pr.'" li^:;.:- 5-,g".a-' Ufrrtm tljj Sltbrary of Ipqu^atljpJi by lyim tn tl|p ICtbrarij of Pnnrrton ^ti^nlogtral S>fmtnar^ BX 5937 .T54^6 1890 Thompson, Hugh Miller, 1830- 1902. The world and the man THE BALDWIN LECTURES. I. Institutes of Christian History : An Introduction to His- toric Reading and Study. By A. Cleveland Coxe, Bishop of Western New York. i2mo, $1.50. II. Witnesses to Christ : A Contribution to Christian Apolo- getics. By William Clark, M.A. i2mo, fi.50. III. The Church's Certain Faith. By Geo. Zabriskie Gray, D.D. i2mo, $1.50. IV. The World and the Man. By Hugh Miller Thompson, Bis Jiop of Mississippi. i2mo, $1.25. ^ItK galitiwlw gcctuKCB, X890 'vi.'^' THE World and the Man BY HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. NEW YORK THOMAS WHITTAKER 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 1890 Copyright, 1890, BY THOMAS WHITTAKER ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY THE publishers' PRINTING COMPANY 30 & 32 WEST 13TH STREET NEW YORK D. D. D. THESE TO THE DEAR AND NOBLE MEMORY OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS WHITNEY NEW ORLEANS. PASSED TO THE SPIRITUAL CITY OCTOBER 29, 1SS2. EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF WHICH THE BALDWIN LECTURES WERE INSTITUTED. " This Instrument, made and executed between Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop of the Protestant Epis- copal Church in the Diocese of Michigan, as party of the first part, and Henry P. Baldwin, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry A. Hayden, Sidney D. Miller and Henry P. Baldwin, 2d, of the State of Michigan, Trustees under the trust created by this instrument, as parties of the second part, witnesseth as follows: " In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hun- dred and eighty-five, the said party of the first part, moved by the importance of bringing all practicable Christian influences to bear upon the great body of students annually assembled at the University of Michigan, undertook to promote and set in operation a plan of Christian work at said University, and col- lected contributions for that purpose, of which plan the following outline is here given, that is to say: " I. To erect a building or hall near the Uni- versity, in which there should be cheerful parlors, a well-equipped reading-room, and a lecture-room where the lectures hereinafter mentioned might be given; " 2. To endow a lectureship similar to the Bampton Lectureship in England, for the establish- ment and defence of Christian truth: the lectures on 6 EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST. such foundation to be delivered annually at Ann Arbor by a learned clergyman or other communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to be chosen as hereinafter provided : such lectures to be not Jess than six, nor more than eight in number, and to be published in book form before the income of the fund shall be paid to the lecturer; " 3. 'i"o endow two other lectureships, one on Biblical Literature and Learning, and the other on Christian Evidences; the object of such lectureships to be to provide for all the students who may be willing to avail themselves of them, a complete course of instruction in sacred learning, and in the philosophy of right thinking and right living, without which no education can justly be considered complete; " 4. To organize a society, to be composed of the students in all classes and departments of the Uni- versity who may be members of, or attached to, the Protestant Episcopal Church, of which society the Bishop of the Diocese, the Rector, Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. Andrew's Parish, and all the Pro- fessors of the University who are communicants of the Protestant Episcopal Church should be members ex officio, which society should have the care and management of the reading-room and lecture-room of the hall, and of all exercises or employments carried on therein, and should moreover annually elect each of the lecturers hereinbefore mentioned, upon the nomination of the Bishop of the Diocese. " In pursuance of the said plan, the said society of students and others has been duly organized under the name of the ' Hobart Guild of the University of Michigan '; the hall above mentioned has been built EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST. 7 and called 'Hobart Hall'; and Mr. Henry P. Baldwin, of Detroit, Mich., aiid Sibyl A. Baldwin, his wife, have given to the said party of the first part the sum of ten thousand dollars for the endowment and sup- port of the lectureship first hereinbefore mentioned. " Now, therefore, I, the said Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop as aforesaid, do hereby give, grant, and trans- fer to the said Henry P. Baldwin, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry A. Hayden, Sidney D. Miller, and Henry P. Baldwin 2d, Trustees as aforesaid, the said sum of ten thousand dollars to be invested in good and safe interest-bearing securities, the net income thereof to be held in trust for the following uses: ** I. The said fund shall be known as the Endow- ment Fund of the Baldwin lectures. " 2. There shall be chosen annually by the Hobart Guild of the University of Michigan, upon the nomina- tion of the Bishop of Michigan, a learned clergyman or other communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to deliver at Ann Arbor, and under the auspices of the said Hobart Guild, between the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels and the Feast of St. Thomas, in each year, not less than six nor more than eight lectures, for the Establishment and Defence of Christian Truth ; the said lectures to be published in book form by Easter of the following year, and to be entitled ' The Baldwin Lectures'; and there shall be paid to the said lecturer the income of the said endowment fund, upon the delivery of fifty copies of said lectures to the said Trustees or their successors ; the said printed volumes to contain, as an extract from this instrument, or in condensed form, a statement of the object and conditions of this trust." PREFATORY NOTE. The undersigned prints these Lectures because it is a necessity of the condition. That they may not, by some possible readers, be misunderstood, he would say — He beheves very strongly in Human Nature; espe- cially in the Aryan Race, and his own branch of it; in "Heredity;" in the United States of America; but before all, and beyond all, he believes in Almighty God, the Father of Men, in the Catholic Faith, as declared in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and herein, in Joshua Ben Miriam, Who was born in the little town of Bethlehem, in Syria, 1895 years ago last 25th of December — ' The First true Gentleman that ever breathed " — believes in Him as the only God about whom he, or any man knows, or can know, anything, and as the Man who is his ideal of all Manliness, Kingliness, Courtesy and Valour, at whose feet — God and Man — One Person forever indissoluble, he bows in an adora- tion, of which Prayers and Sacraments are only a faint expression. In a great deal which calls itself " The Evangelical Scheme of Salvation " it will be seen he does not be- lieve. Indeed it is, as presented commonly, supremely I o PREFA TOR V NO TE. offensive to him, in its mean, sordid, and cowardly desire to get its poor little beggarly soul, what it calls, " saved. " To him, his Lord's Mission appears to have been to teach and help men to make their souls worth saving. — He does not think the Gospel a contrivance for dodg- ing Hell ! He is very sure that if a man deserves Hell, Hell is the best place for him, and, in any case, he will go there by the merciful ordering of a merciful God ! — And all the world will return thanks! If there seem to be in this, or anything else, " Unorthodoxy " the writer wishes to say he is strictly " Orthodox," in the' only true sense of that word. He accepts, and holds from the heart, every dogma of the undivided Catholic Church, and he believes these same dogmas to be the sole solutions of the questions of his own day and all days — for Catholic dogmas are living principles, seeds of things. He desires also to say to another possible kind of readers, that he has tried to keep up with the advance of what is called " scientific" knowledge in his day, and, as far as a busy and anxious life on other lines would allow, humbly believes he has succeeded. He accepts, of course, gladly, every step that knowledge gains, and holds that a Christianity which cannot do the same, needs very much to take stock of itself and see what it amounts to as a Religion or even a bit of Common Sense. But he ought also to say, knowing how little " science " knows, and how irrational and absurd much of it is, from day to day — (the present theories of light and heat for instance) that he does by no means PREFATORY NOTE. II admire a certain " puppyism " noticeable and offensive in some otherwise amiable " scientific " gentlemen, who, having measured the length of the fore legs of a newly discovered species of beetle accurately, insist that they must thereupon be granted a patent right on the making of a Universe! He, of course, philosophically recognizes " the natural development" of this puppyism from " the environment," but also thankfully reposes on the scientific fact that in the usual nine days the puppy, subject to its conditions, gets its eyes open. And finally, because he believes in God, he believes also in man (he worships a Man). But, as a result, he believes in his own Race as the highest development of Man yet on Earth, and as bound, therefore, to rule, order, control and direct, most kindly but most firmly, all peoples not so developed with which it comes in contact. — The big brother ought to help and direct the little brother — sometimes, perhaps, box the little fel- low's ears ! Who knows? He does not believe in the Gallic, infidel, unscientific lie which Thomas Jefferson put, like a fly in amber, into the " Declaration of Independence." Men are not " created equal," and no men and no people have any ^^rights" which they have not earned. Finally he believes in a world redeemed, in the Victory of Good here on this Earth, in a world where murderers shall be hanged or "electrocised," thieves put in jail, "politicians" banished, and "statesmen," of the present American type, be sent to fit idiotic, or other asylums for imbeciles or knaves, for life. He believes the time is coming when men shall be absolute lords and masters of Nature and all her 12 PREFATORY NOTE. powers, as was the one Man who is the type revelation and reaUty of what God means, when the Eternal Word says, " Son of Man." For that survival of the fittest he is thankful to believe, all powers, visible and invisible, are inexorably working ! Hugh Miller Thompson. Battle Hill, Mississippi, March 31st, 1890. CONTENTS. 4.ECTURE PAGE I. The Outlook, . 17 II. Led Up, . 47 III. Tempted, 81 IV. Bread, 121 V. Kingdoms, 155 VI. The Law of the Case, 197 VII. The End, 237 1 Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered. 3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. 4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, 6 And sailh unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down ; for it is written. He shall give his angels charge concern- ning thee ; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. 7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. 8 Again the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high moun- tain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ; g And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. 10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan : for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. 11 Then the devil Icavclh him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him. St. I\Iatthew s Gospel, Chap. iv. LECTURE I. THE OUTLOOK^ ' ' Men that had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do^ I Chronicles xii. 32. THE WORLD AND THE MAN. LECTURE I. THE OUTLOOK. THE sun of the nineteenth century is fast going down the western sky, and the fore- most races of the world are asking, of the Past, what has it done for them ? and of the Future, what awaits them ? For the century near its end there are voices of praise and voices of blame. There are those who tell us of its great advance in material knowl- edge, in control of the powers of nature, its turn- ing them to men's uses, its victories over the un- known. They proclaim the abundant products men have drawn from the earth, the vast treas- ures taken from the valleys and hills, the secrets wrung from the gray deeps, the wisdom learned amid the polar ice, and the trackless spaces that men have broug-ht under human control. 1 8 THE OUTLOOK. They speak in loftier strains of the broader reach of human Hberty, of the wider understand- ing and proclamation of human rights, of the victories for freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and of man's growing dignity upon the earth. They point us to these. They say the nine- teenth century shall be a century marked, in all coming ages, as the time when men awoke from the darkness of ignorance and superstition, and saw, for the first time clearly, the dawn of the day of hope and victory for humanity. And all these voices are true. We cannot speak too high a word of what the nineteenth century has done. We cannot proclaim too mag- nificently the victories it has gained for man. We cannot be too thankful that we have been born in such a century, trained in it, made a part of its struggles and its triumphs. The flower of all the ages, it is the most splendid century that has rolled out of the darkness of the unknown into the life and light of the world and man. And yet there are other voices, voices of blame just as strong as the voices of praise. Men say we have lost our old reverences, our old confi- dences, some of us have lost our old faiths. We have lost what we trusted to, what our fathers THE OUTLOOK. 19 believed in. High and blessed things have passed out of our skies as the vision of a dream. We have been shaken out of all our habitudes. We know no longer what is true and what is false, what is wisdom and what is folly. All things are questioned. All things are tried. All things are brought into the arena to be dis- puted. There is no grace in old reverence by which anything may justify itself. To-day it must vindicate anew its right to be. That it has stood for a thousand years is no proof, for you or me, that it ought to stand another day. Men ask its use, and we must cast it aside, destroy it, if we cannot give a satisfactory answer. And there are other voices of harsher blame. Men say it is a materialistic age, and point to these various victories of which I have spoken as an evidence of its materialism. It is an age that has lost its ideals. The heroic days have gone. Men are struggling only for temporary, vulgar, material success. It has lost the old, strong grasp upon things eternal. It has become friv- olous. Its questions are frivolous. Its aims are shallow. Men are working for the things of an hour. So men blame the age and blame it as truly, perhaps, as they praise it. There arc these two 20 THE OUTLOOK. sides to it, and both sides, I think, have the right to be; both of them exist, and there is praise and there is blame with equal justice, perhaps. And yet I trust that we here can say of the century in which we are born and doing our work that a great deal of the blame, like a great deal of the praise, is very shallow, very irrational. For, do you know I am rather glad I live in a questioning age ? I am rather glad that things are tested and tried, that men reverence the king's crown no more, that they reverence the bishop's mitre no longer; and it seems to me the age is nobly right in that it counts them both baubles unless there is that below them each that justifies the kingliness of the King and the Fatherhood of the Bishop. I am very glad that, in my day, mere symbols of things count for so little and the things themselves count for so much, that shadows pass away, but the realities that the shadows signify are stronger and more real than ever. We want, we must have, the power of leader- ship; we want guiding and controlling men; we want the power of intellect, and the strong, hon- est right hand to lead, to teach the ignorant duty, to uphold the weak and control the strong. What do we care for the kinp-'s crown ? We want THE OUTLOOK. 2i the man " who can rule and dare not lie," crown or no crown! What do we care for a bauble of lace and satin, we want the leadership, the fatherly heart, the comforting and enlightening, the lifting up and sustaining soul, the apostolic spirit which draws men upward in the old power of its beginning, when St, Paul, the Prince of Bishops, felt the want — not of robes and mitre, but of the old cloak, he left at Troas! That is the tone of the age. It does not to me sound frivolous. It sounds rather thoroughly earnest, real, and genuine. And when you complain again that the age has shaken men's faith, I say, and I quote the old prophecy for that, " Yet once more I shake, not the Earth only, but also Heaven." And " This word signifieth the removal of those things that are shaken as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." There are things that ought to be shaken, shaken out of existence, wiped away, and the age has dared to do that and has dared to do it, in many cases, wisely and well, and in God's service and man's. Our day has no faith in formulas as such. Faith in the realities the formulas stood for and expressed ! It cares little for faith in a dusty bundle of logical statements, called a 22 THE OUTLOOK. " Confession of Faith." It cares a great deal for a faith that lives and works and helps men on and cleans out the world. I should be very far from calling the age friv- olous, or even materialistic. I believe it to be, on the other hand, the most serious and sadly earnest age that the earth ever saw. I believe it to be, also still more, at heart, and when its dumb throes find speech, a thoroughly religious age. If there has been skepticism, if doubts have been evolved and cast abroad in speech and writing, they have been earnest doubts, serious doubts. We have had none of the frivolous unbelief or frivolous skepticism of the last century. Where doubt exists in the nineteenth century it is deeply and profoundly earnest. If I should characterize the age at all I should say it is an age of earnest, weary thought and burdened care, an age most profoundly self- conscious, almost pitiful to me in its self-con- sciousness. As I go among my fellows, meet them, talk with them, there comes always the feeling that these men are sadly in earnest, sadly in earnest about the deepest questions, too, dis- satisfied, longing and yearning for some founda- tion on which their lives can stand. So if they are in doubt and unbelief it is not THE OUTLOOK. 23 at all because they want to be. What they do want is a faith and a foundation. Only you can- not deceive the nineteenth-century man with words; you cannot put him off with platitudes; you cannot any more satisfy him with formulas, no matter how logical. Our advances in material science have taught us that we must get a grasp on the reality every- where, and that nothing can stand against the working Law of Nature and of God ; that you must have your principles and your plans stand- ing upon the foundations of organic law or they cannot stand at all. You must be able to test them, to try them, to put them to every possible examination that belongs to their line of investi- gation, or they will be of no use to you. They must not fail you in the hour of your supreme need. So it is an age of questioning, but of serious questioning, an age that stands waiting, as it were, but with throbbings of heart, dissatis- fied and in restless pain. What its religious writers call its " infidelity " is not at all " Tom Paine and ditch-water." Now there are questions that are facing us and shall hereafter face our children, which questions serious people are trying to get answers for. We cannot leave them unanswered. There is an 24 THE OUTLOOK. irresistible impulse, and it is felt to be an irresisti- ble necessity, to find for them, if we can, some solution. We are going to pass a whole mass of them over to the twentieth century, and we do not feel that we can burden the twentieth century with our doubts and our questions; we want, if we can, at least to find the basis on which these questions can be met with some hope of an answer. We have been trying to solve questions all through the century, and the most stand unsolved yet. There was a time when we supposed that universal suffrage, and democracy on the plane of the Constitution of the United States were going to settle all problems at least of social and politi- cal life. I remember the time well. It was the accepted faith that we had discovered their solu- tion, that we had stated the formula by which all could be settled in certain doctrines that we, first of all men, had found out. We have lived to learn that there is not a single question that has worried and worn humanity that has not yet to be answered in these United States ; that the problems of crime, of pauperism, of ignorance, of labor and of capital and their relations — that all these were never settled and never can be settled by any amount of voting. You may manufact- ure ballot-boxes by the million and keep the entire THE OUTLOOK. 25 population of this country, men, women, and children, black and white, doing nothing else but dropping ballots into them, from the first day of January to the last day of December, and you cannot settle a single one of these questions! There was a time, too, when we supposed we had settled the problems of Political Economy, and we have awaked to the discovery that '' com- petition is not the life of trade;" we have awaked to the conviction that men do not know their own interests very well, and very surely they do not carry them out, and that all the axioms which used to pass current in that " science " are not worth the paper they are printed on, in the face of changed conditions and the experience of human life. We supposed that universal education wrs about to settle some problems for us, and uni- versal education has filled the penitentiaries with men who can read, write, and cipher! Crime is no less on account of all this so-called education, and there is no evidence that it ever will be any less. We have simply put into the hands of men the power to commit crimes which otherwise they could not commit. You must first teach a man to write before he can forge your name to a bank check. You must first teach him chemistry 26 THE OUTLOOK. before he can compound a subtle poison to kill his neighbor. You must teach him a great many things, make him very intelligent, before he can commit a great many crimes which are exceed- ingly common to-day. So we are passing out of the century with all these things unsolved about us yet. The sorrow of the world lies upon our hearts and consciences still. The moanings and cries of pain, the pitiful dumb sufferings of men, are in all the air about us and appealing to all our hearts. We have not stopped poverty. Men are starving to death in Pennsylvania mining villages to-day, so the papers declared this morning ! And men in Kansas are burning corn to keep their houses warm! We have not stopped crime. We have not stopped ignorance. We have not stopped vice. Improved mowing and threshing machines and steam plows have not put bread into the mouths of the starving. Rapid transit has not emptied the slums of our great cities yet. Electric lights and telephones have not made one criminal less or one human pang of pain less upon the earth. Still the hundred-armed Briareus lies beneath our civilization and tosses in pain, moans in his agony. Now and then his agony finds articulate voice, and a terrible voice it is. Underneath our civil-^ THE OUTLOOK. 27 ization, here as well as in England and Germany, lies the pojoi '.lity of a revolution and an upheaval which will send down the pillars of our state in one wide ruin. We have, in the United States, the bad pre-eminence of being politically the corruptest people known to history, by our own confession! So the age is growing very serious at its close. I think the coming generation will be more serious than their fathers. The burdens are coming on them and they foresee it. Laissez yixzW— " devil-take-the-hindmost," as one may say — will not answer in this world as a practical philosophy any more. And that has been our political economy, and our politics as well. Let every man take care of himself; the weakest can go to the wall ; the strongest must always suc- ceed and trample down the weak. So far we have been trying to conduct our civ- ilization on the idea of v<2 victis, " woe to the con- quered, triumph to the victorious! Let him that can win. Let him that can hold." It is the sur- vival of the fittest. It is the ethics of the vulture in the air, of the wolf in the forest, of the fox in his den. According to its ability, power or cun- ning may grasp and hold and the weak world, without power or cunning, must be content ! 28 THE OUTLOOK. Nevertheless, with all this, I believe the world has advanced and is advancing, and that the nine- teenth century is the best century that ever yet dawned upon the earth. I believe that all these things that I suggest as questions unsolved will find hereafter their right answer. I do not be- lieve that ruin is coming at all. I believe that among us, whom God has set as the foremost people in all the world, there will be, in the long run, no disposition to shirk, to deny, to be cow- ardly or selfish in the face of the duty that lies on our hands. I am very sure that in the hearts of us all there is a strong conviction that there is an explanation, an answer, and a possible victory. We Christians have in our hearts an echo of an old word that has come down to us from the plains of Syria, " Behold, the kingdom of God is at hand." What a comfort and support that cry has been! The echo from the banks of the Jor- dan and the villages of Galilee has been to us the answer to the world's questions. There has been all along a strong faith in the hearts of our people that the kingdom of God, in some sense or other, is a reality; that it is bound to come; that what- ever may not lie ahead, that kingdom surely does. We have staggered on blindly and helplessly, sometimes most ignorantly, looking to see the THE OUTLOOK. 29 splendor of that kingdom rise above the eastern hills upon the weary road humanity blindly toiled upon, worn and sick for the long waiting. " It will all come right in the end " is an American conviction. We have been children of hope be- cause the promise of the kingdom has been our birthright. We have not sunk down in despair in any crisis hitherto, because we felt that God was on the side of men — not " on the side of the strongest battalions," but on the side of the weak- est and the poorest, on the side of the pauper, of the slave, of the oppressed, on the side . of the down-trodden and wretched — that God was on tJieir side! We have had that in our heart from our fathers' faith ; we believed that and it has carried us on so far. We have quoted words of Scripture on our battle fields. In our struggles in life we have believed they meant something, that they were real ; the promises would stand al- though the day gave no sign. Has all that passed away ? Shall we enter upon the twentieth cen- tury without tJiat ? That is the fear of many, you know. And then they turn and tell us, " What is your promise of the kingdom of God — what is it after all ? " Your pulpits, your preachers, and your teachers have taught you that the promise of the kingdom of 30 THE OUTLOOK. God, in their popular theology, meant simply this, that men must suffer in this world ; there must be always, what they call in England now, " a re- siduum " of humanity, a scum that rises on the top or a vile sediment that sinks to the bottom ; that this is an essential condition ; that you there- fore cannot look on the earth for justice, or righteousness from man to man. Men in the great mass must be content to suffer, to labor, and to die and be buried and forgotten ; that the kingdom of God means that if they bear this sore struggle well and have " saving faith," when they die they will go to heaven ! The kingdom of God and the promise of it have been used in this way, as something to in- demnify people for the sufferings, shames, dis- graces, and failures, and all the falsehood, wrong, and cruelty of this common world. "The king- dom of God is very far away. You reach it through the portals of the grave ; you must die first to get to the kingdom of God, and then there shall be atonement made and all wrongs righted, and the poor will be as happy as the rich, and the sufferings of this temporary mortal life will all be compensated by glorious rewards in that far-away kingdom to come ! '* Well, that thought has been a grand support THE OUTLOOK. 31 to men in darkness and distress. That hope has carried men through ages of sorrow and bitter- ness that would seem might have crushed them into the dust. But our present age decHnes to accept that' as its theory of the kingdom of God. I decHne frankly to accept it myself as any fit and sufficient theory. I look back to the early proclamation of it, and I read there that " the kingdom of God is at hand ! " Where ? On the earth ! In the hearts of men! I read there that Christ came to establish, in the world, the king- dom of God. I read there that He came to re- deem the world, that He came to make this com- mon earth His own. And so I am glad that I have lived in a century when men have awaked to that interpretation of the promise, when they have said to their teachers, " Nay, you shall not console me for an injustice reigning here by the promise of a justice after I am dead. I want justice notv. You shall not starve me here in this world and then indemnify me with the promise of eating bread in a kingdom of God hereafter. You shall not let my children die for want of bread and try to comfort me with religious tracts! You shall not forbid me and those belonging to me a hovel to shelter our heads from earthly cold and heat, and expect me to rest content with 32 THE OUTLOOK. ' the promise of a golden mansion hereafter in the heavens." The God who reigns in the heavens reigns here, and this world is His, we take it, as well as the world to come. If this world does not belong to Him, what world does ? We have awaked to the denial that the earth belongs to the devil. We have awaked to claim the earth for God and for man and man's good, to say it is His and He hath given it to the children of men ! and hereafter you must arrange things on that theory. Neither priests nor creeds nor rulers shall teach us any more, when they crush men to earth and bind them in chains of slavery, ignorance, or supersti- tion, that it is all right and we shall be paid for it in some age yet to come if we accept all kindly and lie down content to be trampled on! So the kingdom of God has come, from t.hat cry of the past, to be to us, in this nineteenth century, another thing to be thankful for. It has come to mean a new idea with civilized. Christian men, from the farthest extent of this land to the extreme of Russia, wherever Christ is worshipped. They are rising, in the large mass at last, to the comprehension of the fact that this earth was redeemed by Christ and that the kingdom of God is a thing that belongs to life rilE OUTLOOK. 33 and time; that the hope and purpose of Christian government and Christian conquest are to make the kingdom of God right here visible on the earth; to get men to lead their lives according to the laws of that kingdom ; to reproduce upon the earth a type of God's spiritual city in the heavens; that justice and mercy, kindness and pitifulness must be the currency from one man to another here. The idea finds expression, no doubt, in many wild words, and may possibly, in many wild acts. ki saying this we are going against a bit of sci- ence, so-called, of to-day. For, strangely enough, our science, in some of its lines, is working with the darkness superstition and oppression of the past on this very matter we are considering. It is said the earth is temporary only; it carries within itself powers to destroy it. The slightest variation imaginable in the motion of the stars may explode it in an instant. It may fall into the sun ; it may be consumed by collision with another star; but a terrible end must come, and it must finally swing back into the eternal fire mist from which it came. A very comforting doctrine and a very ele- vating! It viay be very " scientific," but it strikes me as being rather discouraging to us who are trying to do our day's work on earth. 3 34 THE OUTLOOK. " What do I care for a two-penny planet that is going to exist a couple of thousand years, when it carries nothing but my bones with it, anyway ? I shall be a great, strong tyrant if I can, and will live in it and have my good time in it, if that is the end of the business, with very little care for it or anybody or anything upon it." So scientific men are working with the darkest superstition and sorest tyranny, making the earth temporary, a shifting bit of color in a kaleidoscope, with no meaning. • It maybe "science." I don't know. It is not what I get out of the revelation, at all events, and it is not Avhat I believe from the reason I possess, and all the scientific talk in the world cannot make me believe it for one instant, be- cause such talk is only a guess. Of beginnings and endings natural science'knows nothing. I believe that God made the earth; I believe that Christ redeemed it, and that the Almighty has a great drama to work out upon it; that it is not an accident ; that it did not come by chance, from any fortuitous gathering of atoms. It is here for a purpose and to be brought back, finally, to be a place where the sons of God can live and know themselves to be in their Father's house. I don't know but all men have it, but certainly THE OUTLOOK. 35 there are one hundred milHon men who speak the EngHsh language who have it inborn in them, that this world is not going to nothing before we have settled a hundred questions or so that need settlement, before it has become meek and Christ- like, before we have built upon it the grandest civilization that man has ever dreamed or can dream, before we have made all men free upon it, before we have made all laws just upon it, all •cities clean and sweet and pure upon it, before we have extinguished upon its face murders and thefts and violence, before we have made it a kingdom sanctified and that God and man can bless! In our hearts there lies that conviction of the golden day, that belief in a better time com- ing; it has moved us on so far, given us all our victories so far. Our people have never despaired in the darkest hour, beca'use we have believed in the future, in the world, and in God and in that old cry from the wilderness, " The kingdom of God is at hand ! " notwithstanding the false in- terpretation of some of our theology and of a great many of our preachers. Let us hold its true interpretation which is lying to-day in the heart of our race, that the kingdom of God has meant to them a world clear and civilized, sweet and fair, a world of happy 36 THE OUTLOOK. homes, of art and science and of knowledge, of justice and peace, and while we live upon it, at least we " Sons of the Lion line," shall never be satisfied with anything less. Our kingdom of God means that ! You may call it materialism. We want to realize it now in the body instead of waiting for the spiritual life. It is right that we should. It is a mighty impulse to all our efforts. If we can- not realize it here, how can we prove that we shall anywhere ? If we cannot make the king- dom of God in our own hearts, lives, neighbor- hood, town, and family, can we make the kingdom of God anywhere ? Does not the instinct of the practical race demand that we shall see some- thing of it here ? That we shall have our hands upon it now? That there shall be some earnest of its possession ? And so our views of " religion " have been changing. I have spoken of the shaking of our faith, of the cries that men utter because what they imagine to be " the old faith " has been dis- turbed. I do not believe that what I hold to be the Old Faith ever was or can be shaken. I do believe we have shaken all to pieces certain formulas that some people supposed contained it. They have passed away. This has by no means THE OUTLOOK. 37 'passed — the sober earnestness with which all thinking men feel that they are responsible to an Awful Unseen Power of justice and righteousness; that the whole world altogether is responsible ; that all the ages have been wheeled out in regular order and control and are liable to the judgments of that Almighty Power which judges always, in the long run and in the final bitter end, most irrevocably righteous and true. That conviction has been deepening in the minds of all thought- ful people. And there has been a sadness about it while doing so. Our literature is full of sadness to-day. Our poets sing in minor keys. Our very science is sad, all sad and bitter earnest under this tre- mendous conviction of which I speak. You can- not call it an age irreligious, you cannot call it frivolous. Whatever the ripple upon the surface, deep down in the thinking hearts of thoughtful men there lies this solemn and tremendous conviction. They cannot be reached perhaps by the old-worn-out phrases, they cannot be impelled any more by the scares with which preachers used to scare them, but they are led by deeper and far more commanding terrors than those — the terrors of the pressing conviction that the everlasting laws of love and justice and righteousness are 38 • THE OUTLOOK. working straight on, grinding day by day, and like all the mills of God, though they grind ex- tremely slow, yet they grind extremely small ; that no man and no nation and no institution, no or- ganization no system can, in the long run, go against these everlasting laws without coming to utter wreck and ruin. Praised be God therefor ! So we shall revise, I doubt not, a great deal that has perhaps passed for " orthodox," revise out of existence a great deal that our fathers rever- enced ! Some people are " revising " their " Con- fessions of Faith," so called, now. But in all our revising we shall not revise away the Everlasting Faith which the Lord Jesus brought upon the earth. The large, broad, fatherly Theology of the Lord Jesus Christ will remain. No matter what becomes of the systematized theologies of the theological teachers, the eternal principles they think upon and try to express, and some- times .y/z/press, will always abide. We must enter on the twentieth century with some theory of a cure for human ills. We must have some standing-ground to meet the ques- tions existing and approaching. In order to settle these, there must be some definite and clear view of man's position and man's belongings on the earth. For man stands facing the world as no THE our LOOK. 39 Other creature does. He alone can say " I." He is a person, an independent existence. His first consciousness says to him, " I mn, and these things are." He separates himself distinctly from the universe as soon as he is conscious of anything, and the whole question of his duties and obligations resolves itself into a question of his relation to the world and of the world to him. " How do I stand to it and how does it stand to me? What business have I with it and what business has it with me ? How did I come into it and how am I going out of it, and while I stay in it what have I to do with it ? " All duties, the whole philosophy of life, all that belongs to human living will centre itself in such questions. Every sane man is bound to make some satisfac- tory definition of his relation to the world if he thinks at all. So it becomes to us a matter of vast impor- tance, to the men of this time and of the next ten years of special importance, how they are to enter upon the twentieth century of the Christian era, with what helps and solutions of the questions which are crowding every day more rapidly upon them and upon their children. The ques- tions will not wait. Europe will be republican while some of us are yet in our prime. It may 4° THE OUTLOOK. be communistic while some of us are yet in our prime. You cannot put things off by repeating old platitudes, old sophisms, old formulas — the questions that affect men's living and dying, that affect their bread, their physical health and well- being, their hopes and outlooks when they have found what they call their " rights." On my way from Detroit I passed an insane asylum. Any man who has thought upon it will tell you that insanity is increasing among us rapidly. Yet insanity ought scarcely to exist. We have gained something in merely providing for it. I confess that. But the final purpose should be its extinction. The next building I passed was a poor-house, a very large building. A poor- house in the United States of America and the State of Michigan in the last decade of the nine- teenth century! Clearly a poor-house has no right to exist in a civilized and Christianized land. Clearly if in any land, then not in ours — an empty continent, endless wealth, land for the tilling, and still a poor-house ! We have ordered our matters so stupidly that we are obliged, it seems, to have poor-houses. A poor-house is a blot on the land- scape. It is a confession of imbecility or worse, a disgrace to any people, and yet I believe there are people who "point to them with pride!" THE OUTLOOK. 41 Men ought not to be insane. Men ought not to be in a condition to be sent to the poor-house. There is something wrong about our social order, about the distribution of wealth and its gains and the manner of gaining it — -there is something wrong somewhere deep down, or these things could not be. Insane asylums, poor-houses, hos- pitals, orphan asylums — they are proclamations of folly and wickedness, of imbecility and false- hood ! You may talk the platitudes of your exploded political economy if you want to be thought learned, but wise men are not doing that any longer. They say, "Away with that trash. Those old musty sweepings will not pass current among men who do their own conscientious thinking any more. The ground must be taken that your asylums, poor-houses, and jails are only beggarly makeshifts, that in a sane human society these things are shams ! " We pass to a city like New York, and we learn that one-half of all the children born in the city die before they are five years old! Is that right ? You must provide children's hospitals and Chris- tian refuges for them, but I simply say that chil- dren have no business to die at that rate any- where and no civilized city has any right to allow 42 THE OUTLOOK. it ; that a city that cahiily does allow it and pro- poses to allow it ought not to exist, and will not, in a thoroughly civilized and sane condition of things, be allowed to exist ! You point me to a crowded penitentiary and tell me it is necessary. Necessary under present circumstances, yes. And I am glad you have a big one, and that it is _/>///. I wish you had three or four more just as full! You would not have all your rascals under key even then. But men are saying that penitentiaries also ought not to exist, that it is a strange thing if, after all these years of experience, all these pulpits, all these Bibles and Christian organizations, these common schools, colleges, and universities, that still a large blot upon the fair landscape in a State like yours, must be the walls and towers of your penitentiary ! Something must be done to get rid of peniten- tiaries, of pauperism, crime, ignorance, insanity, vice. Filthy slums of cities must be cleaned out, fumigated, deodorized physically and morally. Such are problems that face our civilization now, and we cannot blind our eyes to them and excuse them and say "it is all a part of life." It is not. And decD conviction is coming into the hearts of the people all over this broad world — in England, THE OUTLOOK. 43 Germany, Russia, France, among all thinking men, that these things have no business to be, that real statesmanship and true practical poli- tics and wise ordering and governing of men are to direct themselves to get rid of these. In our own country people are becoming tired of a politics whose idea of its calling is the straining every fibre of its body in drumming and blowing and lying to elect John Jones mayor of Jonesville, or even " Honest old Jim Jackson " President of the United States ! My purpose to- night is accomplished if I have helped you to see that we have not yet solved all the problems of the world by universal suffrage, or universal reading, writing, and ciphering, but that it is nevertheless our bounden duty, above that of all other men, to try to solve them ; that the solution of them is in the air; and that do as you please, they will be solved in some fashion, peaceably or by force. The United States have not lived for one hun- dred years proclaiming the right of revolution and government for the people, and men's inalien- able right of righting their own wrongs — these have not been preached from stump and pulpit and in political conventions until they have worked their way down into the abiding convic- 44 THE OUTLOOK. tions of men, and of men in other countries as well as our own, that government exists for the good of the governed, whether it be state, national, or municipal, without producing an effect. Ques- tions like these suggested will be answered in some way. I am sure we shall attempt them in a wise way. I think we have not been led out of the northern forests, have not wrought and toiled and thought and endured for fourteen hundred years, without having found out how to deal well and wisely in the supreme crisis, when it comes, with any ques- tion that God brings to us as a people. But we are men of forethought. We want to interrogate to-morrow, to know our times and, when they come, stand upon the right ground manfully. I have attained my purpose if I have reminded you that these questions are pressing thick and fast upon us. I intend to examine what I believe to be the true solution of those and all other questions that touch human life upon earth — solutions drawn from the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and lying upon the pages of the New Testament itself, solutions to which we have perhaps been blinded by a too narrow the- ology, but which are there as plain a guide, it seems to me, as the Ten Commandments. LECTURE II. LED UP. " Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the 7uilderness." St. Matthew iv. i. LECTURE II. LED UP. A MAN gaunt with long fasting. Around him the bare rocks and the brown sands. Over him the drifting clouds of the Syrian sky. He is alone in the silences; only the wild beast cries from the rocks or the eagle screams from the splintered crag. But the solitude is peopled by hosts invisible. He stands, to the outward eye, alone. But the powers of darkness and the armies of light swarm where he stands. Heights that lift to the Throne of God, depths that swirl and sink to the central hells, peopled heights and depths, swim from about him as he stands alone — the centre of the universe, and that universe alive! Such is the vision. Is it what we call literal ? You can debate that if you wish. I do not care to. It is certainly far more than literal. I take it to be spiritual and eternal. It is the revelation of the permanent position 48 LED UP. of human existence. You miss the whole pur- pose of it, I think, if you make it only hteral, the story of an occurrence which began and ended in itself. Who is this man in the vision of the Evangel- ist ? Jesus of Nazareth, I am answered. And again I ask, Who is He ? Your answer, being a Catholic Christian, would be, " The Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, very God of very God, who has taken our nature upon Him from his Virgin Mother, and is therefore also man as well as God. the Son of Man as also the Son of God." You answer rightly- But notice He is a man in this strange revelation all through. He never once asserts his Divine nature. He is hungry as a man might be after a long fast. He needs food. He needs to be ministered to, helped, served by some kindly and loving hands. Look at Him. Listen to Him. In the whole transac- tion He is sheltering Himself and defending Himself with only human weapons. " But He is the Son of God ? " Yes! Only in the use of that name here He means the Son of Man. In this experience He claims for Man the Sonship. " If thou be the Son of God " — "Ma)i doth not live by bread only." The two names here are equiva- LED UP. 49 lent. He is standing, faint, starving, and alone, upon His human Sonship toward God, and not upon His divine. I marvel that the situation should have been in any case minified to a mere lesson of resistance to temptation, and still more that it should have been a matter of debate whether, in this revela- tion of His life, Jesus Christ can be counted as an example, " He was God," it is said, " as well as man. He could not, therefore, really be tempted at all. He was sure of the victory from the first. There could have been but one issue to this struggle. He parts company with us here, ceases to be the guide of weak humanity." Let us treat this no longer as an example in an episode. Jesus is the infinite and eternal Man. The union of the Divine with the human nature made Him so. All Catholic Theology tells you that. Why be afraid of its broad free speech ? Why fear to look into the depths profound or the heights infinite which its loving, trustful, and childlike confidence reveals with thanks to our Father ? " The Lamb slain from the Foundation of the World " — remember that. Do not explain out of existence the words because they do not fit 50 LED UP. into some system of theology or some bundle of dried herbs labelled a Confession of Faith ! Read St. John's Gospel at its opening, and learn that "All things were made by Him." The Divine Logos who was with God and was God. Turn to Genesis and read that He who made man made him in His own image. Poor type enough as he stands a very wretched and broken image now, but the germ of another. There is a strange power in that germ impress. We are finding out more and more about it, and more and more it is wonderful, even overwhelming. The stunted, sun-burned chaparral on a Cali- fornia hillside is very little like the magnificent live oak with girth of forty feet and branches to tent a regiment, his massive roots in the salt sand listening to the immemorial murmur of the sea, and his topmost boughs looking for the white sails coming from afar. Yet both are oaks in grain and iibre, in blossom and in acorn. Such subtile and persistent power has the germ to grow its own. Such likeness in unlikeness does the germ power preserve and develop. The Fejee Islander and the educated, cultured gentleman of New York or London are startling contrasts. There is no mistaking the same human imprint on them each. LED UP. 51 We are poor, broken fragments of humanity at best; the wisest and the noblest of us only dis- tortions and caricatures of the Divine Ideal. This man we have seen alone here in the wil- derness is the only genuine man that we know. In Him the Church of God from the first, in Her free, bold faith and love, has found all perfection, the world's idea of men, her own idea and God's. He boldly flung His challenge into the world's face one day — " Which of you convinceth me of sin?" It was never taken up. It lies there yet — the great defiance. Who will take it up to-day after nineteen centuries ? He came to atone for our sins. Yes. He came to die for us and rise again. Yes. But why stop? One theological system has no need for Him except to die and make that atonement ; sees no living use in His birth or in His resur- rection. Another sees in Him only an example, for its logical completeness has no need of His Divine nature or His death, and certainly finds His resurrection an embarrassment. Broken lights lead us. Half-truths turn to lies in our hands. Theological chaff is threshed on windy threshing floors, and the few grains of corn are blown away with it. One turns to the old kindly, childlike faith of the early day, which 52 LED UP. dwelt lovingly around the feeding-trough in the Kahn, the humble house in Nazareth, the in- tensely human life He lived about the villages of Judea before the end came, and denying nothing, accepting simply when the meaning is too deep for mortal vision, finds in the awful and eternal and yet the household and homelike mystery of the Incarnation, the sum of all mysteries and all love. Our God is a man — a suffering, sore-bur- dened, bitterly tempted man who died, but died Victor and Lord, as all men should live and die! I take this transaction in the wilderness to be no mere accident, no passing episode, then. It has taken such hold upon the consciousness of Christendom, that from the first, solemn observ- ance has gathered about its memory. It is kept alive and present by large observance of due season every year, by special prayer and fasting and meditation. A whole literature of devotion has grown around it. The painters have dwelt upon it ; the poets have sung of it and for it, and the saints of all time have adored the foot- steps in the desert from afar. If I ask you to use it, and let me use it with you and for you for another purpose not devo- tional especially, not for the touching and tender lessons which pious souls have drawn from it, but LED UP. 53 for thoughts and conclusions which may help you and others in the hard, common work of common, every-day life, and clear your vision for the wres- tle, which waits you and all with the rough an- tagonists of our half-brutal world, do not imagine I undervalue the other lessons I have mentioned, but take me only as looking at this strange his- tory from a point of view which I think is not often occupied, and which I believe to be perhaps only possible in our day. For I am thankful to hold that old faith which is not afraid, which indeed challenges our vision from all points of view possible, which is so grandly orthodox that it encourages free dealing for human good with its profoundest mysteries, which is a living growth in leaf and flower and fruit for the healing and help of all men. I take it, then, that in this transaction, in this revelation from the land of vision — the land where all things are real — Jesus stands especially for Humanity. The Eternal Man, who is neces- sarily the Son of God, meets life and its questions, the common life and the common questions of this world, as all men are called to meet them, and deals with them and answers them victori- ously, as all men must deal with them and answer them if they also would win. 54 JED UP. The Sermon on the Mount I take to be the revelation and promulgation by authority of the organic law, what he might call the constitution of the Kindgom of God, as Christ proposed to establish it here on earth. The revelation of the man in the wilderness I take to be the setting forth of man's position in the world as it is, " the work-a-day world," in which the Kindgom of God is to be established, in which it is man's business to establish it, and the methods by which only he can hold his own upon it, and do what God set him to do. Both are logically and necessarily connected. The wilderness, the hunger, the trial, the tempting, the struggle, a parable of things as they are. The conclusion, a declaration of what the end is to be. The Sermon, the proclamation of the principles and laws by which Heaven is adminis- tered, and by which only any real Kingdom of Heaven may be established upon earth. Jesus in the wilderness stands for Humanity in the world. It is a rough world. It is a wilder- ness to the Son of God. His spiritual nature is starved in it, He is alone in it. He has no visi- ble companionship. The wild beasts cry, the wild birds scream. The insects float in the air. The crawling things creep on the earth. Humanity LED UP. 55 is alone. Man is the hermit of time. Among them all there is no helpmeet for him. How came he here ? On the answer to that question turns the whole purpose of human life. There is one that finds voice more or less dis- tinctly in our time. It dogmatizes in our science. It finds utterance in our popular literature. It is in the air, as we might say, of our common thinking. It is this. " Man is in the wilderness as the sand is, as the wild beast and bird and creep- ing thing are ; as the acacia bush on the plain and the moss upon the rock. He is an outgrowth of the desert. He, like all else, is a product of blind forces working blindly, their highest out- come as yet. But he belongs to the wilderness, begins and ends with it." If it be so, there is this strange result : his whole life, wheresoever found, is a protest against the wilderness. The centre of all that is best in him is the moral power within him. And that moral power is in absolute rebellion against the wilder- ness and its ways. If he be a product of the \\'ilderness he should be in accord with the powers that produced him, with the laws that are supreme in the wilderness. There would be no morality in his acts, no right 56 LED UP. or wrong in anything he may say or do. He would not be immoral ; for there could be no immorality if there be no morality. He would just be 7w?i-mora\, and so an end. A tree falls upon a man and kills him. The tree is blameless. The lightning sets his barns on fire and consumes his harvests. No man blames the lightning. The floods break their banks and sweep his fields bare, and no man blames the floods. It is only a child who knocks his head against the table and cries " naughty table!" In the natural forces we look for no discrimination of moral choice. They are neither bad nor good. But a man who slays another — shall we say he is like the tree that falls and slays in falling ? Shall we say that the act is entirely non-moral, and that in blaming him we are like the child who strikes in anger the chair against which he has stumbled and hurt himself, calling it " naughty chair ? " Is there no right and no wrong in itself, but only a relation which endures for a day — the opposite pole of selfishness, called " altruism," which decides right or wrong from the measure of its own pleasure or its own pain ? Was the man who gave the highwayman his purse at the muzzle of the pistol a good man LED UP. 57 because he gave him pleasure, and the judge who sentences him to the penitentiary a bad man because he makes him suffer pain ? This is the case, and all there is in the case, if the man in the wilderness be an outcome of the wilderness. No stream rises higher than its source. The wilderness has no moral law; and all attempts to develop a morality out of it lead to nothing more than this — that is good which gives us pleasure, that is evil which gives us pain ; but, in themselves and absolutely, the words and deeds of men have no more moral value, than the moaning of the wind at midnight. Right and wrong are only figures of speech expressing the effect upon ourselves of acts or agents. We are dealing very lightly these days with the foundations on which our lives stand. A philosophy which proclaims that a man's acts have and can have no more moral purpose than the sweep of a wave, the plunge of a cataract, or the cry of a jackal, may not lead at once to the evil that its common acceptance would seem to involve. The men who argue out such a philosophy are very little likely to act upon it themselves, as little" likely as any men. And then old traditions of the cradle and the house- hold and the church, hold men who have lost 58 LED UP. their intellectual faith to more or less of living upon its ethics still. But it is not hard to see that the philosophy is having its effect. It is descending from its cold philosophic heights, and finding practical accept- ance among those who desire freedom from all restraint. The air is full of it, and when men in large numbers accept the theory that conscience is merely a hereditary superstition, and right and wrong only inherited prejudice, that there is no absolute right and wrong in the universe, and men are, in fact, just as non-moral as the ox or the dog, it is not hard to see that there will be stormy times coming for the twentieth century of our civilization. It is the peculiarity of Christianity as a religion, that, hi the technical sense, it is not a religion at all. The so-called science of comparative religion, with which some writers and thinkers have busied themselves in our time, fails at once when it seeks to include the religion of Jesus Christ, because in their sense it is not a religion. I mean this : that all other religions are methods of propitiation, and that Christianity is not. They begin with the idea of an invisible power angry always or angry at times, at least, with men, and that religion is a method, revealed or discov- LED UP. 59 ered, by which the invisible power may be made to lay aside its anger. Christianity begins with the declaration that God needs no propitiation, that He has already propitiated Himself ; that no sacrifice and no offer- ing can take away sin, nor make the Holy One any more favorable toward the suppliant. God is man's Father, and changes not. What He asks is that men shall live as His children. I say, then, that in the technical sense Chris- tianity is not a religion at all. It is an ethics. It is a life. It begins with a God appeased, pla- cated, loving and pitiful and helpful toward men. He is so of His own nature. Were He not so, all service and all offerings could not make Him so. Nothing which man could do or priests contrive, in ceremonial or sacrifice, could have power to change the Unchangeable The religion of Jesus Christ is purely ethical. Its simple rites are so, entirely, in meaning and purpose. They do not propitiate the Almighty. They are helps to make men better. They are not to change God. They are intended to change men. Christianity is right living after a divine model, and even in the dim shadow of its slow development long ago the fact was not obscure, when the proj^het asked, " What doth the Lord 6o LED UP. require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God ? " Godliness is Godlikeness. And there is this unique characteristic in Christ's religion, that the sum of it all is to grow in Godlikeness, There have been religions without morality, like the Greek and Roman. There have been re- ligions absolutely immoral, like the worship of the Syrian Melitta or the Hindoo Kali. All crimes and all vices have been consecrated to the service of religion at one time or another among men. There is no necessary connection between religion, in its technical and philospohic sense, and right moral living. It is the weakness of much of our popular Christianity, in Protestant and Roman forms both, that the old paganism of our fathers has never been quite exorcised. It is still largely the superstition that some so-called " religious " observances can atone for ill-living, that when we have sinned we have made God angry, and that by doing some specifically religious act or saying some specifically religious word we can make Him forget our sin and be pleased wfth us again. Paganism, you see, dies hard, and so far our best type of Christianity has been only a baptized paganism. "Whatsoever a man sowcth that shall he also LED UP. 6 1 reap," declares the law on which we stand. No technical religious observances, no ceremonies and no rites can change the eternal law. A man reaps his own harvest, here or other where, when the reaping-time comes, and feeds himself with the bread of his own corn when his corn ripens. There has much come to us in these last days for which we should be thankful, in the thinking which is fast making forever impossible the poor heathenism that has passed for Christianity only because baptized under a Christian name, the systems, shocking to our moral sense, which have been imposed upon men as religion while they outraged their human instincts of goodness and kindness. They are " revising " them. Let us hope they will be revised out of existence as soon as may be, as outrages upon the human conscience and libels on our Father in Heaven. And let us hope also that with them will go the artificial morali- ties created by " churches," so called, which have been imposed on human consciences as higher and more important than the divine law, as even means by which breaches of that law and the violation of Christian precepts may be atoned for by " religious " people! It is this profoundly ethical character of Chris- 62 LED UP. tianity which has emancipated man from fear and degrading superstition and raised him to the height so far won. It for the first time, clearly and with commanding force, declared " the ought " to be suprem.e, that only by uttermost submission to the proclamation of *' the ought " is there to be a life possible here or anywhere for men. That so tremendous is this necessity that the awful God Himself is bound by it, that all His worlds are kept by it secure, and that no man nor angel can escape, or hope to escape, in this world, in Heaven or in hell, from the in- exorable Law. And as the basis of this ethical position of man, we read in the revelation here : " Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness." The Son of Man, the Son of God is not a product of the wilderness. It exists already. Its sands, its rocks, its thorns, its living creatures are all there already. It has been created for a purpose. I am not going to discuss the origin of man's body nor how that body may have been builded by its Maker, I believe in a Maker. I believe He knew perfectly to fit means to ends. But if any man chooses to believe that something in the shape of man roamed the earth for centuries LED UP. 63 even, without rational speech or rational sense or anything which essentially differentiates man from a gorilla, I will leave him his belief. I think myself it is a very foolish belief, and has not to sustain it one iota of evidence. But I do believe, because it is quite reasonable, and Moses puts it so, that man was just an animal as he was first created. We have the precise statement of that fact. And that the animal being made, " God breathed into his nostrils the breath of tzvo lives and man became a living soul." In this theory, then, that which differentiates man is a direct creation and gift of God. It is so direct a creation and gift that man becomes, in a true sense, the Son of God and God can be- come "the Son of Man." Into the wilderness of mortal life and time this Son of God is " led up " by the Spirit. He is a stranger in it. He has something to do with it, and something to get out of it. It will have its effect upon him. He will have his effect upon it. There will be action and reaction between him and the wilderness, but he is, by the state- ment of the case, a stranger and an enemy even in the wilderness. The other voice tells us that there is no Son of 64 I^ED UP. God in the case, indeed, that there is no God to have a son ; that man is just a natural output of the blind dumb forces of the wilderness, as all things are; that the wilderness is his home, and his only home, his birthplace, and his burial place ; that he too is a phenomenon, like all the rest, a bubble blown upon the crest of a black wave which sparkles for a moment, then breaks and disappears forever ; that he too, like all the rest, has no hold upon realities, no part in the sub- stance of things. I have spoken in my first lecture of some of the questions that we are called to face in this close of the century, of the shadowy outlines of grim-faced problems that, in the coming time, are to put all our wisdom and valor to the test. We are living in a fool's Paradise if v/e fancy they will answer themselves with no concernment to us. Scientific theories come and go, and even philosophic, say their say and pass or remain, with the various "theories," no doubt valuable, in their time, " of the irregular verbs." There is one thing always present, always inexorable, the judgment of actual fact upon human conduct. What will you do with your crime? What will you do with your ignorance? What will you do with your misery and poverty? What LED UP. 65 will you do with the broadening and deepening gulf which, under all the forms of your de- mocracy, divides " the masses " from " the classes," and marks the meanest and lowest difference that in any civilization ever separated man from man — money ? Shall we answer " nothing ? " We can if we will. But facts like those that face us do not take No for an answer. They are quite cold- blooded, and insist on being dealt with in some fashion, and in some true fashion — one that ex- presses the reality and sense of things, or they turn on men and grind them to powder. We have no ground to suppose that we in this coun- try are to be freed from the working of that most inexorable of all those form.ulas they call laws — the law that nations, like men, must reap what they sow. Human history and experience cannot be ruled out from any wise human thinking. They are as much parts of nature as animals or plants or chemical combinations. There are also just as sure laws by which they come to pass. In facing the questions of our complex civiliza- tion the first thing to be settled is man's own re- lation, to the world in which he finds himself. 5 66 LED UP. Necessarily all his subsequent words and acts will be determined by that settlement. If he has been produced by the natural forces, as he calls them, working on the earth, responsi- bility does not exist. He did not make the past. He cannot influence the future. Free moral agency is excluded from the forces that affect results. It has no power, never had any, and never can have. It cannot be evolved out of the play of forces which are not free. Our position, therefore, is that of utter helpless- ness before whatsoever the future may threaten or promise. We are tied hand and foot amid the interplay of beneficent or destructive activi- ties. We must dumbly wait an issue we are powerless even to modify. And we may make a philosophy out of this! Indeed, it has been done. We may take man and his relations and associations, his history in nations and communities, as a part simply of the exhibition of the same forces that show them- selves in the growth of grass and trees, in the movements of tides and winds, and tabulate the facts and compare their connections, accepting the past as it has been and the present as it is, and try to draw therefrom the law of frequencies and sequences— just so much murder, so much LED UP. 67 robbery, so much disease, so much insanity, on general averages, and always with the assump- tion underneath that there is no personal choice to modify, no element of free determination to check or change, and we may call it " The Phi- losophy of Sociology," or any big name we like. But back of all these lies in you and me the consciousness that we can change, that we can prevent now, that men could have prevented and could have changed in the past. And, still more, the conviction, inherent, impossible to alter, that we ourselves ongJit to prevent, ought to change many things which are and are coming, that men in the past not only might, but ought to have done things w iich they did not do, and have left undone many things which they did do — that Neros and Borgias were just as responsi- ble as Howards and Washingtons, in fact, that Neros and Borgias had no right to be. There emerges — that is, whenever a man thinks seriously — the two facts which are persistent in his consciousness. First, that he is free. Second, that there is an " I ought." He passes no judg- ment upon any other man without recognizing these two facts as universal, necessary, and indis- putable in human nature. History forms a great portion of literature, in 68 LED UP. some respects its most serious portion. All his- tory is filled with judgments upon the men and the facts of the past, and all these judgments are made upon the accepted principle that men are not and never have been under control of phe- noincna, that they could make and ought to make their decisions without reference to any powers in the world of phenomena, but solely' with refer- ence to principles which belonged to them as free men under the law of human duty. The historian of Rome has no more hesitation in making such judgments than the historian of England. Each holds men and the moral nature of men responsible for the course of human events in a degree apparently unlimited. Have they been all mistaken ? Has the situa- tion which exists to-day over the earth no result within it of human freedom, of human right- doing or wrong-doing ? Is it the outcome merely of physical-world forces blindly working without purpose ? If we accept this (and it is the conclusion, let us remember, of that '* naturalism," rather tin- naturalism, which declares man a product of the world, a development of physical forces, a neces- sary growth of the wilderness), then all our his- tory books, from Herodotus to Froude, from the LED UP. '69 Book of Chronicles to the Life of Abraham Lin- cobi, are a mass of impertinent trash, blaming where no blame was due and praising where no praise was owed, and taking for granted, all through, a freedom where there was no freedom and a duty where no duty could exist, but also all ordered and deliberated effort on the part of man to guide the future in any way, to help the good and put down the evil, is necessarily a child- ish dream. We turn from this to the other position — di- rectly opposed — revealed to us in this vision and revelation in the wilderness. The wilderness exists. There is no word of hozu it exists or hozv it came, or what is to be the end of it, so far. It is here, and God leads up that strange lonely being, His Son — the Son of Man — into the wilderness. He is led up for pur- poses which belong to Himself. The wilderness exists for Him, not He for the wilderness. He is in it, in that which makes Him the Son of God and the Son of Man, a sojourner and a stranger. While influenced by the situation affected by the environment. He is entirely conscious that He and the environment are two. He stands upon His feet and says "/." He is the only creature on earth that can say that small syllable. He says. 70 LED UP. "/ am an hungered." "/ am thirsty." "/ am cold." He says, " I will eat." " I will drink." " I will clothe myself." " I will warm myself." Even in His lowest animal needs He forms his resolution and formulates it if need be in speech. In the most purely animal necessity He distin- guishes Himself from His environment. The first conscious lesson the infant learns is that he is an " I," and that he exists, by no means always in accord with, but far oftener in direct resistance to, the things which are not "/." And this Son of God, distinct and conscious of Himself as being in the world, and yet, in the most serious meaning, no part of it, is also con- scious that He is free, that He can, in any possible contingency of two courses, choose which He will, and moreover is conscious that in all His import- ant decisions there comes in the question of the course He otight to take, the duty He ought to do. In his highest development, his most conscious differentiation from the environment, there rises finally the conviction— one might almost say in- born conviction — in the loftiest people, that he is responsible for the wilderness, held to answer for the condition of his environment. Before the fact a mass of mere metaphysical cobwebs, more or less systematic and philosophic, LED UP. 71 are ruthlessly swept to the winds. " lyTan influ- enced by environment ? " Yes! " Man educated by environment ? " Yes again. " Man largely the product of the environment?" Why, surely! Only when you have phrased your phrases to suit, do not imagine you can weave them into a system and explain things, for here comes a man one day who lifts up his voice and cries : " Your environment is a shame and a curse, a lie and an infamy, and yoii are responsible for it ! You have made it, or you allow it to stand. In the name of God, away with your environment ! Sweep it into the limbo of things accursed by men and God ! Get rid of it on your peril, or you and your environment together will be swept into the general rubbish-heap of the universe by the in- exorable law in such cases made and provided, and the common conscience of humanity will say, * served you both right,' " We never rise to mend an old evil, we never band together to bring in a new good, we never rouse ourselves to any onward step upon the road of human progress, that we do not proclaim our conviction that man is morally responsible for his environment. People die in the foul slums of our cities. Dare any man say they ought to die ? Is it not the 72 LED UP. unspoken and the outspoken conviction of all civilized men that they had no business to die, that the environment which brought sickness and death was a foul thing for which are held re- sponsible some men, somewhere, always ? And children grow up in the same slums into outcast women and criminal men, " The envi- ronment produced them." Yes. A horrible and accursed environment, for whose existence, for one day, the inexorable law holds some men re- sponsible, and to whom some day it will mea- sure out the penalty in a harvest of their own sowing. Day by day true science has been bringing to the common conviction more and more the tre- mendous responsibility that rests on men for the condition of the world they live in. While one set of men, dealing with the same facts of human knowledge and scientific discovery, have seen in them only materials for subtle metaphysical cob- webs in which to entangle their own thoughts, another and a wiser set, and a far larger, who see that knowledge is worth the good it does, have seen in these same facts additional pledges for human duty and graver weights of man's re- sponsibility toward himself and the world. We may pass the first. I think the froth and LED UP. 73 scum, rising quicker to the surface, is quicklier blown away. Thankful for the larger illumination the larger knowledge gives, the vital question is not what theories you can invent about the universe and its origin, or man and his origin, from the little vantage ground that larger knowledge gives, but how can you order that knowledge and organize it to make man better and his life more master- ful and victorious upon the earth ? And so there is growing upon us the conviction, always I think latent, but impossible of outward utterance at all, until Jesus fought His fight in the wilderness, and not until now capable of emphatic and resolute utterance — namely, the moral conviction that men are, apart from all theories, responsible for the world they live in. There is no expression even of any such con- viction as a feeling in ancient literature, sacred or profane. It is first put into words by Jesus Christ : " Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." There is the con- viction in germ, as the oak is in the acorn. How it has grown! And now, with all the light of the ages thrown upon it, the declaration flames across the pillared front of every capitol, of every temple of learning and law, as of science 74 I^ED UP. and religion; it is emblazoned on the folds of every Christian people's standard ; it fills their literature, and chants itself in all their poetry^ — man is responsible for the world. Away with your dreary talk, as of the darkest of all dark ages, of " man being the product of his environment ! " The new day and the new knowledge cries aloud to all the stars, " Man is responsible for all environments. He has so won, so mastered on this earth, that his own con- science is his own witness that he must annihilate environments that will harm him or his, that, among other things, he has mastered or can mas- ter any environment whatsoever, physical and moral, and that the ages to come and the inex- orable laws which bring those ages in will hold this age responsible for the environments it al- lows to stand ! " There is absolutely no hope in the position as- signed us in this world by " the Dirt Philosophy," which has turned itself into a metaphysics and declares we men are the results of blind '' natural selection " and the survivors in that immemorial Kilkenny-cat fight — " the struggle for existence." In that case we would only have to stand aside and let the selection keep on selecting and philo- sophically watch and speculate upon the issues LED UP. 75 of that feline prize-fight conducted in the world's big ring, where it seems to be a universal rending and devouring of all but " the fittest to survive." The selection and the fight have " let Jis out," at all events, and if we are wise we will meddle with neither any more, except to stop the cater- wauling ! But we are men of our century. And the two tremendous words, Duty, Responsibility, flame before us night and day, and utter themselves in every air, thank God, we breathe. Suppose we take the plain ground of human position plainly revealed in the elder Son. We will rid ourselves, at least, of all logical incon- sistencies. Duty and responsibility and the call of our time will have rational foundation. We are the Sons of God. It is a high descent. But nevertheless we are assured of it by many voices. We are in the wilderness. But we must bear ourselves in the wilderness as Sons of God. It is our only safety and peace. We did not come into the wilderness of our own motion. Neither did we come by chance. Far less did we not come at all but just sprout there like funguses. We came by law too, in due order and by due process, and by an intelligent and reasonable law which had a purpose. We 76 I.ED UP. are not " freaks," but, poor as we are, legitimate children of the Family, so that the eternal Son " is not ashamed to call us brethren." And being in the wilderness we are on our Father's ground. He owns it and has committed it to us to occupy for a time and a purpose. Manifestly we have some relation with it, some- thing to do in it and for it and for the other sons who are led up like ourselves. Duty emerges. Responsibility canopies life. Hope shows the way on, and stands with us at every struggle. The Sons of God must bear themselves worthy of their high relationship. They must better things. They must help the weak. They must pity the wretched. They must stretch hands down to the fallen. They must do justice. They must love mercy. In short, they must be civilized, do you not see, in the very highest sense of that word ? And they must be civilizers, improvers, reformers, menders of things, menders of themselves, and menders of the world ! They cannot let things alone unless things are right. There is a divine hunger and thirst upon them to straighten the crooked, and clean out the foul, and make the dark things light. The more they are conscious of the Sonship the higher LED UP. 77 they grow into its conception, the intenser be- comes their unrest and discontent with the wil- derness as a wilderness. They will not be satis- fied till they make it blossom as the rose. The wilderness of their hunger and their trial must be a wilderness to which angels may come before they are done with it, or their business in it, set by Him who led them into it, is not complete. So to gird ourselves for the work before us, to get standing-ground for the wrestle with the problems whose grim faces frown out of the com- ing days, we turn to the vision of Him who stood for us all, the one Son of Man and Son of God who held His place in the wilderness and solved forever the law of living, revealed the secret of the battle and the victory for all the Sons of God I LECTURE III. TEMPTED. To be tempted of the devil. " St. Matthew, iv. i. LECTURE III. TEMPTED. 1 T is a hard saying. Who can hear it ? We * say, " Lead us not into temptation." Yet we are told here, according to our argument, that man is led up by the Spirit, which is the Spirit of God, into the wilderness of life and time, for the express purpose of being tempted of the Devil I The Prayer is the human instinct uttering itself to God, a right childlike, trembling, timid prayer which the tender Father hears and answers in His own wise, pitiful, fatherly way. " Do not let it be too hard for me. Remember I am but a child. The road is rough, the sand is bare, the sun beats hard, and my feet bleed on the sharp flints. Do not lead me into temptation and leave me. Stand by me. Help me. Lead me through. Expose me not too much, seeing what I am." The Prayer is tJiat, perhaps, or that is part of what the Prayer means. I do not know. It 82 TEMPTED. means far more than I can understand, as all the Lord's words do. I know, however, that while I pray the prayer with all my heart, and know the prayer is answered and is divine, it is also the fact that I am tempted, and that temptation is the law of life. Now, the revelation or the discovery of a Law does not make the Law. The Law is there all the same, whether one know it or not. What- ever difficulty may be in the Law, let us not fool- ishly blame him who shows it us as if he created it of his own caprice. The plain fact is, when we look carefully, that the world is so ordered that it is a trial place, a testing place, a tempting place for this unique being Man, who finds himself led up into it by some will stronger than his own. All trial, test, and tempting involve the possi- bility of failure. They lead to failure again and again. That is the law of the case too. We have to accept that. It is terrible and it is mysterious, but a certain amount of ruin is involved in all testing. They test rifle-barrels at the arsenal. A cer- tain number burst and are ruined in the test. If they had not been tested, they might pass for very good rifle-barrels, until in some supreme TEMPTED. 83 crisis of the nation's life, they go to pieces, de- stroy an army, and lose a great cause. They test sword-blades also, and a ratio, pretty constant, go to pieces in the trial. A certain number of cannon always burst in testing, and become so much rubbish. But notwithstanding, we must, at any cost, have sabres on which our cavalry can depend and cannon which will not fly to pieces and deal death among our artillery-men when a hostile fleet lies in the ofling. It goes everywhere. When we want a genuine thing we put it to the trial, we test it, attempt it, being engine, ship, bridge, or what you will, and in every case there is a certain risk involved, and the possibility of destruction to the thing we test. The law of " the survival of the fittest," so called by scientists, goes much further, we shall find, than they dream. It appears to me they have gotten the measure of one small segment of a fact which pervades the universe, invisible as well as visible, which indeed is a necessary fact (or law, if the word pleases one better and does not mislead him to think it anything more tJian a zvord) of the entire universe being what it is. And the fact is a most irrational and cruel one at the first consideration. It involves death and 84 TEMPTED. ruin by wholesale. The thing is tried, that is, tempted, put to the attempt, and, in the million upon million of instances, the attempt destroys the thing ! Of the myriad blooms upon the trees in spring- time, how many develop into ripened fruit in the autumn ? Even under man's intelligent and anx- ious care in our walled orchard closes, the abor- tions of bloom and fruit, tried by rain and wind and sun, and tested by insect enemy, which fail and come to nothing, are beyond reckoning. Left to the unguarded conditions of the open field and forest, it is but one here and there that comes to perfect issue. In the animal kingdom, nearer to ourselves, and where our sympathies in a sort can reach, the ruin and death of the unfit is that which op- presses one, rather than the survival of, here and there, one fitting. Air, earth, and sea are alike slaughter-houses. Of the millions of incipient living forms in any, it is but here and there one that attains tliQ prophecy of its beginning. The arrowy deaths, hungry and fierce, dart through the flying sea-foam, only to be pursued themselves by deaths more terri- ble, swifter of sweep, more ravenous and strong. We accept all this under the name of "the TEMPTED. 8S survival of the fittest," and make no complaint. Indeed, it is justified under the purpose of the attainment of a higher good. At all events, whether we justify it or not, consider it benefi- cent or not, it is the fact that everything we know that lives, animal or vegetable, is at once, upon finding itself differentiated into individual- ity, put to trial. Enemies are round it to afifiict it with stress and strain, and its fibre is tested, its power to stand, its right to exist and come to its full purpose. There is no malignancy in the powers that test it, either, so far. The storm that tests the roots, stock, and grain of the young oak has no ill-will to the oak. The whale who de- vours ten thousand living things at a mouthful does not hate the mackerel. Indeed, the whale loves the mackerel ! In fact, this so-called Law of the survival of the fittest is the optimistic form of stating the very dark and mysterious fact that this is a world of deadly wrestle, of battle to the death, which battle and wrestle sift out, by trial and most in- exorable test, that which has not the fibre, the courage, the strength or the prudence to entitle it to be. The process in some of its forms is a horrible and apparently cruel one. We try to say, " In the long run it is the best. The law is 86 TEMPTED. really beneficent. Nature mercifully sweeps her failures into the dust-bin of things forgotten. She is forever aspiring, looking upward, strug- gling toward better things, toward a dimly-seen ideal she has never won, and she is pitiless of what stands in her way. Her weak, foolish, lazy, helpless things must perish that her best ideal so far may live." The statement of the law, however, was made long ago, in a higher realm and on another plane of God's worlds. I suppose myself it exists as a fact here, because it exists as an eternal fact in the world of which this is the shadow. I mean exactly what I say. To me this world is only the shadow cast into time of the eternal world, which is substance and reality. We are, even by our materialism and through our imagined ma- terialistic science, drifting away fast, as all real thinkers are seeing, into the glooms and grand- eurs of the spiritual. They have left us, you know, no matter any more. That is relegated to the crude fancies of ignorance. We have nothing now but appear- ances. Somewhere, it is possible, lies a sub- stance, a substratum, a real background, on which phenomena display themselves and flicker and fade like the colors in a kaleidoscope. But TEMPTED. 87 about that we can learn nothing, we are told, from the phenomena. Only the pJienomaia and the noumena remain — the appearances before our eyes, the thoughts about them in our own facul- ties. Firm-rooted earth, sun, stars, and deeps, where earths and suns and stars are born, are the shifting shadows of a dream, which exist only in the thought of the dreamer. Curious that ' ' The mitred saint of Cloyne " should avenge himself on the sneers of the eigh- teenth century by mastering the materialism of the nineteenth, and that the hardest, baldest, and apparently barest of all philosophies of matter should turn Berkelyan in its last analysis, and declare with him that nothing exists, in this world, of real but only of seeming! I take it all processes which we observe here, and which, seeing them occur continually in the same connections, we call '' Laws," do so occur because they are reflections cast into time, into phenomena, of processes eternally needful and necessary in the real world, of which the phe- nomenal world is the more or less faint expres- sion. Bishop Butler's argument from Analogy rests on a more unassailable basis than even so deep a 88 TEMPTED. thinker perhaps himself perceived. On the unity of Law, namely, that is, that the visible and in- visible, if they exist at all, must be correlative, and the material express the spiritual. He is an instance of that which may encourage us all, that any clear and true thinking deals not alone with passing phases of opinion, though it may set itself purposely so to do, but must be valuable and permanent when such passing phases are forgotten, because it has gotten grasp upon truths eternal. What shall I say then ? I am not here to dog- matize. I seek but to suggest. Is it the eternal Law, then, that all things created must be tried ? You may call it "tempted," but tempting and trying are all one when you speak of the moral and the spiritual, of any creature that says " L" Is it that the existences spiritual which have been tried and have been ruined in the trial, must necessarily be swept into the dust-bin and rub- bish-heap of a universe that has no place nor use for its own failures ? Do we call such dust-bin and rubbish-hole "Hell," and must "the con- suming fire " be the best sanitary method of dis- posing of angels or men who are failures, who could not survive in a universe, inexorable and pitiless in its demand for growth, and right TEMPTED. 89 growth and strong growth in the beings, in all its worlds, which say " I ? " Let us turn to facts which face us. As the world in which we live is a sifting and winnowing world, a testing, trying, proving world in its efforts to better the things within it, physi- cally, so also is it a world to test and try and tempt, that it may educate, select, and better its growths spiritual. Explain the fact as you may, the fact exists that there is a moral and spiritual, as well as a natural selection in the world, a moral and spir- itual "survival of the fittest" and destruction of the unfittest. Races perish, not from physical but moral fail- ure. Nations disappear unfit to survive, with all physical resources in their favor, from purely moral unfitness. Families, stalwart, healthy, courageous in all that belongs to physical power of survival, have perished from moral weakness, unfit to be. It is a phenomenon common in all ages and lands. The survival of the fittest, when you come to men, changes its face and takes in moral strength and spiritual fibre, demands something altogether different from the speed of the horse, the courage of the lion, the cunning of the fox, 9© TEMPTED. if men are to survive. Reverence, steadfastness, truth, fortitude, patience, loyalty — a whole array of qualities which belong purely to the spiritual side of the nature, are those which secure the existence and continuance of families, races, and nations of men. In the struggle for existence among animals only the animal qualities are tried. There is no temptation possible for them, in the sense that they are put to moral test or strain. In the man's case the struggle for existence becomes a moral struggle, and the more he be- comes differentiated, as a man, the more entirely human he becomes, the more markedly is he tried in his moral fibre and tested in his moral make-up, the more, that is, he becomes tempted and has to resist temptation. Now, if moral growth be under the same law and conditions as physical growth (and Our Lord commits us to that as do the philosophers), then this world, to be a school for moral training, must be a rude, unfinished, tempting, and mis- leading world. If we grow by resistance and prove our right to be by our power to hold our own, to exist, then there is, as far as we can see, nothing else possible except a world where we are not only tried, but even, in ethical sense, TEMPTED. 91 tempted. The large possibilities of failure must be accepted, the large margin for ruin must be admitted, and still we must somehow hold to the faith that the arrangement is beneficent. Of course now the evil becomes moral evil. The trial ceases to be a mere unmoral trial of power — it becomes a malignant temptation, a spir- itual force put forth to overcome, to mislead and delude. The world is so tempting from its own appar- ent constitution and our own relations to it, mis- leads and seduces the moral nature so strongly, that I am not surprised that many people are prepared to say there is no other tempter but the world and the flesh. And yet here there comes to meet us a power of evil, purely spiritual, an impersonation of temptation to which the Son of God is deliber- ately exposed — "tempted of the Devil." I cannot make the Diabolos here a figure of speech. My philosophy compels me to accept a world of Evil as well as a world of Good. There must be, if there be an invisible world at all, powers in it, and activities to answer to the dark cruelties and malignities of this. If the phe- nomenal world be an expression of the real world of which it is phenomenal, then evil is there, and 92 TEMPTED. reveals itself here. And as I know and can con- ceive of no force except as the manifestation of a personal Will, as no other force is " thinkable " to any man, so the manifestation of Evil requires my assent to an Evil Will somewhere, and an Evil Person or persons. Besides, I have a profound reverence for human nature, and I do not believe it is diabolic. I also do not believe the world is diabolic. But there are some things men do so absolutely diabolic, so devilishly cruel and malignant and hateful, that out of respect for human nature I am com- pelled to use the reverent form of the old Com- mon Law indictments and say that the man guilty of such deeds was " instigated by the Devil." A decent regard for my own nature compels me to believe there is a personal devil, legions of them indeed. For I will not say that men are devils, and yet I must account for devil- ish deeds! But the Devil is not Master, but Servant. His power must necessarily be very limited. He is a will and a person, but you and I are wills and persons also, and are, I hope, a good deal stronger and braver than he. He appears to be used by the Almighty as a servant, to apply the tests to the Sons of God to reveal their character and TEMPTED. . 93 expose their flaws. He must somewhere have been an enormous failure himself ; indeed, we are assured he was. But the wisdom of our Father in Heaven puts even failures to use, it seems, and it looks somewhat as if the Devil had been made a sort of uncouth slave to help in the training of His Sons. We need have no reverence for the Devil, of course, and in fact it is not worth while having even much respect for him. Martin Luther called him '' God's monkey," and flung his inkstand at him, and it is quite possible Martin was not so far wrong. Of course we all understand that the Satan of John Milton has no existence outside of Paradise Lost. His grand and gloomy dignities exist only in the vast imagination of the great Poet. In the revelation of human position in the wil- derness the Diabolos literally acts the slanderer, as we shall find. He gathers up all the false- hoods and cheats which the material puts upon the spiritual and gives them spiritual voice. He puts himself, as the depraved spiritual always does, on the side of the material. He denies the real and asserts the phenomenal, and as it seems to me, is deceived himself. He has lost spiritual insight and views things from the outside. He 94 . TEMPTED, argues upon appearances and realities have be- come a shadow. One might ask in wonder, if the ultimate ruin of a spiritual personality be not just this, that it is banished from the real world into the phe- nomenal, has itself lost its own spiritual reality and become itself a phenomenon ? The truth of things has become impossible! It lives among the lies of things, the shadows and pretenses of things! It has become a liar itself and, in the case of a high spiritual dignity lost, " the Father of lies! " We are necessarily reaching toward one con- clusion here, whether we can unders*:and it or not. It will go out in mystery as all things go, and it Avill be hard, it may be, and may look even cruel. It cannot be helped. If we are Sons of God, we men, we must be put to the test. Indeed, long ago the Prophet proclaimed of the eternal Son of God, " He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He shall purge the sons of Levi. As gold and silver are tried." If we are the Sons of God we must be trained. There is no training physically that does not in- volve the possibility of destruction. I ask hum- TEMPTED. 95 bly, I ask even fearfully, is there any spiritual training that does not involve the same ? But one will say, " Why did not God make us without the necessity of such training and such possible waste and loss ? " I can only say, Why did He not make the world perfect at the begin- ning? Why did He not make His universe other than it is ? We have seen that the world in which we find ourselves, even for the creatures of its own, is a world of struggle, of trial, of wrestle and strain, of splendid survival and innumerable failure. If now God lead up His own children — those whom He has made in His own image, and breathed into them the breath of the intellectual life and the spiritual life — the two lives that make them " living souls " and so differentiates them forever from all other organized things — if He lead them up into this wilderness, I say shall we be astonished at finding them under its con- ditions subject necessarily to its arrangements ? Is it not rational to infer that they are fitted exactly to such a world, and such a world to them ? That they also are to grow by strain and stress of temptation and trial, that the uni- versal law, that resistance is the method of ad- g6 TEMPTED. vancc, shall be found reigning here in things spir- itual as it reigns in things phenomenal ? And it does not change the law that myriads of the children of our race are spared this trial. The majority of those born into the wilderness are taken out of it before temptation begins. There is no sense in this if we look at our "science" only. The death of infants is abso- lutely irrational in the face of the law of survival if we confine that law only to time and the world. I dare say there is nothing more preposterously senseless than the death, at a year old, of a child who, in head and hand, in health and intellect, was the perfect flower of his race ! But the Great Father has other schools besides this. He is not confined to one curriculum for the train- ing of His sons, and those He takes away need other discipline than this wilderness affords. He trains some here. He need not train all. When we look at the growth and training of the races and nations of the earth — of men in the mass, we find the experience invariable. Out of obscure conditions, out of sore pain, and sordid toil, and hard living, out of savagery and igno- rance, out of battles without and battles within, out of writhings in the dust and struggling to the feet again for a few more staggering steps TEMPTED. 97 onward, out of wretchedness and poverty, out of distress and imminent ruin, the great races and peoples of the earth have fought their way into Hght and freedom. All along they were tempted. There was the suggestion at every step to cease the struggle, to shun the pain, to sit down content in slavery, to eat and drink and enjoy, as well as one might, whatever was at hand, and let principle go, and steadfastness, and manliness, and accept "peace at any price " with injustice and wrong. The nations that have failed yielded to the temptation. The peoples that are to-day slaves and degraded fell before the Tempter. In every case, I think, if we knew the facts, we would find it so. The nations that have not failed, the peoples who stand upon the heights of Time to-day, the Masters of the world and of themselves, are the peoples who have resisted the temptation of the wilderness, who have stood, consciously or un- consciously, upon the conviction that they were not children of the wilderness, but Sons of God and children of the light, that their descent was royal and their ancestors heroes and demigods, and that they were here to master the wilderness and drive the haunting demons from all its shad- c,8 ■ * TEMPTED. owy valleys, the brute beasts from all its moun- tain-caves! Let us tabulate, if we will, the rate of national progress, let us say, of our own race, from the savagery of the German forests to the civilization of London and New York. Let us show, step by step, the development and find the law of evolu- tion if we can. But if we be true thinkers and philosophers, let us not fail to take this fact into the account and give it the enormous importance it holds, that from the dawn of its history this race has held itself sprung from the Powers Di- vine, that our heathen forefathers believed them- selves children of the yEsir, the breed and blood of All-Father Odin, and that their Christian de- scendants have been taught, from their cradles, that they are the children of Almighty God, and in the name of the Elder Brother, " God and Man, in one Person Jesus Christ," have the right to claim the birthright ! Surely it would be a poor philosophy of his- tory that would leave out, in accounting for the tremendous victories of the race, for all the light and leading that has put it, strong and free and mighty, as the torch-bearer of Time, such a blood- born, innate conviction as this, dominating it for fifty generations! TEMPTED. 9g And looking back upon the past we can see that, in every century of its history, this race has been upon trial. In plain English, it has been tempted and so tried. And the temptations have come most surely to it when faint and hungry in the wilderness. It has grown by being sifted. It has become clearer in its own convictions by being tempted. It has, as one of its own Poets has sung, learned well " how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong." It has been by no means blameless in its his- tory, by no means always conscious of its own high purposes. But this it always has held in its worst estate, some dim conviction of its high calling as allied to the Highest, as sharing a di- vine life and purpose, and so not of the wilder- ness utterly. I think it no open question that, for the ends of freedom and earth-mastery and high service to God and man, there is no attainment possible by any people, except through some such tempta- tion and pain. There is no case on record where a race has been given freedom and self-mastery and has retained them. It must itself have con- quered them, deserved them, earned them, by victory in the long trial of the wilderness. And, moreover, that victory has been never lOO TEMPTED. won by any people, in any age, save by one who has had the profound conviction that, in some sense or other, it was a people with a divine con- nection and a spiritual purpose, a race, in some sense, of the Sons of God. The past of the world becomes luminous, in this view of the Law, with a divine purpose. It is a past filled with sorrow and shame. The leaves of its story are stained with blood and tears. That story is a record of robbery, cruelty, and merciless slaughter. The soul grows dark in the shadow of the world's wrongs, and with the Prophet cries — "How long! O Lord, how long!" Must this be the story to the end? Is man to be forever the prey of man ? And one turns to the wilderness, and the light that overhangs the Syrian sands, where the Eter- nal Son is in warfare for His own, and cries, " In these wild ways the nations are builded who must save the world. Out of all this sorrow come the crowned and sceptred peoples who have stood upon their sonship toward God, their kinship to light, their hatred of darkness, their faith in ever- lasting righteousness, their trust in God and Man." Others have disappeared in the darkness. They failed and surrendered to the tempter and the TEMPTED. loi temptation. These come forth into the day dawn, the sunrise upon their crests. They are scarred and worn. They are blood-stained and dust-covered from the terrible wrestle. These are they who survive from that grim battle of the West — the shadowy type of all the rest — "Where all King Arthur's table, man by man Had fallen in I>yonnesse about their Lord." From the bloody days at Tours when the Frank hammer beat back the power of Islam, from the day of Senlac when Harold fell, from Marston Moor and Naseby, from the hunger and the nakedness of Valley Forge, from the long en- durance of Waterloo, from the iron hail of Chicka- mauga, they emerge crowned and free and strong, because they faced the trial like men, and be- lieved that " man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Let us turn to the training of individual men upon the earth without reference to their spir- itual, but solely to their physical and intellectual character. There is temptation, trial, risk at every turn. You must train your son physically. You wish to make a strong, healthy, symmetrical man of 102 TEMPTED. him. You cannot do it by packing him in cotton- wool and putting him away in a bandbox. To be sure, by that process you would save all risk of breaking a bone in his body or getting a scar on his flesh. But you are also very certain you could never in that way make a physical man of him. So you deliberately expose the boy to " every- thing out of doors." You let him face the sun's heat, the rain, the snow, the storm. You en- courage him to all boyish activities. You drive him from the fireside if need be. You know per- fectly well you are at least risking his taking cold. You are challenging croup, pneumonia, and catarrh. You do the best you can for him, clothe him warmly, watch over him carefully, push him out and let him take the risks. He climbs a tree. All boys that amount to much do that. It may some time be a very necessary accomplishment, as, for instance, should he be hunting Grizzlies in California, and the Grizzly take a notion to hunt him ! But he risks a fall always in climbing. He may break a leg or an arm ! You accept that, and if you are sensible, allow him and even encourage him to climb. Of course, you are anxious. That goes without saying, and you watch him. TEMPTED. 103 You wish to give him gymnastic training. Now, a considerable ratio of boys break their bones or strain themselves seriously in these ex- ercises. You expose him to the risk. He ought to learn to ride a horse. Every American boy ought to learn. You wish him to be a free, bold rider. Of course you advise him and instruct him and begin his lessons with a well-broken, gentle horse. At the same time you deliberately expose him to the risk of being thrown and having his neck broken. It is desirable he should learn to swim. He will never learn to swim after the good old lady's formula, "Yes, my dear, of course you must learn to swim, but don't go near the water." You accept the possibility of the boy's 'being drowned, if you insist, as I think you ought, on his learning to swim. Let it be what it will that you wish to train him in for development of his physical powers, and you expose him to injury and possible death. To handle a boat, to use a gun (and that is a desirable part of every American boy's edu- cation, in my judgment), to run, to leap, to play in any athletic game is to take risks, risks of seri- ous injury, even risks of life itself. Yet a wise parent will deliberately expose his I04 TEMPTED. son, and encourage him to expose himself, to accept the risks with deHberation and forethought for the advantages to be obtained. Indeed, life is so organized that these risks cannot be shunned in any case. The mechanic, the engineer, the brakeman, the man laying brick on the wall, the other putting slates upon the roof, the sailor on the yard-arm in an Atlantic gale, and the farmer driving his reaper, are all meeting risks which cost a certain number of men every year limbs and life. If we would escape absolutely from risk, the world's business would come to an end. No man should venture out of doors. But even the house would be no security in a cyclone! He would be reduced to burrow in the earth. Every activity of life involves risk. The greater the activities the greater the risk. The civilized man accepts an hundred risks the savage shuns. But these are physical and personal risks. There are others, perhaps more serious, which face us in all movements of business and the combined activities of men. A certain number of mercantile failures occur every year. No man enters upon such business without taking his risk of failure. A certain number of banks fail every year. I am not aware TEMPTED. 105 that the fact prevents any of us who are fortu- nate enough to have any money from depositing it in a bank, and I think none of us would refuse a few shares in such an institution, although we are quite aware that cashiers, and even presidents, do cross into Canada and leave the stockholders to settle matters with the depositors! Let us get distinctly before us the fact that the training begun in infancy never ends in this world. It is a training in foresight, in prudence, in strength, patience, and courage, a training which necessarily demands at every moment risk, and even fatal risk. If these things be desirable at all, we see no way to get them except in the way of trying the man, of having ruin and failure watching on his footsteps, of holding him at every moment in peril of these. There are exceptions now and then in certain exceptional lives. But exceptions prove the rule. The law is that a man lives and does his work with risk of destruction to it, to himself or to both, on either hand, and he is bound at his peril to use all his best powers to preserve him- self. But, you say, thece are only risks. What about temptation ? I answer, the risk comes from the lo6 TEMPTED. temptation. The temptations to indulgence, to laziness, to shun trouble, to enjoy the day, to take the easy side, not the hard one, to end trouble by hasty and unconsidered action — some such temptation makes the risk in most cases. The basis of all trial, if you examine closely, you will find to be a temptation. It is a great temptation, too often yielded to, for instance, to use a boiler with a rotten bit of iron in it just 07ie day more. " It has worked so far. It will work a day more. We will accept the risk. We have no time now to attend to it." There are a large number of graves in the various cemete- ries of the country which owe their existence to the yielding to this temptation ! Indeed, this temptation is the root and heart of all, I think, the temptation to take a lie for a truth, a sham for a reality, a rotten boiler for a sound one, and imagine the lie, the sham, the rotten boiler, will answer for this occasion at least, or this day! In a world like this, there is but one end for a man or a people who take a course like that. But to return to our boy again. I have spoken of the way his father must train him physically. It is under the same conditions precisely in which he must train him intellectually. Chil- dren's brains have given way under the studies TEMPTED. 1C7 which were meant to strengthen them. An ap- plication too intense or long continued, or nar- rowed to one subject, has weakened more than one growing intelligence, or lamed it for life. Perhaps the risk here is not so pressing, and the examples are fewer, than in the case of physical exercise and physical injury. And I fancy I need not lift a voice of warning to the members of this University, as if it were an anxious matter on tJicir account ! Still, there is the risk even in the University of Michigan ! At all events, the head will ache, the eyes will grow weak, the brain will be confused, anxiety and sleeplessness will come, where there is hard study and earnest seeking after knowl- edge. The price must be paid for the gains we make. The body neglected will avenge itself, and scarce any man devotes himself to an intel- lectual pursuit, with the consuming energy which high excellence demands, without paying the penalty in some weakness of the body. Great scholars are not often robust men. Often they have been the victims of pain and sickness for the whole course of their lives. But what father who launches his son on the career of high intellectual culture, and dreams splendid dreams of wisdom attained, and high Io8 TEMPTED. trophies gained for human enrichment, by one who bears his name and honors it, ever hesitates on that account ? He takes the risks for the son he loves as himself. He exposes him to such risks, and encourages him to expose himself. And the son himself faces and accepts the same risks, if the root of the matter be in him. All the warnings of well-meaning advisers, all the experience of the past have no weight with him. Having made up his mind to his career, pressed by the sacred hunger and thirst of knowl- edge, he accepts the risks of weakened body and aching head and lost muscle for the sake of the high purpose he holds before him. But a larger responsibility yet rests upon the Father in the moral training of the child. If we find a difBculty in the fact that God leads His children into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil, let us remember that we find the same difficulty in the dealings of earthly fathers with earthly sons, and that we ourselves who are fathers have not hesitated and do not hesitate, in our weakness and blindness, to do this very thing which we find so strange in the All-wise Father of Men. The son has been carefully guarded and taught under the roof-tree of home. He has been anx- TEMPTED. 109 iously shielded from contact with evil, even from knowledge of evil. His associates have been chosen with care. His going out and coming in have been guarded. It might seem well if it could be always so. The mother generally feels that it would be, and very naturally. Still, the time must come when these home- guards must all pass out of his life. The child must become a man. He must learn to stand upon his own feet and bear his own burdens and answer for himself. The crisis comes to every most carefully sheltered boy. He must leave home; he must go to the great School or to the great City. The father delib- erately sends him to the one or the other, know- ing, as the son cannot know, the enormous moral risks he is running, the fearful temptations to which he exposes him. It is a tremendous responsibility, but a part of the natural responsibility of fatherhood. And the wise father knows there is no other way in which the boy can be trained into a self-reliant, high-principled man. He must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He must know good and evil. He must learn to stand by the right for its own sake. He must meet temptation and resist it and grow stronger by resistance. So no TEMPTED. only does moral manhood grow. So only is soul culture possible. As in all else, so also in this, growth comes from resistance, strength comes from wrestling. Yet a certain number of young men so exposed become moral wrecks ; temptation masters them. They shame the name they bear, and bring down gray heads to the grave in sorrow. Are you, earthly father, frighted from your purpose on that account ? It may be your near- est neighbor or your nearest friend's experience with his son. Does it change your purpose ? Nay! to-morrow with prayers and good words and a yearning heart you will send the pride of your life forth to face the world's temptations and the risk of moral ruin, unsheltered save by your own and his mother's prayers, and the grace of his father's God. There is need of stalwart moral manliness upon earth. As the world is, there is but one way to be assured of its existence, we may even say only one way to have it grow. So universal is the conviction, that we act upon it in the whole business of our lives. You decline to trust merely untried innocence. You are not sure that it will stand the test. It may be very fresh and sweat and fair, but you do TEMPTED. in not, with confidence, depend upon it. A man is honest, you say. Yes, but has he ever been tempted to dishonesty ? He has never fallen, because he never had the opportunity to fall. There have been no stumbling-blocks in his road, therefore he has never stumbled. You do not trust such an one with your busi- ness or your strong-box. You are too good a judge of human nature to put your interests of that sort into the hands of one who has never betrayed a trust, because he never had a trust to betray. You want a man who has shown himself trustworthy, honest, and true, where there was temptation to be otherwise. And the larger the temptation, the more frequently assailing, the higher grows your own confidence in the man who comes out victorious. You lean on him at last as on a rock. Temptation reveals character. And you are right in your judgment, more profoundly right than perhaps you know. For temptation not only sifts and winnows, not only tests and reveals, it also educates, develops, and strengthens. The moral nature grows strong by mastery. The spiritual muscles develop in the wrestle with evil. " My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations," saith the Apostle. He is looking at this side of the 112 TEMPTED. experience. " The trial of your faith worketh patience." The temptation is anotlier call to spiritual wrestling and spiritual growth, the op- portunity for another increase of steadfastness, endurance, and trust. The soul comes out strained and scarred, perhaps, for the wrestle was for life and death. But it comes out victorious, and has gained earnest of victories to come. Tempta- tion mastered, creates character And still, after all. the strange mystery remains that the Father, whom we believe loving and pitiful, knowing so many of them will fail and go to ruin, does yet lead His children into this wilderness of life and expose them to tempta- tion, I am not trying to explain the mystery. It is not explainable. I certainly am not trying to explain it away. All ultimates are mysteries, and this is an ultimate. I am only pointing out that the law of survival holds in things spiritual, as in things natural, that the condition is perfectly natural and precisely what one might have expected had he been before- hand told that spiritual beings were to be in this world at all. It is by its own open confession a very imper- fect world. It is ragged, incomplete, crude, and TEMPTED. 113 savage. It has to be fought with and mastered or it casts out its failures relentlessly. The Sons of God placed in it, apart from the question of the purpose in their placing, are put, as a matter of course, under the Law by which this imperfect world is guided. They too must be sifted and tried. They too must be trained by struggle and developed by resistance. They too must accept the risks of failure and destruction. As individuals and as nations and races they fail and are swept away before our eyes. What I mean to say is that it is all in the law and the order, all entirely natural and to be ex- pected in a world like this. Practical wisdom accepts the situation, bends to the law, orders itself according to the facts, and leaves insoluble mysteries unsolved here as everywhere, as in any case it must do. But you say, " all this was known before. Wherein are we the better for the revelation ? The fact still remains, and men go to wreck yet by millions before our eyes. Where is any fact or any knowledge revealed to us further which traverses this abiding and ugly fact, that after all only the strong survive and the weak still perish miserably ? You have shown us that the pitiless 114 TEMPTED. law reigns in the spiritual as in the material. Where is the comfort in that ? " I point again to the Man in the wilderness and the position he occupied. I find in that position the law displaced, as far as our spiritual nature is concerned, by a higher law, which is yet the same expressed in terms of the supernatural. The Man in the wilderness, the Man tempted, is the Son of God. He is taken out of the cate- gory of earthly things while yet upon the earth and His feet placed upon an eternal foundation. The mind, illuminated by that revelation of human position, declares that temptation may be overcome and turned to uses only and to goods. It sees with pity, but with righteous indignation also, that men tempt men and drag their brethren down, that the foul " residuum " in our cities' slums, the dark contingent in our jails and peni- tentiaries, the lost souls and bodies of our civili- zation and even Christianity, so called, the fair faces " lost in the dark depths of our great towns," the manhood drowned in drunkenness, the victims of our sordid greed who live and die in wretchedness like beasts, are the outcome, not of God's ordering nor even of Nature's, not the failures before the world's temptations or the Devil's, but the ruins wrought by human sin, and TEMPTED. "5 the wrecks that men make of their weaker breth- ren for their own lusts or their own gain. And while it says and admits the mystery that God has led up His children into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil, it denies with all its voices that He has led them up to be tempted of Men ! And here is the first hope. The strong con- viction that they are God's children. He may expose them, perhaps must expose them, to temptation, but He surely wants them and in- tends them to overcome! The loathsome dregs of your civilization, in crime and shame, in ig- norance and vice, in drunkenness, in debauchery, are not of God's making, but your own. These exist not by law, but against law. By taking the census of them, by tabulating them, by trying to account for them, no man makes them lawful under Nature or under God. They are not facts on which to generalize a law. They are the out- come of man's falsehood and wrong. Stand upon the ground of sonship. We are all in the stress together, all in the fight with the Devil, all wrestling for life and breathing-room in the wilderness, and all these, the lovv^est fallen, are children of God. Beat temptation back from them if you can. Defend them with all your might. Help them when they are hard pressed. Ii6 TEMPTED. Throw your shield over the weak. Raise up the fallen. Stand hy your own and God's, these men and women round you. Work for them as the Elder Brother did. Fight for them as He fought. Die for them, if need be, as He died. The assurance of all victory lies in this, that the wilderness after all is our Father's, that we are here by His Leadership, and that we are His children. As the Eternal Son conquered, so may we conquer by standing upon His ground. The law for us as Sons of God is not failure, but success; not defeat, but victory. We have failed so far, and the wrecks are round us because we have insisted that men are children of the Devil, and that it is nature to lead their lives by the Devil's laws. The Man in the wilderness has cried to us from afar and we have misunderstood His voice or re- fused to hear it. But this Voice, all these cen- turies, has proclaimed the watchword of our vic- tory. We are Sons, and the Sons are not under Law, but under grace. Even in temptation the Father wants his children's deliverance, and seeks their growth. And what shall the children want ? Only their own ? Or that of all their brethren ? Shall we rise to the larger conception, the very IRMPTED. H7 central idea of the wilderness, that the Church is not merely to seek the salvation of individual souls, but is an organized army of the Sons of God to shelter and defend mankind from tempta- tion, and throw the serried ranks of the strong soldiers of the Lord round every child of His, here sore beset and beaten ? And to the conception behind and within that, that the world's temptations are hard enough, and the Devil's fierce enough alone, and those which are harder and fiercer and more accursed than either, the temptations and the traps that men set for men, are, in the name and power of God, to be swept from the face of the earth, should that involve also the sweeping away, with wrath and indignation of God and men, those who set them ? A world where men stand with the deep con- viction in their souls that they are Sons of God will be a world where temptation will remain no doubt, but where it will be transformed into the blessing of a loving training and a Fatherly dis- cipline, a world where not only God, but every child's bigger brother, will help him to see the use of temptation, and win through safely. LECTURE IV. BREAD. ' ' Command that these stones be made bi-ead. " Matthew iv. 3. LECTURE IV. BREAD. OF all animals upon earth the human animal alone is hungry. The others find all things ready to their needs. He alone finds no provi- sion. The resources are all in nature, that is true, but he must master and utilize the resources. He must house, clothe, feed himself by outrages upon nature. He finds no table spread for hint in the wilderness. The lowest creeping thing upon the sands, the most ephemeral insect hum- ming in the sunshine is more favored far than he. He alone must make his bread out of the stones. But yet he must make it. He must live while he is in the wilderness and live under the low conditions of the wilderness. The Son of God so far is on a level with the beasts and the birds. Food is as necessary to him as to them. As an animal, too, his organization is the most perfect — the most differentiated, the most hetero- 122 BREAD. genized, as the jargon is, and his physical needs are consequently infinitely greater. It is the literal fact that man, in his highest development as civilized man, is starved in the wilderness, while the lowest brute is housed and fed. The wilderness is in conspiracy against him on his physical side. To make bread, then, not to find it, is the problem before this animal, Man. In the earliest record of him that law is laid upon him. Other creatures may find their bread. Man, in the sweat of his brow, shall eat his only when he has made it. Now, in this first need of his he is tried. He must, even in the first provision for his animal wants, in the satisfying of his merely animal hun- ger, in his very eating to live on earth, he must stand apart from all creatures else, and find this a moral discipline. A stranger in the wilderness, the Son of God, he carries his nature with him, and the conditions of the wilderness are con- verted into spiritual conditions. The struggle for existence becomes, in his case, a moral strug- gle. How, rightly, shall he get bread ? The hungry beast gets his food where he can, and how he can. He is controlled by no power but his hunger. He recognizes no right but the BREAD. 123 imperious right of animal want. There are no rights in others as against that. His food is before him. He takes it, cannot help taking it. It is all purely animal. He feeds under a physi' cal compulsion. The man who makes his bread to supply his own hunger and that of even the beasts which depend upon him, is at once, as in all his activities, put under the ethical laws which are supreme over all his actions, little or great, and finds him- self under spiritual discipline, spiritual trial and tempting even in the matter of his bodily food. Therefore it is in the natural order that the Son of God is assailed and tested first through his physical want. In the case of the Lord here, what was the point of the temptation ? There is the divine side in every activity, there is also the diabolic side. What was the diabolic side ? According to our argument He was standing for us all. We are trying to understand from his experi- ence in the wilderness our own position, our own temptations and their meaning, our own security in and deliverance froj)i the temptations. He stands for humanity especially and peculiarly in this transaction. What was the exact pomt, then, in the assault 124 BREAD. that tried Him ? TJuit determined, we find the exact point also of the assault upon humanity for all time through its animal needs, and also how the supply of those animal needs is an ethi. cal training, because it may become the line of an ethical assault. For we have seen that tempta- tion can only come in the line of moral discipline. " Command that these stones be made bread." Is it, then, a sin to make bread out of stones ? Is that the point ? Does the wrong lie in the ma- terial out of which we make the bread ? We pass that, ot course. Such questions an- swer themselves. We must leave out the case (for there was no question of that here) of the unhappy bakers of our time who follow the Devil's order literally, and, to the ruin of their own poor sinful souls and the stomachs of their customers, do actually mix ahivi with their flour. As also we leave out of the case their no less sinful brethren, the wretched creatures who induce the ignorant to mix the poison of their patent baking powders in the morning rolls of innocent people who have never harmed them ! Even the Devil, we are safe in saying, had no notion, as yet, of the possible diabolism of men when put in pos- session of the science of the nineteenth century! The wrong could not lie in the making bread BREAD. 125 out of stones, for that is exactly what men have been doing since the world began, what they are, by the needs of their situation, com- pelled to do, what the Father commanded them to do when He led them first into the wilderness. Bread from stones! The measure of its mak- ing is the measure of human advancement. The progress of men depends upon the extent to which, more and more, man learns how to turn the useless stones of the earth into supplies for his needs! We are doing this triumphantly in our day, and we rightly congratulate ourselves upon our success. We drag the shapeless ore from the bases of the hills, the coal from the deep caverns where it hides ; we convert them into power under our hands. The great engines throb with the pulses of imprisoned might. The red furnace fires light the darkness of our midnights, the melting torrents of the iron rush blinding bright to the moulds which shape them to our use, the strong-armed toilers man the forges, and the hammers clank and clang as they beat the iron into bread! We are finding nothing without its use. The waste of our factories is fast ceasing to be waste. The refuse in shapeless slag of our foundries and 126 BREAD. metal works is turned to new values. We are believing that nothing is made in vain. The desert turns to riches under the hand of industry and knowledge. The wilderness, the barren sea, the splintered rocks become abundant in bread. The nettle fibre is converted into webs of beauty. The useless sea-wrack tossed by the wave upon the brown sand of the shore is " useless " and " vile " no longer. Thousands upon thousands of men are making their bread out of the sand and the stones. The wealth of the world in large part to-day exists from thing useless half a century ago, and men gather about bountiful tables and thank God, let us hope, for bread created out of material hard and intractable, worthless apparently and forbid- ding as the ragged splinters of the Syrian rocks. And our advance depends, as we see, upon this instinct and this endeavor. That we can make bread out of stones is the prerogative of the Sons of God. It is a unique prerogative, and in its creative power allies man to his Father. That he must make bread from stones is the inexorable necessity of the wilderness. This prerogative and this necessity have driven us forward. We are impelled by the unconquer- able desire of testing our sovereignty in the wil- BREAD. 127 derness to find more and more materials of which to make our bread, and other regions in which such materials exist. Hence all our commerce, all our explorations, all our settling and our civilizing, all our new States and new cities, all our inventions, our prac- tical science, our politics, our news gathering and distribution, our treaties, our international con- nections. Hungry man roams the wilderness, the coarse, shaggy, uncivilized, and ungainly earth, to find stones to make his bread. He is very hungry. And he is somewhat capricious. He wants new flavors in his loaves, new dishes on his table, new relishes to his bread. He roams the world for them. And he wants to be sure of his supply. So he organizes his roamings into explorations, into merchant business and commerce, and the mapping of the trackless seas. He endures want, hunger and thirst, and loneli- ness. He wears himself in muscle and in brain. He denies himself up to the last necessities and beyond. He works with every power of hand and mind. He is reducing, exploring, mapping, and mastering the world in his hunger for bread which neither Nature nor God will make for Jam as they do for the sparrow on the house-top, 128 BREAD. which, being the Son of God, he must make for himself, the furnished raw material being stones! Does one want it literally ? Let him take a wheat-sheaf in the harvest field, the result of the husbandman's toil from the months past of plowing, sowing, and of reaping, and he finds his bread, in this rudest and earliest form of making bread, growing out of, upheld by, and prepared for him by the flint itself in stalk, leaf, and seed covering! The point of the temptation, then, was not the making of bread from stones. There is nothing wrong there. Did it lie in making too much bread, more bread than was needed ? For while St. Luke writes, " Speak to this stone that it may become a loaf," St. Matthew writes, " Speak to these stones that they may becomes loaves." Manifestly the question amounts to this: Is it a sin to have abundance of bread ? Is it morally wrong to be rich ? And is this the suggestion to evil here ? We answer that abundance of bread is a bless- ing promised by the Lord to His own. It is a mark of Divine favor. The notion that there is something holy in poverty and want, something pleasing to God in starvation and misery, is about BREAD. 129 as unchristian as it is irrational. That such an idea exists, that one can even find it in devotional books, and hear the echo of it from pulpits now and then, is but evidence of the persistence of the worst suggestions of old Paganism, or at least old Manicheism, under Christian forms. Riches and plenty are the gifts of God to hu- man industry, patience, and self-control. The more riches the better, so the man remain master of his riches. The more bread the better, so the man remain master of his bread. Abraham was one of the richest men of his day, a prince and leader in the East, and he was "the Friend of God." Melchizedek was a king as well as " a Priest of the Most High God." Job was the greatest sheik and the richest in all the eastern land, and God blessed him after his trial by giving him twice as much as he had before. Is a tramp the favorite of Heaven, and is the millionaire a sinner in its sight ? Is the pauper living a godly life, and are you, who are taxed to support him, living evil lives ? Was the Prodi- gal Son among the swine, who would fain have eaten the carob-pods the swine were fed on, alto- gether righteous, and his Father altogether a sinner because he had " bread enough and to spare ? " To ask the questions is to answer them. 9 I30 BREAD. Turn to races and peoples. Were the North American Indians, living from hand to mouth and not sure of to-morrow's dinner, a holy peo- ple, and the civilized Europeans unholy because they had dinners, under necessity, for half the world as well as for themselves ? Are the United States and Great Britain the wickedest peoples upon the earth because they are the richest ? Does the just Judge of all the world show His indignation against us for our transgressions, by giving us " a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills we may dig brass," a land filled with the stored sunlight of the ages past in coal mine and oil fountain, with the ore from the great fires that roared when the mountain hammers shook the rocking world, before recorded time ? A land where the yellow corn laughs on every hillside and valley in the harvest ? Where the great rivers run through a thousand leagues of exhaustless fertility ? Where the blue lakes ripple to the margin of the teeming prairie and the wealthy woodland ? Are all these God's visitations upon us for our sins, because we are making our bread so abundantly that the white-winged ships or the fire-driven coursers of the Deep are bearing it to every haven where men are an hungered ? BREAD. 131 And our great kinsmen across the waves, are they the worst of European peoples because God has given them lordship over the teeming plains of India, over the exhaustless resources of the Island Continent of the South, over all the seas and over shores illimitable, and made their mer- chants princes and their bankers among the rulers of the earth ? We are fond of thinking just the other way. We say the two peoples most rich and abundant in bread are so by the blessing of the Lord, are so by good purpose of the Lord, and for good ends in His ordering of the world. We say, indeed, that under the abiding law — " Whatso- ever a man soweth that shall he also reap " — these peoples have gotten what they worked for. They have earned what they possess. Courage, patience, perseverance, industry, self-restraint, fixed ideals of liberty, law, obedience — these have gone into their making, and riches and power in plenty and to spare have been their honest re- ward. For here there comes to us this other consid- eration. In the making of his bread in the world, in dealing with his lowest animal needs, there comes to him ethical discipline. To make bread out of stones rightly, there is necessary 132 BREAD. for man the human qualities. He must make his ozvn bread. It requires industry. It demands patience, temperance, self-restraint. Courage is needed and faith, faith in God, in law, in order, in himself, and in his neighbors. Mutual help and mutual trust are demanded by the conditions. We cannot produce a single harvest without industry, without trust in the Lord of the Harvest. Whatsoever and whosoever we consider him to be — Our Father in Heaven from Whom you and I ask our daily bread, or " the Power behind Phenomena" whom we know only by his inarticulate heavings and writhings as of Enceladus under ^Etna — we must still trust him, still, you see, put ourselves in the hands of some Power invisible — our only question being whether it is a Power that has or has not sense, a Power one can go to and ask for things, or a dumb, stupid Force that cannot hear you and has no sense to understand you if it did! that cannot lift from above its " lubber length " the material mass that crushes and conceals it, long enough to utter one articulate word, or show us one finger of its hand! Faith is, however, demanded as you and other men are trained in it, some trust and some de- pendence upon powers invisible, and to us at least BREAD. ^Z2» omnipotent, and that in itself is moral training, even a spiritual. We get that much even in getting our bread. Indeed, this whole business of bread-making by men is removed whole hemispheres, as we see, from the foraging and preying of the beast. It is no answer to this to say that savages seek their good and get it very much like the brutes, on very low levels indeed of human effort. Even in their case, when we look closely, the difference is enormous. But we are speaking of men who are most differentiated from the animals, are most human, and therefore most consciously the Sons of God, and tJicir bread-making and bread- consuming becomes such that the Lord can make a sacrament of the material and turn the meals of men into symbols of divine mysteries. Bread and Wine become the outward signs of spiritual realities. Bread and Wine, observe, not Fruit and Water. These last are the food and drink of the foragers, the mere animals of the world. But Bread and Wine, the results of the creative intelligence and power of the Sons of God working on the dumb material, symbols of all the victories of order over disorder, of the spiritual over the material on earth. The Supper of the Lord must be a purely Jiiunan meal. 134 BREAD. The temptation, then, we conclude was not in the making of bread. It was not in the making it out of stones. It was not in the making it abundantly. We must go further. Who asked the Son in the wilderness to make the bread ? Is not that the question which lets light into the heart of the situation ? The temptation was to make bread at the bid- ding of the Devil. To make it at God's bidding, under God's order, is a necessity and a duty. To make plenty of it, enormous quantities of it, is right. To turn all the stones of the desert into bread may be a thing desirable, and certainly is no sin. But to do it at the suggestion of the Devil, in his time and Jiis way, and as under his obedience, there lies the fatal failure and apostasy for a Son of God. The Man in the wilderness, who de- clined to make bread for His own sore hunger because the Tempter bade Him, does not hesitate, in another desert place, to feed five thousand with five loaves when they are hungry. And this temptation, as we see at once, is an abiding temptation of the situation. It is continually at home in the wilderness. It continually assails men. And it assails them because they are Sons of God, and on the ground of that sonship and BREAD. 135 the power that sonship gives. Since the getting of his bread is a moral training to a man in the world, so it may be perverted to his moral curse and ruin. The first gate through which he is to be assailed is, from the condition of things, the gate of his animal necessities. Through these high and low together may be assailed. It is the common highway, for at this point the material and the spiritual first touch. Through this gate the soul first enters into the wilderness, becomes cogni- zant of the existence of the v/ilderncss, and finds itself alone and a stranger there. Through this gate the soul of the sage and the soul of the clown alike look out into the wilderness and ask for bread. The first trial comes here, the first training. Here therefore also comes the first attempt to sift, and if it may be, to overthrow and ruin the Son of God. Being the Son of God, and having a son's rights and royalties in his Father's house, the Tempter meets him on that ground. "You can do what you will since you are the Son of God. All things here are your own. There is no need for hunger. The Father has not provided for you just now. He seems to have forgotten you for the time 136 BREAD. being. His arrangements appear not to have taken account of this emergency or worked up to it. You are thrown upon your own resources ' Command that these stones be made bread ! ' " Bread at the suggestion of the Devil! Bread in the Devil's fashion ! Distrust of the Father and the Father's laws. Distrust therefore of our own Sonship! The abandonment of our Son- ship, the denial of it! The submission to the Devil! The acknowledgment of his wisdom and power, even his kindness and care for men in need ! The confession that the world is his, and he has the right to give orders upon it, and dis- pose of even so much as the stones of its deserts! This is all involved in the temptation ! Need I point out to you how men have yielded ? How the millions fail just here at the threshold ? How making bread at the Devil's bidding has filled our jails, peopled our almshouses, stocked our asylums, created the misery and degradation of our great cities, and ground down the millions of the world's toilers in poverty, into lives scarce human ? The boy wants to make bread in the Devil's way. He pilfers from his employer's till in the small way allowed him. The trusted clerk or manager wants to make bread in the .Devil's BREAD. 137 fashion. He forges, or empties the safe. The burglar looks for his bread in the same way, and breaks into your house, and if need be murders you to get away with his material. The dishonest merchant breaks and makes a fraudulent assignment, ruining scores of innocent and honest people, because he believes the Devil will provide him with more abundant and better bread than God and his own right effort. Let us confess the temptation is not only the common one, but the strong. At times it seems as if there were no reply possible. In the cor- rupted currents of this world honesty at times seems the worst policy. A man stands bewil- dered before successful fraud. The knave wins his way and prospers. The cheat is successful. The man of integrity struggles in poverty, and lays down his toil at last, with hands folded to their last rest, weary and worn hands, aching head and bewildered heart, glad that the end has come. He dies in obscurity as he had lived. His life has been, by the world's measures, a fail- ure. He lies under the clover, and no man asks for his grave or proposes a monument to keep his memory in honor. A man beside him has lived a knavish life, and all men have known it. He has prospered. 138 BREAD. Riches and honor have been his, notwithstand- ing, all the days of his life. Men have given him high place among them, have recognized him as a power in the world, have sought to be his friends as an honor to themselves, have flattered him and imitated him, have even exhausted their mother tongue to express their admiration of his character and his success. And when he is dead the forum and the mar- ket echo with the sound of his fall. Values are changed. Great interests are affected. Power- ful corporations take observations of their posi- tion ; ask how the great man's death will influ- ence their business or their securities. The news- papers print columns about the distinguished citizen and hold his life up as an example to the young men of the country; reams of resolutions bewailing his loss to an admiring community are sent to his af^icted family or spread out in the public press, that reservoir of pure truth and mirror of lofty integrity which we all so believe in and admire ! He is buried with all the distinction a " success- ful " life demands. The foremost citizens are hon- ored by being asked to bear his pall. His body rests in satin and is cased in rosewood and velvet. The speaking marble lifts itself aloft and lies in BREAD. 139 the face of the sun without a blush, bearing a record of such worth and virtue above his pom- pous tomb as the poor creature himself never believed in, for either heaven or earth. Contrasts like these are familiar experiences in life, and they are dreadfully staggering to one's faith. In these latter days, when the word Bread has taken on a far larger meaning, when it is no more the necessaries of life or even the comforts, when our fathers' necessities would be to us want, and our fathers' comforts our prime necessities, when their luxuries indeed have become to us essentials of existence, the temptation is growing more pressing daily. We need so much Bread now, and such varied kinds. The plain fare of our grandfathers will no longer serve. We want books, we want pictures in our homes, we want to profit, in our own persons, by the conquests we have made over nature. No cottage now, unless " a cottage of gentility," if not " with a double coach house," at least "with all the mod- ern improvements," hot and cold water in every room, steam-heaters and electric bells, "hard wood finish" inside, and painted all the colors of the rainbow outside, as a libel on the memory of " good Queen Anne ! " I40 BREAD. I do not condemn this, observe. Believing that all the stones of the world are given to the Sons of God, that they may make bread, believing that the supply of their bodily needs is not a brute business but a divine, I am not sorry but glad that, in ever widening circles, men are bringing the wilderness under contribution, that their wants are educated by their continued supply, that they are still hungry for richer, better, and costlier Bread, in every generation, and in in- creasing numbers in each. For so they are driven, more and more, to explore the wilderness, to find out its value as a Bread-producing place, to mas- ter it and civilize it and turn it to human and orderly uses. The insatiable hunger of the Sons of God upon the earth is the motive power, original and rude, but very strong, indeed strongest of all, which is conquering the world. And I am glad to know that hunger can never be appeased, that it grows with what it feeds on, that it is not a beast's hunger which can be satisfied and so to sleep, but a human hunger and a divine, which can never be satisfied till it feeds upon the Bread of Heaven in the great Feast of the Children's return ! But I also see that the increasing wants of men BREAD. 141 necessarily increase their temptations. I see that the impulse to take the Devil's word for truth is necessarily more frequent and more potent where men's tastes have been most highly educated and their wants most increased. So comes the list of robberies, breaches of trust in private companies and in public offices, which extends itself in our daily papers. Hence, too, the wild gambling in the stock and other ex- changes which calls itself legitimate, as well as that other gambling which goes under its own proper name, though scarcely worse. Combinations to compel the poor man to pay a penny more for his loaf or his bushel of coal, while the other poor man who produces the loaf or works in the coal mine is reduced to the low- est possible wage on which he can work at all. Importation of the most degraded classes from the slums of the old world, diseased, ignorant, vicious, even criminal, to drive out the native workman, whose American sense of decency, and of what belongs to his family, will not allow him to be content with the conditions in which these others live. These, too, and the rich man's greed and the clerk's knavery, the bank president's robbery and the sneak-thief's larceny, the merchant's failure 142 BREAD. and the dishonest workman's dishonest work, the garments that fall to pieces and the shoes that do not wear, the badly built house and the adul- terated food, the wall that tumbles down and kills its builders, the fraud, sham, and lies of busi- ness and of life — all are a yielding to the Tempta- tion — the attempt to make one's bread at the Devil's suggestion or command. A universal yielding would make human so- ciety impossible. Any yielding is, as far as it goes, high treason to that society. For society is divine, and can exist only upon divine laws, upon the express and foundation understanding that the Devil's bread is poison ! It may exist for a time, and even give no signs of its deadly affection, and yet contrive to get rid of a good deal of the poison, if it be a young vigorous society with a good inherited constitu- tion. But only let the condition continue and the strongest social order ever framed will die in convulsions. It can only stand and prosper on the clear principle that the world's materials for bread are God's, and that men must handle them, and get their bread, whether nations or individ- uals, as Sons of God and brethren of one Family. But how to face the Temptation ! BREAD. 143 The voice from the wilderness is clear. The Son there stands upon His Sonship as a Man. He throws up the common shield under which all men may shelter — the Word of God. " Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The beasts live only by food. Keep that away, they die, and there is an end. Man dies and there is not an end. The life which makes him human does not depend upon bread. The temp- tation owes all its force to the idea that man is but an animal, that if the animal life perishes, all has perished. It is quite possible the Devil thought so, at all events had accepted materialism. He was preaching it here. He always does. Yet see how simple a word explodes the false- hood! " Man has two lives. One of them is sup- ported by bread. It is not the most important life, not that which makes man. There is another life which differentiates humanity, is its specific character and distinction, and that does not live by bread." It is the same thing in the question, " Is not the life more than meat, and the body than rai- ment ? " In the other declaration, " He that find- eth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life, for my sake, shall find it." 144 BREAD. Need we of all men be told of the sweet rea- sonableness of the position ? Did not the men we hold for our highest types and examples stand upon it, and become strong and fair for the vision of all time ? The earthly life is valuable! Yes! But its value is not infinite. There are things far more precious than life. We have, again and again, reckoned its value and prized many things be- yond it. Better a dead honest man than a living knave! Better a dead truth-speaker than a living liar! Better a dead hero than a living coward! As a people believes these things in its heart, so is its power. Find the number of men in this land who hold truth, integrity, honor, and manli- ness dearer than life, and you have the physical as well as moral force of the land, the men who, by God's blessing, will save the land in its need ! For these have the root of the matter in them. They may be, in many points of view, rough-look- ing Christians. But I do not hesitate to say that they have found the central ground, on which alone any true Christian, and, that is, any genu- ine manly life can be lived in this world. It is our thanksgiving to God, who rules among the peoples, that in the crises of its trial, in the darkest days of its long pilgrimage, our race has BREAD. 145 never wanted men who knew that law, and home and freedom and faith were worth lives by the thousand, and who have stood bravely ready to give their own, and count them saved in the giving! Is there any virtue in living a mere animal life? If that be all, how much, in the common con- science of Americans or Englishmen, is life worth? Worth living ? No ! The question is not debat- able. There is no use in any man's worrying himself to write a book upon it. The written words of all our literature, our brave, honest, manful English speech, in History and Poetry, in Law and Ballad and the people's Songs, in Science and in Romance, from Saxon Caedmon to Saxon Thackeray, has one utterance only and one conviction — Life is worth just the truth and honor, the faith and valor it holds, for God's service and for man's. The life that bread can preserve, or the want of bread destroy, our Shepherds and Kings of Men, from truth-speaking Saxon Alfred to truth- speaking Saxon Lincoln, have all held and taught, is worth just the good sacrifice you can make of it for something better ! The words of Christ, as I must say so often, are words of power — living, abiding, creative 146 BREAD. words. They are infinite words and inexhausti- ble by men. One man finds his need in them. Another his and a totally different need. So races and peoples find each their meaning of power. And it came to ours to find a large gospel in this utterance in the wilderness. A rough, un- couth, savage sort of Christians were our fathers for many years. A good many of their sons re- main so. But they did sqq in the Child of Beth- lehem, in the Man of Nazareth, from the first, a true King and Master, a dauntless Hero, a cour- ageous Lord and Leader for free-born men. That side of the revelation of life came to them. They grasped it from the first, and their bravest and best they have always held, wherever their tongue is spoken, are the men who can die, but cannot lie, the men whose lives are in their hands, as the Eternal Man's was, for God's glory or Man's good! " Man doth not live by bread only." " I will starve but I will not lose mine integrity. I dare to be poor. I dare to suffer want and physical distress. I covet no man's bread. I am sure I will not touch the Devil's! The good Father has put me here to hold my place and do my work and I discharge myself of all responsibility BREAD, 147 in the matter. If He chooses to let me starve, die here in the wilderness, and let the jackals and the vultures bury me, that is His affair. But that is better than to turn knave, mean liar, thief, and scoundrel and feed on royal dainties as the Devil's lackey ! " It is these lackeys of the Devil who are the ruin of us! These poor, cowardly, crawling creatures who lick his feet for the refuse of his kitchen ! They dare not be honest, and eat brown bread. They dare not live in plain houses, and walk in homespun. " Plain living and high thinking " — " gone," you say ? Yes, and vulgar living and no thinking at all come in their place, and the smell of the eternal stoke-hole upon the scraps they have sold their poor souls for! Some of them are rich, live in fine houses, have abundance of bread of the very best quality. Some of them are poor, do not live very well after all, and have small allowance. But all are alike in this, that they believe man lives by bread only, that he is an animal, and the slave of his palate, stomach, or back, and the worst thing that can happen to him is to have his carcase un- comfortable! There is not a hair-breadth's difference among them all, nothing to chose between the fine lady 148 BREAD. in her satins, and her waiting-maid, between the rich man at his wine, and the butler who cheats him or steals from him, if they expect their bread from the Devil and not from God, if they take their little animal lives for the dearest and most precious things they know! There is a general grading going on all the time among men. God levels men up. The Devil levels them down servant and master, rich and poor, maid and mistress. Under either pro- cess, there is not much to choose between them after a while. "A nation of shopkeepers." It was a sneer about England. It may be a more biting sneer about America. We are a dickering, swopping, buying, selling, bargaining people beyond any that ever existed. The typical American has become " a Drummer ! " Do you wonder that high-hearted people have always looked with a little contempt on " shop- keeping" — notwithstanding the fact that it is the universal business of America and England, and that very good men sell tape and needles ? There is nothing necessarily lowering or un- manly in buying and selling, in keeping shop or making merchandise. It is, in these days, an oc- cupation fast developing into pre-eminence. It BREAD. /4g has gotten its mean name, because it has been so largely meanly conducted, and the Devil has been so close a councillor behind the counter, and at the day-book and ledger, and it deserves its contempt. Why should you find sneers, in all our litera- ture, about the family that makes pretensions to position socially, because the grandfather was a dealer in soap and candles ? There are no sneers if the grandfather was a sailor, a miner, an en- gineer, a blacksmith. Why should we find the sneer has a point because it is a question of soap and candles ? Soap and candles are good enough in their places. The reason is that " trade " is suspected of ser- vility, falsehood, meanness, knavery, that the Devil's whisper to make bread in his way is nearer to the man of the day-book than to him on the yard-arm in an Atlantic gale, or him in the mine with fire-damp and like dangers round him ! There is no use of complaining. It is the race instinct. And it is the salt that saves the race. We honor the occupations of danger, the activi- ties that have an ideal, the business where life risks itself! We do not honor the shop-keeper, pawn-broker, or " drummer " as such. Stand on "the bridge," some night, in "half a ISO BREAD. gale," when the great " ocean greyhound " roars through the Atlantic surges, and sends the salt foam flying to her maintop; sit in the engine " cab," when the locomotive thunders through the darkness of a wild winter night, and in the sailor pacing the bridge with you, in the stalwart, clear-eyed, engineer standing beside you, you will find the types of human activities that the men of our blood recognize as manly. Rough Christians both of them ! Yes, but they both believe, when the crash comes of a collision in mid-Atlantic, and the great racer has plowed half way through a sinking ship, and the order is " boats away," or when the engine sways and rocks upon a track washed out — they both be- lieve, and stand on reeling deck and rushing en- gine — in that faith, " Man doth not live by bread only." They will each die that other men may live. Now, some day, we will carry out our " busi- ness " in the same heroic fashion. We will man- ufacture, we will buy and sell and deal with €ach other in the same temper and with the same heroism we have displayed upon our battle-fields. Believing in God who rules the world, and rolls the ages on, I believe the day is coming when we shall recognize ourselves as Sons of God. Our BREAD. 151 lives in our hands for the weak, the falHng, the ignorant, the sorely tried, when, chivalrous gener- osity shall rule in shop and factory, when we shall recognize the common brotherhood, and fight the fight out shoulder to shoulder every- where. " Courage, brethren ! What will they say at home if we yield ? " Yes! " What will God and the angels say ? What will the Elder Brother say ? We dart; not fail ! Stand fast! We do not live by bread alone ! " After all, the wilderness is an abundant place. The Father has supplied raw material for all His children's needs. There should be no man hun- gry, no shivering child, no homeless wanderer found on earth. Supper and lodging to-night, breakfast to-morrow, is every honest man's claim. " I have been young and now am old and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread." The Law of Heredity, you see, announced very definitely some centuries before Mr. Darwin guessed about it. And the Law holds. The ideal civilization must be built upon it. The stand the Man took in the Wilderness is the foundation rock to build upon. " I am the Son of God. I can make bread out 152 BREAD. of stones. It is my prerogative and birth-right. No devil can, not the smallest burnt cake! My Father owns this land and has given it to me, and whether I am hungry or feasting is no business of yours. That is a matter between my Father and myself. I certainly won't take lessons in bread-making from you. Away with you! With our Father's help we are going to make a God's world, abundant and fair, out of this wilderness." Our questions — communism, socialism, rela- tions of capital and labor, of rich and poor, about which foolish men " looking backward " or looking forward write and speak foolish twaddle, can be settled and settled only by the word from the Syrian wilderness — " Man doth not live by bread only, But by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God Doth man live." LECTURE V. KINGDOMS. " Again, the Devil taketh Jiini tip into an exceeding high mount- ain, and shewcth him all the kingdoms of the woi-ld and the glory of them ; and saith unto him. All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall dozen and worship me," Matthew, iv. 8, 9. LECTURE V. KINGDOMS. WHEN man upon the earth has won his way to the supply of all his animal needs, he has but begun to feel the larger wants which be- long to him as an intellectual being. Here he seems to part entirely from the crea- tures with whom so far he has had much in com- mon. He, like them, has needed food for his physical hunger. He has, indeed, differed widely from them, in the method of obtaining it; indeed in all the conditions that concern it, but he and they have alike needed it. But this obtained, the man, and the mere animal part company. Its stomach filled the animal is satisfied. Its highest need has been supplied. It lies content until the imperious call of hunger sets it foraging or hunt- ing again. The lowest type of man is low and remains low, as it remains content with this same content. 156 KINGDOMS. The race satisfied with physical abundance for the day, with every felt want supplied, when it is sheltered, covered, and comfortably fed, is a race very low down in the scale of humanity. With the higher types of men, the supply of bodily need is only a vantage gained for the sup- ply of other needs which are quite as imperious and which spring at once into power and clam- orous utterance, when the sufficient bread is at- tained. There is no gulf leaped either in this case. One thing grows out of another, in orderly devel- opment of course. Leisure given from mere bread getting, spends itself in bettering the bread. The hut once built and made a sufificient shelter against storm and cold and wet, made cheerful as a human nest of reasonable bodily comfort, becomes soon a home, and man adds this touch of beauty here, and that bit of refine- ment there, having time and means now, and the hut is on the high road to become a palace. The log structure in a Greek forest held the prophecy of the Parthenon. The wattled churches of Augustine, in the rude realm of Ethel- bert, contained the effectual germ of the Cathe- dral of Canterbury. The necessity of mastering nature in some KINGDOMS. 157 degree, in order to get the plainest bread, devel- ops a habit in man, and, having gotten the bread, he goes on instinctively, as it were, upon the same road, mastering her for more and better bread, till the rude meal of parched corn and pulse becomes a Lord Mayor's banquet, and the sheltering hut in the forest grows into a palace of marble and bronze. But the bodily needs, no matter how abun- dantly, luxuriously, and magnificently supplied, merge themselves into intellectual needs which in their turn are quite as hungry and compelling. Man must know the rationale of things. He is compelled to make things logical. His first and still his surest science is the science of mea- surement and of number. He will build his house by count, by rule and line. He will lay the base of his pyramid " four square to every wind that blows." There is a compulsion on him to mete and bound by line and angle the acres of his fields, the square feet of his garden. Reason, order, beauty, the harmony of things, become parts of his quest, as soon as that of sufficient bread is satisfied. Hence rise " the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them " more or less. The Son of God in the wilderness is royal. 158 KINGDOMS. He has the hungry heart of the conqueror. He becomes conscious of His power and His rights. The wilderness is not a lair of wild beasts, or a nest of dragons. There are strange forces in it. There are wonderfully beautiful creations which suggest still more beauty. There are many things to be discovered in it, many things to be mastered and enjoyed, when once you have dis- covered how, in tolerably satisfactory fashion, to make bread out of stones. You may cut gems from its rocks. You may carve porphyry columns from these splintered crags. The very sand may be melted into crys- tal. Treasures lie in these ragged clefts. There are a thousand things to be gotten beside mere bread, when one has mastered the situation. But the situation must be mastered. Indeed, in order to have a reasonably satisfactory cer- tainty of bread you must establish a kingdom, some expression of reason, and embodiment of order, some power of personal will amid blind force, some rules to order even that personal will, and some methods by which it shall act and react upon itself and the material. In the mount of vision the Son of God stands with the temptation. All the kingdoms of the world, and their glory, pass in His review "in a KINGDOMS. 159 moment of time." They are the outward expres- sions of human sovereignty over the world, as far as such sovereignty has attained. Past, present, and the time to come all are spread before the Man in the wilderness; all that ever have been or ever will be seen by man, are in vision here of the Man who was and is infinite and eternal. The golden domes gleam in the mystic light. The lofty towers flash back the splendors. The pillared courts, the long vast colonnades, swim away in the golden haze. Temples and palaces and sweeping walls loom through the light of the wondrous vision. Nineveh, and Babylon with its gardens in the clouds. The avenues of sphinxes, the pyramids of the Nile, the pillared grandeurs of Persepolis, " the vast Akrokeraunian walls," the snowy won- der of the Athenian Akropolis, and, last of all, the domed glory of the Lady of all Kingdoms, throned on her seven-hilled seat. And not these only. All that is to be! Paris and Berlin and New York, and London with the thousand masts of Thames! The temples of their religion, the magnificence of their capitols, the palaces of their learning, the dim vastness of their libraries, where human i6o KINGDOMS. thought is hoarded for the coming years, the wealth of their storehouses, the power of their gHttering legions, the roar of their thunders on the deep, the fire-driven car, rushing across the continents, the iron leviathan sweeping through the cataracts of the wild seas — all the kingdoms established by man over natural forces, and the untrained and untamed resistances of the earth, pass in the field of this wonderful vision on the mountain. Now, first of all, remember the Son of God came expressly to get these kingdoms. That was His mission and business on earth. To make all these the kingdoms of God was the end. There is no sin then in wanting the kingdoms of this world. Indeed, to get possession of all that are, and to build new, is the purpose of an ordered rational human life. The fault of your savage, the degradation of your barbarian, the wretched and shameful re- trogression of the dregs of your civilization is that they have ceased this divine quest of king- doms. As the Son of God, man is a kingdom con- queror, or a kingdom maker by necessity of his nature. Kingdoms of comfort, kingdoms of in- telligence, kingdoms of power, kingdoms of KINGDOMS. l6l beauty and grace, kingdoms of order and law — he is seeking them continually or he is failing in the purpose of his mission. And many of them are kingdoms in the land of vision. Indeed, there first he sees them. Their mystic glories swim before his tranced eyes to lead him on. The real kingdom has never yet approached his ideal. His eyes are enchanted by the vision. The land is a far land yet in which the glory of his kingdoms lies, and the wilderness about him is bare and desolate. But the glories of the mount of vision, " the exceeding high mountain " which venturous human thought climbs, and where human imagination rests and sweeps the horizon of all knowledge and all ex- pectation of all that has been, and all that might be, is far above the wilderness, and there the watcher and the spiritual powers are alone to- gether. It is no longer a question of a poor loaf of bread, when man, the intelligence, awakens. He who wanted, down yonder, only a meal for his hunger in the wilderness, now wants all royalties and all crowns. The nearer the heights, the more the imperial nature asserts itself, and its demand for empire. Yes, kingdoms arc what we seek! and king- 1 62 KINGDOMS. doms in the land of vision! The humblest of us wants, at least, the kingdom of home. The vision haunts the men of our blood, and it is a vision of power. One small spot, which is ours, where we are master and lord, a little walled-in sacred kingdom where the sceptre is love, and the throne a chair of benediction, and the crown, a crown of blessing. We would gather into that dear kingdom those we are called upon to care for, to shelter and guide. To us and them it is sacred from all the world. It walls out armies of ugly enemies, bestial or diabolic. Disorder, selfishness, greed, lust, cruelty, hatred, malignity, the coarse beasts of the wilderness, assail our dear kingdom in vain. We would build it, and order it, and guard all its walls, arm all its towers, and have, by day and night, the wardens set by love, challenge the hours as they pass, with the cry — "all is well! " We want the kingdom of knowledge. We would enter into the powers and magnificences of that realm of Light which men have won by ' the patient toil of centuries from the ancient Dark. It is the noblest of us who seek for crowns and thrones and sceptres there, the no- blest, and yet always the humblest. But the re- ward of the conquest is glorious! To tread, as KINGDOMS. 163 Prince and Master, the long halls where the lords of the human mind have left us their treasures without price. To walk conscious that we are their legitimate heirs, that we shame not our high estate or their royal names, that we, too, are born to the purple of intellectual dignity, children of the light and humble allies at least of the imperial thinkers, the laureled torch-bearers of all time! Some of us want the kingdom of the world's resources. We want the thrones of gold, and the diamond sceptre, not because we care for the throne, we prefer a leather-covered ofifice-chair; not the sceptre, for a stout walking stick or a serviceable umbrella suits us better! But we want the kingdom of power of which great wealth and abounding business success hold the keys. Our ships should cast their shadow upon every sea. Our engines should pant in the valley and hammer with iron arms on the hillside at our command. Our wealth, expression of our power, should lie safe-stored, subject to our order in many vaults of proof. Our factories, where the rude product of the mine or the field is beaten and forged, or spun and woven into forms of use and beauty, should split the darkness of the 1 64 KINGDOMS. night with the red flash of their many-windowed stories. We would have a kingdom of industry, and would be crowned in that kingdom. We would have no armies to lead against our fellows, but armies trained and, under our ready orders, armed with tools against want and poverty, against idle- ness and waste, armies to carry the standard of our estate still farther into the dark realms of waste and want and the world's disorder, and conquer there, under our leadership, wider prov- inces for human homes, for human industry and order, and for plenty and comfort as their due reward. And I dare to say that all these kingdoms are legitimate inheritances of men. They are all supremely human. Again we face a differentia- tion infinite, between the creatures native to the wilderness and the unique creature who has been led up into it. The kingdoms are his. But he is not in pos- session. They wait to be won. He is there to win them, to make them human kingdoms and divine. We have considered none for which it is not manly and gentle and becoming in the Son of God to seek, indeed which it is not his bounden duty and ethical obligation in the wilderness to KINGDOMS. 165 seek with all his power. But there are other kingdoms beside. We want, some of us, the kingdom of power over our fellows. We desire to lead and order men in their corporate condition as nations and peoples. We want the throne of authority and the sceptre of command. The home is too nar- row for us, the realms of knowledge too ideal. We want our word to be not merely instructive and persuading, but authoritative, law or the making of law for other men. We would have our wisdom confessed in human act, and our opinion crystallized in human obedience. We would sit upon the heights of our time and send our orders to ring amid fleets and armies, and fill the echoes of the coming world. It is the most fascinating, to some at least, this Kingdom of Power. It is the only kingdom which history, the judgment of mankind, has thought worthy of the name. And it is a high quest. To rule men is a grand calling. It brings humanity nearest to the divine. It was not un- natural, but natural that kings should be held " hedged with a divinity." They expressed, in a way, the supreme sovereignty. They, in a way, stood for the master of the world. They repre- sented authority, and law and order, and ranked 1 66 KINGDOMS. gradation and due place and bounden duty among men. Obedience became loyalty. And loyalty became a passion. And even in our latter days, when we have constitutional kings, deriving au- thority from the people, and from no divine or hereditary right, still the king stands for the people, symbolizes the majesty and the unity of the national will, and as chief magistrate is sacred. Which of us will dare to say that it is an evil thing to desire the Kingdom of Power, or a share of it ? Where is the wrong or crime in the wish to govern men, control their movements, command their obedience, so only it be in wise ways, helpful, orderly, profitable to themselves and others ? And vast power among the nations? Is it wrong to seek the exercise of such power if a man is conscious he can exercise it wisely, and seeks by wielding it to beat down chaos and an- archy, and build order and peace, to destroy the evil and build up the good, and make more and more righteousness and truth prosper upon the earth ? " Till the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are furled, In the Parliament of man the Federation of the world." I think we shall have to admit that political ambitions, the strong desire to rise upon the thrones of power, and wield, in whole or part, a KINGDOMS. 167 great nation's forces, guide a great nation's ways, and speak with the voice of a thousand cannon, and in the roar of a hundred iron-clads, speak with all the thunder of a great imperial People in his words, is an entirely legitimate human ambi- tion, and a thing a man may seek and work for, and yet say his prayers, and look for the blessing of God upon his endeavors. And there is the kingdom of culture and art. A frivolous kingdom as many good men count it, and against which much assault is made by them in the name of God. It is an enchanting king- dom. Its gardens are full of the songs the poets sing of all things that have been or will be. The crowns are laurel there. The palace walls are alive with creations on canvas more enduring than their makers. The terraces are peopled by silent but immortal forms of grace and beauty. All music is in the air, and fills the heart with rapture and the echoes of harmonies never heard by living ears. All beauty is there in sculptured permanence, in soaring architecture, and on glow- ing canvas. The royal portals open wide upon that world of splendid shadows which yet is the world of truest realities. The air is filled with sights and sounds which never were on earth or any sea. l68 KINGDOMS. And the high souls dwell there, themselves their own companions. Kings, all, over the realm of men's souls. Homer, Dante, Shakes- peare, Milton sing, Angelo carves and paints and builds, Raffael beside him, and the harps and organs answer to the touch of Mozart and Men- delssohn. A bit of that fairy kingdom for your own ? Any harm in that ? Thence the wild creatures have fled forever. There is nothing bestial there. It is, of all the kingdoms, the human kingdom, so it be ordered by the Sons of God. They dwell there, the men we know and love, and their gen- tle faces are full of welcome to their kingdom of beauty and peace. Nay, all these kingdoms are ours for the win- ning, with due obedience and reverence to our Father whose they are. The temptation was not, you will observe, to win the kingdoms of the world. It was to win them in a particular way. The Devil lied. The Lord Jesus had come to the earth, as I have said, was in the wilderness, indeed, on a specific mission. It was to make the kingdoms of the world, " all these things," His own. There was a long, hard road before Him ere KINGDOMS. 169 the end could be attained. It would end in the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, Pilate's judgment hall, the hill of Calvary. Seeking the kingdoms of the world in one way, He would have a reed for His sceptre, a crown of thorns, and a cross dyed purple with His own blood for His enthronement. And even so, and at the end, the conquest would be but begun. Through long ages after, the kingdoms of the world would be filled with the dark places of cruelty, tyranny, uncleanness, and lust. Human cries would pierce the heavens in the shrill torture of men's slow suffering. Their pale hands would lift to the dumb sky, ap- pealing against the devilishness reigning in the kingdoms of the earth. From rack and dungeon, from scaffold, stake, and faggot, from fields of senseless slaughter, from burning roof-trees and hearths hissing with the father's blood, from the roads where starving babes wailed for their dead mothers, still, from age to age, through the creep- ing centuries, would the pallid, pitiful faces of human agony look to the cold sky that gave back no sign. The Man in the wilderness knew all this. These Kingdoms of the World would still go on. Devil fashion and brute fashion, for ages to come, and all His effort be to sip"ht in vain. I70 KINGDOMS. Yea, men would see it, and sneer and mock and point to Him as a failure, ask " Where is the Kingdom of God He promised," and stagger the faith of His few friends by pointing to Him as one who had promised much and performed lit- tle, a king without a kingdom ! And here came in the Temptation. "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." Victory is promised at once. The purpose of the coming will be fulfilled with no waiting. The toil, the pain, the heavy heart of disappointment, the sickness of hope deferred will all be spared Him, and the world will be so much the sooner ransomed. Such was the Temptation. Such is the Temp- tation. And men since the world began have yielded. They have been cheated by lies. "All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me." The Devil claims them and men befooled admit his claim. They have taken the Kingdom of Home at his hands. They took it with polygamy in earlier days, and they take it with divorce now. It is only a kingdom of the world at best. A mere civil contract makes it. It is invaded by lust and selfishness, its gates and walls broken down, KINGDOMS, 1 7 1 and all its realm laid desolate by the invasions of selfish passion and animal desires. There stands Marriage and the Home, the cen- tral cradle and citadel of human life upon the Earth, and Evil has claimed it from the first, and its joys have been declared gifts of the Devil. Men have sought a kingdom there, and, taking it at the hands of the Devil, failing to see the divine meaning and purpose in it, or denying it if they did, they have anarchy and brutality in- stead. Entering upon that fair kingdom with no sense of the high consecration its sceptre and crown demand, seating themselves upon its throne as a seat held from the world or the Devil for the sake of human desire or human self-interest, they have debauched the home, and what wonder that we find, under many a roof, instead of the ideal family of a Son of God, a lair merely of foul, low, brutal creatures that shelter there in sullen ill- will or snarling ill-temper. The natural instinct is nearly all that is left, and the doctrine that the marriage bond is a merely civil (felt to be often- times a very iinoAwW) contract, and dissolvable almost at the parties' will, is the shame and men- ace of our country. No wonder that in homes on such a basis the 172 KINGDOMS. voice of prayer is silent, that the household meals are as unblessed by any acknowledgment of God as the feeding of beasts, that the father goes to one " church " and the mother to another, and the children perhaps to none at all ; that religious instruction is never given in such homes, and that, as more and more the home is shattered and its interests divided, to protect the weak party in its organization, our wise legislators should more and more make the husband's and the wife's in- terests separate, and that crank reformers should propose to take the wife out of the diabolic homes we have created and send her into the streets and market places for her own good ; that indeed our blind legislation having done what it could to destroy the home, should boldly pro- ceed upon the theory of pure savagery in its ulti- mate form — that the unit, namely, of Society is not the Family, as our race has held for twenty centuries, but the individual, with his or her mis- erable selfish lusts and insanities! Need we won- der that, in less than two decades, over three hundred and twenty-eight thousand such homes have been abolished by divorce in the United States ? Men fall down and worship the Devil for the kingdom of wealth. They look not for control KINGDOMS. 173 and mastery of the world's resources from Him who made the world and created those resources, but from the lying power of Evil which has spoiled and usurped Heaven's gifts for the ser- vice of Hell! Here you have the- grinding of the poor, the cruel covetousness that God abhorreth, and which is express worship of the Devil's Eidolon, the going down upon their knees in abject fashion to the liar who has imposed his lie upon them, all the meanness of the shop, all the fraud of the small retail knave, all the sharp dealing of the money-lender, all the miserly grasping which destroys the grace and the sweetness of life — ■ destroys life itself in getting the means of life — all the perversions of the use of wealth from high and noble to mean and selfish uses — all arise from acceptance of this first lie, that the Devil owns the world and its kingdoms, or at least has a mortgage on them, and if a man would get his share in any one of them, he must do suit and service therefor to Mammon or to Beelzebub! For entrance to the kingdoms of art, of grace and taste and beauty, men have sued at the Tempter's feet, and have gone in and profaned the realm that should be the fairest, the realm that should at least suggest the Paradise of God. 174 KINGDOMS. Degradation of Art ! Can we expect aught save the degradation of art, when it is taken not as a high service of God, not as a walled king- dom sacred to Him, but as a kingdom where evil lusts and passions, where diabolic suggestions and even diabolic service are at home and are to be served ! A degraded drama ! Of course a degraded drama! What else can you look for ? It should be a school of virtue. It should utter, as indeed it has, the noblest and purest thoughts of men. It was never meant to be a kingdom of the Devil. It need not be. Is Macbeth or Lear a literature of Evil ? Foolish words are said for and against the stage. There is no reconciliation. There can be none till the foundations are understood, that here is a broad realm of one of the kingdoms which man ought to hold for himself and God, and which instead he is doing the Devil service for! He must pay this little bit of toll to Hell, this piece of uncleanness, this equivoque, this vile suggestion, or he cannot hold the kingdom ! It is a far fall from Mozart to Offenbach, as far as from Handel to a drunkard's debauched song. Yet it is music all the way. What makes the difference ? It is the old difference, and the KINGDOMS. 175 persistent one. Is the land of St. Cecilia a divine Kingdom or a diabolic ? To possess it and enjoy it must we serve God or serve the Devil ? To win and wear its sovereignty must we fall down and worship, with drunken catch, and harlot's song, and impious mockery of purity and truth, Belial and our own lusts ? Or is it a high king- dom kept by our Father and to be given by Him to the labor and study, and reverent care of His children ? A kingdom where the eternal har- monies seek utterance at the hands and in the voices of men, a kingdom whose air is thrilled once and again with notes lost from the harp- strings of the angels, dropped echoes of the chants from the choirs invisible ? One looks over the story of the world, and all its shames and half its sorrows, all its debase- ^ ment and much of its bitter disappointment, has come from the great surrender. The fair kingdoms seen on the mount of Vis- ion, meant to lead to high endeavor in God's service and in man's, whose glories gleam the brighter in the land of the ideal, the higher on the far off hills they flame and burn and beckon, these fair kingdoms men have turned to serve the Devil for, and have changed the splen- dors of heaven into the red sjlare of the Pit. 176 KINGDOMS. The earth's ancient kingdoms rose and fell. Their scattered records and remains are left us for our study. The one fact you get out of that study, which is of prime use and importance to thinking men, is that in every case the notion was that evil was supreme on earth, and kingdoms must be built on devil-service to be strong. Hence wars of mere conquest, wars as .evoid of all human principle as the hunting of a pack of wolves. Nimrod was "a mighty hunter before the Lord," and the first to covet and obtain one of these kingdoms. He is a type of all the conquer- ors, "a mighty hunter and his game was man." His Assyrian Kingdom, Babylon after, the Per- sian and the Mede, "the Macedonian madman," Rome when it leaves its first estate of honest in- dustry and republican toil — they are all in the same line. The robber Northmen, our ancestors, ravaging, burning, murdering on all the coast of Europe; Alaric of their own blood before them, and Attila the Hun, the scourge of God, the unspeakable Turk in his turn — all the kingdoms, one may say, have been taken and accepted and their glory sought for by the service of the Devil. Almost in our own day, darkening the sky with a lurid hell-crlare that will be the last of that sort the KINGDOMS. 177 world shall see, thank God, a man, the last of a long descent, wanted a kingdom in the old fash- ion, saw he thought his way to get it, believed kingdoms were given in this world by the Devil, therefore must be sought and upheld by blood- shed, cruelty, and lies; declared that "God was on the side of the strongest battalions " ; that the Devil was God, that is, of this world at least. And when his schemes went to wreck one stormy Sunday in Belgium, and he was left in his sea- girt prison to muse on the past and study men, and understand, if he might, the way God's worlds are ordered, he gropes on blind to the end. He tries to account for his ruin by this cause and that, this combination of circumstance and that; declines to see that the Man of the Syrian wilder- ness had founded a kingdom which at last was making him and his like impossible for ever- more ; that the proclamation that the world is God's and He has given it to His sons the children of men, is a warning " hands off " to all kingdom builders hereafter on the Devil's basis. His reputed nephew and successor failed to learn the lesson of the Great Conqueror's fall. He, too, put his trust for his fair kingdom in lies and fraud and force. He held it of the Devil and made it the Devil's in its political and social 12 178 KINGDOMS. corruption, in its trust in shams and pretences, and he, too, " the Sphinx of Europe " they called him, the man who seemed to hold the destinies of Europe in his hands, disappeared one day like an exploded bubble, he and his kingdom together, at the firm touch of a gray-headed old man, who believed in Almighty God and said his prayers! For we are in a world, you know, where things develop. So the idea that Christ stood upon in the wilderness that the kingdoms of the world are not the Devil's has been slowly developing with the increasing years. Governments exist not for the curse but for the good of men. Kings reign to do Divine Service and not Diabolic. The Christian con- science has been strengthening and enlightening itself. Wars for one man's aggrandizement have ceased and even wars for one people's. It is only on some pretence of beating back injustice, of clearing the world of wrong, that any war can justify itself any more. Governments as their sole title to exist must be enlightening and ben- efiting to men. They do not exist by the con- sent of the governed solely by any means, as our Declaration of Independence, with a half-glance at the truth, declares. The people's unanimous KINGDOMS. 179 consent, its enthusiastic support under the utmost Democratic form, and most minute registering of the people's will, may be a vile and brutal gov- ernment, which the rest of mankind may find it a bounden duty to destroy. The world to-day would endure a Roman Republic as little as a Roman Empire. And just here, let me say, that to us upon whom the ends of the world have come, there rises the most solemn responsibility ever laid on men, in their corporate capacity as a nation. There has been set before our vision an empire such as never came to the wildest dreams of am- bition, boundless practically in extent, exhaust- less in its resources, and in its near future im- mense beyond any civilized land in the numbers of its people. So vast are its power, riches, and numbers in the field of present vision, that we may count it safe from all enemies but ourselves. Our people smile with contemptuous indifference when windy patriots talk of the need of armies and forts and iron-clads, of our defenceless cities and the long line of a peaceful coast, where no cannon frown from the headlands, no ramparts guard the shore. They feel, I think, that they mean no wrong and therefore no wrong will be attempted, that i8o KINGDOMS. they dream of no aggression upon others, and others will not make aggression upon them. But also they feel that a giant may sleep in safety; that of all empires, this last mighty birth of time is not called to fume and boast and strut with epaulets and feathers to scare a possible enemy, that it at least, and at last, can stand " like statue solid set And moulded in colossal calm." Conscious of its own just intentions and con- scious too of the power, as all the world is, of sixty-five million free men in possession of a con- tinent in the name of God ! We boast ourselves, it is said, too much ; we are rebuked for our self-consciousness. It is all a question of the temper of our boasting and the spirit of our self-consciousness How do we bear ourselves under the enormous responsibility? With all the world's experience behind us, spring- ing to life full-armed, beginning where other peoples leave off, inheritors of the riches of knowledge and enlightenment, with no old wrongs to clear away, no ruins of empire to cover out of sight, in an empty world it has come to us to make a kingdom. The eyes of God and man are on us. If we KINGDOMS. l8l make a failure, it will be the colossal failure of all time. We feel we are not going to fail. I am thank- ful we do. So it be no blind confidence in our- selves I am thankful. But we cannot escape the temptation. We are bound to be sifted. Till we are, we are not sure. The world is not sure. But you say " we have been sifted ; we have gone through a terrible experience; we have been baptized as all peoples must be, it seems, in blood, and have come out of that red baptism safe; our institutions are secure." What do you mean by " our institutions " ? Is there any divinity in "institutions" ? They are only the expression of a people's insight, its sense of truth and right and justice. And they are often far better than the existing people. The institutions are good enough. It is a question, after all, of how the institutions are administered ! The dead institution must be converted into a living force before you can decide very wisely upon its character. The actual government is often very far from the ideal, and the actual is what decides the character. No ! we have by no means gone through the sifting. There are fiercer trials than war. The l82 KINGDOMS. temptation of a boundless prosperity is the sub- tlest and most seducing. It gives voice to the ancient he. "All these are mine, and to whomsoever I will I give them." Increasing wealth, ever swelling abundance- the trophies of a ^''TrmmpJiant Democracy,'' in means of luxury and self-indulgence, are not the securi- ties against a devil's kingdom which is doomed, by the merciful and stern law of God and nature, to perish. It has come to this among us, and it is a sign, that the man who desires a part of the power of this great new kingdom, who takes the ordinary means of getting control of it — the man, in short, we call politician or ofifice-seeker, for himself or others (for there are men who would rather be the power behind the throne than occupy the throne itself), is considered, over most of our country, as a man who is ready to sacrifice prin- ciple generally, and to use crooked ways to ob- tain his ends. I say, without a word here of whether this is common or not, that it is an alarming portent ; that the name politician, which means one who busies himself, as every good citizen should, with the interests of his country, the well-being of the community, who even neglects his private affairs KINGDOMS. 183 to do SO, has come to be a name of shame. That to say of a man, in a country hke ours, " he is a pohtician " should amount to saying " he has no principle, and in public matters is next door to a knave," is a condition for very grave reflection. But it has come to that. There is no denying it. The statesman has died out. The politician has come in his stead. Has he come to stay ? Well, you may be sure he will not stay long nor the kingdom that endures him! He owes his existence here as everywhere, now as at all times, to the belief that the kingdoms are the Devil's. He gets down upon his knees to him for a share of his favor. He does not do it, usually, with the idea of remaining there. There are men who have be- lieved they could give this service and then, hav- ing gotten their grip upon the kingdom, could drive the Devil out. Indeed, men have more than once undertaken that enterprise deliberately. It is a bright idea at first sight — the notion of cheat- ing the Devil into serving God. It has been a pet notion of various kinds of men — a little evil for a great good, a lie to flavor the truth, a spirit- ual sugar-coated pill, lie outside, bitter tonic truth inside, well-concealed, and swallowed for the lie's sake ! 184 KINGDOMS. From the formal announcement that a good end justifies evil means, that a lie may be told in defence of the truth, to a raffle at a church fair, a bit of gambling for the glory of God, there have been innumerable contrivances to get the Devil into Sunday-school, and even to set him to teach the catechism, but they have not worked successfully. Your politician takes the lie into silent partner- ship. He believes a plausible lie is better than an ungainly truth. " The stupid people love to be deceived, let them be deceived." It is an old political maxim. So the man begins to conceal unpleasant truths, to palter with his own convictions, to justify the means by the proposed end, to fawn upon men whom at first he must despise, to cringe and crawl for popular favor, to mislead by plausibil- ities, to bribe at last and buy for money " the most sweet voices " of our " free and enlightened voters " from the city's slums and grog-shops, to swop and trade with others of his kind the un- savory merchandise of corrupt votes in which they deal, to empty himself, in short, of all that goes to make high character, honorable and in- dependent manhood. The temptations to this sort of corruption in KINGDOMS, 185 a Republic are greater than they are under any form of kingdom. In the latter case a man has but one or at most a few masters to lie to, flatter, fawn on, or deceive. In the former he has thou- sands, and often the meanest and the lowest mas- ters. In a republic of universal suffrage ruffians often, and criminals. It has so developed that in our great cities we have such corruption and thievery, such mis- carriages of justice, such sardonic mockery at any pretence to truth, honesty, or decency, as I think do not exist and would not be for a day endured in any other cities under the sun. It has come to that pass that in some cities to occupy the position of a city magistrate is almost to proclaim one's self a knave, and to be an alder- man is equivalent to confessing one's self a thief. The influential politician is the leading rough of his ward, and the interests of a great city are dis- cussed and settled in its grog-shops! Is it any wonder that, directly in the face of our professed political principles, the rock-based foundations, as we imagined, of our free institutions, great cities have asked that their franchises be re- stricted, their home rule abolished, and that some decent men from beyond their own debased sur- l86 KINGDOMS. roundings would order their affairs with some regard to decency ? Does the plague of the lie stop with the great city ? We should be thankful if it did. But one cannot blind himself to the situation to that extent. That American politics are now and have been for long thoroughly corrupt is an open secret. Not long since, one of our leading statesmen, speaking to me of a step which he felt constrained to take by his conscientious sense of duty, said, " the politicians say I have ruined myself, politi- cally, by that act. Why, sir, they talk, some of them, as if they carried the suffrages of the peo- ple in their vest pockets. One of them had pro- posed, he said, to transfer me five thousand votes, but after my action he feared he could not deliver them. If I thought as meanly of the American people as he and his kind I should esteem it a personal disgrace to accept any office at their hands." The corruption of our politics is having its re- action upon the corruptors. The American poli- tician is one of the most remarkable as well as the most sinister developments of all time. To have votes enough is to be on the heights of earthly felicity. He has made the word " pop- KINGDOMS. 187 ular " the measure of all excellence. A man is "popular," he is therefore a blessed man. A preacher is "popular," he must be therefore the best and most admirable preacher. A patent pill is "popular," it is incumbent on us all to swallow the pill. A measure is popular, there is no further question of its justice or wisdom. "Popular" expresses the final measure of all earthly perfec- tion in pills, preachers, or politics! And yet the man has an inner contempt for the poor rag god he is down on his knees before. He beats him and abuses him as a Congo negro his mumbo jumbo. He buys him in the market. He buys him with money, or with his own abject and unmanly service. He is his slave. He dares have no will of his own, and express no opinion of his own. And yet he despises the pitiful mas- ter he adores. The moral decadence that, in so many cases, follows office-seeking and office holding, is one of the most striking phenomena of our modern life. The man seems to become worm-eaten all through, while he still retains the outside fair- ness, like timbers I have seen in the waters of our Southern coast, riddled and channelled through and through by the teredo, while the outside gave no sign. 1 88 KINGDOMS. Nay, universal suffrage, we are seeing, gives only a possibility of a larger corruption. It makes temptation universal. To befool the igno- rant, to buy the venal, to flatter the corrupt, to oppress those who are without political influence, and fawn on those who have, becomes politics. The statesman perishes. The demagogue comes to power. Government becomes a game of trick- ery, and an election an organized fraud. It was not meant for this. The men who or- ganized this new kingdom in the West meant it to be a divine arrangement. They looked for and asked God's blessing upon it. They believed people would be intelligent and conscientious, and statesmen would be true, the leaders and teachers of the people. They based their experi- ment, for it was an experiment, upon faith in God and man. They looked in hope to see the es- tablishment of such a kingdom of purity, sim- plicity, and integrity as h.ad never yet existed upon the earth. No prophet could have per- suaded them that men could ever buy seats in the grave Senate they established, or ruffians sit in the councils of American cities, or the votes of those citizens be bought and sold like old clothes in a rag fair, *' in blocks of five " or otherwise! KINGDOMS. 189 Where is our trust for deliverance from these tendencies which all good men deplore ? In uni- versal education ? Yes, if by that you mean edu- cation of the whole man, spirit as well as mind, ethical as well as intellectual. But if you mean, what is commonly called education, the teaching of a man how to take care of himself, the sharp- ening of the intelligence only, then I beg to say that such a trust is a rotten reed, in face of the fact that our penitentiaries are filled with gradu- ates of our common schools, of our academies, even of our colleges, and that whole classes of crimes, which are the most demoralizing to so- ciety and the most threatening to the safety of the Republic, can only be committed by your so- called educated men. In our increased scientific knowledge do you say? In our larger mastery over the material things about us, in our increased deliverance from superstition, and even, as some say, from religion ? Will the science deliver you, I ask, which, in its final philosophical statement, assures you that you are a product of the earth you walk on, and responsible only to it and its opinions, and un- der no restraint save the laws it has evolved ? That there is, in the whole universe, no absolute IQO KINGDOMS. right or wrong, only passing opinions about things of the day ? That consequently, if public opinion allows bribery bribery is all right, and if the de- velopment has only reached the point of political knavery as yet, you are quite justified in being a public knave ? Trust or hope in a philosophy which sweeps away all basis of moral action in private or in public, and effaces God out of the universe, for the deliverance of a people from national corruption! There has been a direct reversal of the condi- tions here. The development has been the wrong way. The Republic was purer fifty years ago. In Washington's day public service was not the spoil of a purchased party victory. Have we hope in our free and enlightened Press, "the Palladium of our liberties"? The suggestion could only waken Titanic laughter on Earth, and make the angels weep. You have only to look at it and be answered. It has no conception of leadership or teaching or enlight- ening now. If it ever had it has long since ab- dicated such pretension. It is down in the mud before the rag god " popularity," and is itself the most venal thing where all things are venal. It prizes truth if it will sell the paper. It prizes a lie equally if it will do the same. KINGDOMS. 191 We cannot find much hope in our "free Press," Where then ? The old hope, I think, is the only sure one — the fathers' hope. " In God and godlike men we put our trust." I have not said all this because I believe the wondrous Empire of the West is ruined or near ruined. I have spoken in warning, not in panic. I believe we must hark back here to the old foundations. A development to destruction is a possible development, but not a pleasant one, certainly a development, which should be by any means stopped. The Republic is a Kingdom of God. It is under no bestial or diabolic law. We have the right to its possession and enjoyment. The world waited for it long, and it came with the sun-burst of a divine splendor. Heroes rocked its cradle. The fathers thanked God for it, and prayed Him to save it forever. We have been turning it into a kingdom of the Devil. We have been treating it and seeking our glory in it as a vulgar growth out of the dirt. It has lost its divine meaning to many of us. They take it for an organization out of which to get the utmost possible for their greed, their pride, or their lusts, a partnership in a free fight for the world's 192 KINGDOMS. offal, and woe to him who does not get offal suf- ficient. There is virtue enough in the land to ban and banish such bestial conception of national life. Let the coming men enter upon it as a divine charge. Let them leap the thirty years of rapid decadence, and stand upon the old ideal, where millionaires existed not and " boodlers " were un- known. The Kingdom is God's ! Rich, grand, and fair, the stately mother-land is divine! She is worth all our love and reverence. She is nurse, and teacher, and guide. Her true voice is always clear for high things, true things, pure things. Her offices are sacred trusts. Her character, her great name and fame are in the charge of her children. Shall we stand and see her debased and dis- honored, her queenly robes besmirched, her im- perial diadem trampled in the dust, her honors put to sale in the market place ? If she be a Devil's kingdom, there is no word to be said. If we seek to live in the republic as in a nest of unclean beasts, because it is the best and richest feeding place and shelter for such beasts yet won by men on earth then I need say no word more. KINGDOMS. 193 But if all this is the old diabolic lie of the wilderness, if the Republic be a Kingdom of God, given in these last days to men, as the fathers believed and as they believed who left their bloody relics in many an unknown grave giving their young lives to save her, then to keep her saved for evermore, is to train her sons to live in her as " Sons of God," as men who can starve but cannot betray a trust, men who can suffer but never fail, men who can die but cannot lie, men who hold every fraud, every piece of trick- ery, every bribe given or received, to be high treason against the Republic. Her sons, knowing her great meaning, reverenc- ing her as a gift from God, living in her as in a kingdom of God, whose law is truth, justice, and righteousness, answering the old temptation with the old word of power " Thou shalt worship the Lord Thy God and Him only shalt thou serve — so and only so — " Shall she lift herself to sunlight And the fair daylight of time and man With the same splendor in her eyes forever." 13 LECTURE VI. THE LAW OF THE CASE. ^'1/ ikoti be the Son of God cast thyself down; for it is written, 'He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot asrainst a stone,' " St. Matt. iv. 6. LECTURE VI. THE LAW OF THE CASE. THE relation between science and religion is, among thinking men, the most vital, intel- lectual interest of our time. What our discover- ies in what we call "the laws of nature," that is, the orderly sequence of phenomena, bear to our faith in power, and orderly sequences, which are not phenomena whether in ourselves or in another Being or beings higher than ourselves, what the connection, if any, between processes which we can see and test and tabulate, and processes which we cannot test and cannot tabulate, is just now the question which is pressing upon Theo- logians and Naturalists both. That, in a logical analysis, there is no necessity for the sequences we call " laws of nature " goes without saying. It is a part of our intellectual nature to ask the cause of things. There is a compulsion upon us to find the thing that does this other thing. But when we examine the 198 THE LAW OF THE CASE. " foundations of our conclusions upon a given cause and effect, the generalization, that is, of these observations which we call a " law," we find the sole basis of our law to be a sequence, " one thing follows another, as far as we have observed, therefore they will always come in that relation, and therefore the one is cause and the other is effect." It IS post hoc ergo propter hoc ^nd nothing more. Why these sequences occur, is entirely beyond us. And how many links we should be obliged to go back in the chain before we find the real cause no man can tell. We know that a certain degree of what we call cold, quite distinctly measurable, freezes water. Biit what the cold is, and what causes it, lie outside our knowledge. In short we see the visible process, two or three links in the sequences of what we call cause and effect, but no man of sense supposes these to be all the sequences. There comes one at last as he goes up the chain, which goes out into the invisible, an effect without any visible cause. Now there are several conclusions open to choose in this condition of things and each of them may justify itself upon some rational ' ground. But there is one which is absolutely irrational, the conclusion, namely, that the chain THE LAW OF THE CASE. 199 of sequences, or what we call cause and effect, ceases with the last link we can see. All our experience (and experience is all we have to go upon) compels us to hold that there may be many links yet in the chain ; that some of them may yet be discovered ; that we are com- pelled by an intellectual necessity to try to dis- cover them, but that, no matter how many we succeed in making visible and knowable, we shall still find the last of them linked back into the unknown. And there is still another conclusion which only needs to be stated to be clearly seen and admitted, and the forgetting of which puts a de- lusion upon us continually, this, namely, that the order of the sequences is surely not their cause; that is, that the generalization which we call a Law of Nature is a formula of the mind and not a force, nor itself a cause of anything. All we know, then, is sequences — this thing comes, that other thing follows it. Of the causes of things we are absolutely ignorant. Causes, therefore, are not phenomena. They lie outside the realm of observation. Phenom- ena cannot be the effective cause of phenomena. The phenomenal world, therefore, is not its own cause. What makes it and all the phenomena in 200 THE LAW OF THE CASE. it, lies outside it, and is in a sense unknowable, that is, in any scientific sense, for science does not deal with ultimates, but Avith phenomena only. At the same time that the sequences which we cannot see are not capricious, that they are orderly and harmonious, and to be trusted, is a necessity also of our thinking. That cause of phenomena which resolves itself into the invisi- ble force of a human will, capricious and strange as it may at times appear, we yet decline to be- lieve capricious or purposeless. We are com- pelled to seek a motive, the invisible, intellectual force w^hich swayed the will. And then only do we reach the point where cause and effect clasp each other where the cause originates itself. We have reached the home of causes — personality. For it will not be claimed by any thinker, that the motives which sway even the Jiiiman will are always or necessarily from without. Even if we admit, as I am quite ready to do, that my will acts from motive in each particular case, I am very certain that, in many cases, that motive is entirely from within. I should simply declare it to me quite " unthinkable " ; that I am not able to decide my action and do not habitu- ally decide it by motives Avhich belong solely to THE LAW OF THE CASE. 201 my own personality and originate within and not without it. The naturaHsts have been compelled to an- nounce a " Power behind Phenomena," though they declare such power " unknowable/' and I freely admit that, in the sense of the naturalist, it is unknowable. But out of our own consciousness we are forced to this conclusion, that whatever the final source of Power be, whatever the final original of all causes, it must be a Personality, since it is utterly unthinkable that anything save a Person can originate within itself a motive and of itself be- come a cause. It is equally a necessity of our thinking, de- rived from all our experience, upon which we rest, as it were instinctively, that in that Person- ality we should find cause and effect still, that is, every determination of that Personal will would be orderly and reasonable and the result of some sufificient motive if we only knew it, though such motive would originate in the Personality itself. The final Personality, then, to which it seems we are driven to hold "the Power behind phen- omena" to be, must be intelligent, orderly, and in itself be its own Law and its own Order, the orig- inator of its own motives, and the harmonious source and last cause of all causes. 202 THE LAW OF THE CASE. A first expectation then would be that the re- lation between " Science," even in the narrow sense, and indeed somewhat foolish sense, in which the word is now used, to express only what we know of phenomena, and, what we call " re- ligion," that is, some belief in realities behind phenomena, ourselves to begin with, in that which makes us Is, and in another Being or Be- ings beside, who are related to us in some way — the first expectation I say would be that these two would harmonize; that when there appears to be discord, it is only in our own lack of knowledge, or dulness of vision, not in the situa- tion itself. •What I want to call your attention to now is, that this problem of the relation of " science " and religion, like every problem I think, which con- cerns men in belief or conduct, comes into the Temptation of the Wilderness, and finds a sug- gested solution. Mark that the temptation to humanity is to seek to make its living upon the Earth, to get its bread in the wilderness into which it has been led up, at the suggestion of the Devil. It has defended itself against the temptation which comes through its physical needs by the assertion of its double nature and double life — THE LAW OF THE CASE. 203 its existence outside phenomena, its relations to the invisible — '^ Man doth not live by bread only." And again, on the side of its intelligence, its desire for kingdoms, for ordering things and har- monizing, for putting wild forces under will con- trol, for making a Kosmos out of a Chaos, it is tempted by being urged to admit the sovereignty of Evil, its supremacy in all kingdoms possible upon the Earth. Out of this it emerged victori- ously by assertion of the sovereignty of God and good. " The Power behind phenomena is holy, just, and true; there are many cheats put upon us by the visible. It may at times seem as if the powers behind and within all kingdoms are dia- bolic, but I decline to believe it. I will not ac- cept a Kingdom as a fief of Evil. Under any circumstances, and all circumstances, I will wor- ship the Lord, Holy and Good, and Him only shall I serve." Humanity is delivered, that is, from submission to temporary wrong, from the misleading of triumphant evil visible, by its grasp upon the in- visible, the Holiness and Goodness which, amid all phenomenal delusions, it yet holds to be Mas- ter and Lord, and entitled only to its homage and service. 204 THE LAW OF THE CASE. The appeal again is to the things not seen — the eternal processes, the eternal causes. Then comes the final issue. " Since this is so and you are yourself of the real world, and so firm fixed as servant and subject of the Lord of that, and, as you claim, of all worlds, have the courage of your convictions. Your phenomenal life is nothing anyway by your own argument. Besides God has promised to take care even of that. You have appealed to Him against what your eyes see, to the Power behind phenomena against phenomena themselves. Stand by the appeal. Cast thyself down. Trust Him to the uttermost. He has given His word. His angels shall take care that thou do not strike even thy foot against a stone. The phenomenal according to you is only phenomenal, and a passing shadow to the Son of God; its poor hungers, whether for bread or kingdoms, are but for a day. The short phantasmal animal life is nothing in any case. Trust thyself to the real life and power of which thou art a part. Cast thyself doivn ! " The scene of the trial is well chosen. It is no longer in the wilderness of physical want and bodily distress. It is no longer on the mountain where the world's glories and glooms appeal to the intellect and imagination. The issue has THE LAW OF THE CASE. 205 been gathering nearer to the central citadel of human nature, to the very spiritual centre and heart of the whole. Foiled at the gate of the senses, repelled at the gate of the intelligence, the assault is now upon the very invisible personality itself — the Spirit. The field of the struggle is the summit of God's House, the very highest pinnacle on the mount of snow and gold where God's pure dwelling is. The Holy of Holies is beneath, the Altar of Sac- rifice and of incense. The odors of the offerings and the voices of priests and people, in prayer and chant, rise in the still air. God's special presence is here. It is the home and abiding place of the Eternal upon earth. Here, if anywhere, the Son of God may trust himself to the things which are eternal and put himself in the hands of His Y dither —Cast thyself down ! It is clearly a question of the relationship be- tween the visible and invisible processes. The Son of God, mind, is not asked to commit suicide. That is not the temptation. He is promised that the fall shall not result in death. The angels shall bear Him up. The invisible forces shall preserve Him against the visible. Even physical destruction is not suggested. There shall be 2o6 THE LAW OF THE CASE. physical preservation. Even the foot shall not be injured when He flashes from the golden pin- nacle to the rocks below. What is the temptation? I answer a common abiding temptation of course. We may expect that ; one that remains among men, and among men also in their best estate and highest attain- ment — the temptation to despise the world they live in, the old temptation of the two other trials in fact, namely, to believe the world visible to be partly or wholly the Devil's, and that its laws and limitations may be trampled on and broken down by men who dwell upon the heights of God's Temple in the clear air of religion and on the lofty pinnacles of faith, and breathe continually the incense of prayer and offering. It was the temptation which, yielded to, drove men into the wilderness in other days to herd with the wild beasts and, in a fancied imitation of Christ, to despise the world Christ loved and died to redeem. Men took refuge in the cloister later, fleeing from a world they frankly declared to be the Devil's, casting contempt upon it and all its ways, its governments, its business, its families, its homes, its motherhood and fatherhood, as being by their nature accursed of God — nothing left THE LAW OF THE CASE. 207 then for the sons of God, or they who would be such, but to bar out and wall out every approach of what was only fit to be trampled and spat upon. It was this which set St. Simeon of the pillar, and other madmen like him, in Christ's name, to abandon every human duty, household, commun- ity and church duty, to break every law of our Lord's, one might say, and outrage every moral obligation of man to the world and his fellow- men, in the name of Christ. " But such temptations are not experienced now ?" Are they not.? The old Manichee libel upon the world is not dead by any means. It has survived through many changes, and takes on many forms. The notion of a contest between the " processes " of the natural world and the powers of the world invisible, you will find, I imagine, very common yet, among very religious people. The notion is at the root of a great deal of what passes for piety, and finds expression in hymn and prayer. It is by no means unheard of that a man should cast his body down, so only that he save his soul, that his body is a mere clog to him, and he cannot do better than get rid of it. Is it quite understood and accepted that a man is put in trust of his body as of his spirit, 2o8 THE LAW OF THE CASE. and that in many cases it is just as much a sin to be sick as it is a sin to steal ? The old doctrine of "special Providences," so called, as commonly accepted by pious people, was, for its rationale, founded almost on the Tempter's words — God would protect us even against our own stupidity or our own presump- tion, and even our own sin. We might cast our- selves down from any height but His angels were always on the watch for us, if we were only of " the Elect." The Almighty had no regard for His own order and arrangement upon earth. Indeed it was not quite certain He had any fixed order at all upon it ! At all events, He would disar- range it and break it all up upon a call made in favor of His special favorites. I deny not, understand, that many beautiful and faithful Christian lives were lived under this view of things, for God's grace goes over all, and " right views " of that grace are not at all as necessary, as a certain class of people used to try to impress upon us, in order to right living. That it led in other cases to evil, to a caricature of Christianity, to a spiritual pride and self-con- ceit, offensive and intolerable to Christian hu- mility, I am very certain. It produced prayers framed on the very model THE LAW OF THE CASE. 209 of the Pharisee's, and by no means extinct yet, in which men warmed up their gratitude to God by reminding Him and themselves of how much He had done for them as compared with other men ; of how He had burned other men's houses and spared theirs ; how He had sunk other men's ships and brought theirs safe to land ; how other men's children had died, and how theirs were healthy and strong ; how other people were led into temptation even, and deprived of the means of grace, while they had been carefully guarded, and surrounded with all means to de- fend and save their souls. It seemed impossible to get up any gratitude to the Almighty except on the ground of con- trasting His forgetfulness at least of other people, with His special consideration for them, and the highest gratitude seemed possible only when His forgetfulness of others gave way to a sharp re- membrance of them for punishment, to be con- trasted, in calm satisfaction, with the, of course, " undeserved " blessings He was pouring upon them — " No better by nature than others " always to be added ! '- * I take the following from the last number of a little Sunday- school paper. The writer has told a little story, real or imaginary, and pro- 14 2IO THE LAW OF THE CASE. What strange manifestation of character came out under this view of things among people who considered themselves good Christians! Pardon me a reminiscence of my own ministry. In the family of one of my parishioners was an only child, a little girl of marvellous precocity of intelligence and of an exquisite beauty. The child became greatly attached to me as I met her in my pastoral visits or in the Sunday-school. She was, of course, the apple of the parents' eyes. The mother, especially, made an idol of the little creature, and indulged to the full her motherly pride in the child's wonderful beauty and bright- ness. A somewhat foolish mother, she dressed the little one as foolish mothers will, not for the child's health or comfort, but to adorn her fair- ness. So it came once that, returning from an absence, I was sent for to see her and found the child in a hopeless case, in the high fever of an attack of pneumonia. She knew me in her semi- delirious state and I prayed for her, and she said ceeds to say that " the little story teaches us these precious lessons." Here are two : First, that many others are far worse off than ourselves; and that for this reason, if for no other, we should be grateful. Secondly, that in trying to please others we forget our own troubles. . FHE LAW OF THE CASE. 211 her own small prayer, her hand in mine, and then came the end and the little hands were folded, and the bright eyes closed forever. Another sinless soul was gathered with the Holy Inno- cents about the Throne of God. Something very precious had gone out of my own life when my small parishioner was taken and my heart was heavy. The parents were heart-broken. The mother's grief was wild and uncontrolled. I went to see her after the funeral; I had learned all the facts by this. There had been a juvenile party. It was winter weather, bitter cold, and snow upon the ground. The little creature must go, of course. The gathering would be incomplete without her. So the vain mother dresses the child upon that winter even- ing with her arms and little neck bare, her limbs lightly clad, in fashion, to show the grace of the child's beauty — how many foolish mothers have done and will do just the same! — and sends her out to the merriment of the small people's party. Pneumonia came, of course! When I visited my poor parishioner in incon- trollable distress for her loss; when she cried out against God for taking her treasure from her arms, accusing His justice and Mercy; when she 212 THE LAW OF THE CASE, asked me to pray that she might see some reason and some right in her desolation, I could not re- strain myself; I spoke some certain plain words which, if hard, were true and wholesome, for my own grief was great. I said, " Do not blame God, please, for the child's death. Do you suppose He would sus- pend the laws of the universe for your sake? What right or claim have you upon Him for such favor at His hands ? He did not kill the child as you accuse Him. You killed her yourself. Your own foolish vanity made you break His laws, His earthly laws, indeed, but still His laws, expressive of His will. The result came. The child was sure to take pneumonia. You deliber- ately risked her life. Did you expect a miracle ? And sending her out dressed as you did, only a miracle could have saved her from pneumonia. Do not blame God. Blame yourself." My poor parishioner is type of a large class. They blame the Almighty for the natural and inevitable results of their own folly and their own sin, and then think themselves exercising the highest piety when they seek to reconcile them- selves and submit to God's will. To tell them what is the plain truth, that the result was not according to God's will but against that will, the THE LAW OF THE CASE. 213 consequence of breaking His wise and merciful laws, made to help and guide us in His world, is to make them stare at you as impious. Yet what else can you say of the charges made against our Father in Heaven by religious people ? I pray to submit to God's will, says the repentant debauchee in whose bones the sins of his youth are burning. It is God's will, says the repentant and reformed drunkard when he pays, with shattered nerves and half sodden brain, the penalty of the inexorable law. It is God's will but not in the sense these mean it. It is His will as expressed in the natural laws of the human body, which is His own quite as much as the hu- man soul! Are all the diseases men have brought upon themselves by self-indulgence,, by folly and by sin, — and they are the vast body of diseases under which men suffer, — are these things against or ac- cording to God's will? Why He has warned at every step. His laws have put lighthouses on every headland, buoys on every shoal. If you come to wreck, it is not for want of warning. If a man cast himself from the pinnacle even of the temple, down the sheer precipice, four hundred feet to the rocks below, has God broken him to a shapeless mass or has he destroyed himself ? 214 ^^^ /-^^F OF THE CASE. If the captain, in spite of all beacons, and all charts and observations, will persist in driving his ship into the teeth of a rocky shore, is the Almighty responsible, or is the captain, for the bubbling cries of an hundred of His creatures sinking to darkness through the foam ? Am I, in such case, to say " God's will be done," and lay it all on Him, when wife or children shrieked, un- heard, for life, to the cruel sea and the pitiless sky ? Is it mine to think the Almighty should have seized the ship and in spite of steam and steering have driven her the other way ? In cases like these we are not so blind. The great crises, occurring rarely, throw a light too large to allow our delusion. But in the common cases the best of us are apt to live in a haze and to resent the light, even be offended with those who bring it, declaring sometimes that they are irreverent, or irreligious. A man cannot, let me say with all reverence, and in the name of religion, be a glutton and then blame His Maker for his dyspepsia ; I do not know that he can devour hot biscuits of the sal- eratus type with fried pig (a viand long ago condemned by God and Nature) and have any right to make the same blame. If he tt'/// drink excessively, is it a just expec- THE LAW OF THE CASE. 215 tation that the Ahnighty will see that he does not have the gout? If he insists on working night and day, and carrying the figures of his ledger and the details of his bargains to bed with him, even into church with him on Sundays, run- ning over them when he has his prayer book be- fore him, has he any reasonable ground for con- fidence ; can he make it a subject of prayer, that he shall not, some day, have a stroke of paralysis, or find softening of the brain, or the more desir- able end — an effectual stroke of apoplexy ? Have , we the right to look on these results and piously accept them, as things God pleased to send, but which He might just as well not have sent if He had a mind ? A city is smitten by pestilence. Prayers are offered that God would check or remove the ter- rible visitation. They are sometimes publicly ordered. Almost always they express themselves that the pestilence is a visitation of His hand, and a deserved punishment of the people's sin. And so it is, if they understand the matter rightly. The pestilence is an outcome of their pre- sumptuous sin and its inevitable punishment. The sin is the breach of God's laws of health, and generally the high-handed breach. There are foul gutters, reeking alleys, bad 2i6 THE LAW OF THE CASE. water, overcrowded tenement houses, filthy streets. Every plainest law of sanitary conditions is trampled upon. And this is done in greed or selfishness. Each man thinks he may allow this and escape. Whether his neighbor escape or not is of no concern to him. And when the result comes, and death stalks the streets, is the remedy found in prayer ? Yes, if you understand that prayer means not only words said but works done. In this case, genuine repentance and effectual prayer are not had in the church but in the streets, the manual of efTective devotion is not a Prayer Book but a shovel and a broom, and if we have a high ritual which requires incense, carbolic acid and chloride of lime should be chosen. Yes, in such a visitation let the people see the hand of Him who rules all His worlds by Law, let them throng the churches and confess their infractions of His Law in their blind selfishness and stupid greed, and ask Him to have mercy upon them and then make their prayer a real prayer by going out, all hands, into the stricken city, and at any cost of money and labor clean it up and wash it out, and so mend their evil ways and live. Let them never dream that the pestilence is THE LAW OF THE CASE. 217 any capricious visitor or that God will arbitrarily save them from the results of their own presump- tuous sin. And let them not lay upon Him the blame for desolate homes and crowded grave- yards. Nay, the temptation upon the Temple pinnacle is, like all the others, a universal temptation. It takes different forms, but its essence is still the same, and men yield to it to-day, and cast them- selves down as they have ever done, in the pre- sumptuous trust that the Almighty, for their sakes, will suspend arbitrarily His own wise methods. Our increased enlightenment does not prevent the existence of such a fanaticism as calls itself Faith Cure or Christian Science. In some form or other such delusions have continually ex- isted. The theory at the bottom is always the Devil's misquotation. The means may be de- spised. For certain inducements, extraordinary faith, extraordinary acts of piety, the Ruler of all things will suspend the operation of His orderly working, and produce effects without causes, cures without remedy, and deliver from the results of his own action the man who has found the secret of persuading Him ! The miseries and degradations of the world. 2i8 THE LAW OF THE CASE. which result from men's ignorance of the laws by which only an ordered and rational human life can be lived on earth, are terrible enough. But those which result from direct defiance and con- tempt of those laws, under the motives of greed and covetousness — from sheer laziness and im- becility or from presumptuous contempt of them, are vastly more and more terrible. In both cases religion has been taken to be a plan of deliverance, and a promise of deliverance from the natural and orderly consequences of our own ignorance, folly, or presumption. A papal Bull against the Comet is the expres- sion of a very common mental attitude among religious people. And seeing the absurdity of that attitude, the irrational folly of swallowing half an ounce of strychnine and then expecting to get well by a prayer, so-called, believing as all about them compels them to do, as every further step in knowledge of natural order is giving us more reason to believe in the fixedness, sacredness, and solemnity of that order, in the reasonable- ness and goodness of that order, is it surprising that the naturalists should have little reverence in their speech for such religion? Having Faith a man may remove mountains. THE LAW OF THE CASE 2x9 But what do you mean by Faith ? As a matter of fact, mountains have been removed, moun- tains of difficulty of all sorts, and even literal mountains of rocks and earth from the paths of men. But never, surely, by a Faith which can embody itself, satisfy its whole necessity, in any most eloquent form of words. The good old lady in Vermont, I believe, whose view out of her chamber window was stopped by the rocky hill in face of it, determined to test the promise to Faith, according to her lights. She prayed all night most fervently (and she was a very religious woman, according to the measure of religion which reigns in that part of our country among her class), and when the dawn came, upon looking out of the window and find- ing the provoking hill still there, she exclaimed in disgust, " Yes! there you are still, just as I expected ! " But one day an engineer came along with his instruments and chain bearers, examined the hill very thoroughly, measured it accurately and ex- pressed his settled faith that it could be removed. For the hill was in other people's way as well as in that of our good lady — this time in the way of a new railroad. The engineers' report was accepted by the 220 THE LAW OF THE CASE. company and his faith adopted for their own, and in a few months' time the hill was effectually re- moved and that by faith, only this faith was a practical and saving faith and did not confine its expression to words. Also, after a few weeks of vigorous expression, that faith would have been very much astonished to find the hill declining to get out of its way! Genuine faith finds its an- swer coming from the moment it sets itself to praying after its own method. I remember once in a Church Council when the Missionary Treasury was in serious stress — not means enough to meet existing obligations, and new calls coming continually for advance into new and promising fields, after some debate upon the situation, a most religious proposition was offered by a very devout gentleman as a solution of the difficulty, this, namely, that a special day of Prayer to Almighty God should be appointed in this behalf, and all the people should be exhorted earnestly to appeal to Him to help His Church in the extremity. I believe the proposition did not pass. It was felt, if I remember rightly, that there was no good excuse for laying this burden upon the Lord, especially as there were three or four gen- tlemen present at the consultation, any one of THE LAW OF THE CASE. 221 whom, like him who made the proposal, could then and there have drawn his check for four or five times the deficiency and have been as little conscious, financially, of the act, as when he paid his monthly grocer's bill ! In the years past, when nature seemed to hu- man ignorance a lawless and devouring monster, when there were terrors in the fields, and evil spirits in the woods, and fierce powers in the mountains; when the winds and the thunders were the sweeping and bellowing of demons in the air; when man was the helpless sport and prey of frightful forces, the victim of causeless disease, misery, and death ; when meteors scared the world with terror, and nations grew pale with fear in an eclipse, — against all these things there seemed only the defence of prayer, and that in the narrow meaning in which they defined Prayer, in which, by delusion of heredity, even such an able man as Prof. John Tyndall still to this day understands it, that is, a form of sacred words, reverently meant and uttered. Then also Nature and God seemed to stand opposed. Nature was, in large degree, man's enemy. She was always " casting him down." God must give and did give His angels charge, or he would be again and again dashed in pieces. 222 THE LAW OF THE CASE. God alone by His direct interference could save him from the cruel, irrational, bestial or diabolic powers about him. And so men prayed against natural forces. It was one of the advantages of religion that it gave a shield against the results of natural processes, and, as men thought, suspended natural law. So men in filthy cities, reeking with unheard-of abominations, prayed against " the Black Death. ' It was the only remedy they knew, the only form in which they could put a prayer, a Miserere, or a Mass. It was much that they believed in a good God still, and that the awful visitation was brought on by their own unworthiness. Still remained the central fact and power of Christ among them, and from the light on the dying face of Calvary they read, in the dread face of the Awful Death, that God is merciful and man a sinner, and cried to Heaven and not to Hell (as many millons of men in like case have done) for deliverance. So in many a monastery and church, along the coasts of Europe, swelled the wail of the Litany with the added petition of the Ninth Century. Libera nos ira Nonnanorum ! From heathen powers, cruel and accursed as THE LAW OF THE CASE. 223 from the mysterious Death of the Black Plague, let us be thankful that they prayed to God. It was a blessed thing that, in the darkest time, they still believed God could rule the world, that the Supreme Power of the Universe was good and not evil, and could hear and sometimes did hear the cries of suffering men. And now the darkness has somewhat fled away. Increasing knowledge has driven out the night fears and the terrors of our fathers' ignorance. We have found how we can handle and use many forces and processes in nature. It has come to us that our condition depends, in vaster degree than our predecessors dreamed, upon things in our own power. Not only our well-being here- after, but our well-being here is in our hands greatly. And so comes a certain reaction. We are dis- posed to consider what is technically called Prayer to be a power for that other world but useless here. A growing notion, commonly ex- pressed, is that God has nothing to do with mat- ters upon the earth; that He has left us to get on, as we can or may, with things here, by our own skill or force, and that He confines His in- terest in us and care over us entirely to our rela- tions to the other world, of whose laws and pro- 224 THE LAW OF THE CASE. cesses we are still as ignorant as men used to be of the laws and processes of this. So "science," so called, and " religion," so called, drifting apart, are leaving us just where men were in the darkest day. The notion thoi was that the world was largely and hopelessly in the power of Evil; that the masses of men were naturally in the world, in remediless sorrow and misery; that God, only now and then, when compelled by words or ritual of power, might be induced to interfere. But still men had a hope. God was supreme in an- other world. He would there carry out His full purpose, enjoy His heart's desire. The bad and the accursed devil's brood would be put down, and to reward for sorrow in this life, the good man would be given joy in that life to come. Who dares to sneer at this ? How would the men of many a century in Europe, our kindred, our fathers, have borne the hopeless darkness of a world given over, as it seemed, to the Devil, become a kind of vestibule and outer court of hell in its hatred and cruelty and tyrannous trampling on the bodies, lives, and souls of men ; how would they have endured through all, sur- vived and won out into such light as they have gained for us without the Faith — that some- THE LAW OF THE CASE. 225 where there was a better life than this; that they could endure a Devil's world for a few short years in the hope of a God's world yet to come ; could bear vva'ong for a year, in vision of eternal right forever ? If our fathers* religion took many a crude ex- . pression as it seems to us to-day, if it took even many a fierce expression, and only saw God clothed with the lightning and speaking in the thunder of a just wrath against the strong and merciless evil-doers of the earth, let no man con- demn, still less let no man speak of them in shal- low folly or chattering contempt. The wilderness was very wild and bare in which they found themselves. Savage brutes cried from the rocks and poisonous creatures crawled in the sands. The brazen, blistering sky was above them. All things seemed to declare the Devil's , lie a truth, and that this world was his own. Other peoples accepted the lie, and some too of " the noble people," the Aryan race, overborne by the pitiless forces of nature and by evil men, sur- rendered the old inheritance of their ancestors and turned to the service of evil gods, because they were evil, and, as evil, owned life and time. Our fathers in the darkest day never faltered. They had been given to see the fair face of the 15 2 26 THE LAW OF THE CASE. Man in the Wilderness, full of pity and goodness, but full, too, of the mighty Power of both. They believed in Him, and clung to Him through all, and in the darkest hour despaired not of the final victory of goodness upon the earth, and through the blackness of every lightning-riven, storm- rended sky, saw the eyes that wept at Lazarus's tomb, and looked pity in their dying, pity and forgiveness ere they closed upon the bloody cross ! If they divided this world from the other, if they confined religion to the invisible, they did only what some of our Naturalists are asserting we must do to-day; what some even of our re- ligious people who are trying to " reconcile Science and Religion " are ready to do also, in the hope that triumphant Science may leave them a place for religion still. As between the two ways of doing this, if it must be done, I confess frankly my choice of the elder way. It led to the development of many a type of manhood of stern and heroic mould. The grand names of the Christian past, the names that ring yet like the peal of trumpets in every generous soul, fought their brave fights and grandly won or grandly fell on noble fields of high endeavor, because they were sure a good THE LAW OF THE CASE. 227 God reigned somewhere, and that on some grand day He would say " well done " to any man who had done his duty faithfully in His fear. What sort of character will be produced among men should they accept the belief that neither on earth nor in any heaven is there any God — good, bad, or indifferent — to care whether a man is hero or coward, liar or true, knight or knave, only a huge brute " Power behind Phenomena," without brains and without heart, whose sole intelligible suggestion is "take the best care of your own precious carcass that you can." What type that belief will produce remains yet to be seen! It is to be hoped it will always so remain ! The guess of what it might be from the slight sug- gestions of history is quite enough to make one pray that prayer with all his power. A world turned into one vast swine-pasture would not be a very lovely world, I think, even should the swiiie be of the best developed and improved im- ported breeds, taught with care to walk upon their hind legs, even to utter articulate grunts. But there is no compulsion upon us to choose between the two views. They are both half truths and therefore false. The Law of the situation is plainly laid down by the Lord in Humanity's trial. "Cast thyself 228 THE LAW OF THE CASE. down," is the temptation. Being God's Son, He will see thee safe in all danger. The material world in which thou art for a day is nothing to Him who inherits the Eternities. "Cast thyself down : for it is written. He .shall give His angels charge concerning thee." The Lord flings up the shield of God's word against the perversion ; defends himself as before by appealing to an universal principle. " Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God." Tempt Him? How ? Clearly by calling upon Him to preserve you even in the breach of His law, by trying Him how far He will allow your disobedience and yet save you from the conse- quences. " The known breach of His physical laws, as we call them, is moral disobedience?" Yes, that seems to be the case if we understand those laws. " Then those ' Laws ' are divine ? " Yes ! we must surely accept that. The two processes of which I spoke in the be- ginning of the Lecture, the process of cause and effect visible, which we call natural law, links it- self, in order, to the process of cause and effect invisible, which we call supernatural law, and both are the expressions of a personal will, orderly, kosmical. just, and good. THE LAW OF THE CASE. 229 We know but very little of the divine processes even on the earth. A few of them, which concern our lowest animal life from day to day, are forced upon our attention. We find out quite early that fire will burn and that ice is cold; that it is dark when the sun goes down, and remains dark till he rises again. A few others we have learned by patient study and close examination, and the labor and study of many men. We have learned enough to know that the processes are all orderly, have each a beginning, middle, and end, and can be depended upon ; that is, that they are the expression of an intelligence, and an intelligence like our own, be- cause our own can see and appreciate order and meaning and purpose, and fitness to the purpose, in many of the processes, and thence have the right, indeed have an intellectual compulsion upon us to conclude they exist in all. But, after all, we know very little. The circle of our knowledge compared with the circle of our ignorance is like the little ring of light sur- rounding a candle in a pitchy night. We take up no line of these processes that we do not find ourselves at last, and generally very shortly, plunged into the dark. Our words at the best are inadequate and we use them half blindly, and 230 THE LAW OF THE CASE. tangle ourselves up in them in confusion; one of the most common and tyrannous delusions about them being that we take them for things. Only the other day, for instance, I read some reasoning by an exceedingly bright-minded and very thoughtful man, who was explaining how we are quite ignorant of some kinds of force, but ,that we are quite familiar with the force of gravity, having gotten a mathematical expression for that. Here were two words imposing upon him for things. Force is a mere word for certain phe- nomena. And our intellectual necessities compel us to believe that whatever is at the base of these phenomena, must be at the base of all; that is, that whatever our word Force stands for it must be one Thing or one Person. There can be no such thing as different and many forces. Again, the only mathematical formula con- nected with what we call the Force of Gravity is a statement of how the Force works. We are as ingorant of what the Force of Gravity is as if Newton had never seen the apple fall. His ma- thematical formula is not, as our friend seems to think, a little glass box into which Newton put the Force of Gravity to examine it at his leisure, and in which he left it stuck fast on his formula, like a beetle on a pin! THE LAW OF THE CASE. 231 The Force of Gravity, I need scarcely remind you, is only an expression for a phenomenon of whose cause we are in utter ignorance, and New- ton's formula only a mathematical statement of the way it works. Now, because we know so little is one of the reasons why many of us have so little regard for the elaborate guesses and imaginative theories of " Scientists," We decline to call those theories and guesses Philosophy. We reserve that noble and consecrated word for a quite different line of thinking, and we enter our very respectful, but entirely abiding and quite unalterable protest against calling the authors of such guesses Phil- osophers. It would be a degradation of an im- perial word such as all scholars should denounce. But little as we know of the processes of the one First Cause even in this world, we know enough to say that it is supreme in all worlds, and in all possible conditions of life, and that granted that man is the Son of God he is still, in this world, bound to reverence and obey the Father's will as revealed on Earth. The use then of all means, the obedience to all conditions, the submission to all restraints of the " Laws of Nature," is bounden upon the Son of God in the Wilderness. 232 THE LAW OF THE CASE. The study and further understanding of those processes, the reverent questioning of all things which can teach us concerning them, the use of all lights which illumine the dark, is a duty the Son owes to Him who placed Him here. It is clear that, instead of teaching the safety of ignorance, instead of suggesting that religion should shun the knoAvledge of the material, that it should flee from Science in fear, or ban it as evil, our Lord teaches here the exact reverse. "All these earthly things," He seems to say, " are God's and are sacred. One must tempt Him by no misuse. His methods here are good and blessed. The processes of His visible action wise and worthy." There is a certain sacredness about what we call Natural Law then. Nature, as we call the material, is reverenced, and to be questioned in a spirit, humble and teachable. So is man safe in this lower realm, as he obeys with this lower obedience. He discovers that hosts of evils which oppress him are due to ignor- ance of God's ways in Nature or to breach of those ways. He is right in believing that he can escape only by knowledge and obedience. But he can surely ask Him, Who Avorks by these laws, to enlighten his own mind, to see and strengthen his own will to obey? A person can THE LAW OF THE CASE. 233 understand a person, a will another will, an intel- ligence another intelligence. The Power, the Force, in all things, is a Person. Revelation tells him so. Philosophy leads him to that conclusion, and not one fact in Science stands in the way of the conclusion ; indeed all seem rather to de- mand it, though some of its disciples prefer to write " I do not know," over the doors of their libraries. And reverently studying these lower ways, faithfully trying to know them and obey them, the man who believes himself a Son of God, led up into the Wilderness to be tried, finds the basis of a rational, trustful, and safe human life. He is in the arms of Law, being in the arms of his Father. Order above, in the Heavens, order below on the Earth. Law, beautiful and terrible as an armed Archangel, guards his going out and coming in. He is on its side by birthright. He too is come to extend the realm of Law, to work with it, to reduce disorders to its obedience and the wild chaotic things of Earth to ration- ality and service to God and man. And he gets his training here in these low things himself to obedience, and thence to command. He serves that he may reign. And all the time he can pray. It is most 234 ^^-^ -^^^^^ OF THE CASE. rational and natural that he should. He, the Son of God — the son of law, the child of light and order, a birth of the dawn here in the world that is yet a wilderness, where so many things are dark, so many things disordered to appearance, where tempting voices are round him to mislead. Shall he not stand by Law as by his life, and shall he not in his distress cry to Him who is the source and fountain and executor of Law, high, low, visible, invisible, law in the sprouting of an acorn ; law in the ordering of a constellation ; law in the service of the intelligences vast and fair that stand about His throne, — shall he not cry to Him to hold him up and lead him right and teach him more and save him, while he, too, tries in his small place to serve, to reverence, and to obey ? And shall any man dare to tell him that since all powers are at last one Power, and all laws at last one Law, still his grasp on law here is not grasp on law yonder, and that the thrill of his need, at one end of the chain of law on earth, is not felt, and its message carried to its ending in the Throne of God ? LECTURE VII. THE END. ' ' Then the Devil leaveth Hitn, and behold A ngels came and ministered nnto JIi?n." LECTURE VII. THE END. U THE Hi HE angels came and ministered unto im." Tlie Son of God on earth is in touch with the Spiritual Powers both good and bad! He has just ceased his contact with the one and imme- diately enters into contact with the other. The true ground has been taken and held throughout, and now, as the bad disappears, as the dark goes away, the light and the goodness come round Him and stand by Him, minister to Him, help Him. And, observe, that the angels do not take the Son of God out of the world after he has had His discipline. They still leave Him where He is. He is yet in the wilderness. All His work is to come. He has only been trained for that work; they come to aid Him now after His struggle, but all that He has to do lies before Him yet undone. 238 THE END. He has just been preparing for it. It stands yet, a very bitter and hard sort of work. It is hard and bitter for the Eternal Son of God, hard and bitter for every one that shares His humanity. But let no man dream that when the victory is won he has won it of himself, or that it is won at all to the last hour of the struggle, or that he is then any more than prepared to enter upon an- other contest. Christ was never again personally tempted. He had won once for all. We wrestle our lives through ! Now here is another sharp contrast to the theory that Man is a product of the world, a de- velopment from any of its powers. He is evi- dently a stranger introduced into it and trained in it for some good purpose. No product of it, but put into it from the outside, a power from without. He has entered into special relations with it and it with Him, and it is evident that these relations have been entered upon because there was some special work for him to do upon it. Now, if we ask what that special work in his case is, we may be answered that it is but the de- liverance of his own soul out of it. But, mani- festly, that must be a very incomplete answer, for if that be all, why was he ever tangled up in it.'' If he has nothing to do with it except to get THE END. 239 out of it, why was he ever put into it at all ? Clearly we must find some other purpose for his being in the world than this. If there be two worlds, a material and a spirit- ual, if they stand in any way related, there must be, when we finally examine, a link, a point of connection somewhere that joins the one to the other, that partakes of both worlds and stands in both. Naturalists are very busy finding links be- tween different kinds of animals, links that seem to share the nature of two species, two forms of life, so as to easily pass over breaks in organiza- tion. Suppose we admit that it must be always so, that there is a regular step up and on, must the height not be reached when, if there be an invisible world admitted at all, there must be a connecticn in nature not only with that but with the visible. And, if that be so, then there is no other being but man that can stand for that con- necting link. If you reach development up to that point you can only stop with a being that is prepared to touch one world with one hand and the other world with the other, and if he be such and so constructed he must have things to do in either world. Now we, as Christian people, take it there is an invisible world, a spiritual world. We hold 2 40 THE END. ourselves to be scientific in saying so; we believe ourselves thoroughly supported, not only by revelation but by all the analogies. We know that the power behind the visible world is invisi- ble, that behind the phenomena is the Power that makes pJicnoniena. Suppose God wants to " save "—as we call it — the lower world, suppose he wants to elevate the visible world, deliver it from darkness, free it from chaos and disorder, how shall He do it ? Sup- pose there be a power personal that can do it at all, how shall he do it ? The strange thing is that apparently He cannot do it by purely spirit- ual beings! And yet this is natural and reasonable. The spiritual must be clothed with the material to touch the material, to handle it, to deal with it. So we say, reverently, that God cannot save men without becoming a man! Here is the strangest necessity in " the scheme of salvation " as worked out by theologians. There can be no salvation until God becomes man! This is the story familiar to us from childhood, taught us in our catechisms, the story of the in- carnation, of the Second Person of the Trinity becoming Human. God, to save the world, puts His Son into the world, and thereby adopts the THE END. 241 whole race of men and gives them under Him this world to save. So this strange being, Man, touches both the Eternal and the temporal, lives in both. Our Lord stood in the wilderness for universal humanity. Now look at the relations that follow. We reach here the spiritual nature and the phy- sical consciousness of man. I don't know how else you can explain the visions that come to him of a land that never was on any earthly shore, of fairer scenes than ever lay under any sunlight or moonlight here, of statelier cities than ever towered aloft in any clime, if we have not in such the vision of " the spiritual city," whose walls and towers are never builded by mortal builders, where all things are pure and fair, grand and holy, where all is light and all is divine. If we have not had such visions we are strange products of a Christian land in this century! I believe we all have them. It is a sort of in- nate vision and dream in men, this of the Spiritual City; St. John describes it in the Revelation as the new Jerusalem, coming down from Heaven to Earth, a place walled in from sin and shame, whence all that is foul and false has been swept away and all that is good and pure and sweet is 16 242 THE END. preserved forever, a place where all light shines and all darkness has fled away. There is that in us which compels the seeking to build upon the earth a shadow at least of God's high City. We say it exists in " the land that is very far off." Some day we hope to attain it. But we cannot be content with that ; we must strive to make shadows of it here, on the earth ; must try here to make things something like heaven The impulse of our destiny is upon us, and the higher we go the higher we reach as men, we find clearer this vision of the spiritual city, and also the more resolved and determined we find the human Avill to reproduce it here. There is of course the other side, the content- ment that one has with the world, and we can be thankful because such content exists amid all the sufferings of life ; because when life comes to the end there then awaits us the blessedness in the land beyond and a faith that we shall see those towers that shine forever, and those homes where we shall dwell in peace. But, at the same time, one feels it is not all he has to do, to get his own soul safe out of the wilderness. The Avilderness is dear to us after all. Heaven, beheld by faith, may be very fair, and call out, for its attainment, the highest and noblest that is in us, but even THE END. 243 the hope of Heaven cannot destroy affection for the dear green earth where we were born, for the world where we have lived and loved. We can see in its mornings and evenings, in its sapphire seas, in its emerald woodlands, in its flashing streams, in its descending cataracts, in its white morning glows, in the splendor of its noontides, some image of that other land that has been promised and for which we hope ; we cannot leave this in despair. We say " the world must be better for my be- ing here, I have my work to do in it and I must turn to that ; I cannot leave it as I found it." That has been the impulse that has brought us hither. China has not advanced an inch in all the historic period, — she is just where she was. There are other cases of absolute stagnation. VVe congratulate ourselves that we belong to a race that moves on and up. One of the best words we have is " progress." We believe that to-day is responsible for to-morrow. A curious thing that, the idea that we are responsible for the making of the world ! You make your theory, you tabulate the facts that belong to all sorts of events in the world you try to make a "science of sociology " out of them. When you have done all you have not told a single secret of the move- 244 ^^^ END. ment. You may mark the advance and the re- trogression, the eddy and the swirl, where things stop an instant and then sweep forward, and all this may be very valuable. To have this laid down for you and to have the facts grouped to- gether where they belong, kind for kind, may be of use, but when you have that done where is the force that produced it all ? There must be a force, where does it lie ? When you examine you will find it a personal force in very large de- gree. The final force is always personal. You finally reach a race that believes itself responsible for the condition of things about it. No man believes in a sociology without men. The consciousness of every one of us holds us responsible, each in his degree, for the conduct of the world. You say, " I am responsible for my community in my degree, for my land in my de- gree, responsible for the ideas that reign in it, for the way it is going. I am bound to lift up my voice and protest against the wrongs if I believe there are any. I am bound to give my voice for right things, bound to see that they are right. The whole body of us is bound to do the same. If some great evil grows to large headway in the next generation the men of this generation are under obligation and are guilty of the result. THE END. 245 They should have seen it, they should have pre- vented it." What becomes of the theory of non- personality in the Universe, of no spiritual Mas- ter in the organization, and the movement of hu- man life, of society, and the nations of the world, when men themselves turn round and say, " we hold ourselves responsible; we need not have had these things so; we condemn ourselves for per- mitting them." Count our murders. We ought not to have them. There is no necessity that they should exist. We can lower them to a minimum, can prevent them, we believe, alto- gether. There is no use in having pestilence and famine. We are responsible for both. You look back again ; you find that all great movements, all that make eras, have some man or men for their authors. These did not come without changes, and changes produced by a personal will. We may say, if Christopher Co- lumbus had not discovered America somebody else would have done it. Yes, but not then, and all the argument gathers around the fact that it was discovered then, just when the best time had come for its discovery, when Europe was prepared to make the best America. You cannot argue that away. Columbus created an era, that is all. Luther made an era. Men may blame or praise 246 THE END. the results of the era as they see fit, but that the era was made by a man, and by one man and by one man's personality and one man's will, so that that personality and that will are stamped upon the world for all time, is the clearest fact of modern history. Jails were in a very bad state and men might have possibly mended the jail condition, but would they have mended them, or would the condition be to-day as it is if Howard had never lived and travelled and visited jails and never died for the cause he took in hand ? The slave trade might have ended, but I take it no man can tell the story of its ending without naming William Wilberforce and understanding that there a personal will, a personal power, a man's love of man changed the face of the world, the conditions of sociology, the position of men upon the earth. You that read history can take scores of cases, which I need not go over, that come to your mind spontaneously where men have, by their personal will, the force of their in- dividuality, changed the whole course of the stream of time. There has been injected into the world's move- ment, moving under regular cause and effect of course, a personal element which has transformed THE END. 247 and changed, and you have to make your account with that. So it is perfectly right to say we put our trust not only in God but also in man. *' Ye believe in God, believe also in Me," said Christ. The one Man of all men, the Son of God, appointed to carry out God's purpose, to do God's will spiritual and material, carries out perfectly and to the utmost the intentions of the Infinite Will. We have these millions of finite wills of other men, and they are right and do their work exactly, as they work in accordance with that other Will. So God and man work together. The weakest man, working upon His side, is a majority! And now in our looking at the days to come, we start from this basis that will carry us through, and enable us to do the work logically and con- sistently. We start, as sons of God, as delegated spiritual powers on the earth to set things right. It is the ingrained conviction of our people, per- haps of all the foremost peoples, and especially of the foremost men among those peoples, that they are to set things right; that they are respon- sible for things. The problems of the coming time face us and we them. We say we cannot leave this world as the abiding place of Satan. We propose that the angels shall come down and 248 THE END. minister to the sons of God, and taking that stand we cast away the blind and weak theory of the production of things from themselves as if all things were a chain of names without cause and without power, and take the ground that the world can be mended, and that it must be mended by personal wills ! And then when we look at things with which we have to deal, we ask ourselves are any of them sacred from our hands? Is a special form of government sacred ? Surely not. The state is sacred. There is no special form of the state that is so. The government and the state are two. Have you reached yet the highest possible development of the state organization, an organi- zation to do justice among men to govern wisely and in the spirit of God ? Have we reached that point ? No state ever yet approached the ideal. Our own has made an advance, no doubt, but it is very far away from the ideal yet. There is nothing at all sacred in majorities. In fact there is sometimes very much that is much the reverse of sacred. Majorities have a very bad habit of being wrong in the story of the world. We have scarcely a possession on the earth that men praise that was not at some time sustained by a minority, condemned by a majority. There were manifold THE END. 249 voices against it, ten or an hundred strong voices which were the echoes of the Eternal Voice, were for it and it won. Nor is the word "president" more sacred than the word " emperor," nor the word " governor " than the word " king," These are matters of no sort of consequence. Then there is surely nothing sacred in the de- tails of our business, or our financial systems. Do not suppose Almighty God cares much about our bank balances or our arrangements of capital and labor, of finances, of manufacture and com- merce. These things have been meddled with by men ; they have developed by natural effects which we see about us. Men have just as often muddled them as improved them. As they stand now, no man pretends they are final or even ven- erable or respectable. We have no reverence for " the dismal science," as if it were of any im- portance in a decent humanized world. In an ideal state of society we will not have a great deal of crime, of fraud, of poverty, of sick- ness. These things will be minimized, will be re- duced to the lowest possible expression, and finally, in a perfect state, they will be entirely removed. Do you say they cannot be ? If so, then I answer, the Christian Church may just as well close its doors, because the Christian Church 250 THE END. is simply and solely the ideal of the Lord Jesus Christ established on the earth to leaven the rest. She oue^ht to be His ideal and her business is to bring all the outside world to accept that ideal and to be a part of it, and if this business is not going on then the church of God is good for nothing except to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. There is nothing more offensive to the nostrils and to the taste, I think, than leaven. You can- not eat it, you cannot offer it to your God, to 3''our king, or to your friend. It is simply a rot- ten substance. It is a curious thing that the Lord should describe His kingdom under that word, that he should say " the kingdom of God is like leaven," an absolutely useless thing except as it works on other things. That is all it exists for. Unless the church of God on earth is work- ing on the world about it, remaking that world, it is very clear the church of God is of no account whatever. , Those who come into that church of God, who take the vows upon them, say they have seen His ideal of Avhat ought to be in the church and in the world, and by the power and the grace of God they are going to go on and try to realize that ideal. But no man has ever attained it. THE END. 251 That is another strange thing about it, no man has ever kept the vows of his baptism. No man has ever kept the vows repeated in his confirma- tion and at the table of the Lord, and no man ever can keep them. Our great Christian Poet has put it exactly, warning those who would enter the mystic gates of the strange, dim city, "TheKine, Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame A man should not be bound by, yet the which No man can keep." It is a part of the mystery of our strange life, the voice coming from the spiritual world, telling what we ought to be as sons of God and asking us to take the vows. We take them, and then finding ourselves tied hand and foot in the ma- terial, allied to the beasts that perish, made like them, skeleton for skeleton, function for function, one stands dismayed. We carjnot keep the vows. We can only climb and strive, and climbing and striving try to help all others climb and strive beside us. The problems that press upon us are the eter- nal problems that have faced men in social life from the first. I dare to say that no man ought to be com- pelled to live in any Christian land a life that is 252 THE END. not human. That he should have all the oppor- tunities to live such a life; that our-arrangements of circumstances, of leisure, of occupation, should be such as compel no man to be a mere toiling beast. That has been the lot of the great body of men in all past time. It is coming to us surely in these later days to see that it is not longer the human lot. Labor, hard labor, is divine. God has blessed it and man has honored it, but the labor of the dumb beast, of the ox in the yoke, of the mule at the plough, that is not divine labor. If the man who holds the plough handles behind the ox or mule only toils as they do for to-day's rations and the night's brute rest you have bru- talized the man. Labor has brutalized him ; it has dragged him down among the beasts ; it is not the labor of a Son of God. This will have to be changed some day. I do not care what your arrangements are, or your government or business, financial or otherwise, there is one thing that is just as sure as the eternal words of God, just as sure as that the stars in their courses fight on the side of eternal right and eter- nal law ; such a thing as that must go ; it must go kindly, sweetly, gently, if it may, but if it cannot go that way it will go some other. Go it must. And then again I do not care what your ar- THE END, 253 rangements are, when one man's mind is so taken up, occupied and exhausted, that he dies pre- maturely, drops in his tracks because he cannot take care of the immense income he must yearly reinvest; kills himself in trying to find out how best to roll his millions over, and another man, not twenty rods from him, sits beside his starving child or wife in a great Christian city ; be your civil and social arrangements what they may, you can make up your mind that is a condition that must be changed, no matter what becomes of such arrangements. In the crises that come when such things go as they must, reverence for old conditions does not stand much in the way, and there is a strong tendency in our time, and it is a happy and holy tendency, to get down to the facts in every case, to be no more imposed upon by venerable, no matter how venerable, de- ceits, cheats, and pretensions. Need in the world for the common physical sufferings of men ? Surely not ! It has been naturally arranged for quite other conditions. There is bread enough to feed all the hungry every year and millions of loaves to spare. There is cloth enough to cover all the cold and naked and plenty to spare. The abundance of the world we have been obtaining; it has been rolling 254 THE END. in upon us in endless measure, and the problem now is how you are to distribute it so that men may live contented and reasonably human lives under all these gifts. When a man has time to think, to cultivate himself, to reason with himself and consider his higher and better life, we can have a world of civilized, cultured, intelligent, reasonable men. And if I understand the message of my own land to the rest of the world, the grand revelation of life in " the gigantic Daughter of the West " — this is it — " Man must be able to live a human life on earth." It must come, and it must come here before it comes anywhere. Charged with intelligence, with leadership, with freedom from all the old fetters of bondage, intellectual and spiritual, shall not the children she holds in her mighty arms settle the questions of the ages ? They cannot do it as drifting expressions of the world's forces, themselves products of blind chance. And now, after all, what practical connection does all this suggest with the world unseen and the spiritual city ? Can we get any help from angels or God in our earthly endeavors ? If so, how is it gotten ? Is there any use in pray- ing, any answer to prayer ? If I have not settled THE END. 255 that I do not know how I am going to settle it or give you any farther word to help you. I have been considering man on the earth as God's spiritual messenger to redeem the earth, the weakest of us, the smallest of us, as having a part and duty in the work. We are personalities, the originators of movements, and those move- ments aflect others. Now, being persons and being sons and citizens, too, of the spiritual city we are allied to Almighty God ; we are in daily communication with him; we, and we alone, so far as weknow, on the earth, can send our voices to His seat, and therefore the infinite powers of heaven are in conjunction with men. We, our- selves, effect things and God effects things. What we call the development and chain of events about us is only the regular action of God's will and of our own will, and therefore God can hear the prayer of God's children and God can answer the prayer; the true expression of the relation- ship between these two is prayer and the answer to prayer. I say only human voices can go from earth to heaven, and man only can have that voice an- swered. Men, persons, and efficient wills, are bound therefore to the throne of God, the infinite Personality, the infinite Will. And more, if our 256 . THE END. faith be true that on the circle of the heavens and on the throne of God a Man is sitting, a human nature, will, and personality, the Lord and Mas- ter of this world and of all worlds, then I think a man can speak to a Man and the Man will hear him. But that man is his brother! Any word of need from the lost and wretched, any cry of human want passes through the shining ranks of all the angels, into the very inmost au- dience-hall and presence-chamber of the Al- mighty, a man's voice in his need, his own need or his brother's, and the voice shall be answered. You ask how ? Can God answer prayer ? Can he change His own action, "suspend" His own " laws ? " Is the Almighty tied up as you and I are not tied, by the uniformity of His own pro- cedure ? He is then in worse case than the poor Persian king in Babylon — chained hand and foot by his own law so that much as he desired it he could not save Daniel ! You and I never break natural law, as we call it, but we handle it, we use it, we turn it to wise ac- count ; we seem to change it or suspend it for our own good or the good of others and do no harm ! God Almighty knows far more about His own action, about the way He manages and handles His own creation than you or I do. Do you THE END. 257 suppose He is a slave to it ? Is He not as free in it as one of ourselves ? Do you not see the whole supposed difficulty is a blunder about a word taken for a thing ! But one thing is sure, the pulse that beats between the Son of God and God Himself, between the Eternal Personality invisible, and the poor little needy persons here on the earth sent for a special purpose and to do a special work, that close clinging of want and supply must be so close, so intimate, that no one thrill of human need can come but it must touch the will of God vibrating along the unseen line between these two. Man's attitude on the earth while doing God's will is our Lord's attitude. On the spiritual side of his nature he lives among the everlasting facts, and handles the Eternal powers that make phenomena. To deny God's power to answer the prayers of His children is to make the Eternal God th6 slave of the pheno- mena ! I spoke about our race as being of all men the race that hopes. It seems you cannot break us down. You cannot make this people take on de- spair. You may call them rash. That may be their fault. But never do they give up hope of the good day coming. Fair to-morrows are com- ing to us and to all men. 17 258 THE END. We look for victory. There is but the one way to triumph. The land is our Father's. It is ours because we are His sons. We will defend our own. We ask only our own, but in God's great name we will insist upon our Father's land for our Father's children. A Kingdom of the Sons of God! We have made, in these last days, no more modest a proc- lamation than that ! It was made three centuries ago with a narrow and even foolish meaning. We make it now in the light of a broader day and a loftier vision. A land of justice and of right, a land of truth and loyalty, a land of sweet, fair homes of purity and peace; a land where honest wages come to honest work ; a land where manhood holds its old reverence — it is the image of God! All the weary march can surely not be for nothing! All the blood, the toil, the tears, the starving of the wilderness, cannot fail. We have struggled on toward Sun-Setting so far that our waiting eyes see at last Sun-Rising! The Earth shall hang luminous in the smile of God. Angels shall minister in a world where men say to the Sensual and the Dark — in the Name of our Father, ^'get thee behind me, Satan ! " BISHOP THOMPSON'S BOOKS. THE WORLD AND THE LOGOS. The Bedell Lectures for 1885. Square i2mo, cloth, $1.00. "As a superb piece of dialectic, as a capital example of good fighting, this little book will be a real enjoyment." — The Churchman. THE WORLD AND THE KINGDOM. The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1888. Fourth Edition. i2ino, cloth, 75 cents. " To say that these lectures are admirable is saying but little — they are nTore ; they are eloquent, forceful and convincing. Their lines of argument are well laid, and the reader lays the finished volume down with a fuller faith and a larger and stronger hope." — Christian af Work. "It is one of the suggestive books of the day, not because of any new theories or startling statements, but because of the clear, keen way of putting much that is commonplace." — Public Opinion. THE WORLD AND THE MAN. The Baldvi^in Lectures for 1890. i2mo, cloth, $1.25. Jttst out. A series of brilliant lectures in continuation of the line of thought in the above volumes. The titles of the several lectures are : The Outlook, Led Up, Tempted, Bread, Kingdoms, The Law of the Case, The End. The book is unusually vigorous and refreshing. COPY. Essays from an Editor's Drawer on Religion, Literature and Life. Fourth Edition. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. "** Copies sent postpaid on receipt of price. THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 AND 3 Bible House, New York. SERMON STUFF. By the Rev. S. D. McCONNELL, D.D. THIRD EDITION. 12mo. Cloth. $1.00 net. "It certainly is the most remarkable collection of sketches we have ever seen." — The Standard of Ihe Cross. "We can readily see how they can be made an immense help to an overtaxed and hurried preacher, in the way at least of suggestion, and to all such we heartily commend it." — The Christian at Work. " We find among them many ingenious, forcible, and sug- gestive schemata for the pulpit." — The Independent. " For clear, manly, strong thought, we frankly commend this book as a model to sermonizers." — The Christian Union. 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"The author has gathered into a volume twenty-six essays on just those topics and questions pertaining to Church faith and worship on which a multitude of people, both without and within our congregations need to be instructed. The statements are always clear, concise, direct and per- suasive. There is nothing extravagant, overwrought, fan- tastic or bitter. Many of the essays would make excellent chapters for lay-reading." — Rt. Rev. F. D. Huntington, D.D. " It will do good. It has the rare merit of lucidity." — The Rev. S. D. McConncll, D.D. " I think it will have a large sale. I hope it will." — Bishop Brewer {Montana) " I am glad to see Mr. Snyder's tracts in book form, and predict for them a wide circulation and increased usefulness as so published." — Bishop Neeley {Maine). " The style of these sermonettes is simple, the thought clear, the teaching positive." — Church of To-day. " We cordially welcome this book as one of the most needed helps in parish work. . . . 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The book is a beautiful specimen of typographical art." — Standard of the Cross. " With his mind well stored from this book, any church- man will find himself very fairly equipped against the ignorance and prejudice of sectarian controversalists, and provided with a readiness of answer to such as enquire con- cerning the ways and the teachings of the Church." — Pacific Churchman. Copies in either style of binding will be forwarded pre- paid on receipt of price. THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher, 2 and 3 Bible House, New York. CARDINAL GIBBONS ANSWERED. TTbe fmth of our jfotefatbete. An Examination of Archbishop Gibbons' " Faith of Our Fathers." Fifth edition. Revised. 380 pages, i2mo, cloth, ^i.oo (postpaid.) " Dr. Stearns shows himself to be a scholar, a logician, and a stalwart defender of Protestant principles, . . It is one of the keenest, clearest, and most convincing arguments ever put forth for popular use." — Christian Stuvdard. " Dr. Stearns is able, witty, patient and conclusive." — South- western Presbyterian. " He follows the Archbishop, chapter by chapter, tearing the gauze from his concealed falsehoods, and cutting him to pieces at every point." — The Central Baptist, '' We hail with joy this opportune reply to a work that has had sway for about two years without meeting refutation and rebuke, and hope it will meet with as hearty a reception from people as well as press. It meets every doctrine and dogma of the Church of Rome, and robs it of its boasting.''— The Methodiit (New York). " The Rev. Dr. Stearns, of the diocese of Ea^ton, has brought out, through Whittaker, of New York, publisher, a crushing reply to Archbishop Gibbons' work, ' The Faith of our Fathers.'" — Church A^(?W5- (Baltimore), Oct. g. " Our author has both the learning and al)ility to u«e it. He can see the weak point in an argument, can keep his temper, and moreover has a pleasant, sometimes a humorous method of writing. Hence tins book is both able and interesting. The author has done his work well. To what extent the Archbishop's book has been circulated among Prote.stants [probably to the extent of half the ' sixty-five thousand,' seeing it was written expressly for them — see the opening sentence of the Introduction] we know not ; but certainly the antidote is at hand. We therefore hope our pastors will see that this work has a large circulation, and is just as impor- tant for other Protestants a^ ourselves." — Southern Churchman, OcX.<^. "Since the days of the masters of English Theology, who encountered every Jesuit and other Romish champion that showed his face and unhorsed and took away the sword of every one whom they encountered, ihere has bren no such sturdy, vigorous, indom- itable and all-quelling fighter for the Catholic truth. Of Archbishop Gil)l)ons he does not leave so much as to be worth decent burial. Dr. Stearns vindicates, for the hundredth time, but with learning and wit which has not been a hundred times exhibited, that we represent, and the Church of Rome doss not represent, in faith, usage, and worship the Catholic Church of the beginning; and so clearly does lie see, that he shows, also, clearly ; and his learning is as easy to the average American reader as his wit. There is not, moreover, a liresome or dull word in the whole book. Let every lover of 'that which is good ' buy this book and spread its sale and reading," — Standard of Cross {C\t\e.\a.nd), Oct. 25. '• In these days of half faith and less than half knowledge, it is a tea! comfort to meet with a thorough, stalwart, earnest, deeply learned man like the author of this book. Dr. Stearns is most enipliaticaliy not one of those wlio find it hard to say how they differ from the Church of Rome, and easy to say how they differ from Protestant denominations who are not so far from the true faith as that body is. He is still more emphatically not one who, ignorant and stupid hatred of Popery, accepts mere Protestantism as the true faith and practice, and blindly suspects and disowns what is Catholic. Archbishop Gibbons' book Dr. Stearns positively cuts to shreds, showing the worthlessness and paltriness of every claim and pretence of which it is made up. And how he does it ! See what work he makes of St Peier's 'supremacy'! See the clear and indisputable account of the British Church, ages before the Mission- ary St. Aui^ustine from Rome ! But, indeed, see ihe whole book ; buy it, and gtt it read." — The Living Church (Chicago), Nov. 6. "Dr. Stearns has most thoroughly accomplished his purpose. He follows the Archbishop chapter by chapter and mercilessly drives him to the wall. We have 1, n jwn something in past days of Roman controversialists, but anythng more coolly audacious than some of the statements and ' arguments ' which Dr. Stearns exposes we have never seen. He literally pulls the Archbishop to pieces. And this is done in a racy, pleasant style, full of wit and humor, such as might be expected from the author of ' The Af tei piece to the Comedy of Convocation.' In conclusion, we might caution our readers against supposing that this book of Dr. Stearns is useful and interesting only as an examination of Archbishop Gibbons. It is a valuable Theological Manual. It will be found extremely service- table by any clergyman, however well furnished he may be on these importf'.nt subjects. This volume will be a helpful guide to any 'layman also who may chance to be perplexed in the mazes of the Roman question." — The Churchman, Nov. 15. *,* Copies mailed postpaid upon receipt 0/ price. THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 and 3 Bible Honse, NEW YORK. C hristianity in D^I f ondnct. Studies of Texts relating to Principles of the Christian Character. Crown octavo, 338 pages, neat cloth binding. Price f I.50, " It is one of those books, of which we have too few, which can be read and re-read with growing interest and satisfaction and always with renewed instruction and profit." — Christian At Work. " It seems a pity that a book containing such decided opinions on many questions should not have the endorsement of the writer's name." — Publisher s Weekly. " This i-i a volume of exceptional excellence. The author of these twenty-two sermons should have not concealed his personality The style is lucid, tlie argument strong, the purpose direct, the spiritual uplift continuous. The thoughts are very rich, and there is nothing slipshod in their arrangement. The topics are selected by a master-spirit, who knows what man needs and how to supply his need. Many a vol- ume of sermons announced with flourish of trumpets ad supported by illustrious names ontains less ihan ihis. It is in the conduct of daily life that Chris iamtv declares itself, and ihe wise adaption of precept and parable to the minute duties of each day shows not only the skill of the writer, but the breailih and beauty (.f Christian truth. Humility, for- giveness, anger, purity, lyini,', giving, heavenly citizenship, the. one talent, the Elder Brother, are all treated with a calm spirit, and a clear appre- hension of the t'u-e Christian doctrine. Ii is a plensure to read these pages, free from he restless drive of an excited passion. The author can afford to give his name in the next edition, and furnish more sermons for publication." — Christian Union. " It is a b )ok a layman mi^ht have written, and which it will do good for a layman to read. For our own part, reading between the lines, we incline to the clerical oii^in, and we do not believe we shoi.M have to go far from a prominent parish in this city, to put our hands upon its min- ister and to say ; ' Thou art the man.' But be this as it u:ay, we wel- come the volume, both for its subject and treatment. It is Ch istinnity applied, and that is the great need of our day. The libraries are londed down with treatises, many often stupid, on dogma and doctrine; the clergy preach about the ct remonial and the aesthetics of religion, its clothe- and drapery, and wVat men want to know about is its flesh and blood, its life." — Mail and Express, N. Y. *** Copies will be forwarded by mail or exptess, prepaid, at f r.50. T HOMAS W HITTAKRR . 2 and 3 Bible House, New York. Princeton Theoloqical Seminary Libraries 1 1012 235 7762 Date Due '■i '' >)''<•■ '. ::■: J: ■ 'H ■ '''•{•.''••' y-^v :' ;■:: :2 -■ '■ .,■* ' ■ ■ ,'■.<', 0^:, "•*: ->«:'^j« ■'J ^•