; i LIBR ARY OF CONG RESS, ChapAdA)opyAght4) Shelf_:i^_P 5* , UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. a o^UnJ/, Jy^^^? / FIVE MINUTE TALKS BY THE Rev. Clinton Locke, D.D., DEAN OF THE NORTH EASTERN DEANERY, DIOCESE OF CHICAGO. y^ MILWAUKEE, WIS. THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. \ T «* LlBRAR) OF WASHINGTON BX 5- reverence, and utterly incomprehensible to me. A handsome priest with long curls read the Gospel in two or three languages ; TWO EASTERS IN ONE YEAR. 135 the singing was very poor, and the only really fine things were the jeweled mitres and robes of the bishops and the patriarch. Nobody seemed £much impressed, and I was rather glad when it was over, and I could breathe pure air once more. WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THE DEPARTED? LET us talk a little about the departed and our relation to them. Those who are dear to us are taken from us. We have been accustomed to lavish on them every endearment, every personal service. We worked for them ; they were the spur of our life, and our greatest joy was to be able to make "them happier, no matter at what sacrifice. And now all this is over. The great veil has dropped between us and them. We tug at its folds, but there it hangs, and not all the commands of all the emperors, not all the offered treasures of the world, can lift its hem. All our ministries are over. We can no more encircle with loving arms the little form. We can no longer keep watch and ward that danger comes not too near ; but still we can- not keep out the wish: u 0h, that I could do something for thee ; I want to do so much !" Now, in answering that wish, I shall assume that death does not put a stop to love, or dissolve any true relation of love; that those who are behind the veil remember those who are still before; that eyes look on us which we cannot see, and hearts beat for us WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THE DEPARTED ? 137 which we cannot touch. I said I would assume this, and yet I do not know why I should call it an assumption, for it is a universal belief. It is human. It is natural. Life would be intolerable without it. There never was any great creed that was not based on the idea that the living and the dead are still dear to each other, and that such undying things as love, and friendship, and interest, survive the touch of time, the worm, the grave. I know the first thought is, "I can do nothing for my dead ; they do not need me. They have everything. Their cup is full. Nothing remains for me." Now God has everything, but for all that, we can give Him something which pleases Him. There are things He wants from us. He wants our love, He wants our happiness, He wants to see us better men and women. He says in His Holy Word that He craves the offering of a contrite heart and a meek and lowly spirit. If we can do then for Almighty God services which please Him, how much more can we do for God's creatures ? There is not a man, no matter how rich, how highly placed, who cannot be helped by us. You think a rich man has everything, but he longs for things money cannot buy, nor commands bring about. He wants love, sympathy, friendship, and the poorest man can give him these. So you see that it is false reasoning to say that because the departed are in Paradise, and enjoy all its glories, you can do nothing for them. They are human beings. They have interests on earth. Even Dives in the other world felt the deepest interest in his 138 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. still living brothers, and wanted some one sent to warn them. Why, there is a whole crowd of things we can do, words we can say, lives we can live, which will give the departed the greatest joy. Why should it be the angels only who rejoice over the penitent? Souls in Paradise and in Hades are a great deal nearer to us than angels are. Do you not see then how those in Paradise must get hap- piness and joy from any attempt you make to do good to others, to lessen grief and want and suf- fering, to improve men, to bring them to greater light, to help them to avoid the very errors into which they themselves had fallen when on earth ? It will soften greatly the pangs of separation to look away from the gloom when we sit mourning, and to go to sadder lives and darker homes as a messenger from the one who is dead ; to feel that you have been sent on this errand by the dead child, or wife, or husband you so loved, and that they are watching and approving. So when jou sigh and say : What can I do for the dead ? remember you can do this. You can go to the sorrow-laden and the grief-stricken and offer them soft words of sympathy. You can do some deed of charity which will lessen a little of the burden of human pain. You can found, if you are rich, some memorial which shall be for ever doing good. You can rescue some child from sin, from ignorance, from cruelty. You can teach the blessed Gospel of Jesus to children. You can help in this way or that wa}- the glorious mission of the Church. You can show forth in your life greater WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THE DEPARTED? 139 love, purit} r , unselfishness, and all these things will give happiness to the spirits in Paradise, for these are the things they love and desire to further. And there is one thing more you can do for them, you can pray for them. The mother kneels down and prays for her living boy ; shall the mere fact of death shut her up from pra} T ing just the same way for her boy gone to Paradise : "Oh God, give him new joy, exalt him from glory to glory, grant light to him and yet more light " ? Why should I not do this ? Am I to be given the foolish reason, "Because Romanists do it?" So they also say the Lord's Prayer and the Creed ; shall we therefore stop say- ing them ? The Bible never says that death fixes all conditions. They cannot be fixed until the judg- ment, if then; and immense changes may take place in every human soul before that. You deprive 3 r ourself, and you deprive those gone before, of much comfort and of much joy if you neglect this great link of communion. Bind \ r ourself and your dead together. They are yours, and you are theirs, now and forever. THE TESTIMONY OF THE STONES. DO you ever think of the testimony to the accu- racy of the Bible afforded by ancient build- ings, long buried under the rubbish of ages, and now being excavated in Assyria, in Egypt, in Jeru- salem; tombs with their inscriptions, paintings, inscriptions on monuments, those curious cylinders of clay found at Nineveh, coins, papyrus rolls, and all such things; things which, as you readily see, could not be tampered with as manuscripts of the Scriptures might be by transcribers? The store of these things daily increases as the desire of knowledge in man pushes further his digging and delving in the wrecks of the past. The mine has only just been opened, and we look with confidence in a few more years to the greatest light being thrown on chronological puzzles and difficulties about words and customs which have long worried Bible students. Of course, in a short paper like this, I can only indicate a few examples of what I mean; but these may induce you to look more deeply into a very interesting subject. You will remember that when THE TESTIMONY OF THE STONES. 141 Abraham lost his wife, he bought a burial place for her from Ephraim, the Hittite, and we often read in the Bible of Hittites; for example, "Uriah the Hittite" and " Solomon sold horses to the kings of the Hittites." Nowhere in history could one word be found about the Hittites ; and infidels, twenty-five }^ears ago, used to say: "This is a mistake of the Bible; these Hittites are imag- inary." Now, as the rolls and the cylinders are deciphered, w r e are getting much information about the Hittites during their power and their conquests in those far-off days. The Egyptian records speak of them often ; in one place it tells of a thousand chariots taken from the Hittites. There is a papyrus in the British Museum which contains along poem about the battles of Rameses with them, and an Assyrian obelisk contains accounts of them. We know the very year — 717 B . C . — when they were wiped out of existence by Sargon, the Assyrian king, and their splendid empire, which had extended far and wide for many centuries, was destroyed. Do you not see what a grand confirmation that is of the Bible statement so long pronounced to be incorrect ? Come down now to the time when the Israelites were in Egypt. We read in the Bible of a king who knew not Joseph, and of the slavish work the Hebrews had to do in building two great treasure cities, Pithom and Rameses; and how the king descended to the mean trick of denying them straw and making them gather reeds to keep the unbaked bricks together. Not many years ago a magnifi- 142 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. cently embalmed mummy was found in Egypt, easily known from the inscriptions to be the mummy of Rameses II.; and so well preserved that you can easily trace the resemblance between the embalmed face and the statues and portraits of him all over Egypt. On one inscription his name is connected with one of the cities the Israelites had to build ; and now the other city, Pithom, has been found, with treasure chambers in it, and reeds in the brick partitions. There seems but little doubt that this was the king who oppressed the Hebrews, and again Scripture is confirmed by discovery. Now we come to the Moabite stone. In the year 1868 there was discovered, in the land of Moab, a basalt stone covered with inscriptions. The Arabs who discovered it broke it all to pieces, but the fragments were carefully gathered up and put together, and the stone is in the museum of the Louvre. See now how that stone corroborates Scripture. We read in II. Kings, that Mesha, the King of Moab, paid tribute to the King of Israel of 100,000 lambs and 100,000 rams, with their wool ; but that when Ahab died the King of Moab rebelled against Israel. Now the inscription on the stone, which is in the oldest form of the Hebrew alphabet, reads: "I am Mesha, King of Moab The King of Israel oppressed Moab, and my god Chemosh was angry with him. His son Ahab succeeded him, and one who said : I will oppress Moab, and my god said go : Go take Nebo against Israel, and I went and took THE TESTIMONY OF THE STONES. 143 it." Nowhere else in the world is there a line about Mesha, only on this stone and in the Bible ; and do you not see how the short and simple story of that Book is thus accidentally, as we say, confirmed ? The curious libraries of the kings of Nineveh have been found, the books all being clayc}dinders, stamped with cuneiform characters; and these books of clay are filled with references to the king- doms of Israel and Judah, and the events which are related in the Bible, in Chronicles and Kings and Isaiah. For example, there is one inscription : "As for Hezekiah of Judah who had not sub- mitted to my yoke, I besieged and captured forty- six of his strong cities." Could there be a more pointed witness to the truth of the Scripture narra- tive than this? Infidels have said there was no such person as Belshazzar. A cylinder has been found with a prayer of the King of Babylon for his eldest son Belshazzar. There are many more examples if I had the space to give them ; but certainly these will serve to introduce you to one of the most interesting and striking lines of illustration of the Bible. There are one or two not very expensive books 3 r ou might get and read, especially one by Prof. Sayce, who is a great authority- in such matters. THE ROGATION DAYS. ONE of the recollections of my boyhood is being taken by my mother to a sewing society. As I was intended for the ministry, a visit to such societies w r as considered part of my training. I listened to the respectable matrons pulling to pieces a neighboring clergyman who was guilty of that awful crime of Puseyism, which was at that time a burning question. One lady said : " Do you know, he keeps Rogation Hays ? " I remember the shudder of horror that went through the assembly, and how all thought there -was but one step beyond that, and that was Rome. And indeed very few people then had any idea w 7 hat Rogation days were. In an obscure place in the Prayer Book it was mentioned that there were such things ; but it was not until the revised book came into use a few years ago that there was any general knowledge of those days. No service of any kind marked them ; but now we have special Lessons for them and special pra} r ers, and the Sun- day before Ascension is called in the rubic before these prayers, " Rogation Sunday." Even now, THE ROGATION DAYS. 145 the Prayer Book does not tell, except in an infer- ential way, why these days are kept ; and compar- atively few parishes ever keep them, since they have no especial Collect, Epistle and Gospel. They originated in this wa} r : In the year 452, the dis- trict around Yienne, in France, was laid desolate by earthquakes and fires, and the prospect of a good harvest was very doubtful. The Bishop of Yienne, Mamertus by name, appointed the three daj^s before Ascension Day in that year as a solemn fast, when all Christian people were to go in pro- cession, singing litanies, to a church outside the walls, where God was to be asked to pardon the sins of His people, and grant them a good return for the seed just sown. As far as the Western Church is concerned, I would fix this as the definite time from which we date the kind of prayer we call litany, short sup- plications with responses, one of the most highly prized and effective parts of our service. This particular form of devotion "took" (to use a modern phrase) very rapidly, so that in the fifth centur\^, St. Caesar of Aries writes that the Roga- tion days were ' ' regularly observed by the Church throughout the world." You will find that this was the way in which the greater part of our ritual observances obtained a footing. Some church began some ceremony, or form of devotion. It found favor with the adjoining churches as likely to increase piety. Then neighboring dioceses took it up, and after a while it became general throughout the national Church, and so spread 146 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. over the Christian world. The same process is going on now. For example: Many years ago one of my parishioners heard in a church in New York a hymn sung kneeling before the Litam r . He told me of it, and how edifying he found it, and I introduced it into the service. No other western parish then had it, but it spread very rapidly, and now is quite general. Witness also the very rapid spread of the Three Hours' devotion for Good Friday. When the Prayer Book is revised at the end of another century, provision will undoubtedly be made for that service. But to return to the Rogation days. Thej- are the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension ; and as far as our Communion is con- cerned, their object is to ask God to bless the labors of the husbandman, and to grant such seasonable weather that we may gather in the fruits of the earth. The Litany ought to be said on all these days, in memory of the origin of these rogations or petitions, for the word comes from the Latin, rogare, to petition. We have no pro- cessions outside the churches on these da\-s, as far as I know, but they are quite common abroad. I happened to be travelling through Bavaria once on the Rogation da} r s, and it was very pleasant, as the train passed from village to village, to see, marching along the newly-sown fields, processions headed by the priest, and cross, and choir, singing litanies. In England, from very ancient days, the parishioners walked around the bounds of the parish, on the Rogations, saying the Litany and THE ROGATION DAYS. 147 thel03cl and 104th Psalms; and 3-011 can find now in very many parishes, crosses which mark where the processions stopped, and the curate explained what they were doing, and offered suitable prayers. So, go to church on the Rogation days ; or if you can not, pray at home that the harvest may be good, and that the ground may bring forth abundantly. Do not be kept from such prayers by the statement that all nature is governed by laws, and that ground will only produce and fruit ripen according to the rain and sun, and richness of the earth, and labor bestowed on it. We all know that, and we would not plant a seed unless we were sure that great laws were back of us which would ensure its ripening with proper care. We would none of us be silly enough to pray for rain in Arizona, for example, during the months when rain never falls. But while we know all about law, we also know that even with our feeble wills we can counteract law. I can make a ball fly up, when the law of gravity- is that it shall fly down ; and if I can do such things, what cannot God do ? He may help the harvest in a thousand ways of which we are ignorant, and law exist ail the same, and we are ri,2;ht in praying for any good thing. ASCENSION DAY. YOU will often hear people call Maundy Thurs- day Holy Thursday, but it is a great mistake. Holy Thursday is the common name for Ascension Day ; and just as there is one Friday particularly good, so is there one Thursday particularly holy, and that is the Thursday when our Lord withdrew His visible presence from this world ; we must not say "left this world," for as He says, wherever two or three are gathered together in His name, there He is in the midst of them. He is before us in the per- son of the poor and the needy. He is really and truly present with us and for us in the Eucharist, so that He is just as much connected with the world as when He parted with His disciples, only we see Him not. It is impossible to tell just when Ascension Day took its place in the sacred calendar; both St. Augustine and St. Ch^sostom have sermons on it, showing that in their time it was generally observed; and our own common sense tells us that the early Christians would not have been likely to forget, or to celebrate with scant honor, the last day our Lord passed with them. ASCENSION DAY. 149 There are four festivals which stand far before any of the others: Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Whitsunday ; and Ascension is one of the very few days in our Prayer Book which has an octave, that is, a week of special services, marked by a preface in the Communion Office. It is a day when every Churchman ought to make a point of going to church to celebrate the proudest event in the history of man; the day when human nature reached its greatest glory, being taken by our Lord into the other world, and in His person placed on the throne of heaven; so that a Man rules the whole creation, a Man who is also God. We commonly say our Lord went up from the top of Olivet, but the Scripture does not say so. On the contrary, it says : " He led them out as far as Bethany," which is nearly a mile from what is known as Mt. Olivet ; and again it says in Acts, that after the Ascension, the Apostles returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a Sabbath day's journey, that is, a mile. This shows conclusively that it could not have been that summit which directly overhangs the city, and on which St. Helena built a church. The olive woods around Bethany where our Lord passed so much time with dear friends, was a much likelier place for His leave-taking than the glare and publicity of what we call the Mount of Olives, which can be seen from every house in Jerusalem, and which seems near enough, in that clear air, to reach with a stone from the city wall. The Turks have a mosque there, and they show 150 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. the place from which our Lord ascended, which is, of course, a pious fraud. We also commonly say, our Lord went up. Children may say that, but intelligent men must know that there is neither up nor down in this universe; that the same ether and stars are all around the world ; and that if we were carried to the moon, the world would look to us just as the moon does now. The Scripture does not mean by "up " that our Lord went travelling on from star to star until He got to some highest point; but just that He passed out of sight, a cloud shutting Him out from view, passed into that inner and unseen universe where He now dwells. For the proof that there is an unseen universe close to this, out of which this came, and into which it is passing, I commend you to a scientific treatise called " The Unseen Universe." I have not the space to discuss that here. But, some will say, our Lord must have gone very far away; for St. Stephen looked up stead- fastly into heaven, and saw it opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. Yes, but why suppose the saint looked so far away? Is it not more reasonable to suppose that his spiritual sight was so sharpened, as is very often the case with dying persons, that it pierced the veil which hides the other world from us, and he had a glimpse of the unseen, not so far off, but so different ? There is no need to bring in a distant view, as if St. Stephen's material e^-eshad been endowed with tel- escopic power. We can see very well (the proofs are ASCENSION DAY. 151 very abundant about sleep-walking people) without ever opening our material eyes, and so can we hear. St. Paul heard the words our Lord uttered out of the unseen world, on that memorable day before Damascus, while those around him heard only sounds. Do you ask what we know about this world into which our Lord has withdrawn ? The Scrip- ture figures about it — pearly gates, golden streets, seas of glass, and so on — convey merely the impression that human words are inadequate to describe its glory. They give no definite idea. One sentence of our Lord about it is, however, quite plain. He says it is a place of many mansions; which must mean a place with different planes, different states, different spheres, so that the con- ditions in that world are as varying as in this. How could it be otherwise ? Every hour hundreds of spirits are pouring into it from this side, all different, no more fitted to be together there than here. Each one must go to his appropriate place; and there is ever progress and ever evolution, and (blessed comfort) our Lord Himself prepares the place for His children, and leads them to it at their death. CHARACTER THE SOURCE OF TRUE CHURCH PROGRESS. WHEN we want to judge of the outcome or the utility of any society or organization among men, we do not, as a rule, go to the consti- tution and by-laws of the society to find out what its purposes are. We ought to do that. It is only fair that we should, but we do not. We make up our judgment from the members, from their walk and conversation. If we see them, as a general thing, the better for belonging to the society in which they are so prominent, we are apt to form a good opinion of the society; but if we see no improvement we are likely to conclude that the society does not accomplish its purpose. Of course the published principles of the society are very greatly taken into account. When we know an association to be called, " The Jolly Good Fellows," and its open purpose to be the cultivation of con- viviality, we do not expect to find its members models of temperance and quiet living. When, however, an organization proclaims loudly that it has for its aim and object the improvement of CHARACTER THE SOURCE OF TRUE CHURCH PROGRESS. 153 character, the raising the tone of daily life, and when we see the rank and file of that society not showing the least improvement in character, and content with a very low standard of daily life, we have a certain right to say : I do not care to know much about the laws of that society; whatever they are, the members are not governed by them at all, and their membership has not improved them in any way. Theoretically, I repeat, this is not what we ought to do ; practically, it is always done, and neither you nor I can change it. Now the same mode of treatment is applied to that great society to which we belong, the Church of Christ. The Church, of course, rests upon the life of Christ as laid down in the Word of God. The teachings of the Lord Jesus are proclaimed to be its teachings. It exists to improve humanity ; to be the channel by which divine grace is conveyed to men, so that theymaynot have to fight unaided, and therefore in vain, the world, the flesh, and the devil. Its reason of being is to draw men nearer to God, and to lessen the selfishness human beings ordinarily display. These principles of the Church are found in the Bible, and are set forth in creeds, confessions, and liturgies ; but as a general thing, men do not investigate these documents, but form their judgment of the Church from the Churchmen and women. They will not even read history and see what splendid specimens of men and women the Church has produced ; but make up their minds from the Christians around them, whom they meet every day in business and in society. Now I repeat 154 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. that this is not quite fair;btit we will have to take things as we find them, and recognize that the influence of the Church upon the world will be determined, not so much by getting men to inves- tigate its claims, as by what they see of the char- acter and life of its adherents. I might set forth in the most lucid and eloquent way the great doc- trines of Christianity ; I might picture my Redeem- er's life and sacrifice in the most moving terms ; I might describe the joys of heaven and the pains of hell as never man did before me ; it would not pro- duce half the effect upon outsiders that would be produced by the sight of a church full of men and women really practising love, meekness, gentleness, faith, joy, and every other form of unselfishness; doing business in the fear of God ; mingling in unity with a view to mutual help and ennoblement ; enjoying without excess and without sin, the joy- ousness of life, ever bearing in mind their sonship to God and their brothership to men ; striving to carry out as far as erring men can carry out, the model set them in the life of Jesus. Since this is so, what a tremendous responsi- bility falls upon ever3 r Church member ! His great object must be, not the getting himself into heaven, or just shaving the gate of hell; but the so living that men may be led, seeing his unselfish and uplifting life, to conclude, "I, too, will try that way. It helps all those people who are of the same cla3 r that I am, surely it will help me." You think that the reason why the Church does not win more people is because she is so hampered by the attacks CHARACTER THE SOURCE OF TRUE CHURCH PROGRESS. 155 of infidels and the obstinacy of error and igno- rance ; but I tell you that while these all may be pebbles which impede the smooth flow of the river, the great rock which chokes the water, makes it foam and eddy, and bars navigation, is the ordinary life of the ordinar\' Christian. Men have often said to me: "I remain outside the Church, not because the doctrines are often so incomprehensible; not because of any great sin which I am unwilling to give up ; not because I do not want to serve God; but because I doubt, judging from what I know of the Church people around me, whether it would be of any benefit to me to take the Church vows." What answer can you make to this, unless you can instantly point to many and many a life known to the objector, which gives evidence of the hallowing effect of Christianity, and which shows the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit? The moment the Church life sinks so low that we must remain dumb when we are asked to show in the world around us people who are the better for the Church and for Christ, that moment marks the end of the Church as a factor in the elevation of the race. But such a moment has never struck, even in the darkest hours of the Church's history. There always has been, and there are now, numberless examples of what the following of Christ could do for men. The parish that is without them is a disgrace to its Lord. Remember, then, that if you want the Church to spread, you, yourself, must live your part of the true Christian life. MEANING OF WHITSUNDAY. IN our Prayer Book, Whitsunday is written as one word, except in the Octave, when we find Whitsun-week. This rather confuses the deriva- tion, but I will give you your choice of three, for doctors disagree as to which is the right one. Some contend that the word ought to be Whitsun- day, and the Whitsun is got in this way : Pente- cost, in German, Pfingsten ; old German, Whing- sten ; old English, Whitsun ; or } r ou may prefer White Sunday, so-called from the robes of the candidates for Baptism, Whitsunday having been anciently a great day for baptizing; or you may incline to Wit-Sunday, as marking the da}- on which the "wit," or wisdom of the spirit was given to man. This last one is very taking. In the Roman Church it is called Pentecost, and the Sundays which we call Sundays after Trinity, are called Sundays after Pentecost. But no matter how you get the word, the day commemorates the coming of divine wisdom into the hearts and lives of the Apostles of Christ, which took place when they were all together in a MEANING OF WHITSUNDAY. 157 room on the Jewish Feast of Pentecost. A strong wind shook the room, a namelike tongue (a lam- bent flame) hovered over each head, and every one there was filled with a sense of holy inspiration, and they began to speak with other tongues, just as the Holy Spirit guided them to do. This being entirely a supernatural occurrence, could only be perfectly explained by a supernatural person ; and all that I can do will be to tell you what some of it means to me. The wind and the flame seem appropriate marks to me of the coming of a new time, the beginning of a new life, the first step on the splendid ladder of liberty, which even yet is not half mounted. Such an event called for some striking outward sign. When such events occur in a nation's history there are salutes from a hundred guns ; there are tempests of applause ; there is great excitement. So when this great event happened in the kingdom of God, He marked it by awful signs of His own, so that those who saw it never could forget it, and never could confuse the inspiration of genius with that inspiration. There is an inspiration of genius. There were clever men in Moses' flock who drew plans for the decoration of the tabernacle. The Bible says the}- were inspired. It says Samson was inspired with courage when he met and slew thirty men at Ashkelon. It says David was an inspired player, and the same thing can be said now. It was an inspiration that flashed into Newton's mind the law of gravitation. The great poets are inspired. Raphael painted by inspiration. This peculiar 158 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. gift of God distinguishes the genius from the ordinary man. Study and wealth and place could never teach men such things. The}' are inspired to do them. Then there are higher kinds of inspira- tion, and this recorded here is the highest of all, the inspiration of men of little education and narrow Jew minds with the great plan of salva- tion, the Gospel of Christ; inspiring them to tell it everywhere, to tell it right, to tell it convincingly, to tell it so that generation after generation of men could take it to their hearts, and themselves catch this same inspiring spirit which will enable them to rise out of the dust of appetite and sin, into a clearer air of high resolve and noble achieve- ment. Certainly the day which the Hoiy Spirit of God chose that He might breathe Himself in this glorious way into the hearts of men, might well have been marked out by those great symbols of inspiration — wind, blowing now gently,now firmly, as the Spirit does, invisible as the Spirit is ; and fire which burns and tries and lights up in the material w^orld, as the Spirit does in the immaterial. But the tongues with which it is said they spake, what does that mean ? Now if I should undertake to tell you all that the old Fathers and the young fathers have imagined it meant, this five-minute talk would have to be stretched into a five-month talk, and you would not know much more at the end than you know now. I am inclined to think that you and I had better take the common sense view of it, that it means just what it says ; that the men who were in that MEANING OF WHITSUNDAY. 150 room went out in the street and preached, and that either every man who heard them, understood what they said, or that they spake, some one, some another, language, so that groups recogniz- ing their own language, soon gathered around the man who was speaking it, and were able, with that pleasure a man in a strange land always feels at hearing his own tongue, to follow the speaker. . & ^.v, ~ .. ~ "~"& 1 have never been able to decide for myself whether the miracle was in the hearers or the speakers. There is not one word in Scripture to tell us whether this gift was a lasting one or not. In the account of the labors of the Apostles, it is never said the\- made use of it. As they worked in regions where Greek was the general language, they did not much need it. But however that may be, this Whitsunday preaching was a wonderful sign that all men are one in the speech and tongue of Jesus Christ. THE EMBER DAYS. WHAT do Ember Days mean, and what should we do on them ? There are four sets of Ember Da}^, occurring on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the first Sunday in Lent, after Whitsunday, after Sept. 14th, and after Dec. 13th, corresponding to spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The name " Ember" is probably a corrupted form of the Latin words, Quatuor Tempora, the four seasons. This in Ger- man was shortened into Quatember, and in Eng- lish into Ember. It means the four times in the year when Churchmen are to fast and pray for God's blessing on that particular season of the 3^ear. These times began to be fully observed in Italy about the 5th century, and not until much later outside of that country. They do not exist at all in the calendar of the Eastern Church. In the whole Western Church, however, they have gradually come to be the stated times for the ordaining of priests and deacons, and it is this fea- ture on which we now lay particular stress in the keeping of the Ember Days. If you look in your THE EMBER DAYS. 161 Prayer Book you will see in the Occasional Pray- ers, two very beautiful prayers which are to be used in the ' ' weeks preceding the stated times of ordination," meaning the Ember times. Unless your priest was careless, or you yourself were pay- ing little attention, 3^ou must often have heard these prayers on the four Sundays in the year which follow or precede the Ember days; and if there is a dairy service in \^our parish, and you go to it, on the Ember days themselves. It does not follow that only at those times can priests and deacons be ordained, for there is no morning in the year when it could not be done ; but there are stated times — stated so that the whole Church may be praying together that God's bless- ing may so guide the Bishops and pastors of the flock that they may not lay hands suddenly (that is, without due consideration) on any man, but may faithfully and wisely make choice of fit per- sons to serve in the sacred ministry of the Church ; and also to pray that God's grace and benediction may be given to those ordained, that both by their life and doctrine they may show forth God's glory and set forward the salvation of all men. It is a very grand and inspiring thought that at certain four times in the year in every Episcopal and Roman Catholic church, the priest and the people are putting up common supplications for those who are to take on themselves the trials, the duties, the joys, of the sacred ministry. Trials, because the scanty salaries, the small effect of all their labors, the huge mountains of sin ever confronting 162 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. them, are trials ; duties, for what duty can be so weighty and so absorbing as the care of souls ; and joys, because there is no higher, nobler, purer joy than that of being useful, of having one's whole life consecrated to the bettering the life of your fel- lows, and being the channels by which God has chosen to convey sacramental grace and help to the faithful. Have you ever thought at the Ember times, of your especial connection with them, and that you were called upon^to add your voice to the prayer for those to be ordained ; and that you were bound up in the great net of the Apostolic Succession, Bishop after Bishop, priest after priest, succeeding one another as Ember days succeed to Ember days? Lay people in the American Church are very apt to forget how closely they are connected with every ordination that takes place. You think it is an affair which only concerns Bishops and priests, but you are very much mistaken. No Bishop, priest, or deacon, can be brought to ordi- nation in our Church without laymen playing a most important part in it. Among the papers which it is absolutely necessary for a young man wishing to be ordained deacon to present to the Bishop, is a certificate from the vestry of his par- ish, all laymen, and from the Standing Committee, composed of clergymen and laymen. When a deacon wishes to be a priest, he again must have the lay signatures of the Standing Committee, and before a Bishop can be consecrated, Standing Com- mittees, equally with his peers, must consent to it. THE EMBER DAYS. 163 You see then how intimated the lay element is bound up with the Ember days ; and it ought to make you very careful, in the first place, what ves- trymen 3'ou elect, since they may at any time be called upon to recommend some one for Holy Orders ; and in the second place, to make you very earnest in your prayers for the guidance of your Bishop in choosing men, for ultimately the choice rests with him and he does not pretend to be infal- lible, and also for the candidate that he may not lightly and unadvisedly take on himself the awful responsibilities of the priesthood. Unless a man loves his priestly office, not for worldly advantage, or for the social rank it gives him, but for the opportunities it offers fordoing good to men, I can imagine no drearier life than his must be. I once knew a priest who had taken Orders to please his father and mother, and for certain temporal advantages, and he told me he felt like a convict with a ball and chain around his leg. He was not a hypocrite, and he knew that he was in a false position, but he had not the courage to leave it, and lived and died an unhappy and discontented man. Pray for your Bishop, and for all the clergy, but especially for your own parish priest, not only on Ember days, but on all days. No men need prayer more and crave it more, and none will be more grateful for it. THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. ANYONE who is not an expert theologian hesi- tates in regard to writing anything about the great doctrine of the Trinity, for fear of a hue and cry being raised against him that he is a Sabellian or a Monophysite, or a Monothelite, or something of the sort. Do you ask me to explain those big words ? I do not think it best to do so, for fear you might think you were one ; just as young medical students when they read about diseases, are very apt to imagine they have all the symptoms themselves. Of course if you should happen to be one of those things you could not be burned or choked for it as your ancestors were, but you would have to hear a great deal of bad language about yourself. I hope that you are, as I am, a good Orthodox Trinitarian, and say with all your heart your Litany and }'our Glorias, and indulge in no useless speculations. I came to this conclusion long ago. The whole Church once investigated the Scrip- ture doctrine of the nature of God to its very depths ; years were spent on it. The noblest minds THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 165 in the Christian Church gave it the whole wealth of their intellect. Great councils of the Church, in which the whole Christian world was either repre- sented, or which that world afterward accepted, pronounced upon it. Nothing new in the way of proof can possibly now be said about it, and I am perfectly willing and glad to abide by their decisions. All that they could do was to state what the Apostles and Evangelists had written, and the conviction of the early Christians as to the meaning of what they said. They could not explain the doctrine, for the simple reason that man cannot explain God. A horse can understand certain traits about humanity, that man is master, that he is gentle or cruel, that he must look to him for food, shelter, etc.; but how little a horse can understand of that wonderful thing, the body, the soul, the spirit of man. So I, a man, being made in the image of God, can understand, to some degree, some of His attributes, His power, His glor_v, His fatherly care, His sympathy; but how little I know of the whole awful being of God, what He is, His nature, His essence. All that }^ou or I can do is to accept the statements of God's Word as interpreted by God's Church from the earliest ages, and believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, Three Persons in one Godhead, feeling all the while that we are expressing ourselves only in the best possible words human skill could furnish for the statement of unfathomable things, and with very great 166 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. tolerance for those who feel they must use other terms in speaking about God. But while we may not be able to understand fully the nature of God, there are many thoughts and many illustrations which are very useful in helping us to understand it better than we do. Let us talk about them a little. Do not let the argument that a Holy Trinity implies something contrary to reason have the least effect upon you. Very few thoughts will show you that the doctrine of a Holy Unity is not a bit more reasonable. Unitarians say of God that He is omnipresent. Can you comprehend a Deity being in all places at the same time, omniscient? Is it at all in the power of your mind to understand a person know- ing the past, the present, and the future all at once? So you see that the idea of God in one Person is not one whit easier to comprehend than the idea of God in three Persons. It is not very difficult for you to grasp the idea of God your Father, that He is not a cold, cruel destiny, wield- ing a sceptre of changeless purpose, but a dear parent who loves His children and does all that He can do (limiting Himself as He has by granting them free-will) to make them good, obedient, and therefore happy. But when we try to think of this God we must think of Him as a man, because our minds can only think of an intelligent being in that way. You can, as the Scripture writers often do, use figures, a sword coming out of His mouth, and rays out of His hand ;but you feel that all that THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY. 167 is figurative, and your mind will run back to the idea of a man of awful power and glory. Now just think how admirably the doctrine of God the Son born of the Virgin, fits in with thatne- cessity of human thought. In the light of the Trin- ity you raise your e} r es to the figure of your dear Lord clothed with this humanit\^, but perfect God, your Brother and your Redeemer. Then when the whisper thrills through your soul, "Do this ! " "Do not do that ! " you cry to yourself, " It is the inspir- ing Spirit of God," and so in the light of the Trinity again you kneel before God the Spirit. You will find that these three thoughts of God as the Father, as the Man, as the indwelling Spirit, and yet one invisible God, who cannot be lessened, and who cannot share His place with another, are really the exhaustive thoughts we men can have about God. You will find in your own nature a wonderful illustration of the three in one. You must recog- nize in yourself the physical man, living the animal life, the intellectual man, exploring the universe and day by day making greater progress, and the man of feeling who loves, who hates, who sympa- thizes ; and yet all these co-exist in the same man, three and } r et one. Sometimes one of these persons acts and sometimes another, but no one can act without the other two. You see how they are separated, and you see how they are interwoven; so is it with the persons of the Godhead. ST. LUKE. LET us talk a little about St. Luke. A great many people always consider him one of the Apostles, but he was not, and it is not even certain that he was one of the seventy disciples . Indeed, it seems most probable that he was one of St. Paul's converts, and he certainly was his constant and affectionate companion. He implies that he was not an eye witness of Jesus' life, but that he "had perfect understanding of all things from the very first." The proper title for him is "Evangelist," which means a writer or letter of the evangel, or Gospel, or good tidings. He also wrote the Acts of the Apostles. Do you ask how we know one man wrote both? Why, from the same reasons that we know Dickens wrote both the Curiosity Shop and Pickwick Papers ; because the style, the words chosen, the tone, is the same. A Greek scholar easily concludes that one man wrote the two books, from the very first ascribed to St. Luke. He was brought up a doctor, and St. Paul calls him, in one place ' ' the beloved physician ; ' ' but that of itself would not prove him to have been any ST. LUKE. 169 higher in station than the Apostles, for in those times many doctors were slaves ; but it is evident from his writings that he had been more carefully educated than St. Peter or St. John. Tradition says that he was a painter, and I have seen one or two pictures he is said to have painted. If his doctoring was no better than his painting, his patients were to be pitied. He is not mentioned many times in the sacred narrative, but just the few times that his name occurs tell us more about him and show up his character better than a big book w T ould, stuffed full of commonplaces. An artist can, with a few strokes of the brush, put before you a truer conception of a face than a tyro laboring for weeks could ever do. Let us notice these two or three little points, and see how grand a man they depict, and how much we can learn from him and are indebted to him, entirely independent of the priceless debt we owe him in having left us such treasures in his books. Once St. Paul, writing to his pupil and adopted son, St. Timothy, laments his loneliness, and speaks of some who had gone away, and he adds the words : " Only Luke is with me." Now we immediately judge from that, St. Luke to have been a fearless and steadfast man. He was not afraid of sharing St. Paul's imprisonment; he was not afraid of Roman dungeons, and all the trials which menaced Christians then when they were hated and despised, and considered just what we consider anarchists now, as enemies to the State. He stuck by his friend, and that is the kind of 170 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. friend we want. A real friend is one who, no matter whether we are in jail or out of jail, still holds our hands and still remains by our side. Then in his letter to the Colossians St. Paul calls St. Luke "the beloved physician." Now of course he may be thinking of his own debt of gratitude to St. Luke. St. Paul, you know, was a man in quite delicate health ; and it was a great comfort to him to have always near him a skilled doctor like St. Luke. It was enough to make him love him. This epithet, however, was one which St. Paul evidently knew those to whom he was writing would understand when he called his doctor "beloved." That was the way, doubtless, in which people generally spoke of him ; and is there any body who is more loved in a family than a truly sympathetic and competent doctor? I have had, as president of a large hospital, a great deal to do with doctors; and while they have weaknesses (no more than priests have), I wish to say that I have never found any body of men more unselfish and more eager to help humanity. A doctor does more charitable work, and gives more time to the poor than any other man ; and I have been often greatly touched to see the hours on hours of the most exhausting labor which a doctor, whose time was gold, would give to some poor colored girl who could not pay a cent. Do not sneer, as the devil did when speaking about Job, and say : "He does it to get more skill, and because it is an interesting case." He does it nine times out of ten because he wishes to relieve suffering, and that is a trait in ST. LUKE. 171 which he draws very near his Lord. That St. Luke had the pet name of ' the beloved physician " speaks volumes for him, and shows him to have been a man of sympathy and skill, a loving, kind- hearted, and genial doctor; and there are no better citizens and companions than that sort of plrysicians. But there is still another hint about St. Luke which still more strongly brings out his portrait. The second Epistle to the Corinthians was written from Philippi by Titus and Luke (St. Paul, remem- ber, rarely wrote, his eyes were weak, and he generally dictated), and St. Paul, speaking of Titus, speaks of his companion as "the brother whose praise is in the Gospel throughout the churches." Now I have read a great many laudatory articles about men, filling columns ; but I do not think that if St. Paul had written such an article, he could have said more than in those few words. If I heard that all the churches praised a clergyman, I should conclude that he had eloquence, tact, sincerity, faith, logical ability, zeal, and adaptation ; and when you give those to the quali- ties I have already mentioned, courage, steadfast- ness, sympathy and skill, you have about as good a pattern of a man as can be turned out. Church hospitals are often and very properly called after him. May the diseases of our souls, as the Collect says, be healed b} r the wholesome medicine of St. Luke's doctrine. ALL ANGELS. THE feast of St. Michael and All Angels is with us now, and it is the right time to talk a little about the holy angels. Even if we did not find a word in Scripture about intelligent beings between God and man, our own reason would lead us to conclude that there were such beings. As we look from ourselves down the line we see a wonderful succession of living creatures, decreasing gradually in intelligence, until a simple cell of life is reached ; and we would reason from that, that also upward, in an ever-increasing mental and spiritual expansion, must rise the chain of glorious existences toward the unapproachable majesty of God. The Christian doctrine of evolution has brought out a more magnificent conception of the whole universe of God than was ever before imagined. But wholly apart from logical conclusions, we believers in the revealed Word of God, find stated there, in the clearest and most distinct terms, not only the existence of angels, but revelations as to their nature, their functions, their connection with ALL ANGELS. 173 us. We must not conclude that because they have appeared in human form to men, therefore they were once men. They are obliged to take that form when visible to us, because any other form is repulsive and would only shock us. Two or three times in Scripture spiritual beings are described to us with animal parts ; head of an ox, six wings, eyes within and without, and we can make nothing of such descriptions. Angels have their own form, but we do not know what it is ; nor could our mortal eyes probably bear to look upon it. It is very absurd to have children sing, "I want to be an angel," for we men want to be raised from the dead with the spiritual body which belongs to glorified humanity, and in the next world we want to be glorified men and women. Our dear Lord did not "take on Himself the nature of angels," but the nature of men; and we are His brethren, and we want to be, as Scripture says, "like Him." And now let us see what the Holy Scriptures tell us about angels. I will not give texts, for they would take up too much room ; but I will try not to state anything for which there is not Scripture warrant. While angels are not men, the difference between them and us is not one of kind, but one of degree. They are not hampered with flesh as we are, but they possess the same attributes that we do, truth, faith, love, etc. As they are created beings their nature is finite, and therefore subject to temptation; and it is distinctly told us that 174 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. angels have fallen before temptation, have "left their first estate" and are now "angels of the devil." Nothing is told us as to how they fell; and all the common notions about that, and much else about angels, come from Milton's "Paradise Lost," a book that has greatly confused and corrupted our ideas of the whole unseen world. You must take care to separate between its imagin- ings and the guarded statements of Scripture. Not much is said in the Bible about the office of the angels in the heavenly world. It seems to be one of perpetual adoration and praise of God ; and painters have loved to picture their glorious ranks with white wings waving, and beautiful faces aglow with reverence. It is all right to think of the great angelic company in this way, but remem- ber it is imagination, not doctrine. Very clear statements are made in Scripture regarding the connection of angels with nature; not the manner of the connection is told us, but the simple fact. We read of an angel who has power over fire, and of others who hold the winds of the earth. An angel's descent caused the earth- quake at our Lord's tomb ; an angel smites Herod and annihilates the armies of Assyria; and one was seen by David with outstretched hands poised over Jerusalem, ready to send in the plague if so commanded. The rabbis carried this idea to the most absurd lengths, and taught that every dis- ease had its angel; but I have stated only the words of the Bible about the link between the spirits of the air and the world of nature. It is in ALL ANGELS. 175 the connection of angels with men that we are chiefly interested, and both Old and New Testa- ments have much to say about that. Often did they guide Abraham and Jacob and Lot and other patriarchs ; and you will remember how the eyes of Elisha's servant were opened, so that he saw a whole array of them camping around the little town where his master dwelt. They announced the birth of Christ ; when He was hungry after His temptation they came and gave Him food; and they did the same in the garden at the agony. They told men of His resurrection and ascension. It is expressly said that angels are all " ministering spirits sent forth from God to do service for us who are heirs of salvation;" and from these words and from our Lord's own statement, that the angels of children stand very near God's throne, it has always been a pious belief in the Church that every person has his own guardian spirit. The Church of Rome makes this a doctrine ; our Church does not, but she thoroughly allows the belief, and it has been and is held by her most spiritually minded children. Our Church teaches in the Collect for All Angels' Day, that angels " succor and defend us on earth ;" and in the Sanctus, when we say at every Communion, "with angels and archangels and all the glorious company of heaven we laud and magnify Thy glorious name," she teaches us that a great company of spirits invisible is present and worshipping with us. When we are penitent, angels rejoice over us, and when we die, angels carry us, as they carried Lazarus, into Paradise. 176 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. Angels also are to take a great part in the judg- ment. We are forbidden expressly to worship them, but we ought to think much about them and bless God for their aid and sympathy. Men may desert us, but Christ and the holy angels never will. ST. SIMON AND ST. JUDE. THE 28th of October is the festival of St. Simon and St. Jude. Who was Simon and who was Jude, and why are they put together ? There were two Simons among the twelve Apostles; Simon Peter, and this Simon who is generally distin- guished by the title, "the Cananite," or " Zelotes." Our Bible spells the word, " Canaanite," which would lead one to think that it means he came from Canaan; but the revised version more cor- rectly spells it "Cananite," and then a scholar knows immediately that it is the same word as "Zelotes," one being the Chaldee, and the other, the Greek, for "Zealot ; " and showing that Simon was a member of the sect of Zealots, a Jewish sect in our Lord's time, noted for its fanatical patriotism. There are half a dozen Simons, you will remem- ber, in the New Testament, besides these two Apostles: Simon Magus, Simon the Tanner, Simon the Leper, Simon of Cyrene, Simon, the father of Judas Iscariot, and Simon the Pharisee. I was well aware of all the difficulties (too long to discuss here) about his family and his relation to 178 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. our Lord, but it seems quite probable that he was the son of Alphaeus or Cleopas (the same man), and our Lord's cousin. We do not know one single thing about him from Scripture, except that he belonged to the Zealots, and they were all fanatics. It shows how our Lord used all kinds of men. We often laugh at fanatics, but a great deal of the fine work of the world has been done by them. If it had not been for fanatics, this would still be aland of slavery, nor would the frightful evil of drink ever have been so impressed on the public mind. A fanatic, trained as Simon was by our Lord, must have been a wonderfully ardent, enthusiastic man who had the courage of his convictions. A fanatic who has learned some wisdom is one of the most valuable helpers you can have in any cause. There were also two Judes or Judases among the Apostles : the infamous Judas Iscariot, and this one who had two other names, Lebbaeus and Thaddseus ; Lebbaeus probably referring to Lebba, the town of his birth, and Thaddaeus only another form of Judas, both coming from the same Hebrew word, "to praise." There is very little probability that this Judas was the one who wrote the Epistle of St. Jude. Of that Jude we know very little, except that he was the brother of James, the Bishop of Jerusalem, and perhaps our Lord's cousin. The word "brother" was used among the Jews, as it is now in Eastern communities, to denote a far wider relationship — cousins and brothers-in-law, and nephews. You will see the phrase in Scripture, "our Lord's brother," and you are at liberty, if ST. SIMON AND ST. JUDE. 179 you choose, to think that these were actual broth- ers of our dear Lord ; but the whole Church has always piously thought that the Blessed Virgin had but one child, and that these were cousins, the sons of the Virgin's sister, or nephews of Joseph. It is perfectly justifiable to think this, and suits our feelings better. The reason why St. Simon and St. Jude are put together is perhaps the idea, even now held by many, that they were both sons of Alphaeus, and therefore as brothers should go together; but that reason would not apply to SS. Philip and James, who are also put together on one day. A perfectly satisfactory reason is that these two cases of two Apostles together were so arranged on purpose to recall to us the fact that they were sent out, two and two, for the great work of preaching the Gospel. How lonely they would have been other- wise. How considerate of our Lord thus to plan it. Missions ought ever to be conducted in the same way, incommunit}^ several together, whether men or women. The modern plan of sending families has never appealed very strongly to the writer of this paper. He thinks the preachers of the cross in heathen lands should entirely give up all American ideas of life; and in dress, in food, in habits, in houses, conform to the people among whom they are to live. They might be most unpleasant, and utterly preclude the taking of families, but in his opinion it would be much more effective. It must have gone against the grain for the earlv missionaries from Rome to leave all the 180 * FIVE MINUTE TALKS. elegancies of Roman life and go out among the bar- barian tribes in Gaul and Germany, and live as they did ; but the love of Christ constrained them to do it, and so they made those wonderful conver- sions. I recognize the noble and devoted work of our missionaries; it is only a question with me whether we are -working in the best way. To come back to SS. Simon and Jude, as I said, we know nothing of either, but their names. Here are two men who took leading parts in the first preaching of the Gospel, men who were chosen for the best reasons out of other men, by our Lord Himself; and yet they are plunged in perfect obscur- ity, while we know even the baby words of fourth and fifth-rate generals and base-ball players. Nor are their cases peculiar. Newman says in one of his sermons that we do not know who first planted corn, or who first tamed a horse; and yet what two things have more greatly benefitted man? Who first imagined that the downy seed substance of a certain plant could be woven into clothes ? And yet that idea revolutionized dress, and was so pro- lific a one, that the whole world, if his name were known, would set apart a day to his memory. How this shows that not those about whom trumpets are blown and volumes written, are the greatest benefactors of their race; that often in secret and silence, as God works, are the most tremendous results accomplished. However, fame, in the great majority of cases, soon passes; but these names are written forever in the book of God. What matter if human history ignores them? ALL SAINTS' DAY. ALL Saints' Day, Nov. 1st, is one of the most glorious festivals in the Church year. Next to the four great feasts, it has always come the closest to my heart. It came into prominence in the Western Church about the beginning of the 7th century, when Pope Boniface IV. conceived the grand idea of turning the Pantheon, a noble build- ing still standing in Rome, built in honor of all the heathen gods, into a Christian church, consecrated to the honor of all the Christian saints, the Blessed Virgin at the head. He set apart Nov. 1st as a day for their especial commemoration ; and never from that time in that church have they ceased to be honored, and the influence of that festival has spread over the whole Western Church. The East- ern Church observes the same thing on a different day. The word "saint" has changed its meaning several times. In the New Testament, generally, it merely means the whole body of Christians, good and bad together. St. Paul writes to the " saints at Ephesus," meaning the whole congregation; and 182 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. we read of " collections for the saints" and of " saluting the saints." Then in Revelation St. John evidently means by the word, the martyrs, and in that sense he calls Jesus "King of the saints." This was the meaning long attached to the word in the Church, but gradually it became the designation of every person remarkable for holiness, no matter whether he had suffered mar- tyrdom or not ; and it is in that sense we alwa} r s use the word now. We mean by " saint " a person of such spirituality, such unselfishness, such pure and holy life, that he or she stands out pre-eminent from the crowd of the ordinary servants of God. The Church of Rome has a process for making saints, and formally putting them in the kalendar ; but it is too long to describe here. Our Church has no such form, but it would not be a bad idea to have it declared by some authorized body that on account of the eminent usefulness and holiness of such a man or woman, it was allowable to com- memorate those on a certain fixed day. We have days to keep in memory of Washington and Lin- coln ; there is no reason why we should not have days to freshen the recollections of some of our eminent Church people whose works and whose example have been an inspiration to thousands, both in their lives and after their deaths. We will probably come to that. We are not at all likely to fall into the common Roman error of forgetting our Lord in a devotion to some favorite saint. Any one who has travelled much abroad must have noticed that, whatever Roman writers mav say in ALL saints' day. 183 regard to their teaching as against any such doc- trine, the practice of the common people is surely in that direction. It is a glorious picture, that which opens before us when we think of the great army of the saints, and it is such a comforting thought. You see so mam' half-and-half Christians, so many eaten up with selfishness, so many falling by the way, so much falseness and sin staining the Church every- where, that it does oneimmense good to turn away from it all, and think of the thousands on thou- sands now at rest who lived in this same Church such lives of holiness, devotion to others, sublime faith, dauntless courage, that men agreed without a word of dissent to call them saints. Out of the Church constantly that array is reinforced; and whatever you may, on superficial grounds, think of the Church, it has ever been and is now, the nursery of the highest virtues. If the Church could show such products all along the ages, why not now ? Surely she is a thousand times purer than she was some centuries ago, and yet never did saints fail even in her darkest days. It is just so now; everywhere and in every village there are choice souls all on fire with love to God, all absorbed in the good of men, who are getting ready for sainthood. They do not think so, for they are not pluming themselves on their holiness, but are constantly bewailing their imperfections ; but God knows who they are, and their own Lord is getting their places ready. They are the salt of the Church and of the earth. 184 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. But you will say : "I never can be one." Why not ? The saints were of the same clay that you are. They had the same passions you have, and when we look into their lives we find that they fell into the same mistakes and sins which marked other people. They were no peculiar creations, but they made the object of their lives the service of God and of their fellow-men; and gradually that intense passion swallowed up their lower natures and took possession of their lives, so that they only lived for that. It is possible, if you have the courage, and will prayerfully stick to the struggle, for you to do the same. The saints were from all stations of life; some were kings and queens, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis, St. Margaret; some were soldiers, St. Alban, St. Martin, St. Sebastian; some were sweet young girls, St. Lucy, St. Cecilia ; some were Bishops, Chrysostom, Cyprian; some were servants, like the English Sarah Martin, or the French woman who founded the Little Sisters of the Poor. It makes no difference to God, for holiness is a great republic. I do not allow myself on All Saints' Day to include in my thanksgiving only the saints who were in the Church. I thank God then for every good, and true, and unselfish life, in every creed, and in spite of the errors of that creed. Poor must your lineage be, if you can remember none of 3^our own name and your own blood. HOW TO ENJOY RICHES. I AM going to ask the question : " Do you know how to be rich?" You need not burst into inextinguishable laughter and cry, "Any fool would know that." Any fool might, but you are not confessedly a fool, and the question is worth your consideration. A very rich man said to me once: "I do not really know how to be rich and enjoy my riches. I was brought up in a very plain way, and had to look, for many years, long at a sixpence before I spent it, and I cannot get used to pa}dng out money for a thousand things which I see other rich people find necessary and pleasant. It seems wasteful and extravagant to me. Nor can I accustom myself to very liberal giving. I do not wish to be mean, but it seems to me as if I would be doing wrong to give away as much as I see people doing who are not as rich as I am. I do not understand it, and to do the like would be to me positively painful and unnatural." Now, the man who said this was a most excellent and worthy man ; and whilel pitied him as I would 186 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. pity a blind man living amid lovely sights, I felt the truth of what he said, and that a certain education, a certain training, was really necessary to enable a rich man thoroughly to enjoy his riches. A lesson easily learned, you say ; but how- ever that may be, I notice that a good many rich men do not learn it. There is nothing wrong in riches, and whenever you hear a preacher say so, just whisper to yourself: " Nonsense, he would grab at riches in a moment, if he had the chance." It is the fashion now to abuse rich men and nag at them, and it makes many who are rich afraid of making any display ; but comfort yourselves with the thought that it is righteous and just and proper that you should have all the comforts and luxuries your riches can procure you, so long as they are not demoralizing luxuries. Extravagance is a relative term, just like econonry. Their mean- ing depends on the man to whom they are applied. It would be mean in a millionaire to haggle about some little expense, or to save his candle ends ; it would be extravagant in a poor man not to do so ; for if he did not, he would be apt to fall into debt. A man has the right to live according to his means ; nay more, if you have a good income, it is your duty to live well. It helps trade ; it makes life more comfortable; it broadens your own views of life, and puts you above those belittling and depressing cheese-parings which poverty often entails. I really do not know any material bless- ing for which a man ought to be more truly thankful, than the feeling that he has an income HOW TO ENJOY RICHES. 187 sufficient to make both ends meet without pinching and stretching. Enjoy life then in a comfortable, happy way, without any compunctions of con- science, if you are rich enough to do so ; though if you have the temperament and the Christian philosophy you will be surprised how much enjoy- ment you can get out of very little. One great good you can get out of riches is to show hospitality with them. Dinner parties and pleasant recreations for those in your station of life are all right and perfectly consistent, but do more than this. I know a rich woman who lives and entertains according to her fortune ; but every week her carriage goes to take some hospital nurses out riding ; or some tired sewing girls are sent to see a good play ; or some old women in an institution are invited to tea ; or some young men, lonely in the great city, are asked to come to a Sunday dinner. I do not know anybody who enjoys a fortune more, or who makes more people enjoy it with her. You can do the same; and believe me, it brings a great deal more happiness than sticking big diamonds in \ r our ears, or sewing lace, at one hundred dollars a yard, on your frocks. Riches enable you to travel, to hearagood talk, to buy good pictures, to enjoy good music, and, in fact, to employ a hundred ways of softening your character and enlarging } r our mind ; but do all this with somebody who cannot afford it, for that will make your own enjoyment infinitely greater. I do not believe 3^ou can get any good at 188 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. all out of riches unless you part with them. What fun can there be in just counting over your bank account and making a new list of your invest- ments? The world is full of good causes that need help; and if you will only take time and study the subject (and there is no more delightful study), really finding out where your money is to go, and what a little timely supply will advance, you will be the happiest man in the world. There is no keener delight than the feeling that you are helping on a noble work ; but just sending a check will not give you that delight. You must know about it, and interest yourself in it. One annoyance all rich men have to bear, and that is, the conclusion arrived at by the people who know your affairs much better than you do yourself, that you ought to give more than you do. It is so easy to arrange what others ought to give; just try to be satisfied with keeping your own account right. Never give one cent which your creditors ought to have, for that is immoral. JUGGLING WITH THE BIBLE. YOU can prove anything you like from the Bible, if you are only smart enough to know how to juggle with words. There never was a queer sect, or heresy, or fad which could not pick you out a fine lot of texts to substantiate its dog- mas. Tobacco was not discovered until mam r centuries after Christ; and yet there is a crank con- stantly publishing tracts against it, full of texts to prove the terrible wickedness of smoking and how sure of eternal punishment it is. I once went with a clerical friend to a Quaker funeral. There was an address, and the speaker wanted to air the peculiar Quaker views against the sacraments, so he said : "St. Paul hated Baptism, did he not say, ' I thank God I baptized none of you V " This was a little too much, and my friend who was burly and big-voiced, roared out so loudly that he could be heard all over the cemetery, the rest of the verse, "except Crispusand Gaius, and I baptized also the household of Stephanas." This threw a coldness over the ceremon3 r , but that way of quoting Scrip- ture still goes on. I heard in my own chapel a 190 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. priest who believes there are just seven sacra- ments, gets them all out of the Lord's Prayer, though the most of us think it rather a stretch of interpretation even to make " Give us this day our daily bread" refer to one of the two our Church teaches as ordinarily necessary to the being in a state of salvation. The seven waterpots at the marriage of Cana have also been made to mean the seven sacraments ; and the two swords which the Apostles had among them at the Last Supper were made to do duty for centuries as proving that both the spiritual and temporal power belonged to the Pope as head of the Church. A priest, not a hundred miles away, was asked once by a woman why it was necessary that all the consecrated wine should be consumed at the altar ; and he told her the Scriptures said : "Drink ye all of this." Now this way of treating God's word has done immense harm. It is just making the Holy Bible like those boxes of letters used for a well-known game. You pick out the letters you want and spell words with them. No doctrine ought even to be put to proof on simple texts sifted out here and there, and strung together without any regard to the context. You will often hear a man called a wonderful Bible preacher when all that he does is to make you up a mosaic of texts, many of which have not the slightest reference to the doctrine before him. Because a verse has the word " faith " in it is no proof that it teaches the doctrine of justification by faith, or illustrates that in any wa3>\ I have heard sermons which did not have JUGGLING WITH THE BIBLE. 191 one word of Scripture in them, except the text ; and yet which brought out the power and the spirit of God's word better than if they had been paved with texts. When you want to clinch a doctrine with a text you must take one about the meaning of which there cannot be any logical controversy. For example, " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Now nothing but the most prejudiced and dis- torted reasoning can make that mean anything else than a clear statement of the divinity of Christ ; but it is not so with that text from Genesis so often used in proof of the Trinity, " Let us make man in our image." That will not hold water for a moment. You cannot prove that there is no change in the condition of a soul after death from the text, "as the tree falleth so shall it lie;" for when you look into the context you see that it has no reference whatever to that subject. Then you must be sure that the original is rightly trans- lated. Not watching this has been a fruitless source of pointless quotations. The Revised Ver- sion knocked the bottom out of many chosen ves- sels of texts which preacher after preacher had used as proofs incontestable of divers doctrines. Remember the devil quoted Scripture, and our Lord in His replies put His divine condemnation on that style of exegesis. The devil's children have quoted it many a time since. As a well-known writer has said: " Tyranny has engraved texts upon her sword, oppression 192 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. has carved texts upon her fetters, cruelty has tied texts around her fagots, ignorance has set knowledge at defiance with texts wo ven on her flag, gin-drinking has been defended out of Timothy, and slavery has made a stronghold out of Philemon." It would be impossible to tell how many pious souls have been kept from Holy Com- munion by that obsolete and misguiding transla- tion, "he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself." The word "damnation" has totally changed its mean- ing, like many other English words. It meant originally, condemnation, blame, but it now means future punishment. The same remarks will apply to the word "hell," which in three cases out of four in the Bible means the grave, not the place of punishment. Any tinker thinks he can quote the Bible glibly, but these few remarks will show with what care, what reverence, what study, text quot- ing ought to be approached. WHY IS THERE EVIL IN THE WORLD? THERE is no question about which people worry so much as the one: "Why is there evil in the world ? Why could not God have made the world good ? " This worry is not confined at all to Christian people; but all over the world, in every creed, and in the past as well as in the present, this question has occupied the mind. There probably never was a child who did not ask its mother why God made the devil. There is one very convenient theory, extensively held in old times, and even by some philosophers now ; that there are two great first principles, one the creator of good, and the other the creator of evil; that these two are eternally fighting for victory, and that in the end the creator of good will triumph. Christians, however, must abhor such a doctrine. There can be only one Creator, only one Supreme Being. God and the devil are not equal, one is the creature of the other. Whatever power evil has, is either necessary from the constitution of things, or permitted, until its errand is accomplished. But after you have said that, the old, old ques- tion will come up. If God be greater than evil, He 194 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. must allow it to be here; why does He do that? Why is it not impossible for us to do evil ? Now the whole mystery of evil is far beyond my power to solve. It is the rock against which all philoso- phy has ever dashed itself in vain ; but for all that there are good, common sense answers to the ques- tions I have stated, which may relieve many minds, and show very plainly why there is evil in the world, and why we are not all good children. Suppose God had made everybody so that it would be impossible to be bad. I do not think it in His power to do that, but just for the moment I will grant that He could, what would we then all be? Why, just machines. A steam engine has to do one way. It has no choice. Its cranks and wheels and pistons are put together to act just so; and unless it break down, it has got to act that way. Animals are practically the same. They live in a prescribed way, and they cannot live in any other way. The}' never reason that it is wrong to sting and claw and choke their neigh- bors. They have no moral sense. We do not blame snakes for poisoning people. No one would arrest a snake and try it, and put it into jail. We all say : Snakes cannot help doing so, they are incapable of sinning. But do you not see, they are also incapable of doing good? The}" cannot, because they have no free- wills, do acts of humanity, of generosit}', of self-sacrifice. The two things go together. If you are capable of doing good, you must be capable of doing evil. If you WHY IS THERE EVIL IN THE WORLD? 195 cannot do evil, you cannot do good. This conies of necessity from free-will. God wished to surround Himself with creatures who could give up self, who could resist tempta- tion, who could give Him voluntary obedience; and to do that, He had to give such creatures free- will. He did not want servants who had to obey whether they would or no. You can judge from your own feelings, for you are made in God's image. What pleasure would there be to you in the company of men who were like a box of tin soldiers? Where they were set up they had to stay. They have no will. They cannot change. You want companions who can of their own choice love you, help you, give up their wills for yours. Much more then must God like that, so He made us free to do evil as well as to do good. If you cannot possibly do evil, you are not free, you are a machine, you are a tin soldier. If you are put in a box, you sta3^ there; if you are bent you cannot straighten yourself. You have no merit in keeping straight and you deserve no praise for keeping your place. Do you not see that to be men as we are, with a power of choice, we must have the power to choose evil ? But could not God have made us with wills which would never will evil ? No, He could not, and have us men ; for the very word " will "implies the abilit} r to choose one of two courses. Remem- ber, there are things God cannot do. When we say He can do all things, we mean all possible things. God cannot make square round, nor two and 196 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. two three, nor good evil ; nor is it in His power to make such a thing as a man without the possibility of that man choosing wrong. It was a dead certainty when God created spirits and men with the power of choice that some among them would choose to disobey. They did choose that way, and evil came into the world. But could not God have shielded us from temptation? Well, He could, just as you could keep a man out of mischief by chaining him to a post ; but you keep him then out of good at the same time ; he cannot do harm, but neither can he do good. If we were to have the power of grow- ing better, of rising higher, of progress, of glorious self-sacrifice, we had to have the power of refusing to do all this. Do you not think that God made just as perfect a man as He could and give him free-will, and do you think this reasoning accounts sufficiently for evil spirits and evil men ? Do not say " free-will then was a bad thing to give us." Why, our free-will has enabled us to do all the splendid things we have done; achievements in art, in culture, in civilization, in moral excellence, in devotion. We would just be like tigers and apes without it. We must take the risks of the evil that comes with it, just as with the glorious sun we take the risks of sunstroke, and drought, and putrefaction. FOR FOURTH OF JULY. LET us think a little of our relations to our country as Christian men and women. It is too often the case that Churchmen forget alto- gether that patriotism is a Christian virtue, and that the duties to the State are insisted upon by the writers of the New Testament with quite as much force as any other duties. We seem to think that a class of persons called politicians are to attend to the State, just as tailors attend to our clothes, and tinkers to our tinware; that these people know all about that business and we can leave it in their hands. The results have been most fearful — corruption, bribery, wild extrava- gance, foolish laws — simply because people without principle have had the management of such things. Now, I contend that it is not only a silly and a very costly mistake in Churchmen to let politics alone, but it is really a sin; a sin because it is selfish and ignores the good of the community, and considers not our neighbor. Just according to our influence, and our position, and our endow- ments, will God hold us responsible for having 198 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. neglected our duties to the State. In some coun- tries, in Turkey, for example, men might be excus- able for letting the State entirely alone. They might say: "We are not consulted about the officials and the law-makers, and so we will not meddle with them, but thank the Lord when they are tolerably decent, get along the best we can when they are rogues, and when things get too bad, try a riot and a revolution." We cannot give this excuse, for God has put in our hands a tremendous power. We can, by a little piece of paper called a ballot, decide directly who shall occupy almost every office in this land, and indirectly every office, for we can choose those who are to appoint to other offices. This power is not restricted to a few of us. The poorest man has it as well as the richest. The black man wields it as well as the white, the illiterate are endowed with it as well as the college professors. I am rather doubtful about the wisdom of this universal suffrage, but that has nothing to do with it ; we have it, and we are responsible for it. Since we and we alone decide who are to make and carry out the laws, we and we alone will be held respon- sible by God for the sort of men we choose. Even if we are deceived in men, as is very likely to be the case, the elections occur so often that we need not have to endure them a great while; we can put others in their places. Never before on such a scale as this, has power been put in the hands of all men. There are no privileged classes in a political sense. The whole population is before us to FOR FOURTH OF JULY. 199 choose, and eligibility to office is almost as exten- sive as the number of electors. I am often amazed to see how lightly we esteem this awful power; a power greater in its conse- quences and its possibilities than electricity or steam. One of the worst features about this is that as we grow better informed and more pros- perous, and attain higher social position, the less we seem to care about using our voting privilege. Englishmen are so dinerent; the greatest nobles and the whole leisured class take an active interest in politics, and give a great deal of attention to them. I think our upper classes are improving, but the case is bad enough, and causes the most serious alarm among thinking men. Do not say that you belong to a party and must vote with that. You are a free man. You can vote as you please, and if your party is tr\4ng to carry an iniquitous measure, you are put in no danger, unless you are an office holder, by leaving it. Even if you were, duty to country is above mere self- ish interest ; it is one of the most sacred duties in the world. Now, I call upon you as Churchmen, as servants of Christ, as under the Spirit, the author of true liberty, to consider carefully the character of the people who are to make the laws, and for whom you are to vote. I do not ask that they shall be Churchmen, but that they shall be honest and clean. I would infinitely rather have a true- hearted secularist for alderman of my ward, than a dishonest and sneaking Churchman. What we 200 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. want are men who fear God and who keep His commandments; who could no more be bribed than the Washington monument, and whom no newspaper could intimidate. They do not need to be college bred, or the owners of fine houses, if they have good, honest common sense, and have the welfare of the community and not their own pockets in consideration. Do not say that such men are too hard to find. Honest men, thank God, are in the ascendant, for if they were not, utter confusion would cover all our business. It may be hard to induce such men to take office ; but that is because the sense of the duty of citizenship is so dull and dormant. By the press and by the pulpit a public opinion must be created which will really force men who can be useful to make the sacrifice of some of their time for the benefit of their city, or their country, or their State; and they ought to be compensated for any loss they may have to sustain in doing so. You certainly can exercise as much care in choosing an alderman, etc., as you would in choosing a business partner, or an administrator for your estate. You cannot shove this off on any Kaiser, grand duke, or high mightiness. In the Providence of God it has been put upon you ; and the way you have attended to it will come in with all the rest of your life at the judgment, and form a more important part of it than you seem to think. WHY DO THE INNOCENT HAVE TO SUFFER? IN answer to the question, "Why God permits evil in the world," I know very well people will say : " Your answer may be a good one, but why do innocent people have to undergo all this pain and suffering ? " " People who do not choose evil, why do they have to suffer evil? Take children, innocent women, good and noble men, and all the brute creation who have no power of choice ; why do they often have to undergo such agonies and bear so much unmerited suffering?" Now just as in the " Origin of Evil, "so in "Pain and Sorrow" there are great depths which the keenest intellect has never been able to fathom ; but if some reasons for the good of suffering can be shown, does it not prove pretty clearly that if we knew enough, other reasons would come to light? that the darkness on the subject comes from our not having eyes keen enough to pierce it ? Let me see whether I cannot give some well-founded answers to the query : " Why do the innocent have to suffer?" In the first place, pain is the best thing in the world to keep us from greater pain. Unless pain 202 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. attached to certain acts we would all die before our time. If a burnt child did not dread the fire, why, it would run into the fire the next chance it got, and perish. The pain keeps it away, and saves it. If I did not get a pain in my stomach from eating wrong food, I would be eating some- thing very bad for me all the time ; and very soon my body would become poisoned, and I would die. Every one soon gets to know that pain is a signal for the stopping of certain things ; so in that way pain is one of our best friends. Then again, if you will run over in your memory the lives of men and women who have been of much use in the world, and are much known, you will probably find that they are people who have had to suffer a great deal, and that suffering has made them greatly what they are. Take Dante ; his life was one of great sorrow and trial, and it gave him an insight into life that nothing else could have done. Suffering develops patience, cheerfulness, unselfishness. I know you will say that it does not always act in that way, that it some- times hardens people, and makes them very bitter. That is true; but you can say of the fire which warms you and cooks your food, that it can destroy your property and burn up your child; that, however, does not controvert the truth that fire is a great blessing. That a good thing is some- times perverted to a bad purpose is no proof against its being a good thing. Our free will is responsible for that. WHY DO THE INNOCENT HAVE TO SUFFER? 203 Then, again, pain and suffering make us a great deal more pitiful and sympathetic. There is an old Latin line which put in English reads: " Not ignorant of suffering, I know how to succor others," and nothing could be truer. If you want S3^mpathy you will not find it in some boy who knows nothing about life, but in some one who has buffeted its waves and tasted its bitter cups. He can enter into your feelings and do you good. Again, I do not believe there ever was developed any very strong, self-reliant character, without suffering. People born with silver spoons in their mouths sometimes amount to something, but it is the exception. It takes adversity, it takes struggle, to make a man evolve his best gifts, and rise to his best usefulness. Darwin says somewhere that he is sure he would not have done half the work he did, if he had not been so troubled with ill health. But the question will be pressed : Why do so many innocent people have to suffer, as for exam- ple, those destroyed by floods or earthquakes, or cholera ? Why do mothers have to undergo the agony of seeing their little innocent children taken from them before they can speak ? Now all nature is under great laws, the winds, the waves, the germs. Certain causes will produce certain effects. Our experience teaches us this, and we feel that unless this were so, unless we could always rely on fire producing heat, and seeds planted producing fruit, life would be perfectly intolerable. If we did not know that we were in a kingdom of laws, how could we transact business, make promises, engage 204 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. in undertakings ? Uncertainty about the seasons, or the effect of this or that process, would paralyze everything. Now if law must prevail, it is per- fectly impossible, without a miracle, to prevent its often hurting innocent people. If the laws of san- itation are so violated that cholera breaks out, why, innocent and good people have to die as well as evil and guilty. If children or their parents violate the laws of health, they must perish, no matter how dear they are. Do you think that exceptions ought to be made in your favor, and that your house in cholera sea- sons ought to be marked by God, so that the angel of the pestilence would pass over it ? Such a thing could not be. If God should break the laws of nature for you, He ought to do it for the next per- son ; and if He kept breaking it for every case, utter confusion would ensue. Just imagine us the vic- tims of chance or caprice. Laws are made to pro- duce the greatest good to the greatest number ; and some have to suffer when they come athwart them. Do not let this keep you from prayer. There is a law for that as for other things ; and as God har- monizes all laws, so He does that, and it works just as all other laws work, under His loving care. HAVING A TRYING DISPOSITION. A WOMAN was lately talking to me about her son who, she said, had such a " trying' ' dis- position. Let us talk a little about this word " trying." What does it mean ? Why, something that makes great demands on the patience, the temper, the courtesy, the religion, of those who have to deal with it. Have you a trying dis- position ? Oh, of course not. You know a large number of people who have, and you wonder how people can live with them, but you are not that kind of a person at all. How fortunate ! But as you love to give advice, you may get some ideas from this paper which you can communicate to the people who are trying, and that will "try" them a little. It does not follow because you are called "try- ing," that you are through and through disagree- able. A man may be very agreeable in very many ways, and in one or two others very trying. Indeed, some of the most trying persons I ever knew in my life, were really very good, spiritually minded, and excellent people. I once knew a man 206 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. thoroughly well bred, filled with zeal, fervent in good works, profoundly religious; and yet there was no one who had anything to do with him for any time who did not find him trying. He seemed never to be able to do anything in the way the majority thought right, and there was always friction and ruffled feathers. A clergyman told me he had a man in his parish respected by every one who knew him, an eminent example of holy living, devoted to the said clergyman and constantly doing favors for him, in fact, his right hand man ; and yet the whole parish put together, even count- ing the ritualistic old maids, who are perhaps the most trying religious things ever created, did not worry and fret the clergyman like that man. He always was wanting things done which the clergy- man knew would be most unwise to do. He would often in very small ways show a disposition to tyrannize. He would listen often to gossip of the rankest character and annoy the clergyman with it. He really spoiled his admirable qualities by a few disagreeable traits. I have no doubt if you had asked him about his rector he would have spoken most lovingly about him, but would have added confidentially: "He is, you know, some- what trying, but I manage to get on with him." I think I hear you say : "No one is perfect, we are all weak, erring human beings ; and the clergy- man of whom you speak ought to have been very thankful that he had such a parishioner, and not to have bothered about his little imperfections. ' ' Well, he was thankful, he loved the man very dearly, but HAYING A TRYING DISPOSITION. 207 that could not blind him to the fact that he could have improved himself greatly. We all love trjdng people, often very much, and they love us who are equally trjdng. But because we all have this infirmity, shall we fold our hands and say : " Nothing can be done to help it. It is just our way and we cannot do any other way?" Hot weather is trying, but you endeavor to find remedies for it. You wear light clothes; you sit in the shade; you avoid exercise and excitement. You can palliate, soften, modify, turn in another direction, a vast number of very annoying things. Surely, it is a Christian's duty to labor at getting the motes out of his eyes, motes which every one about him will certify to being tolerably stout beams. But you reply: "We do not know when we are trying, if we did, we might work at it." Oh yes, you do. Often and often your conscience has whispered to you: " That way of talking and acting is not the right way, it ought to be changed," but you have given no heed. I do not believe that anyone is always thoroughly blind to his faults. It must have occurred some- times even to the Spanish Philip II. that he was hypocritical, selfish, cruel. When you are told by some one intimately connected with you that cer- tain ways you have are very trying ways, do not say to yourself: " Oh, that is just mistaken judg- ment," or "What nonsense to make such a fuss about trifles." Give the matter very serious con- sideration, think over it, pray over it, and, what is more, struggle to get the better of it. Wiry, even 208 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. the most ingrained defects can be overcome by hard work with God's implored help. The miser can become generous; the hot-tempered, patient; the profane, sweet-spoken; the tale-bearer, reticent; the censorious, charitable. Such transformations have been seen millions of times in the world of grace, and in men and women fashioned of the same clay you are. Just as in the physical world, deaf and blind and crippled men have so artfully mastered their weaknesses that they can really accomplish more than hearing and seeing men, so can you in the moral and spiritual world deal with your trying ways until you have really made them the ladders on which you may mount to higher things. Are you " trying" at the table, finding fault with the food, and spoiling all your wife's or your mother's meals by making sharp remarks about everything they have provided ? Some men do that as regularly as they sit down, and seem to think sneering at the food as necessary a condi- ment as salt and pepper. Nothing can be more trying. Have you some little ways of sitting, speaking, dressing, which try your husband, but which you persist in thinking just fanciful in him to fuss about? Anything that annoys others is not a trifle ; and even if the fact that others are annoyed by it is " trying" to you, so much the more should you strive to get rid of it. Trifles make up our lives, and any one can bear with more composure having an arm cut off in fifteen minutes than having pins stuck in it for fifteen years. NON-DOCTRINAL SERMONS. I NOTICE that an association has been formed to supply the public with non-sectarian and non- doctrinal sermons. Now to my mind a sermon that was non-sectarian and non-doctrinal would be worthy of a place in the greatest show on earth. I presume "non-sectarian" means a ser- mon to which neither Methodist, Baptist, Presby- terian, Ethical Culture, Christian Science, Univer- salist,nor Unitarian, could object ; a sermon out of which has been taken anything that could pos- sibly be faulted by any particular division of Chris- tians ; a sermon that could be preached in a joss house as well as a Church, and would be quite as appropriate for the steps of a Japanese temple as the pulpit of a modern meeting house. Such a ser- mon would be very much like a rice pudding, from which had been removed the rice, the sugar, the flour, the salt and the eggs. The residuum would be nil. The ministers who are to write these ser- mons belong to various sects, and honestly profess to hold the views of the sect to which they belong, and to believe that their sect presents the best pos- 210 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. sible exposition of Christianity. How can they with any consistency set forth sermons which utterly ignore the "best possible exposition of Christianity?" Is that fair? Is that honest? Can they do this without juggling with words ? How, for example, could a Baptist or Methodist clergyman urge people to follow Christ and walk in His way, without alluding to Baptism and the Lord's Supper ? And yet these two things are cer- tainly sectarian ; for the Salvation Army, the Y. M. C. A., the Christian Scientists, the Quakers, and many other Christian bodies do not hold these things as at all indispensable in the right follow- ing of Christ. This association of ministers must leave them all out, and yet the sects to which they belong teach in their confessions of faith their absolute necessity as part of the following of Christ. But far funnier than the non-sectarian sermon would be the non-doctrinal one. How I should like to see it ! But alas ! I never can, because it is perfectly impossible that it should exist. Remem- ber, it is to be a Christian sermon, set forth by Christian ministers as an exposition of Christian- ity. It must rest on the belief in one God, all just, all holy, all powerful, all merciful. Certainly noth- ing less than that could express any Christian idea of God ; and yet here immediately we have a doc- trine over which men have fought and disputed and agonized for thousands of years ; but in the plan of these sermons disputed doctrines must be ignored. I would ask how then, in the name of NON-DOCTRINAL SERMONS. 211 common sense, can you, on these terms, lay even the foundations for number one, in the course of non-doctrinal sermons ? It is perfectly natural that all religious doctrine should cause dispute, because religious doctrine is like the doctrine of our family life, or the doctrine of our government ; something that is woven in with our life, and we naturally resent its being disparaged. In times of ignorance we resented it with fire and sword, and we still are using bad and bitter and intolerant language about it. All that was wrong ; but if we have any robust faith at all, we must of necessity protest boldly, strongly, loudly against those who attack it. We would be false to our Captain % Jesus Christ, and chicken-livered soldiers of the Cross, if we did otherwise. Picture to 3'ourself a sermon which did not dare to say for fear of being thought doctrinal, that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous ; or that could only allude to Christ in the most general and milk-and-watery way for fear of treading on the toes of the doc- trines of His nature, His knowledge, His power, His remedial work. Would it not be Hamlet with Hamlet left out ? Remember that a sermon which denies or ignores certain doctrines is just as doc- trinal as any other. "I do not believe in the per- sonality but in the immanency of God, and I believe the Lord Jesus to be human born only, and only a great exemplar," is just exactly as much of a creed and a doctrinal statement as the Nicene Creed. The people who hold such views hold them as their creed ; and if they have an organization 212 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. (and they must have to live) that will be the creed of the organization, and these will be the doctrines preached. Do you not see that a non-doctrinal sermon is as great a monstrosity as a six-legged calf? But we will be told that the object of this course of non-doctrinal sermons will be to teach morality. Yes, but what kind of morality ? Turk- ish morality? Apache morality? or Christian morality? But Christian morality rests on the Christian religion, and the Christian religion is a series of doctrines concerning Christ and His teaching. It cannot be stated without immedi- ately involving dogma. It is not conceivable that these ministers intend to set forth that modern code of morals which boasts itself as entirely free from the shackles of Christian opinion, and resting entirely upon the natural desires of man. Beyond a doubt, they intend strongly to urge every human being to repentance, to throw off sin, to seek the face of God in pra}rer, to recognize a duty to a father as shown in a child-like obedience, and to the practising of every virtue because God loves it. Their ideal will be the Lord Jesus, and to Him will they point their hearers. But all this is Christian doctrine; it is the essence of the Christian Creed. Christian morality is founded on Christian doc- trines, and it is pure moonshine to talk of non- doctrinal sermons. ROUNDING OFF THE CORNERS. I AM going to call this paper " Rounding off the Corners," and it was suggested by the follow- ing words in the Bishop of New York's Convention Address last year : " Our duty to the social fabric, yours and mine, is not to pull it down, because its existence seems to us to involve certain intolerable hardships ; but to make these hardships tolerable, as even the hardest labor and the sorest privations ma}" be made tolerable by an inexhaustible sympa- thy, and a never-tiring helpfulness to all within our reach." I could not have a better text than these words ; let me preach from them. We all know how road builders and track layers strive to avoid sharp corners ; how thej r try not to have sudden twists and hard places to get around. Anything angular and stiff and sharp is, when possible, put out of the way. Now, life is full of sharp corners, and corners which could not be made otherwise than sharp. They had to be so, and we may try as much as we please to construct life without them, but it cannot be done. Yes, our socialivStic and anarchistic friends say, and that it 214 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. is so proves the whole structure of society to be wrong, and it ought to be pulled down to the ground and built up again without any sharp corners . That would be a pretty big j ob , however, and it is not likely to be soon done, and we cannot wait for it. Besides, it is utterly impracticable to tear everything down. It could not be done with- out tearing down much that is priceless, and just as useful and just as necessary as any new thing that could be found. Westminster Abbey is very old and rusty and time-eaten ; but nobody thinks of tearing it down, but of restoring it, of renewing the worn out parts, of propping and strengthening the work ; society is very much like that. It will be much more profitable to see how we can stop leaks, patch walls, put in new pieces here and there, than to labor and howl (and it is chiefly howling these iconoclasts do) that everything must come down and we must have a bran new thing. The amusing part is that these pullers down are all by the ears as to what kind of a building ought to go up in place of the present one; and the experiments they have hitherto tried have been anything but reassuring to plain people. Let us recognize the sharp corners, wish with all our hearts they were not there; but knowing that we cannot help their existence, strive to pad them, try to round them off, try to make them as little sharp as possible. You have no idea how much can be done in this way, by showing, as Bishop Potter says, "an inexhaustible sympathy and a never- ROUNDING OFF THE CORNERS. 215 tiring helpfulness to all within our reach." Remem- ber, sharp corners occur in the running of the rich as well as the poor ; and quite as many rich people as poor fall over them and are hurt, and want sympathy as badly as any poor person does. I need not give a complete list of the inevitable hardships of life, and I mean by that those which do not belong to good conduct or misconduct, and which may come to the most pious as well as the most wicked, and fall upon the most prudent and lie in wait for the most careful and blameless. It w T ill be sufficient to mention sickness, loss of situa- tion from inevitable causes, loss of property through the fault of others, unworthy relatives, undeserved blame, loss of some limb or faculty by which you earned your living, pinching poverty, wretched environment from which there is no escape, witnessing the prosperity of wickedness and the success of the tyrant and the grabber, and sorrow in its myriad and perfectly irresistible forms. We have to meet these and they cannot be got out of life. Riches cannot keep them all off, and poverty does not bring them all on. The}' are independent of money and rank and learning. Now, it is no use to shakeyour fist at these things, and wail and rail at the state of things which pro- duces them. There they are, and they sa} r , " What are 3-ou going to do about it? " Mone}- will help some, but it is no more use in many others than dead leaves would be. There is one thing which will help us all, no matter whether the sufferer be rich or poor ; and it 216 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. is a thing the poorest can have at his disposal just as freely as the rich ; and that is sympathy. If we can have that, the sharpest corners will lose some of their sharpness ; and we can bear, as we never thought we could, the rawness of the sores which running against them constantly makes. Do not put me off by saying, "Oh, sympathy is like a taste for music ; some people are born with it and others are not ; I was not, and, therefore, I must be excused." Nonsense, we are no more born with cultivated hearts than we are with cultivated minds. Indeed, when we see how cruel children are, we sometimes doubt whether sympathy is ever natural, but that is only for a moment. We feel that there is a natural foundation on which, with determined efforts and the help of God, we can develop a greater pow T er of sympathy. We have to learn to be self-forgetting, to look steadily at human life and think about it, and get unto our minds how hard it is for some, and to enter into their feelings. Our Lord expressed this divineh^ when He called it "losing your life for others' sake.'' If you want to round off the corners in your fellows' lives, you have got to lose your own life, to lose the hugging yourself, alwa^^s thinking about your own comfort, dwelling on your own fancies. You must merge yourself in the life around you ; and by reading, by observation, by keeping your eyes and heart open, learn to feel for men; not theatre feeling, but the feelingthat prompts you to do, to say, to plan, to arrange what you possibly can to help. If you do not do this, you will suffer ROUNDING OFF THE CORNERS. 217 for it. Tom Hood wrote a poem which pictures a woman seeing pass before her a procession of the people she might have helped and did not ; and she shrieks: "No need of sulphur and of boiling lead for my punishment; this crowd is what damns mv soul." THE PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. AS I was listening to the Gospel about the unjust . steward on the 9th Sunday after Trinity, I thought of the pages and pages which have been written to explain it. Many a dusty old tome hidden away in libraries is full of discussions about this story. The steward stood for this, and the debtors for that, and the rich man for so and so, and it was a great jumble. But is the parable so difficult after all ? Has not the difficulty been cre- ated, as in so many other places in the Bible, by overlooking the very plain meaning on the surface? Let us see : A rich proprietor, who owned a great deal of property, employed, of course, an agent to look after it, and to this agent were given of neces- sity very full powers . He fixed the rents . He made the leases, and in him the greatest confidence was placed. The proprietor heard in some way that the agent was doing crooked work, and that it was not safe to have him longer in charge. He made up his mind to dismiss him, notified him that he intended to do so, and asked for the accounts THE PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 219 that there might be a final settlement. The agent was very much taken aback at being found out, and said to himself: " What am I going to do ? I have not saved up anything. I cannot turn my hand to any menial work, and I certainly am too proud to take up begging as a means of support." He then, being a very bright fellow, thought out a plan b} T which he could make some capital for him- self, and provide some resources when he should lose his place. He sent for his master's tenants and said to one : "What rent do you pay ? " "I pay a hundred measures of oil a year." " Well, now, just alter j-our lease from one hun- dred to fifty." It was easy to alter the leases, for they were written on wax tablets, and with a little skill one could easily change figures. This, you see, reduced his rent about one-half. Of course the tenant was most willing, for he knew the agent arranged these things, and he thought him most obliging to do this great favor for him. Then another tenant was sent for, and told to change his rent, which in the lease was put at a hundred measures of wheat, to eighty. Probably other tenants were similarly favored, and this sharp trick made them all very great friends of the agent, and ready to do him any good turn they could. The agent was found out however, for there is always somebody to tell; and while the proprietor hated to be cheated, and was probably very angry about it, he could not help "commending the 220 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. unjust steward because he had done wisely." That is, he could not help expressing his admira- tion for the clever trick, and crying to his friends : "What a bright fellow this cheating steward is, and how admirably he has feathered his own nest at my expense." We have all done this. I have been intensely angry at having been fooled by some adventurer asking for help ; and yet I could not help admiring the smartness and the wisdom shown by the rogue in fooling me. This is the story our Lord told, in the Eastern fashion, to a listening crowd, and he proceeded to point a moral from the stew- ard's conduct. " How this shows," He says, " the superior prudence and quick- wittedness of worldly people in managing worldly affairs, so superior to that of unworldly people." He does not approve of the agent's conduct, that was impossible ; but he uses him to show the pains people take and the thought they give to bring good results out of investments ; and he urges on those who have nobler things to manage, some of the same acute- ness and the same wisdom. Why should not the same keen and strict busi- ness principles be applied to managing churches and hospitals and colleges, that we see every day applied in the world of trade to corporations and business concerns? Because you are pious is no reason in the world why you should not manage your affairs, and otherpeople's affairs entrusted to you, as carefully as the most irreligious man would, and you will do well in that to imitate him. You THE PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 221 need not imitate his drinking, swearing, lying, and loose morality ; but you can imitate his foresight, his prudence, his unceasing care and attention. Then our Lord draws another lesson from the agent's making friends for himself out of his busi- ness acquaintance. He advises religious people to use their worldly advantages to make themselves heavenly friends. Make them, he says, out of your money, out of your position, out of your credit, out of your talents. Use these to the best advan- tage for God and for your fellow men. Do good with them. Employ them for noble ends, never for purely selfish purposes. Give your money in good causes; use your position to help on worthy enterprises which need the bolster of a well-known name ; lend your credit to a deserving friend to whom it will be life. Take your talents, whatever they may be, and employ them, not wholly for yourself, but also for the glory of God. Then "when ye fail," which means "when you die," all these good things you have done by the help of your worldly riches, all those products of 3 r our unselfishness, will "welcome you into everlasting habitations," that is, into Paradise; will stand around you, will vouch for you, will be the grandest body r -guard your enfranchised spirit, going to meet its Lord, could have. Is not this a simple explanation of the parable ? Do not think our Lord's term for money, etc., ' ' mammon of unrighteousness, ' ' a harsh one. You yourself often call it "filthy lucre" and "dirty 222 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. money," for it is that so often, but it need not be ; and, Moodyism and Calvinism to the contrary notwithstanding, it can be made, as our Lord says, a very cloud of witnesses for you, when, with your hand in His, you would enter heaven. I.— THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. WHEN our Lord said : " Are there not twelve hours in the day?" He spoke a proverb, and He meant by day, life, just as we say, " The day of Washington or Napoleon.'' He meant all the various duties and interests of life, expressed by the perfect number twelve, as coming into any life to make it a well-rounded one. Have you these twelve hours in your life? These are the twelve hours: 1, prayer; 2, worship; 3, duties to self; 4, duties to others; 5, pleasure; 6, business; 7, rest; 8, travel; 9, citizenship; 10, study; 11, thought ; 12, society ; and I say boldly that any day, that is, any life, that has not these twelve hours in it, is an imperfect day, a life marred. I do not mean that every life has got to have them in the same proportions, hours of the same length; but that every well-rounded life must have them all in, or it is not well-rounded. Let us review the dial-plate of our life, and see whether the hour or even the minute hand ever points to all the hours. And first, pra} r er. Does that regularly and every day come into your time? I do not mean 224 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. just something done from habit and without thought. You and I, when we were boys, and alas ! often since we have been men, have knelt down and dashed off an "Our Father," or "Now I lay me," and " God bless my parents," etc., with- out any more real interest than if we had been repeating the alphabet. That is not prayer, though it is much better than no prayer at all ; for into that form the substance will sometimes come. I do not mean that. I ask you whether some time, between your uprising and your lying down, you lift your heart up from earth toward your dear Lord in heaven, ask Him to help you, ask Him to pardon you and to guide your path ? Now, you may have all the other eleven things in your day, and if you have not this, it is a bad day. It is like some dish with costly ingredients with the salt forgotten. It is tasteless. Second, worship; the public recognition and worship of God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Does this come into your week, we will say, for it may not be in your power to have it come into your day. You may repty : "I am here in church every Sunday." Ah, that is all very well, but what do 3 r ou do in church? Do you take a real part ? You might go to an election ; it would not help your party on much if you did not vote. Do you, while you are in church (making allowance for the wandering of the mind, which no human being can possibly escape entirely in any service), do vou enter with heartiness and devotion into I.— THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. 225 what is going on, into the confessions, the peti- tions for this or that need, the thanksgiving for mercies, the glorious praise of the majesty of God, and the sweet festival of love, when we gather around the common table of our Master ? Third, duty to self. No man can neglect himself for one day without its telling on all the days that come after. I do not confine myself to his personal appearance, though I do consider that very impor- tant, and the calling it vanity most foolish and empty. I include, and put in the first rank, the care of his temper, his words, his example, his actions. We have to watch ourselves every moment; for a whole crowd of passions, tenden- cies, impulses, stand on tiptoe ready to rush off the very moment the guard relaxes his attention. If you leave out this care even for twelve hours, it piles up work for the next day, which has its own burden. Fourth, duty to others. I trust you have love in your lives. A life that has not in it, at some time, the love of man for woman, or woman for man, the family love, is really only half a life, a six-hour day, not a twelve; but I mean much more than this. Do you every day of your life recall to your- self the fact that you are one in a joint brother- hood ; that all men are your fellows, and that no one of them can suffer without its being your duty, if possibly within your power, to furnish that help ; that your fortune and your talents are not yours for yourself, but for all your circle, all 226 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. with whom you are in touch ; yes, all men every- where. In some slight way, this hour must enter into every twelve. Fifth, pleasure. One single day without pleas- ure in it is like one of those days in nature, all gray. I do not mean by pleasure, vice, though alas, it is often confounded with it ; but I do mean laughter and fun. I do mean something that lightens the heart, and blows care out of the window for a little time. It used to be thought that if you were really religious you must have a long face ; but we have got past that and perhaps lean to the other side. Even the old Puritans got a great deal more fun out of life than you think, though much of it was very course fun. Life is often so hard, the day grinds on so heavily, do not be afraid to lighten it with innocent mirth and a good deal of levity. Sixth, business. This, of course, must be one of the longest of the twelve hours, and often of necessity must crowd upon the others. It must receive attention. It must have the principal por- tion of your time, and the larger portion of your thoughts ; for it is the substratum on which has to be built up your public and your private life. Preachers sometimes talk as if there~were some kind of a sin in a man's occupying himself with the things of this world, but how can he help it? and, indeed, ought he to help it? Is not his busi- ness a great school for his character, and a lever by which he can work in the world for others' good as well as for his own? No, go regularly to I.— THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. 227 your business, put into it your best energies, transact it in the fear of God, and according to a strict construction of the rules of honor ; never be mean, truckling, or overbearing in it. God will then surely cry : " A well-spent hour." II.— THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. LET us continue the subject of the twelve hours of the day of life. We have considered six : prayer, worship, duty to self, duty to others, pleasure and business ; the seventh is rest. We are talking of twelve hours of day, not of night; so I do not mean sleep, necessary as that is. I pity the being who cannot get his full share of that ; and I warn the man who thinks he can curtail it, that some time or other, offended nature will rise up and punish him for depriving her of her rights ; but I do not mean that, I mean a cessation from work ; I mean idleness, if you choose to call the rest of a man who works, by that ill name. We have idlers, and a useless tribe they are ; but believe me, pure rest is just as much in the plan of God for a true day as any work is ; and when from force or from necessity, you cannot get it every day, it is wrong, it is against nature, and that is against God. Eighth, travel. Many will say the day could be very full, the life well lived without that, and it is true. One could serve God and His fellow-men without ever crossing the bounds of his own little II. — THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. 229 village ; but we are talking now of a full, true life, and that needs to have in it this ingredient also. You need every now and then, if possible (and in these days, hard indeed must be your lot, if you cannot sometimes do it) to get away from the narrow precincts in which you have to live ; to get out of the rut into which you inevitably fall ; to breathe new air and see new men. I remember a man telling me that he came into the Church in a little village, where it was a small, weak, despised thing ; and though he heard its greatness preached about, he never realized it until he went to New York, and saw what a power it was, its splendid churches, its glorious services. Travel broadens your idea of God, and deepens j^our charity for man. Ninth, citizenship. For many of you, and this applies every day more and more to the educated and thoughtful, this part of the day is utterly passed by. You seem to think that from some source or other comes the government, and that it will take care of itself and you; but recollect, you are the government, you make it, you unmake it. God has put into your hands this wonderful power of making your laws, appointing your law-givers, displacing them, changing them often and as you will. No matter then what Turks may say as an excuse for letting alone any misgovernment, on the plea that they have no power to help it, Americans cannot say that. They can help it ; and any man who lets day after day of his life pass by without studying the questions of the hour, and putting in 230 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. that powerful piece of paper to shape them this way or that way, deserves anarchy, deserves oppression, deserves to suffer from the trickery of politics, deserves the anger of God. Tenth, study. And can there not be a life with- out study? Yes, there can be. Oysters live and vegetables exist ; but is that the day a man with powers of soul and spirit should choose for him- self? We cannot all learn alike, and our Bible or our Shakespeare affords far more to one than to another, because he brings a clearer eye and a more discerning spirit to its study ; but there lives no man who cannot learn, and if he will not, he commits the sin of wilful ignorance, which in the category of sins takes a higher rank, and is stained with a deeper dye, than many of you think. " To know," is man's most splendid aspiration; and knowledge comes by labor. You are not born with it, and money will not buy it ; oh, put into your life this noble hour of study. Learn all you can of your world, of its Author, of its Saviour, of its destiny. The more a chastened intellect expands here the higher the place it takes there. Eleventh, society. We have to live in society, whether we want to do so or not. We are all dependent on each other, and if a man shuts him- self away from all human intercourse, he must starve ; that is inevitable. But let us get above that and remember that society is heaven-descended. It is God's way of lessening our selfishness, of round- ing off the rough edges of our character, of bring- ing out love and fidelity and friendship and mutual II.— THE TWELVE HOURS OF THE DAY. 231 help. There can be no advancement without it; and even in a state of savagery its main principles are ever found. What are you doing to brighten it, to purify it, to elevate it? It is made up of individuals, and just what they are, it must be. A village of drunkards will have a society of brutal- ity and lust and filth ; a village of self-respecting, God-fearing men and women is a power, subtle and penetrating, which moves and changes far beyond its own limits. If you love men, go among them and take their hands. And now we reach the twelfth hour of the day, and it is, thought ; no life is fair and even without it. I do not mean thought about "what we shall eat, or wherewithal we shall be clothed ; but the asking oneself, every now and then, the solemn questions: "Where do I stand? To what am I tending ? Am I going baxkward or forward ? Do I grow better or worse? Am I of use, or damage, in the world?" Unless you have this hour and apply its warnings, your life will be thin and super- ficial, and there will be a flaw in it which will widen as the days go on. And so, hastily throwing out in each point, some hints to start your own reflections, have I traced the day of life, as it seems tome a Christian man should strive to have it, and for which God's aid ever waits. May it be your day; and may it draw, hour by hour, on through all the twelve, until the night is reached, and lo, there is no night! A moment of darkness, and we step out into the perfect day ! THE BESETTING SINS OF THE RICH AND OF THE POOR. I HEARD a very interesting sermon the other Sunday on the difficulty a rich man had in being a Christian. A great many rich men were sitting near me, and I watched their countenances to see how they to ok it . They listened very quietty, but they seemed to be saying to themselves : " Oh, I shall get to heaven all right, in spite of what he says." The sermon led me to think on the relative obstacles in the way of a religious life for a rich or a poor man ; and really I could not see much differ- ence. They appear to me pretty well balanced. Of course when our Lord said : "A rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of heaven," He referred to the new kingdom He was then founding in the world ; and He meant as the event proved, that it was going to be very hard for people who were well to do to give all that up for the obloquy and persecution, and probable confiscation, which would come on the early professors of the Chris- tian Faith. THE BESETTING SINS OF THE RICH AND OF THE POOR. 233 But that state of things has changed. No rich man, to become a very earnest and true Christian, is obliged to throw away his riches, or to change one item of his well-ordered and com- fortable life. I know very many rich men of the most simple and unostentatious characters and lives ; and I know many poor men who are proud and selfish, and a great deal more difficult than anj^rich. The fact is that a certain style of living, luxurious living, if you please, not meaning by that, riotous or improper living, seems to me to be a matter of education and environment and cus- tom, and by itself to have very little to do with a man's truth and genuineness, and devotion to re- ligious duty. A man used to great " style " scarcely notices it. It does not awaken in him a sense of pride and superiority. It is just a part of his daily life, especially if he has been born to it. I do not include in this a vulgar display of wealth for wealth's sake; silver menu cards, peaches at a dollar apiece, and wines of enormous cost. This is demoralizing indeed, but rich men do not in general perpetrate such follies. On the other hand, the not being able to have soup ever}' day, and having no servant, by no means implies any less crossness, or unselfishness, or humility. The most thorough worldliness co-exists with the greatest poverty, and the most thorough unworldliness with the greatest riches. One's station often obliges one to incur certain great expenses of liv- ing, dress, table, furniture, etc., but the heart is not of necessity bound up in these things. That is 234 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. all I care to establish ; that riches, of necessity, do not make you selfish, arrogant, pleasure-loving, luxurious and forgetful of God. Riches have their great dangers, but so has poverty; and as I said, these dangers are pretty evenly balanced. Let me try to show this, first, about the besetting sins of riches : I. They blast the sense of dependence upon God, which is such a sweet relation. When you can order and obtain anything you want from anywhere, it is very apt to make you forget that everything we have comes from the hands of God ; that He gives us all things richly to enjoy; and there springs up in the unwatched heart a feeling that God is not necessary to you, that you can take care of yourself. II. The bootlicking which is done to rich men, even by the vestries of the churches where they take pews, is very apt to give them airs, to puff them up with ideas of their great importance. They become dictatorial, tyrannical and impa- tient, at not having their own way. III. A common effect of riches is selfishness. Wrapped in your own comfort, you forget the discomfort of others ; and in the charmed life you are able to lead, you lose touch with all those millions of lives which are not charmed, and which a little help from you would so greatly brighten. IV. The being able to gratify every desire stim- ulates wrong desires, and rich people often suc- cumb to their very great opportunities, in them- selves an enormous temptation. THE BESETTING SINS OF THE RICH AND OF THE POOR. 235 To sum up: The besetting sins of the rich are pride, self-sufficiency, self-importance, luxury, selfish indifference to the wretchedness and poverty in the world, easy gratification of every desire. All rich men are not beset by all these, nor do they of necessity fall victims to any. Now, what are the besetting sins of the poor ? I. Disbelief in God. They get to think because there is such inequality in worldly fortune, that there is no superintending Providence; that religion , and priests, and churches, are just inventions of the rich to keep quiet the poor, and this world is the portion of the fortunate. II. Enviousness of and anger with those better off than they are. Poor people often seem to think some sort of injustice is done them by those who from one ca.use or other are able to live better and more comfortably. They foolishly think rich people hate and despise them, and they foolishly return that hate. III. A proud and very disagreeable thing called "independence." I have always found the self- importance of some journeyman a great deal more intolerable than the pride of the rich, because very bad manners generally go with it. IV. Selfishness in regarding only your own class interests, and saying since you have to look out for number one, \ r ou will consider no other number. V. The common temptation, besetting rich and poor, to yield to desire, more dangerous often in 236 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. the poor, because coarser and tmtempered by refinement. These, then, are the besetting sins of the poor: Envy, covetousness, disbelief in God and the Church, pride, selfishness, coarse desire. I do not see much to choose between the two catalogues. The fact is that every station in life has its trials, and they do not vary much in power. Each and every one, rich or poor, must find out and watch these trials of his station, fight against them, and use God and His Church to help fight, and spend no time in thinking : " Oh, if I were only somebody else and in some other rank, I could do much better." ESPRIT DE CORPS. LET us talk a little about Esprit de corps. I wish I could use an English word for it, since I think it very bad taste to mix either your speech or your writing with foreign words ; but there is no exact English equivalent. The meaning we all know. It is being devoted to any organization to which you belong, the honor of every one of its members being your honor, the adversity or pros- perity of the body being part of your adversity and prosperity. The phrase belonged originally to military life; and referred to that devotion which a soldier is expected to feel for his regiment, for his company, for his captain, for his flag. It was, and is, thought a soldier's duty to stand up for his comrades under all circumstances, whether wise or unwise, whether involving gain or loss for himself; nay, he is expected to face danger and death rather than desert the corps of which he is a member, or leave one of his fellows in the lurch. I know well that this duty has often been carried to excess. Officers who had no personal cause of quarrel have felt bound, when the honor of a comrade or the 238 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. fair fame of the regiment was attacked, to chal- lenge the assailant, fight a bloody duel, and often lose their lives. I do not uphold this, but I cannot help admiring it. I want, now, to apply the spirit of the phrase to our life and our surroundings. Have we esprit de corps ? Do we cultivate it as we should ? Does it make any difference to us what others say of men, and bodies of men, with which we either voluntarily or involuntarily are associated ? For example : You are an American, and by that I do not mean an American in the foreign sense ; for on the continent of Europe, Venezuelans, Brazilians, and Mexicans are all Americans; but I mean a child of the United States. Now, do you form one of that degenerate crowd who spend their breath in decrying their own country, running down its institutions, drawing comparisons to its discredit with English, French, or even Italian, ways ? There are such people. I have met them here and abroad, and they are as irritating to me as red peppers. I do not ask whether you play a good hand in the great game of " brag," with which all Americans are said to be so familiar; but I ask whether you always stand ready to break a lance for the honor of your country, and believe her to be the noblest and grandest country in the world ? She has faults. There are spots on the sun. But do you cover them up, or do you exaggerate and publish them ? There are other things, however, beside country which call for esprit de corps. You belong/to an ESPRIT DE CORPS. 239 order. You are a carpenter, or a merchant, or a farmer, or a priest. I will take a priest, as illus- tration, and I do it because for almost all other orders there are " unions" and so much esprit de corps, that thousands of men will lay down their tools and walk out of their shops if the most insignificant and most worthless of their union, or whatever it may be called, is suffering anything the}^ consider to be unjust. We may blame the extremes to which this is carried, but we cannot help admiring the self-sacrifice it often entails. Now, there are no "unions" for priests, and very little esprit de corps. Do not imagine that I want such unions, or advocate priests going on strike, and all the other priests refusing to do any- thing till the brother on whom they thought the Bishop or the vestry were jumping, got his rights. That would not only be absurd, but wicked ; but I do advocate a strong class and caste feeling among those who are in Holy Orders, that they should stand by each other, defend each other, hide each other's weaknesses ; and only when strong duty commands it, bring to the bar of justice their erring brethren. The Emperor Constantine, at the Coun- cil of Nice, said : " If I should see a Bishop com- mitting mortal sin, I would not cry out. I would hide him in the folds of my purple. ' ' This, of course, was Oriental hyperbole, but I wish that we priests had something of the same feeling; that we felt more deeply our "Order," and that the corps feel- ing was more evident in the ranks than it is. It does not seem to me that I could, unless forced by 240 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. the sternest sense of duty, ever become the perse- cutor of one of my brother priests. This feeling may appear blamable, but I think will meet with the approval of every manly heart. There are enough people to find fault with us, to misunder- stand our motives, to belittle our calling, to pick out our flaws, to twist our mistakes into formid- able offenses. Let us stand by each other, protect each other, and keep up a weak brother as long as we can do so without dishonor to our priestly vows. But not only priests need to think of " esprit de corps" but laymen. What is your Church to you, my lay friends ? Is it like the precinct where you live, something whose common honor does not lie very near your heart ; or is it what you sing it is in hymns, and spout it is at Church Club banquets — your mother ? If the Church be your mother, then ought not a mother's honor, a mother's fair fame, to be the very dearest thing you know ? Ought you not to respect that mother's commands, even if they do not always chime in with your views ? Let our Church be for us not simply a moral club, not simply a conventionality, but something for which we are willing to peril our ease, our for- tunes, and, if need be, our lives. A MAN THE HEAD OF HIS HOUSE. ONCE upon a time, centuries on centuries ago, an old man stood up before a large assem- blage of people, and, after a speech full of earnest words, used this sentence: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Now, remember, a man said this in his capacity as head of his house. "Nothing strange in that," you say. "Is not a man always the head of his house? " Well, it used to be thought so, and it is good Bible doctrine that it is so ; but you must confess that our talking sisters seem to teach that it is only so with very great qualifications, and to think it so is a good deal of a superstition. Now, the news- papers seem to think this is very funny ; and they have added to their stock subjects for jokes, such as the summer vacations of the clerg3 r , and the young men who stay late courting, this one of the "new woman." To me, however, the situation seems very serious. I read in my Bible such words as these: "I suffer not the woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence ; for Adam was first formed, then Eve." 242 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. "The head of every man is Christ, the head of the woman is the man." "The man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man." "For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man." These are hard nuts to crack. No wonder so many women nowadays say they are rotten nuts, and not worth the cracking. But, my friends, they are good, sound nuts, and the meat in them amounts to this: that it is a God appointed thing that a man should be the head of the house, in the State, in the Church, in the society, in the home. But let us leave the general question. "My house " certainly means " my family." Let us stick close to that. Because a man is the head it does not follow as a matter of course that he is always a good head. Often he is a totally unworthy one, and then how the family suffers. It is just like a sick physical head. When that comes about, the hands grasp only feebly, the feet seem loaded with a ball and chain, the nerves jar and jangle like some ruined harp. In such cases what a blessing- it is if the wife can step in and take the headship , and save the family from ruin. To recognize a headship does not imply, as these preaching females teach, a cringing servitude, or a servile obedience. I recognize the President of the United States as my civil head, and the Bishop of Chicago as my ecclesiastical head; and I " order myself lowly and reverently to them, as my betters," but I do not cringe to them, or give up my rights to them, or A MAN THE HEAD OF HIS HOUSE. 243 submit tamely to tyranny on their part. Nor should the wife to the one who miserably performs his duty as the head. No husband can compel a wife to do wrong. He may see fit to laugh at God and all holy things ; he cannot force her to do so. He is bound to respect all her rights of conscience, and her duty to her children and her obligations to the society in which she lives. She certainly has reserved rights which she does not give up in mar- riage. But all this does not impugn the statements of the Bible that the man is the head of the house. And now, my man, what sort of ahead are you? What sort of a head is he who spends his leisure time in carousing, in running after strange women, in playing the pot-house politician ? What sort of a head is he who, never at home, becomes a sort of myth to his children, who hear of their father, but never see him ? What sort of a head is he whom every one in the house must feel is a selfish, grasp- ing creature; who thinks everything in the house is for him and his comfort alone ? The children must not make a noise, and no one must have any par- ticular enjoyment if it interferes with his ideas or whims. Oh, the mockeries of heads these are, and yet such awful consequences hang upon the good or bad direction of families. Charles Dudley Warner, in his charming articles on Chicago, speaking of the homes, says: "A stranger will be surprised to find in a city so new so many homes pervaded by the atmosphere of books, and art, and refined sensibility. There is so much here that is in exquisite taste that one has a 244 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. hopeful heart about the future." This is very pretty and very true, and, above all, very tickling to the Chicago palate ; but are the heads of these homes inscribing over them : " As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord " ? Are you, head, in your representative character, doing that, or does ' ' me, ' ' in your case, mean your wife ? It is all right that she should do it, but you — you can go on shirking your religious obligations ; you can remain deaf to the voice of the Church; you can be blind to private prayer and public profession — all these you can get on without. " Am I not a good head ? " you say. " I provide well for my family's needs. I personalty attend to their education. I set them an example of clean living and honest dealing. Is not that serving the Lord?" Yes, it is, but it is only a half service. How about family prayer? How about being at the head of the seat on Sundays ? How about going up to the altar ? How about a life avowed to be after the pattern of the Gospel? Nothing is going to save this land from moral wreck but the heads of houses standing up and saying: " As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." THE FAILURES OF INFIDELITY. IN the May Forum, 1896, the ratio of increase of communicants with that of the population of the country is compared, and the advantage is found to be very greatly with the churches. The percentage of increase in population for the decade ending in 1890, was 24.86. The increase for the past five years has not been as great, but we will assume that it has been, and put it at 12.43. But the growth of the churches since 1890 has been at the rate of 20 per cent. It is clear that the churches are gaining on the population rapidly and steadily. Items like these from a paper certainly with no great prepossessions in favor of Orthodox Chris- tianity, must make the infidels and the agnostics, and the Ingersollites and the new women, and Gebal and Ammon and Amalek, very mad indeed. They are continually blowing trumpets to call the world to see Christianity squelched; and then when the world comes, they are forced to cry, like the Pharisees, "Behold, the world is gone after Him." It is really pitiable to see people try so 246 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. hard to sweep the ocean out with a broom, and make so little headway. I often wonder how, in the face of the Christian Church, they have the courage to persevere. Her history, the knowledge of the way along which she has come, her trials, her oppositions, and her present flourishing state, it seems to me, must force any sensible man to say, " There is something that is not of the earth in this thing, or else it would have perished with the thousand empires, dj^nasties, systems, and schemes which have risen above the horizon, shone for a while, and then gone out forever." Its worst foes always have been, and are now, inside of it, among Christians themselves ; but that does not prevent its multiplying like the sands of the sea. Consider the state of things now. Some of the most gifted men in the world are trying hard to talk Christianity down. Books are published every month which prove as clear as daylight that it is all a delusion ; great governments, like that of France, do all they can to lessen its influence; scientific men show in eloquent lectures that there cannot even be a God, let alone a Saviour. Reverend gen- tlemen prove the Bible to be full of faults and con- tradictions and inconsistencies, and our dear Lord to be only a highly gifted man ; and yet here is the Christian Church, not a senile, palsied, trembling old hag, but a young, beautiful boy, whose healthy blood heals in a month or two the deepest wounds, and who stands erect, laughing at his foes. I pity you, you whose noses are turned up at Christianity. I really pity you ; for as you look at THE FAILURES OF INFIDELITY. 247 the numberless churches everywhere going up, the ever-increasing flock of missionaries, the splendid army of young men serving under the banner of Christ, the enormous sums everywhere given for enterprises under the invocation of Christ, it must be such a disappointment, it must convey such a bitter sense of failure, it must seem such a madden- ing incomprehensibility^, to find that Christianity will not be killed ; that although you have shown a thousand times how foolish it is, how narrow- ing, how unreasonable, that sensible men certainl\ r must give it up, they will not do it, they will stick to it, they will get baptized, will take Christ for their Master, will say they are sinners, will go to the Cross for forgiveness. Why don't you infidel people show us some- thing better than Christianity ? We are not fools, we do not usually throw away good things when we see them. Show us a better religion (for a religion of some kind man must have, you do not need to be told that) than this old Bible religion, set forth in the Creed, taught in the Sacraments, shown in the Church, and we will surely adopt it. This is a free country, we are not forced to be Christians to get a place in society, or to succeed in business. I grant it used to be so, and I grant that man}- people just said they were Christians for such purposes ; but you fellows have done this much good, you have knocked that plaster image to pieces ; and an 3^ one can be perfectly respectable and, if rich, receive all possible honor, without the slightest affectation of Christianity. It is not un- 248 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. common now to hear boys just out of knickerbock- ers declare themselves agnostics ; and if that word be synonymous with ignoramuses, they well de- scribe themselves. We can then all profess your opinions without doing our worldly state any harm, but why don't we ? Answer that ! But you know you cannot, and it must make you very angry. Why don't you give up and go into more profitable business ? God knows our presentation of Christianity is often poor enough, and distorted enough, and mean enough, when compared with our great Founder's teaching and example; but such as it is, it grips men as all your salves and lotions, and porous plasters and anodynes fail to do. How you must chafe under this, and ask each other when you meet, " Why do we not make more head- way against this wretched Christianity? " I will tell you why : " Because it is from God, and neither you, nor I, nor all the world, can put it down." INSPIRATION. MOST people connect i ' inspiration " only with the Apostles and patriarchs and prophets ; but we make a great mistake by cherishing any such narrow view as that, just because our grand- fathers held it, or our old rector used to preach it, when we were children. Inspiration has a far nobler meaning than that. The breath of God has been breathed out more fully than that. The wind of God has blown further and wider than within those limits. We too often connect God only with religion and religious things ; and we forget to con- nect Him with the painting of pictures, the evolu- tion of steam engines, the logic and argument of philosophies. We have forgotten that ever}' good thing comes from God, whether religious or secular ; that no wild savage could think a good thought unless the Spirit of God was breathed into him; that every thing that is not purely animal, everything that belongs to man as dis- tinguished from brutes, is by inspiration of God, is just the everlasting breathing of Him who breathed the first spiritual breath into the first lump of clay, 250 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. whatever form it had, and whatever instincts it already possessed; of Him who breathed, long after that, on the Apostles. So, when the first man had the idea of a better knife, or a better spear, it was by inspiration of God. When he first began to speak some rude verse, or strike some poor harp— a string across a turtle shell, two sticks of wood beaten in har- mony, — it was an inspiration. When he first stooped down by a fallen foe, and gave him water, orboundup his wounds, it was an inspiration. The first love that was not lust was an inspiration. Every invention, every poem, every act of gener- osity, or unselfishness, everything that animals cannot do, is by the inspiration of God. Our natural breath we have as the brutes have; but our breath of mind, of soul, of spirit, is our special breathing upon by the Hol} T Ghost. We use this word "inspiration" — and very rightly— for any extraordinary work. When an orator says some- thing very brilliant and uplifting, we say, " He seems inspired." When a very wonderful inven- tion is given to man, we cry out, " What an inspi- ration." We say of a great singer, "She was most inspiring." And above all, of some books which have been written, we say: "The writers appeared to have been inspired — to have had their eyes and their ears opened as no other men ever had; to have had their souls illumined as ordinary men never experienced." Now, the inspiration of the Bible is something of the same kind, only in an immeasurably greater INSPIRATION. 251 degree. Above all other books that ever were written, these books bear the traces of the breath- ing of God, because, better and greater than all other books, they teach us how to live aright, how to think of God, how to understand the world ; above all, they reveal to us the character of Jesus Christ, the Ideal of humanity, the Incarnation of God. I do not say no other book ever was inspired. We are right when we speak of the inspiration of Shakespeare and Dante. But I do say that far above all other books is the Bible the breath of God ; and it, separate from all other books, can be called the Word of God. No matter about the scientific mistakes of the Bible, and they are many; or the historical con- tradictions, and they are not a few; or the con- fused numbers, or the difficulties of authorship, or the whole business of what is called the " Higher Criticism;" they do not invalidate the glorious inspiration of the Bible am- more than Dante's absurd notions about astronomy, or Shakespeare's making Bohemia a country with a sea coast, invalidate their inspiration. The Bible has been inspired by God to teach me how to live and whom to follow, and how to get near Him. What matter about its opinions about other things? Concerning those awful things it is my best, my only guide, and for these I cling to it as God's best gift to me. Inspiration, remember, belongs to \ r ou, no matter how dull you maj T be, just as to the great- est genius in the world ; and just as the amount of fresh air in a house will depend on the doors and 252 FIVE MINUTE TALKS. windows cut in, or whether it is planted in a canyon, or set on a hill, so the amount of inspira- tion you will get will depend on your capacity to receive; and if you have only a limited capacity, whether you try to give it a chance. The wind of God is always blowing. The Holy Spirit is always breathing, but it cannot get into shut-up places, barred and bolted to keep all air out. Is your life like that ? People, to get air, go where air is. Are you going where you are sure to find the wind of the Spirit? It blows in the Church, it blows in the Sacraments, it stirs and freshens every ordinance and ritual arrangement. Do you put yourself in the way of it ? " But I can- not see it," you say. Well, you cannot even see the wind that stirs your hair. Who can see heat, who can see the force behind all other forces, for which men of science are groping? They know it, but no one can see it. You can feel it, if you open your heart and let it in. Call on the wind of God to come and blow away your prejudices, your objections, your arguings. Ask it to melt the ice around your heart. Come, wind of the Spirit, come, " inspiration of God," and blow away our evil tempers, our lust, our sloth, our pride. Sweep the floor clean, and make room for Christ and for better things. REASONS FOR BEING A CHURCHMAN. Addressed to English-speaking Christians of Every Name. By The Rev. Arthur Wilde Little, L. H. D., Rector of St. Mark's Church, Evanston, 111. Paper, net, .50 ; cloth, net, #1.00. "Those of our readers, both clerical and lay, who are not in pos- session of this invaluable treatise upon the Anglican Church should certainly lose no time in procuring a copy. Without exception, we know of no work which deals with the subject in so exhaustive and able a manner. It was highly recommended by the late Principal of Moore College, and its sale in England and the United States has far exceeded any book of its kind." — Sydney (Australia) Banner. SOME AMERICAN CHURCHMEN. By Frederic Cook Morehouse. Cloth, net, $1.00. Contains Biographical sketches of Samuel Seabury, William White, John Henry Hobart, Philander Chase, George Washington Doane, Jackson Kemper, John Henry Hopkins, William Augustus Muhlenberg, James Lloyd Breck, and James DeKoven; with full page portrait of each. "Mr. Morehouse has given us an exceedingly interesting book in this little work. From amongst the great men who have adorned the American Church he has selected ten men who have made their mark in the history of the Church, and in the brief space at his disposal has given an account of the special work in which they severally aided in building up the Church. Church history is perhaps more pleasantly learned in the lives of the men who have helped to make it than in any other way, and Churchmen generally will be glad to have a volume so full of valuable information respecting the growth and development of the Church as seen in these brief sketches." — Canadian Churchman. Published by THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO.. Milwaukee, Wis. Three Books by John F. Spalding, D.D., Bishop of Colorado. THE CHURCH AND ITS APOSTOLIC MINISTRY. Net, $1.00. "It will doubtless take its place among other books of the same character, as a cheerful, temperate statement of the Church's position and claims as they are understood and held to be by the ' moderate' school of High Churchmen. The arrangement of the Historical proofs of the Apostolicity of the Church's Ministry is very clear and concise, and, while in popular form, as we have said, there is no 'ad captandum' praise, blame, or criticism. The manner of the book is kindly and conciliatory, though clear." — 5/. Louis Church News. THE BEST MODE OF WORKING A PARISH. A course of Lectures. Net, $1.00; by mail, $1.10. "Experience, reflection, sound sense and a thoroughly Catholic spirit enter into these discussions in about equal proportions. They are suited to clergy and laity everywhere, especially to young pastors and to the rising and spreading communities where the author is effectually planting the Church." — Gospel Messenger. JESUS CHRIST THE PROOF OF CHRISTIANITY. A course of Lectures. Net, $1.00; by mail, $1.10. "This book contains twelve admirable sermons on sound and or- thodox Anglo-Catholic lines, and quite in keeping with the most modern and — in the true sense— advanced critical knowledge of our fay "—Church Review (London). NOTES FOR MEDITATION ON THE COLLECTS, FOR SUNDAYS AND HOLY DAYS. By the Rt. Rev. A. C. A. Hall, D.D., Bishop of Vermont. Net, $ 1 .00 ; by mail, $1.10. Thoughts and inspirations drawn from each of the Collects. Published by THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO., Milwaukee, Wis. WHAT IS MODERN ROMANISM ? An examination of those portions of Holy Scripture which have alleged bearings on the claims of the Church of Rome. By George Franklin Seymour, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Springfield. Net, .75 ; by mail, .80. "Bishop Seymour is on some accounts peculiarly fitted to discuss the question raised in the title to this book. It is only the alleged Scripture grounds of Romanism that are here examined; and of all the doctrines or positions peculiar to Romanism, the Papal Suprem- acy is the only one considered. The author's view is that the whole system stands or falls with the claim that the Bishop of Rome, as successor to St. Peter, is of Divine right the supreme and infallible head of the Church, the vicar of Christ. . . . There is a fresh- ness and pointedness in the Bishop's way of putting it that is origi- nal. ... In fact it may be said that the Bishop of Springfield has utterly disposed of Roman Scriptural claims, root and branch." — Pacific Churchman. THE CHURCH IN THE PRAYER BOOK. A Layman's brief Review of Worship. With introduc- tion by the Rev. Samuel Hart, D.D. By Edward L. Temple. Cloth, net, $1.25. "There are any number of works elucidatory of the Prayer Book, but the larger number are written by clerymen. Mr. Temple was a member of the General Convention during the whole of the long period the work of revision was in progress, and this book is the result of his scholarly and profound study of the subject. Every page bears witness to careful examination of facts, and equally care- ful weighing of them before arriving at a conclusion. A spirit of thorough loyalty to the Prayer Book pervades it throughout. It is especially valuable at this time, because it explains with such perfect clearness the alterations made at the last revision, and the reasons for them. It has the further merit of a clear style, which is by no means the least of its advantages." — Pacific Churchman. Published by THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. Milwaukee, Wis. Deac.dif.ed us.ng the Bookkeeper process NeutralBing agent: Magnesium OxSe Treatment Date: April 2006 PreservationTechnoloqies AW0RLDLE *f"'^AP ER p nESERV ^ T(0N ' 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111