tIBRARY OF PRINCETON 
 
 
 
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 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 
 BX 5937.S44 S4 1902 
 Siiipman, Jacob s. 
 Sermons 
 
LIBRARY OF PRINCETON 
 
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 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
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SERMONS 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. Jacob S. Shipman, D.D. 
 
 Rector of Christ Church 
 New York City 
 
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 LIBRARY OF PRINCETON 
 
 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 3 1 West Twenty-Third Street 
 
 1902 
 
Copyright 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 igo2 
 
 Published, Dec, igo2 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 The author of this volume had long 
 looked forward to a time when, relieved 
 from the duties of active parish life, he 
 might find opportunity to place in more 
 permanent form the best results of his 
 thought and study, as these had been 
 embodied in his sermons and addresses. 
 Before this time came to him, a dark- 
 ness fell between his mind and the outer 
 world. 
 
 It is more than probable that, had the 
 choice been his, other sermons than some 
 that are included here might have been 
 selected ; it is more than probable that, 
 in reviewing the sermons finally selected, 
 changes and corrections would have been 
 made, — changes and corrections impossi- 
 
ble for other hands than the author's own 
 to make. 
 
 It is to us certain, however, that what- 
 ever might have been the form, arrange- 
 ment, and contents of a volume prepared 
 for pubHcation by himself, its dedication 
 would have been to her who, through 
 bright days and dark, and to the end, 
 stood nearest to him, as she was, beyond 
 all, dearest to him. It is therefore with 
 the belief that we are fulfilling what 
 would have been his wish, and also with 
 a great desire to link with his some evi- 
 dence of our love and admiration, that 
 we, their children, dedicate this volume 
 to the memory of our mother. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Miracles of Our Lord 
 V The Resurrection-World 
 
 The Manifestation of Hidden 
 
 Out-of-Church Religion . 
 
 The Atonement 
 
 Love ..... 
 
 Our Lord's Divine Humanity 
 V The Resurrection 
 X The Resurrection-Body . 
 X^The Resurrection-World 
 
 The Holy Trinity 
 
 The Triumphal Entry 
 
 
 PAGB 
 
 • 
 
 I 
 
 • 
 
 14 
 
 Things 
 
 • 32 
 
 • 
 
 . 48 
 
 • 
 
 • 59 
 
 • 
 
 74 
 
 • 
 
 . 86 
 
 • 
 
 1 00 
 
 • 
 
 114 
 
 • 
 
 134 
 
 • 
 
 153 
 
 • • 
 
 164 
 
THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. 
 
 This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, 
 and manifested forth his glory. And his disciples believed 
 on him. — St. John ii. ii. 
 
 OTARTING from this text, I might 
 ^^ take for my subject the particular 
 miracle here referred to ; but, instead of 
 that, I shall take for my subject the ques- 
 tion. Is any miracle at all really credible? 
 
 There are men enouo-h who would an- 
 swer this question with an emphatic No. 
 If I should ask them why, they would 
 answer, Because a miracle would, of ne- 
 cessity, involve the violation of some law 
 of nature. I deny it. 
 
 By nature we mean matter and its forces. 
 We speak, indeed, of the nature of man 
 and the nature of God, of an intellectual 
 nature, and of a moral nature, — but when 
 we use the word "nature" by itself, we 
 
mean matter and its forces. Now there is 
 no doubt that the characteristic of nature, 
 in this meaning of the word, is necessity. 
 The forces of nature act unconsciously — 
 without reflection, without voUtion ; and 
 they act according to laws that are strictly 
 unvarying. Let this be granted. I see 
 no reason to believe that those laws, or 
 any of them, have ever, for one moment, 
 been suspended. I do not believe, in 
 fact, that any one of them has been sus- 
 pended, for one moment, since the world 
 began. 
 
 But besides nature there is such a thing 
 as will ; and the characteristic of will is not 
 necessity, but freedom. I need enter into 
 no argument to make this statement good, 
 we accept the fact of our moral freedom 
 on the same authority on which we ac- 
 cept the fact of our own existence — on 
 the authority of consciousness. We do 
 not simply believe it; we know it. All 
 men know it. We recognize it in all the 
 affairs of life — in all our reflections on 
 
our own actions, and in all our conclu- 
 sions with regard to the actions of others. 
 The most uncompromising necessitarian 
 in theory, when he does a thoroughly un- 
 worthy thing, blushes over it with shame, 
 just like other men ; and that blush tells 
 the story. It tells that the real conviction 
 of the man's heart is deeper than his logic, 
 and orives the lie to it. 
 
 Now if the will be free — if it be capable 
 of choosing — if it be not linked into the 
 chain of necessary causes, then it is not 
 a part of nature ; it is something above 
 nature ; in one word, it is supernatural — 
 not unnatural, or preternatural, but super- 
 natural. This is the starting-point of my 
 argument. The will is a supernatural 
 power ; and we, because of it, are super- 
 natural beings. 
 
 My next proposition is, that we, by 
 virtue of our own supernatural power, are 
 capable of so using the forces of nature 
 as to cause them to work out our own 
 purposes. We are not only capable of 
 
 3 
 
doing this, but we actually do it every 
 day. We do it, not by violating the laws 
 of nature, but by conforming to them. 
 By conforming to the laws of nature, we 
 find nature pliant to our wills — able and 
 ready to accomplish results which, left to 
 itself, it never could accomplish. Nature 
 furnishes the forces and the laws by which 
 the telegraph performs its work ; but 
 nature could never make a telegraph. It 
 could never make a watch, or a steam 
 engine, or a plough. It cannot, indeed, 
 reasonably be claimed that the human will 
 ever introduces any new force into nature ; 
 but it can reasonably be claimed, and it 
 must, in reason, be conceded, that the 
 human will does select, and combine, and 
 direct the forces of nature to accomplish 
 its own particular designs. 
 
 My third proposition is this : that if we, 
 by the simple exercise of intelligence and 
 will, can accomplish special designs in na- 
 ture, — not in violation of, but in accord- 
 ance with, the laws of nature, — much 
 
 4 
 
more can God. I know, indeed, that an 
 objection may be offered just here. The 
 changes that we effect in nature, it may- 
 be said, are effected through our bodily 
 organism. Have we any reason, it may 
 be asked, to beheve that spirit can act 
 upon matter directly ? I say Yes, with 
 all confidence. I say Yes, because the 
 fact is matter of immediate consciousness. 
 The human soul is spirit, and the human 
 body is matter. From the nature of the 
 case, spirit cannot be solidified into mat- 
 ter, or matter be sublimated into spirit. 
 If, therefore, the soul acts upon the body 
 at all (as, certainly, we know it does) it 
 acts upon it directly. How the soul acts 
 upon the body, we do not know ; but in 
 whatever way it does so act, in that way, 
 or in some way analogous to that, it is 
 reasonable to believe, God acts upon the 
 universe — the whole vast organism of cre- 
 ation being as responsive to His will as 
 the human body is to ours. I see no mid- 
 dle ground between this conclusion and 
 5 
 
the denial that there is a God that made 
 the world. Of course, I do not believe in 
 the old mechanical theory of creation ; 
 but I say that if God made the world — no 
 matter how — there must be some way in 
 which His will can direct its forces. 
 
 In the truth of this conviction, let me 
 add, I feel greatly strengthened by that 
 theory towards which the deepest currents 
 of modern thought seem drifting : the 
 theory that the real world — the world that 
 we never see, as distinguished from this 
 merely phenomenal world that we do see 
 — is not material, but dynamical ; in other 
 words, that the real substance which un- 
 derlies phenomena, and constitutes their 
 causal basis, is that which we apprehend 
 as force — a something continually efHuent 
 from the Source of all being, a something 
 standing in immediate and uninterrupted 
 connection with the Divine will. Let it 
 be observed, however, that I make this 
 theory no part of my argument for the 
 reasonableness of miracles. That argu- 
 6 
 
ment is complete without it. The great 
 truth rests upon foundations that no in- 
 genuity can overthrow, — the truth that 
 there is no more intrinsic absurdity in the 
 idea that God should work a miracle than 
 there is in the idea that a man should lift 
 a finger. 
 
 But it may be asked, Why, if the case 
 for miracles be so clear, do so many men 
 of competent learning and keen intelli- 
 gence hold them to be impossible ? I 
 have thought of that. That many men, 
 learned and intelligent, do hold miracles 
 to be impossible (practically impossible, at 
 at least) is no doubt a fact. Predispo- 
 sition against belief in miracles seems to 
 be in the air. It is a predisposition that 
 belongs to the spirit of the age ; we all 
 feel it. I should be dealing deceitfully 
 were I to give the impression that I do 
 not feel it myself. But — how to account 
 for it. The contrast between the strength 
 of this predisposition on the one hand 
 and the singular lack of any rational 
 
 7 
 
support that has ever been found for it 
 on the other is something remarkable. 
 When a man says that miracles are im- 
 possible, and you ask him to give his 
 reasons, he finds himself at a loss. He 
 cannot formulate his objection into an 
 argument ; and yet his objection remains 
 as overpowering to his mind as ever. He 
 can only repeat, again and again, that a 
 miracle is inconceivable. And just this, I 
 am thoroughly persuaded, is what is, in- 
 deed, the matter. The difficulty with so 
 many men is, not that to God miracles 
 are impossible, but that to them they are 
 inconceivable. It may well be that mir- 
 acles are inconceivable to them. Con- 
 ceivability, in this meaning of it, is not a 
 thing of the reason ; it is purely a thing 
 of the imaorination. The modern mind 
 has devoted itself, with an intense de- 
 votion, to the study of nature. It seems 
 to me impossible that the study of nature 
 should affect belief in miracles directly 
 through the reason ; but I can easily un- 
 8 
 
derstand how such study might affect 
 belief in miracles indirectly through the 
 imagination — taking the imagination as 
 the faculty of conceiving, of realizing. I 
 think, in fact, that in this way the common 
 predisposition against miracles has come 
 about. It has come through the im- 
 agination passively yielding itself to the 
 constant spectacle of nature's regularity. 
 Men have suffered the weight of this im- 
 pression to press upon their minds until 
 their sense of possibility has come to be 
 restricted to the mould of physical order. 
 Their minds have gotten materialized 
 down to the point where, as they say, 
 they cannot imagine such a thing as a 
 supernatural occurrence; and then they 
 have come to mistake this blind insistence 
 of a mental habit — this mere inability to 
 realize what they have never experienced 
 — for a rational conviction. The root 
 of their difficulty lies in the assumption 
 that inconceivability and incredibility are 
 practically one and the same thing. As a 
 
 9 
 
matter of fact, if we could believe only 
 that of which we can conceive, we should 
 have to reject many credible things ^ — and, 
 first and foremost, the fact of the exist- 
 ence of Almighty God. 
 
 So much for miracles in general. Let 
 me now speak — but briefly — of the mir- 
 acles of our Lord. 
 
 It has been often said that even if the 
 abstract possibility of miracles were con- 
 ceded, the improbability of their actual 
 occurrence is so vast as to make the con- 
 cession practically worthless. Now I am 
 ready to grant that were the working of 
 miracles recorded of any mere man, the 
 improbability of the record's being true 
 would be well-nigh overwhelming. But 
 the claim is, on the part of Christians, 
 that Christ was not a mere man. I shall 
 not stop to discuss the grounds on which 
 this claim is rested. It is not in the least 
 necessary to my purpose. I simply say 
 that if this claim be true, the whole face 
 of the matter changes. Men may deny 
 
 lO 
 
the Incarnation as a fact ; but they must 
 admit the strong presumption that, if so 
 extraordinary a fact were to occur, it 
 would be followed and attested by extra- 
 ordinary events, that, if the chain of causa- 
 tion were thus to be struck by the hand of 
 God, the vibration would be felt through 
 all its links — that the miracle of such a 
 personality would give birth to miracles 
 of power. There is no direct argument, 
 therefore, to be brought against the prob- 
 ability of the Gospel miracles. The only 
 argument through which this point could 
 possibly be reached would be an argument 
 against the probability that God would 
 intervene, in the way in which the Chris- 
 tian creeds declare He did, for the res- 
 toration of man. And such an argument 
 would be not only unscientific and value- 
 less, but to the last degree presumptuous. 
 No man can know the counsels of the 
 Omniscient. No man is better qualified 
 to give an opinion as to what the wisdom 
 and the love of God might prompt Him 
 
to do, or not to do, than the spider that 
 weaves its web upon the grass is qual- 
 ified to criticise the architecture of the 
 worlds. 
 
 My argument for miracles is now fin- 
 ished. What I have been saying has been 
 said, for one thing, because the miracles of 
 our Lord have come to form the dividing 
 line between what is commonly under- 
 stood as belief and what is commonly un- 
 derstood as unbelief. It has been said, for 
 another thing, because there are those to- 
 day, holding the place of religious teach- 
 ers, who are saying just the opposite. 
 Indeed, to speak slightingly of miracles — 
 to strip religion of all that is supernatural 
 — has come to be accepted with multitudes 
 of people as a sign of freshness, and liber- 
 ality, and breadth ; and the men who do 
 this thing are almost sure of a popular 
 following. Certainly, I myself can pre- 
 tend to no indifference to popular regard. 
 I should like, above most things in this 
 world, to speak, from Sunday to Sunday, 
 
 12 
 
to crowded and interested congregations. 
 But if, to reach this end, I should have to 
 turn from the voice of Reason to listen 
 to the low vague mutterings of that so 
 changeful, and often so misleading, div- 
 inity, the Zez^ Geist, or Spirit of the Age, — 
 if, to be considered broad, I should have 
 to be broader than was He in whose name 
 alone I have any right, as a Christian min- 
 ister or as an honest man, to speak from 
 this pulpit, it would be better that my 
 words should be echoed back from empty 
 walls, or that my lips should be forever 
 sealed. 
 
 13 
 
THE RESURRECTION-WORLD. 
 
 Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he ? — Job xiv. lo. 
 
 TJAVING spoken of the resurrection, 
 and of the resurrection-body, I am 
 to speak this morning of the resurrection- 
 world — meaning by that the world into 
 which men rise on leaving this world in 
 which they die. 
 
 The subject thus announced stands in 
 very close connection with that of our 
 Lord's ascension ; and as this is the last 
 Sunday before Ascension-day, I shall 
 introduce what I have to say with the 
 question, In what sense, consistent with 
 Scripture and with reason, can the fact 
 of the Ascension be understood ? 
 
 It is commonly supposed that, because 
 our Lord went up in the sight of His dis- 
 ciples from Mount Olivet, He must, there- 
 14 
 
fore, have continued to go up until He 
 reached Heaven, and the throne of God, 
 and the innumerable company of angels, 
 far away on some wandering planet or 
 fixed star. From this view of the matter, 
 both my reason and my reading of the 
 Bible compel me to dissent. In the first 
 place, we are expressly assured that " flesh 
 and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of 
 God" — that is, the world that we call 
 Heaven. Into that world, therefore, our 
 Lord, with His body of flesh and blood, 
 could not have entered. In the second 
 place, any world that could be reached by 
 passing from this world through space, 
 must lie in the same space with this world, 
 and therefore must, of course, be, like this 
 world, material. Materiality does not 
 cease to be material by simply being dis- 
 tant. As a matter of fact, it is demon- 
 strable that the remotest of the heavenly 
 bodies that we can see — that dimmest 
 of the fixed stars, to reach which, though 
 travelling with the speed of light, would 
 
 IS 
 
 t 
 
require not less than forty thousand years 
 — is as thoroughly material as this earth 
 of ours. It follows that if the world into 
 which our Lord ascended was a spiritual 
 world, His true ascension could not have 
 been through space. 
 
 But here I anticipate a question. Why, 
 it will be asked, if our Lord did not con- 
 tinue to ascend through space to Heaven, 
 did He lift His body from the earth at 
 all ? Why did he not vanish into the 
 spiritual world by simply dissipating the 
 elements of that body as He stood in 
 the midst of His disciples? Doubtless, He 
 might have done so. But, in that case. 
 His disciples — slow of heart as they were 
 to believe, earth-bound as were their con- 
 ceptions still — would still have watched 
 and waited to see Him reappear in their 
 secret assemblies, or by the lonely lake- 
 side, as had been His wont. His rising 
 visibly from their midst before withdraw- 
 ing into the world invisible, was intended, 
 I believe, to teach them the more impres- 
 i6 
 
sively that this departure, unlike His 
 former vanishings from their view, was to 
 be no temporary withdrawal, but the sol- 
 emn close of all sensible intercourse with 
 the Church until the consummation and 
 the end of all things. Just as our Lord 
 had appeared in His material body, not 
 as any necessary part of the resurrection, 
 but simply to give assurance that He had 
 risen indeed, so now He ^/jrappeared in 
 His material body, not as any necessary 
 part of the ascension, but simply to leave 
 assurance that He had indeed ascended. 
 
 To the minds of many, this teaching 
 may seem to make the spiritual world — 
 the world to which our Lord ascended — 
 unsubstantial. I can quite understand 
 that it should be so. It is very curious 
 how the meaning of the word substance, 
 in popular usage, and the meaning of the 
 same word as used in philosophical think- 
 ing, are opposed to each other. They 
 are opposed to each other pointedly and 
 exactly. In popular usage, substance 
 
 17 
 
means that which we can perceive or con- 
 ceive of by means of the senses. In the 
 usage of philosophy, " substance " means • 
 nothing of the kind. In the usage of 
 philosophy, all that we can perceive or 
 conceive of by means of the senses be- 
 longs exclusively to the category of the 
 phenomenal — substance meaning, as the 
 word implies, the unperceivable, inscru- 
 table something which stands under 
 phenomena, and supports them as cause 
 supports effect. In popular usage, the 
 substantial world is the world which we 
 see around us, and whose objects we can 
 touch. In philosophic usage, the sub- 
 stantial world is a world which we can no 
 more see or touch than we can see or 
 touch the things that lie beyond the river 
 of death. 
 
 Most gladly would I avoid, in this dis- 
 cussion, everything that might be unin- 
 telligible even to the most unpractised 
 understanding. But, consistently with 
 my purpose, I cannot do it. To the sin- 
 i8 
 
cere believer, no other warrant is needed 
 for belief in the existence of a spiritual 
 world than simple faith in God's almighti- 
 ness. But, unhappily, all men have not 
 this simple faith ; and if we would render 
 rational, either to our own minds, or to the 
 minds of others, the possibility of such a 
 world, there is but one thing for it ; we 
 must render to ourselves some rational 
 account of this world that we call mate- 
 rial, — what it is and how it came to be. 
 
 Of the substance of this material world, 
 the senses, I have said, tell us nothing. 
 What we call matter is not substance. 
 It is simply an aggregate of effects — 
 effects produced not outside of us, but 
 within our own consciousness. These 
 effects depend partly upon regulative 
 powers within our own minds, and partly 
 upon a cause external to our minds. The 
 popular fallacy consists in regarding them 
 as properties of things — in regarding, for 
 example, sound, and light, and heat, and 
 color as inherent in objects outside of 
 19 
 
us ; whereas science has demonstrated 
 that outside of us there is nothing to oc- 
 casion our perception of them but simply 
 motion — the pecuHar kind and character 
 of the motion determining the nature 
 of the effect. The sense of touch gives 
 us nothing but a state of our own con- 
 sciousness — a feeHng, namely, of more 
 or less resistance. Even what we call 
 extension is purely phenomenal. It is 
 purely relative. It is simply the measure 
 of certain powers within ourselves. Were 
 those powers diminished a million-fold, 
 things around us would be enlarged a 
 million-fold. Were those powers en- 
 larged a million-fold, things around us 
 would be diminished in the same ratio. 
 Were those powers made infinite, exten- 
 sion would disappear. " It is wholly in- 
 conceivable," says Professor Huxley, " that 
 what we call extension should exist inde- 
 pendently of such consciousness as our 
 own." 
 
 I repeat, then, that what are popularly 
 
regarded as properties of matter are 
 really effects within ourselves, and that 
 these effects depend for their existence 
 partly upon regulative powers within our 
 own minds, and partly upon a cause ex- 
 ternal to our minds. What is the nature 
 of the cause external to our own minds, is 
 not a matter of immediate perception. It 
 is simply a matter of inference. The con- 
 clusion to which, in general, the great 
 leaders of modern thought both in sci- 
 ence and in philosophy have come, is, 
 that it is simply force — or, rather, that 
 form of the Divine energy which we ap- 
 prehend as force. " The ultimate bearing 
 of scientific truth," says the Duke of 
 Argyll, in his Reign of Law, *' cannot be 
 mistaken. . . . Nothing is more re- 
 markable in the present state of physical 
 research, than what may be called the 
 transcendental character of its results. 
 . . . Under the subtle analysis of the 
 physiologist, the chemist, and the electri- 
 cian, matter dissolves and disappears, 
 
 21 
 
surviving only as the phenomena of force ; 
 which, again, is seen converging along all 
 its lines to some common centre — ' slop- 
 ing through darkness up to God.' " 
 
 "The great lesson which Berkeley taught 
 mankind," says Mr. John Fiske, in his 
 essay on The Unseen World, "was that 
 what we call material phenomena are 
 really the products of consciousness co- 
 operating with some Unknown Power (not 
 material) existing beyond our conscious- 
 ness. We do very well to speak of ' mat- 
 ter ' in common parlance, but all that the 
 word really means is a group of qualities, 
 which have no existence apart from our 
 minds. Modern philosophers have quite 
 generally accepted this conclusion ; and 
 every attempt to overturn it has resulted 
 in complete and disastrous failure. In 
 admitting this, we do not admit the con- 
 clusion of Absolute Idealism, that nothing 
 exists outside of consciousness. What we 
 admit as existing independently of con- 
 sciousness, is the Power that causes in us 
 
those conscious states which we call the 
 perception of material qualities. We have 
 no reason for regarding this Power as in 
 itself material ; indeed we cannot do so. 
 . . . We are thus led," he continues, 
 " to the inference that what we call the 
 material universe is but the manifestation 
 of infinite Deity to our finite minds ; and 
 matter — the only thing to which materi- 
 alists concede real existence — is simply 
 an orderly phantasmagoria ; and God and 
 the soul — which materialists regard as 
 mere fictions of the imagination — are 
 the only conceptions that answer to real 
 existences." 
 
 To those who have followed me thus 
 far, the bearing of what has now been 
 said, must, I think, be evident. If crea- 
 tion does not mean the manufacture of a 
 substance, but simply the production of 
 phenomenal forms through the interaction 
 of infinite Power with finite mind, then — 
 given the fact that we survive death — it 
 is just as rationally conceivable that we 
 
 23 
 
shall find ourselves surrounded by another 
 world as it is certain that we find our- 
 selves surrounded by a world here and 
 now. " There may be," says the author 
 just now quoted, " there may be, and in 
 all probability is, an immense region of 
 existence in every way as real as the re- 
 gion which we know, yet concerning 
 which we cannot form the faintest rudi- 
 ment of a conception. . . . It is a 
 belief which no imaginable future advance 
 in physical discovery can in any way im- 
 pugn. It is a belief which is in no sense 
 irrational, and which may be logically en- 
 tertained without in the least affecting 
 our scientific habit of mind, or influencing 
 our scientific conclusions." For my own 
 part, I hold this belief as a clear, down- 
 right conviction — not simply as a matter 
 of faith, but as a rational conviction. I 
 find no more difficulty in believing that 
 another world awaits us on the farther 
 shore of death than I find in believing 
 that beyond the Atlantic Ocean lies the 
 24 
 
continent of Europe. And I believe that 
 that world is, to repeat the words of Mr. 
 Fiske, " in every way as real as this world 
 which we know." I would like to make this 
 point emphatic, because I have spoken 
 of the spiritual world as in its nature 
 phenomenal. There is, in truth, no pos- 
 sibility of any w^orld that is not phenom- 
 enal. All creation must be phenomenal 
 from the necessity of the case. God 
 Himself is the sum of all substantial be- 
 ing ; and that sum can neither be added to 
 nor taken from. But the phenomenal 
 does not mean the unreal. It means sim- 
 ply that which has not the ground of its 
 being within itself. This world that we 
 call material is phenomenal. And yet we 
 never complain of it as unreal. We 
 never think of it as not solid enough be- 
 neath our feet. We never feel that we 
 ourselves, or our friends, are ghosts. We 
 need have no fears on this score about 
 the next world. That world will certainly 
 be not less real, in any way, than this. 
 
 25 
 
If it seems as nothing to us now, it is 
 simply because we are not now in the 
 spiritual condition. When we shall have 
 passed into that condition, the spiritual 
 will be the only real, and the material 
 will, in turn, become as nothing. 
 
 Another thing — a thing which I can- 
 not prove, but which I hold as reasonable 
 — is this : that between the material 
 world and the spiritual, notwithstanding 
 the gulf of difference between them in 
 nature, there is a close resemblance as to 
 types and forms. Milton wrote : 
 
 What if earth 
 Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein 
 Each to other like, more than below is thought ! 
 
 nd why not? God is the author of 
 both worlds alike. Both worlds alike 
 are expressions of His thought. It is 
 not God's way to use a plan and then 
 fling it aside as if it had proved a failure. 
 In the crystal we find a " mute prophecy " 
 of the vegetable ; in the vegetable, of the 
 animal ; in the animal, of man. We find 
 26 
 
creative plans, not abandoned, but em- 
 bodied in ever higher and more perfect 
 forms. On this principle we should ex- 
 pect to find whatever is good and beauti- 
 ful in this world better and more perfect 
 in the next. I know many shrink from 
 imagining that there is anything in Hea- 
 ven at all like things of earth. 
 
 Bright fields beyond the swelling flood 
 Stand dressed in living green — 
 
 SO they will sing in church ; but tell them 
 at home that you really think there will be 
 fields, and trees, and flowers in Heaven, 
 and they will call it materializing Heaven. 
 The reason is, that they have materialized 
 themselves down to the point where they 
 can see nothing divine or spiritual in the 
 world around them, and then they look 
 upon it as a matter of religion to think of 
 the next world as in all points the exact 
 negation of this. There may be some- 
 thing religious in this way of thinking, 
 but I confess I cannot see it. 
 27 
 
Be this, however, as it may, there is one 
 point about which I feel sure — a point 
 which, no matter how often I may have 
 made it, I shall never willingly miss any 
 fair opportunity of making again. The 
 point I mean is this, — that the spiritual 
 world does not lie apart from this world 
 in space. It cannot. It cannot, for the 
 simple reason that the division between 
 the two worlds is not in space, but in our- 
 selves. It is a division between two dif- 
 ferent sets of senses — those on the one 
 hand belonging to the natural body, and 
 those on the other hand belonging to the 
 spiritual body. The same spiritual sub- 
 stance underlies both worlds. The same 
 procession of the Divine energy interact- 
 ing with the human mind, produces both. 
 The only difference is, that to produce 
 the natural world the divine energy in- 
 teracts with that part of our nature which 
 St. Paul calls the psychical, or natural ; 
 while, to produce the spiritual, it will have 
 to interact with that part of our nature 
 28 
 
which the same apostle calls the pneumat- 
 ical, or spiritual. Death means simply 
 the shifting of this point of interaction. 
 Life will not be interrupted. The world 
 will not cease to exist, but will be trans- 
 figured. As it fades from our view in its 
 natural form, it will dawn upon us in its 
 spiritual form. When we die we shall 
 not have to go through the air to get to 
 the spiritual world. It will need no trans- 
 ition through space. It will be like the 
 removal of the bandage from the eyes of 
 one who has been blindfolded. This, I 
 think, we may be said to know. To my 
 own mind certainly it is as clear as the 
 clearest demonstration in mathematics. 
 Into other questions suggested by the 
 subject — questions which can be an- 
 swered only with opinion — I shall not 
 enter. My sole aim in this discourse has 
 been to demonstrate that for belief in a 
 spiritual world there is a rational basis. I 
 am convinced that for multitudes of men 
 such demonstration is the one thing 
 29 
 
wanting. With multitudes of men the su- 
 preme difficulty in believing is not the ques- 
 tion, " If a man die, shall he live again ?" 
 but, " If a man live again, where shall he find 
 a world to live in — a world real, and yet 
 not material ? " In that view of creation 
 which I have now been trying to set forth 
 — a view towards which all the drifts of 
 modern thought are setting — this diffi- 
 culty is met. In that view it is clearly 
 seen that the existence of another world, 
 with its spreading landscapes, with its in- 
 telligent and eager throngs, is perfectly 
 consistent with every principle of reason, 
 with every postulate of science. '* Thus, we 
 have reached a point," I believe, where, 
 as another says, " faith may look into the 
 future undisturbed by any news that sci- 
 ence may bring us from the stars, or by 
 any question as to where the living who 
 have gone from us abide. And thus our 
 latest thought, sent forth like Noah's 
 dove, to search over the depths for the 
 everlasting hills, brings back upon its 
 30 
 
wings the perfume of unseen lands, and 
 some fresh signs of that rest that shall 
 remain when the flood of the years shall 
 have passed away." 
 
 3' 
 
THE MANIFESTATIONS OF 
 HIDDEN THINGS. 
 
 Who both will bring to light the hidden things of dark- 
 ness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts, — 
 I Cor. iv. 5. 
 
 TT was once remarked, by one of the 
 greatest of English preachers, that 
 ** Few sermons so commend themselves 
 to the imagination, and yet few sermons 
 so little impress the conscience and the 
 heart, as those descriptive of the last judg- 
 ment." The remark, I think, is true. And 
 the reason why it is true, I think, is this : 
 that sermons, for the most part, in dealing 
 with the last judgment, incline to make 
 everything of what is dramatic and purely 
 figurative in its representation, to the ne- 
 glect of what is essential in its process. 
 
 The representation of the last judg- 
 ment, as given us in Holy Scripture, I 
 32 
 
call figurative. I call it so, advisedly. I 
 call it so, reverently. It is natural that it 
 should be figurative. It is the peculiarity 
 of Scripture prophecy to deal in figures. 
 And this peculiarity is the most striking 
 in those prophecies which treat of what 
 are called the last things. Take the 
 Revelation of St. John. The horses and 
 the horsemen, the dragon and the beasts, 
 the earthquakes and the trumpets, the 
 bottomless pit, with its lock and key, the 
 golden city, with its jasper walls and its 
 angel-guarded gates, the books and seals, 
 the emerald throne, the crystal sea, the 
 river of life — surely no one ever yet has 
 dreamed of understanding these as any- 
 thing but symbols. 
 
 Take, again, the occurrences predicted 
 by our Lord as to attend the ruin of the 
 Jewish state and nation — the shaking of 
 the powers of Heaven, the darkening of 
 sun and moon, the falling of the stars. 
 Surely no one can fail to agree with Sir 
 Isaac Newton that while what is here 
 
 3 
 
presented Is fact, and not figure, yet the 
 form in which it is presented is figure and 
 not fact. And so, universally. Whenever 
 our Lord speaks of the Last Things, He 
 uses not the language of literal descrip- 
 tion, but draws a picture in which facts 
 are represented by symbols. Nor is this 
 all. It is a principle of which I must re- 
 mind you again and again, that the picture 
 which our Lord draws of the Last Things 
 is without perspective. This principle 
 ought always to be kept in mind. In 
 weighing the subject which we have in 
 hand, it is of the utmost importance. The 
 picture, I say, which our Lord draws of 
 the last things is not only a picture in 
 which facts are represented by symbols, 
 but it is a picture which is without perspec- 
 tive. It seems to have been conceived, 
 not from the human standpoint, but from 
 the Divine — from the standpoint of Him 
 with whom there is no future and no past, 
 but only an eternal now. It therefore 
 makes almost nothing of distance in time. 
 
 34 
 
The near and the remote are brought 
 together — projected upon one and the 
 same plane — just as the stars, though dif- 
 fering in distance from the earth by mil- 
 hons on milHons of miles, appear to the eye 
 of the beholder to be shining side by side. 
 By the operation of this principle, that 
 which was to happen to each individual of 
 our race in his own allotted time, is repre- 
 sented as happening to all together. Each 
 one, as he passed into the light of eternity, 
 was to appear (or as the late Revision trans- 
 lates more accurately, be made manifest) 
 before the judgment-seat of Christ ; there- 
 fore, all are represented as standing before 
 the judgment-seat of Christ at one and the 
 same time. In this view, the last day of 
 the New Testament must be understood 
 just as science has forced us to understand 
 each one of theyfrj/ days of the Old Tes- 
 tament — as a period of indefinite duration ; 
 the judgment-day of Christ extending not 
 simply through the closing four-and-twenty 
 hours of earthly history, but through the 
 
 35 
 
lapse of revolving ages. The judgment, 
 in fact, runs parallel with the kingdom of 
 Christ and stretches on throughout the 
 entire period of the Christian dispensation. 
 At the beginning of this dispensation, the 
 trump of God — the Gospel call — began to 
 sound among the nations ; and the angels 
 (or, to translate literally, the messengers, 
 the ministers of Christ) began their work 
 of gathering together the elect from the 
 four winds — from the one end of Heaven 
 even to the other. That trump is sound- 
 ing still, and still the judgment is going 
 on. The root-meaning of the principal 
 word, or rather words, tX2Ln'A2X^^ judgment, 
 in the New Testament is simply that of 
 discernment, distinction, separation. This 
 distinction is not to be arbitrary, but es- 
 sential. The judgment is not to make it, 
 but make it known. The character with 
 which a man dies is that which must de- 
 termine his condition after death ; and the 
 judging of the man can consist in nothing 
 but in bringing his character to the light. 
 36 
 
The view in question would change no 
 feature of the faith whatever. It would 
 overthrow no fact — it would unsettle no 
 principle. It leaves the fact of a general 
 judgment just as it finds it. It simply 
 distinguishes between what is essential 
 to that fact and what is figurative in its 
 description. It simply regards the judg- 
 ment, as St. Paul himself regarded it, as 
 consisting in manifestation by the light. 
 It is true that in the Epistle for the day 
 St. Paul connects this manifesting light 
 with the coming of the Lord. "Judge 
 nothing," he says, " before the time, until 
 the Lord come, who both will bring to 
 light the hidden things of darkness, and 
 will make manifest the counsels of the 
 hearts." It is a matter in which Bible 
 scholars are agreed, that the first Chris- 
 tians — including the Apostles themselves 
 — looked for the visible reappearing of 
 the Saviour in their own day. They had 
 a right to do so. They could not have 
 failed to do so without giving way to 
 
 37 
 
downright unbelief. The Saviour had 
 promised that He would come in the life- 
 time of the then existing generation ; and 
 that promise was fulfilled. It was ful- 
 filled, but not in the manner in which the 
 first Christians expected it. The word in 
 this promise, which we translate coming, 
 means also being present. I am glad to 
 see that the late Revision so explains it in 
 the margin. Wherever, and in whatever 
 manner, Christ is present, there, in the 
 sense in which He Himself used the word, 
 He comes. His presence in power, at the 
 overthrow of the Jewish state and polity, 
 was as much a fulfilment of His promise 
 as though He had appeared in fleshly form 
 to the eyes of His waiting people. Christ's 
 coming is not a journey, but a manifes- 
 tation. To whatsoever soul His presence 
 is manifested, whether in this world, or in 
 the world of spirits, to that soul He comes. 
 He will come to us when we go to Him. It 
 is His presence that makes His coming. 
 In that presence we shall stand at death ; 
 38 
 
and the light of that presence will both 
 bring out the hidden things of darkness, 
 and will make manifest the counsels of our 
 hearts. This truth is a very solemn one. 
 It is unutterably solemn, when we come 
 to think of it. 
 
 Here in this world, it is only actual 
 crimes, and gross crimes at that, that are 
 likely to be made known. It is only such 
 sins as result in injury to others, that so- 
 ciety is interested in bringing to the light. 
 But such sins are comparatively few. By 
 far the greater number of our sins are 
 those which we feel are in but little danger 
 of exposure, and which, therefore, we com- 
 mit with but little sense of fear. Take 
 away the hope of concealment for sin — 
 and you would make sinning a much more 
 serious thing for most persons than it is. 
 Suppose it to be the established order that 
 on the first day of each year, every man's 
 record for the past year should be re- 
 vealed, that every scene in his life should 
 be photographed — every word spoken, 
 
 39 
 
every whisper breathed in secret, should 
 be echoed in tones of thunder — every 
 thought, every wish, every feeHng, of the 
 heart, should be written out to be read 
 and known of all men, — to how many of 
 us would the first day of the coming year 
 be a day of rejoicing ? I should hope that 
 some of us might be found willing to face 
 the trial. But I believe that many of us 
 would as soon go into annihilation. I be- 
 lieve that many of us would feel like call- 
 ing on the rocks and mountains to hide us 
 from our shame. This case is imaginary ; 
 but the case which is real is like it. Cer- 
 tainly, it is not one whit less awful. The 
 disclosure I speak of may not be made 
 this year or the next ; but it will come to 
 you, and to me, and to all of us, within a 
 few years at the remotest. And it will be 
 none the less hard to bear in the world to 
 which we are going than it would be here. 
 If anything, it will be harder to bear. 
 There will be more persons there to wit- 
 ness it than there are here. Not only all 
 40 
 
that are now here will be there then, but 
 all the loved ones whose memory we 
 cherish and whose good opinion we would 
 rather die than forfeit will be there. All 
 men will be there that have ever lived ; 
 and not only all men, but all the holy 
 angels ; and, high above them all, the dear 
 Saviour — whose insulted gentleness will, 
 I think, be the hardest thing of all to bear. 
 This case is no mere supposition. It is 
 real. Even the material universe, could 
 we trace the endless intertwinings of the 
 effects produced in it — even the material 
 universe, as the photograph and the phon- 
 ograph help us to conceive — registers all 
 the deeds we do, and all the words we 
 utter. But there is another register, more 
 plastic, more permanent, and more legible 
 than this. It is the man himself — the 
 inner man. It is commonly spoken of as 
 the soul. I prefer to speak of it as the 
 spiritual body. I hold it for a truth — it 
 is certainly held by an ever-increasing 
 number of Christian thinkers — that we 
 
 41 
 
have, each one of us, a spiritual body now, 
 — invisible, impalpable, to sense, but thor- 
 oughly substantial, — that this spiritual 
 body is all the while being moulded into 
 exact correspondence with the characters 
 which we are forming, and that when, at 
 death, these earthy masks shall fall, it 
 shall stand forth in the spiritual world dis- 
 closed, " The conception of the spiritual 
 body," says an eminent clergyman of the 
 Church of England, " is one which is in- 
 timately connected with that conception 
 of the unseen world which the scientific 
 intellect of the present day is embracing. 
 . . . Every disturbance — every dis- 
 placement — which takes place within the 
 visible universe, is propagated by vibra- 
 tions throughout the whole system, until 
 it finally registers itself in that unseen 
 world from which the seen ultimately de- 
 rives its energy. All this is taught by 
 living masters of science. And more than 
 this. They teach that even the thoughts 
 of men, attended as they are by corre- 
 42 
 
spending quiverings of their fleshly frames, 
 are transmitted in hke manner, and in Hke 
 manner are registered " — registered not 
 only in the brain, thus forming the basis 
 of what is called //^;)'i-2V^/ memory, but also 
 in the spiritual body, thus forming the 
 basis of eternal memory. This is a very 
 solemn thought, — that we are making our 
 own eternity here in time, that we are 
 every moment weaving the threads of the 
 immortal vesture of our spirits, that the 
 deeds of our natural bodies perpetuate 
 their results in the very tissues of our 
 spiritual forms, that the passions, the de- 
 sires, the loves, the hates, that we daily 
 cherish, leave an ineffaceable impress upon 
 all within us that is deathless. 
 
 Here in this world a beautiful exterior 
 often disguises an ugly state of things 
 within. In the next world it will not be 
 so. In the next world we shall be attract- 
 ive, or repulsive, according to the charac- 
 ters with which we go from this. I am 
 afraid that there are many beautiful 
 
 43 
 
persons here who will there be simply hid- 
 eous ; even here, men or women cannot 
 long be bad within, without showing it 
 outwardly in their faces. And if this be 
 true of a substance so intractable as that 
 of the natural body, it is easy to conceive 
 that the plastic substance of the spiritual 
 body will show the inner man with abso- 
 lute exactness. Lucian, in one of his 
 Dialogues of the Dead, says that whenever 
 a soul comes before Rhadamanthus to be 
 judged, the first thing done is to have it 
 stripped and examined ; because every sin 
 that is indulged in leaves upon the soul a 
 characteristic mark by which the sin may 
 be known. Lucian was not a Christian. 
 He was a Pagan. But in this passage he 
 certainly hit upon one of the most solemn 
 of Christian truths. 
 
 And yet while this truth is solemn, it 
 has an aspect, also, which is most encour- 
 aging. Not only are sins self-registered 
 within us, but also all that which is op- 
 posed to sin — every heavenward aspira- 
 44 
 
tlon — every holy desire — every loving 
 deed — every pure and noble thought. 
 Of course, that which will show in our 
 favor, when we come to die, will be, not 
 what we actually accomplished, but the 
 motive with which we acted ; and the 
 only motive that will avail with God is 
 the simple motive of love — the love 
 which He Himself infuses. I believe 
 that in the lis^ht of love the sin-marks of 
 a human soul will more and more fade 
 out. So, at least, St. Peter would seem 
 to teach when he says that " love " (we 
 call it charity) " shall cover the multi- 
 tude of sins." It is certain that love is 
 the only thing that saves. It is certain 
 that love is the only thing that really 
 ennobles. It is certain that love is the 
 only thing that will count for us in judg- 
 ment. It is conceivable that one may do 
 a great deal of work, just to be considered 
 a great worker, or give exceptionally large 
 sums in charity, just to be considered 
 exceptionally charitable. Everything of 
 
 45 
 
this sort will go for nothing. A dime 
 given out of a kind heart, with a kind 
 look, and a few gentle words, will go for 
 more in the judgment than ten thousand 
 dollars, put down without kindness, upon 
 a public subscription paper. Many per- 
 sons feel it a great disadvantage that 
 they have neither means nor opportunity 
 to do anything noticeable in the way of 
 good works. As regards the good of 
 others it may be a disadvantage, but it is 
 not so necessarily as regards one's self. 
 God's measure is not our measure. In 
 the sight of God, the poor widow who 
 cast her two mites into the treasury did 
 as much as the rich young ruler would 
 have done if he had sold his all and given 
 it to the poor. It is the little things we 
 do, which, just because they are little, we 
 are not tempted to feel proud of, that are 
 the most likely to stand the light. 
 
 Let us, then, try to learn this lesson : to 
 be in our inmost selves what we would 
 have others think us ; to do all the good, 
 46 
 
kind, loving things we can, and to do 
 them with as Httle of outward show as 
 we may, and with an eye as single to that 
 day, when, standing in the light, we shall 
 be brought face to face with the whole 
 record of our vanished years 
 
 47 
 
OUT-OF-CHURCH RELIGION. 
 
 Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, 
 do all to the glory of God. — i Cor. x. 31. 
 
 IT is no uncommon thing to hear peo- 
 * pie say that they are too busy to be 
 rehgious. 
 
 Did you ever think what it is that 
 makes it possible for a train of cars to 
 move on the track of a railroad ? You 
 will say, perhaps, " Why, of course, the 
 power of the steam in the engine." I 
 think not. If you could suppose a train 
 of cars to be suspended in mid-air, the 
 power of ten thousand engines could not 
 make it budge an inch. There would be 
 motion of the wheels, but no locomotion 
 of the train. You have, perhaps, actually 
 seen an engine trying to start on a frosty 
 morning, when the track was covered 
 48 
 
with a thin glare of ice — the wheels re- 
 volving with mad rapidity, but the engine 
 remaining stationary. The difficulty was, 
 not that there was any lack of power to 
 move the wheels, but that the track was 
 too smooth for the wheels to " take hold." 
 The thing wanting was not power, but 
 fricHo7i. 
 
 Did you ever think, again, what it is 
 that makes it possible for a bird to fly? 
 Certainly a bird could not fly without 
 wings, but then wings would be useless 
 did they meet in their stroke with no re- 
 sistance. It is the resistance of the air 
 against which the wings are beaten that 
 enables a bird to rise, and sustains it in 
 its course. 
 
 Now, what the friction of the track is to 
 the motion of an engine — what the resist- 
 ance of the air is to the flying of a bird — 
 that, the duties, the cares, the trials, the 
 worries, of our every-day life are to the 
 heavenward motion of the soul. It is these 
 things that furnish the friction which 
 
 4 
 
 49 
 
enables the soul to move towards its pre- 
 destined goal, the resistance which enables 
 the soul to soar upwards, and get ever 
 nearer and nearer God. 
 
 The Christian life is a life of continual 
 overcoming ; and, of course, the idea of 
 overcoming without conflict is an absurd- 
 ity. There is no gaining of strength for the 
 body without daily trial of the muscles ; 
 and there is no gaining of strength for the 
 soul without daily trial of temper, motive, 
 principle. But in those duties which we 
 are too apt to think of as exclusively re- 
 ligious, there is no trial at all — of temper, 
 motive, principle, or anything else. There 
 is no particular trial in coming to church, 
 and saying prayers, and singing hymns, 
 and listening to not very long sermons. It 
 is not here that the soul finds the friction 
 which enables it to move ; it is here that 
 the soul finds, or should find, simply its 
 motive power. It is not here that the soul 
 finds the resistance which bears it upward ; 
 it is here that the soul gathers, or should 
 
 50 
 
gather, simply its strength of wing. We 
 speak, indeed, of Divine worship as Divine 
 service, — as, when I said, this morning, that 
 there would be Divine service here in the 
 church this evening. And in one sense 
 Divine worship is Divine service ; but it is 
 not that in the sense of religious work. 
 Worship is to the soul what eating and 
 drinking are to the body ; and we do not 
 speak of eating and drinking as work. 
 We eat and drink, rather, that we may be 
 strengthened for work. Just so it is as 
 regards worship. We worship God that 
 we may get strength from Him to do our 
 work in life religiously. But that work is 
 not here in the church ; it is at home, 
 amid the nameless worries of those noisy 
 children, in the shop, the office, the field. 
 Wherever your daily occupation is, wher- 
 ever your daily trials are, there is your re- 
 ligious work. 
 
 If religion consisted in praying and 
 singing, and feeling good, then, I grant 
 you, the time devoted to the every-day 
 51 
 
duties and drudgeries of life would be so 
 much time lost. But as religion consists, 
 in fact, not simply in acts or emotions, 
 but in character, — in being loving, and 
 pure, and patient, and honest, and truthful, 
 — I can conceive of nothing more favor- 
 able to the best religious culture than a 
 life filled to overflowing with the very 
 commonest of duties and cares. We need 
 not be thinking all the time about Heaven 
 — its golden harps, its shining robes, its 
 glittering crowns — to be all the time get- 
 ting nearer Heaven. Not that we should 
 make it an aim to shut out Heaven from 
 our thoughts. Far — very far — from that. 
 As followers of Him who endured the 
 cross " for the joy that was set before 
 Him," we ought to think, and often think, 
 of that time, so soon to come, when these 
 earthy masks shall fall, and the spirit look 
 with cleansed and open vision upon the 
 glory to be revealed. But merely to think 
 of the life to come can serve no purpose. 
 To sit at home and dwell with rapture on 
 
 52 
 
the beauty of Italian skies, — the glories of 
 Italian art, — this can never take one to 
 Italy. Nothing can but travel. And 
 nothing but travel — spirit-travel — can 
 take one to Heaven. The way to Heaven 
 is represented as a pilgrimage ; and this 
 pilgrimage includes far more than the 
 crossing of that mysterious boundary 
 which men call death. Our pilgrimage is 
 one with our entire probation. Death 
 marks, not its beginning, but its close. 
 The pilgrim path must day by day be 
 trodden here on earth. The Heavenward 
 traveller must journey upward to the Ever- 
 lasting Gates with feet that are still tread- 
 ing the dust. How we walk the earth — 
 that will decide the question where we 
 shall find ourselves when we leave the 
 earth ; that, and not the feelings which we 
 may have when we come to die. 
 
 It is sometimes said that such or such 
 a religion is good enough to live by, but 
 a poor religion to die by. If to die com- 
 fortably were the main thing, I would 
 
 53 
 
rather say that any religion is good 
 enough to die by, but only that religion 
 which is true is good enough to live by. 
 Only that religion which is true can make 
 a true character — full, rounded out, sym- 
 metrical ; but any religion that is em- 
 braced sincerely may bring comfort to 
 the dying hour. As a matter of fact, the 
 Roman Catholic and the Protestant, 
 the Trinitarian and the Unitarian, die 
 with equal confidence ; and the Mahom- 
 etan, in the East, and the Pagan Indian, 
 in the West, meet death with as little 
 fear as Christians of whatever name. 
 
 Now I do not say that persons consci- 
 entiously embracing any of these religions 
 must be or will be condemned in the 
 judgment of God. God forbid. But I 
 say that the facts just cited prove, not 
 that all religions are equally true, or 
 equally good, but that any religion — true 
 or false, good or bad — if honestly be- 
 lieved in, and honestly lived by, may 
 bring comfort in the dying hour. But 
 54 
 
this is not what the religion of Christ 
 proposes. It proposes, not a "scheme" 
 to make death easy, but a power — an in- 
 fluence — an inspiration — to make Hfe 
 holy. It proposes to save us not directly 
 from any penalty in the unknown future, 
 but from our present selfishness. It pro- 
 poses to enable men to live righteously 
 in the present world as the only way of 
 fitting them to live happily in the world 
 to come. This, indeed, is the pre-eminent 
 thing in Christ's religion — that it aims 
 to get men to live to the glory of God 
 here, and not simply to escape the wrath 
 of God hereafter — that it aims to save 
 men, not from God, but to Him. Doubt- 
 less it points to heavenly rewards, but it 
 holds out no other hope of reaching them 
 than simply that which rests upon the 
 faithful discharge of earthly duties. And 
 this is not more scriptural than it is rea- 
 sonable. 
 
 " If," says Robertson, " the caterpillar 
 should forget to feed upon the leaves 
 55 
 
necessary to its caterpillar state, and 
 should spend its time in dreaming of the 
 day when it should be a beautiful butter- 
 fly, and float away, like a winged blossom, 
 upon the air, it would never be a beauti- 
 ful butterfly at all, but would die an ugly 
 caterpillar." It is so with us. 
 
 "Three sailors," says another, "stepped 
 into a boat to cross a river. Two took 
 the oars, and, as is usual, turned their 
 faces towards the shore which they were 
 leaving. The third took the helm, and 
 stood with his face towards the shore 
 whither they were bound. * Behold,' ex- 
 claimed one standing by, 'what may re- 
 mind us of our own condition. Life is a 
 mighty river, flowing into the ocean of 
 eternity. Upon it we are all afloat — 
 each in the boat of his vocation. Like 
 these sailors, therefore, we ought to turn 
 our faces to the world that we are leav- 
 ing, and put our confidence in God, who 
 stands at the helm, that He will steer to 
 where happiness awaits us. We should 
 S6 
 
smile were these men to turn around and 
 pretend that they could not row unless 
 their eyes were fixed upon the place 
 to which their course is tending ; and not 
 less foolish would it be in us to dwell so 
 much upon the blessedness of the world 
 to come as to forget the humble and nar- 
 row path of duty which leads to it 
 throuorh the world that is.' " 
 
 In this illustration is gathered up the 
 teaching of this whole sermon. 
 
 The grand secret of getting on in the 
 spiritual life, is, always to be true to the 
 present hour — be its duties great or lit- 
 tle. Great duties are never to be waited 
 for. They are never even to be wished 
 for ; they are not needed for our disci- 
 pline. And, besides, they come to any of 
 us too seldom to have much to do with 
 our discipline. But the little duties that 
 crowd one's path at every step — it is 
 these that really give shape to character. 
 And they are giving shape to character 
 every day and every hour. Upon how 
 
 57 
 
we meet these duties all depends — all, 
 really, that is worth living for here in 
 time — all, certainly, that any one will 
 care for when time shall be no more. 
 
 58 
 
THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 By his own blood he entered once into the holy place, 
 having obtained eternal redemption for us. — Heb. ix. I2. 
 
 THIS is Passion-Sunday, or the Second 
 Sunday before Easter ; and the text 
 is taken from the Epistle for the day. 
 The subject that it introduces is what is, 
 comprehensively, called the Atonement. 
 
 This word " atonement " (important in 
 Christian theology as is the doctrine for 
 which it stands) is to be found but once 
 in what we call our authorized version. 
 It was earlier to be found in Tyn- 
 dale's translation — from which it seems 
 to have been borrowed by King James's 
 translators. By Tyndale himself it was 
 probably pronounced At-one-ment. Cer- 
 tainly At-one-ment was what Tyndale un- 
 derstood it to mean. In the Canterbury 
 Revision — the revision of 1881, which is 
 59 
 
supposed to represent the scholarship of 
 the age — " atonement " does not appear 
 even once, but instead of it, we have "rec- 
 onciliation." The two words are exactly 
 equivalent in meaning. 
 
 Reconciliation means, of course, peace 
 between parties (to use the legal term for 
 it) who were before at variance. In the 
 case of the reconciliation to be brought 
 about by Christ, there was, strictly, but 
 one party to be reconciled. God was not 
 at variance with man. It was only man 
 that was at variance with God. We are 
 nowhere told that Christ came to recon- 
 cile God to the world ; but we are told 
 distinctly that God was in Christ, recon- 
 ciling the world to Himself. But " recon- 
 ciliation" is only one word that, in this 
 connection, the New Testament makes 
 use of. We have also the word ''sacri- 
 ficed The heathen meaning of the word 
 " sacrifice " is something offered to appease 
 an offended deity. I do not deny that 
 this meaning found lodgment also in the 
 60 
 
popular mind of the Jewish people. It 
 was not unnatural that it should. But, in 
 the distinctively Christian use of the word, 
 no such meaning has any place. So far 
 was God from requiring the death of His 
 Son before He could love the world that, 
 as we are told expressly, He so loved 
 the world that He gave His Son to die 
 for it. God certainly did not need any 
 sacrifice from man to Him; but, just as 
 certainly, there was the greatest possible 
 need for the greatest possible sacrifice 
 from Him to man. 
 
 But, you may ask, does not the sacrifice 
 of Christ mean that Christ suffered for 
 us? Most certainly it does mean that. 
 Most certainly Christ did suffer for us ; 
 but that is not the same as saying that He 
 suffered instead of us. For the innocent 
 to bear voluntary suffering in order to re- 
 claim the guilty, is divine. To inflict 
 punishment, due the guilty, upon the inno- 
 cent — no matter how willing the innocent 
 might be to bear it — would be less than 
 6i 
 
human. Why was it, then, that Christ 
 suffered ? It was not, I have said already, 
 to appease the wrath of God. Was it to 
 show how much God loved man, and thus 
 to get man to love God in return ? It 
 would be safe, I think, to say that this 
 was one object of our Lord's sufferings — 
 an object of which we could hardly make 
 too much, unless we were to make it the 
 only object ; for it was not the only ob- 
 ject. There was another. To find out 
 what that other object was, we must, at 
 this point, drop the term ''sacrifice^' and 
 take up the term " redemption^ The idea 
 of redemption is that of a buying back, a 
 ransoming from bondage. As to who was 
 the Ransomer, there has never been any 
 question : it was Christ. As to who was 
 the ransomed, there has never been any 
 question : it was man. As to what was 
 the ransom-price, there has never been 
 any question : it was the whole sacrifice 
 of Christ — a sacrifice which began in the 
 manger, and was finished on the cross. 
 62 
 
But to whom the ransom-price was paid — 
 as to this point there has been question 
 almost from the beginning. Iranceus, in 
 the last years of the second century, took 
 up this question, and decided for himself 
 that the ransom-price was paid to the 
 devil. And this opinion of his was the 
 orthodox opinion in the Church down to 
 the time of Anselm — that is to say, a 
 period of nearly a thousand years. This 
 shows how much the authority of estab- 
 lished opinion in the Church may be 
 worth. It was succeeded by various 
 modifications, one after another, of the 
 theory that the ransom-price was paid to 
 Divine justice. It is quite the fashion 
 now, in certain quarters of the Church, to 
 make light of this theory. For my own 
 part, I do not see why. I do not see that 
 it is a thinor to be made liafht of. It seems 
 
 o o 
 
 to me, rather, an imperfect sort of effort 
 towards explaining one of theprofoundest 
 and most unquestionable of truths. The 
 chief ground of objection to it is the way 
 
 63 
 
of putting it. It is put in the language of 
 forensic theology. Translate it into the 
 language of modern thought, and it takes 
 on a different look. Translate it into the 
 language of modern thought, and Divine 
 justice means simply the Divine law of 
 man's nature. That man had transgressed 
 the law of his nature was simply a fact. 
 That the effect of transgressing the law 
 of his nature was to work in his nature an 
 inability to keep the law — this was simply 
 another fact. It was a fact which, in one 
 form of statement or another, all men ad- 
 mit. In the New Testament, this in- 
 ability is spoken of as " corruption." It was 
 to such corruption that man was in bond- 
 age. It was from such corruption that 
 man needed a deliverer. Had it been 
 possible for man to sin without corrupting 
 his nature, mere repentance for the sin 
 would doubtless have been enough. But 
 such was not the case. It could not pos- 
 sibly have been. Transgression in the 
 will wrought corruption in the nature by 
 64 
 
a rigid necessity. To heal himself of such 
 corruption, by effort of his own, was some- 
 thing that man himself could never do. 
 To suppose that he could — to suppose 
 that he could change his nature simply 
 throueh the enereies of that same nature 
 — would be to suppose that an effect could 
 be its own cause. Here, then, I say, was 
 a work that man could not do. It was a 
 work at the same time that God could not 
 do for man — that is, directly ; for, if He 
 could, it must have been by compulsion ; 
 and compulsion and moral freedom are 
 things utterly incompatible. Not all the 
 omnipotence that made the worlds could 
 have removed a single stain of the cor- 
 ruption of man's nature. It was a work 
 that could not have been done from with- 
 out man. It had to be done, if done at 
 all, from within him. It had to be done 
 through the operation of the human will. 
 That in this way it might be done, the 
 Son of God Himself became man. He 
 descended into the whole human condition. 
 
 5 
 
 65 
 
This is what we mean, or ought to mean, 
 when we say that He took our nature 
 upon Him. Our nature is but one. Our 
 different individuaHties are multitudinous ; 
 but our nature is but one. In each man 
 it is entire, but among all men it is not 
 divided. The Son of God, therefore, in 
 taking our nature upon Him, literally 
 took upon Him the nature of the whole 
 race. He took it upon Him without sin 
 in His way of taking it, but, at the same 
 time, with all its imperfections — with all 
 its sin-born infirmities still clinging to it. 
 Do you say. No ? Do you deny that there 
 ever was a time when the man Christ 
 Jesus was not perfect? Is it not written, 
 let me ask, that He increased in wisdom? 
 Was He perfect in wisdom before He 
 increased in it? Is it not written that He 
 increased in favor, and that, not only with 
 man, but with God ? Upon what was this 
 based — this increase in favor with God 
 and man ? Is it not written, again, that, 
 though He were a Son, yet had He to, 
 66 
 
learn obedience by the things which He 
 suffered? Why had He to learn obe- 
 dience? From first to last, indeed, He 
 was without sin. In this we must all 
 agree. But sinlessness, except in a purely 
 negative sense, is not perfection, and car- 
 ries with it no such implication as per- 
 fectness. The truth clearly is, that the 
 Son of God took our nature upon Him, 
 not as already perfect, but simply to make 
 it perfect — to undo, by suffering in our na- 
 ture, the whole evil work that sin, by indul- 
 gence, had inflicted upon it. " Through 
 sufferings," says an Apostle, "He was 
 made perfect," and " being made perfect," 
 says the same apostle, "He became the 
 author of eternal salvation unto all that 
 obey Him." 
 
 But how could this be ? How could 
 the making of our nature perfect in Christ 
 save us? If we think for ourselves, I 
 know of but one answer that we can (jive : 
 it did not save us. It certainly did not 
 save us. It could not save us. But there 
 67 
 
was one thing that it did. Inasmuch as 
 our whole nature was in Christ, our whole 
 nature was in Him redeemed — i.e., made 
 perfect. That He did ; but, apart from 
 His teaching, that was all. That was 
 His work. It was His whole work. Re- 
 demption does not mean salvation. Re- 
 demption affects simply the common 
 nature. But in every man there is, be- 
 sides the common nature, a particular 
 person ; and salvation is something that 
 affects the person. Our whole nature was 
 redeemed in Christ ; but it was redeemed 
 only as connected with His own single 
 person. In order that we might share per- 
 sonally in our Lord's redeeming work, 
 something more was needed. It was need- 
 ed that there should be a living union 
 between our individual persons and our 
 common nature as it was, and is, in Christ, 
 and such living union is possible only on 
 the condition that one and the same Spirit 
 dwell at one and the same time in the 
 Saviour and the sinner — so joining the 
 68 
 
two together, of the twain making one. 
 This is the whole sum of the Scripture 
 theology of the Atonement, as I am able 
 to understand it. 
 
 I have now explained, or tried to ex- 
 plain, four of the New Testament terms 
 that are used in connection with the 
 Atonement. But these do not exhaust 
 the list. 
 
 Another such term is ''propitiation " — a 
 term whose theological equivalent is '"satis- 
 faction." If any one should conclude from 
 what I have now been saying that I do not 
 believe in the Divine requirement of satis- 
 faction, he would, in that, be wrong, I 
 believe in it. But as to what the satis- 
 faction is that God requires — it is quite 
 possible that he and I might differ. He 
 mieht believe that when sin has been com- 
 mitted, God requires that His own holi- 
 ness be vindicated by the punishment of 
 the sinner — or, if not of the sinner, of 
 some one willing to take the place of the 
 sinner. I certainly believe nothing of the 
 69 
 
kind. I cannot believe that God is so 
 poorly off in character as to need any such 
 vindication. Sin means wanderinQ^ from 
 God ; and the satisfaction that God re- 
 quires is that we return to Him. This is 
 the only satisfaction that God requires. 
 The Divine love cannot be satisfied by 
 punishment. Punishment is, in no sense, 
 an alternative satisfaction to obedience. 
 Punishment simply proclaims that the 
 Divine law is not satisfied. It is simply a 
 consequence of sin, whose purpose is to 
 lead the sinner to make the true satisfaction 
 that the law demands — i.e., to set himself 
 right with God ; and Christ is said to be 
 our propitiation for the reason that it is 
 through Him only that this can be accom- 
 plished — for this reason, and no other. 
 
 There yet remains one term to be 
 noticed, and that is " blood" — the blood of 
 Christ. This term, in its various connec- 
 tions, is thought by many to make strongly 
 in favor of that vindicatory view of the 
 Atonement that I have been denouncing, 
 70 
 
I think that it makes, in fact, in just the 
 opposite direction. When the blood of 
 Christ is spoken of it is not, of course, 
 His literal, physical blood, that is meant. 
 The word is here used by way of symbol, 
 just as it is when we say that the blood of 
 the martyrs is the seed of the Church — 
 meaning their self-devotion, their con- 
 stancy even unto death. The blood of 
 Christ means His whole life and death of 
 suffering. But what is it that the blood 
 of Christ is said to accomplish? The 
 vindication of God's holiness? Nothing 
 of the kind. Its whole work is spoken 
 of as bearing upon the human conscience. 
 The sacrifices under the law could not — 
 so an Apostle tells us — make him that 
 did the service perfect as pertaining to the 
 conscience, but the blood of Christ— the 
 same writer goes on to say — purges 
 the conscience from dead works to serve 
 the living God. And the reason is plain. 
 It was by the blood of Christ — it was by 
 His suffering life and death— that our 
 
 71 
 
nature was redeemed — i. e., was made per- 
 fect. It was therefore by the blood of 
 Christ that a way was laid open for sin- 
 ful men to get away from themselves — 
 to be able to disown themselves — to be 
 morally as free from their whole past as if 
 they had literally died and literally been 
 born again. 
 
 This completes our review of the Atone- 
 ment. The Atonement, let me add, is a 
 work intended to effect, not any change in 
 God, but a great and blessed change in 
 men. This change the Atonement does 
 not necessarily make for any man ; but for 
 every man it makes it possible. It is a 
 change that can be actual only on the 
 condition that we ourselves consent to it. 
 The reconciliation of man to God cannot 
 be brought about by force. We may, if 
 we will, resist the Spirit's drawings. This 
 is our responsibility. It is a responsibility 
 affixed to the fact of our being men. It 
 is, beyond all comparison, the greatest 
 and the most awful responsibility of life. 
 72 
 
We may, if we will, resist the Spirit's 
 drawings. And if we do — disownincr thus 
 all personal interest in the redemption 
 wrought in and for our nature — are we 
 ready to face the consequences ? 
 
 Remember, the dream of life will soon 
 be over, and the time for answering this 
 question, to any purpose, will not be then : 
 that time is 7iow. 
 
 73 
 
LOVE 
 
 He that loveth not, knoweth not God : for God is Love. — 
 I St. John iv. 8 
 
 f REMEMBER a friend's once putting 
 to me this question : " What do you 
 mean when you speak of loving God ? " 
 He went on to say that he had some time 
 before put the same question to another 
 — one who had thought much about such 
 matters — and that the answer he had re- 
 ceived was, in substance, this : Love to 
 God is something of which man cannot 
 be conscious — something which we can 
 know, not by feeling it in our hearts, as 
 man feels love to man, but only by the 
 conformity which we observe in our wills 
 to the will of God. I at once dissented 
 from this view, giving my reasons why. 
 I did, and do, dissent from it because, for 
 one thing, it is unscriptural. Love, ac- 
 
 74 
 
cording to the view in question, would be 
 reduced to mere obedience ; whereas the 
 Scriptures distinguish broadly between 
 the two — making obedience to spring 
 from love as its motive, a motive whose 
 presence in the soul is not gathered by 
 way of inference, but felt — felt as a con- 
 straining power — felt as a Heavenward 
 drawing — felt as longing and desire. 
 
 I did, and do, dissent from that view 
 because, for another thing, it is contrary 
 to the whole tenor of Christian experi- 
 ence. There is a something which in 
 every age has filled the hearts of men 
 with a strange, unearthly joy, lifting them 
 above the temptations and disquietudes 
 of the world, transforming sorrow and 
 privation and pain into ministries of bless- 
 ing. There is a something possible to 
 the human heart so strong that it has 
 hushed the cries of agony and wakened 
 songs of peace amid the flames of martyr- 
 dom. There is a something which with 
 thousands, I believe, to-day, is felt to be 
 75 
 
better than life — something for which men 
 in abject poverty would not accept the 
 riches of the world, which sufferers, 
 racked with pain, would not exchange for 
 ease, which mourners in their grief would 
 not give up to call their loved ones from 
 the grave. This something, those who 
 have felt it have believed to be the love 
 of God. They have believed this with 
 perfect confidence. Has all this uniform 
 experience been self-deception ? Why 
 should it so be thought of? " Why," says 
 one, " simply because I cannot conceive 
 how it is possible to love God — to love 
 Him, I mean, in the same conscious way 
 that we love parents or children or friends. 
 I cannot conceive how it is possible to 
 love one whom we have never seen, and 
 of whom we cannot even form the faint- 
 est conception. The Bible tells us that 
 God is Love, and Justice, and Holiness, 
 and Truth ; but these are only attributes. 
 Try to put them together, and construct 
 to your imagination a person out of them 
 76 
 
— a person without parts or passions, with- 
 out form or dimensions, without location 
 in space or beginning or ending in time 
 — you cannot do it. All that you know 
 about God is a catalogue of abstractions ; 
 to love it with a genuine heart-love, with 
 a love that is warm and thrilling — is just 
 impossible." All this some one may say. 
 I concede the difficulty thus presented ; I 
 concede it in its fullest force. I concede 
 that unless we can realize that God is a 
 person, as truly a person as any one of us, 
 — a person, too, with whom we ourselves 
 are directly dealing, — we cannot love 
 Him. But how is this point to be 
 achieved ? By some force of the intel- 
 lect? I have just admitted that to be 
 impossible. We may, indeed, reason that 
 the universe exhibits marks of design, and 
 that design implies thought, and thought 
 a person thinking. But this process, after 
 all, gives us not the living intuition of 
 God's person ; it simply gives us ground 
 in logic for believing that God is personal. 
 
 77 
 
For a better process, I must appeal to 
 your own experience, an appeal without 
 which, in such an argument as this, all the 
 libraries of theology count for nothing. 
 You remember the time when the con- 
 sciousness of sin came to your soul like 
 an avenging spectre. It may have been 
 some one sin of peculiar enormity, or it 
 may have been your whole spiritual con- 
 dition ; but in view of it you felt wretched, 
 undone — every refuge of lies cut off — the 
 pitiless storms of self-accusation beating 
 you down to the dust. In that hour your 
 sense of responsibility was something ter- 
 rible. To whom or to what did you feel 
 responsible ? To society ? To your fel- 
 low - man ? To blind, impersonal law ? 
 To a collection of moral abstractions ? It 
 could be no abstraction. You could, in- 
 deed, not give it shape or feature. You 
 could no more then than you can now 
 bring God within the bounds of your con- 
 ception. You could no more then than 
 you can now construct God's person out 
 
 78 
 
of His attributes. No attempt of the 
 kind was thought of. No attempt of the 
 kind was needed. The case was too clear 
 for speculation. There you stood face to , 
 face with God — and you knew it. God V 
 was as real to your convictions as the 
 judge upon the bench is real to the crim- 
 inal at the bar. It is always so. Speak- 
 ing in general, the practical sense of 
 God's personality is given us in whatever 
 powerfully appeals to the moral nature, in 
 whatever rouses the sense of moral re- 
 sponsibility. Speaking in particular, it is 
 given us in the deep-felt conviction of sin. 
 Such a conviction is, as a rule, the first step 
 of a sinful man towards loving God. But 
 it is only one step. The criminal does 
 not love the judge simply because he feels 
 he is in the judge's power. He may fear 
 him, he may tremble at his very look, but 
 that is not to love him. A guilty soul's 
 mere sense of responsibility to God would 
 be as likely to lead that soul to despair of 
 God's mercy as to rely upon His love. 
 79 
 
Another step, then, is needful. The next 
 thing to reahze, after God's personaHty, 
 is His nature — or, as we should say. His 
 disposition. Is God really loving ? Is 
 He really merciful ? Or is He only just ? 
 Whither shall we turn for answer ? Do 
 you say, " To Providence ? " But what 
 then do you make of the crimes with 
 which almost every page of history is 
 stained? — the oppressions of sceptred 
 might, the tortures of persecution, the 
 butcheries of war ? Do you say, " To 
 nature ? " But what then do you make 
 of the earthquakes, the tornadoes, the 
 blight of harvests, the pestilences pouring 
 death into the lungs of helpless millions ? 
 The truth is, both nature and Providence 
 are full of seeming contradictions. In the 
 light of neither can the question concern- 
 ing the nature — the disposition — of God 
 be settled. It can be settled only in the 
 light of that great factor which alone sup- 
 plies the key to the drama of human his- 
 tory — that supreme, that central fact, 
 80 
 
around which all revelation gathers — the 
 Cross of the Redeemer. This is, to those 
 who accept it, demonstration perfect — 
 and there is no other — of God's love to 
 man. I do not, indeed, believe, and the 
 Bible does not teach, that the cross was 
 in any sense a means of getting God to 
 love the world. I do not believe, and the 
 Bible does not teach, that Christ, by His 
 death, had to satisfy the wrath of God 
 aeainst the world, before He could be 
 brought to love it. To speak in that way 
 is to put Christianity down on a level 
 with the worst forms of paganism. Christ 
 died, not to get God to love the world, 
 but just because God did love the world, 
 and had loved it from all eternity. Let 
 Mr. Ingersoll and the rest misrepresent 
 and caricature Christianity as they may, 
 this is the simple Gospel — that, " God so 
 loved the world that He gave His only 
 begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
 in Him should not perish but have ever- 
 lasting life." The cross is not the cause 
 
 6 
 
 8i 
 
 / 
 
of God's love ; but it is the effect of it, 
 and the measure of it, and the revelation 
 of it. And wherever in the Hght of the 
 cross God's love is seen that love is felt. 
 Let me repeat this truth and emphasize 
 it. Wherever in the light of the cross 
 God's love is seen — wherever it is believed, 
 accepted, relied upon — it is felt. Faith in 
 it is the channel for the communication of 
 it. It is love apprehended by us that be- 
 gets love within us. "We love Him be- 
 cause He first loved us." It is only in 
 this way that men can love God. It is 
 only in this way that men can know God. 
 It was Richter, I believe, who said that 
 " to love a man we must know him, but to 
 know God we must love Him." Whoever 
 said it, the saying is profoundly true. " It 
 is with the heart that man believes unto 
 rigrhteousness." It is not said that the 
 heart believes, but that with the heart the 
 man believes. It is, of course, the head 
 that believes, but it believes through the 
 heart. Certainly I would not make little 
 82 
 
of reason in religfion. I would make much 
 
 & 
 
 of reason in religion. There is no religion 
 worthy of the name witJiout reaso7i. But 
 I say that for the man of science to expect 
 to find God in the material creation with 
 nothing but intellectual analysis is just as 
 absurd as it would be in an anatomist to 
 expect to find the soul of a man with 
 nothing but a dissecting knife. It is only 
 the heart that ever really finds God ; and 
 always in the heart that does find Him 
 there is love for Him. I do not mean 
 that man's love for God is simply a nat- 
 ural affection lifted up to a supernatural 
 object. It is not. It is itself supernat- 
 ural. It is not something drawn out of 
 us ; it is something put into us. When a 
 man gives himself up to God, God takes 
 possession of that man, His Spirit enters 
 into the man, and, entering, sheds abroad 
 within him God's own love — not simply 
 awakens human love, but infuses divine 
 love ; and this love, which flows from 
 God to man, is the self-same love which 
 
 83 
 
flows back from man to God. I am not 
 using the language of figure. I am using 
 the language of spiritual science. The 
 characteristic of all human affection is par- 
 ticularity. The characteristic of Divine 
 affection is universality. I mean that 
 human affection chooses among objects, 
 while Divine affection is all-embracing. 
 You can love one man and hate another ; 
 but you cannot love God and hate at all. 
 The reason is, than you can love God only 
 with His own love, and that love is full, 
 radiant, impartial. Like the light it falls 
 everywhere. It flows out beyond the 
 circle of personal friendships. It flows 
 out beyond the circle of personal acquaint- 
 ance. It extends to the remotest bound- 
 aries of the peopled earth. It seeks to 
 evanofelize the heathen. It seeks to re- 
 claim the guilty. It seeks to comfort the 
 sorrowine. It leads men even to seek to 
 do good to their enemies — to pray for 
 those who despitefully use them, and to 
 bless those who persecute them. Is this 
 84 
 
a natural affection ? I tell you no. It is 
 supernatural. It is not of ourselves ; it is 
 the crift of God. But it is a gift which all 
 may have. It is a gift which no one can 
 afford to be without. Selfishness is in its 
 very nature destructive. Love is in its 
 very nature saving. It is the only thing 
 that can save. Hereafter, it is the only 
 thing that can save a man from himself; 
 and to be saved from self is just the salva- 
 tion that the Gospel offers— to be saved 
 from a state of things within, and not 
 from any mere surroundings. This salva- 
 tion, the love of God, whenever felt, must 
 of necessity effect, and there is nothing 
 else that can effect it either in this world 
 or in any other. 
 
 85 
 
OUR LORD'S DIVINE HUMAN- 
 ITY 
 
 The second Man is the Lord from Heaven. — i Cor., xv, 47. 
 
 I DESIRE to have the word man, in 
 this text, regarded as emphatic. Our 
 first mistake, it seems to me, in reasoning 
 about the person of our Lord is that we 
 assume an essential diversity between the 
 Divine and the Human. 
 
 Mr. Liddon, in his Bampton Lectures 
 on " Our Lord's Divinity " says : " Christ's 
 manhood is not of itself an individual be- 
 ing ; it is not a seat and centre of person- 
 ality. . . . It is a vesture which He 
 has folded about His person ; it is an in- 
 strument through which He places Him- 
 self in contact with man and whereby He 
 acts upon humanity. ... In saying 
 that Christ took our humanity upon Him, 
 86 
 
we Imply that His person existed before, 
 and that the manhood which He assumed 
 was itself impersonal." 
 
 I do not quote these words of Mr. Lid- 
 don with any view to controvert them — 
 very far from it. I quote them simply to 
 say this : that, without something more — 
 something which Mr. Liddon does not 
 state — the fact of our Lord's perfect man- 
 hood does not seem to me to be estab- 
 lished. Impersonal humanity, joined to 
 an alien person, in association with an 
 alien nature, does not seem to me to make 
 a perfect man. My own position, let me 
 say at once, is that original, substantive, 
 humanity subsists in God ; that in God 
 and man we behold not two alien and ex- 
 clusive natures, but that the Human, in 
 its ideal condition, is included within the 
 Divine. Certainly, I think this position 
 must be conceded true, if truth be con- 
 ceded to the position of Mr. Liddon 
 — which is simply the position of the 
 Church. The position of Mr. Liddon 
 
 87 
 
and the Church is this : that the words 
 Human Nature are not simply a con- 
 venient expression for the many points in 
 which individual men happen to resemble 
 one another, but that they stand for a 
 real something to which all such resem- 
 blances are due — that there is not a sepa- 
 rate human nature belonging to each 
 individual of the race, but that all the 
 individuals have one and the same human 
 nature in common. This nature, the 
 position is, is not parcelled out — one part 
 falling to one person, and another part 
 to another — but each person inherits the 
 whole. In each man it is individualized, 
 but among all men it is not divided. 
 
 Now, I say, if this teaching be — as I, 
 for one, believe it to be — true ; if it be 
 true that human nature is not a mere 
 generalization, but a generic entity — a 
 something which individual men do not 
 constitute, but which, on the contrary, 
 constitutes them individual men — conform- 
 ing them to the distinctively human type ; 
 
if it be true that human nature is a some- 
 thins: which can be conceived of — as Mr. 
 Liddon, in the words just quoted, does 
 conceive of it — as subsisting apart from 
 any human person, then I say that human 
 nature, since its necessary subsistence is 
 not in men, and must be somewhere, and 
 since it cannot be in finite beings other 
 than men, must subsist essentially in God. 
 And just this I understand to be the clear 
 teaching of Scripture. The teaching of 
 Scripture is, that the image of God is in 
 man. And this we say ; but we shrink 
 from saying what, nevertheless, we ought 
 in consistency to say — that if the image 
 of God is in man, the original, or sub- 
 stance, of man must be in God. We ex- 
 plain the creation of man in God's image 
 as meaning that God took some imper- 
 sonal substance and fashioned it into a 
 being resembling Himself. This will not 
 do. Among thinking men all such car- 
 penter-theories of creation may be said to 
 have died out. Man is not a substance. 
 89 
 
He cannot be. There can be but one 
 substance in existence, and that is God. 
 The Infinite cannot be added to. Man 
 is but a finite image of God. In trying 
 to conceive that man, as a mere image, 
 can be anything real, anything more than 
 such stuff as dreams are made of — we find 
 ourselves perplexed. It is natural that 
 we should. It is our own infirmity. Here 
 in this world we never see the image of 
 anything but what is material. When you 
 stand before a mirror, you see your own 
 image as a copy not only of your appear- 
 ance but of your motions. It moves 
 when you move, and as you move. It 
 does whatever you do, and it does nothing 
 else. This results from the fact that it is 
 simply an image of the body, and the body 
 is only matter. It has no intelligence or 
 will of its own. A material image can 
 copy no more than belongs to matter, 
 while a spiritual image can copy no less 
 than belongs to spirit. It must, therefore, 
 be living, intelligent, volitional. It must 
 90 
 
have a personality of its own. If the 
 image of God were not capable of think- 
 ing for itself, and of willing itself, it would, 
 in so far, be no image of God at all. 
 
 Do you ask how, by what process such 
 an image could proceed from God — how 
 it could get personal otherness from Him ? 
 You are asking about the whole mys- 
 tery of life. I do not know. I know that 
 a substantial something cannot be created 
 out of nothing. I know that we are not 
 God. I know that we are not separate 
 parts of God. I am shut in, therefore, to 
 the conclusion that our constitutional rela- 
 tion to God can be expressed only, as the 
 Bible does express it, by this word image. 
 It is certain we have not the ground of 
 our being within ourselves. The truth, 
 thus stated, no one will question. And 
 yet the truth thus stated is simply the 
 truth that we have not within ourselves 
 the substance of our being. The sub- 
 stance of our being — the original and 
 prototype of our humanity — is in God. 
 
 91 
 
It is in the Logos, or Word, or Son 
 of God, of Whom it is revealed that 
 not only through Him were all things 
 made that have been made, but in Him 
 all things consist ; He is the Mediator 
 not in Redemption only, but in Creation. 
 He is the Unity of the Infinite and the 
 Finite. In Him Divinity and Humanity 
 stand related in a way which we may 
 think of as the relation to one another of 
 the two poles of a magnet. In Christ, 
 says a profound thinker, "the transition 
 from one nature to another is not over any 
 chasm or even line of division, but clear 
 and continuous, as the transition from 
 one pole of the magnet to the other. . . . 
 He is thus the way to the Father, as a 
 mountain path is the way to the mountain 
 top. And as the eye of a traveller at the 
 foot may slowly travel up the majestic 
 slope till it is lost in the clouds, so the 
 mind may contemplate Christ from His 
 lowliest and most human traits, where He 
 is one with the humblest of ourselves, up 
 92 
 
beyond the highest reach and limit of hu- 
 manity — ' far above all principalities and 
 powers, and every name that is named ' — 
 to that dazzling summit of glory where 
 He is one with God." 
 
 The Nicene Creed declares, I know 
 that the Eternal Son "was made man." 
 I accept the statement in what I take to 
 be its intended sense. But the expression 
 itself is not in Scripture. The Scripture 
 expressions are that "the Word was made 
 flesh " — that the Son was " manifest in 
 the flesh " — that because the children were 
 partakers of the flesh and blood, He also 
 Himself likewise took part in the same. 
 There is nothing to imply that the Word, 
 in becoming incarnate, became other in 
 essential nature than He had been. It is 
 simply taught that He became other in 
 condition — that He laid aside, as St. Paul 
 declares, the form of God, and took upon 
 Him the form of a servant. I do not say, 
 with the ancient Apollinarians, that He 
 simply took upon Him a fleshly body and 
 
 92, 
 
an animal soul ; I say that He took upon 
 Him our whole condition, that He de- 
 scended into all the limitations of our 
 nature — body, soul, and spirit. 
 
 The view thus stated does not attempt 
 to modify any of the conclusions of the 
 Church as regards the person of our 
 Lord. It simply attempts to make the 
 foundation upon which those conclusions 
 rest more scriptural, more rational, more 
 stable. It exposes no point of the faith 
 to attack — so far from that, it protects 
 the faith just at the point where attacks 
 have been most frequent. It meets the 
 whole Socinian error by first conceding 
 the demand out of which the Socinian 
 error grew — the demand, I mean, for 
 unity in the person of our Lord. Socin- 
 ianism could find no ground of unity for 
 the person of our Lord except in His 
 Humanity to the exclusion of His Divin- 
 ity. Our present thought finds such 
 ground of unity in the Divinity of our 
 Lord as including the type and substance 
 
 94 
 
of His Humanity. It sees in Christ not 
 the conjunction of two aHen natures, but 
 the subHme reaHty which He Himself 
 disclosed in declaring, " I am the root 
 and the offspring of David," — not the off- 
 spring only, but the root. He was the 
 root of David, just because He is the root 
 of every man. He is the root of our 
 whole Humanity. He is the ideal man. 
 We are apt to think of Him as an ex- 
 ceptional man — exceptional, I mean, to 
 the type of man. We are apt to think 
 this of Him because of His Divinity. We 
 are mistaken. Between Divinity and Hu- 
 manity there is no opposition. Christ 
 was perfectly human for the very reason 
 that He was perfectly Divine. He is the 
 typical man. It is we who are excep- 
 tional. He is the normal man. It is we 
 who are abnormal. In Him — in His 
 character, in His life — is the pattern 
 of all true manliness ; and just in the de- 
 gree that we depart from that pattern, 
 just in the degree that we turn from 
 
 95 
 
truthfulness, and purity, and love, and 
 gentleness, and devotion to the Father — 
 just in that degree we become unmanly. 
 
 Christ, again, being the ideal man, is, 
 of course, the complete man. It is sel- 
 dom, that, among our fellows, we meet 
 with more than an approach to roundness 
 of character. We develop — where we 
 develop at all in the right direction — 
 without much regard to symmetry. We 
 find one manly trait prominent in one 
 man, and another in another man. In 
 Christ, all manly traits were perfect, and 
 in perfect balance. All manly traits, I 
 say — but I use the word in its broad, 
 generic sense ; for whereas among mere 
 men humanity is divided Into male and 
 female, neither man alone nor woman 
 alone representing it in its totality, in 
 Christ these two types of character were 
 united. The distinction of sex is the dis- 
 tinction of the entire nature. It runs 
 through the whole spiritual constitution ; 
 and in this sense Christ was as truly 
 96 
 
womanly as He was manly. Christ, again, 
 is the universal man. He showed no 
 trace of his age or circumstances. He 
 was born under the reign of Augustus 
 Caesar; but for anything in His life or 
 teachinofs He mig^ht as well have been 
 born in the nineteenth century. He was 
 born a Jew ; but for anything Jewish in 
 His character, He might as well have 
 been born on the planet Uranus. He 
 was born in poverty and obscurity ; but 
 there was nothino- in Him to sug-orest a 
 question as to rank or condition. He 
 was superior to His whole environment. 
 But He is the universal man in a sense 
 far deeper than this. He is the ideal 
 man in every actual man — the universal 
 man in every particular man. St. Paul 
 teaches that every man is made up of two 
 very different men — the natural man and 
 the spiritual man. The natural man is 
 that which constitutes our separate in- 
 dividuality. The spiritual man is the uni- 
 versal man within us — t. e., the humanity 
 
 7 
 
 97 
 
of Christ. Did it ever occur to us what 
 precisely is meant by loving our neigh- 
 bor — that is, all other men — as ourselves? 
 To love individuals, as individuals, we 
 must know them. In this sense we could 
 love only a very few. In this sense we 
 could n't possibly love people in China 
 or Central Africa. The author of Ecce 
 Homo says that Christ begot in men the 
 sentiment which he calls the Eiztkusiasm 
 of humanity. " Enthusiasm of humanity " 
 is an expression meaning not love for 
 human individualities, but love for the 
 universal man in every particular man. 
 Love for Christ means love for the whole 
 race in which Christ insphered Himself. 
 It is the only love that is, or can be, uni- 
 versal. Not until Christ came into the 
 world did the world so much as dream of 
 a universal brotherhood ; and not until 
 the world receives Christ into its heart 
 will its dream of brotherhood be realized. 
 Christ, finally, being the universal man, 
 is also the representative man. He is 
 
the second man. He stands to the whole 
 race in the relation of Head — to whom 
 we, by the operation of His Spirit, may be 
 personally joined, and so through Him 
 be saved. He is the one Hope for man. 
 There is no other. There never has 
 been. He is the Light of men. He is 
 the Light of all men ; and everywhere and 
 always, men who have followed the light 
 as they have seen it have consciously or 
 unconsciously been led to Him. Through 
 Him, the only Door between earth and 
 heaven, all the millions of the saved have 
 passed ; and the solemn words, written as if 
 to stand over the portals of the world of 
 life, stand true for us and will stand true 
 for the last redeemed child of man — " I 
 am the Way, the Truth, and the Life : no 
 man cometh unto the Father but by Me." 
 
 99 
 
THE RESURRECTION 
 
 Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the 
 bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and 
 the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a 
 God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him. — St. 
 Luke XX. 37, 38, 
 
 J\ yi Y purpose is to preach three sermons 
 ■^ " ^ this Eastertide in a series — the 
 first, on the Resurrection, the second, on 
 the Resurrection-body, and the third, on 
 the Resurrection-world : and I hope that 
 no one will undertake to pass judgment 
 on any part of my teaching until the 
 whole shall have been placed before you. 
 My subject this morning is the Resur- 
 rection. Let me say at the outset that in 
 the New Testament this v^ordresurreciion 
 means one thing, and one thing only. It 
 means simply what is commonly meant 
 by immortality. It means simply the 
 survival of a man's personality in the 
 
next world after his death in this. It is 
 something that is predicated only of per- 
 sons — never of their bodies. Certainly 
 the New Testament teaches that men are 
 to have bodies in the resurrection, and 
 that in the truest sense they are to have 
 the same bodies then as they have now. 
 It teaches this as a fact of the resurrection 
 life ; but it does not teach that this fact is 
 what the resurrection means. In the New 
 Testament, I repeat, the word resicrrection 
 means but one thing — personal survival 
 after death. And in saying this, let me 
 add, I am not saying something that was 
 never said before. I find it said in the 
 writings of great scholars and divines as 
 well of the past as of the present, as well 
 within our own communion as without. If 
 I seem to make but little of such authority, 
 it is for the simple reason that no author- 
 ity of the kind is needed. The Divine 
 Authority is enough. 
 
 There are three places in the New Test- 
 ament where the resurrection is spoken of 
 
in the literal, as distinguished from the 
 apocalyptic style. In the celebrated fif- 
 teenth chapter of the first Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, St. Paul first argues for the 
 resurrection — for the resurrection simply ; 
 and in the entire course of this argfument 
 there is not one word of allusion to the 
 body. The substitution of re-aniTnation of 
 the dead body for resurrection would turn 
 the reasoning into the sheerest absurdity. 
 The whole point of the argument is in the 
 words, "As in Adam all die, even so in 
 Christ shall we all be made alive''' It is 
 not until the Apostle has said all that he 
 has to say touching the question of the 
 resurrection that he takes up the further 
 question of the resurrection-body — begin- 
 ning with the words, " But some man will 
 say. How are the dead raised up, and with 
 what body do they come ? " 
 
 In the other two places of Scripture to be 
 mentioned in this connection we have the 
 recorded words from our Lord Himself. 
 In one of them we have His interview 
 
with Mary weeping for the death of 
 Lazarus. ** Thy brother," He said, " shall 
 rise again." " I know," she answered, 
 " that he shall rise again in the resurrec- 
 tion at the last day." Then came the 
 solemn assurance that the resurrection 
 consists, not in the re-animation of dead 
 matter at some future and far-off day, but 
 solely in the unbroken continuity of life 
 beyond the grave. " I am the Resurrection 
 and the Life . . . Whosoever liveth 
 and believeth in Me shall never die." Not 
 one word about the body, but simply 
 "shall never die." Of course, our Lord, 
 in making resurrection to depend upon 
 belief in Himself, distinguishes between 
 resurrection and resurrection, just as, in 
 saying, " It is not all of life to live," we 
 ourselves distinofuish between life and life. 
 But this does not, in the least, affect the 
 point that I am making. /The point that I 
 am making is simply this, mat, in the teach- 
 ing of our Lord, the idea of resurrection 
 concerns simply the survival of persons, 
 103 
 
and is wholly distinct from the idea of 
 body. 
 
 In the place remaining to be spoken 
 of, this point is brought out with such 
 perfect clearness that I see not how any 
 one can doubt regarding it. Our Lord 
 was speaking to the Sadducees. The 
 Sadducees did not believe in any resur- 
 rection ; but they did believe in the writ- 
 ings of Moses. It was from the writings 
 of Moses, accordingly, that our Lord drew 
 His argument. He laid His finger on a 
 passage whose genuineness they could not 
 dispute, and it flashed yvith a meaning 
 they had not suspected. / ** Now that the 
 dead are raised," He said, "even Moses 
 showed at the bush, when he calleth the 
 Lord the God of Abraham, and the God 
 of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For He 
 is not a God of the dead, but of the 
 ^living." jHis argument was this — that 
 Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob had, long 
 before the time of Moses, passed out of 
 this world ; and that if they had, at the 
 104 
 
\ 
 
 same time, passed out of existence, they 
 
 were nothing, and nothing could have no 
 
 God. If the Lord was their God still, 
 
 then the personal relation between God i i i 
 
 and them was still in force, and they, l-' **". /Ia« 
 
 therefore, must have survived death ; and . u-A^^^ 
 
 in the fact of their surviving death was 
 
 seen the fact of their resurrection. If 
 
 they were still alive in some other world, 
 
 they would have risen into that world 
 
 from this. 
 
 Our Lord was not using the argument 
 that would be the most convincing to all 
 men. But He was using the argument 
 that would be the most likely to convince 
 the Sadducees. With our modern scien- 
 tists, and with those whom our modern 
 scientists have made sceptical, of course 
 the writings of Moses go for nothing. 
 But is there no arg-ument whose force 
 even these men must own ? — no argument 
 to justify, even to the coldest intellect, 
 the grand conclusion of the text, that 
 " unto God, the dead all live" ? 
 
 105 
 
The question of the continued exist- 
 ence of the human soul hereafter depends 
 first and mainly upon what answer is 
 given to the question, Is there such a 
 thing as a human soul existing here ? I 
 appeal, for the answer to this question, to 
 the authority of consciousness. We know 
 that there is a world around us — but 
 how ? By demonstration of reason ? So 
 far from that, philosophy concedes, and 
 long ago conceded, that no rational de- 
 monstration of this fact is within the lim- 
 its of possibility. We know that there is 
 a world around us by what we feel with- 
 in the sphere of our own consciousness. 
 And in precisely the same way we know 
 that there is a soul within us. We are 
 conscious of personality. We are con- 
 scious of will. We are conscious of moral 
 obligation. We are just as distinctly con- 
 scious of these facts of our own interior 
 experience as we are conscious of a feel- 
 ing- of resistance when we strike a rock. 
 If we set aside these facts of conscious- 
 io6 
 
ness, we set aside the only ground on 
 which we can beUeve in anything— even 
 in the fact of our own existence. 
 
 Now what is the argument on the other 
 side? On what ground is it urged that 
 mind is but a mode of physical energy? 
 —that reason, and will, and conscience, 
 and love are but secretions of the brain ? 
 The argument is this— absolutely this, 
 and nothing more : that mental activity is 
 dependent upon physical condition. We 
 admit the fact. It has been admitted al- 
 ways. The brain is the organ through 
 which, in this world, the mind is mani- 
 fested. When the brain is disordered, it 
 executes the mandates of the mind con- 
 fusedly. When the brain is dead, it can 
 execute no mandate of the mind at all. 
 But to argue from this that it is the brain 
 that thinks, and sorrows, and fears, and 
 loves is not one whit less absurd than 
 to argue from the fact that when the 
 strings of a violin are loosened or broken 
 the Tnstrument can give forth no sound, 
 107 
 
therefore a violin in good condition really 
 makes its own music — the necessity of a 
 violin-player being a popular but baseless 
 assumption. It is one of the prevalent 
 impressions just now that recent science 
 has furnished materialism with arguments 
 of a very formidable kind. In fact, one 
 of the leading dailies in this city devoted 
 an editorial, some time ago, to saying this 
 very thing. It more than intimated that 
 Christian scholars are in no state of pre- 
 paredness to defend the position in which 
 they find themselves. And just here, let 
 me say, is the great difficulty with which, 
 in contending for the faith, we find our- 
 selves confronted. It is not the writings 
 of really thoughtful men. It is the vague 
 and ignorant impressions of those writings 
 that are imposed upon the public mind 
 through the columns of the newspaper 
 press. As a matter of fact, science has 
 furnished materialism with no arguments 
 at all. I do not ask you to take my own 
 authority for the truth of this statement. 
 io8 
 
I shall quote two of the foremost thinkers 
 of the day, both swinging clear of all au- 
 thority — Bible, Church, and Creed, — the 
 one an Englishman, the other an Ameri- 
 can. The Englishman is Professor Tyn- 
 dall. " When you have proved every fact 
 that you claim to prove," he writes to the 
 Materialists, "you have proved nothing. 
 You leave the connection between the 
 mind and the body exactly where it was 
 before." The American is Mr. John 
 Fiske, of Harvard University. " I be- 
 lieve," this author says, "that modern 
 scientific philosophy, as represented by 
 Spencer and Huxley, not only affords no 
 support to materialism, but condemns it 
 utterly, and drives it off the field alto- 
 gether. I believe that it is even clearer 
 to-day than it was in the time of Des- 
 cartes, that no possible analytic leger- 
 demain can ever translate thought into 
 extension, or extension into thought. The 
 antithesis is of God's own making, and 
 no wit of man can undo it." This is as 
 109 
 
reasonable as it Is candid. Science — that 
 is, the science of nature — cannot touch the 
 question of the soul. But the testimony of 
 consciousness can, and it does. Conscious- 
 ness, in revealing the soul as personal, as 
 volitional, as moral, declares it to be, not 
 the product of the body, but an entity 
 different from the body. This entity now 
 exists. What reason we have for sup- 
 posing that when separated from the body 
 it ceases to exist, I challenge any man to 
 tell me. No man can tell me. There is 
 no reason for it. There is not the faintest 
 shadow of a reason for it. The fact that 
 in death the body is unconscious furnishes 
 no ground for even a suspicion that the 
 soul becomes unconscious with it. The 
 body ought to be unconscious in death. 
 It is precisely what the believer in the 
 survival of the soul ought to expect. The 
 body is but matter ; and matter, into what- 
 ever forms it may be organized, can never 
 become a conscious thing. To suppose 
 that it could, would be to suppose the 
 
utter annihilation of its nature, and the 
 substitution of something else in place of 
 it. (^he body is not conscious even in 
 life. It is only the soul that is ever con- 
 scious ; and when the soul leaves the 
 body it is like the breaking up of a tem- 
 porary partnership in which, according to 
 agreement, each party takes out what is 
 properly belonging to him. In this part- 
 nership in man, the outer body belongs to 
 the natural world, and the natural world 
 would take back the outer body. The 
 conscious soul belongs to the spiritual 
 world ; and the spiritual world takes back j. 
 the conscious soul. This is all. This, I 
 believe, is the only view of the facts in 
 the case that reason, left to itself, would 
 think of takincT. But this is a matter in 
 
 o 
 
 which, unhappily, reason is not always left 
 to itself. It is, perhaps, seldom, if ever, left 
 to itself. The thing that seems to furnish 
 the strongest argument, with most men, 
 against our survival of death, has nothing 
 at all to do with reason ; it is simply an 
 
appeal to sense. It is the spectacle of 
 death, as its effects are seen in the body. 
 The body is all of man that we ever 
 really see ; and hence it is that, in spite of 
 our philosophy, we come, without being 
 aware of it, to think of the body as the 
 man ; and when we see the body bereft 
 of every sign of consciousness, we can 
 hardly persuade ourselves that it is other- 
 wise as regards the soul. This comes 
 from the infirmity of mental habit. 
 
 But the infirmity of mental habit is 
 seconded in this same direction by infir- 
 mity of another kind. It is seconded by 
 moral infirmity. A downright practical 
 conviction of the immortal life cannot 
 come through the understanding only. 
 Within the sphere of the supersensible, a 
 man can really believe only according 
 to what the man himself is. He can- 
 not really believe in anything the truth of 
 which finds no correspondence within him- 
 self. Evidence in such a case may silence, 
 but it cannot satisfy. " A true and satis- 
 
 112 
 
fying sense of immortality," says a great 
 divine, " cannot be taken at second hand. 
 We cannot read it in the pages of a 
 book, whether of nature or of inspiration. 
 There must be fellowship with the Christ 
 of the Resurrection before we can feel 
 its power." "Join thyself to the eternal 
 God," says St. Augustine, " and thou wilt 
 know thyself eternal." Just in the degree 
 in which we feel the stirrings of the im- 
 mortal life within us here and now will 
 the conviction of the immortal life be- 
 yond become real and abiding. The 
 blank and dreary wall of doubt that sense 
 has built between that life and faith can- 
 not be broken down by any battering- 
 rams of arguments ; it need not be. All 
 that we need is to let God's spirit take 
 hold of us, and lift us up so high that we 
 can reach over and feel for ourselves that 
 there are things on the other side. 
 
 "3 
 
THE RESURRECTION-BODY 
 
 But some man will say, How are the dead raised up ? and 
 with what body do they come? — i Cor. xv. 35 
 
 IN my first sermon on the Resurrection 
 it was my aim to show that the word 
 resurrection is used, in the New Testa- 
 ment, to mean one thing, and one thing 
 only — the rising of the real man into the 
 life of another world when the material 
 body dies in this. 
 
 In this meaning of the word, the resur- 
 rection must, of course, take place, not at 
 one and the same time to all men at some 
 future and far-off day, but to every man 
 in his own order — that is, at the time 
 of his death. That there are passages in 
 the New Testament which might seem to 
 support the traditional view as against my 
 own — of this I am well aware. The fact 
 is easily accounted for. It was natural 
 114 
 
that when our Lord referred to the resur- 
 rection with a distinctly didactic purpose, 
 He should present it in one style, and 
 when He referred to it with a merely 
 moral purpose, He should present it in 
 another. In the former case, speaking to 
 the understanding, His aim would be 
 clearness. In the latter case, speaking to 
 the heart. His aim would be impressive- 
 ness. In the one case. His language 
 would be literal ; in the other case, it 
 would just as naturally be figurative. 
 And so, in fact, we find it. In His con- 
 versations with the Sadducees, and with 
 Mary near the grave of Lazarus, we find 
 our Lord speaking of the resurrection 
 of the dead literally, as a present fact ; 
 while, at another time, we find Him 
 presenting the same fact in a picture — 
 a method of presentation, of course, in 
 which there can be no such thing as suc- 
 cession in time, but, instead of it, only 
 contiguity in space. 
 
 But the chief thing that has kept men 
 
 "5 
 
from accepting our Lord's plain teaching 
 about the resurrection is the beHef that 
 the resurrection-body is to be material — 
 that it is to be composed, in fact, of the 
 very particles of matter that are laid aside 
 at death. It is seen that no such resur- 
 rection as this belief demands has taken 
 place as yet, and from this it is concluded, 
 in the very face of our Lord's most literal 
 and most positive teaching, that no resur- 
 rection is to take place until the end of 
 the world. 
 
 This belief is certainly unreasonable. 
 It is just as certainly unscriptural. Our 
 Lord, indeed, says nothing about the 
 resurrection-body. He says to the Sad- 
 ducees that Abraham, and Isaac, and i 
 Jacob must have risen from the dead, |Sy 
 because they are now living. He urges 
 upon Martha, in proof of the immediate 
 resurrection of the dead, that those who 
 believe in Him can never die. But as to 
 the question : " With what body do they 
 come?" He says not one word. For 
 ii6 
 
answer to this question we must go to St. 
 Paul — to the fifteenth chapter of his first 
 Epistle to the Corinthians. In that chap- 
 ter, as I said in my first sermon in this 
 course, St. Paul argues, first of all, for the 
 resurrection as a fact — using the word res- 
 urrectio7i in precisely the same sense as 
 that in which our Lord had used it, in 
 the sense, that is, of personal survival 
 after death. Then, when he has finished 
 his direct argument for the resurrection, 
 he conceives of an objection which might 
 be offered, and takes up that. " But some 
 man will say, How are the dead raised 
 up ? and with what body do they come ? " 
 Remember, St. Paul does not identify 
 the question of the resurrection-body with 
 that of the resurrection. He treats it as 
 simply something with which the question 
 of the resurrection might be complicated. 
 To him the question of the resurrection- 
 body was so clear as to need no arguing. 
 It was so perfectly clear to him, in fact, 
 that he could hardly speak patiently about 
 117 
 
it even to a merely supposed objector. 
 " Thou fool ! " he said, " look at the plant 
 unfolding from the seed, and learn from 
 that." In this illustration we are taught 
 one thing with absolute certainty ; and 
 that is, that in the production of the 
 resurrection-body there is to be nothing 
 miraculous. Like the various forms of 
 plant-life in nature, it is to be the result 
 of a perfectly normal process of growth. 
 To this teaching of St. Paul's the tra- 
 ditional view of the question stands point- 
 edly opposed. It makes the production 
 of the resurrection-body a miracle. In 
 saying this, I speak advisedly. The last 
 particles of matter that enter into one's 
 natural body can have no more germina- 
 tive force to shape themselves into a spir- 
 itual body than any of the particles of 
 matter that entered into it years before 
 and have gone to waste. It is not claimed, 
 in fact, that they have. The claim is that 
 God's omniscience knows exactly where 
 each one of those last particles is, and 
 ii8 
 
that at the end of the world His ahnighty 
 power will bring them all together again, 
 and rebuild them into the body of the res- 
 urrection. The claim is, most distinctly, 
 that the resurrection will be brouofht about 
 by miracle. And this, I say, is pointedly 
 opposed to the teaching of St. Paul, — just 
 as much so as any two things could be. 
 St. Paul did not believe in the existence 
 of persons in a disembodied state. He 
 does not raise the question, nor conceive 
 it possible to be raised, whether men 
 shall, or shall not, have bodies in the life 
 beyond. He considers only what bodies 
 they shall have, and how they are to get 
 them. The resurrection-body, he says, 
 is to be a spiritual body ; or, rather, he 
 says that it 2's a spiritual body. He 
 speaks of it as existing now. " There is a 
 natural body," he says, " and there is a 
 spiritual body " ; the natural being first, 
 not in the order of existence, but simply 
 in the order of disclosure. It is my own 
 most clear conviction — more than once ex- 
 119 
 
expressed from this pulpit — that the spirit- 
 ual body is man's true body ; the natural 
 body being but its changeful and transi- 
 tory wrapping : nor in this connection do 
 I stand by any means alone. In one of 
 the published sermons of one of the pro- 
 foundest thinkers of the Church of Eng- 
 land, the Rev. Mr. Baring-Gould, I find a 
 passage so pertinent to the point in ques- 
 tion that I shall venture here to introduce 
 it. " Have you ever seen," he says, " a 
 water-spout, or a column of sand travers- 
 ing the desert ? . . . Both are pro- 
 duced by the same cause. There is an 
 eddy, a spin of wind which passes over 
 sea and land. As it sweeps along the 
 ocean, it catches up the water, and whirls 
 it up in a pillar to the clouds ; and there 
 it stands — an opaque trunk, like that of a 
 gigantic palm-tree — between the sea and 
 the sky. It passes on till it touches the 
 land : then there is no more supply of 
 water to feed it, and at once it dies away 
 to the eye and discharges itself in a 
 
torrent of rain. Is it gone altogether? 
 No. It moves on, but it is invisible. 
 The same windy spiral sweeps farther in- 
 land, and now it crosses a desert. At 
 once it draws the light particles, and in a 
 minute is again visible to the eye — now 
 as a red-brown pillar, stalking over the 
 waste. It travels beyond the verge of 
 the desert and at once vanishes again. 
 It has nothing more to feed it and make 
 it manifest ; but it is there still, and the 
 line of its course is marked by the effects 
 it produces. We may," he continues, 
 " take this as an illustration — not a very 
 perfect one, but still as one — of the spirit- 
 ual body, and its relation to matter. We 
 are, each of us, as it were, some such a 
 spiritual existence as a whirlwind, and life 
 here is but the catching up of elements — 
 the assimilation and sifting out of the 
 earthly atoms which give us a visible ex- 
 istence. As long as we eat and take to us 
 material to raise the column of the visible 
 body, so long we may be said to live 
 
 121 
 
in the world ; but at last the spiritual-elec- 
 tive current sweeps on to other soil, and 
 then the sandy pillar crumbles away, and 
 all that is left of the living, carnal body is 
 the little heap of dust in the church-yard. 
 Are we no more ? By no means. The 
 spiritual body still lives, but is passing 
 over the tract of immaterialism. It takes 
 up no more earth, and is therefore no 
 more seen of men." 
 
 In this illustration we must beware of 
 one thing — I mean that the spiritual 
 body, here likened to a whirlwind, is in 
 itself invisible, impalpable, unsubstantial. 
 It is all that to us here in the material 
 body for the simple reason that material 
 senses can comprehend nothing but ma- 
 terial substance. But our present power 
 of apprehension is not the measure of all 
 reality ; and when we pass into the spirit- 
 ual condition, we shall certainly find 
 neither our bodies nor our surroundings 
 in any way less real than we find them 
 here and now. Of this, however, I am 
 
to speak in m)- sermon on the resurrec- 
 tion-world. 
 
 If now the question be asked as regards 
 the germ of the spiritual body, I answer 
 that this germ must itself be spiritual. 
 The material could as little be sublimated 
 into the spiritual, as the spiritual could be 
 condensed into the material. But the 
 traditional view says no. It says that the 
 germ of the spiritual body is material. It 
 is marvellous how men will seize upon 
 some accidental circumstance in a com- 
 parison, and let it run away with them. 
 They have done this with St. Paul's 
 comparison of the growth of the resur- 
 rection-body to that of a plant. With St. 
 Paul himself, clearly, the significant point 
 of the comparison was the law of germi- 
 nation in the seed, and not the mere 
 circumstance of place where the seed is 
 sown. And yet, fastening upon this 
 mere circumstance — fastening upon the 
 fact that, as a rule, although by no means 
 universally, seeds germinate under ground 
 123 
 
— men have built upon it the argument 
 that, since the only part of man that is 
 ever buried in the ground is the dead 
 body, therefore it is the dead body that 
 must become the seed of the spiritual 
 body. If cremation, instead of burial, 
 had always been the universal mode of 
 disposing of dead bodies, the argument, 
 probably, would never have occurred to 
 any one. Certainly, nothing could be 
 more irrational. A dead body is nothing 
 like a seed. It is only like the empty 
 hull of a seed. A seed is a living thing. 
 It is, in fact, the whole embryonic plant 
 
 — with a covering to nourish and protect 
 it during the first stage of its growth. 
 When that first stasfe of orowth is com- 
 pleted, the outer covering falls away, and 
 the plant stands disclosed to the sunlight 
 and the air. That, in man, which answers 
 to the embryonic plant, is the spiritual 
 body. That which answers to the outer 
 wrapping is the material body. That 
 which answers to the ground is the world. 
 
 124 
 
The spiritual body is to be unfolded from 
 the living man, planted here in this world 
 . at birth, and not from his mouldering re- -J 
 '^ mains, buried in the ground at death. '*. 
 " The time," says the great philosopher, 
 John Locke, "that man is in this world, 
 affixed to this earth, is his being sown, and 
 not when, being dead, he is put into the 
 ground ; as is evident from St. Paul's own 
 words : For dead things are not sown. 
 Seeds are sown being alive, and die not 
 until after they are sown." And as here 
 in this world is the sowing, so here in 
 this world must be the growing. I do 
 not mean, of course, that the spiritual 
 must in this world reach its full perfec- 
 tion ; but here it must continue until the 
 material body falls away. Then it rises. 
 
 To all this, I know, there are certain 
 popular objections. 
 
 The first is, that our Lord's resurrec- 
 tion was a pattern of our own, and that 
 our Lord, after His resurrection, appeared 
 to His disciples in a material body. It is 
 
 125 
 
true that our Lord appeared to His dis- 
 ciples in a material body ; but it is not 
 true that His resurrection was a pattern of 
 our own. It was a pledge of our own 
 resurrection ; but in one respect, at least, 
 it certainly was not a pledge. Our Lord 
 had to make His resurrection manifest. 
 He had to prove it to men's senses. 
 Men's senses could not discover His 
 spiritual body. It was necessary, there- 
 fore, that He should reappear in material 
 form. This He had claimed the power 
 to do. He had claimed the power to lay 
 down His life — that is, His physical life — 
 and to take it up again. And this He did. 
 During the great forty days between His 
 resurrection and His ascension He did 
 it repeatedly ; and the last time with this 
 peculiarity — that, instead of vanishing, as 
 at other times, from their midst. He first 
 rose slowly and solemnly above them — 
 thus impressing the fact upon their minds 
 that His sensible intercourse with them was 
 about to close forever — and then gave back 
 126 
 
His material form to the world of material 
 things. Our Lord did not always, during 
 those forty days, appear in the same form. 
 To Mary in the Garden He appeared in 
 one form, and, in the afternoon of the 
 same day, to the disciples on their way to 
 Emmaus in another form. But in what- 
 ever form He appeared it was undeniably 
 in a body of flesh and blood ; and into 
 that Kingdom whither He withdrew (both 
 Scripture and reason assure us) flesh and 
 blood could never enter. Plainly, the 
 body of our Lord's post-resurrection ap- 
 pearances was not His resurrection-body, 
 but simply what I may call His evidential 
 body. Such a body as that we ourselves 
 shall not need. We shall not need to 
 prove our own resurrection. We shall 
 not need, therefore, to return, even for a 
 moment, to the material condition. 
 
 It may be objected again that there is 
 at least one passage in the New Testa- 
 ment between which and what I have 
 been saying there seems to be no possible 
 127 
 
 I 
 
harmony. [ The passage meant is that in 
 which St. Paul speaks of the Lord's de- 
 scending from Heaven with a shout, with 
 the voice of the archangel and the trump 
 of God, the dead rising from their graves, 
 the living caught up from the earth, and 
 all together meeting the Lord in the air. 
 / I This passage was written by St. Paul in 
 "his earlier ministry. It was written, it 
 ^ \ would seem, before the writer had attained 
 to that large grasp of the resurrection 
 which he shows in his argument to the 
 Corinthians. The Apostle speaks with 
 great caution. He begins with the words, 
 ** Now this we say unto you by the word 
 of the Lord," — meaning, as I understand 
 him, not that he was about to speak 
 by inspiration, but that he was about to 
 speak without inspiration ; that he was 
 simply going to repeat the words of the 
 Lord as recorded or remembered by His 
 disciples, claiming no exceptional influ- 
 ence to aid him in their interpretation. 
 If I am right in this position, — a position 
 128 
 
which has been taken by men very emi- 
 nent in exegesis, — then certainly the ob- 
 jection in question is utterly without force. 
 The third and last objection that I shall 
 mention is this — that the view that I have 
 now been settingr forth involves the denial 
 of the identity of our future bodies with 
 our present bodies. It is positively and L^'^ 
 exactly the other way. It is only the spir- 
 itual body that furnishes any shadow of 
 basis for the identity even of the natural 
 body. If the identity of the natural body 
 were in the particles at any time compos- 
 ing it, then that identity would be losing 
 itself continually ; for such particles are 
 certainly changing. The truth is, the 
 only thing that identifies your present 
 body with the body that you had ten 
 years ago, is the fact that that was your 
 own body, and that this is your own body. 
 Wherever you may be, in whatever world, 
 your body, let it be composed of whatever 
 substance it may, will be your body ; and 
 for this reason it will be as thoroughly 
 
 9 
 
 129 
 
identical with the body that you have to- 
 day as the body that you have to-day is 
 identical with the body that you had ten 
 years ago. All this fear about the loss of 
 bodily identity is an idle fear. It is a 
 thing which belongs simply to the realm 
 of speculation. It can never invade the 
 realm of fact. When the mother throws 
 her arms around the boy that has been 
 ten years at sea, she never thinks of rais- 
 ing any question as to where he got his 
 present body. Tell her that it came from 
 the soil and the air of the Indies — tell her 
 that she never touched nor saw one par- 
 ticle of it before — it makes no difference. 
 There is her boy, and that is his body — 
 just the same boy that she sang to in his 
 infancy, and that she pressed to her heart 
 when he left her to cross the seas. It will 
 be quite the same when we meet on the 
 farther shore of the ocean of Time. Cer- 
 tainly, that which gives identity to the 
 body here cannot be thought of as losing 
 its own identity there. Speaking for my- 
 
self, I can say that, although the expression 
 " the resurrection of the body " is nowhere 
 to be found in the Bible, I believe in the 
 resurrection of the body a thousand times 
 more firmly than I could have believed in 
 it had I retained the teaching concern- 
 ing it which was instilled into my mind in 
 childhood, and which, as a student of the- 
 ology, I learned in a more formed way 
 from Bishop Pearson on the Creed. The /^ 
 old theology of this subject cannot stand. 
 It is bound to go. It is going fast. The 
 newer doctrine is making its way with all 
 schools of thought, with all communions, 
 with all creeds. It has invaded even the 
 Roman Church itself. Indeed, an Engf- 
 lish Romanist has furnished one of the 
 most important of the books written in its 
 explanation and defense — a work in which 
 the author says : " When the idea of the fs^ 
 spiritual body was first suggested to me, 
 it broke on my mind like a flash of heav- 
 enly light ; and now that I have brooded 
 over it for years, it seems to me the true 
 
 131 
 
and only solution of many scriptural, theo- 
 logical, and scientific difficulties. It dis- 
 places no stone in the edifice of Christian 
 doctrine, but gives unity and consistency 
 to the entire building. It breaks through 
 the doors closed against it, and stands in 
 the midst of other doctrines, as Christ, in 
 His spiritual body, stood in the midst of 
 His disciples, saying, ' Peace be unto you.' " 
 But this doctrine brings not only convic- 
 tion to the understanding. It brings also 
 comfort to the heart — banishing forever 
 that dreary dream that ages, perhaps, on 
 ages must roll by before we can know 
 again, as we know them here, the loved 
 ones who have passed within the veil. 
 And it brings, besides, the most solemn 
 of all motives for life. To some extent, 
 we know, even the outer body reveals 
 spiritual character. The spiritual body 
 will reveal It perfectly. The spiritual body 
 will contain the whole record of our lives 
 — of which kind they were. That record 
 we are making now. That record will 
 
constitute the books out of which we shall 
 be judged — yea, out of which we shall 
 judge ourselves. Let no man deceive 
 himself. Let no one think that he can 
 long deceive others. "There is nothing 
 hid that shall not be made manifest." 
 
 133 
 
THE RESURRECTION-WORLD 
 
 "lyirHEN the light of the first Easter 
 ^ ' dawned, the disciples had already 
 yielded to their foes the great point in 
 question. What the Master had told 
 them about His rising from the dead, 
 they had never clearly understood ; and 
 now, it would seem, they had dismissed 
 it from mind. The spectacle of the dead 
 body had proved too much for their faith. 
 They were utterly overwhelmed w^ith dis- 
 appointment and sorrow. They had lost 
 all hope. They had lost everything but 
 memory and love. " On the first day of 
 the week, very early in the morning," 
 came the faithful Galilean women to the 
 sepulchre, bearing sweet spices and oint- 
 ment to anoint the body — a proof not 
 134 
 
more of their devotedness than of their 
 despair. But spices and ointment had 
 been brought in vain. The stone they 
 found rolled away — the sepulchre empty 
 — and from two angels robed in white 
 they heard the strange, glad greeting ; 
 " Why seek ye the living among the 
 dead ? He is not here, but is risen." 
 Quickly the tidings sped to the other 
 disciples. The excitement among them 
 was intense. It was indescribable. They 
 could hardly believe for joy. In fact, 
 they could not believe until the Master, 
 by repeated personal appearings, had 
 compelled belief. Of such appearings, 
 five He granted as on this day ; while 
 afterward, for forty days. He remained in 
 intimate intercourse with His followers, 
 being seen, on one occasion, by as many 
 as five hundred of them at once. 
 
 If there is anything in this world that 
 is certain, it is that the disciples believed 
 that their Master had risen from the 
 dead. They believed it with as little 
 
 135 
 
doubt as they believed in their own exist- 
 ence. Were the truth of this assertion 
 challenged, I should appeal, in the first 
 place, to the testimony of the Gospels. 
 Were it denied that the Gospels were 
 written in the lifetime of the Apostles, I 
 should pass on at once — without stop- 
 ping to show the groundlessness of such 
 denial — to the unimpeachable testimony 
 of St. Paul. About the time when St. 
 Paul lived and labored, there is no ques- 
 tion. He was converted in the year of 
 our Lord 41. He wrote his first Epistle 
 to the Corinthians in the year 57. The 
 genuineness of that Epistle is undisputed. 
 It has never been disputed by any one. 
 In that Epistle St, Paul says : " I declare 
 unto you, first of all, that which I also 
 received," and then goes on to give the 
 main facts in the history of the resur- 
 rection, just as they are given in the 
 Gospels. 
 
 Now, remembering that this testimony 
 was something that St. Paul had not 
 136 
 
evolved out of his own consciousness, but 
 had "received," — remembering also that 
 St. Paul was personally acquainted with 
 the other Apostles, that he had met 
 them all at the Council at Jerusalem, and 
 that he had been a fellow-laborer with St. 
 Peter at Antioch, — it becomes as certain, 
 I say again, as anything in this world 
 can be, that the Apostles all believed in 
 the resurrection of Christ as a most literal 
 fact. It was to the resurrection of Christ 
 that they were wont, on all occasions, to 
 make appeal. It was to the resurrection 
 of Christ that they were wont to point as 
 to the very keystone in the whole stu- 
 pendous arch of Gospel truth. They put 
 it forth as their peculiar claim to a hear- 
 ing that they had seen the risen Lord. 
 When a successor to the traitor Judas 
 was to be chosen, they insisted on this 
 as an indispensable qualification for the 
 office — that he should be one whc could 
 bear the same witness with them. They 
 showed their belief in the resurrection in 
 
 137 
 
this way, and they showed it in other 
 ways. They showed it in their constant 
 observance of this Holy Sacrament that 
 we are about to celebrate — an observance 
 that spans the whole gulf of years be- 
 tween them and us, and that without the 
 resurrection would be as utterly mean- 
 ingless as it would be without the cruci- 
 fixion. They showed their belief in the 
 resurrection in the fact that, Jews though 
 they were, with all the reverence of Jews 
 for the commandments and ordinances of 
 the Law, they at once transferred their 
 Sabbath observance from the last day of 
 the week to the first — connecting it no 
 longer with the deliverance of Israel from 
 the bondage of Egypt, but with the de- 
 liverance of all mankind from the bond- 
 age of death. They showed their belief 
 in the resurrection in the very zeal with 
 which they began at once to plant the 
 Church — one day, dispirited, fearful, aim- 
 less, hiding away in an upper room ; a 
 few days later reappearing in the Temple 
 138 
 
overflowing with hope and joy — full of 
 plans for work — with a courage that 
 could look death in the face and not 
 falter. 
 
 It may indeed be said — it has been said, 
 in fact — that the Apostles lived in an un- 
 critical age, and were themselves men of 
 uncritical minds. There was in this case 
 no need of the critical mind. There was 
 need of nothing, besides honesty of pur- 
 pose, but eyes and ears and memory. 
 Certainly these disciples were critical 
 enouo-h to know their Master when they 
 saw Him. Certainly they could not have 
 been persuaded that, for forty days after 
 His crucifixion, they had seen Him, 
 touched Him, talked with Him, been 
 taught by Him, if nothing of all this had 
 been true. The delusion theory is utterly 
 inadmissible. It is weak. It is puerile. 
 It is absurd. St. Paul meets it in this 
 way : "If Christ be not risen, then are we 
 false witnesses before God." " Either our 
 declarations concerning the resurrection 
 
 'is 
 
are true or we stand before God perjured 
 men. There is no middle ground. We 
 have not been deceived in this matter ; 
 and whether or not we have been trying 
 to deceive others — let our own lives and 
 teachings, to say nothing of the testimony 
 of hundreds of others still living, settle 
 that." The ready test of false assumption 
 is found in the inconsistencies to which it 
 leads. Any false theory of facts always 
 throws the facts themselves into irrecon- 
 cilable confusion. It is so in this case. 
 Set out with a denial that Christ rose 
 from the dead, and then His life, His 
 character. His teaching, the testimony of 
 His disciples concerning Him, His own 
 testimony concerning Himself, at once in- 
 volve the mind in difficulties more per- 
 plexing — I may safely say a thousand-fold 
 — than any that confront belief. " The 
 man," said Dr. South, "who would not 
 believe the resurrection upon a state- 
 ment of its claims, would not believe it 
 if he himself should rise from the dead." 
 140 
 
De Wette, the leader of German Rational- 
 ism in the first half of the present cen- 
 tury, wrote and published, the year before 
 he died, an essay which took the world by 
 surprise. The surprise was occasioned by 
 these words : " The fact of the resurrec- 
 tion, although a darkness which cannot 
 be dissipated rests upon the way and man- 
 ner of it, cannot itself be called into 
 doubt." A fact about which such a mind 
 as De Wette's, after studying the matter 
 for a lifetime, not only critically but scep- 
 tically, could entertain no doubt, may 
 well be regarded as resting on sufificient 
 evidence. 
 
 As to "the darkness" that De Wette 
 speaks of as resting "on the way and 
 manner of the resurrection," that cer- 
 tainly is something that men have made 
 for themselves. They have assumed, as 
 De Wette himself seems to have assumed, 
 that the body in which our Lord ap- 
 peared to His disciples was His true 
 resurrection-body. " A material body," 
 141 
 
it is said, " endowed with spiritual proper- 
 ties." This assumption at once throws 
 all the facts of the case into hopeless con- 
 fusion. Upon what I feel very sure is 
 the plain truth of this matter, I can at 
 the time only touch. Every man, even in 
 this world, has, besides the material body 
 which he knows of through the natural 
 senses, a spiritual body, which until, at 
 death, his spiritual senses shall be opened, 
 he cannot directly know of in any way. 
 The true body of our Lord's resurrection 
 was His spiritual body. But because natu- 
 ral faculties cannot discern any spiritual 
 thing, our Lord resumed, from time to 
 time, during the great forty days, the ma- 
 terial condition — reclothed Himself with 
 a material bod)' — putting such body on 
 and off at will, just as He had claimed 
 the power to do — doing this, not as any 
 essential part of His resurrection, but 
 simply to make His disciples sure that 
 He had risen. 
 
 It may be said that, in this view, we 
 142 
 
are confronted with quite as great a mys- 
 tery as that of " a material body endowed 
 with spiritual properties." Let it be 
 granted. But there is this difference : in 
 this view we are confronted with a mys- 
 tery, and nothing more ; while the idea of 
 *' a material body endowed with spiritual 
 properties " confronts us with a downright 
 contradiction in terms. Did we refuse to 
 accept facts simply on the ground of their 
 involving mystery, we should accept noth- 
 ing at all — not even, or rather, least of 
 all, the fact of our own existence ; but 
 contradictions we can accept only on the 
 condition of stolidly refusing to think. 
 The root of the whole difficulty in this 
 question of the resurrection-body — of our 
 Lord's resurrection-body and of our own 
 — lies in a failure to grasp the truth that 
 the spiritual can be substantial. Ask 
 for a definition of the spiritual, and eight 
 men out of ten, perhaps, will get no fur- 
 ther than to say that it is the immaterial — 
 " the immaterial " meaning that which is 
 143 
 
not matter, a mere negation. Spiritual 
 body thus comes to mean the negation of 
 body. And so as regards the whole spir- 
 itual world, I am satisfied that for multi- 
 tudes of men to-day the supreme difficulty 
 in believing in any resurrection is not 
 the question, " If a man die, shall he live 
 again?" but, " If a man live again, where 
 shall he find a world to live in — a world 
 real, and yet not material ? " Modern 
 thought, in its deeper reaches, has been 
 helping us to answer this question. It 
 has been showing us that all that we call 
 material is in reality but phenomenal — 
 the joint product of that Divine energy, 
 on the one hand, which we apprehend, 
 under various forms, as Force, and, on the 
 other hand, of the constitutive powers of 
 creature mind. Modern thought has thus 
 been showing us that, in whatever sense 
 matter may be called substance, in that 
 same sense precisely there may be — nay, 
 must be — as many different kinds of sub- 
 stance as there are possible modes of per- 
 144 
 
ception — all conceivably coexisting in the 
 order of time, and yet bearing no sort of 
 relation to one another in the order of 
 space. Our only mode of perception here 
 in this world is through the natural senses ; 
 matter thus becomes the only substance 
 that we can possibly perceive. But if man 
 be a spiritual being, he must, of necessity, 
 have spiritual senses ; and when these are 
 freed from their material wrapping, he 
 must perceive another substance — another 
 world. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant book that 
 has appeared the present year — the most 
 significant, I mean, among books touching 
 upon matters of religious belief — is Canon 
 Maccoll's " Christianity in Relation to 
 Science and Moi^als,'' and I have found 
 this work so strikingly confirmatory of my 
 own teaching as regards the subject now 
 in hand that I shall venture to quote from 
 it a single passage : " If we are to believe 
 the Bible," says the author, "the spiritual 
 world is not a region far away in space, 
 
 lO 
 
 I4S 
 
but a higher plane of being, permeating 
 the natural world, and requiring spiritual 
 faculties to apprehend it. We are thus 
 in the condition of a man born deaf and 
 blind into this world of solid matter. He 
 is in the midst of two worlds of which 
 he knows next to nothing — the world of 
 colors and the world of sounds. For him 
 the abounding beauties of nature do not 
 exist. He cannot reach them by travel- 
 ling through space. He might visit every 
 world in the visible universe in search of 
 them, but his search would be in vain. 
 What he needs is not a change in his sur- 
 roundings, but a change in himself. Open 
 his eyes and ears, and then, without 
 any change of place, he finds himself in- 
 troduced into the worlds which he had 
 vainly sought by changing his environ- 
 ment. This," adds Canon Maccoll, " is 
 the kind of relation in which Holy Scrip- 
 ture represents us as standing towards the 
 spiritual world." The meaning of this 
 author is, in other words, that what divides 
 146 
 
the world in which we arc and the world 
 in which we shall be, is simply two dif- 
 ferent modes of perception — two different 
 sets of senses. We stand in the spiritual 
 world to-day as really as we ever shall — 
 only we stand there within fleshly masks. 
 When the masks fall from us, we shall 
 have no pilgrimage to make to see the 
 world of spirits ; the world of spirits will 
 be all around us — as real, as natural,* as 
 stable as this world of matter is to us here 
 and now. 
 
 Now in this view we can see the reason 
 why St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians 
 that " flesh and blood could not inherit 
 the kingdom of God." A material body 
 has no place in a spiritual world. A 
 material body could no more be per- 
 ceived in a spiritual world than a spir- 
 itual body can be perceived in this 
 material world. It is not rationally con- 
 ceivable that our Lord's material body 
 was the body of His resurrection. Nor is 
 it rationally conceivable that our material 
 
 147 
 
bodies are to be the bodies of our resur- 
 rection. The notion of the resurrection 
 of the flesh at the end of the world was 
 not of Christian origin. It originated 
 with Zoroaster, who taught it a thousand 
 years before the time of Christ ; and it 
 was imported by the Jews from the East. 
 Our Lord condemned it, positively and 
 pointedly. To Martha, He proclaimed 
 that the resurrection was not something 
 to take place at some distant future, but 
 a present fact. To the Sadducees He de- 
 clared that, if Abraham and Isaac and 
 Jacob were still alive, that settled the 
 question of the resurrection. If they were 
 still alive in the world of spirits, that was 
 proof of their having risen to that world 
 from this. Our Lord's conception of the 
 resurrection — as good Bishop Newton, Dr. 
 Timothy Dwight, and others have been 
 at pains to show — was simply that of the 
 rising of the spiritual out of the material. 
 He made no mention of a resurrection- 
 body. He does not seem to have thought 
 
it necessary. He never seems to have 
 entertained the idea that man could exist 
 without a body. All the teaching that we 
 find in the New Testament about the 
 resurrection-body is from St. Paul ; and 
 St. Paul's teaching as to this point is clear 
 and ringing. It is, that in the resurrection 
 we are to have bodies ; that such bodies 
 are to be not material, but spiritual ; that 
 they are not to be miraculously re-created 
 at the end of time, but developed within 
 the living man here and now, by a process 
 as purely normal as the unfolding of a 
 plant from its parent seed ; and, what is 
 more, that our resurrection-bodies are to 
 be thoroughly identical with our bodies 
 here — identical, that is, in the same sense 
 that our bodies now are identical with the 
 bodies that we had ten or twenty years 
 ao-o, not identical in substance, but iden- 
 tical as being the outcome, the expression, 
 of the identifying principle within us. To 
 my mind it is inconceivable that the 
 identity of the body, or the possibility of 
 149 
 
recognition of friend by friend, should any 
 more be lost in the next world than in this. 
 I am well aware that in the New Tes- 
 tament passages may be found which, 
 superficially interpreted, would seem to 
 make against what I have now been set- 
 ting forth. The characteristic of all 
 such passages is that they are conceived 
 in the apocalyptic style — a style in which, 
 instead of literal descriptions, we have 
 dramatic pictures. Pictures, of course, 
 cannot represent events as occurring in 
 temporal succession ; and hence it is that, 
 in the representations of the resurrection 
 and the judgment, we find events which 
 were to occur to '* every man in his own 
 order" grouped together as occurring to 
 all men at one and the same time. These 
 pictures certainly contain no error. In 
 past ages, perhaps, it mattered little 
 even if they were mistaken for literal de- 
 scription. But in such an age as ours — 
 when the spirit of inquiry is so thoroughly 
 aroused — such a mistake might easily, 
 
 150 
 
in the case of many a mind, prove fatal to 
 
 belief. 
 
 The teaching of this sermon, let me say 
 in closing, would in no way mar any 
 feature of the Faith as handed down from 
 age to age in the Church's venerable 
 Creeds. It would leave the grand and 
 solemn verities of resurrection and judg- 
 ment all untouched — only it would give 
 them a firmer hold upon intelligent con- 
 viction. It would not even affect the 
 truth of what is called the Intermediate 
 Abode ; it would simply make the Inter- 
 mediate Abode, instead of a place where 
 spirits idly wait for judgment, a place of 
 training, of education, of preparation for 
 God's full disclosures. It would mar, I say, 
 no feature of the Faith. It would simply 
 remind us the more impressively of what 
 too often we forget, — of the close and vital 
 bond that links our daily life in this world 
 of shadows with the eternal realities that 
 shall stand revealed when the shadows 
 shall be gone. It would simply fix it in 
 
 151 
 
our convictions that every thought we 
 think, every feeHng we cherish, every 
 motive to which we yield, is even now 
 being woven into our spiritual vesture, 
 and thus recorded in all within us that is 
 deathless. Such would be its fruit. If 
 the fruit be evil, then cannot the tree be 
 good ; but if the fruit be good, it can 
 hardly be that the tree is evil. 
 
 152 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY 
 
 I AM to speak this morning, as I have 
 always spoken on the occasion of this 
 festival, of the doctrine of the Holy 
 Trinity. 
 
 That this doctrine involves a great 
 mystery must certainly be admitted. But 
 there is nothing in that to make it incred- 
 ible. If we were to believe only what 
 was not mysterious, we should not be- 
 lieve anything. We should not believe in 
 the existence of a world around us. We 
 should not believe even in our own exist- 
 ence. But in truth it is not mystery that 
 ever perplexes any one. We are perplexed 
 only when we try to accept as equally true 
 things which we cannot reconcile with 
 one another. There is nothing in the 
 mere mystery of the Trinity at which any 
 153 
 
man should stumble — nothing, in fact, at 
 which any man ever has stumbled. Where 
 there is stumbling at all, it is not because 
 the doctrine is so mysterious, but because 
 it is thought to involve contradictions 
 which are so plain. 
 
 What the Church teaches, and has 
 always taught, as touching the doctrine of 
 the Trinity is this : that there are three 
 Divine Persons, but that the fact, that 
 the entire Godhead — i. ^., the substance, 
 or nature, of God — is in each of those 
 Persons, without any inequality or differ- 
 ence, makes the three Persons but one 
 God — in other words, that God is one 
 as to His substance, but three as to His 
 manner of subsisting. 
 
 That the same nature in its entirety 
 can at the same time belong to more than 
 one person is a fact which admits of no 
 question. It is a fact which is demonstrated 
 in the very existence of man — in the ex- 
 istence, I mean, of man as man. In this 
 fact lies the whole mystery of being — the 
 
 154 
 
mystery of God's being, and the mystery 
 of our own. The human perso7is upon 
 this globe are numbered by hundreds 
 of miUions ; but not so the nature which 
 makes these persons human. There are 
 not even two human natures. Human 
 nature is but one. It is never new created, 
 but always communicated in the mystery 
 ofgeniture — always "begotten, not made." 
 And always it remains entire. One per- 
 son has not one fraction of it and another 
 person another fraction, but in each per- 
 son it is as whole and undivided as if it 
 were in that person only. And thus, I 
 believe, in the coming into life of every 
 child of man, we behold the shadow of 
 that mystery by which the Son is eternally 
 begotten of the Father. It is not true 
 that the idea of Fatherhood has been 
 transferred, by way of figure, to God 
 from man. The truth is, rather, that the 
 whole relation of Fatherhood is but a 
 reflection in man of that which subsists 
 eternally in God. 
 
 155 
 
You think, perhaps, that my illustra- 
 tion is not fortunate. You would tell me, 
 perhaps, that any three persons among 
 men, however they may have one and 
 the same undivided substance or nature, 
 are not, after all, one man, but three men. 
 I know, but the two cases are not by 
 any means the same. God is every way 
 perfect. Man is every way imperfect. 
 Perfection is always equal to itself, and 
 therefore must always be one with it- 
 self. In imperfection, on the other hand, 
 there must always be diversity. In imper- 
 fection, unity is impossible. The thoughts 
 of a perfect person must always be per- 
 fect thoughts, and the actions of a perfect 
 person must always be perfect actions. 
 To such a person, any thoughts other 
 than those which he actually thinks, and 
 any actions other than those which he 
 actually wills, would be impossible. It 
 must follow, of course, that if there were 
 other perfect persons, the thoughts and 
 the actions of all would, in the same 
 156 \ 
 
circumstances, be the same. In one word, 
 all these perfect persons, while retaining 
 each his personal distinction, would be, 
 intellectually and morally, as well as in 
 substance or nature, one. This is what 
 I mean in saying that perfection is always 
 equal to itself, and therefore must always 
 be one with itself. And when I say that 
 in imperfection unity is impossible, I 
 mean that no two imperfect persons — 
 to say nothing of a whole race of per- 
 sons — could be found always to think, 
 and feel, and act alike. If it were other- 
 wise, — if all men had, in the same cir- 
 cumstances, but one thought, one feeling, 
 one will, — then we might speak of the 
 unity of man in a multiplicity of persons, 
 just as we now speak of the unity of 
 God in a triplicity of persons, — and when 
 we spoke thus, I believe that we should 
 be speaking properly. Of course, in the 
 case of men, however perfect, there would 
 remain not only personal distinction, but 
 bodily separation, — spatial individuation, 
 
 157 
 
as the philosophers would phrase it, — but 
 this element, in our thoughts of God, 
 must be excluded. 
 
 What I have now been saying, I have 
 said with a distinct purpose. The most 
 serious, because the most practical, objec- 
 tion ever brought against the doctrine of 
 the Trinity is that it would destroy the 
 unity of the Godhead. This was the real 
 secret of the great Unitarian movement 
 led on by Channing in the early years 
 of the nineteenth century. The real point 
 against which that movement was di- 
 rected was not the belief that there are 
 three distinct persons in the one God- 
 head, but against the belief which made 
 two of these persons not only personally 
 distinct, but morally different. Calvinism 
 did, in the minds of those who embraced 
 it, destroy the unity of the Godhead. It 
 did it unconsciously, but it did it effectu- 
 ally. It made the Father one kind of a 
 God, and the Son a God of another kind. 
 It pictured the Father with no lines in 
 158 
 
His face but those of pitiless justice. In 
 that system, the Son had to die for the 
 world before the Father could be induced 
 to love it ; and even then the Father 
 loved the world, or, rather, a part of it, 
 not because there was anything in it 
 worth loving, but because the Son had 
 died. For this consideration He con- 
 sented to elect certain persons to eternal 
 life — in His own good time awakening 
 them from their slumber of death by a 
 call which they could not resist, and en- 
 abling them to persevere in their Chris- 
 tian course by a grace from which they 
 could not fall away. The rest, He left 
 to stumble on to their merited doom. It 
 was this system against which the Uni- 
 tarianism of Channing and his friends 
 was an earnest protest. I honor those 
 men, not for rejecting the Christian doc- 
 trine of the Trinity — God forbid! — but 
 for refusing to accept the theological 
 views with which good, but mistaken, 
 men had contrived to make that doctrine 
 159 
 
seem identical. The great strength of 
 the Channing movement lay in the errors 
 of the system against which it reacted. 
 With those errors everywhere modified, 
 if not yet everywhere removed, the move- 
 ment has ceased to be aggressive. It 
 has come to a standstill. I believe that 
 if the doctrine of the Trinity had been 
 presented in the latter part of the eigh- 
 teenth century as it has been presented in 
 our own day, that movement would never 
 have been inaugurated. It is strange 
 that occasion for such a movement should 
 ever have been given. Certainly the 
 doctrine of the Trinity, as held by the 
 Church, and as we believe it is taught in 
 Holy Scripture, is decisive enough as 
 against the Calvinistic tritheism. That 
 doctrine is not that the Son is of a different 
 mind from the Father, but that He is the 
 express image of the Father — that He 
 came into the world to declare the Fa- 
 ther. It teaches, not that the Son died 
 to get the Father to love the world, but 
 1 60 
 
that the Father *' so loved the world that 
 He gave His Son to die for it." It 
 teaches that we are saved, not simply 
 by Christ's throwing the mantle of His 
 merits over us, but by His putting His 
 own love, and truth, and purity, and peace 
 within us. 
 
 Certainly, in all this teaching there is 
 nothing to destroy the unity of the God- 
 head. The Scripture doctrine of the 
 Trinity, I repeat, does not destroy the 
 unity of the Godhead. So far from that, 
 it establishes the unity of the Godhead. 
 It takes more than a unit to make a 
 unity. In a God who should be simply 
 uni-personal, there could be nothing more 
 than a bare and barren unicity. This last 
 word I borrow from Coleridge, a writer 
 who says (in his Aids to Refiedioii)'. " I 
 am clearly convinced that the scriptural 
 and only true idea of God will, in its 
 development, be found to involve the 
 idea of the Trinity." This testimony of 
 
 Coleridge is substantially the testimony 
 II 
 
 i6i 
 
of the profoundest and clearest minds that 
 have given the matter their earnest study. 
 It is well known that Schelling, in his 
 latest years, renounced his dreary Pan- 
 theism to rest upon the doctrine of the 
 Trinity. It is well known, also, that upon 
 this doctrine as its foundation Hegel 
 built the whole vast superstructure of his 
 philosophical system ; and to this day 
 the entire Hegelian school — however 
 they may differ as to other points — are 
 at one in this : that to conceive of God as 
 personal at all, He must be conceived of, 
 not as a unit, but as a Trinity-in-unity. 
 
 I know, indeed, that this doctrine of 
 the Trinity does not ask to be received 
 on the ground of its inherent reasonable- 
 ness. If it did, it could speak only to 
 the educated few. It asks to be received 
 on the ground of the authority of Him 
 who openly revealed it, an authority 
 resting not upon the evidence of abstract 
 argument, but of the demonstrated, his- 
 torical fact — a kind of evidence which 
 162 
 
any man can judge of. But though it 
 asks it not, it is receiving, and is, I be- 
 lieve, to receive still more and more, the 
 willing homage of thoughtful minds to its 
 own profound self-evidence. I believe 
 that this very doctrine, which little or 
 unlearned minds have so long derided, is 
 yet to take its place among the most con- 
 vincing evidences of the truth of the Son 
 of God — that the day will dawn upon this 
 earth when as Faith joins in the Thrice 
 Holy of the Angels' cry, Philosophy, with 
 uplifted hands, and calm, adoring gaze, 
 will take up the grand ascription of the 
 ages, and give to God the glory due His 
 triune name of Father, Son, and Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 163 
 
THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY 
 
 If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, 
 the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are 
 hid from thine eyes. — St. Luke xix. 42. 
 
 AX7"E commemorate to-day — the first 
 ' ' day in Holy Week — our Lord's 
 triumphal entry into the Holy City. 
 
 The day before this triumphal entry, 
 our Lord arrived at Bethany ; and there 
 he accepted an invitation to a feast at the 
 house of Simon the Leper. With Him, at 
 the feast, sat Lazarus — whom, a little while 
 before. He had called back from the dead. 
 Jerusalem — only about two miles from 
 Bethany — was at this time filled with the 
 pilgrims who had come from every quar- 
 ter of the world to take part in the 
 approaching Passover ; and no sooner was 
 it known that Jesus and Lazarus were at 
 Bethany than multitudes began to pour 
 164 
 
out of the city to see them. And again, 
 the next day, when our Lord and His dis- 
 ciples were on the way to Jerusalem, "much 
 people," it is written, "took branches of 
 palm trees, and went forth to meet Him, 
 and cried Hosanna ; Blessed is the King 
 that Cometh in the name of the Lord." 
 
 No one can fail to remark a very strik- 
 ing contrast here with the whole tenor of 
 our Lord's previous life. Before, we find 
 Him retiring from the public gaze — 
 avoiding the homage of the crowd — with- 
 drawing Himself from those who would 
 make Him king. — Now all is changed. 
 He no longer refuses the title of King : He 
 accepts it. He is even at pains to assume 
 something of the outward state of royalty. 
 Can we divine the reason ? Events were 
 at hand which it was necessary to His 
 cause in the world that the world should 
 know. It was necessary to concentrate 
 upon Himself the attention of the whole 
 Jewish nation — to make all, unwilling or 
 willing, His witnesses. His triumph was 
 
 165 
 
not for Himself, but for others. For Him 
 it was no triumph. For Him, in all that 
 homage, there was no gladness. As the 
 long procession began to wind down the 
 Mount of Olives, and the city, with its 
 temple, and palaces, and towers, flashed 
 upon the view. He wept, saying, " If thou 
 hadst known, even thou, at least in this 
 thy day, the things which belong unto thy 
 peace ! but now they are hid from thine 
 eyes." These words, while applying pri- 
 marily to the people of Jerusalem, have 
 certainly a meaning for us, and for all. 
 
 They remind us, in the first place, of 
 the truth that God's mere omnipotence is 
 not enough to save us. God being per- 
 fect, and we imperfect. His power is, in 
 one sense, less than our own. We can do 
 wrong : He cannot. We can be unreason- 
 able : He cannot. We can be inconsis- 
 tent : He cannot. It is clear, therefore, 
 that if salvation means (as it does mean) 
 being saved from our sins, God has no 
 power to save us in our sins. It is clear 
 i66 
 
that salvation is not a question of disposi- 
 tion in God at all. It is simply a question 
 of condition in ourselves. What God's 
 disposition is, we know; His will, we are 
 told expressly, is that all men should be 
 saved. But the thing decisive is, not the 
 Divine will, but the human. God could 
 not force a soul to be holy. No man 
 can be made holy against his own will 
 
 — in fact, without his co-operation. And 
 if there is anything clear in the whole 
 Bible, it is this, that without holiness 
 there is, and can be, no blessedness. 
 Blessedness cannot come from mere sur- 
 roundings. Heaven, as well as Hell, will 
 depend not upon where a man is, but upon 
 what he is. This is something of which 
 we ought to feel thoroughly assured. 
 Hopes for Heaven, built on any other 
 foundation than that of fitness for Heaven, 
 
 — such fitness as only God's own Spirit 
 can prepare, — must prove to be like 
 houses built in drifting sands. Certainly, 
 if God had had any arbitrary power to 
 
 167 
 
save men, the Saviour would never have 
 had to agonize in the Garden, or die upon 
 the Cross. And just as certainly, if the 
 Saviour Himself had had any power to set 
 aside the eternal principles of judgment, 
 He would never have wept tears of hope- 
 less sorrow over impenitent Jerusalem. 
 Palm Sunday, then, teaches us this lesson 
 — that pardon without repentance is not 
 possible. But it teaches us something 
 more. It teaches us something about 
 repentance. The Jewish people had so 
 hardened themselves in impenitence that, 
 to them, repentance was, practically, no 
 longer possible. May persons bring 
 themselves into a like condition now ? 
 Certainly, so far as human observation 
 goes, the tendency of character is to 
 settle down into forms that, more and 
 more, become unchanging ; while our 
 Lord, we know, in warning His hearers of 
 the sin against the Holy Ghost, spoke of 
 the danger of an eternal sin — not an act, 
 but a state, of sin. The intimations seem 
 i68 
 
to be that there is a possible condition in 
 which there is no forgiveness, not because 
 God is not willing to bestow forgiveness, 
 but because that in man which alone 
 could take forgiveness has been palsied. 
 And surely in this possibility there is a 
 warning — a warning against putting off 
 that which we ought to do now, and could 
 do if we would. The exhortation is, " To- 
 day, if ye will hear His voice, harden 
 not your hearts." We read of no one 
 in the Bible, who, having put off the call 
 of God to a more convenient season, ever 
 gave heed to it at all. I do not say that 
 such a thing is not possible. I simply 
 say that the Bible is silent respecting it. 
 Do you remind me of the case of the 
 penitent thief ? The case of the penitent 
 thief, I answer, is not in point. All that 
 the penitent thief had ever heard of the 
 Gospel was v/hat he heard in the unearthly 
 prayer upon the Cross, " Father, forgive 
 them ; for they know not what they do." 
 While, then, we look on Jerusalem to-day, 
 169 
 
still unscathed by battles, still visited with 
 tidings of redemption, and yet lost, may 
 we not well ask whether the Saviour 
 might not find among ourselves those for 
 whom all His love and all His pity could 
 not avail — those for whom, though He 
 had shed His precious blood. He could 
 shed now only bitter tears — those for 
 whom, though He beheld in them the pur- 
 chase of redemption, He could only ex- 
 claim, in helpless anguish, " O that ye had 
 known, at least in this your day, the things 
 that belong to your peace ! but now they 
 are hid from your eyes." 
 
 But Palm Sunday has another lesson. 
 
 Although Jerusalem was hopelessly im- 
 penitent — although she had sinned away 
 her last day of grace — yet she still kept 
 up her zeal for her religion — such as her 
 religion was. She was zealous for the law : 
 she was never more punctilious in ritual 
 observance ; she was never more servile 
 in regard for the traditions of the elders. 
 Our Lord Himself bore witness to the 
 170 
 
zeal of the Pharisees — the most rigid and 
 the most orthodox of all the Jews — when 
 He told them that they would compass 
 sea and land to make one proselyte, even 
 though they made him twofold more the 
 child of hell than themselves. The most 
 hardened, the most impenitent class in 
 Jerusalem — those whom the Saviour so 
 bitterly denounced — went the farthest in 
 their devotion to the Church. Devotion 
 to the Church was, with them, a thing of 
 unmingled selfishness, it was a thing of 
 the narrowest partisanship. In the ver- 
 nacular of the present day, the Church 
 was, with them, a mere machine. They 
 regarded our Lord very much as a so-called 
 machine-politician might regard a broad, 
 high-minded, impartial statesman. For 
 such a teacher, they simply had no use. 
 They looked upon Him as the represen- 
 tative of a system that was utterly incom- 
 patible with their own pretensions. They 
 could not appreciate the spirituality of 
 His teachings. His breadth of view — 
 171 
 
His catholicity of spirit — aroused all the 
 venom of their bigotry. One who could 
 make so little of the Church as He did — 
 one who could exalt mere condition of the 
 soul so far above the most venerable of 
 institutions — one who could even see 
 the marks of God's acceptance in persons 
 who stood altogether outside the pale of 
 the Church — in Syrophenician and Sa- 
 maritan — such an one — no matter how 
 good he might seem to be — had no 
 shadow of right to call himself a church- 
 man. This was the way they felt. When, 
 for the moment, our Lord seemed to be 
 coming over to their side, they began at 
 once to move towards Him. Had He 
 continued to assume the state of a Jewish 
 King, they would gladly have continued 
 to rend the air with hosannas to His 
 name, as they did to-day all the way from 
 Olivet to Jerusalem. This He did not 
 do ; and within five days their angry 
 voices were shouting for His crucifixion. 
 Ought this not to be, to all of us, a warn 
 172 
 
ing ? It is among the first of the warnings 
 of Holy Week, and it seems to me one 
 of the most solemn. It warns us, that if 
 we have nothing broader, more spiritual, 
 more Christ-like, to go upon than what we 
 call our churchmanship, we are not only not 
 prepared for the better life, but have missed 
 the only way that would lead us to it. 
 
 There is still another thing of which 
 Palm Sunday may remind us. It may re- 
 mind us that nations, not less than indi- 
 viduals, must suffer for their sins. It may 
 remind us, further, that, though the pun- 
 ishment of a nation's sins proceed along 
 lines purely natural, that fact does not 
 make the punishment, in its ordering, the 
 less Divine. The destruction of Jerusalem 
 had been predicted as a Divine judgment 
 upon the Jewish nation. It had been so 
 predicted by our Lord Himself. And yet 
 in the means by which it was brought 
 about there was nothing to strike the 
 mind as supernatural. We know that 
 Jerusalem was destroyed by the armies of 
 173 
 
Rome ; and yet Christ speaks of them as 
 the armies of the King of Heaven. We 
 know that the Roman armies were led to 
 Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus — sent 
 thither by Nero to quell revolt ; and yet 
 Christ speaks of them as sent forth of God. 
 The Roman Emperor was acting in his 
 own freedom, and for his own purposes : 
 and yet Vespasian and Titus, and their 
 legions, unconsciously held their commis- 
 sions from on high, and accomplished the 
 Divine will as truly as ever did Moses or 
 Joshua or David or Saul. I make no at- 
 tempt to solve this mystery. The man who 
 attempts to solve all mysteries — denying 
 the truth of any mystery that he cannot 
 solve — may at once be written down as a 
 charlatan. We cannot deny the freedom of 
 the human will without denying the whole 
 authority of consciousness and blotting 
 out every word that stands for human 
 responsibility. We cannot deny the sov- 
 ereignty of the Divine will without denying 
 the only principle of unity and order in 
 174 
 
human history. For my own part, I ac- 
 knowledee both, and therefore I hold 
 human history (to the extent that it is 
 true) to be not only human, but Divine. 
 It is Divine in the sense of being a record 
 of God's dealings with men. In this 
 sense, I believe the history we are mak- 
 ing to-day to be as truly Divine, — not 
 sacred, for that means written by sacred 
 authors, — but as truly Divine as that 
 which tells how the Israelites in their glory 
 put to flight the armies of the aliens, or 
 how, in their shame, they sat down and 
 wept by the waters of Babel. 
 
 In the history of nations this principle 
 of judgment, that I have been speaking 
 of, has applications that are obvious. Of 
 one such application, we have all, perhaps, 
 been thinking. We have all, perhaps, 
 been thinking of a power that once, for 
 the vastness of its possessions, for the 
 magnificence of its revenue, for the splen- 
 dor of its court and the pride of its people, 
 held a foremost place in the sisterhood of 
 
 I7S 
 
nations. How stands that power to-day ? 
 Insignificant among the other powers of 
 Europe. Bankrupt, or almost bankrupt 
 at home ; stripped of her foreign de- 
 pendencies. If these results are to be 
 thought of as Divine judgments, for what 
 were they inflicted ? The history of Spain 
 has been the history of protracted and 
 ruthless cruelty and crime against every 
 dependent people beneath her sway. Al- 
 most her last possession in this western 
 world is that fair island that lies far to our 
 south, like a beautiful gem upon the bosom 
 of the ocean ; and there, by outrages at 
 which all Christendom stands aghast, she 
 has filled up the measure of her iniquity, 
 until now a judicial blindness seems to have 
 fallen like a thick curtain upon her eyes. 
 About the war, now so imminent ^ be- 
 tween Spain and ourselves, I need not, 
 and do not care to speak. Such a war 
 would be a judgment not only upon Spain. 
 
 ' This sermon was delivered, I believe, on April 3, 1898. 
 War was officially declared April 2ist. 
 
 176 
 
If ever a country was cursed with the 
 spirit of greed and poHtical dishonesty, 
 and a readiness to subordinate the pubHc 
 welfare to personal, or corporate, or par- 
 tisan ends, that country is certainly our 
 own ; and if, in the strife now threatening, 
 we should suffer (as it is likely that we 
 should) we ought to be able to tell our- 
 selves the reason why. 
 
 Let us hope that the conflict may not 
 come, but, if it come, that it may be deci- 
 sive and be brief. And may God hasten 
 the coming of that day when Christian 
 nations shall have reason enough and con- 
 science enough to blot out aggressive war 
 from the catalogue of human possibilities 
 — not that we may live in supine and sel- 
 fish safety — war itself would be better than 
 that — but that a fuller and nobler tribute 
 of bloodless victory may be brought to 
 the feet of the Prince of Peace. 
 
 177 
 
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