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 BX 7233 .C33 C5 
 Campbell, R. J. 1867-1956 
 City Temple sermons 
 
CITY TEMPLE 
 SERMONS 
 
CITY TEMPLE 
 SERMONS 
 
 BY 
 
 R. J. CAMPBELL, M. A, 
 
 of London 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 
Copyright, 1903, by 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 (June) 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 63 Washington Street 
 Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. 
 [.ondon: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 30 St. Mary Street 
 
AN OUTLOOK 
 
 THERE are not a few persons who maintain 
 that the day of religious enthusiasm is past 
 and gone for ever ; that men are becoming in- 
 creasingly secular in interest and outlook; and that 
 faith has given way before the broad light of reason. 
 This opinion is freely expressed both in the study and 
 in the street ; but, if we interpret the signs of the times 
 correctly, the facts are against it, and in favour of 
 the hope of a revival of religious fervour, zeal, and 
 power. 
 
 Some of these indications can be briefly stated. 
 There is, to begin with, a somewhat different mood 
 observable in the younger ministry of the evangelical 
 churches. The intellectual sermon per se, itself a re- 
 action against an unintellectual type of gospel preach- 
 ing, is giving way to a more spiritual form of address 
 which, without ceasing to be thoughtful, appeals to 
 the spiritual instincts of the hearer and quickens the 
 moral sense. Another sign is to be found in the atti- 
 tude of the hearers themselves. With comparatively 
 few exceptions, congregations do not ask either for 
 scientific lectures, or literary theses, in the place of 
 sermons. They do not seek ornate and pompous dis- 
 courses on the one hand, or conventional platitudes on 
 the other; but they hunger for something strong, and 
 deep, and true, suggestive of heaven and holiness, and 
 
 3 
 
4 AN OUTLOOK 
 
 the living, loving Christ. The more direct and simple 
 the style, and the more rich and real the spiritual ex- 
 perience of the preacher, the more the people welcome 
 the message. They crave the note of certainty. 
 
 Nor is this all. The world cannot live on negations 
 and pessimisms for ever. We have had our period of 
 criticism, analysis, and sweeping demolitions. Science 
 has had her say, and revised her dicta more than once. 
 Biblical criticism has, in some instances, almost 
 reached the reductio ad absurdum stage. The fash- 
 ionable mental mood has been, and perhaps still is, 
 agnosticism. We even hear a shout of triumph from 
 the side of those unaccountable people who desire to 
 see religion discredited. But the shout is itself an in- 
 dication in favour of the recrudescence of faith. His- 
 tory can furnish many parallels for it. But always in 
 the history of Christendom, at the very moment when 
 revealed religion has been declared to be dead and 
 buried, God's prophets have arisen and bidden the dry 
 bones live. History will repeat itself once more. Hu- 
 man nature can never long rest in a pessimism. 
 Whensoever the spiritual faculty has, for any length- 
 ened period, been repressed or obscured, it has always 
 reasserted itself even to extravagance. Is it not the 
 case at this very moment? The hearing obtained by 
 Dowieism, Christian Science, and such-like, is an evi- 
 dence of this, and a tacit rebuke against our feeble 
 Vvays of setting forth the unsearchable riches of 
 Christ. 
 
 But, above all, we may hope much from the prayer 
 circles that are springing up in all directions through- 
 out the land, with the avowed object of waiting upon 
 God for a revival of His work. Such prayer cannot 
 
AN OUTLOOK 5 
 
 fail, for God cannot deny Himself, Christ is more 
 than ever the great necessity, and the one central hope 
 for poor humanity. 
 
 There is some speculation as to the form which such 
 revival may take when it comes. Some people say it 
 will be mainly ethical, and less emotional than most 
 previous religious movements have been. Others be- 
 lieve it will take the fonn of a quickened interest in 
 social justice, a great awakening on the part of the 
 Churches in favour of the poor, the unprivileged, and 
 the oppressed. No doubt there is truth in all these 
 suppositions, but, if we refer to history once more, we 
 learn the lesson that all Christian revivals have begun 
 in the reawakening of devotion to Christ, the Saviour 
 and Lord. We may call this emotion, if we please, but 
 it has taken precedence of all ethical enthusiasms and 
 social readjustments ; in fact, made them possible. 
 Such was the revival of Francis, of Luther, of Wesley, 
 of Moody. 
 
 It may be questioned whether ethical endeavour, 
 apart from faith, has ever succeeded at all. The char- 
 acter it has formed, and is forming in our midst to- 
 day, tends to be self-conscious and introspective; 
 whereas morality at its highest loses sight of itself as 
 its own object, and becomes devotion to a Divine ideal. 
 A quickened spiritual life in the Churches, a recov- 
 ered enthusiasm, a new sense of the presence of Christ 
 as Deliverer and Lord, would set free grand social 
 enthusiasms, and supply an ethical dynamic compared 
 with which all others are feeble indeed. 
 
 For this we need the power of the Holy Spirit of 
 God. We need not to pray for a second Pentecost. 
 The Spirit once given is here for ever. We need con- 
 
6 AN OUTLOOK 
 
 secrated men and women. Let us pray, and trust, 
 and expect. If we have not faith enough, let us ask 
 for it; if we are not sufficiently in earnest, let us 
 humble ourselves, and entreat the Lord to give us to 
 our Master. Surely He will hear. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. What Is God ? , . . . 
 
 II. What Is Man ? . . , . 
 
 III. Personal Communion with God, 
 
 IV. Can God Answer Prayer ? 
 
 V. Supposing Christ Were only a Man, 
 
 VI. God's Remedy for Sin, 
 
 VII. The Mystery of Pain, 
 
 VIII. Christianity and the Social Order, 
 
 IX. The Divine Ideal of Manhood, 
 
 X. Christ and Character-Building, 
 
 XI. Overcoming for God, 
 
 XII. Conscience in Common Life, 
 
 XIII. Personal Immortality, 
 
 XIV. The Doctrine of Divine Love, 
 XV. Praying in Christ Jesus, 
 
 XVI. The Essence of Christianity, 
 
 XVII. The Antiphony of Penitence, 
 
 XVIII. The Dayspring, . 
 
 XIX, God's New Year, 
 
 XX. The Minor Offence, . 
 
 XXI. Vision and Service, 
 
 XXII. The Prophet in Prayer, 
 
 XXIII. Passive Resistance, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 20 
 
 3S 
 45 
 54 
 64 
 76 
 
 93 
 107 
 120 
 131 
 143 
 15& 
 167 
 178 
 191 
 202 
 213 
 224 
 234 
 247 
 262 
 275 
 
WHAT IS GOD? 
 
 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake 
 in titne past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these 
 last days spoken unto us by His Son. — Hebrews i. 1-2. 
 
 He that comet h to God must believe that He is, and that 
 He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. 
 
 — Hebrews xi, 6. 
 
 PROFESSOR HAECKEL, almost the last sur- 
 viving exponent of scientific materialism, says 
 that God, Freedom, and Immortality are the 
 three great buttresses of superstition which it must be 
 the business of science to destroy. Of these three sub- 
 jects the first is overwhelmingly the greatest, and we 
 ,will address ourselves to the question " What is God? " 
 The passages chosen to guide our meditation not 
 only state the question, but also the conditions upon 
 which an answer can be expected, and has actually been 
 given ; for every man believes in God, even when he 
 denies, as I shall endeavour to show. There is no 
 quarrelling at the starting-point ; those who ask the 
 question, What is God? already believe that He is. 
 The difference between the creeds of those who speak 
 confidently about the nature of God, and those who 
 speak hesitatingly, is less in what they respectively say 
 than in what they do not say ; it depends upon what we 
 put into the meaning of that word of three letters, 
 
 9 
 
10 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 which is the greatest in the EngHsh tongue. " He that 
 Cometh unto God " does believe that He is, and some 
 believe that He is a rewarder of them that diligently 
 seek Him. Moreover, the highest spiritual experience 
 rises above this, in maintaining that God, who is never 
 within sight, but who from the beginning of time hath 
 spoken unto men, hath in the last days spoken unto us 
 by His Son ; and when we have heard and seen the Son, 
 the Christ in whom Christians believe, there is nothing 
 more that we know or need to know in answer to the 
 question. What is God ? 
 
 I can imagine someone saying at this point, " Are 
 you quite sure that we are all agreed about the being 
 of God ; is there no doubt about the question whether 
 God is • have we nothing to ask but the question what 
 He is ? " My answer is, Undoubtedly I am right, and 
 you yourself are my witness. There are at least three 
 orders of mind, which represent three different ways 
 of thinking about the fundamental questions of our 
 being and our destiny — the scientific mind, the philo- 
 sophic mind, the religious mind. In one of those three 
 classes every man finds a place. The man of science 
 may not be conspicuously in evidence, but the men 
 trained under scientific methods are. Those who have 
 been to school within the last twenty years know well 
 that it is impossible to escape the habit of mind which 
 is the result of inductive — that is, of scientific — reason- 
 ing. Then there are the men of philosophic tempera- 
 ment, who start by believing in mind. Whether aught 
 else is real or no, they believe in the ]\lind that thinks 
 the world. They believe in their own mind, they may 
 believe in a Whole Mind greater than their own, but 
 still mind. And the religious man would say, " I 
 
WHATISGOD? U 
 
 believe not only in my own mind, but I believe in a 
 Mind which is the source of mine; I believe not only in 
 my own soul, I believe in the Oversoul. Moreover, I 
 believe in an essential relationship between my soul and 
 that Soul ; the Father of my spirit is ever speaking unto 
 me." 
 
 It is often said that a three-cornered contest is 
 going on between the representatives of these three 
 temperaments, and that in two of them at least at the 
 present time the antagonism is more pronounced than 
 it has ever been before. This question has been ad- 
 dressed to me recently, " Is not the rift between science 
 and religion wider than it ever was ? " Thank God, 
 no ! I am well aware that some of the exponents of 
 science and some of the professors of religion con- 
 scientiously think that it is ; but to me, on the contrary, 
 the future is full of hope, because of this — that for the 
 first time in the history of human thought science, 
 philosophy, and religion have a common starting-point 
 — the human mind, viewing itself as part of an ordered 
 whole, or as one effect of a Universal Cause. All three, 
 through their exponents, affirm God, if they affirm at 
 all. Let us take the three positions seriatim. 
 
 The old materialism is gone ; it is as dead as the first 
 edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica. To-day men 
 do not think of atoms and molecules as being the ulti- 
 mate reality. If Miss Marie Corelli were going to 
 write "The Mighty Atom" over again, she would 
 write it differently, or, if you will excuse an Irishism, 
 she would not write it at all. The man of science has 
 ceased to speak of materialism as the explanation of 
 life and mind, although many are old enough to re- 
 member Professor Tyndall's famous dictum about that. 
 
12 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Modern science speaks of a Universal Substance which, 
 if it be matter, is also mind, but may be neither. To the 
 man of science God, law, and the universe are one and 
 the same; to him, again, the universe is self-contained, 
 self-explanatory, self-acting by its own laws. Again, 
 the man of science no longer speaks about a dead world 
 of matter over against a living world of men. These 
 are not two, but one ; there is no death, but only life. 
 The distinction between the organic and the inorganic 
 is going, or gone. Nothing is dead, all is alive, the 
 light from heaven and the dust on the ground. The 
 Universal Substance is one; ever in movement. Here 
 it is a sob, there a song ; here it is the mud on London 
 streets, there the men who walk on it ; here it is a 
 vapour, there a prayer; yonder a mountain, here a 
 Gladstone ; but all the while the same Substance in 
 myriad manifestation, never at rest, ceaselessly acting, 
 in infinite forms. Did I say rightly at the beginning 
 of this sermon when I affirmed that the man of science 
 has his God ? The L^niversal Substance is his God. 
 He would say. All is God, and God is all. His quarrel 
 with religion consists, not in what he says that the man 
 of religion does not say, but in what he does not say 
 that the man of religion does say. 
 
 Let me study the position of the philosophy of the 
 moment. Until quite recently the system of philosophy 
 which held the field was what has been called Con- 
 sistent Idealism. Do not be afraid of the word — it is 
 very simple, after all. It means no more than this — 
 that every man, thinking about everything, starts by 
 assuming his own mind and the validity of his own 
 judgment. To be consistent he must not assume any- 
 body else's mind — only his own. So that every one of 
 
W H A T I S G O D ? 13 
 
 us, looking out on the rest of the world, might say, " I 
 am ; perhaps nobody else is ; it may be that my mind 
 is the only mind in the wide universe of things ; it may 
 be that outside of my being there is no being; every- 
 thing that passes into my experience comes as a series 
 of mind-pictures, passing in idea before my mind." 
 That idealism has completely broken down. Common 
 sense steps in and declares, though you cannot prove it, 
 that there are other minds than yours — you are only 
 one, a spark perhaps, of the Universal Mind. You 
 can enter into relations, soul with soul, with others of 
 whose being you can have no reasonable doubt. So 
 Consistent Idealism has gone, just as Scientific Mater- 
 ialism has gone, and in the place of both we have now 
 the Universal Substance on the side of science, and on 
 the side of philosophy the Universal Mind. 
 
 What says the man of religion? His position will 
 not take long to state, because we all know it. Every- 
 thing which science has said so far I can say, you can 
 say. God is all, and in all ; nowhere is He not ; in every 
 comer of the pathless universe He dwells and reigns. 
 He is the power behind all things, in all things ; through 
 Him all things consist; He is the intimately near, 
 as well as the infinitely far. But where the man of 
 science stops short in declaring that the universe is 
 self-contained and self-explanatory, the man of religion 
 goes on to say. The universe of universes cannot con- 
 tain my God. And where the man of philosophy would 
 say, God is the Universal Mind, the man of religion 
 would say, God is the Universal Heart ; and in the 
 words of the noble psalm our pra5^er is ever rising thus, 
 " Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me, and 
 know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way 
 
14 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 in me, and lead me in the way that lasteth long." So 
 we go a long way together, and that is why I think that 
 for religion to-morrow will be a day of hope; I am 
 waiting to see religion and Christ rehabilitated on the 
 side both of science and philosophy; I am waiting to 
 see Christian experience vindicated, and the day of the 
 Lord is at hand. 
 
 But someone will cry out in expostulation, " Are you 
 sure of all this? I am not prepared to go as far as 
 you. If this is the experience of religious minds, it is 
 not mine — I would that it were ; but I can find no trace 
 on the field of history or in the field of present-day 
 experience of such a God as you name ; the shame, the 
 horror, and the woe of the world seem to contradict 
 your belief in a God whose name and nature are Love." 
 Wait a bit; you have forgotten something — the rela- 
 tivity of knowledge. All our thought about the things 
 which come within the region of observation is relative ; 
 the actual you do not know, at any rate by your in- 
 ductive methods. The relativity of knowledge means 
 that you can know nothing within the wide universe 
 except as your mind permits you to know it, and that 
 mind operates within certain arbitrary limits which 
 intellect, but not experience, can never pass. When I 
 look up into the dome of heaven I know that I am look- 
 ing into infinity ; this morning the sun has come 
 95,000,000 of miles to smile upon us a watery smile. 
 That immensity is a something we cannot grasp. But 
 sweep it out of existence, let the 95,000,000 of miles 
 be as if they had never been — how much is left? 
 Blot out the visible universe — what have you retained? 
 As much as there was before. Now, what becomes of 
 the validity of your scientific laws, — gravitation, con- 
 
W H A T I S G O D ? 15 
 
 servation of energy, and what not ? Are they untrue ? 
 No, I do not say that, but they are only relatively true. 
 You know that the actuality is infinity. The moment 
 you have touched that concept you have passed it ; but 
 experience cannot go where your mind has thrust itself. 
 I do not say that your scientific judgments are wrong; 
 I say they are relative, and you have to stop at your 
 limits. 
 
 Here is a better illustration, perhaps. Look at these 
 beautiful stained glass windows all the way round this 
 church ; as we sit worshipping we can enjoy them. 
 But suppose that in the audience is a man who is colour- 
 blind; to that man the stained window below the 
 gallery, and the frosted glass window above, are, save 
 perhaps in outline, just the same. Now, what is 
 wrong — the window or his perception of it? There is 
 something short in his brain, he cannot see things as 
 we see them ; but perhaps even we cannot see them as 
 they really are ; there is a reality outside which makes 
 us see colour and form, but perhaps there is more to see 
 than any of us knows. I do not deny the reality ; what 
 I assert is the limit of our perception. The organist 
 leads our devotions very beautifully on the great organ, 
 we feel the hand of a master on the instrument. As a 
 matter of fact, the hand of the master is on us ; he sets 
 the air vibrating, and when the vibrations reach our 
 brain, we cannot explain the mystery, but we hear the 
 harmony. If there were present a man who is not 
 deaf, but who has no ear for music, what would he 
 think about it all? His experience would be widely 
 different from ours; are we to argue, therefore, that 
 there was no organ? No. No harmony, then? No; 
 but that the man was a faculty short, and the reality 
 
16 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 could not make itself known to him. It is related of 
 Mr. Spurgeon, who, as is well known, had no ear for 
 music, that on one occasion he was sitting with a friend 
 listening to an orchestra playing a beautiful symphony, 
 and his friend said to him, *' Surely, Mr. Spurgeon, 
 you enjoy it?" "No," said the great preacher, "I 
 don't." " But," he said, " it is exquisite." " Well," 
 was the reply, " if every player in that orchestra had 
 his instrument tuned to a different key and went on 
 playing the s)'mphony, how would you feel ? " His 
 friend said, " Indescribable." " Well," said Mr. Spur- 
 geon, " that is how I feel now." What shall we argue 
 from that? That the limit on one side of Mr. Spur- 
 geon's perception came sooner than in the case of his 
 friend ; it does not argue that there was no symphony 
 to hear, it argues that his knowledge of what he did 
 hear was only relative to the whole. That is so with 
 all knowledge. We know the realities of infinity and 
 eternity; in our practical acquaintance we stop short 
 with the symbols of time. 
 
 Then, you may say. What are you doing now ? Are 
 you going to destroy everything we know? Is there 
 anything of which we can be sure? any point where 
 we touch the reality? Yes, personality is the ultimate 
 reality. The only thing in the wide universe of which 
 you can be sure is soul. Things may not be what they 
 seem, but when you have spoken with your friend face 
 to face you have spoken with a reality which is not 
 other and cannot be other than it seems to you. Com- 
 munion of soul is the only real communion. " Stop ! " 
 you say, "that is an assumption." Is it? You have 
 made it already ; your man of science has made it. The 
 validity of his judgments depends upon his assumption 
 
WHATISGOD? 11 
 
 of himself ; unless he has made that assumption, he can 
 get nowhither. Is it an assumption? Why, all your 
 doings in life are based upon it; you would not have 
 been here but for that relationship between reality and 
 reality, soul and soul, which you know to be human 
 society. Can we get farther? Is there a Soul of 
 souls — " the Oversoul," as Emerson would have called 
 it? Yes, says the highest experience the v/orld has 
 ever known. An assumption? Of course; an as- 
 sumption borne out by experience like yours. You 
 have no right to assume me any more than I have a 
 right to assume God, and if you are certain of the com- 
 munion between my soul and yours, I am no less certain 
 of the communion between my soul and His. God is 
 all and in all. Soul of our soul. Father of our spirits. 
 The highest experience the world has ever known says 
 that, and that experience is constant. If in any century 
 we could prove it gone, my theme would have been very 
 differently phrased. But when humanity has been at 
 its noblest, humanity has been holding on to the sense 
 of intercourse with things unseen and eternal, with 
 Soul, which is God. 
 
 Here some may ask me for evidence. What is my 
 evidence? Yourself. You challenge me about Him 
 whose ways are in the sea, you remind me of the dread- 
 fulness of life, the tragedies of every day and hour; 
 you come pouring in from the Stock Exchange, and 
 Fleet Street, and the Strand, and you tell me you have 
 seen sights which have stirred your heart, made it beat 
 fast with pity, and caused you to say, " Poor Hu- 
 manity ! Where is the hope, after all ? Is God blind 
 and deaf and dumb ? " You think about those thirty 
 thousand people swept into eternity amidst dreadiul 
 
18 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 torture in the West Indies the other day, and you say, 
 " Is this the work of a father? " I cannot stop to in- 
 vestigate that problem now, we will come to it in time ; 
 here is the answer for the moment. You are as much 
 a product of the Universal Substance as is Mont Pelee; 
 perhaps you are more explanatory of what the Uni- 
 versal Substance is. Do you pity? Then, if the Uni- 
 versal cannot, Nature in one of her moods has produced 
 something nobler than herself, and that is you. Is the 
 Universal Substance conscious, is it moral? does it 
 know and feel and care? can I enter into relationship 
 with it? As soon as experience has said Yes, then I have 
 discovered God to be a rewarder of them that diligently 
 seek Him, and highest of all. I do not wait upon your 
 experience only ; I look back upon the field of history, 
 and I ask, Whence came that idea of God we are now 
 holding before each other's mind? My gaze rests on 
 one day and on one Being; that day 1900 years ago, 
 when Jesus of Nazareth preached on the hillsides of 
 Galilee, and had compassion upon the people that were 
 scattered as sheep with no shepherd ; and there I see 
 whence came that idea of God which is the only one 
 with which human nature will ever be satisfied again. 
 I listen to the voice in the upper room, I hear the 
 questioning of Philip, " Lord, show us the Father, and 
 we shall be satisfied," and I hear the voice Divine, as 
 He answers, " Have I been so long time with you, and 
 yet hast thou not known Me? He that hath seen Me 
 hath seen the Father." When we have seen Jesus we 
 may have many things to learn concerning the fathom- 
 less purposes of God, but of His nature we need to 
 learn nothing at all — we know it. At the heart of the 
 universe reigns One with the heart of a little child. 
 
 i 
 
WHATISGOD? 19 
 
 Do not stop to perplex yourself with questions about 
 the Trinity. If God be like Jesus, if Jesus can pledge 
 God, humanity has nothing more to fear. If Jesus 
 had died cursing and raving against the faith He had 
 preached; if He had died protesting that the Father 
 had failed Him ; if He had died calling down impre- 
 cations upon His murderers, I should have had no 
 Gospel to preach. But it was not so ; He died saying, 
 "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. 
 Into Thy hands I commend My spirit." 
 
 Jesus is the Soul of the universe. He is the Self of 
 our selves, and the Life of our lives. There may be a 
 universe of universes beyond with which we have noth- 
 ing to do, but in the universe with which we have to do 
 the ultimate is Jesus. Jesus came suffering. If He 
 had come in great glory, I would have had no Gospel 
 to preach to-day. He was born in a stable, cradled in a 
 manger, lived a suffering life, and died a shameful death. 
 
 " O God, O kinsman loved, but not enough ! 
 O Man, with eyes majestic after death, 
 Whose feet have toiled along our pathways rough, 
 Whose lips drawn human breath ! " 
 
 The Cross of Calvary is the key to creation. We see 
 God plainest in the pathos of life ; everything noble 
 rises there. Here we come near to the heart of things ; 
 here can experience rest and be satisfied ; and we may 
 say with the Quaker poet of America : 
 
 " A marvel seems the universe, 
 
 A miracle our life and death, 
 A mystery which I cannot pierce, 
 
 Around, above, beneath. 
 Now my spirit sighs for home. 
 
 And longs for light whereby to see. 
 And like a weary child has come, 
 
 O, Father, unto Thee." 
 
II 
 
 WHAT IS MAN? 
 
 What is man, that thou art inindfiil of him ? 
 And the son of man, that thou visit est him r 
 For thou hast jftade him but little lower than God, 
 And crownest /lif/i ivith glory and honour. 
 
 — Psalm via. 4-j. R. V. 
 All have sinned afid come short of the glory of God. 
 
 — Rom. Hi. 2 J. 
 
 WE have seen that the first of all questions is 
 What is God ? When once a man has settled 
 this question for himself he is in possession 
 of a philosophy of life and an imperative of conduct. 
 The question, you observe, i$ not whether God is ; that 
 is beyond discussion. I have tried to show that every 
 man believes in God even when he says he does not; 
 but all men do not believe in the same view of the 
 aiature of God. Hence it is that upon a man's doctrine 
 of God depends his view of himself and of the destiny 
 of humanity as a whole. If he thinks meanly of the 
 one, he thinks meanly of the other ; if he thinks nobly 
 of the one, he thinks nobly of the other ; and when once 
 he has come to affirm the Christian view of the nature 
 of God — that He is Father, Saviour, Redeemer, Friend 
 — then, and not till then, are we in a position to con- 
 sider hopefully the question, What is man ? 
 
 To that question many answers of a conflicting 
 nature have been g'iven, and are being- given in the 
 world of thought and action. Suppose I put the ques- 
 
 20 
 
WHATISMAN? 21 
 
 tion to some medical student, " Can you, sir, tell me 
 what is man ? " and it is possible he may answer thus, 
 ** Man is a highly developed vertebrate, a more or less 
 clever and successful ape, who has worsted his com- 
 petitors in the struggle for existence, and stands as 
 conqueror at the head of things." I may put the ques- 
 tion to yonder pessimistic philosopher, whose pity for 
 humanity lacks nothing of our own, but whose confi- 
 dence in the destiny of humanity is the accompaniment 
 of his answer to this question, What is man ? "I ask 
 you, sir, what have you to say in answer to the 
 Psalmist ? " Listen to him. " Man is a vapour, a 
 breath that passeth away; man is as a bubble upon 
 the wave of causation, here to-day, gone to-morrow, 
 gone for ever. Man is but one of nature's many ex- 
 periments, and is to make way by-and-bye for another 
 and perhaps a greater. Man has no destiny beyond 
 that which he pictures to himself in his own fancy. In 
 the words of that immortal pessimist, Omar Khayyam : 
 
 "The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upcn 
 Turns ashes — or it prospers ; and anon. 
 
 Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty face, 
 Lighting a little hour or two — is gone." 
 
 I will put the question to this busy City man, "What 
 have you to say in answer to the Psalmist's question ; 
 what would you say of yourself? " The answer might 
 be, " I do not know ; it takes me all my time to live ; my 
 horizon is narrow and contracted, and when I think I 
 get no nearer to the solution of the great mystery." 
 
 " Art is long, and Time is fleeting, 
 
 And our hearts, though stout and brave. 
 Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
 Funeral marches to the grave." 
 
22 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Now, over against those answers set the words of 
 the Psalmist, and with these ringing in our ears let us 
 address ourselves anew to the statement of our position 
 in the great order of the universe. 
 
 " IV/ien I co7isider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers. 
 The moon atid the stars, which thou hast ordained ; 
 What is man, that thou art nmidful of him ? 
 And the son of man, that thou visitest him ? 
 For thou hast jnade him but little lower than God, 
 And crownest him with glory attd honour." 
 
 There, on that statement of experience, I pin my 
 faith. When we have answered the question What is 
 God? there is no room for pessimism in the statement 
 of the question What is man ? I therefore ask you to 
 consider this answer of the Psalmist under the three 
 following divisions : ( i ) Man is that part of the great 
 scheme of things which is the best explanation of the 
 whole. (2) He has some power of self-direction and 
 self-control, and therefore of moral responsibility. He 
 is a universe within a universe. (3) The destiny of 
 humanity is bound up with that of Jesus Christ. 
 
 I. Man is that expression, that part of the great 
 scheme of things which is the best explanation of the 
 whole. As we have said before, I see no objection to 
 the declaration that from one point of view God and 
 Law and the Universe are one. Even to the Christian, 
 God, self-limited, is the Universe. When we are trying 
 to get to the secret of the Universe we are really striv- 
 ing after the explanation of the nature of God. Those 
 two questions are one and the same. So, my friend, 
 the medical student, when you go back to your labora- 
 tory, no matter what you may call the work in which 
 you are engaged, it is nothing more nor less than this ; 
 
WHATISMAN? 23 
 
 In trying to find out the secret of phenomena, you are 
 trying to discover the nature of God. Now, where 
 can we look for that? I answer, in the microcosm of 
 the great macrocosm of existence. You must read man 
 to find out what God is. I am not afraid of anthro- 
 pomorphism, provided you keep your hand firmly upon 
 it. A French writer once sarcastically said, " In the 
 beginning God created man in His own image, and 
 ever since then man has been returning the compliment 
 by making God in his." What else are we to do ? You 
 must read God by the highest of that whole which 
 God has produced — humanity; and by that I do not 
 mean to say you must read God by what you are, 
 but by what you have been made capable of seeing — 
 and that is another thing. So, in spite of the evil, woe, 
 sin, and imperfection of humanity, the great witness 
 in the world for the nature of God is that which hu- 
 manity has been made capable of seeing and being. 
 
 Once in the field of history our eyes have seen and 
 our hands have handled the word of life. Humanity 
 has not been kept in the dark as to what it is intended 
 to be. We have looked once, and seen, and to-day all 
 men, in this country, at any rate, whether they are 
 Christian or Pagan, declare that in Jesus Christ we 
 have seen that attainment of human nature which is 
 worthy to be God, whether it is or not. 
 
 *' Truth is within ourselves ; 
 It takes no rise from outward things, 
 Whate'er we may believe." 
 
 Here I will hazard a proposition — that no man ever 
 yet reasoned out his position in regard to truth, and 
 especially theological truth. You never yet attained 
 
24 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 to truth by a process of ratiocination ; you have simply 
 seen it, and that is all ; and every wise man, no matter 
 hov/ wise he may be, does just that. He sees a thing, 
 and then he sets to work to find out how he saw it. 
 Once, on the field of history, we have seen humanity 
 at its best; and for nineteen hundred years we have 
 been trying to find out how to attain to an ideal for 
 ourselves which has already been manifested in his- 
 tory. We know now what man is, and it has been well 
 said, " An honest man is the noblest work of God." 
 Shall I say a holy man ? In other words, the nearest 
 approach you can find to the ideal of Jesus Christ — ■ 
 that is, the highest declaration of the nature of the 
 Divine that we have ever had; and it is that which 
 entitles us to call God Father. Burns said, in words 
 which are as much English as Scotch now : 
 
 "A king can mak' a belted knight. 
 A marquis, duke, an' a' that ; 
 But an honest man's abune his might — 
 Gude faith, he maunna fa' that ! 
 
 " For a' that, an' a* that, 
 Our toils obscure, an' a' that, 
 The rank is but the guinea stamp » 
 The man's the gowd for a' that." 
 
 When you have attained to personality, when you 
 have discovered a man soul to soul, heart to heart, 
 mind to mind, you have discovered the ultimate reality 
 of the Universe. For God, who is the Father of our 
 spirits, is not less than personal ; He is our Father, our 
 Friend, and no man can come unto the Father but by 
 looking unto the Christ, who has revealed what the 
 Father is. 
 
,W H A T I S M A N ? 25 
 
 There arises in our mind a claim upon the Father- 
 hood of God consequent upon the discovery that we 
 can enter into relations with Him. I ask young men 
 especially, Have you ever felt upon you the almost ir- 
 resistible impulse to utter yourself to the Unseen — to 
 know, to pray, to serve that nobler than yourself, that 
 once you have seen in Christ and now associate with 
 God? Well, when you have done that you have made 
 a claim upon the Unseen which is an affirmation of 
 your eternal citizenship. 
 
 " Life is real, life is earnest, 
 
 And the grave is not its goal, 
 
 Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 
 
 Was not spoken of the soul." 
 
 If you can pray to God, if God has ever spoken to 
 you, you have claimed something greater than time : the 
 eternity of God presumes the immortality of man. 
 
 " How poor, how rich, how abject, how august. 
 How complicate, how wonderful is man ! " 
 
 The Psalmist was right when he said, " A little lower 
 than God, crowned with glory and honour," fitted for 
 a greater sphere of activity than earth can ever pre- 
 sent. Man was made to reign with God eternally in 
 the heavens. 
 
 " When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers. 
 The moon attcl the stars, which thou hast ordained ; 
 What is man, that thou art mindful of him. 
 And the son of tnati, that thou visitest him ? '• 
 
 Man is Thy child, my Father! and w^e shall seek 
 Thee in the city which hath foundations whose builder 
 and maker is God. 
 
26 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 II. We have some power of self-direction and self- 
 control. The latest cult of the hour, which, after all, is 
 a very old one, is that none of us can help being what 
 we are; that if we have made mistakes in life, we are 
 to be pitied rather than blamed ; that in point of fact 
 heredity and environment will account for everything; 
 that far back in the mysterious past, all that has come 
 to you, and all that you are, was already foreordained. 
 I will admit that there is very little room that I can 
 find for escape from determinism, if we stick to logic; 
 so, therefore, I should say that if this man is bad and 
 that man is good, logically we cannot praise the good 
 and we cannot blame the bad. But there are some 
 things higher than logic. The love of children, friends, 
 home, the most illogical thing imaginable — what would 
 life be without it? When we say efifect must invariably 
 follow cause, and for every effect there is an antecedent 
 cause, there is a question v\hich philosophy cannot an- 
 swer — why should any effect follow any cause? I 
 take up this hymn-book, and I choose to drop it. You 
 say it will fall and hit the floor for certain. A man of 
 science might be more careful, and say, " Probably it 
 will fall, for books dropped so have fallen so often that 
 by an observable number of sequences we have deduced 
 a law, and we call it gravitation." The effect of the 
 letting go probably will be that the book will fall. Why 
 should that effect follow that cause? We are back on 
 the old mystery. We are on the borderland again of 
 the question of the relative nature of the data on which 
 all the conclusions about our life and history are 
 based. 
 
 So we go back from the consideration of these curi- 
 ous and unprofitable questions to the simple experience 
 
WHAT IS MAN ? 27 
 
 of simple men. You know perfectly well, and no onel 
 will ever reason you out of it, that if you did a mean ■ 
 thing yesterday, and conscience tells you about it to- 
 day, you are being reminded that you need not have 
 done it, and that you are a guilty man. We will go 
 farther than that, and say that if our responsibility 
 for sin — there ! the word has got in ; it is not only the 
 theologian's word, it is a word of the newspaper and 
 the fireside, and of the business house, and every place 
 where men meet and serve. Our responsibility for sin, 
 I was going to say, may be less than we think, but you 
 can never explain it away altogether. Recently we 
 were all agitated in common with the rest of England 
 when we heard of a certain case in which a mother in 
 high station had ill-treated her little child. London 
 rang with protests ; we said, " There is evidently one 
 law for the rich and another for the poor; this woman 
 should have been punished more than she was, and the 
 judge was unfair." We may have been right, or 
 we may have been wrong, about the case of little Con- 
 nie Penruddock, but there is no mistake about the fact 
 that the community, one and all, without reasoning on 
 the question, at once jumped to the conclusion that 
 both mother and judge were to blame; and in so 
 doing we have presumed responsibility to some- 
 one or to some great thing for what we are 'and what 
 we do. 
 
 " Here ! " says a man, " don't go too far ; you little 
 know how I have been fighting this week, and how 
 I have been beaten in spite of myself. You could not 
 despise me more than I despise myself, but my moral 
 weakness is such that I never can hope to gain a 
 victory over the man that now is. Made in the image 
 
28 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of God, indeed; more likely I have been made in the 
 image of the devil ! " 
 
 You are not the first who has said this. We will go 
 back to the New Testament, and to that wise man who 
 said, " Who shall deliver me from the body of this 
 death ? The thing I would, I do not ; the thing I would 
 not, that do I." Now emerges that huge problem, 
 not merely of responsibility, but of escape from things 
 we are prone to do — the problem of sin. It is not only 
 a problem for preachers ; it is a problem for every man. 
 The question of responsibility comes up — to whom 
 shall we flee except to Him who is the Father of our 
 spirits, and to that unnameable right which every one of 
 us feels pleads within his heart when he gives way to 
 wrong. Here rises the question, to which there is 
 only one answer, and that answer is the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ. Speaking plain words to plain men, let 
 me say this : Your sense of sin already exists, whether 
 you have a sense of God or not. Here is a curious 
 thing — a man lay awake last night because of one 
 guilty fact in his existence he would be glad to get rid 
 of. It is not God he has been thinking of, nor God he 
 fears ; it is that law of righteousness which will not be 
 gainsaid, and which is ever speaking in his poor per- 
 turbed human heart. Yes, the law of sin is a powerful 
 fact in humanity. " All have sinned and come short of 
 the glory of God." Do not talk about a fall in the far 
 past ; men can wrangle forever about that, and get no 
 nearer to the facts. Speak about this, which you know 
 to be the truth, that, whether any m.an besides your- 
 self has ever fallen or not, you have fallen. 
 
 III. Now we come to our third point, which as briefly 
 as may be is this : The destiny of men is, whether they 
 
W H A T I S M A N ? 29 
 
 know it or not, bound up with that of Jesus Christ. 
 Only once have we seen anyone who could be termed 
 sinless ; and the challenge which was given to the world 
 nineteen hundred years ago, when Christ was help- 
 less in the hands of His accusers, to the accusers them- 
 selves, " Which of you convinceth Me of sin ? " is the 
 world's hope at this moment. I state a proposition 
 which cannot be proved — nothing worth proving can 
 be proven ; and it matters very little — it is this : Sin- 
 lessness and Deity involve each other; suffering and 
 humanity involve each other. When we have stated the 
 perfect Man, we have declared a suffering Saviour; 
 when we have spoken about a suffering Saviour, we 
 have declared incarnate God, and, as has been beauti- 
 fully said, " God became man that man might become 
 God." " He was made sin for us who knew no sin 
 that we might become the righteousness of God in 
 Him." If there never had been a Jesus Christ humanity 
 would have been crying out for Him to-day, or for 
 one such as He, to do the work He claims to do. We 
 cannot rise of ourselves from that slough in which we 
 are, however we got there. Sin is intractable, the one 
 problem for which no parliament is sufficient, and 
 with which no human wisdom can cope. Hear it, as 
 the Master preached it, as of old, the only One who 
 ever declared Himself able to loose the bands and let 
 us go free. If Jesus Christ can be proved to have been 
 no Saviour, and to have had no more right to speak in 
 the name of God than the sinful man who addresses 
 you, then it is worse for humanity than if He had 
 never come at all; for until the Dayspring from on 
 high men were looking hopefully forward for someone 
 to come, something from out the mystery to save; 
 
so CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 and when Jesus came they thought they had found 
 Him, and for nineteen hundred years we have been 
 preaching the sinless One, by the Story of the Cross, 
 as the One who is mighty to save. If that Gospel were 
 a lie, better there had never been a Jesus ; it is worse 
 than if there had been no Gospel to proclaim. When 
 we claim that the Christ is able to save, we look beyond 
 the immediate moment, back into human history, and 
 we hear men say, " He has shown Himself able to 
 keep." Is the Christ, who is humanity, the head and 
 the representative of the best in humanity, the Christ 
 who is our hope, reigning at the heart of things or 
 not ? If He is, and this is His world, well it is for you 
 and me ! " What is man, that thou art mindful of him? 
 and the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou hast 
 made him but little lower than God." Taking hold 
 of Christ, he has taken hold of God, and, though all 
 have sinned and come short of His glory, we reign 
 through the merit of the sinless One to all eternity. 
 
 Henry Drummond on one occasion was crossing the 
 Atlantic, and on the deck of the vessel on which he 
 was sailing a number of passengers had gathered to 
 sing hymns, as they often do, and the hymn chosen on 
 that evening happened to be " Jesus, Lover of My 
 Soul." As one man sang, another listened to him with 
 considerable interest, and at the close said : 
 
 " I feel I have heard your voice before ; can you tell 
 me where it was? " " No," said the singer, " but the 
 singing of this hymn recalls to me an interesting event 
 in my life. I was a soldier in the Confederate Army 
 in the great Civil War. I was on outpost duty one 
 night in a lonely place. It was reported that the enemy 
 were in a wood near by. I knew my life was in great 
 
WHATISMAN? 81 
 
 danger. To keep up my spirits, I sang- this hymn, and 
 when I came to the hne ' Cover my defenceless head 
 with the shadow of Thy wing,' it seemed as if all my 
 fears passed away, and I stood for the rest of the night 
 as firm and fearless as though it were daylight. I felt 
 as if my prayer had been answered somehow." 
 " Now," said the other, " you listen to my story. I 
 was an officer in the Northern Army, and that night 
 I was scouting in the wood you mention. That was 
 where I heard your voice, and as you sang ' Jesus, 
 Lover of my Soul,' we were drawing near, not know- 
 ing what you sang. When I and my men came within 
 ear-shot you had just reached the words, which you 
 sang out louder than the rest : 
 
 " ' Cover my defenceless head 
 
 With the shadow of Thy wing,'" 
 
 and at that moment we had you covered with the muz- 
 zles of a dozen rifles. My men were just waiting for 
 the word to send you into eternity, but when you 
 sang that line, I turned to them and said, ' Rifles down ; 
 let us go back to camp.' " 
 
 Here they met, on the deck of a ship in mid-ocean, 
 to tell about the Christ that had governed the act of 
 the one and saved the life of the other. It is a simple 
 story, but it brings me to the point where I would 
 bring every man if I could. You do not feel yourself 
 able for your own life and destiny to say with the 
 soldier : 
 
 " Thou, O Christ, art all I want, 
 More than all in Thee I find, 
 Raise the fallen, cheer the faint, 
 Heal the sick, and lead the blind." 
 
32 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 You can venture your all upon that Man who leads 
 on before. Still I see Him leading there! At the 
 Cross of Calvary there is life and hope for humanity. 
 What is man? August and abject ! What is man? A 
 child of God, a child of shame. What is man? A 
 brother of Christ, the redeemed of the Cross. We need 
 no more. 
 
 " Just and holy is Thy name, 
 I am all unrighteousness. 
 False and full of sin I am, 
 Thou art full of truth and grace." 
 
Ill 
 
 PERSONAL COMMUNION WITH GOD 
 
 And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man 
 speaketh unto his friend. — Exodus xxxiii. ii. 
 
 IN this narrative of old time, and particularly in the 
 sentence which forms our text, there is something 
 which is puzzling to the practical Englishman and 
 to the twentieth-century mind. We are nowadays so 
 literal and exact in our statement of truth, and so little 
 tolerant of the too liberal use of metaphor and symbol, 
 that we are apt to hesitate before expressions of spirit- 
 ual experience which are conveyed in a mental and 
 spiritual dialect different from our own. More- 
 over, we are impatient of views of the Divine nature 
 which would tend to localise, humanise, or limit God, 
 So far is this the case that even the crude and exag- 
 gerated statement of the Godhead of Jesus becomes a 
 serious obstacle to many otherwise religious minds. 
 Hence it is that in reading a narrative like this of the 
 converse which Moses held with God in the taber- 
 nacle in the wilderness we are hindered rather than 
 helped by the anthropomorphism — that is, the man- 
 likeness — of the aspect under which the Deity is pre- 
 sented to our minds. We ask ourselves. Did Moses 
 speak with God face to face ? Did the Lord look with 
 human eyes and speak with human voice to His 
 
 33 
 
34 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 servant? Could He do so? Have we here a sudden 
 and unimpressive anticipation of the manger at Bethle- 
 hem and the upper room at Jerusalem? Obviously, it 
 was not so; the Lord dwelleth not in temples made 
 with hands, and the creation cannot contain Him; yet 
 hath the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
 truth, declared Him. A sentence or two below our 
 text we read : " No man shall look upon my face and 
 live." " God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him 
 must worship Him in spirit and in truth." Let us dis- 
 miss the difficulty and penetrate at once to the spiritual 
 meaning which underlies these symbolical, mystical 
 words. Moses did speak with God face to face, 
 as all prophets and princes of the Spirit have been 
 (privileged to do; as you and I may, and can, and do. 
 He communed with Him, " solus cum solo," alone 
 with the Great Alone, the Only One, with the only 
 one. He talked with Him " face to face, as a man 
 speaketh unto his friend." So spake he, this leader of 
 the host of Israel, with the Friend that sticketh closer 
 than a brother. It was no stranger-God with whom 
 he held converse, but one whom our hearts know and 
 our souls desire, the Fairest among ten thousand, and 
 the Altogether Lovely, who, in after days, declared to 
 His own : " Ye are my friends, if ye do the things 
 which I command you. Henceforth I call you not 
 servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord 
 doeth, but I have called you friends ; for all things 
 that I have heard of my Father I have made known 
 unto you." Whether he knew it or not, it was with the 
 Christ — our Christ, the point at which humanity meets 
 Deity, that Moses communed in the tabernacle in the 
 wilderness; just as, in after days, with clearer vision, 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD 36 
 
 he communed with Him on the Mount of Transfigura- 
 tion, nigh to Jerusalem. 
 
 I ask you, therefore, to consider with me, in the 
 light of the New Testament experience, this message 
 of ancient Israel, and we will think about two things : 
 (i) The present-day need of personal communion with 
 God; (2) the method thereof and the blessing there- 
 from. 
 
 I. It is a remarkable thing that when we are seek- 
 ing for the language of adoration and spiritual feeling 
 we have to go to the Old Testament ; we seek in the 
 phrases of psalmist and prophet the words which ex- 
 press for us — what no words can ever adequately 
 express — the feelings of the soul when aspiring to- 
 wards God. " One thing have I desired of the Lord ; 
 that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of 
 the Lord [the home of the Lord], all the days of my 
 life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire 
 in His temple ; " " my meditation of Him shall be sweet, 
 and I will be glad in the Lord." Such words as these 
 have been taken, not wrested, from their context, 
 transferred and concentrated upon the feeling the 
 Christian has for Jesus ; and to-day, if we want to say 
 what we experience concerning Him who is the Shep- 
 herd and Bishop of our souls, we turn to the language 
 of ancient Israel, to psalmist and prophet. The very 
 words of our text have a sweeter, tenderer meaning 
 when we think of them, as applied to Christ. 
 
 The Christian centuries have been marked by experi- 
 ence of the closer relationship existing between the 
 soul and its Maker, as expressed in the language of the 
 Old Testament, but with the high spiritual conscious- 
 ness of the New. 
 
36 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Let us think of the joy the Christian has in personal 
 communion with the risen and exalted Christ. Eight 
 centuries ago, or nearly, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote : 
 
 " Jesus ! the very thought of Thee 
 
 With sweetness fills my breast. 
 But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
 
 And in Thy presence rest. 
 Jesus, my only joy be Thou, 
 
 As Thou my prize wilt be ; 
 Jesus, be Thou my glory now 
 
 And through eternity." 
 
 No mere sentimentalist was he who wrote those 
 words, but a man at whose word Europe trembled 
 when Europe was wrong; kings and princes con- 
 fessed their sin; the Christian world responded to his 
 prophet-call. 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, the Methodist of the thirteenth 
 century, was once watched by one who loved him well 
 that he might learn from his master how to pray, as 
 his master had learnt from Him who taught His dis- 
 ciples in the days of old ; and when he watched with 
 indelicate intrusion, but with a holy intent, this was 
 all he discovered : Over and over again, the saint 
 was saying, with head bowed and hands clasped, the 
 name of Jesus. The great Apostle of the Reformation, 
 moving in stirring times, riding upon the storm, writes 
 to one who knew him well, " I am so busy that I cannot 
 get on without eight hours a day spent in prayer to 
 my Master." Are we to understand that Martin 
 Luther could take eight hours apart from his work? 
 because, if so, the conditions of his busy life were very 
 dissimilar from the conditions of yours. Nothing of 
 the kind. 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD 37 
 
 " Work shall be prayer if all be wrought 
 As Thou wouldst have it done, 
 And prayer by Thee inspired and taught 
 Itself with work be one." 
 
 But there was this dijfference between Luther and 
 some of you: Before his thoughts became purposes, 
 before his purposes became deeds, they were referred 
 to the Master of all ; his communion with Him was 
 sweet ; he spake with Him face to face, as a man speak- 
 eth with his friend ; and, therefore, it was that it might 
 be said of him as it was said of John Knox by the 
 Regent Morton : " He never feared the face of man, 
 so familiar was he with the face of God." 
 
 Without unduly lengthening these instances, I would 
 remind Methodists of the way in which that mighty 
 movement, early Methodism, achieved its initial tri- 
 umphs. Wesley writes in his journal, " At three in 
 the morning, as we " — a little group who met in an 
 upper room, like that at Jerusalem — " continued in- 
 stant in prayer, the Holy Ghost came mightily upon 
 us, insomuch that, overawed, we fell to the ground. 
 When we had somewhat recovered from the sense of 
 the presence of the Majesty on High, we broke with 
 one accord into the strains of the ' Te Deum,' * We 
 praise, Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the 
 Lord.' " Thence went Methodism forth, conquering 
 and to conquer. 
 
 Verily in every century personal communion with 
 God has been held to be the highest privilege of the 
 soul ; so much so that, as " J. B.," of The Christian 
 World, has put it, men have tried by illegitimate means 
 to retain the experience, while failing to fulfil the con- 
 ditions thereof. For, by communion, such as I have 
 
38 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 instanced just now, I am not speaking of prayer only 
 in the sense of petition. Our joy in the presence of 
 our loved and nearest does not spring from the fact 
 that they or we are begging from each other, though 
 we delight to give ourselves to each other. Communion 
 of soul is the only real communion. There is a lan- 
 guage of the eye more eloquent than the language of 
 the lip, and a language of silence more eloquent than 
 either; it is enough to be near, to feel yourself glad- 
 dened in the presence of the loved. And as Fenelon, 
 the great French preacher and mystic, has phrased it 
 for us, so we might say, " Thou art, O Father, so 
 really within ourselves, where we seldom or never 
 look, that Thou art to us a hidden God." We have 
 not arrived at the meaning of life, nor at the possession 
 of our own souls till we have learned what it means to 
 commune with God ; for at one point in experience, as 
 J. H. Newman reminds us, the only realities for the 
 soul, the only realities for any man, are oneself and 
 God. 
 
 This is the corrective for all that is wrong, fever- 
 ish, agitated, evil, in life ; and this, in the city of Lon- 
 don to-day, and in this congregation, is the greatest 
 and strongest need — whether you are conscious of it 
 or not — that exists for you. We are divine ; you are 
 divine ; your divinity will only find itself in contact with 
 Deity. The soul is not yours to begin with ; it has to 
 be wrought for, gained, and won ; the man who knows 
 nothing of communion with God is a stranger to him- 
 self, and we find ourselves only as we find Him whom 
 our hearts desire. This is an experience greater than 
 any proposition ; it cannot be put into syllogisms ; but 
 it is the most real of all experiences to some who wor- 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD 3» 
 
 ship here to-day. Our home is in God — in Tenny- 
 sonian phrase — 
 
 " When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
 Turns again home," 
 
 and as Sabatier, the great French theologian, has said, 
 " If wearied with the world of pleasure or of toil, I 
 long to find my soul again, and live a deeper life, 
 I can accept no other Guide and Master than Jesus 
 Christ, because in Him alone optimism is without 
 frivolity and seriousness without despair." 
 
 II. The method of such communion is not far to 
 seek. I am not afraid of a trite observation, or of 
 repeating something that is venerable, when I say. 
 The first essential for busy men is withdrawal from 
 your fellows that you may be alone with God. Into the 
 tabernacle in the wilderness ! Leave the multitude at 
 the tent-door, you will serve them the better when you 
 return. Fathers and mothers, burdened for your 
 children, life means many things to you ; it would be- 
 come simple and glorious and beautiful if you left 
 them sometimes that you might bear them on your 
 hearts to God. 
 
 " Oh, what peace we often forfeit, 
 Oh, what needless pain we bear! 
 All because we do not carry 
 Everything to God in prayer." 
 
 Here are you, City men, snatching an hour or half an 
 hour in the middle of the day to worship God. Why 
 are you going back again to toil ? It is because of 
 those represented here, but not amongst us — the wife 
 and the little ones at home. You are not fighting for 
 your own hand. Neither was that man who cheated 
 
40 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 _you this morning ; pity him, if it were so. I never yet 
 met a man who was not playing to an audience, how- 
 ever small. You are caring for somebody, that is 
 why you toil ; you are labouring and suffering, not for 
 yourself; life would be dreary to-morrow, if they were 
 gone. You live in the being of another or others. They 
 were God's before they were yours ; those whom He 
 has given you He could care for Himself without you. 
 Would you learn how to serve? Leave them and be 
 alone with God. " Haven't the time ! " You have ; 
 you have time for many things ; time to commune ; lis- 
 ten to the voice of the Eternal. Time ? — there is time 
 in Cheapside to command audience of heaven. Time? 
 — why, you are always alone, even in your busiest hour. 
 Make a sanctuary outside the City Temple, in the 
 midst of your fellows, in the heart of your business, 
 speak with God in the tabernacle, face to face, as a 
 man speaketh unto his friend. 
 
 The other condition of your communion is openness 
 to God. Cease from the prayer of agonised entreaty; 
 that has its place; wait for the speech of God. Our 
 fathers knew all about this. I saw on the service paper 
 last week that the City Temple is the oldest Congre- 
 gational church in London. It dates from 1640. Do 
 you know what was the type of religious life then? 
 We could criticise it ; it was very grim ; in some cases 
 it was very hard, perhaps it was too self-sufficient. But 
 •no man waited then for his neighbour to tell him about 
 the preciousness of God ; he knew. That was the day 
 of the high-backed pew, when a man came to church 
 not to look at anybody, but to speak with God. That 
 experience was real ; it made such men as conquered 
 at Marston Moor and sent the Royalists to confusion 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD 41 
 
 at Naseby. They were not less men than you ; there 
 was no effeminacy in the Puritan. Now, in this day 
 of conventions, and demonstrations, and congresses, 
 and what not, we commune with each other rather than 
 with God, and we lose because we do not know what it 
 is — am I exaggerating? — in the same degree to be 
 alone with the Maker of us all. There is prayer which 
 is stillness, susceptibility to the Eternal, a heart ready 
 for the impulses brought by the Spirit of God. 
 
 " And when in silent awe we wait 
 And word and sign forbear, 
 The hinges of the golden gate 
 Move, soundless, to our prayer." 
 
 That is the time of vision. Would you see what the 
 needs of the world are, that you may have opportunity 
 to remedy them? See in the stillness, see in the soli- 
 tude, see in the holy place, the multitudes waiting with- 
 out the tent door for the Prophet, Master, and Leader 
 to return, " Our deepest feelings are precisely those 
 we are least able to express, and even in the act of 
 adoration silence is our highest praise." 
 
 Then comes the blessing. The still, small voice that 
 speaks within needs no apologist; you know it when 
 you hear it. There is a sweet comfort and a shining 
 peace in the holy place with Jesus. 
 
 Well do I know the exceptions to this great state- 
 ment. It is not always easy to pray. Sometimes you will 
 be overwhelmed in the black waters of sorrow, and 
 feel as if utterance were denied you, and you cannot 
 pray. Say so to the living God. I have here some 
 words that I copied for you, written by a fourteenth- 
 century mystic, who would not recognise the Citv of 
 to-day, and yet they were written not far from the 
 
42 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 City : " Pray inwardly " — from within — " though 
 thou thinkest it savour thee not; for it is profitable 
 though thou feel not, though thou see naught, yea, 
 though thou thinkest thou canst not ; for in dryness, in 
 barrenness, in sickness, in feebleness, then is thy prayer 
 well pleasant unto Me — and I am Jesus." When I am 
 thinking I am listening, and the voice that speaks to me 
 is the voice that spake by the Lake of Galilee — the 
 same, and not another; and the Christ who spake to 
 our fathers, the Christ in whose name we are gathered 
 here, the same Christ it is who speaks within your own 
 soul now. Cease from your restlessness, give Him a 
 hearing; He preaches His own sermons, brings His 
 own message; keeps with His own power those whom 
 the Father has given unto Him. 
 
 Hear me, you who are strong, and true, and brave, 
 but who do not commune : you are missing something. 
 Begin even now ; leave the rest of us and cleave to God. 
 Be your problem what it may, you are insufficient for 
 it ; for even though you do not pray, God remembers 
 and saves, but when you do the whole world is 
 different, the light is upon it that never was on sea or 
 land. Hear me, you who are sunken in despair, you 
 who are in chains and bondage to propensity or shame : 
 speak not to me concerning this. The arm of flesh will 
 fail you ; you dare not trust another's, much less your 
 own. Go right to the Fountain of all that is good ; 
 speak to the Eternal, who is the source of everything 
 that is holy, and tender, and true ; learn to love by 
 learning to pray. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, 
 there is liberty ; " " and we all with unveiled face, be- 
 holding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed 
 into the same image from glory unto glory as by the 
 Spirit of the Lord." 
 
IV 
 CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 
 
 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
 your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father 
 give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ? — Luke xi. ij. 
 
 This is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we 
 ask anything according to His will. He heareth us ; attd if 
 lue know that He heareth us, whatsoever we ask, we know 
 that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. 
 
 — I fohn V. I4-IS- 
 
 THE subject of prayer is one of never-fail- 
 ing interest to human-kind. For all men 
 pray at some time or other, whether 
 fitfully or constantly, in weakness or in strength, 
 in sorrow or in joy. Some men pray because it 
 is their chiefest delight so to do, and some pray 
 because necessity drives them to it; but they all 
 pray. Prayer is a constant element, and the impulse 
 to pray is ever present to human nature. The ques- 
 tion is not. Shall we pray ? but, Can God hear us when 
 ■we do; is there room for Him to answer; is it any use 
 to pray? To this question our texts — the one on the 
 authority of Jesus Christ, and the other the testimony 
 of Christian experience — supply the answer. The 
 former, remember, is the simple, but very direct and 
 unequivocal, declaration, " If ye then, being evil, know 
 how to give good gifts unto your children, how much 
 more shall your heavenly Father give " — that which 
 includes and is present in every good gift — " the Holy 
 
 43 
 
44 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Spirit to them that ask Him ? " And the testimony of 
 Christian experience, the experience of a man who had 
 heard these words spoken, and Hved upon the strength 
 of them, is this, " This is the confidence that we have 
 in Him " — in Christ, as you will see by the context — 
 " that, if we ask anything according to His will, He 
 heareth us ; and if we know that He heareth us, what- 
 soever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that 
 we desired of Him." 
 
 Some things are very striking about the New Testa- 
 ment teaching on the subject of prayer, but none of 
 them is more striking than this, and the more I ponder 
 the matter the more remarkable it seems to me — the 
 fewness of the conditions attached to the prayer that 
 compels answer from God. New Testament teaching, 
 especially the words of Jesus, are perfectly direct, 
 simple, and emphatic about this. Further, our Lord 
 never hesitates in His teaching about prayer to apply 
 the anthropomorphic argument. He illustrates the 
 doings of God from the best we know of men, and 
 when we have said all we can say upon the subject of 
 prayer, we shall just have come back to the words of 
 our Lord, " If ye," — any of you that is a father — 
 " give, then how much more your heavenly Father, 
 from whom cometh every good and every perfect gift." 
 
 Moreover, I observe, and it is very striking when 
 you think of it, that our Lord does not illustrate the 
 doings of the Father of our spirits in the best man, 
 otherwise His argument might have run thus : " Look 
 at me, see how kind I am and how good ; the Father is 
 as good as I ; He will do for you the things I am trying 
 to do." But His argument was drawn from the ex- 
 perience of any man. Looking upon those who, im- 
 
CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 45 
 
 perfect as they were, represented, perhaps, the best 
 that Jewish society produced at the time, but yet im- 
 perfect, struggHng, faiHng, falHng men, He said, " If 
 ye," any of you, " being evil, know how to give good 
 gifts unto your children, how much more your heavenly 
 Father ! " The argument seems to me to gain strength 
 indeed ; for if our Lord were here at this moment, He 
 would select any man in this congregation and make 
 him His illustration and His proof of the goodness of 
 God. He would say. Are you capable of pity? then 
 God is not worse than you. Are you capable of kind- 
 ness to your child ? God's love must be greater than 
 yours, for it produced you. Are you capable of taking 
 delight in answering prayer? why, you are doing it 
 every day; that is what you are in the City for, in 
 order that you may have the wherewith to answer 
 the prayers that will meet you when you get home. If 
 you, any of you, bad or good, know how to give good 
 gifts unto those whom you love, how much more your 
 Father which is in heaven. Robert Browning has 
 very beautifully expressed this in one of his best- 
 known poems : 
 
 •' Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
 That I doubt His own love can compete with it ? 
 Here, the pai'ts shift ? 
 Here, the creature surpass the Creator — the end, what 
 began ? 
 
 I believe it ! 'Tis Thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive ; 
 In the first is the last, in Thy will is my power to believe. 
 All's one gift ; Thou canst grant it, moreover, as prompt to 
 
 my prayer 
 As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air." 
 
 What is prayer? Not everything that receives that 
 
46 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 name is really prayer. Most, if not all, of you have 
 read Victor Hugo's " Notre Dame," and you may 
 remember that terribly realistic last chapter — a faithful 
 picture, I fear, of mediaevalism at its worst — and the 
 introduction of the figure of Louis XL and of the poor 
 girl who is being done to death by wicked men. Ac- 
 cused of being a witch, the poor, simple girl takes 
 refuge in a cathedral, and Louis — religious, crafty, 
 superstitious, villainous, vicious, unscrupulous — prays, 
 ere the sin is committed, for forgiveness, that he may 
 take the girl from the sanctuary and drag her to a 
 death of agony and shame. He manages to convince 
 himself that forgiveness is accorded before the deed 
 is done. He would have called it prayer. What 
 Avould you call it? That petition came from the hell 
 to which its fruits returned ; it damned the man who 
 prayed it, not the poor girl against whom it was prayed. 
 You need no further illustration as to what is not 
 prayer. What is? Prayer is that in which the soul 
 looks up ; it must be the expression of nobleness in the 
 man who prays. You stand upon the tableland of 
 character when you pray. It is the utterance of the 
 soul's highest to God, and He will be content with 
 nothing less. You have reached to the limit of capacity 
 when you have called to God; the best that is in you 
 appeals to High Heaven when you pray. Prayer, said 
 William Law, is the nearest approach unto God and the 
 highest enjoyment of Him that we can have in this 
 world. 
 
 " Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, 
 The Christian's native air, 
 His watchword at the sfates of death, 
 He enters heaven by prayer." 
 
CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 47 
 
 Prayer is all this. Is it anything else ? Yes ; prayer 
 is a demand note addressed to Heaven, prayer is the 
 human will moving the arm of God, prayer is grasp- 
 ing the power unseen and bringing it down to work 
 great things in the seen. Prayer is human goodness 
 transcending its limitations and bringing down the will- 
 ing aid of the willing Father in human things. But, 
 says someone, you have trenched now upon a difficult 
 subject, and made a very dangerous statement. Is it 
 reasonable to believe in such prayer as that? Is not 
 this compelling the Arbiter of our destinies to abdicate ? 
 I admit the difficulty, and answer it thus : 
 
 First, it is a matter of simple experience that, law or 
 no law, difficulty or no difficulty, prayer does move the 
 arm of God. Here kneels George Miiller, praying for 
 a breakfast for a thousand and more orphans, and it 
 comes ; here is a life's record in. which a man prayed a 
 solid million into existence, without asking a man for a 
 penny. That is evidence as well worth consideration 
 as the law by which an apple falls to the ground. Here 
 is C. H. Spurgeon kneeling at the end of his financial 
 year to tell God about the difficulties that had to be met 
 and the record that has to be placed to his credit. 
 That man, who Hved a life of prayer, and was a prince 
 of the Gospel, if ever there was one, would have said 
 at the last moment, if asked for his testimony, " Good- 
 ness and mercy have followed me all the days of my 
 life. God has never failed when I have called upon 
 Him." 
 
 The witness of holiness is worth investigation. 
 What is holiness? I wish I could tell you the differ- 
 ence between holiness and nobleness. It does not 
 mean that the one excludes the other, but it is the dif- 
 
48 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 ference between the diamond and the carbon. Nobody 
 can tell us what makes a carbon a diamond. The same 
 substances are in both, combined in exactly the same 
 proportions, but the one will shine in the dark and the 
 other will not. We cannot sec what makes the dif- 
 ference, except that the diamond, which is a carbon 
 after all, has managed to feed upon the light somehow, 
 and store it, and shine by its lustre. Holiness is 
 character, the shining light that never was on sea or 
 land ; holiness is character with a fragrance ; holiness 
 is an influence of itself, and it is begotten of communion 
 with the Unseen, and without that you never have it, 
 and no man has ever had it. When you speak about 
 the men you know in business life who are living wel) 
 and nobly without any particular faith in God, with 
 nothing more than a faith in right, you know, as wel' 
 as I know, and as well as they know, too, that if yot 
 place a Spurgeon and a Catherine Booth alongside 
 them, the difference is that of the diamond and of the 
 carbon, and the difference is made by prayer. The one 
 is mighty in communion with the Unseen, and the other 
 is not. The witness of holiness to the efficacy of prayer 
 is this, that no saint ever prayed and doubted about his 
 answer; if it came not in one way, it came in another. 
 Unvarying, unaltering is the witness of holiness to the 
 fact that God does hear prayer, however it is done. 
 
 Secondly, moral freedom and answered prayer in- 
 volve each other. The one factor of uncertainty in the 
 whole scheme of things of which you are a part, is 
 human will. Philosophers may say what they please, 
 but you never get the ordinary man to believe that he 
 has not some power of control over his own destiny. 
 You came from a business house just now, where you 
 
CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 49 
 
 were engaged in altercation with a man, blaming him 
 for a dirty trick. You know that he need not have 
 done it ; he knows it, too. You come into the presence 
 of one whose face reminds you of a noble and unselfish 
 act, and you think, I wish I were like him. He need 
 not have been what he is ; it is grand that he chose the 
 higher. You would never get men to believe that the 
 world is so colourless, so automatic, that men have no 
 power of self-direction and self-control. This power 
 may be much more limited than you think. I am pre- 
 pared to conclude that in many instances moral respon- 
 sibility is not so great as the bystanders imagine ; but 
 it is always there, however small the circle within 
 which it is exercised. A man remains a man with the 
 God-like faculty of willing the right and avoiding the 
 wrong. Once you have admitted that factor of tmcer- 
 tainty, which experience always testifies to, you have 
 admitted the possibility, nay, the imperative probability, 
 of answer to prayer. For if you can take the helm out 
 of the hands of God, you can put it back ; if you are 
 free to do wrong, you are free to pray, " God be merci- 
 ful to me a sinner " ; if you are free to exercise in- 
 fluence over any man, you are free to pray to the Giver 
 of the awful gift that He would help you in the exercise 
 thereof. If you are free as a spirit to commune with 
 the Father of spirits, you are free to transcend law. 
 For what is law but your experience of the dependable- 
 ness of God? We talk as if law was something inex- 
 orable and to be afraid of. Law presumes the Law- 
 giver ; it is personalitv at the back, a consistent God 
 who ordains the things upon which vou can depend. 
 Under the uniformitv of nature there exists an inex- 
 haustible variety. No flower will ever grow in the 
 
50 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 isame spot as another ; you never have two leaves in the 
 vegetable world alike. Under the operation of law, 
 unceasing as it is, God is making a differentiation all 
 the time. Your life is different from that of the 
 man who sits next to you, and though there be a 
 Divinity that shapes your ends, rough-hew them how 
 you will, there is power left for you to refer thought, 
 act, and purpose back to God, who gave you the power 
 of self-direction and self-control. 
 
 Prayer is the reinforcement of human endeavour ; it 
 is not the substitute for it. Prayer is the enlargement 
 of your personality ; prayer is working on power from 
 the unseen — mighty are those who know how to bring 
 it. It is said that the presence of Napoleon on the field 
 of battle was equivalent to a reinforcement of 40,000 
 men. Why? Because he so increased the fighting 
 value of every separate man, that his mere presence 
 was equivalent to another army. Prayer will do that 
 for you. The man of prayer is the best kind of man. 
 The man who can go to God when he has done his own 
 best is drawing what the natural man cannot have. 
 The spiritual man is the man of power, because he is 
 the man of prayer. 
 
 The latest of fads in the semi-religious world is that 
 which, under various titles, is most commonly de- 
 scribed as " Christian Science." The vogue which 
 this fad has is a rebuke to me and to other preachers 
 of the Gospel. For the only moiety of truth that it 
 contains is the purest Christianity. It tells you of the 
 possibility of a victorious life, a life of victory over 
 ill and suffering, danger and fear; and its votaries say 
 that what is required from those who would be Chris- 
 tian Scientists is power to call and power to trust; in 
 
CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 61 
 
 tunc with the Infinite must you be; those who are in 
 tune with the Infinite are masters of their destiny, 
 never the victims of fate. Is that new in the history 
 of the world? It was taught upon the hillside of 
 Galilee nineteen hundred years ago by Him who spake 
 as never man spake ; it was taught by John the Be- 
 loved, in the words of our text. If we ask anything 
 according to His will, He heareth, and if we know that 
 He heareth, we know that we have conquered. Let 
 there be no mistake about the power which comes into 
 a man's life if he has the gift of prayer. 
 
 " Oh, what peace we often forfeit, 
 Oh, what needless pain we bear ! 
 All because we do not carry 
 Everything to God in prayer," 
 
 I have often said that if I can get a man to pray, not 
 now and then, but as the habit of his life, I have been 
 the means of saving him. He will be strong, instead 
 of weak ; instead of leaning for help upon his fellows, 
 he will be their benefactor and the ambassador of the 
 Unseen. Get a man to pray, and you have made him 
 strong, you have given him faith, you have made him 
 climb ; get a man to pray, and the Holy Spirit will shine 
 through him, and the world will be better because he 
 lives. 
 
 There no true prayer without its answer. This may 
 seem a great deal to say, but I would like every young 
 man to remember that point, if he remembers no other. 
 Louis XL did not pray, but that man did who said, " O 
 God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." 
 He looked up, and he stood at his highest ; that prayer 
 set heaven in motion. Prayer is just willing Godward. 
 The answer to prayer begins at the moment when you 
 
62 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 begin to pray. Somebody prayed this morning a 
 prayer that the preacher did not pray ; perhaps nobody 
 prayed it but himself ; he does not want to publish what 
 it was, it is of great importance to him, and to him 
 only. Perhaps it was a prayer of wounded love, tlie 
 cry of a broken heart and of ill-requited affection. It 
 went right to the heart of the Eternal ; it was worthy to 
 go. You may have to wait a long time before you see 
 any fruit of it, but that prayer was as the prayer of 
 omnipotence. You took hold, as Christ would take 
 hold, of the hand of the Father, and what is to be in 
 response to the petition has begun now. 
 
 Will you who are tempted, who have been fighting a 
 battle with the beast within you, who know what it is 
 to contend against fearful odds in a world of extremes, 
 of light and darkness, sorrow and joy, who feel as if 
 you are being overborne in the battle of life, think of 
 this : Every cry that goes Godward brings its immediate 
 response to the perturbed and anxious heart. For 
 there is always an immediate as well as a deferred 
 answer to prayer. Some prayers are answered quickly, 
 some slowly. All are answered more grandly than the 
 scope of the petition itself, but there is never a failure, 
 and if you can only learn that it is so, there will be no 
 prayer that you will ever pray of which you will not 
 be conscious that God has spoken in the moment of 
 your prayer. It is God's will that you should use 
 yours ; it is God's delight to hear you pray. Have you 
 ever gone into the presence of God when you felt as if 
 you could not speak to anybody, as if the world was 
 too black, your confidence in yourself too feeble, that 
 the first thing to do was to get alone somewhere, and 
 speak your thoughts, desires, and anxieties, to the great 
 
CAN GOD ANSWER PRAYER? 53 
 
 Friend, the living, loving, helpful One whom eyes 
 cannot see, but whose presence we feel ? How did you 
 come out of that presence-chamber ? Changed, I war- 
 rant; not because circumstances had changed, but be- 
 cause peace had stolen into your heart, and you felt 
 that 
 
 " God's in His heaven 
 All's right with the world." 
 
 It was as though a mother had picked up her little 
 child, and soothed its disquiet, and bidden it be still, 
 and promised nothing, but in the love had given all. 
 Just to know Him and to feel Him near is to have all 
 your prayers ansv/ered before the answer to one of 
 them has come. Some of you are thinking, maybe, less 
 about yourselves than about those whom God has 
 placed near you, and you may say, " I know of a prayer 
 that was not answered ; I remember praying long ago 
 about that wife, that boy of mine whom it would seem 
 as if nothing could save ; I wrestled in agony with God, 
 and the only answer was death." Maybe that was the 
 answer. Sometimes we seem unequal to the task of 
 caring for those whom God has placed under our care, 
 and we tell Him so. Perhaps the answer is that He 
 takes them home, cares for them Himself, and when 
 we stand upon the other side of death we shall see what 
 it all means. 
 
 " We kneel — how weak ! We rise — how full of power! 
 Why therefore should we do ourselves this wrong, 
 Or others — that we are not always strong, 
 That we are ever overborne with care, 
 
 That we should ever weak or heartless be, 
 Anxious or troubled, when with us is orayer. 
 And joy and strength and courage are with Thee ? " 
 
SUPPOSING CHRIST WERE ONLY A 
 
 MAN 
 
 Pilate saith unto them. Behold the man ! ^John xix. 5. 
 
 WHY did Pilate say, " Behold the man ! " ? Let 
 us see. For the first time in his experience, 
 doubtless, the Roman Governor hesitated 
 about the crucifixion of a helpless victim of popular 
 fury. Pilate's chief inducement, one would have 
 thought, would have been to please the Jews, 
 win their approval by crucifying one who was 
 evidently the object of their bitter hatred. Yet 
 he hesitated almost up to the point when the mob 
 would have turned upon him and wrested from him 
 the sceptre, or reported him to his dread and jealous 
 lord, the Csesar, gloomily waiting in imperial Rome. 
 Yet he hesitated, for he had never looked on a prisoner 
 like this one, helpless in his hands, without weapon to 
 defend himself, without friend to speak for him ; Pilate 
 felt that he had changed places with his prisoner; he 
 was upon his trial, and this kingly man was his judge. 
 He had never looked upon such a man. Even in his 
 hour of shame and agony the Christ, the victim of the 
 hatred of the people he came to save, towered above 
 them in majesty, and compelled the reluctant admiring 
 homage of this master of legions himself. " Art thou 
 a king?" he said; and the Christ, penetrating to the 
 
 54 
 
ONLYAMAN 65 
 
 impulse which made him ask the question, returned, 
 " Thou sayest it because I am a king." In effect, the 
 Master was saying : You can see in your prisoner of to- 
 day, with this purple robe, this crown of thorns, a 
 Master who, though esteemed not of this world, is a 
 man as never was before ; never have you looked upon 
 a man like this : thou sayest it because thou seest that I 
 am a king. 
 
 Keeping closely to the natural and instinctive feeling 
 of this man who looked upon Jesus for the first time, 
 let me introduce you to the most pressing religious 
 question of to-day. All religious controversy seems 
 for the moment to have concentrated upon one sacred 
 head. The question of questions at the present hour 
 is : Who was and is Jesus Christ ? I am proud and 
 glad to think that so many men come with open minds 
 to listen to that question who do not ordinarily frequent 
 the courts of the Lord. Some of you think you have 
 made up your mind upon the question, and that, in 
 doing so you have dethroned the Master from the place 
 where superstition has placed Him. You will have to 
 come back again and reopen the question. " Behold 
 the man ! " and then tell me what you think of the 
 Christ. 
 
 Some of you feel the difficulty of accounting for the 
 Master while retaining the halo of the supernatural 
 around His head. One sometimes hears men say, 
 " How easy it would be to account for Jesus, yea, and 
 to render Him the first place in the estimation of man- 
 kind, if only we could strip away from Him all the 
 adjuncts of a false and mistaken piety ; if we could say, 
 Here is a man, but only a man, one of ourselves, a great 
 and a good, but still only a man." There is a difficulty 
 
56 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 felt about the dual personality. Sometimes one hears 
 a young fellow say : " How could this man pray to God 
 and be God ; exhort Himself, call upon Himself, love, 
 trust, and adore Himself? H Jesus and the Father 
 were one, how are we to account for the personality of 
 Jesus Himself? for that also appears to be one." 
 True. Another difficulty is presented : " Would it not 
 be easier to say that Jesus of Nazareth, the victim of 
 Jewish hate, ran the course that all goodness does in 
 this world ? men crucify their prophets. Did not Jesus 
 die a martyr to the beautiful testimony He bore to the 
 goodness of our Father in heaven ? was not His gospel 
 the occasion of His death? and at the last did not He, 
 in common with all the suffering sons of men, the best 
 as well as the worst, cry in agony from the Cross of 
 Calvary : ' My God, my God ! why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me?' Is it not true that His bones are mouldering 
 into dust in Palestine to-day, 
 
 "And on his grave, with shining eyes. 
 The Syrian stars look down " ? 
 
 Oh, simplify the matter at once, and let us say, 
 Here was a man, the greatest of men, the noblest of 
 men, the purest of men, one who has given us vision of 
 God, but still only a man." 
 
 Wait a little. What is a man? Let us settle that 
 question first. The difference between man and man is 
 all but infinite. The difference between a Robespierre 
 and a Cromwell, for example, in moral stature. Is im- 
 measurable. The dififcrence between a Charles Peace 
 and a Charles Spurgcon cannot be expressed as com- 
 parison, only as contrast. The difference between a 
 Voltaire and a Wesley is all but infinite. " Only a 
 
ONLY A MAN 57 
 
 man " — but it makes a great difference which man. 
 " Only a man " — suppose it was Gladstone ; no build- 
 ing in this land or in any other land would hold the 
 people who would flock to see him and love and adore. 
 Some men stand far above their fellows ; you cannot 
 thir.k of them without looking up; their humanity 
 towers up and up until it is lost in divinity and in- 
 distinguishable therefrom. 
 
 " Only a man "? I will paint you a picture which 
 is perfectly true. Not far from these doors, so Hall 
 Caine tells us, there are gambling hells and drinking 
 dens — clubs they call them, of one kind and another — 
 where degraded men, like harpies, like devils, are prey- 
 ing upon their kind, luring the youth of both sexes to 
 destruction, and doing it for gain, selling others, body 
 and soul, and damning their own in the process. 
 " Only a man " — but a man that does that is a devil. 
 Again : Into one such den on a certain dark night there 
 went another man, and by main force of his sanctified 
 personality he drew out of that foul and reeking sink 
 of iniquity one and another — a man, a woman ; gave 
 them back their manhood and their womanhood, and 
 drew them to the God whom their life had denied. 
 That man died, after a life spent in saving; he died 
 because, some wise people tell us, he had worked too 
 hard to better the lot of humanity ; he died because his 
 rescue work had killed him. Now we speak of him 
 as a saint. Thousands followed him to the tomb ; on 
 the day when he was laid to rest it was impossible 
 almost for all those who wished to pay tribute to his 
 memory to obtain access to the graveside. Amongst 
 the company that stood there was one poor woman, 
 who asked permission to lay a bunch of violets on his 
 
58 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 coffin. He was " only a man," but to her he was a 
 man of men; he had saved her from a fate that was 
 worse than death ; she associated him with the best she 
 knew of heaven and of God. That woman is Hving; 
 that man is dead. Can he die ? " Only a man " — but 
 that man was Hugh Price Hughes. 
 
 " Only a man." Man is a fragment of divinity, 
 and he never can forfeit his origin. " Only a man " — 
 but we must take each man at his real value. How 
 much of God does a man contain ? That is the way in 
 which to measure his humanity. " Only a man " — 
 may he never cease to be a man, too, when his manhood 
 towers up and up till it touches God, and reveals God. 
 We are mistaken when we try to draw any line between 
 that humanity and the God that created it. Moreover, 
 manhood overlaps. None of us liveth to himself, nor 
 can, even if he wants to. You are the trustee, not only 
 of your own life, but of other lives. When you re- 
 fuse to serve, you are serving all the same, causes bad 
 or good. When you are standing for the wrong you 
 are struggling against the right, and lives you never 
 saw are the worse for the life you are living. Every 
 man sends the roots of his being deep into the total life 
 of humanity. Here are we, a great company, rep- 
 resentatives of all humanity that has ever been or ever 
 lived. What I say of the congregation as a whole, I 
 say of the weakest and the least influential man in it. 
 In a sense, all humanity has come to a focus in you ; 
 in a sense, God has spoken to humanity through what 
 you are. We cannot cover much of the territory of 
 another man's being, but we cover some, and you 
 measure the greatness of a man's manhood by the 
 amount that he is able to do for lives other than his 
 
ONLYAMAN 69 
 
 own. How much of God have you brought to bear 
 upon the total life of humanity? Now, judged by the 
 standard that we have been raising, how much of God 
 did Mr. Gladstone bring into the life of England? 
 " Only a man " — but I do not wish to separate him 
 from what I know of God. How much did Mr. Spur- 
 geon bring, how much did Dr. Parker bring, how much 
 did Hugh Price Hughes bring ? " Only a man " — 
 cease talking about mankind as though it were some- 
 thing different from Deity. The difference between 
 man and God is a difference not in kind, but in moral 
 height. From the side of God there is no line drawn 
 between humanity and Deity at all. 
 
 Now this will help you when you come to deal with 
 such questions as that now before us. Jesus is only a 
 man, but He is the Man of men ; Jesus has enfolded 
 humanity. His is the only life that you can say 
 covers the whole territory of humanity. None other 
 could have spoken as Jesus did without blasphemy. 
 He stood for God when He looked at men, and those 
 who stood nearest to Him were compelled involuntarily 
 to ask themselves : " What manner of man is this ? 
 Never man spake like this man ; He has the words of 
 eternal life." We have read in our lesson this morn- 
 ing of the feeling with which the disciples, even him 
 whom we are accustomed to call the doubter, regarded 
 One whom they addressed as Master and Lord. Do 
 you think that the disciples who first saw Christ 
 thought of Him as you and I think of Him to-day? 
 Nothing of the sort. Their creed was never imposed 
 from without, it sprang from within. Before ever 
 Church Councils were heard of, disciples were putting 
 into life and practice what they knew of God through 
 
60 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Jesus Christ. " Master and Lord," they called Him. 
 " Ye say well, for so I am," He replied. " Master and 
 Lord," but " only a man." " Shew us the Father, 
 and we shall be satisfied." " I and My Father are 
 one." 
 
 The vision of God which Jesus brought to these men 
 in the upper room, which changed all their life, their 
 history, their character, their conduct, holds for all 
 time. The worst man as well as the best recognises it. 
 When you think of God you are really thinking of the 
 character of Jesus enthroned at the heart of the uni- 
 verse. You never can dissociate the two. All you 
 know or think you know of the Father you have seen in 
 looking into the face of the Son. Put theology from 
 you ; let the Man stand for his full value as you draw 
 it from the New Testament ; and when you have asked 
 yourself the question, "What think ye of Christ?" 
 can it be that you can answer in any other terms than 
 those of the doubter when he saw Him again — the 
 very same, the Jesus of Galilee, " My Lord and my 
 God " ? The humanity of Christ rises up — ^not that 
 He had to climb there, He was there — until it becomes 
 Deity to us, and we cannot, if we would, separate our 
 conception of the humanity of Christ from our con- 
 fidence in His Godhead. 
 
 This is a matter of simple, every-day experience. 
 Let me state it in another way. Supposing you had 
 never heard of such a man as Christ, reigning for and 
 through and over humanity, humanity would be asking 
 for Him to-day. This is exactly what you are looking 
 for. We have never seen a Man but once. I have 
 seen many attempts at manhood, but I have never seen 
 a Man save in the New Testament. " Behold the 
 
ONLYAMAN 61 
 
 man " — the only one. When I have said that, Hke 
 Thomas, I have cried out, " My Lord and my God." 
 Fulness of the stature of manhood brings me God, all 
 the God I am capable of receiving, and still the Christ, 
 who is the Humanity of God, is looking up into the face 
 of the Father. To all eternity it must be so. Down 
 with your metaphysics, lift the devotion of the heart — 
 our Man to all eternity, our King, our Master, our Gate- 
 way into God, our God. 
 
 That this has been echoed in all experience when it 
 has reached its highest needs no proof. Now I want 
 to make an appeal on the strength of it. There 
 are men in this church who think less of Christ than 
 I do; and the reason we are here this morning is to 
 try to make you think as we do. Supposing Pilate 
 and Thomas could have met and joined hands, and 
 Pilate in a moment of penitence could have said : " I 
 have by my cowardice slain a man, the grandest man 
 I ever saw." And Thomas could have answered : 
 " True, you did, and I loved that man, loved him 
 so that I wanted to go and die with Him, but 
 I deserted Him and fled in His moment of need. 
 We are both criminals, Pilate, you and I; let us join 
 hands. I have discovered something for you, I have 
 seen Him ; He is my Lord and my God. He and He 
 only it is who is the answer to my need and the 
 Saviour from my sin." There was a new experience 
 bom then; the perfect humanity was discovered that 
 redeemed ours. 
 
 ** If Jesus Christ is a man. 
 And only a man, I say. 
 That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
 And to Him will I cleave alway. 
 
62 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 " But if Jesus Christ is God, 
 And the only God, I swear, 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
 For that Saviour has never failed mankind. The ex- 
 perience that was born in the upper room, in the ejacu- 
 lation compelled from the breast of a man who loved 
 and thought he had lost his Lord, has never failed 
 humanity since, has never been absent. Observe that 
 the greatest holiness, the grandest nobleness, the sub- 
 limest achievement of humanity at its best, has been 
 associated with that view of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. 
 We are asking daily for a Saviour, in sin and in sor- 
 row, and in human problems and in human need, and 
 the Christ who, nineteen hundred years ago, was so 
 precious to men has still power to compel the adoration 
 and trust and love as none of the sons of men has 
 ever done or can do. 
 
 " Only a man." Now, put Gladstone beside this 
 Man ; put Hugh Price Hughes beside this Man ; put 
 Charles Haddon Spurgeon beside this Man, and Joseph 
 Parker in his dying moment beside this Man, and lis- 
 ten what they have to tell you. The first-named 
 preacher, dying, said : " Put on my coffin, ' Thou, O 
 Christ, art all I want.' " And the last said : " My love 
 to my Jesus all the time." Galilee does not hold Him 
 now, nor can ; and no tomb was ever invented that could 
 enclose the Christ, and death could not enchain Him. 
 He lives. Because He lives humanity shall never die. 
 It is pleading at the throne of God. 
 
 " The healing of His seamless dress 
 Is by our beds of pain ; 
 
ONLY A MAN 63 
 
 We touch Him in life's throng and press, 
 And we are whole again. 
 
 " Through Him the first fond prayers are said, 
 Our lips of childhood frame ; 
 The last low whispers of our dead 
 Are burdened with His name. 
 
 " We may not climb the heavenly steeps 
 
 To bring the Lord Christ down ; 
 
 In vain we search the lowest deeps, 
 
 For Him no depths can drown ; 
 
 *' But warm, sweet, tender, even yet, 
 A present help is He, 
 And faith has still its Olivet 
 And love its Galilee." 
 
 Here is a stupendous fact, never to be explained 
 away. For this Jesus in whom we trust conquers. 
 Come, you who don't beHeve in Him, is it Jesus? If 
 not, who is it? If we are believing in a lie that still 
 conquers, that makes men holy, but a lie all the same — 
 then God help us; for the whole universe is wrong. 
 But it is not wrong. " Behold the Man that sitteth 
 upon the throne." 
 
VI 
 GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN 
 
 He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin ; 
 that we tnight be made the righteousness of God in Him. 
 
 — 2 Cor. V. 21. 
 
 ET us attempt a retranslation and a paraphrase 
 of that passage. The translation first, and 
 following the order of the clauses in the 
 Greek — " Him who knew no sin, He made to be 
 sin in our behalf, that we might become the 
 righteousness of God in Him." The text gains 
 a little in clearness of statement and in force by 
 this way of arranging its clause and the substitution 
 of words. Now the paraphrase : " By the will of God, 
 Christ can so deal with human sin that the responsi- 
 bility for it can as it were be transferred from us to 
 Him, and that we, being freed from the burden of 
 guilt, may rise into the righteousness of God, which 
 is already His." 
 
 That is a stupendous thing to say. If my reading 
 of the text be right, we are justified in saying that in 
 these few words we have a complete statement of the 
 Christian doctrine of atonement. I know of no other 
 sentence on the same subject in the New Testament 
 which says so much in so few words as this wonderful 
 sentence written from the experience of St. Paul. I 
 am well aware that this passage, and kindred 
 passages dealing with this subject in the New 
 
 04 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN 65 
 
 Testament, are a standing difficulty to many minds, 
 religious and non-religious, both in the pew and 
 in the pulpit. I have known preachers to say that 
 they felt a great difficulty in preaching the Atone- 
 ment, because they were not able to find a place for it in 
 their own experience, and I remember once being told 
 by a brother minister about a layman (permit the 
 word) of high character and influence in the Church, 
 who said to him, after a sermon on the doctrine of the 
 Atonement, " I wish I could go with you in what you 
 have said, but I do not really feel that I need a doc- 
 trine of Atonement ; I have tried to live for the greater 
 part of my days as well as I knew how, I have dealt 
 justly with my fellows, and I think I love Jesus 
 Christ, who is Lord of All, but I would love Him just 
 as much if you never preached any doctrine of Atone- 
 ment at all, and really it has no significance for me." 
 Probably you will think that the speaker must have 
 been in type a Pharisee. He was not. He was a good 
 man. I have known many to say, " I admire the 
 Christian ethic. It stands first, it appeals to the human 
 conscience, it is the ideal for individual manhood; but 
 this doctrine is not ethical, and it is not reasonable. In 
 fact, it is immoral to ask any other being to bear my 
 sins." 
 
 If there be any persons here of this way of thinking, 
 my words are not, in the first place, intended for you, 
 and yet I should wish them to appeal to you, too. They 
 are intended for those who are conscious that nothing 
 but the Christian evangel of the Atonement can reach 
 their experience, and what I should like the rest of you 
 to do is to arrange yourselves alongside the sinner, and 
 try to see with his eyes and feel with his heart; then 
 
00 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 see whether there be not something in the Gospel of 
 the Cross of Christ that you never saw before. I am 
 speaking to those^ then, who are conscious of moral 
 failure when I say this — that the Atonanent, in a very 
 real sense, is the whole of Christianity. Take it away 
 and you have nothing left, no Gospel and no evangel. 
 This is a strong statement, and requires justification. 
 You shall have it. 
 
 To begin with, it is often said that, nowadays, men 
 do not appear to exhibit the sense of sin as they did in 
 an earlier day. We read about the thousands who 
 flocked to hear the fiery eloquence of George White- 
 field, and we are told that with strong crying and tears 
 they entered the kingdom of God, convinced that His 
 message of the Saviourhood of Christ, the atonement 
 wrought by Him, was the first and most necessary 
 thing for every man who would enter into eternal life. 
 Some of you are old enough to remember when Mr. 
 Spurgeon first came preaching in the great metropolis. 
 The same thing took place. If ever there was an un- 
 compromising preacher of the Cross, it was Mr. Spur- 
 geon, and men came in multitudes to that Cross, be- 
 lieving in the Gospel of a crucified Saviour as the first 
 necessity to their spiritual being. Was it not Mr. Glad- 
 stone who said that he noticed since that day a certain 
 decrease in the sense of sin? That humble-minded 
 statesman, grand Christian man as he was, deplored 
 this tendency, and declared that the first thing preach- 
 ; ers of the Gospel ought to address themselves to was 
 the task of awakening the sense of sin. Dr. R. W, 
 Dale said he feared the difference between a past gen- 
 eration and this was largely to be comprised in the fact 
 that men do not now fear God ; they speculate about 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN CV 
 
 Him instead. Be this as it may, I am rather indined to 
 question the statement that the sense of sin is feebler 
 than it used to be. Admitting that there are thousands 
 and tens of thousands in London who care nothing 
 at all about religion or Christ, I am perfectly sure I am 
 within the mark when I say that both within and 
 without the Church there are more men with a burning 
 sense of sin than any preacher or all preachers put 
 together will reach within the next week. The sense 
 of sin has changed its mode of expression ; but it is not 
 gone ; it is real and burning, and the need to which it 
 gives rise is as great as ever. 
 
 Let me try to illustrate. There sits in the City Tem- 
 ple this morning a man of high repute, perhaps, in the 
 metropolis ; he has everything that this world can give 
 him, humanly speaking. He is rolling in wealth, he is 
 a man of great personal influence, with power over 
 the bodies and minds of men. You call him fortunate, 
 perhaps you envy him a little ; there may be some here 
 who would wish to change places with him. Do not 
 wish it any more. He is suffering the tortures of hell, 
 and this is the reason why. Years ago, when he was 
 first climbing to success, he married a young wife, who 
 loved him above all else in this world, and he was will- 
 ing to give her everything in return but kindness. He 
 treated her cruelly, brutally, with that coldness which 
 is worse than hate ; he broke her heart and he killed 
 her. Now he is drawing towards the evening of Ufe, 
 when he has obtained everything he ever tried for, he 
 finds how little it is worth, and he wishes that the 
 tender grace of a day that is dead might come back 
 again to him. That man is as much a murderer as any 
 criminal who was executed in England this week. Pity 
 
68 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 him; do not denounce. The horror of the situation is 
 this : Whether there be any Gospel, any Christ, any 
 God, or no, he is doomed to torture until the grave 
 closes over him. Conscience has told him something, 
 and nothing will rid him from that dread enemy. What 
 do you make of that ? You may give it what name you 
 please, but it is the sense of sin, even though it be 
 awakened by only one dread fact in the past life. Sin 
 is not only a Bible word, not only a pulpit word ; it is 
 a newspaper word, a Stock Exchange word, a Fleet 
 Street word, and the thing for which it stands is a 
 very present experience in the life of every man and 
 woman. You know, without preachers, what it is to 
 suffer because of sin — your own or other people's. 
 
 Now, take another instance. Here is a man whose 
 lot of life is so different from him whom I have de- 
 scribed that there can be no comparison between them ; 
 there can only be contrast. This man started life high 
 in the social scale. He has come down, and done it by 
 his own fault. He has flung away his opportunities; 
 He has destroyed the peace of those who loved him 
 best. It may be that he has broken his mother's heart, 
 and brought down his father's grey hairs in sorrow to 
 the grave. Mark him as he sits near you, shabbily 
 dressed, unkempt, hopeless-looking, the fire in his eye 
 dimmed, his manhood gone. H you were to talk to 
 such a man about sin, he might be impatient, but if 
 you tell him that he has made his bed, and must lie on 
 it, he will bow his head in shame, for he knows that it 
 is true. What do you call that? If there never were a 
 preacher of the Gospel, there is something worth 
 preaching to in that man. 
 
 Close by him is another. You have pitied the poor 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN 09 
 
 unfortunate ; here is one whom you may pity more. 
 He is cursed with success, in that the foundation of 
 that success was laid in falsehood. Years ago he got 
 his first opportunity by telling a black lie; he has suc- 
 ceeded, but if he could^ just put the clock back, and 
 start again, he would give you all his success. You 
 would be welcome to it, but he cannot get rid of the 
 success. Other people are concerned beside him. He 
 would not care to publish to the world — and it would 
 be no use to publish — what he was and what he is. He 
 keeps away from churches, and he has nothing to do 
 with religion, for he won't play the hypocrite. He feels 
 perfectly helpless. That which is done is done, that 
 which is written is written, and he is a miserable man 
 to-day. 
 
 With another instance, I cease illustration, for my 
 point is almost complete. There is another here who 
 fights a battle with a propensity the very existence of 
 which is humiliation. He won a victory this morning 
 over his Apollyon, but he knows that to-morrow morn- 
 ing the battle has to be fought over again. He is 
 wrestling with a demon the existence of which none of 
 his friends suspect. Oh, pity the man with a foul and 
 secret sin ! He knows what it is to be wretched, and his 
 cry of despairing agony sometimes rises up to a seem- 
 ingly silent heaven. Is there any help for such as he ? 
 All these things may exist. In every case it is the sense 
 of sin, without much thought of God. This is a re- 
 markable thing, but it is true. Men can be tortured by 
 conscience without thinking whence conscience comes ; 
 and, yet, when they do associate it with the thought of 
 God, they become at first more dreadful, and after- 
 wards more hopeful. When they say, as poor David 
 
70 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 said after his great fall, " Against Thee, and Thee only, 
 have I sinned," there, though perhaps they suspect 
 it not, is the first dawning of deliverance. Dr. Parker, 
 in his pulpit, once gave, in his dramatic fashion, a 
 description of sin that I have never heard equalled — it 
 makes one shiver to think of it. It was a raised hand, 
 a clenched fist, and a blow in the face of God. God 
 has to do with the conscience, whether you know it or 
 not, and if conscience be not always the voice of God, 
 it certainly is in the cases I have detailed. Sin is a 
 fact, and the consciousness of sin is a fact, and these 
 things give rise to a great problem, a dual problem, 
 which I shall set before you — first, the demand for re- 
 lease from association with the fact of sin ; secondly, 
 the opportunity for living the higher life. 
 
 I. The awful thing about sin is not the punishment 
 it entails, but the guilt that it brings. And yet I would 
 not make light about the punishment. The man who 
 speaks bravely and boldly about bearing his own bur- 
 den, and the penalty of his own sin, is talking of he 
 knows not what. You cannot offer to bear the pen- 
 alty of your own sin. There is no ratio between sin 
 and punishment. If you were penitent to all eternity, 
 you would be as guilty as you are this morning. Pun- 
 ishment does not take away sin ; you remain associated 
 with the fact just the same. Moreover, nobody can be 
 punished for your sin — no, not Christ. There is not a 
 passage in the New Testament which tells you that 
 Jesus was punished instead of you. He could not be, 
 for He had not sinned. What my text tells you is that 
 He suffered instead of you, and that is where the re- 
 demption consists. Again, repentance which is repen- 
 tance in fear of punishment is unworthy of the name; 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN 71 
 
 it is something else, I trow, that in every case is really 
 at the bottom of the feeling. You want to get rid of 
 associations with sin, but that is just what the world 
 does not believe you ever can ; it is a seemingly im- 
 possible thing. It is an extraordinary fact that the 
 most difficult thing for any preacher to do is to con- 
 vince a man of the world that there is forgiveness at 
 all. 
 
 " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, 
 Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit 
 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." 
 
 Yet somehow the human heart protests against that 
 dread sentence, and the cry is continually going up 
 from the victim of propensity. " Oh, for some 
 power to come into my life and save me from being 
 what I am, and thinking what I think, and doing what 
 I do ! " and a cry still more agonising from the man 
 who has sinned away his opportunities. " Oh, that 
 that which has been might be as though it never had 
 been ! Oh, that I could wake and find that the past was 
 a dream, and gone forever ! " 
 
 II. There is the demand which arises for a new op- 
 portunity for a higher life. This again is most diffi- 
 cult to believe. The verdict of society is against it, 
 the testimony of all experience is against it. Per- 
 haps in the pew beside you there sits a woman who 
 has sinned away her purity. Observe how society 
 treats her. I do not say society is wrong; it has to 
 protect itself, and this is the verdict of conscience upon 
 sin that she knew was sin when it was committed. But 
 how hopeless it seems for her to try to live a higher 
 Ufe ! Her sisters may pose as patterns of probity, they 
 
72 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 may become influences for good in the world, and their 
 children may look up to them with hope and confi- 
 dence ; but she must not pose as anything but a humble 
 penitent all her days. The Magdalen must never try 
 to be the saint, or society will remind her that, after 
 all, she is only a sinner. The worst penalty of sin is to 
 be shut off and shut down from the attainment of holi- 
 |/ness; it seems out of character for certain kinds of ex- 
 perience to attempt. And then there is a man here who 
 sinned against society, and society found him out and 
 then cast him out. Let him try to get back. He talks 
 about a chance for a higher life. Where does the 
 chance come in ? I do not say society is wrong, but it 
 is certain to point the finger at him forever while he 
 moves in and out amongst men. We say to one an- 
 other. That is the man who stole in such a year, and 
 got three months, or a year, or five years, as the case 
 may have bf^en. Talk about the higher life for him ! 
 Let him appear in a pulpit, and see what you will do 
 with him. The evil deed will cling to him all his days. 
 Yet the cry is going up, " Cannot I have the chance to 
 live the nobler life that I once had the opportunity for, 
 and sinned away ? " There is a paper in existence, of 
 which you may have heard, called T. P.'s Weekly. 
 I got it a while ago to read a certain article in it on 
 George Eliot. I think it was the best article on that 
 gifted authoress I ever read. The writer of the article 
 said that one thing was constant in George Eliot's 
 psychological writings — her insistence upon the Neme- 
 sis of justice. She never seemed to give a gleam or a 
 gUmmer of hope. Take her Hetty Sorrel, in "Adam 
 Bede." Poor Hetty was more a fool than a sinner — a 
 sinner because a fool. George Eliot trampled upon her, 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN 13 
 
 crushed her, broke her ; from the first page to the last 
 you don't see that there is the sHghtest offer of relief, 
 not a word for poor Hetty. Now, who was Hetty ? I 
 think we are justified in supposing that it was George 
 Eliot herself, and her verdict upon her own sin is writ- 
 ten large in her books. She did not believe in the new 
 opportunity or the higher life. She believed that you 
 must dree your weird, take your punishment, and, 
 once you have taken it, be condemned to the lower 
 plane forever. She makes one of her characters say, 
 in words that are a wail, " It is not worth doing wrong 
 for — nothing ever is in this world." Here, then, is the 
 demand of the sinful heart and conscience. Let me 
 see if I can meet it. 
 
 Your sin can be taken from you as though it had 
 never been. The Gospel that we have to preach is the 
 declaration of Christ's power of so dealing with your 
 sin that it is His, and not yours. Permit me an exag- 
 geration for the moment. There are some truths so 
 big that you cannot state them until you use hyper- 
 bole. It is as though you were to say, " I am not 
 guilty ; the Sinless One is." So complete is the deliv- 
 erance that its moral value is undoubted, instantaneous ; 
 a man can stand straight up on his feet and say, justi- 
 fied in the sight of God, " My redemption has meant 
 the passion of Deity; my Redeemer has the assets of 
 my character. My broken life is His, and the way of 
 opportunity has opened before me because of the holi- 
 ness of Christ, as well as His passion." 
 
 Why don't I explain it? I cannot; nobody can. I 
 have my ideas about it which no theory could ever ex- 
 haust. " Him who knew no sin God made to be sin 
 on our behalf that we might become the righteousness 
 
74 
 
 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of God in Him." God is not reconciled to us by the 
 
 suffering of Deity; there is no passage in the New 
 
 Testament which says so. We are reconciled to God; 
 
 and, from the first page of the New Testament to the 
 
 last, the Gospel of reconciliation is the theme of the 
 
 u /Master and the prophet and the apostle alike. God was 
 
 ^.vvw *'_'^ Christ reconciling the world unto Himself,' not im- 
 
 •C-vMN/Ma-^ puting unto us our trespasses. If ever there was a 
 
 '^T^^ ' Gospel which just met the need that human ex- 
 
 ;tf^Lv<^ perience most needs it is that Gospel of the 
 
 J'Jt\^vl''' Cross of Christ. Let those who have sinned sin no 
 
 4 -TT "i^ more. The death of Christ is not an excuse for human 
 
 H Js*rs»^^" ' "^y' ^^ ^^ God's verdict upon it. The Eternal 
 
 ^^*^ * llighteousness spake in the suffering of the innocent 
 
 
 vv* 
 
 it 
 
 when Jesus died on Calvary, but it means that you were 
 set free, as free as the best of humankind, and the 
 blackest sinner may become the brightest saint. 
 " Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white 
 as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shall be 
 as wool." It would be impossible to exaggerate the 
 moral value of that Gospel ; and that cannot be un- 
 true which has such moral results. There are some 
 men who would remain bad all their lives if they were 
 not assured of such an emancipation as this. You 
 stand away from your sin, and between you and it is a 
 great gulf fixed. Then begins the possibility of holi- 
 ness ; then, and not till then. That Gospel justifies it- 
 self by results ; and said I not well in declaring that 
 the Atonement is there, the whole of Christianity? It 
 is its beginning and its end. 
 
 I appeal now to two orders of experience — the first, 
 that mentioned at the beginning — the man who sees 
 no need for that Gospel in his own case. Have you 
 
 ^ -* U^'it^ U Ptv^ T-Vi^\|u<UU/VUA (hM/V*jkWui^ 
 
GOD'S REMEDY FOR SIN V5 
 
 seen a need for it in anybody else's, now? If you feel 
 that you are superior to it, that the Christ is dear to you 
 without it, perhaps some day you will see for your own 
 sake deep into the mystery, and find that you cannot 
 do without the Crucified. But, whether that day ever 
 comes or not, will you stand alongside the sinner now, 
 and, in the sweet simplicity of the Master Himself, be 
 prepared to affirm it for those who do need it ? 
 
 " Doubtful, where I fain would rest, 
 Frailest where I seem the best. 
 Only strong for lack of test, 
 What am I that I should press 
 Special pleas of selfishness. 
 Coolly mounting into heaven, 
 On my neighbour unforgiven ? " 
 
 " Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he 
 fall." We have not only to preach the Christ of the 
 Resurrection morning-, but the Christ who agonised on 
 Calvary, and at that point we touch a mystery so great 
 that it would take eternity to explain, and it is necessary 
 for every soul of man born into the world. 
 
 The second order of experience — need I appeal to 
 you ? You are l ow down — get up ! You feel in 
 despair — there is no place for despair; for the Christ 
 is Master of all moral records, as well ?s of the world 
 of moral standards. You feel the remorse which comes 
 from having lived a wrong life. Remorse is not re- 
 pentance. Lay hold upon eternal life. There is a way 
 for you into the highest, and that way lies past the 
 Cross of Jesus Christ. Amen ! 
 
VII 
 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 
 
 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee. 
 
 — Isaiah xliii. 2. 
 
 Your sorrow shall be turned into joy. — John xvi. 20. 
 
 EVERY generation has its own way of look- 
 ing at the facts of life, and its own 
 peculiar habits of thought. No man can 
 absolutely escape the influence of the intellectual 
 and spiritual climate of the times in which he 
 lives, nor can he avoid asking the questions which 
 the conditions of his time create, and which other men 
 are asking also. There is probably no question more 
 characteristic of our generation than that which we 
 have styled the mystery of pain. In one sense it is a 
 question that is very old ; in another and larger sense 
 it is a question that is absolutely new; it is as old as 
 human sorrow, and it is as new as the experience of 
 the youngest man. When we think of experience — the 
 experience into which we are born, the experience we 
 make for ourselves — we are sometimes inclined to aver 
 that the question of the mystery of pain never was so 
 intense as it is at the present hour, and certainly there 
 is no question which is more characteristic of our own 
 day and generation. 
 
 I will give some reasons why I believe the question is 
 for us to-day so much larger than it has ever been in 
 the history of the world. Within the memory of some 
 
 7S 
 
THE MYSTERY OP PAIN V7 
 
 the problem did not exist, at any rate, in its intensity 
 was not so present in fact to the minds of men, though 
 it was always in a degree assumed in their experience 
 and intercourse. For example, that gifted lady, 
 Frances Power Cobbe, in her " Recollections," states 
 that she can remember how unmercifully, when she was 
 a child, both animals and children were flogged and 
 variously ill-treated by those who had them in charge; 
 not universally, but so generally that it never excited 
 much surprise. We are aware, too, that such crea- 
 tions of Dickens as Mr. Squeers and Mr. Creakle could 
 scarcely exist to-day ; and such institutions as the So- 
 ciety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (to ad- 
 here to the same line of illustration) are comparatively 
 modern. To our immediate forefathers the problem 
 of pain, which is largely the result of human sympathy, 
 did not exist in such a degree as it exists for us. 
 
 To go a few generations farther back. In the time 
 when Puritanism was in its grandeur — and, if Lord 
 Macaulay is to be believed, Puritanism produced the 
 noblest type of character that has ever been produced 
 in any country and in any age — we notice a certain 
 grimness about the noblest of the men who represented 
 it, say, in the seventeenth century, and, though less 
 conspicuously, in the sixteenth, too. Going to Refor- 
 mation days, the character of Sir Thomas More has 
 variously been commented upon, Catholic though he 
 were, for this reason, amongst others, but this one is 
 always given, that he was a kind and affectionate 
 father, who treated his children with tenderness more 
 like that of a friend than of a parent. We sometimes 
 speak about the good old times ; well, there were times 
 in this country when grandeur of character was per- 
 
78 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 haps more conspicuous than it is to-day, but it is 
 perfectly certain that the sensitiveness and sympathy 
 and perplexity in the presence of the problem of pain 
 did not exist in previous ages of this country as they 
 exist for our experience at the present hour. 
 
 When we go to other civilisations than our own, and 
 especially those v^hich have played a great part in the 
 making of the civilisation in which we live — take, for 
 example, that of ancient Greece, which is in some sense 
 typical and in other sense unique — we find that the 
 problem is present to the thinkers and poets who ex- 
 pressed the spontaneous feeling of the men of their 
 days. But, while the Greek tragic poets could write 
 eloquently about the question of pain and of human 
 woe, which they attributed to the jealousy of the gods, 
 we notice one very conspicuous difference between 
 their way of looking at the question and the way in 
 which we look at it to-day. For a statement of that 
 difference I would refer you to the works of Dr. 
 Martineau, who, in his " Hours of Thought," points 
 out what I suppose we all know now — that between 
 the civilisation of ancient Greece and that of to-day 
 there is this difference, that in the one pity for the 
 weak, oppressed, and unfortunate is largely absent, and 
 in the other, with all its faults, these things do exist, 
 and increasingly so. There were no hospitals in an- 
 cient Greece, no homes for the poor, no orphanages, no 
 institutions for the lessening of human woe ; there were 
 no protests against war. I think that in the last war 
 very largely the strength of what we, for want of a 
 better name, have called the pro-Boer agitation in this 
 country came from the Christian hatred of war in gen- 
 eral. In ancient Greece that did not exist. With all 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 79 
 
 their love of beauty and of human perfection as they 
 conceived it, the Greeks, while they talked about pain, 
 had very little sympathy for those who endured it ; and, 
 therefore, between them and us there is a great gulf 
 fixed in the statement of the problem. In our case it is 
 new, larger, more intense than it was in theirs. 
 
 Before passing from this line of illustration, I think 
 I ought to mention the Oriental religions, which have 
 been founded upon a perception of human pain. The 
 greatest of these. Buddhism, which includes a larger 
 number of adherents than Christianity, came into ex- 
 istence simply and solely through a perception of the 
 fact that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly up- 
 ward. How did Orientalism settle the question? By 
 a selfish individualism which, for the sake of its own 
 future and escape from a dismal present, taught obedi- 
 ence to something like the Christian law of love, but 
 which, when we examine it, is exceedingly unlike it. 
 Buddhism has no God, no future; its solution of the 
 problem of pain is a solution which was a dismal 
 pessimism, and is to-day. There is no answer to the 
 question given in Orientalism, which presents, on the 
 one hand, the extreme of ignoble quiescence, and, on 
 the other, of insensate cruelty. 
 
 Now, how is it that we are thinking about it, say, 
 within the last fifty years, in such a degree? There 
 are several reasons, first, amongst which I place this, 
 that we have discovered the solidarity of human ex- 
 istence with that of the creation at large. Another is 
 this : We have, through years of ease and tranquillity, 
 comparatively speaking, come to feel how arduous was 
 the exisence in which our fathers lived, and with our 
 increased sensibility has come increased sympathy and 
 
80 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 susceptibility to the problem of pain. Is it not true 
 that with increase of knowledge, in our case, has, in 
 some degree, come increase of sorrow, too ? The more 
 capable a man is of reflecting, the more capable he is 
 of suffering. Increased culture means increased 
 capacity for woe. 
 
 " We look before and after 
 
 And sigh for what is not ; 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 With some pain is fraught. 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell 
 Of saddest thought." 
 
 I have a further reason for believing that this sensi- 
 bility of which I speak — a sensibility greater in this 
 generation than in any other — is due to the cumulative 
 effect of the Christian Gospel, But, because there may 
 be some man who will not agree with me, I simply state 
 that point, and leave it without attempting to demon- 
 strate it. I declare that if there had never been a 
 Christ in the world, and if you had never heard of 
 Him, and if there had been no men to live the Gospel, 
 your statement of the great problem of human ill would 
 have been no different from that of ancient Greece or 
 of Oriental Buddhism. The difference has been made 
 in sensibility by the influence of the spirit of Christ in 
 the community in which we live. In a sense, then, our 
 statement of the problem of pain has been given to us 
 by Christ, and, were it not for Jesus Christ, the problem 
 would not exist for us as it does. If Christ creates 
 the problem, where shall we look for the solution but in 
 Christ ? 
 
 We go on now to state the ways in which the 
 problem shapes itself to our mind. First, I think the 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 81 
 
 problem of pain has for us a greater range and in- 
 tensity than it ever had before, because, as I have 
 already said, we have discovered our oneness with the 
 rest of creation. We no longer speak as if the world 
 were made for man, and for man alone. That would 
 be a conceited, ignorant, and narrow view. Moreover, 
 if the world exists for man alone, and no other sentient 
 life has a claim as against ours, then, indeed, there is 
 something wrong with our moral nature ; for we re- 
 serve our pity for suffering only when it affects our- 
 selves, and yet we perceive that the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain together, too. Within 
 the last fifty years we have found out that in the 
 struggle for existence some of the lower forms of 
 sentient life are as heavily handicapped as we. John 
 Stuart Mill has rightly said that, in truth, the very 
 things for which we reprobate, hang, and imprison one 
 another are Nature's everyday performance. Recently 
 I happened to be riding over the Brighton Downs, and 
 scared away some little creature — a weasel or stoat, or 
 something of that kind — from its prey. I came upon 
 the scene without knowing exactly what was going on. 
 Before I could check my horse he had placed his hoof 
 on a little bird that was lying dying, and crushed out 
 the last spark of life. I could not help thinking, as I 
 took the poor little thing into my hand. Here is an 
 epitome of the problem of pain. If this were the only 
 example in the wide universe of life ruthlessly de- 
 stroyed, of fear and anguish, surely in the problem of 
 the sufferings of this little feathered creature is the 
 whole question of pain as it affects me and the rest of 
 humanity. If I could say anything about the reason 
 for the suffering of that little bird, I should have some- 
 
82 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 thing to say about the reason for the suffering of men, 
 and, conversely, if I can see any reason in the suffering 
 of men, there is something that I can safely leave in 
 the hands of God in so far as the suffering of the bird 
 is concerned. 
 
 We notice, too, the apparent indiscriminate incidence 
 of pain, and its apparent meaninglessness in operation. 
 Take that disaster in the West Indies in 1902, by 
 which, within the space of a few minutes, 30,000 people 
 were hurled into eternity — more than fell altogether in 
 the long dreary months of the South African War. We 
 cannot understand how it was that good and bad alike, 
 apparently, in that doomed city, as in Sodom and Go- 
 morrah, were swept out of existence by this awful 
 cataclysm. One pathetic incident I remember reading 
 in the newspapers was this : At the bedside in one of 
 the houses that was entombed by the lava and ashes 
 from Mont Pelee a lady was kneeling saying her 
 prayers. She was not anticipating the catastrophe; 
 she was praying to God for blessing, and apparently 
 His answer was to overwhelm her in destruction. Per- 
 haps in the next street from her was a man who had 
 been living in debauchery. Good and bad alike, they 
 went to a common doom, and went without a word of 
 warning, without time to think or to appeal to the great 
 Being who had done it all. The apparent meaning- 
 lessness and indiscriminateness of the operation of 
 pain make the problem larger to us. 
 
 But, again, and closer to our experience, is this : it 
 strikes at the noblest part of our nature. That man 
 feels most who is the best man. The man who is 
 noblest is the man who is most capable of suffering. 
 Dr. Parker said on more than one occasion from this 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 80 
 
 pulpit : Preach to the broken h.earts ; the man who does 
 that is always sure of a congregation, for there is at 
 least one in every pew. He may have been right, he 
 may have been wrong, but this is certain, that in a con- 
 gregation of the size of this present one there are some 
 whose noble nature has been wounded, who, if they 
 had been less capable of unselfish feeling, would have 
 been less capable of sorrow than they are to-day. The 
 man who is able to love unselfishly and has been treated 
 with ingratitude, the man who is able to give himself 
 in loving sacrifice for another, and whom death robs 
 of the nearest and the dearest, knows something of the 
 problem of pain which is altogether hidden from the 
 man who lives for himself, to eat, drink, and be merry, 
 defying the death that comes to-morrow. So the 
 problem is larger because it strikes the very noblest 
 part of human nature, and is felt most keenly there. 
 Lastly, in this statement of the way in which this 
 problem shapes itself to our mind, oftentimes it seems 
 as though, if joy has slain its thousands, sorrow has 
 slain its ten thousands. Where you find a man who 
 cannot bear prosperity, and who has been destroyed 
 by it, you are sure to find another who has been unable 
 to bear adversity, and has been made bitter by it. 
 Suppose there is only one man in this congregation 
 whose life has been ruined, for whom the whole crea- 
 tion has been darkened, not through his own fault, but 
 because of a calamity undeserved, and it has turned 
 him bitter and made him to protest against the order of 
 the universe — can you wonder at it? If that man 
 alone were here the problem exists for him, and he 
 would feel, as many of us do, most likely, in our sym- 
 pathies with suffering humanity, that there was some- 
 
84 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 thing of reason in Coulson Kernahan's way of stating 
 the question when, in one of his little books, he makes 
 the whole human race come together and utter a chal- 
 lenge against God. For in the statement of the 
 mystery of pain we are really lifting up our faces in 
 challenge to the Most High, asking for some explana- 
 tion of the mystery. For we cannot put the blame 
 entirely upon man. No matter how much man is to 
 blame, there is pain anterior to his moral responsibility, 
 pain beneath it, pain beyond it. The problem of pain 
 is greater than the range of human moral depravity. 
 
 Now I come back to this point at which we started. 
 We must look for answer just at the place already in- 
 dicated — the Cross of Jesus Christ — for this reason, if 
 for none other, that it is through the preaching of the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ that the problem in its present 
 form has emerged in our day for the non-Christian as 
 well as for the Christian man. But we can narrow the 
 range a little, by pointing out that we have nothing to 
 do for the moment with the problem of pain as it 
 affects the lower creation ; if we can settle the problem 
 satisfactorily in so far as it affects ourselves we can 
 leave the rest for the time being in the hands of the God 
 to whom we have successfully appealed. 
 
 Further, I would point out that the problem of pain 
 gains something to-day from the large part which our 
 imagination plays in it. That catastrophe in the West 
 Indies, for instance, is not so large as you think it is, 
 and in another sense it is going on at this moment, as 
 largely as it ever did. For the whole of the pain ever 
 suffered by humanity since time began is not greater 
 than that of the man who has been capable of suffering 
 the most at any one time. And what man was that? 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 85 
 
 When I come to think of it, that must have been Jesus 
 Christ and none other. When you say 30,000 people 
 were hurled into eternity in a moment, what you mean 
 is that 30,000 units were destroyed ; and, whatever was 
 suffered here by the man who suffered most, he suf- 
 fered all. The problem of pain is not greater in im- 
 mensity than it is in intensity. If you have suffered 
 as much as any man who ever lived, the whole problem 
 of pain is concentrated in your experience. That nar- 
 rows the range at once. For now what we have to do 
 is to ask why any one man should suffer, and, in asking 
 why any one man should suffer, I take the man who 
 suffered most, and if I can give any reason for his 
 suffering I have done something to explain the mystery 
 of the suffering of the whole creation. Here, then, 
 opens out a principle which will help you a long way 
 along the road to a solution ; it is this : 
 
 Every human life has a three-fold value — a value for 
 itself, a value for humanity, a value for God. Some of 
 you will say that is fairly obvious; at least, so far as 
 the first is concerned. No; in one sense it is not 
 obvious at all. Its. value for self — " but it is not yet 
 made manifest what we ourselves shall be." Its value 
 for humanity — that is obvious, for no man liveth to 
 himself. Its value for God— how much that involves 
 I do not know, for God's ways are in the sea, and 
 where we live to-day is but the vestibule of the life 
 that is to be. Its value for self— there is nothing 
 noble, worthy, sublime in human character and achieve- 
 ment but has its roots in the mystery of pain. Will 
 any man challenge that ? I defy him to look upon the 
 field of history and find any man whom the conscious- 
 ness of humanity has affirmed to be noble who has not 
 
86 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 had his discipline of struggle and pain. What is the 
 difference between innocence and holiness? Look 
 at that dear little child sitting beside its mother. The 
 faces have a similarity in contour and expression, but 
 there is a difference, too ; the innocence of the one is not 
 the mellow tenderness of the other. Something has 
 been learned in the journey of life between innocence 
 and nobleness — the innocence of childhood, the noble- 
 ness of womanhood. What has made the difference? 
 The difference has been the battle of life, acquaintance 
 with pain. Would you rather be the child or the 
 mother? I will answer the question for you. You 
 would rather be the mother, with the wisdom of the 
 mother, if you could keep the heart of the child. There 
 is the ideal of humanity. Man is at his noblest like unto 
 a little child. Now, only once in history have we seen 
 that perfectly done, but here and there we see it nearly 
 approximated unto. There is a relationship between 
 holiness and innocence which fits them for acquaintance 
 with each other. The saint and the child are very near 
 together, but the former has been through the furnace 
 to learn what the child-heart is. Nowhere in the range 
 of history have I seen aught that is noble, sublime, or 
 holy in human character and conduct but it has its 
 roots in the mystery of pain. Let me speak to you, 
 especially to those who are not Christians, and perhaps 
 do not intend to be — it is true of you, too. The finest 
 man you know to-day, the man you would most wish 
 to resemble, the man who has been of most service to 
 your character, is the man who knows life in its lights 
 and shades, pleasures and pains, sorrows and joys. 
 You do not want to feel that he is shallow; and, if he 
 is not, it is because he has been through the waters, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 87 
 
 and knows something of the bitterness as well as the 
 pleasantness of life — for life is not all pain. Joy is 
 purchased by acquaintance with pain, and in the 
 highest joy is latent an experience of pain. Human 
 instinct tells us that must be true. 
 
 There is the pain which is the direct result of wrong- 
 doing. While I admit that this does not explain the 
 whole of the existence of pain, it explains, perhaps, 
 what somebody here present feels to have been the 
 most perplexing part of his experience. Here is a man 
 with the mark of Cain upon his brow; he looks sadly 
 out upon life because of what might have been; the 
 tender grace of a day that is dead will never come 
 back to him. H I could only remove the punishment 
 of your sins, the problem of pain would cease to exist 
 for you. Then listen to this. So soon as I look upon 
 Jesus Christ for a solution, so soon there comes home to 
 me a message of hope. For I cannot believe in punish- 
 ment which is merely retributive ; I do not think such 
 a thing exists. When God writes His verdict upon 
 sin, in the pain that must be borne, then I see hope for 
 the soul that is punished. He punishes that He may 
 save. Punishment is warning, awakening, calling 
 back to God, and, if you will, the curse may become the 
 Cross. I go beyond this. I see that pain is that which 
 deepens human nature in such wise that even sympathy 
 with joy is only possible through sympathy with pain. 
 You cannot enjoy, and you have not come to the power 
 of seeing others enjoy, if it be not for your acquaintance 
 with the opposite of joy. I do not know whether I 
 ought to call pain the opposite of joy. There is not in 
 our language a word to express sympathy with joy. 
 And yet the word has just been employed, which is a 
 
88 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 wrong one, because there is not a right one. That 
 word sympathy merely means " suffering with." We 
 have no word for " joying with " ; if there were, it 
 Vv'ould be something like " with-joicing " — how shall 
 I with-joice with any man unless I first with-pain with 
 him? To sympathise with joy we need to sympathise 
 with sorrow. I now come to a point where language 
 is not big enough to tell all that I mean. That which 
 is best in human nature and experience depends, first 
 of all, upon your acquaintance with the great mystery 
 of pain. Let me illustrate : the Mayor of Brighton 
 gave a children's fancy dress ball, and looo little people 
 went to take part in it. Parents were privileged to be 
 present in our two largest buildings — the Dome and the 
 Corn Exchange — to see the little ones file through 
 them, and I went because I had a stake in the concern. 
 I noticed this, and it was an exceedingly pathetic sight ; 
 as the little ones came past, here and there I saw a man 
 and a woman crying. What for? The little ones 
 were not crying ; they were just in their seventh heaven. 
 I suppose we were, too, who were watching with full 
 hearts. Why were the grown-up people crying as 
 they looked at the little ones filing by? I see the 
 answer in your faces ; it is because of the sympathy 
 with the joy of the children which was felt by the 
 grown man, with his knowledge of the weight of the 
 world's sorrow. 
 
 " O little feet, that such long years 
 Must wander on through hopes and fears, 
 Must ache and bleed beneath your load ; 
 I, nearer to the wayside inn, 
 Where toil shall cease and rest begin. 
 Am weary, thinkiug of your road." 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 89 
 
 We feel, when we look at the joy that is in the world, 
 that we cannot read it as we should, we cannot enter 
 into it as we ought, we cannot feel ourselves bound to 
 it with ties that nothing can sunder, except we have 
 first had our acquaintance with pain. Even love — 
 which spells sacrifice — love presumes pain. Is there 
 any man, be he Christian, Jew, or Atheist, who would 
 be without the love that lightens his life ? To be with- 
 out the pain he must be without the love ; neither can 
 exist — nor does exist — in this world without the other ; 
 and in the next, I take it that the highest ']oy, the bliss 
 unspeakable, without which we are never to be, will be 
 that in which the experience of pain is latent, but not 
 perceived; experienced, but not remembered. Our 
 sorrow shall be turned into joy. 
 
 Here I come to the second part of the value of which 
 I have spoken. Let me state the points without at- 
 tempting to illustrate. Humanity is one; we take the 
 problem in its wholeness. If any man can affirm that 
 in general, whatever he may say of particulars, pain 
 has proved to be a good for him — or, rather, to be care- 
 ful of language, a means to a good — I ask that man 
 where the good is going to stop. Can you be perfectly 
 content if you realise that your brethren, the rest of 
 humanity, are excluded from the good that you have 
 earned? Assuredly not. Personality comes to its 
 own only in relations. The highest joy which man- 
 kind has shown itself capable of knowing is that of 
 vicarious suffering. Sometimes we shrink from that 
 highest, but for those who have shown themselves 
 capable of it there has come a great discovery, the dis- 
 covery that that joy which calmly seeks that blessed- 
 
90 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 ness is his who gives himself that others may Uve. 
 Now, when I say your Hfe has a value to humanity, it 
 may be that God is carrying out that principle in you 
 without consulting you. There is such a thing as 
 vicarious experience. Who knows but that the poor 
 man outside this church this morning^ who, of an- 
 other's fault and not of his own, has been moved to a 
 sufifering which you shall never share, is doing some- 
 thing for you? If I am unduly mystical, let me say 
 this in support, if not in proof, of my proposition : 
 What you are living to-day you are living for me as 
 well as for yourself. No one like you will ever live 
 again, and no one will live precisely your life. What 
 you are doing, what you are suffering, is for humanity 
 as well as for yourself. You are an end in yourself. 
 God thinks of you as though none other had ever lived, 
 but He thinks of you in relation to the rest, and when 
 the great story comes to be told you will find that 
 suflfering has been giving, and that men have been giv- 
 ing in their pain who never knew it at all. 
 
 That brings me to the last point — that suffering is 
 giving. That is the way in which I should like to 
 read of God. If you could have God come again, or 
 supposing you had never heard of Him on the plane of 
 human history at all, and knew nothing about God 
 except what preachers say and you yourself have 
 thought, how would you have Him to come? If God 
 came on the clouds of heaven, declaring Himself with 
 great pomp and glory, I think I should shrink from the 
 great psalm of majesty ; there would be a note wanting 
 that I should long to hear. But if God came as a 
 fellow and as a leader, and laid Himself alongside my 
 every experience; if God showed Himself capable of 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 91 
 
 suffering, I should feel that God had reached to the 
 ultimate in His nature, and bound me to Him there. 
 And so it has been. Jesus Christ has come. Jesus 
 Christ has come to bring us to the Father; He came 
 bearing His Cross. He leads humanity through the 
 Via Dolorosa; when He takes us through the waters 
 He is at our side, and it is from His lips in the hour of 
 Gethsemane that I hear the promise, " Your sorrow 
 shall be turned into joy." Let me read to you the 
 words of a Roman Catholic theologian, which strike 
 me as being so beautifully true that they may fitly be 
 quoted here : " Our Lord left a special blessing for 
 those children of the first resurrection, who, being 
 perfected in a short time, have fulfilled many times, 
 and are taken in the unsullied freshness of their early 
 bloom, by the wasting sickness or the baptism of blood, 
 to behold the King in His beauty and the land that is 
 far away. But sooner or later a crisis comes in the 
 lives of the rest of us who linger here, when we are 
 constrained to walk — it may be with backward step 
 and averted eye — up the road that leads to Calvary, 
 and the sun goes down at noon, and the stars withdraw 
 their shining, and the Cross stands bare and cold under 
 the darkened heavens, and we must be stretched 
 thereon, whether we will or no. It is well for all in 
 that hour of solitary trial who can patiently, nay, 
 thankfully, embrace their cross as knowing that, in- 
 deed, they are not alone, but are crucified with Jesus." 
 
 Here is the secret of all highest joy, the greatest 
 paradox in human experience — the Cross is the secret 
 of the Crown. Without it you do not know life ; with- 
 out it you do not know God. Life is not all darkness, 
 and whatever darkness there is we can defy, for even 
 
02 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 here and now the secret of the Lord is with them that 
 stand under the shadow of Calvary. You have noth- 
 ing to fear, for it is a pierced hand that holds the 
 sceptre of the world. In the suffering Christ is my 
 hope of glory and of the bliss that fadeth not away. 
 We listen with thankfulness and with confidence to 
 His promise, given as He went forward to His own 
 Cross, " Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto 
 you ; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not 
 your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 
 
 I 
 
VIII 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL 
 ORDER 
 
 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven so in 
 earth. Give us, day by day, our daily bread. — Luke xi. 2-3. 
 
 If ye fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, 
 Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well ; but if 
 ye have respect to persons, ye cotntnit sin. — James ii. 8-g. 
 
 MANY of you must have been privileged to see 
 some time ago the Tissot gallery of paintings, 
 illustrative of our Lord's life and ministry. 
 It was an interesting collection of paintings 
 from this circumstance, if for nothing more, 
 that the great painter who gave them to the 
 world spent ten years after his conversion in study- 
 ing on the spot in the Holy Land the conditions under 
 which our Lord must have lived and wrought and 
 taught. It seems to me that God must have taught the 
 painter Himself. One of the pictures which most 
 commanded my attention was that entitled "The Lord's 
 Prayer." Here Tissot portrays the Master standing 
 in the midst of His disciples, who are seated in a semi- 
 circle around Him, like a class waiting at the knees of a 
 teacher. The Master's hand is raised in hortatory 
 fashion, and the disciples are evidently repeating after 
 Him the words of the Lord's Prayer. It struck me 
 that there, by a flash of intuition, the painter was per- 
 
 S3 
 
94 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 mitted in God's providence to give to the world for the 
 first time the actual conditions under which our Lord 
 taught His disciples to pray in those golden words. 
 " Our Father which art in heaven," said the great 
 Teacher. " Otir Father which art in heaven," re- 
 peated after Him the poor Galilean fishermen sitting 
 side uy side. " Hallowed be Thy name. Thy king- 
 dom come. Thy will be done. Give us our daily 
 bread." The kingdom of God had come when the 
 disciples of Jesus, sitting side by side, said in company, 
 "Our Father which art in heaven," and looking up into 
 the face of Jesus as they said it. The world has been 
 looking into the face of Jesus ever since as the hope of 
 humanity, the great Teacher, Master, Guide, and Re- 
 deemer of the race. There is no problem of impor- 
 tance to humanity which has not some reference to the 
 Gospel of Christ. We to-day, like the disciples of old, 
 can say, " Lord, teach us to pray," and when we are 
 so taught and in His spirit pray, it is for the common 
 needs of humanity that our prayers are most urgent. 
 " Thy kingdom come " will cover them all. But there 
 is no man so rich in this world's goods who can afford 
 to ignore the complementary petition, " Give us day by 
 day our daily bread." On another occasion, as I need 
 not remind you, the Master enunciated, not for the first 
 time in the history of Israel, the two great command- 
 ments which are really one — 
 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart, and zvith all thy soid, and with all thy mind. 
 This is the first and great commandment. And the 
 second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
 hour as thyself. On these two commandments hang 
 all the law and the prophets." 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 95 
 
 The little group of simple men who heard Him thus 
 speak went forth to carry the Gospel message to the 
 world, went forth conquering and to conquer, carrying 
 the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. If there be 
 any other commandment, it is summed up in this : 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Thank 
 God the kingdom of God came when any man' could 
 once sincerely pray so. The kingdom of God has 
 come, and come fully, when any man has given himself/ 
 over to the keeping of Jesus Christ and in His spiritu 
 serves his fellows. No man can partake of the spirit' 
 of Jesus without becoming a saviour — such were Peter, 
 James, and John, whom the Master taught to pray. 
 
 But in another sense the kingdom has not yet come. 
 Society does not obey the voice of the Master. Nearly 
 two millenniums have passed since that historic scene 
 in which the Master taught His disciples to say, " Thy 
 kingdom come," and it has not come yet. The Church 
 has at times been unfaithful to her trust, and has af- 
 firmed that to be the whole Gospel which was only a 
 part. We ought never to acquiesce in counsels of 
 despair. No problem is intractable ; no human want, 
 however seemingly hopeless, is really so. The Gospel 
 of Je sus Christ is a Gospel which carries the_ whole 
 ^56d of mankindTand tnere is no'wanrwhich_it cannot 
 meet. ~^he Church frorrTage to age has been righting 
 herself from time to time in these things, and if at the 
 moment we have got out of touch with some of the 
 I most urgent needs of our day and generation, it is 
 • time that the Church came back in faithfulness to the 
 I spirit of the Lord's Prayer. Now, just at the moment 
 I it seems to me that the Church of Christ in this country 
 ^is in danger of getting out of touch with the great 
 
96 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 \ masses of the workers ; I do not say she has done so, 
 ) but I firmly believe she is in danger of doing it. The 
 statistics which have been published by the London 
 Daily News have caused much searching of heart 
 on the part of a good many of us, and the fault is not 
 entirely with the ministry, whatever may be the real 
 cause of the apparent shrinkage in attendance at public 
 worship. I do not believe that the evil is without a 
 I remedy, nor do I believe that the abstention of the 
 'masses from the service of the house of God is caused 
 (by indifiference to the great themes of religion. The 
 / day will yet come — I long to see it, and hope to live to 
 [see it — when the whole nation shall be brought back 
 (to the loving service of the public worship of Almighty 
 ^God. Nor do I think it is caused by indifference to . 
 the Gospel as it came from the lips of Jesus Christ.' 
 Respect for the name of Jesus never stood higher than I 
 it stands at this moment. You can enter no assembly ) 
 whatever, be it political, rehgious, or merely a place of 
 entertainment, in which any sentiment derogatory to 
 the name of Jesus would be entertained with patience. 
 To-day the great community is filled with admiration, 
 reverence, and love for the name of the lowly Naza- 
 rene. But at the same moment it is true they distrust i 
 those who speak in His name. The ministry is not* 
 just now of good odour in the nostrils of the masses of 
 the people. I often feel that when I have to address | 
 working men they begin by distrusting me: they dis-i 
 trust my brethren of the cloth ; they feel we have no 
 real message for the deep needs of the hour, Now.l 
 the reason, or one reason, is that we have shirked our| 
 duty as a church in regard to great social problems,! 
 the struggle to live. If we have nothing to say 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 97 
 
 we have failed Christianity, Christianity has not 
 failed us. 
 
 This problem is one which is comparatively new. 
 Every student of history knows that in this country 
 centuries ago and under the manorial system, whatever 
 laws might be wrong, the problem of a livelihood for 
 every member of a village community had not even 
 arisen. Plague, pestilence, and famine attacked our 
 ancestors ; but if there was bread enough to go round 
 in the manor the hungriest member of the community 
 was entitled to his share. It is almost within the 
 memory of some living when a modification of this 
 system obtained in rural districts ; it does not obtain 
 now. We cannot meet, under our complex social 
 system, with an example of a country parson like him 
 whom Goldsmith describes, who was " passing rich on 
 forty pounds a year " ; nor can we ever expect again to 
 see the close personal touch in the town between master 
 and man. For with the disappearance, or the com- 
 parative disappearance, of the small tradesman is 
 going, or has gone, the system of apprenticeship which 
 meant some responsibility on the part of the employer 
 for the welfare of the employed. Since 1846, and with 
 the abolition of the iniquitous Corn Laws, certain new 
 doctrines which have had their day have come into 
 vogue, have done a great deal for the amelioration of 
 society, and have brought some mischief too. The 
 doctrine of individual liberty has been carried so far 
 that in some relations it has become tyranny. At the 
 present moment the social order presents certain fea- 
 tures with which we are all familiar, each one of which 
 raises a multitude of problems. 
 
 i. — The first is simply this — the accumulation of 
 
98 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 capital in a few hands, the gradual extinction of 
 the small employer, the formation of great com- 
 panies, rings, combines, and trusts. In America 
 they are feeling the pressure and the power of 
 these great interests more than we are in England, 
 but here the tendency is on the increase ; more and more 
 is it observable that power is being placed in the hands 
 of a comparatively few rich men, who, whether they 
 use it for good or for evil, have the power to use. 
 Now, no great corporation has a soul ; you never met 
 with a conscience in a great body without an individ- 
 uality. Its employees are necessarily units for the ac- 
 cumulation of dividends, and nothing more. I state 
 the fact, and leave it. That tendency is on the in- 
 crease, and it is one fruit of the doctrine of individ- 
 ualism preached so vigorously by good men like John 
 Bright in the middle of the last century. 
 
 ii. — Another feature is the increase of the power and 
 the activity of trade unionism. I hold no brief for 
 trade unionism pure and simple; I believe it has been 
 fraught with many mischiefs. One of its tendencies 
 is to lower the level of ef^ciency to the ability of the 
 least efficient worker ; another has been to attempt petty 
 tyranny over individual workers who are prepared to 
 go further and do more than their fellows to give out 
 what is in them to do ; and the third has been the tend- 
 ency to victimise the community by restricting the 
 output, and therefore gradually lowering the level of 
 national efficiency. Now, in these days, when the 
 nation itself is struggling to maintain its footing 
 amongst the nations of the earth, when our commercial 
 supremacy (I hardly like the word) is threatened, there 
 ought to be no influence, whether it be capital or labour, 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 99 
 
 militating against the prosperity of the community as a 
 whole. But trade unionism was an actual necessity. 
 If trade unionism were to disappear to-morrow, you 
 know perfectly well what the lot of the workers would 
 be. It is bad enough now ; it was bad in the old days, 
 when the factory system first became a power, and 
 under such men as Cobden and Bright. What would 
 it be under Pierpont Morgan & Co. ? 
 
 Here I would point out to you a significant fact. 
 Men of the Samuel Morley type seem to have passed 
 away; money is accumulated in the hands of men of 
 different mental and moral calibre. Men who are 
 good for very little else seem to have the power of 
 making money, and that power gives them a dominance 
 over their fellows to which on no other ground they 
 are entitled. To make a long statement short, the 
 inevitable conflict between these two tendencies which 
 I have stated — the tendency towards the accumulation 
 of capital, and the tendency to the organisation of 
 labour in self-defence and something more — means a 
 certain detriment to the community in which, no matter 
 how you try to safeguard the results, the weakest are 
 the real sufferers. 
 
 iii. — A third feature of the present social order is 
 one with which we have been recently familiar in 
 London, and of which the processions of the unem- 
 ployed are a symptom — the tendency to ever-recurring 
 periods of depression, in which men, only some of 
 whom you ever hear about at all, are deprived of the 
 power of earning their own living. A large number 
 of men over forty years of age are living in dread of 
 to-morrow. It is becoming increasingly difficult in 
 the great business houses of this metropolis for men in 
 
100 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 {middle life once out of a situation to get another. 
 
 ^That is one fruit of our system. We attempt to meet 
 it by sporadic efforts at charity. Charity is not a 
 remedy, it is only an expedient. When on Christmas 
 Day in this place you were good enough to give a 
 collection amounting to i6i, in order to feed poor 
 children, you were doing what was done on that day 
 all over the country, and for one part of the year at 
 any rate the little children were clothed and warmed 
 and fed. There is plenty of goodness of heart in the 
 community when it is once reached. I was standing, 
 on New Year's Day, watching one of these great 
 dinners, when someone camje up to me and said, look- 
 ing at the poor little hungry feeders, " Isn't this a 
 pathetic sight?" I said, "It is, indeed." "How 
 long will this kind of thing be necessary ? " The re- 
 mark sank deep into mind and heart, for the question 
 is one that we ought all to be asking. Why should 
 these little children, the children of the workers, the 
 children of the poor, have to be dependent on us at all 
 for the bread that they eat? They have as much 
 right to it as we have, but it is simply one feature of 
 the system and the tendencies already described — the 
 recurring problem of want of employment, the pro- 
 cessions of men who tramp our streets, some of them 
 humbugs, no doubt, who don't intend to work, but who 
 are a symptom of distress deeper, greater, than our 
 imagination can really comprehend. 
 
 iv. — The last feature of the present system which 
 I shall mention is the increasing tendency to the separa- 
 tion of classes. Under the old system, with all its 
 mischief, the community held the master responsible 
 to some extent for the well-being of his employee. If 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 101 
 
 he treated him badly, all the neighbours knew it. The 
 apprentice was a member of his employer's family, and 
 his future was to some extent guaranteed by the 
 character of the master himself. To-day, and in Lon- 
 don, too, there are men who never see their employer, 
 don't know what he is like; they will certainly never 
 see the inside of his home, as the old apprentice used 
 to do. The tendency is for the distance between the 
 member of the big corporation or business house and 
 his workers to increase, and there is a real danger in 
 that separation of classes, a doing away of sympathy, 
 the erection of barriers between man and man which 
 ought not to be. To illustrate. Some time ago a 
 member of my own church came to me and said : 
 
 *' As a Christian man, I am very much troubled about 
 my position in business life. A few years ago I was in 
 someone else's employ, in daily dread of dismissal, like 
 other people ; I never knew when my time might come 
 to be the superfluous hand. By a fortunate accident 
 I obtained assistance to start for myself. Now I am 
 a member of a great trading concern; I have capital 
 in it, and I feel that every day I am in danger of treat- 
 ing men as I was once treated myself, and subjecting 
 them to the same fear that once haunted me. I pay 
 them the lowest rate of wages I can, for the simple 
 reason that I must. I myself am only one in a big 
 concern. If we pay our men more, we shall not be 
 able to pay dividends so good as a rival concern would, 
 and the general public is looking for dividends. What 
 am I, as a Christian man, to do? I cannot escape 
 from the present situation." 
 
 Perhaps you will blame me for what I said. I said, 
 " No, you can't ; you had better go on as you are ; but 
 
102 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 wherever a chance comes to you of befriending a man, 
 I do it." What we have to do is not so much to change 
 I you or your practice as to change the system. Here 
 is where it seems to me the Church has not been per- 
 fectly clear in the lead she ought to have given. The 
 preacher is not obliged to be a statesman : it is the 
 statesman's business to put into practice the principles 
 which the moral sense of the community demands ; and 
 it is the preacher's business, it is the duty of every 
 , Christian man, to see that those principles are made as 
 clear in regard to every-day social and business life as 
 can be. The remedy is not in levelling down ; never 
 " suffer any man in your presence to say that it is. If 
 you could take away every farthing of the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury's salary, you would not have done any- 
 thing whatever to solve the problems of the unem- 
 ployed in the streets of London. No; the remedy has 
 to be sought in applying through the moral sense of 
 the community the principles of Jesus Christ to the 
 public and the social life of our nation. If we do that 
 you will find that certain principles will come out clear 
 as the noonday, if we are honest to ourselves. 
 The first of these is that 
 
 (I.) Unlimited competition is wrong. There is a 
 t place for competition, but after a certain point has 
 been reached competition becomes tyranny. If 
 there is any man here who is mainly responsible 
 for the future of a small business house he will 
 know what I mean, if I use him as illustration. 
 You go to the promoter of a big concern that is about 
 to crush you, and say, " I cannot hold out against you. 
 What am I to do?" "You must make over your 
 business to me on such and such terms." " But that 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 103 
 
 means ruin to me ! " " Can't help it ; it's all fair ; 
 you're competing with me, and the better will win." 
 Does it not seem a hollow mockery? The better does 
 not win; the stronger does. In fact, the community 
 will be more likely to lose if the big house wins than 
 if the little one does. You are having to pay more to- 
 day for certain commodities just because of the victory 
 of the big concern over the little one, and yet under 
 unlimited competition the big concern is sure to win 
 the victory all the time. Where is the remedy ? That 
 is for you to say, member of Parliament ; it is for you 
 to say, leader of County Council, municipal organiser; 
 that is what you are there for, not for your own in- 
 terests. But if Jesus Christ stood, and he really does, 
 where I stand this morning, He would say to you, as 
 He said in the days of old, under other conditions, in 
 other terms, but with the same meaning and the same 
 principle. Unlimited competition is wrong; you have 
 no business to crush the weak as if he had no rights 
 against the strong. 
 
 (H.) Every man has a right to the opportunity of 
 labouring for his bread. " Oh," you say, " that is 
 easy to say — so easy. But who is going to find him 
 the opportunity of labouring for his bread? Besides, 
 has he any such right, after all, if there is no work for 
 him to do ? " Pardon me, you are begging the ques- 
 tion. By the complexity of our social organisation we 
 have taken away from him the power of using his 
 hands. It is a grand principle that if a man will not 
 work neither shall he eat, but it is a grander principle 
 that if a man will work he should eat. I would there- 
 fore pledge the national credit on behalf of every man 
 who is willing to use his two hands to work. Mark 
 
104 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 you, it is the duty of the community to provide him 
 with that opportunity, for if he were on Crusoe's island 
 he could work, he could till the soil and reap the fruits ; 
 but just because we are so closely and complexly 
 organised here, you have taken away from him the 
 opportunity of so doing-. 
 
 Again, the State — by which I mean you — is entitled 
 to the full value of every citizen it rears. I am a 
 poorer man to-day, and so are you, by virtue of every 
 idle worker that tramps the streets ; we are entitled to 
 what he could do. You say, " But then, he has done 
 enough, there is no work to do; over-production has 
 settled that." There never is over-production ; there is 
 over-proportionate production. Supposing that every 
 man who can turn out boots and shoes could double 
 his capacity to-morrow — would that be over-produc- 
 tion? Yes, if he took the time from making coats. 
 But if I can have a new pair of boots every morning, 
 all the better, provided it does not rob me of my coat. 
 It means that over-proportionate production is possi- 
 ble. Therefore what is wanted is the State organisa- 
 tion of labour. That does not mean that the State will 
 take out of the hands of private individuals the duty 
 and the opportunity of giving employment ; but it does 
 mean that when honest men, and there are plenty of 
 them, are deprived of the opportunity of honest labour 
 the State should find it without pauperising them. 
 
 (III.) So soon as an industry becomes a necessity 
 for the life of a nation — shall I say even for the high 
 prosperity of a nation — that belongs to the nation. 
 Let me illustrate. In the coal strike in America, of 
 which we have recently been hearing so much, a point 
 was reached when the community felt the dread of 
 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 105 
 
 coming winter and no coal. President Roosevelt, the 
 mouthpiece of the citizenship of America, spoke out 
 clearly, and said, " While you. Capital, and you, 
 Labour, are quarrelling, we are shivering with cold. 
 The nation can't stand still for you. Patch up your 
 differences quick, or we'll mine the coal." Why should 
 not that be applied to every such question when it 
 arises? Supposing that, in Lord Penrhyn's case, in- 
 stead of slate it was coal, and supposing instead of his 
 quarry in the particular district where he is master, he 
 owned all the coal; you would very soon see whether 
 we should settle that question which has been dragging 
 on so long. 
 
 (IV.) Up to a certain point the State is responsible 
 for the physical and moral well-being of its individual i 
 members. That is a very trite observation, but we 
 will keep on saying it until it is attended to. We do 
 it already in certain directions. We vaccinate the 
 whole community, whether it likes it or not. We are 
 quarrelling about educating them ; we don't leave it 
 to individual initiative to see whether a child is having 
 an opportunity of learning to read. Why is it, then, 
 that we take it for granted that the State has no duty \ 
 in relation to the question of feeding the father ? But 
 it has — some day you will wonder that anybody ever 
 questioned it at all— it has a duty. You have no right 
 to bring up your citizen, and then leave him to sink or 
 swim when it comes to a question of daily bread. If 
 he will not work he should be made to ; and if he will 
 work it is your duty to see to it that he has the means 
 of substance — which means that he is entitled to the 
 produce of his labour. Whatever that man's value 
 to the State, get it all ; he is entitled to his place in the 
 
106 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 State, his return from the State, because of what he 
 gives to the State. These principles are the very body 
 and blood of Christianity. No matter how difficult 
 they are to put in practice, they should be declared, and 
 as power rests with the community now, as it did not 
 when the Gospel of Jesus Christ was first preached, 
 we must thrust upon the communit}-, and not upon 
 individual churches, the duty of applying such moral 
 principles in all their grandeur and effectiveness to the 
 ordinary issues of human life. 
 
 I close by recalling your attention to the Author of 
 our salvation and to the words of Jesus Himself. 
 That is the way in which that great ministry began 
 which has shaken the world. Our Lord's first duty 
 was to His own. He went to Nazareth, where He had 
 been brought up, and opened the book, and read : 
 
 " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath 
 anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor ; He hath 
 sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver- 
 ance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
 blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach 
 the acceptable year of the Lord. And He closed the 
 book, and He gave it again to the minister and sat down. 
 And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue 
 were fastened on Him. And He began to say unto 
 them, 'This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.'" 
 
 Christ is the deliverer. Don't you leave these 
 problems to any demagogue who repudiates the Christ. 
 Christ is the King in the kingdom that is coming. 
 Christ is the Master of our soul, the Redeemer of our 
 life, and there is no corner of that life which is to be 
 left unredeemed. This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
 and this is the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. 
 
IX 
 THE DIVINE IDEAL OF MANHOOD* 
 
 Love is the fulfilling of the law. — Ro7n. xiii. lo. 
 
 JOHN the Divine is usually thought of as the 
 Apostle of Love, and rightly so; for he who 
 wrote the Fourth Gospel and the Epistles, which 
 stand in the name of the same writer, had a wonder- 
 fully sweet and beautiful message to mankind from the 
 inner mind of his Master. But I often think that the 
 description, the Apostle of Love, belongs just as much 
 to the great apostle of the Gentiles. I think Paul gives 
 us in this epistle and in his other theological letters 
 teaching as helpful, majestic, and tender as that of 
 John the Divine himself, and on that very subject 
 where John the Divine is considered to be master I 
 should place St. Paul by his side. Let any man read 
 I Cor. xiii., written, as it must have been, from a rich 
 and ripe experience, written with tender feeling, with 
 marvellous spiritual insight; and I think he will not 
 refuse the title, the Apostle of Love, to St. Paul. 
 Nor is this very wonderful ; for the Gospel which they 
 had preached was a Gospel in which love was placed 
 as the guide of the virtues, the inspiration and the ful- 
 filment of them all. Christianity is the revelation of 
 the love of God and the inculcation of love of man. 
 * Preached in Union Chapel, Brighton, Sunday morning, 
 January i8, 1903. 
 
108 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Its watchword is " Glory to God in the highest, on 
 earth peace, goodwill amongst men." 
 
 There are three words in the Greek language, each 
 of which has to be translated into English by the word 
 " love." In the New Testament that which is trans- 
 lated " love," in the sense of Christian love, is the 
 agapee. The first word, which is not mentioned, 
 describes sexual love, the second is family affection, 
 and the third this Christian love of which I have 
 spoken, and which might exist in a man who did not 
 know Christ, though it could not exist in its fulness. 
 This word implies a reverent goodwill, in which the 
 will of the man who loves plays the principal part. 
 The love that we have before us here, and which the 
 writers of the New Testament set before us on every 
 occasion when they teach about the inner principle of 
 Christianity, is a reverent goodwill, not only from man 
 to God, but from man to man. Do not, I beseech you, 
 lose sight of the point I am trying to make. The very 
 same word which describes love to God, love from men 
 to God, is the word which is invariably used by New 
 Testament teachers, by the great apostle of the 
 Gentiles, and by John the Divine, to describe the rela- 
 tions which should exist between man and man. Are 
 we wrong, then, in drawing this deduction — that the 
 same quality in reverent affection which is due from 
 man to God is due from man to man ? He that loveth 
 another — what other ? — the other who stands near him, 
 between man and man ; the other who may be God, the 
 Friend who sticketh closer than a brother — he who 
 loveth another hath fulfilled the law, for love is the 
 fulfilling of the law. 
 
 In connection with this great principle, I wish to set 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 109 
 
 before you three propositions: — (i) Religion and 
 morality are not necessarily the same thing; religion 
 and morality have not always been found together. 
 (2) Yet there is no man who would refuse to recognise 
 the imperative of the moral law, even though he dis- 
 obeys it. (3) In Christ religion and morality have a 
 common ideal and a common goal. 
 
 I. Religion and morality do not necessarily involve 
 each other. I am inclined to go so far as to say that 
 in the history of the world religion and morality have 
 commonly been opposed to each other. I think that 
 was so in the world to which Paul preached. At the 
 moment when this letter to the Romans was written 
 Rome was the cockpit of religions. Every fad, every 
 new cult, every evil form of belief and practice, had its 
 representative in Rome. At the moment when St. 
 Paul writes, religion has fallen into deep discredit with 
 those who were disposed to take life seriously and 
 nobly. For then, as now — though happily now we are 
 not as we were then in everything — then as now some 
 serious-minded men who were living nobly according 
 to their lights refused to recognise in the competing 
 and degraded religious faiths of the hour any guidance 
 worthy of the homage of conscience. The State 
 religions even, which were observed and practised by 
 men like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, were not 
 reverenced by the people who practised them ; they 
 were simply recognised as customary, venerable, and, 
 therefore, binding for outward observance and for the 
 sake of social order; but as for having a relation to 
 conscience — that never entered the mind of any person 
 who practised them at all. 
 
 Again, this is not the only instance in human history 
 
110 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 when the same thing has held good. That mighty 
 religion of the East known as Buddhism, which, I 
 think, enrols or includes about four hundred million 
 adherents, and which in some of its forms has borne a 
 certain resemblance to the Christianity under which 
 you and I were trained, came into existence at first 
 scarcely as a religion, but rather as a philosophy pro- 
 testing against the depravity of the cruel and vicious 
 cult of the time. The Buddhism that you would see in 
 India to-day, and to war against which you send your 
 missionaries, is not the Buddhism of Gautama, the 
 Light of Asia, who had no idols in his system, and 
 whose one law was the law of love. For, pessimistic 
 though that creed was, it at least saw as far as this, 
 that the way of escape from human ill was by the law 
 of love. But Buddhism and Christianity were wide 
 as the poles apart in this : that the law of love, once 
 victorious, said the Buddhist, is to result in eternal 
 death, which is the only peace humanity can hope 
 for; while the law of love, according to Jesus, will 
 result in eternal life, which is the good that the 
 Christian can hope for. The .Buddhism of which I 
 have just spoken came into existence as the protest of 
 morality against religion. 
 
 Again, even in the history of Christianity itself, we 
 have something instructive. What was the Reforma- 
 tion of the sixteenth century but the protest of the con- 
 science against the prevailing religion? And to-day, 
 when some of you are inclined to take matters more 
 lightly, and to think that the things for which your 
 fathers fought and died do not matter much, there is a 
 danger lest we lose something which was gained in that 
 great conflict. Conscience entered its protest against 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 111 
 
 the degrading-, immoral, paganising practices of the 
 officials of what purported to be the Christian Church. 
 They rescued Christianity by calling men to the ideal 
 of Christ, to His authority, and to His gospel. Thnt 
 protest of conscience against what seemed to be re- 
 ligion has been made more than once in the history of 
 Christianity since. 
 
 II. Morality and religion, if only Christ be received 
 and understood, have the same ideal and the same goal, 
 must ultimately appeal to the same faculties in human 
 nature. For men always recognise the imperative of 
 conscience, even when they refuse to obey it. When 
 men begin to speculate as to whether conscience is to 
 be trusted, whether it is not the accidental outcome of 
 things for which there is no mental justification — ^the 
 struggle for existence is one, and the social preserva- 
 tion is another — and so on, they are forgetting that the 
 highest achievements of science in the field of history 
 are those that have been made in defiance of the ver- 
 dicts of society by men who have suffered and died 
 for their protest. There is a still, small voice that 
 speaks within which tells a man that the right is to be 
 followed and the wrong is to be shunned, which con- 
 demns a man when he has succumbed to the wrong 
 and refused the right; and to all mankind, said a pagan 
 writer, the voice of conscience is the voice of God. 
 Things may fill us with amazement in this world of 
 perplexities and antitheses, but none of us, I think, will 
 refuse to recognise that morality needs no defence. 
 For man, however imperfect his moral ideal may be, 
 will recognise that if he does not obey the voice of 
 conscience, at any rate he ought to do so, and there is a 
 power within higher than himself, nobler than himself. 
 
112 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 which speaks to him without the voice of any preacher, 
 " This ought ye to have done." 
 
 It is one glory in the history of reUgion that the 
 people of Israel, however they may have come by their 
 call, have identified religion and righteousness. 
 Whenever I hear men, and often young men, speaking 
 lightly about the Old Testament as here and there seem- 
 ing to enjoin imperfect morality, I would like to plead 
 with you to read and think a little more. For, alone 
 amongst the religions of the older world, that of Israel 
 stood out, however imperfectly, as a declaration of the 
 essential unity of the worship of God and the service of 
 right. Righteousness and religion were held to be 
 different aspects of the same thing. In a period and 
 amongst societies where religion had sunk to such 
 degrading depths that human nobleness was ever lift- 
 ing its voice in protest against it, the religion of Israel 
 stands out, and stands out alone, as the declaration of a 
 divine ideal, which, however imperfectly attained by 
 those who professed the religion of Israel, looked for- 
 ward to the establishment of a kingdom of God 
 wherein shall dwell righteousness. Some time before 
 the first preaching of the Christian Gospel, this 
 religion of righteousness was in danger of losing its 
 freshness and its power. At the time when Jesus first 
 began, with his Gospel of repentance and of Divine 
 love, to teach the simple fishermen of Galilee, scribes 
 and Pharisees had managed, by their interpretation of 
 the law, which was at once a law of religion and a law 
 of righteousness, to bind heavy burdens upon men's 
 shoulders, and to reduce the simple moral code to a 
 series of minute ritual observances. He was held to 
 fulfil the law who could remember what to do cere- 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 113 
 
 monially, and he was held to have disregarded the law, 
 however faithfully, kindly, and nobly he might be liv- 
 ing, who had forgotten or who never knew what the 
 proper ritual was. Then came Jesus and swept it all 
 away, and, humanly speaking. He died for doing it. 
 His protest was entered in the name of religion against 
 the burdensome ritual and minute, useless observances 
 with which men were troubled in His day. The first 
 and great commandment, said Jesus, is this, " Thou 
 shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with 
 all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy 
 strength ; this is the first and the great commandment, 
 and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself." For the law, as it was called, 
 with its burdensome code, Jesus substituted a divine 
 impulse. " Love is the fulfilling of the law. This 
 ought ye to do : Love thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 HL In the Christian law of love we have the ideal 
 and the goal both of religion and morality. About 
 this I would like to say three things : ( i ) It is mis- 
 chievous to think or speak of love to God as competing 
 with our love to men. The love of God to us knows 
 no exceptions, and, if our Master is to be believed, is 
 not forfeited, however sternly He may treat us for our 
 misdeeds. Our Father, whose name and whose nature 
 are love, regards us as His children, even when we 
 have wandered from Him, even when we resist Him; 
 for sin is selfishness and rebellion against God. But 
 that consciousness of sonship is not ours until repent- 
 ance has brought us back to the feet of the Father, and 
 we realise that love which was stored up even when we 
 were in the wilderness and away from our Father's 
 home. This sweet Gospel of Jesus Christ is confirmed 
 
114 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 by the witness of the Spirit; for the first fruits of the 
 Spirit in the heart of the Christian is that very power 
 to love, that consciousness of sonship. " Beloved, 
 now are we sons of God, and it is not yet made mani- 
 fest what we shall be. The Spirit beareth witness 
 with our spirits that we are the children of God." 
 But this love of God and love from us to God should 
 never be allowed to compete with, or to be thought of 
 in competition with, in antagonism to, the love we are 
 asked to give to one another. In fact, love to God is 
 fulfilled in love to men. 
 
 I am in danger here of trenching upon the borders 
 of mere sentimentalism and ideal fancy, and some, 
 especially business men, who know what it is to deal 
 with the stern facts of life, might tell me that as a 
 preacher I am up in the air and away from practical 
 realities when I talk about the operation of the Chris- 
 tian law of love from man to man. No, I am not ; and, 
 what is more, you agree with me at every step of the 
 road. You will agree with this — that if you could, 
 by the waving of a magician's wand, to-morrow, make 
 every man do as he would be done by, recognise his 
 neighbour's rights to that which he himself seeks to 
 enjoy in his own degree and in his own sphere, the 
 kingdom of God would have come, there would be 
 little else left to strive for, and the very life that you 
 live now would be fulfilled in the life that you would 
 seek to live, and would have all your dear ones live. 
 If you look in that direction and keep your life attuned 
 to it, you will discover that your attitude towards man- 
 kind is that which will bring about the fulfilment of 
 this idea. For the spirit of kindness, that of reverent 
 goodwill as between man and man, lived in the events 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 115 
 
 and affairs and relationships of every day, will, by and 
 by, so surely as the light follows the darkness, bring 
 in the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of God will 
 come, or so it seems to me, by the recognition of that 
 mutual obligation which is the fulfilling of the moral 
 law between man and man. It is not enough for a 
 man to say he keeps straight ; that is a great deal ; it 
 means you do not wrong your neighbour, and that 
 when your word is passed it is as good as your bond, 
 and so on. But the love of which I have spoken is 
 ever in protest against censoriousness ; there is no 
 place for contempt in the character of him who would 
 do as he would be done by. There are many things 
 which you do not do, you business men, in ordinary 
 every-day life, even in the adoption of the right atti- 
 tude, which would be done if you would only think 
 that love is the fulfilling of the law. 
 
 (2) This law of reverent goodwill as between man 
 and man looks upon every soul as of eternal value — 
 looks, in fact, with the eyes of Jesus Christ. I heard of 
 a poor young woman who had a dreadful bereavement. 
 She had lost her husband and her little child, and then, 
 after the death of both, another little one was bom, 
 and was also taken. These were her all here, and you 
 can scarcely think of a much greater bereavement than 
 that. It seemed as if everything for which she had 
 lived, to which her nature had given itself, everything 
 which had been her joy in service, was gone. But 
 speaking of it in her patient and sweet way — a way in 
 which, I fear, many of us would not have acted in like 
 circumstances — she said, " I cannot think what the 
 meaning of it is, unless it be that I loved them too 
 much, I ought to have loved God more, and so He took 
 
116 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 them away." That is not the God to whom I prayed 
 this morning, nor is it the God of the New Testament, 
 nor is it the Christ in whom Christians beUeve ; for if 
 we are right and Christ reigns He would sooner give 
 the widow's son back than take him away. Your love 
 never competed with the love of God. I do not know 
 why husband and children were taken, but I know that 
 if you knew why you would never ask for them back ; 
 and it was not because you loved them more than God. 
 You fulfilled your duty to God when you loved them. 
 No one ever loves anybody too much. The regret we 
 feel when death has come and taken the best or taken 
 the worst is that we had not loved them more. More- 
 over, though it would be possible to love unwisely or 
 selfishly, and we often see these things, there is a cor- 
 rective in the stern lesson of death. The Christian 
 law of love, with its reverent goodwill, is a law and is 
 a love which will never spare the loved. If you stand 
 where Christ stands, and see as Christ sees, and love as 
 Christ loves, those who are dearest to you are those 
 for whom you can never be satisfied with anything less 
 than the ideal. Is there any man who would be will- 
 ing for his boy to become rich at the expense of his 
 honour and self-respect and purity as a man? Would 
 you like to see your lad a degraded, sensual beast, but 
 a millionaire? Would you like to see him hard- 
 hearted, cynical, unfeeling, vicious, selfish to the last 
 degree, but a master of men and a master of millions ? 
 No, you would not; and what would stop you? It 
 would be the love which asks for a higher than that. 
 Get to the love which asks for the highest, and then 
 you see as God sees, and you feel as God feels ; for the 
 law of which this apostle speaks, this love which is the 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 117 
 
 fulfilling thereof, demands the highest, and will not be 
 satisfied with less. It is possible, then, that the great 
 wrench or the great tragedy might come some day 
 which would induce you as a father or a mother to do 
 in this way, the way of sternness this time instead of 
 the way of kindness, that kindness might prevail, that 
 love might be victor in the great struggle between good 
 and ill. 
 
 (3) This Christian law of love is discriminating in 
 its incidence. I do not want you to feel that you are 
 called upon to love the whole world as you love your 
 own child. If God had meant that He would not have 
 given you a child. Only He Who can see things as 
 they are, and see them everywhere, can number the 
 hairs of the head of every man, and regard every man 
 as an only child. That is the way in which God thinks 
 about you ; you are dear to God, as though the rest of 
 us were not here. But you can't do that. That is why 
 God places the solitary in families; that is why He sent 
 that precious friend who has come into your life, never 
 to go out again ; you could not expel him if you would. 
 There is a hierarchy in our experience of the operation 
 of the Christian law of love. Who has the first claim 
 upon you? For whom are you trustee? Whose life 
 is covered by yours? God will ask that from you 
 some day, and you must not be afraid to confess you 
 loved as much as you possibly could the nearest first, 
 for the sake of God. God will require from you first 
 the life of him who was placed in your charge. Never 
 try to evade the responsibilities of the home circle, the 
 business house, and wherever you have to deal with 
 men. Conscience will tell you what to do; you will 
 always know who has the first claim upon your service 
 
118 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 and regard. Employers, though your circle of em- 
 ployees may be small, do not think you are without 
 responsibility to God. Those men are something more 
 than units to be paid on Saturday night ; they are souls 
 over whom you have a certain charge, and you cannot 
 treat them as you would other people who are not 
 connected with you by this bond of master and man, 
 God put them near to you; He gave you the power 
 that you have — a power over these lives which other 
 men have not. You will have to treat them so, or be 
 held responsible to the Almighty, who holdeth in the 
 hollow of His hand the destiny of every man. The 
 Christian law of love is operative here — not to all the 
 world first, but to those who are in your power. God 
 sends you to be a man and a friend and an inspiration, 
 to take the place of Christ, in fact, to those who are 
 weaker than yourself. " Love is the fulfilling of the 
 law " which operates between you two. Where the 
 Christian law of love reigns life is lived victoriously. 
 So it may be for every man and woman. No doubt 
 there are mourners here; mourners, too, besides those 
 whom death has made to mourn. Here, it may be, is 
 one who lives a long way from another, who dwells in 
 the same home, eats at the same table, partakes of the 
 same experiences. You are mourning about what? 
 About the fact that there is no sympathy between you, 
 no touch ; that, do what you will, you can get no nearer 
 to one for whom you would lay down your life. You 
 must not give up that struggle. You feel like being 
 conquered. It need not be so. Where the Christian 
 law of love reigns you have come into partnership with 
 God, and this is His work, as well as yours ; and 
 though you may never see the fulfilment of it all here. 
 
THE DIVINE IDEAL 119 
 
 go on pouring out that life of kindly desire, that 
 reverent goodwill, which brought Christ here to die 
 for you and for me, and is due for His sake from you 
 to the ingrates, the sinful, the hard-hearted, the evil. 
 Give it, not as those who are being conquered, but as 
 those who are winning all along the line. Remember 
 that the truth shall make you free, and the God who is 
 truth is also love. 
 
 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, 
 and everyone that loveth is begotten of God and 
 knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; 
 for God is love. — Amen. 
 
X 
 CHRIST AND CHARACTER-BUILDING 
 
 Love is the fulfilling of the law. — Rom. xiii. lo. 
 We love Him, becatcse He first loved lis, — i John iv. ig. 
 
 10VE " is an unsatisfactory word in many 
 respects, because it covers so many distinct 
 and even contradictory meanings. In re- 
 spect to these meanings, the Greek language is richer 
 and clearer than ours. We translate into English by 
 one word, " love," ideas for which separate words 
 exist in the New Testament. It is for this reason that 
 one prefers, for example, in i Cor. xiii., the retention 
 of the word " charity," rather than the revisers' 
 equivalent for love. '' Love " means so many dif- 
 ferent things, all of them constant to human experi- 
 ence, that it is requisite, before proceeding with our 
 text, to make clear what we mean by the use of the 
 governing word. I take it that here love means good- 
 will ; it means also benevolence that issues in self- 
 sacrifice ; it means many other things ; but these, I 
 think, are its primary significance. Let me illustrate 
 what I have been trying to show you about the am- 
 biguity of the word. 
 
 When I was driving through London, I saw on the 
 placard of one of the evening papers the announce- 
 ment — " Another Love Tragedy." When I bought the 
 paper I found that the tragedy was the murder of a 
 
 120 
 
CHARACTER-BUILDING 121 
 
 woman by a man who said he loved her. The motive 
 which gave rise to the tragedy in that case was the 
 very antithesis of the motive which inspired Him who, 
 before the tragedy at Calvary, said, " Greater love 
 hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life 
 for his friend." The one was a selfish destructive 
 passion — they called it love — and the other was the 
 greatest thing in the universe, the last revelation of the 
 heart of God, and it led to the offering of the Master 
 on the Cross of Calvary. 
 
 Our second text demands a little closer exegesis 
 before we pass on. St. John has been called the 
 Apostle of Love, and his account of his experience is, 
 " We love Him, because He first loved us." In the 
 Revised Version the word " Him " is eliminated, and 
 the sentence reads, " We love, because He first loved 
 us." On reading the sentence in the older version, 
 you might be tempted to think, and you would not be 
 wrong, that we love Christ, if we love Him at all, out 
 of gratitude; but there is a deeper meaning in the 
 sentence than that. We love, not only " Him," but 
 anybody else, in the high and noble fashion I have 
 already indicated, because Christ is the source and 
 inspiration of all love divine. As the sun is the source 
 of all light and colour, so is Christ the source of every 
 self-sacrificing affection of which His followers have 
 shown themselves capable. We love — love at all — be- 
 cause He first loved us. 
 
 I think these two sentences, with their matchless 
 beauty and their depth of meaning, have an immediate 
 and very real significance for our subject. Character- 
 building, as I hope will be plainly evident later on. 
 
 Most men are willing to admit the vast, the almost 
 
122 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 transcendent importance of character. For example, 
 Professor Romanes, one of the most prominent men of 
 science in the nineteenth century, said in his post- 
 humous work, which four-fifths of you must have 
 it read, " It is surprising how in the long run character 
 I shows itself to be the greatest factor in human life." 
 ' From the point of view of philosopher and historian, 
 Mr. Lecky said in his " Map of Life " substantially 
 the same thing. Neither of these men is speaking as 
 a Christian, though probably both of them would not 
 have denied the name. With those two great author- 
 ities most of you will agree. Character probably is 
 the greatest factor in the shaping of human destiny. 
 This robs God of notliing; for, if you fail God, it mat- 
 ters little what destiny was mapped out for you. 
 
 It would be wrong for us to say that character is a 
 matter of indifference to us, even when it be somebody 
 else's character. Humanity is one, and every char- 
 acter is an asset of the race. When a may says, as you 
 often hear men say of one another, " So-and-So is 
 his own worst enemy, and an enemy to nobody else," 
 he is making a very superficial remark. That man is 
 an enemy to society who is an enemy to himself ; that 
 man is wronging friends, home, country, and God. 
 Character is of the first importance. It matters more 
 than Acts of Parliament; and if in. this forthcoming 
 Session we could secure that every man in England 
 should act from the same high motive as, say, the 
 Prime Minister, or the Leader of the Opposition, or 
 the best minister of the Gospel, or your own father or 
 mother, the world would be saved straight away, with- 
 out any more Acts of Parliament at all. 
 Again, I would have you remember the importance 
 
CHARACTER-BUILDING 123 
 
 of clearly understanding our terms. Let us see just 
 what character is. I will illustrate it thus. There is a 
 man here, perhaps, who has brought his little boy with 
 him; that father is, say, forty years old, the little one 
 is four. There is a striking resemblance between 
 them, but there is a difference too. In one, tendencies 
 which have been reproduced in the other, have been 
 worked out into history, and the history is written in 
 his face, if you only knew how to read it, as Emerson 
 said. But you cannot say that the little one has 
 character; he has disposition. Every man starts in 
 life as the steward of a bundle of tendencies, and in 
 living himself out he is earning his character ; and we 
 say some men have more character or less character 
 than other people. It means that character is the de- 
 posit of conduct ; it is disposition realised and directed 
 either for good or for evil ; it means that your ac- 
 quaintance with life, the struggle through which you 
 pass, the conflicts in which you engage, in which your 
 manhood is either beaten out and ennobled, or de- 
 feated and degraded, are God's means for the realisa- 
 tion of the man you are to be. We are as — 
 
 " Iron dug from central gloom, 
 
 And heated hot with burning fears, 
 And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
 And batter'd with the shocks of doom, 
 To shape and use." 
 
 If you have agreed with me so far, I think we can 
 venture to stand together in saying, one of the first, 
 if not the very first, of duties is the duty of self- 
 formation. 
 
 I proceed to my second point. The highest charac- 
 ter is the fruit of an ideal which is also a living force. 
 
124 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 In the world that you and I know conflicting moral 
 ideals are ever at work. For example, the moral 
 standard of the nursery is not the moral standard of 
 the school; the moral standard of the school is not 
 the moral standard of business life; and there is a 
 standard over all three which is that of the Church. 
 You must have found this out for yourself. When 
 you became a man you smiled at some of the maxims 
 under which you were trained as a child, for you found 
 that father was not quite so good as he wanted you to 
 be. Also, when you were at school, you found that 
 the maxims of the nursery did not hold; you were 
 expected to fight for your footing, and so on. When 
 you entered business life you found almost a new code 
 of morals. Some of them jarred heavily upon you, 
 and you experienced a certain sense of unreality which 
 accounts for some of the abstention from religious 
 worship — that when you come to church on the seventh 
 day the preacher introduces you to another realm and 
 another standard which nobody seems to think of 
 living. And yet every man would admit that there 
 is a moral ideal, whether we realise it or not. We are 
 all looking one way. Any one character is the ap- 
 proximation, however imperfect, to the ideal which 
 is so far above it as sometimes to seem inaccessible. 
 
 This ideal has commonly been associated with 
 religion; but, to be perfectly frank, religion and mo- 
 rality are not the same thing. I have heard young men 
 say, " What would it matter if I were to live up to 
 the best of my light, be as good a man as circumstances 
 will let me be ; what would it matter whether I have 
 a faith or no?" I will show you. First, you will 
 admit that sometimes religion and morality have been 
 
CHARACTER-BUILDING 125 
 
 in deadly conflict, and always when it has been so on 
 the field of history, morality has won. Even to-day 
 I know religious men from whose company I would 
 rather keep free. There is a certain type of sacer- 
 dotalism, and a certain type of evangelicalism, both of 
 which produce unlovely character; and oftentimes we 
 find ourselves in the presence of men of the world, as 
 we call them — I hope not opprobriously — who are real 
 good fellows; and we say so, and we want to know 
 what difference religion could make. We put an 
 indifferent religionist and a noble moralist side by side, 
 and we say, " Which of these is the better man? He 
 cannot be wrong whose life is in the right." The case 
 is stated strongly when we have said all this ; but all I 
 want to affirm is that the highest character, the 
 grandest, the noblest, the most august, is that which 
 religion has directly formed. Neither religion nor 
 morality can reach their highest without each other. 
 Commonly in history — and there is a reason for it — 
 religion has been the inspiration of morality, and com- 
 pelled men to do their best. Matthew Arnold said, 
 " Religion is morality touched by emotion." I would 
 rather say. Religion is morality touched with a sanc- 
 tion ; the goal of each is the same. Their ideal is one 
 — the eternal right; He is the eternal God. Robert 
 Browning makes one of his principal characters say : 
 
 " I have always had one lode-star ; now, 
 As I look back, I see that I have halted 
 Or hastened as I looked towards that star — 
 A need, a trust, a yearning after God." 
 
 In morals we are living backward, and the faster the 
 better; we are moving toward an ideal already mani- 
 
126 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 fested in history nineteen hundred years ago. We are 
 dimbing to Christ. No matter how fast we dimb or 
 how far, we find that the Christ is still above and 
 before. This can't be evolution; it must be revolution. 
 Moreover, we have not progressed an inch since St. 
 Paul wrote the sentence which is our first text. The 
 race may have done, the world, I hope, has ; England 
 is better than imperial Rome; but we have produced 
 no better man than St. Paul, and no sweeter man than 
 John ; and both of them went as individuals to the 
 source of the highest that humanity has ever seen — 
 Jesus Christ of Nazareth. No man here is so indif- 
 ferent to religion, or so careless about himself, but who 
 will say, " Jesus is worthy to be the moral ideal of 
 humanity. I do my homage unto Him." Ah, wait! 
 You cannot have half a Christ ; you can't take one side 
 of a Saviour without taking the other. You must have 
 the religious if you have the moral ; the Jesus whom 
 you affirm to be God is the Jesus who said " Thou 
 shalt love the Lord thy God." The Jesus who com- 
 pels the goodness of which we have spoken was the 
 Jesus who inspired the love that begot it. Moreover, 
 it is this same Christ who has become the conscience 
 of humanity to-day. We could not reckon without 
 Christ in public, social, or individual life. The ideal 
 of the manhood of Christ is the leaven that is leavening 
 society. Moreover, the closer we come to an apprecia- 
 tion of the character of Jesus, the more clearly does 
 His nobleness stand out, as the ideal, not only for 
 imitation, but for adoration. Jesus was strong, strong 
 as the strongest. You have never fought a battle 
 grander or as grand as that which He fought in His 
 loneliness on the eve of His Passion, when the poor 
 
CHARACTER-BUILDING 127 
 
 timid disciples, who thought they were so important 
 to Him, " all forsook Him and fled." Everything that 
 you most admire in manhood you will find in that 
 lonely figure. What was the majesty which com- 
 pelled the would-be murderers to go backwards, tumb- 
 ling upon one another, rather than be the first to lay 
 hands upon Him? What was the thoughtful noble- 
 ness which in the moment of extremity said, " Let 
 these go their way " ; and as the Galileans fled before 
 the rough Roman soldiers and the rabble of Jerusalem, 
 " Whom seek ye," said He, " Jesus of Nazareth ? " 
 But they hesitated ere they laid hold of Him. Yet he 
 was defenceless. It was his manhood only that shone 
 round about Him and shamed and awed. Men feared 
 the Master when they were doing dirty things. They 
 brought a poor trembling woman into His presence; 
 and, though He uttered no word of reproach He woke 
 the womanhood again that the brutality and the lust 
 of men had well-nigh extinguished. There was a 
 man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who has given us 
 vision of God. 
 
 Now, what Christ gave to the world at that time 
 was a moral ideal, which, translated into modern Eng- 
 lish, is this : Character is incomplete except its last 
 and highest manifestation be love. Righteousness is 
 no righteousness which has no room for compassion. 
 There is no goodness shorn of tenderness. A stunted 
 growth without the flower is manhood which has 
 nothing of womanhood in it. The Ethical Society will 
 never save the world. You don't set out to build char- 
 acter by saying, " This virtue, and now that, must be 
 added unto me." No; you change the whole outlook 
 and spirit of your life. Character is a divine impulse 
 
128 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 when it approximates to Christ; and if any man has 
 not the spirit of Christ he is none of His. 
 
 I want to close with a word of warning and appeal 
 
 to young men. I have made no attempt to be popular, 
 
 to amuse or entertain you. I have brought you face to 
 
 face with the ideal which is eternal. Jesus Christ is 
 
 the one challenge to the moral consciousness of the 
 
 world. It is never repudiated, always vindicated. 
 
 How, tested by the standard of Jesus, looks the young 
 
 manhood of to-day? I asked a group of friends who 
 
 I know London better than I know it, " What do you 
 
 ^ think of the character of the young men of London 
 
 I to-day?" One said, "There is a lamentable lack of 
 
 j conscientiousness in the details of everyday life." 
 
 Another said, "There are two sorts of young men: 
 
 I first, the sort that has no energy, no worthy ambition, 
 
 'no desire to do well, either for himself or for the world ; 
 
 I there is another sort, eager, pushing, ambitious, un- 
 scrupulous, determined to succeed — don't mind the 
 price." I wish they could have said there was a third, 
 which they would if it were pressed home — a young 
 manhood, as eager, determined, forceful, and strong as 
 either of the others, but with no axe to grind, who 
 live for an ideal which is bigger than their own puny 
 I life, and who remember that strength of character 
 which issues in love is the ideal of the Master who can 
 never die. 
 
 I have myself observed, concerning the young man- 
 hood of England, some things. First, I notice a lamen- 
 table intellectual thinness. So many young men do 
 not know enough to get on with, and they cannot 
 think ; I mean that once they could have done so, but 
 they shrank from the discipline; they did not seem to 
 
CHARACTER -BUILDING 129 
 
 put into play the moral quality which makes a man 
 bigger mentally as well as spiritually. I notice a con- 
 temptuous indifference to moral issues, a willingness 
 to let anybody else take trouble, to shift the bur- 
 den of responsibility on to other shoulders. Thank 
 God this is not all the young manhood of England; 
 but it is part of it — the manhood (save the mark!) 
 which dismisses religion with a sneer, and thinks it is 
 all done with, the manhood which takes life easy when 
 it can, and when it cannot submits to circumstances, or 
 makes another pay for a success which ought never to 
 have been earned so. Lastly, there is a manhood 
 which, without questioning or hesitation, lives the life 
 of the beast. In saying this I speak to you as a man 
 and a brother. Better allude indirectly than directly 
 to such things in the pulpit. It requires a special grace 
 to handle such a theme. The proper place for the 
 sewer is underground. Every young man knows that 
 there is a temptation to live the life of the beast, and 
 some never think of struggling against it at all. There 
 is no humiliation in being tempted. There is no shame 
 in the fierceness of the contest against a passion which 
 you did not create ; but the shame is in living below 
 that standard of the manhood which you know is that 
 which you ought to live. Think of the vast army of 
 women in London to-day living a delirious existence 
 in which excitement is called happiness. The end of 
 such things is death. If there were no bad men there 
 could be no bad women. I speak conscientiously when 
 I say that I think on the whole women are better than 
 we are; their spiritual perceptions are quicker; they 
 seem as though they stand naturally nearer to the di- 
 vine, But when a woman does go wrong, God help 
 
130 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 her; for she is usually irreclaimable. Never let it be 
 said of any man here that he forgot that the highest 
 reach of manhood is the protection and not the destruc- 
 tion of the weak. You owe a duty to woman for which 
 you will be held accountable to God. 
 
 England needs men to-day as much as she ever 
 needed them in her history. There is a danger that we 
 are falling under the rule of mediocrity in nearly every 
 department of our natural life. Young men, you must 
 change all that. We want strong men, strong with 
 the strength which issues in love ; men strong as the 
 Christ was strong, who look to Him, not only as their 
 ideal, but their Master and their God; for the Christ 
 is not dead, and wherever manhood lives the Christ is 
 at work. Listen to the voice with which He spoke to 
 His disciple:^ of old, for that word was eternal, and 
 means much 1 ) you and me at this hour : 
 
 "Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God is one Lord, 
 and thou shalt love the Lord thy God zvith all thy 
 heart, and zvith all thy soul, and zvith all thy mind, and 
 zvith all thy strength. This is the first commandment. 
 And the second is like, namely, this: Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 " We love because He first loved us." 
 
XI 
 OVERCOMING FOR GOD 
 
 Be of good cheer ; I have overcome the world. 
 
 ^John XVI. 33. 
 
 To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me on 
 My throne, evett as I also overcatne, and am set dowft with 
 My Father in His throne. — Rev. Hi. 21. 
 
 IT is fitting- that these texts should be taken in con- 
 junction, especially as expressive of our Master's 
 teaching upon the great subject we are about to 
 consider. For both texts purport to be the utterance 
 of Jesus ; if not His very words, then, at least, the 
 expression of His mind and intent. In the first text 
 we have our Lord's example and the ground of our 
 confidence of spiritual victory ; in the second we have a 
 call and a promise to him that overcometh of fellowship 
 with Christ and the attainment of that level of saintly 
 experience which can only be described as sitting with 
 Him in His throne. Overcoming is a real thing ; over- 
 coming for God is a great thing; progressive spiritual 
 experience reveals it stage by stage and hour by hour. 
 I. A Man's Reaction upon Life. — It may be well that 
 we should attempt a little change in statement in the 
 first text. The clause " Be of good cheer," beautiful 
 as it is, and redolent with sacred memories, can be 
 more tersely and even forcibly expressed. One word 
 with a note of exclamation after it would do — " Cour- 
 
 131 
 
132 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 age ! I have overcome the world." Courage ! The 
 true ring is given to that word when you remember 
 that it was spoken by Jesus Christ in the hour and 
 article of His Passion. He was going to Gethsemane 
 when He said " Courage ! " to the disciples. But they 
 were going to no Gethsemane, they were but sorrow- 
 ing that He was taken from them. The extremity of 
 His agony they did not know, and they withheld sym- 
 pathy from Him in the hour of His greatest need. 
 " Courage ! " said the Master, not thinking about Him- 
 self, but about these timid fishermen who depended 
 upon Him for everything. " I have overcome the 
 world." " Overcome " is a big word. It means there 
 is something to come over, and getting over it is a 
 thing divine. Even our Master was made perfect 
 through suffering, blessed obstacles, divine agonies; 
 even Christ pleased not Himself. In the supreme mo- 
 ment of His life, the moment of the agony in Geth- 
 semane, and the dereliction of Calvary, His overcoming 
 enabled Him to say, " Courage ! " to those who had 
 not the strength and could not share in His experi- 
 ence. There is a massive loneliness about the Christ 
 here. In fact, to speak of it glibly seems out of place ; 
 let us rather look into the august countenance of Him 
 who spake as never man spake, and take courage as 
 we think about the battle that He fought in the dark- 
 ness for us on that awful night when our text was 
 spoken. 
 
 " I have overcome the world." What is " the 
 world " ? It has several significances in the New 
 Testament. It may mean the sum total of humanity — 
 " God so loved the world "—meaning you and me and 
 all mankind. It may mean, as here, something entirely 
 
OVERCOMING FOR GOD 133 
 
 opposed to God, and which neither God nor you ought 
 to love, the sum total of the tendencies which seek for 
 their gratification here or not at all; the aggregate of 
 the influences which make for the destruction of the 
 higher life; and God in Christ overcame that world. 
 Still, the battle is going on in every individual human 
 life, and it is to this conflict that we are summoned in 
 the words of our second text. See the different ways 
 in which men face this great fact, which all men must 
 face sooner or later, and do something with. Our re- 
 action upon life means something like this. Life comes 
 to every man with certain influences, tendencies, pos- | 
 sibilities, menaces, and we have to do something with I 
 it. The world is always near; you cannot refuse to | 
 enter into relationship with it; what is your re- t 
 action upon this sum total of influences which go to ' 
 make up life? That is the measure of your worth. 
 There are different ways in which men react upon that 
 which we call life; let me give you some examples of 
 them. 
 
 I. There is that which I may describe as a shallow 
 optimism, the talk of the man who leaves to other peo- 
 ple the deep thinking and the serious action, who 
 looks upon life carelessly, even selfishly, and yet may 
 be written down as a very good fellow. Take as an 
 example Dickens's Horace Skimpole in " Bleak 
 House." You remember that this amiable gentleman 
 was a favourite in certain circles because he brought a 
 ray of sunshine with him wherever he went, a child- 
 like artlessness, an unreflective insouciance. But he 
 left to other people the paying of his bills ; and he was 
 able to borrow money with a cunning artlessness which 
 enabled him to get through at somebody else's cost. 
 
134 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 He lived on the fat of the land, but his nearest and 
 dearest were miserable. Dickens painted true to life 
 when he drew Horace Skimpole for us with such 
 fidelity. These people abound, the people for whom 
 the sun is always shining, who see very little to grumble 
 at in this paradise of a world; but, so certain as you 
 meet a man like that, you may know that somebody 
 else is carrying double, because of the burden he re- 
 fuses to bear. 
 
 2. In strong contrast with such a philosophy of life, 
 here is a man whose outlook upon the world is a set- 
 tled melancholy. He seems as if he cannot avoid look- 
 ing for the darksome, repellent, and horrific. His 
 philosophy of life, if he has one, is a pessimism with 
 few redeeming features. As an example, let me cite 
 to you our British poet, Thomson, the author of 
 " The City of Dreadful Night." His melancholy be- 
 came a challenge addressed to God — that old, old ques- 
 tion, asked sometimes persistently, sometimes intermit- 
 tently — Why dost Thou permit the world to be so bad 
 and so sad? 
 
 " Who is most wretched in this dolorous place ? 
 
 I think myself ; yet I would rather be 
 
 My miserable self than He 
 Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace. 
 The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou 
 
 From whom it has its being, God and Lord, 
 
 Creator of all woe and sin, abhorred 
 Malignant, and implacable ! I vow 
 That not for all Thy power, furled and unfurled, 
 
 For all the temples to Thy glory built, 
 
 Would I assume the ignominious guilt 
 Of having made such men in such a world." 
 
 That mood, in varying degrees, is found among all 
 
OVERCOMING FOR GOD 135 
 
 classes of men in England to-day. It presents a seri- 
 ous problem, one that has to be faced. For every one of 
 such thinkers and actors counts. He has a certain re- 
 action upon life, by which not only himself is affected, 
 but the world also. 
 
 3. Very different from either of the foregoing is the 
 man of the strenuous, practical type, who 'acts with- 
 out reflecting much beyond the moment in which he 
 acts ; the man who has big, but always practical, ideas ; 
 who strives, being content with the moment and the 
 sanction of the moment in which he strives. Take as 
 an example the late Cecil Rhodes. Some of you detest 
 the very sound of his name. (Hear, hear.) Some 
 of you do not. (Hear, hear.) Does not that expres- 
 sion of approval and disapproval in a religious con- 
 gregation show that that man must have been a strong 
 man to excite both admiration and detestation? You 
 could not take him indifferently; you either had to 
 stand on his side or were fiercely opposed to him, if 
 only in sentiment. The fact is that, whatever his 
 motives may have been, and I do not seek to penetrate 
 them, he was a practical man, and believed in living 
 the strenuous life, and he did it for objects which were 
 beyond his own interest. We may take a living ex- 
 ample of a somewhat similar type ; I want to mention 
 him with care, and, I hope, without being unduly per- 
 sonal — Mr. Chamberlain. 
 
 Whatever you may think about that great states- 
 man, you have to admit that he is no trifler. If the 
 party for which Mr. Chamberlain stands at present is 
 defeated at the next General Election, you may be per- 
 fectly certain that he will take that defeat standing. 
 You admire one thing about the man, I am sure, though 
 
136 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 you may oppose him fiercely, perhaps, and that is his 
 courage. He takes hold of Hfe with both hands; whatever 
 he sets himself to do he does it with all his might. And 
 yet it would be no unfair criticism of Mr. Chamber- 
 lain to say that neither from him nor from Mr. Rhodes 
 have we ever heard any strong and fervent appeal to 
 the higher sanctions and the eternal verities. Both of 
 them may have made it to themselves, but we have not 
 heard it. To us, reading from outside, such lives are 
 of the strenuous, practical type; they react upon the 
 world, but we cannot see that that reaction has any im- 
 mediate connection with the things that are unseen and 
 eternal. 
 
 4. That brings me to another type for which those 
 I have cited have been preparing — that which Lord 
 Rosebery, in his address on Cromwell, called the prac- 
 tical mystic. Some of you may not like the word 
 mystic. Let me define it for the moment, and 
 provisionally. The mystic is a person who sees the 
 Divine in common things. That made Carlyle a 
 mystic, and Ruskin, and Gladstone. You may drop 
 the word, if you like, and say " Saint." What we want 
 now is a higher type than any I have named. The 
 real want is God's men to be multiplied — the fighting 
 saints of the world. Amongst these we may mention, as 
 typical of those to whose number I would wish to add 
 every man in this place, such a fighting saint as Whit- 
 tier, a poet and a slave-emancipator, whose philosophy 
 of life is contained in his own words : 
 
 " Better to stem with heart and hand 
 The roaring tide of life, than lie 
 Unmindful on its flowery strand 
 Of God's occasions, drifting by. 
 
OVERCOMING FOR GOD 137 
 
 Better with naked nerve to bear 
 The needles of this goading air, 
 Than in the lap of sensual ease forego 
 The Godlike power to do, 
 The Godlike aim to know." 
 
 We feel that that man is coming very close to the great 
 reality when he speaks thus confidently and hopefully 
 of a mighty conflict to which every son of God is sum- 
 moned. Rudyard Kipling had just a touch of it when 
 he wrote: 
 
 " If there be good in that I wrought 
 
 Thy hand declared it. Master, Thine ; 
 Where I have failed to meet Thy thought 
 
 I know through Thee the blame is mine. 
 One stone the more swings to her place, 
 
 In that dread temple of Thy worth ; 
 It is enough that through Thy grace 
 
 I saw nought common on Thy earth." 
 
 From such a sentiment as that we are brought to the 
 New Testament, and we feel a speedy kinship and 
 urgent acquaintance with the great Saviour of man- 
 kind. The highest type of the fighting saint, if that 
 word be not inadequate to describe Him who made 
 saints, was Jesus Christ Himself. When we picture 
 the Christ as weak and languishing, as to be pitied be- 
 cause of His sufferings, as bearing His cross heavily, 
 we are looking at Him from the wrong angle. I like 
 to think about my Hero-Master. " Courage ! " He 
 said in the moment of the Passion, and when the dark 
 destiny was coming to meet Him. Grand in His 
 loneliness, He had time to think about the feeble folk 
 who cowered under His shoulder. " Let these go 
 their way," He said, as He stood facing the multitude 
 
138 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 that with swords and staves came to take an unarmed 
 man. "Courage! You will leave Me alone, and 
 yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me." 
 And if for a moment on the Cross a black cloud seemed 
 to descend to blot out the Eternal, and with it the face 
 of God, and there was wrung from the dying heart 
 that cry of human agony, " My God, My God ! Why 
 hast Thou forsaken Me?" it was only that the next 
 instant there might come back to Him that inrush of 
 assurance : " Father, into Thy hands I commend My 
 spirit " ; and so dying, He lived, and so defeated, con- 
 quered. Be of good cheer, therefore. He has 
 overcome, and to such a conflict are we summoned 
 too. 
 
 n. Our Victory with Jesus Christ. — Do not for a 
 moment imagine that I seek to identify your destiny 
 with His, and completely. You cannot do what Christ 
 did. Something was wrought out for you and me in 
 Gethsemane and upon Calvary that never needed to be 
 done again ; we but fill up the measure that is behind. 
 Nevertheless, He calls us to a magnificent partnership. 
 We all know what is meant by the battle of life. Men 
 who care very little about Christ know what I mean 
 by the phrase, the conflict to live. Whether you will 
 or whether you won't, fight you must. The measure 
 of your worth is, What are you fighting for? You 
 have come from your office, or from behind the counter, 
 to spend a little while with God, to think of higher 
 things, if higher things there be, and you will be back 
 in the rush of it all, and wondering which is the real 
 life — this, in which we speak of a higher to be, a 
 higher that touches the lower at every point, and en- 
 closes our life on every side ; or this getting of bread 
 
OVERCOMING FOR GOD 13a 
 
 and butter, this adding of shilling to shilling, and 
 pound to pound ; this besting your fellows and winning 
 a victory which does not ensure you from the conflict 
 of to-morrow. 
 
 Sometimes it would seem as though life had no mean- 
 ing at all; it is only. a chaos, and the best that you can 
 do is not to think about it; and it may be that you have 
 never paused to reflect concerning your reaction upon 
 it all or the reaction of the eternal upon you. But you 
 must do it, for the question is put to you. Do you 
 know what your life means ? It may mean, as some 
 people tell us, that this is a school, and God has put 
 us here to learn lessons for eternity, and all that has 
 befallen you is fitting you to be a noble man in days 
 to come. That is true, but it is not all, and it is not 
 half. If all that you and I have been summoned to 
 endure and to do means no more than that we are 
 being made good by it, that could be done without our 
 being sent to school. But that is not it. Man is an 
 end in himself, but he is not the whole. God has some- 
 thing to do in His wonderful universe about which 
 He does not consult us. We are put here to live some- 
 thing for God, and I venture to say that the highest 
 satisfactions you ever had, my worldly friend, were 
 those in which you lost sight of your puny personality, 
 and lived for humanity, lived for your kind. Cannot 
 you come to believe that that is the meaning of the 
 whole thing? You are not to be an end to yourself, 
 although you are an end to God. You may trust your 
 destiny to Him by whom the very hairs of your head 
 are all numbered. And take you care of nothing less 
 than this — to play the man and live for the highest. 
 Leave the rest to God. Sure it is that the most blight- 
 
140 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 ing thing in manhood is the influence of fear. Some 
 may feel a dread of what is to be within the next hour, 
 or to-morrow, or the day after; you just shiver in an- 
 ticipation of an evil that is impending. Put it from 
 you; fear is the last thing which should ever have 
 any place in the heart of a child of God. Shake it 
 from you. Come over. Sometimes we are asked why 
 God permits so much that is evil. " Permits " ? Why, 
 He sends it. That old mystic was right who said : 
 " There is no doer but God." Not one of the ills of 
 life could ever touch you if He did not open the door. 
 No matter how malignant your assailant might be, 
 when anything has come to you which your soul pro- 
 nounces unwelcome, praise God, and then you have 
 come over. The evils, as we call them, of life are 
 often not evils at all. We mix up evil with sin, and 
 talk as if the two were one. They are not ; evil is the 
 larger term, and pain may be included in it. You 
 cannot say that your sufferings were good, but they 
 make it ; and I would not have pain expelled from life 
 for all the glory that imagination may give. That is 
 what makes man great, and somehow we feel it when 
 we cannot prove it. An American writer. Professor 
 James, in his Gifford Lectures, lately delivered in this 
 country, says : 
 
 " It is indeed a remarkable fact that suft'erings and 
 hardships do not as a rule abate the love of life; they 
 seem, on the contrary, usually to give to it a keener 
 zest; and the sovereign source of melancholy is reple- 
 tion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire. 
 Our hour of triumph is what brings the void." 
 
 There is a deep truth there, and I do not wish any 
 Christian in thinking about it to feel the slightest mis- 
 
OVERCOMING FOR GOD HI 
 
 giving concerning it. You are called to come over, to 
 come up. 
 
 I stood on the Cornish coast a while, and on one 
 day of storm I saw something which taught me some- 
 thing. A great sea-bird — I could not give a name to 
 it — rose on white wings athwart the stormy sky, and 
 a little group of us watched for a long time his 
 progress against the fury of the elements. Every now 
 and then it seemed as if Boreas gripped that frail thing 
 and hurled it downwards to the earth. Had it been a 
 man, it would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks 
 fifty times. Then it seemed whirled upside down, but 
 always it turned and rose again, and came up and 
 came over, spreading its wings to the attacking winds; 
 it rose and rose and rose, until it was a speck in the 
 sky. Like the sea-bird, so are the sons of God. On 
 the wings of faith and hope we are meant to rise. Be 
 glad of your conflicts; put on the whole armour of 
 God; fight the good fight of faith; call nothing com- 
 mon or unclean. You have won your victory when 
 you have estimated that they that be with you are 
 more than all they that are against you. Consider 
 that in the common things of life there is something 
 that we have to do for God. Why, it makes the 
 horizon inimitably vaster to think it is not for our- 
 selves, but for God, and He will take care of you. As 
 George Macdonald says in " Robert Falconer " : 
 " This is a healthy, a practical, a working faith. First, 
 that a man's business is to do the will of God. Sec- 
 ond, that God takes upon Himself the care of that 
 man. Third, and, therefore, that a man ought never 
 to be afraid of anything." 
 
 Some of the grandest things that have been done in 
 
142 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 this world by heroes of God have been done by those 
 who were feebly endowed, as the world judges, for the 
 task which was before them; but they were done. Not 
 from the seen, but from the unseen, did they draw 
 their strength. It may be that my texts, if not my 
 sermon, shall reach someone who was just about to 
 give up, who felt that the problem of life was too ter- 
 rible, our experience of life too dread, to enable us 
 hopefully to take heart of grace and try again. Put 
 away from you all self-ward feelings; you are just a 
 soldier on the battlefield, and by-and-bye you shall re- 
 ceive the victor's crown, and sit down upon the throne 
 with the Saviour of mankind. But the test and con- 
 dition before the winning of the guerdon are: Can 
 you come over? " To him that overcometh will I 
 grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also over- 
 came, and am set down with My Father in His throne." 
 And hour by hour, and moment by moment, in the 
 very midst of the conflict there is rest. You have no 
 business to be miserable. There is peace in the con- 
 flict, the peace of the heroes of God. Listen to the 
 voice of our Teacher, in whose words I address you 
 this morning. The Master of mankind speaks: 
 " These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me 
 ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have 
 tribulation," of course, " but be of good cheer; I have 
 overcome the world. . . . My peace I give unto you. 
 Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not 
 your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 
 
XII 
 CONSCIENCE IN COMMON LIFE 
 
 What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk huvibly with God? 
 
 —Micah vi. 8. 
 
 A GOOD deal of time has been occupied in aca- 
 demic discussions as to the origin of that fac- 
 * ulty of human nature which we call conscience. 
 The theories advanced, and which, it goes without say- 
 ing, often conflict with each other, and none of which, 
 perhaps, is precisely adequate, may be ultimately re- 
 duced to two. We have, on the one hand, that 
 familiar view, which may best, perhaps, be expressed 
 in the words of that pagan philosopher who is quoted 
 in Pusey's " Spiritual Letters " : " To all mankind con- 
 science is God. The judgment of each will be how he 
 has listened to that voice." Without committing my- 
 self to that view, I may state the extremes thus. The 
 naturalistic view of the origin of conscience is that it 
 represents the deposit of social sanctions which have 
 come down to us from bygone ages. In that view 
 conscience is just one of Nature's expedients for the 
 preservation of her handiwork ; the whole human race 
 is but one of Nature's instruments — the faculty of con- 
 science implanted within the human soul— ah ! — per- 
 haps I had better not say so — within the human mind 
 is one of Nature's expedients to keep the race from 
 
 143 
 
144 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 destroying itself and spoiling hei* work. The explana- 
 tion of that theory is something of this kind. By the 
 gradual elimination of the unfit, Society has half-un- 
 consciously discovered what is best fitted to survive; 
 Society has an instinct of self-preservation. Con- 
 sequently she will not tolerate, never has tolerated, 
 anything which would seriously threaten that exist- 
 ence. If any individual has ever exalted his own 
 interests at the expense of Society, he is treated as a 
 monster, and put an end to in some way or another. 
 Such a process as this, continued from age to age, has 
 supplied every individual with certain tendencies of a 
 social kind which have come to be known as conscience. 
 There is no other origin of conscience, say the natural- 
 ists, than this. Men have somehow come half-uncon- 
 sciously to obey that which in any case Society would 
 require. One damning criticism of that view may be 
 stated in a very few words. It is that the very 
 highest achievements of conscience have been made, 
 not in accordance with, but in defiance of, the sanc- 
 tions of the Society of the time. I call to mind the 
 figure of Latimer tied to the stake in front of Balliol 
 College, Oxford ; I hear the mob around him howling 
 execrations, as the mob is apt to do at a great man, 
 suddenly become helpless ; and I hear the martyr say- 
 ing, " Be of good cheer, Master Ridley ; we shall this 
 day light such a candle in England as, by God's grace, 
 I trust shall never be put out," and it never has been. 
 But a man had to die to make that possible, and the 
 achievement to which his conscience prompted him was 
 one that was taken in actual defiance of the social 
 sanctions and the social demands of his hour. I go 
 back a few years, and I see the monk of Wittemberg 
 
CONSCIENCE 145 
 
 standing face to face with the princes of Germany and 
 tlie representatives of that great Church whose man- 
 date at times made princes tremble ; I see him, unaided 
 and alone, claiming a sanction not heard from other 
 lips than his at that moment for his action in defying 
 that great ecclesiastical organisation. If they are 
 right, he is wrong. What business has he to exalt his 
 opinion? Because of something unseen and eternal. 
 A great organised Society pronounces against him, 
 and his response is this : " Here stand I ; I can none 
 other, so help me, God." Countless instances might 
 be furnished in support of my statement that the high- 
 est achievements of conscience, whatever its origin 
 may have been, have been made, not in alliance with, 
 but in defiance of, the ordinary accepted canons and 
 verdicts of Society. We may say this without very 
 much fear of contradiction, without being academic 
 about the origin of conscience. We know that it is 
 the most unequivocal witness within the individual 
 soul to a higher than self. There is no man without 
 that witness, and there are few men who would not, 
 and at once — in theory at least — pay homage to it. 
 Such phrases as right and conscience, conscience and 
 right, are upon the lips of men who believe in no 
 other world than this. We hear many a man, in deny- 
 ing theologies, in refusing credence to revealed re- 
 ligion, in denying perhaps the existence of God, de- 
 clare, " He cannot be wrong whose life is in the 
 right." He does not stop to dispute about the fact 
 that there is a right; he simply ranges himself on the 
 side of it, as though it were an eternal somewhat de- 
 claring itself within his soul. Though all the world 
 said no, if he be an honest man, and know the right. 
 
146 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 he will continue to say yes, " Because right is right, 
 to follow right, were wisdom in the scorn of conse- 
 quence." 
 
 But conscience is not to be blindly followed. His- 
 tory teaches us that the most serious menaces of society 
 in the past — perhaps I might almost say in the present 
 — have been the behaviour of conscientious, narrow- 
 minded men. Canon Gore, now Bishop of Worcester, 
 has said, a man's first duty is to educate rather than to 
 obey his conscience — to educate before he does obey. 
 A man should see clearly, know well, before he 
 gives himself in vigorous and enthusiastic self-com- 
 mittal to what his conscience tells him is the ideal 
 life, the good and the true. Yet every man will bear 
 me out in saying you have, if you are a worthy man, 
 and are trying to adjust your life to that which is 
 worthy, to try to obey the monition of the still, small 
 voice, and you must not make yourself captive to any 
 man. Something tells you what to do; you have 
 before you in every circumstance, in every crisis, an 
 ideal of the right, and you are called upon to obey it. 
 You can get no further than to say the Eternal speaks 
 to you in the word ought. You disobey it at your 
 peril. Though we differ in details, and conscience 
 may lead one man that way, and another this, neverthe- 
 less that there is such a thing as right you are perfectly 
 sure, and that it is a bigger thing than your particular 
 interest or individual opinion. What more can we say 
 than this, " The light that lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world," has told us ; " He hath showed 
 thee, O man, what is good, and what doth the Lord 
 require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and 
 to walk humbly with thy God ? " 
 
CONSCIENCE 147 
 
 Yet we know that every day around us men are 
 either openly defying conscience, or tacitly compromis- 
 ing with it. Good Christian people tell us that it is 
 impossible to do other than compromise now and then 
 the highest that you are able to see. To young men I 
 would especially say, let someone else give you those 
 prudential maxims. Never you be forced to compro- 
 mise unless it be with your face to the light. I can 
 understand a compromise which means you have come 
 to a wall and you cannot get further ; you are looking 
 and straining and waiting for the opportunity to grasp 
 the idea towards which all your energies have been set, 
 but the compromise which means turning your back 
 upon the light which you have seen is a compromise to 
 which I hope no young man will ever give himself. 
 There are ways in which we are daily compromising 
 with what we know is the voice of conscience and the 
 ideal of life. We compromise in business life by the 
 use of false maxims in regard to our practice. Here 
 is one of them : That moral and spiritual relationship 
 between employer and employed is not business. 
 Then what is business? It merely means that you are 
 to make a living and to secure as much as you can of 
 this world's goods ; get as much as you can, and keep 
 as much as you can get. These are poor maxims, 
 though they be prudential. To see a young man with 
 them is a sorry sight indeed. I will tell you what 
 business is. Business means that you are daily deal- 
 ing with spiritual symbols when you come into inter- 
 course with your brother men, when you come into the 
 counting-house, the shop, or the journalist's office. 
 You have done nothing to-day but what has a spiritual 
 significance, has reacted upon your character, has 
 
148 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 helped to fashion your destiny, has had influence on 
 somebody else. You have been dealing- with spiritual 
 entities, and the resultant of what you have been doing 
 must be measured in spiritual equivalents. Has it 
 never struck you as strange that by God's ordinance 
 you spend eight, ten, twelve, or more hours every day 
 in drudgery — the little time that you can spare for the 
 higher life, perhaps this one hour, and a few minutes 
 before you go to bed? And all the rest means — 
 what? Nothing but clothing your body, pleasing your 
 appetite, getting through and preparing for the end, 
 when even your dearest will bury you as the dead out 
 of their sight? 
 
 " Our hearts like muffled drums are beating 
 Funeral marches to the grave." 
 
 Is that what you spent ten or twelve hours a day in 
 drudgery for ? God does his business badly if it be so. 
 But it is not. This is not the place where we live the 
 higher life. Here we are just talking about it. Out- 
 side and in the business we live it. When you deal 
 with a man across the counter, when you are quoting 
 to him concerning stocks and shares, you are doing 
 something that affects human destiny and will go on 
 affecting it when you are no more. It all means, as 
 Robert Louis Stevenson said in " Doctor Jekyll and 
 Mr. Hyde," it means intent. There is nothing that 
 matters little. If business men would only think hour 
 by hour of the sanction of their business life, they 
 would not find it so difficult to bring all life into har- 
 mony with the spirit of our text : " What doth the Lord 
 require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and 
 to walk humbly with Him ? " 
 
CONSCIENCE 149 
 
 That means that at once there is a relation of mutual 
 trusteeship between employer and employed. It mat- 
 ters very much to you what that man over whom you 
 have power is doing with the rest of his time, when he 
 has passed from your sight. It matters very much 
 what opportunity you give him of leading the right 
 life and the highest. It matters a great deal what ideal 
 you are setting before him. He is either better or 
 worse because of what he knows of you. This is 
 business, the highest business, for which the counting- 
 house is just the opportunity. 
 
 Sometimes employers tell me that it is very difficult 
 to discover a man of character, that they are perfectly 
 willing to pay for character when they can find it, but 
 that the lack of conscientiousness is positively appall- 
 ing. This, I am compelled to believe, is true. Good 
 servants are a rare entity. A man cannot be trusted, 
 as a rule, behind your back ; when yo"u find a man who 
 can, it is worth your while to pay him, so you tell me, 
 as much as you can possibly afford out of your profits. 
 On the other hand, young men sometimes tell us that, 
 no matter what they do for their master, he just re- 
 gards them as a chattel, as a means to dividends, and 
 nothing more. Thank God, all employers are not like 
 it ; but if there are any they are sinning against God. 
 No man is a chattel ; no, not even if he be an unworthy 
 servant. You have some responsibility towards him, 
 and only when that responsibility is carried to the 
 .point where service for him becomes a menace and an 
 injustice to what you owe to other people are you 
 justified in severing the relationship between you twG. 
 A man matters because a man is a soul. Sometimes 
 those who are in your power are treated as if they had 
 
150 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 no soul. A young fellow tells me about his cheerless 
 life, his loneliness in the great city, the hardness it 
 engenders, the cynicism which steals over him, because 
 he feels that he just fills a niche for a little time in a 
 business office, and by-and-bye he is liable to be thrust 
 out at the caprice of a man who' has power to say 
 " Come " and " Go." Again, we are told that from 
 the employee is required service which no conscien- 
 tious man ought ever to render. One of the false 
 maxims of our business life is that trade lies are 
 necessary. If society requires trade lies, and is built 
 upon them, so much the worse for society. We are 
 wrong all round, and we are losing all round. If it 
 be true, as I am told, that to gain z footing in a new 
 district you have to bribe your way inch by inch with 
 the subordinates in this institution or that, there is 
 something against which a conscientious man should 
 protest with all his might. I am told the employer will 
 sometimes require from his subordinate that the lie be 
 told without a blush and the purchaser deceived be- 
 cause he is ready to deceive in his turn. It will be a 
 bad day for England when that becomes general — pray 
 God it never may ! Only the day before yesterday one 
 young fellow asked me an opinion as to his proper 
 course of action. He said : " I am in the antique 
 trade; it sometimes happens that we have to offer 
 for sale to a collector an article which appears per- 
 fectly genuine. If a collector did not ask for it, I 
 would sell it for a small sum and say what it was ; but 
 if a collector asks for it I am compelled by my master's 
 commands to ask ten times its value. I must do it, or 
 I must go. Now, what would you tell me to do ? " 
 It is all very well for a preacher to sit in his arm- 
 
CONSCIENCE 161 
 
 chair and look noble and spiritual and highly moral, 
 and give an opinion which amounts to a command. 
 But I will confess that I hesitated when I heard what 
 were that young man's responsibilities and his chances 
 of a new situation ; but only for a moment. There are 
 no two ways about a thing like that. That is a lie 
 that you are asked to tell, a bad lie, a lie by which you 
 intend to exploit the person who is dealing with you, 
 a lie which he believes to be the truth ; a lie which, 
 though your employer be the principal gainer, and 
 upon him rests the principal responsibility, reacts upon 
 you. Come out of that business; let it go. I would 
 say to you, in the simple words which you heard in 
 your childhood and many a time sang in the Sunday- 
 school: 
 
 " Courage, brother, do not stumble, 
 Though thy path be dark as night ; 
 There's a star to guide the humble — 
 Trust in God and do the right." 
 
 Then they tell me that it often happens in trade that 
 the man who has set before him the Christian ideal 
 finds himself in danger of ruin. He cannot compete 
 with the men who don't allow conscience to stand in 
 their way. Not many miles from this spot I know one 
 such instance — a man who tried to act squarely every 
 day, and at the beginning of the day resolved that 
 there should be no lies told, not even by silence; he 
 would offer for a fair price that which would bring 
 him a fair profit. The result, he tells me, is that his 
 business has been gradually going down. If that is 
 so, I pity the man who alone — and he must be alone 
 — makes such a fight. But I would like to tell any- 
 body like him that is here not to think that you are 
 
152 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 necessarily going- to fail; for in some cases, at least, 
 I have known the precise opposite — a brave man and 
 a good has come out on top. When men knew that 
 his word was as good as his bond, that his Christian 
 character was to be relied upon, and was not lip 
 testimony, they trusted and stood by him. So that 
 there is even here a spiritual dividend for him who 
 will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly 
 with God. But if there were not, let it be just 
 the same. Go straight in your relations with men, 
 live as before the face of God, and if He lets you 
 down, ask Him why it is, and o'lr Father, who seeth 
 in secret, will reward thee openly. For all is not 
 yet. You may have to be contented with a little in this 
 world ; this world is only a corner of the real one, and, 
 by-and-bye, you will see to the full the meaning of the 
 discipline through which you have been called to pass. 
 Again, there is a compromise with conscience in our 
 use of our leisure time. Some young fellows have 
 told me that they will have nothing to do with religious 
 people, and they are not going to promise themselves 
 to any religious organisation ; for, they say, it is im- 
 possible to be other than a hypocrite if you join a 
 religious society and then try to live as the times de- 
 mand. But, young man, you are a hypocrite already. 
 If you have seen the highest and refused to obey, what 
 are you but a hypocrite? You do not stand in the 
 least higher than the man who has joined a religious 
 society, in the hope that God may enable him to re- 
 deem the time. Leisure time, as it is called, is fre- 
 quently employed for orgies. One serious danger of 
 the hour is that which is so often referred to as to have 
 become commonplace — the craze for excitement in one 
 
CONSCIENCE 153 
 
 form or another — the stage, the football field, and 
 worse. There is nothing wrong, intrinsically, about 
 healthy recreation, but when it has ceased to be 
 the servant and become the master, woe to you. Rud- 
 yard Kipling was severely criticised for talking about 
 the " muddied oafs " at the goal. It may have been 
 vigorous language unpoetically expressed, but there 
 is some danger lest the craze even for athleticism — 
 and I stop there — should drive out every higher idea 
 from the minds of its victims. The whole conversa- 
 tion of some young fellows is football, or cricket, or 
 the turf. So soon as excitement of that kind lays grip 
 upon a man's mind, in some way it seems to act upon 
 his conscience. It is but a step to the gambling-table 
 and the drinking-hell, for these things flourish in the 
 atmosphere I have described. 
 
 But, more than that, we have the idle rich 
 around us. Perhaps it does not become us, as 
 members of the middle class, to tell the higher 
 grade what it ought to do, but sometimes one 
 is filled with misgiving when one hears and reads of 
 the condition of English Society to-day. Such a case 
 as that of Lady Granville Gordon — whom God pity ! 
 — reveals a condition of rottenness against which every 
 Christian man in every grade of society ought to set 
 his face with intensity. It matters much to us who 
 love our country. I am told there are Society women 
 who live the lives of pigs in their country houses. 
 How many there may be God only knows. But what 
 a life it must be! Surely there is something of re- 
 sponsibility resting upon us for a clear witness against 
 a state of things which threatens ruin to our country, 
 just as it brought ruin to Imperial Rome. We cannot 
 
154 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 clear ourselves of such responsibility. We must not 
 ignore these things. Where the privileged and un- 
 fettered indulge such bestial instincts as the army of 
 women upon our streets in London, less fortunate, in 
 whom the same practice and the same life, encouraged 
 by some of those whom we meet and talk with day by 
 day — a life made possible because of the atmosphere 
 that these women have been permitted to breathe, and 
 for which we cannot rid ourselves of responsibility — it 
 must bring its natural penalty, and in this world. He 
 who thus trifles with God's opportunities may some 
 day be asked to account for another's fall, besides his 
 own. Here I question myself in company with you. 
 There is a compromise with conscience, which is a 
 luxurious indifference to the state of things I have 
 taken a moment to describe. You may ask yourself 
 what matters it to you that at our gates men are living 
 lives of vice and wickedness and ignorance. It mat- 
 ters much to you, for we are trustees of a higher life 
 which God has given us to see. If we spend our lives, 
 even in a modest way, in comfortable indifference to 
 what our brethren are doing in the great city or in the 
 great Empire to which' we belong, we are sinning 
 against God. Our earthly citizenship demands some- 
 thing more, and it must be rendered to our Heavenly 
 Father. 
 
 I believe in a patriotism which is not often asserted 
 to-day. "Mafficking" is one thing; to stand by 
 your country, and to believe in those who are of your 
 blood and speech, is another. If God had meant us to 
 be entirely cosmopolitan, he would not have planted 
 the solitary in families. If England has a mission to 
 the world, we are summoned to be loyal to England. 
 
CONSCIENCE 155 
 
 Have mercy upon the fallen, and live so yourself that 
 it will be difficult for them to fall. The Lord requires 
 something from those of us who have time to take care 
 of ourselves. There is a beauty owing to our fellows 
 for the sake of the Lord, who has given us the time 
 in which we live and the opportunities to live as we do. 
 Strive for the highest ; it is within reach of everyone. 
 Live for God. The best way to do it is to raise the 
 fallen, cheer the faint, heal the sick, and lead the blind. 
 I cannot pretend that I have no responsibility, nor can 
 you. It is practice that matters, not preaching. If 
 a new revival of religion is coming — and I am one of 
 those who hope for it — I believe it will show itself in 
 social redemption ; spiritual men will fight the fiercest 
 battle on behalf of the hungry, the poor, and the sad, 
 and for Christ's sake men will brothers be to those 
 less fortunate than themselves, and will try to under- 
 stand before they condemn. Deal justly, love mercy, 
 and walk humbly with God. " For they that be wise 
 shall shine with the brightness of the firmament, and 
 they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for 
 ever." 
 
XIII 
 PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 
 
 If a man die, shall he live again ? — fob xiv. 14, 
 Because I live, ye shall live also.^John xiv. ig. 
 
 THIS is a question asked in the Old Testament 
 and answered in the New; asked in a g-ood 
 many cases, but nowhere perhaps so plainly as 
 in this chapter and this book. But the question which 
 is left a little uncertain in the Old Testament, or to 
 which an affirmative answer is given with hesitating 
 voice, becomes a triumphant certainty in the New. 
 Christianity came to tell us about the deathless, age- 
 less life, on the authority of Him through whom life 
 and immortality have been brought to light. His 
 words ring in our ears in confirmation of this text, 
 which is our promise and our surety : " Because I live 
 ye shall live also," " I am the resurrection and the life ; 
 he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall 
 he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall 
 never die." 
 
 It is sometimes said that interest in the subject of 
 personal immortality is not what it used to be, that in 
 point of fact the world — by which we mean humanity 
 — is becoming increasingly secular in interest and in 
 outlook. Some of you are doubtless familiar with the 
 words of that great scholar, historian, and thinker, Mr. 
 Lecky. In his " Rise and Progress of Rationalism in 
 
 156 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 157 
 
 Europe," Mr. Lecky tells us that undoubtedly men are 
 becoming increasingly secular in the focus of their 
 interests. We may learn something from the silences 
 of the pulpit. Ministers and elderly men will both 
 agree with me that whereas once upon a time sermons 
 were always charged with appeals based upon the 
 tremendous issues of conduct, not for time but for 
 eternity, nowadays we have become so practical that 
 appeals are not made from sanctions drawn from con- 
 siderations of judgment to come, and the blessedness 
 of heaven or the terrors of retribution. Now, mark 
 this. In history it has always been true that when the 
 pulpit has taken to moralising, morality has lost its 
 dynamic. We can learn our morals elsewhere, pru- 
 dence will teach us the importance of a certain regard 
 to conduct ; but the highest achievements of conscience 
 in any century have been made, not in accordance with 
 the dictates of prudential maxims, but in obedience to 
 the tremendous sanctions drawn from the consideration 
 of man's eternal citizenship. 
 
 Again, we are told tlia't to-day, intellectually, there 
 is more uncertainty about the fact of personal immor- 
 tality than there ever was before : and perhaps that is 
 true, though not so true as some of you think. We 
 are less certain in some ways because of a new habit 
 of mind induced by acquaintance with the methods of 
 modern science. Young men, who know nothing at 
 all about science, are under the domination of certain 
 notions, derived from the methods of science, and you 
 regard nothing as proven which has not been the result 
 of conclusions arrived at after laborious observation 
 and experiment. In other words, that is proof to you 
 which has been obtained by the inductive method. 
 
168 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Now, young men, permit me to say that there is 
 another kind of proof than this. I want you to con- 
 cede this before we approach the heart of the great 
 subject we have in hand. There is another kind of 
 proof than that which is derived from the inductive 
 method. Moreover, nothing can be absolutely proven 
 even by that method. And again, the things which 
 you do daily, the objects to which you give yourself, 
 the aims of which you are most conscious and to which 
 you devote your energies with most enthusiasm are not 
 the result of your inductive proofs, have little to do 
 with observation and experiment, but are rather the 
 fruit of a Divine impulse. The best things in human 
 nature are not the things which you stop to reason 
 about at all, but the things that you feel and know and 
 see to be the highest. 
 
 Again, it is said that to-day there is a cessation of 
 desire for personal immortality — perhaps I ought to 
 have said a comparative cessation of desire. I have 
 met people who tell me that they have no wish for a 
 life of personal existence beyond the grave. There 
 are several ways in which they could come to such a 
 feeling and condition as that; one is mental ennui. I 
 think that the sense of the mystery of life is so great, 
 the sense of illusion so appalling, the fruit of the 
 noblest effort so small, that some of the best of men 
 gradually grow tired, and cease to bother about what 
 may come, and just wait for the great dissolution 
 without expectation and without hope. A larger num- 
 ber are represented by such a person as this. I heard 
 a City man speak the other day, and I took a mental 
 note of his case. He spoke to a friend in these 
 terms: 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 159 
 
 " I know all you would say to me. I went to Sunday- 
 school the same as you did ; I used to be a worker in 
 the Church ; I had my notions, as you have them now, 
 about man's eternal destiny. I have come to the con- 
 clusion that there is no such destiny, and that, if there 
 were, I don't seek it ; it matters nothing to me. I have 
 worked hard all my life, and my ideal can be summed 
 up in a few sentences. It is this : To provide a com- 
 petence for my five children, and then let death come 
 as soon as it pleases. I ask for no waiting on the 
 other side." 
 
 I Trouble has driven many people to that condition. 
 I know some at the present hour who would be glad 
 to feel that the evening had come, that the night would 
 soon close down, and all their worries and their sor- 
 rows be hid in the silence of the grave. 
 
 And yet with all this there is such an interest in the 
 subject of personal immortality that I question whether 
 many others can compare with it in significance and 
 importance. Men for the most part do want to live. 
 Even some of those who say that they do not, if they 
 could be assured that the best is true, and not the 
 worst, would very soon change their outlook and their 
 hopes, feelings, and desires. 
 
 S^ 
 
 " Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
 Oh, life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller that I want." 
 
 It is love that speaks with the loudest tongue here. 
 There are some people to whom life has ceased to 
 signify much since the dearest went away. Most of 
 
160 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 your interests now are upon the other side; you feel 
 that the cruellest thing- that ever came into your ex- 
 perience was Death's invasion of your home, and if 
 you could be assured that you will see your dead again, 
 you would not trouble very much about your personal 
 immortality — you would be glad to think that love can 
 never lose its own. 
 
 It is for this reason that men are always asking, and 
 will continue to ask, in the words of Job, " If a man 
 ; die, shall he live again ? " I have no hesitation about 
 the answer. No, he will not ; for the simple reason ^ ^ 
 that he will never die. We have the highest authority " ' 
 for saying this. Deathless life is in Jesus Christ.// 
 The Master of the universe, who holds the keys of 
 death and hell, is the One who came to save mankind. 
 The destiny of humanity is bound up with the life of 
 Jesus Christ. To Him do you belong, not to yourself ; 
 not your own are you, but bought with a price. Jesus 
 Christ has rights over your souls, and it is in Him that 
 all your hope is centred, not only for yourself, but for 
 your dear ones. If Christ were wrong in the authority 
 He claimed and the assurance with which He spoke, 
 it is a dismal fact for humanity to-day; but if He 
 were right, all the best we hope for and expect is bound 
 up in our kinship with Jesus Christ. " Because I live, 
 ye shall live also." I will venture upon a prophecy. 
 It is that the next great rehabilitation of the funda- 
 mentals of religion will come, not from the side of 
 theology, but from the side of science. Theology, any- 
 way, is no more than speculation ; it always stumbles 
 along in the wake of spiritual experience. Experience 
 comes first and theology afterwards. My belief is that 
 we are at the dawning of a day when the rehabilitation 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 161 
 
 of the great facts of religion will come from the side 
 of that which has hitherto been hostile to it. More- 
 over, I think the time is coming when our knowledge 
 will be unified with our experience, and our highest 
 aspiration will find justification in the known facts of 
 our Hfe. 
 
 There are certain great names to-day which stand 
 out as exponents of science, and which are associated, 
 at the same time, with a not unfriendly interest in 
 religion. Among these I would like to mention Sir 
 Oliver Lodge, Principal of the University of Bir- 
 mingham. This great man, ex-President of the 
 British Association, said some time ago that to him the 
 hypothesis of a World Soul intimately and immediately 
 concerned with ours is the best explanation of things 
 as they are. The second volume of a work by 
 the late F. W. H. Myers, which bears the signifi- 
 cant title, " Human Personality, and Its Survival 
 after Bodily Death," contains these two passages. The 
 first is : 
 
 " On a basis of observed facts, Christianity, the 
 youngest of the great types of religion, does assuredly 
 rest. Assuredly, those facts, so far as tradition has 
 made them known to us, do tend to prove the super- 
 human character of its Founder and His triumph over 
 death, and thus the existence and influence of a 
 spiritual world where man's true citizenship lies." 
 
 The second passage is this : 
 
 " I venture now on a bold saying, for I predict that, 
 in consequence of the new evidencCj all reasonable men 
 a century hence will believe the resurrection of Christ ; 
 whereas, in default of the new evidence, no reasonable 
 man a century hence would have believed it." 
 
102 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 The second part of that statement is too strong ; the 
 former part I entirely and implicitly believe. 
 
 Again, from this side of Christian experience and 
 this new friendly interest of science in human nature 
 from the religious standpoint, we have derived certain 
 . great ideas. The first is that the world itself is 
 spiritual. What do I mean by that? I do not want 
 to use a vague term and leave it. It may be neither 
 matter nor mind, but it is something greater than 
 either, and which has immediate significance for the 
 highest of which human nature has shown itself to be 
 capable. If we could get at the meaning of the uni- 
 verse, the ultimate meaning, we should find that it has 
 an immediate bearing upon morality, our relations to 
 one another, and to the Soul of all things. Now, if 
 all is spirit, in that regard, if all is soul. Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, whose soul is it that bears such an immediate 
 moral relationship — a relationship which we cannot 
 repudiate and with which we cannot dispense — whose 
 is it? The answer of Christian experience comes to 
 our aid, and says, Jesus Christ is Lord of all, the 
 World-Soul, comes the affirmation from a quarter in 
 which we never heard it before, is the same as He 
 I who spoke on the hillsides of Galilee and in the upper 
 I room at Jerusalem. " Because I live, ye shall live also." 
 ^ The second great idea is this — that personality is 
 1 the ultimate reality in the whole scheme of things. 
 You were prior to the universe ; you are a universe 
 yourself. Every soul has infinite value — here Jesus 
 , speaks again — yours is worthy of an eternal destiny 
 for that reason alone. I could quote Dr. Parker in 
 saying, " Man is a soul, and he has a body." The 
 body is but the language of the soul. " Words, like 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 163 
 
 nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within." 
 Moreover, life is lived in limitation. Here I will utter 
 a sentence I will not attempt to prove or expound, 
 which has little to do with my immediate subject. I 
 say it and leave it. Some men are better than their 
 bodies will let them be. Moreover, life has value in 
 i relation. You cannot live alone the best life or the 
 f highest. It is love which gives significance to the 
 I living. Take that to the very highest plane that hu- 
 manity has ever known. Love of God has produced 
 a somewhat in human character compared with which 
 all else is dim and sordid and ugly. The witness of 
 saintship in the world is this — that life, to be life at 
 all, should be lived with God. It is not eating and 
 drinking and sleeping; it is righteousness and peace 
 and joy in the Holy Ghost. This is life eternal, that we 
 might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ 
 whom Thou hast sent. 
 
 From this point we can get farther and eagerly so. 
 The authority of Jesus comes to our aid. He has not 
 left us without definite witness. Observe how little 
 the Christ ever said about the life to come, and yet how 
 every word He spoke had immediate relation to it. 
 " In my Father's house are many mansions." Suffer 
 me to change that word, time-honoured as it is. A 
 mansion means a big thing now; it did not mean that 
 when King James's translators first put it down here. 
 A mansion is a remain-sion, a place to remain in. 
 " In My Father's home are many resting-places. If 
 it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare 
 a place for you." The sweet authority of Christ comes 
 
 I to our aid in the spiritual witness of believers. There 
 is one type of man who never doubts personal immor- 
 
164 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 /tality, and he is the saint. The nearer to God the 
 surer of heaven. 
 
 You remember the story of the old Scottish woman, 
 who was asked by her minister to test her — so great 
 was her love for the Master, so sure was she of His 
 goodness — " But, Jenny, woman, suppose at the last, 
 after all, your Lord should let you down to hell?" 
 "Ah, weel," she said, "be it as it pleases Him: He 
 will lose mair than me." Goodness has a claim upon 
 God. Goodness is an apologetic for immortality. 
 Produce a saint, and you produce something far more 
 worthy to live than this world of bricks and mortar, 
 stones and lime, sea and air. Nay, you have produced 
 a faith that it cannot be otherwise, and that it shall 
 live. To have lived with God is the promise that you 
 will live for aye. " Because I live, ye shall live also," 
 .i|Life, on the authority of Jesus, is one; death is an epi- 
 Isode, an event in continuous life. Jesus, the Soul of 
 the universe, has charge of yours. When Death 
 comes, he is but a messenger to call personality to its 
 own, " Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
 doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know 
 that when He " — or it — " shall appear, we shall be like 
 Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 
 I Moreover, the persistence of personality means the 
 persistence of all the relations that make life glad and 
 Igood — the persistence of memory, thought, feeling, de- 
 sire, affection. Morality is pivoted upon personality. 
 jMake a noble man, and you take with him to the eter- 
 pial world the relations that have helped to make him 
 noble. Can the dead, then, forget? No; they wait 
 for the great reunion; "they without us shall not be 
 made perfect." " Shall we see our dead again? " say 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 165 
 
 some. Yes, you will; they are safe in the arms of 
 Jesus; in the unseen you will meet them all. And I 
 sometimes long to think the black sheep will be there 
 with the rest. Moreover, I feel that the cruellest 
 stroke of fate which has ever come to any man in this 
 life, in the removal of one who taught him to be noble, J ^ * 
 might be God's call to a higher citizenship here in '^'^y^' 
 preparation for the citizenship beyond. There may be '""(nf^lwA 
 some man or woman here who feels bitter because 
 death has robbed him or her of all that gave meaning 
 to life. Do not feel like that any more; set your affec- 
 tions on things above. If you only knew, you would 
 make Christ your Trustee, and never question Him 
 again. You little know what your dead have been saved 
 from and saved to. Your little child who has gone to 
 heaven is wiser than you, and he will be your teacher 
 by-and-bye. I wonder what the minister of this 
 church, so lately called home, thinks this morning of 
 the thoughts he used to think and the things he used 
 to say about his great agony when it came, and the 
 promise of his partner to wait for him at heaven's gate. 
 He has not forgotten us, and if his voice could sound 
 from the tomb, I know what he would tell us — that 
 Jesus, the Conqueror and King, is the pledge and the 
 guarantee of all spiritual reunions above. Oh, it is 
 worth our while to trust Him, to leave all to Him, to 
 live as in His presence, to make Him the sacrament 
 that puts us in touch with eternity. He is the golden 
 bridge over the gulf of death. 
 
 " Think, when our one soul understands, 
 
 The great Word which makes all things new, 
 When earth breaks up and heaven expands, 
 
 How will the change strike me and you 
 In the house not made with hands ? 
 
166 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 *• Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine, 
 
 Your heart anticipate my heart; 
 You must be just before, in fine, 
 
 See and make me see, for your part, 
 New depths of the Divine." 
 
 Some time ago I read a little book on this subject, 
 advocating a different view from that which I have 
 placed before you. One beautiful instance was given 
 in it of a truth that all our hearts will affirm. A little 
 girl had been accustomed always to bid her father 
 good-night in the same words. She was an only child, 
 and loved as only children are. She used to say, 
 " Good-night, I shall see you again in the morning." 
 The time came when death's bright angel — bright to 
 those who go, dark to those who stay — summoned 
 her to heaven. In her last moments, she called her 
 father to her side, and putting up her little arms, she 
 clasped them around his neck, whispering with her 
 rapidly dying strength, " Good-night, dear father, I 
 shall see you again in the morning." She was right, 
 as the child always is right about the highest things. 
 "Sorrow endureth for a night; joy cometh in the 
 morning." 
 
XIV 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE LOVE* 
 
 The Father Himself loveih yoii.— John xvi. 22. 
 
 THE doctrine of Divine love, w^e are sometimes 
 assured, has been preached ad nauseam by 
 preachers in every evangelical pulpit — in fact, 
 I should suppose in most Christian pulpits in this land. 
 We are sometimes told that the doctrine has been over- 
 done. Perhaps it has. If it has been preached un- 
 convincingly, no doubt that is the fault of the proph- 
 ets who have had it in trust, and that occasionally 
 preachers themselves transcend or overleap their own 
 experience in their declaration of a doctrine which, if 
 it be true, ought to have a greater effect upon their 
 lives, upon the power of their ministry, upon the qual- 
 ity of Christian character. All this may be true, and 
 yet the doctrine of Divine love is of the very essence 
 of Christianity; it is that which explicitly or implicitly 
 should underlie every utterance made in the name of 
 Christ. Most fittingly, therefore, do we on His au- 
 thority go back to it this morning. It may be that we 
 can frankly confess to each other that the Apostle of 
 Love, from whose writings we have taken our text, 
 may not always have retained the ipsissima verba of the 
 Master when he has been writing about Him. In this 
 fourth gospel I believe myself there are places in which 
 * Preached in Union Chapel, Brighton, Sunday morning, 
 March 8, 1903. 
 
 167 
 
168 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 the Apostle has expanded, perhaps even edited, the 
 words of the Master. In so doing he has not made 
 them false, and it matters very little in the cases where 
 this has happened that we may not have exactly the 
 sentence, word for word, which came from the lips of 
 Jesus. Nay, in some places it is difficult to know 
 whether St. John means that he himself is speaking or 
 his Master; he does not tell us where the one leaves off 
 and the other begins. But I never can bring myself 
 to believe that this is true of the last few chapters, and 
 especially from the thirteenth to the eighteenth in this 
 beautiful gospel. Most of us could repeat the four- 
 teenth of St. John without any book at all. It is the 
 classic of Christian experience, and another like unto 
 it is the sixteenth chapter, whence our text is taken. 
 It matters not how John came to remember these 
 words which in a time of great spiritual strain and 
 intensity were given to him to repeat to us. But this 
 is certain: the spiritual man declares — cannot but de- 
 clare — that these are the words of the Master, the 
 words of eternal life. It is on the authority of the Mas- 
 ter, then, with His very sentence ringing in our ears, 
 that we turn this morning to that fundamental of the 
 Christian faith — God is love. 
 
 It is fitting to remember, I say, on the authority of 
 the Master, that this is so, for without the Master we 
 could not affirm it at all. Sometimes we are told that 
 without Christ it were still possible for the human heart 
 to affirm that love reigns at the heart of things. I 
 know not how that discovery is made. The Christ is 
 the source of all that we bring to experience when we 
 affirm that love is the name and the nature of God. 
 We cannot read it in the external world. Henry 
 
DOCTRINE OF DIVINE LOVE 169 
 
 Drummond thinks we can; but I believe that Henry 
 Drummond does what the spiritual man always does 
 when he looks for the kindness of God in the world 
 without — he brings something to nature before he 
 reads out of nature the goodness of the All-Father. 
 
 *' That type of perfect in his mind 
 In nature can he nowhere find; 
 He sows himself on every wind." 
 
 It is only when, as Dr. Dallinger, the great Wesleyan 
 
 divine and man of science, says, we acknowledge that no 
 man has seen nor can see God, not even His footsteps 
 in nature as the God of love, and recognise that the 
 only begotten Son hath declared Him, that we continue : 
 
 " He seems to hear a heavenly friend, 
 And through thick veils to apprehend 
 A labour working to an end." 
 
 Do not, I pray you, mistake my meaning. It were 
 a sad thing for us if, by a kind of illogical dichotomy, 
 we could believe in a God of love in direct contrast to 
 the witness of nature. No, the truth is that the key 
 to the interpretation of nature is to be found in the 
 Gospel, You can call nature the garment of God, 
 woven without seams throughout, when you realise 
 that the highest is the interpretation of the whole, and 
 that in Christ we have the great secret of the cosmos — 
 God is love. 
 
 On the field of history we are not much better ofif. 
 It is a saddening study to the man who goes into it 
 without faith; yea, verily, it is little more than the rec- 
 ords of the crimes and the faults of poor, errant 
 human nature, as has often been pointed out. W^e 
 need a co-ordinating principle somewhere, and I be- 
 lieve that no man has ever yet accomplished in the field 
 
no CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of history aught worthy of the name who has not 
 found, consciously or sub-consciously, that co-ordinat- 
 ing principle in a rule of right which somehow makes 
 itself felt, and works itself out, and which is only an- 
 other name for God. Can there be a right which does 
 not issue in love? Our moral consciousness denies it. 
 The God of right and the God of love must be one and 
 the same, and to preach the right without the love, or 
 the love without the right, is to shear your Gospel of 
 all convincingness and power. Sometimes we preach 
 a God whose nature, though we do not say so, is that 
 of a doting amiability; and sometimes we are inclined 
 to preach a God, though we do not say so, who is a 
 God of rigid implacability. Neither is true; both con- 
 tain a truth. The God of righteousness who is de- 
 clared in history — and you cannot mistake Him — 
 must also be the God of love, if we are to believe in a 
 future for man — a glorious destiny for those who re- 
 main in the image of God. On the field of history we 
 can read a plan Divine best of all when we look 
 through the eyes of Jesus Christ. In our every-day 
 experience, what else can we say? Can we take any 
 other Guide and Master than Jesus Christ? I trow 
 not. If I were a man of the world, pure and simple — 
 and sometimes I think I am not much else — I mean 
 that I would rather look out with the eyes of the man 
 who has to fight the battle of life than I would play 
 the ecclesiastic. If I were a man of the world, pure 
 and simple, I would do what so many thousands of 
 their company even external to the Churches are doing 
 to-day, and without relation to preachers — I would 
 examine the claims of Jesus Christ, and see if there 
 were no hope and guidance for me there. 
 
DOCTRINE OF DIVINE LOVE Hi 
 
 Mr. Moody once said, in his preaching, and in my 
 hearing, that when he first began his wonderful work, 
 not in England, but in America, he was inclined to 
 make some distinction between the nature of the 
 Father and the nature of the Son. I mean their moral 
 nature — put metaphysics away. He had never for- 
 mulated it to himself; we do not always formulate our 
 creeds. But after feeling the sternness of the Father, 
 as over against and contrasted with the winsomeness 
 of the Son, he said it came to him like a new gospel 
 that the Son reveals the heart of the universe, and that 
 kindness is the solution of the mystery there, " He 
 that hath seen Me hath seen the Father " is a moral 
 proposition rather than an intellectual. It should be- 
 come part of the immediate spiritual experience of 
 every man. When you have seen the heart of Jesus 
 you have no more to learn about the heart of God: 
 it will be the same as His to all eternity. On the wit- 
 ness of the Master, whose life — yea, even rather his 
 teaching — is the declaration of this evangel, we would 
 
 say: 
 
 " God is love : His mercy brightens 
 All the path by which we rove." 
 
 If we can establish that declaration — and it is not the 
 easiest thing in the world to do it — we can build an 
 experience of optimism upon it, and say, with Saba- 
 tier: "When wearied by the world of pleasure or of 
 toil I long to find my soul again and live a deeper life, 
 I can accept no other God and Master than Jesus 
 Christ, because in Him alone optimism is without 
 frivolity and seriousness without despair." The doc- 
 trine of Divine love is one declared to spiritual experi- 
 ence. I sometimes wonder when, with our modern 
 
1^2 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 methods, we shall take the spiritual man seriously, and 
 examine him, and endeavour to understand the reason 
 for his life. We go with hammer and chisel and 
 microscope to examine rocks and fossils; why not ask 
 ourselves the question which, in point of fact, some are 
 beginning to ask, Why is a man good, and loving, and 
 confident that goodness and love are making him? 
 Why is it? The experience of the spiritual man is the 
 best apologetic for the Gospel — far more so than the 
 words of preachers, be they never so eloquent ; and the 
 doctrine of Divine love, though it seem to be in plain 
 contrast with the facts of life, is witnessed, without 
 faltering and without fail, in the experience of the 
 spiritual roan. He tells us that the love of God is no 
 thing of weak amiability: it is a very stern thing, that 
 it is discriminating in its incidence, that it will not 
 spare its object, that it is the explanation of sorrow 
 and struggle and pain, and that it is the end toward 
 which these things point, and the triumph in which 
 finally these things shall be destroyed. God hath not 
 left Himself without a witness ; and the spiritual man, 
 living the life of the Cross, never fiinches from the 
 declaration that, in spite of the seeming, " Behind a 
 frowning Providence," there is a smiling face. 
 
 Long ago I remember a lady in this church telling 
 me of her experience of one, a woman, very poor, even 
 ignorant, who had had a hard, strenuous life, and who 
 finally was dying without the hope of doing anything 
 for her children, who made a somewhat remarkable 
 declaration on her deathbed to her visitor. The visitor 
 was trying to convince her, as I am trying to convince 
 you, of the testimony of the spiritual man, that God is 
 love. The poor woman answered by saying, " I can 
 
DOCTRINE OF DIVINE LOVE n3 
 
 believe all you declare about Jesus Christ, but I don't 
 believe in God." You would scarcely think it possible 
 that the declaration could have been made, but, you 
 see, it was made by one who was not accustomed to 
 think. She continued: " If Christ were here, the real 
 Christ of whom you speak, I could tell Him all my 
 troubles; but I cannot tell them to God." The de- 
 mand of that rudimentary experience surely was for 
 a gospel in which Christ should be the pledge and 
 guarantee of the goodwill of God. There are many 
 thousands who feel something like it who may not, 
 cannot, explain why. Christ becomes their gateway 
 into God: and it is not too much to say that there are 
 more men and women believing in the goodness of 
 God to-day — yea, in the very existence of God — be- 
 cause there is a Christ to preach, than through all 
 other means put together. The experience of the 
 spiritual man will bear the test of examination 
 here. There may be one man here in utter 
 despair about his life: he has lived so badly. There 
 in another man close by him who would affirm that, 
 though the whole world go crashing into ruin, still it 
 is well, for " He plants His footsteps in the sea, and 
 rides upon the storm " — He by whom the very hairs 
 of our head are all numbered. Man is a citizen of 
 eternity, and the love of God is broader than the meas- 
 ure of man's mind. 
 
 " Thou judgest us : Thy purity 
 Doth all our lusts condemn ; 
 The love that draws us nearer Thee 
 Is hot with wrath to them." 
 
 Some of you, in speaking about the love of God, forget 
 that the love of God means the wrath of God. They 
 
174 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 never can be separated in spiritual experience. We 
 have read of the soldier-father who destroyed his boy 
 at the front rather than permit him to play the cow- 
 ard's part and disgrace an ancient name, and I have 
 heard a humbler father say, in anguish of spirit, 
 " Would that God had taken my boy years and years 
 ago than let me live to see the man he has become ! " 
 
 Love has an ultimatum. There is a point where love 
 is your enemy, and will destroy you rather than fail of 
 its object: it can be satisfied with nothing less than the 
 highest. For love is noble, and God is nobleness, be- 
 cause God is love. On the other hand, love will never 
 spare the loved, because it is calling to higher heights 
 day by day. Your increase of knowledge of the work- 
 ings of God, of His ways with men, must lead you 
 to know that you will not be placed always in the 
 green pastures and led beside the still waters. God 
 has something grander than this for the children of 
 men: We have read of that ever-great commander 
 who, when asking for someone to lead a forlorn hope, 
 received with gladness the offer of his boy to do it. 
 The old warrior's eyes lighted with love, and with 
 pride he looked at him; he handed him the standard, 
 and said, "There is your task, yonder the enemy; go 
 forward." Was it love that spake, or was it indiffer- 
 ence? Was it the love that would have placed its arms 
 around him and shielded him from all harm and from 
 all danger, love that would have cherished the feminine 
 — which sometimes, after all, is the strongest — at the 
 expense of the grandest in that boyish nature? No; in 
 that warrior I read my God, who spared not His own 
 Son, but delivered Him up for us all, and as He is so 
 are we in this world. 
 
DOCTRINE OF DIVINE LOVE 1^5 
 
 Again, I would have you believe and know, when 
 you speak of the love of God as the interpretation of 
 things as they are, that it is so discriminating in its 
 incidence that it will not deal with any two men alike. 
 I sometimes wonder why this man has so much to 
 bear and that man goes scot free. If the love of God 
 were not discriminating you would both have cause to 
 mourn. Sometimes we preachers deal with a glorious 
 truth so unconvincingly that we begin to feel that it 
 does not matter whether we preach the love of God or 
 not, we are all alike sunned in the atmosphere of the 
 Divine indifferentism. He maketh His sun to rise on 
 the evil and on the good, but He knows which are evil 
 and which are good. It is not as when the sun some- 
 times shineth in your window, and the birds sing in the 
 garden, when you have death in the home; the glory 
 without seems a mockery as you think of the sorrow 
 within. No; there is something greater than indififer- 
 entism here. That man is chosen to be trained and 
 sent at the bidding of love — love that knows itself as 
 love, love that is felt as love; and yonder man is sent, 
 like the warrior in the darkness, against principalities 
 and powers — sent to do and to bear for the sake of the 
 highest. What shall his reward be in the great day of 
 revelation? 
 
 I will go farther, and say I do not think the warrior 
 always knows who has sent him to the fight. Sometimes 
 when I see a poor man afflicted in his body, without 
 opportunity, social influence, or consideration, and 
 suffering every moment of his life, passing me on the 
 streets, I ask myself the question. What is that man 
 bearing for me? Vicarious suflfering is Divine service. 
 We read that at the Cross. It may be some mitigation 
 
176 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of the terribleness of the problem of human agony when 
 you think that some of the unconscious sufferers of 
 the world — I mean those who do not realise that 
 the suffering is Divinely given — are serving against 
 the great day when the secrets of all hearts, the ex- 
 planation of all destinies, shall become known. 
 
 " Yea, sometimes when I feel my heart 
 
 Most weak and life most burdensome, 
 I lift mine eyes up to the hills 
 
 From whence my help shall come ; 
 Yea, sometimes still I lift my heart 
 
 To th' archangelic trumpet-burst, 
 When all deep secrets shall be shown. 
 
 And many last be first." 
 
 If we only believed this, and realised the sublimity 
 of the doctrine which has sometimes been held to be so 
 weak, that God is love, it would waken all the man- 
 hood in you, and call out the best; you would never 
 shrink from the hardest, nO' matter what it involved, 
 and your faith would never fail. Did you ever think 
 of the heroism of the Christ? I love to dwell upon it. 
 There was a Hero crucified, and He is my God. Shall 
 we stand in that fellowship in the shadow of Calvary, 
 or shall we fail Him? See what it has made. Even 
 saving faith is the gift of God, the gift of His love, 
 and to be prayed for; but when it comes it makes 
 heroes — Christ's men, with the marks of the Lord 
 Jesus. 
 
 Renan, that great scholar, and critic, and man, who 
 spoke for an age and a people rich in admiration of the 
 Christ, and stopped just short of the truth that I have 
 now declared, this is what he says of the great Apostle 
 
DOCTRINE OP DIVINE LOVE lV7 
 
 of the Gentiles in his book on St. Paul : " Convinced 
 that he had given his life for a dream, Paul may have 
 wandered, despairing and resigned, on some Iberian 
 shore, aware of the nothingness of life, aware that he 
 was wrong about the Christ, and that the future was 
 dark." Hear what Paul says about himself; it was not 
 just that : " Nothing in heaven or earth shall separate 
 us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord." That is the testimony of a man who died for 
 the faith, and who died many times before the sword 
 of Nero fell. If we only believed it. Dr. Martineau 
 has said, it would be a comfort rather than a dread to 
 think that the issues of our life are hid in God, that 
 there is only a very little we can do in the fashioning 
 of our own destiny. Should we not simply wait, wait 
 in peace and fortitude, the Divine command? Back 
 to the old authority, our Hero-God: " He that hath 
 My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that 
 loveth Me, and he that loveth Me shall be loved of 
 My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest My- 
 self to him. He that loveth Me not keepeth not My 
 sayings, and the word which ye hear is not Mine, but 
 the Father's which sent Me." 
 
XV 
 PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 
 
 If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall 
 ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. — John xv. 7. 
 
 THE subject of prayer is one of never-failing 
 interest to mankind, and one upon which con- 
 troversy shows no signs of coming to an end. 
 We might have thought that all that can be said upon 
 this great theme has been said long ago, and that there 
 was no more either to say or to argue concerning it. 
 Such is very far from being the case. I am perfectly 
 sure that in a congregation so comprehensive as this 
 one, for example, we have the most various types of 
 mind and attitudes, too, upon the subject of prayer. 
 I have brought with me into the pulpit a book in which 
 certain of these types are set forth for a purpose rather 
 different from mine, and I venture to suppose that 
 every type herein suggested is present in this church. 
 I intend to speak about these. The first of these is 
 illustrated in the work before me, which I may remark, 
 parenthetically, is a work on psychology, not on re- 
 ligion. The books that are most valuable to me, from 
 a religious point of view, are nearly always those which 
 treat religious questions from some other standpoint 
 than the religious one. The eminent psychologist 
 who has collected the particulars before me put ques- 
 tions to a number of individuals at random. Here are 
 
 178 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 179 
 
 some of the questions he put to one man and the 
 answers he got: 
 
 Q. — What does reHgion mean to you? 
 
 A. — It means nothing, and it seems, so far as I can 
 observe, useless to others. I am sixty-seven years of 
 age, and have resided in the same place sixty years, 
 and have been in business for forty-five; consequently 
 I have some little experience of life and men, and some 
 of women, too ; and I find that the most religious and 
 pious people are, as a rule, those most lacking in up- 
 rightness and morality. The men who do not go to 
 church, or have any religious convictions, are the best. 
 Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonising are per- 
 nicious — they teach us to rely on some supernatural 
 power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I tee- 
 totally disbelieve in a God. . . . If I were to die now, 
 being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally 
 and physically, I would just as lief — yes, rather — die 
 with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other 
 rational pastime. As the timepiece stops, we die, and 
 that is all about it. 
 
 Q. — What is your notion -of sin? 
 
 A. — It seems to me that sin is a condition, a dis- 
 ease, incidental to man's development not being yet 
 advanced enough. Morbidness over it increases 
 the disease, and, at any rate, it is no use praying 
 about it. 
 
 The writer of the book drily remarks at the close 
 of the interrogation, " If we are in search of a broken 
 and contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this 
 brother." 
 
 Now compare that statement of experience with this 
 one. In answer to similar questions, another man, 
 
180 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 forty-nine years of age, chosen at random, like the 
 other, answers: 
 
 " God is more real to me than any thought or thing 
 or person. I feel His presence positively. Tlie more I 
 Hve in closer harmony with His laws as written in 
 body and mind, the nearer do I feel Him to be. I talk- 
 to Him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and 
 our communion is joy." 
 
 Another, this time a young man of twenty-seven, re- 
 plies: 
 
 " God is quite real to me. I speak to Him, and He 
 answers me. Something over a year ago, I was for 
 some weeks in the direst perplexity. I turned to God's 
 Holy Word, and the promise, * My grace is suflficient 
 for thee,' seems to come afresh from God's heart to 
 mine. Every time my thoughts turned to my trouble, 
 I heard that ring, and I knew that heaven spoke to me. 
 God is the nearest of all realities to my soul. He sur- 
 rounds me like an atmosphere. He is precious. He is 
 necessary, more to me than my own life." 
 
 Now, I suppose we could parallel those two cases in 
 this audience. I am perfectly sure that a number of 
 you have come in here, not because you believe in 
 religion or the Bible, still less in any preacher, but 
 somebody said to you, " We have an hour to spare, 
 shall we go along to the City Temple and see what 
 these people are doing, and what the fellow who is 
 there has to say? " But you have no more touch with 
 us and no more spiritual susceptibility, or you think 
 not, than the organ behind or the walls around me. 
 You can get on perfectly well without any religion. 
 You never pray, and tell me you never want to, and 
 you would feel it rather unmanly not to fight your own 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 181 
 
 battles, and you think what puling weaklings these 
 people are who go whining to a Higher Power when 
 they want things done for them, and so on. Now, my 
 friend, over against your case I place in respectful 
 i:ontrast the experience suggested in the words just 
 read as coming from the religious mind. Not all of the 
 people who pray are weaker men than you; some of 
 them are tremendously strong, and, to say the least 
 of it, you had better judge of Christianity in particular 
 and of religion in general by the best and the strongest 
 it produces rather than by the weak. If you do, you 
 will find some things between you and me that ought 
 to make you pause and think whether you have got 
 hold of the right philosophy of life. 
 
 Partly between these two strong contrastive types 
 of mind there is another great body of experience rep- 
 resented, for anything I know to the contrary, by a 
 majority, a distinct numerical majority, of those who 
 are present this morning. A man of this third type 
 sometimes prays and sometimes does not; occa- 
 sionally he feels an impulse to cry to his Maker. 
 Perhaps an overmastering sorrow drives him to 
 his knees, but, for the most part, prayer has very 
 little to do with his ordinary everyday experience; yet 
 he would be glad to know that there was any reality 
 in prayer. You will perhaps tell me that you have 
 prayed many a time, and you are not conscious that you 
 have got any answer; but if there be such a thing as 
 answered prayer you would like to know of it, that you 
 may get fast hold upon the things that are unseen and 
 eternal. I cannot do better than ask you to come with 
 me as close up as ever you can get to the words of my 
 text; for if ever there was an unequivocal statement 
 
182 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of the experience of prayer and a promise of answer to 
 it, it is in that text, " If ye abide in Me, and My words 
 abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be 
 done unto you." Those words must answer to some- 
 body's experience, for we have the temerity to read 
 them in the pulpit nearly nineteen hundred years after 
 they were written. " Ah," somebody will say, " you 
 beg the question, they were not written so far back; 
 you stick St. John's name on, but did John ever write 
 them, and did Jesus ever say them?" I think John 
 did write them, and that Jesus did say them, and the 
 reason why I think so is that they have stood the test 
 of so many centuries, whether it be sixteen or nineteen. 
 They are here, and they have value-. Men heed them, 
 pray because of them, cling to them, rest upon them. 
 They regard them as a gracious promise, they build 
 them into heart and life, and your preacher of this 
 morning, not to speak of scores of other people who 
 would say the same thing, believes them to be 
 deathlessly true. The Master who spoke them is 
 speaking them still, and He speaks them in the midst 
 of our congregation to-day. " If ye abide in Me, and 
 My words abide in you " — no stranger voice this — 
 " ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto 
 you." Let us further examine into the scope of this 
 stupendous promise. 
 
 " If ye abide in Me," " Now," says my friend the 
 sceptic, willing or unwilling, " I may try this exercise 
 of yours, but to me praying is just like talking at the 
 air; the words go, but they do not bring anything 
 back. I may act on the eternal, but there is no re- 
 action. It is like uttering oneself to an atmosphere." 
 Take your phrase — " an atmosphere." You have 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 183 
 
 prayed to-day to an atmosphere, and you got an an- 
 swer. All your human relations are questions of at- 
 mosphere. You never yet had anything to do with a 
 person but you were dealing with an atmosphere, 
 one that you could feel and describe, and has value. 
 You know it because it reacts on your experience. 
 Every man has his atmosphere, and when you were 
 trying to sell a man a dozen yards of calico across the 
 counter, and asked him a certain price for it, and did 
 your best to get him to pay it, you were praying; it 
 may have been on a low level, but you were praying to 
 a living person, whose atmosphere was round about 
 you, distinct from any atmosphere you ever knew 
 before, and that man's value for you at this moment, 
 whatever it may be, was an exact equivalent to your 
 prayer. Do you think this is a far-fetched illustration? 
 It is not; nothing of the sort. All religion is a ques- 
 tion of personal atmosphere. We live with a living 
 Being. Christianity is no code of rules or system of 
 philosophy; it is a spirit, a life, an atmosphere, and we 
 are dealing with a Person who is, at any rate, not less 
 than any person you ever met in this life. Now if I 
 declare the Person with whom I am dealing across my 
 spiritual counter to be Jesus Christ, you cannot con- 
 tradict me, if experience goes to confirm my faith. 
 Has He kept His word? Has He done aught for me? 
 My prayer has come back laden with something worth 
 the having, and I send it forth again in faith that the 
 return will increase. " If a man abide in Me and I 
 abide in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." 
 
 I have a rather curious case of conversion to tell you 
 about this morning which I only got to hear of myself 
 ten days ago. It, I think, makes the point rather 
 
184 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 clearer than I can make it by simply talking round it. 
 A young man tells me that his experience of Christ be- 
 gan in this wise: He had been what we call a wastrel, 
 though he was of good family, had a public-school 
 education, and, I believe, a commission in the British 
 Army — that school for saints. He went wrong some- 
 how, and, as young men will — it is a great mystery — 
 though he knew he was breaking his mother's heart — 
 he was not particular about his father. He went on 
 and went down. He left the army, went to America, 
 took part in the Cuban War, got wounded. His people 
 at home knew nothing about it; he went off by him- 
 self, sank lower and lower, until in a public-house 
 brawl somewhere he was ^seriously hurt, and had to 
 lie up for a while. Then he took a situation as 
 gardener, in order to think over the course that he had 
 been adopting up to then, and have time to do it. He 
 said one day, " It seemed to me, while I was at my 
 daily task in the garden, as though the Spirit of all 
 things spoke to me, remonstrated with me, humbled 
 me, called me, and I found myself saying in reply, ' If 
 You will help me, I will.' " So slender was his theol- 
 ogy that he did not know who Jesus Christ was, 
 though he had thumbed the prayer-book every time 
 he had gone to church in his boyhood, and repeated 
 with the rest. " Through Jesus Christ our Lord." He 
 had a very hazy idea of the identity of the Master. He 
 just prayed through Jesus Christ our Lord. His first 
 act was to purchase a Bible; he read these Gospels, 
 and particularly these valedictory chapters and utter- 
 ances in St. John's Gospel, and then he said, " I found 
 out who Jesus Christ was; I made no theory about it, 
 but I said to myself, His was the voice that I heard in 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 185 
 
 the garden." You may live for a hundred years as a 
 Christian man, but you will never get any nearer to 
 reality than that. I might have said to him, by the 
 Holy Spirit, it was true, Christ spoke to you in the 
 garden. But he would not have known exactly what 
 I meant. It was quite enough for him to say that 
 Christ spoke — this was the voice that I heard in the 
 garden — tremendous, intimate, personal, near. The 
 Christ spoke and claimed him, and he serves Him to- 
 day as a faithful, humble follower, working in the 
 Anglican Church, his experience all his own. For 
 Christ never comes to any two men in precisely the 
 same way. Every man has his own value with the 
 living Lord. Suppose you were to ask that man 
 whether he thinks he is heard by the Lord of life and 
 death he prays to. He would make answer, " Yes, 
 for I stand in the atmosphere of the Christ; His spirit 
 is my teacher. I would rather not pray against His 
 will; but, when praying, I am rising and learning how 
 to pray. His words abide in me. I ask what God 
 wills and it is done." I am trying to be as simple and 
 plain as I can, and emphatic in the statement of truth. 
 I don't want to say, " If " and " but " — you shall be 
 heard now, but you shall not be heard then; you may 
 pray about that, but you must leave this out. You 
 may pray about anything that matters to your experi- 
 ence, but if you pray in the Spirit of Christ you will 
 soon find that some of your old petitions are left be- 
 hind. Prayer wins a man away from selfishness. 
 Praying, said the present Bishop of Oxford, will either 
 make a man leave off sinning, or sinning must make 
 him leave off praying. If you come to me with 
 curious questions about whether you can pray about 
 
186 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 the removal of the street-pump, or something of that 
 sort, my answer is. Abide in Christ, and you won't be 
 thinking about the removal of the street-pump; you 
 will be thinking upwards, and to be thinking upwards 
 is to be growing nobler as you pray. " Abide in me 
 and I in you " — fusion with Christ, to be looking at 
 His dear face while we pray, to so escape from all 
 things sordid, selfish, mean, base, that we rise into 
 another atmosphere and to another life, and the im- 
 pulse to pray to the Master leads to our placing our- 
 selves upon the altar of service for Him, and you learn 
 by-and-bye that to pray in His Spirit is to enter into 
 that perfect freedom of the sons of God, without 
 which eternal life is not yours. Let me give you an- 
 other picture. When I spoke just now about personal 
 atmosphere I could see the puzzled look on the faces 
 of some of my hearers. Do you not feel that every 
 person has his individual value for you, and that you 
 know that person's presence, apart from speech, to 
 have made a certain influence upon you? One man 
 comes to you with words of honeyed greeting, but you 
 don't trust him, for behind the words there is some- 
 thing that he did not say which is eloquent to your 
 spirit — his personality, you call it; his aura, his at- 
 mosphere, is making its impression all the time. You 
 can close yourself up against it, you can keep him off, 
 sometimes with difficulty; nevertheless, you can and 
 you do. 
 
 It is possible to shut oflf the higher, as well as the 
 lower, to keep a good man at bay as well as a bad man, 
 and in the differing values of the people who come 
 to us we are either better or worse, according as we 
 receive them. One man will come to me downstairs. 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 187 
 
 I know as well as can be, and he will tire me while he 
 talks, not because he is saying stupid things — I shall 
 be saying them myself — but he exhausts me somehow 
 — not by his speech, but by himself. Another man 
 will come and talk to me and vitalise me; I feel the 
 better for having shaken that man's hand. Another 
 man will come who calls forth the best in me; perhaps 
 I feel that, though there were no speech between us, 
 we are brothers; spirit makes answer unto spirit. 
 Every man throws his atmosphere round about those 
 with whom he has to deal, and you can abide in the 
 atmosphere of a man until you are better, if he is bet- 
 ter than you, or worse, if he is worse. You can open 
 yourself to the influence of a man so that your own 
 personality is dwarfed and injured, or expanded and 
 glorified. Lift all these things to the plane where 
 they should be, and think of the Person behind all, 
 all personality, the Lord of all life, and He who holds 
 the keys of death and hell. An atmosphere it is, but 
 a Person in the middle of it, through whom and to 
 whom I pray. We can't lose sight of the face of the 
 Master. We are praying to God and trying to get a 
 glimpse of the face of the Father; our eyes rest upon 
 the countenance of the Son. I never can get nearer to 
 God than Christ takes me, and I never want God to be 
 other than Christ is. If the Eternal is like Jesus, then 
 it is well with humanity all the time. 
 
 One more familiar and homely figure. Last Thurs- 
 day there were not quite so many people here as there 
 are now. Many of you had gone for a holiday. A 
 number of you who were here last Thursday, and who 
 would dearly like to have been out of London and 
 away at the dear old home, will appreciate what I ara 
 
188 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 going to say. Here is the sort of letter that one of you 
 wrote home — the young fellows behind the counter, I 
 mean: 
 
 " Dear Mother : I can't get off this Easter. I 
 should only have one day, and I am rather short of 
 money, and it is a long way home. Could you 
 not persuade father to send me a sovereign or two 
 before Whitsuntide, and I will come home then and 
 have one week-end with you." 
 
 That was a prayer, was it not, sent to somebody 
 far away, but somebody on whom you can count. You 
 know perfectly well that dear old lady will wring that 
 money out of your father, be he never so scrupulous, 
 though he can tell her all kinds of wise things about 
 the way in which you are sure to behave with it when 
 you might get it. She will get it beforehand, and you 
 will have it in time, with a carefully made-out list of 
 the railway trains and her advice to you to take the 
 earliest of the lot. And when you see her face to face 
 you will simply have a closer vision of the face that you 
 have seen all the time. You sent your first request 
 to an atmosphere of personal experience, which will 
 be intensified, but not something new, when you meet 
 her by-and-bye in the holiday time you have been seek- 
 ing for. I know not that we can come very much 
 nearer to the great heart of things than by such sym- 
 bolism as this. God is at once Father and Mother, and 
 I often think that the mother side of God is to be 
 sought in Christ. I am not the first to have said that 
 by a great deal. He is the pledge and the guarantee 
 of the goodwill of the Father. We not only pray in 
 
PRAYING IN CHRIST JESUS 1B9 
 
 His Spirit, but His Spirit teaches us to pray. More 
 than that, His promise is towards you and me, that as 
 our prayers ascend from the lower to the higher hu- 
 manity, from our needy soul to the Christ who has 
 been touched with the feeling of our infirmity, it is 
 through and by Him that you have passed on, passed 
 on to the heart of the Father. We have a Mediator 
 who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Think of 
 that, you men, who have been making ducks and 
 drakes of your opportunities. Think of the boundless 
 pity at the heart of our Father-Mother God, our 
 Brother Christ. Think of that ceaseless solicitude for 
 the souls of men, which knows no change, or ever shall 
 till earth's foundations melt away. Think of it when 
 you are low down in the depths of despondency, when 
 you feel your human weakness most, and get up again 
 and be strong, for the spiritual man is the strongest 
 of men, seeing he is joined to the Spirit of all, and is 
 abiding in Christ Jesus. Mary Queen of Scots used 
 to say she feared the prayers of John Knox more than 
 she feared an army of many thousand men. There are 
 men in the world to-day who do not appear much in 
 the newspaper, and whose names are seldom on the 
 lips of the public; but some day you will find out how 
 many currents and influences they have been setting 
 going in the world of things seen and unseen. There 
 are some people who are omnipotent — I am not using 
 the language of extravagance — omnipotent for the 
 things that they want. They can lay firm hold on the 
 things of God, and they can be trusted with His things, 
 for they have been taught by the spirit of Christ ere 
 they knelt to pray. 
 
 Dr. Parker once said to me, in his impulsive, hyper- 
 
190 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 bolical fashion, " I know a man who, if he were to 
 pray for that chimney, would have it; it would come 
 itself. I never could do that. But I should be much 
 more afraid of that man's prayers than I should of an 
 Act of Parliament." That was only his forceful, 
 pungent, eager way of putting a profound spiritual 
 truth. Prayer is the explanation of personal value; 
 prayer is working with the arm of God; prayer is con- 
 verse with the unseen; prayer is listening, as well as 
 speaking. The Master's words abide in us as well as 
 our words abide in Him, and, as I think I have said 
 before, in the words of that mystical poet who changed 
 our outlook upon nature and God a century or more 
 ago — Wordsworth : 
 
 *' Think you 'mid all this mighty sum 
 
 Of things for ever speaking 
 That nothing of itself will come. 
 
 But we must still be seeking ? 
 Nor less I deem that there are powers, 
 
 Which of themselves our minds impress, 
 And we can feed this mind of ours 
 
 In a wise passiveness." 
 
 It is well sometimes to be still in the presence of Christ 
 that He may teach us how to pray, and when once we 
 learn of Him and feel that His Spirit is in harmony 
 with all that we utter and will, we are praying with 
 those who prevail, and the answer to the prayer comes 
 in the moment of the praying. We have set heaven 
 going, and the reply will soon c.ome. " Ask, and ye 
 shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall 
 be opened unto you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
 in My Name. Ask, and ye shall receive, that your 
 joy may be full." 
 
XVI 
 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY* 
 
 Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eter- 
 nity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy 
 place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, 
 to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of 
 the cotitrite ones. — Isaiah Ivii. ij. 
 
 1HAD at first intended to take for my text one 
 clause of this verse, and, indeed, I think now 
 that I may venture with you to place the em- 
 phasis upon that particular clause, keeping the con- 
 text in our mind, " With him also." I need not remind 
 you of the circumstances under which the text came 
 to be written or of the state of mind to which the ex- 
 hortation was directed. Suffice it to say that it was 
 aimed at the heart of a people who, in keeping their 
 conscience, so to speak, had lost the idea of spiritual 
 fellowship with God. In obedience to what they be- 
 lieved to be the demands and exactions of the law of 
 God, they had forgotten God Himself; therefore they 
 were reminded of the true condition of heart under 
 which a man can expect to approach God, and to be 
 accepted of Him. They were told in effect, in this 
 prophetic language, that only that character is accept- 
 able to God in which humility is the most prominent 
 ingredient. Nay, would we not be justified in going 
 so far as to say that not character but spirit is the 
 * Preached in Union Church, Brighton, Sunday morning, 
 September 15, 1901. 
 
 191 
 
192 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 essential condition upon which we can enter into re- 
 lationship with God? For no human character, how- 
 ever exalted, can claim to be sinless, but every human 
 character, however seemingly pure, or however ut- 
 terly debased, can blend at once with the spirit of God 
 if it possesses the spirit of lowliness. That is the mes- 
 sage that the prophet endeavours here to convey. 
 
 It is of the highest importance in this as in every 
 other generation that men should arrive at right views 
 about God. A very trite observation to make, and yet 
 how much we necessarily attach to it. Not one ser- 
 mon only, but every sermon, must be concerned with 
 that primary proposition. It is of the first necessity 
 that we should all have and keep right views about 
 the nature of God. The late Master of Balliol, Dr. 
 Jowett, was once addressed by a lady who believed 
 him to be somewhat liberal and vague in his views 
 iof religion; she said, "Sir, can you tell us what you 
 Ireally think about God? " The answer was: " Madam, 
 fit matters very little what I think about God, but it 
 matters a great deal what God thinks about me." 
 Yet beneath that assertion there was another which 
 you can distinguish at once, namely: It matters very 
 much what I think God thinks about me. It is es- 
 sential that I should have right views of that 
 Divine nature which is every hour appealing to 
 mine, the one unescapable reality of my life, with- 
 out which one can neither think, nor speak, nor 
 act. Every man must positively or negatively 
 define his attitude to God. See what mistakes 
 have been made in time past, not by Israel only, 
 but by Christendom, when men have got away from 
 the true conception of the nature of God. They have 
 
ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 193 
 
 defined Him sometimes as an implacable Deity, with- 
 out pity, without mercy for the frailties of humanity. 
 He has been worshipped in blood; the worship even 
 of the meek and lowly has often been a worship of 
 agony and tears. In past history it has sometimes 
 seemed as though the Christian Church was a malign 
 influence in the world, so prominent were her pro- 
 fessors in the infliction of anguishing pain. Men 
 might have been saved all that if they had kept close 
 to intelligent vision and thought of Him whose name 
 and nature are love. 
 
 But at the present day it seems as though we are in 
 danger of passing to another extreme. We preach 
 His love, and forget His holiness. For He who is 
 high and lofty above the greatest that humanity can 
 ever conceive has become to us, as it seems, a Being 
 too familiar, whose stock-in-trade is mercy, who is 
 ever waiting to forgive, and whose love is such that 
 He will ever spare the loved, however heinous may be 
 the transgression against Himself. That is not Scrip- 
 tural, that is not the truth concerning the God whom 
 Jesus came to declare. Awful holiness inaccessible 
 to natural human nature it is. Love is an ingredient 
 and an expression of that holiness, it may be, but it 
 is a love that will not spare the loved. When we sin 
 against Him, we sin to our own hurt. It is impossible 
 for us to live as though there were no God, and not 
 be punished for the sin of that practical godlessness. 
 He dwells in the high and holy place to judge the 
 earth. True, there is a love of God which passeth 
 knowledge, to which we cannot attain even in under- 
 standing; but true it is that there is a wrath of God 
 revealed against all the ungodliness and unrighteous- 
 
194 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 ness of men. In the present day it seems to me that 
 right views of God need a certain readjustment; a 
 proper emphasis is to be given to both aspects of the 
 character of Him whom we worship, the holy One 
 who inhabiteth eternity. God is love, God is holiness; 
 therefore, it is that the Lord our God is a consuming 
 fire. 
 
 One reason why it is essential to have right views 
 of God is because the highest reach of human excel- 
 lence that has ever yet been known is rather a Divine 
 impulse than a set of rules. Israel made the mistake 
 of reversing those two sets of ideas. None of us can 
 claim any goodness at all. It is, as it were, drawn out 
 of us by an impulse of devotion to a person. Why, that 
 is true in small things as well as great. Every child 
 has his ideal and his hero. I have seen young men 
 who unconsciously had selected the type of char- 
 acter which they wished to make their own, embodied 
 it in a person, and then gave a certain devotion to that 
 person, either for good or ill to their own nature. We 
 read in George Eliot of a character who was saved by 
 devotion to the sweet innocence of a little child. 
 Silas Marner was a miser, somebody came and took 
 away his hoard, and this poor misanthropic, lonely 
 man, who had been wronged by his fellow-creatures 
 and who repudiated them with bitterness, was re- 
 deemed from his life of sordidness, and bitterness and ■ 
 anguish of spirit by the sweet innocence of a little 
 child that was left on his hearthrug. His life of de- 
 votion to her had something in it akin to reverence; 
 he reverenced the sweetness and the innocence which, 
 though it be not the highest form of goodness, yet 
 blends with it, and he was saved by that. This again 
 
ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 195 
 
 is Jesus's method. Our Master was his own Gospel. 
 Men came to Him one by one attracted by the win- 
 someness of Jesus. He spake, of course, as never man 
 spake, and He was as never man was, and, as has 
 been well said by one who has a right to speak upon 
 such subjects, he reversed our ordinary experience 
 about our human ideals. The nearer we draw to an 
 individual, as a rule the more plainly we see the flaws 
 and the crevices in his character ; but the nearer men 
 drew to Jesus the more His faultless excellence de- 
 clared itself; they were drawn to Him, they hardly 
 knew why, with a reverence and a devotion unex- 
 ampled in the history of the world. We give it now in 
 the same language almost and certainly with the same 
 emphasis that Christendom has always given it: 
 
 " Jesus ! the very thought of Thee 
 With sweetness fills my breast, 
 But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
 ^_ And in Thy presence rest." 
 
 He sums up for us everything that is good, and in- 
 stead of thinking about rules of service we think about 
 Him, and then we are compelled towards the goodness 
 which ever recedes as we approach it, which is a spirit 
 rather than a code. See you that, brethren? The 
 moment we form our conception of God from what 
 we think about Jesus, a divine impulse is communi- 
 cated to character, men rise above rules and sets of 
 rules, above ritual and observance, above such condi- 
 tions as the Jews had set themselves, and the prophetic 
 voice speaks not without but within our hearts, when 
 it says, " Thus saith the high and lofty One that in- 
 habiteth eternity, whose name is Holy " — so holy that 
 we cannot approach unto it — " I dwell in the high and 
 
196 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 holy place with him also," as Jesus did, " that is of 
 a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the 
 humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones." 
 When we think upon these things we begin to under- 
 stand what it is that God expects from us in the ser- 
 vice and devotion of the heart. 
 
 Does it not sometimes seem as though our first ac- 
 quaintance with such an ideal as is here presented 
 repels rather than attracts us towards excellence of 
 character and of life? There must be in a congrega- 
 tion such as that now gathered before me one who 
 has given up a little the ideals that he formerly set be- 
 fore him; he has gone back. Let me ask you what 
 you have done it for, and when you have answered 
 the question, then we shall understand what I am 
 trying to advance to, what I may call the repelling 
 influence of Jesus, the cooling influence of Christ 
 upon the human spirit. Once you had high ideals 
 of duty and nobleness, of the excellence of self-sacri- 
 fice, of what you might be able to effect by the full 
 obligation of yourself; as you have got older those 
 ideals are chilled. Why? Partly because you have 
 found so little room for their exercise, partly because 
 you have been disappointed in the ungenerous re- 
 sponse of humanity, and partly because of the impos- 
 sibility of climbing to and resting upon that level of 
 attainment that you had marked out for yourself. 
 Think what a diflference it makes when the idea re- 
 cedes, and it seems impossible that you can be carried 
 toward it ; chilled is the impulse of your heart toward 
 things that are righteous and good. In the days 
 when Jesus came preaching, men gathered to Him at 
 first with an enthusiasm for an ideal which by-and-bye 
 
ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 19V 
 
 dissipated itself. The effect of Jesus upon some of 
 those who knew Him best was to cause fear and awe. 
 In one hour of wonder, when the apostle Peter, who 
 had given himself as he thought body and soul to the 
 Master's service, was surprised by the sudden vision 
 of His greatness, the impulse of his nature was to fling 
 himself down before Christ, and say, *' Depart from 
 me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" The ideal of 
 service within his own heart was chilled by the thought 
 of its impossibility when he came near to the speck- 
 less holiness of Christ. I think it has been and is so 
 even now. As we fall into sin, blunder succeeds 
 blunder, failure follows failure, we think how impos- 
 sible that holy life is, how far away it is; if we think 
 about it at all, the ideal of Christ rebukes it. Jesus 
 chills the impulse even towards Himself by the thought 
 that He Himself is " The high and lofty One that in- 
 habiteth eternity, whose name is Holy." Oh, how im- 
 possible it is that we can be holy too ! 
 
 That brings me very close to the message of the 
 text, and I am going to try to show how much that 
 message is the message of Jesus. " With him also! " 
 True it is that Jesus is the high and lofty One, but 
 He dwells with him also who is not good and knows 
 that he is not good; with him also who has failed in 
 life and knows that he has failed; with him also who 
 has come down so low in his own esteem that he can 
 get no lower ; with him also this Lord of life and death 
 abides who is of a contrite and humble spirit, with 
 him also abides our Master, not simply to sympathise, 
 but to save, to revive the heart of the contrite one, our 
 Jesus comes. This is the great message of Christianity 
 to the world. It is a message of hope to every heart. 
 
198 CITY TEMTLE SERMONS 
 
 None of us plume ourselves upon what we have done 
 for God, and there is no Christian who would not be 
 willing to confess himself unworthy in His service; the 
 more truly he apprehends what it is that God expects 
 from him, the less is he likely to claim that he has 
 fulfilled that expectation in his own life. You do not 
 want to do that, do you? And the very opposite feel- 
 ing must not be indulged in. So soon as you have 
 discovered your own failure and unworthiness, so soon 
 have you discovered the Spirit of Christ, who abides 
 with those who need Him most and are conscious of 
 that need. High and lifted up, indeed, He dwells 
 with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit. 
 
 Let us examine the spirit with which God cannot 
 enter into relationship. There is the spirit of pride, 
 arrogance, self-sufficiency, self-complacency, selfish 
 worldliness, even of self-pity, self-contentment, which 
 passes where it is a spirit which lays no claim to par- 
 ticular excellence, but a spirit which is not prepared 
 for self-abasement. Let us examine our own hearts, 
 and see which of these spirits is predominant in us at 
 the present moment. Your pride will be crushed, 
 your arrogance will be overthrown, your self-compla- 
 cency will give way in the hour of need ; God will show 
 you the shameful side of your self-indulgence pres- 
 ently; there is no room for self-complacency. So, as 
 soon as we begin to understand, how feeble are the 
 props that support our life, how unworthy of trust is 
 this arm of flesh! God can find no entrance into 
 your heart while you think how much is due to you 
 from others, and how little due to them from you. 
 God, who seeks the right spirit in all His children, 
 sometimes brings about the right spirit by indulging 
 
ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 199 
 
 the wrong spirit, until it is filled out. God takes you 
 very gently by the hand and leads you out into the 
 desert place, until you begin to hunger for home; and 
 God will take you and put you in the darkness until 
 you begin to cry out for the light; God will let you 
 go; yea, urge you to go, into the far country, until 
 you learn to know the husks and remember the bread 
 in the Father's house. You who do not know what is 
 the meaning of that which has come to you, which is so 
 hard to bear, so difficult to support, so impossible to 
 understand, might learn from the text. Contrite 
 means crushed; sometimes God in His mercy crushes 
 us into the right spirit for the destruction of the 
 wrong. Jesus, who spake as never man spake, identi- 
 fied Himself with the promise of our text. I only 
 need refer you to Luke iv. for you to see how easy it 
 is of application to the needs of to-day and to yours 
 in particular. In Luke iv. i8 we read that our Lord 
 entered into the synagogue — for He was so well known 
 — and opened the Holy Book, as we have opened it 
 this morning, and quoted the words of the same 
 prophet : 
 
 " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He 
 hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; 
 He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
 deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight 
 to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised 
 [the contrite], to preach the acceptable year of the 
 Lord. And He closed the book, and sat down, and 
 said, ' This day is this scripture fulfilled in your 
 ears.' " 
 
 How beautiful it is to think of it! The Lord of the 
 universe, the high and holy One that inhabiteth 
 
200 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 eternity, stood amongst men as the lowly One, who 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister — 
 the truth which seems so impossible for the mind to 
 grasp, but which countless hearts have grasped ere 
 now, that Jesus, who was before all things, came as a 
 suffering Saviour unto His own, yet was rejected by 
 His own. He who dwells in the high and holy place 
 came to dwell with him also that is of a contrite heart 
 and humble spirit; this same Jesus, who is despised 
 and rejected by men, is the Judge to whom account 
 must be given of all our doings in this life of ours. 
 And we are not going away from the spirit of the 
 text if we identify Him with that which it contains; 
 with him also dwells this Jesus, with him also who is 
 of a contrite and humble spirit. Brethren, think of 
 it, the Lord of the universe hanging on a cross, ago- 
 nised, shamefully intreated, rejected of men; the suffer- 
 ing Messiah giving Himself for the sins of men, dwell- 
 ing " with him also " — you and I, each one of us, who 
 are of a contrite and humble spirit, and have discov- 
 ered our need of the forgiveness of God. This is the 
 very essence of the Gospel. We talk not about Christ 
 so much as an ideal as a Saviour, when we have right 
 views about God, and have entered deep into the con- 
 ception of His nature, to save men. We think of Him 
 as the one who " was despised and rejected of men; a 
 man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we 
 hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, 
 and we esteemed Him not. Surely He hath borne 
 our griefs, and carried our sorrows: . . . the 
 chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with 
 His stripes we are healed." A modem poet places 
 in the mouth of an Oriental who is supposed to have 
 
ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 201 
 
 been listening to the words of Jesus some such senti- 
 ment as this: 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a man, 
 And only a man — I say 
 That of all mankind, I will cleave to Him, 
 And to Him will I cleave alway." 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a God — 
 And the only God — I swear 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell. 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
 If Jesus Christ is what He claimed to be, and can 
 do what He claimed to do; if He has power on earth 
 to forgive sins, and to revive the hearts of the contrite 
 ones, it is only because He Himself has been crushed. 
 We approach One who has been bruised for our trans- 
 gression, wounded for our iniquity; the chastisement 
 of our peace is upon Him, and with His stripes we 
 are healed. Let us take the message of that text to 
 our hearts, and we will follow it as between ourselves 
 and God, and take it as a personal message. 
 
XVII 
 THE ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 
 
 The son said : Father, I have sinned against heaven, 
 and in thy sight _ and am no 7nore wot'thy to be called thy 
 son. 
 
 But the father said : Bring forth the best robe and put 
 it on him. — Luke xv. 21-22. 
 
 IN this chapter we have the substance of our Lord's 
 teaching on the great mystery of repentance and re- 
 mission of sins. This teaching was given, according 
 to some of the best expositors, to a very composite 
 and heterogeneous body, perhaps that one which was 
 gathered together on a certain historic occasion in 
 the courtyard of the house of Matthew the Pubhcan. 
 The chapter opens, " Then drew near unto Him all 
 the pubHcans and sinners for to hear Him. And the 
 Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying, This man 
 receiveth sinners and eateth with them." The signif- 
 icance of those few words reaches far. Our Lord had 
 just completed His synagogue ministry; He had 
 given His message to those who were waiting for the 
 deliverance of Israel; and now He hungered and 
 thirsted to carry the tidings of the Divine Fatherhood 
 and love to that great congregation which was without 
 the synagogue — the despised, the outcast, the pub- 
 licans and sinners. To that end, say some. He asked 
 Matthew the Publican to prepare a great feast in his 
 
 203 
 
ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 203 
 
 house, and to bring there such persons as he could 
 find and whom hitherto Christ had not known. 
 
 The teaching contained in this chapter is presented 
 in picture form. Three parables occupy the whole 
 space — the parables of the lost sheep, the lost piece 
 of silver, and the prodigal son. It is significant that 
 the first two parables teach one side of the truth the 
 other side of which is taught by the third. It is re- 
 markable, too, that our Lord employs two parables 
 to teach the Divine side of the great mystery of re- 
 pentance, and only one parable to teach the other, 
 but necessary, side of the same mystery — the human 
 side. The first and second parables close with sub- 
 stantially the same words — " joy in the presence of 
 the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." 
 But is not this strange language? and is not this 
 Teacher, who spake as never man spake before, a little 
 mistaken in the application of His own figure? For 
 the sheep, according to our notions of repentance, did 
 not repent; it stayed away, and remained lost until the 
 shepherd went to find it, and the only part that the 
 sheep had to do with the rescue was in submitting to 
 be picked up and carried on the shoulders of the good 
 shepherd. And the lost piece of silver did not, and 
 could not, repent; it remained lost until the woman 
 who had missed it re-discovered it and put it back in 
 the place whence it had fallen. No, there are no mis- 
 takes, as we shall see. It is not the parable of the 
 prodigal that comes first; it is the parable of the lost 
 sheep, and that of the lost piece of silver; and our 
 Lord means us to imply, surely, that repentance is 
 but the climax, the consummation of a state of mind 
 in which God seeks man before man seeks God. Our 
 
204 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 text is the epitome of this teaching, and we have a 
 Divine side and a human side to the great mystery. 
 The human side, v^hich is but the response to the 
 Divine overture, is this : " Father, I have sinned 
 against heaven and before thee, and am no more 
 vi^orthy to be called Thy son " ; and the Divine side 
 is: "Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him, 
 and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet, and 
 let us rejoice and be glad, for this my son was dead 
 and is alive again; he was lost and is found." 
 
 We have, therefore, in the text, remembering the 
 setting in which it is found, two main lines of thought: 
 first, the attitude of the penitent towards God; and 
 second, the Divine response to the cry of contri- 
 tion. 
 
 I. The attitude of the penitent is expressed in the 
 words, " Father, I have sinned, and am no more 
 worthy to be called a son; make me a servant." There 
 is some difference between the act of repentance in 
 which this expression culminates and the feeling it- 
 self in which it takes its rise. Penitence is a state of 
 feeling; repentance is an act of the will. In the one 
 word stress is laid upon the state of the mind; the 
 second places stress upon the will — repentance is ris- 
 ing and going to the Father. There may be a quasi- 
 penitential feeling without any repentance at all, and 
 there may be true repentance — and often is — in which 
 there is very little of contrite sorrow for sin. How 
 often people get wrong about that! I remember that 
 once a man came to see me after one of the services 
 in my church at Brighton, and told me one of the 
 most pitiful stories I had ever heard. He said: "I 
 am here to-night not because I care for your gospel, 
 
ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 205 
 
 or particularly want to hear it, but because my father 
 asked me to do him one last service ; I am here 
 for a few moments, and then I am going back to a 
 companionship and environment which is ruin. By 
 sin I have been committed to the custody of sin; I 
 have broken my mother's heart, and I am bringing 
 down my father's grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. 
 And I cannot get free ; it seems as if a thousand devils 
 were dragging me down to hell." I said: "There is 
 nothing so fatalistic in your experience as that; turn 
 round, go right, repentance is but a turning from 
 sin and a turning towards God." He said : " I can- 
 not repent; I cannot feel towards God as you preach- 
 ers would have us feel; I must go back to the place 
 I have left, and I can imagine no greater hell than the 
 life I am living. But I cannot repent." What a mis- 
 take that man made! What a mistake thousands of 
 people are making to-day as to the true and inner 
 meaning of repentance! Repentance is not necessar- 
 ily a state of feeling; we may only discover the depth 
 of the pit whence we were digging long after our re- 
 pentance has been accepted of God. Penitence is one 
 thing; repentance is another — the climax of a state of 
 mind in which God seeks man before man seeks God, 
 but in which man says: " I will arise and go to my 
 Father; I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, 
 and am no more worthy to be called thy son; make 
 me a servant, but have me at home again." The 
 proper attitude of the penitent is such as is described 
 in the Word before us. One might say, we ask 
 nothing of God, save that we may be taken out of the 
 atmosphere and the thraldom of sin, placed in His 
 presence, given another chance, though not the chance 
 
206 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 that was forfeited — " I am no more worthy to be a 
 son; make me a servant." 
 
 " Yes, Thou forgivest, but with all forgiving 
 Canst not renew mine innocence again; 
 Make Thou, O Christ, a dj'ing of my living, 
 Purge from the sin but never from the pain." 
 
 II. What is the attitude of God towards the peni- 
 tent? What is the Divine response to contrition? 
 The Gospel of Christ: there is none other name under 
 heaven given among men whereby we can be saved. 
 The response is this: " Bring forth the best robe, and 
 put it on him " — the robe of righteousness, the gar- 
 ment of salvation; not the second-best, but the best 
 robe, the best there is — a way up from the lowest 
 depths of the valley of humiliation to the shining 
 height of holiness where dwelleth God. It is not mine 
 to explain that mystery. All I have to do is to de- 
 clare it — that is the prophet's office. It is a mystery 
 so deep that though we live for evermore we can never 
 fathom its mighty depths. From the lowest depths of 
 the valley of humiliation there is a way up to the 
 shining heights where dwelleth God. The vilest sin- 
 ner may become as the serenest saint. But this seems 
 a contradiction, a physiological impossibility; how can 
 that which hath been be as though it had never been? 
 How can a man who has forfeited his opportunity, 
 been associated with sin, in a manner been its victim, 
 its slave — how can he ever be freed from it? I do not 
 know; nobody knows; we know it is done. The pas- 
 sion of Christ, the Cross of Calvary, and all that is 
 signified there, have something to do with the puri- 
 fication, the cleansing of the soul from sin; and there 
 
ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 20V 
 
 is no stumbling-block placed in the way of a man who 
 would rise to God. How to make this clearer I know 
 not. All I know is that everyone needs to know it; 
 for there is none righteous, no, not one. 
 
 I remember once, in preaching, giving an example 
 from the Roman Catholic tradition concerning Mary 
 the Magdalene. Roman Catholic tradition says that 
 Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were one and 
 the same. I do not say they were; it is a tradition that 
 they were. After saying that from the pulpit a woman 
 came to me and said: " I wish you hadn't said that; 
 you have done great injustice to Mary o-f Bethany; 
 you have made me think differently of her now; you 
 have driven her from the sacred place in my spiritual 
 imagination. But I don't believe it," she continued; 
 " Mary of Bethany never was the Magdalene. I cannot 
 think it; she was too pure." "Then," I said, "there 
 is something that the Gospel of Christ cannot do, and 
 there is a stage of human sin, a plane of experience 
 upon which, if you once get, you must stop." The 
 world says that soon enough. We are often told that 
 we make forgiveness too easy from the pulpit ; the fact 
 is, it is the hardest thing possible to convince a man 
 he has forgiveness at all. The ordinary man asso- 
 ciates forgiveness of sin with remission of the conse- 
 quences. But we are not told that the prodigal went 
 back to share once more the substance that he spent 
 in riotous living. No; what he wanted was to get 
 back to the father. His attitude was, " I am no more 
 worthy to be called a son; make me a servant," and 
 the antiphony of that cry was, " My son was dead 
 and is alive again; bring forth the best robe and put 
 it on him." These white and fleesy clouds that float 
 
208 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 in the azure vault of heaven, whence came they? Yes- 
 terday they were trampled underfoot in the mire and 
 filth of London streets. These beauteous flowers, 
 radiant of colour, perfect of form, breathing the aroma 
 of springtime, whence came they? Yesterday they 
 arose from foul-smelling filth and corruption, drawn 
 thence by the sunlight of heaven. What are these 
 that are arrayed in white robes, and whence came 
 they? These are they which came out of great tribula- 
 tion, and have washed their robes and made them 
 white in the blood of the Lamb. The Magdalen may 
 become as the brightest saint of God. The man who 
 has forfeited his opportunities may get something bet- 
 ter back again. How often we are told in language 
 that seems hopeless — ay, in the language of ordinary 
 human experience — in the words of Omar Khayyam; 
 
 " The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ, 
 Moves on : nor all your Piety nor Wit 
 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it." 
 
 It is a different Gospel before us now. The Divine 
 response to the cry of contrition is, " Bring forth the 
 best robe and put it on him." Those who have 
 washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb are pure 
 and white in the presence of the Father. " Though 
 your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as 
 snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be 
 as white as wool." 
 
 There are at least three orders of experience to 
 which the words of our text are specially ap- 
 plicable. First, the man who has been, and every- 
 body knows has been, a prodigal. It may be 
 you have found your way into this house of 
 
ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 209 
 
 prayer, and taken your place amongst the people 
 of God; but you are not ordinarily to be found 
 here, you scarcely know why you are here now. Per- 
 haps it is that in early childhood you remember the 
 sweet sound of the name of Jesus; it meant something 
 to you then — how much you did not know until you 
 had been in a far country. There came one day 
 when you went forth to see life, as you called it — see- 
 ing the life that is only a synonym oftentimes for see- 
 ing hell — you went forth to the great city to push 
 your way, and in doing it you forfeited your inno- 
 cence, you sinned against God and society, and the 
 former punished you through the latter. Society has 
 closed its doors upon you, and everybody knows you 
 have been punished for your transgression. You can- 
 not go back to the place that you have forfeited; you 
 cannot be as though you had never sinned; and, what 
 is more, you cannot feel as though you had never 
 sinned. You think to yourself, as you stand in the 
 far country feeding upon husks, Glad would I have 
 been if I could have the old home back again! Now, 
 everybody would say it is fitting and right that I 
 should preach to that prodigal whom everybody 
 knows to be a prodigal in the words of my text: " I 
 have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am 
 no more worthy to be called a son; make me a serv- 
 ant " ; but then the antiphony comes — sound of grace 
 and sweetness and mercy! — " Bring forth the best 
 robe and put it on him." You are wanted up there, 
 and there is a place for you. 
 
 But there is a second order of experience, not quite 
 so obvious, in which the words of my text are equally 
 applicable. Here sits a man whom people do not 
 
210 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 know to be a prodigal. He has done well in the 
 world; he has obtained place and power and high re- 
 pute; he is a great subscriber to things philanthropic 
 and religious. People bow to him and speak good of 
 his name. He says very little concerning the inner 
 man; but if you could get there and hear his own 
 story — years ago you purchased your success by a 
 foul and filthy lie, you did a mean and shameful thing, 
 you trampled upon somebody weaker than yourself, 
 you sold your soul for gold. You have got what you 
 aimed at ; you have succeeded in everything for which 
 you tried; what you lived for and strove for has come 
 to you. Do you want it? In that far country are 
 you, and feeding upon husks, though you sit in the 
 corner pew in the church. And on the other side — 
 what a revulsion there comes! It was not worth do- 
 ing wrong for — nothing ever is in this world, as said 
 George Eliot. If we could stand again on the other 
 side of sin there is no man but would say that to gain 
 something, to get the very thing you sought is punish- 
 ment. A man would rather be without the fruits of 
 his iniquity once he has experienced them. These 
 prodigals that men do not know to be prodigal, these 
 men in a far country feeding upon the husks — do they 
 not want the Gospel? and is not the ring of the 
 Gospel which I preach the very thing they want ? You 
 think that by sin you are committed to the custody 
 of sin ; you are compelled to stay in the place in which 
 you put yourself; you cannot retrace that path back 
 to the Father's home that you left so many years ago; 
 no, you cannot take that journey unless somebody 
 comes to the far country to you. That is it! Every 
 figure fails somewhere, and even our Lord's illustra- 
 
ANTIPHONY OF PENITENCE 211 
 
 tion of the Prodigal Son cannot teach everything 
 that He wanted to teach, and which is contained 
 within His own Gospel. From that far country 
 the prodigal has a long journey back to the Father; 
 but the truth is, that in the far country is the Good 
 Shepherd who has come to find His sheep. You 
 would not be troubled about your sin but that God is 
 already thinking about you; and you might say to 
 yourself — as I trust you do — in the words of a great 
 saint, " Thou wouldst not seek Him if Thou hadst 
 not already found Him." The son said: " Father, I 
 have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am 
 no more worthy to be called Thy son; make me a 
 servant." The Father says: " Bring forth the best 
 robe and put it on him. This my son was dead and is 
 alive again, he was lost and is found." 
 
 But there is a third order of experience, in which 
 we are all included. Every man and woman who has 
 found his or her way into a place of worship must be 
 conscious, or has been conscious to a greater or less 
 extent, of a great dissatisfaction with things as they 
 are, and you wish that the world had not such a hold 
 upon you as it has. But a few minutes ago we were in 
 the streets of the great city, amid the roar of the 
 trafBc, taking our part in the battle of life; and it can- 
 not be but that we have been to some extent influ- 
 enced by the traffic with which we have engaged, and 
 we want to get free, and we say: 
 
 " Oh, for a man to arise in_ rne_ that the rnan I am 
 mighrcease to be! " 
 
 There IFnone of us who, when he comes to himself, 
 could say other than this: "Father, I have sinned 
 against heaven and before Thee, and am no more 
 
212 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 worthy to be called Thy son; make me a servant." 
 We ask for nothing but to get to God, to hold the 
 hand of Christ; nothing but to rescue our manhood, 
 and re-make it in the Spirit of our Lord, who died 
 for us. 
 
 What is to be done? Thank God for the promise! 
 We have not been left to ourselves. Out in that far 
 country the Good Shepherd has been looking for His 
 sheep; we are just God's little ones, away from home, 
 as it seems, and He alone can bring us back. The 
 Shepherd has come to find His sheep. Now let us come 
 hand in hand to the Throne of Grace, and we will re- 
 peat the word of the prodigal — for such are we, 
 whether the world knows it or not — " Father, I have 
 sinned against heaven and in Thy sight, and am no 
 more worthy to be called a son ; make me a servant." 
 And then — O, mystery of Love Divine! — there comes 
 in the accents of the Elder Brother : " Bring forth the 
 best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his 
 hand and shoes on his feet. Let us rejoice and be 
 glad in the presence of the angels of God; for this 
 my son," saith the Father — " my brother," saith the 
 Saviour — " was dead and is alive again, was lost and 
 is found." 
 
XVIII 
 THE DAYSPRING 
 
 The day spring fro7n on high hath visited us, to give light 
 to thetn that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to 
 guide our feet into the way of peace. — Luke i. yS-yg. 
 
 IN this beautiful Advent song we have a fitting ex- 
 pression for our thoughts this Christmas morn- 
 ing, and a happy motto for the great Christian 
 festival which we meet to celebrate. There is a 
 slight, but not unimportant, difference in phrasing be- 
 tween the text as it appears in the older and in the 
 Revised Version of the New Testament respectively; 
 the former reads thus: " The dayspring from on high 
 hath visited us," and the latter reads, probably more 
 accurately, " The dayspring from on high shall visit 
 us." There is no contradiction ; each version is needed 
 to complete the other, Zacharias, looking forward 
 upon the Birth which was to come, would say: " The 
 dayspring from on high shall visit us," but he might as 
 fittingly have said, " The dayspring from on high 
 hath visited us," and we still more fitly can say this 
 morning, looking back past Calvary to the cradle at 
 Bethlehem: "The dayspring from on high hath 
 visited us " ; the world can never again be as though 
 Christ had not come; and, looking forward upon the 
 age that has not dawned, we can say : " The dayspring 
 
 213 
 
2U CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 from on high shall visit us " — " Ring in the Christ that 
 is to be." 
 
 The incarnation of the Son of God did not begin 
 with the lowly birth at Bethlehem ; it began when time 
 began; it is still going on. The Christ was in the 
 world ages before Jesus was laid in the manger be- 
 neath the lowly cattle-shed ; He was in the world, and 
 the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him 
 not. And the Christ has never gone away; He is in 
 the world to-day, known and loved and trusted by 
 multitudes of those who through Him have received 
 the adoption of sons. Grace and truth came by Jesus 
 Christ, who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for 
 ever. Christ is born anew every morning, and as 
 many as receive Him to them gives He power to be- 
 come the sons of God. " The dayspring from on high 
 hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in dark- 
 ness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet 
 into the way of peace." 
 
 What do we mean by incarnation ? Suffer me to re- 
 call your attention to this very familiar but little under- 
 stood word. You think you know what it means, and 
 you do, partly. You would say at once: " It is God 
 becoming man." You are right, but we might invert 
 the phrase, and say much more truly, it is man becom- 
 ing God. The incarnation is the process whereby 
 humanity is being taken to its home in God or, better 
 still, the incarnation is the discovery that humanity is 
 in God. 
 
 " Follow you the star that lights the desert pathway, yours 
 or mine, 
 Till you see the highest human nature is Divine." 
 
 You may be tempted to say, as men have said before, 
 
THE DAY SPRING 215 
 
 " The birth at Bethlehem is a beautiful and tender 
 manifestation of the Secret Eternal, but how could it 
 be that in that tiny infant, that speck of humanity, 
 dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; how 
 could it be that that little hand, so helpless, was fitted 
 to hold and to wield the sceptre of the universe?" 
 You are God yourself, and God is everything that you 
 are, and infinitely more. Humanity is one, and came to 
 itself in Jesus, our Head, who for us and with us looks 
 up into the face of the Father, saying My God! In 
 Jesus Christ, and in the lowly birth at Bethlehem, we 
 have learnt our solidarity; we are one and indivisible. 
 Individuality is precious, but humanity is not divided. 
 One great family are we, with one Elder Brother, one 
 Master, one Head, one Shepherd, Redeemer, and Lord 
 — Jesus Christ — in whom we have all the fulness of 
 God. In Him we have found how near has God come. 
 " The dayspring from on high hath visited us." 
 
 There is, therefore, a peculiar fitness in the figure 
 which is suggested in our text — " the dayspring," in 
 other words, the sunrise. When we see the orb of 
 day slowly coming upwards on the eastern horizon, 
 we say the day is coming, the sun is rising again upon 
 a darkened world. But you know well what is taking 
 place; the world has been rolling from the dark 
 shadows into the vast ocean of light. When we say 
 " the da}^spring from on high," we say humanity has 
 been turning out of darkness into light; we are learn- 
 ing to look into the face of God; the dayspring from 
 on high hath visited us, we have lifted our faces to the 
 light, we are being guided into the paths of peace, 
 the shadows are fleeing before the Sun of Righteous- 
 ness with healing in His wings. 
 
216 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 The associations of Christmas Day are so winsomely 
 beautiful, so poetically tender, that this has become 
 the sweetest of festivals recognised by the Christian 
 Church, and so long as there is a place in human na- 
 ture for poets, for the mystic, the spiritual, the tender, 
 so long will Christmas Day hold its place. This is the 
 day when joy and sorrow shake hands, when we feel, 
 although we do not say, that sorrow and joy condition 
 each other, that the former explains and declares the 
 latter. This is the day for reunion, when heart clasps 
 heart; the day when we have time and impulse to be 
 kind, the day when we forget and forgive, the day 
 when brotherhood is recognised, the day when we 
 come nearest to breaking down that unbreakable par- 
 tition which is ever between soul and soul. This is 
 the day when we recognise in the very pathos of 
 things the nearness of God. While humanity is what 
 it is, this festival must hold its place, associated with 
 the name that is above every name. But why the 
 name of Jesus? There have been other names in his- 
 tory. Caesar, Charlemagne, Hildebrand — why do you 
 not keep the birthday of these? Few, if any of you, 
 know when it is, and you do not care. Yet the first 
 descendant of the Caesar sat upon the throne in Impe- 
 rial Rome when Jesus was laid in the lowly cattle-shed. 
 It matters little to-day about Caesar, but it matters so 
 much about Christ that in temples all over the land 
 congregations come together to sing praises to His 
 name. Why not Charlemagne? That great king and 
 emperor was crowned, I think, on Christmas Day, 
 800, in St. Peter's, at Rome, and history took a new 
 start from the event. What would it matter to you 
 had he never been crowned at all? We sing to-day: 
 
THE DAYSPRING 217 
 
 " All hail the power of Jesu's name, 
 Let angels prostrate fall ; 
 Bring forth the royal diadem, 
 And crown Him Lord of all." 
 
 Born in a stable, cradled in a manger, yet King of 
 kings and Lord of lords; it is the birthday of the 
 Prince of Peace that is precious to us, and not the 
 crowning day of Charlemagne. Why not Hildebrand? 
 Here was one who claimed to be lord of the visible 
 universe, reigning in the name of Christ, master of 
 emperors, king of kings, the vicar of God, the author 
 of the most magnificent failure in history. On a cer- 
 tain wonderful day I see Hildebrand, Pope and prince, 
 sitting in his castle at Canosa, and outside the gate, 
 standing in the snow, is the Emperor himself, suing 
 for mercy at the feet of the vicar of Christ. Day after 
 day there he stands, day after day there sits Hilde- 
 brand, magnificent in his ecclesiastical authority and 
 power, ruling in the name of Jesus. Where has that 
 pretension gone to? We do not want it to-day. We 
 would not have it to-day; no Pope, no Archbishop, no 
 temporal dominion of the Church of Christ can claim 
 authority over the minds and consciences and inde- 
 pendence of men to-day. But as the power of the 
 organised Church has crumbled into nothing the au- 
 thority of Jesus has been like a rising sun. Higher 
 than ever He stands to-day in the esteem of humanity, 
 the festival of His birth the sweetest Sabbath of the 
 Church. There is an ideal greater than the failure of 
 Hildebrand — the ideal of the kingdom of God which 
 Cometh not with observation, preached by the lowly 
 Jesus who had hot where to lay His head. 
 
 Jesus has brought to light truths the world does 
 
218 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 not take sufficient account of, but which it will never 
 let go, and of these the first is the nearer vision of 
 God. It comes so natural to us to say: "Abba, 
 Father! " Where did you learn that word for God? 
 " Oh, the fishermen heard it from the lips of Jesus. 
 But perhaps somebody else said it before." Ah, very 
 likely, but it made all the difference when Jesus said 
 it. When we say, " Father " we think of the Son, 
 and when men have looked into the heart of Christ and 
 learned there, they have said to themselves. What 
 must the Father be? " Lord, shew us the Father and 
 we shall be satisfied." " Have I been so long- time with 
 you, and yet hast thou not known Me? " Through 
 that glorified sonship we read the Fatherhood divine. 
 God has come near. The pain of humanity remains, 
 the discipline of life continues still, the shadow has not 
 lifted, but the light is shining upon it; Christ did not 
 abolish pain, but He brought God into it, and on 
 Christmas Day some of us are able to affirm : 
 
 " Labour is rest and pain is sweet 
 If Thou, my God, art near," 
 
 He has given us another hope; life is bigger, the hori- 
 zon is wider, we are looking beyond, and " the best 
 is yet to be." God has laid Himself alongside every 
 human experience. Christ might have come otherwise 
 — on the clouds of heaven, to the sound of the trumpet, 
 with glory, pomp, and power; but He did not. He was 
 born in a stable, and cradled in a manger, and some- 
 how the instinct of humanity affirms that was the way 
 that God should come. In the meek and lowly Jesus, 
 in the humble love of that self-manifestation, we have 
 
THE DAY SPRING 219 
 
 the ultimate, the last revelation of the heart of God. 
 There is nothing more that you need to know. Jesus 
 brought to us a new humanity. Unconsciously we 
 have been shaping our ideals since we began to think 
 — young men are unconsciously or sub-consciously 
 looking to this man and that, to this type of character 
 and the other, wherewith to shape theirs — and we 
 think with justice of the strong men who have stood 
 in the past for the right, the good, and the true. Be- 
 yond, behind, above, humanity had been looking wist- 
 fully, gladly, toward the type which is higher, the Man 
 of men, the norm of what humanity ought to be. 
 When we see a good man and love a good man, 
 we mentally measure him against the stature of 
 Christ ; is he like Him ? then he is good ; how near 
 does he come to Him ? That is the measure of good- 
 ness. 
 
 How the ideal of the Christ has entered into every 
 department of human interest and activity! I need 
 hardly tell you who is Tennyson's Christ — it is King 
 Arthur. Christ the King looks out from these pages. 
 The sublimest scene, incident, or passage in " The 
 Idylls of the King " is the parting of Arthur from his 
 sinful, shame-stricken queen. There she lies, grovel- 
 ling at his feet, beautiful still, quivering with the shame 
 of her degraded womanhood, not daring to look up 
 into his kingly face. Here beside her, bending over, 
 stands Arthur, the prince without fear and without re- 
 proach, and he stoops and blesses her, as he parts, 
 with the prophecy that they two shall meet before high 
 God, and claim each other for their own. As he passes 
 from her presence Guinevere raises her head, and sobs 
 out in passionate utterance: 
 
220 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 " Gone — my lord ! 
 Gone thro' my sin to slay and to be slain ! 
 And he forgave me. and I could not speak. 
 Farewell? I should have answer'd his farewell. 
 His mercy choked me. Gone, my lord the King, 
 My own true lord ! how dare I call him mine ? 
 The shadow of another cleaves to me, 
 And makes me one pollution : he, the King, 
 Call'd me polluted ; shall I kill myself? 
 What help in that? I cannot kill my sin, 
 If soul be soul ; nor can I kill my shame ; 
 No, nor by living can I live it down. 
 
 I must not dwell on that defeat of fame. 
 Let the world be ; that is but of the world. 
 What else ? what hope ? I think there was a hope. 
 Except he mock'd me when he spake of hope. 
 
 Blessed be the King, who hath forgiven 
 My wickedness to him, and let me hope 
 That in mine own heart I can live down sin 
 And be his mate hereafter in the heavens 
 Before high God. 
 
 It was my duty to have loved the highest ; 
 It surely was my profit had I known ; 
 It would have been my pleasure had I seen. 
 We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
 Not Lancelot, nor another." 
 
 Tennyson's Christ, Christ the King; Tennyson's gos- 
 pel, the gospel of pardon; Tennyson's future, the future 
 hope. Where did he get it? He never created it, he 
 only saw it in the Jesus of Galilee, who, before His 
 judges, spake : " Thou sayest it because I am a king." 
 There is to me a sweeter vision than this. Charles 
 Dickens has a Christ. Dickens had a favourite book; 
 his favourite child, he said, was David Copperfield, and 
 his Christ is Peggotty, the fisherman. There is a con- 
 
THE DAY SPRING 221 
 
 trast and a similiarity here. Arthur and Peggotty, at 
 the two extremes of the social scale, are one and the 
 same, and their norm is Christ. The sublimest scene, 
 the tenderest passage in this book, is Peggotty's re- 
 covery of his little Em'ly. He tells the story himself, 
 in his quaint, colloquial English, the first night after 
 Em'ly comes home, or, rather, the first night after he 
 had found her and brought her back : 
 
 All night long we have been together, Em'ly and me. 'Tis 
 little (considering the time) as she has said, in wureds, 
 through them broken-hearted tears ; 'tis less as I have seen 
 of her dear face, as grow'd into a woman's at my hearth. 
 But, all night long, her arms has been about my neck ; and 
 her head was laid heer ; and we knows full well, as we can 
 put our trust in one another ever more. 
 
 The tender presentment of Christ, the fisherman — 
 where did he get it? Even that great literary genius 
 did not create it, he saw it. Peggotty is Christ, the 
 Christ of Galilee, who said: " Go in peace and sin no 
 more." 
 
 Many who are thinking of the Christ, and the re- 
 de-mption, the love, and the power of Christ, both to 
 save and to keep, must be turning to Him as the one 
 central hope for our every need. But there are some 
 who cannot worship Him joyfully on this Christmas 
 Day. You are thinking of that height from which 
 you fell, of that opportunity that you once let go, and 
 which will come no more for ever ; you are thinking of 
 the manhood you have destroyed, the womanhood 
 you have polluted, and you are looking up to the dark- 
 some eternal, and asking if the mystery has any word 
 for you. It has — Arthur's word, Peggotty's word, 
 Jesus' word. For the high and the low there is but 
 
222 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 one Christ, the Christ in whom Christians believe, the 
 Dayspring from on high, to give Hght to them that sit 
 in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet 
 into the way of peace. 
 
 Some of you find it difficult to be glad. You re- 
 member a life that once was and never again will be 
 here; you are thinking of those who made life for you, 
 but who have gone into the darkness of that myste- 
 rious future, by that lonely road which we must all 
 tread; and now the world is shadowed. Will it ever 
 be the same again? Have we time to be glad? is it 
 fitting that we should? You are thinking maybe of 
 that burden of yesterday which you laid down at the 
 door of this church, going in for a few brief moments 
 to think about the things that are not seen; but you 
 know you are going to take it up to-morrow, and as 
 you think of your loneliness and helplessness, you are 
 tempted to say : How can I be glad about Christ ? 
 
 " We spake of many a vanished scene, 
 
 Of what we once had thought, and said, 
 Of what had been, and might have been. 
 
 And who was changed, and who was dead. 
 And all that fills the hearts of friends 
 
 When first they feel, with secret pain, 
 Their lives henceforth have separate ends, 
 
 And never can be one again." 
 
 The Lord of life and death, the Babe of Bethlehem, 
 is Conqueror. That tiny hand has shown itself able 
 to comfort and to heal many a broken heart, and it 
 holds the sceptre of the world; and the best is waiting 
 for you. Live for the highest, the only thing worth 
 living for; follow the Crucified, though it be to Cal- 
 vary. Some of you are willing to take your stand be- 
 
THEDAYSPRING 223 
 
 side the cradle, but not in Gethsemane. You must 
 follow Him all the way, for on the farther side there is 
 the fulfilment of everything that is best for you by the 
 Saviour who has gone to prepare the place. Oh, the 
 dayspring from on high is shining and shall shine more 
 and more until the perfect day. 
 
XIX 
 GOD'S NEW YEAR 
 
 There was no more sea. — Rev. xxi. i. 
 
 IN Greek thought and in Hebrew religion the sea 
 was the emblem of mystery. This book of Revela- 
 tion was written by a man who was familiar with 
 Greek thought, as the prologue to the Fourth Gospel 
 shows. Yet he was himself a Hebrew, and wrote 
 about a religion which, though it was destined to be 
 universal, had its beginnings at Jerusalem. Perhaps 
 the use in Israelitish song of the sea as a symbol of mys- 
 tery and dread had its origin as far back as that in- 
 stance which we read for our lesson — " The Lord, with 
 a strong hand, led His chosen people to deliverance 
 through the midst of the sea." Compare, for instance, 
 with our text the language of Psalm Ixxvii., which is 
 evidently inspired by the gratitude felt by Israel for 
 that great historic salvation. " Thy way is in the sea, 
 and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps 
 are not known. Thou leddest Thy people like a flock 
 by the hand of Moses and Aaron." Compare that 
 piece of poetry with the well-known lines of our Eng- 
 lish poet, William Cowper: 
 
 " God moves in a mysterious way 
 His wonders to perform, 
 He plants His footsteps in the sea, 
 And rides upon the storm." 
 234 
 
GOD'S NEWYEAR 225 
 
 The seer of Patmos had some such feeling as this in 
 his heart, and takes a far outlook with wide and glori- 
 ous vision, when he sees the coming end even of the 
 mystery, when there shall be no need for the symbol — 
 " I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first 
 heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there 
 was no more sea." 
 
 We all feel life to be a mystery; we cannot help it, 
 and the older we grow the deeper does the mystery 
 become. Your little child can ask you — perhaps has 
 asked you — questions that the wisest of men cannot 
 answer. Christina Rossetti sings: 
 
 " The mystery of life, the mystery 
 Of death I see 
 Darkly, as in a glass ; their shadows pass 
 And talk with me." 
 
 Was it not Charles Dickens who wrote, " This world 
 is a world of sacred and solemn mystery; let no man 
 despise it or take it lightly " ? Our life — the life of 
 any man — is but a moment between two eternities — 
 that which has been and that which is to come. Life 
 begins, continues, and ends in mystery. I have often 
 heard a man say — so doubtless have you — " I wish one 
 could see any meaning in it all; life is a mystery to 
 which there is no solution." I have heard many men 
 say, " We give up trying to find any solution ; do your 
 duty in the day. Do not seek to probe into what may 
 have no meaning. Life is a mystery, and we cannot 
 find the key." Just now that is the fashionable atti- 
 tude and the so-called reasonable thing to say — 
 " Don't speculate, be practical ; life is a mystery. Live 
 as you can in the fleeting moment, doing bravely what 
 
226 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 is in you to do." There are worse creeds than that, 
 but few of us can remain in that condition of sus- 
 pended judgment. We want a key for the door; we 
 want to know what is on the other side, that we may 
 understand something of the meaning of our own hfe. 
 The mystery presents itself in myriad forms. Let 
 me just say briefly how it has come to some of you 
 during the past year. Here is one person into whose 
 experience death came for the first time last year. It 
 is very remarkable, but none of us feel that death has 
 anything to do with us until it actually comes. We 
 hear about visitations in other families, and are 
 sorry for the sufferers, but we feel that Death is a 
 stranger that has nothing to do with our home circle. 
 We do not like to think of his possible advent, nor can 
 we picture to ourselves what life would be like if Death 
 really came. Well, here is one to whose home Death 
 did come last year and took away the very person 
 whom you could least afford to spare, and that is a 
 thing he often does. Before that blow fell you thought 
 you would be sure to go first, but it was not so; and 
 you have not been able to see anything kind in that 
 call of the grim spectre. You remember how you felt 
 the next morning; you had to go to the great city to 
 work, and when you heard men talking as if nothing 
 had happened, and when you saw them busy here and 
 there labouring for the meat which perisheth, you 
 could not help stopping to ask yourself, " Is it not all 
 a dream ? What a weird mockery is this ! The real 
 to me was that something which is lying cold and 
 still in what was once my home." You have managed 
 to right yourself a little since, but you look forward on 
 the new year in a very different mood from that in 
 
GOD'S NEWYEAR 227 
 
 which you faced the old. Because of that visit of 
 death life is to you a deeper mystery than it was before. 
 
 Then here is a man who last year went through the 
 greatest sorrow of his life; in fact, experienced the 
 complete overthrow of that for which he had lived. 
 You know what I mean, maybe. You had pinned all 
 your hopes to the future of that life, for whom you 
 toiled, sacrificed, suffered, and counted the sacrifice 
 not dear. Now where is he — dead? Better if he 
 were! Perhaps you are so much in a sadder position 
 than he whom I have just instanced that you will say 
 it would be good news if you could know that that boy 
 of yours was in his coffin, rather than where he is and 
 what he is. You can't help saying to yourself, as you 
 sit among people who pray, and perhaps you don't 
 pray, "To what purpose was this waste? If there be 
 any meaning in life at all, why is it that my life, 
 which was not selfishly lived, appears to have been 
 lived only for torture? My boy has failed me." Yet 
 you would be crucified to save him if you could. " Oh, 
 Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for 
 thee ! " 
 
 Here is another — how different an experience is his! 
 He sits in a corner of a pew, solitary, unnoticed ; the 
 frost of age is on his hair. He makes no complaint, 
 there is no eagerness in his outlook, no protest in his 
 prayer. He is patient, resigned, still. Ah, young 
 man, you would never dream that that old man once 
 had as much spring in his step as you have in yours, 
 and as much hope in his heart as you cherish for the 
 opening year. Once he felt as you do, in the pride of 
 your youth — and vou are right to do it — that you are 
 going to conquer life and wrest the golden secret out 
 
228 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 of fate. He thought all that; his experience was hope 
 deferred, and now it is hope gone. He knows what 
 fate has to give him ; it is to be a hewer of wood, a 
 drawer of water to other people all the days of his life. 
 Yet he feels that he has not lived out, and never had 
 the chances to live out, what there was in him to be 
 and to do. It is a mystery, is it not, that he never 
 could and never shall? Here is a man who has only 
 a little corner of his life (does any man live any 
 more?); life has been an illusion, a disappointment, 
 and as he draws near to the dark river he says to him- 
 self, " A mystery, a mystery ! I am no nearer to the 
 meaning than I was at first." 
 
 Here are all these stories of struggle, poverty, 
 shame, and sin. What is that strong man who is 
 conscious of a weak will and mighty passion, and who 
 says to God, " Strange that You have made me so that 
 I so easily do evil and so hardly do good! I am not 
 master of myself. If You had made me as passion- 
 ately earnest to pray as I am passionately earnest to 
 gratify the flesh, life would have been very different 
 for me to-day. Where is the good of making resolu- 
 tions when I know the history of the past year? " 
 Mystery! Surely God's ways are in the sea, in that 
 any of these stories can be told at all. 
 
 The pain of life is just in the mystery. If we knew, 
 there would not be any pain. It is that we do not 
 know, as we look forward upon the undiscovered 
 future, and strain our eyes with peering into the 
 gloom trying to see what is to be, that the pain comes. 
 Hence it is that some of you, standing on the thresh- 
 old of another year, view it with a certain misgiving. 
 What has this coming year in store? Mystery! 
 
 I 
 
GOD'S NEWYEAR 229 
 
 Suffer me to say that there is a value in mystery, 
 and that I will make you see it. Listen to this mother 
 training her little boy. " Tell the truth," she says. 
 " Be sure you tell the truth ; now tell me the truth 
 and I will give you this toy." He looks at his mother, 
 then at the toy, and when he has gazed on the latter,, 
 the truth is told. What do you think of the moral 
 effect of the lesson? Here is another lesson: listen 
 to this father. He stands face to face with a similar 
 culprit; he loves him quite as much. " My lad, you 
 be a man; tell the truth and shame the devil. Did 
 you do this, or didn't you?" The boy looks up at 
 his father, something of the same spirit comes to him, 
 and he says, " I did." Which was the better lesson ? 
 That which was given without the toy. The one 
 knew the reward of the truth-telling and the other 
 did not. There was a certain value in the mystery. 
 Men are but children of a larger growth. 
 
 Here is another story, which is not fancy. There 
 is a man in my church who said: 
 
 " The memory of my father is a sacred influence 
 to me ; yet I can remember the day when I was hungry 
 because of my father's conduct, and I could not under- 
 stand it. I can remember my mother crying as she 
 cut the last loaf, keeping none for herself, and gave 
 to us what there was. My father had been turned 
 from his business rather than do a mean and shabby 
 thing. They gave him three days to think of it, and 
 then he came home with no prospects and no money. 
 I remember my mother taking the two eldest of us to 
 one side, and saying, ' It breaks my heart to see you 
 hungry, but I will tell you what kind of a man your 
 father is ' ; and she told us. Many a time since I have 
 
230 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 been tempted to do wrong, and there rose before me 
 the figure of the man who dared even to see his chil- 
 dren suffer before he could sully his conscience and 
 sin against God." 
 
 Supposing somebody had come to that father on 
 the morning of his heroism and had said, " I will 
 stand by you if you will do the brave thing now," 
 where would the heroism have been? The heroism 
 was in that he did not know what would come; he 
 could not see the future. He only knew and he only 
 did the right. Character is formed by knowing, and 
 by not knowing. Everything noble in you, if there 
 is any, is formed by knowing and by not knowing — 
 knowing what is right, not knowing whether it will 
 pay; knowing what you ought to do, not knowing 
 what you have to suffer for it. 
 
 " Because right is right, to follow right 
 Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." 
 
 Thank God for what He has hidden from us, for 
 things that are given in mystery; thank God for that 
 feeling which we have, that instinct, which is along- 
 side conscience, that on the other side of the mystery 
 the right is reigning, 
 
 " Right is right since God is right, 
 And right the day must win. 
 To doubt would be disloyalty, 
 To falter would be sin." 
 
 It is not all mystery — no mystery ever is. Every 
 man knows two things, or might if he would — duty, 
 blessing. Through all mankind, said a Pagan thinker, 
 conscience is God, and the judgment of each man 
 will be according to how he listened to the 
 
GOD'SNEWYEAR 231 
 
 voice. You are never in any doubt about it; 
 it speaks. You do not need a preacher to tell 
 you what to do to-day; you know God has spoken. 
 God ever speaks to those who have ears to hear, and 
 He has spoken to you. It is a marvellous and beauti- 
 ful thing that the same still, small voice, which comes 
 as the categorical imperative, saying, " You must," 
 says, when the right is done, " Well done, good and 
 faithful servant! " You do not wait for the judgment 
 day for the Master's " Well done." There is all the 
 world of difference between the man who has suf- 
 fered, being guilty, and the man who would suffer 
 because it was right. 
 
 There is a value in the mystery, the value which 
 makes heroism. The world does not want to be with- 
 out that. Hear Savonarola, the great Florentine 
 prophet, going to his death, as prophets often have 
 to do, at the hands of those he had served and loved. 
 George Eliot makes him say, " I count it nothing. 
 Darkness encompassed me, yet the light I saw was 
 the true light." There is an end to mystery, a golden 
 day, and we shall carry into it that which mystery has 
 given us here. When the day of joy comes you will 
 see that your joy depended upon your pain. Every 
 tone in the organ which is rich and beautiful is only 
 rich because it contains a myriad discords. When 
 you hear a tone which you say is dull, although it 
 happens to be the same note as the tone which you 
 say is rich, you may not know what is the matter. 
 It is because there are no discords in it; but you do 
 not hear the discords; you are not thinking of them. 
 Just so. The highest joy is that in which pain is 
 latent, forgotten; but it has been there. When you 
 
232 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 hear a dissonance in a harmony you are instantly on 
 the alert; the discord makes you wait; you wait for 
 the cadence. When you feel pain in this world any- 
 where, although you know you have lived nobly and 
 right up to your lights, you just wait. Something 
 within tells you the cadence is coming, sometimes on 
 this side of death, sometimes on the other; but it will 
 come, when the shadows have departed and the mists 
 have rolled away. 
 
 We are meant to see — God means every man to 
 see — the whole scheme from the beginning, the mean- 
 ing of your life, and He lets you see some of it even 
 now. You do not walk in thick darkness all the time. 
 Look back over the past year, yes, and far beyond 
 that. What do you see? Goodness and mercy have 
 followed you all the days of your life. When you 
 went wrong, pain brought you back; when you did 
 right and it seemed as if everything were wrong, it 
 was only that you were wrong in your judgment. 
 Now you see that things that were veiled in thick 
 darkness were right, after all, so much so that the 
 very last thing you wanted has come to be the thing 
 you would choose if your time came over again. How 
 often it has been that the thing you prayed might 
 not come did come, but the thing you dreaded in it 
 did not come! God's ways were in the sea; you went 
 on dry land through the midst of the sea, and, look- 
 ing back, you see what the deliverance was. Now, 
 looking forward, let me say this. You have nothing 
 to fear, for all your questions are answered before- 
 hand, if you know Him whom to know is life eternal. 
 We know not what awaits us. God kindly veils our 
 eyes, but we know Him whom we have believed, and 
 
GOD'S NEWYEAR 233 
 
 are persuaded that He is able to keep that which we 
 have committed unto Him against that day — the day 
 of revelation, when the secrets of all hearts shall be 
 revealed, and, though many ugly things will come to 
 light, many beautiful things will come to light too. 
 Some of you, of whom the world never hears, that 
 are doing your best in your obscure corners, will 
 stand out then to shine as the noonday in God's new 
 year. God is speaking to you even now in your time 
 of seeking to pierce the mystery. It may be that we 
 seek too much and ask too many questions. Fear ye 
 not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord which 
 He shall show to you to-day. Do you remember those 
 lines of Wordsworth, the mystic of the late poets ? 
 
 " Think you 'mid all this mighty sum 
 
 Of things for ever speaking 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 
 But we must still be seeking ? 
 Nor less I deem that there are powers, 
 
 Which of themselves our minds impress, 
 And we can feed this mind of ours, 
 
 In a wise passiveness." 
 
 God's speech comes to the soul of that man who, 
 recognising that His ways are in the sea, thanks Him 
 for what He has not shown, and says, " My life is hid 
 with Christ in God." 
 
XX 
 THE MINOR OFFENCE 
 
 Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offettd in 
 one point, he is guilty of all.— James ii. lo. 
 
 IN this, at first sight, somewhat mysterious sen- 
 tence, there is a profound psychological and spirit- 
 ual meaning. The truth it contains is one which 
 on reflection every seriously-minded man will affirm. 
 Briefly stated, it is this. Character is all of a piece, 
 woven without seam throughout; goodness is one 
 thing, with many manifestations, each one of which 
 is consistent with all the rest. Every Christian virtue 
 presumes the existence of every other in its possessor ; 
 or, rather, there is but one virtue, which shows itself 
 in various lights, and exhibits itself in diverse atti- 
 tudes. There is only one virtue, whether it show 
 itself as love, generosity, truthfulness, firmness, up- 
 rightness, humility, or what not; and the absence of 
 any one so-called Christian virtue means that the rest 
 are vitiated — not merely that the whole character is 
 incomplete, but every single virtue is incomplete by 
 the absence of one. 
 
 People dearly love anomaly. They are not prepared 
 to commit themselves to theories until they are sure 
 they will work in practice; and, provided a faulty 
 theory does work fairly well in practice, we are pre- 
 pared to put up with it. These peculiarities of our 
 
 234 
 
THE MINOR OFFENCE 235 
 
 moral constitution sometimes expose us to criticism, 
 partly or wholly deserved; for our national incon- 
 sistencies, to a certain extent, are the impressive ex- 
 pression of our individual inconsistencies too. A 
 book has just been published by that acute observer 
 of men and things, and eminent statesman, Mr. Bryce. 
 He calls it " Studies in Contemporary Biography," 
 and it contains sketches of eminent men and their 
 characteristics as known at close quarters to Professor 
 Bryce. In the sketch of Lord Beaconsfield occurs 
 this paragraph : 
 
 " English society was then, and perhaps is still, more 
 complex, more full of inconsistencies, of contrasts be- 
 tween theory and practice, between appearances and 
 realities, than that of any other country. Nowhere 
 so much limitation of view among the fashionable, so 
 much Pharisaism among the respectable, so much 
 vulgarity among the rich, mixed with so much real 
 earnestness, benevolence, and good sense; nowhere, 
 therefore, so much to seem merely ridiculous to one 
 who looked at it from without, wanting the sympathy 
 which comes from the love of mankind, or even from 
 the love of one's country." 
 
 That is a very acute and searching criticism. 
 Nearly everybody would confess it to be true. Just 
 as it is true in the large of English character as a 
 whole, so I believe it is true in the minor world of 
 individuals, and even of professedly Christian char- 
 acter. I would not exempt religious men from the 
 sweeping statements here made. We are composed 
 of contradictions, our religions life bristles with them, 
 and we sometimes forget that Christianity is not a 
 code nor a set or rules; it is a spirit and a life. When 
 
236 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 a man has the right spirit, character can almost be 
 left to take care of itself, and when he has not the 
 right spirit, he may call himself religious, but you 
 will find that his character is inharmonious, warring 
 against itself, and while he forgets the perfect obedi- 
 ence to the Master in one point, he has omitted to see 
 that he has vitiated character all through. 
 
 I am impressed by certain things which as a sym- 
 pathetic observer I cannot but see and regret in my 
 acquaintance with men. One of these is the vast 
 amount of unnecessary unhappiness which exists 
 amongst professedly Christian people and in profess- 
 edly Christian homes. You would get excited in five 
 minutes if instead of talking in this way to you som.e- 
 one were to begin tO' speak about the income-tax, or 
 the education question, or temperance reform. I some- 
 times think we shout loudest about the things that mat- 
 ter least. If you will examine it you will find that your 
 happiness does not depend primarily, no, not perhaps 
 even secondarily, on the right solution of any or all 
 of these questions of common and public interest, but 
 rather upon the solution of the problems about little 
 things that you are living in at home. The home is 
 the place where we should in our common life ap- 
 proach nearest to God ; not the church, not the busi- 
 ness mart, with its discipline, its necessary school, its 
 lessons that will have value in eternity, but in the 
 home we meet with the affinities and the relation- 
 ships which are in some sort types and symbols of 
 eternal realities. In the home we come closest to each 
 other, and are placed in each other's custody in such 
 wise that surely it is God-given and God-meant for the 
 higher training of the individual soul. If home be 
 
I 
 
 THE MINOR OFFENCE 237 
 
 right, men and brethren, you will be better citizens; 
 if home be right, the Church will feel the influence of 
 it; if home be right, our corporate life will not want 
 for good men and true; and if home be wrong, there 
 is something wrong with our religious character and 
 our religious profession. I observe that it is in the 
 minor things that most of the unhappiness is caused 
 which is so common, and which I am perfectly sure 
 exists in the experience of those who are listening to me 
 now. There is, for example, the vice of a dual de- 
 meanour, from which so many of us suffer. The City 
 men who listen to me take no end of trouble to be 
 agreeable to those with whom they have to deal. You 
 may say it is nothing more than would be expected 
 from one man in a civilised country in his relations 
 with another. Let us examine sympathetically your 
 behaviour of a day. A perfect stranger whom you 
 never saw before has been occupying your attention 
 for an hour; you have been quoting prices to him, 
 and trying to get him to buy from you this or that 
 good thing of which you have to dispose. It is per- 
 fectly wonderful how winsome you have been and 
 mean to be, and with hardly any trouble consciously 
 taken. You exhibit yourself in a favourable light, 
 you try to study your man, and I venture to suppose 
 not altogether with the object of exploiting him. You 
 are prepared to consider him in friendly fashion, and 
 you have given far more of the power of your per- 
 sonality for that man's good opinion than possibly 
 you are aware. If he goes away, having bidden you 
 good-bye, he will carry kindly memories of you; you 
 have made a certain impression upon him; if ever he 
 thinks or speaks of you again he will estimate you 
 
238 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 according to that impression. From his point of 
 view, what he thinks of you is you. Now we will 
 go home with you. Somehow there is a differenL 
 man here. You are perfectly unconscious of it, may 
 be, but as you take ofif your hat when you enter the 
 hall your whole demeanour undergoes a change. You 
 forget the winsomeness that was necessary when you 
 were quoting prices; there is a difference in your atti- 
 tude; you don't take so much trouble now to be 
 genial. If anyone were to ask you whether you had 
 been lacking in tenderness, considerateness, sym- 
 pathy, insight, at home, you would say, " No " — ^but 
 you are. Thank God it is not universal, but it is suffi- 
 ciently common for us to give each other pause, and 
 ask whether any professedly Christian man ought 
 ever to have a dual demeanour; the same demeanour 
 which you have to the stranger ought to be the de- 
 meanour which you wear at home. If you have a bet- 
 ter, if you have a higher altitude to take, take it with 
 the nearest and the dearest, rather than with the man 
 you casually meet upon the street. If you do not, you 
 are losing something, and experience tells you that 
 you have lost much, whether you ever think about 
 it or not. It is trifles at home that make happiness 
 or unhappiness. Great tragedies usually begin in 
 little things. A husband and a wife are drifting 
 apart; each of them knows it, neither blames himself 
 or herself. It is little things that cause the breach; by- 
 and-bye the great scandal comes out, and the whole 
 community knows; but there may have been a lifetime 
 of agony before that, which surely need never have 
 been, if what we say and sing in the house of God 
 represented the very truth about ourselves. Our first 
 
THE MINOR OFFENCE 239 
 
 interest and solicitude are for those who are given to 
 our stewardship, and God makes no mistake. What 
 we call incompatibilities often are simply the result of a 
 subtle selfishness, which in keeping the letter of the 
 law forgets the minor things, which brings in a little 
 selfhood by a back door. People may be close to- 
 gether at the fireside, eat at the same table, frequent 
 the same scenes, live in each other's company day 
 after day, and be as far apart as though oceans rolled 
 between. If those who are dearest become to you 
 commonplace and uninteresting, there is something 
 the matter with your vision, 'and it matters little how 
 high you stand in the religious world, what eloquent 
 sermons you may preach, how much good you may 
 philanthropically do, if these who are committed to 
 your charge do not see in your demeanour the good 
 tidings of the love of God. 
 
 This, again, is a cause, I believe, why so often chil- 
 dren of good men go wrong. God forbid that I should 
 say it is always the reason; often there is no telling 
 why a good man has a bad son, but yet I think 
 it is more frequently apparently than really inexpli- 
 cable. 
 
 Let me give you a case in point. A young man 
 comes into the vestry (there have been a good many 
 of them), and tells me, a perfect stranger, a story of 
 suffering or of shadow or of sin. When I have heard 
 it, I ask him about his home. Yes, he has a father 
 and a mother. " Why did you not tell your father, 
 then?" " Oh, he is the last person in the world that 
 I would tell!" "Why? Are you afraid of hurting 
 him?" "No, it is not that; it is that I could never 
 get near enough to him to tell him such a thing as 
 
240 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 this." That is more common than you would suppose, 
 and it is so in the household of good men. The minor 
 offence in the father's nature has been a subtle self- 
 hood which has erected a barrier between himself and 
 his boy. When the boy goes wrong, all the world 
 pities the father; but the father might have avoided 
 that if he had remembered to give himself in sym- 
 pathetic companionship to his son. Never lose the 
 confidence of your children; you never need to lose it. 
 I believe that most lads are kept right rather by in- 
 fluence than by precept. Boys who are living in the 
 metropolis, far away from home, will bear me out in 
 saying that if they have been kept from the house of 
 shame is has probably been owing to the influence of 
 some good mother, who has never spoken a word 
 about, and perhaps knows not of the existence of, 
 these darksome themes of ill. If the influence of a 
 sympathetic parental companionship will not keep a 
 young man right, I know no influence that will. 
 
 Observe, again, how often young people in their 
 turn, conscious of religious instincts, desires, and aspi- 
 rations, vitiate them all by a kind of self-consciousness 
 that takes no account of what it really is. A young 
 person comes to me or writes me a letter asking for 
 advice upon this thing or that ; very often it turns out 
 to be a question concerning some fundamental of re- 
 ligion. I say, " Have you no friend with whom to talk 
 these matters over?" "Oh, no, I am entirely alone, 
 nobody at home understands me; I am often craving 
 for sympathy and understanding, but I don't seem to 
 get it." It is true, perhaps, in one case out of a hun- 
 dred, that there is a noble lonely soul in an uncongenial 
 environment struggling in vain against spiritual odds. 
 
THE MINOR OFFENCE 241 
 
 but the chances are ninety-nine out of the hundred that 
 all that is the matter with that young man is a morbid 
 self-consciousness and an over-estimate of his own im- 
 portance. As Sir James Paget once said to a young 
 man who wrote to him for professional advice, " What- 
 ever you do, don't think yourself exceptional." There 
 is no readier vitiater of youthful promise than self-con- 
 sciousness of that kind which has but itself to blame 
 for the ills of which it complains. Be yourself the 
 strong one on whom the weak may lean, the sym- 
 pathetic friend to whom your friends may look; stifle 
 and dismiss your complaints, try and live in the spirit 
 of the One who had a heart at leisure from itself to 
 soothe and sympathise. 
 
 O'bserve in all these regards the example of our 
 blessed Lord. Nothing is more striking and impres- 
 sive to me in the Christian Gospel than the tender 
 delicacy of the Christ combined with a strength which 
 is the acme of human manliness. Our Master was 
 tender to the Magdalene, to the woman taken in adul- 
 tery; scathing in his denunciation of the Pharisees 
 who would have condemned them. We invert the 
 order as a rule, we are indulgent to the Pharisee, de- 
 nunciatory of the Magdalene. We have false stand- 
 ards concerning the importance and pre-eminence of 
 certain virtues. I make no apology for the Magda- 
 lene ; Christ never did that. He never condoned or 
 compromised with or apologised for sin, but with Him 
 it was a spirit that met with condemnation rather than 
 an act. What is behind the conduct of a man, what 
 makes him do or leave undone? was the question the 
 Master would have asked. With all His tender deli- 
 cacy, gentleness, and insight. He could be absolutely 
 
242 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 irresistible and inflexible in His denunciation of 
 wrong. Keep all your moral indignation if you like, 
 provided you keep with it the tenderness of the spirit 
 of the Master; and remember that if you have not the 
 spirit of Christ you are none of His. The whole of 
 your Christian character is vitiated in its heights and 
 depths, its lengths and breadths, if that spirit be absent 
 in your dealing with those who are nearest and dearest. 
 If a man offends in one point he is guilty of all. 
 
 I am impressed, further, by the way in which this 
 selfhood of which I have spoken operates in individual 
 lives within or without the home circle, in self-pity, 
 self-indulgence, unholy self-regard. A man spends a 
 great deal of time frequently in thinking of himself. 
 Self-consciousness, even when it seems harmless, is 
 often poisonous. Self-contempt even, a craven sub- 
 mission to evil without or within, is as reprehensible as 
 self-pity or self-indulgence in any other form. Men 
 are continually crying out, " All is lost ! " Why, all is 
 found if you hdve but told the Lord you know how 
 much is lost. 
 
 Further still, in our social life of to-day, I am 
 amazed by the existence of two contradictory things — 
 the vast amount of kindness which can be shown and 
 the vast amount of cruelty that can be exhibited by the 
 very same man. I go into a London club, and listen 
 to men talking; it is pretty nearly always true that 
 where two or three are gathered together slander is in 
 the midst of them, and it is a bad time for somebody 
 who is not there. Censoriousness is one of the most 
 hateful of vices, and usually a man sees sooner the de- 
 fects in another man's character than the blemish in 
 his own. There is a psychological reason for that. 
 
 I 
 
THE MINOR OFFENCE 243 
 
 We are sometimes told that spiteful gossip is confined 
 to one sex. I do not think it is, and I will venture to 
 say that the most malicious gossips I have known were 
 men. In point of fact, envy, hatred, maHce, and all 
 uncharitableness exist almost unrebuked in the char- 
 acters of many otherwise religious people. Even 
 those of the cloth are not exempt. The thoughtless 
 cruelty of the statements which men make of one an- 
 other, the ills that they wish, the ifs and the buts that 
 they suggest, are unworthy of a Christian profession. 
 More than that, remember, censoriousness has no 
 place in Christian character. Our Lord's warnings 
 were emphatic upon that point. " Judge not, that ye 
 be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge ye 
 shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it 
 shall be measured to you again." Not in some far- 
 oiif day, but now, merciless judgments always recoil 
 upon the man who makes them. It is perfectly cer- 
 tain that whilst the spirit of bitter and ungenerous 
 criticism is in any man's heart the love of Christ is 
 not there, and it is equally true that while criticism has 
 its place and must have, and we are called upon to 
 estimate the worth of a man's deeds, we do not belong 
 to the Master when we seek to penetrate his motives. 
 Let them alone. 
 
 Moreover, a very severe and real test of the genuine- 
 ness of much of the criticism that goes on amongst 
 men would be this: Supposing you could be satisfied 
 that everything you pretend to deplore in another 
 man's conduct was, after all, a mistake in your infor- 
 mation, and that you had been entirely wrong, would 
 your first instinct be rejoicing? Sometimes, yes ; more 
 frequently, no; you would be sorry to find out that 
 
244 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 you were wrong. Is not this discovery enough to 
 make you think with horror and alarm about your 
 own condition ? If a grudge hke that hes at the bottom 
 of your heart, then what you pretended to denounce 
 was not the thing that was stirring your indignation 
 at alL Moreover, when we speak about grudges, we 
 speak about a somewhat that can enter by the back 
 door and vitiate all the good to which a man puts his 
 hand. A minor offence we call it. We do not ask a 
 man to resign his church membership because he bears 
 a grudge against someone else, but we would ask him 
 not to be too prominent in Christian service if he failed 
 to meet his creditors ; and yet it is certain that the 
 cherishing of a grudge is as much a sin against God as 
 failing to pay twenty shillings in the pound. 
 
 " Hard-heartedness dwells not with souls round whom Thine 
 
 arms are drawn. 
 And dark thoughts fade away in grace like cloud-spots in 
 
 the dawn. 
 I often see in my own thoughts, when they lie nearest Thee, 
 That the worst men I ever knew were better men than me. " 
 
 To be like unto our Master, and to be really in joyful 
 communion with Him, to be the possessor of the peace 
 of God, grudges must go. How many there are 
 amongst us who have no real enjoyment of their 
 Christian life ! We pray and we sing, we attend much 
 upon the services of the house of God, but we are never 
 at harmony with ourselves ; we wonder what is the 
 matter, we speak about it, we ask for guidance of 
 another, it may be. 
 
 Go down to the minor offence, the sin which does so 
 easily beset, that which men do not see and do not 
 
THE MINOR OFFENCE 246 
 
 know, and perhaps do not reprobate; get rid of it; it 
 means the driving out of one spirit by the incoming of 
 another. Thomas a Kempis says in the " Imitatio," 
 " When I consider what I am, then no man hath ever 
 done wrong to me." I think I know what he meant : 
 we have no right to cherish grudges, no right to feel 
 ill-treated, no right to consider ourselves superior to 
 another who has inflicted a wrong. For, when all is 
 told, we have deserved far more of pain than we have 
 ever got. God is merciful, but except we forgive men 
 their trespasses His mercy is stayed from us. As I 
 came up from Brighton one morning, I noted that the 
 sun was shining brightly about halfway up the line. 
 When we got near London it was gone. Am I to sup- 
 pose that it has ceased to shine on the sea-coast? I 
 do not believe it. I think London has sent up from 
 her great heart greyish, blackish clouds, which obscure 
 the face of the sun. Often when you complain of the 
 absence of the peace of God and the sunlight of heaven 
 in your soul, it is because you have generated affections 
 which will not let the Holy Spirit through, you have 
 placed between yourself and your Master barriers it 
 needs repentance to remove. Let us get low down at 
 the Cross of Christ, humble ourselves under the mighty 
 hand of God, and He shall lift us up. See with a new 
 sympathy the kinship of humanity everywhere, feel its 
 heartbeat, get to the undercurrent where we are all 
 divine. Respect the sacredness of another's soul ; look 
 with new eyes upon mankind, the eyes of Jesus, for, as 
 Whittier has as sweetly said as the Faber whom I just 
 pow quoted: 
 
 '" He prayeth best who leaves unguessed 
 The mystery of another's breast. 
 
246 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 Why cheeks are pale, why eyes o'erflow, 
 Or heads are white, thou needst not know. 
 Enough to note by many a sign 
 That every heart hath needs like thine." 
 
 There is no time surely for adding to the world's pain ; 
 life is short at the best, and when the discipline is over 
 we do not want to think as we stand at the parting of 
 the veil that we have made it harder for another to 
 fight his battle and to win his way through. Get the 
 right spirit yourself, and you are working for the 
 Christ, though you do not know it ; and if your spirit 
 be wrong you may claim all the virtues in the calendar, 
 but you do not belong to the Master who hath called us 
 to possess the heart of a little child. " Let this mind 
 be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." " For out 
 of the heart proceed the issues of life." 
 
XXI 
 VISION AND SERVICE 
 
 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord 
 . . . then said I, Woe is me ! for I am undotie ; because I 
 am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
 people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the 
 Lord of Hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me , , . 
 and said . . . thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin 
 purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying. Whom 
 shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here 
 am I; send me. — Isaiah vi. i, j, 6, 7, 8. 
 
 IN this chapter we have the account of the begin- 
 nings of a great prophetic ministry which has pro- 
 foundly influenced the world. Of what nature the 
 vision of Isaiah might have been we are hardly justified 
 in attempting to speculate. That it was mainly subjec- 
 tive and symbolical is perfectly clear from the narra- 
 tive itself, but it was a vision corresponding to an 
 objective reality, which would have been there, whether 
 Isaiah had known it or not, and which always is, 
 whether the world knows it or not. 
 
 " In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord." 
 This vision is by no means unique in religious history, 
 and especially in Christian history. I need hardly 
 bring to your recollection the vision of St. Paul, the 
 vision of St. Francis, the vision of Wesley, the vision 
 of Charles Spurgeon and of Catherine Booth. Men 
 must see before they can say, and in this crisis of an 
 
 247 
 
248 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 experience — an experience not peculiar to Isaiah — we 
 see something and know something which holds good 
 of prophetic spiritual experience for all time. 
 
 This was a time of great national crisis. The king 
 was dead. The prophet-statesman was musing sadly 
 about the future What now? Amid a people, some 
 of them degraded, indisposed for high and holy things, 
 darkness gathering around the national destiny, the 
 great soul of Isaiah was perturbed — and yet, in this 
 moment of deep darkness, the vision comes. How, 
 we are not told, nor how long it stayed ; but " in the 
 year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord," the King, 
 the Lord of Hosts. But the vision at first brought no 
 comfort ; rather was Isaiah trembling and afraid. It 
 becomes no man to rush lightly and irreverently into 
 the presence of God, and no man who has ever had a 
 deep and profound consciousness of that presence Di- 
 vine ever can speak of it as though it were all sweet- 
 ness, and there were nothing of which to stand in awe. 
 This is true of the saint, let alone of the sinner ; and 
 at that moment, when the vision came, Isaiah was no 
 saint — " Woe is me, for I am undone. . . . For mine 
 eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts. I am 
 a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
 people of unclean lips." Then comes the symbolical 
 cleansing. I see by your faces as I speak that some of 
 you know well this spiritual pathway, the sense of awe 
 and dread in the presence of God, the discovery of joy 
 and peace and assurance in that same presence Divine, 
 the fruit of a cleansing. However, that cleansing came. 
 Isaiah was sure that it had come, and hence, w;hen the 
 call was given in the moment that followed, he whose 
 iniquity had been taken away, and whose sin purged, 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 249 
 
 could say, as a sinner, volunteering for service among 
 sinners, " Here am I ; send me." 
 
 There, brethren, is the sequence of the spiritual ex- 
 perience, which was the beginning of all great mission- 
 ary endeavour ; and at the beginning of all great mis- 
 sionary movements, all great evangelical enthusiasm, 
 there is such experience as this. To come from Isaiah's 
 time and experience to our own, and to the day in 
 which we live, and to the country whose citizens we 
 are, and to the subject. Let me say at once, and ab- 
 ruptly, that the present state of foreign missionary en- 
 deavour is one which, while it gives us much cause 
 for joy and thanksgiving to God, also should arouse in 
 us much heart-searching, and cause something of dis- 
 quiet. I know not what your missionary report of this 
 year may be ; I know not for what total of results you 
 have to praise our Father in heaven ; but I know the 
 Society in which I am most immediately concerned and 
 interested, and I feel that at the present time the evan- 
 gelical churches of this country have much cause for 
 introspection and for self-reproach that things are not 
 as they ought to be. Criticism assails us from with- 
 out, even in the mission field itself. There is, we are 
 assured, in some quarters, in spite of our grand total 
 of results, and in spite of the noble and disinterested 
 services of many of those who go out from our churches 
 to the mission field, a declining interest in the foreign 
 missionary question as a whole. Nor is this true 
 merely of the general public, and of those who are 
 casually and loosely the adherents of our churches, and 
 join with us in public worship. I fear we must say — 
 and let us frankly face the fact — that some of those 
 who are interested in our work at home, deeply con- 
 
250 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 ceraed in it, who profess and call themselves Chris- 
 tians, who believe that they have a personal relation- 
 ship to Christ, are beginning to discourage our mis- 
 sionary effort abroad. They say that our methods are 
 not suited to the heathen ; that it were better that we 
 revise them ; perhaps better that we evangelise at home 
 before we venture abroad at all. In a word, all the 
 old arguments which William Carey and such as he 
 heard a century and a half ago. 
 
 My brethren, where there is no argument there is a 
 strange and serious apathy creeping over many of the 
 members of our churches. They not only say nothing 
 about foreign missions, they do nothing for them. And 
 lastly, I think we are justified in saying that while it is 
 not always true that we ought to blame the ministers for 
 want of interest in any noble subject on the part of their 
 people, yet perhaps among the ministers themselves 
 some subjects are nearer to their hearts and some 
 interests occupy a larger place in their affections than 
 that of going into all the world and preaching the Gos- 
 pel of the grace of God. 
 
 I am perfectly sure of this, that if the Church of 
 Christ as a whole had ever fallen into this way of look- 
 ing at the great question which is ours this morning, 
 then the Church would have been doomed. She has 
 saved herself by revivals of missionary interest and 
 missionary effort from century to century. The liv- 
 ing Church is a missionary Church ; the Church 
 which ceases to be a missionary Church is dead. 
 But I think this apathy or declining interest, call 
 it what you will, in this country to-day, in the 
 question of foreign missions, is rather a symptom of 
 something which lies deeper than we have actually im- 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 251 
 
 agined, and is itself a main current or cause of action 
 or inaction. I think the whole country over, the time 
 has come for us to wait upon God for a great revival 
 of His work at home, and for a fresh outpouring of 
 the Holy Spirit upon the people of God, that we may 
 one and all become missionaries, whether here or in 
 the foreign field. 
 
 We have passed through, shall I say in the last 
 twenty^ ye^s, a'period of criticism and negation, in 
 which all the fun darnentaT Tof the Christian faith have 
 gone into t he meltmg-pot ; in whicft, as it seemed, r^n's 
 mood toward the eternal v eriti es h^ been one of^ hesi- 
 tation an3." uncefTainty ; an atmosphere fatal to enthu- 
 siasm. When pre ache rs take to balancing evidence in 
 tRe pulpit for_this_fact or for that, facts_which^ vitally 
 co ncern our Ch ristian ex perience ; when we are^afraM 
 o f ferv our and ent husiasm ; w hen w e are an xiou s not to 
 ma ke o urselves ridi culou s by committing o urse lves too 
 strongly to the great facts of Christian faith ; when the 
 no te of author ity and holv ex perien ce js missing ; thenjt 
 is time tojook tq_gurselves, ministers and people. We 
 have passed through such a period as this, and I be- 
 lieve — and I think I am right in believing — that it is 
 coming to an end. The time has been when the note of 
 spiritual experience was more strongly sounded from 
 the pulpit than it is just now. Sometimes it is falsely 
 sounded ; I think I have heard it so. If there has been 
 one note which Methodism has sounded more clearly 
 than any other evangelical body, it has been the note 
 of holy fervour, enthusiastic sincerity. You may have 
 been weak in some other directions, but, from the day 
 when your first lay preachers went forth, that has 
 been a note which has drawn men into the Kingdom in 
 
252 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 multitudes, and always will. If that note is lost, or if 
 it is more quaveringly sounded to-day, I pray the 
 Lord to give it you back again ! The truth is that we 
 are ashamed sometimes of committing ourselves too 
 strongly to the advocacy of the things which, if they 
 be true, are the only things worth preaching about at 
 all, and if they be untrue we had better shut up our 
 churches and be done with it all. 
 
 There are certain things that I would like to place 
 before you, apart from all questions of criticism, all 
 questions about Christian evidences of any sort — 
 things that human nature always wants to hear about, 
 
 /and always will, in this country or in any other. These 
 are suggested in my text, and of them I may instance 
 
 - two. The first is the necessity for vision of God, and 
 
 'the second is the renewal of the fellowship of the 
 
 •cleansing. 
 
 I. THE NECESSITY FOR VISION OF GOD 
 
 When I speak about vision of God, I speak of that 
 which human nature everywhere, even when it negates, 
 is, consciously or sub-consciously, craving for. We are 
 told that our churches are emptying to-day, and, ac- 
 cording to statistics recently published, it might seem 
 as if in the great Metropolis this were in a measure 
 true, and Methodism itself is not exempt from the gen- 
 eral trend. But I would have you to note that where 
 any man is sure oT^h is own ex perien ce, and speak s it 
 in words wTiich betray no su perficial ity in att ainm ent ; 
 when a man speaks f rom the depths of him about the 
 eternal realit ies, people will come t£ hear, be h£ ejo- 
 quent or no. It is perfectly sure that the restless crav- 
 ing of the human heart— a craving which will never be 
 
VISION AND SERVICE ^53 
 
 stilled without God — is in our midst to-day as much 
 as it ever was ; and what the people need is vision of 
 God. Where there is no vision the people perish. 
 That vision has been stated in words that are nobler 
 than any I can employ to you this morning, by a great 
 poet who sprang from the ranks of Nonconformity in 
 the last century: 
 
 " I have always had one lode-star ; now, 
 As I look back, I'see that I have halted 
 Or hastened as iTooked towards tha.t star — 
 A need, a trust, a yearning after God," 
 
 And, as a cynic in the van of the world put it not 
 more than a generation back, after a crisis which in a 
 fashion might be compared with that of Isaiah, " There 
 is God — what God ? " It is not the God of philosophy 
 that we want, though there is such a God ; it is not the 
 |God of science that men crave to know, though there 
 jis such a God, who holds the world in the hollow of 
 .His hand; it is the God who is the Soul of our soul, the 
 •Life of our lives, the Father of our spirits. " A need, 
 )a trust, a yearning after God." Men's desire is for 
 Isuch a God as this — Master, Saviour, Father, Friend. 
 The world, and England, and the people to whom you 
 and I commonly speak, are one and all, in whatever 
 way they express their craving, seeking for vision of 
 such a God. The vision which has come to men who 
 have stood upon the mountain-top century after cen- 
 tury in Christian history is the vision which I seek 
 should be given afresh to us to-day. The disciples in 
 the upper room had such vision granted, and It 
 was not the vision of the bodily presence only, merely, 
 or even chiefly, which changed them into heroes and 
 saints ; it was simply that they knew whom they had 
 
254 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 believed — the Jesus who stood in the midst. The vision 
 ofjjod which has brought to Ch risten dom all the light 
 and love and^joj in w hkh we are living to-day was 
 vision of God thr ough Jesus Christ. A few timid 
 fisEermen meeting in an upper room, huddled by them- 
 selves for fear of the Jews, with the door fast shut be- 
 tween them and danger, on the morrow become heroes, 
 valiant in the fight, who stand unabashed before princes 
 and kings, and witness in the name of the Crucified. 
 What wrought the change? Whence came the mir- 
 acle? Why the three thousand added to the Church 
 on the day of the Pentecost? It was the fruit of a 
 vision of God which was the first vision of Jesus. That 
 vision, testified to by the Holy Spirit down the ages, 
 has reached us this morning by a magnificent apostolic 
 succession. God has never left Himself without a 
 ' witness ; men have had vision of Jesus, hence vision of 
 'the Father. Men have that vision to-day — God grant 
 'us more ! St. Paul on his way to Damascus sees a 
 vision none other but himself could see, and hears a 
 voice remonstrate with him upon his ways, and his 
 response to the question addressed to him then, to the 
 call which came to him in that moment of crisis, has 
 aflfected your life and mine far more than we know. 
 There was a man whose whole life was given up to an 
 ideal because of a vision he had seen and knew, and 
 giving his account of his own commission, even by way 
 of remonstrance, he phrased it so : " Am not I an 
 apostle? Am I not free? Have I not seen Jesus 
 Christ? " Renan, in writing his well-known " Life of 
 St. Paul," somewhere says, in words that have become 
 familiar, concerning the uncertainty that envelops the 
 end of the great apostle of the Gentiles, " Convinced 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 255 
 
 that he had given his Hfe for a dream, Paul may have O 
 wandered, despairing, resigned, on some Iberian shore, # 
 aware of the nothingness of Hfe." Thank God that 
 with a certain inwardness we can read in the letters 
 that came from a burning experience, such testimony 
 as this : " For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 
 I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I 
 have kept the faith. I am now ready to be offered." 
 There was the fruit of a vision of God, precious and 
 near, compelling and tender; it made the Apostle of 
 the Gentiles the instrument of an evangel which has 
 reached us in this church this morning. We are the 
 fruit of such a vision, and it is ours to pass it on. 
 
 Time would fail me to speak of the instances in 
 which vision of God has transformed comparatively 
 humble lives, and magnified personality, given a new 
 colour to life, a new authority to holy endeavour. Per- 
 haps one might be pardoned for being so intimately 
 personal as to say, however much one may be sure of the 
 reality of other experiences, one can always be more 
 sure of one's own. Will you allow the man who speaks 
 to you this morning as a brother to say, " I, too, have 
 seen the Lord"? and, as Cardinal Newman said of him- 
 self,! would be more sure of the vision than that I have 
 hands and feet. Whatever appearances may be to-day, 
 whatever may be the religious outlook, however serious 
 may seem the deadening apathy which we are assured 
 has stolen over the spiritual natures of our country- 
 men, this I believe, that if we can only multiply the 
 number of those who have vision of God, however 
 humble may be their power, however restricted their 
 sphere, the future of the Church, the future of the na- 
 tion, and the future of the cause of Christ in the mis- 
 
!256 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 sion field is perfectly safe. " In the year that King 
 Uzziah died, I saw the Lord." 
 
 II. THE RENEWAL OF THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE 
 CLEANSING 
 
 That leads me to the second experience of which I 
 spoke, and here I confess I have come to something 
 which it is difficult to state as it should be stated — the 
 fellowship of the cleansing. We are sometimes told ^ 
 that the sense of sin is dying or dead. Don't you be- i 
 lieve it; it is not true. But I have discovered a curi- 
 ous fact — that the sense of sin can exist without much 
 of the sense of God. I know men to-day, wretched, 
 miserable, blind, for whom life has lost its whole value;' 
 they know nothing of God, doubt whether, or deny,i 
 there is a God ; but they know sin, and they know that 
 sin has been conqueror in their nature, and that they I 
 are paying a heavy price for the victory which sin has t 
 gained. When you meet with people whose lives have 
 been comparatively smooth, as you do in your churches, 
 and hear them say that they cannot understand the ex- 
 travagant language of gratitude in which some Chris- 
 tians indulge for their experience of God's pardoning 
 love, ask them to come and study human nature in its 
 agony. You will find that the dual burden of sorrow 
 and sin is universal ; sooner or later, it comes to every 
 man with poignancy, and, sooner or later, the craving 
 goes up, the cry to which there is no satisfaction 
 but Christ — " What shall I do to be saved ? " They 
 tell me that missionaries going to the foreign field 
 sometimes have to create a conscience in their hearers ; 
 better say, they have to interpret to their hearers what 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 257 
 
 conscience has already said. Down in the depths of a 
 man there is a question continually being asked, a 
 question concerning the meaning of life, the burden of 
 sorrow, escape from wrong. I never met a man yet 
 of whom it would not be true to say that he has, how- 
 ever inadequate and however much it needs to be illu- 
 mined by the Holy Spirit, such sense of sin as would, 
 if you could truly state it, bring him to the Cross in 
 humility, contrition, and penitence of heart. I know 
 nothing to meet this experience save the Gospel, which, 
 for 1900 years, has been preached by those who had the 
 vision, and as we are trying to preach it to-day. Breth- 
 ren, if the accent of conviction is lost or feeble, let us 
 have that back again. The stronger and more vivid 
 the experience of the fellowship of the cleansing the 
 more powerful will be our message, our Gospel. 
 
 Sometimes I have been told, again, that men will re- 
 fuse to believe in forgiveness, and I think that is true. 
 In this great city I know not one, nor two, nor three 
 who will accept a kind of fatalistic philosophy of life — 
 believe that once the great mistake has been made, once 
 the terrible surrender to evil has been made, there is 
 no deliverance ; a man must lie on the bed he has pre- 
 pared for himself, must dree his own weird, must wait 
 until the last dread enemy comes, and sin and sorrow 
 are forgotten in the grave. You will meet this around 
 you, and sometimes it fails to find its message in the 
 pulpit; but the only answer to the experience is the 
 Cross. And wait — never be in too great a hurry to 
 'explain the Cross. It is the truest thing in human 
 I nature ; it strikes to the deepest part of human experi- 
 *ence. You never will state in terms of the human in- 
 i tellect the deepest things of the heart. To explain 
 
258 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 the Cross were impossible ; you would have to com- 
 prehend eternity. But to feel the power of the Cross is 
 possible; nay, the power of the cleansing, the new fel- 
 lowship, the risen life are made possible by the in- 
 troduction of the human heart to the passion of God, 
 and in Christ and Him crucified we reach that point. 
 
 I wonder if you will bear with me, or understand 
 precisely what I mean, if I attempt a somewhat mystical 
 utterance. To get where I am pointing you now, you 
 have to stand beneath even the experience of gratitude 
 for God's pardoning love. There is something deeper 
 than gratitude in the fellowship of the cleansing. I 
 can't say what it is — nobody can — but the thing which 
 the sinner dreads before the touch of the Cross comes 
 to him he ceases to dread any more ; he fronts eternity 
 unblanched. Like St. Paul, he knows what it is to 
 say, in the fellowship of the cleansing, " Who is weak, 
 and I am not weak? Who is offended, and I burn 
 not ? " We cleave to the soul of the Redeemer ; the 
 passion to be redeemers comes over us. Down below 
 mere gratitude for Jesus there is a fellowship with 
 Jesus Himself, and not the Jesus of the sunshine only, 
 but the Jesus of the shadow, the Jesus of the deepest 
 things, the Jesus who ministers to the woe of the hu- 
 man heart. In the fellowship of the cleansing, the 
 fellowship of the Cross, the missionary is born; and, 
 brethren, I don't believe there is any other way of 
 making a missionary. Societies will not do it; well- 
 organised collections will not do it, philanthropy is no 
 substitute for it. The only missionary motive in which 
 I have much belief at all is urgent, compelling, over- 
 whelming love to Jesus, born of the fellowship of the 
 cleansing, the fellowship of the depths with God. 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 259 
 
 But for Calvary we could never have had it; but for 
 the Cross we should not know what it means. The 
 
 ^ Cross of Christ in our experience become the dynamic 
 
 I of missionary endeavour, 
 
 I was once in a company where a minister was speak- 
 ing about what he called the New, or Social, Gospel. 
 Well, I believed him. Quite true, we need it; we are 
 to blame for not preaching it sooner. But he said it 
 was the whole Gospel ; he said, " I believe that our 
 Lord is well pleased by those who offer Him little or no 
 devoutness, who are not sure about the claims of the 
 Christ, and especially the dogma of the Atonement, but 
 who are serving to the best of their ability their brother 
 men." I felt it was superficial, though the whole room 
 was against me ; and I felt it because I think our friend 
 began at the wrong end. Philanthropy itself is a fee- 
 ble, pulseless thing unless it has been born of the Cross, 
 and the indirect effects of the evangel of the Cross are 
 responsible for most of the so-called philanthropic en- 
 deavour of the day, against which I would not speak 
 one word of contempt, but which sees no need of an 
 evangel to preach. No, no. The brotherhood which 
 is worthy of the name, the evangelic impulse which 
 alone can save humanity, begins in the fellowship of 
 the cleansing. We have vision of the Holy ; we have i 
 repentance toward God ; we have the assurance of sin . 
 forgiven ; we have the inflow of the Spirit ; we have » 
 that new relationship, which the world can neither [ 
 give nor take away, with Him who agonised upon Cal- 
 vary ; and, with that in our hearts, with that motive in 
 our minds, with that strength in our endeavours, we I 
 go forth in confidence. Missionary or preacher was 
 never made in any other way. We speak to the deep 
 
260 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 things in mankind when we have first been to the 
 side of the Christ. It was this that made John Wes- 
 ley say, " The whole world is my parish." It was this 
 that compelled St. Francis Xavier to the urgent mis- 
 sionary utterance, as, with arms outstretched, he sailed 
 for India, " More sufferings, more sufferings, Lord ! " 
 It was this that came to the Moravian who cried to his 
 countrymen : 
 
 " I hear a voice you cannot hear, 
 Which bids me not to stay ; 
 I see a hand you cannot see, 
 Which beckons me away." 
 
 If there were no humanity to save, none but our own, 
 yours and mine, the fellowship of the cleansing would 
 still be ours ; but we would be seeking for something to 
 do to express to the Christ our sense of what that fel- 
 lowship had brought. 
 
 Two sisters brought this fact home to me within a 
 few hours of the time in which I heard the minister 
 whom I have just quoted speak. One was weak, suf- 
 fering, dying, though the other did not know it at the 
 time. The one who was watching by the Isedside said, 
 " It seems dreadful to be so helpless, to feel I can do 
 so little to assuage the suffering of the dear one. I can 
 do nothing whatever. If I only could do something, 
 that hurts, hurts me, I think I should feel better, to let 
 my love out." I know what she meant quite well — to 
 let the love out. The love that we bear the dear Re- 
 deemer compels us to see the Divine in mankind. 
 There is a sweet and holy sympathy born of that urgent 
 desire to let the love out which was born in the fellow- 
 ship of the cleansing. The love of Christ constrains 
 us. 
 
VISION AND SERVICE 261 
 
 Brethren, the last word I would leave with you is 
 this : Consider little about ways and means ; consider 
 little about faulty methods ; consider much whether we 
 do not need once more vision of God in the face of Him 
 whose visage was marred more than the face of any 
 man; and whether we do not need a renewal of that 
 holy fellowship which begins at Calvary. May we 
 feel as the Apostle of old felt and said — Paul, the 
 aged — " For me to live is Christ — is Christ." If so, 
 when the Master's call comes, as to the consecrated 
 heart it always comes, we shall say with that prophet 
 of old, " Here am I ; send me." 
 
XXII 
 THE PROPHET IN PRAYER* 
 
 I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. — Gen. xxxn. 26. 
 God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing 
 to pray for you. — / Sajti. xii. 23. 
 
 MAY I venture to speak principally to my 
 brother ministers, and not as a censor, but as 
 a brother, from the subject of the Prophet in 
 Prayer? In these two striking passages, the utter- 
 ance of patriarch and prophet, we have a source of in- 
 spiration, a mark for our guidance, and a subject for 
 heart-searching. Here are two strongly contrasted 
 crises of spiritual experience, the experience of the 
 servant of God in all time. Let us compare them a 
 little more closely. 
 
 In the first the patriarch Jacob is before us, an err- 
 ing, sinning, suffering man. He has been for a gen- 
 eration an exile from his father's house, dwelling 
 amongst strangers. He is the possessor of a heritage 
 obtained by fraud, and it has profited him nothing. As 
 George Eliot says, " It was not worth doing wrong 
 for; nothing ever is in this world." After the lapse 
 of so many years, one might have thought that his 
 sin was expiated, and the very memory of it wiped out. 
 We have no record of the way in which it affected him- 
 
 • Preached to the National Council of Evanp^elical Free 
 Churches, in the Dome, Brighton, on Tuesday evening, 
 March 10, 1903. 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER 263 
 
 self, it is not recalled in the pages of the book in which 
 we have read. Great changes have taken place since 
 the sin was committed. Jacob is no longer alone. 
 With his staff he passed over Jordan ; now he has 
 become two bands. He is returning to the land 
 of his fathers, but right across his path comes a re- 
 minder of the day of his guilt. The shadow of 
 retribution is over him ; Esau, his brother, from 
 whom he has nothing to expect but vengeance, 
 is coming to meet him with a strength greater than his 
 own. Then the memory of the past awakens in the 
 breast of this man, and not for himself only is he anx- 
 ious now. He could bear the worst that his brother 
 could inflict, were it not that he is father and master, 
 he has a household to think of ; not to himself does he 
 stand or fall, but if he be punished some should be 
 smitten whom he holds dearer than his own life. He 
 tries every means to propitiate his brother. He has 
 but little hope of succeeding, so he falls to praying. 
 Alone he wrestles till the breaking of the day. But 
 in that dark vigil Esau was vanquished before the 
 meeting took place ; the sinner became triumphant ; 
 he had saved not only himself, but those he prayed for 
 when he prayed for himself, for true penitence, let me 
 say, always contains an intercessory element. If a 
 man prays for forgiveness for himself alone, and if 
 selfishness be the most prominent feature in his prayer, 
 his penitence is false. Jacob wrestled till the breaking 
 of the day with breaking heart because of his dread for 
 his own. He was thinking of the wife and the 
 little ones behind him, and that was the reason he was 
 so urgent, and beat against the breast of God, saying, 
 " I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." And 
 
264 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 the blessing came; that sinful, suffering, erstwhile 
 mean-spirited trickster becomes the prince who has 
 power with God and with men, and has prevailed. 
 
 In short contrast with this is the case of the prophet 
 Samuel. Here is one whose own account of himself 
 you have read in the pages of God's word, who from 
 his childhood upward had served the Lord. He has 
 had no interest of his own ; the people of Israel have 
 been his flock, his children, his very life. We see him 
 now in the hour of his failure. All his efforts are fruit- 
 less, his entreaties have gone for nothing, his labours 
 are returned upon him empty. A rebellious and un- 
 grateful people stand upon the one side, and the prophet 
 and his God stand upon the other. Now it is his duty, 
 stern and hard, to denounce them and warn them of 
 the terrors of the law. It is a sublime moment in his 
 life, but it is a question whether the prophet saw its 
 sublimity — has any prophet ever seen the sublimity of 
 the supreme moment of his life? Here speaks one 
 who had no interest of his own to serve. He had for- 
 gotten himself in solicitude for his people, and yet he 
 had failed — failed. And as he warns them of a wrath 
 to come, and they plead with him to entreat with God, 
 " Pray for us that we die not," we can almost see his 
 demeanour as he answers, " Pray for you ? All my 
 life has been given to you; I have laboured for you, 
 and laboured in vain. But God forbid that I should 
 cease to pray." 
 
 Here, then, in these two utterances we have com- 
 passed for us the extremes of experience, the experience 
 of every servant of God to whom souls are committed 
 in trust. And I venture to say that you must be Jacob 
 before you can be Samuel, and the prayer of penitence 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER 265 
 
 of the man who has got as low as he can in pleading 
 with God for his own soul, the prayer of penitence is 
 like unto the prayer of the prophet, who stands between 
 God and the souls of other men as a mediator. Here, 
 then, we have two things : we have the sinner become 
 the prince, we have the mediatorship of the prophet. 
 
 The greatest need of the present day is the need of 
 stewards of the mysteries of God. We have ministers 
 of Christ in abundance, faithful ministers, honest and 
 true, but we have not many stewards of the deep 
 things. We have practical men, public servants, 
 leaders of thought, champions of the faith, but not 
 many men with a vision of things unseen. We have 
 been warned sometimes that the multitude is deserting 
 the house of God. The statistics published recently 
 have alarmed many of you. It may be that their 
 significance is somewhat exaggerated; nevertheless, 
 they give us cause for some searching of heart. Can 
 we be complacent if the great mass of our countrymen 
 remain outside the radius of organised Christianity and 
 care nothing for the public worship of the Lord's Day 
 or the message of him who preaches the good tidings 
 of great joy? We occupy ourselves earnestly about 
 other things, we must needs think about this thing. 
 
 Again, it is true that in many cases the pew sits in 
 judgment on the pulpit, and we are warned that the 
 day of the pulpit is over, that now the prophet speaks 
 by the printed page rather than by the living word. If 
 so, some of us are arraigned at the bar of God. It 
 ought never to be so. The living man, speaking the 
 living word, will always take precedence of the printed 
 page, unless that page be the Holy Book, Again, how 
 often we ourselves have felt — I speak as a hearer now 
 
266 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 — when we have entered a place of worship, that the 
 man in the pulpit might have been living on another 
 planet ; he never comes near to my life, he is speaking 
 in an unknown tongue. He has nothing to give me, 
 and yet he himself is hungry, and if he were in the pew 
 he would know when the bread of life was given to him 
 to sat. How often it seems as though the preacher 
 is trifling with the souls before him ! His sermon has 
 cost him infinite pains; how long it may have taken 
 him to build it no one but himself can tell, and yet 
 somehow, when this sermon, built with so much labour, 
 so much self-sacrificing toil, is presented to the people, 
 they turn away indifferent. He does not speak with 
 the prophet's voice, who uses the words of Holy Writ. 
 How often it seems, again, as though those who are 
 listening to us missed in our voice the accent of con- 
 viction. I know of nothing more awful than the posi- 
 tion of a preacher who for daily bread declares Sunday 
 after Sunday truths that do not spring out of the depths 
 of his own experience, truths which he only half 
 believes, or does not perhaps believe at all. I have been 
 told that men are placed in this position, and one is 
 almost compelled to believe it, that they go on talking 
 when their own hearts are dry, because of the wife and 
 the children at home who must be fed. But if ever a 
 man was placed in a Gethsemane, surely it is the man 
 placed in a position like that. 
 
 Then, again, the note of authority is missing. We 
 want it back — the note of spiritual certainty. Was it 
 not Dr. Clifford who said the shadow of the priest is 
 upon the land? Why, Doctor? It is because the 
 prophet is so seldom seen ; and, brethren, it is indubita- 
 ble that wherever the prophet stands the priest has little 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER 267 
 
 power. Why do people turn to the priest? Why do 
 we find it necessary to denounce priestcraft, and to try 
 to stand between the children and the confessor who 
 would claim their souls ? It is because people long for 
 the ring of certainty, for the voice of authority, and if 
 the prophet is not there to give it in the accent of con- 
 viction they will turn to the priest, with his spurious 
 claims ; but where the prophet stands forth with tongue 
 and heart of fire the priest they will not endure. 
 Where can this accent of authority come from? It 
 must come from the living experience of the prophet 
 himself. When we dare to stand up to speak about 
 the deep things of God, we must be sure that we know 
 them, and to know them we must begin at the bottom 
 and not at the top. The true prophet will never dare 
 to speak down. Having been down, he stays there in 
 the valley of humiliation, that he may help souls who 
 find themselves in the same place. How often it is that 
 a man comes to us — shall I say often ? — but how has it 
 been when a man comes to us with a broken heart and a 
 burden of guilt and a lurid past, and an awful fact in 
 his life with which we cannot deal? And we have 
 nothing to tell him, and nothing to give. " Oh," you 
 say, " we have." But you have not ; for he comes 
 away again, and says you have not helped him. Speak- 
 ing from experience I can say with humiliation, no 
 pain in my ministry has been so great as the pain of 
 failure to bind up a broken heart, and to heal a moral 
 wound. Was there something that one did not know ? 
 In Dr. Fairbairn's last book, " The Philosophy of the 
 Christian Religion '' — a profound but beautifully 
 human book, such as only a spiritual scholar could 
 write — there is an instance given of this. That great 
 
268 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 thinker and master of the Free Churches of this 
 country says he once knew a man of great promise, of 
 unmistakable genius, of powers from which everybody 
 expected much, who had acquitted himself to the satis- 
 faction of his professors and his fellows in class before 
 he went out to tell the great world the message of his 
 Master. But the first time he stood up in a pulpit, 
 and saw before him the men who were really living 
 life, and the women who were bearing burdens, a sense 
 of the overwhelming horror of it, of the little man can 
 ever do to cope with the forces of evil, with the deep 
 sorrow for which there appeared to be no remedy that 
 he knew of, he was struck dumb, he had nothing to 
 say ; but he silently declared to God that if he escaped 
 from that awful place he would never lift up his voice 
 again until he had something to tell about a mystery 
 behind the mystery — good tidings to save. And, 
 brethren, be never did speak as a prophet again — 
 silenced by the problem of human sorrow. When I 
 read that passage I felt a great dread grip my heart, the 
 dread lest one had been unfaithful, even unconsciously, 
 by treading on the surface of things, unconscious of the 
 depths below ; and the question was asked and 
 ' answered. Do I know the deep things of God, or am I 
 I only prattling about them, as I stand face to face with 
 j sinning, suffering men ? We must know before con- 
 I viction and authority become part of our message, and 
 men are won. 
 
 And, brethren, we can only know by doing as Jacob 
 did. We may have served for a generation, and 
 thought we were doing well, that we could claim the 
 promise of God to make us a multitude ; but the day 
 comes, perhaps, when we find ourselves stripped of 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER 269 
 
 illusions, and face to face with the bare facts of life. 
 Then woe to our souls if we trifle ! Would we deal 
 with sinners, we must know something of the mystery 
 of the Cross. It is not sympathy that is wanted in the 
 pulpit; at any rate, not chiefly sympathy. Sympathy 
 may be a counsel of despair. What is wanted is 
 identity of experience with the men to whom you 
 would speak. If a man comes with a burden of sin, 
 are you a man who said and knew what you meant 
 when you said, " God be merciful to me a sinner " ? 
 We may learn something from the silences of the pul- 
 pit, and I fear often that the accent of conviction is 
 wanting in the message of redemption, because the 
 prophet has not been himself redeemed. Brethren, we 
 have to get into the depths here, and it is only done in 
 the vigil of the darkness, and the wrestling to the break 
 of day. "God be merciful to me a sinner!" some- 
 times means, God show me my sin and the way out, 
 and then give me to point that way. 
 
 " Beneath the Cross of Jesus 
 
 I fain would take my stand, 
 The shadow of a mighty rock 
 
 Within a weary land : 
 A home within the wilderness, 
 
 A rest upon the way, 
 From the burning of the noontide heat. 
 
 And the burden of the day. 
 
 " I take Thy Cross, O Saviour, 
 
 For my abiding place, 
 I ask no other sunshine 
 
 Than the sunshine of Thy face ; 
 Content to let the world go by. 
 
 To know no gain or loss, 
 My sinful self my only shame, 
 
 My glory all the Cross." 
 
2V0 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 You may learn that late in life, but learn it you must 
 before you will speak to sinful men with the power of a 
 Spurgeon or a Parker. We must get down before 
 we get up, be like unto the sinner that we may remain 
 beside him all the days of our life. 
 
 Then it seems to me that the note of communion is 
 largely absent to-day. Our fathers had it — have we 
 lost it? There never was a time more fruitful in 
 Christian efforts than to-day ; there never was a time of 
 greater activity, never so many conventions^ demon- 
 strations, federations, congresses, and what not. But 
 there was an old type of evangelical life, a solitary and 
 a self-sufficient type, which did not, and could not, tell 
 all it knew ; no, not to the nearest and the dearest ; a 
 time when men waited upon God, not always begging 
 and beseeching, but communing. Our fathers may 
 have been short of something, but they were right in 
 having that. To be pov/erful with God you must 
 remain with Him. And to-day is the result of our 
 activity commensurate with the energy put forth? If 
 not, it might pay us to withdraw from a little of it, 
 and get into the holy place, and be alone till the break- 
 ing of the day, till we can wrench a blessing, as it 
 were, from the unwilling hands of God. Sometimes 
 God makes the giving of His greatest blessings hard, 
 and when we have got them we are glad that it was so. 
 Jacob wrestled as for life and death, praying for his 
 own soul because he knew that with his personality 
 was bound up the spiritual destiny of others. The 
 worst punishment that ever falls upon guilt is the 
 punishment which is borne by the innocent in the sight 
 of the guilty. And no man falleth to himself; there- 
 fore, by what we are not, some suffer, as by what we 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER '211 
 
 are, some gain. Into the holy place ! With violence, 
 heavenly violence, take the kingdom by force, " I will 
 not let thee go, except thou bless me." The prophet's 
 mediatorship is of many kinds. It is a loneliness. All 
 prophets are lonely. There is something that this as- 
 sembly will not do for you, brethren, not for any of you. 
 You will go back as lonely in the deepest things as 
 when you came here. If from the word that is so 
 feebly spoken from this platform to-night you are 
 getting good you will never be able to tell to the 
 preacher himself what good; you will feel as though 
 he were thrust out of the operation, and God laid a 
 grip upon your soul. There is an immediacy in 
 spirituality, if it is to have value, and that is purchased 
 at a price. 
 
 Mark the contrast between Samuel and Jacob. 
 Jacob stood between his people and the consequences of 
 his sin ; Samuel stood between his people and the conse- 
 quences of theirs. When once you have known what 
 true repentence means, when once the burden of souls 
 is laid upon you, you will often play the part of Samuel, 
 you will be thrusting yourself between your people and 
 their own sin and the suffering that comes therefrom. 
 Here is the spirit of prophecy which merges it in 
 priesthood. Never be afraid of the spurious priest ; if 
 you have the mediatorship of the prophet you will be 
 laid upon the altar of sacrifice, counting not the cost for 
 love of God and sympathy for men. As Samuel 
 wrought, so will you. For, if you have ever been into 
 the holy place bearing your own sins before God, you 
 will know the way again for sins that are not yours. 
 
 What things matter most? Let the sincerity of 
 our Christian activity show. It is the souls of 
 
272 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 men that matter most. The soul of one Httle 
 child is of more importance to the great scheme 
 of things and the Master of them than any council 
 of state or international treaty. The things that 
 matter are souls. But how few know to-day what 
 it is to travail for a soul! We feel an interest 
 in men, and an interest in sermons; we have a great 
 deal to say, and we say it with earnestness ; but often it 
 does not matter much when the saying is over what 
 becomes of the souls to whom it was said. Oh, 
 brethren, if we can just alter that, England will be 
 stirred to the heart and centre before the twentieth cen- 
 tury has gone far. We are pleading for a revival of 
 spiritual religion in the nation. I care not what form 
 it may take ; it all depends upon the prophet's prayer, 
 the prophet's mediation, whether there be a revival at 
 all. 
 
 Some of you have read, perhaps all of you have read, 
 Victor Hugo's " Notre Dame." The most harrowing 
 scene in that book comes near the end, and I confess 
 without shame that I did not sleep for two nights after 
 I had read it. It is the scene in which the most inter- 
 esting character in the book, a fair young girl, is put to 
 death as a witch after she had just met and discovered 
 her mother. It would be too long to quote it, I shall 
 not try. This fair young girl is the victim of the filthy 
 brutes who take away her life, though she was pure as 
 a lily. That worst of monarchs, that superstitious 
 devil, Louis the Eleventh, gave her to the gallows. 
 The officer of the so-called law came to seejc^her, and 
 an old hag to whom she fled for refuge would have 
 given her up with cynicism and mocking laughter, but 
 she discovered it was her own child, long lost. Ah! 
 
PROPHET IN PRAYER 2V3 
 
 how that mother changed. The divine in her woke up. 
 Inch by inch and foot by foot she fought for her 
 daughter's hfe, with talons and with tongue, with the 
 storm of denunciation, and with the pleading eloquence 
 of agony that melted the hearts of the executioners. 
 And had it not been that their own life would have 
 paid the forfeit they would have let their victim go. 
 But it was all in vain. The daughter was hung, and 
 her mother perished at the foot of the scaffold. She 
 won — she won ! " In death they were not divided," 
 and it may be that vicious old sot, whose life had been 
 given to vice and to infamy, was saved in that moment 
 of her death by her intercessory striving for her daugh- 
 ter's life. God give it to her in heaven. 
 
 I may be speaking to a man who knows a little about 
 what that means; one who has fought with death for 
 his boy. You lost that battle ; that Prince of heaven 
 prevailed against you, and your child is safe in the 
 arms of Jesus. Can it teach you how to fight with hell 
 for somebody else's boy ? Ah ! the eloquence born of 
 experience ! If you have been near to the mouth of 
 the pit of destruction yourself, even in prayer; if you 
 have wrestled till the break of day for the blessing 
 without which prophecy is hypocrisy, you will know 
 how to stand between God and your people, and plead 
 for a life that is dearer to you than it is to themselves ; 
 and not to do it, not to do it is sin. Where is the point 
 where the prophet's labours stop — with the sermon? 
 Why, they don't even begin there. The sermon is 
 made in the secret place. With the labours? The 
 labours are of no use without the prayers. If you are 
 mighty in prayer God will take care of your tongue. 
 Brethren, let us take care to pray ; in the holy of holies 
 
2V4 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 be familiar with God, and you will be fearless before 
 men. The pews sit in judgment on you, man of au- 
 thority. Let the man tremble, let the prophet burn, 
 scorch, and wither them. They will forget to sit in 
 judgment on you. Even when they hate you they will 
 know that you are true. Never keep anything back; 
 declare the whole counsel of God as it is given to you. 
 Never trouble with self-pity or strike the plaintive note. 
 You who come from the outposts, who know what it is 
 to suffer where there is no brotherly sympathy to help 
 you, you are not alone; for if men forget, or 
 never remember, still God is there — is there. And 
 when labour is fruitless, still there is prayer. God 
 forbid that we should sin against the law; for when 
 labour is vain we have ceased to pray. 
 
 " O power to do ! O baffled will ! 
 O prayer and action, ye are one. 
 Who may not strive may yet fulfil 
 The harder task of standing still, 
 And good but wished with God is done." 
 
XXIII 
 PASSIVE RESISTANCE* 
 
 1FEEL that we are face to face in educational mat- 
 ters and in the history of our Free Churches with 
 a crisis even greater than that of 1870. It is prob- 
 able that in after years our descendants will refer to 
 the conflict which is now before us as having been the 
 greatest crisis in the history of Nonconformity in 
 modern times. It is not, I believe, the greatest crisis 
 in the history of our Free Church principles in this 
 country. The best, noblest, and most strenuous battle 
 has been fought for us; others laboured, and we are 
 entered into their labours. But Lord Rosebery has 
 warned us — and he speaks with authority — that if we 
 flinch at the present crisis, our power as Nonconfor- 
 mists and as a public force will be extinct. Whether 
 his lordship is right or not time will determine, but I 
 can assure him, if there be any need to assure him, 
 that, whether he fails us or not, we shall not flinch at 
 the present crisis. Our fathers never shirked a battle 
 for the rights of conscience, neither will we. The con- 
 flict concerning passive resistance has already begun, 
 and I am glad and proud that he who leads off upon 
 the question at Oxford, Dr. Fairbairn, was our spokes- 
 man in the presence of Mr. Balfour, and framed and 
 uttered the last sentence in our Nonconformist protest : 
 *' To the proposal to establish a Clerical majority in 
 * Preached in The City Temple, May 21, 1903. 
 275 
 
276 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 the schools of the people we will not submit." The 
 Education Act, just passed, and the London Education 
 Bill, now before Parliament, are, as a well-known 
 Anglican clergyman and member of the London 
 School Board, has said, " brimful of iniquities." I 
 might occupy the whole time at our disposal in de- 
 nouncing the Act and the Bill from the point of view 
 of a citizen. I might denounce it as an Educationist. 
 I leave, for the moment, these points of view severely 
 alone ; I speak as a Nonconformist and a Christian. 
 This Act puts into the hands of Clerical managers 
 the control of more than half the elementary schools 
 of the country at the same moment that it places those 
 schools entirely upon the rates. There is the crux 
 of the whole question. Many people confess them- 
 selves unable to understand what the policy of Passive 
 Resistance means. You now see the issue. We, as 
 Nonconformists, are, for the first time, being com- 
 pelled to pay directly (we have done it already, indi- 
 rectly) for the maintenance of a form of religious be- 
 lief which we not only conscientiously disapprove, but 
 against which our very existence as Nonconformists 
 is a standing protest. We are not Nonconformists for 
 fun. I believe that on the other side in this contro- 
 versy there are many who really do not understand 
 what our position is. Presently I will read a letter 
 from a clergyman for whom I have a great and sincere 
 respect — so would you if I mentioned his name — in 
 which it is shown, as clearly as can be, that many well- 
 meaning men on the other side of this controversy mis- 
 understand the very fundamentals of our position as 
 Free Churchmen. We object to being compelled to 
 pay for a form of religious instruction our protest 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 277 
 
 against which has led to our existence as Free Church- 
 men. This is a monstrous injustice, one in the pres- 
 ence of which we cannot afford to be mealy-mouthed, 
 and concerning which we feel compelled to take the 
 strongest possible stand, be the consequences what 
 they may. A gentleman writing to the Daily Chron- 
 icle yesterday on the subject of the resolution passed 
 by the Congregational Union a few nights ago 
 said that " entire sympathy " does not mean entire 
 approval. I think I ought at this point to enter a pro- 
 test against a sentence of that kind. As plainly as men 
 could say anything, the Congregational Union has 
 voiced our Churches in saying that we have now been 
 compelled to take our stand side by side with those 
 who intend to adopt the policy of Passive Resistance. 
 If that were not the meaning of the resolution passed 
 on Monday night, then we are merely juggling and 
 playing with words. A friend has told me that he 
 would not have consented to the introduction of the 
 words " entire sympathy " if they did not mean entire 
 approval. I would warn the Government that they 
 have now to face a practically homogeneous Noncon- 
 formity — half the religious life of the nation. As the 
 Congregationalists spoke the other night, so the Bap- 
 tists are speaking, so the vast majority of Methodists 
 are speaking, so Presbyterians are speaking all over 
 the land. " We are not divided, all one body we." 
 
 By passive resistance to the new Education Act we 
 mean — and the struggle is now upon us — that we will 
 put the Government to the trouble of collecting from 
 us the new sectarian rate. Personally I intend to ten- 
 der a portion of the Education Rate — that portion 
 which is not sectarian — and, as I have said more than 
 
278 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 once in public meetings on this question, we can make 
 this issue perfectly clear to the general public. We 
 will pay the people's rate, we will not pay the parson's 
 rate. As the Clerical promoters of the Education Act 
 know perfectly well, whoever appoints the teacher 
 controls the school. A two-thirds majority upon the 
 management means really the whole control. If you 
 will invert that proportion, let two-thirds represent 
 the public and one-third the so-called proprietors of 
 the denominational schools, then, I believe, though 
 we would still have, much to complain of, our Non- 
 conformist policy of Passive Resistance would fall to 
 the ground. I do not represent anybody but myself, 
 and I feel that if a two-thirds majority upon the man- 
 agement of denominational schools were granted to 
 the public, to those who pay the rates, then I should 
 no longer have much excuse for refusing my portion 
 of that rate. Yet we would still have much to com- 
 plain of ; in the mere fact that there are denominational 
 schools is something which we, as Nonconformists, 
 exist to protest against. Our principle is this : It is 
 not the business of the State to teach denominational- 
 ism at all. We are assured that we have no alternative 
 to offer; supporters of the Government twit us with 
 this, and say, " It is all very well to criticise ; have you 
 anything to propose? " We might say, " Leave things 
 alone." But we won't do that. As the situation has 
 arisen, we are prepared to deal with it. We have an 
 alternative proposition. The alternative is, first, let 
 the proprietors of denominational schools hand them 
 over at a valuation. If you are not prepared for that, 
 then use them for the ordinary work of your churches, 
 and allow the education authority to hire them if it is 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 2Y9 
 
 willing to do so. If not, do as Free Churchmen now 
 do; keep them for the use of your churches, and that 
 alone. Do not ask the State to enter and help you to 
 maintain them, but allow the education authority to 
 erect such schools as are needed. I am trying my very 
 best to understand the position of such men as Lord 
 Hugh Cecil, and I think I have got so far as to be able 
 to thoroughly respect the motive of that noble lord. In 
 his summons to us to join with him and his friends 
 in a campaign against materialism, we naturally can 
 feel some sympathy, for at the very moment when ma- 
 terialism, as a mode of thought, as a speculation, is 
 dying or dead, materialism is tightening its grip upon 
 our public and commercial life. Lord Hugh Cecil is 
 perfectly right in saying Christians should close the 
 ranks, fight against the common foe ; but I claim, and 
 would submit to his lordship, that he is taking a wrong 
 method in his mode of meeting the difficulty. We 
 Free Churchmen do not propose to ask the State to 
 help us to fight materialism. We erect our schools 
 and churches, and maintain them without any assist- 
 ance from the national exchequer at all. We would 
 repudiate such assistance if it came ; we do not want 
 it. We believe that the Cross of Christ, the appeal 
 to the consciences of men, is best left to the voluntary 
 efiforts of those who believe in their Christian prin- 
 ciples, and are prepared to pay for them. Mr. Balfour 
 has said, and Mr. Chamberlain, in a less ingenuous 
 way, has also said, that it is quite clear that the nation 
 has declared for denominationalism in education. 
 Both statesmen affect to demonstrate this by a refer- 
 ence to the fact that, whereas 3,000,000 children are 
 being educated in the denominational schools, only 
 
280 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 2,600,000 are being educated in the board schools. Mr. 
 Balfour ought to know better than to say that this is 
 a proof that the country prefers denominationalism, 
 and Mr. Chamberlain does know better. 
 
 There are two very good outstanding reasons why 
 those proportions are what they are. We prefer the 
 cheapest thing as a rule, and the less efficient denom- 
 inational schools have been cheaper for the last thirty 
 years than the board schools, even although the com- 
 promise of 1870 has been gradually encroached upon 
 until five-sixths of the cost of the fonner was, until 
 the passing of the new Act, being defrayed out of the 
 exchequer, and now with the exchequer grant and the 
 rates together, the whole of that cost will be defrayed. 
 Cheapness is one grand reason. Voluntary subscribers 
 were drawn from every interest which felt it to be 
 worth its while to keep out the school board. A second 
 reason has been that, as the law now stands, where a 
 denominational school holds the ground the board 
 school must keep out, whether it likes it or not. With 
 a fair field and no favour, you would soon find whether 
 Englishmen prefer denominational to undenomina- 
 tional education. 
 
 Mr. Balfour has further urged upon Nonconform- 
 ists to understand that the Government means fairly 
 with them, and that under the new Act we can erect 
 our denominational schools and put them upon the 
 rates and taxes. We cannot do anything of the sort. 
 When will he understand, when will statesmen gen- 
 erally understand, that we don't want State pay for 
 our Nonconformist privileges ? Here is a letter which 
 was written to me by a gentleman, a clergyman of the 
 Church of England. For the writer I have great re- 
 
 J 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 281 
 
 spect, he is a brother in Christ, and he writes like one ; 
 but you will see from the wording of this letter that 
 Mr. Balfour is not alone in his misapprehension of our 
 position ; he says : 
 
 " I was present at the City Temple last Thursday, 
 and heard you announce your intention of preaching on 
 Thursday next on the subject of the Education Bill. 
 I know you will pennit me, as a brother minister, 
 though of a different denomination from yours, to 
 write a few lines upon this subject, upon which I have 
 bestowed a great deal of thought. I write as know- 
 ing that you are a pronounced anti-rate-payment ad- 
 vocate. I am one who believes that this so-called 
 ' passive resistance ' is one of the darkest phases of 
 ' conscientious ' action which has menaced the Church 
 and truth of God for many a day. ... I know all 
 the arguments on which it is supported, and as a 
 Christian (though one who greatly cherishes the fel- 
 lowship of every evangelical branch of the Church 
 catholic) I naturally feel a little strongly on some 
 points which I consider to be rather overlooked by 
 Nonconformists. For instance : 
 
 " (i) The fact that the Church of England has, 
 since 1870, gone on, uncomplainingly, paying the 
 School Board rate, thus supporting a form of things 
 (set on foot with a view to the overthrow of our 
 schools) which we disapproved." 
 
 If that gentleman be here now I would like to say 
 to him, in the same friendly fashion in which he has 
 written to me : That first point was scarcely worth your 
 stating ; it will hoist you with your own petard. Since 
 1870 the Board School system, which avowedly came 
 into existence not to supplant but to supplement the 
 
282 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 work which the denominational schools were already 
 doing, has grown increasingly in public favour, just 
 because it was neither Nonconformist nor Anglican. 
 If it was set on foot with a view to the overthrow of 
 your schools, what have you been doing in sitting upon 
 School Boards at all? You have been there as much 
 as we. You have controlled the policy in not a few 
 cases, and, as has been pointed out again and again, 
 the Board School is not a Nonconformist school, nor 
 is undenominationalism Nonconformist education. 
 Surely we profess in common the principles — shall we 
 call them even principles ? — the Bible knowledge which 
 has been taught in Board Schools for thirty years, and 
 taught with efficiency, as statistics prove. Dr. Clif- 
 ford has said, " The Bible is not a Nonconformist 
 book, unless you make it so." The second point in 
 the letter is : 
 
 " (2) That while paying these rates we have, by vol- 
 untary effort, strenuously and constantly maintained 
 and developed our own elementary schools, with im- 
 mense self-sacrifice, these thirty-two years, and thus, 
 in all justice, have deserved to continue." 
 
 I meet that point with the greatest respect. I know 
 Anglicans, scores of them, who represent thousands 
 whom I don't know, who do conscientiously pay for 
 the maintenance of their schools because the principles 
 of the Church of England are so dear to them. But 
 you beg the question. The question is not that you 
 have sacrificed for the maintenance of these schools, 
 and that they deserve to continue ; the question is, first, 
 does the nation want them to continue? and, second, 
 you have gained a great deal from the use of the word 
 Voluntary for your schools, and so on. In reality, you 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 283 
 
 have been paying only one-sixth of the cost ; the rest 
 has been paid by Nonconformists in common with 
 Churchmen through the national exchequer. We ad- 
 mit all your sacrifices. ^But our Nonconformist prin- 
 ciple is that you should not seek to meddle with the 
 appointment of the teachers, who are the national ser- 
 vants in this respect. If your principles are dear to 
 you, do what you have done, erect your own schools^ 
 and keep them free. In practice, whatever we may 
 think about it, the time has come when your denomina- 
 tionalism, about which I admit you ought to feel more 
 in earnest than you do about the rule of three, ought 
 to be kept from such complications as you have your- 
 selves imposed. My correspondent further says : 
 
 " (3) That the Act of 1902 has preserved to us a 
 minimum of such advantage as our ownership of more 
 than half the elementary schools of the land pointed 
 out as our due, vast concessions having been made to 
 the opposition. . , . Had Nonconformists be- 
 stirred themselves years ago, and done anything ade- 
 quate for the education of the country, they would 
 now have their fair share of consideration and their 
 due opportunity of training up their children day by 
 day in their own forms of religious faith." 
 
 You see, Mr. Balfour over again. When you, sir, 
 have made one-half of the sacrifices and endured a 
 tithe of the suffering which Nonconformists have 
 made and endured for the sake of their principles, you 
 can exhort us to sacrifice. During the thirty-two years 
 we have erected churches and schools, though we have 
 by no means such a wealthy constituency as you have. 
 We have not gone cap in hand to the State for any- 
 thing. In those schools our principles have been 
 
284 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 taught under our own vine and fig tree, no man daring 
 to make us afraid. And, mark this, it is often over- 
 looked. If statistics prove anything at all, they prove 
 that the Sunday-schools of the various churches are 
 educating in religion the majority of the children of 
 this country. Do not ask us to make sacrifices which 
 mean that we must take State pay. Look at the sacri- 
 fices we have made in order that we might not take 
 State pay. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, in genuine surprise, I think, has asked 
 us to remember that in refusing to pay the rates now 
 we are taking our stand too late. He says : " You 
 have already been paying for the maintenance of a 
 form of religious instruction in which you do not be- 
 Heve, but you paid through the taxes." Yes, quite 
 right ; but when you put the schools upon the rates we 
 know a little better where we are. We can refuse just 
 so much of the new rate as is for sectarian purposes 
 pure and simple. Besides, the compromise of 1870 
 was not of our making; it was forced upon us, we 
 submitted to it ; for thirty-two years, under protest, 
 we have continued to submit. But from your side you 
 have encroached upon it little by little, until now no 
 shred of it remains. And, were it not so, it would not 
 matter much to me. I should say a point has been 
 reached in the history of our Nonconformity, and in 
 the injustice meted out to us, beyond which we shall 
 bear no more. The whole question has been reopened, 
 and we take our stand as educationists, as we have al- 
 ways done, in demanding, not a sectarian, but a national 
 system — graded, efficient, unsectarian. State-controlled, 
 locally administered by authorities elected " ad hoc." 
 But according to some of our weaker-kneed brethren, 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 285 
 
 together with our conscientious opponent, you are per- 
 forming an illegal action in refusing your rate. What 
 is the difference between passive and active resistance, 
 after all? Well, there is a big difference. If any of 
 our brethren turned extremely obdurate, active re- 
 sistance would mean that we should bolt and bar our 
 windows and watch at the orifice with shot-guns. But 
 we don't do that. When the rate-collector rings the 
 bell we shall open the door; he shall come in and seize 
 the hall clock, if we have one, and he shall take it out, 
 and none of us will lay a hand upon it; we may even 
 be in the crowd to buy it. Illegal — it may be so; I 
 have seen a legal opinion to that effect. Lawless, my 
 clerical correspondent calls the policy, making a dan- 
 gerous precedent which may be followed by all kinds 
 of extremists, Anarchists, and such, in the time to 
 come. Well, we will take the risk. The moral sense 
 of the country is with us, and it would not be with the 
 Anarchists. Moreover, remember, we are not making 
 a precedent. Our Nonconformist liberties have been 
 won, as Dr. Parker was accustomed to say, at the 
 spear-point. They have often been won by breaking 
 the law, " Render unto Csesar the things that are 
 Csesar's." But when the things that are Caesar's come 
 into conflict with the things that are God's, one must 
 go, and we know which. Supposing, then, it be illegal 
 to refuse to pay the rate, then I will break the law. 
 Remember that, in so doing, we have precedent which 
 has established our Nonconformity, which I venture to 
 say has established what is best in our nationality. 
 John Bunyan went to Bedford Gaol because of the law 
 that bade him stop preaching. He said : We oueht to 
 obey God rather than men. Cromwell instituted a 
 
286 CITY TEMPLE SERMONS 
 
 court which tried a king, and ended by cutting off his 
 head; the king pleaded that there was no jurisdiction, 
 it was an illegal act either to try or to condemn. But 
 his head went off, and British liberties were safe. 
 
 I am one of those who believe that Nonconformity 
 is now in a position to dictate terms, and the time 
 may come when we shall have to dictate them to what 
 is now His Majesty's Opposition. 
 
 The time has come to cut away this denominational 
 question from the question of national education. We 
 know exactly where we are, and what we have got to 
 do. We are compelled to passive resistance, it is the 
 equivalent left to us by the House of Lords upon the 
 other side, and, if necessary, we will proceed to the 
 solution of this national question over the ruins of the 
 House of Lords. For the first time for many years 
 the working men are on the same platform as the Non- 
 conformists. Nonconformity and Labour together 
 can make or unmake any Government, but if we are 
 alone, if we had no Labour party, no Lord Rosebery, 
 no Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, no Liberal Party 
 at all to play fast and loose with us — for, remember, 
 we all think it, we were not well represented in the 
 House of Commons during the Education Debate, 
 from the front benches, at any rate — if we had none 
 of these, we will take our stand on the old platform 
 of Nonconformist principle. It is a good thing that 
 we have to fight again, it will put some backbone into 
 us. Have no fear about the issue. May God defend 
 the right! 
 
 
Date Due 
 
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