and undertaken to do, I have confidence in him that somehow he will perform. That is the vital question, and that is settled. And now to these other questions, as they come up, let me address myself with profoundest interest indeed, but without anxiety. It is not a dangerous thing for one who has read this story of Jesus and learned to love him with the affec- tion and gratitude of a disciple, to go on and study the deep things concerning his person and character and the method of liis saving work. It is quite safe ; and you are safe. Let no man frighten you from the perfect calmness of your delightful study. There are many Christians so unfortunate as to have been brought up to believe those shocking and unchristian state- ments of the "Athanasian Creed " that " whosoever will be saved it is necessary above all things that he believe," a certain code of scholastic propositions concerning the person of Christ and the Trinity, " which things if a man believe not, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." One who believes this unscrip- tural and immoral heresy thereby becomes almost incapable of intelligently believing anything besides. He has forbidden MAN^S QUESTION ABOUT CHRIST. 61 himself to inquire candidly, under peril of damnation ; and where a man cannot candidly inquire, he cannot solidly and intelligently believe. He can make believe. Take this way of Christ and of the Gospels : to begin with plain facts — wonderful facts, but simple and intelligible in themselves — and with asking questions ; and contrast this way with the way which theology has commonly followed, and see how much the foolisluiess of God is wiser than man. For the way of theology has too often been to begin at the other end, with enunciating its dogma, and then to hunt through the Bible for proof-texts with which to support it. It has been in the habit of making mpuch of the epistles, and little of the gospels — much of doctrines about Christ, and little of Christ's own teaching, and of the living Christ himself, who is greater than his teaching. It has been a most noble advance that the church of our century has made in the knowledge of Christ, since the time when it began to study, according to the method of the Scrip- tures, to know Christ himself, instead of knowing things about Christ, And we owe this progress to the attacks of heretics and infidels. If it had not been for the powerful and learned labors with which such scholars as Paulus and Strauss in Germany and Renan in France have attacked the gospel history and attempted to discredit the very facts of the life and death of Christ, the church might have been busy to this day, as it was busy fifty years ago and less, pettifogging the old, unfruitful controversies about election and decrees, and theories of atonement, and questions relating to moral govern- ment and free-will. It was not by any wisdom of ours, but by stress of this attack upon the credibility of the gospel history, that we were lifted out of the old rut, and turned into that study of the four gospels themselves, and of the life of Jesus Christ among men, which is the characteristic of the Christian scholarship of the present generation. There is nothing so characteristic of our Christian literature in this 62 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST, generation as that it dwells upon this theme — the person of Jesus of Nazareth. What countless multitudes of volumes on this subject are yearly crowding more and more the shelves of our libraries! — and this whole department of literature, now so vastly voluminous, is, w^e might say, the growth of these last fifty years. It is the fruit of the return* of the church to the method of the Bible, by which, taking the story of the facts of the birth, life, teachings, death and resur- rection of Jesus of Nazareth, and asking What manner of man is this ? — it rises, so fkr as it is able, from the contem- plation of this simple history to the understanding of all mysteries and all knowledge. This is th« method by which the church first learned of the glory of its Saviour's person. And if there be among you any mind that has been stirred up, in the agitation of prevailing controversies and inquiries, to question the habitual or traditionary conceptions of this august person, on which the whole superstructure of the scheme of Christian doctrine has been builded up, — this is the method to which I would bring him back, I would not enunciate to him the statements of orthodox opinion, and bid him take those and read the four gospels in the light of them, and see w^hether he does not find them confirmed thereby. What confidence is a really candid inquirer likely to feel in the result of inquiries so entered upon with a foregone con- clusion in the right hand. I would rather he should begin with that chapter of proper names at the beginning of Mat- thew, and go through the four biographies again as if they were a fresh book ; and at the end of it all, put to himself again the old question. What manner of man is this? And if the answer does not readily come, let him read again, and ask again. And if a life-time should be spent in such ques- tioning as this, without reaching a hypothesis that will include all the marvelous facts, it will be a life-time nobly spent. What companionship is this to which the soul is thus addicted I What likeness to the mind of Christ must needs o:ro\v in that man's question about CHRIST. 63 mind that converses long and lovingly with the life and words and works of Christ ! How much to be preferred, the sus- pense of such a doubter, to the easy-going confidence of one who taking everything for granted, linds no need for ardent and constant contemplation of the mystery of godliness, with' out controversy great, and who having " never doubted, never half believed ! " Be assured, the questionings that bring you and keep you in this personal acquaintance with the Christ of the four gospels are fruitful questionings, indeed. In such society as this My weary soul would rest ; The mind that dwells where Jesus is Must be forever blest. Now in the course of your studies into the documents of Christ's life (and these are very few and small — these four little pamphlets constitute the whole of them), it is safe to take one thing for granted : It will be with you as with every cue who has gone before you in this study, with the exception of some exceptionally coarse minds who have entered upon their work with undisguised malignity of purpose.. Setting aside all theological prepossessions, you will be impressed with the beauty and dignity of the life which passes before you in this fourfold picture. It is with a studiously dispassionate pen that one has attempted briefly to sum up the impressions which the story of Jesus makes on those who have read it without accepting the Christian doctrine of his person.^ They " see in Jesus a unique and sinless personality, one with whom no other human being can be even distantly compared. . . . He taught but three years, and not continuously even during them. He accepted the most ordinary customs of the teachers of his day. He wore no broad phylacteries like the Pharisees ; he was not emaciated with asceticism like the Essenes ; he preached the kingdom of God, not as John had done, between * Canon Farrar, s. v. Jesus. Encyc. Brit. Xinth edition. 64 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. the gloomy precipices of the wilderness, but from the homely platform of the synagogue. . . . He appeared before the people not in the hairy mantle of a prophet, but in the ordi- nary dress of a Jewish man. . . . He came eating and drink- ing. He had no human learning ; his rank was that of a village carpenter ; he checked all political excitement ; he directed that respect should be paid to all the recognized rulers, whether heathen or Jewish, and even to the religious teachers of the nation ; he was obedient to the Mosaic law ; his followers were unlearned and ignorant men chosen from the humblest of the people. Yet he has, as a simple matter of fact, altered the w hole current of the stream of history ; he closed all the history of the past, and inaugurated all the history of the future ; and all the most brilliant and civilized nations of the world worship him as God." The greatest minds, unprejudiced or filled with hostile prejudice, have given concordant testimony. " Kant testifies to his ideal perfection. Hegel saw in him the union of the human and the divine." " Spinoza spoke of him as the truest symbol of heavenly wis- dom. The beauty and grandeur of his life overawed even the flippant soul of Voltaire. Between him and whoever else in the world, said Napoleon I. at St. Helena, there is no possible term of comparison. If the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, said Kousseau, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. He is, says Strauss, the highest object we can possibly imagine with respect to religion, the being without whose presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible. The Christ of the Gospels, says Kenan, is the most beautiful incar- nation of God in the most beautiful of forms. His beauty is eternal. His reign will never end. John Stuart Mill spoke of him as a man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue." When we find such singular accordance among men so "widely differing, extorted, as one might say, by mere power of the subject of which they speak, in spite of hostile feeling MA^''S QUESTION ABOUT CHRIST. 65 and a disposition even scornfully critical, it may safely be presumed that the same traits will make a like impression on yourself. You will find in the story of the gospels, as others have before you, the traits of a man of exceptional and won- derful endowments of intellect, of heroic courage, of dauntless tenacity of principle and purpose, and of a dignity and stain- less purity of character and an impassioned love of righteous- ness which cause him to be thus reckoned incomparable among the human race ; at the same time, a man of singular humility and modest forgetfulness of self, who, endowed with every faculty for great achievement, seemed to have escaped " the last infirmity of noble minds," and to be without am- bition to achieve anything that the world calls great : who accomplished no stroke of battle or of state, put in operation no organized society, constructed no philosophical or ethical system, left no writing behind him, whom nevertheless subse- quent ages and distant nations and races have crowned wdth that honor which he never sought, accounting his teaching the last authority in ethics, theology and law, his person to be an object worthy of the highest reverence, and the epoch of his birth as the Golden Milestone from which to measure in either direction the paths of history ; a man W'ho was, withal, poor, despised and a suflferer, and yet in poverty and suffering most sublime, and in his malefactor's death glorious beyond the power of envy, prejudice and unbelief to behold undazzled ; — whose grandeur of intellect, dignity of character, and religious elevation of soul are nevertheless to men's eyes so outshone by his attributes of love and gentleness, wider than the earth and stronger than death, that the former are forgot- ten in the latter. And yet remember, while you gaze and wonder and admire, that this is not the object of your present study ; that you have opened this volume of the gospels with great and earnest questions that demand an answer. Have a care lest the inquiries which you send out be like those soldiers sent to 5 66 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. apprehend Jesus, who before the glory and dignity of his presence go backward and fall to the ground, and have no report to bring back to those that sent them but this : Never man spake like this man. Our duty is inquiry, not eulogy. And if we are faithful in this duty, be assured that here and there, in the miraculously simple and truthful histories from which our conceptions of the character of Christ are drawn, we shall recognize some facts which, to our candid reading, do not seem naturally to fall into harmony Avith these large general conceptions ; — exceptional facts, which make us feel that the })erson in whom they are found is thus far an unsolved enigma to us, until we are able to discover (if ever we shall discover it) some larger conception of his character and person which ehall include these with the rest. These are the things which will cost us thought and study as we read, taking the four gosj^els into our hand as if they were a fresh book speaking to us of the life of one of whom . we had not known before : — the things in the life of Jesus of Nazareth which are perplexing or inexplicable on any theory of his human character which we are able to frame. These things must be fairly met and considered if we would deal justly by ourselves. We may not leave the difficult facts out of view. We may not strain and garble them into compli- ance with a preconceived theory. We may not indolently call them " mysterious " and so leave them. We need to know the real Jesus, and not a tradition, or a doctrine, or an imagination. And when we have gathered the facts we are driven by the necessary instinct of the mind to frame them together. We read the story of Washington, and in the midst of that great, calm, religious career, we come upon an authentic scene of profane violence which startles and pains us. We do not say, " This is contrary to our conception of Washington — we must suppress it." We frame it into our conception of him, and say, " This was a man not constitutionally impassive, but of mighty man's question about CHRIST. 67 passions which sometimes broke through his strong habitual self-control." We see him inexorably stern commanding the execution of an amiable young man, and we do not say " he was an inconsequent, incongruous mixture, half humane and half cruel ; " we are at no loss to find a principle in his life which reconciles these contradictions. We deal on this principle not only with living and historic, but even with fictitious characters. How many volumes have been written by inquirers after the unity of Hamlet's character, or Faust's ? And is it to be expected that the laws of our intel- lectual activity are to be suspended when w^e come to the study of the gospels ? But our only study for this evening is as to ways and methods, not as to results. We part, you and I, as we gathered here, face to face with a great question — " What manner of man is this ? " But let me not afiect to think it doubtful in what direction this inquiry, diligently pursued, will lead you. I will not predict it in the terms of any scholastic formula or phrase of historic orthodoxy. No man can tell for you w^hat form of statement the truth will take in your mind as you dwell in contemplation on the holy and reverend form of him who is the Truth. But it must be that as you continue gazing upon the glory of his countenance, you shall by and by begin to recognize that beholding it you have beheld a more than human glory — the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, of him who is full of grace and truth. VI. CHRIST'S QUESTION TO MEN. Wi)0 sax) pc tijat jj am?— Matt. xvi. 15. The natural way of satisfying ourselves concerning any per- son, who and what he is, is to find the authentic facts of his life — what he said and did, and what he did not say nor do, — and to form our judgment upon these. The biblical way — the evangelical way — of satisfying our- selves concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth, what man- ner of man he is, is to take the facts of his life (which we are happy in having ready to our hand in four singularly simple and honest records), and to frame our judgment upon them. And it does not require much reflection to pei'ceive that the natural way, and the biblical and evangelical way, is, in this case, the only rational and logical way. We think sometimes, to find a short and easy way to the knowledge of who Jesus Christ is by some apostolic declaration or some church defini- tion of dogma. But we are bound to remember, that so long as the person of Jesus Christ is held in doubt, the ground of our confidence in apostolic declarations, or in church definitions, is gone out from under us. What is it that commands our deference to the religious teachings of an apostle but this, — that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ ? Wherein consists that author- ity of the church, the fellowship of believers throughout the world, when Ave recognize its accordant testimony on any point of doctrine, — but in this, that it is the church of Jesus Christ? Now, when the question is on the authority of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the apostles and the Lord of the church, — that question 68 Christ's question to men. 69 which was put to him in the temple, " By what authority doest thou these things, and who gave thee this autliority ? " — it is very obvious, to a logical mind, that this question cannot be decided by quoting from sources whose only authority is what they derive from him. We can only answer this question by turn- ing to the facts of Christ's life themselves, in the only form in which we have access to them — in the four gospels ; — in tlicse gospels considered simply as the substantially true and trustworthy histories which most men find them to be from their own internal as well as external evidence. For waiving, for the present, all questions that any may raise as to the super- natural quality of these f jur books, it is quite enough, for the purpose of the present argument, to assume that they are true and honest. A fair man, reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, whatever his views on inspiration may be, is pretty sure to rest solidly in the conviction that these are fair and singularly straightforward and sincere accounts of a real person — of his life and acts and teachings. Already, a week ago, we have made a beginning in the study of who this person is. Looking at him as the fourfold picture of his life revolves before us, we find the first impressions of admiration and love which are irresistibly made upon our minds confirmed (as we might say) by the general sufi'rage of mankind. You have not forgotten that impressive consensus of testimony from men w^hose distinction in history has been the suspicious and incredulous jealousy with which they have de- nied and contested every ascription of honor to the person of this man Jesus, but those which are undeniable and incontest- able, — with what singular unanimity they agree in declaring him to be the perfect man, the type of an ideal humanity, — the sum of every human virtue. We are here on ground so nearly uncontested among all thoughtful and serious readers of the gospels, Christian, unchristian, anti-christian, that we may speak with very little hesitation of the symmetry and harmony of a perfect human character as illustrated in Jesus. And this 70 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. is the one thing that humanity beside, in all its generations^ fails to show us. I asked a studious artist, once, about the famous Belvedere torso of Hercules — whether, in all his studies of living models chosen for their physical perfection, he had ever met with its counterpart in muscular development ; and, as I expected, he told me no. It was not infrequent, he said, to find some parts or members thus exceptionally developed — as in the right arm of a smith, or the thighs of a porter — but never the whole sys- tem, as in the torso ; besides, he said, you see in the torso the entire muscular system in a state of simultaneous activity, which is hardly true to nature. You can hardly expect to find the whole system in vigor at once. The antagonist muscles, as the extensors and the Hexors, can hardly be in tension at the same time. AVhen one set is contracted the other set will be relaxed. We must consider the torso as the fragment of an ideal figure. So we make our allowances for the moral constitution of human nature. Some high qualities of humanity seem hardly compatible in the same subject ; and there are what might be called antagonist virtues of which one sort seems to be held in suspense or abeyance when the other is in exercise. We pretty much give up looking to find a whole manhood both strong and S3^mmetrical, and wholly righteous in all virtuous acts, thoughts and feelings, at once. We try to make up such a character by combining in our picture the liighest qualities of more than one ; and when we have finished, the critics cry out upon our delineation for an impossibility, not resembling any real man or woman that anybody knows. Now the thing which has moved the unanimous wonder of the cold-blooded and not too friendly critics whom I have quoted to you, is not so much the prodigious development of some astonishing quality in Jesus, as this blending of seeming incompatibles in a perfect manhood. The qualities that seem to pull in opposite directions seem in his person to find their radiating center and focus of convergence. Courage and hero- CHRIST'S QUESTION TO MEN. 71 ism, profound sagacity of intuition, exquisite sense of right and fitness, are joined with a lofty and severe justice, a greatness and purity of soul which mean and evil motives dared not approach, or approaching found nothing in him. And to all these were united in highest i^erfection the eminently human virtues — the virtues that characteristically belong to a finite, dependent being, such as great humility, modesty, self-denial, submissiveness to authority, deference to public ordinance even on questionable points, tolerance of personal wrong and injury ; insomuch that the epithet which has passed like a surname into common speech is this, — " the meek and lowly Jesus." Joined with these were a reverence before God, a childlike trust in God, and a habit- ual prayerfulness and obedience toward God, which were like a crown of light on the head of his perfect character, outshin- ing all his other human virtues, and yet by its shining making them all the lovelier. And now why can w^e not rest here, Avith this perfect example of human duty and virtue, and be thankful? What need have we of any further theory of the person of Jesus Christ beside this simple one that he was the perfect and sinless man, who practi- cally realized in his person that Avhich many have aspired after and some have approached ? Why is it that men don't rest here ; and that when very noble Christian scholars and teachers, and men of very lofty and beautiful spirit, — such, for example, as the late Dr. Channing — have set forth this simple, comprehen- sible statement of the perfect human holiness of Jesus as a suf- ficient statement, and have commended it to men Avith every form of persuasive argument, reinforced by the attraction of beautiful and holy living, instead of laying hold of it and cling- ing fiist to it, men seem to scatter from it in one direction or the other ? The difficulty with it is that it does not include all the facts. It has the attraction of being very simple ; and it is easy to have a simple theory when you leave out of view such facts as do not easily fall in with it. And that there are such facts is felt by the general sense of those who read the story. 72 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. For we look again, and lo, this meek, gentle and lowly one, this man so modest, retiring, self-forgetful, claiming nothing for himself, assuming no honors, diligently withdrawing himself from those that are thrust upon him, jealous for nothing but the cause of the wronged and the truth and honor of God, this wiser than the ancients, this hero and martyr of a serene courage and fortitude unmatched in history, is found acting in scenes, mani- festing traits, giving utterance to words and sentiments, which are not accounted for by this estimate of his character. That character which seemed most simple and comprehensible for the very reason that it was perfect, is set back under a cloud of mystery and perplexity. There are things in his life that are not like him. And yet men do not say of them that they are blemishes and inconsistencies, for somehow they do not seem such, in him. They only make us think that we have not wholly known him when we have summed up the whole ac- count of him in saying, " he is our perfect fellow man," — that there is something to be added to this (not deducted from it) before we have a statement which comprehends his whole life and all his deeds and words. For instance, one of the conspicuous qualities of his soul, obvious to every spectator, admitted by every enemy, is that very common but always noble quality of courage. And in his case it is of the finest tone and type. There is no bluster nor defiance in it ; it needs not to be nerved by enterprise and great action. It is of that tranquil and serene sort, which in the presence of imminent peril can quietly do nothing when there is nothing to do, and can go forward with words of teaching or works of mercy with an equal mind. I know not whither, in classic history or chivalrous romance, to turn for examjDles of just such courage. And now holding in mind this model of the supremely heroic man, will you explain — Gethsemane ? Alike characteristic of this Man of men is the spontaneous unforced modesty which is the antithesis both of egotism and Christ's question to men. 73 of selfishness. No need to cite instances to prove it ; we all feel it as we read. It is a common trait and ornament of great- ness, especially of great wisdom. And in his case, how con- tent it made him, the Light of the World, to be counselor of the ignorant and outcast, comforter of little children, friend of publicans and sinners. His highest public office was to be reader in a country synagogue, and that office he diligently fulfilled ; and when this congregation rejected him, he had no comjDlaint at spending the rest of his days a homeless wanderer without place to lay his head. And yet this same man openly claimed to be greater than Solomon, and older than Abraham, and demanded that all men should look up to him as teacher and Lord. It was one of the greatest and wisest Teachers of man- kind, Confucius, who having given to his race a system of moral duties admirably true and complete, modestly paused on the border of religious truth, declaring that of God and the unseen w^orld he had no authority to teach. But this unpresuming carpenter's son declares, — "All things are deliv- ered to me of my Father," and of the profoundest mysteries of religious truth avers, — " We speak that we- do know and testify that we have seen." It was a King illustrious among the monarchs of England, Canute, surnamed the Great, who in bitter scorn of human greatness bade his courtiers plant his throne upon the beach, and with humble irony commanded the unyielding tide to stay its waves. It was this Galilean, Jesus, surnamed the Meek and Lowly, who confidently tram|)led on the waves, and in solemn earnest commanded the storm "Be still," and the winds and the waves obeyed him. Scribes and Scholars learned in the sacred law of Moses, and in the books of the inspired prophets, and in the accumu- lated expositions of generations of grave interpreters, had been wont to teach the people out of the treasures of their lore, and it was their boast and honor that they taught on higher author- 74 THE SIMrT.TCITY THAT IS IN CHUIST. ity than their own — the authority of antiquity and of inspired Scripture. But this man, this Nazarene, the gentlest, most sub- missive of men, sat on his Galilean hill-top, and denounced the best culture and highest respectability of his age and nation as being blind, extortionate, hypocritical, and cited the lan- guage of sacred writ and the words of the ancients, to contra- dict them with the words, " But I say unto you," until the multitudes were astonished at his doctrine because he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Consecrated Priests, called of God as was Aaron, deemed it a high and solemn function to set forth in appointed symbols the great truths of divine forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit. On the great day of the feast, they were wont each year, clad in beautiful and festal garments, to the sound of various instruments of music, to descend the temple hill, and from the living spring of Siloam to dip an urn of water and bring it back, with song and symphony, into the temple, to be mingled with the wine and poured upon the altar and the vic- tim. At such a time, when, at the pouring of the libation, the temple and its courts were filled with solemn silence, harp and trumpet hushed, before bursting forth again with multitude of jubilant voices in Isaiah's song, " With joy will we draw water out of the wells of salvation," — at such a moment, what rude voice is it that breaks in with a loud cry, to mar the holy stillness? It is the Nazarene, again — the humble and devout, the meek and lowly — who stands forth with Galilean garb and speech, crying out to the multitude, " If any thirst, let him come unto me and drink." The High-priest, being thereto called of God, might, not without shedding of blood for his own sins as well as for the people's, sprinkling himself with these prophetic drops, and hiding his own person behind the fragrant cloud from the cen- ser, venture into the presence of God's earthly glory, and make bare before the mercy-seat the names that were written upon his breastplate; and from this awful presence might Christ's question to men. 75 nevertheless come forth alive. But this man Jesus, with no priestly lineage, no breastplate nor robe, no censer, no offering for nis own sins, and no confession for himself, fears not to enter into the very secret place of God, uttering words which it is not lawful for man to utter ; he bids all men to come to the Father through him and they shall in no wise be cast out, — to ask what they will in his name and it shall be given them ; — this man, most humble and devoutly reverent, most meek and lowly, most childlike, and dependent, and submis- sive ! What manner of man is this ? There had been divine Prophets before the day of Christ, men who had desired to see his day and had not seen it, and many were the signs and mighty works which they had wrought. Men of like passions w^ith ourselves, they had prayed earnestly, and the heaven had become as brass and the earth as dust ; they prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth brought forth her fruits. Such an one had gone into the still chamber where lay the body of a dead youth, and shutting the door upon them twain, had stretched himself upon the dead, mouth upon mouth, eye upon eye, hand upon hand, and there with long entreaty prayed to God, and prayed and prayed, until at last the parted life came back, and by faith the woman received her dead raised to life again, and God's were the power and the glory. But who is this, that lays his hand upon the bier and the bearers halt, that speaks his orders to " the dull, cold ear of death," saying " Young man, I say unto thee, Arise ; " and the wondering dead sits up upon his bier and begins to speak? Behold the man, pressing through the crowd of those who laugh liim to scorn, meek, unreviling when reviled, who takes the dead child by the hand, and says (how touching the grateful memory that would not lose the very syllables he spoke, when they wrote down the story in another tongue !) — he says to her Talitha, ciimi, — damsel, arise ; and then (as it perplexes us to read) " straitly charges them that no man should know it." 76 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. See him once more. He has lost a friend, he whose foes are so many and whose real friends so few. The sisters of the dead cling to him, when at last, long waited-for, he comes to Bethany, and say, one after the other, " Lord, if thou hadst been here ! Lord, if thou hadst been here ! " And as he followed with the weeping company along the sad, familiar street of Bethany, and took the path toward the village sepul- chres, to go and see where they had laid him, human nature was too strong for the composure of that affectionate, wounded heart, and Jesus wept ! And then, declaring, " / am the resurrection and the life " — he, this sorrowful, bereaved man, with the tears of his affliction still wet upon his face, looked down into the fetid grave's mouth, and sliouted to the four- days dead, " Come forth ! " Holy Apostles, made bold by his authority, like prophets who had been aforetime, speaking by the Sj)irit of God, have declared to those who confess their sins that God is faithful and just to forgive them their sins, and have encouraged the penitent to look to God in faith for pardon. But this man, Jesus, looked on the anxious face of the palsy-stricken, and said to him, "Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee." And when the whisper ran through the shuddering crowd : " Who is this, that forgiveth sins also ? Who can forgive sins but God only ? This man blasphemeth ; " — he answered all their questionings by that which could only provoke to deeper questions still — he bade the palsied Arise and walk, — that they might know that the Son of Man had power on earth to forgive sins. It is told of blessed Saints who preached the story of his life among the heathen, and were attended on, as he had promised them, by signs following, that on one occasion, when in the name of Jesus of Nazareth they had wrought a miracle of heal- ing, the heathen priests, with an impulse of reverent gratitude, brought oxen and garlands to do them honors of divine worship. But they rushed in among the people, wdth rent garments, with Christ's question to men. 77 Lorror dissuading them from such an act. Before the feet of a holy Angel, seen in a heavenly vision, a man fell down to worship ; but the angel forbade him, saying " See thou do it not. I am thy fellow-servant. Worship God." But the meek and lowly Jesus, who taught supreme love and worship to be due to God alone, saying " him only shalt thou serve" ; who taught the equal brotherhood of men, bidding them call uo man Master, and himself was not ashamed to call them breth- ren ; and who would not suffer the young man kneeling at his feet to call him good ; — he it was who commanded that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father, and in open defiance of the charge of blasphemy for which men w^ere ready to stone him on the spot, asserted boldly, " I and my Father are one." What manner of man is this ? But the mystery of this strange and unaccountable person- ality becomes most perplexed, not by the honors which he claims for himself, but by the amazing things which he boldly and unhesitatingly undertakes to do for others — for any who will trust in him — things which to man are impossible. What boldest of the children of men, of the messengers of God, has ever dared to utter such words? "O Israel," they had been wont to cry, '' return unto Jehovah thy God ! " " Come, and let us return unto the Lord : for he hath torn, and he will heal us ; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up." Thither they pointed, to the one true, ever-living God, fountain of life and light, who forgiveth all iniquities and healeth all diseases, and redeemeth the soul from destruction. Is it nothing strange, when the humblest and most filial of the sons of God, a Gali- lean villager, standing before the throng of his fellow-country- men, bids them, not, Keturn to God, but " Come unto me, and I will give you rest ; " when he repeats, " Believe in God, believe also in me ; " "I am come that ye might have life ; " "I am the door ; I am the way ; I am the bread that cometh down from heaven ; I am the truth ; I 78 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. am the resurrection ; I am the life. Whosoever believeth in me shall never die " ? What can we make of that strange scene when in the midst of an unnatural darkness resting at noon-day over all the* land, two neighbors, in the uttermos4 paroxysms of dying anguish, descried each other's tortured faces through the gloom, and on^ said to the other, — himself just writhing as if in the final struggle, his forehead torn with thorns, his brow beaded with the death-sweat, his voice choked with feverish thirst, his head about to drop upon his breast in death — " This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Did he seem the man to undertake such a trust and hold forth such promises unauthorized ? Would he invite such confidence to disappoint it ? And yet what suffering, dying man that was ever born of a woman, could claim to himself the power of giving or withholding everlasting life ? Be not impatient if I leave you still confronted with all that is solemn and beautiful, with all that is deep and perplexing, in this crowning problem of all human history, I would not be eager to bring you to any foregone conclusion of my own. I have no anxiety at all that you should hasten to accept cer tain ancient scholastic statements that are current under the name of orthodoxy. I would not even hurry you at this hour, to the consideration of those indications which the Holy Scrip- tures themselves give of the direction in which we are to seek the solution of these contradictions. Why should you not, like the first disciples of Jesus, continue for a time face to face with this wondrous Being, the mystery of piety, who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory ; and ponder in your own hearts the questions which he puts, and which the world puts : Who do men say that I am ? Who say ye that I am ? Who is this ? What manner of man is this ? — or that question which Pilate asked, What shall we do with Jesus who is called the Christ? And if, while yet you gaze perplexed upon that blessed face. CHRIST^S QUESTION TO MEN. 79 SO marred more than any man's, while as yet you have found no solution of these deep wonders in which your mind can rest, if perad venture you see something in Jesus Christ which gives you assurance of his tender and personal love to every human creature, and of a perfect truthfulness and faithfulness which could not betray nor disappoint the confidence of any who trusted him according to his promise— if you should say to your- self, " I do not understand this Jesus, but I love him ; I put my trust in him ; how he saves I do not altogether know, but he has promised, and I take his word ; he shall be my teacher, and he my guide, and he my forgiveness, and he my peace with God, and he my salvation forever and ever ; " — ^then will that peculiar blessing rest on you, the blessing which the risen Lord pronounced on those who have not seen and yet have believed. VII. THE MYSTERY MANIFESTED. tDUljout contraticrsi) great is tl)c mpstcrp of ooMincss ; Jjf ivljo m\s manifcetiV in tl)e ftcs[), justificii in tijc spirit, seen of anjicls, prcarhcii among Xtjt nations, bclicocii on in tlje morlli, rccciuci) up in glori). — 1 Tim. iii. 16. Before entering upon the great subject that is brought before us in this text, some things need to be premised about the language, and (in the strictest sense of the word) about the letter of the text. You have noticed, as I have read the flimiliar words, that the phrase " God manifest in the flesh " is changed, in the Revised New Testament to " he who was manifested in tlie flesh,? for the reason, given in the margin, that the old read- ing rests on no sufficient evidence. It is a long and agitating controversy the decision of which is thus pronounced. It was a question on the crossing of a t. Did a certain Greek letter in an old parchment book in the British Museum have a stroke across it or not. One said, " Yes, I can see it." The next man answered, " No, but what you sec is in a darker ink, and was added by some one who wanted to strengthen this text for a proof-text." " Yes," says the first, again, " I acknowledge that the text has been tampered with ; but under the dot of black ink, I see a faint stroke in the same ink with the rest of the word." " No," replies the second, " you think you do ; but what you see is really a stroke on the opposite side of the parchment, which shows through, and, in fact, has at last cor- roded through the parchment ; and here is Professor Maske- lyne, with a very powerful microscope which will settle the 80 THF. MYSTERY MANIFESTED. 81 matter." And so the matter is settled, not by Professor Mas- kelyne's microscope only, but by the testimony of other manu- scripts, and the laborious collation of all possible proofs. The change of reading, which was resisted by the friends of ortho- doxy as if the safety of Christ's church were at stake, has had to be admitted at last ; and yet the church still stands fast on the Rock, and is like to stand for all the gates of hell can do against it. It has only lost a proof-text — that is all ; and it has gained in the conviction that its knowledge of God and his truth stands in something much clearer and stronger than a proof-text — in the general tenor of Christ's life and of the "■whole teaching of the holy Scriptures. Another preliminary point is the proper meaning, in the New Testament, of the word mystery ; as in this phrase, " the mystery of godliness, without controversy great." There is a modern and popular use of the word, in which it means some- thing inscrutably dark and perplexing — something hopelessly baffling to the powers of the human mind — an insoluble riddle or enigma ; and this modern and popular sense of the word is often enough carried back into t^e Scriptures and applied to the word as found there, in such a way as to hide the meaning of it. It is a very favorite w^ord with some sorts of theologians, who are fond of shortening up an argument, when it begins to be troublesome, by saying of one subject or another, " Oh, that is a mystery ! " — as if this word were the end of all questioning. Now it is well to understand that the word in the New Testa- ment has no such sense. It means a thing once hidden, but now brought to light. It means a new discovery. It does not at all imply that the matter, when once revealed, is difficult of understanding. It may be a very simple and elementary mat- ter, such as simple minds can easily grasp when it is brought to them. Our Lord did not call around him, for his disciples, a group of twelve acute philosophers ; but to the twelve simple and teachable fishermen whom he did call, he said, " To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God ; " — to 6 82 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. them, and to us, also, if we are willing to learn. There is nothing in this word, mystery, to drive us away with our ques- tions, but everything to encourage us. We draw near, then, with deep reverence, but without terror, to the great mystery of godliness which is now manifested in the flesh, as to a thing which " it is given to us to know." And gazing on those things into w^hich the angels desire to look, we are not afraid to ask what is the meaning of these wondrous contradictions which we have been contemplating in the life of Jesus Christ ? We look to find the missing fact, or the com- prehensive theory, which will reconcile the opposites and incom- patibles which we find in this man. He is the bravest, calmest of heroes and martyrs ; and we would know what means that agony and bloody sweat in Gethsemane. He is the humblest of men, in his unobtrusive goodness and preference of others to himself; but he asserts his dignity as higher than Solomon's or Abraham's. He faints with hunger, and is weary, and is over- come with sleep: but restrains the storm by a syllable, and scatters health and vigor about him with the touch of his fin- gers. He bows with dee]3«st reverence before the majesty of God, continuing all night in prayer, — he declares " I can of myself do nothing ; " but he bids others to put their whole trust in himself, saying, " I will give you rest " — " whatsoever you ask, I will do it." He bleeds, he cries aloud in pain, he faints, he dies ; — he who by his own authority summoned the dead from the bed, from the bier, from the sepulchre, and who declared " I am the Kesurrection and the Life ; " "I will give eternal life." ThiLS briefly and inadequately I have recalled to your mind that series of contradictions which impresses the mind of the thoughtful reader of the gospels, and grows ujDon him more and more, the more he studies them. And for help in the solution of the question, " What manner of man is this ? " whither can we turn with so much hope as to those who companied with him intimately as his disciples; who thus THE MYSTERY MANIFESTED. 83 lea. lied the mind of Christ, who were expressly commissioned by him to give account of him to all the world, and who, according to his promise, were endowed with divine gifts equij)- ping them for this very work ? What light do we get on this dark question from these, and from their later-born associate, Paul ? Shall we not expect to find in their words some inti- mation that this personality of Jesus Christ was not a human personality, but was something other and higher, as if, being not man, but being of an order of existence separate from humanity, and far exalted above it, those things which may not be affirmed of any such as we are might be true of him ? This seems to have been one of the first conjectures of the ear- liest Christian speculation — that Jesus Christ was not really a hmnan being. But in the teachings of these first friends and followers of Christ, we get no light at all in this direction. There is no point on w^hich they are more clear, unanimous and emphatic, than in asserting the very manhood of the Christ. He was " the man, Christ Jesus." He was not of the nature of angels, but of the seed of Abraham ; he is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, having been tempted in all points like as we are. In fact, in the Gospel and Epistles of John it seems to be the writer's purpose to controvert at every opportunity that considerable sect of early Christians who tried to solve the perplexing facts about the life and teachings and acts and ama- zing promises of the Christ by saying that he was not really, in flesh and blood, a man. He was that very thing, says John. Our eyes have seen him, our hands have handled him. I saw the spear thrust into his side when there flowed out blood and water. This is that disciple that testified these things, and we know that his witness is true. Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. He was born of a woman, says Paul, — born under the law. He is our brother, says the writer to the Hebrews ; " he is not ashamed to call us brethren." And yet these same writers who so insist on it that Jesus 84 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Christ is our fellow-man in all the qualities and sympathies of manliood, instead of adding anything to mitigate or explain away those prodigious perplexities and contradictions that appear in the story of his acts and teachings, go on to heap them mountain-high by the most amazing declarations con- cerning this brother of ours, this fellow-man. To him they ascribe the incommunicable names of God, — quoting as of him the words of ancient Scripture that are spoken of Jeho- vah. To him they impute the works of God, declaring that of him and through him and to him are all things, and that it is he who upholdeth all things by the word of his power. Of him they predicate the infinite attributes of God; and to him they ascribe the worship which is due to God, saying to him, " Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor," — to him, who is " Lord of lords," " Lord of glory," " Lord of all ; " " Lord of the living and the dead ; " " Lord of all in heaven and on earth and under the earth." And yet all this, of a man born of woman ; who grew in stature and grew in wisdom ; who was flesh and blood ; who was seen, felt and handled; who was hungry and thirsty; who was weary and slept ; who was distressed and prayed for deliv- erance ; who was bereaved and wept ; who was a man of sor- rows ; who was crucified and cried out in anguish ; who was pierced with the spear and bled ; who died and was buried ! Is this all the light that the Scriptures have to give, upon the great problem of the Gospels — upon the question, " What manner of man is this ? " You will reproach me that I have brought you hither in quest of light, and have showed you no light at all, but have led you rather into deeper and deeper shades of darkness. I feel as if, for all the relief I have thus far given to your perplexity, you might rise against me as the mariners did against Columbus, when many days of voyaging had brought them only further out upon the seas, with no glimpse of the sought-for land in sight. And I can only plead for yet a little patience, a little watching of the sea and THE MYSTERY MANIFESTED. 85 stars and scanning of the far horizon, as of those who know not how soon some bird of unknow^n wing, some floating branch from undiscovered forests, some distant point of light piercing the darkness, may give hope of our yet coming into our desired haven. And meanwhile, even in the midst of the amazing and irrec- oncilable facts with which Ave are bewildered, it will not be altogether useless to look about us and make a sort of com- parative estimate of the situation. For it goes a great way with us men, when we have an unexplained phenomenon before us, if we can find some other unexplained phenomenon that is in some respects like it, and put the two into a class together. And if we are so happy as to find a third, so that we are able to say of it, " Oh, it belongs to that class of phenomena!" we consider that it is almost tan- tamount to an explanation of them all. It is not safe for any of us who live outside of the charmed circle of physical scientists to say what those privileged men do not know to- day ; but it is certain that not many yesterdays ago they did not know^ much about the nature of electricity ; and that when galvanism was discovered, they did not know much about the- nature of that: but it was a great comfort to them when they WTre able to find things in common between them, and between these two and magnetism, and to talk learnedly about all three of them in a group, as " the imponderables." It seemed almost like understanding them. And in fact it was an appreciable step toward understanding them. Now in our studies of the New Testament we have been brought f}\ce to face with an incomprehensible group of statements and facts concerning Jesus Christ, which seem like irreconcilable contradictions. Is there anything else like this within the com- pass of our knowledge and experience ? If there is, it will at least help to make our minds tolerant of the suspense while we are waiting for a solution ; and may even — who knows ? — put us forward toward a real understand in:i: cf the hidden thino^. 8G THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Give me a little time, I beg, to state a case in parallel. I will not abuse your patience. Of all the realities which make up this universe, and which are capable of being the subjects of human thought and study, there are two classes. Each excludes the other. The two to- gether constitute the universe. Each class has its own set of attributes which are incapable of being applied to the other. These two classes of realities are the material and the spirit- ual, — matter and mind. One characteristic of matter is dimension, in length, breadth and thickness. One characteristic of mind is consciousness. It is impossible that a conscious spirit should have length, breadth and thickness. It is impossible that a mass of matter, so many inches long by so many broad and thick, should think, or wish, or love, or be conscious. Not only these things never are, but in the nature of the case they cannot be. It is a curious thing in the language of the old-fashioned exploded science of the Middle Ages that it used to apply to material objects the ex- pressions, as of love and hate and sympathy, which are appro- priate only to spiritual objects. Water came up in the pump, they said, because " nature abhorred a vacuum." Different matters would mingle according to their " affinities," or sym- pathies. The vapor of anything was its soul or " gas " ; and the extract of a drug was its " spirit." The language has a poetical, unreal sound to us ; and we see that it never can have been really true, to any one, except in some poetic sort of sense — that the facts of the mental and spiritual are not to be seri- ously affirmed concerning material things. The fashion of language in our day has changed. The modern blunder is — not to impute to material things the quali- ties which belong to mind and spirit — but to talk about spirit- ual things as if they were material, or were functions of matter; ^to talk about mind as if a mind was nothing but so many ounces of white and ash-colored pulp arranged in convolutions ; —as if a mind could be dissected and weighed : to talk about THE MYSTERY MANIFESTED. 87 thought ai5 if it was the secretion of a gland, disengaging phos- phorus : to talk about conscience and afiection as if these were functions of the viscera and the excito-motory system, like di- gestion and assimilation. The old blunder was that of meta- physicians out of their sphere, talking about physics in the terms of mind ; the new blunder is that of students of mechan- ics and physics and chemistry out of their sphere, talking about mental and spiritual things in the terms of matter. This sort of talk is doubtless misleading and confusing ; but after all, it cannot permanently confuse the common sense of sensible people. AYe all know that it is absurd to say that an intellect can weigh fifty-five ounces, or that one hundred and ten cubic inches of white and gray pulp can think, or that a soul can have an upper side and an under side. If there is anything that we know, it is that our knowing is not done by a machine but by a mind ; — that soul is not body and that body is not soul. Wise-sounding talk may confuse us for a while ; but the common sense of mankind always comes right after a little. And when I think of myself, I know by that very thinking that I am a thinking being — a soul, which by its nature has none of the properties of matter. And what I know of my- self I know of other men who by their thoughts, em-otibns, affections, are made known to me. They, too, are thinking beings, minds, souls. I can not be mistaken. I say of them, without hesitation, those things which cannot be said, without absurdity, except of spiritual existences. I declare that they are wise, benevolent, prudent, learned ; that they are sorrowful, penitent, trustful, prayerful ; that they are generous souls, great minds, magnanimous spirits. And now here is some one who speaks of one of these and says that he is short of stature, and of light weight ; that he is of fair complexion, or symmetrical in shape ; that he has "been wounded, or bruised or burned. Absurd ! impossible ! You cannot strike or cut a soul. You cannot weigh a spirit, or measure an intellect in feet and inches. It is simply a wild 88 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. and senseless misuse of words, to talk about the complexion of a mind, as if it could be white or red or swarthy. You can- not mean to say these things of him ! And yet he does mean it ; and no contradiction will shake him from it ; and in fact you admit it yourself. Either what lie says is absurd and im- possible, or else what you say is absurd and impossible; and yet they are both true. It is true of the same being that he is both benevolent and thoughtful and that he is six feet tall and one hundred and fifty jDouuds in weight ; — that he is invisible and intangible, and that he is of a certain complexion, and has been wounded and maimed. At the same time he is sick and he is sound ; he is suffering and he is happy ; he is mortal and he is immortal. You think you can explain this perhaps when you say that these different affirmations are made about two different things — about a body and a soul ; and ^^ou say that these two things are combined or united in the man. Have you solved the per- plexity thereby ? Or have you only relieved one impossibility by stating another ? For I can easily jjrove to you by argu- ments of philosophy which " admit no refutation, and produce no^ conviction," that the combination of these opposite things which have no quality in common, is not only impossible but in- conceivable. There is no explanation of this contradiction, but an explanation which just as much needs to be explained, and is just as inexplicable. The two terms of the contradiction stand there together in your own person, incompatible, irrecon- cilable, — and both true. And this is the creature, man, this bundle of incompatibilities, this incarnate contradiction, this animated paradox, this unsolved and insoluble problem of creation, this opprobrium of his own philosophy, this riddle unguessed and given up, this solemn sphinx in despair over his own enigmas, — this is the creature who halts before the mystery of godliness, without controversy great, now manifested in the flesh, before which the multitudinous hierarchies of the heavenly host hang silently in suspended flight — cherubim whose lifted THE MYSTERY MANIFESTED. 89 •wings have overarched the heavenly mercy-seat — seraphs whose unending cry of Holy, holy, holy, is hushed in the unwonted silence that is made in heaven — sons of God, wRose voices had mingled in the chorus of the morning-stars when the corner- stone of all the worlds was laid — angelic messengers who in their swift ministries have explored the uttermost of the works of God — all into the wonder of this great mystery desiring to look ; — man halts before this same mystery of godliness, with his poor, baffled intellect drooping from the vain effort to com- prehend his own existence, and remarks, " I do not understand it." Poor fellow-creatures ! dear children of men ! who ex- pected you to understand it ? And yet these very failures of ours in the study of oui-selves, these baffled inquiries, these futile reasonings, are a help wonder- fully fit, divinely given as it should seem, to enable us — not, of course, to comprehend, but to receive, the mystery of godliness. For just as looking on ourselves we recognize inhering in us contradictory attributes such as it is impossible should belong to the same substance, and yet alike belonging to ourselves ; so looking upon Jesus Christ, we recognize new contradictions, the finite things and the infinite, such as it is impossible should co- exist in one, yet co-existing. And just as, admitting the baffling enigma in our own nature, we are accustomed to make a so- called explanation of these impossibles by formulating a new impossibility, that soul and body, spirit and matter, w^hich of their nature cannot be united, nevertheless are united in one person, so that of that person we declare the things w^hich are true of either substance ; — so looking upon Him who is very man, concerning whom, nevertheless, are affirmed attributes and acts no less than infinite, men, bewildered by the height, the depth, the length, the breadth, aspiring to know the love that passeth knowledge, have attempted to solve these impossibilities by the statement of a new impossibility, that the Infinite and Absolute and Eternal was united in one being with the finite, the conditioned, the dependent. Of which if any man shall 90 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. say it is incomprehensible, the answer is yes ! And if he shall say it is impossible, the answer is, yes, like the facts of which it is the attempted summary and expression — facts which are impossible, and yet are true. Further than this I do not care to go. Beyond I trace the course in which theology, ever aspiring to find out the Almighty to perfection, has toiled over its statements concerning "eternal generation " and " kenosis " and " hypostatic union " ; I see the ground torn and trampled by sterile and blighting controver- sies ; I count the rejected systems, anathematized as heresies, and their adherents stigmatized and cast out with uncharitable rancor ; I see the air made turbid with the dust of unprofitable strife, and cloudy with a mist of unintelligible words ; and I do not care to follow in that w^ay. I turn me back to where E see the blessed company of humble saints adoring before the cross, and the host of holy angels gazing thereon as they who into these things desire to look, but are not able ; and there I find that which is greater than to have solved all inexplicable questions — I find " the love of Christ, which surpasseth know- ledge." I can wait — can wait forever, if need be — for the an- swer to these unanswerable questions. I am not ashamed to share the bewilderment of God's blessed ano^els. VIII. THE PURPOSE OF CHRIST'S MIRACLES OF HEALING. €ljttt pc max) knoro tijat ttjc ^-an of man IjiUlj powcv on cnrtl) to forg'mc sins, (Ijc 5i\iX\) tcr tiK sicK nf tljc ;uil3i;) J sat) unto tl;cc ^rise, take up tiji) kl>, aniJ flo unto tijp l)0U5c. — Mark ii. 10. It is not so easy a matter as it might seem, to explain the multitude of the miracles that are narrated or referred to in these gospels which give us all that we know of the life of Jesus the Messiah. Ttiere are many difficult questions about the miracles, on w^iich I do not mean to touch at this time ; but this concerning the multitude of them is a question which adds difficulty to all the rest. The accounts of them make up a large part of the four gospels ; and this second gospel of the four, which is a sort of condensed gospel — a gospel in tract form, as one might say, for general circulation among plain people — is made up more largely of detailed accounts of healing than any one of the others. We must remember that the least of these gospels is a whole gospel, that it was meant to be complete in itself, and sufficient. And when it comes to presenting the essence of " the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God," in the least possible space, it is interesting and very astonishing to see what is kept and what is left out. I will venture to say that there is not a minister among us all w^ho in preparing a short gospel in sixteen chapters, would have left out the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Prodigal Son, or that would have said " whatever else we leave out, we cannot spare the full detail of these acts of heal- ing." I believe that we should have made room for a good 91 92 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. deal more of what we call " fundamental doctrine " by con- densing into one chapter a half dozen chapters containing the details of one case after another of the healing of sick people. Why is it that these three brief years of our Lord's ministry should have been so largely consumed in these hun- dreds, thousands of acts of healing men's bodily ailments and infirmities and even inconveniences ? And when it comes to putting the substance of " the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," into the space of twenty pages, why must a good half of the space, or more, be occupied with telling, over and over again, this story of curing sick men, and feeding hungry men, and raising dead men ? Take out these and other mira- acles, and what have you left of the Gospel of Mark ? Well, you have four parables, and some brief memoranda of conver- sations, and the story of the trial and crucifixion and resur- rection. But the miracles are more than half the story; so that evidently, in the mind of the evangelist — shall we not say, in the mind of Christ ? — the miracles were the gospel, in a very important sense. But in what sense are they the gospel, either for us, or for the men of that time ? What was the purjiose, and what was the result, of all these mighty v/orks ? It seems very obvious and easy to say that this work of heal- ing had its object and end in itself — that it brought just so much of joy and happiness into the world, and diminished by just so much the gross sum of human misery. It seems a very obvious explanation ; but the objections to it are quite as obvious, and are overwhelming. 1. If the one object of Christ's miracles was directly to reduce the sum of human misery, then they were a failure ; for their result was inappreciably small and insignificant. I know it does not seem so, as we fix our attention on him from day to day of his brief public life, following him as he " goes about do- ing good and healing all that are oppressed of the devil, because God is with him," — as we sit beside him, in the city or the wilderness, and see the countless procession of the wretched draw- PURPOSE OF CHRIST'S MIRACLES OF HEALING. 93 ing near to him, and of the cleansed and healed bounding away, and making the air to ring with praises '' to God who had given such power to men." A magnificent display, it seems, of the supreme bounty of God, that when he bringeth his only-begot- ten into the world, he should send him on such a royal and triumphal progress. Where'er he went, affliction fled, And sickness reared her tainthig head. Tlie eye that rolled in irksome night, Beheld his face, — for God is light ; The opening ear, the loosened tongue, His precepts heard, his }jraises sung. With bounding steps, the halt and lame, To hail their great deliverer came ; O'er the cold grave he bowed his head. He spake the word, and raised the dead. Despairing madness, dark and wild, In hia inspiring presence smiled ; The storm of horror cobsed to roll, And reason lightened through the soul. But, after all, when we consi^ler it with some regard to per- spective and proportion, what an atom of comfort is this, beside the huge, mountainous mass of human woe ! AVhat a mere drop of solace in an ocean of agony ! Think how this earth looks, to him who can look down upon it from the circle of the heavens. P .re ihe little globe is toiling j^ainfully round upon its axis, neaving up into the light, and then bearing down again and burying in the darkness its unspeakable loads of misery crying incessantly toward God. For these many, many centuries, until the hundreds of years begin to be counted up into the thousands, in all the various lands of earth, one generation has been grow- ing up after another, strutting its little hour of pride and folly, feeling the pangs of a myriad of diseases and distresses, and reel- ing, one after the other, down to death. Men have looked in upon the outer edge of the population that swarms and swelters 94 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. and ferments within the boundaries of China, and have come back sickened with the sight of such teeming masses of human wretchedness, and at the thought of just such millions in province after province of that great empire, beyond, and yet beyond. Just such masses of human sorrow, only the individuals changed, did Marco Polo find in the same region six hundred years ago. Just such were there, but dilierent men and women, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand years before. Press westward thence, along that historic continent, from peninsula to thronged peninsula — Further India, Hither India, each groaning with its weight of suffering humanity — and pierce to those central plains in which the two great powers of modern civilization are preparing to fight over again the ancient battle for the empire of the East. It seems like an unknown desert to us, as we look over its great expanses on the map ; and we do not realize that here was the home of primeval monarchies and of those " cities of old and modern fame, the seat of mightiest empire " whose names fill the son- orous verse of Milton — "Of Canibalu, seat of Cathaian Cham, And Saniarcand by Oxns, Temir's throne." What visions of ferocious cruelty and of helpless misery come before the mind at the opening of that map of Central Asia, with its seats of barbarian tyranny, bringing up such names of horror as Timur Leng, and Genghis Khan, synonyms of bloody atrocity. It is the hive whence all the nations of the AVest swarmed forth ; and what a bloody cradle of our race it is ! Come westward still, along the path of empire. Pause to read the records of atrocious torture written out on the alabaster walls of the Assyrian palaces — unearth the ghastly mummies from Egyptian catacombs — tell the bricks laid with the groans of captives into sepulchral pyramids — tread the j^rocligious ruins of the Roman baths and palaces, the monuments of Chris- tian persecution — stand within the dreadful walls of the Col- PURPOSE OF Christ's miracles of healing. 95 isGum, and listen for the fading echoes of the groans of those countless victims over whose dying anguish the gay ladies and dandies of the bloody city laughed and chatted. What shall I more say ? The very sea is full of the secrets of piracy and murder and the fearful slave-trade. All Africa is a continent consecrated to cruelty and mutual hate — an arena for mutual tortures among savage men and savage beasts ; and the islands of the sea are full of the habitations of cruelty. O pitiable world, of which the fairest corners are so filled with sordid misery and sickness, and whose soil is mellow everywhere with hopeless graves ! Now in the midst of this broad earth, there is a narrow^ strip of country, a little patch upon the earth's surface — you can hardly find it on the map of the world, it is so insignificantly small ; and in the midst of sixty centuries there is a generation, and in the midst of the generation, three short years, and in the course of those years a little number — a few hundreds of sick and lame and demoniac persons healed, and a few thousands saved for some hours from the inconvenience of hunger, and three or four dead persons recalled to life, only to die again after a few months or years. No, no ! if the purpose of our Lord's miracles was directly to lessen the sum of the misery of mankind, they failed. They did not accomplish it in any appreciable degree. 2, But secondly, we are compelled to acknowledge that such an object as that of arbitrarily interrupting the general course of human suffering by miraculous interference not only was not accomplished by the power of Christ, but it ought not to have been accomplished — it would not have been a blessing. The notion that there w^as too much pain and suffering in the world — more than was right, more than was best, more than was needed by mankind for their own good ; — ^the notion that God our Father had dealt hardly by his children, and that the Son of God, with a superior love, came down to mitigate the hardship which the Father's too great severity had imposed— 96 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. is quite too much like some other of the obsolete noticns of a mediseval theology, and quite too much unlike the word of God. For it is not true. God tolerates no pain in the world that can be spared. It was not in revenge or cruelty, but in that justice which is another name for love, that he pronounced on the apostate race the curse of toil and suffering and death. Plis curse was the best blessing that mankind, sinful, apostate, were capable of receiving. The world had flung itself off the track and w^as ready to rush down into perdition, and it was time for the engineer to put on the brakes. And just this discipline of enforced labor, of inevitable pain, of prospective death, was the only thing that could hold it back. If the world with sickness and unhappiness and pain and foreboding and fear and death is a lazar house, without these it would have been a Pandemo- nium. If the philanthropist, guided by the police, looks into the squalid dens of vice where sin conceives and brings forth death, and turns away sick with the spectacle of suffering, — if the occasional revelations of iniquity in higher life startle us by showing what unseen depths of mental anguish, of tormenting jealousy, of unappeased envying and craving, of self-loathing and despair, are covered by the thin garments of luxury and dissipation, — it is the only comfort that grieved humanity can find, to think that the only thing to be imagined worse than what we see would be a world in which sin could riot unpur- sued by pain and death ; in which no screams of woe, no sights of horror, no fearful looking3-for of wrath, should warn back tempted men from paths of wickedness, and enable good resolu- tion to keep its foothold when it stands in slippery places. If lust might revel in its untiring round of voluptuous unclean- ness, with no satiety to mock, and no disease to smite and slay, — if there w^re no adder's sting at the bottom of the drunk- a rd's cup — if covetousness brought no sordidness of soul and f o scorning from one's neighbor — if selfish ambition might go ' imbing on forever, each day delighting itself with giddier PURPOSE OF Christ's miraci.es of healing. 97 heights, with never a l)aiig of conscience for the poor disre- garded and the right cast down, — if tliere were no nights to shut men up face to face with tlieir own thoughts, no murdered sleep to haunt the guilty, no sick days to strike away the pride of luinian strength, no death, no law of God, no wrath to come ; — what a hell this world would be ! No, no ! There is no pain that is not needed ! It never falls but where God wants that it should fall — God, w^ho does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. He him- self, who sends pain and death, brings healing and resurrection. It did not need the Son of God to do these works of mercy. The Father, like the Son, is this day going to and fro about the earth to lay his fatherly hands upon the sick and give health wherever sickness can be spared, and life wherever life is better than death. His ear and eye — like that of Christ who is the express image of the Father-^are ever waiting to catch the first evidence of that resignation and faith which show that affliction has wrought its j^erfect work and can now be dismissed ; and whenever that turning of the heart is seen, the word of God calls back his swift, obedient messenger of sorrow, and his healing work is just as surely accomplished, and just as divinely, whether through the chain of second causes that are guided by his secret providence, or in the splendid blaze of miracles that follows on the words of Christ his Son. It is the same God that worketh all in all. " Verily, verily, the Son can do nothing of himself but what he seeth the Father do ; for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." It was not the works of God that Jesus came to destroy — not even God's " strange work " in suffering and sickness, but the works of the devil. And it is to this end, this chief and sovereign end, that all these mighty works of healing are directed. He declares it plainly himself It was " that ye may know " — that we may know — " that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sin" — for this — that he saith to the sick of the palsy " Arise, and take up thy bed, and go 7 98 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHIHST. tliy "way into thine own house." And men do see it and know it; and the throng breaks forth in grateful songs, glorifying God, and saying We never saw it on this fashion ! But hark! what is this? I hear one dissonant, incisive voice piping its shrill protest above all this chorus of grateful thanksgiving, and saying, " Not so ! it does not prove it at all ! it is entirely inconclusive ! Don't praise God yet, and don't have any hope or confidence in the forgiveness of sins, until you have heard my argument about miracles ! This belief of miracles doesn't work into my system at all ! " Oh, I thought I knew that voice. It is my friend the philosopher, with his theory of the universe. I know him, and I know his argu- meiit about miracles — and a very good argument it is, as fiir as it goes. It is founded on the uniformity and constancy of natural law, of which, he says, there is a universal and instinc- tive conviction in the human mind. Very good and sound, and founded on observation of tlie working of nature and of the mind of man. Now, my philosophic friend, carry your observation of the mind a little further, and see if you don't come to another universal and instinctive con\'iction — an in- stinctive belief and expectation that this constancy of natural order, may be, will be, broken in upon, on due occasion. I put this universal instinct against the other universal instinct, and back it with examples, ten to one. Your system has no room for it, I know. Your theory of the universe is contrived on the plan of leaving out of view those facts of the human soul that do not work in easily with the rest. It is a beautiful theory, and it is a pity that facts should interfere with it. But here the facts are — the instinctive expectation of man- kind — the expectation that has given rise to all the monstrous superstitions of the world, that when God shall interfere to break the dreadful chain of moral causes that binds penalty to sin, he will give sign and token of the same by breaking also the chain of physical cause and effect that holds the crea- tion groaning under bondage to bodily pain and weakness. priii'osE or ("iiuisTs miiiaclks or healing. 1)9 When li'j sc^iidotli 111- only-boi^OLtcn into the world he will find some way to signjilize him to the wretched, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the palsied, the sinful and unha})py of every land and language and century, a.s God's authorized connnissioner. Tliere was one hopefdl and prophetic soul that had trusted thai it had been Jesus who should redeem Israel — who should proclaim liberty to the captive, the oi)ening of the ])rison-do()rs to them that were bound. But still he languished in a tyrant's dungeon, and saw no sign of coming deliverance, no ray of hope. 80 he sent messengers to look for him whom he had baj)tized though needing no cleansing, and to put the question ])lainly: — Art thou he that should come, or must we still Willi and wait and look for another? And now what answer of comfort, what words of instruction, what doctrine making -wise to salvation, ^vill not the Saviour send to suffering John the Baptist ? He answers liim never a word ; but while the expectant messengers are waiting for their reply, he — what? — he goes right on and w^orks miracles of healing. " In that same hour he cures many of their infirmities and plagues and of evil spirits ; and unto numy that are blind he gives sight ; " — and then says to the messengers, " There ! that's your gospel ! go take that to John." — And to "that same hour" depressed and desponding souls in every age look back and know the token, and say: " It is he that was to come! I know him, the Christ of God." Somehow, these miracles, that look so un- philosophical to certain critics, do seem to be the sort of badge of a divine commission that men generally ask for and expect to see produced on the part of one who comes as a representa- tive of God. And for my part I find it not at all strange that God sh(juld conduct this matter with regard to the instinctive wants and cravings of plain men in general, as much as with regard to the refined and possibly sophisticated scruples of a few. Glance back a moment, now, at the course of our study thus far, as we have asked ourselves, and asked the word of God, 100 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. what was the object and meaning of our Lord's wonderful works of healing. We lind 1, That the object was not, by miraculous intervention, to drive pain, and sickness, and death, or any considerable amount of it, out of the world. This was not accomplished by them — it ought not to have been accom- plished. 2. Christ's power to heal the body was meant (so he expressly declares) as a sign and token of his power to save the whole man, body and soul. " That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sin," — therefore " he saith to the sick of the palsy, Arise and walk." But this is hardly sufficient, after all, to account for the multitude of these miracles — that the great bulk of this gospel should be made up of miracles and almost nothing else. It does not look like the wisdom of God to salvation that his commissioner should spend the main part of his time in merely proving his commission. And so our mere veneration for the wisdom of God in Christ commands us to look deeper into these works of healing, to find their whole meaning ; and we do not look in vain. For, — 3. Christ's works of healing set before us the w^ay of salva- tion — the way in wiiich he gives it, the way in which we are to receive it. The miracles are parables — not the less parables for being also facts. " The kingdom of heaven is likened unto them." And as our Lord in his spoken parables did sometimes give flill explanation of one that it might serve us as a model for explaining the rest, — so did he also in these parables wrought visibly in action. As it is said in ^latthew (viii. 16), " He cast out the evil spirits with his word, and healed all them that were sick, that it might be fidfilled wdiich was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, " Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknasses." In particular, this story of the paralytic let down from the roof is so told as to be a key to the undei^tanding of all the miracles, and a key of the whole gospel unlocking to us the method of salvation. It shows us the Holy One of God mani.- PURPOSE OF CHPJST's MIRACI.P:S of IIKALING. 101 festcd to destroy the works of tlie devil — not first pain aiid sorrow and then sin ; but first sin, and then the pain, sorrow, death that sin has wrouglit. He saith not first Arise and walk, and then Thy sin be forgiven thee ; but first to the sinner ]^e forgiven, and then to the sick of the palsy Arise and take uj) tliy bed and go unto thine house. Not in vain the Scripture saith " the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." While sin remains, death cannot be spared. The wretched world hath need of him. But by and by the great work of the Redeemer shall be complete, and that mysterious scene, the consummation of all the ages, shad- owed forth in words of awful majesty, shall be enacted at last, and the Son shall stand before the throne of the Everlasting Father, to surrender up his august commission. He shall point to the great multitude of every land and age, of every kindred and tongue and tribe, and say : " Behold me and the children whom thou hast given me — all whom thou gavest me I have kept." He shall bring sin and Satan in chains, and make a show of them openly, conquered, captive. Sorrow and sighing he shall have subdued and made to flee away. And now, at last, the last enemy, the king of terrors, long ago disarmed of dart and spear, robbed of his dreadful sting, which is sin, despoiled of all power to hurt believing souls,— the last enemy shall be dragged forth to his ignominious execution. Then how the universe shall shake to the vibrations of that great chorus, " The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ ; " — " and the Son shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father; and God shall be all in all ! " IX. THE HEALING OF THE PALSIED. €.l)at t)c mar) kmnu tljiU tljc <$an of man IjiUlj pouicr on carti) to forgiuc sing (Ijc saiti unto Ijini tljat mas plU5■u•^) J sap unto tijcc ilrisc, an& take up ti)9 rouci), ani> jio unto tlji) IjouiJc. i\.n^ immc^■uUcll) Ik rose up lulorc tl)cm, an^ took up tijat uilji-rcon Ik lai), an^ Iicpartcii to Ijis Ijousc glori- fi)infl (!}o^. — Luke v. 24, 25. We spent our last Sunday evening in studying the purpose of those mighty works of healing in which the time and human powers of endurance of our Lord Jesus Christ, in his earthly ministry, were so largely consumed. What was his object in them ? What relation did they bear to his great work of saving the world ? It could not have been to diminish, by direct interference, the gross sum of human suffering. For, in the first place, if this was their object, they were a failure ; the deduction they made from the mass of human misery was insignificant. And, in the second place, this would not have been a right or worthy object. Pain and misery are not in the world for nothing ; they are here for a purpose, — for a good, a merci- ful, a divine purpose. The Son of Gfod is not more merciful than his Father, and not less wise. The works that he doeth are those that he seeth his Father do — none other. He comes to take away men's troubles and pains, when these can be spared, not before ; and just such works as this " his Father worketh hitherto." And in this very story of the healing of a paralytic, we find the key of his purpose in these mighty works. " That ye may hnoiv that the Son of man hath poiver on earth to forgive 102 THE IIEALIXU OF THE PAESIED. W6 sz«.^," — for this purpose it is that " he siiith to the sick of the palsy Arise and walk." Having this key of the meaning of our Lord's Avorks of mercy, we can follow him through the long succession of them, as he " goes about doing good and healing all that are oppressed of the devil," and can find in them all, not only the sign and proof of his power to save from sin, but the example and illustration of his way of saving. Here we see the two antagonists confronted. In Jesus Christ we see God manifest in the flesh ; and in the maladies and visible infirmities of men, Ave see sin manifest in the flesh. In the infinite diversity of these — i:>alsies, blindness, leprosies, epileptic convulsions, demoniac madness — we have set before us, in no dark parable, the Protean phases of human sin. We hear the authoritative word of absolution, cleansing, heal- ing. We witness the act of faith by which he who asks re- ceives. These mighty works are a continual parable, in which the whole life of Christ sets before us the kingdom of heaven. I shall count largely on your own thoughtfulness in follow- ing up this clue which the very words of Christ give us to the instruction to be found in his works of healing ; and because there is so much in this story, so many accessory figures in the scene, all having vital relation to it, Ave Avill, for this hour of study, fix our attention on one of the tAvo central figures, and on only two or three of the lessons out of the many that Ave can learn from this. We Aviil consider, 1. The Paralytic's Prayer ; and, 2. The Answer that he received. But Ave shall not be able to understand this figure in the fore- ground, unless Ave make some study of the accessories of the picture in the gospels. This incident comes near the beginning of our Lord's Avork. It is a time of wonder, questioning, excitement in all Palestine, and especially in the region about the Lake of Galilee. The rumor is running to and fro that a ncAV prophet has appeared, one Jesus, or Joshua, a young man from Nazareth. Wonder- ful thinirs are told of him. His \vorks of healing exceed all 104 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. that have been recorded of them of old time ; even the fables of the heathen have hardly dared feign such marvels as are au- thentically vouched for by eye-witnesses of the works of this Jesus, — and his deeds are not so wonderful as his life and teaching. We do not need to transport ourselves to a distant land and age to imagine the result. It was then what it would be now. These first two pages of Mark's gospel record the universal amazement that prevailed through all that region. Everywhere they Avere gathering up their sick folk out of all towns and villages, to go and find the great Healer. And when the crow^ds beheld the healing of the deaf, the blind, the crippled, the feverish, the lunatic, the demoniac, " they were all amazed." They broke out into shouts and songs of " Glory to God." Against his express desire, they " spread his fame abroad through all that region," every man who had seen the wonder being filled with irrepressible desire to tell it to his neighbors ; and some of those who were healed could not recon- cile their gratitude with their obedience, but being " straitly charged to tell no man," " went out and published it much, and blazed abroad the matter." But there is a more, wonderful thing in the story than any of these — a thing which touches men with a more awful and solemn reverence, and meets a deeper and more hopeless craving of humanity. Not only does he heal bodily ailments with a touch, and calm and re- store the diseased intellect with words of power, but he comes to souls bowed under burdens of conscious sin, and subdues even this malady, the most obstinate and afflictive, when once it has become deep-seated — the most unyielding to any human arts, arguments or persuasions — by the authority with which he declares, " Son, thy sins be forgiven thee." There is no stint to his gifts, no price set upon them. None ask but they receive ; none seek but find. Of course, he is beset by crowds without number or intermission. The whole city gathers about his door. He rises long before daylight and goes out into a solitary place to pray ; but all men are seeking him, and hia THE HEALING OF THE PALSIED. 105 disciples go out to find him and bring him back, and go with him from town to town, preaching and healing. Finally, *' he can no more openly enter into the town, but is without in desert places ; and they come to him from every quarter." Wlien the wilderness is no longer a protection to him, he comes back quietly to the town again — his own town, Caper- naum. But he cannot be hid. " It is noised that he is in the house." At once, there is a rush. The house fills up, and the long, narrow entrance and the street in front of the door are choked with the crowd. And it is not altogether a common crowd, either. There begin to be some distinguished men in these multitudes. All the way from Jerusalem have come learned men, scribes and lawyers, to inquire diligently and critically, as their duty is, into the claims of the new prophet. Doubtless such great men would have privileged places ; and all through the court, and chambers, and narrow^ entrance-pas- sage, the multitude, sick and well, pressed and jostled and crowded. Thus and then it was that there came four men to the outskirts of the crowd, each holding up the corner of a mattress on which was lying a sick man, lielpless from paraly- sis. What was to be done ? The house was full. They could not get near the door, for the crowd ; much less force their way "with such a burden, through the packed vestibule, through the dense throng in the central court, to the place where, sur- rounded by the learned scholars in the law from Jerusalem, the young Prophet stood and taught as one having authority. Now, before we go farther with the story, it is necessary for you to get an idaa of the peculiar structure of an Eastern house of the better class. It is built solid around a central court, from which all the rooms receive their light and air. On the street, you see nothing but a dead wall, pierced by a single door opening into a long narrow archway that leads into the court. When you have come into the court, you look about you at the doors and windows of every room in the house, of both storeys. But immediately opposite the archway by wdiich 106 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. you come in, tliere is one room that reaches up through both storeys to the very roof, and is completely open, without any wall at all, toward the court. The floor of this room is three or four feet higher than the pavement of the court, and this is the chief reception-room of the house. Observe that this ele- vated floor is a platform from which you can see all over the :;:)urt, and into all the windows of the house. On such a plat- form, I have no doubt, our Lord was standing or sitting as he taught the throng in the house at Capernaum. There is sometimes one other access to the house beside the street-door and archway. Often, an outside staircase leads up to the flat roof, which is the customary place of retirement for the family, the place of devotion, in summer nights the sleep- ing-place. This suggested to the sick man's friends an expedi- ent. They lifted him tenderly up the staircase, and laid him down on the roof. Just over the reception-platform on which tlie Prophet stood they took away course after course of the overlapping tiles, and then with cords attached to the corners of his mattress, they let down the helpless, trembling creature, until the scribes from Jerusalem and Galilee, and other digni- taries who occupied foremost places, were compelled to fall back before the new-comer, and this poor bundle of wretched humanity lay in the midst of them at the feet of Jesus, a type of the impotence of sin to heal itself— an illustration of Prayer and of How prayer is answered. Consider, 1 . The j^a mlijtics prayer. It was a wonderful prayer — so brief, so comprehensive, so afiecting, so complete ; stating the whole case, setting it forth in every particular, detailing every symptom of the malady, urging every argument of sym- pathy, calling for exactly the comfort and help that were re- quired ; — such was the prayer offered by the sick of the palsy, as his couch with its half-dead burden dropped on the ground at the feet of the Christ. What then did he say ? Not one word ! The silence which this strange intruder brought with him into the school of THE HEALING OF THE PALSIED. 107 Christ was broken ouly by the voice of the Son of man liim- self — *' Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee." He had told his story well. There was a dead and leaden limb hanging to a half lifeless trunk. There was a hand shaking with the helpless tremor of the nerves that could do H:tle more than tremble. There were the lips druling and m;)wing, and the tongue h)lliug with a look like idiocy within the gate of speech, and tlie eyes, last refuge of the blockaded intellect, looking with longings that cannot be uttered toward him who is the Life. And now do you ask what did he say ? Rather, what did he leave unsaid? Just by lying there before the Lord, without a gesture or a word, he had declared his desires, with submission and faith, to his Saviour. Let the disobedient tongue deny its office if it will ; let the quivering hands hang down, which he w^ould fain lift in supplication ; let the feeble knees refuse to bow ; — they cannot hinder him of his approach to the Saviour. The trustful soul has got the victory over the body of this death, and through this tattered vail of flesh he who made the heart hath read the prayer that is written on its fleshly tablets. It was an unspoken prayer, but not a prayer unuttered or unexpressed, otherwise it would not have been a prayer at all. I know what the hymn says : — " Prayer is the soul's sincere dasire, uttered, or unexpressed .... Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear ; " and it is good poetry, and may be truth or falsehood according to the sense in which you take it. . It is easy to take this overflow of a Christian poet's heart, and use it, in a sense which the writer of it would have ab- horred, as a sentimental apology for never praying. " Prayer is the offering up of our desires to God ; " the Westminster theologians, not always right, are wholly right in this. A desire never oflered up, a lazy longing never addressed to the Giver of good, is a prayer, in ihe same sense in which a man's lounging through the corridors of the Capitol wishing he had some of the public money, is a petition to Congress. There 108 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. were plenty of paralytics in Galilee, at that very hour, each one with " a heart's sincere desire " that he had his youth and strength back again, but who never came to Christ to ask for it, and went palsied down into their graves. There were blind men, in the days of Christ, as benighted and needy of all things as Bartiniseus and his nameless friend near Jericho, but who never had the courage of faith to cry out for mercy to the Son of David. There were lepers wallowing in hope- less uncleanness and misery, with longing recollections of the days when their ulcerated limbs had been fair and healthy as the flesh of a little child, but who never ventured to say " Lord, make me clean." There were friends, sincere and true, watching by many a hopeless invalid in Galilee and wishing they might see him as in months past, who made no effort to bring their charge to the feet of Christ, or, if any effort, one that was discouraged by hindrances, and utterly dismayed when they saw the crowd about the door. Not to such as these did the great blessing come; but to those in whom the " sincere desire," working together with the con- sciousness of their own utter helplessness, and with some little mustard-seed of fiuth in the Son of God, moved them to the very act and deed of presenting, even though it were in elo- quent pathetic speechlessness, their requests to Christ, with faith. I find, in the very nature of this sick man's malady, some instructive indications as to what is the prayer of faith, and what is faith that gives prevailing power to prayer. It is not without significance that so large a proportion of our Lord's miracles of healing were wrought on the blind, and the palsied — the sufferers from those two forms of human infirmity which most discipline one to a sense of his own helplessness and need, and most educate him in the habit of confiding in the strength and wisdom and faithfulness of another. Not when I look on the hills of Nazareth, or the blue waves of Galilee, or the an- cient olives on the hillside by the brook Kidron, am I more THE HEALING OF THE PALSIED. 109 reminded of tlie very person of tlic Lord Christ, than ^vllen I watch the blind man confiding with absolute trust in the hand that leads him, or the palsied resting 041 the strong arm that supports him, and remember that it was just such help- less, just such trustful ones as these, whose coniiding faith v»on his love and commanded his noblest works of mercy. And as I meditate of blindness and palsy, I better understand tlie darkness and impotency of sin, and what is that faith by which we should commit ourselves to the infinite wisdom, love and power of God. 2. Observe now the Answer which the palsied man received to his prayer. And if it seemed at first, to any, that he had uttered no prayer at all, such will surely think at first that he received no answer at all. Very commonly this is true, in the gospels, of our Lord's response to those who come to him. " Jesus answered and said," we read ; but the answer has no obvious relevancy to what was asked. Nicodemus says to him, " Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God." Jesus answered and said, " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." He answers, not the words, but what lay in the heart, beliind the words. Li such wise he answers the prayer of the palsied — a prayer that says, plainer than any words can say it, " Lord that I might be healed." It seems no answer at all, — " Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee." There seems to be some untold story here. There is more than palsy — there is sin ; if not an anxious lace, at least a troubled conscience. And there is a keen diagnosis on the part of the great Healer, going deeper than the surface symptoms, reaching to the inmost roots of the trouble. And his answer is given accordingly. Observe in it, — (1.) That the paralytic received the substance, though not the form, of what he had asked, to his entire satisfaction. He received an answer as completely satisfactory to himself, as Paul received when, praying mightily, again and again, that 110 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. the thorn in his flesh might be removed, he got for answer " My grace is suflicient for thee ; " and thereupon " was glad, and gloried." Did the features of the paralytic, think you, betray to the gazing and murmuring scribes some sign of disappointment or discontent, when those majestic words were spoken do^^'n to him — " Thy sins be forgiven thee " ? Is it ever those who cry mightily to God, who are found complain- ing that he is slack concerning his promises? And if not, then who are you that are finding fault? — making bold to come between the saint and his Saviour, to complain that the covenant is not fully performed ? If Christ is satisfied, and the suppliant soul is satisfied, who are we that we should inter- fere to measure the prayer against the answer, and remonstrate with the Lord that his ways are unequal ? Nay, I take you all to witness, — (2.) That this petitioner received more than the equivalent of what he had asked, by as much as it is a greater thing to suffer and be happy and joyful in the midst of suflTering, than it is not to suffer at all. Three Hebrew youths, faithful to God their Saviour, were shuddering at the prospect of the fur- nace heated seven-fold and roaring like the mouth of hell to devour them. Think you they did not pray earnestly that the flame might be quenched, or the power of their eneniies be palsied, that so they might not be cast into that place of torment ? And was God's ear heavy, or his arm too short ? Nay, how much greater than what they asked was the thing which they received! It had been a light thing not to be cast into the fiery furnace, compared with the joy and glory of walking through the flames unhurt beside the Son of God, "glorifying God in the fires." Daniel prayed and trusted that the God he served continually would deliver him ; — and looked, perhaps, to see the plots of his enemies unvailed, and himself saved from entering the lions' den. But how much greater the answer than the prayer ! How sweeter far the night passed A\'ith the savage beasts beside the angel of the THE IIEALINCJ OF THE PALSIED. Ill Lord, thau the sentried security of Darius's palace ! We do not need to go, for such examples, to the banks of the Eu- phrates and the Chebar. We may find them here by the Schuylkill and the Delaware, to-day. Here, many a sick man has implored the Lord for health and strength, and won a blessing greater than he asked, in learning — " how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong." Many a bankrupt man, that had struggled, with anxious cal- culations and many an earnest petition, for deliverance from accumulating troubles, and seemed to find no answer fro^n God, has been rewarded at last with the heavenly gift of grace to step majestically down from wealth to poverty, and has found a joy in low estate beyond what wealth could ever give. O mothers, that have bowed with strong crying, and prayer that could not brook denial, over some cradle filled with piti- ful moaning and wailing of the little one most dear to you, and have watched the inexorable symptoms grow from worse to Avorse, while prayer seemed vain, and hope went out in blank despair — have you no testimony to give, how the peace of God, and a possession greater than of sons and daughters, came down into your heart — an answer as much greater than the prayer as the Giver is greater than his gifts ? (3.) But now observe, finally, that when he had receis^ed the equivalent of his prayer, to his full content ; and when he had received " exceeding abundantly above wdiat he had asked ; " at last, this palsied man was given the identical thing which he had asked. Not for his sake — no, he did not ask it now. He was of good cheer — his sins Avere forgiven him. So far r.s appears, he was full of exceeding peace and content, craving nothing more, but wholly satisfied, the rest of his appointed time, to lie, a helpless infant in the everlasting arms. No, it was not for his sake, but " that ye may know that the Son of 112 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. man hath power on eartli to forgive sins, therefore he saith to the sick of the pals}^, Arise and walk." For now the palsy had accomplished its work, and could be spared. It had brought the suflerer and laid him low and helpless at the feet of Jesus to receive the forgiveness of his sins, and what more could it do for him ? The time was come, at last, when it might be dismissed, but not till now. AwA Christ is not so unkind as to give healing so long as suffering is still needed. He is not less merciful than the Father, as he is not more merciful. Would you dare to ask that your grief, your pain, your burden should be taken away before its A\ork was done ? Could you bring your mind to wish that all thcsj past hours, and days, and weeks, and weary months of suffer- ing should have been in vain, in vain ; and that God should call back these stern but kindly servants of his, while yet tlieir mission was incomplete, and bid them Let him alone ! sorrow is wasted on him! he is joined to his idols; let him alone? But now, the sick of the palsy is forgiven and at i^eace. The sickness has well fulfilled its painful but beneficent ministry, and he who is Lord over all the powers of life and death, that saith to this one Come, and he cometh, and to another Go, a.nd he goeth, may call away this sad-faced angel, and send him back to where, before the throne, they " stand and wait " for some new bidding upon messages of love. And he saith to the sick of the palsy. Arise, and take up thy couch, and go unto thine house. X. THE PRAYER OF THE HEATHEN MOTHER. ll.nu tijc uiomati was a (Drcck, ii ^*i)rctpl)i">cnidrtit b\) race; anti sl)c ksaugljt l)im t!)tU l)c luoulti cast fnrtl) tljc iicmnii out of l;cc iJttUflljtcr. — Mark vii. 23. [Cf. Matth. XV. 21-28.] I TRUST thr.t you understand and approve the reasons which brin^ me back, again and again, to the study of one and another of the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth. I am looking to find in them, plainly set forth, by word and act, the way of saU'ation. Nothing less than this, I have before argued with you, could have been the object of this ministry of miraculous healing, than to exhibit the Saviour in the act of saving — to exhibit the lost in the act of being saved ; to illus- trate God's power and mercy and how he applies it — to illus- trate man's need and sinfulness, and how man's faith lays, hold of and receives God's help. The gospels are so made as if men, slow of understanding, had said, " If only we could see God save a man, if we could see a man coming to. God in faith and receiving salvation from sin, then we should be able to understand these things better than by many definitions and explanations ; " and as if God had made reply : " Ye can not see my face ; no man hath seen God at any time ; God is a Spirit. But this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. In him I am manifest in the flesh. Know him, and you will know the Father also. Neither can any man see sin, but only the manifestations and results of sin. For sin is a spiritual malady, whose end is death. But here are these bodily maladies that are in the Avorld because of sin, and which are, in some sense, sin manifest in the flesh. And if 8 113 114 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. you would know how men with the invisible burden of guilt on the conscience, and of indwelling corruption in the soul, may come to the unseen God, and be forgiven and renewed and saved, — look here upon God manifested visibly in the person of Jesus Christ, and upon these representatives of humanity, with what simplicity they bring their various woes to him, and are made perfectly well." Thus we do see the Lord, as it is written, " bearing our sicknesses, and carrying our diseases ; " and with infinite variety of circumstance and character, like the Protean shapes of ugliness which sin as- sumes when it is working death, we see coming up before him, sometimes singly, sometimes in throngs, now with their own faith, and again borne or led by the pitiful and believing prayers of friends or parents, the palsies, the blindnesses, the leprosies, the deformities, the lunacies, the sorrows and be- reavements of men. And in each variation of character and act ahd circumstance that is set before us we find some new illustration of God's forgiving love and holiness, and of hu- man ignorance and impotency and need, or human faith and prayer. Let us look at this touching story of the Canaanitish woman and see whether it has not something to teach us. It is the simplest of dramas — with only two persons in the scene, and a group of disciples, like a sort of chorus, interposing a single exclamation that helps bring out the meaning of the story. But it is very dramatic, and all the more so for being so obviously and simply true. But to take the full force of the story we must try and bring before our minds the scene in which it is set. Our Lord had just come out from one of those sharp colli- sions with the narrowness, formalism, jealousy and sectarian- ism of the religious people of his time, that were so painful to him, and so disheartening. I cannot but think that, being such as he was, one such harsh encounter, compelling him to solemn, stern words of rebuke and denunciation, must have THE Pr.AYER OF THE HEATHEN MOTHER. 115 been more exhausting to him than weeks of healing and teach- ing ; so tliat it seems intelligible enough that when it was over he should say to his twelve followers, "Come, let us get away from this and rest awhile ; — let us seek out some place where we are unknown, and hide ourselves from the scourge of tongues." Whither can they go ? He cannot walk in Judea, for there the Jews are seeking to kill him. If he stays in these Galilean towns, he is beset by delegations of scribes and Pharisees that have come on from Judea on purpose to ensnare him in his talk, and his Galilean neighbors are ready enough to take up a reproach against him. He can find no rest in the wilderness, for they come to him thither from every quarter, so that the desert places become populous with sick and hun- gry crowds that are as sheep without a shepherd. There is one refuge for the wearied-out, exhausted Man of Sorrows. Toward the North, where the cliffs of Lebanon rise bolder and loftier and crowd closer down upon the sea, is the narrow strip of sea-coast memorable in history as the earliest home of maritime commerce, and of the splendid wealth that resulted from it, as well as of the luxury and corruption, the disasters and overthrows, that followed in their turn — the land of Tyre and Sidon, otherwise called Phcenicia. In those lands of the East, men speak of centuries as we speak of decades. Fifteen hundred years before Christ, Tyre was a great and famous town — mentioned in the book of Joshua — and Sidon, a day's walk to the north of it, was older yet. Six hundred years before Christ, following hard after the prophecies of Ezekiel to fulfill them, Nebuchadnezzar the Great came marching down the coast with his Chaldeans, and destroyed it after a siege of thirteen years' duration. It would not stay destroyed. That little rocky island lying off the cliffs of the inhospitable coast has been one of the points of earth predestinated for the abode of man. Three hundred years before Christ, Alexander the Great, marching his Macedonian phalanxes down this narrow coast line, found Tyre lying across his path to India. On its 116 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. island of rock it seemed to defy him, until, after seven months of vain siege, he gathered up the ruins of the former city that cumbered the shore and tumbled them into the sea, and over that isthmus marched over and took the town and destroyed it again. Since that, to this day. Tyre is a peninsula, and no more an island. But now, in the days of Christ, the city was growing up a third time. And the relics of its splendor at the period in question are visible to the traveler to-day. You see the traces of that magnificent enterprise that marked the palmy days of the Koman Empire. They sent to Egypt for the numberless granite columns that decorated the quays and breakwaters — you can see them now lying in piles under the blue, tideless Mediterranean w^aters. They sent to the Grecian islands for sculptured marbles. They decorated the neighboring hillsides with the villas of Greek and Roman merchants, w^ith statues and fountains and tesselated pavements. And not least " on every high hill and under every green tree " they set up again the shrines and temples of that utterly corrupt and licentious idolatry that had polluted not only this Canaanitish race itself, from the beginning, but all the races that came into relation with it. Its pestilent wickedness continued, as God had fore- told, to be a thorn and a snare to the chosen people itself. Tyre, destroyed again and again by God's judgments, was heathen Tyre still ; and its people w^ere true descendants of Sidon, son of accursed Canaan. The glory of Tyre is departed now\ I spent a night there more than thirty years ago. We looked out of our w^indows in til 3 morning, and saw the ground strown with ruins, in the midst of which was a long, massive double column of polished Egyptian granite, lying prostrate, that is the relic of a famous Christian Church built here, three hundred years after Christ, by the Emperor Constantine, of which the historian Eusebius preached the dedication sermon. These fragments, and the massive ruins of the harbor covered by the tumbling waves, THE PRAYER OF THE HEATHEN MOTHER. Il7 and here and there a sculptured stone or a lonely column, are all that remain of the princely city. The hovels of poor fish- ermen occupy the sites of palaces and temples ; and the muni- tions of her rocks are a place for the drying of nets. It was to the edge of the territory belonging to this rich, corrupt, heathen city — a most uncongenial neighborhood, that .the Man of Sorrows, just because it might be presumed that nobody wanted him, nobody cared for him there, had come for the rest which he could not find anywhere in his own country. And just here, on the only occasion in the whole course of our Lord's public ministry when he set foot beyond the narrow boundaries of his own little province, there comes out of her house to find him this heathen woman of an alien race, and the little incident ensues which ^ve have just been reading out of the two gospels of Matthew and Mark. I want to hold your attention fixed this morning on a single figure — that of this distressed, supplicating, persevering woman, calling your notice to her trouble, her faith and how it showed itself, and her suc- cess and reward. This woman — not a Jewish woman living over the border, but "a Syrophcenician by race," descended from the old ac- cursed Canaanitish stock whom the Jews hated, and Avho (of course) hated the Jews back again ; — this woman — not a con- vert bearing^ witness to the true God amid surrounding: idola- try, but "a Greek," that is a heathen still in her religion ; — this woman has a dreadful burden of distress which she wants, for some reason, to bring to this man Jesus Christ, and to no one else. Who was she, rich or poor, in low station or in high, of fair repute or of evil ? We do n jt know — we do not care — the questions are of no importance to the object of the story. Here was a brokcn-licarted mother with a frantic, raving child. That is a sort of case which is a good deal alike the world over, no matter where you find it, high or low. The case is one of those (tlie world is full of them) in which distress comes upon one through the malady of anotlier. The 118 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. immediate sufferer may be half unconscious of his calamity, or half indifferent to it. Perhaps it is the very nature of the malady that it benumbs the sensibilities, and extinguishes both fear and hope in a prevailing torpor or apathy of the mind. It is no infrequent sight, to those whose duties often call them to sick rooms, to see the patient stunned by the terrific blow of a malignant disease, wearing his life away in unconscious pangs. And it is a most pitiful thing to stand in the chamber of such a sickness, where there is nothing to be done, and see compassionate and broken-hearted friends hanging about the sick-bed, feeling that they must do something. But it is not the unconscious patient that we pity ; it is the crushed and despair- ing friends. We see the same thing in this cry of the Ca- naanite woman : " Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David ! 7ny daughter is sore vexed with an evil spirit" — "Pity on ?/ie;" not the tossed and torn demoniac child, whose power of suffer- ing is blunted already by her malady ; who is sinking under the power of it ; whom death will mercifully relieve by and by ; — no, not on her, but on this heart-broken mother, whose agony of mind is worse than tearing and rending of body, and vrho cannot be comforted unless the child is cured. The case is one out of a multitude in which the immediate sufferer is brought to Christ not by his own prayer but by the prayer of others. Sometimes it is a paralytic borne of four ; or it is a convulsive cliild brought in the arms of a weeping father, or it is even a dead child or servant, on which his healing or reani- mating power is invoked by the intercessions of another. Plave you ever seen anything like this in the symptoms of this raging pestilence of sin ? Have you ever known the patient fascinated by its illusions, or crazed with its mad delirium, or hardened into apathetic indifference, or inactive in the helpless torpor of despair, so that if anything is to be done in his behalf, it must needs be done by others? And do you find no encouragement, in such stories as this of the Syrophoenician woman, to believe that those who seem to be past the power of praying for them* THE PllAYKR OF THE HEATHEN MOTHER. 11!) selves may be taken up in the arms of natural affection and brought to where the Lord may lay his hands upon them and heal them ? Each bond of social influence, each tie of* natural affection, may be a means that God shall use to bring them within the circle of the attractions of the cross, "drawing thcni with the cords of love, with the bands of a man." O doubly blessed such an affliction, which brings to Christ not one alone but two — preparing the sufferer to receive the grace, and teach- ing the sympathizer how to pray for it ! Learn by this story of the Canaanite to bring not yourself only, but your friends and your children to the feet of Christ. This natural affection with which you yearn for the happiness of others may not be holiness itself — even the publicans possess it, and the very brutes display it nobly ; but it is the forerunner of it. It is the messenger that goes before in the path of the Holy Spirit, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest God come and smite the earth with a curse. 2. Observe, now, secondly, this woman's faith, of what sort it was, that so drew the loving approval of the Lord, and won his tardy but abundant blessing. To begin with, it was no superstitious or credulous reliance on she kncAV not what or whom. Mark by what name she called this stranger faring his way among these alien mountains, and seeking only for seclusion and repose. " Thou son of David," she cried, " have mercy on me ! " What was the son of David, or of any other Hebrew Iving, to her, a Tyrian and a Gentile ? Plainly there had come to her, — we cannot tell how, but we can imagine many different ways, — some notion of the divine promises of a Saviour, and some proofs that they were fulfilled in this Jesus. She was not believing on him of whom she had not heard, nor believing without reason or evidence. God never asks one to believe thus. Her faith was not a superstitious cred- ulity. But neither, on the other hand, was it a hesitating experiment, as of one who should say, " Let us try this new 120 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. healer, — he can't do harm and he may do good ; there is nothing else to try." This is not faith ; this is unbelief — dis- trust. You can tell it, no matter in what reverent language it may try to disguise itself, by its fuiiing and giving up. Faith holds on. It has decided into whose hands it wall com- mit itself, and there it stays. Faith is humble. It is itself a confession of weakness and need, and is not to be cast down nor discouraged by having the weakness and the need set before it. Tell it " You are poor and unworthy," and it is ready with the reply " Therefore I come for help and forgive- ness and acceptance." Such tests as these are the trial of your fliitli, — more precious than the fiery trial of gold that perisheth. That flame which burns aw^ay the distrustful attempt to make a doubting experiment of Christ, makes the true faith that commits itself to God without one reserve, to shine out like the drop of pure gold at the bottom of the crucible. Christ tried the faith of this heathen woman by these two tests, and it was perfect and entire, wanting nothing. She is content to be not only a suppliant, and not only, for the time, an unsuccessful suppliant, but (what is hardest for pride to bear) a neglected, slighted suppliant. What but a perfect faith could have sustained her under the silence of Christ? If he had but rebuked her, or argued with her, there would have been something for the mind to lay hold of and react against. But to follow him step by step as he walked on with his disciples talking with them on other subjects, as if he neither heard nor cared for her crying, this was the last cru- cial test of her perseverance in fiiith. If the Lord had been angry with her, it would have been easier to bear. Which of us would not have turned back and given up under the discouragement of such a silence? But still she followed on and cried out, " Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David ! " he all the time answering her never a word, until the disciples, sturdy fishermen, of no melting mood, could bear it no longer, and begged him not to protract the w^oman's dis- THE Pr.AYf:R OF THE IlExVTllEX MOTHER. 121 tress and theirs. But even after this intercession, he had notliing to say to the woman, but kept on his way, merely remarking to his disciples that his mission was to Jews, not to Gentiles. And through all these discouragements, she grows only the more importunate and persevering. The more this Saviour seems to repel her, the more it seems to her that she cannot be re- pelled — that she must cling to him. And now when it appears as if he had pronounced sentence against her and the case were closed, and he were departing from her, she cannot let him go. She throws herself in his path with acts of reverence ; she cries out still, "Lord, help me! Lord, hel^ mel" However it has come to her, there is no mistaking it, in her is the spirit of faith. She is not trying an experiment. Her heart is fixed. " She be- lieves and therefore speaks." Faith like hers does not need to be taught to pray. Its " native speech " is prayer. It does not need to be cautioned not to faint. It has no thought of giving up. It will keep on calling until the Lord hears and answers. Cavils, objections, difficulties are of no account with it. No matter who may rebuke it that it should hold its peace ; so much the more will it cry, " Have mercy upon me, thou Son of David." Tell it that the Lord has no need that we tell him anything ; that it is vain to argue with him who knoweth all things. So much the more will it fill its mouth with arguments, and order its cause before him. Thus has it ever been with the great examples of believing prayer. Thus Abraham reasoned with the Lord concerning the guilty city. Thus Jacob strove with the angel, saying, " I will not let thee go." Thus Moses stood ftice to fiice with the Lord, and pleaded with him for the honor of his name and the safety of his people, as a man pleadeth with his friend. Thus Hezekiah, when the word had come to him., " Thou shalt die and not live," turned his face to the wall and argued with God for his life. And thus this heathen mother not only followed the Lord with strong crying and tears, but when, at last, she knew the words which he would answer 122 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHKIST. her, and understood what he would say unto her, she put forth all the efforts of her intellect to meet his words. Her prayer was the effort of her whole self, body, mind and spirit — the clinghig of her hands, the outcry of her affections, the strenu- ous endeavor of her intellect in the quick wit of her rejoinder. Jesus answered and said, " It is not meet to take children's bread and cast it to dogs." And she said, " Truth, Lord ; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their master's table." We shall come, by and by, to study the other personage in this dialogue, and shall have difficulties enough to solve con- cerning the strange words and stranger silence of our Lord. But it remains now only to add to the account of this heathen woman's earnest affection, her bitter trouble, her faith prevail- ing above all discouragement, her perseverance in prayer, — the story of her reward : Then Jesus answered and said unto her, " O woman, great is thy faith ; be it unto thee even as thou wilt." And her daughter was made whole from that very hou^. XL THE HEALING OF THE HEATHEN GIRL. /or tt)i3 uaping ga tijp mai; ; tijc Jifmcm is gone out of tijt) iiauflljtfr. — Mark vii. 29. It is a twofold, rather, I ought to say, a manifold revela- tion, this that comes to us in studying the successive pictures, crowded into the scanty canvas of the four gospels, of Jesus Clirist the Healer, surrounded with the objects of his compas- sion and power. We fix our attention on the chief and central figure, and find the continually changing expression, in the terms of human nature and human language, of the eternal and unchangeable power and love of God. We look about upon the multitude of the sick folk, and of those who bring them, and find not only, in this vast diversity of bodily mala- dies the types of spiritual disease ; but in the various actions and words with which men come or are brought to the mani- fest and visible Christ, the exemplifications of that faith and prayer with which we may bring our various needs to the Father '* whom not having seen we love." Looking thus steadfastly (in the last Sunday evening's ser- mon) on the face of that sorrowful woman of an alien race, of a foreign home, of a heathen religion, who besought the Son of David so instantly in behalf of her daughter " sore vexed with an evil spirit," we found personal, practical instruction, I am bold to say, for each one of us : 1. In her example of intercessory prayer, which seems to be represented, as indeed it well may be, as peculiarly acceptable and dear to God forasmuch as it is not the bringing of our own immediate griefs and troubles and wqjits to ,him, but the bringing of another's griefs and wants, 123 124 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. "wliich we thus make our own. In nothing do we come nearer to the fellowship of Clirist, than when, like him, we thus "take the iniirmities and bear the sicknesses" of others, rather than our own. 2. We note the character of her faith in Je|us, not uuni- telligent nor irrational, but founded on some knowledge, however it had come to her, of who and what he was ; — an unreserved and entire and exclusive faith ; — therefore a tenacious and per- severing faith which having nowhere else to go will stay beside the Lord until there comes some sign from him that he har« heard. 3. We are instructed by the manner of her prayer, which is not only importunate and persevering, but argumentative, as if she would exhibit reasons that should move the mind of the Lord, and contest with him the objections to her petition. And, 4, Ave find the note of the divine apj)roval placed upon this faith and j)rayer, in the Lord's mighty work of healing, and in that tender word of his, uttered after his long silence and discour- agement of her — that word " O woman, great is thy faith, be it unto thee even as thou wilt ! " And now, having studied this example of human faith ac- cepting and laying hold of salvation, we turn our attention to the other figure in this touching scene, — the Lord and Giver of salvation, and look to find in his acts and words a visible and practical revelation of God in his dealmg with suffering and ruined men. For we look always to the life and words of Christ for a double teaching : — first, as the model of perfect human excel- lence ; and then, as the expression of the divine character — to use an apostle's words, as the visible " image of the invisible God." (Col. i. 15.) And how in the same person we can hnd this twofold teaching — how we are to distinguish when he is the model and exemplar of perfect human excellence, and when he is setting forth the attributes of the infinite Father, may some- times be a perplexing question to us ; at least it has often been a perplexity to me, until I came to understand that Jesus Christ is never more the revelation and manifestation of God, than when THE HEALIXG OF THE HEATHEN GIRL. 125 he is most the example of perfect and holy manhood, which is the very image and portraiture of the divine nature in which it is partaker. So that we have not to go through the gospels, as some have been wont to do, sifting, sorting and separating, saying, " Here it is the divine nature that speaks, and there again it is the human nature," but shall find, wherever we see the Lord, and hear him, that we have before us at once the perfect model for our imitation, and the exj^ression of the mind of our heavenly Father, who is also his Father. Now looking thus on Jesus Christ, first, as the niodel of our duty, and secondly as the expression of the divine nature, we find, as soon as w^e come to study his part in the story of the Syrophoenician w^oman, things which amaze us, at least, if they do not even painfully trouble and perplex us. And if they are perplexing to us as believers and disciples of his, I do not know that they are any less perplexing — perhaps they are even more so — to unbelievers. For on the very lowest view that intelligent unbelief takes, now-a-days, of the char- acter of Jesus, allowing the utmost latitude for supposing fault and inconsistency and failure, instead of being thereby nearer to an explanation of his strange dealing on this occasion, w« should be further away from it than ever. Here is a man of whom the very least that can be said, his enemies themselves being judges, is that he is pre-eminently kind, sympathetic and merciful. His ruling trait, as it is expressed by the author of Ecce Homo (who is as far as need be from being an implicit and uncritical believer) is an " enthu- siasm of humanity." It is an inadequate characterization, but it is certainly a just one, as far as it goes. He is a lover not only of mankind, but of men and women and children, each of them, as he meets them individually ; and that is a greater thing than to be a friend of the race. His sympathy stops at no boundary line of race or creed or condition. He is made a martyr to the universal largeness of his humanity. The one tenet which most provokes the spirit of national and 126 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. sectarian bigotry to plot and compass his death is that of universal charity and hope — the same tenet which provoked persecution upon his earliest disciples after his departure. Everywhere men recognize this in his looks, his words, his actions, and are emboldened, whoever they may be, to make him their friend. The most dejected, depressed and outcast pluck up heart to come to him, and never come in vain. The most alienated from the commonwealth of Israel — the com- manders of the enslaving armies, the collectors of the detested tribute, even the Samaritans, most scorned and hated of the outside races — were sure of words and acts of kindness from him, if from none other. And now see him here followed by a distressed and weeping woman that cries after him for help. The least he could do, one would say, was to give her his sympathy. The comfort of a kind word would cost him nothing. But he does not grant even so much as this. He does not even condescend to notice her. She addresses him in the most respectful terms. She follows him with the humblest entreaties. But he docs not turn his head to look at her. He Avalks on in complete disregard of her, as if she was not there, until at last his friends, a company of rough fishermen from the lake, can no longer bear to hear her heart-breaking sobs and complaints, and beg him to put an end to them. But (still without speak- ing to her at all, or paying any attention to her) he gives them a forbidding answer, to the effect that this case does not come within the scope of his mission. And when she reso- lutely will not be refused, but comes and throws herself down in his path, and turns up before him that sad, sad face of hers, imploring him, " Lord, help me ! " he does not even speak gently to her, — " My good w^oman, I am very sorry for you, but you must not ask me to do this." He does not even slip quietly aside and leave her. He actually seems to spurn her with insult : " It is not fit to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs." How stinging the comparison, we do not readily THE HEALING O^ THE HEATHEN GIRL. 127 conceive. To us, the word dog is not exclusively a term of opprobrium ; not seldom it is a symbol of loyal affection and fidelity. Not so in the East, where the dog is never spoken of with respect. Remember if you can, any place in the Bible in which the word is used otherwise than contemptu- ously. In those lands, the dog is not the friend and compan- ion of man. He is not the faithful dog, or the intelligent and affectionate dog. He is looked upon as a mean, treacherous brute, suffered to run wild in the streets of a town for the ser- vice he may do as a public scavenger ; or if kept about the house, only tolerated there for reasons of convenience. If the phrase had been " it is not fit to take the children's bread and throw it out to the pigs," it would not carry to our minds a stronger impression of disgust and repulsion than this word dog did to the woman of Canaan. It carried wdth it all the contempt which a Hebrew, and especially a Hebrew of the royal pedigree of David, might be supposed to feel for the un- clean heathen about him. How is this to be accounted for ? Is there anything in the character of Christ that will explain it ? Men have done such things as this before and since, doubtless. But not such men. If some men had done it, — seeming to scorn the agony of a heart-broken woman, protracting her distress in long suspense, meeting her humble entreaties with words of repulsion and contempt, — you would say that it needed no explanation at all — that it was perfectly intelligible from what you had known of them ; and when you had said this you would feel that you had spoken their utmost condemnation. There are other men of whom if such a thing should be reported, you would say, first, that you did not believe it ; and then, if the fact was shown to be unmistakable, you would say that it was some- thing inexplicable, and unless some way could be found of ac- counting for it, you might very reasonal)ly begin to suspect that there had been some attack of mental disorder such as impels the patient to the exact opposite of his habitual disposition. 128 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. But what can we do with this case — so extreme, so perplex- ing ? There are two ways of dealing with the discrepancies and other difficulties which we encounter in the gospels. One is to soften down and explain away the difficulty so as to diminish it to the lowest terms, and then blink the remainder. The other is, to take the facts just as they are given to us, and learn from them whatever lesson God means that they shall teach. And this is the way which I mean always to follow. Here we have an incident in the life of Christ, which is surely not in accordance with the common course of his actions; and no amount of explaining away will suffice to make it seem so. It comes into a small class of the excep- tional actions of his life — if Ave may call those a class which have very little in common except this, that they are excep- tional and out of the connnon course of his doings. Such, for instance, are the cursing of the fig-tree, the scourging of the traders from the temple, the terrible denunciations and threat- enings against the Pharisees. There is sometliing to be learned from each one of these, concerning Christ, concerning man, concerning God. What is it that we are to learn, in this case? 1. It is something worth learning, in the first place, that the difficulties which perplex us in the life and work of Jesus Christ are very like some of the difficulties that beset our understanding of the acts and government of the heavenly Father. So tender and loving God nmst be, and we are assured that he is ; — assured by his dealing toward ourselves and toward all creatures, assured by the common praises of his people, by the voice of his word, by the testimony of his Son. All his works praise him and his saints bless him. His fatherly providence extends to every least event. The spar- row does not fall without his care. And yet what unspeakable distresses fill the world, and fill the life of every human crea- ture — distresses which, nevertheless, the word, the silent will of God, might in a moment make to cease! God is the hearer of prayer — nothing in all his v/ord more explicitly declared, THE IIKALIXG OF THE IIEATIIEX GIRL. ^ 129 more gratefully believed ; and yet throughout his word the coustaut refrain of his people's eoniplaints in every age is this: "Plow long, O Lord, how long? let it repent thee concerning thy servants." " O my God, 1 cry in the daytime but thou heiirest not, and in the night season and am not silent. Why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me?" Alas! "when I cry and shout he shutteth out my prayer." How often these ancient words are the utterances of our own sorrowiid experience — the voices of our deep despair ! It is worth something to us in those houi^s of long delay and hoi^e deferred, when we cry and shout, and yet God seems so deaf, so dumb, — to find that when men bring their entreaties to the most mighty, most compassionate of all the sons of men, it may sometimes be that he, with all his qui-ck love, shall long delay to hear, and when he speaks, shall seem only to repel. And when we stand in studious w^onder, again, before this contradiction in the life of Jesus, even the darkness of it seems to shine as the day, when we reflect how like it is to the darkness that is round about the eternal Father. " O mystery of godliness," we cry, "without controversy great, that is manifested in the flesh ! " 2. AVe learn from this incident in the life of Jesus, what some have failed to learn, that his love and compassion are not such but that he is capable of looking with unbending fortitude on human misery, whenever there is a sufficient reason for it. His tenderness and loving-kindness toward every form of human distress do not proceed from this, that he has not the nerve to bear the sight of suffering. How the grandeur of his character is dishonored by those who conceive of the great love wherewith he loves, as a matter of nervous susceptibility ; and who find him to be made up of no qualities but those of mild- ness and gentleness, the subject of irresistible impulses of pity which are balanced by none of the sterner virtues of justice and hply indignation, " the hate of hate and scorn of scorn," — • as if he were one whom the cry of distress or the sight of blood 9 130 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. would break down in a moment, and whose voice had no tones in it but those of entreaty and benediction ! Ah ! they thought not so, who slank away before his righteous anger and his up- lifted whip, from the courts of his Father's house. They Icnew better, who cowered and gnashed their teeth under his denun- ciations of meanness and hypocrisy and oppression. She knew better, who followed him with entreaties and bitter wailings along the base of those Phoenician cliffs, pleading the anguish of her heart, and the writhing and torment of her demoniac daughter, before his dumb lips and unrelenting features. Any people with the New Testament in their hands ought to know better. But how common a thing it is that when a minister of Christ speaks in the very tone and spirit of his Master in rebuke of wickedness, there are wise editors and other critics to rebuke him by the example of " the meek and lowly Jesus." How often, when he hurls indignant rebuke, the threatening of God and the scorn of honest men, at those who despise the poor and needy, he is cautioned to remember that Christ's kingdom is not of this world ! And when he repeats with awe the solemn words with which Jesus himself describes the wrath of God against sin, there are those who are ready to object that Christ's own words are not quite Christian. It is well worth remarking that we have in this story a lively example of the sort of nervous-sympathetic tenderness that hastens to relieve distress because it cannot bear to see it or hear it ; but it is found not in Christ, but in his disciples. They are all for helping and healing. " Dispose of her case and let her go," \_d-oAu(7 itJijcn l)c smu ^csiis from afar, Ijc ran atilr lt^or3l)ipc^ \)'m; an^ crtjiitfl aut roitb rt Imtti imici', l)c oaitlj, " 1.DI)at l)aiic J tci Im luitl) tijcc, Jcsua, tljou <$-on of tl;c i1Io9t ijifil) Cmli ? J aiijurc tljcc bi; (Doii, torment mc not." — Mark v. 6. We are not permitted, in the contemplation of this story of one possessed with a legion of unclean spirits, to avoid speak- ing of the somewhat difficult question. What was the nature of the so-called " demonism " of the New Testament? Part of the difficulty in the case is wholly unnecessary, having been created by a misuse of words in the old trans- lation, which (not at all to the credit of the company of Revisers) is perpetuated in the new. It is nowhere said in the New Testament, concerning any one, that he Avas possessed of the devil. In one passage only (Acts x. 38), mention is made of the healing of " all that were oppressed of the devil." But in all other like passages there is no mention made of " the devil," but of " unclean spirits " or " demons." The two words are used Avith absolute distinctness throughout the books of the New .Testament. There is the devil, that is to say, the accuser, or the calumniator, used always in the singular number and with the definite article, of a ruling spirit of malignant ■wickedness, " the ruler of the darkness of this world." And then there is frequent mention of dcemons, or spiritual beings capable of coming into relation Avith men. The Avord is com- mon enough in oth-er Greek authors, as applied either to good or to evil influences. But in the Ncaa^ Testament it is used rarely if at all in any but a bad sense, as equivalent to " evil 133 134 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. spirits," or " unclean spirits." The confnsion between these two words is a needless confusion, from which we should have been saved if the counsels of the American scholars had pre- vailed in the revision of the English New Testament; this word demon and its derivatives would not then have been translated as if they pertained to the devil and to things dia- bolical. A second point of difficulty that troubles some people is that this describing of a malady as if it were the infestation of some living thing that had entered into the person seems so like the relic of a barbarous and superstitious pathology, which ascribes all sicknesses to such a cause. To which we may make either of two answers : (1.) That if this description of certain maladies as wrought by evil spirits is a survival of the superstitious notion that all maladies w^ere so caused, it may be a survival of just so much in that notion as was true and ought to survive. Or, (2.) That if barbarism and super- stition used to allege that all human diseases are produced by the agency of living beings invisible to the ordinary sight entering into the patient, tlien barbarism and superstition are in pretty good company, considering that the very latest word of the most advanced pathological science comes out at pre- cisely the same point. And here is a third difficulty, which is suggested in the question Why are there no cases of demonism in our own times ? — a question to which, as before, there are two answers : (1.) That it is not certain that there are no such cases now. There are many to insist, with a very formidable array of evidence in favor of their claim, that cases of possession by spirits, clean or unclean, are peculiarly frequent in these days. (2.) If no cases just like what are described in the gospels are recognized in modern pathology, this is no more than might be expected from analogy. Some of the diseases most clearly defined in early history do not appear in any modern treatise on the Theory and Practice of Medicine, and cannot be iden- TIIE (JADARENE DEMONIAC. 135 tified, by the description, with diseases now known ; and on the other hand some of the most formidable diseases that now scourge the human race are known to have had a modern origin. It is one of the commonest maxims of medical sci- ence, quoted sometimes to cover its own change of front, that the type of diseases changes from age to age. For my part, I find it nothing unlikely that in an age like that of the coming of our Lord, when a decisive conflict was impending between the kingdom of evil and the kingdom of heaven, these maladies that involve the mind and soul, and indicate the presence of some mischievous s])iritual agency, should be found to take on a character of peculiar malignity. The four evangelists give themselves very little concern about pathology and diagnosis, although one of them was a physician. But taking the gospels as an honest and not unintelligent record of the phenomena, we make out two points very clearly concern- ing this demonism : 1. It was not mere lunacy or epilepsy, for these diseases are recognized and clearly distinguished from the work of the evil spirits. There are j^atients in whom the work of the infesting spirit produces symptoms like epilepsy; and other patients in whom it produces symptoms of dumbness ; and there are still other manifestations ; but beneath these symptoms they detect indications, which the sufferer himself confirms, of something different from the mere physical diseases of like symp- toms, by which these cases were surrounded. 2. As this demon- ism was not mere disease, so, on the other hand, it was not mere wickedness — the willful giving up of one's self to the instigation of the devil ; — a mistake to which we are inclined by the un- happy mistranslation of which I have spoken. It is always spoken of and dealt with as an involuntary affliction, looked upon by the Lord with pity rather than censure. Neither is it treated as if it were, in any special sense, a visitation for sin. Doubtless these sufferers were sinners ; and doubtless their suf- ferings stood in some relation to their sins ; but it was not this relation, that thev were "sinners above all others." 136 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN. CIII^IST. The truth seems to be this : that sin, unbelief, ungodliness, opened the way for this awful curse, and that when the alien spirit had taken hold of body and mind and will, it had the power of plaguing with various disorders — with wild, moping, melancholic madness, or with epileptic convulsions, or blind- ness, or dumbness. Both the disciples and the evangelists, and even the popular apprehension of the Jews, distinguished clearly between such of these maladies as were merely physical, and such as were inflicted by malign spirits. The startling and unearthly fact, in the words and actions of the demoniac, is the presence in him of a double consciousness and will. You hear now his own voice in pitiful complaint and supplication, and now the fierce cry of the demon, speaking with his organs and claiming to represent his person. He does not know himself. He is torn with discordant desires, and tossed to and fro between conflicting passions. Physicians who have studied the horrible symptoms of delirium tremens describe the sort of double consciousness that sometimes characterizes its wretched victims, in terms which remind us of this demonism described by the evangelists. Here, in the story of the maniac at Gergesa, you find an example of it. The wretched madman, whose malady has de- fied all remedies and all restraints, who, with the superhuman strength of madness, breaks all fetters and chains, and tears the garments from his body, has fled away into the sepulchral caves, to be the companion of jackals and hyenas. At night they hear his howls with horror in the town, mingling with the cry of those obscene beasts. As one who is at discord with himself, he turns fiercely, not only on his own kind, making the lake road impassable by reason of men's terror of him, but also on himself, hating his own flesh, and mangling his body with stones. It is another sign of this unappeasable discord within him that as the shallop bearing Jesus, the Caster-out of demons, nears the shore, he rushes down to the water's edge, as if craving de- THE GADARENE DEMONIAC. 137 liverance, — and the next moment, when the command " Come out of him " has gone forth from the lips that have just rebuked the wind and the waves, he cries out : " I beseech thee, torment me not." Then, when Jesus asks him : "What is thy name?" his consciousness becomes inextricably entangled again, and he answers, as not knowing which is himself and wdiich is the host of infesting spirits: ^^ My name is Legion, for we are many." As to the spirits themselves, we get some hints of their ways here and elsewhere in the New Testament. They are represented as wandering uneasy and restless until they can find lodgment in some human body and soul, if may be ; if not there, then anywhere, even in a swine's carcass — some living organism of which they can take possession, and there work their malignant will. The unclean spirit beds itself luxuriously in the consciousness and thoughts and members of its victim, and loathes to be dis- possessed. Like certain noxious tropical insects, it sinks its feelers and tentacles into the flesh, so that to tear it away is like tearing the flesh away from itself. To leave it there is torture, and to remove it is w^orse torture ; so that the patient rushes to the surgeon, and when the surgeon puts forth his hand to heal him, it is as if victim and tormentor shrank away together, cry- ing : " Let me alone ! I beseech thee, torment me not ! " Now is it any dark parable to you, that I should need explain how like this is to the possession which sin takes of the mind ? — how evil thoughts and passions and purposes for which the soul was not made, but which are alien to its divine constitution in God's image, do root themselves like a morbid growth into its very substance, till the soul, bewildered at the unnatural con- flict within itself, cries out against the power of sin, craving to be delivered, and then, wdien the Deliverer comes "near, cries out again, with a loud voice : " What have I to do with thee, Jesus, Son of God most high ? I beseech thee, torment me not ! " We have the story of just such an inward conflict told by the 138 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. apostle Paul out of his own experience. Even Paul seems sometimes of doubtful consciousness, as if hesitating which of the antagonists in this interior struggle is himself, and which is the invader from without. Sometimes it seems to him that it is the malign influence that is himself, he willfully " fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind," into whom God enters v.ith the power of a new life, so that thenceforth it is "not he that lives, but Christ that lives in him." But in that almost tragical seventh chapter to the Romans, where he recounts the struggle, he says it was not he that did or consented to the wrong, — his real self was his better self, that revolted from the power of sin. " That which I do I know not ; not what I would, do 1 practise ; w^hat I hate, I do. But if I do what I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. ... I delight in the law of God, after tlie inward man ; but I see a diflerent law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the. law of sin which is in my members." Have you no like experience which has showed you how the power of sin so twists itself in with the roots of your life and seems to make part of yourself? Every life that is more than half a life feels the imjiulse of motive forces, the strongest of which become dominant, and tend to become domineering — " master-passions " we call them. Just in proportion as we rise above the torpor of a vegetable existence, we feel these forces working, throbbing, driving within us, like the motive power in an engine. And when these forces are burned out or ex- tinguished, we do not call it life, but suspended animation. It is a pitiful sight to see a man, with the powers and faculties of a man, become inert and useless for lack of motive — like a dis- used locomotive rusting on a side-track, or a steamboat that has exhausted her fuel, and is drifting with wind and current. His passion for money, for pleasure, for notoriety, is satiated, or is exhausted, and there is no headway left by which to steer him, THE G ADA RENE DEMONIAC. 139 except the hulf-speiit luoiiientuni of old habits. He keeps up a show of pretendin*^ to live, and does a little, in a languid way, of what live men do earnestly and for a purpose. He reads the newspa})ers a little, and has a little taste for literature or art, but not much. He talks politics a little, and bets a little on horses or candidates, and smokes — well, he smokes a good deal, and gives all his mind to it. But he does nothing with strong interest and has no distinct purpose or object in life. The in- spiring, impelling passions of life are to him a mere memory. Now these passions of life which when extinguished leave the man so inert and flaccid, when given free play, without con- trol of law or duty, become to the soul a dear necessity from which it does not know how to part. To rend them away is like tearing the life out of the life. Such is the organization of man, that the passions which impel the mind after certain objects become dearer than the objects themselves. The desire is a greater matter to us than the thing desired. You do not read human nature aright unless you apprehend this. You suppose that it is a craving for more money that keeps men up to their work long after they have money enough ? You might as well suppose that the motive which leads a company of English country gentlemen on a toilsome break-neck chase all day long after a poor, worthless brute was their insatiable appetite for fox-meat. It is a most unjust mistake to suppose that the motive which pushes on the business-man in the eager pursuit of money, long after all his reasonable needs are pro- vided for, is the mere sordid love of having. It is not this so much as the love of getting ; and not so nuich the love of get- ting, as the love of successfully pursuing and achieving. He must have something to do, and to do with his might. He needs a purpose in life, even though it be an inadequate and unworthy purpose ; and so this passionate eagerness of pursuit, after that which in his heart he knows is not worth pursuing, fills his mind with busy thoughts and plans, and makes him company for his solitude, and entertainment for his weariness, 140 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHKIST. and puts a mainspring into his life. It grows to inordinate strength, perhaps ; it overshadows his nobler feelings ; its morbid enlargement draws aw^ay the real strength of his soul ; it becomes his master passion, — his besetting sin. But the more it overgrows itself, the more it hurts him, the more it saps his life, the more he feels that he cannot part with it. It has come to be identified with himself; if that were gone there would be nothing left. Take away that fiery, domineering passion, and put nothing in j^lace of it, and what a useless and flaccid creature he has become ! life not worth living, nor the world worth living in ! It is not always so. You have known men the cutting ofi" of whose business career did not turn out to be the end of them. There was too much of them — too large and complete a man- hood — to be destroyed by a single stroke. They were inen as well as business-men ; and when the business was gone there w^as a man left. And you have known the other kind, nerve- less, extinguished, dead before his time, for lack of a motive power. It is not only failure that produces such. Success can do it as well. The man has reached the figure at which he always said he would retire, and so he buys him land and builds him a country-seat, and retires, with nothing to do; until by and by the spirit that seemed cast out finds its old lodging standing vacant, no new interest or passion to occupy it, and comes back sevenfold stronger, and hurries its victim back into Wall Street or Third Street as a speculator. I need not multiply illustrations. The same thing may be true in politics, or in any form of literary or professional com- petition — that men become enamored of their own passions. The more the master-passion l)ecomes aggrandized by use, the more one loves to feed and cherish it. And when it becomes intensified to exorbitant energy, driving the man along with accelerating speed in a course of selfishness, men w'onder at the momentum of such a career, and falsely think that it is the inordinate passion, the sin, of the man, that makes his life so THE GADARENE DEMONIAC. 141 like a mighty torrent ; just as if, watching the growth of some exhausting tumor that is drawing off into itself the forces of the system, they should say to eacli other concerning the patient " See what health and vigor ! how he gains in weight ! " — when, all the time it is not himself that is gaining, but his false self, his own worst enemy, that is so flourishing, while the man is wasting day by day. But after all, although these inordinate passions, rooted and growing like a parasite in the substance of a man, are not the man himself, it is almost as if they were, when the question arises. How shall they be eradicated ? Such a strange condition of the mind it is, when the capacity of loving the thing we abhor, and clinging to that we long to be rid of, is developed. We are fascinated Avith horrors. We throng the theatres to break our hearts over agonizing tragedies — so do we learn to love intense bitterness of agitation. I do believe that there have been those who in their craving for intense emotion have loved to cherish and aggravate within themselves the torments of a guilty conscience. One can hardly read the full story of Lord Byron's life without recognizing him as a morbid amateur of remorse, raging against God and man and against his ov.n soul, ever plunging into new depths of sin, and reveling in new acts and expressions of self-torment. " He was ever in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones." Now it is the nature of your sin that it has so imbedded and rooted itself in you that although it is not of your proper con- stitution, it has nevertheless identified itself with you to that degree that " when you would do good, evil is present with you." It has planted itself in these natural passions, innocent in themselves, but grown to inordinate dimensions of selfishness until they crowd God from his throne and leave him no room in the heart. For there is no room for God in any heart that does not yield him the supreme place. When that place is denied him, what can he do but depart? And then sin leaps into the vacant seat and rules. And though the soul 142 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. winces under its cruel lash, nevertheless the tyrant keeps his place by the victim's own consent ; and when the Liberator comes near, preaching deliverance to the captive, the opening of the prison-doors to them that are bound, the victim rushes to welcome him, and then in a moment the victim and the pos- sessing demons cry out together, " Let us alone ! I beseech thee torment me not ! " What help is there for the soul that is in such a plight — the will, the motives, the desires, the active faculties, all that should co-operate in the effort of self-healing, themselves implicated in the disease, so that even when deliverance is brought nigh, it will none of it, but warns the Saviour away? It will, and yet it will not. The consciousness of need and danger are of no avail; even faith and prayer bring no help, for there is no prayer but with a reservation — let not the double-minded man think that he shall receive anything from the Lord. So Au- gustine prayed, " Save me, O Lord, save me ; — but not now." O helpless man, the hope for you is that God will be to you better than your prayers, will do for you exceeding abundantly above that you ask ; — that when you pray, " Save me, but not now," he will answer, " Now is the accepted time ; now is the day of salvation, look unto me now and be saved." Be not afraid to come near your Lord and Saviour, even though the sin that is in you, the evil thoughts, the demoniac passions, cry out against your prayers and say, " Let us alone ! torment us not ! depart from us ! what have we to do with thee, Jesus, Son of the most high God ! " Doubt not that the compassionate Lord will be more ready to hear this craving of your better nature than the clamor of a legion of evil spirits, and that if you will but suffer him, he will deliver you from your worse self; he will command the inward discord of your mind to cease, and make the storm a calm ; and you, even though it be not without sore rendings from the retreating fiend, shall at last sit peaceful at the feet of your Kedeemer, clothed and in your right mind. XIII. THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADAKENES. ^iiii tijct) bcQan to IkscccIj bim to icpart from tijcir boriicrs. — Mark v. 17. This verse concludes the brief history of Christ's doings among the Gadarenes ; for the next verse tells how he took them at their word and went aboard the boat to return to his own. city. The four verses, 14-17, are a complete chapter by themselves. They tell the whole story of Christ's coming to a people, the attesting of his divine mission, the impression on the people's minds, their rejection of him, his withdrawal from them. It is the history of The Gosj^el among the Gadarenes. The scene of this whole story lies somewhere on the eastern shore of the little lake — the pond, as we should call it in America — of Galilee. I have never visited that shore ; except at favorable times, or under the protection of a guard, it is not safe to visit it, on account of the plundering and murdering Arabs that infest it. But from the w^estern shore, — from the city of Tiberias, and the lovely little valley of Gennesareth, — I have looked across the four or five miles' breadth of blue water, and seen the green treeless and houseless shores sloping down to the water's edge, breaking here and there into bluffs of rock, in the face of which one may descry the openings of oaves that have been hollowed out for sepulchres. Somewhere ilong that shore this strange event took place; but exactly where has been for fifteen hundred years one of the doubtful questions in Biblical geography. It was "in the country of the Gadarenes," but plainly not at or near Gadara, for that was six miles southeast from the lower end of the lake. It is a famous old ruin, to this day, and in the days of its glory waa 143 144 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST, the splendid metropolis of all that region. But as for any such place as Gergesa, or Gerasa, in the neighborhood of the lake, it was as undiscoverable as Capernaum or Chorazin on the western side, until, a few years ago, my venerable mis- sionary friesd and former traveling companion, Dr. Thomson, exploring that desolate shore, stopped beside a little heap of ruined buildings, and asked the Arab peasant who was with him what was the name of that place. He answered that it was called K/iersh ; and as soon as he heard the syllable, Dr. Thomson recognized that it must be Gergesa, and that this was " the country of the Gergesenes." He looked up the lake shore, and there, in the bluff hill-side, were the mouths of such rock-hewn tombs as the demoniacs might have had their dwelling in, and from which they might have come rushing dowm to the beach to meet the approaching boat. Just about this place, too, the flat by the waterside grows very narrow, the steep hills croAvding closer to the lake, so that, as he observed the lay of the land, he felt that he could fix on the very hill- side on which the great herd of two thousand sw ine was feed- ing, and the very steep down which they rushed into the sea. All which, and a hundred other most lively and interesting illustrations of the Scriptures, are they not written in Dr. Thomson's two delightful volumes entitled " The Land and the Book"? Wherever it was, on the east side of the lake, that the won- der took place, the frightened keepers of the swine would not have had fiir to go to find people to tell it to. It is lonely enough there now — among all the crowded heaps of ruin no inhabitant left except the wandering gangs of thieving Arabs. But the ruins show how dense a population once swarmed on this as on the other side of the sea. Into some one of the ten cities that gave the name of Decapolis to that region, there rushed some of the panic-stricken peasants who had been tend- ing swine, and told what had happened down by the water-side. •* That horrible, naked maniac, possessed with demons, that lives THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADARENES. 145 in the tombs — you kuow him ! " Oh, yes, tliey all knew him ! He was the terror of all the neighborhood. They had not dared to travel by that road for fear of him. But what has he been doing now ? " Why, he is cured ! He is as quiet, and gentle, and reasonable as any man. And the fury and madness that were in him seem to have gone from him into the great herd of swine, so that these went plunging down the bluff into the lake, and we have lost them." Naturally, all the city turned out, as Matthew says ; and, as Mark and Luke add, not only all the city, but a great crowd of the country-folk, to look into this strange story of the swineherds. The men must have run far, in their fright, so that the crowd that returned with them had a good distance to come. For by the time they arrive on the scene, this naked wretch has been got into decent garments, and they find him in the midst of the little group of the disci- ples, sitting at the feet of the great Teacher, "clothed, and in his right mind." It was a great work that had been done, and a great talk they had over it ; and the two themes over which these Decapolitans talked with their neighbors who had wit- nessed the afiair were these: 1. "Concerning the things which had befallen him that had been possessed of demons ; " and 2. " Concerning the swine." Without overstraining the story, to make it teach us more than it means, we may find good matter of reflection in this double subject of the inquiries of the Gadarene people, which seems to have been the double occasion of their fear (for we are twice assured that " they were afraid ") and of their en- treaty to Jesus to depart out of their country. 1. You may be at a loss, perhaps, to see any good reason why the healing of the wretched man possessed of demons should have been an occasion of terror to the people of the neighborhood. It might seem more reasonable that they should have found it rather an immense relief to their fears, when the frightful creature that had been the terror of that part of the country, whose horrible frenzies had made the road that led by 10 14G THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. Ills cave impassable, so that tliey took long circuits to avoid him, was foimd by them sitting as quiet as a good child, at the feet of Jesus, trying to learn something of God and truth and duty, and of who this wonderful Saviour was — this .destroyer of the works of the devil. You might naturally enough think that, being evidently a timid and fearful sort of i'olk, the}'' would have been so thankful for the relief as to gather at once about the Son of God with a petition that he would never leave them, but stay on their side of the lake and make it his home, lest the demoniac madness should return to their fellow- citizen, or should break out in some of the rest of them. What good reason could they hnd, in all that they had heard, for sending Jesus out from their borders? What good reason ? Ah, but tiiis is asking too much — to look for a good reason for a wrong action. The most that you can expect to find, in such a case, is an actual reason. It is the very nature of sin to be unreasonable. Its reasons are no reasons. We may look for the motives of it ; and for the ex- cuses for it. But in giving reasons for wrong conduct, we can- not go much further than to show that it is like the conduct of human nature in general under like circumstances. And we do not pretend to justify human nature. Why should Adam and Eve be afraid when they heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden ? Why should Moses be afraid and hide his face when the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush and said " I am the God of thy father " ? Why should Isaiah, when he saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up, cry out " Woe is me, for I am undone, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts"? Why should John, when in spirit he beheld the heavenly vision of the Son of Man, fall at his feet as one dead ? Why, when Peter saw the revelation of the power of God in the person of the Christ, should he cry out, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord"? Know this, and you will know why the crowd of the Gadarenes, when they saw by what power it THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADAREXES. 147 "was that their demoniac neighbor had been restored to health and reason, should one and all be struck with terror, and begin to beg tlie Healer not to stay so near them. It is in human nature, somehow, account for it as you may, that men do not like to come quite so near to God. It is not only that they shrink from the manifestation of the divine anger — that would be intelligible enough ; but men do not like such close dealings with God anyway. In fact anything that brings them close face to face with the powers of the unseen world is a thing that men in general shrink from. A supposed supernatural appearance — a ghost — no matter whether it comes on an evil or on a benignant errand, frightens them ; they want to get away and hide as soon as they may. And this is still more true with regard to every near manifestation of the Almighty God. Even when God seems winning us to hold converse with him, and by every persuasive word, evefi'y reassuring symbol, would draw us into his confidence — as when he says to Moses, " I am thy father's God," and shows him, for his comfort, how all that dazzling glory hurts not and consumes not — even then Ave hide our fiices, and are afraid to listen to his voice. The Christ may come to us only in works of benignant healing. In most gracious and merciful ways, we may behold the won- derful power of God revealed in Jesus. But so long as it is manifestly God, holy and just, that is revealed in him, we shrink away. AYe are afraid. It is our instinctive impulse to cry out, like Simon Peter, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Or confusedly, in panic, not clearly confes- sing to our own hearts what we do, we in our secret thoughts beseech him to depart out of our coasts. You do not think that this is so with you ? Do not be too sure. Perhaps you would know your own heart better at this point, if you had had some wide observation of the working of other hearts, or long experience in trying to persuade them. It is the one labor of the ministry of the gospel to persuade men to come near enousrh to God to know him — to look Christ 148 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. in the face long enough to know him. Dr. H. A. Boardman of tliis city wrote a little book entitled " The Great Question ;" and when you looked within to see what " the great question " w\"is, you found it nothing but this — " Will you consider the sub- ject of personal religion?" And why should not any man — every man — say yes to this Great Question ? But they w^ill not. The complaint of the old prophet is the complaint of the modern preacher — " My people will not consider." Christ comes to them with his word of hope, " Repent ye, and believe the gospel," and they will not purposely affront him and rebuff him ; but they find it irksome that he should come so near he, the Son of God, and look them in the face so ear- nestly with those " eyes like a flame of fire." He comes for nothing but blessing, to help men free of the torment of their infesting sin. But not even thus is he welcome. He cannot be so near us, holy, harmless, undeliled, without being a reproach to us. We see our secret sins in the light of his countenance. It becomes intolerable. Our lips frame words of welcome, and praise ; but our hearts are all the time silently pleading with him to " let us alone," and depart out of our coasts, even though we would shrink from putting such a thought into words. We feel easier with a legion of malig- nant demons near us, than with one faithful and merciful and holy Saviour, 2. The second topic of consultation among the city-folk and country-folk of the country of the Gadarenes, was this : — " concerning the swine." I do believe (to do these people justice) that if w^e could have been there, and could have charged them to the face with having deliberately rejected Christ — willfully driven away the great Healer, simply on account of their interest in pork rais- ing, they would indignantly and sincerely have repelled the imputation, and have suggested a number of other reasons by W'hich they supposed they were actuated, instead of the one which really affected and decided their minds. THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADAREXES. 149 It is not the way men act, to ponder the question of religious duty in all its aspects, and finally, with conscious, seltish wick- edness to confront God or his messenger with the announce- ment, " I see what is right and what is wrong, but the right is going to be prejudicial to me in the way of business, and I reject it. I will do wrong instead of right. Evil shall be my good." I know something of how human selfishness expresses itsidf now-a-days, and I do not believe it was so very different tiien. I do not believe they said explicitly to each other, *' Tins is a great and divine work of mercy. God himself is manifest here destroying the works of the devil, and delivering our fellow-man from bondage to unclean spirits ; surely the kingdom of God is come nigh unto us. — But then, on the other hand, see what it costs ; — two thousand head of pork is a great deal to lose, — and we will not have God's kingdom." I do not believe they said this ; I do not believe they distinctly thought it ; but they did it. And you, bevrare how^ you put yourself under the same condemnation. For you need not expect that the gospel of salvation Avill ever come to you without bringing along with it some conditions of loss and self-denial. It has the promise, indeed, of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come ; and gloriously it fidfills this promise, whether to society or to the individual. The gravest embarrassments to the pro- gress of the kingdom of heaven grow out of the constancy and generosity with which its promise of this life is fulfilled. The fact has been compressed into an elegant Latin proverb, by a famous Englishman of two centuries ago, in something like this shape: "Religion has given birth to riches, and the mother has been devoured by her offspring."* In the long nm, on the large scale, on the general average, the blessings of this life do so steadily flow toward the godly, that it is as much as the Church can do — it is a great deal more than the . *Ii3liglo peperit dlvitias, et mater devoraia est a prole. — Loed Falklanix 150 THE SIMPl.R'lTV THAT IS IX CHRIST. Church can do — to keep herself clear of those who seek godli- ness for gain. But the gospel, that brings with it such gain, never comes without inflicting some immediate loss, personal or public. In its institutions, it brings, for instance, the observance of a Sabbath rest ; and this, in itself, is a basis of national wealth to the nations that accept it. You are not half aware how much you owe in money for the weekly rest from labor. I remember, when passing through France more than thirty years ago, reading in the French newspapers the report of the debate In the Legislative Body on the bill for the Observance of the Lord's Day, that had been brought in by the illustrious Count de Montalembert. It was met by the economists with the objection that France could not afford to lose so much time out of her productive industry ; and the objection was answered on the spot with the undeniable fact that those two countries whose industries were most productive and pros- perous were the very ones in which the Sabbath rest was most scrupulously observed — England and the United States. No doubt about it ; but then, to begin with, it was going to cost a clear sacrifice of one-seventh out of the working time, and that was too much ; and so poor France toils on without her Sabbath, still. Thus it is with the institutions of the kingdom of heaven — they are a blessing for both worlds ; but then they cost So it is also with the charities of the church. You do not have to wait for the light of heaven to show you that it is more blessed to give than to receive. To every one that has learned to give, as God giveth, " with simplicity," this blessing comes, and stays beside him day by day and night by night. It pays to give — to give by method, and system, — to make a business of giving. It pays cash dividends in this present life ; for to make a systematic business of giving puts a balance-wheel of sys- tem into all one's business ; so that there is clear logic in that text of Psalm cxii., " A good man sheweth favor and lendeth ; he THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADARENES. 151 will guide his cfffairs ivith discretion." It pays, in this respect, to have the kingdom of heaven come ; but it costs. It is an income-tax of* ten per cent, to you, and blessed is he whosoever is not otJeiidcd thereat. Blessed is he, who, wlien the Saviour of mankind draws near with healing for the wretched and the sinl'ul, docs not begin to reckon up how many head of swine of his may be endangered thereby. It is exactly so with the social reforms of the Gospel. Not one of the social vices at which they strike, but entrenches itself in vested interests, so that even honest and good citizens find, to their own surprise, that they are indirectly involved in them. You cannot cut out these cancers without cutting into sound flesh. If the secret vice that burrows out of sight in this city, coming to the surface only now and then in some fes- terhig and fetid sore, should be exterminated to-morrow, there are very few of you that would not indirectly experience some incidental inconvenience in your business. There is a legion of demons raging through this community, seizing upon some of the choicest of the young men and trans- forming them to the likeness of fiends or of brutes ; invading the homes of the people to leave behind them a trace like that of a destroying angel ; damaging the wealth of society more than if an annual fire were to go sweeping from street to street. And now when some inbreathing of Christian earn- estness and sympathy, some gift of a wonder-working faith, makes us strong to say to these tormenting demons, " We com- mand you in the name of Jesus Christ that ye come out and depart," — when one by one the broken wrecks of manhood begin to take back once more the faculties of reason, and the fashion of their countenance is altered, and their very raiment changes from unwholesome rags to neatness and comfort, and they seek the company of Christian disciples and the assem- blies where they meet their Lord, and thus sit at the feet of Jesus clothed and in their right mind, and the constant, con- suming waste of mind and property begins to be stayed; — how 152 THE SIMPTJCITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. many are there who, as they look with admiration at the change, will bethink them of the effect it is likely to have on the courses of business, and be tempted to break in upon the songs of those w^ho give glory to God, with the exclamation, " My swine, O my swine ! " It is so with the personal morality of the gospel. It will in- terfere with your plans, break up your arrangements, frustrate your schemes, in business, in politics, in society, in the conduct of life. That petty fraud — that adulteration or misrepresenta- tion, so common that no one thinks of it — that smart, lying advertisement that you have got in your desk ready for the press, — those keen little tricks or disingenuous compliances in politics that are to carry the caucus or the election and put you into office or keep you there — those shams and deceits, that neglect of homely duties and of wearying charities, by which you are studying to gain social position and pleasure — how these herds of unclean things, the soilure and blemish of your lives, will have to rush off into the sea, if the Holy Christ is to come to you and live with you. Are you ready to let them go, or will you rather come and pray the Lord to depart out of your neighborhood ? My dear fellow-Christian, if, at one word from you, you knew that the mighty power of God, quickening, solemnizing, puri- fying, would descend upon this people, and that multitudes would turn from death unto eternal life, are you sure that you would speak it? How many of your plans — your innocent plans, perhaps — would be quite discomposed by it? — the par- ties you were going to give or to attend — the merry amusements that you meant to set on foot for the season, — your affectionate calculations on the social enjoyment and success of your chil- dren — ^these might have to wait and stand aside, if there should begin to be a very great and prevailing religious earnestness ; and are you quite sure that if, at one word from you, the Lord would draw near, mighty to save, you would sincerely speak it, saying out of your heart, " Yea ; Lord, even so, come THE GOSPEL AMONG THE GADARENES. 153 quickly"? — or while your lips were saying, "Come, Lord Jesus," would your heart be " praying him to depart out of these coasts " ? Remember, that it is on what the heart prays, not on wdiat the lips say, that the Lord is looking. And when the question is, my friend, on your own personal conversion, is there not, perhaps, light to be gotten from this story of the Gospel among the Gadarenes on some of the per- plexities that have troubled your mind, and been too difficult for your best counselors ? It is an old story, this which you tell me-— how you have struggled with that besetting power of sin that lias seemed to possess you like a demon — how you have longed to be converted — how, whenever there was a revival of religion you have hoped that you would be a su])ject of it, but how^ it never has come so; and how you wonder that God should leave you thus, when you are all ready, and willing, and anxious to be converted. But are you willing, wholly, unre- servedly ? Are there no worldly vanities cherished in your heart which you do not mean to let go ? — no selfish ambitions that you have been hiding in your bosom, afraid lest God should see them if he came too near ? — no stye of swinish pleasures which you have meant, and still mean, to reserve when the Caster-out of demons comes to dispossess you of unclean spirits ? Kothing of these ? Are you all ready, with a whole heart, to be Christ's disciple now? Then listen to me this one w^ord: You are Chrisfs disciple noiv; and the very next thing for you to do is to profess his name, and join yourself to the company of his people. XIV. THE APOSTLE TO THE GADARENES. 3is l)c ttitt0 entering into tljc boat, Ijc tbat Ijaii been pos3f09cb mitl) ^cmon0 bceoufiljt l)im tl)at l)c miflljt be luitlj |)im. 5ln& Ijc Bulfcrclr Ijjm not, but saitl) unto tjiin, "(So to tl)t) !)0U3c unto tbi) f^cn^0, an^ trll tijcm l)Oiti fircttt tl)tn{)3 tlje iTorb IjiUI) lione for tljec, rtnii l)Oiu tje l)aii mcrcp on tl)cc." —Mark v. 18, 19. Can any one explain the reason and significance of the varying instructions which our Lord gave to those whom he liad healed, and to his disciples generally, on the subject of making known his works and his character ? They are a per- plexity to me. In some cases I can understand the reason, for it is declared on the face of the record. In some other cases I can make a conjecture which satisfies me in j^ai't. And in some, it is difficult to make even a satisfactory guess. On the whole, the matter is a puzzle. I wish you would examine it and see what light you can get upon it. It is not difficult to understand his silencing the unclean spirits whom he cast out, with a rebuke, forbidding them to say that they knew him, or to testify that he was the Christ (Mark i. 34). He wanted no dealings with the kingdom of Satan except as an enemy, and would give no excuse for the blasphemers who declared that he ca.*t out demons by Beelze- bub their prince. Therefore he abhorred and repudiated all such endorsements, as Paul and Silas did afterward when the Pythoness at Philippi followed them day after day, crying, " These men are the ser\^ants of the most high God, which shoAV unto us the way of salvation ! " Then there are certain cases in which the injunction not to 154 THE APOSTLE TO THE GADAREXES. 155 report ii certain ininicle seems to be closely connected with thfc account of (huigcroiis plots agiiinst the life of the Lord, as in the third chapter of ^lark and the twelfth chapter of Mat- thew, as if it was simply a just precaution for personal safety. And in this latter passage (Matt, xii.) there is that striking quotation from Isaiah — " he healed them all ; and charged them that they should not make him known ; that it might be ful- filled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet: .... *he shall not strive nor cry, neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets ; ' " — as if this was an expression of that calmness, meekness, absence of egotism or ambition which marked the mind which was in Jesus Christ. Then tliere was the connnand to the three disciples, as they came down from the mount of transfiguration, that they should " tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man should be risen from tlie dead" ; and that more impressive injunction, following upon the solemn declaration of Peter, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God, in which he " straitly charged them that they should tell no man that he was Jesus, the Christ." Per- haps this, too, had something to do with those growing conspir- acies against his life which he forewarned them, at that very time, were soon to be successful. But I cannot help the im- pression that it was part of the settled method of his mission that men should see his works and life, and form their own con- clusions as to his pereon, rather than to have the proposition Jesus is the Christ put before them in the first place, and then miracles and gracious words quoted to prove it. This seems to have been the spirit of his answer to the messengers of John the Baptist when they brought the question, Art thou He that should come ? He answered them never a word ; but told them to look and see, and then go and tell John and let him judge for himself. And it would really seem, to-day, that if that was the thought of our Lord, the Church has at last, after eighteen hundred years of contrary practice — teaching a dogma about Christ and then citing his life to prove it — gone back to its 156 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. Master's own method, and given all its powers to the telling sjid illustrating of the facts of his life. Observe how very rarely the Saviour volunteered to tell any one that he was the Christ. He told the Samaritan woman ; he told one poor excommuni- cated blind man ; whom else did he tell it to, except in answer to question? But how do you explain his charge to the two blind men in Galilee, when he had healed them — to " see that no man should know it " ? or that command to the household of Jairus the centuric^i, after the raising of his daughter, — in almost the sam^e terms? But mainly, how do you explain that such injunctions were his general custom so far as he gave any directions at all to those whom he had healed of their diseases ? TJiis ptory of the man from whom he cast out the legion of demons is really, so far as I have found, the one solitary ex- ception to this custom. Other men, filled with a grateful and inexpressible longing to tell of the Lord's miraculous mercy toward them, he strictly charges to be quiet and let no man know about it. In this only instance, one who is beseeching to be allowed to get into the little boat just pushing from the shore, that he may be near his Lord and Saviour and follow him meekly and silently as a learner, is repelled and sent away with the command to go on a mission and preach the story of his mai'velous cure among his kindred and to his father's house ! Can you tell me the reason why the rest should be forbidden to tell of the loving-kindness of the Lord, and why this man should be forbidden to do anything else ? Why is it ail? There are a dozen charges to conceal the gospel, to one charge to proclaim it ; and yet I have heard this one text exhorted and preached upon a score of times, to where I have heard the others once, — if even they are ever preached upon at all. I leave the question for your own meditation and study ; and now, in the moments that remain, let us study this solitary case by itself for our own instruction. Take the scene once more into mind. It is changed since THE APOSTLE TO THE GADARENES. 157 last WG looked upon it. First, wc saw the strange meeting between the great Healer, and the fierce demoniac who rusihed down to encounter him as he neared the shore. Then ^ve had sketched before us the group on the hillside — the Healer of sicknesses and Caster-out of demons standing in the midst with his disciples ; at his feet, sitting as a learner, clothed and in hij right mind, looking up with wondering awe, and calm, peaceful gratitude, at his Delis^erer's face, the frantic creature of a few hours before, whose hideous cries and feats of desperate madness had been the horror of the whole country ; and the crowd that had rushed out from the towns of that densely-peopled region and were standing terrified yet angry, beseeching Jesus to leaye their borders. And this group has now broken up. There, away up the hillside, the angry crowd are lingering yet. They have carried their point, and the Saviour whom they have rejected has turned to leave them ; — it is so easy to be rid of Jesus if you Avill. Downward he goes in sorrow to the beach where the little shallop lies rocking in the sands, and timidly in the rear comes this new disciple with only one humble peti- tion — " that he might be with him." Among the greatest wonders of Christian art are to be reck- oned the things it has not done nor attenuated — the incompar- able subjects it has neglected. Who, for example, ever saw a picture of the young man with great possessions going away sorrowful, fallowed by that pitying look of tenderness and yet of disappointment, on the face of the Saviour who " looking upon him loved him " ? And what painter has ever attempted to set before us this scene of true human interest — the man dispossessed of the demons rushing down into the water as the little boat is pushing ofiT, begging them to put back for him, that he may be with Jesus ; and the Healer standing up and looking back with face so full of tenderness, but with inexor- ably forbidding word and gesture, saying, " Xay, not so ; but go to thy friends and thy father's house, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee and how he had 158 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. mercy on thee." And I seem to read upon the features so lately distorted with demoniac passion tlie bewildered wonder of his disappointment, as the boat recedes from his vainly out- stretched hands, and the dear face of Jesus fades into the dis- tance, and he stands there, deserted of the Saviour, and so lonely ! How strange a thing it is ! Here the Great Teacher goes about the land bidding men leave all and follow him, and stretches forth his hands to a gainsaying people that make light of his call and go their w^ay, some to their farms and some to their merchandise ; but now there comes to him one who would fain be his follower, and him he casts away from his presence, and escapes to the other side of the sea. So many he has charged to hold their peace and tell no man of his Avonderful works of mercy ; and here is one who asks nothing better than to follow him everywhere, and gaze in grateful silence on the face of his Benefactor, — and this one he bids go back to his friends and publish abroad the story of his deliv- erance! These are strange doings on the part of Christ — perplexing things. They do not seem to be natural, according to the ordinary courses of human conduct. They are not like the way men act in like circumstances. What are they like f Ah, my dear friends, these strange acts of Jesus Christ — unac- countable, perplexing, bewildering — are they not marvelously like the acts of God — his strange acts, and like his work — his strange work? If Jesus never did anything that troubled us to understand, and worried us, and drove us, at last, to the sheer act of trust that it must needs be right since he did it — how unlike he would be to the Father ! But just here things do look perplexing enough to this poor man ! "Go home to thy friends ! " " But, Lord, I have no friend but thee. I have been an outcast now these many years, — a dweller in unclean sepulchres, abhorred of men. What have men done for me but bind me in chains and fetters of iron ? But 'thy hand hath loosed ray bonds of pain, and bound me with thy love!' Let me be with thee where thou art! " But still THE APOSTLE TO THE GADA REXES. 159 from that most gracious One comes still the inexorable, " Go back — back to thy friends and thy father's house — go tell them what the Lord hath done for thee ! " " What? I, Lord?— I, so disused to rational speech? whose lips and tongue were but now the organs of demoniac blasphemy ? — I, just rallying from the rending of the exorcised fiends ? I, surrounded by a hos- tile people that have just warned away my Lord and Saviour from their coasts ? — And can I hope that they will hear my words, who turn a deaf and rebellious ear to thee? Nay, Lord, I entreat thee let me be with thee, there sitting at thy feet clothed and in my right mind, that men may look and point at me and glorify my Lord, my Saviour ! Let them go, whose zeal to tell of thee even thy interdict cannot repress, — tliere be many such — send them ! But let me be near thee, be with thee, and gaze, and love, and be silent, and adore ! " Was ever a stronger argument of prayer ? And yet the little boat moves off, and Christ departs, and the grateful believer is left alone to do the w^ork for which he seems so insufficient and unfit ! How like Christ's dealing is to his Father's ! To translate the story into the terms of our daily life, it shows us, 1. That the path of duty which Christ has marked out for us may be the opposite of that which w^e naturally think, and ardently desire. All our natural aptitudes, as we estimate them — all our tastes and preferences, yes, our p-are3t and highest religious aspirations, may draw us toward a certain line of conduct, while on the other hand the manifest indi- cations of God's word and providence inexorably close up that way and wave us off in another direction. A noble and unselfish impulse, a sacred ambition, may stir you to join yourself to the company of Christian ministers, and it lo;)ks like a duty so high as to be pflramount to every other. But there thrusts itself in the w^ay some petty but im- portunate call of humble and private duty, some obligation to kindred or a father's house, which, with eye fixed on the hope 160 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. of great and signal usefulness, you try to push aside as a tempt- ation of the devil ; but it will not be thrust aside. You say to yourself that a man must be willing to leave father and mother and children and business for the gospel's sake — but God finds some way of admonishing you that a man must also be willing to stay by them for the gospel's sake, when he is called thereto, and answers the fine texts with which you try to excuse yourself from humble and irksome duty, Avith other texts, — how he that provideth not for his own household is worse than an infidel, — and how he makes void the law of God who says to his father or mother Corhcui — I have conse- crated to religious uses the time and labor that might have gone to your support ; — and so God shutsaip your favorite path of service and makes plain before your feet a very humble and obscure little by-way for you to walk in. There is many a man with a ready facility of speech, and an enthusiasm burning to utter itself, never so happy as when he is overflowing with earnest talk, who is overwhelmed and bewildered with uttermost perplexity when God clearly says to him, by some providence, " See thou tell no man ! " What can it mean, that God should put to silence such gifts as his ! But God knows his gifts better than the man does. There is many a man who supposes that his gift is to talk, who has really a splendid gift for holding his tongue, if only he would cultivate it. There is often, doubtless, a Christian woman who frets at the barriers that nature and society have jointly put in the way of her wide, public usefulness, and turns back to the dull routine of housework and nursery-work, and takes u]) again the daily task that never seems any nearer to be finished, con- scious of faculties that get no play in these occupations, and tempted to complain that God has given her no scope for the exercise of her best gifts. Gifts ? What do you reckon among the best spiritual gifts? A gift for self-denying patience in steady work ; a gift for discerning what is exactly right and THE APOSTLE TO THE GADARENES. 161 detecting wliat is just a little ^vrong, and for going straight forward, without any words about it, to do tlie right and to refuse the not exactly right ; a gift for keeping a sweet and .serene temper in the midst of vexing and irritating trials — are there any diviner gifts than these? Covet earnestly the best gifts. The most excellent gift is charity. On the other hand, there is many a man wdio shrinks from the task of public discourse — a man slow of speech, hesitating of utterance, of shrinking temperament, who says to himself: "My manifest calling is to serve God in some inconspicuous way, glorifying him by near and secret communion, but not hoping for any wide success or influence," — many such an one, whom nevertheless God draws out from his seclusion as he did Moses, and gives him no time for his congenial meditation and retirement, but drives him into the very courses of public service from which he shrinks as being incapable. And how often it happens that this reluctant helper, so inwardly con- scious of his incompetency, coming to his work with painstak- ing study and preparation, and with trembling dependence on the help of God, is found to be the very man for the place in which the facile and self-confident had failed ! 2. It is a mere truism, but it is well to enunciate it in view of the illustration of the text — that when religious privilege and religious duty seem to conflict, the duty is to be preferred above the privilege. It would seem as if the case of this nameless lunatic of De- capolis had been set before us here as an a fortiori case for all generations to the end of time. Who of us can ever say of him- self that he is called to a more discouraging, a more hopeless duty ? What one of us can ever be called to surrender that supreme religious privilege — the personal, visible companion- ship, the personal, audible teaching of Jesus the Lord ? And if lie might not choose, but must needs go away, untaught, un- trained, to be alone from his Saviour, and be himself a teacher of others, can there ever be imagined a case between duty and 11 1G2 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. privilege Avlien you or I should be at liberty to hesitate ? His longing to be with the Lord was like that of Peter when he heard the voice from out the excellent brightness, and beheld the vision of the glorified prophets in the holy mount. " Lord," he cried, "it is good to be here! Let us build us tabernacles and abide ! " But he w^ist not what he said. 3. This is the final and manifest lesson of our story, — that duty, preferred and followed instead of privilege, becomes itself the supreme privilege. You are right, in choosing a place of residence, to pay the gravest consideration to the question what will be for the best spiritual advantage of yourself and your family — what oppor- tunities you and they will have for mental improvement, for the society of good men and women and children, for instruc- tion in righteousness, and for the public worship of God in his Church. Would you have the right, for any light motive such as your betterment in business, to uproot your household from the midst of the beauty and glory of a Christian civilization and plant them in a comnuuiity without schools,* witliout Christian society, without Sabbaths, without churches, without the word of God? Would you net say "No! the interests of the soul are supreme. What will it profit them or me if we gain the whole world and lose our own souls " ? And yet this is what the missionary does, — sacrificing the love of father and mother, of wife and children, and of native land, yea, and his own soul also, for the kingdom of Christ and his righteousness, — and receives his reward an hundred-fold in this present life — kindred and family, and houses and lands, an hundred-fold in spiritual blessings on his own soul, and in the world to come life everlasting. No ! the interests of the soul are very great, but they are not supreme. And if they were supreme, they are not to be gajned by running after them, but by letting them go. The supreme interests are those of the kingdom of God and his righteousness ; and whoso, forgetting the interests of his own soul, shall follow after these, shall surely find that all THE AI'Ooi'LE TO THE GADARKNES. 1 G3 things besido are added unto him. For he that will seek his own soul shall lose it ; and he that will lose his soul for Christ's sake and the gospel's, the same shall find it. See, now, as the illustration of this final lesson, to what honor came this nameless man at last. Having given up the infinite delight of the personal companionship of Jesus, behold him now promoted to this dignity, that he should be tlie first in the king- dom of heaven. The trained disciples, that had left all to fol- low the Lord, are passed over, and this highest honor, that he should be the first commissioned preacher of the gospel, is given to him who left the Lord himself, at his command, to do the Lord's work. And no man knoweth his name unto this day. But in the resurrection those unknown syllables shall be spoken again with " Well done, good and faithful servant," and shall shine above those of prophets and apostles, like the sun, and like the brightness of the firmament, forever and ever. XV. THE SIGX OF THE SWADDLI^'G-CLOTHES. A CHRISTMAS SERMON. €lit3 stjiill be a sip unto pern ; l)c sljall finli tl;c babe lorafipcii in 0iuttiiMinfl- clnttjcs. — Luke ii. 12. It is safe to say that Avhen the gospels were translated in our venerable version, it did not occur to any of the translators that this word siv addling -clothes would ever be an obsolete word, needing to be illustrated by a description of ancient or foreign customs. And yet so it is at this day. The usage which is alluded to in this word is to our American minds entirely strange. Few things among the old-world customs, I venture to say, strike some of us as more outlandish — more pitiable even — more entirely removed from our notions of good care and right training, — than the swaddling of littlo helpless babies, as it is practised, for instance, in Germany. I do not believe an American mother can generally pass ono of those poor little Wickelkinder, strapped down on its back to a pillow by spiral after spiral of convoluted bandages, without longing to apply the scissors and let the little prisoner go free. And yet it is only a few generations since this way of treating new-born children prevailed, with variations and aggravations, in all nations, even the most civilized. We owe our own emancipation, in this land and century, from this and other artificial traditions, to no other single influence so much as to a remarkable book published in the middle of the last century by a citizen of Geneva — I mean, of course, the Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It speaks thus of the universally prevalent treatment of an infant cliild as it had continued to 164 THE SICIX OF THE SU'A1/J)LING-CL0THES. 1G5 his day : " Scarcely docs the child begin to enjoy the liberty of moving and stretching its limbs, when it is j|)laced anew in confinement. It is wound in swaddling-clothes, an d laid down with its head fixed, its legs extended, its arms at its sMes. It is sr.rrounded with cloths and bandages of all sorts that pre- vent it from changing its position. It is a good thing if they do not even draw the bands so tight as to hinder respiration, and if they have the foresight to lay it on its side to avoid the danojer of stranojulation. . . . The inaction and constraint in which the child's limbs are confined must necessarily disturb the circulation, hinder the child from gaining strength, and affect its constitution. ... Is it possible that such cruel con- straint can fail to aflTect the character of the child, as well as its physical temperament? Its first conscious feeling is a feel- ing of pain and suffering. It finds nothing but hindrances to the motions which it craves. More wretched than a crimi- nal in irons, it frets and cries. The first gifts it receives are fetters ; the first treatment it experiences is torture." Such was the practice of a hundred years ago in the highest families of the most civilized country in the world. In many lands, partly owing to this very protest, the practice is better now. But in the slow-going East the common practice of the nursery is no better, and it is probably no worse, than it was nineteen hundred yeai's ago. But it is worse than anything we ever see or hear of in this part of the world. In fact, it comes nearer to the binding of an Indian papoose to a board, than to anything that we are accustomed to see in the families of Cliristendom. Once wound around with these swathing-bands, ;):netimes with an addition of fresh earth against the skin, ;ind packed in their cradles like a little mummy in its coflSn, the poor little babies are expected to stay there, all cries and complaints notwithstanding ; they are not removed by their mothers even for such necessary occasions as to be fed. I have heard pitiful stories toid by missionaries' wives and by missionary physicians, in the EusL, of the sufferings of little IGu THE SIMPLICTirY THAT K IN CHRIST- infants in consGqi\.enc8 of the obstinate persistence of parents in a usage wKiich we clearly see to be so unreasonable and unnatural. It is. obvious from the matter-of-coui-se way in which the thi^iig is mentioned, that when the virgin mother of the holy child, having brought forth her first-born son, swathed hiifl in swaddling-bands, she was only following the ordinary tradi- tion of the country. She did the best that she knew. But now, you will ask, is ii not strange that when the shep- herds were given a sign by which they should know their new- born Saviour, their Lord and Christ, they should be told, not of something distinguishing him from all children beside, but of something Common to all the infants that were born that night in all Judea ? " Ye shall find him wrapped in swad- dling-clothes." Why not say, according to the instincts of heathen mythology, Ye shall know him by the bees that gather to suck the honey of his lips, or the strangled serpents that lie about his cradle ? Why not say, according to the suggestions of Christian legend and art, Ye shall know him by the aspect of supernatural majesty which it shall be the dream and the disappointment of all the world's artists to attempt to portray? Or, Ye shall know him by tlie halo of celestial light beaming from his brow, as in the Holy Night of Correggio, and filling the rude stall with an unearthly brightness? Or, Ye shall know him by some accessories worthy of so royal a birth, by gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense that strew the humble shed? The very question brings its answer : You are to know him from all these natural dreams of a fond imagination, from the hopefol prognostications of pious Hebrew mothers, or the im- patient fiuicies of fanatics, or the artful fictions of impostors taking advantage of the general expectation with which the very atmosphere of Palestine was saturated, to set forth some feigned Messiah — you are to know him from all these by the fact that he is just the opposite of all such imaginings — that he is to all appearance just a helpless human infant, the most THE SIG>,' OF THE SWADDLIXC-CLOTHES. 1G7 h2l])les3 tbiii:,^ in the whole creation, bound and bandaged in swaddling-clothes. And if you would know how to distinguish him from other such, it is not by his grandeur but by his pov erty. There is no room in the inn for such as he; and they have laid him in the manger, among tlie cattle. To illustrate the use of such a sign as was given to the shepherds, let me suppose some traveler accustomed to the splendor and reserve of royal courts visiting the city of Washington, and asking on his way to tlic White House how he should find the President. We should tell him you may know him by this sign: He is a plain man, plainly dressed in a black suit, and you will find him in the centre of the thickest crowd, and everybody coming up to shake hands with him. First, he is not distinguished in the way you expect him to be, and secondly he is unmistakably distinguished in just the opposite way. But for some such ''sign" as this our traveler might naturally mistake for the President some attache of a . South American embassy standing apart in a halo of dignity and a light blaze of gold lace. This " wrapped in swaddling- clothes and lying in a manger" was just the sign the shep- herds needed. And we do well, if, looking for the Christ, we take heed to it ourselves. We are not yet safe from the error of them of old time, who thought to find the Lord clothed in soft raiment and dwelling in king's palaces. " She wrapped him in swaddling-clothes." We accept the unconscious testimony of the evangelist against all those unbe- lieving theories concerning the person of our Lord and Christ which explain the mystery of his character and person on purely rational and natural grounds. "His mind was by nature of an exceptionally noble type" (so these theories run), " and being placed in circumstances of singular advantage, in a simple and natural state of society, the whole atmosphere of which was redolent with inspiring hopes of a coming Messiah and his salvation, in a family in which the traditions of royal descent were a constant livinof influence, i.nd under a rare' and 168 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CimiST. perfect nurture under which all his fiiculties Vv^oukl have free play and exercise, it is no wonder that he should ha^^e devel- oped into the consummate Man of men. Amid the artificial and sophisticated civilization of Rome or Athens, shut in by ihe narrow bigotries of Jerusalem, such a character would have been impossible, it needed the pastoral simplicity of that Galilean Arcadia, the peaceful seclusion of quiet little Nazareth, and above all, the wise, religious and normal influences of the natural home training of that remarkable family of Joseph and Mary, to produce the character of a Jesus." Thus the unbeliever ; and, at the other extreme, it is curious to see how the exaggerations of the medieval system lend themselves to the same view — ascribing divine perfections to the Virgin Mother, elevating Joseph to be " the third mem- ber of the earthly Trinity," and so surrounding the infancy and childhood of Jesus with supposititious miracles, as to make of the crowning miracle of his life and character almost no miracle at all. This is a striking instance, and one out of many, showing how the systems of unbelief and of exaggerated credulity play into each other's hands. Now in vindication of the personal glory of Jesus, "the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth," I set over against all these uiiscriptural and anti-Scrip- tural notions that represent him as cast from his birth into the lap of an exceptional, a natural and normal, even a mira- eulous and divine nurture, — I set, as an illustration of the actual, historic fact, this simple and, as one might say, uncon- scious testimony of Luke, " she wrapped him in swaddling- clothes ; " and I will show how the constraints of artificial training that were imposed upon the Holy Child in the hour of his birth, to make him like the rest of his generation and unlike himself, continued to surround him to his death ; so that he was not in any sense (as our modern dreamers dream so fondly) the product of his age, but its antithesis. He was what he was in spite of his age, not because of it. And having THE SIGN OF THE SWADDLING-CLOTHES. 169 tasted continually, through his long life of grief, the bitter- ness of this protracted struggle against all the adverse currents of a corrupted world, and having triumphed against them all in dying, he invites us to drink of the same cup, and be bap- tized with the same baptism, as well as to sit down with him in the same kingdom. And now observe to what extent this hampering of the body that was imposed upon " the heavenly Child " by a world which even in its tenderest kind intentions was utterly incapa- ble of receiving its infant Lord, was a type of the limitations which beset him round from year to year. 1. First, there was the narrowness and ignorance of the most notoriously obscure — the most proverbially and almost illustriously insignificant — of all the petty out-of-the-way vil- lages in Galilee. It was a little hamlet, wedged between the hills near Tabor, lying off to one side of all important thor- oughfares. Probably modern Christendom can furnish no parallel to the inertness of life in such a village. A country hamlet in America, far removed from city and railroad, from shops and factories, seems to us to lead a somewhat irksome life of dull routine and narrow prejudice and domineering public opinion. But such a town in the atmosphere of Amer- ica and of the Nineteenth Century, is largeness and liberty and variety itself, compared with a French or German country parish. And yet into the dullest of these consider to what an extent the breath of modern Christendom is breathed, with its daily mails and newspapers, its school and church, its edu- cated minister, and its library. Imagine it with the most of these civilizing and animating influences withdrawn, and you have Nazareth. And do not think, carelessly, that in the prevailing listlessness, there would be naturally a greater lib- erty of thinking to one who should take it into his head to do anything of the sort. On the contrary, as we all know, there is no social tyranny so oppressive and domineering over indi- vidual liberty as that of the public opinion or prejudice of the 170 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHEIST. pettiest and most ignorant communities. AVhat miglit be ex- pected -to come forth from Nazaretli was well expressed in the question of Nathanael ; and in the general feeling that the various prophecies that the promised Messiah was to be of the lowliest and unlikeliest antecedents, were all fulfilled in the fact that Jesus was " called a Nazarene." And yet in spite of these sw add ling-bands, " the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom ; and the grace of God was upon him." 2. There might seem to be prospect of emancipation from these hindering limitations, when at the age of twelve he passes the confines of the lonely village, and goes with the multitude that keep holy day up to the city of his father David. His place — so he told those who had sought him sorrowing — was there at his Father's house. And truly there were great men sitting there in the temple cloisters, whose wise words have come down to us in the dark, square, backward-wa-itten characters of many a Hebrew volume of traditions of the elders. What a longed-for opportunity it must have been to the Holy Child, full of wisdom and the grace of God, to escape from the circum- scribed wisdom of the village elders, and listen at Jerusalem to those who sat in Moses' seat! ■ But alas, the rigid narrow^ness, the fatal clinging to the letter, the fear to teach what was right and true and confessedly divine except it could be justified by some commentator upon a commentator! We are accustomed to speak of the books of casuistry taught in Roman Catholic seminaries as cramping and "enfeebling to the mind ; and so they are. But they are vigor and liberty itself compared with the traditions of these Hebrew elders. By his visits to the temple the growing boy learned, not what to imitate, but what to hate and shun, and by and by to denounce as the making void of his Father's law^, in those days of solemn teaching when the multitude wondered at him because he "spake as one having authority, and not as the scribes." 3. I truly think that the Son of man found more congenial THE SIGN OF THE SWAPDLIXG-CLOTHES. 171 fellowship, lifter all, when he came back to the village syna- gogue, than ever he found in his Father's house that had been turned into a den of thieves. At least he had escaped from under the shadow of that overbearing hierarchy which always oppressed him at Jerusalem. There might be prejudice at Nazareth, and narrowness, and the constraint which village public opinion always attempts to force upon the individual. But the synagogue, the type of the church, was a singularly free republic. The sole supreme authority was that written upon tlie scrolls of the law and enthroned behind the curtains of the little sanctuary. It was natural that the youth who was beloved throughout the neighborhood " growing in favor with man," should come (as it appears) to be the designated reader in the Nazareth synagogue. There, as afterward in the marble synagogue built by Gentile generosity for the congregation at Capernaum, he added his " word of exhortation " to the words of Moses and the prophets. But " his own received him not." At Capernaum they murmured at him. iVt Nazareth they sought his life. 4. If anywhere the Son of man could escape the hampering limitations which the society of that age and land imposed upon him, it would be in the select society of those v;hom he had " chosen out of the world " to receive the kingdom of heaven. According to the famous maxim of Cicero, "the orator is what his audience makes him." And it is a true maxim. If the orator creates the assembly, it is also true that the listening assembly makes the orator. Think of it, and lay it well to heart, my brethren, that you, by your thoughtful, intelligent attention, may add such fi;^rce and inspiration to the preaching of the gospel as that other hearts shall be the more deeply reached and stirred.— Here, then, peradventure, may we not find some of the natural causes of the wonderful life and speech of Jesus Christ? Such listeners as Matthew, and ' John, and Peter — how much had they, not juniors but coevals or even seniors of the young Rabbi, to do with the develop- 172 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. ment of his great teachings? Now we cannot disguise the comparative greatness of these men. It is a striking argument in the evidences of Christianity to remark the sudden falhng- ofF when we pass from the books of the canonical Scriptures to the writings of Polycarp and Hernias and even Clement. But the contrast between the firet disciples and their successors is nothing compared to the contrast between them and their Master. The comfort and enlargement of mind which the Great Teacher could find, even in the selectest company of his disciples, was like that which some great dramatic poet may- have when he delivers his verses to the actors and hears them mangled and murdered, all the tenderness and fineness of their meaning lost through coarse- misappreciation ; or such as the composer may have, when the harmonies that have sung them- selves to him from the vocal page in the silence of his cabinet are turned to jangle and discord by the unskilled performers. He told them of the kingdom of heaven ; and they began to scramble for the offices. He spoke of subduing the world by love ; and they were ready to smite with the sword and impre- cate fire from heaven. He told of the sufferings that must be, and they took him in hand to rebuke him. And now behold him, so pent in by limiting and belittling influences from his rude cradle upward, as he grows in stature and in wisdom, and in favor with God and man. See, he looses himself alike from the swaddling-bands wdth which human aflfection, from the thongs with which human hate, have bound him. He takes off" the grave-clothes in which he has been wrapped, and emerges from the sepulchre of a dead age and a dead church. And how majestic, and how solitary ! Alone ! Nay not alone, for the Father is with him. The sign that was given to the shepherds is a sign also to us — that we find the Holy Child wrapped in swaddling- clothes. Illustrious men have sometimes had an honest pride in inscribing upon their escutcheon, beneath a noble crest, the symbol of the humble mechanic rank in which they had their THE SrCJN OF THE .SWA])DLIX(i-CEOTlIES. 173 origin. So the Church of* Clii'i.st, beneath the diadem of supreme royalty, quarters upon its shiehl, beside the cross and the thongs, the manger and the swaddling-bands, and invites the world to read the blazon. That family group which the painters of every later age have been essaying to depict, — tlie carpenter with his simple, uninquisitive faith obedient to heav- enly visions, the pure Virgin with her unskilled maiden ten- derness pondering strange memories in her heart, both leaning over the Wonderful, but understanding not the saying which he speaks to them, — these speak over again to us the language of that j^rophet who first called his child Immanuel, " Behold we and the Child whom the Lord hath given us are for signs and for wonders from the Lord of host^s." XVI. THE CHILDREN IN THE TEMPLE. A PALM-SUNDAY SEEMOX — TO CHILDREN. il^^ tl)c mu^titu^c3 tlmt mcnt Iicfnre l)im, an^ t!)at follauu'&, rricft, saying, " i3i"'3rtnna to tljc JS-on of JDanii) : Blcsscb is \)c tl;at comctl; in tl;c mtnu of tijc fnvii : ijosiuuia in tlje l/tfiljcst." — Matt. xxi. 9. As I looVi^.d out into the eveuing sky, a week ago, and saw the slender little new moon following the sun down into th'^ west, I thought to myself, There it is, once more, — the j)assover moon. When this moon is full, will be the time when, all the world over, the Jews will be making ready to eat the passover, and the time of the passover is the time when Christ our Lord was crucified. When the passover-moon was new, our dear Lord was getting ready to go up to Jerusalem where he was to suffer. And next Sunday (so I said to myself) Avill be the anniversary of that first day of the week, eighteen hundred and fifty years ago, when Jesus Christ arrived at Jerusalem, and made his entrance into the city with the multitudes and the palm-branches, and the children crying Hosanna in the temple. Of all the Sundays in the year, it is the children's Sunday. We must bring the children into the temple, that they may sing their Hosanna to the Son of David, who cometh in the name of the Lord. That was the strangest procession in the history of the world. It was a great nudtitude tliat ftll into line behind Jesus and his disciples all the way from Jericho, up the steep, narrow, rocky road, shut in by great cliffs on each side, that leads to Jerusalem. And of all that great crowd, we do not certainly 174 . • THE CIIILDIIEN IN THE TEMPLE. 175 know but two persons — two blind beggars whom the Lord had just healed near the gate of Jericho, and who at once had come into the procession and " followed Jesus in the way." But knowing who these were, we may naturally enough guess who some of the rest were. It would be strange if in that great company on their way to Jerusalem for the feast, there were not many of the five thousand, and of the four thousand, \vho had been fed by the Lord when they were hungry and fainting in desert places in Galilee, not many mcmths before. In such a crowd from beyond Jordan and from both shores of the little lake, there would surely be some of the palsied and lame who had been brought to him through all these years, and had been made to " leap like a hart " at the sound of his gracious voice. Among those that flocked about him to see " the King in his beauty " must have been some of those whose eyes he had unsealed from midnight blindness ; and among the voices that broke out in Hosannas till the wilder- ness and the solitary place were glad with joy and singing, there would not fail to be some which the touch of his healing finger had loosed from dumbness during those three years of doing good which were now^ drawing to a close. I can almost see that great, glad multitude that had come down the green Jordan valley, making everything gay with their pil- grim psalms and their bright holiday garments, as they make the sharp turn at Jericho, to climb through the steep ravine toward Jerusalem. I should look among them to see if I could recognize the form and face, once so fierce and dread- ful, but now radiant with serene peace and love, of one who had once been an outcast, dwelling in tombs, possessed of unclean spirits. Somewhere, close beside the Lord, I should expect to find a widow from the little town of Xain, leaning on the arm of that only son whom the Lord had given back to her from his bier. Do you think that the good centurion and the servant whom he loved, would be far away ? And would not the crowd make way to give a near place by the 17(J THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHIilST. Master to Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and hk little girl ? AVe are not distinctly told that any of these were there ; but we know that the crowd was full of those who had memo- ries like these, for they were shouting and singing praise to God for the wonderful — "the wonderful things which they had seen." Toward the end of the hard day's walk, just as they come to the last steep climb, the road passes two little villages, on 3 of which, Bethphage, has quite disappeared, so that we can- not find any trace of it ; but Bethany, where Martha and Mary and Lazarus lived, is still there on the mountain side. Here they find a young ass, and place Jesus on it, and lead him along with shouts, as if it were a king's triumphal march to his capital. There were plenty to sneer, no doubt, and say, " Not nmch like a king — poor, tired-looking, dusty, travel-worn man, plodding along on this homely little beast ! " But oh, what king or conqueror ever had such a retinue, or brought such captives in his train ? And now the procession comes to that wonderful point — how well I remember it ! — where the road from Jericho turns the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and all at once the ancient city, gloriously enthroned upon her triple hill and crowned with her diadem of walls, emerges upon the view. It is a fair sight to-day, but far more glorious then, when the Temple of God, roofed with gold, threw back the sunlight from its pin- nacles ! And as they halt here for awhile, the crowds from the city begin to pour forth and up the mount to meet them and escort them in. This made two great choruses — "the multitude going before and the multitude following after " — and hark ! now, as they move on, strewing the road with gar- ments and palm-branches, — hark ! they are going to sing. The two multitudes toss back and forth the responses of tlie psalm to each other, " Hosanna — Save now — Blessed be he that Cometh in the name of the Lord." It was a part of the great passover psalm, the one hundred and eighteenth, tliat they THE CHILDREN IN THE ') KMPLE. 177 were singing. I have read from it to you this morning. Head it again, at home, and see how fit it was — how full of prophecy. Our Lord loved it. It was daily on his lips through all this week of anguish. It was the last song of the little company at the Holy Supper, before they went out again into this ]\Iount of Olives, in that night in which he was betrayed. Think what it must have been to them all, as they shouted it amid the waving palm-branches, and made the dark valley of the Kedron, and the recesses of Gethsemane, and the steep of Moriah to echo with its Hosaiinas ! So they came up, at last, to the temple-gate — the "gate of the Lord into which the righteous should enter," — and the King of glory entered in. And now it was that the children came in, in crowds ; and they caught up the same chorus that the rest were singing, and took it with a great shout, " Hosanna to the Son of David." I suppose that children in Jerusalem were much like children in Philadelphia, in this, that they were glad when a friend came back amongst them. And- Jesus was their friend. No child ever seemed afraid of him. He never drove away a child that wanted to speak with him. His disciples wanted once to drive them away, and he said, " Xo ! forbid them not ! suf- fer them to come ! of such is the kingdom of heaven." And now the great men about the temple complained to him of the children's coming in and singing Hosanna ; and he answered, "Let them sing! What does the Psalm say? — 'Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise.' " I wonder whether he did not think, at this moment, of that time, twenty years before, when he had been brought for the first time, a little boy of twelve, to this house of God his Father. At any rate, he who had always preached to grown-up and educated men that their way into the kingdom of heaven was to become like little children, was not the one to rebuke the children who were only claiming that he was their king too, and trying to sing their Hosanmi with the rest. But he did sharply rebuke those that were jealous of the children and 12 178 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. wanted to stop their singing ; and he made it to be understood, from that day to this, that wherever he had a church, there was room in it for every little child to sing his praise and pray to him with all the rest. This is so like Christ, and so unlike the world in general, to declare that being ignorant, and weak, and of very little consequence, is no reason to hinder God's tender love, or to stand in the way of Christ's salvation. I have heard people, often enough, protesting against the folly of trying to give the joy and hope and comfort of the gospel to very feeble-minded folk, to very light and superficial minds, to very degraded and ignorant races, — of trying, in fiict, to seek and save that which is lost. Some people never can get over thinkhig that Christ's chief delight ought to be in very super- ior people, educated and refined,, — in the best nations and races. It is by laying this gospel well to heart that you will get the better of this foolish and wicked pride, and be content to confess your sin and need, and to sing with the rest of us out of this Hosanna Psalm, that the Lord is your Strength and your Song, and that he also is become your Salvation. This was the song with which the old and young came trooping together into the temple, on that Palm Sunday, swinging their palm-branches, and shouting, " Hosanna ! Save, Lord, Ave be- seech thee." Now let us all, old and young alike, beware of the foolish mistake of supposing that there is any virtue or merit in just being young. There is nothing in being ten or twelve years old which is in itself more acceptable to our Lord, than being fifty or sixty years old. Certainly he never thought of blam- ing us for growing up, and growing old and feeble. And he always taught that even very aged people could be like little children, and ought to be. Nothing in all the gospels is more truly childlike than what is told us of one of the splendid Roman army-ofiicers, who trusted Christ so like a little child, and of whom it was said " I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." That little child, Samuel, when he called THE CHILDREN IN THE TEMPLE. 179 out iu the dark, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth," was not more 'childlike than venerable old Abraham when he answered, " Lord, here am I." Young Timothy, taught in the holy Scriptures at the knee of his mother and grandmother, w^as childlike just as " Paul the aged " was, when he wrote to Timothy, " I am ready to be offered." The childlike virtues are loveliest when we find them in the strong, the wise, the learned. The dear old man, who numbers his days and learns how frail he is, and gently leans upon the arm of his Father in heaven, and fears no evil, as he totters down into the dark valley, is just as dear and childlike a child as the little boy that simply honors and obeys and trusts his Father on earth. And as a grown man may be like a little child, just so a little child may have grown sadly like an old man — having all the traits of mind from which the old man needs to be con- verted. A pitiful thing it is to see ! My friend, Mr. Charles Brace, who has given his noble life to rescuing lost, outcast children in New York, tells of the old look that they wear — the lines of doubt, distrust, suspicion, drawn prematurely about the lips and eyes — the set, j^inched expression of self-reliance, at an age when they ought not to be relf-reliant, but happily, trustfully reliant on the love and wise guidance of others — the air of self-importance and of knowing-it-all, as if nobody could teach them any thing, which makes them seem so un- lovely to most people's eyes. We have sweetly childlike old people, and we may find unchildlike children, anywhere — suspicious children, that can't trust ; wilful children that can't be taught; and self-conceited, self-important children whom people generally laugh at and sneer at, but whom they that have the mind of Christ tenderly pity, knowing through what tribulation and mortification they must pass, if thev are ever to come into Qirist's kingdom like little children. It is a ques- tion for every one of us, — how can we be as little children — in simple faith, in straightforward humility, in willingness to be helped and taught and forgiven and saved ? How can we 180 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. keep and cherish these traits of character ? how can we recover them if we have lost them ? how can we gain them if we never had them — these traits that are the glory of childhood and the greater glory of a Christian manhood and womanhood ? There are two more questions that will come up in some minds in connection with this story of the Palm Sunday ; and when I have tried to answer these, my sermon will be done. 1. What became of this great multitude of shouting and singing followers of Christ during the awful week that followed? Ah! it is a sad question to ask. What did become of them? We do not seem to see much of them afterward, in any of these four gospels. There may have been some of them among the dis- ciples that " followed afar off." Perhaps there were some of them scattered among the throng in the high -priest's palace; perhaps some were among the crowd before Pilate's house; but we don't hear of their crying Hosanna, then ; I wonder if perhaps there were any who had already learned to shout, "Crucify him." I love to think that there may have been some who stood with the " daughters of Jerusalem " beside the way, and wept when they saw the Lord go by bearing his cross toward Golgotha. But we miss them just when we would like to hear more of them — these two great multitudes. And if you think this quite unaccountable, just ask yourself where would you be this week, if some such awful tragedy of persecution were to be enacted over again. Here we are singing Hosanna on Sunday, with the multitude. If persecution were to arise because of the word, and the multitude should begin to fall away and scatter, is it quite sure that we should still be following the JMaster close at hand? 2. How was it possible that one so beloved and honored by the people on the first day of the week, should be cried on to a cruel death by the clamor of the peoj^le, before the end of the Aveek? And for the answer to this question, also, we have only to look carefully at the plain story, as it is plainly told, and then Tiir-: c'lirLDKKX ix the tempi.e. 181 look into our own hearts. This awful deed of the crucifying of the dear and blessed Lord and Christ was wrought by com- mon human motives, working in common human hearts; by common human sins, like yours and mine. Each day of this sad week bears witness against our hearts. This Sunday reproaches us with tiie instability of our friendships, the shallow- ness of our conviction, the transiency of our devotion. The Alonday will tell us, in the story of the cleansing of the temple, how the selfishness of common everyday interests was enlisted against the Lord. The Tue.^daij, with its sharp debates in the temple cloister, will tell how the acrimony of theological hatred was added to the confederacy; on the Wednesday, \\\\\\q Je3us seems for a little while withdrawn from view, we see his own disciple Judas plotting with the priests — basely deserting a falling cause, as men will and do, and yet disguising his guilt to his own conscience ; on the Thursday we see emerging into view, in the council of Caiaphas, that motive of the glory. of God anil the good of his cause, without which it would seem that the greatest crimes against humanity are never perpe- trated ; and when, at last, the weary dawn of the i^r?Wa?/ breaks above the ]Mount of Olives, it needs only the very common, very human policy of Pilate, subordinating all duty to his allegiance to Caesar and his purpose to be Caesar's friend, and the very common, very human unreasoning rush of the crowd in the direction of the loudest shouters and the apparent majority, to achieve the crucifixion of the Lord of glory. There is nothing in it all, but plain common sins like yours and mine. O hateful sins, that have wrought this deed ! Vile greed of gain; hateful sectarian emulation; base shrinking from the falling cause; unworthy faithlessness to God, that would do evil for God's sake; mean ambition; vulgar rushing \\\Xh the nuiltitude to do evil; — I know you all. I heard you whisper- ing in the plot. I saw you following to the garden. I saw you smite with the bloody scourge, and bufl^et with the hand, and plait the thorny crown. I heard your blasphemies, your 182 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST. shouts of Crucify, your sentence, " Let him be crucified." I heard your driving of those cruel nails; and through the dark- ness the railing voices which I heard scoffing at the Sufferer were yours. O sins that slew my Lord, henceforth begone! O mind that was in Christ, be thou henceforth in me I XVII. THE PETITION OF CERTAIN GREEKS. AN EASTER SERMOX. tloui tljcrc mere certain ^reeka nmon^ tljose tljiit went up to morsljip at tlje feast: t'jese tljerefcre came to Pl;ilip, loljid) was of Betljsaitia of (Dalilee, an& askcli l/mi saijinj), =S-ir, lue uioulis eee i'esus. pljillp romcti) anii telletl) iXniirciu : ^n&reit> cometl), anii pljilip, anli tljep tell I'esus. Sintf 2c5ue ansiucrctb tijcm saijinti, '(Llje Ijour is come, tljat tije 5-on of ilXan 3l;oult> be olorifieU. [Witli the following verses.] — John xii. 20-33. This being, in some respects a difficult Scripture to intelli- gent readers (it presents no difficulty at all to the unintelli- gent) is presumptively a specially profitable Scripture to as many as shall come to understand it. For it is God's method in the difficulties of sacred Scripture, first to provoke and stimulate inquiry, and then splendidly to reward it. The questions that arise on the first reading of this story are several : first, what is the importance of the incident, that it should be mentioned at all ? secondly, why there should have been so much hesitation and consultation among the disciples over so simple a matter as this request of " certain Greeks ? " thirdly, why it should be that after the request had been re- lated with so much particularity, nothing is distinctly said of wdiat came of it — whether it was granted or not ? finally, what was there in this seemingly trifling incident, just mentioned by one evangelist and then dropped, not so much as mentioned by the other three, that should so have agitated the soul of the Son of man that he should almost be ready to say, " Father, save me from this hour " ? What is the connection between 183 184 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. the message of Philip and Andrew to their JNIaster that certain Greek visitors to Jerusalem at the Passover wished to see him, and the answer that he made — " the hour is come ; the Son of man is to be glorified — but only through death. This grain of wheat, if it be preserved, will be but sterile : it must fall into the ground and die, and then shall it bring forth much fruit " ? If we w^ould knoAV these things, we must study deeply into the spirit of the four gospels, if by any means we may attain to the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. The message of the Greeks came to the ear of our Lord just at that juncture in his ministry wdien he began to feel with its heaviest weight the meaning of those words of the prophet Isaiah, which he had been wont to read aloud in the synagogues of Nazareth and Capernaum — the w^ords " despised and rejected of men." There had been days — the earlier days of his Galilean ministry — Avhen all who heard him seemed ready to bow in homage before the w^ords which he spake with such authority. In the presence of his mighty w^orks of healing, the voice of selfish bigotry itself seemed to be stricken dumb, and the contradiction of sinners to be abashed and put to shame. Here at Jerusalem, amid the pride of learning of the scribes, and the pride of " place and nation " of the priests and rulers, it was different ; but even here such crowds followed to gaze upon the man who had raised up Lazarus from the dead, that it was said among his enemies, " Behold, the whole world is gone after him." And yet, for all this, it is evident, even to an unprophetic eye, that he is rejected of his own nation. He has come to his own, and his own receive him not. For long months the bigoted Pharisee and the skeptical Sadducee, who never have agreed on anything before, have been working with one accord to entangle him in his talk, and embroil him either w^ith one party or with the other. Scribes and priests and rulers have been dogging him from one retreat to another as spies upon his w^ords and deeds. They have plotted murder in private. They have tried to provoke the THE ri:TITl()X OF CEIITAIX CREEKS. 185 mob to bloody violence in the tcnu^le court. Already they are begiiniing to draw the heathen governor into their plans, and to tamper with one of the twelve disciples with j^roposals of treachery. His near friends will not believe it when he tells them ; but there is no illusion in his own mind. He knov>'s the set, fanatic purpose of his enemies to take his life. And, notwithstanding many evidences of popular affection, he knows the circumstances that are combining to abet that purpose. How soon the bloody end of that lovely and blame- less life shall come is evidently a question only of a few days. From amidst the incessant cavilings, disputes, intrigues, trea- sons, conspiracies with which all this part of the story is filled, two incidents, wdiich come close together in the Gos- pel of John, stand out in delightful contrast with the rest. The first is that jubilant processional entrance into the city and temple with the palm-branches and hosannas of the multitude; and the other is this petition of "certain Greeks." Looking carefully into the language of the story we find some slight but clear and unmistakable indications of Avhat sort of people these Greeks Avere. The tense of the Greek verb used is significant: they w^ere " among those who were iu the habit of coming to the feast" — not chance-comers, passers-by on a jour- ney, but habitual attendants at the Passover feast. And, secondly, they were not mere tourists, or sight-seers, such as doubtless did gather to witness that wonderful pageant, so unlike anything the world beside could show — a whole nation congregated to solemnize the memory of a divine deliverance ; these Greeks were among those who were wont to come up to the feast, not to gaze but " to worship." These minute but dis- tinct inc\ieations mark this group of inquirers after Jesus as representative men. They belonged to a class destined to fulfidl a great and important part in the subsequent history of the king- dom of Christ — the class described again and again in the Acts of the Apostles under such titles as " devout Greeks," " devout per- 18G THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. sons," " they that feared God." The phrases are familiar to all at- tentive readers of the book of Acts, and you recognize how great was the part which this sort of people fulfilled in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They were not converts to the Jews' religion, you understand. They never had received the sacrament of naturalization and adoption into the family of Abraham, nor acknowledged the obligation on them of the ordinances of the Mosaic law. Outwardly they were Gen- tiles still ; but Gentiles who had seen the folly and falsehood of the heathen idolatries, and were seeking for something better. Such unrest and dissatisfaction with the " outworn creeds " of Paganism were felt throughout the Roman world. Some tried to rest in a general disbelief of all religion. Some tried to borrow a religion from Egypt or the East, and under the pres- sure of this demand the importing of foreign religions grew into a trade. [This was the ready explanation that occurred to some of the Athenian idlers as they listened to Paul and his *'new doctrine" from the benches of the Areoj^agus — that "he seems to be one of those introducers of foreign divinities."] But in the midst of men's waverings^ and gropings, these " devout Greeks" had found what they were looking for in the Jews' synagogue. For already the Jews were wandering everywhere, and wherever a few families of them sojourned, there was the synagogue. Every seventh day they met to read in Moses and the prophets of the hope of Israel, and with them, not only the converts who had entered into the Hebrew citizenship, but neighbors and fellow-worshipers who knew no citizenship but that of Rome — men who, seeking thoughtfully from one school of philosophy to another the answer to the questions. What is happiness? What is virtue? What is the highest good? — had found, at last, in Moses and David, teachers greater than Plato or Aristotle. The synagogue meetings used to be full of these outsiders. The Jews had a name for them, calling them, not converts, for they were not such — calling them "proselytes of the gate," as if hinting that they did not get beyond the THE PETITION OF CERTAIN GREEKS. 187 threshold.* Such an one ^vas the devout centurion Cornelius at Cesarea; another such was the good centurion at Caper- naum, who built the marble synagogue because he loved the Jewish people. They were very apt to be centurions or sokliers. Such were the "honorable women which were Greeks," whom Paul more than once found among his eager listeners in the synagogue. They were very apt to be women, revolted by the ■\\ ickedness of heathen religions. Such Avcre the nmltitudes at Antioch in Pisidia, who listened gladly to the Gospel, when the Jews blasphemed and contradicted, until Paul and Barnabas waxed bold and said to the Jews, " Seeing ye put from you the word of God, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." Wherever the apostles went, it was the ''devout Greeks" that were the open door by which the Gospel entered upon its triumphs in the Human world. Neither was the preparation of the heathen mind for the Gospel limited to these half-proselytes. Through the heathen litera- ture of this period, the scholar is startled every now and then to come upon thoughts that seem strangely Christian as we read — thoughts of a holier God, of a higher morality, of a larger humanity — they are the thoughts of men who are straining their eyes to find the light, and who already begin to get some glimpse of that true Light which lighteth every man that Cometh into the world. And alongside of this preparedness to receive the Gospel, which is discovered in the heathen mind of that age, is that marvelous providential preparation to dispense it, which is the admiration of all intelligent history. How often we say to each other, over the morning paper, "We live in a wonderful age!" The men of Paul's time and of Jesus' time lived in an age just *Dr. Ederslieim (Jesus the Messiah, vol. ii., p. 890, note) gives a reason which is hardly conclusive, for reekonin':^ the Greei s who song lit to see Jesus, as "proselytes of righteousness." This view niipht 'le admitted without substantially weakening the argument of this dis- course. 18S THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. SO wonderful. Then, as no\Y, the world had been brought into one place. The multitude of wrangling principalities, whose perpetual warfare had kept the earth in turmoil, had blocked the paths of commerce, and had disturbed the retreats of philosophy and the sanctuaries of religion, have been suppressed and supplanted by a universal empire, which may plunder and oppress, but will suffer none beside to do it; the track of whose conquests is the pioneering of great highways of peaceful trade ; and whose title of Roman citizen is a panoply and safeguard to its wearer to the ends of the earth. And with the universal empire lias grown up the universal language of literature and thought and commerce — the Greek. On this incomparable language it seemed as if the providence of God had conferred a sort of Pentecostal gift, that by means of it men of the most widely different lands and religions might hear and know his wonderful works. It is evident — more evident to us than it was to the men of that generation — that the world wjis ripe for some great change. The nations, an-hungered, were seated by tiftits, and there was a hush as of expectation that One should break and bring to them the bread of life. Bearing these great facts in mind, we turn liack to the story of the request of certain Greeks for audience of the great Teacher, and we find that in its method it seems marked with a sense of the grave importance of it. They would not venture to come with it directly to the Lord. They took careful coun- sel. They sought the only one of the disciples v/hose Greek name, Philip, seems to mark him as the right man for their message. xVnd it is not without deliberation and consultation with his fellow-townsman, Andrew, that he ventures, coming with Andrevv', to communicate to his Master that jjetition of certain Greeks, which, being announced to the Lord, seems to agitate him with so deep a revulsion of feeling. The Greeks were calling for him. And v;hy not go? Why should the Master hesitate ? It seems to have been a thought THE PETITION OF CERTAIN GREEKS. 189 not wholly foreign to the mind of the Lord or the mind of his enemies. In this same Gospel of John there is a striking passage which receives light from this in the twelfth chapter, and reflects it back again. Said he to them that would lay hold on him : " Ye shall seek me and shall not find me, and where I am ye cannot come." The Jews, therefore, said among themselves, " Whither will this man go that we sluJl not find him? will he go unto the dispersion among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks f What is this Avord that he hath said? " [John vii. 34-36, K V.] And now what nobler possibility had ever presented itself to one who felt that he had brought a great light into the world ? Thus far his light had seemed to be hidden under a bushel. That little patch of historic soil at the junction of three continents, itself so secluded from them all by desert, and mountain, and ocean — that narrow beat from Galilee to Jewry and from Jewry back to Galilee again — had been the sole scene of all his life and teaching. It does not appear that be ever once set foot upon the shore of the Great Sea ; although the broad vistas of it must ever and anon have opened up be- fore him, as from hill-top to hill-top he trod the weary distance to and from Jerusalem. Only once, exhausted with the burden that he bore, of our infirmities and sicknesses, he ventured over the rocky boundary of heathen Tyre ; but then it was only to rest, not to labor. " He was not sent," he said, " but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But now the prospect that seems to open itself before him is as when from out the secluded little Galilean vale of Nazareth one climbs the sightly eminence of Tabor, and before him spreads not only the land of Israel, the d'stant cliffs of Judah, the teeming valley of Jordan, and the goodly mountains of Lebanon, but also " the great and wide Sea" — the highway of the nations, the avenue of the world's commerce, the central scene of universal history and empire. This petition of the Greeks to Christ — how like it was to that voice which came a few years later to Paul as he 100 THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IX CHRIST. slept beside the ruins of old Troy — a far distant voice, heard faintly across the surging of the Hellespont, as of one clad in the garb of Macedonia, saying, in the language of another continent, " Come over into Macedonia and help us ! " Oh heavenly vision, to which he was not disobedient ! but follow- ing it, told the story of his Gospel until " his lines had gone out into all the earth and his words to the ends of the vrorld." What if it had been, not Paul, but Jesus, who, being despised and rejected of his own, had said to the seed of Jacob, " See- ing ye put from you the word of God and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, / turn to the Gentiles ! " Suppose it had been Jesus, not Paul, who, following these seekers of his light back to their Gentile homes, had taught the longing nations of life and immortality ! Suppose it had been he, who, speaking as never man spake, had stood in the busy streets of Corinth, had climbe