MAY 2 1918 
 
 BX 5937 .T?" C68 T91F" 
 
 ^^^f^^;^ 'Challenge to man's 
 SDirit m this world crisis 
 
CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN'S SPIRIT 
 IN THIS WORLD CRISIS 
 
By the same Author 
 
 ESSAYS IN APPRECIATION 
 
 New Edition, Revised 
 i2mo. Cloth, $1.20, net 
 
 The Rev. Henry A. Coit — Sister Anne 
 Agnes — The Rev. Morgan Dix — The 
 Rev. William Reed Huntington — The 
 Right Rev. Henry Codman Potter — The 
 Rev. Canon Laurence Henry Schwab — 
 Newman Once More: A Study — Bishop 
 Doane: The Poet — An Experiment in 
 Conservative Revision of the New Tes- 
 tament: A Review — General Booth — 
 Christ and Bergson — John Pierpont 
 Morgan — ^William Croswell Doane. 
 
 NEW YORK: LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
CHRIST'S CHALLENGE 
 
 TO MAN'S SPIRIT 
 
 IN THIS WORLD CRISIS 
 
 Advent Addresses at the Cathedral 
 
 of St. John the Divine, New York /.\:^^ ^ ^^^ 
 
 MAY 2 1918 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM DOUGLAS, D.D., S.T.D 
 
 <fO/nfi{Pki ccMA^^V 
 
 Published by Request of the Demi and Others 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G., LONDON 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 I918 
 
Copyright, 1918, by 
 GEORGE WILLIAM DOUGLAS 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 These addresses were delivered in course at 
 the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, 
 on the Sunday afternoons in Advent, 191 7. Their 
 general subject is the essential spirituality of 
 human life, in contrast to the materialistic aspect 
 which in these trying times our life has seemed 
 to wear. Like many others, the preacher has 
 heard above the tumult of world-war a distinct 
 challenge of Jesus Christ our Lord to the spirit 
 that is in man; and these addresses are a faithful 
 endeavor to declare the message that has been 
 thus vouchsafed. 
 
 Everybody is aware by now that this is a dan- 
 gerous world, but it is more and more evident 
 that the chief danger is not to men's bodies, but 
 to their minds and souls. At the front plain 
 soldiers have learned this where the appearances 
 were most to the contrary. On the battle-field 
 bodily harm is for the moment comparatively 
 unimportant: what matters most is the spirit, 
 and the body must be kept fit so as to secure 
 presence of mind; and some have found their 
 souls more liberated than ever, realizing that the 
 point of death is a point of life. Meanwhile 
 
VI FOREWORD 
 
 those same old mysterious terms, the good and 
 the bad, crop up and are appHed even to the 
 mechanism of war and the material implements. 
 We cannot refrain from judging these according 
 to the character of those that wield them, and 
 their spiritual purpose. 
 
 Behind the lines this world crisis has had much 
 the same result. The great surprise of Hfe these 
 past three years has been the spirituality of it, 
 and the arousal of the human mind, even when it 
 was being drilled to attain what looked like the 
 goal of sheer materialism. Germany has borne 
 tacit testimony to this by her system of universal 
 espionage, her propaganda and intrigue. Here 
 her aim was, not men's bodies, but their mentality, 
 and to control or break their spirit. 
 
 As to presence of mind, the Prussians by years 
 of preparation had stressed that for all and even 
 more than it is worth. All Germany had been 
 intellectually drilled. But here came another sur- 
 prise. Many intelHgent men had supposed that 
 if you develop the intellect, man will thereby of 
 himself alone outgrow what is brutal in him. But 
 the devil was ready to tempt even intellectuals 
 to be brutish still. So it has been proved on 
 an enormous scale that the brute man can be 
 intellectual up to a certain point. But at that 
 point he has had an astonishing experience. He 
 has found that brute force, even when backed by 
 
FOREWORD Vll 
 
 brainpower and unlimited desire, is in the long run 
 futile for the government of intellectual men that 
 are not brutish, since these resent to the death such 
 domination unless their spirit gives way. God 
 knows that America has sins enough of her own, but 
 hitherto she has not succumbed to the delusion that 
 Might is Right. Nay at the very moment when, 
 dismayed by Prussianism, thousands of mankind 
 were asking whether Christianity is not a failure, 
 the challenge of Jesus Christ made itself heard 
 once more. His Name is probably on more men's 
 lips now than ever before. And now, as ever, 
 the authority of Christ Himself is superior to 
 that of those who have called themselves Chris- 
 tians. Christ searches and divides the spirits 
 of men, asking them, "What spirit are ye of?" 
 He presents Himself in the Everlasting Now: 
 the life to come begins here for those who will lay 
 hold on it. To which decision Christ invites us, 
 saying: "Follow Me, and ye shall not walk in 
 darkness." 
 
 This, then, is our Day of Judgment; but it 
 goes beyond our immediate trial. This war will 
 not last forever; but afterward, on what appear 
 to be more peaceful fields, the challenge of Jesus 
 will still be ringing in our ears. So there our 
 Christian warfare shall continue. The science of 
 political and industrial management remains to 
 be mastered, and the prophets of democracy fore- 
 
VUl FOREWORD 
 
 see that the science of management does not lie 
 with the managers alone. Labourer and manager 
 must co-operate and sympathize, animated by 
 Christ's Spirit, or else the devil will prod them to 
 the same old tragedy of brutishness backed by 
 brainpower and unlimited desire. It is not merely 
 a technical but a human problem, and, as such, 
 spiritual. Here again man, if he will lay hold on 
 eternal life, can exchange nothing for his soul; and 
 the intrepid spirit must choose whether to be inde- 
 pendent oj Christ or independent with Him. To 
 have faith in democracy we must have faith in 
 Christ, Who presents our God to us as the Servant 
 of servants. Social service without Christ is 
 cankered by Pride; but Christ, as Captain of our 
 souls, is the transfiguration of HumiUty, and God 
 as Love is all in all. 
 
 After my course was finished I received from 
 the Dean of the Cathedral a most kind expression 
 of his hope that my sermons might be pubUshed. 
 A like request came from the circle of clergymen 
 in New York and vicinity known as The Clericus. 
 I have availed myself of the permission given me 
 to print in an appendix these unexpected letters 
 which induced me to let my little volume go out 
 into the world. 
 
 George William Douglas. 
 
 Feast of the Epiphany, 
 January 6, 191 8. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Christ's Challenge to the Spirit of Man i 
 
 In spite of appearances, man is still finding that 
 this is a spiritual world. Even on the battle-field 
 the body must be fit, not so much for its ovm as 
 for the spirit's sake. Presence of mind and spirit 
 decide the issue; and some find their spirits liberated 
 as never before. And the old mysterious terms, 
 the bad and the good, still apply even to war tools 
 according to the purpose of those who wield them. 
 
 In Advent we celebrate the arrival of the most 
 spiritual Person in the world. He met the worst 
 that we encounter now; but throughout He was 
 in touch with the Father of Spirits. Christ offers 
 us His knowledge of the Father, and challenges 
 our faith. 
 
 II. What Spoils the Human Spirit: Pride 15 
 
 The tragedy of Saul. German Kultur is now our 
 object-lesson. To Americans it came from a dis- 
 tance, for our institutions are not favourable to it; 
 but in other forms we have the same temptation. 
 Bishop Lawrence's call to Purity. Our part in the 
 world-war, if we are great enough to be humble. 
 
 III. Laying Hold on Eternal Life 28 
 
 What identifies our life here and hereafter, accord- 
 ing to St. Paul. Paul's doctrine presented alle- 
 gorically in the Mediaeval play, "Everyman." 
 Both Paul and "Everyman" agree with Darwin's 
 doctrine of Development. Christianity does not 
 neglect the present for a future life, but makes this 
 life even more interesting by its links with the life 
 to come. We must not magnify the Hearse, which 
 is but a signal of the Everlasting Now. It is not 
 that, "If you do so and so, you will get there" but 
 " If you do right you are there.'" To know and follow 
 Christ is eternal life. 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 IV. The Transfiguration of Humility 41 
 
 Applied to Christ this term acquires a new mean- 
 ing. So the world's idea of humility is changing 
 where Christ is known. The age of Celsus con- 
 trasted with our age. But Christ's humility re- 
 quires ever new applications, which we find difficult. 
 As to the barbarian mind Christ seemed to humiliate 
 God by service, so to the mind and imagination of 
 the modern scientist Natural Law seemed to lock 
 God out of His world. What this world crisis has 
 taught both the scientific and the plain man. Hu- 
 man efficiency need not swagger; and God may hide 
 Himself. It is an over-eager reading of the ways of 
 Providence, to expect that the ultimate right Cause 
 shall quickly win. The lesson of Bethlehem. 
 
"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; 
 He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; 
 Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! 
 Our God is marching on." 
 
 Julia Ward Howe 
 
 (The Battle Hymn ol the Republic). 
 
Christ's Challenge to Man 
 
 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO THE SPIRIT OF 
 
 MAN 
 
 The days of the years of my pilgrimage. 
 
 — Gen. xlvii:9. 
 Thou shalt keep the feast of harvest. 
 
 — Exodus xxiii:is, i6. 
 
 Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased 
 the joy: they joy before Thee according to the joy in 
 harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 
 
 — I sat. ix:3. 
 
 Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. 
 I am afraid of you. 
 
 — Gal. x:ii. 
 
 Hast Thou (O God) eyes of flesh, and seest Thou as 
 man seeth? Are Thy years as man's days? 
 
 — John x:4, $. 
 
 As the days of Noe, so shall also the coming of the 
 Son of Man be. . . . Then shall two be in the field; the 
 one shall be taken, and the other left. Watch therefore. 
 — Matt. xxiv:37, 40, 42. 
 
 Not to confuse you in the reading, I gave my 
 texts without chapter and verse, so that the tone and 
 consensus of God's Word might bear upon us in a 
 total impression. Last Thursday we celebrated 
 our national Harvest Home, and I do not suppose 
 
2 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 that it ever fell at a more heartsearching time; 
 though if ever a people had cause to be thankful for 
 their harvest from the farms, our nation has it now. 
 
 But yonder in Europe there is a harvest of an- 
 other kind, mixed in with the fruits of the field, — 
 a ghastly harvest of human bodies, piled up like 
 potatoes in the trenches; and it requires little 
 imagination for our souls to see there the grim 
 Harvester, with the sickle in one hand and the hour- 
 glass in the other. "Thrust in Thy sickle, and 
 reap; for the time is come for Thee to reap; for 
 the harvest of the earth is ripe. And He that sat 
 on the cloud thrust in His sickle on the earth; 
 and the earth was reaped." Yet, under God, 
 even that awful harvest will in the end be helpful 
 to mankind. 
 
 And here we sit in comparative plenty, having 
 garnered our farm-goods. Comfortable, comfort- 
 loving Americans, gathering in your corn, and wine 
 and oil — ^yet anxious now in spite of them — ^ye 
 observe days and months, and times, and years; 
 but I am afraid of you. I am afraid lest the irony 
 of Isaiah hits us hard: "Thou hast multiplied the 
 nation and not increased the joy. They joy before 
 Thee as men rejoice when they divide the spoil." 
 For have we not reaped hitherto our full share of 
 the spoils of war, though we be but on the fringes 
 yet of its sufferings and sorrow? Ah me! there is 
 another sort of harvest there, and soon it may be 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 3 
 
 here, for us to gather if we will — a harvest of lessons 
 for man's immortal soul ; and whether we be joyful 
 in that, or not, depends on other operations than 
 our gleanings of grain and oil and wine. And 
 already we have seers, who see us through and 
 through — Recording Angels. Saith one such in 
 the Apocalypse: "I know thy works. I counsel 
 thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou 
 mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou 
 mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy 
 nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes 
 with eyesalve, that thou mayest see." 
 
 Bear with me therefore, brothers, if in this 
 Harvest Home a spirit in my feet brings me to 
 that higher field, where a real spiritual warfare 
 puts us now in danger of our everlasting lives. 
 I am hearing today the searching question of Jesus 
 Christ, put one harvest morning on the plenteous 
 fields of Palestine to the Pharisees and Sadducees, 
 when they asked of Him a sign from Heaven: 
 "O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the 
 sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? 
 . . . For what is a man profited, if he shall gain 
 the whole world and lose his own soul? What 
 shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" 
 
 Someone has said that a Christian who is not 
 full of joy and thanksgiving at Christ's feet, is 
 not a true Christian. "Rejoice in the Lord alway. 
 And again I say, Rejoice." But know thyself 
 
4 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 first, or thy thanksgiving will be like the tinkling 
 of a cymbal. Do you remember the passage in the 
 Book Joshua, where Achan was found out in his 
 sin, and found himself out? and as he stood there, 
 taken, Joshua said to him, "My son, give, I pray 
 thee, glory to the Lord God?" If our Harvest 
 Home this year puts us where Achan was, and we 
 know it as Achan did, then indeed may we rejoice 
 with exceeding great joy. 
 
 We residents of this metropolis, be our homes 
 hard or luxurious, are within easy reach of the best 
 and the worst in human life. Even here some peo- 
 ple make for themselves a narrow room, sordid and 
 selfish, with short views; though it need not be so, 
 for the men and women of this community, do 
 what they will to shorten their views, have wide 
 relations: many have personal experience of large 
 affairs, and the education to appraise them at their 
 value; and none of us can even walk the streets 
 without being confronted with a cosmopolitan 
 population. And just because the place is so 
 large, the scene so varied, the population so diver- 
 sified, within due limits of decency and convention 
 the resident here is allowed to be himself, and to 
 go his way, unnoticed in the crowd, though the 
 whole wide range of the crowd's tastes and thinking 
 is opened out before him. Intellectually and spir- 
 itually, no thoroughbred American in New York 
 has either right or reason to be cramped at all. 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 5 
 
 His field is the world. Just because we have this 
 privilege of intellectual and spiritual independence, 
 here, if anywhere, — above all in this great Cathe- 
 dral — is the spot to rise above the characteristic 
 weakness of so many comfortable, comfort-loving 
 Americans, to shirk the heights and depths of 
 conduct and hard thinking, — to take as easily as 
 possible their opportunities of life. 
 
 For life's helm rocks to the windward and lee, 
 And time is as wind, and as waves are we, 
 And song is as foam that the sea-winds free, 
 Though the thought at its heart is as deep as the sea. 
 
 A year ago this time hundreds of thousands of 
 Americans were congratulating themselves that 
 our President had "kept us out of the war." Now 
 he has led us into it. Thank God for that! it is 
 one great blessing of our Harvest Home. For this 
 is a social world; if one member suffers, all do: 
 if one nation or another is defending the cause of 
 righteousness and justice against sheer materialism 
 and Unlimited Desire, then every nation is in that 
 war, and must take sides; and woe to those who 
 imagine that by abstinence from downright con- 
 flict they are not taking one side or the other. 
 Thank God we took our side ! 
 
 "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
 In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side, 
 
 And that choice goes by forever twixt that darkness and that 
 light!" 
 
6 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 Someone has remarked that the men who are now 
 under thirty-five did their preparatory thinking 
 for life "in an age saturated by sentiment;" and 
 you and I can now see that this sentiment was 
 operating in one or the other of two directions: 
 the joie de vivre, childlike delight in being aHve and 
 letting it go at that: the Gospel of Amusement, 
 Bread and Sport; or again, a mawkish compassion 
 for those whose lot is hard. But ours is a sterner 
 time. Instead of being merely sick with pity for 
 pain, we now see that pain is nature's warning of 
 danger, and that we must be ready to live danger- 
 ously. Whoso shirks the danger, even in thought, 
 and still more in action, is making himself like unto 
 the beasts that perish. "Man will not abide in 
 honour, seeing he may be compared unto the 
 beasts that perish; this is the way of them. This 
 is their foolishness. O consider this, ye that forget 
 God." In the Providential development of life on 
 earth, it appears that foreknowledge of suffering 
 and death, the ability to take them to oneself and 
 weigh them beforehand, is one of the distinctions 
 between man and the mere animal. The animals 
 exhibit little or no forethought of either pain or 
 death, and but a transient recollection of them 
 when seen in others. The animals are like the 
 larks we read of now on the battlefields, singing as 
 buoyantly as ever throughout the booming of 
 cannons and the hurtling of shells — the bullet has 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 7 
 
 not hit the lark yet, so what does it care? But 
 man, if he stops to recollect, by his experience of 
 pain to himself, and of pain and death to others, is 
 rendered a different being from the animals; so 
 much so, that the vast majority of recollected men 
 (bear me witness, brothers) would be immensely 
 relieved to know that they and their dear ones 
 would not have to suffer, and would not have to die. 
 This awful war, at first sight composed so largely 
 of brutishness and sheer mechanics, has raised, as 
 never before so widely, this distinctly spiritual 
 issue. All mankind are brooding over it. They 
 are impatient of the former generation's Gospel of 
 Amusement. When somebody proposed that our 
 leading Baseball Teams should be war-exempt, it 
 was a good sign that there was a general exclama- 
 tion of disapproval and disgust. Nay more, this 
 sense of the seriousness of life and duty has been 
 roused in thousands of our young men and women 
 who a short time ago were most bent on mere 
 amusement. There is a new determination, a 
 seriousness in their ardent eyes, a willingness to 
 be found at prayer. 
 
 Life is real, life is earnest, 
 And the grave is not its goal. 
 
 Death certainly is a great adventure, but no whit 
 greater than was our entry one by one into this life 
 from our mother's womb: hardly greater than 
 
8 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 the adventure whereby we pass from childhood 
 into manhood, or from singleness to matrimony 
 with its awful risks and happiness, or again from 
 vigorous manhood to the stiller time of old age 
 and decrepitude before the leap of death. It is 
 all for each of us one great adventure, with danger 
 ever present; and at each stage of it, we meet the 
 same insistent challenge, Christ's challenge, "What 
 shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" 
 
 To the astonishment of many of us, that chal- 
 lenge has come where we least expected it — at 
 what appeared to be the most brutal and mechan- 
 ical point in the world — the modern battlefield; 
 and by thousands of Christian men it has been 
 accepted there. This outcome of the struggle is 
 thrillingly depicted by Raemaeker in his picture of 
 King Albert of Belgium confronting the German 
 Kaiser. With a sweep of his arm the Kaiser points 
 to devastated Belgium, and exclaims, "See, Sir, 
 you have lost your all." But King Albert an- 
 swers, "No, Sir, we have not lost our soul." Thus 
 materialism vanishes, and the whole of what is 
 seen is recognised as an expression of the unseen. 
 It is a triumph of the intrepid spirit. The same 
 comes out when the medium is not artistic, but the 
 ordinary expression of plain men. There has come 
 to these battling men a new impression of detach- 
 ment from mere material things, of spiritual free- 
 dom, of being in the world but not quite of the 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 9 
 
 world. Plain soldiers, as their letters show, cooped 
 up in the trenches, have been learning what it is to 
 feel unhampered by peril or held by the risk of 
 death. There and then, of all moments in the 
 world, it is borne in on these fighting men that all 
 the revolting part of their business, which largely 
 began in disregard of the value of the soul, is now 
 proving more than ever the importance of the soul 
 as an individual unit dealing with others of like 
 kind. The whole issue turns on what the single 
 souls care for and believe, and their body is as 
 nothing in exchange for their soul — for presence 
 of mind. Dear ones at home, distractive circum- 
 stances, unwonted scenes, fatigue, wounds, hor- 
 rible sights of anguish, — nothing robs these men, 
 or their surgeons and nurses, of their power of 
 mental concentration, or renders them inatten- 
 tive to the duty of the moment— their spiritual 
 task. Neither do they count their life dear unto 
 themselves. What matters is, what the man is 
 from moment to moment. So the mind is done 
 with fluster, and the spirit with fretting. A man 
 takes his life in his hands: he deals with it simply 
 and directly. The doors of the senses are guarded 
 -strictly for the task in hand. The man does not 
 even notice when he is wounded; he gets used to 
 being at the point of death, till it becomes to him 
 none other than a point of life; for his one idea is, 
 to "do the next thing" — that proper thing. Mean- 
 
10 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 while there is floating in his mind a consciousness 
 of the largeness of life, of the momentous and 
 dignified connections between the small individual 
 and the great beyond — the great Cause — so that 
 no individual effort is unimportant. Not by me, 
 not on my account, shall the Great Cause suffer. 
 
 Act, act in the living present, 
 Heart within, and God o'erhead ! 
 
 For at least a generation following this war that 
 will be one influence which thousands of the sur- 
 vivors shall bring back to their respective homes 
 and nations. It is one part of the challenge of 
 Jesus Christ accepted, and imparting to those who 
 accept it a new quality of the inner life, a new 
 ethical energy. Politics, business, literature, the 
 Churches — all shall show the effects of it. So 
 God the Heavenly Father brings good out of evil, 
 and turns the fierceness of men to His praise. 
 Thank God for that at our Harvest Home. 
 
 But the challenge of Jesus is not confined to 
 those who receive it on the battlefield. It is coming 
 also to us behind the lines. If some soldiers, in 
 their carnage, learn thus to live the life of inde- 
 pendent personal souls, why not we? 
 
 This is Advent Season, when we make ready to 
 celebrate the coming of Jesus, — the most spiritual 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 11 
 
 Person that ever wore the form of man. And 
 what those mortal men that I just spoke of — those 
 battling brothers of ours fighting for our cause — 
 have had as their experience of the real essential 
 force of human life even in abnormal conditions — 
 Christ at His Coming exhibited the same; and for 
 thirty-two years before the final year His exhibi- 
 tion of it was in what we call the quiet ways of 
 the normal life of man. For thirty years He lived 
 what we call the "Quiet Life," mostly at Nazareth 
 as a Carpenter; followed by two years of a more 
 conspicuous ministry, more evidently arduous and 
 fuller of opposition, until the painful end. Prob- 
 ably the proportions of the normal and abnormal 
 life were about the same for Christ as for the rest 
 of us before we go hence and are no more seen; 
 for He tasted what it is for a man to live and die, 
 and He was in all points tempted like as we are. 
 In His life, as in ours, there was the normal and 
 the abnormal, the exciting and the commonplace; 
 and in both Christ acquitted Himself in pre- 
 cisely the same manner: as a truly spiritual 
 Person, possessed of God and conscious of that 
 fact. Evil spirits, "principahties and powers, 
 mustering their unseen array," waited on Him 
 as they do on us; but Christ was always on His 
 guard: He exchanged nothing for His soul. 
 We must follow His example. Many people 
 are being prompted by this war to throw all 
 
12 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 their spiritual helps, — what they call ''their 
 ideal agencies" — education, international law, fra- 
 ternized commerce, even Christianity itself — to 
 throw all these into the scrap heap. Christ would 
 not have us use this crisis so. He would have us 
 use it to magnify the human soul for time and for 
 eternity. He would have us exchange nothing for 
 our souls. And His challenge to us, in our com- 
 paratively normal life even in war-time, is pre- 
 cisely what He makes to our soldiers in the trenches. 
 The first thing which they find there is the inde- 
 pendence of soul that makes the difference between 
 brute and man; and here in our more normal cir- 
 cumstances, we can find the same. But when we 
 find that, the next question is. Are we then inde- 
 pendent with Christ, or independent of Him? 
 For either we can be; and the challenge of Christ 
 goes even that far. 
 
 You and I, with our independent spirits, have 
 got to pass our private judgment on the objective, 
 historic fact of this war, not by itself, but coupled 
 with another historic fact; and the fruit we 
 gather from both together will be our Harvest 
 Home. There is nothing that has happened in 
 this war; nothing that ever led men to doubt 
 the Fatherhood and strong Love of God, that 
 did not befall Christ in His own time and Person. 
 Round the Figure of Jesus of Nazareth, there 
 closed in for exhibition what was as bad as the 
 
WHAT SPIRIT ARE YE OF? 13 
 
 worst that we see now. Everything that has 
 ever moved men to doubt God's love and power; 
 every pain of body and anguish of mind; every 
 experience of sardonic and bestial malignity, so 
 far as the essence of it goes; every taste of the cup 
 of fickleness and ingratitude and selfishness, and 
 of the shortsighted looseness of mind, that has 
 turned some philanthropists into cynics and made 
 some men go mad, — all this, even this, befell our 
 Lord. Yet He maintained His conviction and 
 asserted His personal knowledge that man is a 
 spirit in touch with the Father of spirits; that God 
 is Love, and in Him is no darkness at all; and that 
 He is a re warder of them that diligently seek Him. 
 Christ disappeared for three short days in what we 
 call death, and reappeared with the same serene 
 joy of perfect Sonship : before and after death the 
 same smile of the soul was in His eyes and on His 
 lips. ''Peace I leave with you. My Peace I give 
 unto you." Brothers, will we garner that for our 
 Harvest Home? Few thoughtful persons of good- 
 will can look out on this world today and not 
 perceive that it is no mere panorama of material 
 mechanics — of stocks and stones and gesticulating 
 bodies: that there is a spiritual issue in which we 
 partake. But Christ's challenge goes deeper and 
 higher. He would lift our spirits to confidence in 
 God the Father; and in that sense Christ would be 
 Captain of our souls. 
 
14 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 Any person who awaits the outcome of this war, 
 or of some interior crisis of his own soul, before he 
 will settle in his mind and will whether Christianity 
 is valid or not, is like the old doubter in Galilee, 
 who demanded of Jesus another miracle before 
 he would believe on Him. And to the modern 
 men, even as to the Galilean, the patient Jesus is 
 offering the same scrutinizing testimony, saying, 
 "Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the 
 Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying. Father, 
 Father." 
 
 " Speak to Him, then, for He hears, and Spirit with spirit can meet. 
 Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands or feet." 
 
 "Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be 
 taken, and the other left. Two women shall be 
 grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and 
 the other left. Behold, I have told you before. 
 Watch therefore." 
 
 "Turn Thou us, good Lord, and so shall we 
 be turned!" 
 
II 
 
 WHAT SPOILS THE HUMAN SPIRIT: PRIDE 
 
 KULTUR AS AN ObJECT-LESSON 
 
 And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord an- 
 swered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor 
 by prophets. 
 
 — / Sam. xxviii:6. 
 
 Unless it be Judas Iscariot, there is hardly in 
 the whole Bible a gloomier tragedy than this of 
 Saul — that unhappy king, so splendid and attractive 
 in his prosperity, so ruined at the last. * How the 
 young men and maidens admired him as he stood 
 a head taller than the applauding multitude, 
 modest, manly, magnanimous, on the morning 
 when Samuel anointed him ! What meanest beggar 
 would have changed places with him, when in 
 disguise he skulked at midnight round the hill to 
 the witch's cave? And when from that woman 
 with a familiar spirit he got Samuel's message, as 
 
 * This opening passage of my sermon is a reminiscence of one 
 of Canon Farrar's. Twenty-one years ago I acknowledged my 
 indebtedness to him in a sermon I preached at St. John's Church, 
 Washington; but I do not know which book of his I referred to, 
 so I cannot now make my reference definite. 
 
 15 
 
16 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 from the lips of a ghost— from Samuel who had 
 been the friend of his youth and might have blessed 
 his reign — there was a crash on the rocky floor, as 
 Saul swooned and fell straightway his full length 
 upon the earth. How did the sun, which had 
 risen gloriously, go down while it was yet day! 
 Next morning he lost the battle, and was sorely 
 wounded by the archers, as the tide of Israel's 
 carnage rolled towards him from Gilboa's heights. 
 His people were defeated: his brave sons slain. 
 What was life to him any longer? Since his faith- 
 ful armour-bearer would not ease him of his life, he 
 fell on his own sword. Then the foul Amalakite, 
 plundering the slain, took the crown from the 
 kingly forehead and the bracelet from the arm; 
 and all that remained of the beauty of Israel was a 
 grinning skull among Dagon's trophies, a suit of 
 riven armour in the house of Ashtaroth, and 
 a few bones bleaching in the sunlight on Bethshan's 
 walls. Yet in all that tragedy this is the most 
 tragic: that "when Saul inquired of the Lord, the 
 Lord answered Mm not, neither by dreams, nor by 
 Urim, nor by prophets." Outward troubles may 
 be borne. Threatened by shipwreck, we can breast 
 the storm. Even such an unspeakable calamity 
 as that at Halifax three days ago can be endured 
 by our manhood and our constancy. All our 
 experience, emphasized these past three years, has 
 taught us that earthly hopes are utterly pre- 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 17 
 
 carious, and the most vigorous youth may be 
 snapped short. But faithfulness feeds on suffering, 
 and courage does not die. To be vanquished in 
 battle, to be superseded in power, to see popularity 
 crumble; to watch the rise of another while one's 
 own work wanes ; to experience even that sinking 
 of the heart which is caused by failure after hon- 
 ourable effort — all this Saul had to bear, and all 
 this can be borne. But to be in utter perplexity 
 of soul; to stagger blindly to a spiritual precipice; 
 to have one's prayers flung back to one and know 
 they deserve no answer because God has not been 
 really in one's prayers — that is anguish worse than 
 death. If God be with us, we can grope in the 
 darkness and find His Hand. Saul of Tarsus, the 
 Apostle Paul, when he had nobody likeminded and 
 in prison was condemned to death, could write the 
 exultant letters that enhearten us to this day. 
 But when Saul, the King of Israel, inquired of the 
 Lord, the Lord answered him not. Ah! that is to 
 be desolate. 
 
 What was the cause of it? Pride: spiritual pride. 
 Brethren, we are dwelling, these Advent after- 
 noons, on the essentially spiritual nature of human 
 life, and how this has been brought home to people 
 — ^young and old — in what one would have thought 
 to be a most unlikely way: the way of war, where 
 the brute and the machine appear at first to dom- 
 inate and decide the issue. But in this history of 
 
18 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 Saul, who was himself a man of war, we have 
 exhibited, at the very centre of the spiritual Hfe, 
 what spoiled it— spoiled it in peace-time equally 
 with war-time — Pride. 
 
 Time was when God was really in Saul's thoughts, 
 and therefore kept him humble. Saul recognized 
 himself to be God's representative — set by God and 
 anointed by Samuel to be King over Israel. He 
 often worshipped God, and spoke of Him, and wel- 
 comed His messengers and performed His behests 
 faithfully, and fought God's enemies at all risks. 
 Yet by and by it was all in vain, for Saul let his 
 mind be changed. There were forewarnings. God 
 sent prophets to him, such as Samuel, and sweet 
 singers like the shepherd David, whose psalms 
 were, as we know, the very voice of praise and 
 prayer. But self, not God, was in the citadel of 
 his soul. It was the devil's sin, and it had the 
 devil's punishment. And it is written for our 
 admonition in the inspired chronicle. Read it for 
 yourselves, and ponder. Notice the subtle begin- 
 nings and the insidious degrees of it, and ponder 
 them. Was there ever a better opportunity for 
 us to take the lesson home than this, when a 
 momentous year is drawing towards its close, and 
 the birthday of the Christ-child is near, Whose 
 cradle was the very shrine of humility? Thereafter 
 take this verse of the Psalm we so often say, and 
 put it this time directly to yourselves: "All my 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 19 
 
 fresh springs are in Thee." Possibly that was one 
 of the sweet songs that David sang on his harp 
 before Saul, in the days when there was yet hope 
 for him. There is hope for us now; but are the 
 springs of our being in God, or in ourselves? Is 
 God our centre? Or are we self-centred? Let 
 us not be disappointed of our hope. 
 
 Brethren, we should end this old year and begin 
 the new with resolution — with good resolves, wise 
 plans and earnest hopes. If in God we put unre- 
 servedly our trust, everything — our friends, home, 
 Church, business — will have fresh zest for us; 
 and not least our war-work. We shall be gentler, 
 kindlier, braver, more vigorous, more buoyant; 
 for God can Hft us up forever! Yet even if it be 
 that our spirit is not altogether spoiled; if we are 
 not as yet quite self-centred; nevertheless there is 
 an old Greek motto which still holds good, and 
 which prepared men for Jesus Christ: "Know 
 thyself." It is not the superficial thrill of worldly 
 occupation, the dignity of being busy, the trap- 
 pings of a lively community, the whirl of a great 
 city; it is not even the gravity of a political crisis 
 and the din of war that constitute the vital interest 
 of men's conduct here. The vital interest lies 
 where Christ put it : What shall a man, a Church, 
 a nation, give in exchange for the soul? And when 
 we are tempted to make such exchange, it is self- 
 knowledge that helps to bar the way, convincing 
 
20 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 US that God alone is our shield and our exceeding 
 great reward. At that crisis to be self-deceived is 
 awful; and spiritual pride comes before that fall. 
 Oh, to be simply desirous, at the heart of all, to 
 do God's will ! How rare that is. And because it 
 is so rare, true happiness, true power, are also 
 rare. 
 
 There has been in our time a stupendous exhi- 
 bition of spiritual pride, individual and national. 
 Mankind never saw it bulk so large. And man- 
 kind are passing judgment on it: we must: no 
 other course was left to us : we were pushed to the 
 wall and compelled to express our opinion, and to 
 act accordingly in open war. As the Personality 
 and character of Jesus Christ have grown into the 
 consciousness of modern men, over against that 
 another character — a horribly distorted human 
 nature — has loomed larger and larger. Our former 
 Minister to Holland, Dr. Henry Van Dyke,* 
 who lived very near to this distorted embodiment 
 of human nature possessed by an evil spirit, was 
 speaking the other evening at the annual dinner of 
 Union College alumni. This was his terse, grave 
 summary of what he saw face to face. "The 
 German people are waging this war on three false 
 assumptions: first, that God chose Germany to 
 * Reported in the New York Times, December 14, 191 7. 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 21 
 
 dominate the world; second, that He chose the 
 House of Hohenzollern to dominate the German 
 people; and third, that the way to attain domina- 
 tion is by force." The New Testament fore- 
 saw it and called it Anti-Christ; and at last it has 
 shown itself as evidently that, — to the amazement 
 of mankind. Just now it styles itself by that good 
 old title, Kultur; and it has not hesitated to claim 
 that Christ was mistaken: that probably there is a 
 God, but Christ's presentation of Him was mis- 
 leading. As we look back a little it seems strange 
 to us — now that the mask is dropped from this 
 character — that for more than a generation most 
 of us were fascinated by this so-called Kultur. 
 We thought its ways so good, so useful to the 
 world — the very thing we needed. To use the 
 parlance of the street, when Kultur had a chance it 
 really seemed "to get there": to touch the goal of 
 efficiency — of the exploitation of the earth and of 
 human faculty, which is the ideal of political 
 economy. It really appeared to have the saving 
 spirit, and reminded us of Christ's Sermon on the 
 Mount: "Gather up the fragments, that nothing 
 be lost." We little guessed how much would soon 
 be lost by it, even of material things, not to men- 
 tion souls! for it had made us ashamed of our un- 
 regulated, discursive, individualistic methods — 
 at any rate as we appHed them. But the mask has 
 fallen; nor is this the first time that Satan clothed 
 
22 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 himself as an angel of light, deceiving, if it were 
 possible, the very elect. For 
 
 Oh, the little less, and how much it is ! 
 And the little more, and what worlds away! 
 
 Even if the methods were all good, — which they 
 are not, — we see now that they are poisoned at 
 their spiritual source, so that their superficial 
 efficiency but renders them more deadly. With 
 the domineering spirit in control, rather than the 
 guiding, persuasive spirit of Jesus, the final fruits 
 of Kultur are not conservative but destructive; 
 and lo! physical, intellectual, spiritual destruction 
 are all around us now, along with an open, cynical 
 disregard of high spiritual ideals. If man or 
 nation will not consent to let their soul be dra- 
 gooned and commandeered, "down with it, down 
 with it, even to the ground." Do it, or die. 
 Might is Right, and be it so. This hard spirit, 
 this time-spirit of world-domination is what Christ 
 withstood in His temptation: "Get thee behind 
 Me, Satan." Now, become aggressive, Satan 
 has pushed us Christians to the wall. We had no 
 option but to fight him, as one fights a maniac. 
 It is war to the death, not for world-power, but for 
 freedom to be children of God and disciples of 
 Jesus. It is war to the death; and after death the 
 judgment. Aye, the Judgment Day. You can- 
 not, God does not, judge mere stocks and stones 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 23 
 
 and guns and gesticulating bodies. God judges 
 the spirits of the fighting men; and now, if ever, 
 we are wrestling with evil spirits for the cause of 
 God and Christ. Our mistakes, our sins, are 
 many. They weaken our ability to serve the 
 great Cause. Many of us may well inquire whether, 
 in past days, there has not been in ourselves also 
 something of the temper of Anti-Christ. But 
 poor soldiers of the true Christ though we be, our 
 merciful Heavenly Father has made the issue plain, 
 and shown us what to do. Therefore we com- 
 mend our bodies and our spirits unto Him. "Be- 
 hold I saw all souls, small and great, standing 
 before God; and the books were opened: and 
 another book was opened, which is the book of 
 life." Our Lord Jesus, in His own recorded words, 
 described our situation exactly: "Woe unto the 
 world because of offences! for it must needs be that 
 ofifences come, but woe to the man by whom the 
 ofifence cometh!" This offence cometh from 
 Kultur. 
 
 God's way now is to give us an object-lesson; 
 and He gives it from outside the United States of 
 America because here, thank God, our poHtical 
 life does not favour the conditions that would 
 supply the materials for this particular lesson. 
 Let me illustrate from an instance where our 
 conditions do supply us with an awful object les- 
 son of another kind. I mean our national problem 
 
24 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 of intemperance.* Time was when even in 
 America the upper classes were as intemperate with 
 liquor as the lower classes. Now that is not so. 
 Hence if you go to a Sunday School of the upper 
 classes and describe a drunkard to them, they are 
 apt to laugh; whereas in a school of children from 
 the slums there would hardly be a smile on any 
 face. And the reason is that your children have 
 not seen you drunk: they only think of it as a 
 funny experience that in the streets they some- 
 times see; but the slum children in their tene- 
 ment houses — often in their own homes — know 
 what the curse of intemperance is, and they 
 therefore do not smile. Somewhat so we Amer- 
 icans have had no near and unavoidable object- 
 lesson of what it is to live under a tyrant, or an 
 autocracy which acts as if Might were Right, and 
 whose mind is set on dominating the world. But 
 now God is giving us Americans an object-lesson 
 in this from across the seas, and as it is brought 
 home to us we smile no longer at Kultur. 
 
 Yet there is a danger that arises, not so much 
 outside of us as in the citadel of our own souls, 
 and the nature of it is the same as that whereby 
 Saul fell. It makes me tremble when I hear 
 
 * See Dr. Leighton Parks's sermon on Service, p. 23. His 
 sermon was published after my sermon was preached, but before 
 it went to press; so that I am able to borrow, and gratefully to 
 insert here, Dr. Parks's timely illustration for my own theme. 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 25 
 
 and read the expressions of self-satisfaction and 
 self-confidence, when mention is made of what 
 America is doing and has done. There is too much 
 bumptiousness, as if we Americans "know it all": 
 too much reference to the grand, decisive part that 
 America is going to play in "making the world 
 safe for Democracy." How about making Democ- 
 racy safe for the world? Neither Democracy nor 
 America are going to be decisive in this war unless 
 they have a humble mind, and think soberly of 
 themselves. Under God, America is called to a 
 great part in this world- transaction ; but "know 
 thyself" first, and never dream that thou canst 
 be without God in the world. And don't dwell on 
 what America shall get out of it. Let your mind 
 rather dwell on what God, the great and pure, 
 shall get; though even so we are going into this 
 war to get something for ourselves and for the 
 world. We are going to get freedom. Would 
 that our Pacifists could see that what we are fight- 
 ing for is a vital part of them and of all of us — as 
 much a part of us Americans as our mother and 
 our home: freedom for our spirit, mind and body. 
 But true freedom implies humility.* As Secre- 
 tary Lane said, in his Report published in last 
 evening's newspapers, "Our status in this war 
 gives us a place of moral ascendency, from which, 
 
 * Cp. the phrase of our P. B. Collect: "Whose service is perfect 
 freedom." 
 
26 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 if we he great enough to he humble, we can be real 
 masters of men, conquerors of the invisible king- 
 dom of man's mind." But for that, brothers, we 
 must first acknowledge the mastery of God, and 
 bow, not our knees merely, but our inmost souls 
 to Him. 
 
 I have just mentioned Purity; and I did so 
 vaguely, generally, as one must. But you know 
 what I refer to. Nothing so bars the soul to God 
 as impurity; for did not Christ say, in one of His 
 Beatitudes, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for 
 they shall see God"? 
 
 Have you read the measured, grave, veiled words 
 in which Bishop Lawrence, of Massachusetts, 
 referred last week to the canker of vice that is 
 threatening to eat up the physical vitality and the 
 spiritual worth of our young soldiers, even here in 
 the camps near home, and still more yonder at 
 the European front? Perhaps you and I cannot 
 do much about that directly. That rests in other 
 hands. But O fathers, mothers, sisters, friends — 
 we who stay behind — how about our own home-life 
 and our social life? How about the thoughtless 
 innuendoes of our gossip, the reckless stories, the 
 questionable dress, the double lives we know of? 
 And how our young folks are allowed by their 
 parents to touch the verge of impropriety! Can 
 
KULTUR AS AN OBJECT-LESSON 27 
 
 our home-life and our society pass unscathed when 
 Christ utters His indictment: "Whoso looketh on a 
 woman to lust after her hath committed adultery 
 with her already in his heart?" Beware of "the 
 foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines." And 
 O brave young men, who are risking, sacrificing 
 your lives for us, for God's sake don't sacrifice your 
 purity! Go into the war to get and keep your 
 purity. For some of you that may be the hardest 
 fight of all. 
 
 I will not go on. When one speaks of the cit- 
 adel of the soul, no other human being can pre- 
 sume to enter, or expose what he suspects. 
 In that inmost court it is enough for each of us to 
 try to take heed unto himself; but there are other 
 courts where we gather together, and where we 
 share a common responsibihty. Let us endeavour, 
 this Advent, "in all our ways to remember God, 
 and He shall direct our paths." Let us resist in 
 ourselves the beginnings of evil, and not be self- 
 deceived and blasted by spiritual pride. For in 
 that case, even if we inquire of the Lord, He will 
 not answer. When we assemble this coming 
 Christmas at the Christchild's cradle, and like 
 the Wise Men kneel down there, pray God for our 
 nation, for our youth, for each of us, that in this 
 day when, as never before, we have the oppor- 
 tunity of spiritual power, it may not be spoiled, 
 but may be clothed and crowned with humility. 
 
Ill 
 
 LAYING HOLD ON ETERNAL LIFE 
 
 O man of God . . . lay hold on eternal life. 
 
 — I Timothy vi:ii, 12. 
 
 On previous Sunday afternoons we dwelt on the 
 noticeable fact that to many serious men, and to 
 some who were not serious before, the essentially 
 spiritual nature of our present Hfe has been em- 
 phasised in the last three years. Whatever men 
 may be searching for, the great, just God is search- 
 ing and discerning the spirits of mankind; and 
 very many have recognised that we are being 
 searched by Him. That is one sign of our times. 
 It is more and more perceived that in this awful 
 time the community that will be defeated, if there 
 be defeat, will be the town of Bunyan's allegory — 
 the town of Mansoul. 
 
 "One watchword through our armies, 
 One answer from our lands — 
 No dealings with Diabolus 
 So long as Mansoul stands." * 
 
 So much for the Hfe that now is. But how about 
 the next life? What do we know of that? This 
 
 * The Holy War. Poem by Rudyard Kipling, in Christmas 
 number of Land and Water. 
 
 28 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 29 
 
 question also is being asked, and it is in natural 
 sequence to the other. If we can no longer sepa- 
 rate the everlasting life of spirits from the brief, 
 elusive, brittle fragment of it that is spent in the 
 form of flesh: if "temporal" and "eternal" are no 
 such antithesis as we used to make of them: if 
 it is as spirits that we live here, and as spirits that 
 we pass beyond: if in these gruesome days the 
 consciousness of eternity is really entering a Httle 
 into our daily habits of thought and feeling, while 
 sanguinary death is taking so many that we care 
 for into that near, next world : if the vast majority 
 of our human race of spirits are already yonder, 
 and just now our youth are to be gathered thither 
 in milKons, while it is mostly we older ones that 
 linger here a Httle longer — then it hardly seems 
 rational to suppose that, if there be a God, and if 
 He, as Christ declared and died to show us, is the 
 Heavenly Father Who careth for His own, there and 
 here — it hardly seems rational that He would leave 
 us in ignorance of the links of daily practice that 
 unite our Hfe to theirs. What, then, do we know 
 of the Hfe we have to Hve here that ties and iden- 
 tifies it with the life they have to Hve there? That 
 is the question which thousands are asking, some 
 here and in this Cathedral; some on the battle- 
 fields. Are we not told that the Tommies never 
 say that their comrade has died? He has "passed 
 on." They will not admit that there is a break 
 
30 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 in the life- tie that binds them. One long, un- 
 broken line of them is simply "passing on." 
 
 In his letter to Timothy, which suppKed my 
 text, Paul was evidently brooding over the same 
 question; and he has much to say about it. An 
 old man, under suspicion from the powers that be, 
 he knows that he has but a precarious hold on the 
 present Hfe. So to his favourite disciple he speaks 
 of the next world, to which he feels so near. His 
 language is solemn, but no more so than when he 
 spoke of usual matters; and what he says is with- 
 out a trace of that fear of the unknown which, in 
 any connection, troubles most men. Not only is 
 there no fear in Paul's language, but there is the 
 ring of confidence and joy. Paul's mind is neither 
 cowed nor clouded by the mystery of the next 
 world, by his ignorance of its conditions. On the 
 contrary he is sure that he knows a great deal 
 about it; so much so, that he even urges Timothy, 
 who has the zest of the present strong in him — as 
 it ought to be — Paul urges this young man to lay 
 hold now on that eternal life, as if what is after 
 death were even now within Timothy's reach and 
 ken. What does Paul mean? 
 
 I can hardly lead up better to the answer than 
 by an illustration lately afforded to those who 
 stop and think. Four years ago, in the Master's 
 Court of the Charterhouse, London, the Eliza- 
 bethan Stage Society produced a play of great 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 31 
 
 interest. The same play was produced in New 
 York three years ago, just before the war came, 
 and under our very eyes transferred the drama 
 from the stage to the battlefield. At that point 
 the actors became soldiers ; but for those who have 
 spiritual eyes the substance of the action was hardly 
 different at all. 
 
 In those Elizabethan days the people were fond 
 of allegory. They Hked to have the influences 
 that press on human life so personified on the stage 
 as to search the spectator's soul and purge him for 
 a while. So the playwrights called their acted 
 allegories "Moralities." The MoraHty chosen for 
 the antiquarian revival that I refer to was en- 
 titled "Everyman"; and as he watched the 
 progress of the piece, carefully set forth with the 
 old-time furniture, the modern spectator was 
 transported into the mediaeval mood. 
 
 Two platforms stood in an open court, backed 
 by windows, in the Perpendicular style, of the great 
 hall of the Charterhouse. To the left was a small 
 stage, with simple scenery — a large chair in the 
 middle, two doors at the back, a spinning-wheel 
 on the left, and two candles on the right; and 
 behind the spinning-wheel and candles were cur- 
 tains. At the back of the stage was an upper 
 stage, to represent Heaven. The other platform, 
 on the right of the audience, was a heptagonal 
 structure, painted for stonework, and approached 
 
32 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 by steps. The two sides away from the audience 
 were continued up for the background with imi-, 
 tation windows. Above was a canopy, blue and 
 starred. The floor was open in the middle like a 
 grave. 
 
 The Play, "Everyman," began with a prologue, 
 spoken by a solemn messenger. He then retired, 
 and the action began with the appearance of God, 
 majestic, with a golden crown, on the upper stage. 
 With uplifted hands He spoke of the careless Hfe 
 of men, and called on Death, His "Mighty Mes- 
 senger," to summon Everyman to bring without 
 delay his reckoning and account. Then God 
 withdrew. Death, on the lower stage, would have 
 been grotesque but for the effect of his terrible, 
 unchanging voice, which brought out the beauty of 
 his words. Everyman entered, gaily clad in early 
 fifteenth-century costume, and singing a light 
 song. Death held a dialogue with him, and finally 
 struck him with a dart, refusing all the bribes that 
 Everyman offered him, and leaving the wounded 
 man to himself. In terror at the long journey 
 through the Valley of the Shadow, Everyman seeks 
 a companion among his acquaintances. First he 
 calls on Fellowship, another gay character, profuse 
 in promises beforehand, but quickly drawing back 
 when he hears whither Everyman would lead him. 
 Then in succession other friends are tried, but all 
 excuse themselves. Finally he betakes himself 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 33 
 
 to two friends hitherto neglected, Good Deeds and 
 Knowledge. They stand by him, but insist they 
 cannot help him now unless he will first go to 
 Confession, an old priest; though in referring 
 Everyman to this good priest they are careful to 
 add a sharp censure on evil priests. Everyman 
 goes to the good priest, makes his confession, and, 
 after doing penance, he covers his gay worldly 
 dress with the sober brown garment of Contrition. 
 Then, when he has made his testament giving half 
 his goods in charity, he receives the Sacrament, and, 
 clad in white and bearing a cross, he returns with 
 slow, weak steps to the grave on the other plat- 
 form. All the other characters desert him, and 
 Knowledge and Good Deeds alone are left, while 
 Everyman sinks into the grave with a final cry to 
 God. Hidden angels sing joyfully over the parting 
 soul, and the Doctor appears to point the moral in 
 an epilogue. 
 
 Now here, in the crude mediaeval imagery, we 
 have the same view of the situation to which St. 
 Paul gives a more intellectual touch, but to like 
 spiritual effect. That mediaeval playwright, and 
 the spectators of his "Morality," are as confident 
 as Paul was about the life after death, and they are 
 confident in the same way; for both have accepted 
 the message of Jesus Christ. They do not pre- 
 tend to be able to describe the physical aspect of 
 the world beyond the grave. They do not dis- 
 
34 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 guise the natural tremor of him who passes thither, 
 though in their own demeanor there is more of 
 awe for themselves than of fear for him. They 
 do not blink the fact that it is unnatural for him or 
 them to hurry forward the hour of the transition. 
 Nevertheless they are convinced, as Paul was, that 
 the essential nature of the life after death is so 
 identical with the nature of our life before death 
 that, if we will, we can Hve here on the same plan, 
 so that we and those beyond shall be in the same 
 unbroken line of life everlasting. Knowledge and 
 Good Deeds are not afraid to pass over with Every- 
 man at death. 
 
 One might pause here to notice how this con- 
 viction of both Paul and the mediaeval play- 
 wright agrees with what modern science has 
 taught us — Darwin's law of Development: that 
 nature usually moves, not by fits and starts, but 
 by a steady process, one step leading to another; 
 one condition of things containing within itself 
 the germ of what shall follow. If, then, there be a 
 future life, we must, as Paul says, be able to lay 
 hold of it here. But what I wish to emphasise this 
 afternoon is, that Jesus Christ anticipated this 
 modern science. Christ not only estabhshed the 
 fact of survival after death, — His own and ours — 
 but He disclosed the supplementary fact of the 
 continuity of character: that there is no such 
 absolute unlikeness, as men supposed, between 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 35 
 
 the good life here and the good life there. Though 
 we cannot now imagine the scenery of the Hfe be- 
 yond the grave — eye hath not seen it, no brush 
 can draw the picture: we have no organs here for 
 such perception of it — nevertheless we have other 
 organs that perceive it even now; we can under- 
 stand and practice the manners that prevail beyond 
 the grave: we have seen, we can imitate the sort of 
 conduct here on earth which is the conduct there 
 of those with whom all is well. Christ's human 
 Life is a revelation of eternal Life. That is why He 
 insisted that His disciples should establish His 
 identity after His resurrection. "Handle Me, and 
 see that it is I Myself" — the very same you knew 
 before I died. And, as He constantly insisted, He 
 was not in this appeal emphasising the body for 
 the body's sake, but for the life's sake, for char- 
 acter's sake, which is the spirit of the body. "In 
 Him was Life, and the Life is the Light of men." 
 "This is the record, that God hath given unto us 
 eternal life, and this life is in His Son." "We 
 have seen it," says St. John. "Our hands have 
 handled it, and we bear witness and shew unto 
 you that eternal hfe which was with the Father, 
 and was manifested unto us." In other words, as 
 the mediaeval playwright put it, Everyman has 
 Knowledge of Jesus, and by Good Deeds can make 
 Christ his friend, Who will not desert him when 
 Death calls him to the Hfe that is to be. The blood 
 
36 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 of Christ is the very hfe of Christ, and that saves 
 Everyman. Everyman is saved if he uses his 
 knowledge and chooses the right Hfe rather than 
 the wrong; for the great gulf between right and 
 wrong is both here and there. 
 
 Now one charge against our religion has been, 
 that Christians neglect this present life for the 
 dreamy, dreary hopes of another life to come; 
 and unquestionably the weak hold of our religion 
 on men's minds and wills has been largely due to 
 the artificiaUty of many of our forms for it. St. 
 Paul himself says, "We have this treasure in 
 earthen vessels." But there is nothing artificial 
 when, following his Master Jesus, Paul enjoins: 
 "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things 
 are honest, whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, 
 and of good report: if there be any virtue, and if 
 there be any praise, think on these things. And 
 the peace of God, which passeth understanding, 
 shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ 
 Jesus. Brethren, be followers of me, as I also am 
 of Christ. This is eternal life, to know Jesus 
 Christ. O man of God, lay hold on eternal life," 
 i.e., grasp it now. 
 
 So the Christian Hves and labours in this tem- 
 poral scene, facing his certain grave as he faces the 
 other adventures that belong to the mystery of our 
 being, and are lived through— birth, childhood, 
 manhood, marriage, and whatsoever career we 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 37 
 
 choose: for the element of adventure is in them 
 all. This present world has been made interesting, 
 absorbing, dehghtful as well as sorrowful and diffi- 
 cult, by the Creator's deliberate intention; and 
 there is nothing foreign to God in it, except sin. 
 It was meant to afford a fair field for our powers, 
 our tastes, our ambitions. *'A11 things," the Bible 
 says, "are given us richly to enjoy." It is a very 
 engrossing affair, and was intended to be so. It 
 is part and parcel of our rehgion to work here 
 "while it is called today, before the night cometh." 
 It is the prudent and natural exercise of our God- 
 given faculties to spend them on the objects which 
 are now before us, since the objects which the next 
 life shall present are not before us now. For the 
 present, if we be practical, we must expend our 
 powers as the Bible commands and commends: 
 in replenishing the earth and subduing it. "In 
 your patience ye shall win your souls," was one of 
 Christ's last words — in building our earthly homes, 
 and securing our finances, and educating our chil- 
 dren, and cultivating our social gifts, and doing our 
 best for the City and the State, and for the inter- 
 States which mankind's progress across sea and 
 land is more and more welding into one vast, 
 puzzling problem for society at large. The whole 
 earth — rivers and ocean and soil and sky— was 
 meant to be made by our genius to contribute to 
 our longevity. Why not? since, properly speaking, 
 
38 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 we need not be lingering at all, but living here sub- 
 stantially as by and by we shall be living beyond 
 these voices. In the entire whole of life, if we be 
 followers of Christ, the very quaHties that serve 
 us best here will serve us hereafter; for by these we 
 shall be acquiring good character, which is like 
 gold: it is good anywhere; it circulates everywhere 
 — here and beyond the grave. The ancient Egyp- 
 tians, when they banqueted, set a corpse among 
 the guests for a memorial of human vanity; but 
 the true Christian is mindful of the inevitable 
 grave, not to render his enjoyments gloomy and 
 taciturn nor to paralyse his energy, but to test 
 what it is worth while to be ambitious about — 
 right character: Knowledge and Good Deeds. 
 On the road to Emmaus Christ, even after His 
 resurrection, looks back and mentions His death 
 without a qualm. It does not trouble Him to 
 recall either the suffering that preceded it or the 
 crisis itself. His life transcends them. 
 
 So for us it is simply a question of what we put 
 faith in for the Everlasting Now. "Now is the 
 day of salvation." If you choose, you can put 
 faith in the type of character that is contrary to 
 Christ; as if injustice and impurity and dishonesty 
 and selfishness were the way of life — the way to 
 succeed. Many do so, making these things the 
 object of their faith; and, as Christ says, "Verily, 
 they have their reward." But for now two 
 
GRASP THE ETERNAL NOW 39 
 
 thousand years Jesus is before mankind as the 
 right Object of faith, if what we want is Everlast- 
 ing Life. "Jesus said unto His disciples, Will ye 
 also go away? Peter saith unto Him, Lord, to 
 whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal 
 Hfe." It is not, as some say: "If you do so and 
 so, you will get there." It is that, if you Uve right, 
 you are there. For persons of good will, death is 
 simply another instance of passing on from plane 
 to plane, from sphere to sphere, of continuous 
 being, with God in Whom we have our being. It 
 rests with you and me, as it did with Peter, to make 
 that act of personal faith; for "he that cometh to 
 God must believe that He is, and that He is a 
 rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." 
 "This is the anchor of the soul which entereth 
 within the vail, whither our Forerunner is for us 
 entered, even Jesus." 
 
 Every phase of actual hfe involves an act of 
 faith. As the baby at the breast begins by an 
 act of faith in his mother, whose hfe he draws in 
 order to Uve at all, so the Christian thrives spirit- 
 ually by faith in Jesus and His Life. But faith 
 brings experience also. The baby gets Hfe at the 
 mother's breast; and he who takes Christ's Hfe 
 Uttle by Httle feels and knows that he is in the Way 
 of Life, which is purity, truth, justice, mercy and 
 charity. As Christ said to the Woman of Samaria: 
 "Whoso drinketh of the water that I shah give him, 
 
40 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 the water that I shall give him shall be in him a 
 well of water springing up into everlasting life." 
 
 So whenever a good deed is done, or a true word 
 spoken, by you or to you, say to yourself inwardly, 
 "Thus it shall be for ever and ever. To me to live 
 is Christ. Lift me up forever!" 
 
 Men and brethren, was there ever a period in 
 human history when death was so evident as now 
 and caused so little surprise? We see the sword 
 suspended over all the world, and hanging by a 
 single hair. Everyman is no longer an actor on a 
 stage for us, since all of us are he. Does it not 
 behoove us, then, to do in actual hfe what he did 
 on the stage? All the world's the stage, and all 
 men and women are the players. But let us not 
 magnify the Hearse, for that is but a signal of the 
 Eternal Now. Lay hold on this, O man of God, 
 with confidence and joy. 
 
IV 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION OF HUMILITY 
 
 And they found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying 
 in a manger . . . She laid Him in a manger, because 
 there was no room for them in the inn. 
 
 — S. Luke n:i6, 7. 
 He humbled Himself. 
 
 — Philippians ii:5. 
 
 Not very long ago the Governor of Arizona, 
 just to see what it feels like to be in jail, volun- 
 tarily spent a day in cell number 24 of the State's 
 Prison, to which he is often obliged to condemn his 
 fellowmen. Not a single newspaper spoke of it as 
 a humiliating act. No one here present would so 
 regard it. But at the outset even of our Christian 
 era that act of the Governor of Arizona would have 
 been considered humiliating. What has wrought 
 this change in human opinion? The birth, the 
 life, the death of Jesus, realised in human history. 
 And the way men's change of mind about it began 
 is recorded by St. Paul. He summed up his im- 
 pression of Christ's whole transaction in a single 
 phrase, where sorrow turns to joy — a phrase so 
 terse that it lingers even in our forgetful memories. 
 
 ''He humbled Himself." Once it has been 
 applied to the Son of God, that phrase acquires a 
 
 41 
 
42 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 new meaning and a different tone; and because 
 we do apply it so, the world's idea of humility is 
 slowly changing wherever Christ is known. 
 
 To gauge this moral and intellectual change in us, 
 notice that the idea of humble service by one per- 
 son of another has so penetrated our social system 
 that if any person now undertakes to rule us by 
 Divine Right without first proving that he can and 
 will serve us, we instinctively resist his claims; 
 and when Democracy claims Divine Right, we 
 Christian democrats submit it to the same test. 
 "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the 
 law of Christ; for the Son of Man came not to be 
 ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His 
 life a ransom for many" — this is no longer a maxim 
 of the New Testament alone : it is a principle of our 
 best civilization. We deem it savagery to be 
 otherwise minded. But put your mind back eight- 
 een hundred years, and hear the scoff of Celsus, 
 the leading earnest sceptic of the first Christian 
 era. Celsus was a good man, a reHgious man 
 acording to his lights; yet this is his impression of 
 Jesus: "So this is your God, and he who came to 
 save the world is the son of a carpenter!" To a 
 pagan in the time of the Cassars, it was incredible 
 that the world's master, no matter how good, 
 should enter it in any such guise. Whereas if you 
 walk the streets of New York to-day, and gather 
 about you the people whether rich or poor, it is no 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 43 
 
 stumbling-block to their faith that Christ took the 
 form of a servant, nor even that He died upon a 
 Cross. The high, ethical force — not alone the 
 beauty but the force— of human Love, stopping at 
 nothing that will help the object of affection, is so 
 plain that when God comes down for like purpose 
 it does not, in our eyes, degrade Him. Not that 
 we do not require, as the Pagans did, that our God 
 shall show Himself to be powerful. Nay, we still 
 must have Him so — the Almighty, Who is a most 
 strong Tower. Rather it is that we have deepened 
 our conception of what the highest power is. 
 Brute force is to us no longer a sacred manifesta- 
 tion: it is little better than mechanical — but one 
 step higher than machinery and engines, on the 
 way from matter to true man ; whereas the ability 
 to be self-controlled and self-devoted, to curb 
 unHmited desire and arbitrate antagonisms, is to us 
 a sign that a low form of force is being refined, trans- 
 formed by the higher intellect and the nobler spirit 
 and thereby made stronger than before. 
 
 Notice that it had been by some supposed that if 
 you develop the intellect, man will thereby of 
 himself alone outgrow all that is brutal. But the 
 devil was on his guard. He was ready to tempt 
 even intellectuals to be brutish still. Now, how- 
 ever, that the intellectual aggressor has had, by a 
 world-war, this colossal demonstration that brute 
 force is in the long run futile for the government of 
 
44 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 intellectual men, since educated men resent such 
 force; so soon as the physically weaker are or- 
 ganized to protect themselves against reckless 
 antagonism, — so soon as brutish intellectuals are 
 at a deadlock with intellectuals that are not brutish, 
 and the force of spirit has a chance to hold the 
 sceptre over all — perhaps God's time is at hand for 
 the overbearing men to regain their mental bal- 
 ance, and see that Christ was right : that the most 
 compelling force of all — not destructive of either 
 compeller or compelled— is intelligent Love, that 
 "stoops to conquer." As our beautiful iioth 
 Psalm, of this morning's service expressed it, "He 
 shall drink of the brook in the way : therefore shall 
 he lift up his head." 
 
 But there are other appKcations of Christ's 
 humility in coming to us, which we still find hard 
 to accept, though these also are in process of ac- 
 ceptance. 
 
 One of these is in the field where the human mind 
 has reached the conception of natural law. Of 
 course law implies a lawgiver, and the lawgiver, if 
 present, need not be necessarily inflexible. But 
 the barbarian mind originally did not know that 
 there are laws of nature, and so they were not 
 thought of as hindrances in God's way. How- 
 ever when physical science had disclosed the idea 
 of natural law and made it vivid, then to many 
 who were religiously disposed natural law seemed 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 45 
 
 to be a hindrance to the effective presence here of 
 the great Strong God, to Whom men used to pray, 
 on Whom they used to lean. God seemed to be 
 locked out of His Kingdom in this world, however 
 it be in the world to come. As this afternoon's 
 Lesson from Isaiah put it, "Oh that Thou wouldest 
 rend the heavens : that Thou wouldest come down ; 
 that the mountains might flow down at Thy 
 Presence!" — that was the disposition of many 
 educated minds that were religiously disposed. 
 The ancients had thought it natural for God to 
 swagger around the universe; and though educated 
 moderns did not expect God to swagger and be 
 blatant, that He should endure the burden of a 
 physical Cross was to them unintelligible. Though 
 they could see the beauty and the moral force of 
 endurance on man's part, and even on God's 
 part in the moral sphere, they could not bear that 
 God should not evidently display His power over 
 the physical mechanism of this world: they could 
 not think of Him as serving us even according to 
 His own laws. God must be hke the average 
 of human beings, who, even if they are educated, 
 when they have effective power want it to be con- 
 spicuous. So, if there be a God Who is effective 
 here, He must "rend the heavens and come down." 
 This difficulty of scientific minds was slowly 
 disappearing even before this world-wide war 
 broke out. For after all, it was largely a difficulty 
 
46 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 of the scientific imagination. Men could not imag- 
 ine how an Almighty God could hide Himself in 
 His own laws, and still be our Saviour. But more 
 and more the scientist found many other mys- 
 terious matters, which he has proved to be facts 
 though he cannot imagine how : and meanwhile the 
 spiritual side of the scientist's imagination waxed 
 stronger than it had been; for natural science 
 became less materialistic in its own premises. To 
 such men as Kelvin and Wallace and Barrett and 
 Pasteur and Oliver Lodge, and to philosophers like 
 Bergson and others, their own scientific terms and 
 postulates are involved with soul-power. Even 
 practical skill is recognised to be inwrought with 
 such power, without which no machine will oper- 
 ate; and even machines when used are found 
 not to have restricted, but to have enlarged the 
 scope and reach of the spirit that is in man. By 
 practical skill a man takes over the machine that 
 science gives him, and makes it an extension of his 
 own body, so that the machine, like and with his 
 body, works to spiritual ends ; and these ends must 
 still be judged by those same old awful, spiritual 
 tests — the bad and the good. Man's fingers 
 manipulate the machine, but there is soul-power in 
 his fingers that quaHfies both the fingers and the 
 machine. George Herbert's poem, 
 
 "Who sweeps a room as for God's laws 
 Makes that a^d the action fine," 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 47 
 
 can be translated into the whole colossal field of 
 modern physics and mechanics. A doctor in his 
 laboratory and clinic; an architect rebuilding 
 San Francisco with stone and steel after an earth- 
 quake, or Halifax after an explosion, is manifesting 
 an energy of soul that brings life and love and 
 happiness into the realm of what looked like fatality. 
 And as his heart and mind glow with that con- 
 sciousness, he is not far from the satisfaction of 
 knowing that "the spirit of man is the candle of 
 the Lord," Who worketh in us whether to will or 
 to do. 
 
 Many highly educated men had got that far 
 when the war came. Just before the war a speaker 
 in London said: "Ever since I was a boy I had the 
 feehng that the spiritual world is so real, so near 
 me, that I could almost put my fist into it." But 
 since this war began, he and thousands of noble 
 men, plain men, are sure that they are putting 
 their fists into a spiritual world — wrestling, as St. 
 Paul says, not with flesh and blood, but with evil 
 spirits, while good spirits are on their side. And 
 behind the battle line, in scientific laboratories 
 helping on the Cause, the imagination of the hard- 
 working scientist has not found itself cramped 
 by the idea of natural law. For now he sees that 
 the good or evil of his scientific instruments is not 
 determined by them as mere machines; and that 
 they work both ways, good and bad. In some 
 
48 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 men's hands, because of their mentality, these 
 machines are devoted to brutal destruction; 
 while in other hands the same implements are safe- 
 guarding the most precious, the most spiritual 
 powers of the human race; and the cross of Christ 
 — a Red Cross now — can move in benediction on 
 any field. This experience was expressed for us 
 Americans, not by a professional parson in the 
 usual Church, but by our President from the 
 White House, when in his last address Mr. Wilson 
 focussed all the natural laws and the mechanical 
 apparatus, and in the hearing of mankind gave this 
 profoundly spiritual account of what we and our 
 Allies are engaged in. He said: "This intoler- 
 able thing of which the masters of Germany have 
 shown us the ugly face, this menace of combined 
 intrigue and force which we now see as the German 
 power, a thing without conscience or honour or 
 covenanted peace." On hearing that, which of 
 us had difficulty in imagining that this is a spir- 
 itual world? and that as God in Christ long ago 
 came down into this world, even if there was no 
 room for Him in Bethlehem's inn, so again He is 
 coming now into this frightful scene, where there 
 seems to be small room for Him? 
 
 Thus not alone the plain man, but the man of 
 science tempted on a narrower field to suppose 
 that God's force, if genuine, must be immediate 
 in order to be effective, is having on the wider field 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 49 
 
 of war an immense object-lesson, and that in the 
 very direction whence part of his trouble came. 
 It had been the delegation of Divine Power, the 
 scattering of it, the committal of it to second and 
 third and a thousand hands, until the hall-mark of 
 Divinity seemed to be lost in the human crowd, 
 and in natural laws and physical devices — it was 
 largely this that made it hard for the scientific 
 imagination to see how there can be really a Divine 
 government of this multifarious world. But on 
 the enormous scale of this world-war we are having 
 an impressive illustration of how, in spite of appear- 
 ances, a truly governing influence and stress can 
 be effected even by a central mind and will that 
 are only human; so that our spiritual imagination 
 finds it easier to apply to God's government what 
 we see in man's. By sheer stress of circum- 
 stances the man of science has had to leave his 
 sequestered laboratory, where in quietness he felt 
 his personal power, as if things were in his con- 
 scious grip. He has had to go out and commit 
 himself to others, less scientific and far less inven- 
 tive than he. Yet though science, now more than 
 ever, is confessedly a large part of warfare; and 
 though the field of what must be done scien- 
 tifically in warfare is vast almost beyond concep- 
 tion; and though the central scientist is lost to 
 view in the crowd — hidden away in a complicated 
 chain of secondary causes and secondary persons — 
 
50 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 nevertheless the influence and control of that 
 central scientific man are so effective that in the 
 result he feels himself. Edison, Wright, Mar- 
 coni; the inventors of the submarine and of the 
 stabilizer for the flying machine; the English 
 Colonel Swinton who conceived the tank — who 
 shall say that these men are not effective in this 
 stupendous undertaking and felt throughout the 
 world? Yet they are almost as invisible and un- 
 perceived by the hundreds of thousands who oper- 
 ate for them, as God is invisible in His universe 
 to the creatures of His hand. The man of science 
 knows how men generally look to him to win this 
 war, and he is answering their prayers. What a 
 physical, mental, spiritual presence he has in and 
 among us! how executive after all he is! He is 
 about our path and about our bed, "making the 
 world safe for Democracy." And lo! not one of us 
 thinks that his self-effacement is the least humil- 
 iating: we exalt him highly, and give him a great 
 name. And if the scientists have crosses to bear, 
 as they all have; if they must weep over the inad- 
 equacy and obstinacy of small men, and the ego- 
 tism even of otherwise capable and faithful men; 
 if they must be shocked to see their implements 
 misused by bad men ; is not all this of a piece with 
 the revealed experience of the Divine Being Who 
 has borne our infirmities, and by Whose stripes we 
 are healed? Even the Old Testament prophet 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 51 
 
 said of the Heavenly Father, ''Doubtless Thou art 
 a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel the 
 Saviour"; and when Christ was here He used 
 to speak in lovely words about the birds of the air 
 and the flowers of the field, and such Kke peaceful 
 samples of God's presence and efficiency. Now 
 the illustrations that come to us seem grim 
 and forbidding. Yet the lessons from the field 
 of war were also foreshadowed by the winged, 
 searching words in which, on other occasions 
 than peaceful GaHlee, our Lord expressed Himself 
 to men. 
 
 Furthermore, as human society develops into 
 Christian civiHzation, we are convinced that not 
 only was Christ's humihation the divinest quahty of 
 His manifestation, but that it is in keeping with 
 the most fundamental feature of human society, 
 the Family. The family, of many members, is a 
 perpetual object-lesson for man of what Christ 
 reveals to us of God, Which inhabiteth eternity. 
 In our famines law and love — guidance and due 
 punishment, but not drastic compulsion; the dis- 
 cipline of experience, and the force of persuasive 
 example — these introduce us to the life on earth, 
 and prepare us for the life to come. The best 
 ordered household is the most amenable to laws. 
 The head of the house is not obtrusive in the man- 
 agement; and although you would miss the master 
 and mistress if they were not there, you often for- 
 
52 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 get they are there, since the home seems to run 
 itself. So with our Heavenly Father. 
 
 " Behind the great unknown 
 Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His 
 own." 
 
 Still speak, if you will, of the humiHation of the 
 Incarnation— so tenaciously does the paradox of it 
 cHng to our Christian phraseology — but grasp with 
 mind and heart and will that the manner of our 
 Lord's birth and crucifixion is but the supreme 
 instance of God's method in the universe as one 
 whole; and that the surprise about it, which is 
 expressed even in the Bible, is the creature's sur- 
 prise, not the Creator's. "Thus saith the Lord of 
 Hosts; if it be marvellous in the eyes of the rem- 
 nant of this people in these days, should it be also 
 marvellous in Mine eyes? saith the Lord of Hosts." 
 It is God's custom to order His conduct without the 
 self-assertion, or rather without the self-display, 
 which even in human beings is a sign of imper- 
 fection, not of superabundant power. We must 
 outlive our barbarian mind. We must accept 
 Christ's revelation of what God actually is: the 
 I AM That I AM. 
 
 The fact is, God in Christ is educating us; 
 and here the irony of St. Paul appHes: *'the 
 weakness of God is stronger than men." As with 
 human teachers and their pupils, we cannot gauge 
 
HUMILITY TRANSFIGURED 53 
 
 God's ultimate purposes, though Christ has helped 
 us to know some of them, and much of God's 
 character. But if God is educating us as we edu- 
 cate our children, can we imagine a more efficient 
 way? Perhaps, in this short, perplexing world, 
 it is not so much a question — to employ the phrase 
 a young man used to me — it is not so much a 
 question whether God "gets there," as whether we 
 do. And perhaps we are getting there. 
 
 "Thouart the Way. 
 Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal, 
 
 I cannot say 
 If Thou hadst ever met my soul." 
 
 Brothers, in this especially tr3dng time some of 
 us have allowed ourselves to be despondent, as 
 if the Church and the religion of Jesus were being 
 successfully treated with contempt. But it is an 
 over-eager reading of the ways of Providence to 
 conclude that the better, the ultimate cause must 
 quickly win. So it is well for us to be brought at 
 Christmastide to the cradle of the Christchild. 
 The old master Garofalo pictures it so that even 
 there and then the happy, adoring angels are pre- 
 senting the Holy Child with the nails and scourge, 
 symbols of the prolonged suffering that was to 
 befall Him before the end. We must not quite 
 forget, even in our Christmas joy, that iniquity 
 was apparently triumphant in our Lord's Kfe, and 
 right was crucified. Nay, no sooner did He rise 
 
54 CHRIST'S CHALLENGE TO MAN 
 
 again in glory, manifesting His power over the 
 grave, so that if. looked as if henceforth He would, 
 as we are wont to say, "have His own way" in 
 everything — no sooner did He rise from the dead 
 than He began by restricting that marvellous 
 manifestation to a very small number of persons. 
 As St. Peter said in his address to the kinsmen and 
 friends of Cornelius: "Him God raised up the third 
 day, and shewed Him openly; not to all the peo- 
 ple, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even 
 to us." And thereafter our Lord pursued the same 
 old perplexing method. For did He not commit 
 His cause to the frail and faulty apprehension of 
 Jew and Gentile, leaving it to be worked out by the 
 little faith of such disciples? We are working it 
 out now. 
 
 And, by a strange coincidence, it is in these dark 
 days that the good news has come that the English 
 have taken Jerusalem and Bethlehem for the AlHed 
 Cause; and this without firing a single gun at the 
 holy places. May we not take this as a sign that 
 the long-suffering Spirit of Jesus, humiUated as 
 men think, is bound to Hve and grow among us in 
 God's own way and time? God is in no hurry, for 
 He has eternity to work in; and our times are in 
 His Hand. This time there is room for Him in 
 Bethlehem's inn. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
THE DEAN'S OFFICE 
 
 Cathedral of St. John The Divine, New York 
 
 The Rev. George William Douglas, D.D., 
 5 East 88th Street, New York City. 
 
 December 26, 191 7. 
 
 My dear Dr. Douglas: 
 
 Let me express again my appreciation of the service 
 you have rendered to the Cathedral in preaching here 
 the series of Advent sermons which was concluded 
 last Sunday. 
 
 You have placed us all under a great obligation. 
 You will put us still deeper in debt if you will accede 
 to the wish which many have expressed that the 
 sermons might be published. So many have found 
 them stimulating and helpful that the publication of 
 them would be a public benefit. 
 
 With warm regard, I am, 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 (Signed) Howard C. Robbins. 
 
TUCKAHOE, N. Y., 
 
 Jan. 2, 1918. 
 Dear Doctor Douglas: 
 
 It is my pleasant duty to notify you that at the 
 last meeting of The Clericus it was moved and unani- 
 mously carried that The Clericus should request you 
 to publish your Advent Sermons at the Cathedral 
 of St. John the Divine. The members present desired 
 to sign their names to this request, and some who 
 were not present particularly desired to do the same. 
 I am forwarding their signatures herewith. 
 I wish you God's blessing on a happy new year. 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 (Signed) Frederick A. Wright, 
 Secretary of The Clericus. 
 
 Henry Townsend Scudder Herbert J. Glover 
 
 Arthur L. Bumpus L. W. Batten 
 
 Charles F. Canedy Wm. Sheafe Chase 
 
 Randall C. Hall Henry A. Dows 
 
 Floyd S. Leach Frederick A. Wright 
 
 Melville K. Bailey W. H. Owen, Jr. 
 
 Stanley Browne-Serman Henry V. B. Darlington 
 
 John Mark Ericsson Robert Ellis Jones 
 
 George F. Nelson E. Vicars Stevenson 
 
 G. A. Carstensen W. S. Bishop 
 
 John Williams 
 
FEINTED BY BEAUNWOETH & CO., BROOKLYN. N. Y. 
 
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