/2_ .//. f^i 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 PRESENTED BY rt^ T. cMlAC^ip T? . rTlOn ^O 
 

 ' f vixx«>T<^ -i\suiue^ 
 
 ^^^^^ V r f^9 y- 
 
THE LAW OF LIBERTY 
 
 AND OTHER DISCOURSES. 
 
THE LAW OF LIBERTY 
 
 AND OTHER DISCOURSES. 
 
 DEC 11 1910 
 
 JAMES MORRIS WHITON, Ph.D. 
 
 (jlcto TJorft : 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 and 3 BIBLE HOUSE. 
 
 [890. 
 
THE MANY FRIENDS, 
 
 IN ENGLISH HOMES AND CONGREGATIONS, 
 
 WHOSE ESTEEM I CHERISH, 
 
 WHOSE HOSPITALITY I HAVE RECEIVED, 
 
 WHOSE WORSHIP I HAVE SHARED, 
 
 iljis Series of riscmirecs 
 
 IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE. 
 
 This volume is a memorial of a delightful 
 sojom^n in England dm-ing a part of the 
 summer of 1888, upon the invitation of the 
 Kev. Joseph Halsey, of Anerley, to take his 
 pulpit in his vacation. Among my cherished 
 remembrances of Anerley there is one which 
 seems deserving of public mention — tJae 
 greater advance made there than elsewhere 
 toward the ideal of a truly congregational 
 worship, in a common prayer as well as 
 common praise. Some twenty years ago, in 
 a discussion of this subject in America, the 
 venerable Dr. Woolsey, President of Yale 
 College, advocated a combination of free 
 prayer with fixed forms of prayer, as uniting 
 the advantages claimed by the advocates of 
 each. It was a pleasing surprise to me to 
 find this so well realised at Anerley ; for 
 
Vlll AUTHOR S NOTE. 
 
 instance, in the earlier part of the service, 
 the audible participation of the people in the 
 General Confession and the General Thanks- 
 giving, while, further on, the free prayer 
 retained its traditional place. I cannot but 
 think this a real improvement deserving of 
 general adoption. 
 
 In my inability to revise the print of the 
 latter part of the volume before leaving 
 England, I am indebted for that service to a 
 kind and skilful friend, v^ho prefers to be 
 unnamed. 
 
 J. M. W. 
 
 Aneelet, London, S.E., 
 September 3, 1888. 
 
DISCOURSES. 
 
 I. The Law of Liberty 
 
 II. 
 III. 
 IV. 
 
 V. 
 VI. 
 
 THE 
 
 Solomon : An Old Story with a New Face 
 Helping God .... 
 Spiritual Barbarism 
 The Mystery of Evil . 
 The Assurance of Immortality 
 VII. The Transfiguration : A Glimpse of 
 Unseen World . 
 VIII. Is Deception ever a Duty ? . 
 IX. The Trinity .... 
 X. Balaam : The Moral Cross-Eye 
 XI. The Advent of the Christ . 
 XII. The World's Balance-Wheel 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 23 
 4.5 
 63 
 81 
 103 
 
 125 
 145 
 169 
 191 
 213 
 235 
 
I. 
 
 THE LAW OF LIBERTY 
 
I. 
 
 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 
 
 " Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this 
 grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches 
 of Christ." — Ephesians iii. S. 
 
 Theee are two points of view from which 
 we may regard whatever we call our duties. 
 The first is that of obhgation and constraint, 
 when we do not feel attracted, but rather 
 compelled. We say : " I ought," " I have got 
 to do it." We take hold, but it seems hard and 
 repelling, only toilsome work. It is well for 
 us if we have enough of conscience to respond 
 to this whip and spur. But there is something 
 better for us, a higher point of view. This is 
 in desire for the duty, as for a welcome oppor- 
 tunity, when an inviting prospect opens. Then 
 interest wakens and grows ; our minds are 
 ■engaged ; we work with a will, spontaneously, 
 
 Preached in Anerlet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Morning, August 5, 1888. 
 
4 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 freely, heartily, happily. Not to work would 
 be a deprivation, a disappointment. Such 
 work is that free and joyous exercise of our 
 faculties which we appropriately characterise 
 as play. 
 
 Now our moral progress does not extend 
 beyond the childish stage, till we have ad- 
 vanced from the first to the second of these 
 different points of view, in our estimate of 
 the various things which present themselves 
 originally as duties. Our moral development 
 is carried no farther than we have learned to 
 look on all duties with the desire of those that 
 long to do them rather than with the con- 
 straint of those that are enjoined to do them. 
 In doing anything that is in itself good, our 
 moral benefit is comparatively small, until the 
 sense of duty, which pushes us up to it, 
 changes into a love for the good thing, which 
 attracts us to it. Doing right from a mere 
 sense of duty is the mark of a lower rank, as 
 God's servants. Doing right from the love of 
 it is the mark of the higher rank, as God's 
 children. 
 
 Jesus tells us, " Whe7i ye have done all 
 things that ye are commanded, say, ' We are 
 unjprofitahle servants ; we have done that which 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 6 
 
 loas our duty to do.' " This sounds dis- 
 couraging enough. Perhaps it was so in- 
 tended — to drive us off from the lower level of 
 unsatisfying task-work to the higher level of 
 filial service, in a fellowship whose inspiration 
 of sympathy and affection is the very light of 
 life. So Jesus seems to intimate, when He 
 says to the disciples, " I have not called you 
 servants, but I have called you friends." 
 
 Now, our moral education begins under the 
 lower set of motives — the various motives of a 
 law that is external to ourselves, a law which 
 comes down upon us from above, a law which 
 says, " Thou shalt," and " Thou shall not," a 
 law that we acknowledge by confessing, " I 
 ought," " I have to." But our moral education 
 is but half wrought, if we are not brought out 
 from these rudimentary lessons of obligatory 
 ordinances into the free play of the higher set 
 of motives, motives from within ourselves, 
 motives of a law that has been transcribed 
 from tables of stone upon the living tablet of the 
 heart, a law whose mandate is one with our own 
 desire. This is what the Apostle James calls 
 " the laiD of liberty.'' Its burden is one of 
 promise and of cheer, in a heavenly vision 
 that ail good things are possible to us. This 
 
6 THE LAW OP LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 law of liberty we honour in only longing for 
 more strength and studying for more means to 
 make that which is possible actual. 
 
 In fewer words, what has been said 
 amounts to this : The problem of moral 
 progress is to develop obligations into desires, 
 to transfigure stern-visaged duties into de- 
 lightful privileges, to raise our view of all 
 the good work within our power from the 
 aspect of laborious toil to that of the spon- 
 taneous and gratifying exercise which has the 
 attractiveness of play. " The entire object of 
 true education," says Ruskin, "is to make 
 people not merely do the right things, but 
 enjoy the right things." 
 
 The result of such an education is before 
 us in the text. Paul tells us how he regarded 
 the occupation of his life. Wretched as he 
 might be deemed by some, he counted himself 
 the happiest of men. In the twenty years that 
 he had spent as Christ's missionary, he had 
 once been stoned till nearly dead, five times 
 publicly scourged, three times shipwrecked, 
 hunted from city to city, living from hand 
 to mouth on precarious work and precarious 
 charity, despised by the majority of his 
 countrymen, hated and persecuted beyond 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 7 
 
 most men of his time. But all this casts no 
 shade over his spirit, no dimness over the 
 glory of the life which he loves. At the 
 moment of his writing he is a prisoner in 
 Eome ; one arm is fettered to the arm of the 
 soldier who is charged with his custody. But 
 with his one free arm he writes to his far-off 
 church at Ephesus this confession of his glad 
 and grateful soul: " Unto me was this grace 
 given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearch- 
 able riches of Christ." Imprisonment, martyr- 
 dom itself, with all the past years of hunger, 
 poverty, footsore travel, obloquy, outrage, all 
 melted, in the Divine light into which he had 
 risen, into transient annoyances that were 
 merely incidental to the doing of a work that 
 he embraced with passionate desire, the op- 
 portunity of which — drawbacks and all — he 
 rejoiced in as a boon from the grace of God. 
 
 Now, it would be very foolish to drop such 
 a case as this with a mere shrug of wonder as 
 too romantic to be of use to us. It is a grand 
 case of a man who proved equal to a great 
 opportunity. The same spirit that made him 
 equal makes men in smaller cases equal to 
 smaller opportunities of the same kind. The 
 same steam that drives the ocean leviathan 
 
8 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 through the vortex of Atlantic cyclones drives 
 the pleasure yacht that plies on summer even- 
 ings up and down the river. It would be very 
 foolish, therefore, to ignore the lesson which 
 Paul's experience gives us by saying, Paul was 
 inspired, he had higher powers, lived on higher 
 levels than we can. Doubtless Paul was in- 
 spired. That wonderful confession of his in 
 our text proves it. No man, after being for 
 twenty years made a door-mat and foot- 
 scraper for the world, could say, " Unto me 
 was this grace given,'" through all this to 
 X^reach the Gospel to heathen, except he were 
 an inspired man. 
 
 But what inspired him ? Just that which 
 may inspire us also to rise to our opportunity, 
 as he rose to his. I say no more than God's 
 sober truth, when I say that we, in our place, 
 may have the same inspiration that Paul had 
 ill his place. Paul's inspiration was the 
 ardour of his personal devotion to Jesus the 
 Son of God. " For me to live is Christ,'" said 
 he. Just as other men are full of one thought 
 — how they shall make a fortune, how they 
 shall carry an election, how they shall discover 
 some secret of Nature or perfect some inven- 
 tion of art, he was full of the one thought, 
 
I,] THE LAW OF LIBEKTY. 9 
 
 liow to be like Christ, how to build the church 
 of Christ, how to fill the world with the grace 
 and truth of Christ. This was the inspiration 
 that transformed his toilsome work into a 
 delightful play of well-disciplined and trium- 
 phant power. 
 
 The difference between Paul and the man 
 of least capacity is in this respect like the 
 difference between a gallon measure and a gill 
 measure. Each can be full of that inspira- 
 tion which flows from a divine motive, and 
 from a noble object which is embraced with a 
 true appreciation and a hearty desire. 
 
 One day in every year, called Pentecost or 
 Whit-Sunday, is commemorated as the day 
 when the Spirit of God rose to full tide in the 
 hearts of the Apostles and their little company 
 in that upper room at Jerusalem. The power 
 of the Holy Ghost that came upon them 
 then was in the flooding of their souls with a 
 mighty desire to fulfil their Master's bidding, 
 to bear witness of Him to the world. In the 
 ardour of that desire, fears vanished and diffi- 
 culties melted. What had been set before 
 them as a duty they embraced with a sacred 
 passion. Constrained, indeed, they were, yet 
 no longer by a mere commandment, but 
 
10 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 because, as they said with Paul, " The love of 
 Christ constraineth us." 
 
 The great fact which this historic experience 
 records — the baptism of the Church of Christ 
 with the Spirit of Christ — is appropriate not 
 merely for an annual commemoration, but for 
 a daily remembrance. Nor is it appropriate 
 merely for apostles, missionaries, and leaders 
 in the church. It is even more urgently 
 necessary for those to think upon, who, in the 
 round of common life, are conscious of no 
 great opportunities — those who in the toil and 
 moil of daily labours are too often unaware 
 how precious an experience is lost to them for 
 lack of that Spirit who glorifies the humblest 
 life which He touches with His sacred tongue 
 of fire. 
 
 For this over-busy, care- driven, work- 
 haunted life which most of us live there is, 
 indeed, no subject of higlier practical im- 
 portance than that with which the historic 
 lesson of the day of Pentecost has made one 
 day a lesson to all days. 
 
 The reflective moments of a thoughtful 
 mind, intent more on substantial than on showy 
 things, are often haunted and sometimes op- 
 pressed by the question, How to redeem our 
 
I. THE LAW OF LIBEETY. 11 
 
 daily life Irom waste ? How to lift our lives 
 above a dwarfing and deadening routine of 
 mere mill-work ? How to dignify the neces- 
 sary commonplace of house and street and 
 shop with that which is not commonplace, 
 with sympathies and interests and influences 
 that are wide as the world, high as heaven, far- 
 reaching as eternity ? How to exchange the 
 life of formalism, that is not worth living, for 
 the precious life of faith, and make our life 
 count all that it can in the Kingdom of God. 
 Let me urge you, my friends, to put these 
 questions to yourselves, for the question is the 
 first step toward a revelation of the way and 
 the power. 
 
 To illustrate our need of putting such ques- 
 tions, there are stated times when we come 
 here to the Lord's Table. Let us at such 
 times ask. Why do I come to the Lord's 
 Table? Suppose that it were omitted from 
 our list of customary observances, should 1 feel 
 anything like hunger for it ? Is it only one of 
 our observances, that must be honoured at the 
 set time, because the time has come, because 
 it is expected of us, because it would be very 
 improper to omit it ? If so, we are simply 
 maintaining a Christian form on the old 
 
12 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 heathen level of an obligatory ritual. That is 
 " work-religion," nothing but incense-burning 
 before a Deity who cares nothing for a fragrant 
 smell. To imagine God to be pleased or our- 
 selves bettered by keeping up a sacrament as a 
 mere obligatory ritual, or to come to it simply 
 as such, is utter superstition, which leaves us 
 living on the low level where it found us. It is 
 hardly any better than keeping a sick man's 
 pulse going and breath going by spoonfuls of 
 beef-tea, instead of keeping vigorous life at full 
 tide by going to the family table with a healthy 
 appetite. Unless we come to the Lord's Table 
 with a craving for what God offers there, we 
 are far from being in spiritual health. Indeed, 
 it is too true, that just as the sick man kept 
 alive on beef-tea has only life enough in him 
 to be miserable, so there are many who have 
 only enough religion in them to be periodically 
 uncomfortable. 
 
 And so, when any of my friends says to me, 
 I do not regard it as obligatory to come to the 
 Lord's Table, I answer. There is higher 
 ground for you to take. Whether or no it be 
 obligatory I do not care to argue. But it is 
 beyond all question desirable. Your great 
 need is to be thoroughly and well alive — " alive 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 13 
 
 to God." There is food there that you need. 
 There are quickening convictions of the love of 
 God, the grace of Christ, the assurance of hfe 
 eternal for us and ours, which are obtained there 
 as nowhere else. What ! are we not content till 
 we have been ordered and commanded to seek 
 such things ? The precious reality is no ritual 
 enjoined by authority, but the dear privilege 
 of a loving heart ; not a ceremony or a pro- 
 priety, but an inspiration ; not a form, but a 
 power, that is found by those who seek it, to 
 make our common life stronger, richer, purer ; 
 — the power of a truer fellowship with 
 Christ, the power of a steadier faith in God, 
 the power of a closer gi-asp of the sacred 
 realities of duty, the sacred possibilities of 
 destiny. 
 
 Let me take one more illustration from the 
 fact that we acknowledge it to be the com- 
 mandment of Christ to make offerings for the 
 spread of Christianity in the moral and 
 religious deserts which still deform our own 
 and other lands. In view of that admitted 
 fact, let each of us ask himself — Why is it that 
 I ever give for that purpose ? Is it because I 
 am required and expected to, or because I 
 desire to ? If the plate never came to me for 
 
14 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 my offering, should I care to bring my offering 
 to the plate? And yet that offering means 
 everything that is good for multitudes of fellow- 
 creatures who have very little that is good. 
 It means books and schools for the ignorant, 
 clothes and ploughs for the savage, decent 
 dwellings for the brutish. It means Christian 
 homes in place of harems ; the honour of 
 woman for her degradation ; Christian physi- 
 cians for unwholesome lives; Christian teachers 
 for superstitious minds. It means the uplift- 
 ing of whole nations and dark continents into 
 intelligence and civihsation, through the know- 
 ledge of God in Christ and the hope of the 
 eternal life. That is what that offering for 
 Christian missions means. And it is a blessed 
 thing that the opportunity of it comes, a 
 more blessed thing to bid it come, as a means 
 by which we can hold to our hearts the 
 dearest interests of humanity, and can feel 
 our hearts expand in the generous embrace 
 of it as in the embrace of Christ ; a blessed 
 thing to grasp it as the coveted lever by 
 which we can make the pressure of our hand 
 felt as a power for God to the ends of the 
 earth. 
 
 And so, when any of my friends says to me. 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY, 15 
 
 I feel no obligation to give for missions to the 
 heathen, I answer, There is higher ground for 
 you to take. Whether or no it he obligatory I 
 do not care to argue. But there can be no 
 doubt that it is at least desirable for you to live 
 a larger life and in a larger world than you do ; 
 and the plate comes to make the world larger 
 to you, and make your soul enlarge with 
 wider sympathies both with the world that 
 needs redemption and with the world's Divine 
 Kedeemer. If it be true that many men have 
 very small and narrow minds, it is because 
 they are exclusively occupied in daily struggles 
 for very small things. The enlargement of 
 mind which comes, as Matthew Arnold 
 reminds us, from deaHug with great affairs, is 
 within the reach of every man who will em- 
 brace the sublime interest and take the divine 
 part that Jesus calls him to, in consecrating 
 his life to the advancement of the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 The more investments we make in things 
 that enrich mankind, the richer we. The 
 more points of hel^^ful contact and influence 
 we make between our life and the life that 
 struggles to form itself anew in any region of 
 moral ruin and human decay, the wider is the 
 
16 THE LAW OF LIBEETY. [l. 
 
 horizon of our ordinary thought, the grander 
 the movement of our daily endeavour, the 
 nearer we are to Him who is impelhng and 
 shaping all, the more joy to us that we were 
 ever born, because born to such opportunities 
 in the kingdom of God, 
 
 Follow now, my friends, as you can, many 
 a similar line of thought in regard to many a 
 worthy thing that claims our co-operation as 
 members of the community, or as members of 
 the church. Learn thus to interrogate your- 
 selves, for the sake of your own moral develop- 
 ment, as to the motives that lead you to take 
 hold of the good things you are asked to do. 
 It is better to do good under the pressure of 
 obligation than not to do it at all. But to do 
 good because of a stern voice which says, 
 " Thou shalt," is not enough for us. No man 
 can be better than his motive is. Hence the 
 highest motives are essential to the highest 
 goodness. The good which we receive in 
 doing cannot be expected to be larger than 
 the good which we desire to do. And there- 
 fore the supreme importance to our real 
 growth in real goodness — as distinct from 
 mere activity in external forms of goodness — 
 that we look below the surface of things, till 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 17 
 
 we see and desire somewhat of the real good 
 that lies wrapped for us in every good deed 
 which waits to be done. 
 
 Here comes up the practical question sug- 
 gested by Paul's great confession that it was 
 " grace " to him to have the opportunity of 
 preaching Christ to the heathen at such 
 tremendous costs. How did he discover that ? 
 What shall reveal to us the real desirableness 
 of any good thing that is going to cost us so 
 much toil or expense ? Many, no doubt, look 
 on such a grand life as Paul's with no kindling 
 of desire to achieve what he achieved at such 
 a price. They look on the life of a missionary 
 on the frontier of civilisation, or on the 
 activity of the Christian lady who spends her 
 time in visiting the homes of the city poor, 
 as certain Hindu gentlemen looked on a 
 European ball. When they saw ladies and 
 gentlemen dancing hour after hour, they could 
 not appreciate the pleasure of such exercise. 
 It seemed to them like work. They said, 
 " How tiresome it must be. In our country 
 we do better. We hire people to dance 
 before us, and we have nothing to do but 
 enjoy the spectacle." That is very like the 
 way in which some people hire the minister 
 
18 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 or the missionary. " Save us the trouble," 
 they say, " and here's your money." 
 
 The Europeans pitied the Hindus for such 
 an opinion, though in candour I must say I 
 think the Hindu in that matter as wise as the 
 European. But, my friends, we need to pity 
 •ourselves, whenever we find ourselves in- 
 capable of appreciating or sharing the enthu- 
 siasm, the inspiration, that flows into a soul 
 from a divine object. What is it to be set 
 face to face with a divine object, with Jesus 
 Christ, and feel no enthusiasm responding 
 within us ? It is to discover that we are 
 blind, paralysed, spiritually dead. 
 
 Think now of that poor negro woman in 
 Connecticut, who bequeathed the savings of a 
 life spent at the wash-tub to the Yale Theo- 
 logical Seminary, to be a fund for the education 
 of indigent men of her own race to preach the 
 Gospel of Christ. She lived by her wash-tub, 
 but she didn't live in it ; she lived above it. 
 And just that is the privilege, the dignity, 
 open to our common life, to the multitude of 
 working lives, to live in a life that is wider, 
 higher, grander than the work we live by. 
 Her outward life was common and low. But 
 her inner life was dignified by an interest that 
 
I.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 19 
 
 made the struggle of her aspiring race her 
 struggle, their achievements her achievements, 
 the purpose of God for their elevation her 
 purpose, the glory of the world's Kedeemer a 
 glory in which the earnings of her humble 
 labour procured her lofty soul a share. Poor 
 in spirit must we confess ourselves, if we can 
 see nothing to emulate in such an example, or 
 if we care not to infuse into the labour of our 
 bread-winning such a spirit as she infused into 
 hers. 
 
 Here, then, we have found, on one of the 
 humblest levels of the modern world, a life of 
 the commonest drudgery filled with dignity 
 and power by the same divine object that 
 inspired Paul's life of tribulation with thanks- 
 giving for his opportunity from the grace of 
 God. The gill measure, the gallon measure — 
 the laundress, the Apostle — are both full of the 
 same inspiration. And what is it that fills 
 them ? What is it that reveals to them that 
 it is " grace,'' a boon, a privilege, to embrace 
 the Christian opportunity with all its costs ? 
 The Apostle answers, " The unsearchable riches 
 of Christ " ; His glorious power over men as 
 the great Lover of men ; the glory of partner- 
 ship vdth Him in the work of the world's 
 
20 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. [l. 
 
 redemption ; the rich joy of joining heart with 
 Him, and hands with Him, of sharing costs 
 with Him and income with Him in the develop- 
 ing of the grace and glory of the kingdom of 
 God ; the opportunity of investing our 
 pittance along with that vast investment 
 which our Redeemer made in the Bank of 
 God, when He gave Himself for the world ; the 
 coming joy of thinking, when at last we see 
 the world made new, that our hands and our 
 hearts have helped the Son of God to make it 
 new. 
 
 " The unsearchable riches of Christ." In 
 these words, my friends, is the hiding of that 
 power, that inspiration, by which we are to 
 solve the problem of our moral progress from 
 the childish to the adult stage — the power 
 which transforms duties into privileges, the 
 inspiration which exalts obligations into 
 desires. Divine love, embracing us that we 
 may return its embrace, here brings us to an 
 open door out from bondage under the shalt 
 and the shalt not of our baby-schoolmg to 
 good. The Spirit ever calls us to its Pente- 
 costal revelation of a blessed freedom in doing 
 good through the higher motives of the 
 Christian " laio of liberty.'" Untraceable by 
 
1.] THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 21 
 
 US, in the widening stream of good endeavour, 
 are " the unsearchable riches of Christ,'' in 
 their onward flow through the ages of grace 
 and glory. Unfathomable are the resources 
 of God to enrich all those who strive to think 
 and work with Him. Let none of us despise 
 his birthright in these "unsearchable richest 
 Let not our daily life grow mean and poor, by 
 dechning whatever sacrifice it costs to share 
 in these riches, and to make others sharers 
 with us and with God. 
 
 " Make use of me, my God, 
 Let me not be forgot ; 
 A broken vessel cast aside. 
 One whom Thou needest not.' 
 
II. 
 
 SOLOMON: AN OLD STOBY WITH A 
 NEW FACE. 
 
11. 
 
 SOLOMON: AN OLD STOBY WITH A 
 NEW FACE. 
 
 " Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the 
 abomination of Moah, in the mount that is before Jerusalem, 
 and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. 
 And so did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and 
 sacrificed unto their gods. And the Lord was angry with 
 Solomon, because his heart ivas turned away from the Lokd, 
 the God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice, and 
 had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not 
 go after other gods : but he Jcept not that which the Lord com,- 
 manded." — 1 Kings xi. 7—10. 
 
 Solomon is here recorded as an apostate, 
 and the man of highest wisdom is charged 
 with supreme folly. In this we shall jSnd a 
 lesson of practical consequence to us. And it 
 behoves us to look closely at the facts, and see 
 what Solomon's apostasy and folly really was, 
 that we may avoid that which is in fact the 
 same. 
 
 We are not to conceive of the matter as if 
 
 Preached in Anerlet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Evening, August 5, 1888. 
 
26 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 Solomon, in the height of his wisdom, had 
 become a grovelhng idolater. He was, indeed, 
 intoxicated and blinded with the pomp of his 
 greatness ; but he was not quite so stupid in 
 this matter as the popular notion regards him. 
 Having builded his magnificent Temple to 
 Jehovah, he did not go about to dishonour it 
 by abandoning it for the shrines of idols, and 
 forsaking the worship of his father's God for 
 the deities of foreigners. 
 
 Modern times have illustrated the case. 
 When the Pope was sovereign in Eome, 
 Protestant worship was as stringently pro- 
 hibited in that city as ever was idolatry in 
 Israel. Nevertheless, the English or Ameri- 
 can minister, enjoying the rights accorded to 
 his nation, might freely practise the forms 
 that were interdicted to Papal subjects as 
 heretical. 
 
 Now the record, however sternly disapprov- 
 ing of the fact, nevertheless states the fact as 
 a thing apparently similar to this. It was not 
 for himself or his subjects that Solomon built 
 these idolatrous shrines, but "/or his foreign 
 wives." He had a numerous harem, con- 
 spicuous in which were some foreign prin- 
 cesses. As a concession to these, and probably 
 
il] an old stoey with a new face. 27 
 
 as a mark of respect to the states with which 
 he had formed these matrimonial alliances, he 
 erected these shrines to the deities of their 
 several countries. His policy in this respect 
 was long foUowed by his successors. It is 
 remarkable that the historian does not blame 
 them for tolerating the shrines which he 
 blames Solomon for introducing. Even dur- 
 ing the reigns of kings whose piety is highly 
 commended in the sacred history, these shrines 
 to the heathen deities were tolerated under the 
 eaves, as it were, of the national Temple. 
 Not until the reign of Josiah, near the end of 
 the monarchy, were they finally destroyed in 
 the zeal of a great revival of orthodoxy. 
 
 The Books of the Kings are both a history 
 and a philosophy of history, that is, an ex- 
 planation of historical facts by their causes. 
 Written long after Solomon, in the period 
 when the nation had come under the sceptre 
 of a foreign power, the historian records not 
 only the rise and fall of the Hebrew monarchy, 
 but also what appeared to him to be the cause 
 of its decline. This he found in a decay of 
 orthodoxy by the intrusion of heathen modes 
 of worship. He traces the evil back to 
 Solomon, and attributes the great rebelHon, 
 
28 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 which divided the kingdom in his son's time, 
 to the anger of God at the allovv^ance which 
 Solomon had granted to the idolatrous worship 
 of his foreign wives. 
 
 A closer study of the history gives us a dif- 
 ferent view of the matter, and a different idea 
 of what Solomon's apostasy was. The prac- 
 tical lesson, to which we shall come in this 
 modified aspect of the case, will not be pre- 
 cisely the same as that to which tradition has 
 accustomed us. But it will be closer to the 
 facts of history, and quite as pertinent to the 
 conditions and the dangers of our own times. 
 
 We shall find, for substance, that Solomon's 
 apostasy was not in religion so much as in 
 morals ; not that he became a heretic, but that 
 he became a tyrant ; and that the Divine dis- 
 pleasure which was manifested in the rebellion 
 against his successor was provoked, not by the 
 idol r.hrines he built for his wives, but by the 
 oppression of which he was guilty towards his 
 subjects. It is true, as the record states, that 
 " his heart was turned'' from his father's God, 
 but it was not to the idols of his wives, so 
 much as to the idols of his own heart — a love 
 of magnificence, which he gratified unfeelingly 
 by heartless exactions from his people. Just 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEW FACE. 29 
 
 as Louis XV. sowed the seed of the French 
 Eevolution by the harem, the palaces, and the 
 army which he sustained by extortion from his 
 subjects, so did the far wiser Solomon bequeath 
 revolution to his son as the effect of his apos- 
 tasy from justice to oppression. 
 
 In Solomon's history, however, we are to 
 regard the general as well as the special lesson. 
 The general lesson which Solomon gives to all 
 time is in the contrast of what he was with 
 what he became, the contrast of actual results 
 with what might naturally have been expected, 
 the folly perpetrated by the man of exalted 
 wisdom. No thoughtful mind can study the 
 history of Solomon without a fresh impression 
 of the hardening and blinding influence exerted 
 upon the heart by the possession of power and 
 wealth. This was what " turned Solomons 
 heart from God,'" as the historian tells us; 
 not however as an apostate from a Divine 
 ritual, but as an apostate from the Divine 
 righteousness. 
 
 The child learns early that the wisest man 
 was Solomon. If mere intelligence could 
 secure a man against ruinous errors, Solomon 
 was more than trebly guarded. 
 
 He came of a wise stock. His mother, 
 
30 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 Bathslieba, was a grand-daughter of David's 
 famous counsellor, Ahithopliel, the wisest man 
 of his time. 
 
 His education was carefully directed. He 
 tells us that he was taught by his father to 
 " get wisdom " as the principal thing. And he 
 seems to have done so, for David tells him, at 
 his accession to the throne, " Thou art a wise 
 man, a?id hioioest what thou oughtest to do." 
 
 He also seems, in his early life, to have 
 conscientiously striven to know what was 
 right. His first recorded prayer was for this : 
 " Give Thy servant an understanding heart to 
 judge Thy people, that I may discern between 
 good and had.'' 
 
 If now we look at the various unfoldings of 
 Solomon's wisdom, it grows upon our admira- 
 tion as a wide-branched and deep-rooted tree, 
 able to weather all storms. 
 
 He has been called the first great naturalist 
 and m.an of science in history. "He spake 
 of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon 
 unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. 
 He spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of 
 creeping things, and of fishes.'" Or, as we 
 should say in modern phrase, he was a 
 botanist, a zoologist, an ornithologist, an 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEW FACE. 31 
 
 entomologist, and an ichthyologist. His 
 knowledge was encyclopedic. Commerce also 
 sprang up under his hand, reaching to the 
 extremities of the known world, and bringing 
 to him, as the visit of the Queen of Sheba 
 indicates, the ideas as well as the products of 
 distant lands. 
 
 Furthermore, in the exercise of his varied 
 wisdom he became a distinguished teacher of 
 mankind. " He spake three thousand proverbs, 
 and his songs were a thousand and five." Says 
 Dean Stanley : " The teaching of Solomon is 
 the sanctification of common sense in the Old 
 Testament ; and to this the final seal is set by 
 the adoption of the same style of thought, in 
 the New Testament, by Him who with His 
 Apostles taught in Solomon's porch, and ex- 
 pressly compared His wisdom to the wisdom 
 which gathered the nations round Solomon of 
 old." 
 
 Still more, the wisdom of Solomon, however 
 deep its spring, drew from other minds as well 
 as his own. His views, however broad, were 
 broadened by intercourse with other sages. 
 He appears to be the centre of a group of wise 
 men, whom we may compare to the seven 
 sages of Greece in later times. The maxims 
 
32 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 of this wise fraternity have come down to us 
 under Solomon's name in the Book of Proverbs, 
 where we read of them as the " seven 2nllars " 
 of the House of Wisdom. Among such asso- 
 ciates the wisdom of their great chief was 
 cultivated and grew. 
 
 And finally, in the development of Solomon's 
 Mdsdom we find what was most remarkable in 
 that age, and what even in our age has still 
 to be insisted on — a clear recognition that 
 morality, justice, truth, and mercy far outrank 
 all rites and ceremonies, and lie close to the 
 heart of religion, and furnish the only stable 
 basis of government. "To do justice and 
 judgment are more acceptable to the Loed thayi 
 sacrifice.'' " The king that faithfully judgeth 
 the poor, his throne shall he established for 
 ever J" 
 
 Contemplating this so widely-branching and 
 deeply-rooted tree of wisdom, well may we ask 
 with surprise, How could it fall ? Aye, how 
 could it ? But it fell, and great was the fall of 
 it. What sagacity, what philosophy can boast 
 itself impregnable after this, or neglect a 
 ceaseless vigilance against the insidious and 
 unsuspected causes of a fall equally surprising 
 and calamitous. 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEW FACE. 33 
 
 The Arab legend pithily tells us that a worm 
 was concealed in Solomon's staff, and secretly- 
 gnawed it asunder. What was this hidden 
 worm? Wb.3Lt wrought this wise man's 
 marvellous apostasy to folly ? What has the 
 same human nature to guard against to-day, in 
 its highest pride of opinion and fulness of 
 resource, at the risk of a fall Hke Solomon's ? 
 
 As we study the record of Solomon's great- 
 ness, we see that, with the exception of a 
 pregnant hint or two, only one side of the 
 history of his reign is told. The splendour of 
 the royal city is depicted, but the distress 
 which formed its counterpart is almost wholly 
 hid, except in the one word of complaint which 
 his subjects used in their humble petition to 
 his son and successor for rehef : " Thy father 
 made our yoke grievous." 
 
 That it must have been a grievous yoke is 
 plain from the account of the magnificence 
 which Solomon created through the tribute 
 and the labour which he imposed upon a plain 
 agricultural people. 
 
 The Temple, which was seven years in 
 building, may well have been acceptable to the 
 national spirit, as the fit memorial of their 
 loyalty to the God under whose favour they 
 
34 SOLOMON : [ll. 
 
 had grown to greatness. " B^it Solomon loas 
 thirteen years in building his oion house," on 
 whose tower glittered a thousand golden shields, 
 in whose porch rose a throne of ivory, all 
 whose plate and table-service was of gold, ''for 
 silver was nothing accounted of in the days of 
 Solomon." For mules, hitherto deemed good 
 enough for the royal family, he substituted 
 horses imported from Egypt, and constructed 
 four thousand stalls adjacent to his palace. 
 The daily consumption of his household in- 
 cluded thirty oxen and a hundred sheep, with 
 other things in proportion. " The hing made 
 silver to he in Jerusalem as stones." To this 
 opulence the tribute of allied princes brought no 
 small share. But a glimpse of the burdens im- 
 posed upon the nation itself is given in the brief 
 mention of the corvee, or forced labour, which 
 was required for all this grand architecture 
 that now beautified Jerusalem. What the 
 builders of the Pyramids did, what the builder 
 of the Suez Canal did, impressing the requisite 
 number of hands to do the work, Solomon 
 seems to have done. " The king raised a levy 
 out of all Israel, and the levy was thirty tliou- 
 sand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten 
 thousand a month, by courses." The odium of 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEW FACE. 35 
 
 this service seems to have expressed itself in 
 the fact that the only blood shed in the revolt 
 of the ten tribes from Solomon's son was the 
 blood of the officer at the head of this levy — 
 Adoniram. 
 
 Sifijns of disaffection were not altogether 
 wanting in Solomon's time. Some of the 
 tributary nations revolted. A free-spirited 
 leader of opposition, Jeroboam, appeared in the 
 powerful tribe of Ephraim, but was forced to 
 flee the country. Blinded by the splendour 
 with which he had surrounded himself, the 
 wise but foolish despot heeded not the murmurs 
 of a suffering people. But when the reins fell 
 at his death into feebler hands, the long ac- 
 cumulated grievances broke out in a formidable 
 uprising. The stupid obstinacy with which 
 his son announced his intention to persevere 
 in his father's policy and to coerce opposition 
 by severity, was followed by a secession of five- 
 sixths of the tribes from his sceptre, and the 
 reduction of the empire of which Jerusalem 
 was the centre to the rank of a petty princi- 
 pality. 
 
 Thus the wisest of kings ruined his own 
 realm simply by infidelity to his own principles. 
 Faithful justice to the poor he had himself 
 
36 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 declared to be the basis of a stable throne ; 
 but nevertheless he alienated the mass of his 
 subjects from his sway by his oppressive exac- 
 tions. If we call him the wisest fool in history, 
 we still are of the same clay as he. What, in 
 fact, is the essence of such folly as his but that 
 which is common to all, the gap between 
 knowing and doing, the inconsistency of prac- 
 tice with theory — the profession of exalted 
 sentiments and the toleration of actual contra- 
 diction to them in base conduct? Let him 
 that is without sin in this respect cast the first 
 stone at Solomon. 
 
 This general lesson, however important, is 
 not the only moral to be drawn from the fall 
 of Solomon. There is a special lesson of equal 
 consequence to us. It is a lesson that has 
 been lost sight of, and is at present most neces- 
 sary to be brought to our attention. 
 
 The reign of Solomon was a period of won- 
 derful material development, as rapid as it was 
 grand. The contrast between his father's 
 time and his is a contrast of patriarchal sim- 
 plicity with imperial magnificence. Temple 
 and palace took the place of tabernacle and 
 tenement. A rustic population was dazzled 
 by the foreign luxuries and wonders which a 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEY\' FACE. 37 
 
 newly opened commerce imported. The 
 cedar of Lebanon, the gold of Ophir, the 
 spices of Arabia, the horses and chariots of 
 Egypt, the ivory, apes, and peacocks of India, 
 were suddenly introduced among the vineyards 
 and olive groves, the cornfields and pastures 
 of Palestine. The impression of such a widen- 
 ing of the horizon of knowledge, and such an 
 expansion of material wealth, all in the life of 
 one generation, we can adequately represent 
 only by the development of great cities and 
 continental enterprises that America has 
 exhibited since the discovery of Californian 
 gold. 
 
 What, now, is more natural, and at the 
 same time more fallacious, than to regard a 
 grand material development like this as iden- 
 tical with real prosperity? It is often so 
 regarded to-day, and in so regarding it men 
 do but repeat Solomon's mistake. Intoxicated 
 with magnificence, he took scant care for 
 niercj, for the comfort and welfare of the 
 multitudes upon whose contributions of labour 
 and taxes the splendour of the royal city and 
 court was based. 
 
 There is but one statement of the record 
 which appears at all inconsistent with this 
 
38 SOLOMON: [ii. 
 
 "view: " Judah and Israel ivere many, as the 
 sand which is by the sea in rnultitude, eating and 
 drinking and malcing merry.'' This, however, 
 may well have been in the earlier period 
 of Solomon's long reign of forty years, and 
 before the burdens had been imposed against 
 which the petitioners for relief protested as a 
 *' grievous yoke." 
 
 The historical spectacle thus presented, a 
 great and rapid concentration of wealth run- 
 ning parallel to growing discontent among the 
 poor, is specially instructive for every period 
 of brilliant material development, such as we 
 have witnessed in our lifetime. It is not the 
 concentration but the diffusion of wealth that 
 gives stability to any form of society. The 
 increase of wealth and the increase of the 
 commonwealth are not always identical. 
 Even under a despotism, much more under 
 any constitutional government, the grievances 
 of the poor and weak will force a hearing if 
 they are not welcomed to it. Solomon cared 
 much for God's Temple of cedar and gold, but 
 little for God's living temple, man. It is not 
 the churches of any city, but the humble 
 tenements, whose condition gives the surest 
 practical test of the regard actually paid by 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WITH A NEW FACE. 39 
 
 society to Christianity. We mistake when wo 
 measure Solomon's piety by his Temple, and 
 we must not make the same mistake in esti- 
 mating our own. If we are to judge fairly 
 of the Christianity which worships in the 
 cathedral, we must inspect the human habita- 
 tions which it maintains in the slums. 
 
 The fundamental error of Solomon was an 
 error from which no period of history has been 
 exempt — the divorce of theoretical from prac- 
 tical rehgion. His wisdom plainly warned 
 him, that righteousness is the ritual which 
 God requires first ; and so he tells us in his 
 own proverbs. And yet, though his Temple 
 was not wanting in magnificence, his adminis- 
 tration was wanting in mercy. In conse- 
 quence, that Temple, built for the common 
 worship of the twelve tribes, was deserted by 
 ten of them in the lifetime of some who had 
 taken part in its dedication, and the worship of 
 the golden calf was set up at Bethel in its stead. 
 
 The golden calf is pretty widely worshipped 
 to-day. We hear many and timely lamenta- 
 tions of the neglect of Divine worship, agnos- 
 ticism, and infidehty. Grave evils ; but back 
 of these is the fundamental evil of Solomon's 
 mistake. Now, as then, is theoretical religion 
 
40 SOLOMON : [ll, 
 
 often divorced from practical, and orthodoxy 
 more cultivated than humanity. Not but 
 that we see noble charities on every hand. 
 I doubt not that Solomon also practised alms- 
 giving. But as to the humanity that is 
 blended with religion, it is not yet thirty years 
 since it took a bloody war to open the eyes of 
 many American Christians to the iniquity of 
 holding men as slaves — a war in which it was 
 not without difficulty that many British 
 Christians were restrained from intervening 
 on the slaveholder's side. Nor are all Chris- 
 tian eyes yet open to the inhumanity of a. 
 kind of slavery, in which the strong still ob- 
 tain permanent command of the labour and the 
 earnings of the weak, and hold them, though 
 freemen in name, in a sort of industrial bond- 
 age to hard conditions. Says a college pro- 
 fessor in New England : "The wild barbarity 
 of primitive times has given place to the more 
 refined and systematic cruelty of organised 
 society." 
 
 Undoubtedly, many Christian people care 
 more for making labour cheap than labourers 
 comfortable ; and what is this but inhumanity ? 
 more for erecting houses to God than for 
 legislation to improve the dwellings of the 
 
II.] AN OLD STORY WTLTH A NEW FACE. 41 
 
 poor : so far, doubtless, they are with Solomon. 
 And it is notorious that religious conventions 
 spend much more time in debates on theology 
 and church machinery and schemes for ex- 
 tending the Gospel, as they understand it in 
 its theoretical aspects, than in discussing the 
 practical applications of the Gospel to social life, 
 so as to make business more just and more 
 benevolent, competition more equitable and 
 more humane, employers more sympathetic 
 toward employees, and the rich more consider- 
 ate of the poor. The Christian people of 
 America and England, so far as the humanities 
 of social relations are concerned, do not Hve up 
 to the laws of Moses, much less to the laws of 
 Christ. And this defect is coupled, as in 
 Solomon's case, with zeal for the externals of 
 rehgion, for sanctuaries, and for creeds. Even 
 now we see in New York much more interest 
 manifested in planning a ten-million-dollar 
 cathedral, than in reforming the horrible tene- 
 ment-houses, where babies die in summer heat 
 like flies, and where no domestic decency or 
 morality can be maintained. No wonder that 
 there is some infidelity in consequence, and 
 that many have deserted the Temple for the 
 shrine of the golden calf. 
 
42 SOLOMON : [ii. 
 
 But infidelity cannot spring from genuine 
 religion ; it can be begotten only by infidelity. 
 The parent infidelity is to-day, the same as of 
 yore, to be found inside the Temple, in the 
 worshippers who rear the sacred Cross aloft on 
 steeple-tops, and leave it there, regardless of 
 the essential humanity of the Gospel of which 
 the Cross is pledge ; expecting, indeed, that the 
 minister of the Cross will make it his main 
 object in life to do good unselfishly, but 
 reckoning that the follower of the Cross may 
 make it his chief aim to get on in the world. 
 O brethren, Solomon reads a lesson to the 
 Church of to-day, which is imitating his folly 
 in measuring life and success and glory by a 
 materialistic standard rather than a spiritual, 
 by the scale of acquisitions in wealth and show 
 and power, rather than by the scale of dis- 
 tributions through humane sympathies and in 
 benevolent services. 
 
 If the modern house of God is to hold the 
 people to it any better than the ancient, it can 
 be only as the builders of that house remem- 
 ber, what the wise builder of the Temple 
 knew, but forgot ; that the altar which God 
 most jealously stands by is " the altar of 
 human need," the need of justice even before 
 
II.] AN OLD STOBY WITH A NEW FACE. 43 
 
 charity. The idols to which, in Solomon's 
 company, the disciples of Christ, even wiser 
 than he, are in danger of falling away from the 
 altar of God, are not the idols of the intellect, 
 to which orthodoxy may be sacrificed, but the 
 idols of the market, to which the rights of the 
 poor and the weak may be sacrificed. If now, 
 as in the midst of Solomon's magnificence, 
 along with the hallelujahs of glorified art and 
 commerce and wealth there is audible the under- 
 tone of a miserere from the depths of a growing 
 human distress, we must beware of the worm 
 hid in Solomon's staff. We must clear our- 
 selves from all indifference to the demands of 
 men for justice, and for the sympathy which 
 only can hinder selfishness from injustice. 
 " The LoBD our God is a jealous God " — not 
 jealous for Himself, but jealous for His children, 
 for His little ones. "■And what doth the Lobd 
 require of thee, hut to do justice and to love 
 mercy and to ivalk humbly loith thy God? " 
 
III. 
 
 HELPING GOB. 
 
III. 
 
 HELPING GOD. 
 
 "Jesus said, Take ye away the stone." — John xi. 39. 
 
 The superhuman work which Jesus wrought 
 at the tomb of Lazarus was so glorious, that 
 it has drawn attention away from an im- 
 portant human work which co-operated with 
 it. The taking away of the stone from the 
 door of the tomb was as essential to the 
 restoration of Lazarus to his life in this 
 world, as was the resuscitation of the vital 
 spark itself in his cold clay. Jesus could 
 have done both Himself. The same voice 
 whose mandate, ''Lazarus, come forth,'" was 
 obeyed by the issuing of the swathed form 
 from its transient imprisonment, could like- 
 wise have bidden the stone to roll away, and 
 it should have rolled — a lesser wonder fitly 
 inaugurating the greater. But Jesus under- 
 
 Pkeached in Anerley Coxgkegational Church, 
 Sunday Morning, August 12, 1888. 
 
48 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 took to do only what inferior power could not. 
 What others could, He required that they 
 should. Only when they could do no more, He 
 did all the rest. 
 
 This incident, the greater power choosing 
 to depend on the lesser power for a small part 
 of a stupendous work, reveals to us God's 
 method of bringing great and good things to 
 pass. In this revelation of the Divine method 
 toward us we are shown also the rule and 
 limit of our dependence upon that Divine aid 
 which it is both our instinct and our duty to 
 seek. 
 
 I. As to God's method. 
 
 "We have been taught to pray, " Give us this 
 day our daily bread," a petition which includes 
 all that is necessary for the preservation and 
 development of life. But we find that God's 
 method of giving is to put things where we can 
 get them, and to put on us the responsibility 
 for getting them. The materials of the bread 
 we shall eat in future years are now in the soil 
 and the water and the air, and the power that 
 is to combine these materials is ready in the 
 sun ; but it depends on us to place the 
 materials properly for the superhuman power 
 to work upon them. The result will be the 
 
III.] HELPING GOD. 49 
 
 bread we pray for. Sometiraes, when a man 
 thinks how the great powers of nature are 
 working with the regularity of a machine to 
 bring forth and ripen each year's crop, while 
 all that man does is simply to open doors, and 
 keep them open, for the power of God to flow 
 freely through, he may question what his 
 prayer for daily bread has to do with the 
 result. He will not question much, as soon as 
 he perceives that God is depending upon his 
 help for the result. His prayer is not so 
 much a prayer for the stability of the machine 
 of Nature, as for the quickening of his own 
 fidelity and diligence as the feeder and 
 operator of the machine, that he may be 
 delivered from sloth and sleepiness, and not 
 abuse his freedom to neglect his proper part. 
 That is the main part of the true meaning we 
 should find in our prayer for daily bread ; it is 
 prayer for constancy in the duty of getting it 
 by taking away every stone that hinders. 
 
 It is just the same when we pray for the 
 bread of spiritual life, in the truth and grace 
 that our higher nature lives by ; the power of 
 God is ever present to come in ; our prayer is 
 to be for constancy in keeping open the door 
 of faith and love through which it enters. 
 
 4 
 
50 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 In every department in which we study 
 God's method of sustaining and developing 
 the hfe of man, we find that he rigidly 
 adheres to the rule of requiring men to 
 take away the stone which blocks the way 
 to good. Preventable diseases, arising from 
 :filth and miasma, have scourged the world for 
 •centuries ; but no other Divine voice than 
 that of the promptings and warnings that 
 are given through suffering and death has 
 guided men to discover the cause of the 
 plague and remove it. Those scenes of 
 horror recurring in the crowded and filthy 
 ■cities of the East, ever since the pestilence 
 ravaged Jerusalem more than twenty-eight 
 hundred years ago, proclaim how long and 
 how much God will let men suffer, until 
 they bestir themselves to take away the 
 ■stone. 
 
 When we study the progress of the discovery 
 and invention by which men have multiplied 
 their productive powers and enhanced their 
 intelligence and welfare thereby, it would 
 appear that God has made the world a many- 
 doored treasure-house replete with innumer- 
 able utilities, and having bestowed on men the 
 key of a wondrous inventiveness, has ap- 
 
III.] HELPING GOD. 51 
 
 pointed to them the responsibihty of finding 
 and opening the stone doors. From one of 
 these doors there comes the power of heat ; 
 from another, the power of electricity; from 
 another, the power of diffusing thought by the 
 printed page ; from another, the anodyne and 
 the anaesthetic that reheve from pain ; from 
 another, the explosives that cut through moun- 
 tains the highways of commerce ; from others 
 the knowledge of various sorts, by which 
 health and intelligence and peaceful order are 
 promoted. These doors, which we find and 
 open from day to day, have been waiting for our 
 key of discovery since men began to breathe. 
 We are to thank their Creator for what we 
 unlock from them even more than if special 
 messengers from heaven brought it every day ; 
 inasmuch as self-support is better for a family 
 than almshouse support, or as the living that 
 €omes through educated effort is better than 
 the living that comes through a spoon in the 
 hand of a nurse. These doors to waiting 
 treasures lie under Africa undiscovered to-day, 
 as they lay under Europe and America a 
 thousand years ago, waiting, as Kepler said 
 God had "waited six thousand years for an 
 observer," waiting as the lakes of oil under 
 
52 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 Pennsylvania waited, simply for the borer to 
 take away the stone. 
 
 In the lands of highest knowledge, where 
 the most doors to power for progress have 
 been found, and the secret of mastery over 
 Nature best learned, the same law of respon- 
 sibility for the use of the key still insists on 
 further compliances, and voices its command 
 by the complaints of manifold wants still 
 clamouring to be met, and many evils still 
 waiting for the delayed remedy. Though 
 Lazarus is alive, and waiting to appear, he 
 cannot come forth until the requirement is 
 obeyed, " Take ye aioay the stoneJ" Full as 
 the pipe may be of gas or water, it will not 
 flow until the finger turns the faucet. Schools 
 and libraries may bring all the wisdom of the 
 ages to our hand, but the hand of study must 
 unseal the fountain ere we can drink. The 
 most fertile fields may lie next our door, but 
 " if any will not ivorJc, neither shall he eat.'* 
 The church- spire may be in sight from our 
 window, but except we heed the hint of its 
 heaven-pointing finger, and lift our desires 
 where it points them, the heavenly treasure 
 remains to us an unopened mine. " The Jci?ig- 
 doni of heaven is like treasure hid in a field,'"' 
 
III.] HELPING GOD. 63 
 
 valueless to us till we take away the stone. 
 The bread of spiritual life, just like our daily 
 dinner, is put where we can get it, if willing to 
 seek it. In each case the election is left with 
 us to work for it or starve. 
 
 But think, friends, how many lives are beg- 
 gared, intellectually, morally, spiritually, by 
 disobedience to this primal and universal law 
 of sweating for our necessary bread. How 
 many good and noble purposes are smothered 
 in their birth by the laziness or cowardice 
 that will not take the stone out of the way. 
 How many rich opportunities are lost because 
 their price of endeavour is begrudged. How 
 much of life is dawdled away because it is 
 easier to say I canH than I will. How many 
 never come to the Table of Christ because of 
 the stone of old habit, or prejudice, or un- 
 spiritual lethargy, which blocks their way to 
 participation in Divine inspirations of power to 
 live a higher and worthier life. Think on 
 these things to-day. Perhaps some good 
 deed, some new and better beginning, long 
 delayed, reminds you now afresh of lost time 
 and hindered benefits. As conscience mur- 
 murs, " I meant to, I might have done it long 
 aero," let the Divine command repeat itself 
 
54 HELPING GOD. [ill, 
 
 with a constrainirg urgency, " Take ye awaj/ 
 the stone." 
 
 II. As to the rule and limit of our depend- 
 ence upon Divine aid. 
 
 During a long period that has hardly yet 
 gone completely by, Christian thought centred 
 in the idea of the absolute Sovereignty of God. 
 God was so great that man was nothing. God 
 was so almighty that man could do nothing, 
 except sin, until God took hold of him, and 
 made him stop sinning by an "irresistible 
 grace." Men were exhorted to repent, but 
 were told from the pulpit that they could not 
 repent unless it should please God to make 
 them repent. Men were exhorted to pray for 
 the Holy Spirit, but were told that the Holy 
 Spirit was as much beyond their efforts as the 
 wind, and praying for the Spirit was like 
 praying for the wind ; it might come, and it 
 might not ; God in His Sovereignty might 
 grant or refuse their prayer, and it depended 
 wholly on His secret will. Jesus had com- 
 pared the Holy Spirit to the wind in respect 
 to its secret source and the invisibility of its 
 mighty power; but they had misunderstood 
 Him, and imagined Him to speak of an 
 arbitrary power, in whose sphere of action 
 
III.] HELPING GOD, 55 
 
 they had alike no responsibihty and no- 
 control. 
 
 But we are discovering the mistake of think- 
 ing so. We read the Scriptures more in- 
 telligently now. God moves and rules the 
 world and humanity from within. The 
 Christian thought of the recent past, which 
 contemplated God as afar off, separated 
 from man and the world, and communicat- 
 ing with him by messengers, has risen to the 
 truer thought of a still older past, when Chris- 
 tianity first proclaimed the union of humanity 
 with One " who is above and through and 
 in us all.'' The Divine Spirit, through whose 
 prompting the heart prays, " Our Father,'" is as 
 universally diffused as the air that swells the 
 sail, the heat that works the engine, the 
 gravitation that binds every dwelling, stone 
 by stone, to its base. But, whether in the 
 lower or in the higher ranges of life, God will 
 work out our welfare and salvation only as we 
 work with Him, " who works in us to will and 
 to do," omnipresent ever, but operative never, 
 except according as we obey His requirement, 
 " Take ye aivay the stone." 
 
 We find ourselves obliged by the inexorable 
 conditions of the Divine laws whose special 
 
56 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 sphere is in laboratory, field, and factory. So 
 surely as there are not two Gods, but One, the 
 same necessity of obedience to law makes its 
 demand in every province of spiritual en- 
 deavour for the realisations of Christian 
 character and Christian enterprise. The 
 powers on which we depend for the life 
 that subsists by eating and drinking are 
 at the service of him only who will take 
 away the stone, and open the door that 
 they may deliver to him their gifts. So 
 surely as God is One, it is the same with the 
 higher powers on which the higher life 
 depends, which is in conscience toward God, 
 and in dutiful communion with His grace and 
 truth approaching us in Christ. 
 
 The word of Christ that strikes the ear, 
 the Table of Christ before the eye, are always 
 freighted with the Holy Spirit's pov/er. But if 
 a non-conductor divides the wire, the electric 
 current stops ; if a shutter covers the window, 
 the light turns back ; if a stone of inattention 
 or scepticism fills the doorway of the heart, the 
 Spirit is as though He were not ; His power as 
 ineffective as though it were not present. 
 
 What, then, is the rule, and what the limit 
 of our dependence on God ? 
 
III.] HELPING GOD. 57 
 
 The rule is that we must depend on God as 
 in us as well as above us. " Ye are not your 
 own,'' says the Apostle. Our natural faculties 
 of mind and body, of thought and affection 
 and choice, are not only ours but God's. They 
 are not only from Him. They are a part of 
 His power, just as really as are the heat and 
 light and magnetism of the material universe. 
 So far only as we use them according to His 
 bidding, they work out His good will. So Paul 
 taught, when he said, "J j^ut thee in remem- 
 brance that thou stir up the gift of God which 
 is in thee." Very likely we have thought of 
 God only as external to us, and of His powers 
 only as coming down upon us out of a far-off 
 heaven. The Apostle rebukes us for that : " Say 
 not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into 
 heaven ? Or, who shall descend into the deep / 
 The Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and 
 in thy heart." Now, therefore, let us think 
 also of God as dwelling with us, and of His 
 power as lodged within us — power to think a 
 part of His thought, power to feel some of His 
 affections both as to sin aud as to righteous- 
 ness, power in some degree to will His will 
 both as to evil and as to good. Such is Paul's 
 doctrine, when he says, even to a pagan 
 
58 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 audience, " In Him ice have our being " In 
 this Scriptural idea, that all our natural 
 powers, spiritual, intellectual, and physical, 
 are a part of God's power, we find an 
 inspiration for all effort to do right, we find a 
 thought which energises, sanctifies, glorifies 
 our common life. 
 
 This, then, being the rule, to depend on 
 God in us as well as God above us, what is 
 the limit of our proper dependence on God ? 
 
 The question is usually put thus : How 
 far may one depend on God, and how far on 
 one's self? This is a wrong way of putting 
 it; it involves the old mistake that God is only 
 external to us, that our natural powers are 
 not a part of God's power, and that a proper 
 dependence on our natural powers is some- 
 thing different from dependence on God ; that 
 part of our time is God's and the rest our 
 own, or that part of our property is God's 
 and the rest our own. All this dividing and 
 distributing between what is God's and what 
 is not God's is deceitful and mischievous ; let 
 us have done with it. To depend on our 
 personal powers in religious endeavour is the 
 practical way of depending on the unknown 
 power of the Holy Spirit, because it is 
 
ni.] HELPING GOD. 59 
 
 depending on that known part of His power 
 which is within ourselves. To depend on 
 something that the Holy Spirit may do for us 
 by-and-by, without depending now on the 
 power of attention, the power of reflection, the 
 power of choosing right, the power of self- 
 devotion and of persevering in a right choice, 
 and whatever other power from God has been 
 intrusted to us, is like depending on next 
 year's profits instead of depending on the 
 money in hand ; like depending on some friend 
 sending you a cart-load of water from the 
 public reservoir, and not depending on your 
 power to turn the faucet in your house. 
 
 The man who says that self-dependence in 
 religious endeavours makes a man self- 
 righteous and forgetful of his dependence on 
 God, says what is true only of those who do 
 not understand themselves, or understand 
 what proper dependence on God is. A man 
 might cut the pipe connecting him with the 
 public reservoir, and then keep his faucet open 
 all the while, but get no water. A man may 
 break his connection through conscience and 
 prayer v^dth the Infinite reservoir of spiritual 
 power, and all the natural outlets of that 
 power in church services, sermons, sacra- 
 
60 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 ments, will then be dry to him, and he will 
 remain a dry formalist or a dry sceptic. But 
 let him miderstand his living relation to the 
 living God, the Source of all supply, let him 
 keep open his spiritual connections with God 
 through prayer, let him begin his dependence 
 on God by using that portion of God's power 
 that he has in hand, and then his dependence 
 on himself is dependence on God ; there is no 
 limit to such dependence, either in beginning 
 or in ending. The stream will flow for ever, so 
 long as the faucet is open and the connections 
 close. Witness the word of the Apostle, " All 
 things are yours." Witness the word of 
 Christ, " Lo, I am with you always.'' 
 
 The lesson of our present study is one 
 which concerns us all. 
 
 There are many to-day in Christian congre- 
 gations who are looking for some Lazarus to 
 come forth in life, while they are neglecting 
 their first and most essential duty to take 
 away the stone. There are many who are 
 waiting for some Divine Breath to fill sails 
 which they keep furled to the mast, some fire 
 from heaven to fall upon the altar which they, 
 instead of kindling, are wetting down with 
 their own selfishness, some magnetic leader 
 
III.] HELPING GOD. 61 
 
 to come and shake them out of their stony 
 indifference. Is it not the plain and sober 
 truth, that the great folly and weakness of 
 many people called Christian is their depend- 
 ing on the power of God in heaven to revive 
 their spiritual life, to make them prayerful, 
 brotherly, earnest in doing good, before they 
 will use the power of God that is within them 
 — looking to Him for some unrevealed grace to 
 heal their dissensions, to inspire their ac- 
 tivities, before using His grace that is at hand 
 in their own tongues and knees and pocket- 
 books — in their own waterproofs and um- 
 brellas? " The children of this tvorlcl," said 
 Christ, " are iviser." They have learned to 
 " taJce aioay the stoned 
 
 There is also a question which common 
 honesty requires every sceptical hearer of the 
 Gospel to put to himself. Is the Gospel 
 argument really weak ? Is Christ's demonstra- 
 tion of God and the way of life really inade- 
 quate? Is the Bible at fault, the preaching 
 off the track of truth, the faith of the ages 
 visionary, the Christ Himself a dreamer of 
 unreahties? Or is the difticulty in my own 
 doorway, a stone for me to remove that the 
 power of God's truth may come in? This is 
 
62 HELPING GOD. [ill. 
 
 a possibility that an honest mind will test. 
 If I have sought after God in vain through 
 the speculations of the intellect alone, I will 
 seek Him through the affections of the heart 
 also. If I have found disappointment in look- 
 ing to Christians for truth and light, I will 
 look to Him who is " the Light of the world," 
 to Christ Himself. Behind the stone of in- 
 attention, or personal prejudice, or preoccupy- 
 ing cares, there may be waiting for me the 
 power of a divinely-quickened, Christ-filled 
 life. I am bound in conscience to test it, and 
 see if it be not so. Let me take away the 
 stone. Let me take it away noio. 
 
IV. 
 
 SPIBITUAL BARBARISM. 
 
IV. 
 
 SPIRITUAL BABBABISM. 
 
 "Brethren, I count not myself yet to have apprehended ; hut 
 one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and 
 stretching forward to the things which are before, I p>ress on 
 toward the goal, unto the prize of the high calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus.'" — Philippians iii. 13, 14. 
 
 The secret of an undecaying life Paul tells 
 us in this notable sentence of his letter to his 
 friends in Philippi. He never allowed himself 
 to think he was doing well enough. He was 
 always trying to achieve better, always study- 
 ing how to improve upon himself. He was, at 
 the time he wrote, well on in years. His life- 
 work was nearly done. It had been full (^f 
 toil, full of triumph in his chosen career. He 
 was now at the point where men are wont to 
 look back rather than forward, to post their 
 books, and sit down to what they find their 
 
 Preached in Anerlet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Evening, August 12, 1888. 
 
 5 
 
66 SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. [iV. 
 
 net gain. Not so Paul. As long as he lived 
 he purposed to live, and the only way to live 
 w^as to grow, to blossom and bear fresh fruit 
 even in old age, like a noble tree, however many 
 the harvest seasons that had deposited their 
 ingatherings. *' I count not myself yet to have 
 apprehended " — to have grasped and gained all I 
 may. "Oiie thing I do, for getting the things which 
 are behind, and stretching forward to the things 
 which are before, I press on toward the goal." 
 
 Such a spirit we naturally admire. We 
 admire it in whatever line we see its energies 
 directed. We admire it in the veteran states- 
 man, whom we see in old age meeting the 
 fresh exigencies of new times with a spirit 
 whose fertility of resource and whose energy 
 in execution are still marked with the flush of 
 youthful vigour. We admire it in the veteran 
 missionary, when we see a man like David 
 Livingstone, at the age when most men prize 
 dearest the comforts of home, setting forth 
 once more to explore the dark continent be- 
 yond the reach of all his previous journeys in 
 the unflinching pursuit of his life-long hope to 
 redeem Africa from slavery. AVe admire it in 
 the veteran student, like Charles Darwin, who, 
 after ransacking the globe for the treasures of 
 
IV.] SPIKITUAL BAEBARISM. 67 
 
 natural science, and making for himself the 
 foremost name in the century as an investi- 
 gator of natural laws, devotes the evening of 
 his long and laborious day to patient researches 
 into the doings of so humble a creature as the 
 earth-worm which the boy impales on his fish- 
 hook, and instructs the world by a revelation 
 of the wonders that lie beneath the garden soil. 
 We admire it in the great Apostle, who, after 
 introducing the Gospel into the chief cities of 
 Asia and Europe, after manifesting the Spirit 
 of Christ in profounder thought and grander 
 action than any other man of his time, sees 
 more that is still to be done and learned in his 
 divine calling, and confesses himself, in his 
 grey hairs, still a learner, a runner still striving 
 toward the goal. 
 
 Yet it should be no mere barren admiration 
 that we feel, fruitful in no impulse, as when 
 we see a more beautiful face or a more stately 
 form than Nature has given us. We are each 
 conscious of an appeal which such examples 
 make to a power, which, in latency or activity, 
 we all possess. Such hves, though in an 
 inferior way, we all may live. In so living, is 
 the divine hope of the ripely developed, normal, 
 undecaying life. 
 
68 SPIEITUAL BARBARISM. [iV. 
 
 I. Two thoughts are here at once suggested, 
 so obvious, indeed, that it is mainly for the sake 
 of their less obvious applications to our highest 
 interests that they need to be impressed upon 
 our minds. 
 
 1. The first is, that the Apostle's principle, 
 in the Christian life, is the very principle which 
 makes the civilised man distinct from the bar- 
 barian. The characteristic of civilisation is 
 its restless progressiveness. The character- 
 istic of barbarism is its supineness and stag- 
 nation. 
 
 The civilising man has his time-worn cara- 
 van-track to the golden Indies, but he will 
 have one directer and easier. So he must 
 launch with Columbus on the frowning Atlantic 
 to find or to make him a new way. He has 
 turnpikes and stage coaches, but these do not 
 ■carry him fast enough. He must level and 
 tunnel the mountains, and lay him a smooth 
 pavement of iron, and harness a horse of fire 
 to his rapid car. The earth yields him bread 
 enough to eat, and live. But he will " not live 
 b>j bread alone." He must get bread enough 
 to buy with it a better provided life than that 
 of a mere bread- eater. So he contrives ploughs 
 and threshers of steam to make the arm of the 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. 69 
 
 farmer equal to the productive power of the 
 sun and the field. He finds the pen of the 
 copyist too slow for the hunger of the mind. 
 So he contrives the types and cylinders that 
 scatter libraries over a continent with the rays 
 of each rising sun. 
 
 On the other hand, the barbarian is distin- 
 guished from him by the lack of all effort, all 
 spirit to make the effort, to improve the condi- 
 tion inherited from his fathers. He is content 
 to live in a hut, to live half-clothed or un- 
 clothed, to scratch the ground with a stick for 
 a plough, to trudge on foot with a trail for a 
 road ; — not only to take the world as he finds 
 it, but to leave it as he found it, without a 
 thought or effort to better anything or to better 
 himself, except in excelling his fellows in their 
 struggle for bare existence as hunters or 
 warriors. 
 
 Such are the two great types of humanity 
 which the world exhibits. But let us reflect that 
 the one sort do not all Hve in countries where 
 civilisation prevails. Nor do the other sort all 
 live in lands where barbarism is dominant. 
 Every region of the now civilised world has 
 risen out of the ocean slime of barbarism by 
 the uphfting power of the spirit of civilisation 
 
70 SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. [iV. 
 
 in its elect pioneers. And every region of the 
 civilised world still retains traces more or less 
 of the barbarism out of which it once emerged. 
 We see the primitive barbarian spirit still, 
 wherever we see apathy disbelieving in better- 
 ment, stagnant conservatism resisting improve- 
 ment. Wherever men oppose innovations by 
 saying, " What was good enough for our fathers 
 is good enough for us " — wherever they resist 
 a change from which better things are pro- 
 mised, and say, "We have never done so 
 before," they revert, however unconsciously, 
 yet most really, to the barbarian type of 
 thought, which says, " My father never wore a 
 shirt, and why should I undertake to be better 
 than he?" 
 
 Commonplace as these observations are, 
 they serve to direct notice to what is too 
 commonly unobserved in ourselves. None the 
 less does the old barbarian strain that is in 
 our blood come to the surface when a man 
 thinks of his moral condition, and says, " I 
 am as good as the average of my neighbours ; 
 why need I try to be better than they ? " The 
 community is full of this spiritual barbarism. 
 If we doubt it, facts declare it. On one side 
 see the restless struggle for betterment in 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBAPxISM. 71 
 
 external life, so characteristic of civilisation ; 
 on the other, in respect to the betterment of 
 the inner life, see the contented apathy which 
 characterises the barbarian, men's torpid 
 satisfaction with the existing development 
 in themselves of truth and knowledge, of 
 righteousness and charity, of faith in God, 
 and brotherly kindness to man, and moral 
 likeness to Christ, the Divine pattern of 
 humanity- Such a state of mind, if we 
 are intent on reality, and mean to call 
 things by their right names, — what is it 
 but spiritual barbarism? It is this from 
 which a man must be saved, or he is not 
 saved with Christ's salvation, according to 
 the Gospel. 
 
 2. The second thought which the Apostle's 
 rule of life suggests is this : a rule which God 
 has made fundamental in the movement of 
 the world, we must make fundamental in 
 individual life. "What we find working as a 
 law of God in history, we must work into our 
 own biography. 
 
 Look, then, at the world. Contemplate 
 collective humanity as Pascal described it 
 when he said, " The entire succession of men 
 through the whole course of ages must be re- 
 
72' SPIEITUAL BAEBARISM. [lV> 
 
 garded as one man, always living and inces- 
 santly learning." 
 
 What more comprehensive sketch of the 
 history of this world-man than in the words 
 into which Paul condensed his own biography : 
 ^'Forgetting the ihings which are behind, and 
 stretching forward to the things lohich are 
 before, I press on toward'the goal" ? Since the 
 day when primeval man first lighted a fire 
 to boil his pot, and hollowed out his first 
 canoe from a tree, up to the day when the 
 latest development of these primitive con- 
 trivances in combination appears in the steel 
 hull driven by the steam-giant across three 
 thousand miles of ocean in a week, the world 
 has never rested in its advance : God did not 
 intend that it should rest, any more than that 
 a growing plant should rest. 
 
 What past achievements has the world 
 made and forgotten in achieving more and 
 better; what "lost arts," as we call them; 
 that wonderful astronomy of Egypt, able, not- 
 withstanding its fundamental misconceptions 
 and mathematical inaccuracies, to compute 
 eclipses for six centuries to come ; that 
 wondrous engineering of Peru, able to pierce 
 the Andes for five hundred miles with a high- 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. 73' 
 
 way surpassing all the marvels of Eornan road- 
 builders in its leaping of chasms and levelling 
 of cliffs ! Again and again it would seem as if 
 the men of Babylon and of Memphis, of Athens 
 and of Eome, in surveying their achievements, 
 must have said to themselves what the ancient 
 navigators said, when they had reached the 
 limit where the land-locked Mediterranean 
 looks out through its Gibraltar gate upon the 
 shoreless Atlantic : " There is no more be- 
 yond." 
 
 More modern men have said this ; have 
 prophesied dire results to come of beHeving in 
 more beyond — from setting up power-looms 
 instead of hand-looms, sewing machines 
 instead of needles and thimbles, locomotives 
 instead of coach-horses ; but the law of evolu- 
 tion was too mighty for them. There were 
 more buds and blossoms yet in the tree than 
 men had seen come out of it. The world 
 moved on — such was the Divine spirit within 
 its wheels — to forget the things that were 
 behind in stretching forward to those that 
 were before. 
 
 Said the Popes to those who saw a purer 
 Church and a purer truth attainable, " There 
 is no more beyond, except the fire, for such as 
 
74 SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. [iV. 
 
 would disturb our established order." Said the 
 English kings of the seventeenth century to 
 the uprising spirit of liberty, *' There is no 
 more beyond, except the prison and the 
 scaffold, for such as question what we have 
 settled." " There is no more beyond," say the 
 theologians of the seventeenth century who are 
 with us to this day, '"' except proscription for 
 such as go beyond our bounds." But still the 
 Church moves on ; the world moves ; the things 
 that were are not the things that shall be. 
 There is far more beyond than we have seen or 
 ■even dreamed. There are branches to spring 
 from the ever-growing tree that have not yet 
 even budded. 
 
 Such is the law of the great world-move- 
 ment, Divinely organised, in its exhaustless 
 power of unfolding from the past and present 
 •a future ever better. If we see it, we should 
 learn from it. This is its lesson. The law of 
 the world-movement is also the Divine law 
 for the individual life. The world-movement 
 fulfils the law of ceaseless progress under the 
 impulse of the Spirit of God; no mortal life 
 is long enough, no human spirit capacious 
 enough, to rule an orbit so vast. But what 
 God works in the great whole we are to work 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. 75 
 
 in our part. His evident purpose of more 
 beyond is to be our faith for aspiration and 
 pursuit, our rebuke of premature contentment 
 with a fraction of the Divine result. He in 
 the mass, we as the molecules of the mass, are 
 to be of one mind, ''forgetting the things that 
 are beJiind, stretching forward to the things that 
 are before, and pressing on toward the goalT 
 
 II. From thoughts so obvious we may draw 
 fresh convictions of what is most imperative 
 for the realisation of the moral and spiritual 
 capabilities of our nature. AVhile we derive 
 inspirations of confidence from our contem- 
 plation of the grand law of the world's un- 
 ceasing progress, must we not see that this 
 also pronounces a stern rebuke upon every life 
 that is not in harmony with this law? But it 
 is hardly worth our while now to think of the 
 ultra-conservatism which we find in the com- 
 munity and in the Church, vainly calling the 
 €ver-marching columns to halt, and be satis- 
 fied with the tabernacle in the wilderness, and 
 daily rations of the manna that the fathers ate. 
 There is a pressing personal interest for every 
 man to look into here. 
 
 Since " criticism, like charity, should begin 
 at home," we must ask, On what xDrinciple 
 
76 SPIEITUAL BAKBAEISM. [iV. 
 
 is our personal life and thought conducted? 
 So far as relates to our worldly situation, 
 it is on the principle of constant endeavour 
 for betterment, as the necessity of an un- 
 decaying life. Better skill, wiser schemes, 
 profit, promotion, advantage — every one of 
 us is studying for these. We are not so 
 content with what we have, but that we 
 believe in having better, and try to have it. 
 How, then, about the far more important 
 thing ? How can we be contented with what 
 we are, how not believe in being better and 
 try to be it in ourselves? Said Saint Augus- 
 tine, " Men travel far to chmb high moun- 
 tains, to observe the majesty of the ocean, to 
 trace the source of rivers, but they neglect 
 themselves." Our adage tells us that " man 
 is a bundle of contradictions." But what 
 greater contradiction than endeavour for 
 betterment in fortune, but not in character and 
 life? Let us not, then, think censoriously of 
 any, in Church or State, whom we see indolently 
 content with the mouldy bread and threadbare 
 garments of a bygone time, so long as we may 
 suspect the same faihng in ourselves — supine 
 contentment with what we are in thought, in 
 spirit, in temper, in faith, instead of aspiration 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. 77 
 
 after that which we should be and can be, in 
 hkeness to our Master. 
 
 Search thine own hsart. What paineth thee 
 In others, in thyself may be ; 
 All dust is frail, all flesh is weak ; 
 Be thou the true man thou dost seek ! 
 
 " Oiie thing I do," said Paul. Why must we 
 -do the same thing, cultivating moral earnest- 
 ness, cultivating conscience, cultivating our 
 sympathies and powers of doing good, culti- 
 vating devoutness and faith in God, cultivat- 
 ing, in a word, the Christ-like character, in 
 whose satisfactions is the fruit of " the tree of 
 life," the repast of the blessed for ever ? 
 Because otherwise our life runs counter to the 
 principle which the advancing world obeys — 
 false to nature, false to itself, false to God. 
 Morally, such a hfe runs in the line run by the 
 unimprovable and decaying races of mankind, 
 which tend to run out. All unimprovable life 
 must, sooner or later, run out. However 
 broadly stated, it is hardly to be doubted con- 
 cerning anything that lives, that, where the 
 law of development will not work, the law of 
 decay and dissolution is the only law that will. 
 This, then, is the personal concern we 
 have with God's law of undecaying and pro- 
 
78 SPIRITUAL BARBARISM, [iV. 
 
 gressive life, which we see emphasised in the 
 contrast between civihsation and barbarism, 
 manifested in the world's movement as the 
 world's organic law, and insisted on in the 
 Gospel of Christ as the law of spiritual life, 
 the law of redemption from spiritual death. 
 To work with it, intelligently, consistently, 
 perseveringly ; as we use it in external things, 
 so using it inwardly, in the endeavour after a 
 true development of the moral and spiritual 
 self — this is the one thing for every man who 
 thinks upon the inner and central realities 
 of life to set himself to do. In this one thing 
 is involved the promise of the utmost that God 
 can ever bestow upon human hope. But in- 
 stead of this, how many there are who indo- 
 lently criticise the disposition they see in the 
 community and in the Church to rest con- 
 tented with the past. We must look to our- 
 selves : we ourselves are too contented with 
 our own past : the society we find fault with 
 IS made up of such as we. None of us is quite 
 clear of failure to live morally according to the 
 Divine ground-law of the world, in using what 
 is good as only a stepping-stone to what is 
 better, and moral gain as only moral capital 
 for increased production. 
 
IV.] SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. 71) 
 
 Contemplate the runner in the Greek race- 
 course, from whom Paul borrowed the figure 
 of pressing forward to the goal, to whom the 
 goal is everything, and each stride toward it, 
 as soon as taken, nothing in comparison with 
 the strides that still intervene between him 
 and his prize. Look at the machine stamped 
 with the date of half-a-dozen different patents- 
 in consecutive years, and see there the image 
 of the dihgent inventor bent on ultimate 
 excellence, to whom each improvement makes 
 a stepping-stone to another improvement, and 
 each difficulty mastered gives skill to master 
 remaining difficulty, until the original creative 
 idea is rounded out in a consummate instru- 
 ment. Such is the true life of the spirit con- 
 formed to the Divine law of progress — not a 
 drift but a race, not a dream but a study, not 
 self-contentment but self-criticism and self- 
 improvement with the eye upon the Divine 
 model, and constantly saying to itself, " This 
 one tiling I do.'' 
 
 The great reproach of Christianity is its 
 passive content with an average morality, and 
 a life devoid of aspiration to higher levels — in 
 a word, its spiritual barbarism, stagnant, 
 supine, and poor in power. But our choice 
 
80 SPIRITUAL BARBARISM. [iV. 
 
 lies between the law of spiritual development 
 and the law of spiritual decay. No other 
 destiny than under one of these two is open 
 to us. Therefore, " while we live let us live." 
 So, indeed, the Roman Epicurean said. His 
 words mean much or little, according as one's 
 ideal of life is low or high. And so the same 
 words also form the family motto of the pious 
 Philip Doddridge. Let them be our motto, 
 inspired by the moral earnestness of Dod- 
 dridge, which the Epicurean Horace wholly 
 lacked. In Jesus behold the Divine ideal of 
 life, and while we live let us live, " the disciple 
 as his Master, " building into the life of the 
 spirit ever more of that which is indestruc- 
 tible by the years which bring dimness on the 
 ageing eye, and weakness on the ageing hand. 
 " Ye see your calling, brethren." Embrace 
 it as " the high calling of God," to realise ever 
 more of the ever higher and better which lies 
 ever beyond. 
 
V. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
V. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 
 
 "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and 
 create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things." — 
 Isaiah xlv. 7. 
 
 The intelligence, spread before us yester- 
 day, of the awful calamity by whicli, last 
 Tuesday morning, while we were at our 
 breakfast tables, more than a hundred fellow 
 beings were suddenly plunged from their beds 
 into their grave in the waters of the Atlantic, 
 has freshly brought before us the constantly 
 recurring question, which vexes men's minds 
 to-day no less than it did before the Old 
 Testament was written — Whence and why the 
 evil in the world ? 
 
 In our text the prophet very boldly repre- 
 sents God as asserting His responsibility for 
 
 Preached in Anerlet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Morning, August 19, 1888. 
 
84 THE MYSTEEY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 the existence of evil, even to the extent of 
 saying that He is the author of evil : " I create 
 evil, I, the Loed." But observe that evil is not 
 the same as sin. Nowhere is sin attributed to 
 God, or any agency in bringing it to pass. 
 But evil, natural evil — tempests, floods, earth- 
 quakes, diseases, fatalities of all kinds, and 
 their dire results to human life, are the work 
 of God. 
 
 Among the Eastern people, where the Jews 
 at that time resided in captivity, the prophet 
 found a different belief. Evil was there be- 
 lieved to be the work of a malignant deity, 
 who divided the control of things with the 
 benevolent deity. In that theology the govern- 
 ment of the world was a two-headed affair, 
 shared between Ormuzd and Ahriman, hostile 
 deities, who ruled on contrary principles, and 
 thwarted each other all they could. This 
 old Persian dualism, or double headship of 
 things, has worked far and wide in thought, 
 and is traceable even in Christian theology, in 
 which the devil has often been credited with 
 more power than he actually wields. The 
 prophet, however, repudiates that way of 
 thinking, and ascribes the evil of the world, 
 as well as the good, to God. This is not so 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 85 
 
 short and easy a way out of the difficulty of 
 accounting for the existence of evil, but it will 
 prove more satisfactory, because it will be seen 
 to be true. 
 
 We are concerned here with the solution of 
 one of the trying mysteries of life. In the 
 hour of pain, sickness, sorrow, death, our 
 anguished nerves and bleeding hearts make us 
 cry out, " Why should we be smitten ? Whose 
 hand has smitten us?" We see no good 
 cause why we should be smitten. We see no 
 good end to be attained by our being smitten. 
 It is natural, as many of the heathen creeds 
 show, to attribute our suffering to some wrath- 
 ful or malignant power. Many of our neigh- 
 bours so attribute it, either to an angry God, 
 or to a mahcious devil. The Bible unhesita- 
 tingly attributes it to God, but is careful to 
 remind us that " the Loed is good to all, and 
 His tender inercies are over all His ivorJcs." 
 This is just what it is hard for some to 
 beheve, and we need to see strong reason for 
 believing it. 
 
 What, now, is more difficult to prove, than 
 that it is consistent with goodness when the 
 one bread-winner is taken away from a poor 
 and dependent family, or when the mother is 
 
86 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 taken away from the new-born infant, or when 
 men perish by hundreds on the sinking ship, 
 or by thousands in the inundation of the river 
 valley ? We cannot readily see how goodness 
 is at all active in such events. Least of all 
 can we see it when we ourselves are the suf- 
 ferers. All that we are then capable of is, in 
 our calmer moments, to think our way to the 
 conclusion that, after all, perhaps through pro- 
 cesses beyond our power to trace, such evils 
 are not incompatible with a general scheme or 
 plan for all things, that is both originated and 
 controlled by Infinite Goodness. This is 
 everywhere the teaching of Holy Scripture, 
 both in the Old Testament and the New : 
 ^^ The LoED is righteous in all His ivays" ; 
 " Let them that suffer according to the will of 
 God commit the keeping of their so2ils to Him 
 in ID ell-doing as to a faithful C7-eator." 
 
 There are two points, a right view of which 
 is essential to our getting at the truth of the 
 matter, and these now require notice. 
 
 1. Death is not in itself an evil. Simply 
 because it is as common and as natural to us 
 as sleep, death is no more evil in itself than 
 sleep. If death is an evil, then birth is an 
 evil, for continual birth makes continual death 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 87 
 
 necessary, if there is to be any such thing as 
 equal opportunities in the world. Each must 
 have his turn at the table. And what is death 
 but a birth into another life? That to-day, 
 with all its advantages and enjoyments, must 
 end, is well, for it is succeeded after sleep by 
 another. The light which the fact of a day to 
 come sheds upon the end of this day, is shed 
 upon the end of this life by the fact of a life to 
 come. The student, at the end of his college 
 course, parts with the sincerest regret from the 
 college world he has found so pleasant, and 
 feels many a pang of sadness in farewells to 
 cherished friends ; but in the larger world he 
 goes to he expects and finds abundant compen- 
 sation. Immortality transfigures — nay, says 
 Paul, " abolishes " death. Says our poet : 
 
 There is no death ; what seems so is transition. 
 
 It is, said Jesus, but a " sleep.'' Even in the 
 case of the wicked, whom it introduces to evil 
 beyond, death is not in itself an evil, any more 
 than the door is evil through which any wrong- 
 doer passes to trial or to imprisonment. Dying 
 is simply going through the door between two 
 worlds. 
 
 2. Suffering is evil, but is worked by good- 
 
88 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 ness to good ends. We can understand that 
 well enough. At least, we know there is such 
 a thing as wholesome suffering, and we do not 
 spare inflicting it on others for their good. 
 But, we ask, Could not the good ends have 
 been accomplished without the evil of suffer- 
 ing? Well, put the question home. Could 
 you have been made free from faults and follies 
 without suffering? Experience, both of our- 
 selves and others, answers. No. What the 
 Bible affirms, in a certain point, of Jesus, must 
 be much more broadly affirmed of every man — 
 "perfect through suffering " only. 
 
 The only conceivable way of dispensing with 
 suffering is to dispense with imperfection. 
 But a creation in which there is nothing im- 
 perfect, but everything is finished, is incon- 
 ceivable. We cannot conceive what that state 
 of things would be, in which there was not 
 only no infancy and childhood, but no growth 
 of anything ; nothing to learn, because every- 
 thing is known, and nothing to do, because 
 everything is done. The only sort of world 
 open to our minds is a world where things and 
 men are forming, growing, learning under 
 training, and being made perfect in the putting 
 off of that which is raw and the putting on of 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 89 
 
 that which is ripe, through processes which 
 naturally involve suffering. 
 
 But it is staggering to think of the amount 
 of suffering which this involves. Perhaps we 
 may think that it might have been largely pre- 
 vented, if God had provided better instruction, 
 had had guide-boards set up to show the right 
 way, and thorn-hedges to close up wrong ways. 
 Well, has He not done so ? Have we never 
 known people to take the wrong way in spite 
 of wise counsel, and to take it again and again 
 in spite of bitter experience?" When, in so 
 many cases, experience fails, and suffering 
 is in vain, how weak would any softer and 
 smoother discipline have proved as a means to 
 good. 
 
 What we have to admit, then, is, that suffer- 
 ing, though evil in itself, is a means to good, 
 and is an instrument in the hands of goodness. 
 Our difficulty is, that while we see this to be 
 true to a certain extent, we do not see it in 
 every case. Nevertheless, it appears true, as 
 far as we are able to trace the connection of 
 cause and effect. What is the most reasonable 
 conclusion from that ? Simply this, that we 
 should see the same if we were able to see 
 further. What is true so far as we know, what 
 
90 THE MYSTEEY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 we see to be true more and more, the more we 
 know, is probably true to the end. 
 
 This is not merely an inference ; facts point 
 that way. Plagues, like the cholera, were long 
 unaccountable, except as a mysterious dispen- 
 sation of Providence. What good end they 
 served was past imagining. They have been 
 traced to their cause in filthy habits of living. 
 When this stops, the plague stops. The 
 benefit of the plague is not merely in enforcing 
 the laws of health, and thus preventing the 
 suffering that comes of breaking them. It is 
 by cleaner living to produce better men, not 
 only physically, but mentally and morally 
 better. For it is not so easy to be a saint on 
 a dung-heap, or a philosopher in the midst of 
 rot. 
 
 Thus, in one way or another, we shall find 
 that the agency of suffering, through various 
 forms of evil, is to produce a wiser, stronger, 
 purer human life. So far as we can trace the 
 connection of cause and effect, suffering plainly 
 works for good. But if we cannot in many 
 cases trace the connection, shall we then deny 
 it ? We may, indeed, say : I do not see the 
 goodness in the blizzard, desolating so many 
 homes, in the river flood engulfing thousands, 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 91 
 
 in the deaths that leave parents childless and 
 babes orphans. But we must say it reverently, 
 aware that there are more facts than we see, 
 and more truth than we know. 
 
 It is not in our times that doubt has first 
 risen against either the sovereignty or the 
 goodness of God from the fact that so much 
 evil is in the world. In Isaiah's time, as our 
 text shows, men doubted God's sovereignty ; 
 He couldn't help it ; the evil spirit was too 
 strong. But we can no longer attribute any 
 such alleged defeat of God either to the 
 ancient Ahriman or to the modern devil. 
 Science has come to the aid of Christian 
 thought by showing that one law rules 
 throughout creation ; that gravitation and 
 light are uniform in their action on the earth 
 and on the stars. 
 
 Again, some of the philosophers of Greece, 
 with Epicurus, reasoned thus : God either 
 would prevent evil and could not : in which 
 case He is weak ; or He could prevent it and 
 would not; in which case He is mahgnant. 
 But this we see would depend on why He 
 would not. The surgeon hurts the child in 
 setting a broken bone. The parent can pre- 
 vent that suffering, but will not. The parent 
 
92 THE MYSTEEY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 is therefore malignant. So reasons the sceptic 
 about God. But if the evil were the means of 
 good, to prevent the evil would be malignant. 
 Still, it is hard to be reasonable in our suffer- 
 ings. Job's wife, who said to him, " Curse God 
 and die," is a common character. Even we, 
 who now, in this calm hour, are quite easily- 
 persuaded that evils which do not touch us 
 are consistent with the sovereignty of good- 
 ness, may find our philosophy suddenly melting 
 in the flame of some doubly-heated furnace of 
 affliction in which we to-morrow may find 
 ourselves plunged. Why and wherefore over- 
 whelmed, we cannot tell. It is of no benefit 
 to ask why. Time only can explain that. 
 Meanwhile, what are we to do? "Jesus 
 answered and said unto them, Have faith in 
 God." We know there are not two hands on 
 the helm. We know that one Sovereign is on 
 the throne. We know that all His works, so 
 soon as the light of vision falls clear and 
 bright upon them, are seen to be wise, and 
 just, and good. This should be enough for the 
 emergency, till the time of clear sight and 
 calm judgment comes again. When we are 
 thus shut up to the alternative of believing in 
 God, or believing in a blind chance or fate, or 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 93 
 
 a malignant devil, we have reason enough to 
 say with our poet : — 
 
 Yet, in the maddening maze of thingf. 
 And tossed with storm and flood, 
 
 To one fixed stake my spirit clings ; 
 I know that God is good. 
 
 I know not where His islands lift 
 
 Their fronded palms in air ; 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 
 Beyond His love and care. 
 
 And what now if it be one of the ends for 
 which the evil is appointed — to educate us into 
 this trustful faith in God? Among all the 
 varied ends of goodness which it may serve, 
 this, surely, is not the least. 
 
 It is certainly a pathetic spectacle which is 
 presented by the introduction upon this earth, 
 amid all the fierce and roaring powers of 
 nature, of puny and tiny man. Contemplate 
 him in his primitive condition, as he comes 
 into being on the planet where fire, frost, and 
 flood, tempest, earthquake and volcano, have 
 been battling with each other for ages— burn- 
 ing, rending, blasting, grinding, till they have 
 prepared the soil, the coal, the metals, that 
 are to serve his need. And what is he but an 
 infant, the weakest among the animal tribes 
 
94 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 that he must conquer and tame ? Surely, by 
 what but suffering can this rudimentary man 
 become perfected man ? The frost must spur 
 him to clothe himself, the tempest to house 
 himself, hunger to lay up food, dangers to 
 cultivate prudence in avoiding and courage in 
 overcoming. The very pains which thus 
 stimulate his powers to exercise bring pleasure 
 in that exercise, and happiness in the fruits 
 of exercise. The pleasures of civilised life, in 
 all their variety and abundance and high 
 refinement, have thus come to exist as the 
 fruit of pains, which spurred humanity toward 
 higher and higher levels. In the light of such 
 a fact suffering is manifestly not only no dis- 
 proof, but rather proof of the goodness which 
 thus ordained. 
 
 And yet one may ask. Though good in the 
 remote results, and good for those in whose 
 days the slowly ripening fruit matures, is it 
 good also for the moment, and for those that 
 are planting the seed ? Are the earlier and 
 low-down men on an equality of benefit in 
 this respect with the later and high-up men ? 
 We must say that they are. The first rude 
 hut, which suffering from the weather forced 
 the primitive savage to construct, seemed as 
 
v.] TEE MYSTERY OF EVIL, 95 
 
 good to him as our improved dwellings seem 
 to us. In such comparisons of man with 
 man, we must always remember that " the 
 limit of nature is the limit of enjoyment." 
 Then, again, pain equally for all men stands 
 as a kindly sentinel to warn and guard 
 against destructive injuries. Pain is the 
 great preservative of life, whether low or 
 high. Furthermore, whether it be from 
 apathy or from fortitude, the ruder tribes 
 of men are said to view death itself with 
 less fear, and to meet it with more calmness 
 and resignation as a natural thing, than 
 do the highly civilised. And so, whatever 
 point of view we take, we find not only 
 that suffering has been the stimulus to the 
 protecting and the perfecting of life, but 
 also that in all grades of the long process 
 its agency is equally benevolent toward all 
 men. 
 
 While, then, there are still some who 
 think, with King Alphonso of Castile, that if 
 God had consulted them before making the 
 world, they could have given Him some 
 valuable suggestions, those who have properly 
 cultivated that valuable branch of knowledge 
 which is in proper acquaintance with our 
 
96 THE MTSTEEY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 own ignorance, will be disposed to admit 
 whatever truth there is in Pope's familiar 
 couplet : — 
 
 In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite. 
 One truth is clear, whatever is, is right. 
 
 Two French astronomers of fame have as- 
 serted that they could have placed the moon 
 better, so that it should always be seen full. But 
 it has been proved that the consequence of this 
 alleged improvement upon God's plan would 
 be, *'that the moon would give sixteen times 
 less light than it gives now, and would be in 
 constant danger of extinction." Truly it is 
 better to have some dark nights every month 
 than to have wise astronomers tinkering at 
 God's arrangements. 
 
 But, indeed, it is pathetic and saddening to 
 witness the struggle of feeble man with the 
 gigantic powers of Nature. Tragic often is 
 his fate in the icy grasp of the frost-king, in 
 the vortex of the cyclone, on the foundering 
 ship. "What seeming waste of life, what pro- 
 fusion of suffering ! Mr. J. S. Mill has 
 written a very vigorous indictment of Nature, 
 as more remorseless than any fiend that is 
 known to history, more bloodthirsty than any 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 97 
 
 whom mankind have execrated as a murderer, 
 more indifferent to human suffering than any 
 madman ; from which he concludes that 
 there is no moral spirit animating the terrible 
 giant called Nature. The rigour of Nature 
 makes it hard for him and many others to 
 believe in the goodness of God. These great 
 world-forces, indeed, rush like cannon-balls 
 straight to their end without heeding what 
 they crush in their path. But are they there- 
 fore blind ? Are they uncontrolled by intelli- 
 gence ? Are they instruments of anything but 
 goodness? Our eyes moisten as we read of 
 the children frozen by the bhzzard on their 
 way home from school, of the light vainly set 
 in the cottage window for the father perishing 
 within a rod of his door. But if this is not 
 to be, what is the alternative? Supernatural 
 interferences, constantly suspending Nature's 
 order for the sake of those that are in the way,, 
 fitful irregularity in place of that steady 
 invariableness on which alone we are able to 
 base our plans and proceedings with intelligent 
 forethought. A world so regulated, or rather 
 unregulated, we may unhesitatingly declare a 
 world of far greater and worse suffering than 
 any which results from the strict maintenance 
 
■98 THE MYSTERY OP EVIL. [V. 
 
 of any established order. What ? says the 
 poet : 
 
 Shall trravitation cease when you go by ? 
 
 What ? says the moralist : Shall not men be 
 bound under sufficient penalties to adjust 
 themselves obediently to all laws? Manifestly, 
 it is every way better to be obliged under 
 penalty to conform to Nature, than that 
 Nature should be forced spasmodically to 
 conform to us. 
 
 Here the familiar story of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers of New England is in point. They 
 arrived on the American coast in the most 
 unseasonable time, at the setting in of winter. 
 Their exposures and hardships consequently 
 brought on a fatal sickness. Before their first 
 corn was planted half of them had been buried. 
 Seldom has a more pathetic tale been told 
 than that of these poor, pious exiles — 
 
 A screen of leafless branches 
 Betwixt them and the blast. 
 
 But had it better not have been so V Is 
 heroism worth so little that there had better 
 be no occasion made for it by the presence of 
 great evils calling out all the strength of 
 
v.] THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 99 
 
 spirit that man is capable of ? Who can tell 
 how much that terrible suffering, met with 
 such loftiness of spirit, has been worth to the 
 world, in kindling the same unquenchable fire 
 of heroism in multitudes of admiring be- 
 holders ? So I have seen it stated, and with 
 reason, as I think, that the vain search of 
 Englishmen for a north-west passage to India 
 around the frozen extremity of the American 
 continent was worth all the suffering it had 
 caused, for the heroic qualities of human 
 nature which it had displayed for the admira- 
 tion and imitation of the world. Nor is it 
 worth this for the spectators only, but for the 
 actors also. What the fire is to the gold, that 
 is suffering to the character ; lessening pride, 
 developing patience, subduing selfishness, 
 drawing forth sympathy, cultivating the trust- 
 fulness of the saint, and the strength of the 
 hero. The noblest and purest souls have 
 learned to say, "'It is good for me that I have 
 been afflicted." 
 
 And so the great mystery of the evil in 
 God's world requires for its solution a right 
 answer to the supreme question. What is it 
 that we are to be intent on as our first aim ? 
 Not happiness, surely. In the midst of " all 
 
100 THE MTSTEEY OF EVIL. [v. 
 
 the ills that flesh is heir to," it is plainly not 
 happiness that is first to be thought of. 
 Evidently God has not made that the first 
 thing. And it is a proof of His benevolence 
 that He has not. For happiness for the 
 imperfect means content v^ith imperfection. 
 Compare balmy India v^ith bleak Scotland — 
 lands w^here Nature is genial and bountiful 
 with lands v^here she is stern and stingy. We 
 find man at his best where Nature is very 
 harsh and niggard. It often is as our hymn 
 says, " Where every prospect pleases," that 
 " only man is vile." It is from those that 
 seek happiness first that the cry of the 
 pessimist comes, that existence itself is the 
 supreme evil. Well says Carlyle : "If what 
 thou namest happiness be our true aim, then 
 are we all astray. Behold thou art fatherless, 
 outcast, and the universe is — the devil's." 
 Perfection, rather than happiness, this is first ; 
 in order to this, suffering ; then, in proportion 
 to the perfection attained thereby, resulting 
 blessedness. 
 
 Nor is this a mere opinion. History 
 has manifestly led that way. The facts of 
 long observation and experience point that 
 way. Saints and heroes there are not many 
 
v.] THE MYSTEEY OF EVIL. 101 
 
 yet, but more than there were. Better grows 
 the breed of men. The whole creation still is 
 ''groaning,'' as Paul declared, under the 
 pressure of the disciplinary evil. But, after 
 every successful struggle, the conquering 
 Samson finds honey in the carcase of the 
 lion. 
 
 But whether it be the heathen savage, in 
 
 whose prehistoric sepulchre we find beside the 
 
 skeleton the bow and arrows placed there for 
 
 his use in Elysian hunting-grounds, where no 
 
 foe shall hinder his chase of game upon the 
 
 peaceful hills, or whether it be the Christian 
 
 philanthropist, on whose monument we find 
 
 sculptured the palm and crown of the divinest 
 
 victory, we read everywhere in the heart of 
 
 man the God-implanted presage of a coming 
 
 life, in which the spirit, schooled by suffering 
 
 to the way of God, is appointed to the full 
 
 fruition of its painfully developed energies, and 
 
 the pains of training are forgotten in the joyous 
 
 exercise of perfected powers. It was in the 
 
 intuition of this great truth that one appointed 
 
 to more hardship than is common to the lot of 
 
 man bore his testimony to the ages thus : 
 
 " Our light affliction, which is for the moment, 
 
 loorketh for us more and more exceedingly an 
 
102 THE MYSTEEY OF EVIL. [V. 
 
 eternal tveight of glory ; while ive look not at 
 the things ivhich are seen, hut at the things 
 which are not seen : for the things which are 
 seen are temporal ; hut the things which are not 
 seen are eternal." 
 
VI. 
 
 THE ASSURANCE OF IMMOBTALITY. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 
 
 " I lay doivn My life, that I may take it again." — 
 John X. 17. 
 
 In these words of Christ we find a thought of 
 the highest consequence in our quest for certain 
 proof of Hfe after death. That thought is, that 
 in the very yielding up of hfe with such a pur- 
 pose as that of Jesus there is a certainty that 
 that purpose shall attain its end in a continued 
 life. Such a surrender of the mortal existence 
 is a guarantee of receiving the immortal. This 
 is not at first sight evident, but on examination 
 it becomes conclusively certain. 
 
 In the almost daily presence of death, in the 
 absence of any verifiable communications with 
 departed souls, in the presence, also, of more 
 or less scepticism on the part of neighbours as 
 to the reality of a future life, one of our most 
 
 Pkeached in Anerley Congkegational Church, 
 Sunday Evening, August 19, 1888. 
 
106 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 important needs is to establish our belief in 
 that reality upon impregnable foundations. It 
 is the grand fact as to which it concerns us, for 
 the moral vigour and steadfastness of our pre- 
 sent life, to have absolutely no doubt at all. It 
 is well if we have found rest in the traditional 
 belief. It is better if we have by our own 
 thought made that belief our assurance, and 
 confirmed our confidence by personal insight 
 into the indubitableness of its proof. 
 
 There are moments of darkness which some- 
 times blind us, especially when we have seen 
 the clods fall into some precious grave. In 
 the silent vacancy of a bereaved life we some- 
 times ask, with passionate earnestness : "How 
 do I know that the one who never will come 
 back is living still? " Then no borrowed belief, 
 no traditional response, will meet our demand 
 for insight into the secret of the grave. We 
 must see for ourselves that immortality is no 
 mere wish and hope, no mere passionate long- 
 ing, but an assured fact. 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus is the fact on 
 which Christian faith is generally content to 
 rest for proof of immortality. Thus the Apostles, 
 the eye-witnesses of that fact, uniformly argued. 
 "■ If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, 
 
VI.] THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMOETALITY. 107 
 
 even so them also which sleep in Jesus ivill God 
 hring with Him." If we are thus convinced it 
 is well ; it is a rock-built faith. 
 
 Still, as a matter of fact, many are not thus 
 convinced. I have known such. They would 
 like to be convinced, but — they say — can any 
 ancient event which rests on historical testi- 
 mony alone be as free from doubt as a fact like 
 the resurrection should be? History — they 
 say — often misreports facts. How can we be 
 certain that it has not misreported this ? How 
 is it to be proved beyond all doubt, that the 
 Apostles really saw the glorified form which 
 they thought they saw ? A highly educated 
 man, mourning the death of a child, thus 
 writes to me : "I wish I could share your 
 assurance of a resurrection life. But a mere 
 wish is not sufficient for a rational belief. 
 Modern learning has convicted ancient faith of 
 many illusions. How can we be sure that the 
 twenty-fifth century will not thus convict the 
 nineteenth of credulity in regard to the resur- 
 rection? " 
 
 Such inquiries one meets to-day, not from 
 mockers but from earnest seekers for a convic- 
 tion which, could they attain it, they would 
 prize as the light of life. The usual historical 
 
108 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 argument — there has been a resurrection, be- 
 cause trustworthy men report it — they ask us 
 to strengthen, if we can, because historical 
 testimony to past events is always open to 
 criticism, and they want a proof that is not 
 thus assailable, that holds like a clinched nail, 
 not a mere belief, but a verified certainty. 
 
 The Scripture itself respects this demand. 
 While the Apostles usually argued from the 
 historical testimony of the then living wit- 
 nesses, they argued also on the still higher 
 ground of psychological necessity. Peter, in 
 his first sermon, says that God raised up Jesus 
 from death, " because it was not possible that 
 He should be holclen by it." That is, the very 
 nature of Jesus' life made His resurrection 
 necessary. Now, this psychological line of 
 thought is for us to follow to-day. It is a very 
 simple line of thought ; the only hard thing 
 about it, if any, is its name. Where the his- 
 torical proof asserts only what has been, the 
 psychological proof shows what must be. 
 While the historical proof deals with the re- 
 corded testimony of witnesses who cannot be 
 recalled to undergo a cross-examination, the 
 psychological proof deals with the facts of 
 living nature, which are as open to the scrutiny 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 109 
 
 of reason to-day as they ever were. Among 
 all the available v^itnesses for the resurrection, 
 the life itself v^hose resurrection is in question 
 is as competent a witness as any, and is en- 
 titled to speak in its own behalf.* 
 
 Now, however content we be with the 
 traditional historical proof, as well we may be, 
 we shall nevertheless do well to fortify it. An 
 interest so vital as the assurance of a future 
 life is not to be suspended on a single line of 
 evidence, where more is near at hand. A hope 
 so precious should have more to sustain it 
 than a belief that the senses of the witnesses 
 to an isolated and unparalleled event, such as 
 Jesus' resurrection, were not deceived. It 
 should also have the farther benefit of seeing 
 that, in the nature of things, there must be a 
 resurrection; that what the history records 
 is guaranteed by the very nature of the life 
 as a life that could not perish. 
 
 * The tei'iu " resvirrection " may be used in two senses. 
 It may denote the phenomenal manifestation, as reported 
 by the Evangelists, or it may denote the substantial reality 
 — the rising up into the future life of the spirit. It is with 
 this latter sense of the word that the argument here given 
 has to do. Whoever will analyse Jesus' argimient with 
 the Sadducees upon the resurrection wiU see that He uses 
 resiu-rection and life after death as logically equivalent and 
 convertible terms. 
 
110 THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 This, then, is the thought which we find in- 
 volved in Jesus' saying : " I laij down My life, 
 that I may take it again." Death, therefore, 
 in Jesus' view, is not a destroyer but a de- 
 liverer. Life is preserved by the surrender of 
 life. Nay, Jesus adds, emphatically, that it is 
 for this that God loves Him, because He gives 
 life as the price of life — the highest sacrifice 
 for the highest prize. " Therefore doth My 
 Father love Me, because I lay down My life, 
 that I may take it again." This does not 
 mean that God loves him merely because He 
 dies and rises again, but because, in the way 
 of duty, He surrenders life in order to preserve 
 fife ; yields the lower to gain the higher, pre- 
 cisely as He bids His disciples to do: " if e 
 that loseth his life in this world for My sake, 
 the same shall save it.'' The thought of Jesus 
 is, that death, voluntarily accepted in a holy 
 cause, as an act of duty, is an act not of self- 
 destruction, but of self-preservation. In this 
 idea we shall find the demonstration we are in 
 search of, not merely the reality of the resur- 
 rection, but the rational necessity of it. 
 
 Here, then, we merely lay down the simple 
 proposition that the fundamental instincts of 
 life are trustworthy. This is all that we need 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. Ill 
 
 take for granted in our proof of immortality. 
 AVe have perfect right to assume thus much — 
 that Nature is truthful, that there is no fraud 
 or imposture in the constitution of things. 
 
 Now when we inqmre what instinct is, we 
 touch a wonder that is indeed Divine. We 
 are wont to think of the instinctive actions of 
 animals as of lowly origin, mere brute and 
 irrational action. There could be no greater 
 mistake. On the contrary, the action of 
 instinct in man or beast is the immediate 
 action of the Universal Mind in its orderly 
 adaptation of means to ends ; instinctive 
 action is Divine action. When the bee builds 
 its six-sided cells, it has no notion of geome- 
 try, but " God geometrises " in the bee. The 
 duckling that takes to the water does so not 
 by its own intelligence, but in obedience to 
 the intelligent direction of the Mind which so 
 organised its nature. When God is repre- 
 sented as asking Job, " Doth the hawk fly by 
 thy wisdom and stretch her wings toicard the 
 south ?" it is implied that it is Divine intelli- 
 gence which prompts and guides the annual 
 migrations of the birds. The instinctive 
 action by which the lower creatures, as soon as 
 born, either seek their food or avoid their 
 
112 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMOETALITT. [VI. 
 
 natural enemies, is intelligent, but it is not 
 mere animal intelligence. It is the intelli- 
 gence of the One Mind which wisely works in 
 all. It is so in man as in beast. We also 
 have our instincts as well as our reflecting 
 reason. When we act from purely natural 
 instinct, it is not merely we, but God acting 
 in us in advance of the slower action of our 
 self-conscious reason. We must trust our 
 reason, but where our reason is unready or 
 insulBcient we must trust our natural instinct. 
 In all that is perplexing and uncertain we 
 feel that in trusting our nature — that is, 
 original and unspoiled nature — we rest on 
 truth and reality. Now this fundamental 
 faith — the primal necessity of our life — forms 
 the bed-rock on which an impregnable proof 
 of immortality rests. 
 
 There is nothing that all trust more un- 
 hesitatingly than the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. In the action of this instinct — sudden, 
 unreflecting, imperious — we see the intelli- 
 gence of the Author of our life exerting itself 
 for the continuance of life. When danger 
 bursts upon us like a lightning flash, we do 
 something to escape it, before we have time 
 to think what is best to do. This instinctive 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 113 
 
 action is ours, and yet not ours only, but 
 God's ; the action of the Universal Mind 
 which is the same in all. In this instinctive 
 ^iction there is both a testimony and a dictate 
 — a testimony that Hfe can be prolonged, if 
 we can make the necessary effort; and, also, 
 a dictate to make that effort. We believe 
 the testimony, we act upon the dictate, we 
 know that nature is truthful. But, now, we 
 have to notice that it is not only in physical 
 dangers, amid rushing waters or falling rocks, 
 that this instinct of self-preservation works — 
 not merely to save our bodies from wounds 
 and death. 
 
 Wherever conscience is developed, wherever 
 integrity, purity, honour, truth have been 
 wrought into life, there is found a moral 
 instinct, whose action is the glory of humanity 
 and the grand wonder of the world, as the 
 action of Him who is above the world. It is 
 an instinct which seeks the preservation of 
 our moral life, just as the corresponding 
 animal instinct seeks to preserve our animal 
 life. Like the lower instinct, also, the higher 
 instinct gives us both a testimony and a dictate 
 — a testimony that the moral life can be pro- 
 longed by the necessary effort and sacrifice, 
 
114 THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [vi. 
 
 and a dictate to make that effort and offer that 
 sacrifice. 
 
 We see this moral instinct impelhng those 
 whom it animates, to choose death rather than 
 hfe, to yield the shrinking nerves to the rack 
 of the tormentor, to how the neck to the 
 executioner's axe, to surrender the living flesh 
 to the flames of martyrdom, rather than to 
 buy life with one word of treason to the 
 dictate of conscience. A most unique and 
 marvellous phenomenon this appears to who- 
 ever reflects upon it — this willing, nay, joyous 
 embrace of physical death as the deliverer of 
 the moral life. Men who are willing to live 
 at any price regard it as sheer folly, fanatical 
 madness, preposterous suicide. Nor could we 
 avoid agreeing with them, unless we were 
 convinced of the truth of Jesus' saying: "I 
 lay down My life, that I may take it again.'* 
 Such, then, is the alternative presented to 
 reason. Either the moral instinct which parts 
 with this world rather than part with truth, 
 with purity, with integrity, with a good con- 
 science, is an utterly irrational and treach- 
 erous instinct, throwing away everything for 
 an utter blank, or else the prize it struggles 
 for is worth the price it pays ; the world 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 115 
 
 it aspires to is as real as the world it sacri- 
 fices. 
 
 The mere statement of this alternative will 
 carry conviction to most minds. But it must 
 in reason carry conviction to all minds. And 
 so there is more to be said. The question 
 may still detain a few cautious thinkers,, 
 whether this moral instinct, so sublime in its 
 self-devotion, is really, as we view it, a self- 
 preserving instinct. That it preserves some- 
 thing, there can be, of course, no question. 
 Virtue is kept alive in a vicious world ; 
 honour, faith, moral heroism, spread from 
 such examples by a sacred contagion. The 
 sparks from the martyrs' burnings kindle a 
 holy flame in many a beholder's soul. What- 
 ever these heroic victims thought worth the 
 keeping, when they refused to keep their life, 
 has, indeed, been kept aHve and propagated in 
 the hving world by their laying down of life. 
 Not utterly bootless their deaths, then, in any 
 case. But, if this were all, they were not self- 
 preservers but self-destroyers. If this were all, 
 they died as rats die, in whose migrations the 
 bodies of some fill ditches for their comrades 
 to march over. They have, indeed, by dying 
 kept virtue ahve in others. But did they 
 
116 THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 keep their own viutne, for the sake of which 
 they died, any longer than they kept their 
 breath ? That is the question. Our answer 
 to it conies from the moral instinct itself. Our 
 confidence in the answer rests on the trust- 
 worthiness of the moral instinct. This cannot 
 he false unless Nature itself is a liar, and there 
 is nothing in the universe which we can trust 
 as absolute truth. 
 
 In the reign of Henry VIII., Sir Thomas 
 More, the foremost Englishman of his time, 
 was required to take a new oath of allegiance, 
 in which was a clause affirming that the King's 
 divorce from Catherine, his first queen, was, in 
 a religious point of view, valid. This More 
 did not in his conscience believe, and therefore 
 declined to sully his conscience by swearing 
 falsely. For his refusal he was brought to the 
 scaffold as a traitor and beheaded, while many 
 of his fellow Catholics saved themselves by 
 committing perjury. The question is, whether 
 More, by his heroic fidelity to conscience, 
 merely contributed to keep integrity alive in 
 other men, who admired his example, or 
 whether, beside this, he kept his own integ- 
 rity alive, although his body perished. 
 
 Let us imagine a modern disbeliever in im- 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 117 
 
 mortality arguing with More to persuade him 
 not to resolve on death. 
 
 Your integrity is dear to you, Sir Thomas, 
 but what is integrity? It is only a refined 
 sort of taste, a very dehcate physical sensa- 
 tion, as much a part of bodily nature as your 
 preference for the fragrance of a rose. If you 
 save your hfe by consenting to this required 
 perjury, you cannot, of course, enjoy your in- 
 tegrity as you have hitherto. But that will be 
 only parting with one sweet odour, you will 
 have one enjoyable physical sensation less 
 than now. And this you can, no doubt, make 
 up by some new or increased enjoyment in 
 other directions. You will, of course, for a 
 time feel a certain disgust, but that is also a 
 wholly physical matter, like a vile smell in the 
 nostrils, and this you will, no doubt, be able 
 to banish in time by various agreeable ex- 
 pedients. Men never hesitate to sacrifice a 
 limb or an eye to save their life, and your in- 
 tegrity is a mere function of your brain, the 
 same as your sight. Why not sacrifice it to 
 the royal mandate rather than take it to the 
 scaffold, where in a moment you will lose it 
 and everything else for ever— all your fine feel- 
 ings and what you call conscience vanishing 
 
118 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 utterly at the fall of the axe in the last breath 
 that gurgles from your headless trunk ? Nay, 
 rather, yield as others yield, keep what 
 you can of life, family, friends, enjoyments, 
 honours, for many years to come. 
 
 Such is the plea with which a denial of the 
 immortal life of the spirit re-enforces the 
 natural instinct of the throbbing animal life 
 which recoils from death as its destroyer. 
 And yet, in spite of all the ghastly terrors in 
 the way, in spite of the repugnance of a sen- 
 sitive nature to encounter its destroyer, in 
 spite of all the doubts that are raised, when, 
 to offset the visible and tangible benefits of 
 continued life in this world, there is nothing 
 to cast into the opposite scale except what 
 is invisible — a simple faith and hope — the 
 self-preserving instinct of the moral life girds 
 the martyr of principle with an invincible 
 courage to lay life down that he may take it 
 again. 
 
 Shall any thinking man here say that there 
 is no life to take again which is independent of 
 the failing heart-beat ? Did More keep his 
 integrity, but keep no life of integrity ? One 
 can say so only by the sacrifice of reason to 
 absurdity. Either integrity is perishable, or 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 119 
 
 the life to which integrity belongs is imperish- 
 able. 
 
 But what stark unreason it is, to say that 
 the dictate of the moral instinct of our nature, 
 which bids us to part with life for the keeping 
 of integrity, is less rational than the dictate of 
 the physical instinct, which bids us part with 
 integrity for the keeping of life ! And when 
 we see and applaud the action of moral heroes 
 and saints, in whom the self-preserving in- 
 stinct of the animal life is met and overborne 
 in its most imperious demands by the self- 
 preserving instinct of the moral nature, what 
 blind unreason, again, it is, to say that the 
 defeated instinct to save the body pointed to a 
 substantial advantage ; but the conquering 
 instinct to lay life down to take it again 
 pointed to something unsubstantial — a mere 
 shadow and illusion ! Beyond demonstration 
 to our senses as is the life to be taken again, 
 in contrast with the life of the senses which is 
 laid down, it is made good to our reason as an 
 absolute certainty by this one fact — that, if 
 there were no such life to come, we could give 
 no rational account of the action of our higher 
 nature, our moral instincts. We should be 
 forced to admit that the noblest part of human 
 
120 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMORTALITY. [VI. 
 
 nature is the most deceptive and the most 
 irrational. 
 
 When, therefore, Professor Drummond, with 
 many other eminent Christian thinkers, says 
 that immortahty is the one point in the Chris- 
 tian system which most needs verification from 
 without, by some proof of an external sort, we 
 regret it as a most incautious and unwarrant- 
 able concession. On the contrary, we are 
 compelled to insist that the exact contrary is 
 the only true statement. We have to believe 
 in the life which we have not seen, simply 
 because it is a necessity of reason for the 
 rational explanation of the phenomena of 
 human nature. Similarly, we have to believe 
 in other things invisible, because they are 
 necessary to reason. The ether which fills all 
 space, through which the stars move, no eye 
 has seen. Yet that there is such an ether is 
 the faith of science. Why? Because the 
 phenomena of light can be explained only by 
 the existence of this invisible ether. Such 
 scientists as Professor Tyndall tell us we 
 must believe it to be a reality, because it is a 
 postulate of reason for the rational explanation 
 of the action of light. Precisely on this 
 scientific ground of rational necessity the 
 
VI.] THE ASSUEAKCE OF IMMORTALITY. 121 
 
 doctrine of immortality rests, besides the 
 declaration of the Scriptures. The evidence 
 for it from the action of our moral nature is 
 so convincing, that a distinguished writer of 
 the last century — Samuel Clarke — declared 
 that, even though there v^ere no other 
 revelation, it could not be gainsaid or doubted. 
 In just this point we can also appeal to one of 
 the most celebrated names of modern science. 
 Says Professor Huxley : "If one is able to 
 make good the assertion that his theology 
 rests upon valid evidence and sound reason- 
 ing, such theology must take its place as a 
 part of science." In view of what we are 
 thus encouraged to claim as a scientific verifi- 
 cation of immortality, w^e may now quote the 
 remark of another of the great scientists of 
 our time. Said Herbert Spencer: "How 
 truly its central position is impregnable, 
 religion has never adequately realised." 
 
 That an assurance of immortality is the 
 central necessity of religion is evident. As 
 there is no progress of any kind without self- 
 denial, as there is no self-denial of any kind 
 without the expectation of a gain to over- 
 balance the sacrifice ; so all moral progress, 
 all growth of virtue, is at an end, if there is 
 
122 THE ASSUEANCE OF IMMOETALITY. [VI. 
 
 ■an end to the hope of hfe to be taken up 
 when this hfe is laid down. 
 
 When so saying, we do not forget the splen- 
 did instances of self-devotion in many, who 
 have met death bravely in a noble cause with- 
 out the sustaining hope of a life to come. 
 But in these we see that gracious provision of 
 God, through which, when reason falters, 
 instinct takes its place. In such instinctive 
 heroism, unsustained by conscious reason, we 
 see just what we see in the unreasoning 
 sagacity of the lower animals. It is the 
 action of the Universal Mind, intelligently 
 working in the bhndly acting creature. 
 
 But while we recognise this, we see, on the 
 other hand, what history shows without 
 exception. No human virtue has ever been 
 able to propagate itself from generation to 
 generation, to redeem society from gravitation 
 into profligacy and moral ruin, or to make 
 truth and righteousness spread in the world, 
 apart from a rational conviction of the life to 
 come. Apart from that conviction, at once 
 awing and inspiring, men generally act upon 
 the maxim, that " a living dog is better than 
 a dead liori," and prefer to live like dogs than 
 to die hke lions. A bound is set to the power 
 
VI.] THE ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY. 123 
 
 of truth, conscience, duty, by any suspicion 
 that the grave is the bound which is set to 
 Hfe. It is only the hand of Immortahty that 
 draws aside the veil which this world casts 
 over the face of God as our Judge. It is only 
 the foregleams of Eternity which cast a saving 
 light on our pathway, so beset by the precipice 
 and the pit. This kindly Hght God has im- 
 planted as the central instinct of our souls. 
 It is ours to cherish as His most precious 
 gift to reason. It is ours to follow as our 
 most precious guide to the Father's , blessing 
 and the Father's house. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION : A GLIMPSE 
 OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 
 
VIT. 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION: A GLIMPSE 
 OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 
 
 "And it came to jpass, about eight days after these sayings. 
 He took with Him Peter and John and James, and went up info 
 the mountain to pray. And as He was praying, the fashion of 
 His countenance was altered, and His raiment became white and 
 dazzling. And behold, there talked with Him two men, which 
 were Moses and Elijah ; who appeared in glory, and spake of 
 His decease which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. 
 Now Peter and they that were with Him were heavy with sleep -. 
 but when they were fully awake, they saw His glory, and the 
 two men that stood with Him." — Luke ix. 28 — 32. 
 
 It was in the last summer which our Lord 
 spent in His earthly ministry that the event 
 which we are to study took place. Hardly 
 nine months remained in which to finish His 
 work. The sky was dark with the gathering 
 of the storm that burst on the day of the 
 Crucifixion. Such a time our Lord chose 
 
 Peeached in Aneelet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Morning, August 26, 1888. 
 
128 THE TRANSFIGURATION : [VII. 
 
 for His coronation week. Withdrawing from 
 the scene of strife to the sources of the Jordan 
 at the foot of snowy Hermon, He there accepts 
 the crown which Peter offered in confessing, 
 " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living 
 God,'' and declares that truth to be the Eock 
 on which His Church should defy the powers 
 of destruction. The week thus ushered in is 
 closed with the Transfiguration, when Peter's 
 confession is sealed in glory by the Voice from 
 heaven: ''This is My beloved Son — hear 
 Him." There was in this a special interest 
 for those disciples, and there is a special but 
 somewhat different interest in it for us. 
 
 How important was the Transfiguration just 
 then for those disciples we see when we look 
 at the weakness of one man against a multi- 
 tude, of twelve men against the world. Peter 
 had indeed confessed to the outcast Teacher, 
 " Thou art the Christ, the So7i of the living 
 God." But could he hold himself to that 
 against the world's scorn ? Could he draw 
 others to stand with him in his flouted faith ? 
 Especially when that new-born faith was to be 
 exposed immediately to the test of wintry 
 rigours, in his Master's ignominious and 
 violent execution as a blasphemer and 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 129 
 
 deceiver ? No ; Peter could not stand to such 
 a faith in the Son of God as he had confessed, 
 unless he had some supernatural facts, 
 divinely strong, to stand upon. Some such 
 event as the Transfiguration was a moral 
 necessity to him in his case. When he was 
 opposed by the cry of " fables " he falls back 
 on the facts his eyes had seen and his ears 
 had heard : " For we did not folloio cunningly- 
 devised fables, lohen ice made knoivn unto you 
 the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 hut we tvere eyewitnesses of His majesty. For 
 He received from God the Father honour and 
 glory, when there came such a voice to Him from 
 the excellent glory. This is My beloved Son, in 
 whom I am to ell pleased : and this voice we our- 
 selves heard come out of heaven when we were 
 with Him in the holy mount." Thus, even in 
 his old age, he appeals to the Transfiguration 
 as an event which raised his faith above the 
 possibility of doubt. 
 
 But if the interest of the Transfiguration 
 for us varies from what it may have been 
 for the first believers, it is because om- stand- 
 point varies from theirs. If they looked 
 upon it as a crown-jewel which proved its 
 possessor to be a Prince, we, knowing the 
 
130 THE TRANSFIGUEATION : [VII. 
 
 Prince from other evidence, look upon it as 
 proved to be a genuine crown-jewel by the 
 princely brow on which it glitters. History 
 has shown us other jewels, other transfigura- 
 tions. What we call by pre-eminence the 
 Transfiguration, was simply the first, the 
 prophetic one, like the bright star that first 
 ■comes out in the evening sky in promise of 
 the whole train of constellations that are to 
 gild the dome of night. The transfigured form 
 of the outcast Teacher, as He prayed alone on 
 the mount, was prophetic of the transfigured 
 character in which He should be hailed by a 
 converted world as its Saviour ; prophetic of 
 the transfigured Cross, which from an emblem 
 of shame was to become from its connection 
 with Him an emblem of glory ; prophetic, 
 also, of the transfiguration which His Spirit 
 should work upon that world ; prophetic of 
 the countless transfigurations of individual 
 souls into new creatures through faith in 
 Him. 
 
 Wonderful as was that lonely scene of glory 
 on the mount, these moral and spiritual trans- 
 figurations which it ushered in exceed it in 
 glory as the rising sun exceeds the morning 
 ■star. In the undoubted presence of the 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 131 
 
 greater wonders we more readily accept the 
 less. 
 
 But while for Peter, James, and John the 
 Transfigm^ation scene may have been tem- 
 porarily more important than for us, as a 
 prophetic revelation of the glory of their 
 Lord, there is for all Christians in all ages 
 an equal preciousness in the glimpse it 
 afforded of the unseen world. Here heaven 
 and earth seem very near each other. Here, 
 in the glorified forms of ancient saints, we 
 have a vision of an already accomplished 
 resurrection and judgment of the dead. 
 Here " the spirits of the just made perfect " 
 show some knowledge of and some interest in 
 that which is about to take place on earth. 
 Here a common bond unites the living and the 
 dead. That bond is Christ and His redeeming 
 work. Such are the suggestions which natur- 
 ally arise from the record. This, then, is our 
 present concern, to review the record, and 
 gather what it teaches as to the future state. 
 
 But first we need to answer those who ques- 
 tion us for the evidence that so extraordinary 
 an event was no dream or illusion, but an 
 actual objective reality. 
 
 The answer is furnished by the record itself. 
 
132 THE TEANSFIGUEATION : [VII- 
 
 especially by the points which " Luke the 
 physician " has made. It would seem that 
 Luke has, in his own mind, anticipated the 
 question, and that he has followed the physi- 
 cian's bent in noting the symptoms which 
 distinguish a reality from a hallucination. 
 From him we learn that while the disciples 
 kept watch beside Jesus, who was praying 
 through the night, they had become drowsy, 
 but were roused into full wakefulness by the 
 light which streamed from His transfigured 
 form. Thus, then, they did not witness the 
 beginning, but only the progress and close of 
 the scene. Thus it did not begin in their 
 imaginations. Furthermore, it does not seem 
 to have occurred unexpectedly, as dreams 
 occur. Jesus evidently expected something 
 significant, for He took with Him to the place 
 those three Apostles whom on other occasions 
 of importance He chose for His witnesses. He 
 evidently intended that these select three 
 should witness something unusual. How they 
 recognised the mysterious visitors of their 
 Master and the subject of conversation between 
 Him and them, we are not informed, but may 
 reasonably suppose that Jesus told them after- 
 wards. 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 133 
 
 The nearest parallel that our experience 
 supplies to the glimpse into the unseen world 
 thus given to those disciples, is in the visions 
 and the voices that some in dying seem to see 
 and hear, in that mysterious border-land 
 between the world they are leaving and the 
 world they are entering. This subject was not 
 long ago discussed with all the resources of 
 modern science in a work on " Visions " by 
 Dr. Edward H. Clarke, one of the most 
 eminent of American physicians. His con- 
 clusion is that in the majority of cases these 
 visions and voices are the product of the 
 dying brain itself, a projection of impressions 
 which the experiences of life had previously 
 registered in that organ of thought. But he 
 records some cases that he does not explain 
 thus. He is disposed to think, from facts that 
 have come under his study, that actual glimpses 
 of the world beyond our senses may sometimes 
 be caught by those who are approaching it ; — 
 that the dying may sometimes really see things 
 external to themselves which their attendants 
 cannot see. Our belief in the sacred record 
 does not depend on such supporting testimony. 
 Nevertheless, we recognise the support, and are 
 grateful for it, when we find the evangehst 
 
184 THE TRANSFIGUEATION : [VII. 
 
 and the scientist bearing witness to similar 
 phenomena. 
 
 1. The first lesson, then, of the meeting of 
 Moses and Elijah with Jesus on the holy 
 mount, is this : The invisible world is very near 
 the visible. Seeing it makes it really no 
 nearer. Not seeing it makes it really no 
 farther off. Moses and Elijah were near the 
 disciples before the disciples saw them. They 
 were not far when they ceased to be seen. 
 Nor now are they far from earth. 
 
 We are not to suppose that the world to 
 which the dead depart is in any remote star or 
 planet, or that their unseen mansions are any 
 further from ours than one part of this globe 
 is from another. Said Wordsworth, in his re- 
 nowned poem upon " Intimations of Immor- 
 tality," 
 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
 
 I prefer to say, Heaven lies about us ever. 
 
 Even science has begun to talk about the 
 " unseen universe," on whose blank depths, as 
 they seem to us, the world that is seen reposes 
 like a wreath of vapour on the bosom of the 
 air. Were our eyes differently made, or had 
 we more of the power which some abnormally 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 135 
 
 constituted persons have occasionally exer- 
 cised, of seeing otherwise than through the 
 lenses of the eye, we should be made sure that 
 heaven is as near earth as the air, through 
 which the dragon-fly skims over the lake, is to 
 the water in which the fly lived when he was 
 a wriggling grub. Between us and our be- 
 loved, who have crossed the mysterious 
 threshold into the next room of our Father's 
 house, we have no reason to think that any 
 great distance is interposed, but only the thick 
 curtain of a dead wall, impervious to any sight 
 or sound. This is both for our comfort and 
 for our health. The physical and mental un- 
 health which attends the attempts of spiritism 
 at commerce with the dead enforces the Old 
 Testament law against it as a law of health, 
 and warns us to permit the departed to depart 
 — warns us to respect the veil that God has 
 dropped between, yet with comfort in think- 
 ing it is only a veil and only for a time. 
 
 2. Another thought given by the Transfigur- 
 ation story is that of an accomphshed resurrec- 
 tion. We read that Elijah, indeed, had been 
 translated — without death and burial, while 
 Moses had died and been buried. Yet both 
 appear in glorified bodies, as in the resurrec- 
 
136 THE transfiguration: [vii. 
 
 tion-state. What resurrection can we con- 
 ceive of as to come to them additional to this? 
 And if they had risen from the dead, had they 
 alone? We cannot so think. We cannot 
 admit them to be the sole exceptions to a 
 nniversal law. We cannot think of them 
 otherwise than as the representatives of an 
 iiniumerable choir of the risen and glorified 
 spirits of the dead. 
 
 In so saying we do not forget that the New 
 Testament speaks of Christ as " the first-fruits 
 of them that slept." But we are not to under- 
 stand by this that Christ was the first who 
 entered into the resurrection-life of the unseen 
 world. Eather, that Christ is the first who 
 made that resurrection-life a certainty to us. 
 He first cleared up the mystery of the state 
 after death, first established the reality of 
 the glorified life in the spiritual body. His 
 resurrection first settled the questions as to the 
 reality of that life, to which such appearances 
 as that of Moses and Elijah might well give 
 rise. Thus He is to us " the first-fruits " of 
 the resurrection, the beginning of our positive 
 knowledge of it. The reality of it existed 
 before He showed it. His showing of it first 
 showed it to be a reality. 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 137 
 
 What our birth is to this hfe, that is our 
 resurrection to the next hfe. Not, as the poet 
 says — 
 
 That far off, Divine event, 
 To -which the whole creation moves, 
 
 but as the Apostle said, " to every man in his 
 own order," as soon as he drops this body. 
 An eminent theologian once confessed to me 
 that he should so believe from the sayings of 
 Christ were it not for some things that Paul 
 has said. But the Voice that spake from the 
 cloud directs us to Jesus, and bids us " hear 
 Him." The Jewish belief was of a remoter 
 resurrection, at some world's end, as Martha 
 thought. Traces of this old way of thinldng 
 colour some of Paul's sayings. Again we find 
 him rising to the higher thought which he had 
 learned of Christ. The Christian truth, if we 
 can receive it from the lips of the Master 
 rather than from His interpreters, is that of 
 an immediate resurrection — a truth of such 
 precious consolation that we should be loth to 
 forego it. 
 
 With this fact of an accomplished resur- 
 rection goes the corresponding fact of an ac- 
 complished judgment. Moses and Elijah have 
 
138 THE TRANSFIGURATION : [VII. 
 
 evidently entered into the blessed fruits of a 
 godly life upon earth. Their judgment is thus 
 as complete, with reference to " the deeds done 
 in the body," as it can ever be. But if theirs 
 is so, we cannot suppose theirs alone to be so, 
 or regard them as exceptions to a general law. 
 The moment we put aside, as unworthy of 
 belief, the notion of an unconscious sleep, or a 
 chrysalis-state of all the dead till the advent of 
 some " last day," when all at once awake and 
 rise, we also have to put aside the twin notion 
 of a judgment delayed till the end of time, and 
 then taking place for all together. Our courts 
 sit for a time and then rise. The Divine judg- 
 ment belongs to no one time, but continues 
 through all time. It is not an event assigned 
 to a particular date in the calendar, but a pro- 
 cess as uninterrupted as the activity of God, 
 and as eternal as the operation of His law — 
 " eternal judgment," says the Scripture. We 
 think differently only when we mistakenly in- 
 terpret the figures and pictures of Scripture in 
 a literal and mechanical way. When we die 
 out of this life, we rise into another, and in 
 that rising we experience our judgment, as we 
 enter on our inheritance of good or evil, in 
 reaping whatsoever we have sown. 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WOELD. 139 
 
 3. But next, a lesson of precious import is 
 given by the appearance of Moses and Elijah 
 together in the resurrection-state of glory. 
 
 Moses and Elijah were men separated 
 from each other in history by long cen- 
 turies ; they were separated, too, by marked 
 diversity of character more widely still ; — 
 Moses, the erudite scholar and philosophic 
 law giver, Elijah, the unlettered hermit and 
 rude reformer, whose greatness lay in his 
 austere uprightness and fiery zeal. But here 
 these men, so separate in time, so unlike in 
 character, appear together in the resurrection- 
 glory, with Jesus as their bond of union, and 
 their conversation centres on His cross-bearing 
 mission to redeem mankind. In this we have 
 a glimpse of that blessed society of the good of 
 all ages, which the New Testament calls " the 
 City of God," into which the godly are ever 
 entering through the resurrection-gate. In 
 this society the bond of sympathy is that com- 
 mon interest in Christ and the work of Christ 
 in which the ancient sage is a brother to the 
 modern missionary, and in which all earthly 
 diversities melt in the glow of desires alike 
 engaging all. 
 
 4. We may also learn another thing. The 
 
140 THE TRANSFIGURATION : [VII. 
 
 disciples found their own interest in their 
 Master's coming death shared by Moses and 
 Ehjah in conference with Jesus. They saw 
 the glorified dead exhibiting an interest in 
 that which interested their friends on earth. 
 The subject of their interest was an eventful 
 crisis in God's redeeming work. Moses and 
 Elijah were seen conversing with Jesus about 
 His death. That they were there doing it, is 
 a sign that they came there to do it. That 
 they were there talking of it, is a sign that 
 they had been thinking of it before, and would 
 think of it afterwards. That they were thus 
 interested, is a sign that more than they were 
 interested — that the whole society of kindred 
 spirits to which they belonged thought with 
 them on the great event on which the talk 
 of these two with Jesus turned. This fact, 
 that the death of Jesus at Jerusalem was so 
 evidently a matter of knowledge and interest 
 to the glorified dead, is therefore a sign that 
 events of a similar kind — all events that have 
 to do with the advancement of God's kingdom 
 on earth — are matters of similar knowledge 
 and interest to the heavenly community. 
 The career of a Luther reforming religion, the 
 sailing of pious Pilgrims to plant Christianity 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD, 141 
 
 in a new world, the abolition of accursed evils 
 like slavery and intemperance, the institution 
 of Christian missions and Christian charities, 
 and — not less — those so-called "secular 
 events " that mightily promote truth and 
 brotherhood, like the introduction of the 
 printing press, the opening of electric com- 
 munications — in a word, all earthly move- 
 ments that have to do with the development 
 of the kingdom of heaven among men, we 
 may believe to be now matters of knowledge 
 and interest among those who have gone up 
 through the death-gate into the higher ranges 
 of the service of God. 
 
 And if we may believe that so much as this 
 concerning earthly affairs is a matter of know- 
 ledge and of interest to the blessed dead, we 
 must in consistency believe that even more 
 may be. If Luther's grand struggle against 
 anti-Christian power may engage the minds 
 of glorified spirits, equally may the struggle of 
 the same Luther, when a little boy, to earn 
 his bread. The great and " little things so 
 interpenetrate and connect with each other, 
 as inseparable parts of one grand movement, 
 that if the one is known on high, the other 
 is probably known in its relation to it. 
 
142 THE TRANSFIGURATION : [Vll. 
 
 Some, I know, draw back from such a 
 thought. A great poet thus utters the com- 
 mon fear : 
 
 Do we indeed desire the dead 
 
 Should still be near tis at our side ? 
 Is there no meanness we would hide ? 
 
 No inner vileness that we dread ? 
 
 Can the blessedness of the dead be unim- 
 paired, if they witness so much of wretched- 
 ness, so much of wickedness, in their beloved ? 
 It is a worthier view to take, that their 
 bliss does not depend on their ignorance, 
 but on their faith in the God to whom all 
 souls belong, and on their faith in His pro- 
 cesses of salvation. How much their know- 
 ledge of earthly things involves, we cannot 
 tell. Whether it involves an invisible ministry 
 as well as an invisible sympathy, we cannot 
 tell. But it is a precious assurance to be 
 drawn from this history, that there is at least 
 an intelligent sympathy which unites those 
 who have passed into the heavens with those 
 who continue upon earth. As our great poet 
 has said : — 
 
 they do not die. 
 Nor lose their mortal sympathy. 
 Nor change to us, although they change. 
 
 i 
 
VII.] A GLIMPSE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD. 143 
 
 What a glorious fellowship is then the 
 privilege of the humblest or obscurest servant 
 of the King ! The world may care little for 
 what he is doing. But the great object of his 
 endeavour is an object of interest to glorified 
 spirits. The cheering thoughts that swell in 
 at times upon his soul with refreshing tides of 
 inspiration are not his alone, but his in part- 
 nership with the invisible brotherhood, who 
 think and feel and strive with him. 
 
 " Therefore let us also, seeing loe are com- 
 passed about with so great a cloud of loitnesses, 
 lay aside every toeight, and the sin which doth 
 so easily beset us, and let us run loith patience 
 the race that is set before us, looking unto 
 Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faiths 
 
 We have to ask, then, as we lay down this 
 theme : What present sympathy have we with 
 this heavenly fellowship of thought and hope 
 of which we have had a glimpse on the holy 
 mount ? Is the main interest of our present 
 life the same as theirs — the advancement of 
 the kingdom of God, the accomphshment of 
 the world's deliverance from the sin and evil 
 under which it groans ? Or is it an alien 
 interest, a lower interest — our self-aggrandise- 
 ment only, in personal profits and pleasures ? 
 
144 THE TRANSFIGURATION. [VII. 
 
 On this depends our destiny to the higher or 
 the lower ranges of the future hfe. On this it 
 depends whether our future fellowship be 
 glorious or inglorious — with the covetous, the 
 selfish, the ungodly, or with Moses and Elijah, 
 with Peter and Paul, with Him who is the 
 Divine Centre and Bond of all those, in all 
 ages and in both worlds, whose hopes of 
 blessedness are bound up with the triumph of 
 Truth and Eighteousness and Love in a per- 
 fected humanity, in a regenerated world. 
 
VIII. 
 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY 
 
 10 
 
VIII. 
 
 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 
 
 "And Elisha said unto them, This is not the way, neither is 
 this the city : folloio me, and I ivill bring you to the man whom 
 ye seek. But he led them to Samaria." — 2 Kings vi, 19. 
 
 This text records the deception of an armed 
 enemy by the prophet Ehsha — a falsehood in 
 the mouth of a good man. It introduces us to 
 a subject of great importance, the question 
 whether deception is ever a duty. 
 
 We have to observe— 
 
 I. There are two distinct grounds on which 
 the duty of truthfulness is placed in the Bible. 
 
 1. That of social expediency. Truthfulness 
 is essential to the order and peace of society. 
 A society in which falsehood was the rule 
 would be in a state of discord tending to 
 •a state of war. Therefore we have this 
 
 Preached in Aneelet Congregational Chapel, 
 Sunday Evening, August 26, 1888. 
 
148 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 precept : " Speak ye truth each one with 
 Ms neighbour, for we are members one of 
 another.'" 
 
 2. That of personal obligation to conform to 
 the Divine character. God is the Being of 
 perfect truth. Personal truthfulness patterned 
 after God's truthfulness is one of those 
 qualities in which a man owes it both to him- 
 self and to his Maker to be godhke. There- 
 fore we have this precept : " Lie not one to 
 another ; seeing that ye have put off the old 
 man with his doings, and have put on the neio 
 man, which is being renewed unto knowledge 
 after the image of Him that created him." 
 
 These two principles are at bottom one. It 
 is socially expedient that men should be god- 
 like in truth. In view of this men ask : Are 
 we ever justified in deviating from absolute 
 truthfulness in our intercourse with one 
 another ? 
 
 From Saint Augustine down to recent 
 times, this question has been answered in the 
 negative by moralists who take the same 
 ground as to falsehood that the Quakers take 
 as to war. On the other hand, such men as 
 Jeremy Taylor, Milton, and Paley would allow 
 exceptions. Opinions are still divided. It is 
 
YIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 149 
 
 a vexed question of constant recurrence. We 
 ought to form a clear judgment in order to 
 keep a clear conscience. 
 
 There is one guiding thought which goes far 
 to helx^ us to right conclusions. It is this : In 
 any supposable circumstances, the supreme 
 question never can be, What is not my 
 duty? but ever and only the positive in- 
 quiry, What is my duty? Consequently 
 we are not to ask simply, Are we ever 
 justified in deviating from absolute truth ? 
 Put the question in that form, and you open 
 the door to an excuse-making disposition, to 
 all sorts of pleas from a self-indulgent spirit, 
 slack and indifferent to moral effort ; it ex- 
 poses us to imagine that the claims of duty 
 may sometimes be relaxed. The claims of 
 duty are never relaxed. If there be a suppos- 
 able case in which we may utter what is not 
 perfectly true, it can only be a case in which 
 such a course is the course of duty. The 
 only proper form, then, in which the present 
 question is to be put, is this : Is it ever our 
 duty to utter what is not perfectly true ? Are 
 there cases in which it would not be right for 
 us, under the circumstances, to say what is 
 perfectly true ? 
 
150 IS DECEPTION EVEE A DUTY? [VIIl . 
 
 II. We have now to notice that the question 
 before us belongs to a large class of questions 
 which depend for their adjustment upon a 
 general principle. 
 
 This class is sometimes spoken of as " con- 
 flicting duties " ; more properly, conflicting 
 claims to duty, since duty in any case can lie 
 only in one direction. 
 
 For instance, the claim of a man's family 
 that he shall give his time to their support is 
 overborne by the counter-claim of society that 
 he shall give up his business to serve for weeks 
 on a jury. A man's claim that his right to his 
 own property shall be inviolate is met by the 
 superior claim of society to take enough of 
 that property away from him to lay out a rail- 
 way. The claim of human life to be held 
 sacred is met by the paramount claim of self- 
 preservation against the burglar whom a man 
 shoots in his bed-chamber, and by the claim of 
 social order against the murderer on the 
 scaffold. The claim of our moral nature for 
 truth in speech and action is met in time of 
 war by the counter-claim of necessity for 
 deceiving the enemy by all sorts of stratagems, 
 so as to impair his power and opportunity 
 for mischief. The deception recorded of 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 151 
 
 Elisha in our text was practised upon an 
 armed enemy. 
 
 In all questions of this class, one duty seems 
 to override another. It is not really so. 
 Duties do not conflict. There is conflict be- 
 tween the claims of different courses to be 
 regarded as duty. In any of these cases, that 
 which is duty under ordinary circamstances 
 simply ceases to be duty, and another course 
 of action becomes duty in its place. There 
 can never be but one thing at any one time 
 which, in the supreme sense of the word, is 
 duty. Here, then, we come back to the ques- 
 tion as already stated : Does duty ever require 
 us to deviate from perfect truth ? 
 
 III. This question brings us next to ask, 
 What is the general principle on which these 
 conflicting claims are so adjusted that the 
 supreme duty in any given case is made clear ? 
 
 Our Saviour has answered this by the way 
 in which He settled questions of this kind 
 which involved the duty of Sabbath keeping. 
 The cattle which had fallen into holes might 
 be gotten out on the Sabbath day, despite the 
 prohibition of labour on that day, because the 
 claims of benevolence were supreme. " I loill 
 have 7nercy and not sacrifice." 
 
152 IS DECEPTION EVEE A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 The Apostle Paul, following the principles 
 of his Master, has said that the several com- 
 mandments against killing, adultery, stealing, 
 falsehood, coveting, were merely specifications 
 under the general law of benevolence ; — that 
 all such commandments, as to their principle, 
 were summed up in this : " Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to 
 his neighbour ; love, therefore, is the fulfilment 
 of the law." 
 
 This, then, is the principle which must 
 decide where real duty lies in all these ques- 
 tions of conflicting claims, the law of love — 
 benevolence — the obligation to seek the 
 greatest good of the greatest number. 
 
 To illustrate how this works : The law of 
 love enjoins respect for human life, under the 
 specification, "Thou shalt not kill." But it 
 also forbids us to respect the life of the mur- 
 derer, because that would practically under- 
 mine respect for human life. The hangman 
 has to kill in order that there may be less 
 killing. The same law of love enjoins respect 
 for personal property and hberty. But, to 
 secure this end, it must take away liberty and 
 property from those whose crimes undermine 
 respect for personal liberty and property. The 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 153 
 
 same law commands social order in obedience 
 to civil authority. But the same law, in great 
 emergencies, also requires revolution, forcible 
 overturning of the civil authority that has 
 degenerated into intolerable tyranny. The 
 same law forbids us to wound our neighbour's 
 feelings. But it also commands us to hurt 
 those feelings, on certain occasions, by 
 appropriate rebukes and censures, either for his 
 own or the general good. Thus the greatest 
 perplexities of conscience frequently arise from 
 the fact that the supreme law, the law of love, 
 makes apparently opposite demands at different 
 times. It, therefore, is not so simple to work 
 by as a rule that requires the same act every 
 time, but it is a law well adapted to educate 
 conscience into wisdom to live according to 
 things rather than according to names — to 
 develop spiritual freedom in the use of prin- 
 ciples as better than mechanical habit in the 
 use of rules. 
 
 There is one course, however, in regard to 
 which the law of love makes a single and un- 
 varying demand. Because it is a law whose 
 varied operation is designed to educate the 
 conscience, it always and inflexibly demands 
 that the personal conscience shall be kept 
 
154 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 inviolate. Not for the dearest interest that 
 could be alleged, not to save life, not to 
 procure the greatest gain for the holiest 
 cause, will it suffer conscience to incur a 
 stain or a wound. Perjury, adultery, forgery, 
 apostasy from one's cherished faith, might 
 often be the imagined means of some great 
 advantage for the moment to one's self, 
 or to the relatives or the cause most dear to 
 us. In the history of Christianity the peace 
 of families, the life of parents, has often hung 
 on the decision of an individual whether to 
 deny his faith or avow it. In courts of justice 
 the life of the accused may depend on the 
 decision of his own brother whether to swear 
 falsely or truly. The touching story of the 
 sisters, Jeanie and Effie Deans, will be re- 
 membered by all readers of " The Heart of 
 Midlothian." In one of Shakespeare's best 
 known plays, the plot turns on the alternative 
 presented to a sister, whether her brother shall 
 die, or shall be ransomed at the price of her 
 own dishonour. In every conceivable case of 
 conflicting claims, the law of benevolence 
 insists with clear and penetrating voice upon 
 this one ever-paramount duty, under no cir- 
 cumstances to be set aside. 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 155 
 
 A good conscience, stainless uprightness in 
 act and purpose, is the first thing to be cared 
 for, come what may. It is easy to see why. 
 Without this pure and stainless conscience, 
 the law of benevolence itself, whether in small 
 matters or in great, can neither be recognised 
 nor kept. When personal rectitude is im- 
 paired social bonds are impaired, social as 
 well as personal corruption spreads. All 
 human interests rest at bottom on this main- 
 tenance of conscience in purity inviolate. 
 
 If, then, our consciences should dictate for 
 the conservation of truth what Quaker con- 
 sciences have dictated for the conservation of 
 peace — a rigid surrender of all other rights to 
 the right of the truth — then the surrender 
 must be made. Purity of conscience must be 
 cared for first. 
 
 Let us, however, in such a case, be sure that 
 we do not impose on ourselves with a mere 
 phrase, when we speak of "the right of the 
 truth." Eights belong only to beings, not to 
 things. Apart from the right of some being 
 to the truth, it would be hard to show that 
 the truth itself, as an abstract thing, can have 
 any right at all. 
 
 IV. Our inquiry now becomes more specific. 
 
15G IS DECEPTION EVEE A DUTY? [vill. 
 
 We have seen that the law of benevolence 
 requires us sometimes to take away the per- 
 sonal liberty of our neighbour, or his property, 
 or even his life. Does it ever require us to 
 take from him the truth ? 
 
 I answer, that I think it sometimes does, 
 but that it is a serious matter to take away 
 the truth, as it is to take away liberty, or pro- 
 perty, or life. It is not to be done lightly, or 
 without a conscientious appreciation of the 
 responsibihty assumed. Otherwise we trifle 
 with sacred things, lose sight of the funda- 
 mental sanctities, and risk the shipwreck of 
 our virtue. 
 
 The physician may find that his patient's 
 life cannot be saved, unless he deceives him. 
 Such deceiving is then required by the same 
 law of love which would require him to tell his 
 patient the truth, if he could bear it. Con- 
 science need not be wounded in such a case. 
 But why not? Because the patient has a 
 right to live if he can. Here Edmund Burke's 
 saying applies : " Men have no right to what 
 is not for their benefit." He has no right to 
 the truth, if the truth will kill him. If nothing 
 but deception will save a sick man, he has a 
 right to the deception ; because, could he 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 157 
 
 understand the case, he would rather be de- 
 ceived than die. Only let us be sure of the if 
 — the absolute necessity of the deception, that 
 it is no lazy shift of mere convenience, too 
 careless about the truth to make a study how 
 to save it without hurting the patient. Then, 
 though the form of truth be surrendered to the 
 demand of benevolence, the spirit of truth is 
 kept, for the spirit of truth is that same bene- 
 volence, whose demands we satisfy by the 
 necessary deception. 
 
 But suppose conscience is not satisfied — not 
 clear. Suppose one cannot rid himself of the 
 persuasion, that, even in such a case, it is 
 wrong to falsify or deceive. Then, come what 
 may, the conscience must be satisfied and re- 
 spected. The Bible rule is, " whatsoever is 
 not of faith" — whatsoever does not rest on a 
 positive conviction that it is right — " is sin," to 
 him who, against his conscience, permits it. 
 
 In another case a man may find that a crime 
 cannot be prevented except by deceiving a 
 would-be burglar or assassin. Such deceiving 
 is then required by the law of love, which de- 
 mands that society shall be protected against 
 criminals. This right of protection extends 
 as far as is necessary. It may justify the 
 
158 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 killing, and if so, the deceiving, of the criminal. 
 Killing is repugnant, and so is deceiving, to a 
 right-minded man ; yet both may be necessary 
 and approved by conscience, for the protection 
 of the rights of society against the enemies of 
 society. Conscience admits that the assailant 
 of society, the public enemy, v^ho invades us 
 either by war or with crime, has for the time 
 forfeited certain rights, the right to the truth 
 included. Not only has he no right to the 
 truth, but, so to speak, he has a right or desert 
 to the opposite, to be deceived, as well as to be 
 imprisoned or put to death, for the protection 
 of society. In so doing, we simply give him 
 his rights, or as we say, "his deserts." But 
 if this would violate the conscience, if a man's 
 conscience bids him rather suffer death than 
 deceive an assassin, then, come what may, 
 conscience must be obeyed. For the law of 
 benevolence bases all welfare on righteousness, 
 and therefore obedience to conscience is always 
 its supreme behest. 
 
 Those who regard the works of God in 
 nature as revealing somewhat of the thoughts 
 of God, may find a Divine lesson taught by 
 the instincts which the Creator has implanted 
 in the lower animals. You come on a sitting 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 159 
 
 partridge in the woods. She flies a short 
 distance and then, to hire you from her nest, 
 imitates the motions of a crippled bird — makes 
 5^ou think you can catch her in a moment — 
 crawls and flaps along the ground, as if unable 
 to fly, until she has thus drawn you off a 
 distance, when she suddenly takes to flight. 
 Never was a more prettily acted deception. 
 The object is the preservation of her brood. 
 This instinctive action of the mother is the 
 action of the Universal Mind, intelligently 
 guiding its unreasoning creatures. The Crea- 
 tor's own work is in her trick. It is a revela- 
 tion of the Divine judgment as to the legitimacy 
 of deception, in an extreme case, against the 
 assailants of home or life. 
 
 In the treatment of the insane, the same as 
 of the sick, other cases of necessary deception 
 may arise. There are cases in which the insane 
 not only have no right to the truth, but have a 
 right to be deceived, and the law of benevolence 
 bids us respect that right. 
 
 Professor A. P. Peabody, of Cambridge, 
 New England, says that in such cases that 
 which is falsehood in form is not falsehood in 
 fact. " The statement which is indispensable 
 to the safety, repose, or reasonable conduct of 
 
160 IS DECEPTION EVEE A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 the insane is virtually true to him, since it 
 conveys impressions as nearly conformed to 
 the truth as he is capable of receiving." 
 
 The Professor, however, cautions us that 
 there is danger in unnecessary resort to such 
 deception. He says, " Those v^ho have the 
 guardianship of the insane are unanimous in 
 the opinion that falsehood, when discovered 
 by them, is always attended with injurious 
 consequences, and that it should be resorted 
 to only when imperatively required for their 
 immediate safety or for that of others." 
 
 It is necessary to recognise the existence 
 of these cases of legitimate deception. It is 
 equally necessary to observe, that they very 
 rarely occur. The grand law of life is strict 
 fidelity to truth, depending on a clear-sighted 
 benevolence to dictate to common sense 
 whatever any exigency may demand. Here 
 we come back to the statement we started 
 with and must never part from. The question 
 is always to be this : Not what am I permitted 
 or justified in, but what am I required to by 
 a supreme allegiance to the law of love. 
 
 V. This, in the next place, puts out of court 
 all falsehoods of convenience — by far the 
 largest class of deceptions in which people 
 
YTII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY ? 161 
 
 justify themselves. They have no standing 
 ground left as soon as duty, rather than 
 excuses, becomes our object. Children ask 
 troublesome questions. Thoughtless people 
 ask impertinent questions. It is sometimes 
 much more convenient to dispose of the ques- 
 tion with a false answer. But a resort to 
 falsehood, in such cases for mere convenience, 
 has its injurious reaction. It is like a resort 
 to the brandy bottle whenever one feels 
 languid or overdone. Our moral tone is 
 lowered. A bad habit grows up. And as to 
 the injury we do by the falsehood of conve- 
 nience, it is simply beyond our power to 
 measure. The falsehood once let fly is like a 
 pistol-shot out of a city window ; it may fall 
 harmless in a garden, it may enter your 
 neighbour's window, your neighbour's head. 
 
 But what of those cases where questions 
 are asked us beyond all right to ask them? 
 Such questions are assaults. We have a right 
 to defend ourselves. Yes, but there's a choice 
 of weapons. When we are assaulted we may 
 have a right to use our fists, we have no right 
 to whip out a pistol on every occasion. But 
 people whip out lies as border ruffians draw 
 pistols on every provocation — extreme 
 
162 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 measures in trivial matters. This is clearly 
 wrong. With more address, with more 
 courage, a great deal of needless falsehood 
 may be avoided. 
 
 Cases occur, however, in which evasion or 
 silence is equivalent to exposing our secret. 
 Here we have to ask, Has the questioner a 
 right to know ? If so, that right must be 
 respected, and the truth made known. If not, 
 as in the case of a spy or meddler, what shall 
 we do ? Here moralists differ. But it is note- 
 worthy that two of the most eminent of recent 
 English moralists — Professor Sidgwick and 
 Dr. Martineau — take the ground that a no 
 confidence rule should hold toward such the 
 same as to armed enemies ; that mere rogues 
 should have no right to presume for their 
 own ends upon the veracity of honest men ; 
 that deception toward such is a legitimate 
 means of discouraging their intrigues ; that it 
 is a duty to frustrate, even by deception if 
 necessary, those who seek a base advantage 
 by the scruples of the truth-loving, from whom 
 they try to extort secrets. As to this, how- 
 ever — whether we subscribe to this opinion 
 or not — we must insist, as before, that in all 
 cases the paramount duty is to respect the 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 163 
 
 dictate of our conscience, and keep its purity- 
 inviolate. 
 
 But what shall we say of the lies of trade ? 
 Simply this : They are born of a mother lie, 
 " Ail is fair in trade," a maxim which regards 
 trade as privateering, in which one may take 
 all the prizes he can by sailing under any 
 assumed flag. The same mother lie, " All is 
 fair in politics," breeds the swarm of party 
 lies. But what greater monstrosity than the 
 attempt to conduct any public service, 
 whether of commerce or government, on the 
 theory of a state of war, where " weapons 
 clash and law is dumb," and truth is super- 
 seded by trick for selfish ends. Traced thus 
 to the false principle from which they spring, 
 the lies of trade and politics appear as smoke 
 wreaths ascending from that pit where, as the 
 Scripture says, are " all liars,'" because there 
 is no love. 
 
 Among the falsehoods of convenience, I 
 mention last the falsehoods of compliment 
 and flattery. " I'm so glad to see you (but I 
 wish you were a mile off)." " Bo stay (but 
 how I wish you'd go)." " Come again, I shall 
 so enjoy it (but may it be a long day before you 
 do)." " How fine your sermon or 3'our music 
 
164 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 was to-day (but really it was very common- 
 place)." Then conscience protests : " What 
 did you say that for?" "Why, I had to say 
 something." Not that, however, if you did 
 not think it in truth. No man has learned to 
 speak the truth till he has learned to hold 
 his tongue. A great many of the lies of 
 convenience come from the indulgence of a 
 foolish propensity to gabble. 
 
 But let us mark this : Much that is false, as 
 the dissimulation of a selfish mind, might 
 become true in the geniality of a benevolent 
 mind. It depends on the point of view we 
 take. A neighbour, calling, finds you at 
 house-cleaning. Still, you can say, with a 
 good conscience, " I am glad to see you," if 
 you take the kindly view of the case, which, 
 in the midst of all embarrassments, is glad in 
 feeling and testifying unselfish friendliness. 
 Many of the falsehoods of social compliment 
 declare no more than a genuine benevolence, 
 in the same situation, might truly utter. To 
 avoid such falsehoods, therefore, cultivate that 
 humane, benevolent interest in each other, 
 which looks mainly on what is good, and 
 speaks of the good it sees. This the good 
 woman did, who, when the subject of conver- 
 
VIII.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 165 
 
 sation happened to be the devil, expressed the 
 wish that we all might imitate the devil in 
 respect to his perseverance. The anecdote 
 has been reported in jest, but it illustrates a 
 trait to be cultivated in earnest. 
 
 VI. And now, in the phrase of Holy Writ, 
 " Of the thmgs lohich loe have spoken this is the 
 sum: " 
 
 Deception is never right, unless the supreme 
 law of benevolence makes it for the time a 
 positive duty, as in the extreme cases speci- 
 fied. 
 
 However extreme the case, it is never a duty 
 unless conscience requires it as such. Amid all 
 necessities, the supreme necessity is a pure con- 
 science. And yet we must bear in mind that 
 conscience will often feel regret at the best that 
 a hard case admits of. We must not confound 
 this noble regret of conscience with the protest 
 which conscience makes against violation. 
 Deception, however right and necessary, can 
 never fail to provoke the regret of a healthy 
 conscience. This we must often disregard, if 
 justice is to be done, but the protest of con- 
 science never. 
 
 If ever a duty, deception is a most serious 
 duty, the same as duty in an extreme case to 
 
366 IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? [VIII. 
 
 take away liberty, property, or life — a duty 
 that demands a vigilant and earnest con- 
 science, backed by a sense of grave responsi- 
 bility, just as the use of strychnine for 
 medicine demands a keen eye and firm hand 
 that will give not one unnecessary drop. 
 
 Personal convenience can only palliate de- 
 ception, can never justify it, because it can 
 never make it a duty under the law of love to 
 our neighbour. The falsehood of convenience 
 can never be anything more than the false- 
 hood of selfishness, and, as such, is always 
 unlawful. 
 
 Unlawful deception, however trivial, is a 
 crime against moral health and personal 
 character. Says Dr. Wayland, "White lies 
 always introduce others of a darker com- 
 plexion. I have seldom known any one who 
 deserted truth in trifles that could be trusted 
 in matters of importance. There is no vice 
 which more easily than this stupefies a man's 
 conscience." 
 
 " To love truth for truth's sake," says John 
 Locke, " is the principal part of human perfec- 
 tion in this world, and the seed-plot of all 
 other virtues." Speaking and dealing accord- 
 ing to the reality of things, without sham, 
 
Vni.] IS DECEPTION EVER A DUTY? 167 
 
 illusion, or fraud, is the spinal marrow of cha- 
 racter ; wound it, and moral paralysis ensues. 
 The Divine laws of all existence are based on 
 truth, and administered in truth. To base 
 our work, our reputation and influence, our 
 character and expectations, on anything but 
 truth, is to defy both nature and God. He 
 who chooses any other instrument than truth 
 to work with, grasps a sword by the blade to 
 strike with the hilt. Whatever he hits, the 
 weapon, so grasped, drinks most deeply of his 
 own life-blood. 
 
IX. 
 THE TBINITY. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE TRINITY. 
 
 " The Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
 Ghost."— Matthe-w xxviii. 19. 
 
 An eminent member of the Church of England 
 not long ago said to me : " The subject of the 
 Trinity has been dropped here, except once a 
 year, on Trinity Sunday." Nearly at the 
 same time an equally eminent English Non- 
 conformist said to me : " The truth of the 
 Trinity is that from which we are to expect 
 most for the quickening and deepening of 
 Christian life." Eegretting the former of these 
 two statements, and heartily believing the 
 latter, I wish to spend this half-hour with you 
 in thought upon the Trinity. 
 
 Here I trust that no one, having heard this 
 announcement, will so remember past impres- 
 sions of unintelligible mystery in this subject 
 as to despair of profit from any further atten- 
 
 Pkeached in Aneklet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Morning, September 2, 1888. 
 
172 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 tion to it. Sad work has indeed been made 
 with it in the past, and to such discouragement 
 that we seldom hear it undertaken in any 
 Christian pulpit. Dr. Bushnell, that revered 
 teacher of the New England churches, was 
 wont to declare that the current orthodoxy had 
 become rank heresy in its treatment of the 
 Trinity. I am very sure that we need to find 
 our way out of a dreary wilderness of theolo- 
 gical subtleties back to the ancient simplicity 
 of the original truth, where we shall find com- 
 fort instead of confusion. 
 
 It especially behoves us to seek freedom from 
 the reproach of believing what we cannot ex- 
 plain so as to satisfy the intelligent inquirer. It 
 is not true to say that the Trinity defies 
 explanation ; not true that it is above the 
 intelligent comprehension of any clear-minded 
 man. A child of fourteen years recently came 
 to me with a spontaneous expression of interest 
 in the exposition of the subject which I am 
 about to give. But, on the other hand, it is 
 true that what Dr. Bushnell calls " the dilapi- 
 dated orthodoxy " of the New England churches 
 on this subject — no worse dilapidated, I appre- 
 hend, than in other modern countries — has 
 brought it into a view which he calls " repug- 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 173 
 
 nant to faith and impossible to reason." It is 
 imperative, therefore, at the outset, to disavow 
 all interest in the old mothers of controversy 
 — the theological riddles about *' the three 
 Persons." We must begin by confessing that 
 the term " persons " is, in effect, a misleading 
 word — which Calvin himself professed willing- 
 ness to drop. We must bid adieu to whatever 
 we have found unintelligible in our theology, 
 and seek to rediscover the truth in the Scrip- 
 tures. Here it appears to be proclaimed to the 
 new convert at his baptism as the one funda- 
 mental and comprehensive truth which his 
 young faith is to lay inteUigent hold of— the 
 summary and condensed expression of his 
 Christian consciousness. 
 
 Yoa are aware that these three designations 
 — " the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," 
 are not given by Christ as different names of 
 God, but as together constituting the one 
 Name by which the Christian is to confess 
 God as the Supreme Object of faith. But have 
 you reflected on the fact that it is by this Name 
 of God that Christianity differs — so far as out- 
 ward profession goes — from Judaism, from 
 Mohammedanism, from every form of religion 
 ever known ? This is a difference more essential 
 
174 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 than we may at first suppose. En popular 
 thought names are mere labels convenient for 
 the external distinguishing of one thing from 
 another. In Christ's teaching, as in the Scrip- 
 tures generally, names express radical distinc- 
 tions, names stand for substantial and vital 
 realities. Consequently, the Christian idea of 
 God, as Christ embodies it in the uev^^ Name 
 by which He made God known — " the Father, 
 and the Son, and the Holy Ghost," differs 
 essentially from every idea of God that any 
 other religion has ever presented. This, there- 
 fore, I beg you to bear in mind, is the supreme 
 interest of our present subject, to come at the 
 distinctively Christian idea of God. 
 
 This is, indeed, the fundamental object of 
 all religious inquiry. But I now urge it as 
 being also the chief practical necessity of com- 
 mon life. Rightly understood, the Trinity is 
 no speculation of dry learning, far from daily 
 needs ; it is the Divinely-given watchword for 
 the Christian's daily struggle. For it is the 
 symbol and pledge of the great fact on which 
 our salvation depends — the perpetual in- dwell- 
 ing of God in the world, His eternal union with 
 the life of humanity, and His presence in the 
 individual breast. All other religions have set 
 
IX.] THE TEINITY. 175 
 
 God at a distance, high in the heavens, afar 
 from the world, and outside of human life. It 
 is the glory of Christianity to have filled this 
 gulf — to show God as with us and in us — 
 saying, with Paul, " Ye are the Temple of God, 
 and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you " ; 
 saying, with Paul's Master, " The Father is in 
 Me and I in Him ; " promising the believer, in 
 Jesus' words, " The Father and I will make our 
 abode with him.'' 
 
 The scientific doctrine of evolution, and its 
 fundamental principle that all life is one — that 
 the life of the insect and the life of the man, 
 the vital rill and the vital river, are but the 
 one widening stream from the one original 
 Fount of Uncreated Life, is really a modern 
 philosophic reading, a reading but in part, of 
 the ancient truth which Jesus made the basis 
 of His Gospel — that God is not outside of His 
 works but in them, as the Father in the Son, 
 as the Spirit quickening all things, as the One 
 Life of all that live. It is this truth which 
 gives sacredness to our life, enthusiasm to 
 philanthropy, patience and hope to our earthly 
 struggle, and glory to the world in which the 
 Creator and Redeemer is recognised as the all- 
 pervading Presence. It is for this that the 
 
176 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 Trinity is at once the fundamental truth of 
 Christianity, and the universal truth which 
 touches daily life at every point with an up- 
 lifting power. 
 
 We are well aware, as we are often re- 
 minded of the fact, that the name "Trinity" 
 is not in the Bible, and that the Trinitarian 
 phrase, " the Three Persons," is not in the 
 Bible. But we have at present no concern 
 with the Trinitarian dogmas which have 
 descended to us from the fourth century, in 
 which with much truth there is much mystery. 
 "We apply ourselves simply to the Biblical 
 statements. We find in the Bible a progres- 
 sive revelation of God, of which the names 
 given to Him at successive periods mark the 
 successive advances, till the revelation is com- 
 pleted by Christ in His announcement of the 
 Triune Name of " the Father, and the Son, and 
 the Holy Ghosts 
 
 The first step of this revelation of God ap- 
 pears in the Book of Genesis.* The word first 
 
 * Apart from all critical judgments respecting the date 
 of the first chapters of Grenesis, or other parts of the Old 
 Testament, the fact before ns is, that the final editors of 
 the Old Testament Canon — whoever they were — have used 
 the material at their hand for a record of the progress 
 of revelation, and have distinctly marked successive ad- 
 vances in men's conception of God. 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 177 
 
 used to denote God is a plural word, signifying 
 " gods." Here we have a glimpse of primitive 
 heathenism, worshipping many gods, deities 
 of the air and earth and waters. Kevelation 
 begins by teaching these polytheists the Unity 
 of God. To do so, it communicates no new 
 name of God, but takes the plural name of 
 deity, which was in common use, and makes 
 a new use of it — treats it as not a plural but a 
 singular name, applying to the plural form, 
 *'gods," the singular pronouns "he," and 
 " his," and " him." So the Hebrew reads, that 
 " Gods created man in His own image." Our 
 missionaries often have thus to give a new 
 turn to a heathen word, in order to bring in a 
 new truth. This seems to have been the first 
 attempt of revelation — to teach men to speak 
 of Deity as God, not gods — He, not they — 
 One, not many. 
 
 Next, we find that this first lesson has borne 
 fruit. The truth that the many gods of 
 heathenism must give place to one God, is 
 embodied in a new name for Him, and 
 instead of the plural form, Elohim, "gods," 
 appears the singular form. El, signifying "the 
 Mighty One." Here is a real advance in men's 
 idea of God. The many powers before dis- 
 
178 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 tributed among many deities are at length 
 regarded as concentrated in One, whom, with- 
 out partner or rival, men worshipped as the 
 Supreme Power. 
 
 A new advance of thought respecting God is 
 marked by still another new name. The God 
 of Power, El, is also He in whom His 
 worshippers may trust. This thought is con- 
 nected with the name Jehovah (originally 
 pronounced " Yah we "). This is the name by 
 which Moses revealed God to his oppressed 
 people as the God of hope. It is interpreted 
 in the Book of Exodus as signifying, " I will be 
 constant to you," as He in whom you may 
 trust.* Accordingly, God is there represented 
 as saying, " This is My name for ever, and 
 this is My meniorial to all generations.'' By 
 this name throughout the Old Testament 
 God is represented as a faithful covenant- 
 keeper with His people. The earlier thought 
 of God's almighty power has here ripened into 
 
 * The phraseology is confessedly obscure. But the 
 A.V. and R.V., " I am that I am," is probably a mistake 
 for the future, "I will he that I will he." The word of 
 promise, "I will he," is more congruous with the occa- 
 sion, and more suited to the understanding of such a 
 people, than a declaration of self-existent Being, "I 
 
IX.J THE TRINITY. 179 
 
 the thought of God as the refuge of hope and 
 the guardian of faith. 
 
 But trust naturally begets love. This 
 appears in the further advance of thought 
 about God which the Old Testament makes 
 in the confession of Isaiah, " Doubtless Thou 
 art our Father." Here, at last, the yearning 
 of man for Divine sympathy in the communion 
 of the spirit comes to its bloom. Karely, 
 however, did these ancient believers reach this 
 higher level. In barely ten instances in all the 
 later writings of the Bible is this precious name 
 of personal relationship apphed to God. The 
 Old Testament saints seem to have thought of 
 God as the Father of their nation. It was 
 reserved for Jesus to reveal Him as Father to 
 every man. They thought of Him only as a 
 distant Father, throned above and worshipped 
 from afar. It was reserved for Jesus also to 
 manifest the Father as in the world, and as 
 the Partaker of the life of His human family. 
 
 Thus we see that, on the one hand, there 
 had been a progress of revelation concerning 
 God, and a great advance in men's thought of 
 God, This had been led up from the many 
 deities of heathenism to God, as One, and 
 Almightv, the faithful Covenant-keeper, and 
 
180 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 the heavenly Father. We even find Jeremiah 
 rising to the sublime utterance, "Do not I fill 
 heaven and earth ? saith theljonj).'' But yet 
 the fact remained, and now we must mark it 
 well, that there was still in common thought 
 a chasm between God and the world, between 
 the Life of God and the life of men. God 
 was regarded as of one nature, and man as of 
 another ; God was in heaven and man was on 
 earth. Communication was at arm's length. 
 God only touched things from the outside, and 
 so made them go. Nor is it beyond the truth 
 to say, that this ancient Jewish conception of 
 God is still among us the prevailing one. 
 
 What, therefore, I now wish to lay all 
 emphasis upon, is the unquestionable fact 
 that this Jewish conception of God as outside 
 the world, and controlling it at arm's length, is 
 one that the Christian truth of the Trinity will 
 not agree with any better than the new wine 
 vnth the old bottles in Jesus' parable. The 
 bottles burst ; the wine is lost. Men reject 
 the Trinity, simply becau^se it will not fit 
 reasonably into their Jewish notion of a God 
 who is not a partaker of the life of the world, 
 who governs the world as a king governs a 
 remote province of his realm. The only idea 
 
IX.] THE TEINITY. 181 
 
 of the Divine Trinity that will fit this non- 
 Christian idea of God, is that of a trio or 
 triplet of Divine "Persons." But, in propor- 
 tion as this expression becomes compre- 
 hensible in an intelligible sense of vi^ords, 
 it becomes contradictory to the primal 
 truth, that God is One. We have been taught 
 to elude the contradiction by taking refuge in 
 mystery and appealing to faith. This is not 
 necessarily unreasonable, but it is certainly 
 premature until we have gone back of the 
 contradiction to see whether it does not derive 
 a fictitious strength from some falsity in our 
 fundamental conception of God. 
 
 A very different conception of God was 
 introduced by Jesus. We now must notice 
 that He introduced it as preparatory to that 
 final announcement of " the Father and the 
 Son and the Holy Ghost,'' with which He com- 
 pleted and crowned His teaching concerning 
 God. It is Jesus' thought of God as with us 
 and in us, which is summed up in that Triune 
 Name, and gives us the right thought about 
 that Triune Name. 
 
 We are sufficiently familiar with Jesus' 
 frequent declarations of His unity with God. 
 Yet I doubt if we duly understand His thought. 
 
182 THE TEINITY. [iX, 
 
 He said, " I and Mij Father are one." But He 
 also prayed for the disciples in similar words, 
 '* that they may be one, everi as loe are." Call- 
 ing Himself constantly by a name that no one 
 else addressed Him by — " the Son of Man " — 
 He spoke as the Representative of hmnanity, 
 the Ideal Man, and taught us so to regard 
 Him in respect to our relations with God. 
 Thus He prayed for the disciples, " that they 
 may all he one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, 
 and I in Thee, that they also may he in Us." 
 
 Are we sure that we have found the deep 
 meaning of these words ? Plainly they show- 
 Jesus' thought to be this : that union with 
 God which had become fully realised in Him 
 was capable of being realised in those who 
 learn of Him — He being, as the Apostle says, 
 " the firstborn among many brethren'' So 
 Athanasius taught, that all that Jesus was and 
 did belongs to the race of man with which He 
 was one.* Evidently, in these words of prayer, 
 which He breathed on the last night before the 
 Cross, He claimed for Himself no exclusive 
 
 * It is clear that the " homoousion," or consubstantiality 
 with the Father, which was the shibboleth of the Trini- 
 tarian party in the Council of Nicsea, so far as true of 
 Christ must be true of the race of which He was 
 born. 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 183 
 
 unity with God — for then the old chasm in 
 human thought and life between God and men 
 would still remain unfilled. Evidently, it is 
 the One Divine Life which is alike in Him and 
 in all the children of God, though in varying 
 degrees. That Uncreated Life, which was 
 before all things, has become, as it were, 
 generated,* or " begotten," in its creatures. 
 This is the truth, profound but plain, which 
 we express, whether we know it or not, in 
 speaking of " God the Son." 
 
 For God is doubtless revealed in Jesus, but 
 not in Jesus only, though in Him supremely. 
 AVhat we see to be Divine in Jesus, we see to 
 be no less really Divine when shown in others. 
 God is doubtless revealed in every follower of 
 Jesus, so far as he is Jesus' follower. But 
 these revelations of God in human life are 
 more than rays of goodness from a distant 
 source ; they are the glory of a present God ; 
 they reveal a generated, or " begotten," life, 
 which is one with the Unbegotten. "It is 
 God" says Paul, " ivlio worheth in you.'' And 
 again, says Paul, " There is one God and Father 
 
 * The Nicene doctrine of "eternal generation," dis- 
 paraged as it has been by some modern Trinitarians, must 
 be held to represent an undeniable truth. 
 
184 THE TEINITY. [iX. 
 
 of all, who is above all, and through all, and 
 in all." God is in humanity, as well as above 
 it. This is the truth by which Jesus and His 
 chief Apostle conduct us to an understanding 
 of the term " Son " in the Triune Name — the 
 oneness of the "begotten" with the Unbe- 
 gotten Life. 
 
 Here we find no such scandal to reason or 
 puzzle to faith as in the popular notion of a 
 distinct Divine Person, who is not a distinct 
 person in any intelligible sense of that word. 
 Nor do we find here any such weak dilution as 
 fancy has been driven to in the recoil of reason 
 from words without meaning, as when it has 
 imagined that the term "Son" is merely a 
 name by which God calls Himself while en- 
 gaged in a temporary work as our Eedeemer. •' 
 On the contrary, the real import of this word 
 *' Son" is that eternal truth which, in these 
 last days, science is already beginning to dis- 
 cern in its discovery that all created life is 
 one. The Christian revelation is, that the 
 
 * The peculiarity of " Sabellianism " (nowadays a 
 handy term of reproach against Trinitarians who dissent 
 from popiUar tritheistic notions) is in regarding the " Son," 
 and also the " Holy Ghost," as merely transient phenomena 
 of Deity, expedients for the present purposes of revelation, 
 and both beginning and ending in time. 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 185 
 
 created life is one with the Uncreated. God 
 is not afar, but here. God is both in Jesus as 
 spiritual Head of His human family, and in 
 every member that is joined to the Head. 
 Says Paul : " The head of every man is Christ'' 
 The Creator has not left the creation to 
 itself, but evermore abides in it as its Begotten 
 Life, guiding its course, bringing forth successive 
 births of goodness and of power.both sharing our 
 life and shaping our destiny tov^ard ends Divine. 
 On the other hand, the "Father" is God 
 above the world, above all worlds, before all 
 ages, the infinite and mysterious Fount of 
 Being, whom the Agnostic scruples even to 
 name, but to us dear and adorable as Father 
 for that which is "begotten" of Him — the 
 Son, supremely revealed in Jesus, * mani- 
 fested in all human goodness, witnessed to by 
 the progress of philanthropy, as the Partner of 
 our struggle, the Helper of our salvation, the 
 abiding Strength of our strength, the Eternal 
 Boot and Blossom of our life, God in our life 
 for ever. 
 
 * In the Scriptural term " only begotten," as applied to 
 Jesus, we cannot take " only " to mean exclusively, without 
 contradicting the Scriptvu-altriith which Paul discovered in 
 a Greek poet, " We also are His offspring." Not exclusive- 
 ness, but pre-eminence is meant here by "only." 
 
186 THE TEINITY. [iX. 
 
 Such is the consecration which Jesus would 
 impart to human hfe by the very Name of 
 God, as the Sharer as well as the Giver of our 
 life. 
 
 A profounder consecration still is in that 
 remaining word, "the Holy Ghost," which 
 speaks of God as the sharer, not only of the 
 common and visible life of humanity, but of 
 the personal and hidden life of the individual. 
 Darkened and smothered though it be, there 
 is yet a Divine spark latent in the most 
 imbruted life, one chord which, when all 
 others are broken, will still respond to the 
 touch of truth. But when cultivated by con- 
 stant earnestness and prayer, how godlike the 
 power by which one true man stands singly 
 forth to face a hostile world, by which 
 the weakest become heroes, by which 
 prisoners sing psalms in chains, by which the 
 unbearable is borne and the impossible is 
 done. 
 
 And what is this power, by which a good 
 man fights the good fight? Men call it " con- 
 science," The Apostle, looking higher, says: 
 " The Spirit helpeth our infirmity." " We live 
 by the Spirit." Jesus says : "He shall be in you, 
 to guide you into all truth." We may find God 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 187 
 
 everywhere, but we shall find Him nowhere 
 if not within ourselves, where the touch of an 
 invisible Hand checks our waywardness, and 
 a mysterious Voice reproves our folly, and 
 visions of a Divine judgment - seat arise to 
 warn the careless and confirm the wavering. 
 And this most secret " Soul of our soul " is 
 indeed the same God who is before and 
 above the world as Father, and in the world 
 as Son. In naming Him " the Holy Ghost " 
 Jesus makes His revelation of the Divine 
 Trinity complete. And as He is about to 
 leave the world. He communicates to us this 
 Triune Name of the Eternal One, to 
 represent, says Dr. Schaff, "the whole of 
 Christianity," to be cherished as " a brief 
 summary of all the truths and blessings " of 
 His revelation. 
 
 And now, let none of us imagine that any- 
 thing essential has been left out of our 
 account, because the usual phraseology about 
 the " Three Persons" has been discarded. If 
 we miss this, we miss nothing but what the 
 staunchest Trinitarians have confessed un- 
 satisfactory, and Calvin has declared himself 
 willing to disuse — so has it been at once the 
 
188 THE TKINITY. [iX. 
 
 stumbling-block of Christian intelligence, and 
 the natural provocative of scepticism. Nor 
 let any one imagine that it is a novel modern 
 speculation that has been proposed. Far from 
 it. It would be easy to exhibit the essence of 
 it in quotations from Athanasius, the father of 
 Trinitarian theology. If here we miss any- 
 thing that we have reputed as a "form of 
 sound words," it is only the phrase — a ques- 
 tionable phrase — that we miss. The thing is 
 here, all that Jesus taught us, " the Father, 
 Son, mid Holy Ghost,'' the Three personal 
 agencies of God, not three individual agents — 
 the Three personal activities of God, not three 
 individual actors. These Three activities are 
 the One God in the fulness of His eternal 
 working, above, and through, and in His 
 creatures, as Fathee, Son, and Holy Ghost 
 for ever. There are these Three, no more, no 
 less. For in these is comprehended the entire 
 sphere of knowledge and of power, and the 
 whole circle of Life is thus eternally filled, 
 from centre to circumference, with the infinite 
 activities of God. 
 
 Finally, let us not imagine it to be a matter 
 of small moment to have received such a truth 
 as this of the Divine Trinity for the parting 
 
IX.] THE TRINITY. 189 
 
 gift of the Lord Jesus. "Well may we regard 
 His last words as His most significant words. 
 What does it signify, then, that in His last 
 words He communicated this new and Triune 
 Name of God ? 
 
 Doubtless it depends much on our con- 
 ception of God, what sort of a life we live. 
 A false or misleading idea of God brings moral 
 darkness and weakness into the soul. The 
 darkness of heathenism is the shadow of its 
 falsities concerning God. The weakness of 
 much nominal Christianity grows out of its 
 delusions concerning God. From ages of 
 darkness there still survives in the Church 
 the illusion, common to all false religions, 
 that God is of a nature alien to our nature, 
 external to the world, and by His very in- 
 finiteness removed from us. This is so in- 
 bred into us that we unconsciously act upon 
 it, even though we know it is not so. The 
 truth of the Divine Trinity is the appointed 
 safeguard against this, that we may not live 
 as in a soulless world, and in an unspiritual 
 mind, blinded to the eternal presence of the 
 all-pervading Divine Life. Our life is indeed 
 both communicated, and shared, and inspired, 
 by the Eternal One, who " is above all, and 
 
190 THE TRINITY. [iX. 
 
 through all, and in all." For our steadfast- 
 ness in duty, for our purity of heart, for our 
 peacefulness of hope, we need much more 
 than the Trinitarian dogma about the " Three 
 Persons." We need to reahse in our habitual 
 consciousness the true Christian import of the 
 Name of God, as the " Father, the Son, and 
 the Holy Ghost." Oftener let us think upon 
 it, that the Life of the all-creating Father 
 still animates the filial growth of the unfolding 
 world, still palpitates in the spiritual struggles 
 of aspiring goodness ; and that this same Life, 
 which shone with divinest glory from the face 
 of Jesus, still strives within us, to bring light 
 out of darkness, and to make us in the Spirit 
 true children of God. 
 
X. 
 
 BALAAM: THE MORAL CBOSS-EYE. 
 
BALAAM: THE MOBAL CBOSS-EYE. 
 
 " And when Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord to bless 
 Israel, he went not, as at the other times, to meet ivith en- 
 chantments, hut he set his face toward the wilderness. And 
 Balaam lifted up his eyes, and he saw Israel dwelling accord- 
 ing to their tribes; and the spirit of God came upon him. 
 And he took up his parable, and said : 
 
 Balaam the son of Beor saith, 
 And the man whose eye was closed saith : 
 He saith, which heareth the words of God, 
 Which seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
 Falling down, and having his eyes open : 
 How goodly are thy tents, Jacob, 
 Thy tabernacles, Israel ! 
 
 — Numbers xxiv. 1 — 5. 
 
 The story of Balaam is a remarkable story. 
 However we understand the occmTences de- 
 scribed, the moral lesson is plain and un- 
 mistakable, and nowise dependent on the 
 historical accuracy of the narrative. But 
 probably the larger number of readers have 
 
 Preached in Anerlet Congregational Church, 
 Sunday Evening, September 2, 1888. 
 
 13 
 
194 BALAAM : [X. 
 
 taken more notice of the beast in the story 
 than of the man, more of the animal which 
 for the time seems to have two tongues — the 
 power of human as well as of animal utterance, 
 — than of the man who has two minds — the 
 rational and religious insight of a man, 
 together v/ith the perverse and wilful temper 
 of a brute. The man, however, is undoubtedly 
 a greater wonder than the beast he bestrides, 
 so far as the moral world is grander than the 
 physical, so far as the play of spiritual forces 
 is more significant than the impressions which 
 strike our senses and are gone. Here is 
 the real marvel of the story ; — not in the dia- 
 logue of man with beast, or in the dialogue of 
 man with angel. 
 
 The historical Balaam died more than three 
 thousand years ago. The type survives. 
 Balaams are still common — men of high pro- 
 fession and low practice, of strong emotions 
 and weak principles, of right discernment and 
 perverse desire — two-minded men, morally 
 cross-eyed, their conscience discerning truth 
 and duty, their desire turned aside to what is 
 false and lawless. What Jesus means in say- 
 ing, " If thine eye be single, thy lohole body 
 shall be full of light," appears in our study of 
 
X.] THE MOKAL CROSS-EYE. 195 
 
 Balaam as the type of the exactly opposite 
 condition. 
 
 Balaam flashes into the sacred history Hke a 
 comet, bright and grand, from regions un- 
 known. He seems to have lived beyond the 
 Syrian desert, by the river Euphrates, in the 
 land from vs^hich Abraham with his high faith 
 in God had emigrated westward five hundred 
 years before. The degree of religious illumin- 
 ation which Balaam seems to possess appears 
 equal to that of Moses himself, greater even 
 than that of many in Christian lands. Thus a 
 purer light than we have imagined may shine 
 in many a soul that we class among heathen, 
 and the heathen, even without the Gospel, 
 may be in his sins without excuse. 
 
 Balaam had a trade, and lived by it. He 
 was a diviner. The universal custom of the 
 nations was to propitiate by means of magic 
 those invisible powers with which men now 
 cope by means of science. To prognosticate 
 future events, to avert drought and pestilence, 
 to procure victory in war, to obtain, in short, 
 from the invisible realms beyond the penetra- 
 tion of ordinary mortals that " knowledge of 
 good and evil " which is said to have been 
 sought in Eden from the fruit of the forbidden 
 
196 BALAAM : [X. 
 
 tree — a higher knowledge and so a higher 
 power to obtain good things and avert evil — 
 this was the trade of the class to which 
 Balaam belonged, and a very lucrative trade it 
 was. For a single fortunate prediction a 
 diviner might obtain, as we learn from Xeno- 
 phon, a sum equal to about £6,000. 
 
 Balaam seems, like others of his trade in 
 ancient and modern times, to have possessed 
 that highly sensitive nervous organisation 
 which — as in persons classed as clairvoyants 
 or spirit-mediums — is susceptible to certain 
 mysterious influences of which normally con- 
 stituted men feel nothing. In a certain high- 
 wrought exaltation of his nervous life he came 
 under a power superior to that of his own will, 
 so that he could not but utter the thoughts 
 that then possessed him. In such a condition 
 he fell prostrate upon the earth, and spoke 
 involuntarily under control of an irresistible 
 influence. In such a condition, it was literally 
 true, as he said : " If Balak would give me his 
 house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond 
 the commandment of the Loed, to do either good 
 or had of mine own iJiind." 
 
 This strange endowment of genius was, in 
 Balaam's view, his property rather than his 
 
X.] THE MORAL CROSS-EYE. 197 
 
 trust, and he was bent on making what he could 
 by it, without much scruple about the way. 
 
 Balak, the King of Moab, was then in a 
 strait. The host of Israel, in its march to 
 Canaan, had arrived in his territories, and was 
 subsisting itself upon the country. Unable to 
 cope by arms, he resorted, after the manner of 
 the times, to supernatural weapons. His 
 embassy crossed the desert to Balaam, and 
 offered him a large retaining fee to come and 
 pronounce his potent curse upon the invaders. 
 
 To this, however, Balaam gave a positive 
 refusal. He took time to deliberate, and came 
 to the conviction that God was on the side of 
 the Israelites. As to Balaam, so to us, it is 
 the voice of conscience which is the voice of 
 God. " God said imto liim, Thou shalt not go ; 
 tliou shalt not curse the people, for they are 
 blessed." Accordingly, he sent word back, 
 " The Lord refuseth to give me leave to go." 
 
 But Balaam's heart was not in his refusal. 
 He was willing to disobey conscience, but not for 
 so small a consideration. This the ambassadors 
 saw, for they presently came back with a 
 louder call, and a larger fee, and still larger 
 promises. Balaam's heart is set on going, but 
 he must first get around the commandment, 
 
198 BALAAM : [X. 
 
 " Thou sJialt not go ; " he must make it seem 
 right to conscience. So he bids them wait, 
 while he inquires further into his duty. 
 
 The result was the usual result to which 
 mental dishonesty comes. We can make black 
 and white change with each other if we are so 
 disposed. So African slavery used to be justi- 
 fied by American preachers as God's appointed 
 means for Christianising Africans. Balaam 
 worked on his conscience like an ingenious 
 lawyer on a reluctant jury, — precisely as men 
 do now, when they persuade themselves that 
 laziness is care for health, revenge is justice, 
 stinginess is prudence, lying a business neces- 
 sity. And conscience gave at length the 
 desired verdict. Not without reminder, how- 
 ever, of the awkwardness in which he might 
 be placed when the test came, if, in the 
 trance-condition, his tongue should prove un- 
 able to utter the curse that Balak was to pay 
 him for: ''God said, Go with them; hut only 
 the word which I speak unto thee, that shalt 
 thou do'' 
 
 On that risk, notwithstanding, Balaam went. 
 So every man who is false to the bidding of his 
 higher nature goes at risk of things alike be- 
 yond his calculation and his control. 
 
X.] THE MORAL CROSS-EYE. 199 
 
 It was on the journey that the incident of 
 the speaking ass occurred which has so unduly 
 diverted attention from the moral lessons of the 
 story. We owe it a word or two to relieve 
 some curious minds. 
 
 Our first duty in our Bible reading is to find 
 the consistency of things. If, indeed, the 
 dumb creature uttered a human voice, as the 
 second Epistle of Peter remarks, this narrative 
 becomes most inconsistent. For, in that case, 
 we find Balaam, a professional diviner, and 
 engaged at the time in a very critical under- 
 taking in which he would be most alert to 
 notice all unfavourable signs, quite unaware of 
 anything in his beast of a preternatural sort. 
 What he observes we must conclude from 
 what he does. He does only what any angry 
 teamster does vdth a refractory horse. Had 
 there been any so portentous a prodigy as an ass 
 suddenly gifted with human speech he would 
 not so have done. His profession, his circum- 
 stances, his hazards, must have forced him to 
 a very different behaviour. Unless, then, we 
 are prepared to accept a most surprising and 
 incredible inconsistency in the story itself, we 
 must regard Balaam's conduct as evincing 
 nothing more in the action of his beast than a 
 
200 BALAAM : [X. 
 
 brute nature in terror is capable of. So the 
 dumb creatures often speak to us by looks and 
 cries, inarticulately, but eloquently and in- 
 telligibly. 
 
 Conceding this short digression to those who 
 stick in this part of the story, we must now 
 follow Balaam in his crooked way. 
 
 In the midst of the unaccountable reluctance 
 of his ass to proceed, a strange terror came 
 upon him. " The Lord ope?ied his eyes." As 
 a natural clairvoyant, he may well have seen 
 in his way the hostile apparition that was 
 invisible to his companions. Immediately the 
 whole question of conscience which he fancied 
 he had closed was reopened. No question of 
 conscience is ever closed till it is settled 
 rightly. From term to term of the court the 
 case is adjourned, and the costs of sin's- 
 interminable bill mount up meanwhile — to be 
 paid some tune to the uttermost farthing. 
 " And Balaam said u7ito the angel of the 
 Lord, I have sinned; noio, therefore, if it 
 displease thee, I will get me back again." But 
 there was no if about it. It was a clear case. 
 Yet Balaam dishonestly asks for more light, 
 when his trouble was that he already had 
 more than he liked. 
 
X.J THE MORAL CROSS-EYE. 201 
 
 We often see men nowadays asking for more 
 light, when all they need is more liking for the 
 light. Many a man's mind was frankly stated 
 by the Scotchman who said, " I'm open to 
 conviction ; but I'd like to see the mon that 
 can convince me." Whoever wants more light 
 must walk toward what light there is. Balaam 
 owaied, " I have sinned." The only reason- 
 able conclusion was to stop, and go back. 
 But that would be decidedly inconvenient. 
 There w^ould be a scene with his fellow 
 travellers. It would be confessing a humiliat- 
 ing mistake in starting. He would seem very 
 inconsistent. So, as he had committed himself 
 to the business, he would go on, unless God 
 had something more positive to say against it. 
 Thus we find the will generally carries the 
 conscience, and a dishonest will makes a false 
 conscience. A voice seemed to say, "Go." It 
 merely echoed his own choice to go. " The 
 angel of the Lord said unto Balaam, Go uith 
 the men : hut only the word that I shall speak 
 unto thee, that shall thou speak. So Balaam 
 went ivith the princes of Balak." Balaam 
 chose to regard it as a permission. In fact, it 
 was a doom, and cast shadowy misgivings 
 ahead upon the incalculable possibilities. 
 
202 BALAAM : [x. 
 
 The king and the diviner at length meet. 
 In their first conference the better side of 
 Balaam's nature comes out for a moment. It 
 is not uncommon for men to initiate the most 
 selfish courses with the most upright profes- 
 sions. A political platform that proposes an 
 act of national dishonour will begin with an 
 appeal to the principles of righteousness. A 
 church meeting that is to be spent in wrang- 
 ling will be opened with prayer for the Holy 
 Spirit. The Prophet Micah has recorded the 
 lofty utterance of Balaam, when Balak, in his 
 distress, declared himself ready to sacrifice 
 even the heir of his throne to gain God's 
 favour for the nation. " Wherewith,"' said 
 Balak, " shall I come before the Lord, and how 
 myself before the high God ? Shall I come 
 before Him loith burnt offerings, with calves of 
 a year old ? Will the Loed be pleased with 
 thousands of rams, or ivith ten thousands of 
 rivers of oil / Shall I give my firstborn for 
 my transgression, the fruit of my body for the 
 si7i of my soul ? " And Balaam answered : 
 " He hath showed thee, man, what is good ; 
 and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
 do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God I " 
 
X.] THE MOEAL CROSS-EYE. 203 
 
 There is nothing in the whole Bible that is 
 purer spiritual truth than this voice out of the 
 enhghtened conscience of the greatest of the 
 Gentile prophets. But our wonder at finding 
 such a spiritual gem in the midst of a heathen 
 world, and in connection with superstitious 
 beliefs and magical practices, pales before the 
 wonder of a Christian world, so common that 
 it has almost ceased to excite wonder, in the 
 coupling of the purest theory and the basest 
 conduct. We find it in men like Louis XV., 
 entitling himself "the most Christian king" 
 while leading the life of a rake and a tyrant, — 
 in men like Kobert Burns, who could write 
 sach a poem of Christian family life as " The 
 Cotter's Saturday Night " and also stanzas as 
 foul as any that ever blotted an English page. 
 The same unnatural embrace of Life and 
 Death, in which, as in the case of Balaam, 
 Death comes off the victor, we may see to-day. 
 There are men who in private life are honour- 
 able, in politics unscrupulous ; devout on 
 Sundays, on week days deceitful ; in theology 
 conservative, in morals liberal. There are 
 women who would much object to staying 
 away from the Communion Table, but would 
 have no scruple at retailing hearsay slander 
 
204 BALAAM : [x. 
 
 over the tea-table. Even the clergyman, who 
 ojBficiates at the Table w^ith holy words in his 
 mouth and a heart full of adultery, is by no 
 means an unheard-of imitator of Balaam's 
 sin. Alas ! we need not search for Balaam 
 beyond the circle of our own acquaintance, 
 perhaps not beyond the range of our own 
 practices. The double-mindedness, the moral 
 cross-eye of which Balaam is the typical 
 example, appears in every man who knows 
 the thing that is right and does the thing that 
 is wrong, in falseness to his own convictions 
 of truth and duty, letting the devil in him 
 choke the angel in him. 
 
 Having now made his most respectful bow 
 to God, Balaam turns to his trade, intent on 
 " the wages of iniquity." Most picturesque is 
 the scene upon the sacred page. From height 
 to height the king and the diviner walk, where 
 the outlook upon the fair landscape and the 
 vast encampment of Israel may stir the 
 imagination of the seer and elevate his 
 emotions into the region of rapt feeling, that 
 the currents of the prophetic impulse may 
 seize upon him and carry him up into ecstasy 
 and oracle. Thrice did Balaam seek by solemn 
 sacrifice to propitiate the Power whom he 
 
X.] THE MOEAL CKOSS-EYE. 205 
 
 could propitiate only by the obedience he had 
 refused. Thrice did he attempt, with seven 
 altars, seven bullocks, and seven rams, to 
 modify the original commandment, " Tliou 
 shalt not curse them, for they are blessed." 
 Thrice the prophetic rapture came upon him, 
 as he gazed upon the enchanting view ; thrice 
 he fell prostrate under the overmastering spell 
 of power ; and thrice the tongue that craved 
 to curse was compelled to bless. 
 
 And can he choose but fear, 
 
 Who feels his God so near. 
 That when he fain would curse, his powerless tongue 
 
 In blessing only moves ? — 
 
 Alas ! the world he loves 
 Too close around his heart her tangling veil hath flung. 
 
 Wonderful is Balaam's forecast of the course 
 of history, grand his diction, as he prophesies 
 to Balak the ascendant " Star" of Jacob, the 
 dominating " Sceptre " of Israel, and presages 
 the successive rise of the great Eastern and 
 Western powers. 
 
 He watch'd till knowledge came 
 
 Upon his soul like flame. 
 Not of those magic fires at random caught : 
 
 But true prophetic light 
 
 Flash'd o'er him, high and bright, 
 Flash'd once, and died away, and left his darken'd 
 thought. 
 
206 BALAAM : [x. 
 
 If we wonder at this gift of prophecy in 
 a bad man's lips, we are to remember that 
 prophetic genius for forecasting history is 
 like scientific genius for divining the laws of 
 nature — an intellectual gift, quite capable of 
 coexisting with moral obliquity. More won- 
 derful than any prophecy is that union in 
 which the grandeur and the baseness of which 
 a man is capable are here exhibited. As 
 Balaam pictures the fleeting glories of earth, 
 the abiding glory of righteousness rises before 
 him, and words flow from his lips that have 
 been consecrated for ever to the expression of 
 Christian hope : ''Let me die the death of the 
 righteous, and let my last end he like his." Yet 
 he hankers still after the wages of unrighteous- 
 ness. And when Balak proposes to make 
 another trial at cursing, on a hill-top where 
 there is no grand and ravishing prospect to 
 excite a prophecy of Israel's greatness, but 
 only the fag-end of their camp, Balaam 
 willingly renews the unscrupulous attempt, 
 Keble has portrayed it in his well-known 
 hymn for the second Sunday after Easter, 
 already quoted : 
 
 O for a sculptor's hand, 
 That thou might'st take thy stand. 
 Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze. 
 
X.] THE MORAL CROSS-EYE. 207 
 
 Thy tranc'd yet open gaze 
 Fix'd on tbe desert haze. 
 As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees. 
 
 In outline dim and vast 
 
 Their fearful shadows cast 
 The giant forms of empires on their way 
 
 To ruin : one by one 
 
 They tower and they are gone. 
 Yet in the Prophet's soid the dreams of avarice stay. 
 
 — the same avarice that spotted the ermine 
 and the wisdom of Lord Bacon, Chancellor of 
 England, foremost philosopher of his time, 
 with the ignominy of bribes, and put him in 
 history's pillory, where Pope taunts him as 
 
 The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind. 
 
 how great is man ! how base is man ! 
 But let him that is without sin be the man to 
 stone Balaam, We, too, are of the same clay. 
 Are we not all in danger of this self-imposture 
 of imagining that a bow to God is rehgion 
 enough, and our trade no requisite part of 
 God's service ? Are we not all in danger of 
 mistaking the religion of gush for the religion 
 of duty? Too often are men satisfied with 
 devoutly wishing to die the death of the 
 righteous, while wilHng to live the unrighteous 
 life of contradiction to sacred convictions. 
 Full often there flies at the masthead a flag of 
 
208 BALAAM : [x. 
 
 profession as honourable and godly as Balaam's, 
 while the voice of command and the hand at 
 the wheel are as selfish and base as the lust of 
 money can make a miser or a pirate. 
 
 We are near the end of the story, but there 
 is one more step of degradation in Balaam's 
 way to his doom. Balak, in the rage of his 
 disappointment, bade him go home. But 
 Balaam, having come so far, did not mean 
 to lose his fee, whatever else he lost. He 
 made his humble apology to Balak. His will 
 was good enough, but he had lacked power. 
 The irresistible influence that came upon him 
 in the trance had forced him to speak other- 
 wise than he wished to. But he could do 
 better. Cool-headed policy, dictated by his 
 own intelligence, was more reliable than the 
 mysterious power that took his self-control 
 away. Like Faust selling himself to the evil 
 one, he sold himself to Balak to bring about 
 in immediate effect that curse of Israel which 
 he had been unable to put into words. The 
 plot formed by this man of so heavenly know- 
 ledge was worthy of demoniac malice. 
 
 Balak's nation, like other Arab tribes, wor- 
 shipped an idol, called " Baal-Peor," with 
 orgies of beastly licentiousness. Balaam 
 
X.] THE MOEAL CKOSS-ETE. 209 
 
 counselled to invite the Israelites to take 
 part in these orgies. The baser part would 
 comply ; the weaker part would be drawn in ; 
 the Divine wrath would follow. Out of the 
 carnival of lust would come riot and revolu- 
 tion, and a reverse of that glorious destiny he 
 had prophesied. This would not injure his 
 credit as a prophet, and the money would at 
 last be his. 
 
 This damnable device was adopted, but 
 Balaam, like many other malicious gunners, 
 suffered more by the recoil than his mark by 
 the projectile. At first it seemed as if the pit 
 of ruin yawned underneath the Hebrew camp. 
 The people swarmed around the vile altar 
 where worship was offered by prostitution. 
 "Israel joined himself unto Baal-Feor and 
 the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 Israel." But Balaam, like every other man 
 who fails to reckon God among the factors of 
 a result, had taken no account of the sacred 
 fire. In the breast of the Jewish nation, as in 
 the bush where glowed the unearthly fire that 
 Moses saw, there has burned from the first a 
 religious zeal, sometimes waning to a single 
 spark in some lone Elijah, and sometimes 
 mounting in tongues of devouring flame, as in 
 
210 BALAAM : [X. 
 
 the patriots of the Maccabean revolution. 
 This sacred fire now blazed forth in the hand- 
 ful of choice spirits that rallied around Moses. 
 The desperate situation was retrieved by- 
 desperate means. Sword in hand, these fierce 
 Puritans hurled themselves, as God's avengers, 
 upon the voluptuous multitude. Conscience- 
 stricken, panic-stricken, they fell in their 
 blood. The plot had failed. The plot was to be 
 avenged. The nation that had seemed falling 
 to pieces was reconsolidated in a grand crusade 
 against the idolatrous altars that had wrought 
 such suffering. The record of the victory 
 closes the list of the illustrious slain with the 
 most detested name : " Balaam, also, the son 
 of Beor, they sleio loith the swords If he got 
 his money, the ill-gotten money perished with 
 him. The dazzling comet that had so sud- 
 denly blazed out in the eastern sky as sud- 
 denly disappears — " a wandering star,'" says 
 the Apostle, going out into " the blackness of 
 darkness." 
 
 The moral has run along with the story. 
 With the occult problems which it raises as 
 to things as yet equally beyond science and 
 revelation, we now have nothing to do in our 
 
X.] THE MOEAL CROSS-EYE. 211 
 
 quest for moral and practical lessons. Most 
 conspicuously of any Biblical character 
 Balaam illustrates that monstrous self-decep- 
 tion to which every man makes himself liable 
 who puts his conscience not in the saddle but 
 under it, to be ridden by an unrighteous 
 desire. Under such treatment of conscience 
 a man upsets his moral balance and makes 
 himself a moral lunatic, responsible for his 
 craze and its consequences. But at the final 
 coming to one's self, when conscience, as she 
 surely will, regains her seat, what judt:(ment 
 more consuming than to realise that the pure 
 knowledge and the foul practice were both 
 our own, and that we ourselves, with open 
 eyes, sacrificed the angel to the fiend ! This 
 is " the loorm that dieth not, and the fire that 
 is not quenched.''' 
 
XL 
 
 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 
 
XI. 
 
 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 
 
 " I come quickly. Amen : come, Lord Jesus." — Revelatioa 
 xxii. 20. 
 
 It is more than eighteen hundred years since 
 these words were penned, a Divine promise 
 and a Christian prayer. For eighteen hundred 
 years that prayer has been constantly repeated, 
 " Come, Lord Jesus." For eighteen hundred 
 years that promise has been receiving fulfil- 
 ment. Its last word, " quicklij," has not been 
 at fault. 
 
 When Jesus died. He had certainly come to 
 no great number of men, and to no great 
 influence in the world. But, by and since His 
 death. He has certainly been coming to men in 
 a growing power, as Teacher, and Leader, and 
 Lord. To new races, new lands, new condi- 
 tions of society, He has been coming in a 
 
 Preached in Lower Edmonton Independent Church, 
 Sunday Morning, September 9, 1888. 
 
216 THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. [XI. 
 
 growing authority, as a growing light, infusing 
 a growing influence into thought and conduct. 
 This is still going on, and will continue to go 
 on. More and more in the future, as in the 
 past, is Christ to come into control of men's 
 minds and lives. We so judge from experience. 
 What has been will be. 
 
 What Jesus has manifestly done is manifestly 
 what He promised to do. And as there is 
 much more to be done, we may expect that it 
 will be done. The prayer, " Come, Lord Jesus" 
 is as appropriate now as originally. The 
 promise, " I come quickly " is guaranteed by 
 its progressive fulfilment thus far. We pray 
 and strive for the complete fulfilment both of 
 the promise and the prayer through an Advent 
 of Christ continuously advancing to His com- 
 plete ascendancy, when He shall have filled the 
 world, and filled individual life, with His 
 spiritual power in righteousness and peace. 
 
 For eighteen hundred years the Advent of 
 Christ has been a fond object of Christian 
 thought and hope. And yet there is still no 
 small perplexity and delusion in regard to it. 
 Surely on this subject a clear mind is greatly 
 to be desired. On the threshold of our inquiry 
 stands the question. What was it for that He 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 217 
 
 came into the world as a babe ? It was to lay 
 a foundation, in the actual facts of an earthly 
 existence, for His effectual coming into the 
 moral and spiritual life of men. In order to 
 do this, He must be born, must experience the 
 common lot of men, have a historical career, 
 and die. We are accustomed to speak of His 
 Advent, when we mean only His birth. This, 
 however, was but the preparation for His real 
 Advent, which is not in the flesh, but in the 
 spirit. People speak of His " second " Advent, 
 when they mean a future coming at " the end 
 of the world." But in reahty the so-called 
 "second Advent" is to be looked for much 
 nearer than that. It is to be recognised in 
 His spiritual coming as the Eenewer of the 
 hearts and minds of men. If we call it the 
 " second," to distinguish it from His coming 
 into the world at birth, we must still remember, 
 what is generally overlooked, that the only 
 real Advent of Christ is not a physical event 
 but a spiritual process. It belongs to the 
 world of thought and feeling, not to the world 
 of the five senses. It is His entrance into the 
 moral and spiritual life of the world. When 
 this has taken place, there is no other advent 
 to be expected. So far as this has not fully 
 
218 THE ADVENT OF THE CHBIST. [xi. 
 
 taken place, we look for more and more of it in 
 the future, as in the past. Thus the promise 
 still holds for us as for the first disciples, 
 "I come quickly; " and it still calls forth 
 the responsive prayer, "Amen: come, Lord 
 
 " Quickly,'' said Jesus. Has it indeed been 
 so? Is not this a staple scoff of scepticism, 
 that eighteen hundred years have passed since 
 the angels sang, " Peace on earth to men of 
 good zvill," and yet to-day sees the Christian 
 nations of Europe armed to the teeth against 
 each other, and Churches that celebrate the 
 birth of Christ still divided and hostile, as 
 Catholic and Protestant, and almost within 
 hearing of the cathedral choirs festering masses 
 of as squalid barbarism as can be found on 
 earth? ''Quickly" : how can we vindicate 
 that word as the word of truth ? How can we 
 hold to it without disappointment ? The 
 answer cannot be put briefly, but it can be put 
 convincingly. It is many thousands of years 
 since man came into the world, and there are 
 still wildernesses waiting for the coming of 
 man. Not more strange is it, that there are 
 moral desolations still waiting for the coming 
 of the Divine Son of man. 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. *219 
 
 Nevertheless the promise, " I come guickly" 
 has been verified in history. In less than forty 
 years after these words were written, we find 
 surprising testimony borne to them in the 
 letter of a Eoman governor, Pliny, to the 
 Emperor Trajan. In his remote province of 
 Bithynia, Pliny finds that a new power has 
 drawn away from the heathen temples " many 
 of every age and rank, and of both sexes, not 
 only in the cities but in the country districts," 
 so that the temples are nearly deserted ; and 
 this, he reports, was a new power in the minds 
 of men, which expressed itself mainly in greater 
 purity of life. What took place there took 
 place in greater or less degree all over the 
 Eoman world of that day. The fact attests 
 the promise, " I come quickly." The beginning 
 was immediate, although the process has been 
 long. 
 
 Here, then, another word of Jesus claims 
 notice. He evidently expected to be long in 
 the process of His coming, although im- 
 mediate in its beginning. " Think ye," said 
 He, " that I am come to give peace on 
 earth / I tell you, Nay ; but rather division : 
 for there shall be from henceforth five in 
 one house divided, three against two, and two 
 
220 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. [XI. 
 
 against three." Division first, in order to 
 peace ultimately. 
 
 Suppose I were to show you a glass of lime- 
 water. It is transparent, but it is not pure 
 water. Suppose you pass into it a jet of 
 carbonic-acid gas. Instantly the transparent 
 water becomes turbid with a white cloud. The 
 acid separates the lime from the water, joins 
 itself to the lime, and changes it into carbonate 
 of lime, the molecules of which make the 
 white cloud. Let it stand awhile, and they 
 will settle at the bottom as a powder. Now 
 that the division has taken place, with all this 
 temporary disturbance separating the lime and 
 the water, the water becomes clear again, and 
 now it is j)ure. 
 
 Thus, wherever Christ comes as a purifying 
 spirit, the first effect is disturbance and division. 
 The world is disturbed, the soul is disturbed, 
 until the evil in them is separated from them. 
 And while this is going on we cry impatiently, 
 " How long ! " For long it is. 
 
 And yet why so long ? Eighteen hundred 
 years, and so much evil still remaining unex- 
 pelled ! The answer is not far to seek. It is 
 not that evil men are obstinate, so much as 
 good men unwise. The believers in Christ 
 
XL] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 221 
 
 have hindered His coming and thwarted His 
 work far more than the unbehevers. 
 
 It was an early and a mischievous mistake, 
 that pohtical influence might further Christ's 
 spiritual mission. Then the State formed 
 close alliance with the Church. One must be 
 in fellowship with the Church to be in favour 
 at Court. To this day, in most of the Chris- 
 tian world this alliance is maintained, which 
 more than anything else has made Christianity 
 a sham and a shame, through the hypocrisy 
 produced in some and the enmity roused in 
 others, — yet all with good intent by unwise 
 believers in Christ. 
 
 Another equally unhappy stumbling-block 
 to the progress of Christ's Advent in the 
 world was the notion that early gained a place 
 from which it has not yet been expelled, that 
 anti-Christian error, or what was so regarded, 
 should be visited with penalities in outward 
 suffering, as by exile, imprisonment, death, or, 
 as in these less violent days, by ostracism and 
 social disrepute. And so it came about that, 
 whatever fallacy or mistake had crept into 
 Christian thought or practice, it could not be 
 corrected ; to touch it was sacrilege ; the fire 
 was lighted for the reformer. Go, stand upon 
 
222 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. [xi. 
 
 the Thames Embankment before the statue of 
 William Tyndale, martyred for translating the 
 Bible into our English tongue, and there reflect 
 what religious persecution, protecting religious 
 delusion, has done to delay the Advent of the 
 Christ. 
 
 If we ask. Why had it to be so ? we have to 
 answer just as we answer the question. Why 
 have men been allowed for ages to perish by 
 deaths that were preventable, until they dis- 
 cover how to prevent them ? It is the way of 
 God, that men must learn by experience. And 
 this, the only thorough way, is a long way. 
 So much the slower is the Advent of the Lord, 
 until His wilhng but unwise helpers learn not 
 to hinder Him. 
 
 Yet one more hindrance, which from the 
 beginning until now His would-be helpers 
 have cast in the way, is the notion — of which 
 we especially must beware — that thought and 
 understanding are of primary importance in 
 His work, rather than feeling and affection. 
 What has been the consequence of this 
 mistake? The very basis of Christian fellow- 
 ship and co-operation in a common love to 
 Christ has been lost among the differences of 
 Christian intellects. Christian strength that 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 223 
 
 should have been used in alHance for the 
 common cause has been wasted in divisive 
 wrangling about theories. Far worse even than 
 this, and a much more fatal obstacle to the pro- 
 gress of Christ's spirit, zeal for orthodoxy has 
 taken the place of zeal for righteousness and 
 charity. Theology has been more esteemed 
 than morality and humanity. And so men 
 who would have accepted Christianity had it 
 been presented in its true character as spirit 
 and life, have rejected it when presented as a 
 dogma, not only often repulsive to reason and 
 feeling, but often dishonoured by the profligacy 
 or the barbarity of its false professors. 
 
 Oh, it is no wonder that our Lord, however 
 quickly He began to fulfil His promise, " I 
 come," has been so long in fulfilling it, while 
 His nominal helpers have so interferred with 
 the work of His purifying Spirit in expelling 
 evil from the world. So much of the devil has 
 gone into theology ; so much of the inhumanity 
 of man has been ascribed in the creeds to God, 
 and has been perpetrated by professedly 
 Christian men in the name of God. And this 
 strange mixture of heathen and Christian in 
 the popular dogmas and practices of the 
 Church has been offered to men as Christ's 
 
224 THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. [XI. 
 
 grace and truth ! Not strange is their scepti- 
 cism at that. But, strange, indeed, to doubt 
 the promise of Jesus, rather than the intelh- 
 gence of those who have so hindered its fulfil- 
 ment. 
 
 Especially strange is any question as to the 
 present reahty of Christ's promised Advent, 
 when, despite these formidable hindrances, it 
 has already made such actual progress. "We 
 have simply to ask. What sort of principles 
 and influences have been, on the whole, 
 gaining ground and power in the world ? 
 What one name in the world has been win- 
 ning recognition and authority more than any 
 other ? Even infidelity has changed its tone, 
 and has learned to mention the Name of Jesus 
 only with respect. Far as the world may yet 
 be from the full recognition of the spiritual 
 sovereignty of Christ, we can see that the 
 course of things has gone far that way. We 
 can see that He has been coming into a wider 
 control as the moral Leader, as the Judge 
 who rights wrongs, as the Lawgiver who is 
 obeyed. 
 
 Is it not to be reckoned as an effectual 
 Advent of Christ to His spiritual throne, 
 whenever Christian principles come to power ? 
 
XL] THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. 225 
 
 This is what we have seen in the growing 
 conviction that reHgious persecution is wrong, 
 and in the large, though not yet complete, 
 tolerance shown to men who once would have 
 been burned for their opinions. When the 
 delusion that cursed the world during the 
 gloomy ages which believed in witchcraft came 
 to an end, and the superstition was broken up 
 which had consigned myriads of hapless and 
 helpless creatures to death because of their 
 supposed partnership Avith supposed devils, it 
 was a real Advent of Christ in the spirit of 
 humane intelligence. When the cruel laws 
 were abolished which hanged httle children 
 for petty thefts ; when criminals began to be 
 treated less as vermin to be destroyed, and 
 more as men to be reformed ; when the educa- 
 tion which had been the privilege of a few 
 began to be opened to the many ; when the 
 insane, who had been treated as wild beasts to 
 be caged, began to be compassionated as sick 
 neighbours to be healed ; when government, 
 which had been wielded in the interests of the 
 great, began to be employed in behalf of the 
 humble ; when slaves were made free men ; 
 when war began to exempt non-combatants 
 from destruction, and arbitration began to 
 
 15 
 
226 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. [xi. 
 
 take the place of the sword ; — there was in 
 every instance an actual and effectual gain of 
 moral power. In this there was a real pro- 
 gress of principles clearly Christian. In this 
 there was a clear advance in the progressive 
 Advent of Christ toward ultimate sovereignty 
 as the Lawgiver of the world. Most manifest 
 has this been in the modern development of 
 a philanthropy so wide, that even the dumb 
 animals have their share of benefit, and in the 
 spread of Christian missions, together with 
 the humane ministry of Christian physicians, 
 into every part of the heathen world. The 
 Gospel story of Jesus' cures of the lepers, the 
 blind, the paralytics, seems to be repeated in 
 our time. The advent of the medical healer 
 of " the ills that flesh is heir to," in the train 
 of the Christian missionary, is but one of many 
 signs of the progressive Advent of the Son of 
 man. 
 
 But all this is recent, mostly within a cen- 
 tury. Why so recent? Why this waiting, 
 this tardy coming of the Christ, this late 
 growing of the Christian spirit to power ? 
 Why might it not have been at least a thou- 
 sand years earlier in its beneficent conquests ? 
 We have already taken note of the bin- 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 227 
 
 drances created by the mistakes of Christian 
 men. Besides these, we must now make 
 account of the hindrance due to pohtical 
 convulsions. 
 
 The world into which Jesus was born was a 
 decaying world. Its breed of men had dege- 
 nerated. Its liberties had perished. Its 
 heroes were dead. Its vigour was exhausted 
 by luxury on one side and slavery on the 
 other. How little progress Christianity could 
 make in such a world, is illustrated by that 
 which survives of it among the debased 
 churches of the Greek Communion, the 
 Kussian, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic. In that 
 decaying world Christianity was sown like 
 wheat among the falling leaves of autumn. 
 Hardly had it struck root, ere a wintry 
 period closed in and checked its growth as 
 under snow and ice. A deluge of barbarian 
 invasions — Goths, Huns, Vandals, Franks, 
 and Saxons — poured over Europe. The clock 
 of history was set back a thousand years. 
 The old barbaric strife for the survival of 
 the fittest set in again in centuries of war 
 and violence. Thus a new world, as it were, 
 raw and refractory, was created for the Advent 
 of the Son of man. And such a world it was, 
 
228 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. [XI. 
 
 which had for apostles of that Advent only 
 men who held the crucifix in one hand and 
 the sword in the other, compliant allies of 
 barbarian king;s, presenting to the nations a 
 mysterious creed and magical sacraments 
 and the terrors of purgatory, but no real 
 Christ. 
 
 Indeed, it was not the Church which did 
 most to prepare the way of Christ to the wait- 
 ing nations. It was the industrial spirit which 
 most effectively combated the military spirit, 
 and thawed away the winter of barbarism. It 
 was commerce and art and education which 
 roused thought into search for truth, and made 
 ready a people prepared for the Christ who 
 came in the spiritual power of reformers like 
 Wyclif and Hus and Luther. That industry 
 and commerce, that art and education, which 
 at length broke up that barbarian winter of 
 a thousand years, when the Christianity 
 which had been sown as winter wheat in 
 autumn sprang up again as in April, must be 
 reckoned as among the " angels," or ministers, 
 of whom Jesus spoke when He said, "The Son 
 of man shall send fortli His angels, and they 
 shall gather out of His kingdom all tilings that 
 cause stumbling .'^ 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. 229 
 
 A gi-eat clearing of Christian thought and 
 nerving of Christian effort depend on our 
 recovery of this great truth of the Advent 
 from its long and disastrous eclipse. The real 
 Advent of Christ is His coming in spiritual 
 power rather than in outward form. "We 
 should cease expecting a miraculous display to 
 the senses, and look for Christ in the touching 
 of hearts and influencing of thoughts. And 
 this, be it noticed, is in no narrow circle of 
 ideas. All truth belongs to Christ. Every 
 Interest of humanity is the interest of the 
 Divine Son of man. Every discovery, which 
 widens the range of knowledge and power, is 
 in His service. Every science, every art, is 
 one of the many "angels" that fulfil His 
 work, and promote His Advent as the Ee- 
 deemer of the world from every kind of evil. 
 So Dean Stanley thought when he said, 
 " Whatever is good science is good theology ; 
 whatever is high morality and pure civilisation 
 is high and pure religion." Complete Chris- 
 tianity is identical with complete humanity. 
 The protests of some sceptics against Chris- 
 tianity are, in fact, protests only against a 
 narrow conception of Christianity and of 
 Christ. 
 
230 THE ADVENT OF THE CHRIST. [XI. 
 
 From our survey of the past we also may 
 learn how we are to promote the true Advent 
 of Christ to His throne of power in the world. 
 We have seen that it has been hindered by 
 narrow notions about it. Men have said, It 
 is not to be in our day ; and have neglected 
 to open the doors. Men have said, It is 
 not to be unless we can put down heresy 
 and infidelity ; and have devoted themselves 
 to writing big books of controversy and thun- 
 dering against unbelievers, while they allowed 
 slavery and war and prostitution and intem- 
 perance to flourish. Men have said. It can 
 only be through great revivals of religion ; and 
 have contented themselves with praying 
 for the Holy Spirit and preaching theology, 
 while conscience remained without instruction 
 in the morality of common life and business 
 and politics were left without the range of 
 Christian interests. In consequence, we have 
 seen the strongest antagonists of this narrow 
 form of Christianity gaining great credit as 
 the apostles of social reform and of ethical 
 culture, and making a plausible boast that 
 they, rather than the Church of Christ, cared 
 most for public morals and social justice. And 
 we have even seen this boast sustained by the 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. 231 
 
 unwisdom of Christian people, who have ap- 
 phed to such reformers outside the Church 
 the epithets of "morahst" and "humani- 
 tarian," as terms of reproach, although such 
 words are among the terms of a truly Christian 
 glory. Only by avoiding such narrowness, 
 whether within or without the Church, can we 
 promote the effectual Advent of Christ, in the 
 fuller sovereignty and wider application of His 
 spirit to the remedy of every wrong, the 
 shaming of every lie and fraud, and the 
 casting out of devils generally. 
 
 But, brethren, let us judge ourselves in this 
 matter. Would we shut our pulpit against 
 any recognised Christian minister on the 
 ground that he is not of our theological school? 
 Would we, for instance, think it unwise or 
 unsafe to invite such an undoubted man of 
 God as the truly reverend James Martineau 
 to give us in this place a Christian message, 
 on the ground that "he is a Unitarian"? 
 Observe, I do not ask whether we would have 
 such an one for our constant minister, but 
 only this : Would we debar him from any 
 entrance as a rare and unusual visitor? I 
 trust not. Be assured, my friends, the true 
 test of Christian fellowship is not in dogma 
 
232 THE ADVEKT OF THE CHEIST. [xi. 
 
 but in spirit, not in the creed but in the 
 spiritual life. The hymns of such men are in 
 our hymn books. It was a Unitarian who 
 gave us the hymn, 
 
 In the Cross of Christ I glory. 
 
 Even those worship with such men in spiritual 
 songs who will not worship with them in any 
 other way, or tolerate their presence as 
 preachers of Christian duty. 
 
 But such narrowness can only hinder the 
 Advent of Christ in His catholic and inclusive 
 sympathy with all that is true and good, 
 wherever found. We are to make the most- 
 of the grounds of alliance vnth all who bear 
 the Christian name. When we make the 
 most of the grounds of division, we commit 
 the one great and ancient error which, as 
 much as any, has thus far hindered the 
 effectual Advent of Christ as the Leader of a 
 host that is variously regimented, but yet is 
 one host, and is all His. Let us, then, look 
 to ourselves, lest by a zeal without know- 
 ledge and without love we should hinder the 
 true Advent of the Christ. 
 
 Finally, be it remembered that Christ's 
 
XI.] THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. 233 
 
 promised Advent is not an event, but a pro- 
 cess. It belongs not to a single day, but to 
 the course of the centuries. It is no such fact 
 as may be reserved for a merely annual com- 
 memoration on the twenty-fifth of December. 
 It is the ever-present fact which, more than 
 any other, has to do with the redemption of 
 common life from triviality and waste. It is 
 the daily interest of a world in which a 
 Divine Light and a Divine Life are steadily 
 though slowly unfolding, the daily concern of 
 all who hope and pray, " Thy Kingdom 
 come." 
 
 In our aspirations to be better than we are, 
 Christ comes to us to-day. In every conquest 
 of our worse nature by our better, Christ 
 comes to us more fully. He comes in every 
 new interest and effort for more truth, more 
 humanity, more justice and charity. He 
 comes in every deepening of conviction that 
 the true gain and glory of our life are in the 
 identification of our interests with the pro- 
 gress of His Sovereignty in us and over all. 
 Thus thinking, let us pray for His Advent to 
 appear in greater kindliness in the home, 
 conscientiousness in the daily task, helpful- 
 ness toward the weak and ignorant, catholic 
 
234 THE ADVENT OF THE CHEIST. [XI. 
 
 sympathies with Christian brethren, zealous 
 care for private and puhHc righteousness. 
 Thus praying, let the endeavour of our life 
 agree with the time-hallowed prayer: "Ame?i: 
 come, Lord Jesus." 
 
XII. 
 
 THE WORLD'S BALANCE-WHEEL. 
 
XII. 
 
 THE WORLD'S BALANCE-WHEEL. 
 
 "Thou Shalt love thy neighbour as i/iysel/."— Matthew xxii. 39. 
 
 In these plain words our Lord has announced 
 the law of social equilibrium and stable pro- 
 crress. 
 
 In society, as well as in physical nature, 
 there are forces at work, both of attraction 
 and of repulsion. In the movements of the 
 starry worlds stabiHty is the result of equi- 
 librium between the force that tends to make 
 the whirling spheres fly apart, and the force 
 that tends to make them fly together. In the 
 structure of our living bodies stabihty is the re- 
 sult of a similar equilibrium between the vital 
 force which builds the molecules together, and 
 the chemical force which decomposes them. 
 In like manner, the stabiHty of society depends 
 
 Preached in Lower Edmonton Independent Church, 
 Sunday Evening, September 9, 1888. 
 
238 THE woeld's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 upon the maintenance of equilibrium between 
 the socialistic force or tendency which draws 
 men together, and the individualistic which 
 draws them apart, each in his own line of 
 things. For without individualism, or self- 
 love, there would be no progress : without 
 socialism, or neighbourly love, there would be 
 no stability. But these two in equal activity 
 secure momentum with stability as the re- 
 sultant of their diverging impulses. This is 
 the philosophy of the brief precept which our 
 Lord has given as the world's balance-wheel — 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 There are two points emphasized in this 
 Divine commandment — (1) The duty : " Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbour,'" (2) the standard : 
 " as thyself." We must examine the standard 
 first, for the sake of making the duty more 
 intelligble. We shall see that there is no 
 foundation for the common objection, that 
 while the theory is fine the realisation is 
 impracticable. 
 
 I, The commandment implies what it does 
 not expressly enjoin, that we must love our- 
 selves. Because a man is responsible to God 
 for himself first of all, he must first of all take 
 care of himself, and to do this he must love 
 
XII.] THE world's BALA.NCE-WHEEL. 289 
 
 himself. Without this there can be no in- 
 terest, no effort, to better one's self ; and, 
 without this, no interest or effort to better 
 one's neighbour. Here we must remember 
 what Shakspeare has said : 
 
 Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin 
 As self-neglecting. 
 
 We must seek what is genuinely good for 
 ourselves, in order to any enterprise or dis- 
 cretion in seeking for our neighbour what is 
 genuinely good for him. The man who offers 
 his neighbour a treat to intoxicating drink at 
 a saloon-bar, does not wisely love his neigh- 
 bour, however generous toward him he feels, 
 because he does not v^sely love himself in 
 such a gratification of appetite. 
 
 When our Lord says, '* Give to him that 
 asketh thee, and from him that ivould horroio 
 of thee turn not thou away,'' He certainly 
 takes for granted that His hearers have 
 common sense. Lynx-eyed critics have some- 
 times been bat-eyed to this obvious considera- 
 tion. Give wisely is, of course, His meaning. 
 Give what is helpful ; give it in ways that are 
 helpful. Give not where giving is hurtful ; 
 give not in hurtful ways, for in such giving 
 
240 THE woeld's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 there is no real love. Give no razors to 
 children, no pistols to fools, no money to sots 
 or spendthrifts ; for such giving is practically- 
 hating, not loving, your neighbour. 
 
 But it is so widely imagined that self-love 
 and love to our neighbour are in their nature 
 antagonistic, that we must here insist on the 
 contrary fact. Love to our neighbour is in 
 truth nothing but the social form of rational 
 self-love. 
 
 This, however, is by no means to be ex- 
 plained thus, that we are to do good to others 
 in order that they may do good to us, to help 
 another in his pinch, because, and so that, he 
 will in turn help us in our pinch. This is 
 caring everything for one's self, nothing for 
 the other. It is a selfish trade, and no love. 
 
 The real consistency of self-love and neigh- 
 bourly love will be apparent, as soon as we 
 see what is the self which we are to love. 
 Here, then, we have to insist on a discrimina- 
 tion between the real, social self which God 
 made, and the fictitious, isolated self which 
 is a mere spoiled fragment of what God made. 
 The real and wide distinction between the 
 social self and the isolated self is well empha- 
 sized in the proverb, " One man is no man." 
 
XII.] THE world's balance-wheel. 241 
 
 It is the social self only which we are to 
 love — the self which recognises one life in all 
 lives, and all individual interests as also com- 
 mon interests. In the consciousness of the 
 social self the good and ill of one are inse- 
 parable from the good and ill of another. 
 Each individual self is a member of a body- 
 animated by a common life, which is helped 
 or hurt throughout all the members by what- 
 ever touches any member. In this view of 
 the real unity of our own and others' interests, 
 patriotism, public spirit, neighbourly feeling, 
 Christian sympathy, are not something alien 
 to self-love ; nay, they are specific forms of 
 true self-love — that is, of the love of the social 
 self. 
 
 Thus there is a clear parallel in moral law 
 to what science has unfolded of physical law, 
 through the discovery that physical forces are 
 correlated as the varying forms of one force, 
 and are convertible into each other. When a 
 railway train is stopped, the motion is ex- 
 tinguished as motion, but not as force. Heat 
 is developed by the friction, and every degree 
 of force that appeared in the form of motion 
 reappears in the form of heat. There is a 
 correlation of moral forces as of physical, and 
 
 IG 
 
242 THE world's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 moral forces are, like the physical, convertible 
 into each other. The natural and healthy self- 
 love which prompts us to earn our bread or to 
 guard our good name, is still active, though in 
 another form, whenever the healthy instinct 
 of a common humanity, or of Christian sym- 
 pathy, leads us to share our loaf with the 
 hungry or to shield our neighbour's good 
 name from slanderous tongues. In so doing 
 we not only love our neighbour as ourself, 
 but we love our true self also — our social self. 
 
 But the opposite of this is the isolated, the 
 unsocial self, which looks on the individual 
 interest as exclusive and separate and para- 
 mount, and seeks this without regard to the 
 common good. This isolated self we are never 
 to love, simply because it is a false fiction of 
 a perverted heart. We may in fancy, but in 
 fact we never can, cut ourselves off from the 
 common life of humanity, and from sharing, 
 whether we will or no, in its common good 
 and ill. We are not isolated beings, but 
 mutually dependent and mutually helpful 
 members of one living body. It is as such 
 that we are to love ourselves. Then with 
 the same love we shall love our neighbour 
 also. 
 
XII.] THE world's balance-wheel. 243 
 
 Thus must we clear away the misunder- 
 standings which beset the subject and per- 
 plex the conscience. Thus can we see how 
 necessary, just, and wise is the self-love 
 which is the standard of all right love to our 
 neighbour. 
 
 Such self-love, beyond all care for our mere 
 bread-and-butter interests, cares for things 
 that make us more lovable because more 
 loving ? A wise self-love cultivates those bene- 
 volent principles, kindly affections, broad and 
 generous sympathies, which unite us with 
 God and mankind, and bring upon our heads 
 the blessings of many whose burdens we have 
 lightened and whose cup we have sweetened. 
 The happiest lives are the most inclusive lives, 
 which take up other lives most largely into 
 their own life ; or, as is said in common 
 phrase, which aim to make others happy. 
 The richest men are those who are rich in 
 loving hearts and loving deeds. Every other 
 sort of riches is perishable, but this is " the 
 treasure in heaven that faileth not.'' No man 
 can afford to postpone laying up this treasure, 
 till he has laid up wealth of a perishable kind. 
 He is the greatest loser who, out of covetous- 
 ness, or churlishness, or indolence, denies him- 
 
244 THE world's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 self that Divine self-development which comes 
 only in ministering to the joys and wants 
 and sorrows of his neighbom's. Those whom 
 he neglects may find other sources of relief. 
 But he lost what no other source of self- 
 improvement can supply when he sealed up 
 the spring of loving-kindness and human sym- 
 pathy in his own soul, and thereby severed 
 himself from God and human kind, departing, 
 as Jesus says, " to the devil and his angels." 
 Such is the correlation of moral forces, that 
 love to our neighbour is only the social form 
 of a wise self-love. Shakspeare touches the 
 point when he says : 
 
 This above all : to thine ownself be true, 
 And it must follow, as the night the day. 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man. 
 
 There is, however, some untruth to self, 
 and some falseness to others, in much that 
 is fancied to be neighbourly love, but is not 
 such in fact. 
 
 A wise self-love will deny ourselves what is 
 not really good aild helpful. Consequently, in 
 all true love to our neighbour we shall deny 
 the same to him. 
 
 Much as we are all bound to help one 
 
XII.] THE world's balance-wheel. 245 
 
 another, we are all equally bound to help 
 ourselves. It is a worthless character which 
 rejects the duty of self-help. It is a very 
 unwise love to our neighbour which relieves 
 him of this. It is far better for a thought- 
 less or shiftless and lazy man that we should 
 allow inconvenience, and even suffermg, to 
 force this duty on him, than that he should 
 never learn it. God Himself does this by 
 making sharp troubles whip us for impro- 
 vidence. We are not to interfere with God's 
 discipline by trying to make things soft and 
 comfortable for the careless and the indolent, 
 when God's schoolmaster — experience — comes 
 to rap their knuckles. A great statesman 
 once said, that what he most feared for his 
 country was not a day of judgment, but a day 
 of no judgment. This is what we ought most 
 to fear for ourselves, and consequently help 
 our neighbours to fear for themselves. If 
 the judgment consequences of carelessness 
 and recklessness were less often set aside by 
 a soft-headed philanthropy, there would in- 
 deed be suffering, but in the long run less 
 suffering, because more reform. Character 
 can never be properly developed without ex- 
 perience in the school of suffering. Some men 
 
246 THE woeld's balance-wheel. [xii, 
 
 can never learn some necessary lessons except 
 under whips that draw tears, or even blood. 
 
 The world is called a hard world. But so 
 far as that word is used in censure it would 
 be quite as true to reproach the world as a 
 soft world. When the telegraph operator 
 whose carelessness almost wrecks a train, 
 instead of being summarily dismissed, is 
 merely reprimanded, and retained in hope 
 of better doing, his repeated carelessness, 
 wrecking the express and causing the loss of 
 two lives, makes us wish the world had been 
 harder on him before. What the world needs 
 is, in fact, more hardness and more softness, 
 but each in the proper place ; — softer hearts, 
 they can be none too soft ; but harder heads, 
 to apply the softness in the right place and 
 proportion. 
 
 Human benevolence will be more like the 
 Divine benevolence, when it holds men in a 
 stricter responsibility to the consequences of 
 conduct. When the pressure of the appre- 
 hended consequences of misconduct or neg- 
 ligence begins to lighten, the safeguards of 
 morality begin to dissolve. We are not to 
 think first of comfort, but first of character, 
 both for ourself and our neighbour. There 
 
XII.] THE world's balance-wheel. 247 
 
 is no way of saving men whicli can dispense 
 with the strict enforcement of responsibihties. 
 As always healthful, though sometimes hard, 
 we should seek for nothing less for ourselves, 
 and in love to our neighbour nothing less for 
 him. 
 
 And yet we have still one truth to bear in 
 mind, lest we apply this wholesome principle 
 to one another without mercy. The Psalmist 
 sees God's mercy in His rendering " to every 
 man according to his wo7-k." We must 
 emphasize the " his." Our doing is often 
 only in part our own, in part another's. A 
 parent's mistreatment is often part of the 
 child's misconduct. Accordingly, while we 
 strenuously insist on enforcing responsibility 
 for consequences, as required by true neigh- 
 bourly love, we must still discriminate in our 
 neighbour's conduct the part which is re- 
 sponsibly " his work." The mischief wrought 
 through the drowsiness of an overworked and 
 exhausted labourer is only in part, perhaps 
 not at all, his work. In the case of any culprit, 
 the element of wrong that is not altogether 
 his is a fit subject for man's mercy, as it is for 
 God's. 
 
 So much for the standard of true neigh- 
 
248 THE woeld's balance-wheel, [xii. 
 
 bourly love, wise and strong, loving character 
 first and comfort next, with all softness in 
 the heart and none in the head, preferring 
 even suffering to demoralisation. 
 
 The other thought which our Lord's precept 
 presents is the duty to be fulfilled according to 
 this standard. 
 
 II. " Tliou slialt love thy neighbour." 
 
 1. This demands right feeling, but more 
 than feeling. Sentiment is requisite, but 
 sentiment incarnated in conduct. And such 
 conduct is much more than merely negative, 
 more than mere minding our own business 
 and letting our neighbour alone to mind his, 
 more than mere declining to take a share 
 in the backbiting and over-reaching of neigh- 
 bours that goes on around us. He does well 
 who is silent, when the circle of talkers is 
 engaged in cutting up the follies and faults 
 of a neighbour ; but he does better, who says 
 a good word out of a kind heart for the absent 
 subject of criticism. 
 
 In early times an advance in morality was 
 made when the strong man, who in battle 
 had overcome the weak man, instead of slay- 
 ing him, permitted him to live as his slave. 
 It was a still further advance when the 
 
XII,] THE world's balange-wheel. 249 
 
 stronger emancipated the weaker, and left 
 him to himself a free man, to live as best he 
 could. Morality now claims a fresh advance 
 in the treatment of the weak by the strong. 
 It is mere negative benevolence which simply 
 lets the weak alone, to sink or swim, in the 
 merciless stream of industrial competition in 
 which multitudes have but the slenderest 
 chance. The world's maxim, " Live and let 
 live," must give place to the Christian rule, 
 "Live and help live." The natural law of 
 the survival of the fittest must be superseded 
 by the spiritual law of fitting to survive. 
 As essential as doing for self is to self-love, 
 so is doing for our neighbour to neighbourly 
 love. Wishing well is nothing when it stops 
 short of doing good. " To him that hioiveth 
 to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." 
 We have already seen that, in the corre- 
 lation of moral forces, wise-doing for our neigh- 
 bour is only another and a special form of 
 wise-doing for our true social self. Every- 
 thing we do that helps another realise a 
 better life helps us realise a better life. Now 
 how are we stirred up to do for ourselves ? 
 Evidently, by considering ourselves, our situa- 
 tion, prospects, powers, wants. This, then, is 
 
250 THE woeld's balance-wheel, [xii. 
 
 the first step of neighbourly love toward doing 
 good to other selves. " Consider one another, 
 so as to be provoked (or stimulated) to love 
 and good works ;" — " Not looking each of you 
 to his oivn things, hut each of you also to the 
 things of others.''' 
 
 The first of truths in nature is the last 
 of truths in moral realisation — that it is one 
 life which throbs within us all, the same 
 sensitive, struggling, yearning, aspiring life, 
 strung with the same nerves of pleasure and 
 of pain, susceptible to the same hopes and 
 fears, wrung by the same wants, swayed by 
 the same passions, quick with the same 
 desires, responsive to the same human sym- 
 pathies. Why do we shudder when we see a 
 man perish, but that our life is in him also ? 
 This sympathetic recognition of a common 
 life, which thrills us for a moment in the pre- 
 sence of a great calamity, is what the world 
 hungers for in its daily intercourse. To cul- 
 tivate this is the main part of the duty of 
 neighbourly love. For this we must take 
 more time and thought. We must " consider 
 one another." 
 
 We daily walk the streets engrossed with 
 our own affairs, as indifferent to the life 
 
XII.] THE world's balange-wbeel. 251 
 
 around ns as to the statues in the square. 
 I would that we might of purpose sometimes 
 walk with " a heart at leisure from itself" to 
 read the story of life that is written upon the 
 faces that we meet — the weary, the hopeless, 
 the hard, the dull, as well as the bright, in- 
 telligent, and cheerful faces, in each of which 
 a life the same as ours utters its silent but ex- 
 pressive speech. There is a gang of labourers, 
 dirty and unsavoury, returning from a day of 
 the lowest and hardest work, necessary work, 
 of which you share some benefit. Consider 
 them, their life, the homes they are going to, 
 in noisome alleys, in stilled closets, in damp 
 cellars ; consider their young children, the 
 dismal surroundings, dark prospects and dim 
 hopes of these. Without some such week-day 
 musings we shall forget the Sunday lesson : 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 Yes, friends, this lies at the root of our 
 duty : " Consider one another." We do not 
 think, and so we do not feel, and by not 
 feeling fail in the doing, without which is no 
 true neighbourly love. Where blind selfish- 
 ness sees no way, love — intelligent and active 
 — finds a way, or makes one, to express itself 
 in doing. Out of such considering of our 
 
252 THE world's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 neighbour's case, the great Sunday School 
 movement took its rise a century ago. Out 
 of this considering sprang the beginnings of 
 that movement toward wholesome dwellings 
 for the poor, which has as yet but scratched 
 the surface of a gigantic social wrong. Out of 
 this sprang the Factory Laws against unwhole- 
 some or dangerous workrooms and excessive 
 work-hours, and the slavery of child-workers. 
 Out of this must still come many more effec- 
 tive protests against the cry of the Cain- 
 spirit :" ^m I my brothers keeper ?'' many 
 another righting of unjust social conditions, 
 many a further opening of chances for those 
 who at present are selfishly let alone, over- 
 weighted and handicapped as they are, in the 
 struggle for bread and a home. 
 
 The truth is, my friends, as we often say, 
 ** that half the world does not know how the 
 other half lives." The sin is, as we ought 
 oftener to feel, that it does not care. There 
 is constant contention about work and wages. 
 But were this settled the contention still must 
 be, that employers owe more than the stipu- 
 lated sum in wages, and employes more than 
 the stipulated time in work. The great and 
 universal debt of each to each is the humane 
 
XII.] THE world's balance-wheel. 253 
 
 goodwill of man to man in the sympatb}^ of a 
 common life. But this is constantly defaulted. 
 The world's woe inevitably follows, in its bloody 
 or tearful struggle to win by force the mate- 
 rial equivalents of love. Contracts can never 
 hold men together as conscience can. The 
 belting shps ; the wheels must be geared, 
 tooth into tooth, by the interlocking sympathy 
 of man for man — looking on men as more 
 than mere " hands " on one side, or mere 
 paymasters on the other, each putting him- 
 self by sympathy in the other's place, each 
 loving his neighbour as himself. This is God's 
 cure for the world's disease : " Owe no man 
 anytlimg save to love one another'' 
 
 Here, however, we must limit our study of 
 an exhaustless subject. But if now we are 
 disposed to begin at home some effort toward 
 a better fulfilment of this fundamental duty, 
 we may reflect that there are near us, perhaps, 
 some ignorant domestics who may be taught 
 to read and write, and encouraged to lay up 
 their earnings. There are servants who may 
 be bettered by books from the family library, 
 or by an occasional ticket to the art exhibition 
 or concert. There are young clerks and shop- 
 women who may be put on the road to the 
 
254 THE world's balance-wheel. [xii. 
 
 savings bank, the public library, the instructive 
 lecture, the church. There are handworkers 
 in the trades or factories who may be eman- 
 cipated by some form of profit-sharing from 
 certain degrading regulations of the trade- 
 union, which forbid the ablest workman to 
 do his best. Everywhere is opportunity for 
 the open eye and open heart of that true 
 neighbourly love, which opens doors for a man 
 to better himself by doing his best. Every- 
 where is the call to that kindness and courtesy 
 which to the poorest and humblest pays the 
 debt due to humanity. This outline, such as 
 it is, each one who thinks and feels can fill up 
 for himself. 
 
 The biographer of President Lincoln says : — 
 " When a member of Congress, knowing his 
 religious character, asked him why he did 
 not join some Church ? Mr. Lincoln replied, 
 ' Because I have found difficulty, without 
 mental reservation, in giving my assent to 
 their long and complicated confessions of 
 faith. When any Church will inscribe over 
 its altar the Saviour's condensed statement 
 of law and gospel, " Tliou shalt love the Lord 
 thy God with all thrj heart, loith all thy soul, 
 and with all thy mind, and thy neighhoiw as 
 
XII.] THE woeld's balance-wheel. 255 
 
 thyself,'' that Church will I join with all my 
 heart.' " 
 
 To fulfil that good man's desire, and that of 
 the living around us who think as he thought, 
 we need not to emblazon these words upon this 
 wall. Better when, by a loving heart, they are 
 written with the helping hand upon the hearts 
 around us which hunger for such a recognition 
 that our life is one with theirs. For this each 
 one of us — the least as well as the greatest — 
 has his part to do, so that in this Church the 
 veriest sceptic shall read a living epistle of 
 the grace of God, which conscience bids him 
 join with us to spread throughout the world. 
 
LONDON : 
 
 V,-. SPEAIGHT AND SONS, PRINTEES, 
 
 FETTEE LANE. 
 
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