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 Stryker, Melancthon Woolsey 
 
 1851-1929. 
 The well by the gate 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
FRKS. M. WOOl.SKY S'lRVKKK, D.D.. LI,.U. 
 
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 ^be preebi^terian pulpit 
 
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 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, D. D., LL. D. 
 
 President Hamilton College 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
 AND SABBATH-SCHOOL WORK 
 
 1903 
 
Copyright, 1902, by the Trustees of 
 The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
 School Work. 
 
 Published January, igoj. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Well by the Gate . 
 
 II. The Carpenter's Son 
 
 III. The Tower of Siloam 
 
 IV. John's Three Definitions of God 
 V. Conviction, or Hearsay . 
 
 VI. The Unknown God . 
 
 VII. The Sanctions of Law . 
 
 VIII. The Invisible Companion 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 
 13 
 25 
 43 
 59 
 73 
 89 
 105 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 "Oh that one would give me water to drink of the well of 
 Bethlehem, which is by the gate !" — 2 Sam. xxiii. 15. 
 
 It is the cry of a homesick heart. It is an 
 episode from one of the ruggedest and most 
 educative parts of the life of David, — shepherd 
 and soldier, singer and king. 
 
 David was at Adullam, in the region of Tekoa, 
 a little southeast of Bethlehem. He was a warrior 
 now, wonted to rough fare and to all the priva- 
 tions of outlawry : through the enmity of the king 
 whom he had been appointed to succeed, an ad- 
 venturer, and, though almost within sight of his 
 birthplace, an alien. 
 
 There are vital thrusts against which no harness 
 of war is proof, and one day there came upon 
 David there a consuming desire for a taste of that 
 water which was at the gate-side of the little 
 town, so few miles away, where once had been 
 his home. 
 
 3 
 
4 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 Easily we read enough between the lines of the 
 incident to comprehend that the thirst was not so 
 much in this man's throat as in his heart. Amid 
 these deeds of arms his spirit was wounded and 
 parched. A glimpse, a recollection, and then a 
 sharp longing not to be stifled—" water !" 
 
 Just behind those hills lay the scene of his 
 boyhood. The whole landscape rushed upon his 
 memory,— the kindly old olive trees, the winding 
 familiar paths between, the bleating flocks, the 
 kine lowing in the afternoon. His soul gave a 
 great lurch toward it all, and his lips burned for 
 one more swallow, with his hand for a cup, of 
 that cooling spring. Overpoweringly he remem- 
 bered the days when his now bronzed face was 
 ruddy, the evenings when he piped the sheep 
 to their fold, that night when he strode home 
 shouldering on the one side that hurt but rescued 
 lamb and on the other the skins of the lion and 
 the bear,— all that dear domestic horizon, with 
 its rural duties and its untroubled faith. Now, 
 captain-at-arms though he was, the rushing asso- 
 ciations forced from him the exceeding cry : " Oh 
 that one would give me water to drink of the well 
 of Bethlehem, which is by the gate !" 
 
 Who does not know, or at least who will not 
 know, the wistful yearning, that when it comes. 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 5 
 
 comes so full and passionate for the old width 
 and imagination, the plain joys and complete 
 satisfactions of childhood? In what relief and 
 reality does memory's spectroscope set the sim- 
 plest things of youth ! How it cleanses the pal- 
 impsest of the years to get back the hoHest text 
 so overwritten with lesser thoughts ! 
 
 The lore of the household, of which our store 
 is so precious, abounds in these tender revertings 
 for the cot and the cottage. *' The old oaken 
 bucket " ; '' Rock me to sleep, mother " ; ** Home, 
 sweet home " — these and such as these, of whose 
 echoes our folk-song is full, are the anthology of 
 the heart. Well does Burns say of the lyrics 
 of the fireside, " Compared with these, Italian 
 trills are tame." A literature with no psalms and 
 no cradle-songs were poor indeed, and the life 
 that does not cherish these is a harp untuned. 
 
 ** There are gains for all our losses, 
 There is balm for all our pain : 
 But when youth, the dream, departs, 
 It takes something from our hearts 
 That can never come again." 
 
 A while ago I passed carwise through a ham- 
 let of Pennsylvania, near where the upper Sus- 
 quehanna wanders toward the sea, and where once 
 I lived, a boy of twelve : but how strangely the 
 
6 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 hills, the stream, the street, had dwindled and 
 shrunk together ! Size is relative to that central 
 affection which magnifies all its store of sur- 
 roundings. That which is about has its perspec- 
 tive, not in fact but in love's wiser fancy. We 
 cannot restore the outer ratio of what made life's 
 earhest impressions. A secret and vanished beauty 
 fails of reattachment to visible things. The lute 
 is hushed, the chairs are vacant, and Charles 
 Lamb's plaint springs to pallid lips: — 
 
 " Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood, 
 Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces." 
 
 The well is shallower. The waters that "were 
 wont to go warbhng so softly and well " do not 
 flow as they used to flow. Their gush and 
 sparkle have escaped and something tepid and 
 tasteless has come. The sweetness was about, 
 not in, the draught. The taste was in the tongue 
 and the lips that have changed. 
 
 David wanted, not what he thought he wanted 
 and asked for so importunately, but his child- 
 hood. It was that which haunted his faint and 
 dusty heart. The three brave companions could 
 not fetch it. The fountain of a past youth could 
 not be forced at the sword's point, nor the cup of 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 7 
 
 a life irrevocably departed become the trophy of 
 war. And so when they came from their loyal 
 and daring quest, David poured out what they 
 brought him as a libation, nor would he take 
 for himself what had been their jeopardy. He 
 wanted it no more, or rather, knew that what he 
 wanted with it was other and impossible. 
 
 Suffer, then, a word upon all this to you who 
 sometimes, even if not yet old, turn with thirsty 
 eyes toward an earlier time, and who make your 
 own the substance of this lonely cry. Perhaps 
 the parching years have made your lips and 
 throats to ache with want, — sailors adrift upon 
 brackish floods that offer " never a drop to drink." 
 You who would give all you have for that boyish 
 simplicity with which you knelt at a crib-side 
 and kissed a pure good night upon lips whose 
 earthly benediction has been so long time mute, — 
 look ! Listen, as that little lad yonder with his 
 small treble prattles the twilight prayer — " Now 
 I lay me down to sleep." It is yourself 
 
 You have read that sweet sketch of Holmes, 
 ending with " Two tickets for Boston," and then 
 with the long deep sigh — " No, one ticket for 
 Boston." 
 
 " Oh for a man to arise in me 
 ^^ That the man that I am may cease to be !" 
 
8 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 Oh, God, for an hour of yesterday, for but one 
 taste of that old innocence, for that blessedest 
 tether of "a mother's apron-strings" — oh, for 
 " the well which is by the gate " ! 
 
 But the real gate and the path to it are still 
 accessible, and to every way-weary soul, like good 
 news from a far country, there is offered a cup of 
 cold water and a childhood reattained. O dis- 
 ciple of regret and longing, it is from Him who 
 can transform this transient valley of Baca ! It 
 is from " that spiritual Rock that followed them." 
 It is clean and cool from more than artesian 
 depths. It is freely bestowed of Him who ven- 
 tured, who gave, His life to fetch it for you. Re- 
 fuse it you may not; for He alone had such a 
 right of jeopardy on your behalf It is drawn 
 from the wells of salvation, clear as crystal. Take 
 it to your lips and heart, ** a fountain of gar- 
 dens, . . . and streams from Lebanon." He who 
 for you said, " I thirst," who thirsts for you, de- 
 clared, " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I 
 shall give him shall never thirst " — never again 
 unavailingly ! 
 
 Know where these waters run. Forget them 
 not. For you may clear a large place for yourself, 
 or come to a cave : but it will crowd you some 
 day, the intense desire, the need, the memory. 
 
THE WELL BY THE GATE 9 
 
 God grant you then the song : " Spring up, O 
 well ! Sing ye unto it !" 
 
 It is no mirage, and this Old Testament story 
 is an idyl and message of its truth. Press that 
 day, — press now, — to the gates of Bethlehem, — a 
 man's heart in a child's home. It is the " house 
 of bread," city of Ruth, of Ruth's great-grandson, 
 of Mary, of the Babe, and the shepherds of the 
 temple .of flocks, and the wise men. To him 
 who cries, " As the hart panteth after the water 
 brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God," 
 the antiphon answers, that clasps in merciful as- 
 surance every homing spirit, " Neither shall they 
 thirst any more ; for the Lamb shall lead them." 
 
 Comrades all, not just as David's servitors, but 
 at trial, cost and danger, let us be those who can 
 bring the solace of a renewing God to them that 
 are ready to perish. To carry to one of the least 
 of these the cup of healing is a soldier's task and 
 a saint's. Freely you have received, freely give. 
 
 For the streams for which the spirit cries are 
 not from any of the hills of time, and that which 
 of all things our bodies need most and need most 
 constantly — water — is a parable. 
 
II 
 
 THE CARPENTER'S SON 
 
II 
 
 THE CARPENTER'S SON 
 "Is not this the carpenter's son?" — Matt, xiii, 55. 
 
 A MOTHER telling me of a dear child whom 
 God had taken the short way to heaven, of his 
 face and form, his winsomeness, exclaimed at last : 
 " Oh, if I had a picture of him to show you !" 
 and I said : " I do not need it ; your story is more 
 than any mere likeness." Love is the best camera 
 and the heart the truest sensitive plate — there is 
 no other photography like that. It is surer than 
 the light itself 
 
 We have no authentic pictorial proof of what 
 Christ's face was like. But we need none. The 
 loving and living story is more real than protrait- 
 ure. Here, as in a mirror, we behold the glory 
 of His gentleness and grandeur. And we know 
 Him, too, by their inspired faces who have, soul 
 to soul, begun to wear His image. No intaglio 
 could be more definite. Certainly those who 
 resemble Him here will recognize Him yonder. 
 They shall see His face, be like Him, and know 
 
 13 
 
14 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 as they are known. God's providence must, by 
 some unexplained wisdom, have refrained from 
 preserving any detailed record of that childhood 
 and youth. The clumsy apocryphal attempts 
 neither have the sanction of tradition nor do they 
 give anything that fits His mature personality as 
 reflected in the gospels. We are left to read be- 
 tween the so few written lines and to imagine by 
 His public ministry what He was in those days 
 concerning which our affectionate curiosity is not 
 gratified — those " other things " of which the 
 earliest were hidden safe in Mary's heart. 
 
 His generation all unconscious of what it con- 
 tained, persecutors and disciples yet in their 
 cradles, the Wonderful One grew on. A babe, a 
 lad, a youth, a man — He served out that appren- 
 ticeship of task and trial by which His heavenly 
 Father prepared Him for the stupendous burden, 
 the exceeding sorrow, the absolute victory. With- 
 out leaving the warrant of what is given we can 
 surely assert something, and reverently infer some- 
 what more, concerning the expansion of that white 
 soul. Remember all the time that God gave that 
 young life exactly the best environment for His 
 growth in wisdom. He trained the. Son of man 
 amid simple things and first principles. He brought 
 Him to the closest terms with the average life. 
 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 15 
 
 He familiarized Him with the daily problems of 
 plain men. No, the throne does not make the 
 prince. Verily, it is true, " God hath often a great 
 share in a little house " — a little stairway, a little 
 room, a little lattice, a little closet. Imagination 
 itself steps softly and whispers, " It was here." 
 
 At Nazareth. In beautiful Galilee, on the south- 
 ern ridge of Lebanon. The hills rose sharply 
 and high, cut by the rain grooves. There were 
 views — snow-silvered Hermon to the north, to 
 the west Carmel and the Mediterranean blue ; 
 Tabor, six miles southeast, and beyond Gilead 
 and Gilboa. The Sea of Galilee eighteen miles 
 to the east. Less than a Sabbath day's journey 
 would take Him to nobler prospects than that 
 temple turret gave. How well He must have 
 studied all that landscape ! It seems to have been 
 a rough village. A pretty place may be a very 
 wicked place ; but the worst can be a good dis- 
 cipline. This was Christ's school, but His pres- 
 ence did not make it hospitable. There He 
 preached first. Twice they flouted Him and once 
 attempted His Hfe. Their unbelief shut the door. 
 Would He anger none now ? 
 
 It was a dutiful boyhood. He was " subject 
 to his parents." In that plain household He 
 learned about moth and rust and the much- 
 
i6 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 patched garment. He found room there to keep 
 the two great commandments. He was a good 
 son, " learning obedience " and " in all things Hke 
 unto His brethren." He had good training ; for 
 Joseph was a just man, and His mother was — 
 Mary. He searched the Scriptures and remem- 
 bered them — their broad spiritual wealth was His. 
 There He found the solaces of the interior life, 
 and learned that hfe is not by bread alone. He 
 found quiet shelters for meditation (alas ! so little 
 our practice). The solitude was populous and 
 prayer as natural as love. He was near to all the 
 vital breaths of the open country and to those 
 overtones of joy and peace — God's obhgato — 
 which are always sounding when a pure heart 
 listens. With what fine untarnished senses He 
 appreciated the physical world, with what an ear 
 to hear He caught its meaning ! So in the cool 
 of that day whose heat and travail was to be 
 so terrible. He grew in stature — (" He hammered 
 through "). 
 
 Who will learn, may. God's best schools are 
 not always those most brilliantly endowed. The 
 foot of Mount Tabor was better than the feet of 
 Gamaliel. Tarsus was yet to be tutored by Naza- 
 reth. Here was no dreamer theorizing about the 
 masses. He was one of the mass. He earned 
 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 17 
 
 His living. Once our text was a sneer, " Is not 
 this the carpenter's son ?" Mark leaves off the 
 last word. Either is true to the fact. They 
 taunted Him with being a common man. He 
 had a trade (as all Hebrew boys had, usually 
 their father's), and He supported Himself by it. 
 The Prince of the house of David, the Messiah, 
 was a mechanic — a house-builder. They all knew 
 Him in Nazareth — by sight, they thought they 
 knew Him — their estimates were as self-satisfied 
 and superficial as all of ours are apt to be of those 
 who work for us. But He was no recluse. The 
 boys and neighbors saw Him daily. Many had 
 His work in their houses. Perhaps some who 
 went to cast Him down over that hill lived in 
 houses He had built. It is so yet. 
 
 No doubt the bench could long be pointed out 
 where He wrought — the quaint Oriental tools ; 
 be sure none others ever did such honest work. 
 He wanted no wages that He did not earn. What 
 would you not give for a chisel, a shaving, from 
 that shed ? But wherever modest, earnest work 
 is done, there is a truer souvenir of Christ than 
 any relic could be. Would you not like to live 
 in a house He had built ? But you can engage 
 Him to build your dwelling if you choose. In- 
 deed, except the Lord build your house, they 
 2 
 
1 8 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 labor in vain that build it — it never will be a 
 home. He built this house. This is, indeed, the 
 Builder ! Not clothed in soft raiment. The hand 
 that was pierced for our sins was browned and 
 roughened by day labor. He who made the 
 earth and founded it, set up its pillars and laid the 
 beams of His chambers, without whom was not 
 anything made that hath been made, has, Him- 
 self the foundation, reared that in this earth which 
 no floods shall wrench asunder nor torrents un- 
 dermine. Divine Lord ! Thou whom the builders 
 rejected, Thou glorious architect and artisan in 
 one, build us into that temple, which out of the 
 quarry of the ages rises toward the day of the 
 topstone and the shouting. 
 
 Many of the instances which pointed His teach- 
 ings came out of our Lord's experience as a 
 craftsman, — the man who did not count the cost, 
 the man who built on the sand. In that frugal 
 home He knew the pathos of daily economy, 
 work to do not only, but to find, the taxes to 
 meet, and all the rest of the cotter's frugal task. 
 He helped Mary to contrive for all those brothers 
 and sisters, doubtless often telling her : " Our 
 Father knows that we have need of all these 
 things." We can see one reason why He was 
 drawn toward that Bethany household. Mary 
 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 19 
 
 had always found Him so wise and willing, no 
 wonder that she said at Cana, " Whatsoever He 
 saith unto you, do it." 
 
 Christ feels for the widow and the fatherless 
 and for all who earn their bread in the sweat of 
 their brow. What contempt that royal workman's 
 way pours upon all pride of ease and luxury! 
 Tasks that He so beautified and beatified let none 
 now call common. That carpenter's shop was a 
 thing that angels looked into, singing new praises. 
 The throne exchanged for the workbench ! Well 
 might the sneer at "the carpenter" have frozen 
 on the lips that framed it. Blessed testimony 
 even of the blind and captious ! The derision of 
 the Nazarenes is the ascription of Christendom. 
 
 Two great questions I ask you to dwell upon 
 for a little longer : First, that manhood is superior 
 to circumstances. He who will follow the King's 
 Son may well cross that lowly threshold to see 
 how the tedious unites with the heroic. A true 
 soul does not worry about an arena. That remote 
 village, that cottage, those hill paths, sufficed a 
 Saviour's thirty years of preparation ! He needed 
 no further apparatus of goodness. No drudgery 
 delayed His full growth. Unanxious He waited 
 till that work was done. There He thought out 
 and wrought out the beatitudes, first showing 
 
20 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 piety at home and requiting His parents. Re- 
 member, if you think your horizon narrowed : — 
 
 « Just such as I He trod this earth, 
 With every human load, but sin." 
 
 No matter if your hfe is hidden — if it is " hid with 
 Christ in God." SimpHcity may find fehcity. 
 
 It also teaches us the dignity of work. Idleness 
 is a sin. Only a worker is respectable — every 
 other is a moral pauper. It is worker or shirker. 
 Christ honored the royal law of labor. He knew 
 real things and was not a charge to the world. 
 He came '' to make the best that the world knows 
 native to the humblest." Coming to regenerate 
 society, He never implied that " the world owes 
 every man a living," whether he earns it or not. 
 He came to serve. The gospel of the Mechanic 
 refuses those who refuse a man's task. It ennobles 
 as it enables the toilers of the world — and gives 
 an evangel to the loom, the bench, the forge, 
 '' that they may be with the King for his work." 
 The bone and sinew of the nation are in brawny 
 arms matched with brave hearts. Whatever 
 honors labor blesses the land, and all that de- 
 grades this debases that. Christ is the friend of 
 all who toil and pray. A workingman Himself, 
 He cares for the aching eyes and tired fingers, and 
 
THE CARPENTER'S SON 21 
 
 says, " Come unto me, ye that labor, and I will 
 give you rest." He arrays Himself against the 
 oppressor and the cheat — against him who wants 
 another's work without paying for it, and against 
 him who wants another's pay without working for 
 it. He is the staunch ally of the honest toiler, 
 and says of every one such, *' The same is my 
 brother." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE TOWER OF SILOAM 
 
Ill 
 
 THE TOWER OF SILOAM 
 
 " Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the 
 Galileans, because they suffered such things ? I tell you, Nay : 
 but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those 
 eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, 
 think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in 
 Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay." — Luke xiii. 2-5. 
 
 These questions and their answer affirm cer- 
 tain deep and necessary distinctions concerning 
 the moral government of God, and to establish 
 these distinctions and hold them fast can dispose 
 of much that always will baffle a hasty and im- 
 patient interpretation of earth's events, and can 
 vitally enlighten and encourage us amid their 
 intricacies of trouble and surprise. 
 
 The distinction to be made is that which lies 
 between the two features and departments of 
 divine law — the one outward and physical, with 
 its results consummated here ; and the other 
 inward and moral, with its issues and sanctions 
 largely postponed. 
 
 For, note carefully just what Christ said. He 
 
 25 
 
26 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 was speaking of " interpreting the time," with its 
 especial pubhc warnings and its especial signifi- 
 cance and preluding of some mighty event ; and 
 some who heard Him immediately mentioned the 
 recent official murder by which Pilate had made 
 an example of certain Galileans, and to terrorize 
 the restless agitators of Jerusalem had smitten a 
 group of these, mingling as it were their blood 
 with that of the sacrifices to which they had 
 gathered. The mention of these men to Christ 
 carried, perhaps, the suggestion that they were 
 some radical fellow provincials of Himself, who, 
 for temerity against the existing order of things, 
 had paid as He yet might pay. He takes it up 
 and adds yet another current instance. With the 
 reserved funds of the temple, arbitrarily seized, 
 Pilate had been constructing an aqueduct into 
 Jerusalem. The chief Jews had violently pro- 
 tested, and when at Siloam a tower fell, crushing 
 eighteen of the workmen, it had been pronounced 
 a special visitation. 
 
 Our Lord insisted that the incident of such 
 exceptional deaths was not to be misinterpreted 
 in such a way as to turn attention from general 
 public guilt and its general retribution. The 
 dramatic exception was not to be pressed too far. 
 These mangled men were but instances of what 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 27 
 
 all pride and perversity should meet. These 
 violent warnings were but specimens of the catas- 
 trophe already rising cloudy out of the west. 
 
 He meant that no one should exonerate him- 
 self from partnership in the universal accounta- 
 bility. Harsher calamities were impending, which 
 nothing but a profound and popular repentance 
 could avert. Change or die, was the alternative 
 for all men of Judaea or Galilee — nay, for all 
 peoples and generations — until the final finality 
 of judgment. Everywhere disorder is the outward 
 prophecy and anticipative symptom of doom. 
 
 We well may note how aptly the word of Christ 
 reads the moral sky and interprets current affairs. 
 He spoke to the times, and the incidents and 
 accidents of the day — these, here, the Jericho road, 
 the tribute penny, the ostentatious givers, the 
 unctuous sanctimony of the Pharisees, the carcass, 
 and the eagles. It was direct, vivid, and no won- 
 der the truth made a sensation as He let it in so 
 full upon traditional sham and godless religion. 
 The gossiping conclusion about the massacre and 
 the falling masonry He showed to be superficial 
 and evasive. Then surely we are to have better 
 than a conventional and newspaper philosophy 
 upon earth's happenings, and, instructed by Him 
 who discerns the event, are to interpret nothing as 
 
28 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 isolated from final purpose and common concern. 
 Daily divine providence writes upon the walls 
 that which " the wise shall understand." 
 
 But, further and especially, Christ taught that 
 " these Galileans " and " those eighteen " were not 
 thereby shown to be sinners and '* offenders above 
 all men." And therein He corrected the notion 
 that material injuries to the bodies or estates of 
 men have any constant relation to their moral 
 characters and furnish any final criterion of these. 
 These were not hurt because they were worse ; 
 others had not escaped because they were better. 
 " I tell you. Nay." 
 
 It opens a gateway upon an avenue of profound 
 reflection, whereon for a little let us go ; finding, I 
 trust, some solvents for questions otherwise too 
 hard, some antidotes for satanic suggestions 
 against God, some grateful offsets for things that 
 now seem inscrutably against us. Suffering may 
 be a near or a remote consequence ; it is by no 
 means the measure of the sin of the particular 
 sufferer. 
 
 I. Christ's doctrine that day was the plainest 
 possible assertion of a truth that we often confuse 
 — namely, that physical law and moral law and 
 their penalties and rewards are highly distinct. 
 
 He emphasizes the moment of this distinction. 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 29 
 
 By " distinct " I do not mean unrelated, uncon- 
 nected, but so far separate in form and intent, in 
 method and purpose, that we must not mix them. 
 Both of these orders and their issues are of and 
 under God, and reveal Him ; nevertheless, mechan- 
 ical means and results are separate from spiritual. 
 
 Physical laws, the forms of sense, and the pro- 
 gramme of matter, these are different in kind from 
 the controls and vindications of that inner being 
 which partakes of the divine nature. There are 
 analogies and correspondences all along the line, 
 but nowhere identity or confusion. The body of 
 the universe and the living spirit are two realities. 
 Physics and psychology are not the same. They 
 are together, but they are dual. 
 
 God's systemed and consistent ways of control 
 (which, viewed from the under and empirical side, 
 we call by the impersonal and abstract term of 
 " laws ") are related in the unity of that control ; 
 but the two elements deal with different areas and 
 in separate ways appropriate to each. Each of us 
 has in himself a synopsis of these two realms and 
 dispensations, as covering the one his bodily and 
 outward part, and the other his immaterial and 
 immortal part. We are constantly and properly 
 warned of the fallacy which lies in any physical 
 illustration of moral fact. As a suggestion it may 
 
30 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 be useful ; as a complete parallel it always fails. 
 Quantity and quality deal with terms not inter- 
 changeable. 
 
 There is a certain set of estabhshed facts, con- 
 formity to which makes the laws of bodily health. 
 As solid and regular, but quite other, there is a set 
 of facts conditioning character. Now, by the 
 present intimacy of our souls with our bodies, 
 these two codes, though entirely in different planes, 
 do condition each other — they mutually (recipro- 
 cally) act and react. Moral sanity concerns bodily 
 soundness. As the sky tinges the sea, so vigor 
 has to do with virtue. But all this ordinary asso- 
 ciation by no means merges the identities of the 
 two spheres. The relation of the individual soul 
 with its present body, though so close and reflex, 
 is, after all, but incidental. The station of the 
 engineer upon the particular engine is not essential. 
 The local is not the necessary. The soul is in 
 but not of its convenient but changeable body. 
 The physical may be transferred. Bodily, we 
 " die daily." Metempsychosis is not merely possi- 
 ble, but certain. 
 
 And as it is with physical law in this nearest 
 approach to our spirits, so it is with that physical 
 law at large. Our embodiment has this double 
 significance of both the nearness and the separate- 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 31 
 
 ness of life and its vessels. We are at once 
 incarnate and supercarnal. However closely mun- 
 dane passions crowd us, our souls are taller and 
 look over their heads. The transient is adjudged 
 now ; the permanent waits. 
 
 Translating objective and subjective realities, 
 each into the terms of the other, we must (if 
 careful) distinguish their essential unlikeness, dis- 
 cerning between outward and inward success, 
 between inner and outer penalty and reward. Un- 
 derstanding this division, we must keep in mind 
 that the physical side is limited by physics — it is 
 adjusted to the present only — its sanctions are 
 insistently temporal ; but the cardinal soul is 
 under vital laws, to which this estate is but the 
 first chapter, and whose compensations move in 
 circles to which the article of death is but a mere 
 item. God's physical justice is swift and immedi- 
 ate, but His moral justice advances "with slow 
 pace and silent feet." One is prompt, the other is 
 long-suffering ; but both are sure. The slower 
 mills grind finest. The casual exceptions — the 
 immediate and signal punishments in kind — but 
 show that those who disregard moral law are apt 
 to disregard physical, and these reveal those. 
 But still the inferences, though they do recognize 
 judgment as already proceeding, cannot estimate 
 
32 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 that which is deferred, nor estimate the ratio of 
 guilt, nor safely attempt a theodicy {i. e., an inter- 
 pretation of total divine justice) from what is 
 revealed in physical penalty of physical transgres- 
 sion. 
 
 The fact is premonitory, but its full implications 
 still remain conjectural. The skein is too tangled ; 
 the problem is too involved. The unveiling of all 
 the details — the real and complete evidence — 
 awaits the ultimate day. When all is not accessi- 
 ble, opinion cannot be conclusive. Sodom does 
 not always burn, not every Korah fats the jaws of 
 the earth ; but the readiness with which we make 
 coincidence moral shows our intuition of a finer 
 adjudication, in which the sumptuousness of Dives 
 and the hunger of Lazarus shall be measured in 
 other scales than those of time. 
 
 II. And Christ's " I tell you. Nay " warns us 
 against any inferences that substitute the apparent 
 for the real — warns us against inferring either too 
 much or too little — warns us that inferences may 
 be inconsequent — warns us both to expect and to 
 await. The parallax is too short for us to antici- 
 pate the total issue ; too long for us to doubt it. 
 
 The Greek tragedy — all the literature of tragedy 
 — grasps the intuition of retributive justice, and 
 lies all in the realm of conscience. Its poetic 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 33 
 
 justice is not imaginary, but it is imagined and its 
 oracles are obscure, if (and only if) we think that 
 present reality conforms to its futuritive dramatiza- 
 tion. The interlaced facts reserve the full decision. 
 That both comes and tarries. 
 
 "Some men's sins are evident, going before unto 
 judgment; and some men also they follow after. 
 In like manner also there are good works that are 
 evident; and such as are otherwise cannot be hid " 
 (i Tim. V. 24, 25). There are two sets of sanctions 
 suitmg two phases of law. Just so far as a man 
 knows and keeps either set of laws — the spiritual 
 and the physical — ^just so far will he reap the 
 blessings possible to that set. Temporal obedi- 
 ence, temporary blessing. Moral obedience, moral 
 blessing. " Whatsoever a man soweth." '* Each 
 seed after its own kind." The one obedience 
 ought to imply the other, but does not necessarily 
 involve it. 
 
 Every kind of law is on his side who keeps it, 
 and every kind of law is against him who breaks 
 it. The law of gravity, of explosives, of health, 
 of contract, of commerce, of art — these laws, 
 heeded, become allies. To observe public mo- 
 rality finds public approval. And he who obeys 
 God has God's approval. All obedience, so far 
 as such, works its appropriate results. There 
 3 
 
34 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 are no gratuitous or uncovenanted rewards nor 
 any accidental penalties. The goodness and se- 
 verity of each law is for itself and not for another. 
 This is absolute in moral law, and (however com- 
 plicated by the interference of other unjust wills) 
 is the tendency in what is physical. And the 
 bondage of corruption in which ignorance and 
 violence distrain natural tendency is not always 
 to endure. 
 
 Distinguish. A profane man may be robust ; a 
 false man may be an artist ; a covetous man may be 
 skillful ; and a man may be devout, truthful, gentle, 
 brave, and yet (under the operation of laws these 
 virtues do not concern) may fail in business or die 
 of consumption. Lord Bacon was the father of 
 modern philosophy, but he took bribes. Marl- 
 borough never lost a battle, but he embezzled. 
 Keats died in poverty. Bunyan was a jail bird. 
 McKinley was shot. 
 
 Material success is no final token of God's 
 favor, nor material failure of His frown. Approval 
 for one kind of obedience abridges no penalty of 
 other transgression. Penury and pain without 
 piety have no promises as such. Of all rogues 
 it is the duller part who enter prison. They are 
 not necessarily " offenders above all." Inferior 
 shrewdness (such is the law of shrewdness) allows 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 35 
 
 dull rascality to get its deserts more promptly. 
 Thus the smart outdo the stupid — that proves 
 only itself. If the " wicked prize itself buys out 
 the law," the more wicked it, though terrestrially 
 it escapes " unwhipt." But, saith Shakespeare, 
 " 'Tis not so above." 
 
 *' Who did sin that this man was born blind — 
 he or his parents ?" " Neither," said Christ. The 
 long circuit which transmits the shock of remote 
 sin lies too deep for tracing. The problem is too 
 involved for such glib judgments. Sin's disaster 
 somewhere, and a race involved in the calamity — 
 the innocent and the guilty all cousins in suffering, 
 but the whole philosophy of the woeful spectacle 
 not yet unsealed. Everything is furnished for 
 reclamation, nothing for curiosity. In the race- 
 unity of its trouble, human vision is made to await 
 the consummation which is promised but not yet 
 revealed. The law of sin and death operating 
 even upon those (as babes) who have not sinned 
 individually proves that God for this present re- 
 gards mankind, and deals with it, as a vital unit. 
 It is not simple, but it is evident. Long ago the 
 blow fell upon corporate man of which all mortal 
 ills are but the rowen — behold a race sin-smitten 
 and the irretrievable physical penalty ; but behold 
 also a spiritual intervention from a plane above 
 
36 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 physics ; restoration by a Redeemer, and the 
 trophies thereof! There is no collision nor clash- 
 ing of law or plan. Exactly the seen and the 
 unseen move in parallel obedience. Man is the 
 only offender — man the law-breaker. But to de- 
 cipher and trace responsibility and to assign phys- 
 ical consequence to moral cause, even through 
 a third and fourth generation, is beyond our 
 wisdom. 
 
 The ethical impulse must associate evils with evil, 
 but, save to search and judge our own misdoings, 
 we must endure and wait. All that is abnormal is 
 akin ; further we cannot go. Nature cannot tell 
 us. Sphinx-like she looks with calm, impartial 
 face upon moral good and evil. The crime she 
 punishes is ignorance — she is physical and keeps 
 neutrality. She is a parable of merciless law and 
 a declaration of outer justice alone. In this she 
 throws the spirit back upon its Maker for those 
 other laws that heal those who meet them fully, 
 and turns us toward those eyes that live. So we 
 are bidden " to change our minds " from that evil 
 which destroys unto that mercy which saves. 
 
 III. Christ used the GaHlean slaughter and the 
 Siloam accident to teach a far broader lesson than 
 they grasped who sought to explain these. 
 
 We are to shun a mischievous moralizing which 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 37 
 
 once characterized a certain sort of Sunday-school 
 book. There are present inner penalties, but 
 they are not oftenest shown. The bad boy does 
 not always drown, nor the good boy get rich. 
 On the other hand, it is as nearsighted to 
 reckon that smooth-going sin is immune and en- 
 viable. This is the paradox and puzzle of com- 
 fortable and complacent evil, but the very " pros- 
 perity of fools shall destroy them." It was the 
 fallacy that underlay the superficial arguments of 
 Job's three friends ; that character is a matter of 
 circumstantial evidence. This is the monotonous 
 pessimism which for our warning is illustrated in 
 the major part of the book of Ecclesiastes. The 
 plaint is specious from one standpoint, but it is a 
 submarine conception of the Giver of life ! It 
 puts the truisms of this world in place of the 
 truth that God will overrule it all for those who 
 wait for Him. Ecclesiastes dwells in common- 
 place misery, dismal, but not the whole matter ; 
 it is as little like Christianity as the catacombs are 
 like a sunrise. 
 
 Mercy moves in its own orbit. Each side of 
 tangible sin keeps its own boundaries. Inner 
 forgiveness does not remit overt penalty. Res- 
 titution amends some offenses, but also some 
 scars are worn to the grave. Rescue does not 
 
38 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 restore the external status. Therefore a true re- 
 pentance from evil as such does not stipulate the 
 abatement of outer consequences. A drunkard 
 reforms, his soul heals, but he nevertheless goes 
 to an earlier grave. A Frederick Robertson 
 teaches his generation, but his mind is strung too 
 tight for his body, and he dies at thirty-seven. 
 The Lord put away David's sin, but his child 
 died. Ahab averted immediate penalty, but he 
 was not accepted. The fruitless tree, in the para- 
 ble just following our text, was respited but not 
 spared. 
 
 The tendency is that " the wicked shall not live 
 out half their days," but some grow gray in evil. 
 The tendency is that " the righteous shall still 
 bring forth fruit in old age," but sometimes high 
 obedience has assured martyrdom. We may 
 indulge no theory of special providences that 
 evades the precision of physical effects. Even 
 miracles would but confirm the rule. 
 
 Human law touches little else save that which 
 concerns man in his person and property ; it has to 
 leave the deepest moral vindication for the world 
 to come. Both for warning and for consolation 
 we are taught to look toward celestial justice as 
 the intrinsic thing. Disasters come. A fire de- 
 vours here, an earthquake there. Cyclone and 
 
THE TOWER OF SILOAM 
 
 39 
 
 lightning and rain and sunshine fall upon the just 
 and the unjust. The train thunders into the 
 collision bearing blasphemer and babe. The end 
 is riot here. Looking past these relentless shocks 
 of mechanism, past the grimly beautiful exactness 
 of the physical order, looking on to His moral 
 disclosures of the ends which transcend mere 
 force, we shall escape both a false confidence and 
 a needless foreboding. 
 
 " Nothing has the just to lose 
 By worlds on worlds destroyed." 
 
 By and by, hearing the upper parts, we shall 
 catch the harmony that now is figured only with 
 this mysterious bass. We shall know how even 
 stress and pain could cooperate for good to them 
 that loved God. The convergence of laws will be 
 seen. The clouds appear to be in the same sky 
 with, the sun and stars, but the vapors are really 
 only of the earth. Pain is of this atmosphere ; 
 peace of that. Therefore we await emancipation 
 from these mingled conditions, seeking His esti- 
 mate who can carry us through all the surprises 
 of mortality, and by the law of the spirit of life for 
 ever free us from the law of sin and death. 
 
IV 
 
 JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF 
 
 GOD 
 
IV 
 
 JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 
 
 " These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the 
 Christ." — John xx. 31. 
 
 Of all the original twelve apostles, the apostle 
 John left for all time the legacy that is of the 
 deepest and most varied wealth. 
 
 The figure and temperament and acts of Peter 
 are far more conspicuous in that scenery of 
 Christ's century which is sketched in the first five 
 New Testament books. The life and writing of 
 the apostle Paul occupies a larger and more obvi- 
 ous place in the new Scripture. With either of 
 these men we feel more intimately acquainted. 
 Their personality and motion carries more of 
 windage and tangible impact. 
 
 It is only by closer study that we come to feel 
 the potency and draught of the great son of 
 Zebedee. His manner and meaning and message 
 require a more reflective analysis. He is less 
 dramatic and apparent. The sweep of his thought 
 and purpose comes more slowly to our appreci- 
 ation. But the revelation of God in Christ found 
 
 43 
 
44 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 in the personality and grasp of the fourth evangel- 
 ist an instrument and an interpreter whose mysti- 
 cal insight and far-sighted comprehension gathered 
 and conveyed the truth of truth with a sureness 
 and a sublimity that shines on through the ages 
 as the star Rigel shines in the belt of Orion, or 
 Vega in the constellation Lyra. Immutable in 
 the records which translate the Son of God into 
 the language of adoring wonder and absolute 
 loyalty, indispensable to our ever-deepening and 
 never completed apprehension of that supreme 
 and all-manifesting hfe, the words of him who lay 
 on Jesus' breast are alive with that contact, and 
 impart the palpitating love which there they 
 learned. 
 
 It was his life to make the world know his 
 Lord as he knew him. Christ imparted Himself 
 to this profound and capable nature that through 
 that nature He might evermore convey to souls 
 like-minded the power and scope of His per- 
 petual interpretation of God and of man, of crea- 
 tion and eternity. Of all those deeds John was 
 an observer — the wonders, the mercies, the im- 
 maculate sorrows, the paradox of the cross, the 
 tenantless and angel-ordered grave with its ten- 
 ure as impotent as Pilate's seal, and its testimony 
 as solid as the rock upon which streamed the 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 45 
 
 resurrection light. John knew all the actors and 
 agents of those surcharged years. He knew 
 GaHlee and Judaea, priest and centurion, the home 
 at Bethany, the family of Nazareth. 
 
 He heard and held the parables, the prayers, 
 the promises, the prophecies. He was upon the 
 Mount of Transfiguration and at Olivet. He 
 knew Stephen and Paul. He understood Peter 
 and Luke and James the Just. Thomas and 
 Philip were his fellows. He shared the wonders 
 of Pentecost. He met the furnace-blasts of perse- 
 cution. He survived his comrades, and saw the 
 seed flung abroad and taking root in the convic- 
 tions of the complicated and changing world. 
 
 And at last, ripe for the task, remembering, re- 
 flecting, listening, with an eagle vision that looked 
 down upon the world and time, and with a flight 
 that swam in the upper and cloudless skies, he 
 wrote. The last of the twelve witnesses, and 
 ready when the call should come for the renewed 
 visible companionship of the First and the Last 
 and the Living One, he put to record that which 
 he had heard and seen and handled of the Word 
 of Life. It was mature, competent — it gave the 
 inwardness as one soul had treasured and proved 
 it, and it is holy with His presence who breathes 
 through its transcendant thoughts. The whole 
 
46 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 portrayal and portraiture is John's epitome of the 
 things which were most surely believed by those 
 most competent to try and to tell. It is also 
 Christ's epitome of the beloved disciple. For 
 what can understand, what reconstruct, what can 
 prophesy, what impart, what can endure, like love ! 
 
 The personahty of this profound and intense 
 believer and follower is revealed in what he wrote, 
 it is also veiled by it. John is throughout, but 
 he is retired by a greater. Yet while we follow 
 the significance of the gesture, we need not for- 
 get him whose hand points us to the object. 
 
 What John saw and knew and felt is the reflex 
 proof of his competency, and completes his testi- 
 mony. The witness is also the result of the 
 truth he utters. 
 
 What John's nature was is shown by His dis- 
 cernment who called him. What his training was 
 the three years and the perhaps threescore that 
 followed give evidence. The fisherman neither 
 explains nor hinders the philosopher. For phil- 
 osopher he was — loving wisdom and attaining it 
 — surpassing Plato, and so all others, both in his 
 material and his use of it — handling the last prob- 
 lems of being and divinity, of man and motive, of 
 event, environment, and destiny. He does not 
 propound problems, he solves them, and not an 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 47 
 
 interrogation, but an exclamation of satisfied joy 
 punctuates his concluding word ! To him fiiiis 
 was but relative and terrestrial. It is a conjunc- 
 tion which implies a world that can contain all 
 the story. Moreover he is Baconian. He builds 
 not upon propositions, but upon events. His task 
 is to expound a biography. His final synthesis 
 shows how the best that ever was declares the 
 utmost that can be. 
 
 The Incarnation for him " solves all questions 
 in the world and out of it." He binds the sreat 
 given facts of Christ's life into a unity and reads 
 them as a whole. He sees why the roots bear 
 the fruits. The radical thought of John com- 
 passes all the queries and quests of the soul, and 
 " What know we greater than the soul ?" is the 
 mental attitude of the modern world which, not 
 in spite of the fact that he was poet, but because 
 he was that too, finds its most vital voice in 
 Alfred Tennyson. John was poet, too, and so the 
 fisher of Galilee gathers the greatest both of 
 reason and of rapture, and by love as by logic 
 hath us in the net. Human utterance may fall 
 below his search and sureness, but never can it 
 surpass them. All other reasoning is but a 
 second best, and commentary upon that second 
 best fails of the upper springs. 
 
48 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 How far and wide and high John's thought 
 went — what it compassed and applied ; what 
 ranges of relation it beheld — this appears in three 
 great declarations and definitions, which, under 
 the revelation that is in Christ, he made concern- 
 ing the essential and immutable nature of God. 
 From Him of whom he testified " in Him was 
 life ; and the life was the light of men," he 
 reached out and up to the thought of what the 
 ultimate Being is. He states that Being's nature 
 in three terms of its active demonstration. What 
 God is, responsive intelligence must know by what 
 He does, and know best and supremely through 
 His nearest and most commanding and most 
 appealing manifestation. What God is, in His 
 inmost essence, what the life is which originates 
 and answers our life, John had found in that One 
 whose nature was to him the revelation of the 
 eternal and the absolute. Here is ontology. And 
 the grandeur and finality of the conceptions is the 
 warrant of that appreciation of Jesus Christ out 
 of which they grew. 
 
 These three resolute conclusions are : " God is 
 Light," " God is Spirit," " God is Love." 
 
 These are final truths ; and for John's grasp of 
 them, all that he wrote being in evidence, Christ 
 accounts and Christ only. Every estimate of 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 49 
 
 God, then as now, is colored and fashioned by the 
 soul's estimate of Christ. Light, spirit, love; 
 where either of these three is, there, in degree, 
 God is ; and where God is, there these three are. 
 But these are elements of personality and have 
 no reality outside of that. Our capacity to know 
 them is the correspondence between us and the 
 invisible nature which is before and under and 
 through all things. 
 
 Light is a motion and a communication. It is 
 a creative revelation. It is a thing, and darkness 
 is not a thing, but an absence, just as silence is 
 the negation of sound. A finer skill in physics 
 may yet coordinate or even identify these two sets 
 of vibrations, proving that sound is invisible color, 
 and that color is inaudible sound. Then the ear 
 and the eye are complementary, and we have two 
 senses of the same thing. Then sunlight is only 
 music in an upper scale and harmony is a vision. 
 But truth, spoken or written, is still communica- 
 tion. Light is not only a medium and an agent, 
 it is an author. Strictly, the ether is the agent 
 and the light is that which travels it. Sight is the 
 effect and also the end intended; but the wire 
 that reddens under the electric charge, and the 
 leaping nerve that receives the charge — these are 
 not electricity itself Force is not an agent, but a 
 4 
 
50 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 manifestation — back of the thrill is will. The 
 waves are messengers, but the message is the 
 communication of a being who understands how 
 to send the message to a being that understands 
 how to receive it. Light is the communication 
 of being ! It does also reach and affect what is 
 irresponsive and unaware. It is chemical too, but 
 that is only to say that 
 
 " God fulfills Himself in many ways,'* 
 
 and is not without effect even upon those who 
 have only mineral or vegetable hearts. 
 
 John gazed deep into two wonderful eyes — his 
 soul saw and knew that it was seen — and then 
 feeling the source of infinite beauty, of all that 
 creates and satisfies vision, even the inmost, he 
 wrote, " Whatsoever doth make manifest is light." 
 " That was the true Light, which lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world." He begins 
 his story where Genesis began. The gospel, too, 
 opens with the all-reveaHng Light. Creation is 
 one with Christ. 
 
 Spirit What is it? What is it not? The 
 soul, which cannot define itself in terms of the 
 material and formal world, knows, by a knowledge 
 which objects may illustrate, and so were meant 
 to, which objects at once answer and obey, that it 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 51 
 
 transcends these, and that they can neither origi- 
 nate nor deny it. It is mind, it is will, it is energy. 
 It is parentage and birthright. John saw sense 
 and substance obey the authority of a spirit. He 
 recalled that Christ said, " I will not leave you 
 orphans, I will come to you," and thereupon, 
 under the conviction that the Unseen had re- 
 vealed the compatibility of spirit with a veiling 
 and Hmiting form, and that he had beheld the 
 glory of the Word " by whom all things were 
 made',' he wrote, " No man hath seen God at any 
 time; the only begotten Son, . . . He hath de- 
 clared Him " and reported His word, " He that 
 hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 
 
 It is spirit " that ordereth all things." Not a 
 soulless world, but personal mind, all in all. 
 Cause is back of process. Motion is the answer 
 of life. Creation is a garment. The bodies out 
 of which we peer are but clothing. Nature is 
 instrumental, and is always in the ablative case. 
 God is the nominative. Prayer is the highest act 
 of self-affirmation. 
 
 '* Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can 
 meet; 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 God is Love. To love is to live. Really to live 
 is to seek not one's own. Paul was taught by the 
 
52 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 same teacher in that Hfe whose ideal had its utter- 
 ance in the 1 3th chapter of the Corinthian letter. 
 The various testimony is providential — its au- 
 thority is one. " He that loveth not knoweth 
 not God." " Every one that loveth is born of 
 God." Love is procreative. 
 
 But John had seen love bear and bleed. He 
 knew love face to face. He understood what love 
 would do to bring itself near to a world that lust 
 had wrecked, and to heal the hearts that ache by 
 love's loss. Did Plato, or Aristotle, or Leibnitz, 
 or Kant, or Bacon ever uphold such an all-encom- 
 passing finality ? Here is a greater than Newton, 
 for love is the law of the soul's gravity. Love is 
 of God and unto God. " He that abideth in love 
 abideth in God, and God abideth in him." 
 
 There were three qualities or characteristics of 
 the apostle John that were reflected and summed 
 up in these three profound and crystal affirmations. 
 These personal habits or aptitudes are shown in 
 the temper and bearing of all that he wrote. He 
 inadvertently yet entirely reveals his own nature 
 in what he pens. It was because John was him- 
 self so susceptible to certain influences that he 
 was so fit to impart them. 
 
 First, he is shown to have been remarkably 
 intuitive and reflective. The deepest chords of 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 53 
 
 his being responded in music to the tones of his 
 Master's discourse, and to the power and pathos 
 of His deeds. To his rapt and intense meditation 
 the simplest and most deHcate hints were seminal 
 and apocalyptic. Every fact is sacred to him 
 upon which the realization of Christ's nature and 
 errand is confirmed. He seized the very spirit of 
 that life so lofty in its loneliness and so tenderly 
 true. He appropriated so fully the subjective and 
 essential thought of Christ that he at last is ready 
 more than any other to see the gospel from Christ's 
 own point of view, and to comprehend its final 
 implications. He especially reports the words 
 the Lord addresses to his very own. The other 
 evangelists dwell more upon the detail and effect 
 of the gracious wonders — John upon the meaning 
 of Him who so wrought. The others unfold the 
 swift parables — John handles their master key. 
 Realistic and historical always, and so safe-guarded 
 from pantheistic sublimation, evolving nothing 
 from fancy, but ever sinking deeper the plummet 
 of reflection, he thought so much, so far, but ever 
 so close, that one feels that his very style is like 
 his Teacher's, and that the voice that had so sunk 
 into the depths of a capable soul is reproduced. 
 The fourth Gospel is phonographic ! John so 
 meditated and pondered that the great reality was 
 
54 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 clear to him. With that logic which is implicit 
 and transcendant in intuition, he bridged and 
 harmonized the antithesis between this divine 
 nature and its human conditions. To him all 
 that Christ did and said is explained only by what 
 He was. Within, about, and up, and on, this, 
 such a disciple of such a Master, thought. And 
 by and by he wrote, and the book — from the 
 oracular prologue to the simple epilogue that 
 quietly wonders at the inexhaustible wealth of 
 the material — is the Gospel of Light. 
 
 John, again, was a man of lofty imagination. 
 It is a great faculty. No one is immortally in- 
 structive without it. It sees the invisible. It fore- 
 knows and foretells. It is mature and positive. 
 It does not discuss, it declares. It takes the wings 
 of the morning. To it space is but a terrestrial 
 term, and time is no longer. Under the presiding 
 conception that the Eternal Spirit had in the 
 person of Christ shown Himself concrete with 
 man, John views all light and life sub specie eterni- 
 tatis. All the gleaming figures of Isaiah and 
 Ezekiel, all scene and song, the splendors of 
 temple and ceremony, the magnificence and awe 
 of war, the scroll of record, the glory of lineage, 
 the very stars and suns — become one metaphor 
 of the great and terrible day of the Lord. It is 
 
JOHN'S THREE DEFINITIONS OF GOD 55 
 
 he, whose " soul was grown to match," that was 
 in the spirit upon Patmos, thus to herald the 
 terrors of a kindling world and the white beauty 
 of the new Jerusalem. 
 
 Last and ever this John was a great lover. 
 His meditating and exalted soul knew also that 
 affinity and affection for a friend who could satisfy 
 the depths, which taught him the inmost and 
 uttermost God. And it is that love that breathes 
 its benediction in the first Epistle. Its assurance 
 is absolute. All is open. "We know," "we 
 know" is the key of that whole harmony. The 
 Son of Thunder speaks the valediction of all that 
 band who companied with Christ. He has be- 
 come a grandsire of the Church. He writes to 
 all who love as his " Httle children." He has 
 survived priest and imperator, the torch, the 
 sword, the lions, and the mob. His venerable 
 face is bathed with the soft forelight of a swiftly 
 approaching joy. Anti-Christ troubles him no 
 more. He sleeps. And still at this long remove 
 He who guided that pen of John's would fix us 
 upon the spirit, the light, the love, it registered. 
 "These are written, that ye might beheve that 
 Jesus is the Christ." 
 
V 
 CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 
 
i 
 
V 
 
 CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 
 
 " Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee 
 of Me?" — John xviii. 34. 
 
 A QUESTION is a great opener. This was the 
 way of Socrates. It was eminently the way of 
 Christ. Both were hated because they were so 
 penetrating and so unavoidable. It is because 
 questioning is so personal that conventionality 
 holds it to be rude. It is the instinct of inquisi- 
 tiveness. It is the shortest cut to information. 
 It is the way of the child and of the scholar. It 
 is the key of knowledge. It is alike a keen tool 
 and a pointed weapon. The teacher, the physi- 
 cian, the lawyer, must each acquire skill in in- 
 terrogation. To catechise means to piit to the 
 echo. The prologue of Luke (i. 4) says, " that 
 thou mightest know the infallibility concerning 
 the things wherein thou wast catechised." All 
 questions are demands at sight. 
 
 Life is full of questions — direct, persistent, in- 
 evitable. Life itself is all one great question. 
 To the query "what is your life?" all our char- 
 
 59 
 
6o THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 acters are articulate replies, deep or shallow, firm 
 or weak, vague or clear. To ask and to answer 
 is to live. 
 
 We should be thankful for the many times our 
 Lord was so narrowly questioned. We are in- 
 debted to the very cavils that drew out many of 
 His clearest words. He sought to be questioned 
 and compelled it. He invited interview and re- 
 warded it. Still He does both. He knows how 
 much man needs to ask and to hear, and would 
 leave none to the miseries of a questioning con- 
 science and an unanswered heart. 
 
 We all know Munkacsy's picture of Christ be- 
 fore Pilate, but when we see the perplexed and 
 vexed face of the Roman, though in scdiie, and the 
 calm penetrative look of Him who stands to be 
 cross-examined, we feel that the title should be 
 reversed, and that the scene portrays Pilate before 
 Christ ! 
 
 The sequel of that dialogue makes it intense, 
 and it is full of interlinear truth. More readily 
 to examine Christ the prefect takes Him aside, 
 but, lo ! immediately positions are reversed, and 
 the prisoner is the examiner, having the thoughts 
 of his heart revealed. And we, if we search this 
 Scripture to-day, shall find that it is really search- 
 ing us. So God grant it may, and to our eternal 
 
CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 6i 
 
 benefit ! With a certain vacillation and also (so 
 we may think) with an effort toward official dig- 
 nity, Pilate asks, " Art Thou a king ?" But before 
 any answer to that there rises another matter — 
 quiet but so searching — our text, "Sayest thou 
 this," etc. Past the diplomacy and the maneu- 
 vering, Christ makes the most of the opportunity 
 (slight as it is), and reaches clear in after Pilate's 
 soul. He makes that anteroom an inquiry room, 
 and knocks hard at the door of a heart. But 
 Pilate throws another bolt. He shrinks deeper 
 into himself, and with a poor disdain, disclaiming 
 all personal concern, he retorts, " Am I a Jew ?" 
 — " Told me ?" — of course, how else ? He evades, 
 — " what hast thou done ?" But Christ will not 
 waive that previous question as to His kingship, 
 and He declares wherein and whereunto He is 
 royal. Not a monarch after the manner of men 
 — not martial. Such a king as the Jews would 
 not have. A Messiah that was not a nationalist, 
 a patriot in their narrow sense they renounced. 
 They hated a claim to a sovereignty which at 
 once disavowed their weapons and their motives. 
 They demanded a visible empire after their own 
 partisanship and passion. Their piety was all 
 provincial. 
 
 But Christ's claim to a spiritual dominion, to 
 
62 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 the kingliness of tnitJi, should have acquitted 
 Him of any offense against Caesar. Convert He 
 would, but not stibvert. 
 
 What an immortal opportunity Pilate had to 
 be brave and just ! Alas, it passes ! So in that 
 dialogue which every soul holds once with Christ, 
 there is a critical nearest instant when He deepens 
 mere verbal curiosity into a matter of life or death. 
 His searching scrutiny is that we may realize what 
 lies just under all superficial questions. 
 
 You ask somewhat ? Would you know what 
 it implies ? Would you learn what I am ? Do 
 you ask ? Or is it all forced upon you by outer 
 and unwelcome pressure ? Is it solemn, earnest, 
 or perfunctory ? Is it the man who asks or the 
 official ? Is it original or borrowed? 
 
 This interview between the temporary prefect 
 and the Lord of life emphatically teaches the 
 everlasting distinction between faith and hearsay ^ 
 — between belief and make-believe. 
 
 Christ distinguishes as to the quality of what 
 is said to Him and of Him. That scene and that 
 word urges us to discriminate deep-down honesty 
 toward the Truthful One, from all compulsory, 
 controversial, or conventional talk about Him. 
 Faith to be real must be without duress, — for 
 one's self " and not for another." Fluency of 
 
» 
 
 CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 63 
 
 pious phrase, traditional catchwords, all religion of 
 hearsay, must meet His inquisition whose quali- 
 tative analysis puts us all to the test. Confession 
 of Christ cannot be proxied or deputized. Real 
 thought may be evaded by trite and borrowed 
 words. It is not how much we believe, but how 
 much we believe it. Statements may be true and 
 yet be meaningless if we have not wrestled out, 
 each man his own way, to their mastery. Candor 
 and even capacity are sacrificed if we consent to 
 measure right by prejudice or party. 
 
 It is a vice of too much of our thinking to-day 
 that we get it by subscription and at club rates. 
 Many are too preoccupied or impatient to do their 
 own thinking and want their ideas peptonized. 
 The partisanships of affirmation and of negation 
 are alike external to personal responsibility. They 
 asked with triumph in His day, ** Have any of the 
 rulers or of the Pharisees beheved on Him?" — but 
 it was a non seqidtiir. Credo is not plural. Nothing 
 so stultifies conscience as to borrow one's opinions 
 of duty. Christ said to such, " I know you, that 
 ye have not the love of God in yourselves." 
 " That which my lips know they shall speak 
 sincerely " is the only safeguard of personal truth. 
 And if cant of affirmation is the bane of genuine- 
 ness, is not the cant of denial equally hollow? 
 
64 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 Second-hand doubt, ready-made objection, is at 
 once the shallowest and most unmanly. It, too, 
 says only " what some other told it." 
 
 The propaganda of unbelief finds market for 
 its flimsy wares mainly among those gaping critics 
 of gospel duty who so readily mistake sciolism 
 for scholarship, and who are willing to substitute 
 for resolute reasons a slanderous quotation. 
 
 It is strange how those who renounce the high- 
 est authority are willing to accept the lowest, and 
 to put the misconceptions of domineering ob- 
 jectors in place of the self-testifying Lord ! This 
 is the suicide of individuality. 
 
 We have a right to demand vigilant pains-tak- 
 ing conviction from one another, and that, how- 
 ever little one may say, that much shall have 
 been made his very own. Nothing so becomes 
 the soul as homespun. For what is vitally true to 
 some other shall be false in you if you but adopt 
 it arbitrarily. 
 
 That which we say of God or to God, of Christ 
 or to Christ — if it is only memoriter or rote — is 
 quite another thing from actual experience. A 
 real opinion and purpose is vital, not artificial, and 
 has reproductive power, but an opinion about an 
 opinion is sterile, and, as Paul said of an idol, " It 
 is nothing in the world." BeHef in Christ is more 
 
CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 65 
 
 than a belief in a belief. If religion (according to 
 the best etymology) is from the verb rclegere^ 
 meaning to ponder, it cannot be the thoughtless 
 adoption of the thought of some one else. Each 
 man must chew his own food ! 
 
 Nor can religion m the present indicative use 
 the terms of the imperfect subjunctive. Conviction 
 is far more than a reminiscence. To recite what 
 once was my own is not necessarily to avow it 
 now. My own deepest being must reenact the 
 great submissions and fervent consecrations of 
 the saints passed on or I cannot truly share them. 
 My to-day must break its own path from yester- 
 day to to-morrow. " Considering the issue " of 
 noble lives we are to imitate their faith, not copy 
 their inflections — 
 
 "They climbed the steep ascent to Heaven, 
 Through peril, toil, and pain ; 
 O God, to us may grace be given 
 To follow in their train !" 
 
 To be " carried to the skies on flowery beds of 
 ease " is to renounce the sword and wish for the 
 ambulance. The soft litter of the angels is only 
 for souls who have quit them like men in the fore- 
 front of the battle. Will and work are the hard 
 disciplines of high virtue. The studies that cost 
 us most train us best. Character does not pro- 
 5 
 
66 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 ceed on " the line of the least resistance." Chris- 
 tianity is not bowing at Christ's name, but bearing 
 Christ's j^^y^r. 
 
 " Sayest thou this thing of thyself ?" or is 
 your prayer but an echo, your praise the trill 
 of the mocking bird, your hope and assurance 
 borrowed, your theory of life plagiarized, your 
 diary a copy book! Is Christ your utility or 
 your end? Peacocks and parrots are birds of 
 low flight ; it is the song of the lark that scales 
 the skies. 
 
 The vice of imitativeness is not merely that it 
 offers a cheap substitute for originahty, but that it 
 destroys the power of becoming original. We 
 live in a time when the mechanical and the con- 
 venient greatly menaces the spontaneous and the 
 intuitive. We are tempted by lithograph and 
 process to lose the power of free-hand and to be- 
 come parasites. Almost all things are furnished 
 by pattern and quantity. We feed on canned 
 foods, and think that a check settles all balances. 
 We content ourselves with calling near-sighted- 
 ness omniscience. We pay editors to think for 
 uc, and we build our dwellings by the block. 
 
 Such a searching text as this recalls us. It 
 challenges that laziness in which individuality 
 wilts. It shows the reflex menace of lip-service. 
 
CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 67 
 
 In adjuring Pilate to consider the sources of his 
 speech, Christ warns us all against false pretenses. 
 For the one great thing not to be compounded 
 for, not to be manufactured, or lent, or bought, is 
 faith. For good faith takes the juror's pledge. 
 To say / believe should be as careful and as 
 solemn as an oath. A vote is literally a zww. 
 Creed is non-transferable. An actual creed is an 
 honest account of stock. If it is not alive it is 
 stale. Hearsay is no final evidence. One cannot 
 give away experience. 
 
 I do not plead for less creed, but for more — for 
 far more. But not so much more in quantity as 
 in quality, and as to quality, not more in the ob- 
 jective realities and relations of religion, as of 
 our subjective hold of these. For the outer to 
 be the sign of the inner — that the mighty pro- 
 test, Credo, may have three dimensions, not only 
 length and breadth, but also depth. Any hesita- 
 tion is better than a glibness which tricks out its 
 debility, whether of doubt or devotion, in shreds 
 of pious memoirs and scraps of Bible gotten ear- 
 wise. Audit is one thing, credit quite another. 
 Better five words with the understanding than ten 
 thousand words in an unknown tongue. Do we 
 know it? Do we tnean it? Formulas which 
 have been vital to others may be barren to us. 
 
68 THE WfLL BY THE GATE 
 
 We profane Scripture when we turn phrases that 
 once breathed and burned and bled into common- 
 place shibboleths. 
 
 Mme. de Stael once said, " Better a smaller 
 vocabulary and a fuller heart !" True religion is 
 not a self-monologue, but a dialogue with the 
 Father of our spirits. It means reciprocity. The 
 thing needful is not that we recite the great creeds 
 of the fourth century, or match with music the 
 lyric fervors of Charles Wesley and Henry Lyte 
 — great as these are — but that we " speak that we 
 do know." 
 
 First testy then testimony. It is the tones of 
 experience that command attention. What we 
 have struggled out is ours. To every earnest 
 soul there comes a time when it must revise what 
 it has till then taken for granted, and change the 
 ore of opinion to the metal of conviction. Food, 
 coin, knowledge — we only own what we use, the 
 rest owns us. 
 
 Let us ask not fewer questions of Christ, but 
 only such as we are willing He should answer in 
 His own way. The probe is in the hand of One 
 who is as tender as He is sure. He may hurt, 
 but He can heal. You who so far have taken 
 Christ upon the representations, or worse, upon 
 the misrepresentations, of others, " ask, and ye 
 
CONVICTION, OR HEARSAY 69 
 
 shall receive !" Hear Him. If you were logical 
 to your premises — inadequate as they may be — 
 if you would follow even your latent convictions 
 of what is true in Him, you would come to His 
 feet, yes, to His arms, as both your Sovereign and 
 Saviour, and say ''My King !" And so, with Paul, 
 to others (i Thes. i. 5), "Our gospel came not 
 unto yoti in word only^ but," etc. Your heart 
 will not be nonplussed if you find Him whose 
 work since He was twelve years old has been 
 hearing and answering questions ; but if not — ! 
 
VI 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
VI 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
 " In all things I observe you as exceedingly religious ; for, pass- 
 ing along and noting your objects of worship, I found also an 
 altar upon which had been inscribed To the Unknown God, what 
 therefore ye not knowing worship that do I announce to you." — 
 Acts xvii. 22, 23. {Author's translation.) 
 
 That story in the seventeenth chapter of The 
 Acts gives us the points of contact and of differ- 
 ence between the philosophy of the antique world 
 and the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is almost the 
 strongest passage in the book. It burns with 
 wisdom and suggestion. The circumstances in- 
 troduce the speech, whose brief outline of only 
 about three hundred words is yet enough to show 
 Paul's courage as a Christian and his skill as an 
 orator. Adroit in conciliation, delicate in sugges- 
 tion, thorough in its adaptation, simple and sweep- 
 ing in its logic, issuing in that testimony of which 
 he dare not be silent, and which is still the crux 
 and the scandal of worldly wisdom — it was just 
 like Paul from first to last. 
 
 Silas and Timothy had been left behind at that 
 
 73 
 
74 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 Beroea where the Scriptures of the prophets had 
 such honor, and, waiting for them, all alone, Paul 
 sees Athens where the only prophets are the poets. 
 It is the city of Athene — goddess of skill and wis- 
 dom. All Hellenic art and story and worship 
 and thought centered there. In what it was it 
 stood and stands peerless, supreme. Beautiful 
 for situation, and adorned beyond the rivalry of 
 all later ages, of vast intellectual prestige, of a 
 never-satisfied mental curiosity — it was " the eye 
 of Greece," and is the wonder of time. Schools, 
 sybarites, strangers, slaves — and over all the 
 breath of moral decay. Citizens and all comers 
 alike were having leisure for nothing other than 
 to tell or to hear some " 7icwer thing-." The 
 latest novelty was the most welcome — quid mine? 
 
 Great Aristotle and greater Plato were long 
 dead, and less noble forms of thought now ruled 
 this city of discussions. And this degeneracy of 
 thought showed the incompetency of even the 
 loftiest type of unheavened human reason to re- 
 sist the sensualism that seeks its end in pleasures, 
 and the fatalism whose pride of aspiration finds 
 its conclusion in despair. 
 
 What philosophy, as such, could do, had there 
 been done. Idolatry had exhausted invention. 
 Priests, sacrifices, shrines, festal days, were always 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 75 
 
 in evidence, but this capital of aesthetics was still 
 hopelessly unsatisfied and restless — unhappy and 
 impatient — and ritual had lost its earnestness. 
 
 " When love begins to sicken and decay 
 It useth an enforced ceremony." 
 
 Exquisite refinement of language, subtlety of 
 dialectic, splendor of technique, memory of re- 
 nown — all that made Athens the gossip of the 
 world, had yet failed of that final peace without 
 which conscience arrays man in a miserable 
 quarrel with himself and all things. 
 
 What has Paul to say to this Boston of Greece, 
 and what has it to say to him ? See ! He moves 
 about, inspecting, reflecting, and the city full of 
 idols rouses him to a " paroxysm." All this beauty 
 and no hallowing knowledge of good. Variety 
 itself a confession of spiritual uncertainty. Sim- 
 plicity nowhere. He must speak. And so in the 
 little synagogue, and the great agora, or market 
 place, he held daily dialogue with all comers. 
 The omnipresent mistake gave him a constant 
 text — the true God and eternal life. Everywhere 
 he looked there was a shrine with its label. As 
 one of their own satirists had said, " It was easier 
 in Athens to find a god than to find a man." 
 
 His protest is heard of; for never can be hid a 
 
76 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 resolute man with a true word ! The philoso- 
 phers encounter him to make the cause of Athens 
 their own. They will, if they can, smother him 
 with formulas, riddle him with categories, and 
 silence him as absurd. 
 
 Two theories of human life are there — self-suf- 
 ficient, hostile, inconclusive — the pride of pleasure 
 and the pleasure of pride. The Epicureans were 
 the Greek Sadducees. Sinking below the level of 
 him whose name they held, they had become frivo- 
 lous, and reason for them was but a procuress. 
 With them, though apparently so opposite, came 
 certain of the Stoics, austere, cynical, churlish — at 
 the best fatalists defying the inevitable. Without 
 hope, both. As pithy Thomas Fuller (p. 223) puts 
 it : " The first standing for the anarchy of fortune, 
 the second for the tyranny of fate." They began 
 with a sneer and an epithet : " What would this 
 babbler say?" — the bird that picked up seeds in 
 the street cackling as he did so — a crow. " He 
 seems to be an announcer of alien gods." Strange 
 indeed would his themes be to them. Yet, withal, 
 his sincerity has an unusual flavor. So they have 
 him to the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars, an open 
 and lofty platform of limestone near by, where 
 sat the court Solon had instituted for the trial 
 of capital offenses, where, upon seats hewn from 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 77 
 
 the natural rock, the supreme judges held their 
 venerable sessions. No violence is implied, though 
 the place may have been chosen as carrying a 
 suggestion of intimidation. 
 
 But it fitted the man and his theme, as they 
 ask him, with ironical courtesy, " May we know 
 what this new teaching is ?" It was upon the 
 charge of treasonable novelty of opinion that, 
 long before, this Athens had sentenced Socrates. 
 Socrates would have enjoyed this scene. Paul 
 has permission. Enough. It is under that perfect 
 sky, — about, the city with its lustrous architect- 
 ures, — afar, the countless twinkling of the sea, — 
 at hand, the chattering, curious company. But 
 in him, now to speak, is a tremendous memory 
 and a devoted hope whose passion no flouting 
 can daunt. Men are his occasion, and however 
 curt or critical their attention, all afforded mo- 
 ments are his opportunity. There he stood in- 
 trepid before rhetoricians and philosophers to 
 tell them of life, and, if they would but hear, of 
 Him who is the very wisdom of God. For who 
 has so written His wisdom upon the mind and 
 heart of men as that Jesus whom Paul preached ? 
 What is any history of philosophy worth that 
 forgets that Teacher of teachers — Christ ? 
 
 Fragmentary as this sketch of Luke's must 
 
78 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 be, it shows Paul's masterful tact. Wisest and 
 shrewdest of all known introductions. It is filled 
 with local color and smoothes the way while it 
 arrests attention. Direct, without bluntness, it 
 shows the skill of one who could make the most 
 of an opportunity. Paul is a Christian diplomat. 
 It was notable wit — so Acts xxii. 1-3, xxiii. 6, 
 xxiv. 10, xxvi. 12, xxviii. 17, 19. Remembering 
 such instances, it is curious indeed that both the 
 revisions of 161 1 and 1881 should fail to translate 
 justly the word with which Paul so keenly and 
 truthfully characterized the Athenians. He did 
 not tell them that they were " superstitious," but 
 that they were " more than ordinarily religious." 
 He is not so maladroit as to rebuff them at the 
 outset, and lose his one possible advantage. 
 Moreover, their altars and temples are a positive 
 point in his argument. " Passing along and 
 noting their objects of worship," particularly he 
 had been impressed with one inscribed, " ^ Ayvwarw 
 dew " — what, therefore, they unknowing worship, 
 that will Paul declare to them. Two sentences 
 and the ground is cleared for the theme. It is as 
 clean and keen as a lancet. There is no finer 
 instance of wise introduction in all the annals of 
 speech. Paul had seen Athens soberly, as every 
 true man must consider any great city — he ap- 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 79 
 
 predated its physical beauty and looked beyond 
 this. " Religious " — all men are that. It is the 
 exceeding prerogative and function of man so to 
 be. Something must be worshiped, image or 
 reality. Paul, too, is a worshiper. H knows 
 of whom. 
 
 The instinct is an immense avowal. Yet one 
 may worship an unknown god and die amid the 
 distractions of a miscellaneous idoldom. Thirst 
 is not water, and craving is not knowledge. Paul 
 would direct this appealing and appalling hunger 
 to a reasonable object. He would shed upon this 
 confessed want the light of an unguessed love, 
 and lead it to the shelter of an infinite promise. 
 Not for naught in this city of idols and idlers 
 had he specially considered the inscription which 
 (note the courtesy of the pluperfect tense — not by 
 those before him) " had been written." 
 
 In that epigraph, as in a mirror, idolatry must 
 recosrnize at once its instinct and its failure. It 
 confessed the vagueness and yet the desire — the 
 hunp-er and the starvation. It was a vast and 
 helpless interrogation. [Eder. on Proph., 42, 43.] 
 Showing capacity for God, it showed also the 
 incapacity of the errant and self-willed reason to 
 reach Him ; for even in lofty Athens polytheism 
 and pantheism was the result. That personal. 
 
8o THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 holy, merciful, redemptive One, it knew not. In 
 this very sanctuary of intellect, of letters, and 
 of art, man confessed that such a God was " far 
 above, out of his sight." 
 
 How Paul felt the pathos of it all, imagine. 
 He would take that hand raised in the darkness, 
 and clutching vainly " if haply it might find Him," 
 and guide cynic and sophist to the One so near. 
 He would answer the query and the quest — show 
 the path they had missed, and erase the word 
 " Unknown." 
 
 He does not refute, he interprets. Hebrew 
 Scripture, in form, he does not once quote, for 
 with them this has no authority ; rather he cites 
 " one of their own poets," and yet the spirit of 
 the Psalms and of Isaiah is in all he says there. 
 He adapts himself to their logic, and the so brief 
 summary furnished us yet shows a most system- 
 atic and broad argument. 
 
 God the Maker of the Cosmos and its ruler — 
 not confined (and here suppose the sweeping 
 gesture toward the splendid structures all about) 
 to shrines made by hands. First cause and final 
 end of being ! Giver of all life — maintainer of it 
 all ! His unity and so the unity of all men, who 
 in Him move and arc. All races His offspring, 
 and so brother-bound. Not the '* art and study " 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 8i 
 
 of man, but the heart is the answer. The creat- 
 ure more than the things he fashions, — God more. 
 Idolatry and its idea unworthy then of both the 
 father and the child. God's likeness within. Der- 
 ivation teaching dependence. The times of this 
 " agnosticism " God overlooked. His forbearance 
 with it. His present call to a " change of mind." 
 The judgment of all the habitable earth by a 
 Man whom He had appointed and the assurance 
 thereof by His resurrection. 
 
 Here on the Hill of Mars he cited Athens to 
 face God. Swift, sure, fervid — he strode from 
 premiss to conclusion. 
 
 Hearing of a " resurrection of dead men " some, 
 thereupon, were jeering; some postponed; and 
 Paul knew himself dismissed. Some stuck to him, 
 one of them a judge of the court, one woman, by 
 name Damaris, and others. So it was that day, so 
 it is this day. All that Paul could he did. No 
 church rose there ; no letter to Athens is known. 
 Pride of place, exclusiveness of race, conceit of 
 knowledge, theory that denied the wisdom and 
 the power of the God of life and Lord of death — 
 whatever it was, they closed the testimony of that 
 God whose community of relation to all men 
 contains the community of all men's relation to 
 Him ; whose providence clasps all the issues of 
 
 6 
 
82 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 all hearts ; who leaves none groping in spiritual 
 orphanage that is willing to recognize His pres- 
 ence and do His will. Philosophers as they were, 
 they did not love this deepest and simplest wis- 
 dom. They went their ways and Paul went his. 
 And still the altar stood — " to whom it may con- 
 cern !" It stands yet, in a figure, for those who 
 
 prefer it — 
 
 " Tijj ayvcoarco 6ew !" 
 
 Far Athens went, but not far enough. Gods 
 many were hers, but not God/ 
 
 Certain things remain to reconsider. 
 
 First, that all our theories of life tread out from 
 our conception of God. He, the Maker, must be 
 the first proposition of any intelligible creed. Any 
 whole theory of the creation must hold it sub- 
 ordinate to the Creator — center, circumference, 
 and bond of all that is. Without Him all is 
 absurd and unreal. He cannot be ignored — men 
 have to choose an opinion concerning Him. "The 
 thought of God (says another) spans the history 
 of humanity as the rainbow hangs over the brink 
 of the waterfall, always apparently about to be 
 svvept away by the impetuous waters, yet always 
 there." He conditions our being and our thought, 
 Living by Him and in Him we ought to live to 
 Him ; for zue are His. And He is accessible — ■■ 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 83 
 
 " clearly seen by the creation.'' What we read 
 out He wrote in. It is not anonymous, but rather 
 a great acrostic, which read up and down and 
 not sidewise spells a name. That very shrine at 
 Athens was a cryptogram of truth. 
 
 And He, " in whose hand is the soul of every 
 living thing, and the breath of all mankind," is a 
 Redeemer. He has manifested Himself in a Man 
 — " borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows " — 
 "brought life and immortality to light." The 
 cross is God's philosophy of sin and deliverance. 
 He seeks the heart of the world with that light. 
 
 An idol is at once an acknowledgment and a 
 substitute. It depreciates both God and man. 
 " The workman made it." Divinity and humanity 
 together suffer. That which puts God nearest 
 and loveliest lifts man furthest out of the rapacities 
 of selfishness. Nothing or all. Then let us ask 
 ourselves whether we live up to the Son of man 
 as well as Athens lived up to her idolatries, and 
 whether a mythology practiced is not better than 
 a Christology only praised. 
 
 Think of the proposition, an " unknown God !" 
 And think of bending now at that altar! Yet 
 modern credulity has enlarged upon that of Greece, 
 and writes, to an jinknowable God ! — a God who 
 cannot reveal Himself to His creature — a creature 
 
84 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 who cannot know! — both behttled. Perception 
 shorn of reflection indeed. How infinitely know- 
 ing is this agnosticism ! How smooth the modesty 
 of this large claim that God is unintelligible ! It is 
 petulantly evasive — it is in the wish and the will. 
 It ignores the question, " What think ye of 
 Christ?" 
 
 Its premiss is a priori — manufactured. It begs 
 the very question. And it saws off the bough it 
 sits on — for what is intelligence good for when it 
 has committed parricide ? And why is its eager 
 denial so reiterative, except that some reality urges 
 it on ! It, with mock politeness, conducts God to 
 the frontier. It " does not hke to retain Him in its 
 knowledge." Why ? Ask Athens ! What then ? 
 Ask Athens ! Of what devotion is this ignorance 
 the mother, — in the name of knowledge refusing 
 its possibility? 
 
 Is it not time finally to repudiate the crass dog- 
 matism, which first assumes and then asserts that 
 preoccupation with the apparatus of creation is a 
 sufficient reason to forget its origin and ends ? Is 
 not that a deep astigmatism which dissects a bat's 
 eye and abjures the implications of the mind that 
 does it? Noble is intellectual curiosity toward 
 all fact, but is not the thinker a fact ? Is not 
 the intuition of moral responsibility a fact ? Shall 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 85 
 
 one proclaim the unseen atom and lampoon the 
 unseen God? The animus of that idolatry of 
 mere objects, which, while at every stage it must 
 use subjectivity, — and personality evades its honest 
 analysis, and which retires all the problems of 
 the soul and its laws, — is an animus whose denials 
 are explained by its dislikes. The agnostic is a 
 kind of moral cretin ! Agnosticism preferred is a 
 kind of idiocy, and at last is mental suicide ! 
 
 Its Latin equivalent is ignoramus. It is not of 
 the wit, but of the will. It shuts its eyes and then 
 declares it cannot see. 
 
 The X with which Paul factored was beyond 
 the algebra of mere sense ; it was the sign of the 
 cross. The soul's answer to the soul of its Maker 
 was his major premiss, and led to the depths of 
 wisdom and knowledge — " God in Christ." 
 
 And still the same foundational facts that he 
 used are " to put to silence the agnosticism of 
 irrational men." Creative intelligence, immanent 
 and dominant personality, strenuous love — the 
 gracious and holy One to whom we are akin. 
 This is the bed-rock of theism and of Christianity. 
 
 " Earth's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God." 
 
 Quibble, or quarrel, or accept Him — He is here ! 
 No discovery of His ways can banish Him. Oaths 
 
86 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 and prayers, both, pronounce His name. The 
 accent varies as we put Him into the crucible of a 
 theory, or put ourselves in the crucible of prayer. 
 Wordy Athens missed the central truth which by 
 a willing surrender Paul had found. " We know 
 Him whom we have believed " was his onward 
 cry. Not at that end of the scalpel, but at this ! 
 
 And we may know. Near He is. One wrote 
 upon a blackboard, — " God is nowhere " : but a 
 little child spelled it out, — " God is n-o-w h-e-r-e." 
 A child's longing, a child's faith, a child's assur- 
 ance and love, and that threshold is passed at 
 whose lowly lintel a self-willed philosophy bumps 
 its proud head ! I, for my part, will stick to Paul, 
 all Athenianism to the contrary notwithstanding. 
 I erase the word ^^ ayvcbarw!' I "know in part; 
 but I shall know even as I have been known." 
 
VII 
 
 THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 
 
VII 
 
 THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 
 
 " Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men." 
 — 2 Cor. v. II. 
 
 In the face of that punishment of the slayer of 
 President McKinley, let me undertake to make 
 ** manifest in your consciences " some of the pro- 
 found reasons that underlie what we call the sanc- 
 tions of the law. A sanction is that which binds 
 law by administration. It declares and assures 
 that the authority to command goes with the 
 purpose and the power to execute the results of 
 obedience and of disobedience. Legislation shorn 
 of executive ability is nullified and discredited. 
 Law is not in the subjunctive but in the imperative 
 mood. Authority is not a " bureau of advice," 
 but a right and a purpose to control. It declares 
 a method of administration. It formulates obHga- 
 tion. It bases upon a right. It certifies a purpose. 
 It implies power. It reveals consequences. 
 
 These consequences are sanctions. Its conse- 
 quences, whether of pain or of peace, make good 
 
 89 
 
90 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 its declarations and magnify its intention. They 
 refer to the authority as actual, potential, consist- 
 ent, and complete. The purpose of law is to 
 secure right action — harmony with its authority — 
 life, order, blessing; and this purpose is so real 
 and vital that it will not tolerate trifling, and that 
 it will visit with adverse severity those who offend 
 its spirit and behests. A good law — a good 
 government — has its security in approving and 
 securing good men, and this it does in demon- 
 strating by active results that it intends to secure 
 them from the caprice or malice of those who are 
 contentious and will not obey its truth. If it did 
 not promise and perform both sets of results it 
 would be a failure. 
 
 Power to uphold must therefore go with au- 
 thority to declare, if there is to be a real govern- 
 ment. Offenders must suffer the due consequences 
 of their offense. This is the only possible way if 
 the law is to be respected. Results are necessary 
 corollaries, and they bind (or sanction) the law. 
 The fact of right or wrong relation to the authority 
 dictates the appropriate consequences. These are 
 implicit in the command. They are notified as 
 showing that the issues are vital. A true as 
 opposed to a careless administration of law must 
 become therefore a terror to evil doers and a 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 91 
 
 praise to them that do well. The doing regulates 
 the allotment. 
 
 A false administration, neglecting or inverting 
 this, is shown in the barter of law, in the surrender 
 of its sanctions, in the subversion of its own claim 
 to administer, and becomes a praise to evil doers 
 and a terror to them that do well ! It institutes a 
 "ring." It misgoverns. It prostitutes justice. It 
 prostrates all guarantees of right liberty. The 
 sanctions are thus the judgment which is passed 
 upon the given government — be it of a city, or of 
 a people, as right or as wrong. 
 
 Some sanctions are inevitable. Tyranny has its 
 own. Anarchy has its own. Righteousness has 
 its own. For better or worse they are. Good or 
 bad, they are stringent. They are locked in the 
 reasonable relation between consequence and 
 cause. Were it not so, all the forces in which we 
 are set were irrational. Because " madness lies 
 that way," sanity lies the other way. 
 
 To know " the fear of the Lord "is to know 
 that His wisdom and will and power are pledged 
 together to the maintenance of His actual au- 
 thority. The world that is, is a world where 
 creation and creature are bound in law and right 
 to their Creator. His control is the condition of 
 the satisfaction of the life He begat, and of the 
 
92 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 realm He made for its loyal exercise. The sanc- 
 tions of His laws for things and for souls are 
 everywhere shown. Whatever authority He dele- 
 gates has these behind it. All right rule conforms 
 so far to His, and the rationality and justice of it, 
 in any case, is illuminated by the issuing results 
 that make it binding. 
 
 The law of love, as the law of gravity, has its 
 logical penalties and reward. All control implies 
 the consequences of order and of disorder. It is 
 this reasonable sequence that makes the physical 
 world intelligible and makes the science thereof 
 possible. If law were incoherent (that is, without 
 coherent effects) we could not knoiv. Organized 
 knowledge implies an organized world. All per- 
 sonal knowledge asserts a personal supreme Ruler. 
 A universe without that were a chaos. That we 
 can reason asserts God and His consistency. The 
 continuity of any law of God involves a principle 
 that is as real and as regnant in morals as in 
 physics. Our observations and our instincts, 
 therefore, coincide in expecting certain events to 
 follow certain relations. But these expectations 
 realized are the manifest sanctions of the law. 
 They declare its persistency and its inviolability. 
 Those who run against it confirm it. 
 
 Moral responsibility is structural in this world 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 
 
 93 
 
 of God. Justice is a reality. Particular justice 
 here is based upon " the powers of the world to 
 come." The scale extends far, far, beyond any 
 present instances, and sinks into a thoughtful 
 apprehension stern premonitions of changeless 
 principles. Through all opaque tradition and 
 confused sentiment it darts prophetic rays of an 
 eternal and infrangible authority, under which we 
 have our being and before whose vindications we 
 must stand. 
 
 Equal law, whose pedestal is reared above the 
 tyranny which usurps true authority and the law- 
 lessness which denies it, stands in those intuitions 
 of divine control which ahke rebuke Ishmael and 
 Cain. 
 
 Beast rule — denying all wrong because denying 
 all right, all the havoc of passion and will-violence 
 that would abolish the responsibility it hates, that 
 would sin and not suffer, that resents those sanc- 
 tions which confirm the law — is met even in human 
 courts by that conscience of mankind which 
 reflects a God of rectitude, who would not be 
 worthy if He were neutral toward disobedience. 
 Were His will weak and vacillating, were not His 
 resources pledged to the life that is life indeed, 
 and pledged against the life that is death — did He 
 not magnify and make honorable the law, then 
 
94 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 were there no barriers against a revolutionized 
 universe. 
 
 The instinct which connects penalty with per- 
 versity — the capacity of moral indignation before 
 flagrant injustice, the public determination to visit 
 offenders against even earth's rational order — these 
 show a part of God's ways, and catch the rustle of 
 His skirts. To apologize for the strictness of right- 
 eousness is to ^^-moralize and <3f^- rationalize all 
 human relation. Purpose to enforce is the king- 
 bolt of all law, and of that purpose the sanction, 
 in whatever degree, is the object lesson. Reward 
 and punishment are exemplary. The ends of 
 punishment may include chastisement and reclama- 
 tion, but they include far more. Penalty may be 
 detersive as to the individual, but it must be deter- 
 rent as to others. It considers public and general 
 influence — it is meant to make contempt of court 
 impossible — it is meant to show that justice is for 
 the just by showing that it is against the unjust. 
 It reveals what the true life is by showing what it 
 cannot be. 
 
 No punishment is an equivalent for the offense ; 
 it cannot square the books ; it is not merely an 
 exacted fine ; it cannot be expiation. Therefore it 
 is not vindictive (that is, revengeful — a trying to 
 " get even," pain for pain), but it is vmdicative. 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 95 
 
 Torture is malicious and malice is not justice. 
 Justice is not arbitrary, but explanatory of the 
 tendency and issue of evil. It warns from death 
 that it may impart life. It inflicts that it may 
 prevent. It must visit obduracy or it would not 
 be justice. So it was a Saviour who warned from 
 the danger of " eternal sin." The " strong delu- 
 sion" which resents control and disdains obedience 
 and scoffs at penalty is a cause, but it is first a 
 result. " The transgression of the wicked uttereth 
 its oracle within his heart " (Psa. xxxvi. 1,2, R. V., 
 margin), and the result of its determined persist- 
 ency is banishment from the probation it scorns. 
 Effrontery toward a holy God — and the wholeness 
 of the conditions of life — should fail ; bravado 
 should have its impotence to thwart right solemnly 
 affirmed. The lie of atheism and its anarchy 
 shozdd " gnaw its own tongue !" He who created 
 us moral beings — with reason to see and wills to 
 choose — must treat us both in retribution and 
 reward under the terms of our moral nature, 
 else a mutable authority and all woe to every one 
 involved, as every one would be, in the wreckage 
 of God. 
 
 For God to make known the tendency of law- 
 lessness is mercy. Law is not a trap. The label 
 of " poison " is an admonition to let it alone. If 
 
96 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 it did not kill those who abuse it, the label were 
 a lie. If it does kill, it is kindness to have it 
 known. And there is that kills. If life were not 
 an alternative, it were but mechanical. Law in- 
 volves conditions. Motion itself is conditioned 
 by resistances. Law declares purpose, that certain 
 forces shall act so and so, and their action and 
 reaction are equal. A world of motion must 
 either be a world of law or a world of confusion. 
 The sanctions signify that law is regular because 
 they provide for the compensation of emergencies. 
 Construction is adaptation to condition. The 
 rails declare the nature of the locomotive. Rules 
 regulate life that it may learn and keep the con- 
 ditions proper to it. He who created declares 
 whereunto and wherein. This declaration, how- 
 ever ascertained, is law. Law, then, is not tenta- 
 tive nor subjunctive, but indicative and imperative. 
 Sanctions are a necessary part of its reality. 
 Without these it could not be. They are — both 
 in reason and in fact. Back of what is, we can- 
 not go. In that which is, we think and are. 
 
 This is fundamental to every exercise of intelli- 
 gence and will. To theorize without fact is to 
 attempt a mental vacuum. It is both unscientific 
 and immoral ; for that it refuses to know in order 
 that it may refuse to do. We cannot go behind 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 97 
 
 that law of being which being exhibits. The 
 Creator is demonstrated in that kind of a creation 
 in which, by Him, we, the creatures, are set. 
 
 Strangely enough, and in utter inconsistency 
 with every postulate of their hedonism (the doc- 
 trine that pleasure is the final end), John Stuart 
 Mill and his father both objected that Christianity 
 is immoral because it sets forth a background of 
 penalty and reward. But there the background 
 is even upon the present scale — all criminal juris- 
 prudence recognizes it. Christ did not come to 
 change the natural law of transgression, but to 
 change the attitude and relation to it of a culprit, 
 but not irrecoverable, race. The gospel is not an 
 evasion of law, but honors it while it shows how 
 God may be just and yet forgive. It declares the 
 law of the spirit of a new life which begins in 
 the confession of judgment, which pleads guilty, 
 and which, under the wonderful conditions of a 
 mercy, accepted as such, turns back toward the 
 righteous Will sin had refused to its undoing. It 
 answers the desperate cry of the suffocating heart, 
 " how can man be just with God ?" A gospel 
 that surrendered law would be the good nczvs 
 that God had abdicated ! — what were such a gos- 
 pel worth ? Who would administer it ? It were 
 a Robespierre RepubHc! 
 
 7 
 
98 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 No. The function of a supreme and righteous 
 authority is to show its righteousness to be su- 
 preme, and " submission to the righteousness of 
 God" recognizes and adores that justice which is 
 not a means but an end, and to God's will it utters 
 its total Amen/ 
 
 We study the sanctions of the law most readily 
 by observing penalty. It is obvious and general. 
 There are a thousand diseases ; there is but one 
 kind of health. Blessedness is the reward. It 
 is the absence of penalty and its occasion. To 
 secure this, penalty rebukes that which thwarts 
 it. Life is the avoidance of all that is deadly. 
 Health is the answer to the absence of all that 
 makes sick. Pathology is in order to cure. The 
 absence of all negations fulfills the positive pur- 
 pose. Therefore we have and study these alien 
 symptoms. We " niiitd true things by what their 
 mockeries be!' 
 
 Truly, to fear penalty for its own sake is not 
 goodness. Avowedly its law is for offenders. 
 Its intent is to signify that law is to be kept, not 
 broken. It is, in whatever degree, admonitory — 
 " lest a worse thing befall," but it is admonitory 
 because it is stringently in earnest. The first 
 symptoms have all the incidental values of intimi- 
 dation — they say ''go back'' — the last results are 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW 99 
 
 fatal and vindicate the law — of use and help only 
 toward others who heed and pause. All is fore- 
 warned that all the bearings may be understood. 
 Therefore said Paul, " Knowing the terrors of 
 law, we persuade." Terror is not persuasion, 
 but it prompts to it. God is not mocked ; there- 
 fore mock him not ! " Because there is wrath — 
 beware P' 
 
 By every quicksand there is a sign, — at every 
 critical point a signal, — before every trespass a 
 fence. Those only are angry at this who mean 
 to take the chances. When God does not neglect, 
 be sure He does not exaggerate. 
 
 Penalty alone is not recuperative, but points 
 inward to the need of recuperation. It is intro- 
 ductory — preliminary. It points away from itself 
 to far deeper and higher considerations. It desig- 
 nates evil and urges that "the fear of the Lord is 
 to hate " tJiat. The way of the transgressor is 
 made hard that so he may quit transgression. He 
 is made to fear the bad that he may have its un- 
 reasonableness shown, and may have his ears 
 opened to discipline ; so he can come to see 
 further, and to distinguish mere legal fear from 
 godly sorrow for the wrong. The fitness of law 
 thus appeals to the inner and moral sanctions. 
 The case is carried up into the court of con- 
 
loo THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 science. The terrors of the Lord^ against whom 
 all sin is, lift him above the mere questions of 
 advantage. He seeks not escape, but remedy; 
 not mere remission of pain, but forgiveness oi sin. 
 He sees that penalty has been benign — in leading 
 through, and out of, legal fear. The inwardness 
 of evil appears. He fronts Duty, and can see 
 the bewildering beauty of the love that provides 
 a righteous amnesty. Nothing artificial can equal 
 that. Before its sunlight even the electric pencils 
 cast a shadow. There is " forgiveness with God 
 that he should be feared." They are but prac- 
 tical fatalists who trifle with mercy by evading 
 the obedience to which mercy means to reclaim. 
 That is not a salvation which does not save from 
 sin. The persuasions of God are in order that 
 we may see the sacredness of life as bound up in 
 Him. Goodness is " not of necessity but of free 
 will." Probation discloses sufficient light to cer- 
 tify sin's wages, but not enough to stun and sear. 
 Fear of results leads back to the vision of the 
 false relation which invokes them. It awakens 
 and summons, it arrests and indicts, but its ends 
 arc fulfilled only in a changed mind and a contrite 
 heart. Pardon is given only to those who ask it 
 as their sole resource, and who ask it that they 
 may become clean and true. Love to a holy 
 
THE SANCTIONS OF LAW loi 
 
 God is the only fulfillment of that law which the 
 gospel emphasizes and meets, not evades. Oh, 
 may we all meet this persuasion with surrender, 
 and, held fast in the arms of mercy, be able to 
 say with penitent and devoted, and so with as- 
 sured hearts: " Enter not into judgment with thy 
 servant ! " 
 
VIII 
 
 THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 
 
VIII 
 
 THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 
 *' It is expedient for you that I go away." — John xvi, 7. 
 
 The anticipation of the Ascension, and the pre- 
 lude of Christ's further and ever-crescent revelation 
 of God ! 
 
 His eleven intimate friends knew that a catas- 
 trophe was nearing them. What it was to be 
 they could not tell, but they felt its chilling breath, 
 and they perceived that it menaced that society 
 with Him which had become so vital and so 
 precious. 
 
 Sorrow filled their hearts, and as frightened 
 children clutch a mother's skirts, so with a painful 
 instinct they held that Friend and Teacher whose 
 presence and love had grown to be their whole 
 life. They were troubled too deeply to reason 
 well upon the purpose and way of His going; 
 they only longed not to lose Him, and clung to 
 Him with a suffocating premonition. 
 
 Not directly does He chide their distress, but 
 He corrects its degree, and would soothe the sore 
 
io6 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 hearts whose anxious grief is His grief also. 
 Never does He censure the tears that blind affec- 
 tionate eyes, but wipes them from all faces with 
 His own soft hand. 
 
 When can He better than now assure them that 
 He will not bereave them, — that His departure 
 will " not leave them orphans," — that, in the 
 person of another Helper, who shall more and 
 more show them of Himself, He will come to 
 them to " abide with them for ever," This soon, 
 and that by and by He their Lord will return to 
 receive them again, and to part from them no 
 more. 
 
 These things He had not told them earlier ; for 
 it was not needful while He still was with them, 
 but now He plants in their hearts a great hope, 
 preparing them to recognize and welcome the 
 Holy Ghost as His personal and continued pres- 
 ence. The Paraclete is Christ's perdurable life. 
 
 One more token here that the fondest and 
 firmest promises are made in the hours of intensest 
 need, — in wrecked Eden that earliest gospel of the 
 seed of the woman that should crush the serpent's 
 head, — before impending Calvary this pledge, 
 " Lo, I am with you alway." Every keen pang 
 of love that suffers and trusts is big with revela- 
 tion — its travail contains an overwhelming joy. 
 
THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 107 
 
 The consolations of God bestow new interpreta- 
 tions of His nature and of its nearness, and arouse 
 an expectancy which shall be fulfilled. And w^hen 
 all else is dark, to cite this constancy of God is 
 the best that human lips can minister to human 
 distress. 
 
 So their Friend (and He is ours) declares to 
 them that though their misery is natural, it is 
 unnecessary. They must have confidence in Him, 
 — " If it were not so, I would have told you " ! 
 And to that confidence in His absolute knowledge 
 and fidelity — His personal trustworthiness (and 
 this is the very quintessence and marrow of 
 " faith " — not opinion, or mental conclusion, but 
 the intuition of a person) — to this confidence He 
 appeals, with a reason so deep that they shall 
 always ponder it and wonder, as we, too, wonder 
 at its wealth : "It is expedient for you that I go 
 away." " Nevertheless " — always the more ! In- 
 comprehensible : yet strange as it seems He 
 pledges His truthfulness that His apparent going 
 is to be His coming nearer to them than ever ! 
 His plan, and right, and glory is also to be their 
 great gain. 
 
 They are to accept this now because He says 
 so, — later they are to realize it. They are to 
 enter upon a new era and a riper experience of 
 
lo8 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 God. Their fellowship so far is introductory to a 
 richer bestowal of His nature and a more abun- 
 dant manifestation of His life. As, far into that 
 last night, their Friend talked on with them. He 
 told them more than all else He had told them ; 
 but He is, by that imparted Guest for whose 
 welcome he makes ready, to tell them more yet — 
 to enlighten their remembrance and ever to inten- 
 sify their hopes. Their Teacher is to draw them 
 to loftier vision and to closer intimacy. All they 
 had received and learned so far is but prelude. 
 Power lay in the promise : " Greater things than 
 these shall he do ; because I go unto the Father." 
 " If I go not away, the Paraclete will not come." 
 Thus does Christ affirm Himself the connection 
 between the outmost and the inmost, the God 
 above and God within the soul, and lays His hand 
 upon both. 
 
 God shows His love, both in the course of time 
 and in the progress of each recovered heart, in 
 three consecutive and completing manifestations. 
 They are climactic : Creation, Incarnation, Inspira- 
 tion. The universe about and above, the animate 
 body with and before us, the deep soul within, — 
 these are His vessels of revelation, affirming His 
 power, His personality, and His unseen presence. 
 Reason, sense, and intuition answer Him, — Maker, 
 
THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 109 
 
 Kinsman, and Companion, — and in all, the Lord 
 and Lover. 
 
 That is most which is inmost, including and 
 crowning all else and leading reflection through 
 feeling into direct vital certainty. This is the 
 order of our apprehension of God, the objective 
 evidence leading on and into the subjective. And 
 the strongest is latest in order. Taking ourselves 
 with us at every step, and led by Him who is the 
 beginning and the end, we climb the stairway of 
 experience and fact up to the primary conviction 
 that " in Him we live " — began to live and live 
 now. First we infer, next we perceive, last we 
 know. 
 
 And it was unto the filling of this highest 
 knowledge — essence to essence, spirit to spirit — 
 that Christ went away. Sight was to be surpassed 
 by insight. The sentient soul was to transcend 
 the senses. 
 
 So Paul said '* even though we have known 
 Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so 
 no more " ; for He who once dwelt with His dis- 
 ciples now dwells in them. " The Lord is that 
 Spirit " — inhabiting the soul He saves. To real- 
 ize this dispenses with all sentimental longing for 
 His form. How the emotions of the world would 
 stir were it proclaimed that the Son of God were 
 
no THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 again in the flesh, working again as He wrought 
 at Capernaum and Bethany, talking to this gray 
 and haggard age as He talked in those first years 
 of the era He created ! How it would sift the 
 hearts of men ! But that such an excitement 
 would thrill the nations and create an international 
 crisis would be, first, because He is here now and 
 has been always, and second, because so many do 
 not know it or have forgotten ! 
 
 He showed Himself then, long ago, because His 
 power was to remain. He taught His apostles 
 more after His ascension than they had conceived 
 before. There is no fading out and anticlimax in 
 the written word. He presides in it all. The 
 Old Testament is to be reread in the light of the 
 New, and the great epistles " have the mind of 
 Christ " not merely in comment but in amplifica- 
 tion. They deepen, protract, and fulfill the narra- 
 tive of the Evangels. Peter and John and Paul 
 unfold the meanings — so universal and age-long — 
 of redemption with a ken and grasp which only 
 progress under its central Person could have 
 given them. He taught them to the last, and 
 questions and implications which the gospel raised 
 their after-record answers. Nay, after them and 
 ever since, in a sequence and enlargement that 
 knows no break or period, the company of 
 
THE INVISIBLE COMPANION iii 
 
 those who by the Spirit call Jesus Lord, is the 
 integral proof of His unintermittent and for ever 
 culminating power. The Viewless One is the 
 constantly executive Saviour of the world. This 
 secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him and 
 He will show them His covenant. 
 
 Now surely we can see some of the eminent 
 blessings which were estabHshed by the with- 
 drawal of Christ from sight and all external sense. 
 They are for us also. First, it deepened the appre- 
 hension of His real nature and effect. The open 
 vision gave confidence in God an immensely defi- 
 nite basis, but this was also the foundation upon 
 which fidelity was yet to enlarge. It was not a 
 conclusion, but the beginning of a wider knowl- 
 edge of the real God ever immanent in the life of 
 the world. The corner stone was set fast, but the 
 temple was to rise. The King was come that the 
 kingdom of His truth might prove His reign and 
 endless increase of government. 
 
 Principle was to surpass rule, and companion- 
 ships of soul supersede physical proximity ; for 
 intuition is more than inspection, and the local is 
 swallowed up of the universal. Much as these 
 disciples desired His continued tangible form and 
 His audible word, they were to learn Him better 
 by His apparent absence, following Him rather 
 
112 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 than their sight of Him, and finding omnipresence 
 more than ubiquity. 
 
 The experience which is not merely objective, 
 nor even rational alone, but moral, is the highest 
 discipline and the most direct and consummate 
 assurance. The strongest evidence is in the 
 spirit — this candle Christ lights — and so, how- 
 ever impossible seemed this announcement, they 
 were to comprehend more of their Lord and of His 
 resources and intention by that which then seemed 
 (only seemed) to throw them upon themselves. 
 
 Further, they were to profit in proving the 
 superiority of general over special manifestations. 
 The phenomenal is everywhere the limited and 
 the transitory, the invisible endures and creates 
 new incarnations. The " law of the Spirit of 
 life " transcends the particular effect and in- 
 stance. Biology lies back of morphology. The 
 spiritual force is the fact, and the given form is 
 but its incident. 
 
 We realize by our departures. The boy never 
 knows how much and whereunto his mother did 
 for him until he is gone from home. The won- 
 derful deed fills and dazzles the horizon, — after- 
 wards its meaning, its implication toward and 
 interpretation of the accustomed, translates it, 
 while it reillumines what for a little while it hid. 
 
THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 113 
 
 The call or whisper of God in the soul is the 
 generic and normal thing. Spirit itself beareth 
 witness with our spirit. The silent communion 
 is the closest and the surest. And this constant 
 utterance within to those who seek the Presence 
 in their hearts is the permanent truth which Christ 
 came to teach, and went away that He might 
 teach it the more. Herein at least the Quakers 
 have borne a pregnant testimony. The general is 
 more than the special, and they misunderstand 
 and neglect God who now would turn back to 
 demand a sign. The vacuity of " spiritism " is 
 that it reverts to the senses and foregoes spiritu- 
 ality. At the best it doubts the Holy Ghost, and 
 so is " by its means defeated of its ends." It sub- 
 stitutes curiosity for communion. 
 
 Moreover, Christ's departure devolved upon 
 His disciples larger responsibilities. They were 
 to learn initiative and resolution. Always so. 
 Ability grows thereby and certainty. A father 
 teaches his child the moves of chess, and then, 
 though seeing how many plays might be bettered, 
 he is silent and watches, so that the child may 
 learn the game even by losing games. Coaching 
 is provisional. It does its work by making ready 
 to retire. Our best books are those we have 
 mastered. A college is in order that its students 
 
114 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 may cease to be undergraduates. It is applied 
 that it may educe the after man. There is no 
 influence that we appreciate while we are absorb- 
 ing it, but only when it proves itself by flowing 
 from us. Its reflex is its fulfillment. 
 
 Christ's going was the promotion of those men 
 of His, thereafter to do what He had done. 
 Pupils are to become teachers — disciples to be 
 apostles. They are to reveal His life In their 
 mortal bodies. A world is put upon their hands, 
 while they and it still are on His heart. They 
 have a testimony to give, nourished all the while 
 in their souls by Him who commissions them. 
 
 How wonderfully and how fast they grew ! 
 The Peter of that night could shame all that 
 external knowledge had done for him, but not 
 after Pentecost. The Unseen was to rouse a 
 deeper faith than sight had ever conferred. And 
 to the last — a new beatitude, " Blessed are they 
 that have not seen and yet have believed." He 
 who was there, is here ! 
 
 How evidently Christ, who knew when to come, 
 knew when to go ! The work of incarnation was 
 done, inspiration was established once for all. 
 Their Lord's fidelity challenges theirs, as His 
 representatives. Reasserting the permanent prox- 
 imity of God, the task was finished. 
 
THE INVISIBLE COMPANION 115 
 
 All work is best done by making it ready to 
 transfer, by putting into it a spirit that shall sur- 
 vive one's physical presence and that shall inspire 
 others to maintain and advance it. He imparted 
 what could not but endure, Christ's legacy was 
 His changed but deepened companionship. Had 
 He lived on in Galilee, to be known only as He 
 might be seen, all the millions of men who know 
 Him now had been the losers. 
 
 His more ** expedient " way is His way toward 
 and for us. Perhaps you think that to see Him 
 with your mortal eyes would make you sure, and 
 that His visible lips would answer your com- 
 plex questions, His palpable hands lighten so 
 many burdens ; but the immortal eyes are surer, 
 the inner voice more intimate, the help more 
 immediate. He chose for those disciples the 
 wider, fuller, completer manifestation, giving not 
 as the world gives, and His Good-by was not a 
 parting after all. He is not gone ! 
 
 We whisper that child's hymn : — 
 
 " I wish that His hands had been laid on my head, 
 That His arms had been thrown around me, 
 And that I might have seen His kind looks,'' 
 
 but "Abide with me " is a nobler aspiration. 
 
 Meeting Him now in the daily inmost life, all 
 
ii6 THE WELL BY THE GATE 
 
 things but hasten the day wherein we shall have 
 that whose postponement is our best probation. 
 " A little while " and you shall see Him as He is, 
 then also to add your rapturous Amen to that 
 which, when it was given, was so inconceivably 
 great a promise, and to say and fully know — ** It 
 was expedient that He went away." 
 


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