Q JUN 8 -1927 ^ 
 
 BX 5133 .H68 K5 
 How, William Walsham, 1823 
 1897. 
 
 The knowledge of God 
 
THE EXPOSITOR'S LIBRARX^ 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE 
 OF GOD 
 
 AND OTHER SERMONS 
 
 BY 
 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF WAKEFIELD 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 
 
[ 
 
 Digitized by 
 
 the Internet Archive 
 
 
 
 
 in 2015 
 
 
 
 https://archive.org/details/knowleclgeofgoclotOOhoww 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the onfy true 
 God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." — St. John 
 xvii. 3 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, 1888; and in St. John's, 
 Leeds, before the British Association, 1890. 
 
 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 •Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, 
 for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in right- 
 eousness : that the man of God may be complete, furnished 
 completely unto every good work."— 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17 (R.V.) 
 Preached in Manchester Cathedral before the British 
 Association, 1887. 
 
 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 He hath given them a law which shall not be broken." — Ps. 
 
 cxlviii. 6 (P.B.V.) 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's, 1884. 
 
 THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee." — Job xii. 8 
 
 A Harvest Sermon, preached in Wakefield Cathedral, 1889. 
 
vl 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 ST. JOHN THE BAPTISTS DOUBT. 
 
 rAGB 
 
 Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another ? "— 
 St. Matt. xi. 3 ... ... ... „. 51 
 
 Preached at Windsor, 1887, 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 ' Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge 
 of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of 
 the stature of the fulness of Christ." — Eph. iv. 13 .„ 61 
 
 Preached in S(. Pauts Cathedral, New Year, 1886. 
 
 ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 'Thou therefore endure hardness." — 2 Tim. ii. 3 ^ 
 Preached in St. PauTs, 1887. 
 
 THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 'Reaching forth unto those things which are before." — Phil. 
 iii. 13 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's, New Year, 1888. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. 
 
 y one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be 
 Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free." — I COR. xii. 13 
 Preached at Vewsbury, before the Co-operative Ctngrtss, 
 ma-SuMday, 1888. 
 
 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 Lord, it is good for us to be here : if Thou wilt, let ns make 
 here three tabernacles ; one for Thee, and one for Moses, 
 and one for Elias."— Sr. Matt. xvii. 4 ... ... ... iii 
 
 Preached if St. Paul's, q/iet the Londsn Mission, 1874. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 JEREMIAH— RESOLUTENESS IN THE MIDST OF 
 DISCOURAGEMENT. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Then s»id I, Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak ; for I 
 »m a child."— JER. i. 6 ... ... ... .» 125 
 
 Freachtd at St. Gile^, Oxford, Lent, 1869. 
 
 GOD'S PRESENCE OUR STRENGTH. 
 The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." — Ps. xxiv. i 13 
 
 Preached at the Consecration of the Bishop of Bedford {R. C. 
 Billing) in St. PauFs, 1888. 
 
 DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 
 I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live."— Gal. ii. 20 147 
 Preached at Oxford, Lenten Course, 1873. 
 
 THE PERFECT MAN. 
 Unto a perfect man."— Eph. iv. 13. ... ... .... 159 
 
 Preached on the re-opening of Chester Cathedral, 1872. 
 
 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 In whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto 
 an holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also are builded 
 together for an habitation of God through the Spirit." — Eph. 
 ii. 21, 22 .. ... ... ... ... ... 173 
 
 Preached during the Octave of the Consecration of PorUeei 
 Church, 1889. 
 
viii 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 
 
 "Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh 
 
 on the heart."— I Sam. xvi. 7 ... ... ... ... 189 
 
 Preachtdin Si. PauPs, 1873. 
 
 WITH CHRIST. 
 " With Me."— St. John xvii. 24 ... ... ... ... 201 
 
 Preached at Windsor, before the Empress Frederick of Germany, 
 shortly after the death of the Emperor, 1888. 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 V- 5 
 
i 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 Frtachedin St. Paul's Cathedral, 1 888 ; and in St. John's, Leeds, before 
 the British Association, 1890. 
 
 "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, 
 and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent."— St, John xvii. 3. 
 
 So spake the Master we follow in His great prayer the 
 night before He died on tlie Cross; and the Church has 
 taken His words into one of her daily collects, speaking of 
 God, " in knowledge of whom " (that is, of course, ' in the 
 knowing of whom ') " standeth our eternal life " ; as well 
 as into the Collect for St. Philip and St. James's Day — 
 "whom truly to know is everlasting life." But men say, 
 ' We cannot know God : we do not deny the existence 
 of God ; but we affirm that, if there be a God, He is un- 
 knowable.' Now let me at once allow that there is a 
 great truth underlying this agnosticism. There generally 
 is a truth at the root of all error ; for error is mostly partial 
 or one-sided truth, erring in its ignoring of other truth. 
 It is true, then, that a finite being like man cannot know, 
 with any complete or commensurate knowledge, an infinite 
 Being like God. God is expressly called by us " incom- 
 prehensible," which means, not One whom we cannot 
 understand (whether that be true 01 not), but One whom 
 
4 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 we cannot grasp and embrace, just because the finite cannot 
 grasp or embrace the Infinite. But, because we cannot 
 know God with such a knowledge as could embrace a full 
 and complete conception of that which He is, it does not 
 follow either that we cannot know that God is, or that we 
 cannot know many things about God. Let me tell you a 
 little story, which will help to make my meanmg plain. 
 An old weaver in my parish some years ago had much 
 difficulty in believing in the existence of God, because, as 
 he told me, he could not believe in a Being whom he could 
 not understand, and he could not understand or conceive 
 of a Being without beginning and without end. One day, 
 as he lay on the bed from which he never rose again, he 
 told me he was much happier, for his difficulties as to 
 believing in God seemed to have disappeared. When I 
 asked him how this was, he told me he had been thinking 
 about space, and had seen clearly that there could be no 
 beginning and no end of space. He put it quaintly, but 
 with perfect accuracy, thus : " I thought of travelling away 
 from this world into space as far as I could think, and then 
 as far again, and then as far again, and so on till I could 
 think no longer. And then I said to myself, Now where 
 you have come to there must be either something or 
 nothing. If it is nothing, it is no end, but goes on j and 
 if it is something, then (I thought) what is on the other 
 side ? So I saw there could be no end to space. And 
 then, though I could not think any farther, I saw how 
 foolish it was to disbelieve in the existence of a Being 
 because He had no beginning or end." Now this old 
 weaver, a man singularly gifted with clear reasoning 
 faculties, saw this much at any rate — that it was unreason- 
 able to deny the existence of God, if there were evidence 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 5 
 
 of such existence elsewhere, merely because of man's 
 inabihty to grasp the idea of His infinitude. 
 
 But, it is said, there are things as to which we can attain 
 to certainty. We can study physical facts ; material things 
 are at least real and true ; we can trust the evidence of our 
 senses. And so a Positivist theory is built up, based upon 
 the conviction of the trustworthiness of such evidence as 
 is supplied by our senses. But let us think. Are we sure 
 we know so much about outward objects ? Have we really 
 ascertained what an outward object is ? Take a tree. You 
 say it is plain enough that the tree is tall, and is covered 
 with green leaves, and has a hard rough stem, and the like. 
 But all you really do know is that an impression, which you 
 describe in this way, is somehow made upon the nerves 
 connected with the retina of your eye. The colour is in 
 your brain, not in the tree. The hardness and roughness 
 are sensations of your touch, but you do not know what 
 produces them. All you can say about the tree is that there 
 is an object there which has certain qualities which produce 
 in you sensations which you have learnt to call height, and 
 greenness, and hardness, and the hke. In reality, you can 
 make out very little in any external object except what 
 may be called a sort of core of being, the various things 
 your senses tell you of being in yourself, and not in the 
 thing. You will see that this is so very clearly in the case 
 of sound. There is no sound where there is no ear to 
 hear it. There may be rapid vibrations of the air, but 
 sound is the effect of such vibrations upon a sensitive 
 membrane in the living being. I might draw out this 
 thought much more fully, but I have simply touched upon 
 it to show you that there is as true and legitimate an 
 agnosticism with regard to the physical world and the 
 
6 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 things of sense as there is with regard to the spiritual world 
 and the things of faith. In both fields man's finite under- 
 standing moves within very narrow bounds, and while he 
 is right in saying he knows, and can know, but little of the 
 true nature either of God or of created things, he is wrong 
 in saying he cannot know God, but can know the material 
 things which his senses bring to him. 
 
 But, then, while man cannot know the essence and true 
 nature of any external object, but only the phenomena 
 presented to his senses, he can by means of these pheno- 
 mena know a great deal about external objects, and their 
 relation to himself and to each other. Yes 3 and so, 
 though he cannot grasp and comprehend the essence of 
 an infinite God, he can, if he has the guidance of any 
 suitable phenomena, know much about God, and His 
 relation to himself. And it is quite possible he may find 
 that the phenomena which seem to him to reveal the 
 existence and attributes of God are as trustworthy in their 
 evidence as those which reveal to him the existence and 
 attributes of material things. For example, I judge of the 
 existence and nature of the tree by the peculiar sensations 
 which the presence of that tree causes in my brain, though 
 I cannot tell what the real essence of that tree is, nor 
 what are the qualities in it which produce the sensations 
 I am conscious of. So I judge of the existence, and 
 of the power and wisdom and goodness, of God, by the 
 impressions produced on my reasoning powers, though I 
 cannot know God's essence, nor understand all His methods 
 and purposes. 
 
 Of course all I am so far attempting is, upon the 
 principle of Bishop Butler's " Analogy," to show that it is 
 unreasonable to deny the existence of God because we 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 7 
 
 cannot grasp the conception of His infinitude, and un- 
 reasonable to assert that we cannot know anyihing about 
 God because we cannot know all about Him. For the 
 same arguments would lead us to deny the existence of 
 space, and to affirm the impossibility of knowing anything 
 about a tree. 
 
 There is surely a true Christian agnosticism which 
 consists in a profound sense of our own ignorance, and of 
 the narrow limits of our faculties, and which, therefore, 
 instead of denying possibilities which lie beyond such 
 narrow limits, and the denial of which requires as large a 
 stretch into the unknown as their affirmation, rather bows 
 in utmost humility, and in childlike teachableness welcomes 
 and accepts the scattered rays of light and leading which 
 fall through its dim boundaries from a more luminous 
 sphere beyond. 
 
 O my Father, my Father ! Would they, then, tell me I 
 cannot know Tliee ? Would they shut me into a black 
 dungeon, and forbid me the sunlight of Thy presence and 
 Thy love ? I know I am illogical. I know I am calling 
 upon a God, as if I knew Him, when I am trying to show 
 that He is knowable. I cannot help it. Nay, am I 
 indeed so illogical ? Are all these yearnings of my soul ; 
 these cryings out of my inner self to One in whom I feel I 
 live and move and have my being ; this fitness and adapta- 
 tion of so much of which I am conscious for intercourse 
 with a supreme and Divine and personal Being ; this sense 
 of utter want and emptiness except in the assumption of 
 such a Being ; — are all these facts of consciousness to covmt 
 for nothing ? Are they fantastic dreams and illusions, born 
 but to vanish with the waking up to a harsh cold awful 
 conviction of infinite nothingness? Nay; explain them 
 
8 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 away ; tell me how they come ; assure me they are self- 
 evolved : but they stand there still ; they decline to be 
 philosophised away ; they are very obstinate, and cling to 
 my deepest truest self, as parts of my very life and being. 
 I throw them down as facts which have to be dealt with, 
 and which are as well worth weighing as other facts. It 
 would be to me a strange mysterious paradox, almost like 
 some startling contradiction of a great general law of 
 physics, to find that, whereas all other cravings and 
 capacities of human nature have their objects and fulfil- 
 ments, this alone — the craving and capacity for knowledge 
 of, and intercourse with, a supreme self-existing Being — 
 this, the highest and purest and most ennobling of all such 
 cravings and capacities,— that this alone is objectless, 
 purposeless, meaningless. 
 
 I have been weighing and thinking over many argu- 
 ments, and trying to select such as I might best press upon 
 you in this sermon. Many of these must be familiar 
 enough to those of you who have read and thought on the 
 subject at all. It would be a task of deepest interest to 
 trace out these arguments, even though the treatment of 
 them would be necessarily very brief and imperfect We 
 might travel back together through the vast unbroken series 
 of effects and causes until we stood face to face with the 
 necessity for some great First Cause of all. We might 
 contemplate the wonders of nature, and deduce from the 
 marvellous adaptation and fitness of things, everywhere 
 discernible, the necessity for an intelligent, and therefore 
 a personal, Creator. We might dwell upon the mysteries 
 of man's inner being, and from the existence of conscience 
 and sense of responsibility, so universally existing, might 
 conclude that we owe allegiance to a righteous Being. We 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 9 
 
 might note the fact that we are unable to conceive of any 
 power sufficient to originate movement, or, in other words, 
 to start a new series of causes and effects, except that of 
 will, and so might argue for the existence of a supreme 
 all-powerful Will. We might show the way in which all 
 things tend to good, and are meant to lead to highest good 
 at last, and so might gather the beneficence and love of the 
 Ruler of all things. 
 
 But I am impatient. I have no love for arguing, and 
 I very much doubt if any sceptic was ever convinced by 
 mere intellectual argument. It is not that I despise the 
 arguments on the other side. I do not undervalue the 
 ability, and the high-minded honest love of truth, which 
 many sceptics show. But my own experience is that 
 argument alone seldom convinces any one. Certainly, if 
 it is to do so, it must be of a very high order — far higher 
 than such as is at my command. I am not presumptuous 
 enough to think myself qualified to deal worthily with the 
 deep and difficult questions surrounding our subject on all 
 sides. And to one who has been brought up in the light 
 and joy and hope of religion ; whose best thoughts and 
 motives and longings and endeavours have been ever 
 closely bound up with the truths which some are seeking to 
 deny and to destroy ; who is conscious that the whole super- 
 structure of his moral being, terribly imperfect though it 
 be, rests upon these truths, and that upon the rejection of 
 these truths would necessarily follow the collapse of all he 
 holds sacred and worthy and beautiful ; — to such an one it 
 is hard to spend much time and thought upon abstract 
 argument and intellectual investigation. It is like asking 
 him to reason out and prove by cold dry logic that he is 
 a living being, who can think and feel and choose. 
 
lO THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 But in preaching upon the knowledge of God there is 
 one thing the preacher must always be longing to say. He 
 admits how weak and narrow is man's understanding. 
 He freely allows how impossible it is for such an under- 
 standing to grasp and embrace the majesty and grandeur 
 of God. Nay, he denies not that, while in the flesh, it 
 must always be a difficulty to conceive a Being purely 
 spiritual (and " God is a Spirit "), and to make real to the 
 mind the existence of a nature so different from, and so 
 far above, our own. Well, but suppose that God knew 
 this difficulty too, and suppose that, knowing it. He designed 
 to make Himself known to men in a new and clearer way 
 through the Incarnation of the Eternal Son ? Mind, I am 
 not saying that this is the only Divine purpose in the 
 Incarnation. But we are talking of knowing God, and it 
 is not hard to see that, if God could be so united to one 
 of ourselves that through the veil of Manhood we might 
 discern with unblinded eye something of the nature and 
 character and purposes of God, we might know Him far 
 more fully and truly than before. And surely this is so. 
 Not in vain did the Saviour say, " He that hath seen Me 
 hath seen the Father also." Yes, we want to know God. 
 Human nature is ever crying, " Show us the Father." Tell 
 us what God is, and what He is like, and what are His 
 relations to us. We have a strange instinctive belief, im- 
 bedded in our very nature, ever rising up in vast yearnings 
 after clearer light ; ever, even in darkest places, seeking 
 the Lord "if haply we might feel after Him and find 
 Him"; but an infinite Being, omnipresent, omniscient, 
 spiritual, is too far from our daily and hourly experiences 
 for us to grasp and realize. And so the answer comes. 
 God Himself seems to speak from the awful depths of the 
 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 II 
 
 light which no man can approach unto : — ' I know it, My 
 child. It is hard. And I have trained thee through thy 
 infancy to hope and expect and watch for the unveilings 
 of My love. And lo ! in the fulness of the times I have 
 sent My well-beloved Son to make known to thee thy God. 
 In Our eternal union We are one — I in Him and He in Me. 
 But lo ! He hath become Man ; He hath worn thy flesh ; 
 He hath lived and died on this lower earth for thee. And 
 He hath shown thee that which I am. He is the Brightness 
 of My glory, and the express Image of My Person. In 
 looking upon His holiness, and wisdom, and love, and 
 tenderness, thou hast looked upon the holiness, and wisdom, 
 and love, and tenderness, of God. In gazing upon His 
 stupendous Sacrifice, thou hast seen the will and the purpose 
 of God for thy salvation. Is it hard to know God ? But 
 thou shall know Jesus. And He is God. " This is the true 
 God, and eternal life." ' 
 
 And so I lift up my heart once more, and cry, O my 
 Father, my Father ! I bow myself before Thee in lowliest 
 adoration, in deepest reverence. I cannot know Thee as 
 Thou art, for I am weak, and blind, and ignorant ; while 
 Thou art infinitely great, and wise, and good, and glorious. 
 Yet hast Thou in Thy Divine compassion revealed Thyself 
 in the face of Jesus Christ. I have looked upon Him, and 
 in Him I have seen Thee. O my Father, my Father ! I 
 know Thee. Yes, I am bold to say it, I know Thee. I 
 know Thee to be tenderer than any earthly father. I know 
 Thee to be supremely wise and just and true. I know 
 Thee to be a God of love, who wouldest not that any 
 should perish, but that all should be saved. It is true 
 I see " through a glass, darkly " now, yet I hope to see 
 "face to face." It is true I know but "in part" now, 
 
12 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 
 
 yet I hope to "know even as I am knowu." But that 
 which I know now suffices to fill me vnih gratitude and 
 with hope. Thy Son hath spoken, and my whole soul 
 echoes the Divine utterance, "This is life eternal, that 
 they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, 
 whom Thou hast sent." Amen. 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 Preached in Manchester Cathedral before the British Association, 1887. 
 
 " Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, fot 
 reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness : that 
 the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every 
 good work."— 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17 (R.V.). 
 
 The Bible is " profitable for teaching, for reproof, for cor- 
 rection, for instruction which is in righteousness." Yes, 
 assuredly ; but I do not find that it claims to be profitable 
 for scientific study. The man of God is by it "furnished 
 completely unto every good work." Yes, assuredly ; but I 
 do not discover that he is by it furnished even partially unto 
 the conclusions of philosophic inquiry. I am quite sure 
 that many needless difficulties have arisen from the preva- 
 lence of a narrow and mechanical view of inspiration ; and 
 that such difficulties would often be removed by a frank 
 recognition of the truth that God allowed the writers of the 
 Bible to write as men, each with his individuality distinctly 
 impressed upon his work ; each, while delivering God's 
 message and guided by God's Spirit, yet using the ordinary 
 phenomenal language of his day as to matters of science 
 (and, indeed, in no other way would he have been intelligible 
 to his contemporaries) ; each unerringly led to the truth it 
 was God's will he should announce for the practical guid- 
 
l6 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ance of His people, but not made superaaturally cognizant 
 of the mysteries of the universe, or of the annals of universal 
 history. Do not let us go to the Bible for what it was 
 never meant to teach. That will save us something. 
 
 The subject I have taken in hand, namely, The Bible in 
 its relation to Science, is so vast that I must try and narrow 
 it by selecting some one point for illustration. 
 
 I suppose many of us have been brought up in the old- 
 fashioned belief, which seemed to our forefathers to rest so 
 clearly on the authority of the Bible, that God created man 
 upon the earth as a totally new and hitherto unknown being, 
 essentially different from all other creatures, in full-grown 
 stature and complete moral and intellectual development, 
 about 4004 years before the Christian era. But none of us 
 can be ignorant of modem speculations as to the origin of 
 man of a very different character from this old-fashioned 
 belief. Of all these speculations, the most prominent, as 
 well as the most startling, is that which is propounded by 
 the advocates of Evolution, who hold that all living creatures 
 have been developed out of earHer and less perfect forms ; 
 so that, if we had the power to trace the almost infinite 
 links of the chain, we should find man's true origin in the 
 very lowest and simplest creature in which life existed at 
 all, each living thing in succession having the capacity for 
 improvement bestowed upon it, and, by the survival of the 
 fittest in the struggle for life, by the informing agencies of 
 external circumstances, and by other constantly operating 
 laws of nature, being able to develope in long ages into a 
 higher and more perfect type of existence, until at last we 
 arrive at that wonderful being — Man. I am not sure that 
 our best scientific men would hold this theory to be as yet 
 finally established, or to be at present more than a highly 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 17 
 
 probable speculation. But undoubtedly there are facts and 
 arguments in its favour which it would be silly to despise, 
 and which to many scientific men appear to possess all but 
 conclusive weight. 
 
 Now what has the Christian, who believes in his Bible, 
 to say to this ? 
 
 There are some devout men who will say, * This and all 
 such-like speculations are straight against God's Word, and 
 therefore utterly untrue and absurd. I cannot even consent 
 to argue about them as if there were any possibility of their 
 acceptance.' Nay, this is not the spirit which is likely to 
 arrive at truth. Have we so utterly forgotten the injury 
 done to the cause of religion by the stolid resistance of the 
 Church in former days to the discoveries of Astronomy as 
 opposed to the Bible ? Is it so long ago since we heard 
 silly denunciations uttered against Geology because it taught 
 that the days of Creation signify vast periods of time, and 
 cast doubts on the popular belief that the fossils of our 
 rocks were carried there by the Universal Deluge? We 
 have read our Bibles wrongly before : we may be reading 
 them wrongly now. I have called the language of the Bible 
 upon physical matters "phenomenal," because that language 
 is most evidently not meant to teach scientific truth or to 
 help scientific discovery, but is the language of appearances, 
 describing things (as all language does popularly) not as 
 they are, but as they seem. I presume, if the writers of 
 God's Word had been inspired to speak of things as they 
 are in the truth of God's own Divine knowledge, the mode 
 of speaking would have been wholly unintelligible to man. 
 The speculations of Berkeley, Hamilton, and Mill, to name 
 only a few of the more familiar of our philosophical 
 writers, are sufficient to show how little we know of things 
 
 c— 5 
 
l8 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE, 
 
 beyond mere phenomena. Thus God's Word, in abstaining 
 from scientific revelations, is simply adapting itself to our 
 understandings, in the same way that it does when it speaks 
 of God Himself in anthromorphic language, ascribing to 
 Him the members of a human body, that we may see as 
 it were a shadow of His actings on the walL We have 
 made mistakes in the past by not discerning these things, 
 and interpreting the words of Scripture with an over-rigid 
 literalism. Let us beware lest we fall into the same mis- 
 take again. What I plead against is a hasty denunciation 
 of what may some day be proved to be founded on truth, 
 a contemptuous rejection of theories which we may some 
 day learn to accept as freely, and with as little sense of 
 inconsistency with God's Word, as we now accept the true 
 theory of the earth's motion round the sun, or the long 
 diu-ation of the geological epochs. 
 
 But there is another attitude which some take up in 
 regard to these speculations. They say, ' Religion and 
 science occupy wholly different spheres, and need in no way 
 intermeddle with each other. They revolve, as it were, in 
 different planes, and so never meet. Thus we may pursue 
 scientific studies with the utmost freedom, and at the same 
 time may pay the most reverent regard to theology, having 
 no fears of collision, because allowing no points of contact,' 
 I have never been able to understand this position, though 
 I have often seen it assumed. It seems to me that there 
 are, and must be, various points of contact between theology 
 and science, and therefore frequent danger of collision, 
 and that it is foolish to ignore or deny this. No doubt 
 they do revolve in different orbits, but these orbits cut one 
 another at certain points. In other and simpler language, 
 God speaks to us by His Word and by His works ; and 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 19 
 
 while for the most part He speaks of different matters in 
 these His two great languages, it is not always so. Some- 
 times he tells us about the same things in the two languages, 
 and then we are bound to interpret the one by the other, 
 and to be very careful that we do not misinterpret either 
 language. 
 
 Now, the origin of man is just one of those matters ot 
 which God seems to speak to us in both His languages. It 
 is one of the points of contact, and (as it seems at present) 
 of possible collision. So we are bound to consider the 
 matter very carefully. 
 
 Now let me, for argument's sake, suppose the theory ot 
 Evolution to be fully established, in the case of man no less 
 than in the case of other living creatures. Let me suppose 
 we are taught, by the teaching of God's handwriting in His 
 works, to look upon man as the latest development of a 
 structure and system of which we trace back the rudiments 
 and gradual growth through ten thousand earlier and pro- 
 gressive forms of life. What then ? Why, then this was 
 the wonderful way in which " the Lord God formed man 
 out of the dust of the ground." We then behold God 
 creating by Evolution instead of by isolated and uncon- 
 nected acts of creative energy. 
 
 But surely our Bible teaches us to believe that man was 
 created as a being wholly distinct from the other living 
 creatures of the earth, and by a very special and peculiar 
 exercise of the Divine Will. Can we doubt it ? Well, no 
 doubt some do doubt it. But can we ? For, assuming the 
 theory of Evolution to the full, it can only deal with the 
 material frame, and its powers and adaptations. Let science 
 teach tliat man is developed from earlier types of life, it 
 can only be as an animal— as a living organism — that he is 
 
20 
 
 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 SO developed. But is this all that man is? Does this 
 embrace our entire conception of man ? Is he nothing more 
 than the most highly developed animal upon earth ? Nay, 
 my friends, whence came this marvellous spiritual endow- 
 ment of which you and I are conscious, and which is the 
 essence of our true humanity ? What if Darwin can trace 
 in some of the lower animals dim hints — distant approaches 
 — to some of the ruder and almost instinctive peculiarities 
 (as they were once thought to be) of the human race ? 
 Does this really help us to bridge over the tremendous 
 gulf between the cleverest of the brutes, and the thinkmg, 
 reasoning, hoping, planning, worshipping, spirit of man ? 
 What if God had chosen to let His creatures ripen by slow 
 degrees into more and more perfect forms, until one was 
 produced which in His wisdom He counted fit for the 
 inbreathing of an immortal spirit ? Was this no new 
 creation ? What if of all His creatures God selected one 
 to be endowed with His own likeness, and to be exalted 
 into the living soul ? Would this have been unworthy of 
 the high place man's creation occupies in the primaeval 
 record ? To me it seems quite possible to reconcile the 
 theory of physical evolution in the case of man's outward 
 organism (with its mysterious and complicated develop- 
 ment of faculties and adaptations) with the dignity which 
 the fiat of the Creator's will has bestowed upon the being 
 whom He made to be a new creature in the splendid dowry 
 of his spiritual and intellectual powers. 
 
 You will see that I do not consider even the boldest 
 speculations as to man's origin to be at all necessarily 
 inconsistent with the firmest belief in his endowment with 
 a special gift of God-like spiritual powers, and with a new 
 nature incapable of death ; and I found this upon the vast 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 21 
 
 and profound distinction between the material and the 
 spiritual in man, repudiating to the utmost those materialistic 
 theories which would confound the two, or make the 
 spiritual nothing else but a phase and phenomenon of the 
 material. I believe such views to be refuted by the very 
 facts of human nature, and to be opposed to all that is 
 highest and best and noblest in our nature. I believe 
 there is a whole region of facts which cannot be rationally 
 accounted for by one who sees in man's nature nothing 
 but the material. 
 
 Of course I am well aware that I have barely touched 
 one branch of a very large and complicated question. I 
 have desired simply to show that, upon ground on which 
 the Bible and science meet, and where they often seem to 
 speak diverse things, some at least of tlie apparent diversity 
 may be caused by our own misreadings of either the one 
 language or the other. I have spoken of the misreadings 
 of the Bible, because that is the side on which I am bound 
 to be mainly on my guard. The truest votaries of science 
 know full well that they have to be no less on their guard 
 against misreadings on their side. It is so easy to mistake 
 our own crude interpretations for the very voice of God. 
 After all, we are very ignorant. The wisest are but feeling 
 after real knowledge, and he who has learnt most, and 
 knows most, is generally the one who knows best how little 
 he knows. There is a true sort of Christian agnosticism, 
 which is nothing else but a bowing down in our conscious 
 ignorance before mysteries too vast and high for our feeble 
 grasp. " So foolish was I and ignorant, even as it were a 
 beast before Thee." 
 
 Well, I have spoken of points in the border-land where 
 science and religion approach one another. But is there 
 
22 
 
 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 nothing to be said of the vast regions which lie far as the 
 poles asunder, and in which no point of contact is to be 
 found ? We Christians believe we have a whole realm of 
 precious truths and realities wholly removed from the 
 purviews of physical research and scientific classification. 
 Have we nothing to say about this ? Shall the astronomer 
 say, 'Come with me, and I will reveal to you stars so 
 distant that the ray which strikes upon your eye has 
 travelled for thousands of years on its way with a swiftness 
 inconceivable since it left its distant birthplace'? Shall 
 the chemist say, 'Come with me, and I will resolve the 
 earth you tread upon, the waters you drink, the air you 
 breathe, into their component elements'? Shall the 
 optician say, ' Come with me, and I will show you the very 
 gases and metals which in their combustion produce the 
 light of Sirius or the Pleiades'? Shall the geologist say, 
 ' Come with me, and I will unveil to your eyes the mystery 
 of the formation of the mighty rocks, and you shall handle 
 the very creatures that lived in the boundless periods of the 
 primaeval earth'? Shall the zoologist say, 'Come with 
 me, and I will let you behold the germs and rudiments of 
 the various parts of your own wondrous frame in the 
 animalculse which your unassisted eye can scarcely detect ' ? 
 And shall we be dumb? Have we no like invitation to 
 make? Have we no marvels to boast of in the region 
 which we profess to know ? Or shall we not say this (and 
 I think there are men of science who will be glad to have 
 this said to them) ?— ' Come with me, and I will take you 
 into a fair land, and show you things that will make you 
 glad. Perhaps you think the land I speak of a dreamy 
 unsubstantial cloud-land; but come and see. It may be 
 you will find some things in it better than dreams or 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 23 
 
 phantoms. It may be I can show you there a stream that 
 can wash out the stains that blot a guilty conscience. It 
 may be I can find you there medicines to heal a sick soul. 
 It may be I can guide you to a fountain which will slake 
 the thirst of a fevered spirit. It may be I can show you a 
 light which will guide you safely through a world of peril. 
 Nay, away with allegory. Come with me, and you shall 
 learn how to conquer a rebellious will, and to purify a 
 corrupt heart. You shall gain a strength that shall give 
 you mastery over self, and victory over sin. You shall pass 
 behind the veil of sense, and see the things that are not 
 seen, things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor 
 have entered into the heart of man, but from the sight and 
 knowledge of which you shall go back to your science rich 
 with new treasures of wisdom, strong with new life and 
 power, glad with new hope, and worshipping — not Nature, 
 but Nature's God.' 
 
1 
 
 I 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS 
 TO PRAYER. 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS 
 TO PRAYER. 
 
 Preached in St. PauPs, 1884. 
 
 " He hath given them a law which shall not be broken." — Ps. 
 cxiviii. 6 (P.B.V.). 
 
 I WONDER whether it ever struck you how strongly the 
 Bible seems to speak of the fixity and changelessness of the 
 course of nature. The passage from which I have taken 
 my text is very remarkable. The Psalmist is speaking 
 of the works of creation, and his words are these : " He 
 spake the word, and they were created ; He hath made them 
 fast for ever and ever; He hath given them a law which 
 shall not be broken." And God Himself is spoken of by St. 
 James as " the Father of lights, with whom is no variable- 
 7iess, neither shadow of turning." Of course, on the other 
 hand, there are plenty of texts telling us that God does 
 hear and answer prayer; and ft is plain enough that St. 
 James never thought of shutting out answers to prayer in 
 what he says about God's changelessness, for he himself 
 encourages us to pray by the example of Elijah, to whom 
 God granted first drought, and afterwards rain, in answer 
 to prayer. But, if we were to take the passages about the 
 " law which shall not be broken " (the " decree which shall 
 not pass," as it is in the later translation in our Bible), and 
 
28 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 the invariableness of God, apart from other places (which is 
 the way so many people make mistakes in reading the Bible), 
 we might almost think the Bible itself was on the side 
 of those who think it impossible to believe in God's inter- 
 fering with the course of nature, and so hold it to be foolish 
 to ask Him to do so. Thus even for believers in God's 
 Word there is a difficulty to be cleared up. 
 
 But the same difficulty meets us in the study of God's 
 works — the difficulty, that is, of reconciling an apparent 
 uniformity of action with the idea of a providential ordering 
 and governing of events. I wish to make it clear at the 
 outset that I address myself to those who believe in a 
 personal God, and whose idea of God is of a Being of bound- 
 less wisdom and power, who created all things. I want to 
 try to find an answer for those who say, ' The more we 
 know of the universe, the more we become convinced that 
 the Creator has established a vast system of laws governing 
 all things, which laws we find to be so absolutely certain 
 and unvarying in their operation that we cannot conceive 
 of any variation in their effects (except, of course, by the 
 interposition of some other equally invariable law). But 
 prayer— or at least some prayer— asks for things which 
 imply an interference with the action of these laws, and so 
 it seems to us foolish to ask such things, or to expect God 
 to grant them.' 
 
 I am using the word " law," I am aware, in a rather 
 loose and popular sense. Strictly speaking, a law of 
 nature is simply the formula of the method in which some 
 force of nature is known to act, or, in other words, the 
 expression of the ascertained sequence of cause and effect 
 in the operation of such force. Of course these general 
 laws never vary, and cannot vary, so far as we know. It 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 29 
 
 is with respect only to the action of the forces governed 
 by these laws that we can really speak of variation. 
 
 But, not attempting any needless exactitude of philo- 
 sophical language, let us think a little about these general 
 laws. It is quite true that the more we know of the 
 universe the more we are amazed at the vastness and 
 unchangeableness of these great natural laws, I suppose 
 the great advances of science in modern times are chiefly 
 to be registered by the discovery of such laws, and of the 
 wonderful way in which they, or perhaps more accurately 
 the forces which they regulate, are Hnked together. I am 
 not at all afraid of magnifying the grandeur of this system 
 of Law. To my mind the doing so is only the magnifying 
 the grandeur of the Creator's conception. Let me give an 
 example. When the true notion of the solar system as 
 a band of globes revolving round the sun was once estab- 
 lished by the Polish astronomer Copernicus, there still 
 appeared to be a number of minor irregularities and diver- 
 sities in the system, which could be explained on no 
 principle, and seemed to own no law. The orbits of the 
 planets, for instance, were out of the circle they were sup- 
 posed to follow; their motion was unequal, being different 
 in different parts of their orbits ; their distances from each 
 other and from the sun seemed to be ordered by no rule ; 
 their periods of revolution differed in a manner that 
 appeared quite arbitrary. It was a wonderful work of God, 
 but for a large number of its phenomena no reason could 
 be given but that God made it so. But at the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century the great astronomer Kepler 
 was enabled, by his profound genius and patient labour, 
 to reduce to law and order much that had before been 
 inexplicable, and to formulate tlie great laws governing 
 
30 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 the movements, distances, and periods, of the heavenly 
 bodies. He rightly held that the solar system is no result 
 of arbitrary arrangement, but an exquisitely adjusted and 
 perfectly regulated machine. And I hold that, in thus 
 demonstrating the grandeur of Law, he demonstrated yet 
 more the Creator's wisdom and power. In the same way 
 a vast stride in the triumphant march of Law was made 
 when Sir Isaac Newton thought out and demonstrated the 
 great law of gravitation, gathering at once under the control 
 of one great law a multitude of scattered phenomena. Let 
 it suffice to say that the task of science is continually to 
 extend the domain of Law, continually to lessen the region 
 of phenomena which are as yet unclassed and unclaimed 
 by this advancing conqueror. I might point out that even 
 in branches of scientific study in which it is less easy to 
 trace the sequence of cause and effect, and in which there 
 appears to be far more of freedom and diversity, as in what 
 is popularly called Natural History, or in Geology, Law is 
 continually asserting itself, continually extending its sway, 
 and multiplying its subjects. 
 
 This being so, it is plain that students of nature would 
 be tempted to believe in the universal supremacy of Law. 
 No one can see the phenomena of nature constantly sub- 
 mitting to be arranged and classified under general Laws 
 without being persuaded that this process cannot stop, and 
 that numberless other phenomena will, as time goes or>, 
 be proved to be no less governed by such general laws. 
 And then, going a step farther, it is not unnatural for those 
 who in their study of nature have conceived a deep 
 veneration for the grandeur and sovereignty of Law to 
 suspect that all things will in the end be found to own th< 
 sovereignty, no class or region of facts escaping from its 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 3 1 
 
 masterful sway. And so we find the champions of Law 
 invading even the sphere of morals, and endeavouring to 
 enslave the very phenomena of human motive and action 
 to the same relentless tyranny. Of course, if this is true, 
 and Law is to reign supreme in all things, we are landed in 
 sheer fatahsm and necessity, and not only is there no room 
 for prayer and answers to prayer, but there is absolutely no 
 room for religion, for moral responsibility, for right and 
 wrong. Law is omnipotent. Law is God. 
 
 Against such a result we instinctively rebel. And permit 
 me to say that this instinctive rebellion is no bad argument. 
 We may not be able to explain why or how we arrive at the 
 conclusion ; but, if we feel absolutely sure in ourselves that 
 we are free agents and responsible beings, this conviction 
 may be an ultimate fact of enormous weight in the opposite 
 scale. Tell me that all ray thoughts, motives, resolutions, 
 actions, could be reduced to results of complex laws, if only 
 such laws could be brought to light, and I still answer, ' I 
 am free, and I am responsible ; and to deny this is so con- 
 trary to my elementary sense of my own being that it is 
 absurd and incredible. If this which you tell me is true, 
 I am no more responsible for my actions than a steam- 
 engine.' 
 
 I have been magnifying the power and range of Law. 
 Its power is evermore unfolding itself ; its range is ever- 
 more extending itself. And now I would approach again 
 the question which has perplexed many minds. It is this : 
 Does not the unswerving regularity of the action of Law in 
 all the instances in which it is possible to observe it ; does 
 not the progressive unfolding of the vastness of the sweep 
 of Law ; does not the certainty that many more things yet 
 will be classed under Law ; docs not the very argument of 
 
32 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 analogy itself, which would lead us to reason from the 
 changelessness of God in what we can observe to His 
 changelessness in all things ; — does not all this cast at least 
 great doubt upon the probability of His interfering, at the 
 request of His creatures, with the operation of those forces 
 which He seems to have bound by a law which " cannot 
 be broken " ? 
 
 But stay ; we must look around us once again. Are we 
 sure that in our survey of this marvellous domain of Law 
 we are not overlooking any class of phenomena ? I have 
 already hinted that there are some things which rebel 
 against this mighty tyrant's supremacy, and refuse to own 
 his iron rule. The phenomena of Will are no less real 
 than those of Chemistry or Mechanics, and we are no less 
 bound to take them into account when we are discussing 
 such a question as the present But, whatever some may 
 say, few things are more certain than that the phenomena 
 of Will — and especially the moral acts which depend for 
 their character upon the responsible exercise of Will — are 
 strangely at variance with the idea of changeless Law. Here, 
 in the midst of a universe in which so much seems to tell 
 of the resistless march of triumphant Law, is a whole region 
 of facts the very first idea of which is the idea of freedom 
 from law. No amount of argument will persuade a sane 
 man that he is talking nonsense when he says, ' I can take 
 the right-hand road or the left, as I please ' ; ' I can give 
 this money to this cause, or I can refuse ' ; * I can speak, 
 or I can be silent' You may tell him each separate act 
 is only the necessary result of a combination of previous 
 forces, or of the force at the moment strongest, and that 
 his actions always follow the Une of least resistance ; but 
 he is none the less sure that he is a free agent, with a 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 33 
 
 mysterious power of Will through which he acts. Therefore 
 at once we find at least one class of facts over which Law 
 seems to exercise at most a very limited control. 
 
 I wish, next, to point out the importance of remembering 
 that this group of facts — I mean the voluntary — is constantly 
 touching and affecting the other, namely the physical. It 
 is not only that, while one great class of facts or phenomena 
 is obedient to general laws, another great class is not ; 
 but the facts which we think of as governed by general 
 laws are constantly being modified and regulated by the 
 action of that one force in nature which most refuses 
 obedience to law, namely, the Will. I am speaking now 
 only of the things we can observe and take account of, 
 and of the will of man. It is quite plain that man's will 
 is continually acting upon, moderating, directing, com- 
 bining, making use of, those very forces which we see to 
 be in themselves, and apart from any such interference, 
 governed by changeless Law. Let us be clear. We cannot 
 alter a law of nature. The law is not that which acts or 
 produces any result. The law is only the expression of the 
 method in which the various forces around us operate. 
 We cannot alter a law, but we can alter the operation of 
 the force which is regulated by law. Thus it is a law of 
 nature that by the force of gravitation a stone should lie 
 motionless on the ground. By my will I take up the stone, 
 I throw it up, bringing to bear on it other forces sufficient 
 to overcome for the time the action of the force of gravitation. 
 I catch the stone as it descends, again by my will applying 
 another force to correct the action of the force of gravitation. 
 You can all think of a thousand examples. Why, all our 
 wonderful inventions, the steam-engine, the hydraulic press, 
 the electric telegraph, are nothing else but the Will of man 
 
 i> 5 
 
34 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 restraining, combining, directing, and utilizing the law- 
 observing forces of nature. So you see we have not only 
 a vast group of facts apparently ungoverned by general laws, 
 but a constant interference with the operation of those 
 general laws by that force which originates this group of 
 facts, namely, the Will. 
 
 And now one more step. Look'once more around. Can 
 you point in all that you behold to a real origin or starting- 
 point? In the field of natural science you trace hnk 
 behind link, cause behind effect, the cause itself being the 
 effect of some prior cause, in endless succession. Can you 
 get back to the real origin or starting-point — I mean by 
 observation ? Nay, the first link in the wonderfiil chain at 
 any rate is held somewhere behind the veil. I cannot see 
 it. But stay ; it surely is not so in all things. I pass into 
 another region of facts. I take up a nation's history. I 
 read the stirring details of one of its great wars. Again I 
 find myself contemplating a great chain of events, all linked 
 together as causes and effects. But I patiently follow the 
 chain backwards. I come at last to a great deed of wrong. 
 I see a point where all seems to hang on the issue of one 
 man's action. If I place myself in thought at the moment 
 of this crisis, I see the question to be, ' Will he do this 
 wrong, or will he forbear ? ' A nation's history, a people's 
 welfare, hangs on the issue. The deed is done, and the 
 first link in the chain is in my hand. I cannot get farther 
 back. When I come to the point where a free will makes 
 the choice, and where I know that choice can be made 
 either way, I feel I have reached a real origin or starting- 
 point. Will has set the series of causes and effects in 
 motion, and it is itself a first cause, so far as my observation 
 goes. So now we seem to arrive at this truth, that the only 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 35 
 
 true origin or starting-point of events, whicli is within the 
 area of our observation, is the action of a Free Will. 
 
 You will note the stages of my argument so far. I 
 showed, first, how vast is the power and range of Law; 
 secondly, that there is a large class of facts which refuse to 
 be governed by Law, and are the result of freedom of Will ; 
 thirdly, that the forces which are under the dominion of Law 
 are constantly interfered with in their operation by this 
 strange force, which owns no law, namely. Will ; and fourthly, 
 that we are not able to discern by observation any power 
 which can set in motion a train of causes and effects except 
 the Will. 
 
 And now to apply these thoughts to the question we are 
 seeking to solve. 
 
 We have assumed the existence of a personal God, the 
 Creator of all things, of infinite wisdom and power. The 
 laws of nature are His laws. The forces of nature are His 
 forces. But in the midst of these law-governed forces the 
 Creator has placed a strange force or power which we see 
 to be of a different nature from the rest. In a word, tlie 
 God who ordained Law also ordained Freedom. And this 
 freedom He made to dwell in the Will of His creature 
 Man. Man can choose; Man can originate; Man can 
 make the forces around him his slaves. 
 
 But are we to imagine that the Will of the creature is to 
 be free for constant exercise, while the Will of the Creator 
 is to be sublimely passive? Was the Will which created 
 exhausted by that supreme effort ? Has it laid by its 
 freedom, while granting man's ? ' But,' say some, ' we 
 will grant that in the sphere of vtorals God may interfere 
 by direct exercise of Will, and thus may answer prayer. 
 But this touches not the great inscrutable mystery of the 
 
 1 
 
36 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 changelessness of the operations governed by the laws of 
 nature.' Nay ; then we would farther answer thus : I by 
 the exercise of my will divert, suspend, direct, combine, 
 the forces which are governed by the great laws of nature. 
 But I am made in the image of God. Even if my Bible did 
 not tell me so, I could not conceive of a God except as the 
 perfection of that which in me is imperfect. I can know 
 no God except One whose likeness I may trace, however 
 dimly, in myself. And this free-will of mine — must not this 
 too reflect something of the Divine nature ? Am I able to 
 moderate and apply the forces of nature, and is the God 
 of nature unable ? Is my will to be a real force in the 
 universe, and Go(Ps Will none ? And so too, once more, 
 when I see whole chains of events, changing the world's 
 history, taking their origin from an act of human will ; when 
 I trace in that act of human will a real cause and starting- 
 point of a new chain of facts; am I to doubt that God's 
 Will in like manner, though unseen and unobserved by 
 man, is the true source and origin, not alone of the first 
 launch of the embryo universe into space, but of number- 
 less groups and chains of facts affecting His creatures' 
 welfare, and moderating the destinies of mankind ? This 
 analogy appears to me a very cogent argument ; and, if the 
 student of the physical world would argue by analogy from 
 the grandeur of the laws which he beholds to the majesty 
 and power of Law, so let the student of the moral world 
 argue by analogy from the largeness of the freedom which 
 he recognizes to the force and breadth of Freedom as an 
 agent in God's universe. 
 
 I do not know that I need say much more. If there be 
 a God, omnipresent and omnipotent, of whose nature and 
 modes of acting we are compelled to form our conceptions 
 
GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 37 
 
 from that which we know of the dim reflection of these in 
 ourselves ; whose Will, like the will of His highest creatures 
 on earth, is free, originating when it so pleases, moderating 
 and applying when it so desires, perhaps more often than 
 we think combining diverse forces so as to produce results 
 which we call chance, only working with a power and 
 wisdom and perfection of method far beyond our finite 
 grasp ; — plainly it only needs to add one other attribute, 
 that of Love, to make it certain that that Divine Will must 
 order and adapt external things to His creatures' good- 
 And, moral good being the highest good, we are sure that 
 God must govern the world in righteousness, and effect 
 (though we may not know how) all that is necessary for His 
 righteous ends. Nor, I think, is it possible to conceive 
 of such a God as this allowing no intercommunication 
 between the moral beings of His creation and Himself 
 Dependence upon God is certainly a needful part of man's 
 training, and His love would bind us to Himself by bonds 
 of love and gratitude. So that the scheme whereby the 
 creature asks, and the Creator grants, is a natural and reason- 
 able outflow from the reasoning we have pursued. 
 
 "For what are men better than sheep and goats 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
 If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
 For so the whole round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." ' 
 
 To Thee, then, O God, I look up. Yet I tremble at 
 Thy majesty and Thy greatness. For " who is like unto 
 Thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders? " 
 " When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, 
 * Tennyson, /dy/ls, Guituvere, 
 
38 GENERAL LAWS AND ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 
 
 the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained ; what is 
 man, that Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, 
 that Thou visitest him ? " All things are changing here, but 
 Thou changest not. "The fashion of this world passeth 
 away " ; but Thou art " the Father of Ughts, with whom is 
 no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The grandeur 
 and the changelessness of Thy wonderful laws fill me with 
 profoundest awe. Thou hast made, and Thou ordainest, all 
 things. And canst Thou hear the stammering prayer of me, 
 the least of Thy creatures ? Canst Thou stay in Thy glorious 
 march to notice the worm by the wayside ? Shall I dare 
 in my simplicity to ask Thee to stretch forth the arm of Thy 
 omnipotence to bring me the blessing I crave, or to turn 
 aside the impending evil ? Even so. Lord. Thy laws o 
 nature are strong and wonderful. Yet there is a law 
 stronger and more wonderful still — even the law of Love. 
 I believe Thou lovest the creatures of Thy hand ; for Thou 
 art Love. I believe thou orderest all things in love, as in 
 wisdom and power. I believe Thou art ever acting in and 
 with Thy mighty laws and forces. Thou art the Master, 
 and they are Thy servants. And, believing this, I look up ; 
 I adore Thy awful majesty; I praise and glorify Thy 
 power and Thy wisdom. Yes, but more than this. I look 
 up, and tell Thee of my needs and my desires. Thou 
 knowest all; yet Thou wouldest have Thy children look 
 to Thee in childhke trust and dependence, O God, Thou 
 art changeless ; yet from Thee, who changest not, cometh 
 "every good and perfect gift" O God, Thou art strong; 
 yet strongest in the might of Thy Love. Therefore, in 
 lowly faith and loving reverence, we re-echo the ancient 
 cry, " O Thou that hearest prayer, unto Thee shall all fiesh 
 come." Amen. 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE 
 EARTH. 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE 
 EARTH. 
 
 A Harvest Sermon, precuhed in Wakefield Cathedral, 1889. 
 
 " Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee."— Job xii. 8. 
 
 Teach thee what? For Job it was the omnipotence of 
 the Creator, the awful, yet mysterious and unintelligible, 
 power and majesty of God. 
 
 These are days when men are speaking to the earth, 
 daily, vehemently, persistently. They are asking it all 
 manner of searching questions ; — how it was formed ; what 
 are its component parts ; through what processes it became 
 what we now see it ; how it is maintained in its wondrous 
 course and orbit ; how it is related to the other heavenly 
 bodies ; how it has attained to its adaptation to its present 
 inhabitants ; what destiny is in store for it in the future. 
 
 You say, ' But the Bible has taught us many of these 
 things.' Yes, in the simple grand pictorial ways in which 
 alone man could receive its teachings. But, if the Bible 
 tells us that God is the Creator of all things, if it gives us 
 splendid visions of Creation, if it assures us that God has 
 made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved, yet 
 the Bible never professes to teach Science, or to show the 
 methods by which God plans and orders and effects His 
 
42 THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 creative acts, or to reveal, pretematurally and prematurely, 
 
 the wonderful discoveries man is ever making in his study 
 of the material world. The Bible was not given for that. 
 It speaks in the language of the day in which, and of the 
 people to whom, it was written. No other language would 
 have been understood. The Bible is not a Book of Science, 
 but a Book of Life. It does not teach the laws of Nature, 
 but the laws of God. It does not tell us the way in which 
 God fashioned this world, but the way in which we may 
 reach a better. " All Scripture is given by inspiration of 
 God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor- 
 rection, for instruction in righteousness ; that the man of 
 God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good 
 works." 
 
 Well, we are not afraid of speaking to the earth. Why 
 should we be ? If we believe it is the work of God's hands, 
 how can it teach anything dishonouring to its Maker ? We 
 call the Bible God's Book. Well and rightly do we call it 
 so. We cannot prize it too highly. But God's library has 
 more than one volume. There is, first, the Book of God's 
 Holy Word, i.e. the Bible. But there is, secondly, the Book 
 of Nature, " the Earth," as it is called in my text. And 
 there is, thirdly, the book of your own heart and conscience, 
 that which you read when you turn within. And I would 
 study all God's volumes. And, if any one asks me how 
 can I best know all that may be known of God's dealings, 
 and God's will, and God's truth, I would make answer and 
 say, Speak to the Bible, and it will teach thee — teach thee 
 great and wondrous things ; teach thee blessed lessons of 
 God's love and mercy ; teach thee, above all, " as the truth 
 is in Jesus," the mystery of Christ's holy Incarnation, the 
 "unsearchable riches of Christ." And then, "Speak to 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 43 
 
 the earth, and it shall teach thee" — teach thee beautiful 
 lessons of law, and order, and harmony, and wisdom, and 
 progress, and submission. And then. Speak to thine own 
 heart, and it shall teach thee — teach thee lessons of right- 
 eousness, and justice, and lovingkindness, and unselfish- 
 ness. And I would add this one word more. I would 
 say, To study one of these volumes without the others is 
 to run a great risk of being one-sided, and of taking narrow 
 and imperfect views of truth. 
 
 Now I will not say that in studying these three volumes 
 of God's library, and comparing them together, all will be 
 plain and easy, and that no difficulties will confront you. 
 We are very ignorant, very short-sighted, and very bigoted 
 too sometimes, so that, when God would show us light, we 
 shut our eyes and refuse to see. And yet surely, if God 
 teaches man by all these ways, if all these volumes really 
 belong to God's library, we shall find them interpreting 
 one another, each volume in turn throwing light on the 
 dark places of the others. But I think also, before we find 
 this, we shall most probably often find one of these volumes 
 seeming to contradict another, and God's books teaching 
 diverse things. Let us take a very simple instance. I 
 have already quoted the verse in the Psalms which declares 
 that God has made the round world so sure that it cannot 
 be moved. Now in old times people believed that the 
 earth stood still, and that the sun and all the stars revolved 
 round the earth. Of course, when such was the belief, the 
 verse I have referred to would seem to describe exactly 
 the true fact of the fixity and immobihty of this earth. But 
 the great astronomers Copernicus and Galileo spoke to the 
 earth and it taught them. It taught them that men had 
 been mistaken in understanding that verse as affirming the 
 
I 
 
 44 THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. j 
 
 fixity of the earth as the centre of the universe. We all i 
 know the shameful story of the aged Galileo persecuted 
 and imprisoned by the Inquisition, and made, on pain of i 
 death, to swear that his doctrine that the sun is the centre 
 round which the earth revolves was false and contrary to ' 
 Holy Scripture, and that the earth is the centre and im- 
 movable. He knew he was right, though he was thus 
 compelled to deny what was so clear to him. And now 
 we all know he was right. His teaching about the solar I 
 system is known to every child in these days. But does i 
 any one ever dream of any difficulty in reconciling such a | 
 verse as that which declares that God has made the round ' 
 world so sure that it cannot be moved with the accepted , 
 facts of Science in this matter ? No ; we have spoken to j 
 the earth, and it has taught us to interpret aright the words j 
 of Holy Writ. God's second volume has thrown its light I 
 upon His first. Once again, when first Geology became a j 
 science, and, founding itself on facts of observation, declared i 
 that there was abundant evidence in the rock-strata of long 
 ages of preparation, and of vast periods of progressive life, 
 ere yet the world became the dwelling-place of man, many . 
 students of God's Word were staggered and dismayed, : 
 deeming such language directly opposed to the record of 
 the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis. But soon it 
 was felt that the days of Creation might picture and ; 
 represent long periods of time, and now that the teachings 
 of Science have been universally accepted in this matter, 
 the difficulty of reconciling these two handwritings of God * 
 has vanished away. Once again, as before, God's second 
 volume has shed its light upon His first, and we know that, i 
 when men found the handwriting of the rocks contradicting ■ 
 the handwriting of the Bible, they were misinterpreting, i 
 
 5 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 45 
 
 not God's works, but His Word. God cannot contradict 
 Himself. And when we find what seem to us contradictions 
 in comparing any two of God's vohimes, we are bound to 
 suspect that we are misinterpreting either the one volume 
 or the other. So we are not afraid of science. It has 
 often taught us how to understand and interpret the Bible. 
 We have been able, by turning to the second volume in 
 God's library, to correct our mistakes in reading the first. 
 
 And may not the same be said with regard to the third 
 volume? I suppose no difficulties in the study of Holy 
 Scripture are more disturbing to many godly students than 
 the imperfect, and sometimes seriously defective, views of 
 morality which find place in the Old Testament. I do not 
 refer to the grave falls of men otherwise held up to admira- 
 tion, because no thoughtful person imagines such falls to 
 be lightly regarded by a God of righteousness, and their 
 lesson is a very obvious one, namely, the warning that he 
 that standeth must take heed lest he fall. But a seemingly 
 cruel destruction of the nations of Canaan is approved ; 
 polygamy is sanctioned ; Jael's act of dastardly treachery 
 is praised in Deborah's song of triumph ; certain of the 
 Psalms breathe a spirit of bitterness and revenge. What 
 shall we say to these things ? Shall we say, If these things 
 are in God's Word, they must be right and good, though we 
 may not be able to understand them ? I dare not say this. 
 I should be afraid of injuring tlie moral sense of my hearers, 
 and teaching them to accept a low standard of moral 
 judgment. I would rather say. Speak to thy heart, and it 
 will teach thee. It will teach thee that absolute purity 
 and justice and charity are necessary elements in the only 
 standard of morality conceivable as that which an all-holy 
 God could set before His children as their aim and ideal. 
 
46 
 
 THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 It will teach thee that the embodiment of such an ideal is 
 that which thy heart has learnt to love in the Person of 
 Jesus Christ. And then once more you will turn to these 
 faulty ideals in God's Word. What can they mean ? How 
 can we regard them? Perhaps in taking them to be a 
 revelation of God's standard of morality we have been 
 making a mistake. Yes, surely it is so. Let the light from 
 the third volume in God's library shine upon this dark 
 place in the first, and lo ! we discern God's progressive 
 education of His people ; lo ! we see Him training them 
 to new and higher conceptions, raising the standard as 
 they are able to bear it. In the earlier stages they must 
 learn simple lessons, as little children learn them. The 
 Canaanites are destroyed to teach God's abhorrence of 
 degrading sins ; polygamy is permitted until the nobility 
 of woman, and her equality in the sight of God, are secured 
 as the foundation of the sanctity of marriage ; Jael's 
 treacherous act is belauded by Deborah, perhaps because 
 the prophetess had herself unworthy ideas of the sacredness 
 of hospitality, and spoke not then as moved by the Spirit 
 of God, but also perhaps because her whole thoughts were 
 centred in the confusion of God's enemies, and in the 
 certainty that God's cause would prevail ; Psalms are com- 
 posed calling down vengeance on the enemy, which at any 
 rate isa step in advance of the old rule of " an eye for an 
 eye, and a tooth for a tooth," as acknowledging that ven- 
 geance is not man's but the Lord's. And so the light grows, 
 and through Patriarch and Prophet and Psalmist, stage by 
 stage and step by step, the people of God learn new 
 thoughts of God and God's righteousness, until in the fulness 
 of time they are ready to be shown the full " light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 47 
 
 I have kept you long from thoughts of your Harvest 
 Festival ; so I come back to my text, " Speak to the 
 earth, and it shall teach thee"; teach thee first what it 
 taught Job — lessons of the wonderful power and wisdom 
 of the Creator ; teach thee to exclaim, " O Lord, how 
 manifold are Thy works ! In wisdom hast Thou made them 
 all : the earth is full of Thy riches." 
 
 But when Jesus Christ walked on earth, He looked 
 round and saw, as we see, fields and trees and corn and 
 flowers. No doubt they spoke to Him of God's power and 
 wisdom. He tells us so. But His eye pierced deeper than 
 this. To Him the earth was always speaking in parable. 
 See how He is ever beholding the inner in the outer, the 
 spiritual in the material. To His rapt eye the two great 
 worlds of matter and of spirit are always running parallel to 
 each other. They are like two great circles one within 
 the other (though which is the nearer and which the farther 
 who shall say?). And those parables of His— the Sower, 
 the Tares and the Wheat, the Seed growing secretly, — what 
 are they but flashes of light, striking here and there across 
 the two great circles, and revealing to us their parallelism ? 
 Oh, if we were not so blind and deaf, we should see all 
 nature built up of parables, "all that meets the outward 
 sense" (as Coleridge teaches us) "one mighty alphabet for 
 infant minds," that they may spell out their lessons, and 
 learn " the substance from the shadow " : 
 
 " But chiefly this — God first, God last, to view 
 Through meaner forms and secondary things 
 Effulgent, as through clouds that veil His blaze." 
 
 , Oh, " speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee " — teach 
 thee many a precious lesson of thy soul's life and growth 
 and destiny ; teach thee wonderful things about God's love 
 
48 
 
 THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 and patience and fostering care; teach thee as some 
 gracious teacher of men might teach his earnest thoughtful 
 docile pupil, 
 
 "Speak to the earth" once more. Ask it, Has it no 
 teachings for thy spirit, thy highest powers, thy moments 
 of best communing with God? What then this strange 
 thrilling sense of beauty and grandeur, which oftentimes 
 fills thy soul to overflowing ? What this voice of mountain, 
 and sea, and starlit skies, and rushing rivers ? What this 
 whisper of sweet flowers, and soft sunlights, and blue 
 distance ? There are few of us who are quite deaf to these 
 voices, though to some they speak far more loudly than to 
 others ; and it is, alas ! easy to deaden the ear to them 
 altogether in the harsh din and discord of the world. But 
 what do they say? As one stands alone some sweet soft 
 evening on a mountain-side, watching the splendid sunset 
 lights burn on the shoulder of the slanting scar, or die 
 away in the faint flush of the western skies, what are the 
 voices saying? Not alone that God is great and God is 
 wise, but that God is good. Yes, they teach of love. 
 They move to praise. They draw out the purest and 
 tenderest emotions of the heart, and touch the soul with 
 thankfulness. " Tlie heavens declare the glory of God, and 
 the firmament showeth His handywork." " The Lord is 
 loving unto every man, and His mercy is over all His 
 works. All Thy works praise Thee, 0 Lord, and Thy 
 saints give thanks unto Thee." 
 
 " Speak to the earth " yet again. Ask it what it is, as 
 it rolls on its wondrous way through the fields of space, 
 pursuing its yearly round, and measuring its appointed 
 times and seasons. It will answer thee again, and say, 
 The Lord, the ever-blessed Son of God, has trodden upon 
 
THE TEACHINGS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 49 
 
 this earthly ball. His footsteps have hallowed and sanrtitied 
 the spot He has visited. He came to make this earth a 
 better and a holier place. He came to make it (as He will 
 make it for those who love Him and serve Him) the foot- 
 itool of God and the antechamber of heaven. 
 
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S 
 DOUBT, 
 
1 
 
 i 
 
 ! 
 
 I 
 
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S 
 DOUBT. 
 
 Prtachidat Windsor, 1887. 
 
 "Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another ? "—St. 
 Matt. xi. 3. 
 
 It has always been a question whether St. John the 
 Baptist sent his disciples to make this inquiry for his own 
 satisfaction or for theirs. The natural sense of the passage 
 would certainly imply the former, and it is best always to 
 take the natural sense when there is no strong reason to the 
 contrary. But there is a reason to the contrary in this case, 
 and a reason that has seemed to many a very strong one. 
 They point to the clear and decided evidence borne by St. 
 John the Baptist to Christ, and they ask, How could one 
 who spoke as John spoke, one who saw the mystic Dove, 
 and heard the awful Voice, and who pointed to Jesus as 
 He passed by, and cried, *' Behold the Lamb of God ! " — 
 how could he have ever afterwards doubted ? This argu- 
 ment seemed to the ancient Fathers so strong that most of 
 them (not all, but most of them) accepted the interpreta- 
 tion which saw in the inquiry of my text a desire to satisfy 
 the doubts, not of St John himself, but only of his disciples. 
 But is that reason so conclusive ? Is it so very unlikely 
 
54 ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 
 
 that one, once clear and unshaken in his faith, should at 
 some future time be clouded over and sore troubled with. 
 doubt ? Is it so unknown a thing for a faith once bright 
 and confiding to be dimmed and daunted in some season 
 of great trial and conflict ? Do you, my brother or sister, 
 to whom God has granted in your joyous trusting youth to 
 walk bravely in His light, and never to question the beau- 
 tiful things taught you at your mother's knee, — do you think 
 it a preposterous idea that a day may come to you when a 
 cloud shall drift across your sky, and a great blank of thick 
 darkness make you sore a»fraid ? It came to Job, when he 
 cried, " Oh that I were as in months past, in the day when 
 God preserved me ; when His candle shined upon my head, 
 and when by His Ught I walked through darkness ; as I 
 was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was 
 upon my tabernacle ! " It came to Elijah, when he prayed 
 that he might die, because God's cause had failed, and he, 
 even he only, was left on the Lord's side. It came to 
 David, when he put up that sad moan of a beclouded spirit 
 in the seventy-seventh Psalm, " Will the Lord absent Him- 
 self for ever, and will He be no more entreated? Is His 
 mercy clean gone for ever, and is His promise come utterly 
 to an end for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be 
 gracious, and will He shut up his lovingkindness in dis- 
 pleasure ? " And why not to Sl John ? Why not to you, 
 or to me? Modem interpreters have felt this so strongly 
 that they have generally inclined to the belief that it was 
 for his own sake, to dispel doubts which had drifted over hi;: 
 own soul, that St. John sent his messengers to our Lord to 
 ask him, " Art Thou He that should come, or do we look 
 for another?" I accept this view with my whole heart. 
 The more I know of the troubles which weigh down poor 
 
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOULT. 55 
 
 fainting souls ; the sad — nay, ' sad ' is not strong enough — 
 the wretched, horrible, torturing, doubts which come not 
 rarely to the best and holiest ; the more I watch the way 
 in which this turbid overflow of doubt is whelming pure 
 and loving souls as it rages by ; the more I thank God for 
 this picture of a noble soul shaken for the moment by the 
 chilling wind of a bitter dismay, crying in a paroxysm of 
 cruel agony, ' Can this be He ? Should I be left in this 
 foul dungeon, with no help, no light, no deliverance, if this 
 be indeed the Messiah ? ' Yes, I thank God for St. John 
 the Baptist's doubting, as I thank God for St. Thomas's. I 
 thank God that the poor storm-shaken soul may say, This 
 is no new trial, no mere outcome of the thought and light 
 and honesty of the truth-searchers of these latter days. 
 Saints of God have known it from the first Nay, I will go 
 higher. I will stand by the Cross. The King of saints 
 hath known it ! I will listen to that cry from the depths of 
 darkness, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me ? " Yes, He who is touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities can be touched even with this. My Saviour has 
 passed through the deepest waters of desolation. And God 
 had not forsaken His well-beloved Son. And He had not 
 forsaken His servants, who cried to Him. Can we not 
 trust in Him, even what time we are afraid ? 
 
 But stay. It is always well to test any view one may take 
 of a passage of Holy Scripture by the context. Sentiment 
 is no safe foundation for interpretation. And there are two 
 things in the context which should be weighed. First, our 
 Lord's answer to the two disciples of John. Is this answer 
 what it would have been, had the inquiry been made for 
 their satisfaction, and not for his ? Why that "Go and show 
 John again those things which ye do hear and see " ? That 
 
56 ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 
 
 he, when they reported these things to him, might answer 
 
 their doubts, and show them how mistaken they had been ? 
 But this Jesus Himself could have done so much better 
 when they stood before Him. If the inquiry had been for 
 their sakes, would not Jesus have said, ' Stay, and behold 
 My wondrous works ; stay, and listen to My words of 
 power ; and then ye will question no more ; your doubts 
 will all be ended ' ? And then, again, how the view I am 
 defending explains our Lord's comments on the character 
 of St. John the Baptist immediately after the two mes- 
 sengers had departed ! Those standing by had heard the 
 question. They might very naturally think. This man who 
 was so brave in his preaching in the wilderness, and who 
 was always magnifying Him who was to come after him, 
 has changed his mind ; he has been put in prison, and he 
 is turning coward ; he cannot bear a little hard treatment. 
 And so the Lord vindicates him from the suspicions which 
 his message and inquiry might tend to produce. He turns 
 to the people and asks them what it was they went out into 
 the wilderness to see. Nay, it was no feeble vacillating 
 character blown hither and thither by every gust of wind ; 
 it was no luxurious and self-indulgent man, " clothed in soft 
 raiment," who could not endure suffering and persecution. 
 He was still " a prophet, and more than a prophet " ; even 
 the forerunner, who had come to prepare the way of the 
 Lord. 
 
 Now I want to say a word as to some of the special 
 causes of the sad trial of doubt. There are many causes. 
 St. John's doubt was born perhaps of low spirits, the result 
 of unjust suffering. Well, it is hard at times to see the 
 light of God's love. In the natural world we often say, 
 ' The sun is not shining to-day,' just because a cloud hides 
 
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 57 
 
 him from us. But the sun « shining all the time just as 
 brightly and warmly as ever behind the cloud, and the cloud 
 is very near the earth. Such clouds pass often across the 
 sky in the spiritual world. I have known three cases of 
 great bereavement which have for a time seemed to blot 
 out all the light of faith. The darkness of desolation was 
 so great that it even hid all the sunshine of heaven. You 
 would think that, just as night reveals the stars, so the dark' 
 ness of a great sorrow would reveal at least the calm distant 
 light of God. It is not always so. Again, we may have 
 known cases in which the unmerited and mysterious sufifer- 
 ings of a little innocent child have torn from a mother's 
 tortured heart all faith in a God of love. It is the same 
 with some complaints. They produce depression of spirit, 
 which makes the sufferer take a dark and hopeless view, and 
 believe that " there is no help for him in his God." Oh, 
 that bitter cry for light one so often hears go up from poor 
 struggling souls ! " Art thou He that should come ? " 
 ' Tell me. Reveal Thyself. Give me a sign from heaven. 
 "Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of 
 Israel, the Saviour.'" O friends, never think or speak 
 harshly of those moaning under the misery of doubt Treat 
 them very gently, very tenderly, very lovingly. For volun- 
 faty doubt, indeed, the doubt that is paraded in arrogant 
 defiance, the doubt that is affected in the spirit of bravado, 
 the doubt that is welcomed because sin is loved, — for such 
 doubt I have no tenderness. But for doubt which comes 
 as a trial, doubt which scares and affrights, doubt which 
 fills with misery and dismay, — for such doubt I have only 
 words of sympathy, and longings — ay, longings unspeakable 
 — to help. 
 
 I must turn to some thoughts of comfort. 
 
1 
 
 S8 ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 
 
 " Go and show John again those things which ye do hear 
 and see." What is this ? ' Go, tell him it is no failure, no 
 blighting of fondly cherished hopes, no bursting of a bubble 
 of prismatic illusions. Go, tell him he may have thought 
 vain things, may perchance have pictured to himself another 
 Messiah, who should come as an earthly king and con- 
 queror.' (Ah, yes, and we too — how often do we picture to 
 ourselves a king, or a kingdom, such as God has never pro- 
 mised !) ' But go, tell John of a power in the world which 
 shall be as leaven to work through the mass. Tell him there 
 is victory to be won through suffering. Tell him you have 
 seen the first pledges of the triumph of the kingdom of 
 heaven,' Is not this just what St. John the Baptist needed 
 to make him strong again ? Is not this just what brought 
 back courage and confidence to the Psalmist after his de- 
 spondent questionings ? "I said. It is mine own infirmity; 
 but I will remember the years of the right hand of the 
 most Highest ; I will remember the works of the Lord, and 
 call to mind Thy wonders of old time." Yes, it is a great 
 thing to be able to appeal to facts. " O God, we have 
 heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, 
 the noble works that Thou didst in their days, and in the 
 old time before them." Go, then, and tell poor doubters, 
 who are wandering in the dark, that Jesus is still the 
 Light of the world, and that in His light they shall see 
 light. Go, and tell the despondent and faint-hearted that 
 God's arm is not shortened, and that thousands upon 
 thousands have found His strength made perfect in their 
 weakness. Go, and tell the wounded soldier in the great 
 warfare, who has striven and failed, who has resolved and 
 fallen, who cries in despair, * The battle is too hard for 
 me,' — go, and tell him that thousands upon thousands have 
 
 i 
 
 j 
 
ST, JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 59 
 
 fought and failed, ay, again and again, and yet have won 
 the victory. Go, and tell the mourner, shuddering in the 
 dark, and unable to see the light of God's love, that the 
 dark cloud has a pavement of gold above, and that multi- 
 tudes have learnt by blessed experience that " whom the 
 Lord loveth He chasteneth." Go, and tell the heart-broken 
 mother, as she watches her little one's sufferings, and cries, 
 'Can God be love?' that, if we could only conceive of 
 eternity, the longest and weariest affliction would seem 
 " but for a moment " ; that at least suffering is a thousand 
 times better than sin ; and that, while God has allowed pain 
 in the world, for many ends not hard to see, and perhaps for 
 some which we shall not see till we see many other hidden 
 things behind the veil, He would defeat His own purposes 
 in allowing pain were He continually working miracles for 
 its abatement. 
 
 And now you are perplexed and troubled by all the con- 
 troversies and contradictions of men, shaken by shifting 
 winds of doctrine, chilled by driving clouds of formless 
 doubt — this " plague-wind of the nineteenth century." 
 Oh, turn to facts. I do not cry down or despise Theology. 
 Theology is most precious as teaching us careful accu- 
 racy in dealing with the truth of God. Theology, I say, 
 is most precious ; but there is something before Theology, 
 and that is History. You ask, " What is truth ? " " Art 
 Thou He that should come, or do we look for another?" 
 I will tell you again the things which I have seen and 
 heard. They are these : " I believe in Jesus Christ, God's 
 only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
 born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
 crucified, dead, and buried : the third day He rose again 
 from the dead ; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on 
 
60 ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DOUBT. 
 
 the right hand of God the Father Almighty ; from thence 
 He shall come to judge the quick and the dead." That is 
 not doctrine, but history ; not theology, but fact. Ves, the 
 grand old Creed is my chant of faith. I will go to my 
 Lord, my living Lord, my Lord who was dead and is alive 
 again, who came once to save, and will come again to 
 judge ; and, knowing how little I know, deeply conscious of 
 my own ignorance and helplessness, I will cry, like the poor 
 stricken father in the Gospel, " Lord, I believe ; help Thou 
 mine unbelief." Amen. 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 Preachtd in St. Paul's Cathedral, New Year, 1886. 
 
 " Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge 
 of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature 
 of the fulness of Christ."— Eph. iv. 13. 
 
 The beginning of a new year sets us to retrospect and to 
 forethought. Any one not given over to carelessness will 
 at such a time at least glance back over the year that 
 is past, and ask of what sort it has been, and make some 
 resolutions as to the spending of the year now beginning. 
 Have we gone forward ? Do we mean to go forward ? 
 
 I want to speak to you to-day of progress. Progress is 
 the law of life and of health until we reach maturity ; and I 
 do not think any one of us will lay claim to have done with 
 growth and progress because we have reached the goal 
 and can advance no farther. We, at any rate, have not 
 yet come " unto a perfect man." 
 
 The Bible speaks much of this law of progress. It 
 speaks of growing in grace and in knowledge ; of growing 
 up into Him in all things which is the Head, even Christ ; 
 of leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ and 
 going on unto perfection; and this "till we all come, in 
 
64 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 the unity of the faith and ol the knowledge of the Son of 
 God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature 
 of the fulness of Christ." And these and other like passages 
 imply a duty and obligation in this matter of growth. 
 
 Irrational things grow. The doctrine of Evolution is an 
 attempt to explain and define the methods of the world's 
 growth. The survival of the fittest implies growth of the 
 race. But irrational things grow in obedience to laws im- 
 posed from without. The growth is physical for the most 
 part, and certainly involuntary. But when we come to 
 rational beings, and when the growth is moral instead of 
 physical, the conditions are changed. Growth then de- 
 pends upon choice— upon the exercise of a conscious will. 
 And this implies a knowledge, both of the end to be aimed 
 at, and also of the means by which that end may be 
 attained. In other words, he that would grow must set 
 himself a goal, and do his best to reach that goal. 
 
 What, then, is the goal at which he must aim ? It is 
 the " perfect man." It is well to explain that the word 
 " perfect " in this place, as elsewhere in Holy Scripture, is 
 not to be understood in the common popular sense of 
 ' sinless,' but in the sense of mature, complete, full-grown, 
 and lacking on no side. If this is the end to be aimed at, 
 it is very necessary that we should know what this " perfect 
 man " is hke. And there is another thing necessary to be 
 known too — namely, what we are now. For we want to 
 compare the one with the other. We can hardly make any 
 very hopeful attempts at growth and progress till we know 
 something both of what we are and of what we ought to 
 be. Nor will it help us to know about the one without 
 knowing also about the other. If you were a doctor, and 
 wanted to cure a patient, it would not help you much to 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 65 
 
 know all the organs and functions of a healthy body, or 
 to be learned in the nature and uses of the various drugs 
 and medicines which might be applied, if you knew nothing 
 about the constitution or the ailments of your patient. So 
 I want first of all to go to the patient and see what is the 
 matter with him, and then we shall be in a better position 
 to try to set things to rights. 
 
 Now the patient is human nature, and each one can 
 judge best about human nature by the specimen he best 
 knows. So I look into my own inner being ; and there I 
 at once discern a great many different feelings, desires, 
 affections, passions, impulses ; likes and dislikes, fears and 
 longings, attractions and repulsions ; each with its own end 
 and object, and all demanding to be satisfied, all wanting 
 to set me to work to gratify them. Some of these seem to 
 want things for myself, and some of them have to do with 
 other people ; some of them are steady lasting things, like 
 love and hatred ; and some are things that come and go, 
 fitful and spasmodic, like anger and the "sinful lusts of 
 the flesh." It is just like a little kingdom with a number 
 of subjects, each wanting and trying to get his own way. 
 But I cannot help being quite aware that some of the 
 subjects of this little inner kingdom are very much better 
 and more trustworthy than others. I feel certain that my 
 Creator did not mean all to be chance and confusion in 
 this inner kingdom. I am certain that I was intended to 
 secure some order and harmony among these clamorous 
 subjects. And what I see at once facing me is the ques- 
 tion, how to keep all in order, and to prevent the strongest 
 tyrannizing over the weakest. Well, I see also in this 
 little kingdom certain powers plainly meant to rule. Their 
 very nature and character show this. They can be there 
 
 F-5 
 
66 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 for no other purpose. I see a power called Reason, which 
 can tell me of the consequences of my actions, and show 
 me what course of conduct will best lead to any particular 
 end I may have in view, and which will, if I choose to 
 consult it, make known to me a great many things which 
 should guide and govern and keep in order the rest of the 
 subjects of the Httle kingdom. And then I see another power 
 called Conscience, which is always telling me, whether I 
 like it or no, whether I am doing right or wrong. And I 
 cannot understand what Reason is there for, if not to guide 
 and direct ; or what Conscience is there for, if it is only 
 to make me uncomfortable, but not to affect or alter any- 
 thing. Even if I had no Bible, it seems to me I could not 
 doubt that these powers were meant to be masters over the 
 rest, and to exercise authority among them. Thus, if I 
 see in myself, as I am, disorder, misrule, weakness, I also 
 see what points to the remedy. I can understand some- 
 thing of what " a perfect man " might be, in whom the 
 powers and faculties meant to rule bore sway, and in whom 
 all other powers and faculties and feelings and desires 
 were ruled and regulated, and kept each in its place, and 
 each to its proper work. For we must not suppose that 
 any of the subjects in our little inner kingdom are useless, 
 or in themselves hurtful. Each has its own place and its 
 own work, just as each organ and member of the body has. 
 For instance, hatred is there to oppose and resist what is 
 deserving of hatred — the mean and false and foul. Anger 
 is there to exercise indignation against injustice and wrong 
 and cruelty. What is wanted is never to let any one of 
 these faculties usurp a power or place not its own, or over- 
 pass its own lawful sphere of work. 'When all are ordered 
 and apportioned and adjusted and regulated in due 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 67 
 
 subordination and in perfect harmony, then man is man 
 indeed. Then we understand what man was meant to be. 
 Then man is fulfilling his true nature. For this is human 
 nature perfected. This is true humanity. This is the 
 " perfect man." 
 
 Many years ago I was talking with a German in Dresden, 
 and, in defending sensual sin, he used a well-worn argu- 
 ment, saying, ' Does not nature itself bid you indulge 
 yourself? ' I am sorry to say I passed the question over 
 with some meaningless words, but I know now what I 
 ought to have said. I ought to have said this : ' By 
 'nature' I do not understand the passion of the passing 
 moment. I discern something truer, nobler, loftier, in 
 nature. I see plenty of claimants clamouring for indul- 
 gence ; but I see among them faculties and powers evidently 
 intended to restrain and direct and regulate the others. And 
 my idea of nature is that which my Maker meant me to 
 be. I am sure He did not mean me to be the slave of 
 every passing desire. I am sure He meant me to be 
 supreme in this inner kingdom, that I might crown with 
 authority the rightful ruler, and not some base usurper.' 
 Yes; a true man is one who has learnt to be what God 
 meant him to be — master over himself, able to control all 
 the varied powers within him, strong to repress all that is 
 unruly, disproportionate, undisciplined. 
 
 Has any man ever attained to this perfect harmony of 
 being? Yes, One— only One. He who came from the 
 eternal depths of God is alone perfect Man. In Him is 
 nothing distorted, nothing exaggerated, nothing uncon- 
 trolled. In Him all graces meet, each perfect, and all 
 adjusted in perfect harmony. Here, then, is the model 
 for imitation, the goal to which all progress of manhood 
 
68 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 must tend. The Christ-like man is the true man. True 
 humanity is likeness to Christ. 
 
 Now what is true of the individual is true of the nation. 
 A people must grow. Progress is with a nation the law of 
 healthful life. Of course the growth of the many can only 
 be by the growth of the separate units of which the many 
 are composed. There is no such thing as the corporate 
 existence of many apart from the separate existence of 
 each. It is absurd to imagine a nation can grow better if 
 each separate member of the nation grows worse. Yet 
 nations receive a character from the majorit)', and the 
 individual life coalesces and amalgamates itself into the 
 corporate life. Well, there is, alas ! plenty that is wrong 
 and perverted and disordered, both in the body and in 
 the several members. The mutual service, the subordina- 
 tion of the less worthy to the more worthy, the correspond- 
 ence of the present conditions with the truest conception 
 of the nature bestowed by the Creator,— these are not always 
 conspicuous, either in the little world of faculties and 
 powers and affections within, or in the organization and 
 unity and interdependence of the members of the body 
 politic without. And the remedy — surely this is the 
 working towards the " perfect man." It is progress— true 
 and solid and healthful progress — that we want. 
 
 Now I will tell you what I am often afraid of in this 
 matter of progress. I am afraid of low motives, and a 
 false ideal of humanity. Men see the disorders of society, 
 they see the misery and wrong, and they too preach of 
 progress. God knows I blame not any wild theorist for 
 trying to strike out any scheme which might better the lot 
 of the poor, and make their life a brighter and a more 
 hopeful thing. It is not with their schemes that I quarrel, 
 
FROGRESS. 
 
 69 
 
 however visionary and impracticable I may think them. If 
 only I could believe they would effect the object sought by 
 their advocates, and were consistent with right and justice, 
 I would espouse them eagerly and at once. What I am 
 afraid of is the appeal to the lower motives, and the 
 absence of appeals to the higher. I am afraid of aspira- 
 tions which busy themselves with external and economic 
 changes, which promise money and ease and leisure, but 
 do not hold up any true and noble conception of humanity. 
 I am afraid of kindling hopes which are bounded by fairer 
 outward conditions, but are not concerned with self- 
 conquest, self-restraint, unselfishness. I am afraid of some- 
 thing like a gospel of greed. Even were the schemes of 
 the Socialists as practicable as I have no doubt their pro- 
 pounders honestly believe them to be, yet they are 
 schemes which demand the utmost self-repression, dis- 
 cipline, honesty, sobriety, diligence. These things must be 
 learnt first, or progress of any sort is a vain hope. No 
 scheme, no system, can be worked by hopelessly unfit 
 instruments. I am speaking of the working classes now, 
 because to them the appeal is made, and they are sup- 
 posed to be the future organizers and regulators of a re- 
 generated society. I am not forgetting that other classes 
 have to learn much too, and that luxury, idleness, selfish- 
 ness, or covetousness, on the part of the rich, will assuredly 
 stimulate the very passions we would gladly restrain. 
 Many of us are longing and striving to set before men a 
 high and pure and noble ideal ; to build as many bridges 
 as we can over the hateful gulf which severs class from 
 class; to teach the rich and cultured more of sympathy 
 and brotherhood with the poor and ignorant. We believe 
 that all true progress must be based upon high and true 
 
70 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 conceptions of manhood, upon self-government, self-denial, 
 modesty, purity, temperance, love. 
 
 Yet I am filled with shame and distress as I say these 
 things — as I speak of holding up a high ideal, and teaching 
 purity and self-restraint. For, alas ! I know what many a 
 working man would say. Let it be in part from class 
 bitterness, if you will ; make all allowance for the unjust, 
 but not unnatural, inference that what comes to light of 
 the few reveals the true character of the many; still many 
 would make answer with a scorn that would burn and sting : 
 * Do you talk of a high ideal ? Do you preach purity ? We 
 think ourselves at least purer than you. We hate your 
 filthy trials. We reject your lofty ideals, for lofty ideals 
 are a sham with grovelling lives. We reject your counsels 
 of purity, for counsels of purity ring hollow in the midst 
 of social rottenness.' If men so speak, does it surprise 
 you ? It is nothing less than a monstrous evil to have all 
 sorts of garbage printed day by day in our papers. There 
 is only one thing worse — namely, that the state of society 
 should make such scandals even for the moment credible. 
 Let me tell you what a number of country lads once thought 
 of these things. It was in a neighbouring parish to my 
 own, and these lads wished to form themselves into a guild 
 which might be a help to them in living better lives. The 
 Clergyman of their parish asked them to draw up their own 
 rules, and they did so, and brought them to him. And 
 one of these rules was, " Never to read reports of divorce 
 trials." No doubt some will call this prudery. I call it 
 manliness. They knew how such reading stained and 
 polluted their souls, and they would have none of it And 
 yet we flood the country with this defiling impurity ! No 
 wonder the Judge who has tried the latest of these hateful 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 71 
 
 suits declared that some check must be put upon the 
 pubUcation of such foul details. 
 
 But I turn from an unwelcome subject to ask how shall 
 the true ideal of humanity be held up and proclaimed before 
 our people. Not by preaching. There is a better way 
 than that. You may picture your ideal; you may dilate 
 on the beauty and harmony of the "perfect man"; but 
 you will not do much till you can show at least some 
 approach to the embodiment of the ideal in actual life. 
 What we want is the personal, individual contact of the 
 higher life with the lower, that the latter may be raised and 
 bettered. The work cannot be done wholesale. It is a 
 work for patient influence. Thousands who never hear 
 a sermon, and who never read the Bible, can and will 
 read the life of a pure high-minded man. And who should 
 exemplify that life if not the cultured, the thoughtful, the 
 generous, who long to help their less happy brothers, and 
 ask to be shown how best to do so ? We tell them it is 
 not by the gift of money, but by the gift of self. It is not 
 by talking, but by living. If many more would follow the 
 pattern of those who in the Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, 
 and in the Oxford House in Bethnal Green, are living 
 among the working people, learning to know them, making 
 themselves familiar with their thoughts and views and 
 feelings and hopes, mingling with them in their leisure, 
 imparting to them of their own acquirements, but above 
 all showing the living picture of pure generous unselfish 
 unworldly lives, the effect would be incalculable. I am 
 not so foolish as to hold up these young men as patterns 
 of what human nature may attain to. But they may be, 
 and I think they are, samples of men trying to work out 
 their ideal, and to grow towards the " perfect man." Nor, 
 
72 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 again, am I for a moment forgetful of the beautiful examples 
 of patience, and generous self-sacrifice, and the dignity of 
 independence, to be met with among the very poor. But 
 it is surely one of the responsibilities lying upon the more 
 educated and the more leisurely to show that they have 
 learnt what is worth learning for themselves, and what is 
 worth teaching to others. Unhappily, those who have the 
 blessings of culture and wealth and leisure are more and 
 more deserting our poorer districts, and so robbing the 
 poor of the purifying and elevating influence they are 
 able, and are meant, to wield. Perhaps this cannot be 
 helped. Yet it is a grave step, and one that should not 
 be lightly taken, to carry to some distant suburb the refining 
 influences which might have shed light and blessing upon 
 many a poorer home. 
 
 There are hindrances to progress on many sides, yet 
 I do not despond. There are the sordid lives, the indolent 
 lives, the selfish lives, of rich and of poor. There is the 
 solid power of resistance in the mass of human beings who 
 have no desire to go forward to higher and nobler things. 
 There are the miserable lowering influences of evil-doing 
 in high places. There are (and perhaps this is the greatest 
 hindrance of all) the inconsistencies of professing Christians, 
 putting stumbling-blocks and occasions to fall in the way 
 of the weak brother. Yet I am hopeful I hold that there 
 is a better, purer, manlier, more reasonable tone pervading 
 our people. I hold that they are making progress in many 
 things. We must not be impatient. Changes in the habits 
 and ideas of a nation are of slow growth. What we have 
 to do is plain. We have to fashion our ideal, to recognize 
 our goal, and then to press on towards it. " Unto a perfect 
 man"— let that be our New Year's motto. It is a high 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 73 
 
 aim, I know. Let us aim high. A low aim never hit a 
 high mark. And I know not how we are to make progress 
 save by setting ourselves a lofty standard and a pure ideal. 
 We would imitate St. Paul, and "forgetting those things 
 which are behind " — thinking nothing of past achievements 
 — " and reaching forth unto those things which are before," 
 we would *' press toward the mark for the prize of the high 
 calling of God in Christ Jesus." Yes, it is a high aim for 
 such as we are. But if there are two things which the 
 Bible teaches plainly, they are the misery of what we are, 
 and the grandeur of what we may be, — sin and salvation,— 
 man's fall and man's destiny. 
 
 Do I want to see what fallen man is like ? I look into 
 my own heart. 
 
 Do I want to see what man restored is like ? I look 
 on Jesus Christ. 
 
 There is my ideal. There is the goal of my ambition. 
 There is the " perfect Man." Therefore I would run my 
 race " looking unto Jesus," and run, please God, better in 
 this new year than in the past ; therefore I would press 
 on, and press on more bravely, more resolutely, more 
 earnestly, in this new year than in the past; till I come 
 some day, though I think not here and not yet, "unto a 
 perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness 
 of Christ." Amen. 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 Preached in St. Paufs, 1887. 
 
 "Thou therefore endure hardness." — 2 TiM. ii. 3. 
 
 Is not cowardice a very noticeable danger in religion at the 
 present time ? I do not mean moral cowardice, but simple 
 downright unworthy cowardice in the commonest accep- 
 tation of the word. There is a distinct tendency to shrink 
 from all that is bard, wearisome, painful. For one thing, 
 we are, in these days of rapid movement, always in a hurry 
 for results ; we want to reap as soon as we have sown ; we 
 grasp at successes, and set little store upon the labour and 
 pains without which successes are worthless ; we are never 
 content to work slowly, and to wait. And this spirit of 
 hurry infects our religion. We must have short and easy 
 ways of salvation. We crave after strong and rapid efifects. 
 We want to slay the devil with a blow. Then, again, there 
 is a softness and tenderness in our ways of thinking of and 
 dealing with both ourselves and others which, good and 
 beautiful though it may be in some respects, not unfre- 
 quently slides into a hasty resentment at anything painful and 
 laborious. We can't bear to suffer ourselves ; we can't bear 
 that others should suffer. This reluctance to admit suffer- 
 ing comes out in many ways. We hear of some sudden 
 and very sad affliction which has fallen upon some dear 
 
78 
 
 ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 friend, and it almost shakes our faith. It seems so hard 
 that one we love should have to endure so much. A sweet 
 young wife, who has brought unutterable happiness and 
 hope into some clouded life, is taken away in her first 
 confinement. We are stunned and amazed. How can a 
 loving Father — so we cry in our Epicurean faithlessness — 
 liow can a loving Father permit such a tremendous sorrow ? 
 As if God, with whom a thousand years are as one day, 
 and one day as a thousand years, had no purpose and 
 destiny for man save to make his little sojourn here as 
 pleasant and painless as possible ! Is not this impatience 
 and resentment at pain and suffering in reality a part of 
 the spirit of unbelief? Is it not an outcome of the grow- 
 ing tendency to concentrate even religious thought upon 
 this life, and to leave the world beyond in vague and dim 
 uncertainty ? Were not our fathers braver and stronger in 
 their faith and in their patience? I have no doubt we 
 needed to learn deeper and fuller lessons of God's fatherly 
 love for His children even here; I have no doubt the 
 Church in former generations had somewhat forgotten the 
 teaching of a present Kingdom of heaven, of a great society 
 of the redeemed having at least its temporary home and 
 embodiment here, even if its metropolis be in heaven. But 
 perhaps with some the swing of the pendulum has passed 
 the middle truth, and has carried them into a sort of 
 religious tarthlincss, which over-values and over-cares-for 
 the present Then, again, it seems to me that the beautifiil 
 grace of pity sometimes passes into an undue and undis- 
 criminating horror at all suffering, even when selfcaused 
 and the very essential condition of wholesome and abiding 
 restoratioa There is so much in the world most piteous, 
 so much that fills one's heart with sorrow and sadness, that 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 79 
 
 one has sometimes to remember that God has His penalties 
 for wrong-doing, and that it is not always His will that we 
 should make things comfortable for the undeserving. I 
 suppose, again, that the growth of luxury in our day, the 
 manifold and constantly multiplying appliances for comfort 
 and ease, engender a certain softness of character, and 
 make the sterner harder discipline of life more unwelcome. 
 Why is fasting, for example, so rarely practised except in 
 religious communities? There has been, of course, a 
 theological distaste for fasting. May there not in these 
 days be more of a self-indulgent distaste for fasting ? 
 
 Let us see how God's Word presents the religious life to 
 us. There is surely abundance of evidence that it is not 
 all light and easy. Why this "Strive" (the Greek word 
 used by St. Luke here is " Agonize," which implies a fierce 
 and eager struggle)—" Strive to enter in at the strait 
 gate"? And remember this gate is at the beginning of 
 the narrow way, not at the end ; so that the first step is 
 marked by stern effort. " He that taketh not his cross and 
 followeth Me is not worthy of Me," said the Master ; and 
 I think the cross does not mean a plaything or a pretty 
 ornament. I think it means something heavy and hard 
 and rough. His cross was ; and He must have been looking 
 forward to that, and drawing His figure of speech from 
 that, when He spoke of the servant taking up his cross to 
 follow Him. Then His followers are not promised worldly 
 ease and comfort. " In the world ye shall have tribu- 
 lation." And so St. Paul went through the cities where he 
 had himself suffered so many things — Lystra, Iconium, 
 Antioch, — telling his disciples that we must through much 
 tribulation enter into the kingdom of heaven. But we 
 scarcely want separate sayings. The whole tenor and 
 
8o ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 bearing of Bible teaching is one unbroken witness to the 
 truth I am trying to impress— namely, that religion implies 
 something hard and toilsome. Why is the Christian life 
 compared to a race, in which there is struggle and contest 
 in order to win the prize ? Why is it compared to a war- 
 fare, in which there is a strong and crafty foe, a battle 
 requiring discipline and courage and patience, a need of 
 well-proved armour and goodly weapons, if we would win 
 the victory? Does it sound as if all were so easy when 
 there are so many exhortations to perseverance, so many 
 warnings against falling back, and when one of the noblest 
 and most valiant of God's champions was rigorous with 
 himself lest that by any means, when he had preached to 
 others, he himself should be a castaway ? Then the growth 
 and stages of advance ; the leaving the principles, or first 
 steps, of the doctrine of Christ and going on unto per- 
 fection; the adding grace to gj^ce, as St. Peter bids us 
 do ; — all this tells of toil, effort, patient labour ; while all 
 the mystic blessings held out in the Epistles to the seven 
 Churches in the Revelation are promised "to him that 
 overcometh. " 
 
 Oh, it is not all light and easy. The yoke will become 
 easy by Divine grace in the bearing, but it is a yoke still. 
 The burden will become light by God's mercy in the carry- 
 ing, but it is a burden still. Let us carry the appeal to our 
 own experience. Is all so very easy ? We have resolved — 
 many times resolved most likely — to conquer our besetting 
 sins. Have we succeeded ? Are they wholly subdued ? 
 Do they never give us any trouble now ? Alas ! our 
 enemies live, and are mighty." Sin is very persistent, very 
 obstinate, very importunate. It seems never to give up the 
 contest, never to accept defeat. It ma/ lie passive for a 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 8i 
 
 time ; we may think we have gained the victory ; and then, 
 in an unguarded moment, it springs up, and renews the 
 assault, and the battle has to be fought all over again. See 
 the man of strong passions : how fierce and furious is the 
 onrush, how terrible the struggle, how frequent the wounds 
 and falls ! Or see the man of weak will : how easily his 
 good resolutions are broken, how quickly the temptation 
 gets the advantage over him, how poor and feeble are his 
 best efforts to withstand in the evil day ! Or look at the 
 long patient effort it costs many of God's true children to 
 acquire the habit of prayer. Prayer is not easy. It is easy 
 to say your prayers ; yes, but that does not always mean 
 praying. To speak from the heart to God, to realize His 
 listening ear, to enter within the veil and set the spirit face 
 to face with the unseen, to take part even attentively (I 
 will not say devoutly or fervently, but even attentively) in 
 a Church service, — is this so easy ? Well, is it not a law 
 running through all life that nothing really great or lasting 
 is achieved without a struggle ? Labour is the condition of 
 success. What is lightly and easily done has very seldom 
 any worthy or abiding fruits. Would the oak tree, think 
 you, be as strong and tough and lasting if it were grown in 
 some conservatory sheltered from every force and action of 
 the outer elements, as when exposed to the boisterous blast 
 and the fierce lash of the hurricane, and hardened and 
 tempered in nature's rough school ? 
 
 In earthly callings men are more reasonable. They do 
 not look for success till after years of patient toil. Their 
 first efforts — how poor and unworthy they are ! How they 
 fashion for themselves an ideal, and work on steadfastly 
 towards it ! How they look down on what they did a year or 
 two ago 1 They know what it is to forget those things that 
 
 G-S 
 
82 
 
 ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 are behind. But the Christian— is he as painstaking ? Is 
 he as patient ? Is ^ as eager to rise and go forward ? Men 
 can toil and struggle. Ah, yes ! for an earthly aim. To 
 become a great painter, to malce money by a profession, 
 to excel in a trade, — it is worth while to endure something 
 for this. But for heaven, for God, for religion ? Well, 
 it really is not worth while taking such a vast amount of 
 trouble here. I don't mean that people say this with their 
 lips ; but they do say it with their lives. They say, speaking 
 by their actions, ' It is silly to put one's self about so much 
 in one's religious work. Of course we do not mean to give 
 it up, and entirely neglect it ; but really there are so many 
 more important things to attend to, such a demand on our 
 time and thought and effort made by our worldly calling, 
 that it is impossible to give so much attention to the other 
 world,' Ah, yes ! there are those who will take infinite 
 pains, who will labour night and day, who will spare no 
 effort, for an earthly end and object, who say as plainly as 
 actions can say it (and I think actions speak louder than 
 words), 'Anything will do for God.' There are those 
 who can be large-hearted and open-handed in their dealings 
 with man, who almost seem to make it a study so dehcately 
 to adjust their relations with God as to combine a certain 
 comforting hold upon religion with a minimum of self- 
 sacrifice. My friends, I appeal to your generosity. Is 
 this worthy conduct? Do you really ask for something 
 very easy to do for your Lord ? Something very easy ? 
 What ! when you think of what He has done for you ? 
 Can you — dare you — set yourselves in imagination before 
 that one tremendous scene, standing, as it were, with those 
 who stood afar off beholding; can you — dare you — look 
 upon that Form, those bleeding Brows crowned with the 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 83 
 
 twisted thorns, those sacred Hands and Feet pierced with 
 the cruel nails ; can you — dare you — looking on this, and 
 whispering the thrilling words, " He loved me, and gave 
 Himself for me," then add these words, 'And now, O 
 Lord, give me something easy to do for Thee ' ? Nay, you 
 are ashamed of the very suggestion. I well know what in 
 your better moments you would say. You have your better 
 moments. You know what it is to feel the generous yearn- 
 ing of a grateful heart. And you would say (for it is a 
 better and truer and nobler thing to say), ' And now, O 
 Lord, give me something hard to do for Thee, that I may 
 prove my love and my gratitude. Give me a cross to bear 
 for Thee, that I may be indeed Thy disciple.' But, again, 
 we could perhaps do the thing He required if He asked 
 for some deed of heroic self-sacrifice ; we could perhaps 
 take up the cross, if it were a very notable cross, at which 
 mankind might marvel : but when He asks for patient 
 continuance in well-doing ; when He points out some secret 
 fault or self-indulgence to be curbed and conquered ; when 
 he offers us a little homely cross of unheroic and unre- 
 quited self-denial ; — lo ! we shrink back and refuse. The 
 task is too hard for us. We want something more to our 
 taste ; something more attractive, something less exacting. 
 Yes, I do not think I am wronging many a professing 
 Christian when I say that he in effect says again and again 
 that shameful thing, 'O Lord, give me something easy to 
 do for Thee.' I am not sure that we, any of us, thoroughly 
 recognize the power and peril of spiritual sloth. There is 
 in so many of us — aye, and not least so in those outwardly 
 most active and energetic — a strange averseness to spiritual 
 exertion. It is to many no effort at all to be outwardly 
 active and energetic ; they are always happiest when fully 
 
84 
 
 ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 employed. But it is to many a very great effort to praj 
 earnestly or for more than a very short time, to read 
 devotionally, to practise self-examination, to acquire the 
 habit of meditation. And sloth shrinks from all unwelcome 
 exertion. We are always asking for something easy to do 
 for our Master. Indolence besets us. There is no enduring 
 of hardness, no working out of our own salvation with fear 
 and trembling. 
 
 Have I seemed discouraging to-day? Do any say, 'If 
 to much is required of me, I dare not undertake it ; it is 
 too hard for me ' ? Nay, my brother, God knows I would 
 not discourage any. Yet I am afraid of prophesying only 
 smooth things. It is better even to be somewhat dis- 
 couraged at first by the greatness of the task as we look 
 forward, than to be discouraged afterwards by the discovery 
 that the task is harder than we had been taught to expect. 
 It is better to count the cost at the outset than to be 
 staggered by disappointment in the issue. But, indeed, there 
 is no cause for discouragement. For we are speaking now 
 of the life's work, and not of the first cry of the penitent 
 soul for mercy ; we are speaking of the life of obedience, 
 and not of the conditions of pardon and acceptance. I 
 would not for one moment abate your faith in God's readi- 
 ness to hear and forgive and accept. I do not think 
 Christians in general are half bold enough in their faith and 
 trust. I do not think, as a rule, they realize as they should 
 the freedom and richness of God's justifying grace in 
 Ch«ist. But I would not have any mistake the beginning 
 for the end. I would not have any forget that salvation 
 is a larger thing than mercy and pardon ; that Jesus came 
 to save His people from their sins, — not from the punish- 
 ment alone, but from the power, the tyranny, of their 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 85 
 
 sins. As is well said in the preface to the well-known 
 Daily Round" " God did not send His Son, Christ did 
 not die, the Holy Spirit did not come, that heaven might 
 be filled with pardoned felons ; but that earth might be filled 
 with children of God, led by the Holy Spirit towards their 
 Father's home." Oh ! do not be content with any little 
 formula which seems to promise a short and easy way of 
 salvation. " Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou 
 shalt be saved," was indeed a most blessed message, a very 
 gospel, to the poor jailor at Philippi ; and yet I think he 
 would find his belief in Jesus Christ soon set him face to 
 face with the battle, the toil, the "hardness." What I press 
 is that none should mistake the beginning for the end, or 
 sit down content with the glow and warmth and blessedness 
 which God in His mercy often gives to the returning sinner 
 as he arises and goes in lowly penitence to his Father. 
 The outside portico is not St. Paul's. 
 
 And then, once more, we are not left to fight out this 
 battle, to run this race, to endure this hardness, unaided and 
 alone. Has not God pledged Himself that we shall not be 
 tempted above that we are able, but that He will with the 
 temptation also make a way to escape, that we may be able 
 to bear it ? Has not the Lord Jesus Christ told us that God 
 will give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ? Are we 
 shut out from the strength and comfort of the words, " My 
 grace is sufficient for thee : for My strength is made perfect 
 in weakness " ? No ; I do not think we need be dis- 
 couraged. Let us only be found with our face turned the 
 right way ; struggling upwards, however fitfully ; fighting the 
 battle, however faint-heartedly ; enduring the hardness, how- 
 ever unworthily ; and I should be full of hope. I think 
 God will pity our weakness and pardon our failures. I do 
 
ENDURING HARDNESS. 
 
 not look for high measures of saintHness, or splendid 
 achievements of heroic self-sacrifice and endurance ; for I 
 know the frailty of our nature, by reason of which we 
 cannot always stand upright. But I do look for some 
 honest effort, some true fighting with sin, some genuine 
 reaching forth towards higher things. And I know that 
 what is gained through effort and toil is far more precious 
 than the same reward would be if it could be had without. 
 " No cross, no crown," is a true saying ; and that saint of 
 God spoke nobly, no less than truly, when he cried, " Oh, 
 what a cross to have no cross ! " Then be not enamoured 
 of easy ways ; do not put away from you what is hard and 
 unwelcome to the natural man ; do not shrink from plant- 
 ing your steps, if God call you, in the path of pain and 
 sacrifice which the Master trod. " Be very courageous " ; 
 " quit you like men " ; " endure hardness as a good soldier 
 of Jesus Christ" 
 
THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
i 
 
 I 
 i 
 
 i 
 i 
 1 
 
 i 
 
THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's, A'ew Year, 1888. 
 
 " Reaching forth unto those things which are before ' — Phil. iii. 13. 
 
 I THINK the man who wrote these words was a good way 
 up on the heights of hohness. I find some things he says 
 so high and heavenly, and so far above my common way 
 of looking at things, that if I did not know he was a very 
 true man, and a very practical man, I might think him a 
 fanatic, an enthusiast, carried away by his subject, dreaming 
 beautiful dreams which have no place in the ordinary life 
 of men. I know what he says about himself: he is "less 
 than the least of all saints"; nay, he is "chief of sinners" ; 
 " not worthy to be called an apostle." But, whatever he 
 says about himself, we rank him high in the ranks of saintli- 
 ness. It was no common man who had those "visions and 
 revelations of the Lord," who was " caught up into Paradise, 
 and heard unspeakable words." Nay, it was no common 
 man who could say, "I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless 
 I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." That alone is a 
 very high and heavenly saying. Perhaps, if we want to see 
 how he soars into the subhme ami unearthly, we cannot do 
 better than read liie Epistle to the Epliesians, especially the 
 earlier chapters. Indeed, in that Epistle we have a strange 
 
90 
 
 THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 and almost startling blending of the loftiest flights of 
 heavenly aspirations with the most practical enforcement 
 of homely duties. There are verses which, as we read 
 them, sound to us, in our poor dim faith and meagre 
 spiritual attainments, like a voice from within the veil 
 
 Yet this man — so great, so glorious, so heavenly-minded 
 — " reaches forth unto those things which are before." He 
 is not for one moment content. His motto is always 
 Excelsior. He has a standard far above him; an aim 
 which he is a long way from reaching yet He " reaches 
 forth." 
 
 Now look at a very opposite case. Here is a poor 
 wretched drunkard, who has never had a thought beyond 
 this world, and never a wish for anything better than its 
 low sensual enjoyments. But he has a sickness, and dim 
 vague thoughts of things he has been taught as a child, or 
 has now and then heard spoken of, perhaps in ridicule, 
 come into his mind. He is frightened, and in his fear is 
 asking (ignorantly enough, no doubt), " What shall I do to 
 be saved ? " Or shall we say a Mission is held in the place 
 where he lives, and he is reluctantly persuaded to go one 
 night to Church, and, when there, by degrees the simple 
 pleading words of the stranger, who is so lovingly and with 
 such self-evident earnestness delivering the message of his 
 Master to the weary and heavy-laden souls, touch his cold 
 dead heart, and awake a long-unknown desire to reform ? 
 He gets a glimmer of a better, purer, truer life. He does 
 not see very far. He has, for example, no conception what 
 sort of a life some gentle pure happy innocent girl, whom 
 he sees in the Church, leads. It is as far out of his sight 
 as the life of an Angel is out of our sight. And yet he has 
 at last got a standard above him. And then he tries. And 
 
THE HIGHER STANDARD, 
 
 91 
 
 then he fails. But he tries again — aye, and fails again. He 
 slips back. He is very weak. What could you expect ? 
 Still he tries. And sometimes he succeeds. He is very 
 far from good. People would laugh if any one spoke of 
 holiness in the same breath with such a man. Yet is he not 
 also " reaching forth " ? 
 
 I have taken two cases at the opposite poles of my 
 subject. There is only one thing alike in them. Each is 
 " reaching forth." My object in bringing together two such 
 opposite cases is simply to get at a principle for our guidance 
 in entering upon this new year. And the principle I would 
 gather from what I have said is this — that it is a great thing 
 always to have a standard above you, always to aim high, 
 always to have something before to reach forth to. 
 
 A book has lately been published, entitled " The Service 
 of Man," by Mr. Cotter Morison. It is a book which has 
 attracted a good deal of attention, and it is a very sad and 
 depressing book. But I allude to it because in it great 
 admiration is expressed for Christian saintliness. True, the 
 author thinks it is all a mistake ; but he thinks it is a very 
 beautiful mistake, and indeed he is quite enthusiastic in his 
 praise of the saintly character. But he asserts that very few 
 are capable of rising to this high level, and accuses Chris- 
 tianity of unreality in exhorting all to be saints, and of dis- 
 couraging those who might live ordinarily good and useful 
 lives by setting them an impossible standard. Now there 
 is a good deal of truth in what he says about man's capacity 
 for saintliness. I certainly do not believe all are able to rise 
 to the high level attainable by some. And I quite allow 
 that it is easy to discourage poor weak struggling souls by 
 holding up to them for imitation pictures of saintliness 
 which they feel to be beyond their reach, and which are 
 
92 
 
 THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 very likely beyond the reach of him who draws them too. 
 'If you tell me,' so many a one will naturally reason, 
 ' I must be like a St. Paul or a St John, or like any of 
 God's true saints, to be saved, I may as well give up trying 
 at once.' Well, I do not tell them this. I know plenty of 
 people in everyday life, not very saintly, and not likely to 
 become very saintly, who still wish and try to do right. They 
 often do wrong, no doubt, but not of set purpose. They 
 are not gifted with much force of character, or with much 
 resoluteness of will, but they are honestly anxious to lead 
 good lives. There are men of business who must work hard 
 at their calling, mothers of families sadly absorbed in family 
 cares, schoolboys at home for the holidays and full of spirits 
 and fun, girls rather devoted to lawn-tennis, and many 
 others of all classes and occupations, neither very saintly 
 nor very wicked. What are we to say to all these ? How 
 shall we counsel them for this new year ? No doubt there 
 are a great many things to say, and I might give other 
 counsels at other times. But to-day I want to say this : 
 Set yourselves a standard well above and beyond anything 
 you have yet reached. Aim high. Very likely you will not 
 attain to anything very great. But if you do aim high, and 
 if you do try hard by God's grace to near your aim, you will 
 attain to something beyond what you are now. Let there 
 be the " reaching forth." 
 
 I quite admit that God endows His children with different 
 capacities, and that some are able to attain to a higher point 
 in the upward course than others. But I am sure God has 
 given to all power to be better than they are. I think that 
 what God looks for is to see us struggling upwards, "reach- 
 ing forth." His command is, " Grow in grace " ; He would 
 have us " grow up into Him in all things, which is the Head, 
 
THE HIGHER STANDARD. 93 
 
 even Christ." St. Augustine says, " The one perfection of 
 man is to have found that he is not perfect " ; and again, 
 "The whole life of a good Christian is a holy longing to 
 make progress"; and again, "If thou sayest 'It sufficeth,' 
 thou art lost." ' Each one is bound to be at least striving 
 upwards, to have at least his face turned the right way, 
 facing the goal. 
 
 And then who shall judge of real success or attainment? 
 Can you or I ? See, here is one endowed with every 
 natural aptitude for a holy life, with an intellect quick and 
 powerful in grappling with the great problems of life and 
 being, with a heart full of love and tenderness, with an 
 imagination rejoicing in all that is pure and comely and 
 gracious, blest in all the surroundings of a gentle happy 
 home, which God has in His mercy fenced from the 
 approach of all grosser forms of evil. Let us suppose we 
 are picturing some bright pure devout girl. She seems 
 almost good enough. What more can be wanted ? Well, 
 God shows her some steep upward path of self-discipline or 
 of self-sacrifice. What if she halts in quiet self-content- 
 ment ? What if she makes no effort to rise to the yet higher 
 level? What if she is simply pure and good because it is 
 pleasant to be so? And here is another, a man, we will 
 say, naturally violent in passions, ungovernable in temper, 
 quite without the restraints of cultured refinement or chas- 
 tened taste. He tries to do right. He hates his vicious 
 outbreaks. Now and then he succeeds. Now and then 
 he fails. He is not one you can respect as a consistent 
 trustworthy Christian. But who shall judge ? The world, 
 of course, would give the palm to the former. Are we quite 
 sure that God would ? May not the poor weak struggling 
 ■ See Pusey on Zech. viii. 21, 
 
94 
 
 THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 soul have really made more efforts than the other, and more 
 progress in proportion, when we take into consideration the 
 point from which the start is made, and the relative height 
 of the standard aimed at ? 
 
 0 poor, strugghng, failing, dissatisfied, sometimes dt 
 sponding, souls ! I do want to encourage you. I can never 
 bid you be content. But I can never let you despair. I 
 can never tell you there is no hope. While you are aiming 
 higher, and while you are trying, even feebly and fitfully 
 trying, there is hope. If I knew that one of you would all 
 your life long go on trying and failing, trying and failing, 
 trying and failing, I should not be afraid of that one being 
 saved. I think God would pity the weakness, and accept 
 the poor efforts, for His dear Son's sake. But if I knew that 
 any one of you would ever give up trying, I should be very 
 much afraid for that one. 
 
 1 have said that I want to centre our thoughts to-day 
 upon one point. I have been seeking for a New Year's 
 counsel. And I have thought that, if I could show how 
 each one may rise to some higher level, and could encourage 
 even those far down on the mountain-track to take one 
 forward step, and to " reach forth unto those things which 
 are before," I might help some in sore need of help. For 
 I see around me many longing for help ; many grieving 
 over their failures ; many not aiming very high, and yet 
 really anxious to travel more bravely and more faithfully in 
 this new stage of their journey than they have travelled 
 heretofore. But I must not let you think I am doing more 
 than touching just one point in the religious life. I must 
 not let you think I am forgetting that there are a hundred 
 other things to say. I am speaking to-day of the higher 
 standard as a principle which may guide God's children in 
 
tkTe higher standard. 
 
 95 
 
 their onward and upward course. I am not speaking of the 
 conversion of the sinner, nor of repentance from dead works 
 and of faith toward God, nor of love which is the fulfilling 
 of the Law, nor of redemption through the precious Blood 
 of Jesus Christ, nor of the sanctifying power of the Holy 
 Spirit, nor of sacramental union with Christ, nor of the 
 prevailing might of prayer, nor of the blessedness of holy 
 worship. I myself do not think a sermon is the better for 
 travelling over a vast region, and trying to embrace the 
 whole counsel of God. I have found sermons enforcing, and 
 enlarging upon, some one point of Christian practice or 
 doctrine more profitable to myself, and I think they are 
 probably more profitable to others. Let me therefore hold 
 fast by my design, and once more ask you to bend your 
 thoughts upon the one counsel I have been setting before 
 you to-day. I will ask you to look into your own hearts. 
 How is it ? Are there any here content with the low level 
 of the world, avoiding scandalous sins, doing plain and 
 obvious duties, and, for the rest, living as others live, with 
 no genuine desire to rise to higher things, with no honest 
 strivings after self-conquest, faith, purity, devotion ? Is this 
 St. Paul's " reaching forth unto those things which are 
 before " ? Or are there any here who have seen and known 
 the love and mercy of Christ, who have gone in lowly 
 penitence to the foot of the Cross, and have tasted and seen 
 how gracious the Lord is, who have listened with humble 
 joy to the message of pardon, and then have rested in a 
 fancied security,.counting, as it were, that they have " already 
 attained," even if they would not go so far as to count that 
 they were " already perfect," and have therefore ceased to 
 strive upwards, realizing rather their past achievements than 
 the many heights still lying in front and above ? Is this 
 
J 
 
 9fT THE HIGHER STANDARD. j 
 
 St. Paul's "reaching forth untu thoic things wliich are ; 
 before " ? 
 
 Nay, my friends, there is assuredly no height in this 
 world where you may stay your steps and say, ' I have I 
 attained.' 
 
 God open our poor blind eyes to see the height above ' 
 our head ! And God help our poor flagging wills to strive 
 to reach it ! 
 
 And now comes the question, What is this higher 
 standard to which I would point you ? What is this dim 
 scarce-discerned height looming over our heads to which 
 we would reach forth ? It has seemed as though to each i 
 one it may be a difterent point— as though each separate | 
 climber were to fix his gaze on the one spot above him 
 whither his next efforts must be directed. And this is true , 
 in one sense, and my very object has been to encourage 
 the backward travellers by pointing them to the next height \ 
 above them as that at which they must aim. Yet is it not • 
 truer to say that the standard, after all, is one, not many, ] 
 only seen with differing degrees of clearness ? For can the j 
 standard really be aught else but the pattern of the perfect j 
 Man? Is it not true that He who was born at blessed j 
 Christmas-tide came into the world to be not only a Sacrifice 1 
 for our sins, but also an Ensample of godly life ? Is it not 
 true that the everlasting Son, He who was in the beginning . 
 with God, and who was God, took our flesh and dwelt j 
 among us, that we might behold " His glory, the glory as of j 
 the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth " ? ' 
 I know we see very dimly and imperfectly, all of us. But | 
 whatever heights of glory and beauty we can trace, as, with ^ 
 half-blinded eyes, we gaze upwards; whatever fair visions 
 of purity and holiness and love and meekness and justice 
 
 j 
 
THE HIGHER STANDARD. 9; 
 
 shape themselves out to our wondering contemplation as 
 we peer into the depths of a light too dazzling for our poor 
 world -encumbered sight; surely these are but partial 
 glimpses of the one all-perfect and all-embracing Pattern. 
 One man discerns one feature, and another another, eacli 
 seeing as he can. Often he knows not what he sees. He 
 is conscious only of something better and purer and holier 
 than himself. And he wishes to be like it. The greatest 
 saint only beholds the dim reflection of the intense radiance. 
 It needs an Angel's eye to gaze unblinded on perfection. 
 Yes, my poor feeble failing brother, you see something 
 above and beyond. It is all misty and uncertain, yet it 
 stirs your heart as though it were a living presence, and 
 you long to get nearer and to see more clearly. And you 
 shall. For He is there. It is the Son of Man who is unfold- 
 ing Himself to your gaze. He is manifesting Himself in 
 an ever-new Epiphany. He is showing you what God 
 meant you to be, what is the Divine ideal of humanity. I 
 know that as yet you see only in part, and understand only 
 in part. But thank God for every faintest glimpse of the 
 great Pattern. Thank God if He is showing you but one 
 feature in which you can become a little more like Jesus. 
 Press nearer ; ask God to purge your eyesight that you may 
 see more, and you sfiall see more. " He that hath, to him 
 shall be given." "Reach forth unto those things which 
 arc before." Yes, travel on with your eyes fixed above. 
 Run your race "looking unto Jesus." I dare say your 
 vision of the great Pattern will be dim and clouded and 
 partial to the end here. But you shall see more and more 
 as you go on. And if now we see through a glass darkly, 
 the day is coming when we shall see face to face ; if now 
 we know in part only, the day is coming when we shall 
 
 H— 5 
 
98 
 
 THE HIGHER STANDARD. 
 
 know even as we are known. Wherefore let our resolve 
 for this New Year be that of him who said, " This one thing 
 I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and 
 reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press 
 toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN 
 DAILY LIFE. 
 
1 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN 
 DAILY LIFE. 
 
 Preached at Dewsbury, before the Co-operative Congress, 
 Whit-Sunday, 1888. 
 
 " By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be 
 Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free." — I Cor. xii. 13. 
 
 This day we commemorate the great outpouring of the 
 Spirit of God upon the little band of expectant disciples at 
 Jerusalem. The Lord, before He left them, had promised 
 " another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth," who should 
 be with them in His stead ; an inner spiritual presence in 
 place of His own outer and visible presence. Indeed, He 
 had declared that it was " expedient " He should go away 
 from them in order that this Divine Comforter might come, 
 implying that this unseen spiritual presence was to be to 
 them something even more blessed and strength-imparting 
 than His own personal presence, strangely dear and precious 
 as that personal presence must have been. The disciples 
 had waited ten days since they saw their Master taken from 
 their head as He went up from the Mount of Olives. 
 They had returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and had 
 believed, and prayed, and waited. And it came. The 
 promise was fulfilled, and "they were all filled with the 
 Holy Ghost." 
 
102 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE; 
 
 Now that this Holy Ghost was given in such wise as to 
 confer new and marvellous powers upon the recipients in 
 no way detracts from the fact that the Holy Ghost is, and 
 was given to be, the ordinary guiding, teaching, informing, 
 and sanctifying Spirit in the Church of God. He was to 
 convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judg- 
 ment. He was to lead into all the truth. He was the 
 Spirit of holiness. And the writers of the New Testa- 
 ment acknowledge Him as the Spirit of adoption, that is, 
 the Spirit which bestows a childlike heart ; the Bond of 
 unity; the Inspirer of prayer; the Source of all worthy 
 obedience; the Power which changes into the likeness of 
 Christ. All this shows as plainly as possible that, when 
 we speak of the Holy Ghost and His work in the heart of 
 man, we are by no means to fix our thoughts upon special 
 and extraordinary manifestations of Divine power, nor upon 
 what we usually think of as religious acts and frames of 
 mind; but that the Holy Spirit is for Christians the Spirit 
 which governs and fashions and directs their whole lives 
 and conduct, having to do with their entire character and 
 principles, and being concerned therefore no less with the 
 daily routine of life, and with all ordinary motives and aims 
 and actions, than with things which we count more dis- 
 tinctively religious. Indeed I know no greater mistake 
 than to attempt to draw a line (and some try to draw a very 
 black line) between religion and the daily life A well- 
 known writer says, "Greatness consists not so much in 
 doing great things, as in doing little things greatly"; and 
 I think we may say. Religion consists not so much in doing 
 rehgious actions, as in doing common actions religiously. 
 If religion does not enter into all the daily life, governing, 
 fashioning, characterizing, all its many forms and phases ; 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. IO3 
 
 if it does not make people different in all conditions and 
 circumstances, regulating their commercial transactions no 
 less than their private devotions, interpenetrating their 
 social relations no less than their secret attitude towards 
 God ; it is a sham and a pretence. I know of no such thing 
 as a religion good for the inside of a church and not good 
 for the outside, good for Sunday and not good for Monday, 
 good for hymn-singing and not good for industrial enter- 
 prise. Religion is not a tender fragile thing, meant only 
 for gentle women and hours of sorrow and the solitude 
 of the secret closet. It is a strong hardy serviceable 
 thing, meant for the hard rough work, and the strange 
 perplexities, and the terrible problems, of life ; a thing for 
 strong men to carry about with them into workshops and 
 factories and streets and courts ; a thing that has to do 
 with social questions and pohtics as certainly as it has to 
 do with lying and lust and drunkenness. 
 
 The truth is, we want to take the Spirit of Christ into 
 all regions of thought and action far more than we do. It 
 is not only that people draw the silly line I have spoken of 
 between religion and daily life, but even when they do feel 
 and acknowledge that religion, or, let me rather say, the 
 Spirit of God, ought to govern the more secular side of 
 their life, they seem to me very often to stop short at the 
 narrow margin of personal and individual responsibility. 
 They will hold that each man in his dealings is bound to 
 be honest and true and charitable, but they will not carry 
 this into the relations which subsist between bodies of men, 
 or between class and class. Many a man will allow that, 
 if he is guided by the Spirit of God, he must obey the law 
 which says, " All things whatsoever ye would that men 
 should do to you, do ye even so to them." But when it is 
 
104 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE, 
 
 a question between class and class, between employers and 
 employed, between producers and consumers, oh ! then it 
 becomes rather far-fetched and Quixotic to appeal to this 
 great law of Christian love. So again with justice. There 
 are plenty of persons, by no means devoid of principle, and 
 who would shrink from being unjust to a neighbour, who 
 never think of the possibility of being unjust to a class. 
 And, once again, there are those who at least try to form 
 kindly judgments of individuals, and to find excuses for 
 them if they are to be blamed, who seem to owe no regard 
 to political opponents in this matter of charity, and to think 
 that, while it is wrong to slander a single person, it is at 
 least a venial sin to slander a large number together. Then, 
 besides this inconsistency in the way many feel and act 
 towards others, as though there were no particular duties 
 towards classes and bodies of men, but only towards their 
 separate component parts, it is to be noted that the same 
 man will adopt a very different standard when he thinks or 
 acts as a member of a class from tliat which he adopts to 
 regulate his private conduct. Plenty of worthy men will 
 tolerate complacently great hardness and even injustice on 
 the part of their own class towards another. No doubt this 
 is generally caused either by simple unconsciousness of the 
 wrong, or by a sense of impotence to do anything to remedy 
 the wrong. Crying wrongs have, [as we all know, been 
 endured for generations, until some philanthropist of resolute 
 persistence has exposed the evil to a half-incredulous public, 
 and then fought hard to obtain redress. We owe an 
 eternal debt of gratitude to those noble minds which, in 
 the face of obloquy and interested opposition, have exposed 
 class wrongs and injustice, and secured amended laws 
 which are now accepted contentedly by all. It is strange 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. I05 
 
 how unmoved Society could be by the horrors of the slave 
 trade, the disgraceful condition of our prisons, or the 
 miseries of our factories and coal-mines, till the trumpet 
 was sounded by a Wilberforce, or a Howard, or a Shaftes- 
 bury. I believe there are few things harder than to awaken 
 Society to social wrong-doing. It certainly needs much 
 grace, much wisdom, much patience, much courage, to 
 grapple with class problems and class interests, and I know 
 not how these are to be successfully dealt with except when 
 the beneficent light of Christianity is turned full upon them, 
 and men are moved and guided by the Spirit of God. 
 
 I came here straight from East London, where I have 
 lived and worked for eight and a half years, and no one 
 can know East London, even superficially, and sit down 
 content with what he sees. To me it has been a perpetual 
 burden of sorrow and of shame to pass day by day among 
 these crowds of poor struggling hope-forsaken half-starved 
 brothers and sisters. Can it be right? Can it be what 
 God meant ? Can it be after the mind of Christ ? These 
 poor workers — I know well enough what some of them are ; 
 I know their unfitness, their improvidence, their lack of 
 energy and enterprise. No doubt in East London we have 
 a large class whom perhaps it is impossible to do much 
 for. But these poor workers— are they receiving what is 
 just and adequate for their labour? Are they enjoying 
 a due share of the profits of their handiwork ? Is capital 
 too strong for them ? These and a hundred other questions 
 keep rising up, and filhng one with anxious trouble. And 
 you are labouring to solve these questions. I should be 
 very presumptuous were I to attempt to deal with any of 
 the confessedly difficult problems which will occupy your 
 Congress this week, I wish to be a learner in your school 
 
I06 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. 
 
 The only right I have to speak to you at all is the general 
 right of a Christian believer, not to speak of a Bishop of 
 the Church of God, to try to bring great general Christian 
 principles to bear upon any matter that may come before 
 him, and to help people to guide their thoughts and 
 deliberations and judgments by the Spirit of Christ ; and, 
 perhaps I may add, the slight additional right which may 
 flow from an interest for many years taken in the work 
 and progress of Co-operation, and a belief that in this 
 direction is to be sought the surest and most hopeful 
 remedy for some of our gravest social anomalies. I will 
 but venture so far into the paths which you can tread with 
 so much firmer and more accustomed foot as to say that 
 to me the part of your work which seems fullest of interest, 
 and most pregnant of large and far-reaching results, is that 
 which has to do with productive Co-operation. No doubt 
 this is also the more difficult part of your work. Co-opera- 
 tion in distribution has been, I suppose, sufficiently proved 
 and tested. But there must be great and difficult problems 
 still to be solved, problems as to the proportionate interests 
 sf producer and consumer, problems as to the part and 
 power to be assigned to capital, and the hke. These 
 questions, so directly and so potently affecting the welfare 
 of our people and the future of our nation, will tax all 
 the wisdom and energy and patience you can command. 
 Perhaps they are questions only to be solved after many 
 experiments and many failures. One thing is very certain 
 — namely, that all great and beneficent social advances are 
 gradual and of slow growth, and that it is madness to hope 
 (as some do) for any real amelioration of the conditions 
 of labour or of society from sudden and subversive change. 
 There are laws of economics, however little some may 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. I07 
 
 regard them in these days, which are too strong for the 
 struggles of revolutionists, and which will take a sure 
 vengeance for a temporary defeat. We might as well 
 expect an earthquake to ripen our harvest, as a social 
 cataclysm to bring happiness and well-being to our people. 
 We must work with, and not against, the great laws which 
 are intertwined inextricably with all our vast and com- 
 plicated social system. I am not one of those who can 
 speak hard things of the wild dreams of the Socialist. God 
 knows there is excuse enough for him. There are times 
 when, being brought face to face with some of the saddest 
 and darkest aspects of life, one is tempted to welcome any 
 scheme, however ill-conceived or impracticable, which 
 might even give a chance for the bettering of what is so 
 infinitely bad ; but your experience and your reason have, 
 I know, taught you the old truth, that " in quietness and 
 in confidence shall be your strength." Each step must be 
 firmly planted ere the next can be safe. Your work is full 
 of lessons of patience and courage and unselfishness. 
 
 And there seems to me a very great incidental blessing 
 in the practical embodiment of your ideas, and the working 
 out of your plans. For surely those who learn to combine 
 with their fellow-workers in industrial enterprise, enter 
 thereby a very school of Christian education. Not only 
 do they learn habits of carefulness and sobriety and self- 
 respect; but, much more, they learn habits of mutual 
 consideration, care for the welfare of others, and self- 
 forgetfulness. And this not alone among themselves ; for 
 when working-men co-operate in labour, when they stand 
 in the double position of employer and employed, when 
 they represent the interests of capital as well as of skill 
 and muscle, it is obvious that they must learn to know 
 
1 
 
 I08 THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. I 
 
 much of the difficulties and anxieties, of the responsibilities 
 and risks, of other classes than their own. And this should 
 certainly be an assuager of bitterness and a promoter of 
 
 charity. i 
 
 I had not meant to touch even so much as I have done j 
 
 upon matters in regard to which I know my own ignorance i 
 
 and inexperience. I seem to have wandered far from the i 
 
 real theme of my sermon. Yet perhaps not so far as may | 
 
 seem. For my subject was the Spirit of Christ in the | 
 
 things of daily life. And it is not hard to discern the Spirit i 
 
 of Christ in work that is planned and undertaken for the ' 
 good of others, and for the encouragement of all that is 
 
 best and most unselfish in the relations of man with man. j 
 " ^Vhatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, 
 
 whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, what- | 
 
 soever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good i 
 report . . . think on these things." This is just what I 
 conceive you to be doing. And I call this Christian work. 
 
 I know very well it may often be done from less than ; 
 
 Christian motive. I know that, even if the work itself be < 
 
 after the mind of the Spirit — work permeated and inter- < 
 
 penetrated with the great generous unselfishness of | 
 
 Christianity, — yet many a worker may himself personally < 
 
 lack the very Spirit which breathes through the work. God j 
 
 help us all to live more and more in the power of the ! 
 
 Divine life, to follow more and more the guidance of the I 
 
 Spirit of Christ! It cannot but be that the separate j 
 individual submission to this spiritual influence must come 
 
 first. It is surely when our own mind and conscience are ' 
 
 governed by the Holy Spirit, when we are regulating our | 
 
 life and actions, our motives and emotions, by the Law of i 
 
 God, which He has said He will write in our hearts, — it is " 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST IN DAILY LIFE. I09 
 
 then that we can turn and look with an undistorted eye 
 on the problems which affect our brother-man. Schemes 
 projected and executed by ungodly men are seldom blest 
 of God. Plans of splendid beneficence have little pledge 
 of success or permanence when they are taken up for 
 selfish ends or lower aims. As St. Paul urged his fellow- 
 labourers in the ministry to take heed first to themselves 
 and then to the flock, knowing full well that the flock would 
 starve if tended by a careless or unworthy shepherd ; so 
 I would say to you. Take heed to yourselves, and then to 
 your work. "Walk in the Spirit," in all lowliness and 
 humility, in all love and tenderness to others, in all 
 generosity and self-abnegation ; be Christ-like in all ye do 
 and speak and think ; and then shall ye be worthy to be 
 used by God in carrying out His holy will, and bringing 
 fight and hope and blessing to your fellow-creatures. 
 Labour on. It is a blessed work ye are engaged in, and 
 It shall have its reward. Ye may not live to see great 
 results from your efforts. Be it so. They will come. It 
 shall be clear some day that this work is the work of the 
 Spirit of Christ. 
 
 " Others, I doubt not, if not we, 
 The issue of our toils shall see ; 
 Young children gather as their own 
 The harvest that the dead have sown, 
 The dwid— forgotten and unknown." ' 
 
 Lewis Morrii, 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 Preached in St. Paul's^ after the London Mission, 1874. 
 
 " Lord, it is good for us to be here : if Thou wilt, let us make here 
 three tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for 
 Elias."— St. Matt. xvii. 4. 
 
 Although there is no necessity to give much heed to the 
 words of one who, when he spoke them, was so startled 
 and confused that he knew not what he said, yet I suppose, 
 in truth, St. Peter was right in the former part of his saying, 
 and wrong in the latter. He was right in thinking it good 
 to have had that moment's ecstasy, to have seen that visiott 
 of the excellent glory in the holy mount. He was wrong 
 in wanting (if such were his meaning) to detain those holy 
 beings in their splendour, and to build shrines upon the 
 mountain where the saints, and the King of saints, might 
 still vouchsafe to manifest the glory of their transfigured 
 presence to the adoring eyes of their favoured servants. 
 
 I have chosen these words of startled excitement as 
 suggestive of thoughts which have been gathering and 
 shaping themselves, I doubt not, in many minds beside my 
 own during the past fortnight. Within less than that space 
 the walls of this great Cathedral were re-echoing the jubilant 
 strains of that noble Te Deum, in which we gave thanks 
 to our God for the great things which we beUeved He had 
 
 '—5 
 
"4 
 
 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 wrought for us in our Mission, and whereof we rejoiced. 
 And standing here this day, at the bidding of your Bishop 
 who sent us forth to our work, I find it impossible to force 
 my thoughts into any wholly diverse channel. The Mission 
 is too fresh in its memories, and was to many of us too 
 absorbing in its interests, to be as yet put quite on one 
 side to make room for other things. Its vibrations are 
 still trembling in many hearts. It is still the talk of many 
 tongues. 
 
 I am sure that many a Missioner, and many a Parish 
 Priest, has been very earnestly putting to himself such 
 questions as these : How far was the excitement, which, 
 in greater or less degree, could scarcely fail to accompany 
 the mission preaching, a good thing for the souls we have 
 been seeking to win for Christ ? And what are to be its 
 fruits ? And how far is it to be maintained, or from time to 
 time recalled and rekindled? Our own part in the work 
 must have forced these questions upon us. But we thank 
 our critics too for forcing them upon us. It is good that 
 this whole matter of the use of religious excitement should 
 be honestly grappled with, and thoroughly reasoned out 
 Those who have shrunk from it and felt its danger have 
 plenty to say for themselves, and it is wholesome (whether 
 we like it or not) to hear both sides. For indeed, when a 
 Clergyman looks on his parish in London, and beholds a 
 festering mass of corruption, vile pollutions of sin infecting 
 the souls of his people as pestilential air infects their 
 bodies, the canker of unbehef everywhere eating its way 
 into all classes, simple irreligion vying in its passive force 
 of resistance to all his efforts with the strength of positive 
 evil, — when he sees all this, and more, he may well be 
 judged leniently if he says, 'For God's sake do anything 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 11$ 
 
 risk anything, dare anything, if only you can shake men 
 out of their apathy or frighten them out of their sins. We 
 are too bad to be fastidious as to the remedies. We want 
 a drastic medicine.' When our children are dying, we 
 don't discuss the question of daily diet. We ask, ' Is there 
 anything else in the world that might save them?' So, 
 whatever wise things may be said (and there are doubtless 
 wise things which may be said) against the remedy so 
 many have been applying to the plague that is raging in 
 our midst, nothing is more natural than that these counter- 
 arguments should be ignored or resented. They seem so 
 cold and calculating when we see nothing but necessity for 
 vigorous action. It is well, then, that at least we should 
 face them now, and see if we can gather from our own 
 mission experiences, and from the warnings and criticisms 
 of others, any definite principles or views with regard to 
 the value and use of emotional excitement in religion. 
 
 Many a soul in this late Mission uttered words strangely 
 like St. Peter's on the Mount of Transfiguration : ' Oh, 
 what a blessed time this is ! Oh that it could only last ! 
 Oh that this newly kindled penitence and love could be 
 kept from dying away again ! Oh that I could always 
 have such visions of my Saviour's face ! ' Ah, yes ! but they 
 that thus spake knew not what they said. There is no 
 difficulty about the simple fact. These vivid emotions are 
 by the law of their being transient. They cannot last. 
 Possibly their very intensity is, roughly speaking, the 
 measure of their evanescence. Souls cannot live and work 
 on day by day with the emotions at high pressure. Now 
 I am far from saying that the Mission in most cases elicited 
 or encouraged any excessive excitement. On the contrary, 
 so far as I can learn, it was marked rather by a tone of 
 
Il6 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 deep and reverent solemnity, by the chastened awe which 
 befits the realization of the presence and power of God. 
 But, though the form into which the emotions aroused by 
 the Mission cast themselves was, I believe, of a far more 
 simple and natural character than many anticipated, yet of 
 course emotions were excited. It was intended they should 
 be excited. And my first question is this : Was it well ? 
 We did it with our eyes open, knowing that at least many 
 souls would be roused to a state of emotion which cannot 
 last, which must soon pass away. Was it well ? I believe 
 it was well. Not in every case. There are, of course, 
 weak and emotional natures for which the stimulus may 
 have been too strong. But, looking at the matter broadly, 
 I cannot doubt it. I believe it was well. 
 
 Why did God bestow upon us the power of religious 
 emotion ? It is certain that no power, no faculty, of the 
 soul was given in vain. Each has its proper use and end, 
 its proper exercise, its proper degree, and its proper 
 relation to other powers and faculties. It must be so with 
 religious emotion. It cannot be given only to be re- 
 pressed and restrained. Observe, we are not dealing with 
 a thing which is only a phenomenon of missions and 
 revivals. God sends this religious emotion to many persons 
 in many ways. Times of deep stirrings of heart and con- 
 science come to most people in the events of their own 
 lives apart from others. One is thus roused to unwonted 
 religious emotion by a season of dangerous sickness ; 
 another by a stroke of terrible bereavement ; a third by a 
 merciful escape from great peril ; a fourth by the stirring 
 words of some book, especially by the power with which 
 oftentimes some verse or passage of Holy Scripture is borne 
 in upon the soul. There are a hundred ways. Now what 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 117 
 
 is to be said of these occasional times of excited religious 
 feeling? First, no doubt, this — that no man must take 
 religious feeling for religion. But, after that, what ? That 
 all such excited feelings are false and hollow and perilous, 
 and must therefore be at once suppressed? That plain 
 simple obedience to God's will is all in all, and therefore 
 all deep emotions are evil and to be avoided ? Surely no. 
 Surely the true thing to be said is this — that God gives these 
 periods of stronger feeling as a mighty help to our weak 
 and wavering courage, that they are a spur to the halting 
 obedience, and a goad to the reluctant will. True, these 
 feelings must be guided and regulated and led into practical 
 channels, else of course they will run to waste, and leave 
 behind them only the barrenness of a field over which a 
 flood has rushed headlong in its devastating course. But 
 I am not speaking of ungoverned and fanatical excitement, 
 but of deep and powerful religious emotion, when I say that 
 God gives it (as is set forth with consummate power and 
 clearness in a sermon well known, I am sure, to some of 
 my hearers, upon " The Religious Use of Excited Feel- 
 ings " to carry us by its force over the earlier difficulties 
 of a new and converted life, or to nerve us to resolutions, 
 and set us upon courses of action, which would probably 
 be impossible to the calculating calmness of dispassionate 
 reason. 
 
 But I think these times of unusual religious fervour have 
 another use. They open to the soul visions of a state of love 
 and joy and heavenly-mindedness, which, if afterwards they 
 even turn into nothing but regret and longing, nevertheless 
 leave behind them a blessing. It is good for the weary 
 toiler, too conscious of his dull earthliness, his cold shallow- 
 » By J. H. Newman. I 
 
Il8 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 heartedness, the poverty of his faith and hope and love, 
 to be able to say, though sighing as he says it, ' I have 
 known the blessedness of a bright triumphant faith; I 
 have understood what it is to pray with holy fervour ; I have 
 realized God's presence and His love ; I have felt a true 
 love to my Saviour, and a true longing after His likeness ; 
 I have had blissful hopes— nay, almost foretastes — of 
 heavenly joy.' I know what some are thinking. Can it 
 be a blessed thing to have tasted of these heavenly gifts, 
 and yet to have lost their sweetness ? Can it be well to 
 say, 'I have known,' when it were so much better to be 
 able to say, 'I know'? Yes, I think it is well. For, 
 if he be wise who says it, he will know that these higher 
 deeper keener feelings cannot be always with him. He 
 will gather up the truths and the duties they have brought 
 to him, as we gather up the bright shells and gem-like pebbles 
 on the seashore when a spring tide has ebbed. These will be 
 kept, when the surging waves that bore them to our feet 
 have retired. He will recognize the swelling of his emotions 
 as the overflow of the river when the sun of God's grace 
 has melted the snows of his chill heart. And he will no 
 more expect the flow of his religious feelings to maintain 
 the fulness and force to which it has at times arisen than 
 he would expect a river to be always at the flood. Let us 
 once realize that these more vivid religious emotions are 
 occasional helps and not permanent states; that they reveal 
 to us what might be but for the weakness and earthiness of 
 our nature, but are in themselves no proofs of high attain- 
 ments of grace ; and then we may thank God for them, 
 and not be afraid or ashamed to say, ' I have known,' 
 when we dare not say, ' I know,' 
 
 But now, allowing that vivid religious emotions, and 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 119 
 
 exalted states of feeling, are not meant to last, but are 
 meant to incite us to renewed penitence and godly re- 
 solutions and fresh beginnings, a very serious and a very 
 practical question remains. How far is religious emotion 
 to form any part of our daily religious life ? Or, in other 
 words. How far are the feelings to be regularly employed 
 in the service of God? We have done with exceptional 
 religious emotion. What shall we say as to ordinary re- 
 ligious emotion ? Is it a good thing or a bad ? Assuredly, 
 as I repeat, our feelings were not given us for the purpose 
 of being crushed out. Our religion is not one of mere 
 dry duty. The very fact that Love holds so prominent a 
 place in it is a proof that at least some amount of religious 
 feeling is necessary to a true religious life. But I would 
 ask this : If we read our Bibles candidly, does it not seem 
 that a greater amount of religious emotion is expected to 
 find place in the daily life of Christians than is commonly 
 felt, or comvnonly supposed needful ? St. Paul was a most 
 thoroughly practical man, eminently a>man of action, always 
 up and doing. He was surely one who would scorn to let 
 feeling take the place of obedience, or to suffer the simple 
 daily duties of life to escape under the cloak of heavenly 
 aspirations and high-flown sentiment. Yet, if anything is 
 plain in his Epistles, it is that a life of duty, however rigid 
 and self-sacrificing, without love, joy, peace, — a life of 
 obedience without emotion — would utterly fail to satisfy 
 him. The heart, no less than the head and the will, 
 must be enlisted in the service of God. I do not think 
 you need turn over many pages of your Bible to find 
 ample proof of this. I would only refer you to one noted 
 passage in the Divine message to the Church of the 
 Laodiceans : " I know thy works, that thou art neither cold 
 
120 
 
 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 nor hot I would thou wert cold or hot. So then, because 
 thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue 
 thee out of My mouth." Indeed, my brethren, we must 
 not be content with a cold heartless religion. You see 
 that even lukewarmness is hateful to God. We do want 
 our religion lifting up into a brighter sunnier calmer 
 atmosphere. We must not acquiesce in a state of dull 
 slavish obedience. We are not slaves, but sons. We want 
 to know more of that "glorious liberty of the children of 
 God." Our religious life is sadly imperfect till it has become 
 a spring of light and joy in our inmost souls. 
 
 Well, thank God, it is so to thousands. Thousands do 
 find in religion the one true secret of peace and happiness. 
 They understand what is meant when it is said of the 
 wisdom, whose beginning is the fear of the Lord, that 
 " her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are 
 peace." 
 
 No doubt this happy state, in which rehgion is really 
 loved as the source of the soul's truest blessedness, is in 
 most cases a state of calmness and rest, a state of quiet 
 inward satisfaction and serene content, rather than a state of 
 tumultuous feeling and rapturous elation of spirit. But it 
 is none the less a state of religious emotion. Emotion does 
 not mean ecstasy. Calm unimpassioned persons who love 
 much church-going, and are earnest and constant frequenters 
 of the means of grace, because these things make them 
 happy, and they therein learn to realize the goodness and 
 love of God, are in reality no less obeying the impulse of 
 feeling than are those who are bowed down to the ground 
 in shame and sorrow for sin under the moving appeals of 
 some mission preacher. Only in the one case the feeling 
 is calm, orderly, habitual, in the other intense and ex- 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 121 
 
 reptional. I know nothing more blessed and beautiful than 
 the bright peacefulness of the loving child of God, whose 
 heart, unshaken by violent emotions, simply believes and 
 trusts and loves, and is full of childlike confidence and 
 thankful praise. 
 
 But supposing there is in the daily religious life of some 
 more of the element of excitement than I have pictured. 
 Supposing, as must be freely admitted, there are not a few 
 in whom nothing better than a naturally restless disposition, 
 or a craving after continual stimulus in spiritual things, 
 accounts for their enjoyment of many church services, much 
 preaching, and the like. Well, no one will affirm that the 
 motive which actuates such persons is a very high one. I 
 do not suppose that any one would consider the indulgence 
 of their tastes anything very meritorious. Their religious 
 acts must rank far lower than such as are done from 
 principle and a sense of duty (though I do not wish to 
 speak of these as so very meritorious). But I come back to 
 the old question. Why did God make us able to enjoy certain 
 things more than others ? Why did He implant in us — 
 though far more in some than in others — a craving after what 
 may move and stir, and perchance elevate, the soul ? Has, 
 in a word, even excitement no work to do, no end to answer, 
 in the daily Christian life ? Take any keen eager impulsive 
 excitable person. May I not believe that God gave such 
 person the power of quick impulse and eager aspiration 
 for some worthy end? And what is that end? Is it to 
 enjoy a ball? or a novel? or a sport? One would 
 almost think so, when one hears people, themselves keenly 
 enjoying all manner of worldly amusements, throwing them- 
 selves into them heart and soul, as we say, yet, when they 
 see others as keenly and engrossingly giving themselves to 
 
122 
 
 RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 religious occupations, settling the matter with a self-corn- 
 placent smile by saying, ' Oh ! it is all excitement.' Might 
 it not be a better way of looking at it if they could think 
 and say, ' I don't know how such an one can enjoy so much 
 religion, I only know I don't and can't. I wish I could. 
 I wish I could take delight in high and holy things. I 
 wish prayer were not so much of a task and burden to me. 
 I wish I loved praising God as well as I love many idle 
 amusements. I wish I could feel the same delight in the 
 thought of God's presence as in the company of some 
 earthly friend ' ? I don't mean to say these idle wishes will 
 do much good, but surely they are truer and better and 
 humbler than the shallow contempt which sets down religious 
 acts and interests to a motive which is assumed to be in- 
 nocent in respect of this world, but blamable in respect of 
 heaven. But set down, in any particular case, much of 
 church-going, praying, reading, and the like, to the love 
 of excitement, if you must, and I will say. Better so than 
 not at all. Perhaps such a character cannot help acting to 
 a great extent from this lower motive. Well, thank God 
 if it lead into good channels rather than bad ones. At any 
 rate, there is more safety and more hope when excitement 
 takes one to church than when it takes one to a racecourse 
 or a theatre. 
 
 My object has been to show that, while we may not 
 trust to the feelings for proof that we are in a state of grace, 
 we neverthless may not despise the feelings as a help to the 
 religious life, and as one sphere, one part of our being, in 
 which that religious life must exercise itself. God's Holy 
 Spirit claims all our being for His own. He not only 
 enlightens the mind, and renews and strengthens the will, 
 but He also sanctifies and elevates the heart's affections ; 
 
RELIGIOUS EMOTION. 
 
 123 
 
 not crushing and destroying them, but chastening, purifying, 
 and directing them, turning them away from things below, 
 setting them upon things above. My friends, be not content, 
 I pray you, with a cold dry unloving service. Obey indeed 
 humbly, simply, patiently ; but over all your obedience shed 
 the bright and beautiful light of love and joy and peace. 
 Never be satisfied till you really love your religion ; and by 
 that I mean till you love God the Father who loves you, and 
 God the Son who died for you. St. Augustine said the thing 
 which he most marvelled at was that God loved man so much, 
 and yet that man loved God so httle. Do not be d oafraif 
 warmth of religious feeling. Surely we are in greater danger 
 of erring on the side of coldness than on the side of warmth. 
 Let the fountain of your heart's affections flow forth freely 
 and generously. Let your religion be bright, loving, joyous, 
 happy, free. Give your hearts as well as your lives to the 
 Lord who hath given you His heart as well as His life. 
 Break through, if need be, your English reserve and coldness, 
 at least when you are with your dear Saviour. Love Him, 
 cling to Him, trust Him, take Him to your heart of hearts. 
 And, in the gladness and freedom and confidence of His 
 love to you and your love to Him, " Rejoice in the Lord 
 alway : and again I say, Rejoice." 
 
JEREMIAH. 
 
I 
 
 1 
 
 I 
 
 1 
 
 ! 
 
 i 
 
JEREMIAH. 
 
 RESOLUTENESS IN THE MIDST OF 
 DISCOURAGEMENT. 
 
 Preached at St. Giles', Oxford, 1869. 
 
 " Then said I, Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak ; tor I am 
 a child."— Jer. i. 6. 
 
 No man was ever called to a harder task than the Prophet 
 Jeremiah, and no man ever felt more profoundly his power- 
 lessness to fulfil the task assigned him. His task was to 
 fight a losing battle for forty years, and I know no task 
 harder than that. But there are some spirits for whom the 
 very excitement of a noble strife suffices. Eager, ardent, 
 devoted, endowed with a keen vigorous faith, buoyed up 
 by a vivid passionate hope, such are able to throw them- 
 selves heart and soul into the thick of the contest, and to 
 do and dare all things for the Lord's sake. Not so Jere- 
 miah. His character and temperament were very different 
 from this. He is well called the " Weeping Prophet," not 
 alone from the sorrowful strains of his utterances and the 
 very sadness of the themes he dwells upon, but quite as 
 fitly from the natural melancholy of his disposition. His 
 temperament has been well described as that "which, 
 while it does not lead the man who has it to shrink from 
 
128 
 
 JEREMIAH. 
 
 doing God's work, however painful, makes the pain of 
 doing it infinitely more acute, and gives to the whole 
 character the impress of a deeper and more lasting melan- 
 choly." Thus from first to last Jeremiah felt — sometimes 
 even to despondency, and almost despair, — the burden of 
 his task. At first it was the magnitude of the task itself, 
 together with the sense of his own powerlessness, which 
 appalled his gentle shrinking sensitive spirit. When first, 
 in early years, called to the prophetic office, his cry is, 
 " Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak ; for I am a 
 child." Yet there was more hope then than afterwards. 
 For this occurred in the reign of Josiah, and the great 
 religious revival of that reign must have filled many a 
 heart with glowing visions of brighter days to come. But, 
 as years went on, the whole prospect began to darken. 
 The nation sank from bad to worse. Those who had 
 looked for much fruit from the good seed sown under the 
 fostering care of the good King Josiah sought for that 
 fruit in vain. And, almost alone, with only two or three 
 faithful friends to comfort him, the " Prophet of tears " went 
 on uttering his solemn warnings, his tender pleadings, his 
 sorrowful laments, — in vain. Few listened, save in wrath. 
 None heeded, save to persecute. Who will blame, when 
 there breaks from him the bitter cry, " Woe is me, my 
 mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife, and a 
 man of contention to the whole earth " ? Who will not 
 sympathize, when, utterly borne down by the seeming 
 fruitlessness of his weary contest with the hardness and 
 obstinacy of his people, he exclaims, " Oh that I had in 
 the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men, that I 
 might leave my people and go from them " ? Who will 
 greatly condemn even that momentary (for it was but 
 
JEREMIAH. 
 
 129 
 
 momentary) casting down of the sword and turning aside 
 out of the battle, when, " because the Word of the Lord 
 was made a reproach unto him and a derision daily," he 
 cried, in bitterness of soul, " I will not make mention of 
 Him, nor speak any more in His name " ? Nay, scarcely 
 have the words left his lips ere he repels them with a 
 righteous scorn of their weakness, adding instantly, " But 
 His Word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in 
 my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could 
 not stay. For I heard the defaming of many, fear on 
 every side." " But the Lord is with me as a mighty and 
 terrible One." 
 
 Nobly, my brethren, and gloriously, — nobly and glori- 
 ously because against the whole leaning of his natural 
 character and temperament, and against the whole tide 
 and current of the outward circumstances in which he was 
 placed — did Jeremiah fulfil his mighty mission. When he 
 first started back, as the Word of the Lord came to 
 him, and cried, "Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak; 
 for I am a child," how did God answer him ? " Say 
 not, I am a child : for thou shalt go to all that I shall 
 send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt 
 speak. Be not afraid of their faces : for I am with thee 
 to deliver thee, saith the Lord." And again, shortly after, 
 " Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak 
 unto them all that I command thee : be not dismayed at 
 their faces, lest I confound thee before them. For, behold, 
 I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron 
 pillar, and brazen walls, against the whole land, against the 
 kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the 
 priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And 
 they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail 
 
 K— 5 
 
30 
 
 JEREMIAH. 
 
 against thee ; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver 
 thee." Such was Jeremiah's task. A gentle shrinking 
 tender spirit was set up by God's decree to be a " defenced 
 city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls " ! A man of 
 peace, who would have gladly found a lodging-place in the 
 wilderness, where he might spend his days in holy con- 
 templation, apart from the political strivings and convul- 
 sions of his doomed land, is to fight his lifelong battle 
 against king, and princes, and priests, and people ! Doubt- 
 less they should not prevail against him ; but, then, neither 
 did he prevail against them. The darts of his prophecies 
 seemed showered upon a city whose defences were sterner 
 and stronger than his own. The smitings of his sword 
 seemed to glance off from an iron pillar no might of his 
 could indent. The subtler shafts of his sorrows and woes 
 were vainly spent against the brazen walls of pitiless hearts. 
 And so it went on till the end came ; and beholding at last 
 the city of God laid desolate, and the people carried away 
 into captivity, he poured forth his exquisitely pathetic 
 Lamentations, and wept as one who had lived and laboured 
 in vain. " I am the man that hath seen affliction," he 
 cries. And again, in those most touching words, in which 
 we feel unconsciously the foreshadowing of a yet deeper 
 sorrow and a yet more utter desolation, " Is it nothing to 
 you, all ye that pass by ? Behold, and see if there be any 
 sorrow like unto my sorrow." 
 
 We will leave the prophet weepmg, among the scanty 
 remnant of the people left in the villages of Judah, over 
 the miseries of his dearly loved country, yet not unsolaced 
 by visions of future deliverance, and of the days which 
 should come of new and glorious blessedness under " the 
 Lord our Righteousness." 
 
JEREMIAH. 131 
 
 The prophet passes out of sight, but I think we have 
 not looked in vain upon his form as he has marched by in 
 his place in the " goodly fellowship of the prophets," — a 
 "man of sorrows," like Him he in so many things re- 
 sembled, — sad yet brave, gentle yet resolute, weeping yet 
 undaunted, " persecuted, but not forsaken ; cast down, but 
 not destroyed," — we have not looked upon this noble 
 character in vain, if we have marked in it that wherein it 
 speaks mightily to us in these latter days. We have looked 
 upon a man whose greatness was in this — that he fought 
 the battle God sent him to fight unflinchingly, in spite of 
 his natural shrinking from the strife, and in spite of the 
 seeming hopelessness of his efforts. Am I wrong, my 
 brethren, in saying that such a resoluteness as this is 
 exactly what we most sorely need in these days ? Am I 
 wrong in thinking that a shrinking from the battle to which 
 God calls us is a very noticeable feature of our age ? 
 
 There are many causes for this shrinking from the battle. 
 Some of them seem to belong to the age itself in which our 
 lot is cast. The state of the intellectual atmosphere is 
 against the spirit of resoluteness in religion. There have 
 been ages in which the bent of men's minds was towards 
 a simple unquestioning faith in dogmatic truth. Those 
 who accepted God's service had no doubts to discomfit, 
 no difficulties to perplex them. To affirm and to believe 
 were natural to the age, and the spiritual life had no inward 
 struggle between faith and unbelief to pass through before 
 it put forth its unabated force in action. Now the tendency 
 of men's minds is to receive nothing unquestioned, to go 
 to the root of everything presented to them, to try to solve 
 the difficulties which are seen to lie at the very bottom of 
 the whole question of religion. There is an analyzing and 
 
132 
 
 JEREMIAH. 
 
 disintegrating of dogma, which is shaking to its foundation 
 the old structure of accepted truth; and men who desire 
 to believe, as they take up first one and then another of the 
 articles of faith, are dismayed to find themselves face to face 
 (as many assure them) with a 'perhaps.' Now religious 
 resoluteness requires sincere conviction. And the absence 
 among many of sincere conviction is one reason why there 
 is so little resoluteness, I am not now speaking in con- 
 demnation of the spirit of the age. It surely has its work 
 to do in the carrying out of God's mighty purposes. I only 
 name it as inimical to that courageous bearing, that un- 
 flinching resoluteness, in religion, which is rather to be 
 found in seasons of undoubting and unclouded faith. 
 
 Then also, probably rather as another side of the same 
 questioning spirit than as a separate feature, the tendency 
 of these days is to self-contemplation. Men's minds turn 
 inwards upon themselves. The feelings and motives are 
 scrutinized where in other ages the great eternal truths of 
 revelation would be contemplated. This is not an age 
 which can compose a Te Deum. Even our very hymns 
 witness to a loss of the grand joyous affirmative spirit of 
 ormer days, and those are most popular which, in place of 
 the mighty verities of our faith, deal with the inner feelings 
 and self-consciousness of the heart of man. The self-con- 
 templative spirit in religion (full of blessedness of its own 
 though it be) is not that which best braces the character for 
 resolute action. Our present leaning is rather to tenderness 
 than to enthusiasm. 
 
 Then there is another very powerful influence at work, 
 which makes religious resoluteness harder than in some 
 other ages. I mean the tendency of high culture and 
 civilization to destroy differences, and to check all displays 
 
JEREMIAH. 
 
 of individual character or action, so that it requires a very 
 unusual courage to take one's own line and to follow one's 
 own convictions in any matter. This undoubtedly helps 
 to damp all kindlings of zeal and enthusiasm, so that 
 numbers of men live below their real principles and con 
 victions, and act the hypocrite, not by pretending to be 
 better, but by pretending to be worse, than they really are. 
 
 These obvious tendencies of the day in part no doubt 
 account for the fact that even religious men shrink from the 
 hearty self-sacrificing devotion which is so noble and so 
 blessed a thing. 
 
 And yet God is in these days calling us all to be up and 
 doing. Side by side with the unnerving, enfeebling, un- 
 settling tendencies of the age, there is a strange spirit ol 
 earnestness and reality among us. Men are everywhere 
 working, planning, organizing. None who long to help 
 others can be long without opportunity. If religious 
 devotedness is rare — devotedness, I mean, from purely 
 religious motives — yet philanthropic devotedness, activity 
 of usefulness, generous expenditure of time and labour and 
 interest in the service of others, these, thank God, are not rare. 
 But we want something higher and better than even these. 
 To which one among us all — priest or people, old or 
 young, rich or poor— has not the word of the Lord come 
 with its call to action, like the trumpet-blast which summons 
 to the battle ? Ye have all heard it again and again. Your 
 very presence in this church bears witness that ye know that 
 God claims your service, that He has set you your task to 
 do for Him, that he has commanded you to fight manfully 
 in the great battle that is set in array. But when you fairly 
 front the matter, and stand face to face with that which is 
 appointed you, have you no tremblings of heart ? Do )'ou 
 
134 
 
 JEREMIAH. 
 
 never shrink back faint and frightened when you behold 
 the hardness of the task set you, and are conscious of your 
 own powerlessness to accomplish it ? If the prophet's battle 
 against the principalities and powers of his unhappy nation 
 was a hard one for a man of his gentle nature to fight, is 
 your battle against the principalities and powers of the 
 kingdom of darkness an easy one for you ? Do you never 
 feel like a David before a Goliath, only without David's 
 sling and stone ? Are there no moments when you could 
 cry, ' Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot fight this battle, for 
 I am a child ' ? A child in weakness, a child in ignorance, 
 yet, alas ! too often not a child in purity and innocence, 
 what can / do to fight the Lord's battle ? Cannot I find a 
 " lodging-place " in this wilderness, where I may sit still and 
 be at peace, and let the din and roar of the battle come 
 to me as an echo from the distant plain ? Nay, my friends, 
 it cannot be. Children I well know we are, every one. 
 Hard I well know the battle is for our poor feeble arms to 
 fight. I know that our "enemies live and are mighty." 
 But I know this too — that, if we turn aside out of the battle, 
 we turn aside from God, and from Christ, and from heaven. 
 The Captain of our salvation who marched in front of us, 
 and fought the battle for us, and won the victor)', said, 
 "Whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, 
 cannot be My disciple." Even now are we (children as we 
 are) watching from afar our Captain's fighting. He is far 
 away in the front, but we can see how He wields His sword, 
 and how He smites the foe. And even now are we, in our 
 Lenten fastings and self-denials and self-searchings, learning 
 (however feebly and ignorantly) to wield our weapons that 
 we may the better fight the great battle. But what we want 
 is courage to fight, though we be but children ; resoluteness 
 
JEREMIAH. 
 
 135 
 
 to persevere, though our fighting seem in vain. We shall 
 fall again and again. We shall seem to make little advance. 
 We shall sometimes lose ground instead of gaining. But 
 we must still fight on. Let our watchword be this, " What 
 time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee." Believe me, there 
 is a sense in which fighting is a greater thing than victory, 
 and trying a better thing than success. Victory may some- 
 times be awarded to a brief conflict, success may sometimes 
 crown a happy venture. But to strive and struggle on, 
 perhaps a long life through, humbly, patiently, resolutely, 
 achieving little, advancing little, the crown of victory seem- 
 ing far off to the last \ to fight our battle in spite of all 
 hindrances, whether of natural character, or of adverse 
 influences, or of opposing circumstances ; to trust, even what 
 time we are afraid ; — this, which was what Jeremiah did, is 
 a great and glorious thing. For this may God nerve our 
 poor feeble hearts and hands I 
 
 And now let a bright and happy thought crown a 
 subject that has not been without its darker and sterner 
 features. However the sorrows of Zion crushed down the 
 prophet's soul in his latest strains of mourning, he had had 
 his hours of triumph and of joy. He had seen in blessed 
 vision the remnant of God's flock gathered out of all 
 countries whither He had driven them, and brought back 
 again to their fold. " They shall be fruitful, and increase," 
 he had sung, " and they shall fear no more, nor be dis- 
 mayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith the Lord." And 
 then, with rapt eye gazing down the coming ages, over the 
 nearer triumph of the restored nation, he had beheld the 
 dim yet glorious outline of a larger and grander blessed- 
 ness, even of the days when a King should reign and 
 prosper, and that King's name *' The Lord our Righteous- 
 
136 
 
 JEREMIAH. 
 
 ness." And we will glory too in the hope that is ours. 
 Even when there are fightings without and fears within, 
 even when with anxious tearful eye we look, as we may 
 perchance have one day to look, upon our Jerusalem, and 
 cry, " Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty, 
 the joy of the whole earth?" — yea, when we are almost 
 tempted to sit down in despair, and say, " But Thou hast 
 utterly rejected us, Thou art very wroth against us " ; — yes, 
 even in the darkest days that can come, we will still love, 
 still cling to, still labour for, still pray for, our Zion ; for 
 "O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers 
 have declared unto us, the noble works that Thou didst in 
 their days, and in the old time before them." Many of us 
 who saw the first dawning of the great Church revival of 
 this generation have lived to own that all our bright hopes 
 have not been fulfilled; yet Jeremiah saw a blasting of 
 every promise in his day, and we see much realized, even if 
 we were once too sanguine. And we believe that of our 
 own beloved Church of England we need not fear to say, 
 " The Lord shall comfort Zion : He will comfort all her 
 waste places j and He will make her wilderness like Eden, 
 and her desert like the garden of the Lord ; joy and glad- 
 ness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of 
 melody." And then — even if we never behold all we yearn 
 and pray for here — still we gaze wistfully onward, and there, 
 on the faint and far horizon of the everlasting hills, we 
 discern, striking upward, like shadowy spears of fire in 
 northern midnights, the dim radiance of some vast hidden 
 splendour, and we know that beyond, where we cannot 
 see now, but where we shall see at last, there is the ever- 
 lasting glory which is the effluence of the throne of the 
 Lord our Righteousness. 
 
GOD'S PRESENCE OUR 
 STRENGTH. 
 
GOD'S PRESENCE OUR 
 STRENGTH. 
 
 Preached at the Consecration of the Bishop of Bedford (R. C. Billing) in 
 St. PauPs, 1888. 
 
 "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof."— Ps. xxiv. I. 
 
 We can surely say this with a far deeper and more blessed 
 meaning in these latter days than could the Psalmist of old. 
 He, indeed, acknowledged and gloried in the sovereignty 
 of Jehovah. He could sing, "The Lord is King; the 
 earth may be glad thereof, yea, the multitude of the isles 
 may be glad thereof." But, lo ! the everlasting Son has 
 visited this lower earth, and has claimed it as His kingdom. 
 To Him is given all power in heaven and in earth. To 
 Him are uttered the prophetic words, "Thy throne, O 
 God, is for ever and ever." God "hath put all things 
 under His feet." And in the mystery of His holy Incarna- 
 tion the Son of God has hallowed and consecrated the 
 earth on which He condescended to dwell. No man can 
 say that the ground He trod, the flesh He wore, the 
 humanity which He took to himself, are accursed of God 
 and things to be scorned as only of evil. No man can 
 say that the circumstances and conditions of human life, 
 in which He shared, are to be regarded by the Christian 
 
140 GOD'S PRESENCE OUR STRENGTH. 
 
 man with fear and suspicion. That human life of His has 
 left its consecration behind " In Him was life, and the 
 life was the Ught of men," and the light has not wholly 
 passed away. If He came verily " trailing clouds of glory '< 
 from God His home, surely there are yet resting on the 
 scenes He visited and the earth He hallowed with His 
 presence some rays of that Divine glory, irradiating and 
 beautifying the world, like the afterglow of a splendid 
 sunset. 
 
 But it is not only that the Son of Man came to receive 
 for Himself a kingdom and to return. In bodily presence 
 it was so. In spiritual power He is still and ever present 
 in His kingdom. " Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto 
 the end of the world." And it is the realization of this 
 presence which is the true strength of all God's servants. 
 This is the great task of faith, for faith is the reahzing 
 power. I have been trying to think what is the great need 
 of those called by God to some great work for His Church, 
 and I believe the chief grace they must seek and cherish 
 is that of faith. When we can live with a vivid and 
 abiding consciousness of the presence of the Unseen ; when 
 we can look not at the things which are seen, but at the 
 things which are not seen ; when the other world is to us 
 as real and as near as this world ; when we can go on 
 our way sure that God is on our right hand so that we shall 
 not fall ; then are we strong to do the work of God. 
 
 And I suppose the great issue that is being fought out 
 in this age is just this — between faith and unbelief ; between 
 a realization of a world of being, of which the senses can 
 tell us nothing, and a blank materialism, which accepts 
 nothing except on the evidence of the senses. The great 
 question of the day is this— Is there a God, present in all 
 
GOD'S PRESENCE OUR STRENGTH. I41 
 
 His creation, whose presence we can realize and believe, 
 or must we train ourselves to see the sun shining (as one 
 has said) out of a Godless heaven upon a soulless earth ? 
 It is a tremendous issue I I do not think there is any 
 halting-place between. I do not think many souls will 
 ever content themselves with the beautiful dreams of the 
 poet who can resolve all the articles of the Christian faith 
 into a haze of tender light without shape or substance, or 
 with a fantastic religion which, having no God to worship, 
 worships humanity itself. The question will be fought out 
 on broader and, if you please, rougher Hnes. 
 
 But we Christians have not now to begin to work out 
 this question as some new and startling problem. We have 
 been taught and trained to accept the truth and reality 
 of the other world, and to believe in the Unseen, And let 
 us thank God that He has given us this blessed teaching 
 and training. Let us thank God for the truth handed 
 down to us from our forefathers, and for a Church which 
 guards and teaches this truth. What I want to press to- 
 day is the more practical and experimental side of this 
 great matter. We accept the existence of the other world. 
 We say our Creeds, and believe, or fancy we believe, in 
 God in Three Persons, and in the blessed truths we learnt 
 at our mothers' knees. But it is the realization of all this 
 that is the matter I desire to urge. It is the living con- 
 sciousness of all this that is so potent to overcome the 
 world. O my brothers, you who are this day to be called 
 to new work and higher office and larger responsibility, 
 let me beseech you to seek with all earnestness this grace 
 of realization, which is nothing else but the grace of faith. 
 You will have much to make you sad, much to perplex, 
 much to cast you down. I know not how you can stand 
 
142 god's presence our strength. 
 
 firm and brave and hopeful except in the sense of God's 
 presence, and in the consciousness that " the earth is the 
 Lord's, and the fulness thereof." There is so much that 
 it is hard to explain in the things around you, perhaps in 
 the secret mysteries of your own hearts and consciences, 
 that you will need this sense of God's presence to give you 
 light and peace. You will often see the ungodly in great 
 prosperity, and God's dearest children in grievous suffering 
 and sorrow; and when you think to understand it all, 
 it will be too hard for you, until you go into the temple 
 of the Lord, and there, perchance on your knees, lay it 
 all before God, and ask Him for Ught. Then He may 
 speak, and you will listen. " The earth is the Lord's, and 
 the fulness thereof." And He is greater, infinitely greater, 
 than the earth and all that is therein. He has larger 
 purposes and ends than we can know, and He can blend 
 and combine and order and direct all things to His own 
 greater ends and purposes. And here too you will see 
 how little a thing is pain or sorrow or trouble, how abso- 
 lutely immeasurable in its smallness beside eternity, and 
 you will understand what the Apostle meant when he spoke 
 of "our light affliction which is but for a moment." I 
 use this only as one illustration of the way in which the 
 consciousness of God's presence, and of the awful reahty 
 of the Unseen, will help you in meeting the many strange 
 perplexing questions which come to us all. But I should 
 be wrong if I did not remind you, my brothers, of the 
 momentous importance of this sense of God's presence for 
 the even harder struggles of your own spiritual life. I need 
 not urge on you the thought — sure to have been very near 
 your hearts as you have contemplated this day in its 
 approaching— of the necessity for your own personal holi- 
 
god's presence our strength. T43 
 
 ness if you are to help the souls of others, and to rightly 
 guide and govern the Church of God. But how are you 
 to win this personal holiness ? How are you to be men 
 of God, going before the flock, marching, as you are bound 
 to march, in the van of God's host? I know not how we 
 can dare to hope for such a spirit and power as shall 
 lead others on the heavenward way except by living in the 
 conscious presence of the Unseen. Many years ago I read 
 a book in which were described the struggles of a young 
 Indian officer to lead a Christian life, and it was there set 
 forth with great force that one of the hardest battles such 
 a young man has to fight is the battle for faith in the 
 Unseen. It may be a hard fight for a young man. I think 
 it is a hard fight for an old one. Yet it is worth the effort, 
 for it is the key to the whole position. When this battle is 
 won there is not much else that need make us afraid. 
 
 But I would have you turn in thought for a while to those 
 among whom you must live and labour. Is the thought 
 I have been trying to draw out for the pastor one which 
 concerns not the flock? Nay, I hold that the highest — 
 yes, far the highest — boon you can confer on the poor souls 
 to whom you are called to minister is this very conscious- 
 ness of another world and of the presence of God. You 
 will say, perhaps, this is advice more fitting to be given to 
 a Parish Priest than to a Bishop, who, from the nature of 
 his office and duties, does not come into such close personal 
 contact with the people. Yet, my brothers, you, if any, 
 should surely give a high and spiritual tone to the whole 
 teaching and ministrations of the Church, and, as you go 
 from parish to parish and from church to church, forget not 
 that you are bound to bring with you such manifest evidence 
 of the reality of your own faith in God as shall make all, 
 
144 god's presence our strength. 
 
 both clergy and people, recognize that the Church of Christ 
 is not a thing of this world, not a mere human institution, 
 but carries with it everywhere its witness to the reality of 
 the Unseen and to the power of the presence of God. Alas ! 
 the vast majority of our people are simple materialists — 
 not by conviction, but by practice. What thoughts, what 
 aims, what hopes, do most of them cherish which pass 
 beyond the things of sense ? " The world is too much with 
 us" — nay, for these the world is simply all in all. It 
 tyrannizes over them by the persistency of its presence and 
 the imperiousness of its demands. Aye, and for how many 
 are not the mere cares and troubles of life, the misery of 
 hopeless poverty, the wretchedness of sordid living, not 
 to speak of the slavery of horrible sin, enough to blot out 
 all sight of the beautiful and glorious things which are 
 unfolded to the eye of faith ? It is truly a great possession 
 when once a poor ignorant earth-bound soul has grasped 
 the conception of a world other than that of sight. It opens 
 out, sometimes with startling suddenness, a magnificent 
 prospect. It seems to endow the soul with new powers. 
 I know how the eye that has been long blind to the light 
 behind the veil is dazzled and confused at the first attempt 
 to see. It at best seems to see " men as trees walking." 
 I suppose to most of us the vision is dim and distant We 
 so dwell on this side the veil that our eyes are unused to 
 the light. But I think in that strange mystic half seen 
 world beyond there is one point on which the soul's eye 
 may rest until it takes shape and distinctness, and becomes 
 a living reality. I think we can at least point to one object, 
 and bid poor helpless souls to see. Yes, in that world of 
 faith we trace the outline of a Form which holds our gaze. 
 It is the Form of the Son of God, our Crucified Redeemer 
 
god's presence our strength. 145 
 
 our Intercessor, our King. It is a blessed thing that we 
 may hold back the great curtain and point to that Divine 
 Person. It is a gracious thing that the great central object 
 of faith is no mere unseen universe, no mere hidden realm 
 of thronging beautiful life and being, but a Person — One 
 on whom we may centre, not alone our gaze, but our 
 devotion ; One on whom we may rest, not alone our 
 wonder, but our love. I know of no panacea for the mani- 
 fold ills of Hfe but this. I know of no teaching which can 
 bring light and hope and peace to the troubled soul but the 
 preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and then the 
 teaching of His abiding presence. For we do not tell our 
 people of a dead Christ, but of a living ; not of an absent 
 Christ, but of a present. We would pass among them with 
 our glad tidings of great joy. We would bid them lift up 
 their heads from the contemplation of all the sordid little- 
 nesses and follies of this world, and behold the great, 
 generous love of God, and make real to their souls His 
 presence with them. We would lead them aside from the 
 weary cares and crushing sorrows of life, and show them 
 One who sorrowed and suffered, and who can feel for 
 sorrow and suffering. We would tell them that He is 
 reigning over them, and that He is waiting to be gracious 
 to them. " The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." 
 If we will only let Him, He will make it a fairer and a 
 happier place for us, and it shall be the antechamber 
 of heaven. 
 
 And we are now about to enter in within the veil. The 
 holy vows will be taken, the consecrating words will be 
 spoken, we shall call down the Gift which is given in the 
 laying on of hands. And then we shall kneel and seek 
 to realize the Presence. Yes, in His own holy Sacrament 
 
 L-5 
 
146 god's presence our strength. 
 
 the Lord will be very near to us. It is, perhaps, easier in 
 this sacred hour to realize His nearness. I do not care 
 to question the when or the how. I fear lest the consrious 
 kwe of the Presence be marred and hindered by over- 
 defining. After all, human words are so imperfect as 
 exponents of Divine mysteries that it is better to bow in 
 silent reverence, and to say, "The Lord is in His holy 
 temple; let the whole earth keep silence before Hira ' I 
 dread attempting to be wise above that which is written. 
 May He be known this day — known as present in healing 
 virtue and in saving power — in the Breaking of Bread ! 
 May each one of us be able to exclaim, " O my God, Thou 
 art true ; O my soul, thou art happy 1 " 
 
 And then we shall pass again into the outer courts. 
 We shall return to all the toils and cares and interests of 
 the world around us. But His Presence shall go with us. 
 We will cherish and cling to the thought in our secret 
 hearts. Whatsoever we may be doing, wheresoever we may 
 go, in the blessed ministrations of God's holy house, in the 
 busy turmoil of multitudinous cares, in the house and in 
 the streets, in solitude and in company, still within the 
 secret chamber of the soul there shall dwell the glad 
 consciousness of a heavenly Presence, cheering, strengthen- 
 ing, comforting ; and, as we pass on our way, weary-hearted 
 sometimes with long and seemingly fruitless labours : dis- 
 mayed and cast down sometimes by the strength and fear- 
 fulness of sin ; sensible chiefly of our own impotence and 
 un worthiness; there shall come to us, like the echo of some 
 glorious anthem pealing through the soul and flooding 
 it with strength and joy, the grand majestic thought, " The 
 earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof" 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED 
 THE CROSS. 
 
i 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY 
 THE CROSS. 
 
 Preached at Oxford, Lenten Course, 1873. 
 
 "I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live."— Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 It is a strange thing— this Cross, which so interblends itself 
 with all the Christian's daily life, coming to him at all 
 seasons, from first to last, in all his varying moods and 
 conditions, softening (I will not say saddening) his joys, 
 tempering (I will not say clouding) his sunshine ; a strange 
 mysterious thing ; a thing of simple form, yet full of deep 
 awful meanings ; a thing which signifies shame and suffering, 
 which once signified only shame and suffering, but which 
 now passes on to other and higher and more blessed 
 thoughts ; a thing which enters in some shape and in some 
 degree into his whole life and being; present often when 
 he knows not ; coming to him sometimes suddenly, unex- 
 pectedly, startlingly ; put from him sometimes with eager 
 frightened hands; worn sometimes secretly close to his 
 heart. 
 
 Does a God whose name is Love — a Father whose love 
 to His children passes a mother's love for her helpless 
 infant — does He delight to stamp on the hfe He has made 
 the burning brand of shame and suffering ? Oh ! what 
 
150 DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS 
 
 does He mean by this terrible Cross ? Is His love all a 
 fable, and is He in reality stem, hard, pitiless ? Doth He 
 " willingly afflict and grieve the children of men " ? I know 
 how these thoughts will come at times. I know how there 
 are moments when the whole soul resents the idea of the 
 Cross as an element of life. I know how, for example, on 
 some glorious sunny day of Spring, when to the young it 
 is intensity of joy to live, when all is bounding hope, and 
 eager expectation, and the heart seems a very fountain of 
 sparkling deUght, the thought of the Cross is shaken off 
 with something of impatient dislike ; it seems as if it would 
 be almost a sin to let a shadow fall on what God has made 
 so bright ; it seems as if He could not mean that anything 
 of shame and suffering should come in and spoil His own 
 beautiful work. And I know too how tempting it is to the 
 preacher to let his hearers bask in the sunlight of God's 
 glorious love, and to forget to point them to that strange 
 shadow that lies all across the hills and plains. To some, 
 I suppose, this is an especial temptation. They realize with 
 a vivid intensity the breadth and glory of God's Fatherly 
 love ; they want to make other hearts feel the warmth and 
 brightness of that love as they themselves feel it; they 
 cannot bear to discourage, to cast down, to repel ; the very 
 Cross itself is for them so illumined with heavenly light that 
 they forget its weight and its sharpness and that it can ever 
 cast a shadow on the scene ; they feel what a certain writer 
 on spiritual matters says of himself, "I have no eye for 
 darkness ; I cannot see anything but light anywhere." * 
 Aye, but all the time there is that faint outhne of shadow 
 traceable all across the sunlit world, if we will but look, and 
 God, the loving Father, has put it there. We do not for one 
 ' Faber, Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjectt, 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 151 
 
 moment question His infinite love. We know He wills 
 only our happiness. Can we doubt it ? He has given His 
 well-beloved Son to die for us; He has heaven in store 
 for us : is not this enough to prove His love ? Shall He 
 give us the best of all gifts, and shall we not trust Him 
 for the rest? Is He a God who gives with one hand, 
 and takes away with the other? "He that spared not 
 His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall 
 He not with Him also freely give us all things?" He, 
 whose " good pleasure " it is to give us the kingdom, 
 how shall He send hurt or harm ? Nay, we are sure that 
 that Cross, which to our short-sightedness seems sometimes 
 to mar the beauty of life, is held forth to us by the hand of 
 infinite Love ; its presence in the life of His children is but 
 a token of His purposes of mercy. The Cross is in very 
 truth an element in the mighty work of restoration, whereby 
 the second Adam is evermore undoing the ruin of the first. 
 Take away the Cross from the life of the Christian, and you 
 have taken away its law, its force, its meaning, its hope, its 
 glory, 
 
 " I am crucified with Cluist : nevertheless I live." Such 
 is the Christian's profession ; such is the Christian's life. 
 The Cross is with him from first to last. 
 
 " Crucified " is a strong word. It not only speaks of the 
 Cross ; it speaks of a nailing to the Cross, of a dying on the 
 Cross. See how this belongs to the Christian's very calling 
 and profession. It is embodied in his baptism itself. 
 " Baptism doth represent unto us our profession," which is 
 that, as Christ " died and rose again for us, so should we, 
 who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto right- 
 eousness." Both to the Romans and to the Colossians 
 St. Paul enlarges upon the mystical death and resurrection 
 
152 DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 
 
 of Baptism, We are "buried with Christ by Baptism into 
 death." And I think we may even go farther, and speak of 
 a mystical crucifixion in Baptism, for in Gal. v. 24 we read, 
 "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the 
 affections and lusts," and in the original language in this 
 place the word for " have crucified " expresses a past and 
 complete act, perhaps more exactly translated by 'did 
 crucify' than by "have crucified," the Apostle speaking of 
 some past occasion on which this crucifying of the flesh 
 took place, so that it is hard to doubt that he is referring to 
 the baptismal vow and professioa In renouncing all the 
 sinful lusts of the flesh the Christian does, in a figure, 
 " crucify the flesh with the aff'ections and lusts," dooming 
 them to death and destruction, leaving them, as things of 
 death, with that dead self which is buried with Christ in 
 Baptism into death. 
 
 But the Cross, which is thus the Christian man's pro- 
 fession, the badge of his baptismal calling, the mark which 
 pledges him to belong to the Crucified One, — this Cross 
 goes forth with him into all his after-life. The crucifying of 
 the flesh is no act done once for all, and thenceforth ceasing. 
 " I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live," is no mere 
 formula of the Christian man's profession; it is the sum- 
 mary of his hfe. " I am crucified " signifies distinctly an 
 abiding state. It is not, ' I have been crucified' That is 
 true of baptismal profession. This is spoken of an act 
 stretching onward to the present. ' I have been, and I 
 am, crucified with Christ.' The Cross is with him still. 
 When Jesus said, " If any man will follow Me," He did not 
 say only, "let him take up his Cross," but also, "and bear 
 it after Me." It marks and stamps and hallows all his 
 daily life. 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 153 
 
 We must think of this Cross and crucifying. What 
 is it ? What does it mean r What does it come to ? It 
 can mean nothing less than that there is in us something 
 which must be roughly and sternly dealt with, something 
 wiiich must be slain, put to death at any cost. Well, we 
 know what that is. St. Paul himself tells us plainly enough, 
 when he speaks of "knowing this, that our old man is 
 crucified with Christ, that the iody of sin might be destroyed, 
 that henceforth we should not serve sin." " The old man," 
 " the body of sin," these are what must die. They are the 
 same as " the flesh with the affections and lusts." Our 
 fallen, corrupt, lower nature, the evil that is in us as oui 
 birthright, — this must be crucified, if we would live unto 
 Christ 
 
 But " crucified " — what does this terrible word really 
 mean? 
 
 I. It means dea//i. A few strokes, a few struggles, will 
 not do. We must kil/ the sin. It must be pursued to the 
 death. Many a one, when roused to see his peril, when 
 brought by the dealings of God's good providence face to 
 face with his sinful soul, will make some resistance, and 
 strike some blows at the enemy. He may repulse the sin 
 for a time ; he may turn the edge of its present fury ; he 
 may fancy he has won the victory, and that the sin is really 
 slain, and will trouble him no more. Ah ! but sin dies hard. 
 It is not David only who has found out that, even though 
 he may confess his wickedness, and be sorry for his sin, yet 
 his "enemies live and are mighty." Because the sin is 
 parried for the moment, we must not think it dead. And a 
 mortal enemy is not really conquered till he is killed. My 
 friends, we must crucify our corruptions as the Jews crucified 
 Christ. They were not content with blows and buffeting 
 
154 DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 
 
 and scourging. These were only the forerunners of death. 
 
 It was His life-blood they thirsted after. Oh ! beware of 
 that snare of a half-repentance, which gives sin a respite 
 and not a death-blow, which cuts the poison-plant down but 
 does not uproot it. To brandish the weapon, and strike a 
 blow now and then at some very daring sin, without intend- 
 ing its death, — to make a pretence of fighting on the Lord's 
 side, while all the time we are secretly parleying with the 
 enemy, — what is this but the sheerest hypocrisy ? 
 
 2. Next, crucifying must imply a violent death. Sin 
 never dies of old age. Some special sin may, but not sin. 
 It must die like a young man in the full strength and vigour 
 of youth. Sin dies hard, not only because it has such an 
 amazing power of vitality, but also because it sells its life 
 dear. It fights fiercely before it will really yield. The 
 " strong man armed " will not surrender to a bare summons 
 and show of arras. He must be challenged to mortal 
 combat. A few prayers, a few hurried resolutions, these 
 will not act like some magical incantation, and frighten sin 
 to death. No, it must be killed violently. It is not like a 
 patient lamb, which resists not the knife. It is rather like 
 some savage wild beast, which, when wounded, only fights 
 the more fiercely. But kill it we must. Crucifixion is a 
 violent death. 
 
 3. It is also a painful bitter deatL Was not our dear 
 Lord's this ? Ah, yes ! the word itself sends us to Calvary 
 for its interpretation. "The old man is crucified with 
 Christ." " They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh." 
 St. Paul might have said ' mortified ' — simply put to 
 death. He might have spoken of the fleshly afl^ections and 
 lusts as subdued, extinguished, driven away. No ; the word 
 is " crucified." The other words might well enough express 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 155 
 
 a purity such as the heathen might aim at; "crucified" 
 belongs to Christianity. It imphes not only the act, but the 
 manner of the act. It is a cruel death — crucifixion. But so 
 sin must die. When strong eager lusts and passions thirst 
 and beg for satisfaction, it is like plucking out the right eye 
 or cutting oflf the right hand to refuse ihem. Yet it must be 
 done. The nails must be driven through them, and we must 
 be the executioners. Crucifixion is a painful bitter death. 
 
 Now I know that I am speaking rather of an aim than 
 of an achievement ; that for most of us — shall I say for all of 
 us ? — the Cross will not mean all that I have described I 
 hope also that for some the struggle will not be so deadly 
 and so terrible as I have said, because God's grace has been 
 long strengthening them to do battle with the enemy that is 
 within them, so that the dying of the sin may be a less 
 sharp and painful process — rather the gradual wasting of a 
 foe pierced with many wounds, than the fall of the enemy 
 after a desperate mortal conflict. But this I know, that for 
 all of us the Cross must mean the crucifying of the flesh 
 with the affections and lusts ; it must mean the slaying 
 of the evil that is within us. It may be a lifelong work, 
 most probably it will be. It is almost always a slow, 
 gradual, progressive work. Well, supposing it be so; 
 supposing we are almost sure that we shall never gain the 
 final victory here ; supposing the old sinful nature proves so 
 strong, so persistent in vigour, that we despair of putting an 
 end to its rebellions; supposing the one result of all our 
 endeavours to slay the fleshly lusts which war against the 
 soul be simply the discovery that, in spite of all, our 
 " enemies live and are mighty " ; — what then ? Shall we sit 
 down in helpless despair, and give up the hopeless struggle ? 
 Oh no ! this is not the hardness which the " good soldier 
 
IS6 DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 
 
 of Jesus Christ " must endure. What we are pledged to is 
 to "fight manfully under Christ's banner," We are not 
 pledged to conquer. What the Captain of our salvation 
 expects of His soldiers is that they be found with sword 
 in hand and facing the foe, ever seeking bravely and per- 
 severingly to smite that foe to death. In will, no less than 
 in profession, the Christian must have crucified the flesh, 
 even though in act there be need of a daily crucifying afi-esh. 
 
 Now we must guard against one thing. It is a very 
 common mistake to suppose that the Cross has to do with 
 great things, with masterful sins, with fierce assaults of 
 temptation, with acts of heroic self-sacrifice, with habits of 
 painful self-mortification, while its bearing upon little things 
 is forgotten or despised. But daily life is made up of httle 
 things. In most ordinary lives occasions of heroic action 
 are very rare. But there is a harder, a braver, a better 
 thing than heroic action, namely the power of the Cross in 
 httle common things. We want, not this or that marked 
 action brought under the constraining influence of the 
 Cross, but the whole tenor of the daily life. We want the 
 Cross to be so familiar a thing to us that it should mark and 
 characterize our whole spirit and bearing. We want it to 
 become at last almost an unconscious element in our being, 
 so that it should be simply natural to us to live, not to self, 
 but to God and to others. Habitual self-restraint, habitual 
 self-forgetfulness, habitual reference of all things to the 
 Cross of Jesus, this must be the way in which the Christian's 
 daily life is hallowed by the Cross. 
 
 And will this Cross then, entering thus into all our life, 
 mar its brightness and its beauty? Must the hfe that is 
 overshadowed by the Cross become a stern hard dreary 
 thing ? Why, we know full well how often, when God 
 
DAILY LIFE HALLOWED BY THE CROSS. 1 57 
 
 brings to some life a very heavy cross from without, — the 
 cross of long bitter bodily suffering, or of weary sickness, — 
 there seems to shine around that life a brightness and a 
 peace unknown before. It is surely so in yet more marked 
 a manner when the cross is taken up voluntarily and 
 borne after Christ. I do not say there will be no pain and 
 anguish. If there were none, it would scarcely be a cross. 
 I do not say the path will be all flowers. If it were, it 
 would not be the path in which Jesus walked. But I do 
 say that the way of the Cross is a very blessed, a very 
 happy, a very peaceful way. To be dying to self, and 
 living to God; to be drawing nearer and nearer to the 
 Saviour who, Himself lifted up on the Cross, would draw 
 all men unto Him ; to be learning more and more of the 
 beauty of religion, and of the blessedness of the answer of a 
 good conscience towards God ; to be growing up, even if it be 
 very slowly and with numberless faults and shortcomings, 
 yet "growing up into Him in all things which is the Head, 
 even Christ " ; to be conquering, even if it be in the midst 
 of many defeats and cowardices, yet conquering step by 
 step the ground occupied by the enemy ; — all this is very 
 blessed and glorious. And all this is the fruit of the Tree 
 of Life, of the Cross from which we sometimes shrink 
 so faint-heartedly. Oh no ! the Cross brings not with it 
 gloom and darkness. It is radiant with light and hope. 
 If only our eyes were opened, and we saw aright, we should 
 be ready to exclaim, like a saint of old, " Oh, what a cross 
 to have no cross ! " ' We should gladly echo the words of 
 another saint of old who cried, " God forbid that I should 
 glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom 
 the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." 
 ' Nulla crux quanta crux ! " 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 " Unto a perfect man." — Eph. iv. 13. 
 
 Prtached on the re-opening of Chester Cathedral, 1872. 
 
 Complete, full-grown, Christian minhood, — a manhood 
 attaining even to the " measure of the stature of the fulness 
 of Christ," — this is the end and aim set before our fallen, 
 but redeemed and regenerate, humanity. And whether 
 we regard ourselves as separate individual beings, or col- 
 lectively as the great family that is named of Christ — 
 whether as Christian men and women, or as the Church 
 of the living God, — it is the same. The individual member, 
 and the body as a whole, is equally meant to advance towards 
 the " perfect man," towards that state of maturity and 
 completeness, the true measure of which is the "measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 
 
 Surely some thoughts upon this great subject of the 
 perfecting of humanity in Christ may well be suggested to 
 us by the very occasion which has brought us together, 
 and the work which we are invited to carry on in this 
 noble building ; and perhaps not unfitly may the last 
 words spoken in the present series of services raise the 
 thoughts of the worshipper from the contemplation of the 
 progress of the material building towards that state of com- 
 
 M— 5 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 pleteness to which it is hoped in due time to attain, to 
 the contemplation of a work greater, nobler, fairer, more 
 lasting — even that of the growth of the spiritual building 
 " unto an holy temple in the Lord." 
 
 The analogies between the material and the spiritual 
 work are very obvious. Each is a restoration. Not the 
 devising and developing of something new and as yet 
 unknown, but the searching out and reinstating of some- 
 thing which has been, but which has been marred and 
 defaced and well-nigh obliterated. We do not pull down 
 the ancient walls, and ignore the old foundations, and 
 strike out some new idea of a building in shape and pro- 
 portions and style more adapted, as we might suppose, to 
 the taste and requirements of the nineteenth century. We 
 laboriously track out all least vestiges of the original 
 builder's great design, and note each fragment which can 
 tell its story of the grandeur and dignity and unity which 
 we are sure once characterized the whole. And this, not 
 from any slavish admiration of antiquity simply because it 
 is old, thankful though we are to link ourselves on with 
 the past in the bonds of eloquent associations and grateful 
 memories; but because we believe that the plan we are 
 studying was planned by a master-mind, and that, even 
 as all departures from, and all neglect of, that plan in times 
 gone by have invariably marred and disguised its beauty 
 and its excellence, so will it be again. Our only safety 
 lies in entering thoroughly into the great architect's own 
 design, and in endeavouring faithfully to embody this in 
 all the work we do. It is the same with the spiritual 
 building. Surely there too was the great Architect with 
 His great design. " God created man in His own image." 
 That image has been marred and shattered and all but 
 
THE PERFECT MAN I63 
 
 effaced by man's sin. Yet traces there are of the primaeval 
 plan still ; fragments which may tell how beautiful and 
 glorious the "perfect man" must be; features discernible 
 amid all the displacements and accretions and confusions 
 through which we dimly trace their form, speaking of the 
 greatness of man's destiny, and, alas ! no less of the great- 
 ness of his fall. And our work is a work of restoration. 
 Thank God, we are not left to put together the plan from 
 such disjointed and disfigured fragments as we may find or 
 think we find. The Almighty Architect has set His plan 
 before us that we may not err. He has shown us the 
 pattern to which we are to work in our restoration. Do 
 we ask for lines and measurements to guide us ? Behold 
 " the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." As 
 we fit our building more and more to that, we are bringing 
 out more and more the great design, and surely once more 
 fashioning man — nay, let me rather say suffering Him, who 
 once created him, now again to re-fashion him — "in the 
 image of God." And is it otherwise with the Church as a 
 whole — the spiritual temple in which we are built up as 
 living stones, in which (as another Apostle writes) we are 
 "builded together for an habitation of God through the 
 Spirit"? I think not. For, though indeed we have no 
 such embodiment of the perfect state of the Church as we 
 have of the individual man, yet surely there was here too 
 the grand and beautiful plan laid out, and partly wrought 
 out ; and if, through man's perversity and blindness, the 
 whole design was never yet brought to completion, yet the 
 lines were traced and the foundations laid, and enough of 
 the great purpose executed to show what might be, and 
 what the Master-builder willed to be ; so that, as in many 
 cases it is left for after-ages to complete some part of a 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 Cathedral Church which was left unfinished by the builders 
 of old, we have only to work on the old lines, and to 
 strengthen the old foundations, and to build on upon the 
 plan begun, to bring the building nearer and nearer to 
 the mind of God. And so in truth all our work for 
 the Church of Christ, — all our endeavours to heal its 
 breaches, to widen its borders, to strengthen its virtues, to 
 correct its errors, to perfect its graces, to utilize its powers, 
 to multiply its energies, — all are a work of restoration ; not 
 indeed to a state which ever has been realized upon earth, 
 but of restoration to the plan of the Divine Founder, 
 mutilated and obstructed and perverted as that plan has 
 been by the sins and follies of man. 
 
 All this restoration is hard work, slow work, costly 
 work. We do not expect a vast building like this to be 
 completed in a day or in a year. Nay, we are content 
 to believe that we may never live to see it quite complete 
 — all done that could be done to make it beautiful and 
 worthy of its holy uses. Yet we labour on. And so 
 with our spiritual work. This must be gradual, laborious, 
 and at best very imperfect. Yet we labour on. Yes ; for 
 it is very blessed work. It is very blessed to be fellow- 
 workers with God in this restoration of the ruined plan. 
 Think how well the upgrowth of the visible building under 
 the craftsmen's skill pictures to you the progress of the 
 mystic architecture. The Christian must grow up into 
 Christ in all things. He is not made at once that which 
 he is to be. First, the foundation is laid. He comes to 
 Christ. " To ivhom coming" writes St. Peter, "ye also, as 
 lively stones, are built up." There is, and ever must be, 
 the foundation. Whether of the Church at large, or of 
 each separate Christian, it is the same. " Other founda- 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 165 
 
 tion can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ." 
 It is true that Christ is also the Head-stone of the corner, 
 the crowning and final glory of the perfected building. It 
 is true that in coming to the perfect man the Apostle 
 speaks also of our coming in the unity of the faith, and of 
 the full or perfect knowledge (as the original word im- 
 plies) of the Son of God. Yes ; for Christ is indeed the 
 Beginning and the Ending, ths First and the Last, the 
 Author and the Finisher, the Fi^andation and the Corner- 
 stone. The work must be " begun and ended " in Him. 
 There is, throughout its course, much new knowledge of 
 Him to be gained, much new faith in Him to be won, 
 much new likeness to Him to be wrought out: but the 
 very first stone of the very lowest foundation must be laid 
 in Him, else it is laid on a quicksand, and whatever super- 
 structure we build upon it will sink and crack and fall. 
 But, the true foundation once laid, firm and sure and sohd, 
 then, stone by stone, course by course, slowly yet securely, 
 rises the after-fabric. Grace after grace is built up on 
 Christ. The scattered stones of the ruin are lifted each 
 into its own place in its own order. Behold the manner 
 of the building. " Giving all diligence," writes St. Peter, 
 " add to your faith virtue ; and to virtue knowledge ; and 
 to knowledge temperance ; and to temperance patience ; 
 and to patience godliness ; and to godliness brotherly kind- 
 ness ; and to brotherly kindness charity." Perhaps it may 
 not be too fanciful to think of faith as like the windows 
 letting in the blessed light of heaven; of virtue as like 
 the walls giving strength and firmness to the whole (for 
 "virtue" in this place seems to mean rather 'manly 
 courage' than simply 'holiness of living,' which indeed 
 comes afterwards) ; of knoivledge as like the pillars which 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 prop and hold up the superstructure ; of temperance and 
 patience as like the floor, which lies low but is not the less 
 serviceable; of godliness as like the arches which point 
 to heaven ; of brotherly kindness and charity as like the 
 cement which binds stone to stone in blessed unity. And 
 many other gifts and graces there are, each to be sought 
 and won in turn, each to be built into its place and added 
 to its fellows, till "all the building, fitly framed together, 
 groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord." And mark, 
 my brethren, how the finer and more delicate graces ever 
 come last, just as the elaborate carved work and the 
 marble and polished stones of the visible fabric are added 
 when the more substantial portions are completed. Those 
 fair flowers which, defying the unbending texture of the 
 stone, crown so gracefully the slender shafts and wreathe 
 the airy capitals in some exquisitely finished building are 
 but meet emblems of the fairer flowers of peace and love 
 and joy and thankfulness and unselfishness and heavenli- 
 ness and devotion, which crown and perfect at length the 
 Christian's growth in grace. 
 
 There is another point in which the building or the 
 restoration of a beautiful church may well teach us a lesson 
 concerning the spiritual work which it so marvellously 
 typifies. Think how much depends on the due pro- 
 portion of part to part, the due harmony of feature with 
 feature, in producing the glorious impression of grandeur 
 and of unity which was the final aim of the architect's 
 prescient skill. It is not the perfection of each individual 
 portion which will produce this effect. A grand old 
 Norman doorway, richly carved with quaintest mouldings, 
 deep, massive, manifold ; a beautiful clustered column, 
 light and graceful as some tall forest tree; a window of 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 167 
 
 Stately simplicity, its well-adjusted lights severely cut 
 through the face of solid stone ; another window charming 
 the eye with its exquisitely devised tracery, its manifold 
 bending lines mapped out as it were on the plain of light ; 
 each of these may be a work of exceeding beauty in itself, 
 but the combination of these will produce no charm, but 
 a sense of discord and incongruity. So too in regard to 
 dimensions. Let each part of a Cathedral be in itself 
 good and true in both style and proportions, yet how little 
 will the separate beauty avail, if wide and lofty aisles be 
 affixed to a low and narrow nave, or a nave of noble 
 dignity terminate in a choir and chancel suited only to a 
 nave of half the size. Now this matter of proportion and 
 harmony is of the very utmost moment in the spiritual 
 building. Whether in the formation of the individual 
 character, or in the edifying — the building up — of the body 
 of Christ, the "proportion of faith," the due counter- 
 balancing of different truths and different sides of truth, 
 the due relation to one another of different graces and 
 virtues, is as essential as the separate care for the ex- 
 cellence of each. The absence of this due proportion 
 produces in the individual, as in the Church, narrowness, 
 one-sidedness, inconsistency, error. Most error, as is 
 often said, is but one-sided truth — truth exaggerated until 
 it dwarfs or obscures other counterbalancing truth. And 
 most of the infirmities and inconsistencies of good men 
 are in like manner one-sided virtues — virtues exaggerated 
 and intensified until they monopolize the region in which 
 other virtues should find their sphere of action. Of course 
 I am speaking inaccurately when I speak of virtues thus 
 exaggerated into vices. For plainly a virtue ceases to be 
 such when it passes the limit of its rightful and healthy 
 
i68 
 
 THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 exercise, and in strict truth there can be no such thing as 
 a virtue in excess. But I shall not be misunderstood. 
 We can all see that practically that which is good in itself, 
 and has a good use, and good ends, may be rendered worse 
 than useless by some great disproportion between it and 
 other virtues. Let us take an example or two. First 
 in regard to belief. One teacher presses the doctrine of 
 conversion into such prominence, and makes it to occupy 
 so large a space in his system, that it practically obscures 
 and overshadows the Divine authority and the life-giving 
 power of the Sacraments. Another preaches sacramental 
 grace to the dwarfing and practical negation of the necessity 
 for a thorough change of heart and life in one who has 
 lived in sin. The one, as it were, builds a splendid 
 western entrance, and heaps up all his means of eflfect and 
 grandeur there, while his chancel is poor and unworthy. 
 The other, expending all his means and attention to secure 
 the magnificence of his chancel, reduces the other parts of 
 his building to an insignificance which equally destroys the 
 unity of the whole. In morals it is the same. Compassion 
 is one of the purest and most beautiful of Christian graces. 
 But it is obvious that, should there be no sense of justice 
 to counterbalance it, it would degenerate into a feeble 
 good-nature at best, and, how-ever beautiful a thing in 
 itself, would have no beauty when becoming the one 
 noticeable feature in an ill-balanced and one-sided cha- 
 racter. It is often the case that a virtue possessed in a 
 weaker measure in some well-adjusted character is more 
 blest to the possessor, more beneficial to others, and more 
 beautiful to contemplate, than the same virtue existing 
 with far greater force and energy in a character lacking 
 such other virtues as should temper and regulate it, and 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 169 
 
 secure its being neither excessive nor defective, but a duly 
 proportioned feature in a fair and harmonious whole. A 
 smaller building which is well-proportioned is more beau- 
 tiful and effective than a larger which is ill-proportioned. 
 May God help us all to build up our own spiritual 
 building, whether of faith or of practice, so that there may 
 be nothing one-sided, nothing e.xaggerated, nothing de- 
 fective, but that, accepting God's truth in all its fulness and 
 manifoldness, and working out the lost image of God in 
 all its harmony and completeness, we may at least approach 
 towards the " perfect man " — " the measure of the stature 
 of the fulness of Christ." 
 
 With two more thoughts I will conclude. First, let me 
 express my deep and earnest conviction that in the system 
 and teaching of our beloved Church of England will be found 
 the best helps towards that growth into the completeness 
 of restored humanity, which has been my subject to-day. 
 I am far from saying that other bodies of Christians, and 
 other systems, have not their own excellences. With 
 regard to those bodies which have separated from us, it is 
 plain that the desire to develop into larger proportions 
 some view or some practice, probably of primary impor- 
 tance, has been at least one of the causes of their existence. 
 Certainly the errors of such bodies are for the most part 
 not false statements, but true statements wanting the 
 counterbalancing correction of other no less true state- 
 ments. It may be, too, that greater zeal and energy are 
 stimulated in a small sect by the very necessities of its 
 existence. But I fearlessly maintain that in the broad 
 comprehensive loving system of the Church of England is 
 to be found a far more harmonious, a far more duly 
 adjusted, a far better proportioned, setting forth of the 
 
170 
 
 THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 truth of God than in any other system in this imperfect 
 
 world. I can never cease to admire the wisdom and 
 beauty of our Prayer-book ; the absence of all forcing of 
 special views of controverted truth so as to stamp a party 
 character upon it; the avoidance of technical expressions 
 belonging rather to man's systematizing of the truth than 
 to the truth itself; the calm and Bible-like simplicity of its 
 thoughts and language. The man trained in the system 
 of the Church of England will be not narrow in views, but 
 broad and loving ; not the slave of a watchword, but a dis- 
 ciple of the Catholic faith ; not one-sided, but many-sided ; 
 not a party man, but a simple and honest member of the 
 Church of Christ. And as in faith, so in holiness of 
 living. It is common enough to be told we must go to 
 the Church of Rome, with all its errors, for examples 
 of the truly devout Ufe. God forbid I should seek to 
 decry the wonderful purity and devotion and heavenly- 
 mindedness which have been shown forth in not a few 
 members of that Church. Their devotional writings, such 
 as those of Scupoli, St. Francis de Sales, Thomas h Kempis, 
 and others, are most helpful to those " who by reason of 
 use have their senses exercised to discern both good and 
 evil." But, while this is most true, yet I hold that there 
 is an unpretending manhness and honesty, an absence of 
 self-assertion and of morbid self-scrutiny, a trustworthiness 
 and straightforwardness, about the character of the true 
 English Churchman which are at least less marked features 
 in the religious life developed in other communions. So 
 that, in an active busy age like this, and in a land where 
 the more practical side of religion is of daily necessity, I 
 believe the simple devout earnest English Churchman 
 displays the nearest approach attainable by us to the com- 
 
THE PERFECT MAN. 
 
 171 
 
 pleteness of Christian manhood. And then the other 
 thought. Surely it is true that the beauty, the order, the 
 quiet and regular influence, of the Daily Cathedral Service 
 is an element in the perfecting of Christian manhood, in 
 those (alas ! necessarily few, but surely fewer than is 
 necessary,) who are able to take part in them. I know 
 this is but one part of the use and value of our noble 
 Cathedral establishments. As homes of learning and piety, 
 as centres of religious life to the diocese, as schools of 
 Church music, they are most precious. And there are 
 other ways in which they may be connected with good and 
 holy works. But my thoughts to-day have clustered around 
 the actual building in which we have met, and there they 
 shall rest. I will hope and pray that many souls may in 
 this glorious Church be helped onward in some little 
 measure in their growth in grace ; that (not untouched by 
 the spirit-stirring influences of beautiful music, and the 
 sense of awe and majesty inspired by noble architecture, 
 yet much more filled with the consciousness of the presence 
 of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands, yet 
 is surely present, to hear, to bless, to do, wheresoever His 
 people meet to pray,) they may be drawn within the 
 veil, and lifted heavenward, and strengthened in faith and 
 hope and charity, and conformed more and more to the 
 mind of Christ, and restored more and more to the image 
 of God, and rendered more and more fit for that new life, 
 in which alone we hope to come, in all its fulness, to the 
 " perfect man," in which alone we hope to attain, in all its 
 completeness, " to the measure of the stature of the fulness 
 of Christ," since it is there that we believe " we shall be 
 like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF TFIE 
 CHURCH. 
 
( 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE 
 CHURCH. 
 
 Preached during the Oclav. of the Consecration of Port sea Church, 1889. 
 
 "In whom all the building, fiily framed together, groweth unto an 
 holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also are builded together for 
 an habitation of God through the Spirit."— Ei-H. ii. 21, 22. 
 
 There are few passages into which greater light and mean- 
 ing are introduced by the Revised Version than this. You 
 will find that in that version the former of the two verses 
 I have read to you is translated thus : " In whom each 
 several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy 
 temple in the Lord." I have no doubt this gives the 
 Apostle's meaning more exactly, and, if so, you will notice 
 that the two verses present to us the two great aspects in 
 which all religion must be regarded — the one the individual, 
 the other the corporate, life of Christians; the one the 
 building up of each single separate soul as a dwelling-place 
 of God, the other the building up of the whole company of 
 the faithful as a dwelling-place of God. In Christ '■'■each 
 several building " thus grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 
 In Christ "ye also are builded together for an habitation of 
 God through the Spirit." 
 
 Now I am going to speak to you this evening of the 
 
176 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 latter of these two verses, believing that the Consecration 
 of this magnificent Church is an occasion which most 
 naturally suggests to us thoughts of our common faith, our 
 common worship, our common life in Christ. But I dare 
 not pass by without at least some few words of earnest 
 enforcement the momentous truth set forth in the earlier 
 of the two verses. When our blessed Lord spoke of the 
 Holy Spirit, "which dwelleth with you, and shall be in you" 
 it would seem that He spoke of a personal individual 
 indweUing presence of the Holy Spirit. When St. Paul 
 appealed to the Corinthians as to the sacredness of the 
 body, saying, " What ! know ye not that your body is the 
 temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you ? " there can be 
 no doubt that he too was thinking of such a separate personal 
 indwelling of the Spirit of God in man. And in very 
 truth this is the foundation of all religion. Till man has 
 personal relations with God, it is hard to conceive of his 
 having any corporate relations. It would be a monstrous 
 unreality to conceive of a society which God could make 
 His abode, in no single member of which societ)- was the 
 presence of the Spirit of God. A whole cannot be utterly 
 diverse from its parts. The presence of the Spirit of God 
 and of the life of God in the soul of man must be pre- 
 supposed before we can even approach the subject of the 
 corporate life of the Church, or, in other words, of the 
 building up of the Christian Society as a habitation of God 
 through the Spirit. I have no doubt there was at one time 
 a great danger of over-individualism among religious people 
 in this land. It was not an uncommon thing to hear 
 people say, ' A man's religion hes between himself and his 
 God.' Why, half the Bible is straight against that ! Pos- 
 sibly there may be some little danger the other way now. 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 1/7 
 
 Happily there has grown up amongst us in theic laiter 
 days a far truer appreciation of the meaning and nature of 
 the Church. I think Church-people at any rate no longer 
 regard the Christian community as a multitude of separate 
 isolated beings, each with his private relation to God, but 
 held and compacted together by no very definite or tangible 
 bond of unity. But may it not be that, in some at least, 
 the very appreciation of this bond of unity, the very recog- 
 nition of the truth and grandeur of the corporate life of 
 Christendom, may over-dwarf the individual aspect of 
 religion, so that there may be an acceptance of Church- 
 membership without an acceptance of deep personal 
 religion, much thought and much talk of the building 
 together, coupled with some little forgetfulness of '■'■each 
 several building" 1 Forgive me for this warning, but I 
 think I have known some enthusiastic Churchmen who 
 have been very poor Christians. 
 
 I turn now to my more direct subject. Certainly, as 
 we read our Bible, again and again we meet with words 
 which can only point to the corporate indwelling of the 
 Spirit of God in the Church. What is this that St. Paul 
 says, " Ye are the temple of the living God ; as God hath 
 said, I will dwell iti them and walk in them ; and I will be 
 their God, and they shall be My people " ? Mark, " ye " 
 (plural) are "the temple" (singular); not 'temples,' but 
 " the temple." But I think words could hardly be clearer 
 than those of my text, " Ye also are builded together for 
 an habitation of God through the Spirit." And this is 
 paralleled by St. Peter's words, " Ye also, as lively stones, 
 are built up a spiritual temple." Indeed, as I said, half 
 the Bible is against the idea that a man's religion lies only 
 between himself and his God. If one thing is absolutely 
 
 N— 5 
 
178 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 plain in God's Word, it is that Christianity is not an indi- 
 vidual matter only, but also a corporate matter. Image j 
 after image, familiar to us all, sets forth this truth. The ' 
 Temple with its spiritual stones, and its indwelling presence j 
 of God, Jesus Christ being the chief Comer-stone, is but | 
 one such image. There is the Vine and its branches, of | 
 which Jesus Christ is the Root and Stem ; there is the 
 Sheepfold and the sheep, of which He is the Good Shep- i 
 herd ; there is the Body and its members, of which He is ( 
 the Head ; there is the Household and the servants, of ' 
 which He is the Master; there is the Kingdom and its ■ 
 subjects, of which He is the King. If one half of the Bible 
 concerns man in his relation to God, certainly the other half j 
 concerns man in his relation to his brother man. Consider ; 
 When Christ and His Apostles first went forth preaching, j 
 what was it they preached ? The Gospel, you say. Yes, j 
 certainly, the Gospel. But in what way ? What form did j 
 the good news take when first proclaimed ? They preached | 
 " the Gospel of the kingdom," " the glad tidings of the \ 
 kingdom of God." Yes, the Gospel of the Kingdom came 
 before the Gospel of the King. You will not mistake me. 
 No one could gather that, because it was first announced, ' 
 therefore it was more important. But the time was not 
 yet come for the fuller Gospel which was to be revealed. | 
 Nevertheless it was a Gospel they proclaimed. It was good J 
 news that One had come to set up a new kingdom among i 
 men. But the Kingdom and the Church are the same, j 
 Therefore Christ and His Apostles went about preaching j 
 the Church. ; 
 
 But stay ; is it true that the Kingdom and the Church 
 are the same? I dare say it does not at once seem 
 
 certainly so to all my hearers. But we must not forget ' 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 1 79 
 
 that nothing can be clearer than that the kingdom pro- 
 claimed was a present kingdom, a kingdom here on earth ; 
 a " kingdom of God " indeed, for God was its source and 
 end ; a " kingdom of heaven " indeed, for it was heavenly 
 in its principles and aims ; and yet assuredly a kingdom 
 full of human imperfections and infirmities. It is like a 
 field in which tares are mingled with the wheat ; it is like 
 a net which gathers of all sorts good and bad ; it grows 
 hke the mustard tree from a little beginning ; it works 
 like leaven in the world ; — all this proves that it is a 
 kingdom here on earth. Then again Jesus said to the 
 Pharisees, " The kingdom of God is within you," i.e. in 
 the midst of you (for the kingdom had no place in their 
 hearts) ; and St. Paul says to Christians, " God hath trans- 
 lated you into the kingdom of His dear Son." If, then, 
 the Church is simply that Society which Christ and His 
 Apostles founded on earth, I am right in saying they 
 preached the Church. If the Church is not that Kingdom 
 which Christ preached and set up among men, I do not 
 know what she is. Yes ; the Gospel of the Kingdom is no 
 less true than the Gospel of the King. 
 
 Now does any one think there is a danger in speaking 
 thus lest we exalt the Church overmuch, or lest we per- 
 chance even put the Church in the place of Christ, as 
 though we were saved by the Church instead of saved by 
 Christ ? God help us, if any such foohsh and miserable 
 idea could enter our heads ! Saved in the Church — yes. 
 But saved by the Church ! Why, " there is none other 
 name under heaven given among men whereby we must 
 be saved," but only the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ. The Church is saved by Christ, not by itself. 
 The Church means only the great Society of poor sinful 
 
l8o THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. ' 
 
 Struggling believing people. How can that save anybody? i 
 O Christian people, let nothing, no Church, no system, no 
 ordinance, no creed, no person, ever get between you and 
 Christ, so as to hide Christ from you, or stand to you in 
 
 the place of Christ. The Church, and Sacraments, and ' 
 
 Ministers, all these are just to bring you to Christ and ' 
 Christ to you. Count it as a privilege worth worlds that 
 
 you may go boldly to Christ for pardon and grace and salva- ] 
 
 lion, and that you have a free access to the Father through I 
 
 Him, and bless all those means of grace and God-given j 
 
 helps which set you in the Divine presence. Or, again, does I 
 
 any one think there may be a danger of setting the Church ! 
 above Christ, as though it were greater than He ? Again 
 
 God forgive us, if we could give ground for any such notion ! I 
 
 What ! the Church greater than Christ ! The Church is '■ 
 
 " His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." But , 
 
 is not the Head greater than the body ? Must not He that , 
 filleth be greater than that which is filled? Then away 
 
 with such fears. If we only once understand what the ■ 
 
 Church is, I do not think they need trouble us much. j 
 
 What we affirm as absolutely clear is that Christ and | 
 
 His Apostles founded a Society in the world, which was at ; 
 
 the very first proclaimed as a -Kingdom, but very soon, as | 
 
 the Bible itself witnesses, became known as the Church. ' 
 
 And now to proceed to some farther thoughts about ; 
 
 the Church. This Society, founded by Christ and His ', 
 
 Apostles, must, like every other society, have its consti- .• 
 
 tution, its government, its rules, its principles. It could j 
 
 not hold together at all without these. Every society, from ! 
 
 a mighty Kingdom to a Village Benefit Club, has these. ' 
 
 What then, I wouU ask, distinguishes this Society of which ! 
 
 we are speaking froui all others ? What marks it ofif from i 
 
 i 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. l8l 
 
 them, and gives it its own special character? It is "an 
 habitation of God through the Spirit." This is what no 
 other society is, or can be. The Church possesses Divine 
 gifts and powers, because it is the abode of a Divine 
 presence. It is a spiritual Society. The world looks on 
 the Church, and sees only a great organization, with much 
 that is imperfect, much perverted, much incomplete. The 
 Divine origin of the Church, the Divine presence with the 
 Church, have never saved it, were never pledged to save it, 
 from the consequences of human wilfulness or error. The 
 world knows nothing of the indwelling Spirit which gives 
 to the Church its essential character. How could it? 
 For we are speaking of that " Spirit of truth, whom the 
 world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither 
 knoweth Him ; but ye know Him " — (Is thai true ? Do 
 ye know Him, brethren ?) — " for He dwelleth with you, 
 and shall be in you." Yes ; the very meaning and pur- 
 pose of the existence of the Church is that it is the 
 area, the clothing, the environment, the casket, of the 
 supernatural. If it be not this, it is nothing ; it is a 
 mere human society, graceless, giftless, powerless. If it 
 is this, it is verily " the fulness of Him that filleth all in 
 all." The world minimizes the supernatural. The world 
 hates the supernatural. It will admit as little as it may. 
 See how it treats the work of Christ for the salvation of 
 man. It will, if it accepts Christianity at all, allow the 
 past work of Christ. That took place long ago. There 
 is a certain distance of thought, as well as of time, in dis- 
 cussing, and even in accepting, the great doctrines of the 
 Incarnation and Atonement. There is a halo of antiquity, a 
 dim reverence of the far faint past, surrounding these acts 
 of near two thousand years ago. But for the present work 
 
1 82 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 of Christ the world has little tolerance. To Christ's 
 presence in His Church through the Holy Spirit the world 
 resolutely closes its eyes. It would be too close, too real, 
 too pressing, to be welcome. It would be a truth not to 
 be speculated upon, not to be held as a time-honoured 
 doctrine, nor to be reverenced as a traditional mystery of 
 a bygone age, but to be acted upon, to enter into lift-'s 
 texture, to become a present power and element in the 
 soul's inner being. And yet, as surely as Jesus Christ was 
 born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
 crucified, dead, and buried, descended into hell, rose again 
 the third day from the dead, and ascended into heaven, 
 so surely is that same Jesus Christ, in the power of His 
 glorified Humanity, present in His Church by the Holy 
 Spirit. He that said, " I will pray the Father, and He 
 shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with 
 you for ever, even the Spirit of truth," said also, and in the 
 same breath, "I will not leave you comfortless; I will 
 come to you." And again, almost immediately, " If a man 
 love Me, he will keep My words ; and My Father will love 
 him, and We will come unto him, and make our abode 
 with him." This is not doctrine. It is fact The Lord 
 Jesus Christ is exalted to His throne of glory. We live 
 under His mediatorial reign. But, when He ascended up 
 on high. He received gifts for men, and the greatest of these 
 gifts was " that the Lord God might dwell among them." 
 And this is the meaning of the foretellings of the promised 
 Comforter. This is the meaning of the Pentecostal man'eL 
 The King is in His kingdom, reigning, pitying, blessing. 
 And the power of His kingdom is the Spirit of God. The 
 Church is " His body, the fulness of Him that fiUeth all 
 in all." And He filleth His body with the life of the 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 1 83 
 
 Spirit of God. It is "an habitation of God through the 
 Spirit." 
 
 I am anxious at this point to guard against a possible 
 danger. We speak, because the written Word speaks, be- 
 cause the living Word speaks, of the Church as the abode, 
 and sphere of action, of the Spirit of God. It is true. Yet 
 we dare not set limits to God, or speak as though He had 
 elected to set such limits to Himself. " The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth," and he would be a rash and wilful man 
 who should venture to deny the presence and power of the 
 Spirit of God in many a soul, and in many a movement, 
 which may seem to us outside the recognized bounds of 
 the sphere of His ordinary action. Even what those recog- 
 nized bounds are is a question of profound moment, and 
 one upon which one trembles to lightly lay down the law. 
 But that there is a large and generous freedom in the work 
 of the Holy Spirit in the world we are learning, I think, 
 more and more freely, and more and more thankfully, to 
 allow. For us Church-people the question is a simpler 
 and more practical one. We have no doubt, not a shadow 
 of a doubt, that in our branch of the great universal Church 
 of Christ we have every element which can assure us of its 
 being a true and pure representative of the great Society 
 founded by Jesus Christ and His Apostles. We are not 
 ashamed to profess our belief that we have more in our 
 own branch of the Church to support and strengthen such 
 assurance than we could find in any other branch, We 
 hold that we have inherited by the mercy of God a faith 
 scriptural and primitive in its purity and simpHcity, catholic 
 and unsullied in its presentation of this faith to mankind. 
 We hold that in our Ministry and Sacraments we have, and 
 hold fast, that which has been held always, in all places. 
 
1 84 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 and by all the Church of God. I would rather we should 
 weigh our responsibilities than boast of our privileges. I 
 have set myself to speak to you of the corporate Ufe of the 
 Church, which is nothing else but the presence of the 
 Spirit of God in the Church. I would that we should 
 realize more and more fully and vividly this great truth, and 
 the practical issues which flow from it, I would that we should 
 recognize more and more distinctly how all that the Church 
 is to us, and all that the Church does for us, rests upon 
 the great truth I am trying to impress on you to day — the 
 truth, namely, that the corporate life and power of the 
 Church are nothing else but the indwelling presence of 
 the Spirit of God. I repeat this to give it emphasis. Let 
 me show you what I mean, as regards the practical bearing 
 of this truth upon ourselves, by some examples. We gather 
 in the httle ones into the fold of Christ by His own divinely 
 ordained Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Why? Because 
 " by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body," and 
 " except a man be bom of water and of the Spirit, he can- 
 not enter into the kingdom of God." We teach the little 
 ones, as soon as they are able to speak the words, to kneel 
 down, and put their little hands together, and say, " Our 
 Father." Why ? Because the Spirit which we have received 
 is not the spirit of bondage, making us afraid of God, but 
 " the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, ' Abba, Father.' " 
 As our children grow older, and are beginning to face the 
 trials and temptations of life, we prepare them with careful 
 pains for the solemn laying-on-of-hands by the Bishop. 
 ^Vhy? Because the Bible tells us that those who partook 
 of this holy rite in Apostolic times " received the Holy Ghost" 
 We lead them on to a yet more deeply blessed and solemn 
 rite. We bid them kneel at the altar-rail, and there receive 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 1 85 
 
 the heavenly food of the Body and Blood of their crucified 
 and risen Lord. Why ? " It is the Spirit that quickeneth : 
 the flesh profiteth nothing " ; and it has been the unbroken 
 teaching of the Church from the beginning, borne special 
 witness to in the most ancient liturgies, that it is the Holy 
 Spirit of God, called down upon the earthly elements, 
 which gives to them their unearthly sanctity and blessed- 
 ness. We gather our faithful ones for Morning and Evening 
 Prayer, and (thanks to our Reformers for restoring to us 
 our primitive and most touching opening act of worship) 
 we begin by the humble confession of our sins before God. 
 Why ? The first work of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, 
 says our Lord, is to convict the world of sin. We join in 
 the simple reverent beautiful prayers of our Church, seeking 
 from our heavenly Father all things requisite and necessary 
 for our souls and bodies. Why? Because '■^ the Spirit 
 helpeth our infirmities," and teaches us how to pray. We 
 read from the lectern (and I would that this reading were 
 always made as instructive and impressive an act as pos- 
 sible) the Lessons from the Old and New Testaments, Why ? 
 Because " holy men of old spake as they were moved by the 
 Holy Ghost." We gather up the blessed teaching of God's 
 Word, presenting its choicest truths as a string of precious 
 jewels, as we recite the ancient Creeds of the Church. 
 Why? Because our Master promised His disciples that 
 the Holy Ghost, the " Spirit of truth" should lead them 
 into all the truth, and bring all things to their remem- 
 brance that He had taught, and in these Creeds we have 
 the truth thus imparted to the first founders of the 
 Church enshrined for us, and committed to us as a sacred 
 charge to be guarded and handed down to our children and 
 our children's children. We ourselves, your Clergy, stand 
 
1 86 THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH, 
 
 before you, and say without fear, as an infinitely greater 
 one said of old, "Let a man so account of us as of the 
 ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God." 
 Why ? Because in that most solemn moment of our lives, 
 when, kneeling before the Chief Pastor of the flock, we were 
 set apart for the fuller ministry of our high and holy calling, 
 there were spoken over us the words of power, " Receive 
 the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the 
 Church of God." 
 
 See, then, how all is full of this one deep, and yet most 
 blessed, mystery — the presence and power of the Holy 
 Spirit of God. See how every act and function of our 
 religious life wins from this truth its blessedness and its 
 efficacy. See how the teaching of my text interpenetrates, 
 and intertwines with, the whole of our Church's hfe and 
 system. See how " ye also," ye Christian people, called 
 into the kingdom, baptized into the body of Christ, sharers 
 in the Divine life of communion with your ascended Lord, — 
 see how " ye also are builded together for an habitation of 
 God through the Spirit." 
 
 "I believe in the Holy Ghost." Yes; how often do 
 these words pass our lips ! How seldom do they find the 
 fulness of their meaning in our hearts and lives ! For in 
 what is it that we profess our faith ? It is in a Divine 
 Person, in a presence and a life, in the indwelling presence 
 and life of God, purchased for us by the sacrifice and merits 
 of Jesus Christ, sanctifying, strengthening, guiding, both 
 the separate individual soul of the child of God in his 
 struggle to work towards " the perfect man," the goal and 
 end of his being, and the whole Church of God in its world- 
 wide issues and destinies, in its corporate life, and common 
 acts and energies. It is this Divine Person, the promised 
 
THE CORPORATE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 187 
 
 and abiding Comforter, who is in the place of Christ as the 
 strength and life of His own ; who takes of the things of 
 Christ and shows them to us ; who in us and in the Church 
 of God ever exalts and glorifies the name of Jesus ; " in 
 whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth 
 into a holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also are 
 builded together for an habitation of God through the 
 Spirit." 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE 
 AND THE HEART. 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE 
 AND THE HEART. 
 
 Preached in St. PauPs, 1S73. 
 
 " Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh 
 on the heart." — I Sam. xvi. 7. 
 
 Supposing that for one whole day we were all of us enabled 
 by miraculous power, and compelled as well as enabled, to 
 look (as God looks) not on the outward appearance but on 
 the heart of every one we saw, what a dreadful — what an 
 intolerably dreadful — day that would be ! How it would 
 startle one with all manner of horrible discoveries ! How 
 it would confound all one's old judgments and opinions ! I 
 don't want to make out my fellow-Christians worse than 
 they really are. I have no doubt whatever that, in such 
 a case as I have supposed, one's soul would be thrilled to 
 behold the unsuspected heroism of many a hidden but 
 desperate struggle with temptation ; one's heart would be 
 melted at the sight of many an invisible cross humbly and 
 patiently borne ; one's admiration would be aroused by 
 many a life of simple purity and holiness where the outside 
 appearance was commonplace and uninteresting enough. 
 These would be the partial compensations. But if there 
 would be at least some happy surprises, some revelations 
 of hidden worth, alas ! I fear it is no libel upon the world 
 
192 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 
 
 around us to believe that the opposite cases would be far 
 more in number. * What ! ' we should too probably exclaim 
 again and again, ' can this cold dead prayerless loveless 
 heart belong to him who has been such a pattern of outward 
 propriety, so constant in his attendance upon the means of 
 grace, so seemingly devout and earnest? Can this soul 
 all stained and befouled with the defilements of secret lusts 
 and impurity be his against whom none ever dared to 
 breathe a breath of slander, so high did he stand above 
 suspicion of shame? Can this shallow frivolous worldly 
 scheming creature be she whom we took to be so simply 
 kind and amiable and unselfish ? Can this soul so full of 
 proud resentful unforgivin'r thoughts, hugging so fondly 
 the memories of misunderstandings, aggravating them so 
 wantonly by imagined scenes of bitterness, can this be his 
 soul who at worst folded himself in a chill reserve to the 
 eye of man, and was ever respected and esteemed for his 
 honourable bearing ? Can he— the scrupulously exact, the 
 patiently laborious, the notoriously trustworthy, man of 
 business — can he own this heart which is like nought but a 
 miser's chest in which is heard no sound save the chinking 
 of gold ? ' These are miserable revelations even to imagine. 
 I need scarcely pursue them farther. But are we looking 
 all this strange sad day which I have pictured upon other 
 hearts, and are no eyes reading ours ? If it would be all 
 but intolerable to be compelled thus to scrutinize with God- 
 like omniscience the inmost hearts of others, would it be so 
 easy to bear the piercing scrutiny of all other eyes upon 
 our own ? What if every one we met for a whole day were 
 to read with perfect clearness every secret of our most secret 
 souls? I think some — shall I sav many? ought I to say 
 most ? — of us would enter into our closet and shut-to the 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 193 
 
 door, and, whether or no we remembered Him who " seeth 
 in secret," would, at least for that day, welcome utter 
 solitude, and flee with dread from the presence of our 
 brother man. How many husbands and wives, how many 
 brothers and sisters, how many parents and children, would 
 fearlessly and happily meet each other that day, and smile 
 with the security of having nothing to conceal from the novel 
 visitant to the secret chambers of which each had hitherto 
 kept the key ? 
 
 So far I am supposing the eye miraculously opened to 
 discern the actual present state and feelings of the hearts of 
 others. I will now go on a step farther. Supposing the 
 power given to embrace, not alone a clear insight into the 
 present positive state of the heart, but also a perfect appre- 
 hension of its relative state and worth, so that there should 
 lie open to the gaze (even as there lies ever open to the one 
 all-seeing Eye) every least element and circumstance which 
 has conduced towards that state and character which we 
 are contemplating, every natural tendency and bias of dis- 
 position, every influence of training and education, every 
 pressure of external force, every negative disadvantage, 
 every weakness or warp of the reasoning faculty, every 
 incident of the previous life which could leave its mark 
 however faint upon the man, — and all these gauged and 
 weighed and balanced and adjusted so as to produce an 
 absolutely just judgment of each person as compared with 
 all others, — and now, if there be fewer shocks of startled 
 dismay than in the former case, yet how utterly would all 
 our old accustomed ways of regarding others be confused 
 and overturned, how strangely different from all expectation, 
 how marvellously unlike anything which our past experience 
 might help us to guess at, would be the order of either 
 
 0—5 
 
194 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 
 
 merit or guilt in which we should classify our fellow-creatures I 
 Truly we should then at least understand the utter truth of 
 our Lord's assertion, " Many that are last shall be first, and 
 the first last." 
 
 Think, for example, of those poor wretches — I suppose 
 the proper epithet for them is ' degraded ' — of whom one 
 may read day by day in the police news of our press. We 
 recoil perchance from the tale of coarse brutal unattractive 
 crime. If we are kind-hearted, we bestow a moment's pity 
 upon the poor ignorant misguided criminal. But to com- 
 pare ourselves — our moral respectable irreproachable selves 
 — with a low repulsive criminal, oh ! this is absurd. We 
 know we have plenty of faults and are "miserable sinners" 
 of course (though, by the way, when any one presses home 
 to us some one particular fault, or suggests our being guilty 
 of some one particular miserable sin, we are straightway 
 angry and indignant) ; but we are so far removed in every 
 way from the ' degraded ' creature we read about, that, if 
 any thought at all of our relative position comes into our 
 minds, it is not so very unUke a thought that was spoken 
 once of old, " God, I thank Thee that I am not as other 
 men are." I don't mean that that is altogether a bad form 
 of thanksgiving, if it be not spoilt by silly pride. But there 
 reaUy seems to most people no point of contact between 
 themselves and some wretched criminal, no common ground 
 where they can stand to make a comparison. They are 
 moving in a different sphere, and to imagine themselves in 
 his place is too wild a thought to be entertained. And yet 
 bring me face to face with even a murderer, if you will, and 
 I have no idea, and no means of forming an idea, which of 
 the two has in reality the more merit or the more guilt in 
 the sight of God. You remember the story of John Bradford, 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 195 
 
 who, seeing a criminal going to execution, cried, ' There 
 goes John Bradford but for the grace of God.' Yes ; I 
 cannot judge between us. If I had that miraculous power 
 I have been supposing, I could ; but I haven't. I can 
 only look on the outward appearance, and that tells me 
 literally nothing of the relative condition of our hearts. 
 Here am I, on the one side, severed by every influence and 
 association and circumstance of life from temptation to 
 crime, blest with everything that should make me happy 
 and contented, with tastes and education and disposition to 
 which gross forms of crime are repulsive, with a position 
 and calling which would make gross crime simply social 
 suicide, so that I am absolutely without the temptation to 
 it, and have therefore never resisted temptation to it. And 
 dare I take credit to myself for a respectability of outward 
 conduct which, so far as I can judge, is the necessary result 
 of things quite apart from my own will ? Dare I look with 
 self-complacency on an immunity from the crimes which 
 God in His mercy has made it all but impossible for me 
 to commit ? While there, on the other hand, is one, reared 
 perhaps in the midst of brutal violence, familiar from a child 
 with all forms of sin, brought up to fear neither God nor 
 man, never taught to resist one temptation, and never re- 
 strained in the indulgence of his evil passions by the tone 
 or influence of those around him — and he has committed a 
 great crime. Well, he must be punished for the good of 
 society ; for his own good, perchance, too ; but how do I 
 know that that poor wretch has not yielded to a force of 
 temptation such as is to me unknown, or such as would 
 inevitably draw me into sin, if only the sin to which I were 
 tempted were a refined and polite sin instead of a gross 
 and vulgar one ? 
 
196 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 
 
 Take another case. A thief is charged before the 
 magistrates. He has dehberately stolen something — money, 
 or food, or clothing. He too must be punished. We, who 
 can look only on the outward appearance, can, of course, 
 only take cognizance of the outward actions, and at most 
 can penetrate a very little way into motives, and comparative 
 guilt. But you, my brethren, who have enough and to 
 spare, who can indulge your cultured tastes and gratify your 
 graceful fancies without stint, you who do not know what 
 it is to covet food or clothing, to whom the thing that poor 
 thief has taken is of no appreciable value, you who can live 
 on the best, and dress as you please, and find money for 
 all your little indulgences, what do you know of that man's 
 temptations ? You have never probably in your life with- 
 stood a fierce assault of temptation to steal. Do you know 
 how many times Ae has done so? You are fenced off 
 by the ordering of God's good providence from the very 
 approach of a temptation which to Aim perchance has been 
 an ever-present peril. Will you dare to hug yourself in 
 a wretched self-complacency, and as you look on the poor 
 thief to say, ' At least I am honest ; I have never broken 
 the eighth commandment'? Well, I hope not But is 
 that so sure? Have you ever heard of such a thing in 
 polite society as running into debt, living beyond your 
 means, ordering costly luxuries which you knew you could 
 never pay for ? Have you ever heard of fraudulent bank 
 ruptcies, or reckless speculation ? Have you ever heard 
 of kind-hearted friends or relatives robbed and ruined by 
 the dishonesty of those for whom they have given security ? 
 Have you ever heard of money borrowed and never repaid? 
 Have you ever heard of tradesmen selling a bad article 
 for a good one, and imposing on the ignorance of a 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. I97 
 
 purchaser ? Have you ever heard of the proverbial cheat- 
 ing, which is almost condoned, in horse-dealing ? One more 
 question. It shall be in sacred words. " Will a man rob 
 God?" It may be some of you have heard of this sort 
 of stealing — of giving to God in alms a miserable pittance 
 while there is lavish expenditure on self, of giving on no 
 fixed principle, so that a wretchedly small proportion of 
 income is dedicated to holy uses, and the Pharisee of old, 
 who gave tithes of all that he possessed (a double tithe, 
 remember, one for the ministry and one for the poor, a 
 fifth of his income in all), may well rise up in judgment 
 against those who profess to live by the great broad free 
 Christian law of love. What is the real difference as regards 
 moral guilt between these things and the thefts of the 
 detected criminal ? True, he steals simply and undisguisedly, 
 with no evasions and circumlocutions ; and these others — 
 well, at least they escape the meshes of the law, and society 
 is lenient towards them on the whole. But as to the com- 
 parative guilt, that is wholly beyond the ken of one who 
 can look only " on the outward appearance." 
 
 Many crimes, as we all know, spring from drunkenness. 
 Drunkenness is very often the poor man's only notion of 
 enjoying himself Would that it were otherwise ! But to 
 the man of refinement there is most frequently no temptation 
 to dnmkenness. It is coarse, revolting, lowering. Yet there 
 may be the most complete indulgence of the appetite con- 
 sistently with the utmost refinement and good taste. And 
 for my part I am quite unable to judge of the comparative 
 guiltiness of the poor labourer who in his coarse way, having 
 no finer tastes, drinks ale to excess, and of the rich epicure 
 who is fastidiously particular as to his meats and drinks, 
 and expends much thought, time, money, and perchance 
 
198 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. I 
 
 i 
 
 temper, upon the flavours of his dishes and the vintages of ! 
 
 his wines. The one falls into crime, and becomes amenable i 
 
 to the police, and is brought before the magistrates or the | 
 court of assize. The other is probably courted and admired, 
 
 and at least he escapes all such painful consequences. But ' 
 as regards the self-indulgence which is at the root of the 
 
 matter, only He can judge truly who looketh on the ' 
 
 heart. j 
 
 One more case I am going to suppose. It is, alas ! a < 
 
 sadly common one. A poor young girl is accused of child- j 
 
 murder. She has been led into sin by one probably far I 
 
 guiltier than herself, and in her misery she has tried to | 
 
 conceal her shame. O ye pure wives and daughters, who ' 
 
 can front the world with level eye, and can scarce under- ; 
 
 stand that dreadful cowering horror and dread of disgrace, j 
 
 who, if ye knew, would perhaps walk with a somewhat ' 
 
 statelier tread and a somewhat sterner mien past some such • 
 
 crouching form in yovur streets, I cannot, I must not, pass I 
 
 by the thoughts which this, the great misery which has ; 
 
 blasted many a young life, has for you. Oh, bear with me : i 
 
 for the sake of that tenderest of all tender hearts, which, \ 
 
 seeing as God seeth, knowing what was in man, once said, j 
 " Neither do I condemn thee " ; bear with me. It is not 
 
 to sully your fair fame that I dare to link my words to you . 
 
 with such a case as this which we are now regarding. But ' 
 I have this to say. It may be — yes, surely it may be — that 
 the vanity which bestows so much thought on personal 
 
 appearance, which perhaps delights so much to attract, the j 
 
 love of dress which is perhaps as absorbing and extravagant [ 
 
 a passion in these days as it ever was among us, the pleasure- I 
 
 seeking which is so incessant with many, and which makes ■ 
 
 many so frivolous and worldly, — it may be, I say, that all this ' 
 
THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 199 
 
 holds in it quite as deep and real a germ of evil, when the 
 circumstances and temptations of each are faithfully measured, 
 as the course of frailty which has led that poor outcast to 
 her deed of sin. You who love admiration and pleasure 
 so dearly, can you tell what you might have been with her 
 temptations and surroundings? And can you tell what 
 she might have been with your safeguards and education? 
 
 Why have I thus drawn your thoughts, my brethren, to 
 speculations upon the comparative merit or guilt of those 
 who to the outward appearance are so unlike ? It is that 
 we may all learn to shatter the idol of self-complacency, and 
 to tear into ribbons the garb of self-righteousness. It is 
 that there may be wrought in us that first work of the Divine 
 Comforter — even the conviction of sin. It is that, if we 
 have been saved from the crimes which have brought misery 
 on others, we may know that this is owing to no merit or 
 excellence of our own, but to the mercy of our heavenly 
 Father. It is that we may trace in our own more subtle 
 and refined sins the same principle of evil which we are 
 ready enough to behold in the rougher and coarser trans- 
 gressions of another class. It is that we may cherish a 
 great generous Christ-like tenderness for sinners; that we 
 may go to sinners, ourselves sinners — aye, go to the lowest, 
 the worst, — and try, as a brother or sister, to help ; that we 
 may not be hurt or surprised or indignant, if we are some- 
 times met with scorn, repulse, ridicule. " Ye have not 
 yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." They have not 
 yet spit upon us. They treat the servant at any rate better 
 than the Master. It is, finally, that we may cast ourselves 
 in all humility and self-abnegation at the foot of the Cross, 
 and there confess our own nothingness, there ask mercy for 
 all our sins and unworthiness, there praise God for all the 
 
200 THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE AND THE HEART. 
 
 safeguards with which He has so graciously surrounded us, 
 there seek and find grace and strength to rise to higher 
 things, there learn the full import and blessedness of the 
 words, " God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, by wliom the world is crucified unto 
 me, and I unto the world." Amea 
 
WITH CHRIST. 
 
i 
 
 1 
 
 ■i 
 
 I 
 i 
 
WITH CHRIST. 
 
 Preached at Windsor, before the Empress Frederick of Germany, shortly 
 after the death of the Emperor, 1888. 
 
 "With Me."— St. John xvii. 24. 
 
 When the Lord prayed, "Father, I will that they also 
 whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am,' 
 there is nothing to show whether He thought of the 
 presence of those He prayed for with Him on earth in the 
 veiUngs of His glory, or in the sweet rest and peace of 
 Paradise, or in the final triumph of His perfected kingdom. 
 Possibly He embraced all these senses in the yearnings of 
 His infinite sympathy. It must be always and in every 
 way blessed to be with Jesus. 
 
 And first, on earth. I suppose it must have been a 
 strangely beautiful thing to have been with Christ when He 
 was on earth. At least for those who really knew, who 
 had grace and insight to discern the veiled majesty of Him 
 who took upon Him the form of a bond-servant, for those 
 who could read the Divine through the Human, — at least 
 for those, to be with Him must have been full of trembling 
 joy. We know what it is to us to be with some one trans- 
 parently good and pure and kind and true. We may 
 ourselves be very far fi-om any approach to the beautiful 
 
204 
 
 WITH CHRIST. 
 
 character we look upon. But there is around such a 
 character a sort of atmosphere of holy influence. It seems 
 as if no unholy unworthy thoughts or feelings could live 
 in that atmosphere. It wards off all gross and shameful 
 things as potently as could an Angel with a fiery sword. 
 We have only to imagine this strange spell vivified and 
 intensified a hundredfold to realize what must have been 
 the effluence of light and beauty and purity which flowed 
 around the visible presence of the Incarnate Son of God 
 But that visible presence is no more. Has it then ceased 
 to be possible to be with Christ on earth ? If He prays 
 that His own may be with Him where He is, can that only 
 be within the veil that hides the unseen world from mortal 
 eye? Nay, He speaks again and again of an abiding 
 presence with His own even here — a presence even more 
 blessed than was His visible corporeal presence. He is 
 leaving them in bodily form, yet He says, " I will come 
 unto you." He is withdrawing His visible presence, yet 
 He cries, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
 the world." He asks, " What and if ye shall see the Son 
 of Man ascend up where He was before ? " Yet He de- 
 clares, " He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh My Blood, 
 dwelleth in Me, and I in him." And is not this the very 
 essence of Christianity ? Is not the sense of the presence 
 with us of a living personal Saviour the one great act of 
 faith which gives meaning and reality to all our religious 
 life and actings? If Christianity is more than a mere 
 memory of the past, or a beautiful dream of the purest 
 imaginings of man's intellect, or a skilfully adjusted scheme 
 of doctrines and precepts ; if it is a living power, a religion 
 worth living for and dying for ; then in its central essence 
 and reality it is the consciousness of the presence — the 
 
WITH CHRIST. 
 
 205 
 
 spiritual presence, but therefore the deeper and larger 
 presence — of the ever-blessed Son of God with the soul of 
 man. I suppose that it is with the thought of this realized 
 presence of Christ that the writers of the Epistles so often 
 use the expression, " in Christ." See how, for example, 
 in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, every 
 blessing and privilege is spoken of as "in Christ." God's 
 eternal choice, our predestination to the adoption of 
 children, our acceptance, our redemption, the gathering 
 together in one of all things, the inheritance, the seahng 
 with the Holy Spirit of promise, all are in Christ, all are 
 bestowed, all are realized, in the sphere of His Divine 
 presence. Yes, even on earth, and even now. His own — 
 those whom the Father has given Him — are with Him, 
 bathed in the light of that pure atmosphere, upheld by His 
 strong arm, drawing from Him heahng virtue, comforted by 
 His human sympathy, changed into the same image by the 
 transforming grace of adoring love. Not in vain does the 
 one great Intercessor plead for us even now that we too 
 may be with Him where He is. For His prayer, even 
 when first uttered, was not alone for those who then were 
 His. " Neither pray I for these alone," He cries, " but 
 for them also which shall believe on Me through their 
 word." And this is large enough to embrace even us in 
 these latter days ; while we doubt not also that what He 
 prayed then He prays still, where at the right hand of God 
 "He ever liveth to make intercession" for us. His "with 
 Me " is mighty in its prevaiHng power even here on earth. 
 And we have witnessed the Divine strength of this "with Me." 
 Surely every noble life of gracious purity and unselfish 
 love, surely every Christ-hke bearing of the cross of suffer- 
 ing, surely every generous career of self-sacrificing labour 
 
206 
 
 WITH CHRIST. 
 
 and devotion, is but a fresh proof that Christ is present 
 with His own, and that His Spirit still animates and 
 inspires the souls of men. I do not think it is only the 
 courageous witness of the uttered word, such as that which 
 Apostles bore so nobly amidst the threats and taunts of 
 their adversaries, which is valid evidence of the strength 
 and force that flow from Christ, for I am sure that there 
 are many, in all ranks and classes, whose simple Christ-like 
 lives and Christ-like tempers and Christ-like actions are 
 such that men may " take knowledge of them that they 
 have been with Jesus." Perhaps half unconsciously (for I 
 do not suppose we always recognize the real source or 
 nature of the power that is working in us), certainly with 
 no vain-glory or self-exaltation (which would be wholly un- 
 Christ-like), these have grown into the likeness of Christ, 
 Christ has been formed in them, and they have borne 
 witness to the world that He is with them. Reflecting as 
 a mirror the glory of the Lord, they have been changed 
 into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the 
 Spirit of the Lord. And thus is Christ's prayer, that those 
 whom the Father has given Him may be with Him where 
 He is, answered even here on eartL 
 
 Then, next, the prayer is answered — oh, how wonder- 
 fully I — for His own in the sweet rest and peace of Paradise. 
 Is not the one clearly revealed and absolutely sure bliss of 
 the departed, who have loved and followed Christ on earth, 
 to be with Him where He is ? Our Lord's own words to 
 the penitent thief on the cross are conclusive, "To-day thou 
 shall be with Me in Paradise." Oh, how we yearn to 
 know more of those "spirits of just men made perfect," 
 those dearly loved souls who have passed within the veil, 
 and are waiting in peaceful and blessed expectation for the 
 
mm CHRIST. 
 
 consummation of the great day ! How we long at times for 
 one moment's glimpse of their calm beautiful being, one 
 flash of light which should reveal to us the nature and 
 circumstances of their spiritual existence ! But God has in 
 His wisdom hidden these things from us. It may be, if we 
 knew more, we might be tempted to dwell overmuch on the 
 beauty and blessedness in which they pass their existence, 
 and so to become forgetful of present duties and of the work 
 God would have us do on earth. We have seen the strangely 
 unscriptural errors into which over-curious speculations upon 
 the state of the unseen world have led a large part of 
 Christendom. Therefore we bow to God's will, and dare 
 not penetrate farther than we are guided by His holy Word, 
 But those little words " wifk Me," what a fountain of light 
 they are, as we muse upon that Ufe within the veil ! Those 
 blessed ones, in their new and wonderful home, severed for 
 a while from their bodily dwelling-place, " free among the 
 dead" in the mystery of their spiritual being ; those " souls 
 of the righteous " which are " in the hand of God " ; — we 
 know but little concerning them : and God, I think, would 
 have us dwell more on the blessed reunion of the Coming 
 of the Lord than on their present state, for it is for that 
 great day that we are bidden again and again to watch and 
 wait and prepare — aye, even to be patient in waiting for it. 
 Yet one thing we do know. They are w/i/i Christ. There 
 is for them some special and most blessed consciousness of 
 their Lord's spiritual presence. The very secret of their 
 joy and felicity is the realized nearness of their Lord, I do 
 not think it is passing beyond the teaching of Holy Scripture 
 to speak of the happiness which must flow from the reunion 
 and mutual recognition of the denizens of the spirit-world. 
 That spirit can recognize and commune with spirit in thai 
 
208 
 
 WITH CHRIST. 
 
 world would naturally flow from many passages in the Bible. 
 Certainly, if the spirits of the departed are in a state of 
 consciousness, as no Christian doubts ; if Christ's Spirit could 
 go among the dead, while His Body lay in the tomb, pro- 
 claiming to them the accomplishment of the great work of 
 atonement which He came to do ; if in that place of waiting 
 the spirit of the dead thief was to meet in conscious re- 
 cognition the Spirit of Jesus ; if the three Apostles could 
 know the spirits of Moses and Ehas when they appeared on 
 the Mount of Transfiguration ; we need not for one moment 
 doubt the blissful intercourse and intercommunion of spirit 
 with spirit. But I suppose that even this great happiness 
 is almost lost and absorbed in the still deeper and more 
 entrancing happiness of being wi/A Jesus. It is His presence 
 in spirit with His own that forms the blessedness of Paradise. 
 
 And so we pass on to the end. And again it is the 
 same. See how the Apostle pictures to the Thessalonians 
 the great day of the Lord. The living, he tells us, will 
 have no advantage, no precedence, over the dead in that 
 day. " For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven 
 with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with the 
 trump of God : and the dead in Christ shall rise first : then 
 we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together 
 with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air : and 
 so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one 
 another with these words." What is this voice of comfort 
 that is to soothe the mourners so that they " sorrow not, 
 even as others which have no hope " ? It is the one great 
 all-embracing all-strengthening thought — " ever with the 
 Lord." And this thought surely gathers up within itself 
 all blissful reunions of parted dear ones, all holy and happy 
 intercourse with those " whom we have loved long since, 
 
WITH CHRIST. 
 
 809 
 
 and lost awhile," all the sweet restorations of holy beautiful 
 human love. Yes ; all the exquisite happiness, all the 
 entrancing joy, all the glory and rapture, of the resurrection- 
 life, ministered through a thousand channels of delight, are 
 drawn into one supreme and boundless harmony of bliss in 
 the presence of Jesus. Nay, more ; for there is something 
 beyond even the joy of beholding and loving. There is the 
 joy of transformation. It is not alone the vision we long 
 for and look for. That will be very glorious and beautiful. 
 But it is the transforming vision. " We shall be like Him, 
 for we shall see Him as He is." " Reflecting as a mirror 
 the glory of the Lord," we shall be " changed into the same 
 image." Nor may we forget the great difference between 
 this new and heavenly presence of the Lord, and that which 
 we dwelt upon last For now we are speaking of the fulness 
 of man's perfected nature, of the risen body, of the 6nal 
 state of the redeemed and glorified. It is of this that the 
 A))ostle speaks in that magnificent chapter which the Church 
 reads for the comfort of mourners in their darkest hour oi 
 grieC It is of this great change that he writes when, 
 speaking of the mortal frame, he says, " It is sown in cor- 
 ruption ; it is raised in incorruption : it is sown in dis- 
 honour ; it is raised in glory : it is sown in weakness ; it 
 is raised in power : it is sown a natural body ; it is -aised 
 a spiritual body." Yes, it is no mere spiritual, and so to 
 us almost unimaginable, sense of nearness, communicated 
 we know not how to the disembodied spirit in the dim 
 mysterious spirit-world ; but a true bodily vision and com- 
 panionship, which we can at least in part understand from 
 our present life and surroundings. In a very literal sense 
 our eyes " shall see the King in His beauty." 
 
 I know not how this vision of Jesus— this great and 
 
210 
 
 WITH CHRIST. 
 
 blessed "with Me" of the Eternal Son— I know not how 
 this harmonizes itself with the larger and yet more awful 
 thought of the vision of God in His supreme majesty and 
 glory. That it does so is most sure. And the sense of 
 the Eternal Fatherhood of God must stand out in calm 
 unequalled radiance as the greater light of heaven. Yet 
 when the Lord sends His messages of warning and of en- 
 couragement to His seven Churches in Asia, and when He 
 would hold out the hope of joy and triumph to the faithful 
 soldier of the cross, He says, " They shall walk with Me 
 in white ; for they are worthy." And again, " To him 
 that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne." 
 It is still the " with Me." This is, then, the true life and 
 strength and bliss of the children of God. " Ever with 
 the Lord " ! With Him in the life of faith now ; with Him 
 in the life of waiting within the veil ; with Him in the Ufe 
 of glory at last ! O blessed Jesu, our Life, our Saviour, 
 our King, be Thou ever with us that we may be ever with 
 Thee. Be Thou with us in joy and in sorrow, in strength 
 and in weakness, in life and in death. Be Thou with 
 us as we walk through the tangled paths of this sinful 
 world; be Thou with us as we enter the valley of the 
 shadow of death ; be Thou with us in the peace of. 
 Paradise and the glories of heaven. O Father, hear Thy 
 Son's prayer for those whom Thou hast given Him, that 
 they may be with Him where He is, now and evermwe 
 Amen. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Plain Words, ist Series. 2J. 
 
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 Plain Words. 4th Series. (On Prayer.) 2s. 
 
 Plain Words for Children. 2s. 
 
 Pastor in ParochiA. ^s. (3d. 
 
 Practical Sermons. 2s. 
 
 Words of Good Cheer, is. 6d. 
 
 Lent Sermons on Psalm 51. xs. 
 
 Cambridge Pastoral Lectures. 2s. 
 
 Daily Family Prayer for Churchmen. \s. 6d. and 6d. 
 
 Revision of the Pubrics. is. 
 
 Poems. 3J. With Hymns, 35. dd. 
 
 Hymns. 6d. 
 
 Notes on the Church Service. 6d. 
 
 Wells Gardner and Co. 
 
 Holy Communion, Preparation and Companion, id. 
 Commentary on tht Four Gospels, 4s. 
 
 S.P.C.K. 
 
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