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Class j&XaiOi 
 
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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSFT. 
 
Rev. Moses D. Hoge, D. D , LL. D. 
 
THE PERFECTION OF 
 BEAUTY 
 
 And Other Sermons 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. MOSES D. HOGE, D. D., LL. D. 
 
 OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA 
 
 With a Lecture on 
 
 The Success of Christianity an Evidence of its Divine Origin 
 
 Delivered at the University of Virginia 
 
 RICHMOND, VIRGINIA 
 
 The Presbyterian Committee of Publication 
 
 1904 
 
DC1 12 1904 
 y^ooyrt*ht Entry j 
 
 CLASS 4lXXb. Nfe" 
 
 ^fofvV 
 
 
 Copyrighted by 
 THE PRESBYTERIAN COMMITTEE OF PUBLICATION. 
 
 R. E. Magill, Secretary. 
 1904. 
 
 Printed by 
 
 Whittet & Shepperson, 
 
 Richmond, Va. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The voice of the preacher still lingers in our ear, and 
 as memory brings him before us in his pulpit, erect, com- 
 manding, thrilled with his message, and thrilling all who 
 heard, we are still longing for "the sound of the voice 
 that is still." To the very close of his fifty-four years of 
 service in the one pulpit, Dr. Hoge was so intent upon 
 the work which his hand found to do, that he could not 
 be persuaded to go aside, and prepare the volumes so 
 many desired, sermons, addresses, memoirs. 
 
 The sermons embraced in this volume were taken, not 
 from his pen, but from his lips, by a stenographer, and 
 when written out, were only in two or three cases revised 
 by him. They are, therefore, almost entirely word for 
 word as they were delivered from the pulpit. Some of 
 them were preached in a number of places, and were heard 
 by great congregations. They are still remembered by a 
 great company, and are all the more desired in this 
 printed form. 
 
 The selection has been made with a view, not only of 
 preserving examples of the method and style of the 
 preacher, but with a desire to give to many that which 
 will be profitable to the spirit and effective in the life, and 
 so perpetuate the fruitful ministry of the preacher. 
 
 It is a profound regret with many, that with these 
 sermons there have not been preserved the prayers which 
 
4 PREFACE. 
 
 accompanied them. Oftentimes the prayers seemed even 
 more marvellous than the sermons, as he bore the silent 
 assembly, with all its wants and desires, to the presence 
 chamber of the God of Israel, who waited to be inquired 
 of. They were made with preparation and with prayer. 
 They were uttered with a voice, reverent, distinct, exquis- 
 itely expressive, which held the ear and moved the heart. 
 They were scriptural in phrase, appropriate to the occa- 
 sion, comprehensive of the whole assembly and its vari- 
 ous needs, and led the worshipping congregation to the 
 gate which leads up to the mercy seat. 
 
 We have added to this selection of sermons, the lecture 
 at the Virginia University on "The Success of Chris- 
 tianity, an Evidence of its Divine Origin," a discourse of 
 marked power and eloquence. It is an argument that has 
 not lost, but gained in strength since it was presented in 
 the masterly address. Other addresses, and some prayers 
 offered on certain notable occasions have been published 
 in the Life of Moses D. Hoge, by his nephew, the Rev. 
 Dr. Peyton H. Hoge, an unsurpassed example of religious 
 biography. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page. 
 
 I. The Perfection of Beauty, n 
 
 44 Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, hath God shined." — Psalm 
 
 1.2. 
 
 II. Not of This World, 22 
 
 " My kingdom is not of this world." — John xviii. 36. 
 
 III. The Holy Mountains, 38 
 
 11 His foundation is in the holy mountains. The Lord loveth the 
 gates of Zion more than the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious 
 things are spoken of thee, O city of God."— Psalm lxxxvii. 
 1-3- 
 
 IV. The River that Maketh Glad, 49 
 
 u There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of 
 God." — Psalm xlvi. 4. 
 
 V. A Little Sanctuary, 61 
 
 u I will be to them a little sanctuary." — Ezek. xi. 16. 
 
 VI. The Survival of the Fittest, 74 
 
 44 The word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever."— i Peter 
 i. 23. 
 
 VII. The Silences of Scripture, 87 
 
 44 And many other signs truly Jesus did in the presence of his dis- 
 ciples, which are not written in this book." — John xx. 30. 
 
 VIII. "But These are Written," ico 
 
 44 But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son 
 of God, and that believing, ye might have life through his 
 name."— John xx. 31. 
 
6 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page. 
 
 IX. The Universal Religion, 1 1 1 
 
 " That thou mayest know the certainties of those things where- 
 in thou hast been instructed." — Luke i. 4. 
 
 X. John the Baptist, 123 
 
 " And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah." 
 — Luke i. 17. 
 
 XI. Liddon, Bersier, Spurgeon, 135 
 
 " And Samuel died, and all the Israelites were gathered to- 
 gether, and lamented him." — 1 Samuel xxv. i. 
 
 XII. " My Mother and My Brethren," . . . 154 
 
 "There came then his brethren and his mother," etc.— Mark 
 iii. 31-35. 
 
 XIII. Kind Words to a Doubting Heart, . . 168 
 
 11 Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and 
 heard," etc. — Luke vii. 22, 23. 
 
 XIV. God's Tender Mercy, 180 
 
 " Through the tender mercy of our God, the day-spring from 
 on high hath visited us." — Luke i. 78. 
 
 XV. Weeping over Jerusalem, 192 
 
 " And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept 
 over it," etc. — Luke xix. 42, 43. 
 
 XVI. What Mean Ye by this Service ? . . . 206 
 
 " What mean ye by this service ?" — Exodus xii. 26. 
 
 XVII. His Hour and His Prayer, 215 
 
 " Now is my soul troubled," etc. — John xii. 27, 28. 
 
 XVIII. His Hands and His Side, 227 
 
 " He shewed them his hands and his side." — John xx. 20. 
 
CONTENTS. 7 
 
 Page. 
 
 XIX. Teach Us to Pray, 237 
 
 11 And it came to pass that, as he was praying in a certain place 
 alone on the seaside, one of his disciples came unto him, 
 and said, Lord, teach us to pray." — Luke xi. 9. 
 
 XX. In the Swelling of Jordan, 251 
 
 k * If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied 
 thee, then how canst thou contend with horses ? And if in 
 the land of peace wherein thou trustedst, they wearied 
 thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?" — 
 Jeremiah xii. 5. 
 
 XXI. A Coffin in Egypt, 261 
 
 11 So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old ; and they 
 embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." — 
 Genesis 1. 26. 
 
 XXII, Unfulfilled Obligations at last Ful- 
 filled, 272 
 
 11 I pray thee, let me go over and see the good land that is 
 beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain, and Lebanon. Get 
 thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes," 
 etc — Deut. iii. 25-27. 
 
 The Success of Christianity an Evidence of 
 
 its Divine Origin, 287 
 
 A Lecture, delivered at the University of Virginia. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 
 
 "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, hath God shined." — 
 Psalm 1. 2. 
 
 THE first verse of this Psalm is a proclamation well 
 adapted to arrest attention, "The mighty God, even 
 the Lord, hath spoken and called to the earth from the 
 rising of the sun unto the going down thereof." I cannot 
 well imagine a more impressive introduction; for God, 
 who made the whole earth, and whose providence controls 
 all the events which make up its history, lifts up his 
 voice. God speaks, and the assembled race constitutes 
 his audience. "O earth, hear the word of the Lord" ; the 
 word of him who created all that live, and controls the 
 lives of all men that have a being, and will finally gather 
 all mankind for judgment at his bar. He speaks; let the 
 whole earth listen. After such an introduction comes 
 the declaration of the text, "Out of Zion, the perfection 
 of beauty." Such is the title that God bestows upon his 
 church. He calls it "the perfection of beauty." Zion is 
 the comprehensive word oftenest used in his declarations 
 of intense and unchangeable love for his redeemed people. 
 Thus we find expressions like these: "The holy hill of 
 Zion," "Zion, the joy of the whole earth," "Praise waits 
 for thee, O God, in Zion," "The Lord hath chosen Zion. 
 This is my rest, and here will I dwell," "The Lord shall 
 bless thee out of Zion," "The Lord loveth the gates of 
 Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob." In the use 
 of this word "Zion" we see how the meaning of a word 
 
12 SERMONS. 
 
 grows fuller and richer by its association with the noblest 
 things, and how it expands until it becomes universally 
 comprehensive of all that is brightest and best. Zion was 
 the loftiest of the hills upon which Jerusalem was built, 
 but the name originally became the title of the entire city 
 of Jerusalem, and then it became a name for all God's 
 ancient people, until finally it became the title of the 
 entire visible and invisible church over which Christ is 
 supreme, through all the world and through all the ages ; 
 and, therefore, when we come to read the great Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, in that magnificent parallel which the 
 Apostle draws between the ancient church and the church 
 under the dispensation of the Spirit, we find him saying, 
 "Ye are not come to the mount that might be touched 
 [alluding to the old dispensation] and that burned with 
 fire, nor unto blackness and darkness and tempest, but ye 
 are come to Mount Zion; to the city of the living God; 
 to the heavenly Jerusalem." This Zion, this ransomed 
 church, the text declares to be "the perfection of beauty." 
 When God created all things by the word of his 
 power, he pronounced them "very good" ; but when God 
 undertook a spiritual creation, it was not the work of his 
 power only, though that was involved: other attributes 
 played their part in the construction of that mightiest 
 work — the wisdom of God as well as his power, the 
 condescension of God and his infinite compassion. The 
 old Zion, that once sat upon the imperial hill which it 
 graced and glorified, has long since passed away like the 
 baseless fabric of a vision ; but the true Zion still stands ; 
 God's spiritual church, resting upon immovable founda- 
 tions, illumined by a more excellent glory, with walls ever 
 rising, with courts ever expanding, until the time shall 
 come when upon the completed edifice shall be placed 
 that ample and beauteous dome, beneath which shall be 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 13 
 
 heard the songs of the jubilant and the emancipated 
 nations. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that 
 inspiration ranges through all the works of God in order 
 to select imagery with which to represent the glory and 
 the beauty of Zion. "She comes forth," says the prophet, 
 "fair as the morning." What emblem could have been 
 selected to give us a more elevated conception of Zion's 
 beauty than this ? — the gladness and the rosy freshness of 
 the early morning, when jocund day stands tiptoe upon 
 the mountain top ! 
 
 "Clear as the moon !" What beauty is there that more 
 charms the eye and the imagination than the soft radiance 
 of the Queen of Night, walking in brightness through the 
 blue? "The church," is the answer; "the Bride, the 
 Lamb's wife," apparelled, not with the beauty of earth, 
 but of heaven, arrayed in the raiment of the King's 
 daughter, and walking in his galleries of light ! 
 
 1. Zion is the perfection of beauty because of the 
 spiritual worship which is offered there, and which God 
 accepts; because of the unity and harmony and fellow- 
 ship and brotherly love that prevail among its members ; 
 because it is adorned with what the Scriptures call, in 
 charming phrase, "the beauty of holiness," a phrase 
 intelligible to the pious Israelite, but which could not 
 have been understood by the cultivated Greek, with all 
 his impassioned love of grace in proportion, grace in 
 architecture, grace in statuary, grace in oratory, grace in 
 the noblest forms of poetic art. "The beauty of holiness," 
 perhaps, was something that he could not comprehend, 
 but, thank God, there are millions now less erudite and 
 less cultivated than the people of ancient classic lands 
 who can comprehend its meaning, and who recognize in 
 it a charm which nothing earthly can even illustrate; a 
 charm not of terrestrial, but of celestial birth. 
 
i 4 SERMONS. 
 
 2. The church is the perfection of beauty because of 
 its beneficent activity ever manifesting itself in efforts 
 for the relief of human want and woe. We recognize a 
 heavenly origin in the kindly cherishing spirit that goes 
 forth from the church for the succor of all that need 
 individual help, and for the uplifting of all the classes so 
 long forgotten and neglected; in a word, for the relief 
 of suffering humanity, whether that suffering is caused by 
 physical or by spiritual destitution. I have oftentimes 
 wondered that the church does not have more considera- 
 tion and more cooperation from the men of the world, 
 who, though animated by nothing but philanthropy, and 
 without regard for the highest interests of the race, yet 
 must see that the condition of the world would be very 
 different from what it is if the church did not exist in it. 
 Every man endowed with ordinary intelligence must see 
 that nearly all the benevolent institutions which furnish 
 homes for the widow and orphan ; asylums for the deaf, 
 the dumb and the blind ; hospitals for the diseased ; 
 wholesome Christian literature for the reading public; 
 the publication of the holy Scriptures in nearly all the 
 languages spoken on the erath, emanate from the church. 
 Why is it that in none of the great resorts and haunts of 
 pleasure and fashion and wealth collections are ever 
 solicited for the suffering poor, and for associations 
 organized to advance all the forms of benevolence? Do 
 you not think it deserves a little consideration among 
 reflecting men that this should be so, and that the 
 church should always be looked to to supply suffering 
 humanity's needs while there are thousands of great 
 secular associations, great political, scientific and com- 
 mercial organizations, powerful by reason of wealth and 
 numbers, to which appeals might be made and from which 
 benefactions might be reasonably expected to come? 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 15 
 
 There is but one gate through which the benefactions of 
 the truly charitable forever flow, and that is the beautiful 
 gate of the temple. Yes, this is one of the elements that 
 constitutes the beauty of the church ; its boundless benev- 
 olence, its wide-reaching, far-reaching, all-comprehending 
 charity. 
 
 I say the church of God is entitled to the respect and 
 the support of the men of the world who care nothing 
 for it as a divine institution, but who do care for their 
 fellow-men, and who do have pity upon the sufferings of 
 the destitute. These are the things that make the church 
 beautiful ; and that which crowns all the rest is when the 
 members of the church, with one consent, joyfully and 
 heartily consecrate themselves to God and take pleasure 
 in the work which is entrusted to their hands. Then, 
 when these things combine — spirituality of worship, har- 
 mony, fellowship, brotherly love, the beauty of holiness, 
 intelligent beneficence and whole-souled consecration to 
 God ; when these elements unite, then the church deserves 
 the title which it receives when it is declared to be "the 
 perfection of beauty." 
 
 I. The church is luminous with the reflection of the 
 glory of its divine author. "Out of Zion, the perfection 
 of beauty, hath God shined." How is this divine efful- 
 gence manifested ? I answer : No element in nature could 
 be selected that so fittingly represents that which is most 
 attractive in the divine nature; as the sun mirrors itself 
 in the placid sea, spread out as a molten looking-glass, 
 so the divine glory is reflected from Zion; no element 
 more suggestive of divine bounteousness than the element 
 of light, just because light is so abundant, so pure; 
 because it diffuses so much joy, because through light 
 all things are made manifest. Without light the earth 
 would be wrapped in a pall, perpetual and impenetrable. 
 
16 SERMONS. 
 
 It is because of light that we see its beauty and derive our 
 impressions of its glory; and therefore it is said, "God 
 is light," to illustrate his perfections and his manifesta- 
 tions of himself to men. When he was conducting the 
 chosen tribes in their magnificent march across the desert 
 to the land which had been prepared for their reception, 
 God went before the host in a pillar of cloud by day, and 
 as the day wore on and the shades of evening approached, 
 lo ! in the centre of that cloud there was a luminous spot, 
 and as the darkness deepened it grew brighter and 
 expanded, and the soft luster spread until the entire cloud 
 from top to bottom was irradiated. All night long God 
 manifested himself in the pillar of fire. So, too, we find 
 when he commanded his people to make a tabernacle in 
 their march through the wilderness, in order that they 
 might have a place where they could congregate and 
 maintain the ceremonies of holy worship, there was one 
 apartment more sacred than the rest, entitled the holy of 
 holies, behind the veil, within which was the ark, with the 
 overshadowing cherubim, and between their golden wings 
 there flashed forth a light, the Shekinah, the manifest 
 emblem of the presence of Jehovah. That presence was 
 more impressively manifested when the temple was built 
 to substitute that movable tent. When Solomon, with the 
 materials which his father had collected for the purpose, 
 erected the temple, at its completion, when the day of 
 dedication came, then the glory of the Lord came down 
 with such effulgence that the priests could not stand to 
 minister because of that exceeding glory. 
 
 2. "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, hath God 
 shined." God hath not only shined in his church to make 
 it what it is, but he also shines out of it by the influences 
 that emanate from it; and so we find that Isaiah says, 
 "Out of Zion went forth the law, and the word of the 
 
 i 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 17 
 
 Lord from Jerusalem/' and it is a very memorable fact 
 that the only idea of true religion which the ancient 
 nations possessed was from the holy light from Zion's 
 hill, shining far beyond the walls of Jerusalem. 
 
 3. Finally when Christ himself, the Redeemer, came 
 to Zion its light shone forth with a new glory ; and when 
 he finished his earthly work, while his commission to his 
 apostles was to go into all the world and preach the 
 gospel to every creature, yet first that gospel was to be 
 preached in Jerusalem, and there the disciples had to wait 
 until a celestial power, manifesting itself in tongues of 
 fire, the emblem of the Holy Ghost, came down to qualify 
 them for their world-wide mission. It is a very impres- 
 sive fact, that as the old nations got their ideas of the 
 one living and true God, and of how he should be wor- 
 shipped, from Zion, so after the advent, all successive 
 nations have continued to receive their ideas of Chris- 
 tianity from the same central source of divine influence. 
 Outward from the very city where the Lord was crucified 
 the word of salvation went forth to all to whom the 
 gospel was preached. 
 
 "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, hath God 
 shined." The people that sat in darkness saw a great 
 light, and to them that sat in the shadow of death a light 
 is sprung up. Just as Christianity prevailed, the world 
 had its very intelligence quickened; a new life suddenly 
 was felt pervading its entire frame; the superstitions 
 that debased men began to vanish ; the false forms of 
 religion that held the intellects of men in baleful subjuga- 
 tion were overthrown, and the human mind was emanci- 
 pated from its long thraldom. Men who had been taught 
 to believe that might was right learned another lesson, 
 and began to understand that right constituted the noblest 
 might. Men became acquainted with their rights, and 
 2 
 
18 SERMONS. 
 
 endowed with the courage to maintain them. By and by, 
 through the pervading influence of Christianity, what we 
 call Christian civilization became the heritage of the 
 world. It deserves notice that the strongest nations of 
 the earth to-day — those which have just laws, true 
 science, constitutional government and free institutions — 
 are the nations that are most thoroughly penetrated and 
 pervaded by the gospel of Christ. 
 
 4. "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, hath God 
 shined." The divine glory is also displayed in the won- 
 derful transformations which this gospel produces in 
 human character wherever it is proclaimed and believed. 
 "Look on this picture and on this, I pray you." Here is 
 the portraiture that the Apostle draws of the depth of 
 degradation into which sin can reduce humanity in the 
 first chapter of his letter to the Romans. When you read 
 the frightful catalogue of epithets which describe fallen 
 humanity, you feel very much as if you were on the very 
 borders of the pit — as if you were listening to the roll- 
 call of demons. But after that appalling register the 
 Apostle says, "Such were some of you, but ye are washed, 
 ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus and by the Spirit of our God." What transforma- 
 tions that Spirit makes ! My friends, do you know that 
 there are some islands in the Pacific that one hundred 
 years agro were inhabited by savages and by cannibals, 
 in which not a single idolatrous temple can be found 
 to-day? Do you know that from one of these cannibal 
 islands a native went once to England, and in the British 
 Museum saw for the first time in his life an idol — one 
 of the idols his forefathers had worshipped, now de- 
 posited in the museum as a curiosity? 
 
 Would you have another illustration of the trans- 
 forming power of the gospel? Then turn to the picture 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 19 
 
 of the primitive church as delineated in the second chapter 
 of the Acts of the Apostles, and contemplate their stead- 
 fast loyalty to doctrine, their hearty fellowship, their 
 abounding generosity, their delight in worship as they 
 continued daily in the temple, with one accord, in prayer 
 and Christian communion, eating their meat with gladness 
 and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor 
 with all the people. 
 
 When Mr. James Russell Lowell was attending a 
 banquet in the city of London, among the after-dinner 
 speeches there were some that contained slurs upon the 
 Christian religion, and ironical remarks with regard to 
 the credulity that still lingered in the world among those 
 who believed in the supernatural ; and when Mr. Lowell 
 rose to respond to a complimentary toast, he said, "It is 
 very easy, gentlemen, sitting in an elegant apartment like 
 this, around a table covered with flowers, with all the 
 tokens and emblems of a refined civilization about us, it 
 is very easy to speculate about religion in a jocose way, 
 and to cast slurs and reflections upon it, but," said he, 
 "while our friends thus indulge themselves in the amuse- 
 ment of discarding religion, they would do well to be 
 thankful that they live in a land where the gospel has 
 tamed the ferocity and beastliness of those who but for 
 Christianity might have long ago eaten their carcasses 
 like the South Sea Islanders, or cut off their heads and 
 tanned their skins like the monsters of the French Revo- 
 lution. I would be glad if any one of these gentlemen 
 would point to me ten miles square on this globe where a 
 man could raise a family decently, under the protection 
 of just and equitable laws, where his children could be 
 raised unspoiled and unpolluted, where age is reverenced, 
 infancy cherished, women honored, manhood respected 
 and human life made secure ; when such a place ten miles 
 
2o SERMONS. 
 
 square can be found where the gospel of Christ has not 
 gone and cleared the way and laid the foundation of true 
 Christian civilization, then it will be in order for skeptics 
 to ventilate their views." 
 
 Yes, my hearers, where this gospel goes, liberty goes, 
 just laws go, education goes, churches are built, all the 
 benignant institutions which bless and benefit society 
 appear. The world is revolutionized and renovated just 
 in proportion as it is penetrated and pervaded by the 
 gospel of Jesus Christ. And when these results are seen, 
 then God is glorified, and "out of Zion, the perfection of 
 beauty, God's glory shines." 
 
 Since these things are so, need I ask, Ought we not to 
 be heartily in harmony, in spirit and in effort, with God's 
 purposes of mercy and grace to the world? Ought we 
 not to throw our lives into the great channels which his 
 kindness, his loving kindness, has opened for our 
 entrance? Ought we not to cooperate zealously with the 
 men that are trying to maintain the cause of truth and 
 righteousness ? Ought we not to give our most intelligent, 
 earnest and generous support to those agencies and 
 institutions by which the whole family of mankind may 
 finally be brought back to its rightful allegiance to God? 
 I think so; you think so; everybody thinks so in his 
 better moments; and, therefore, we see the infinite pro- 
 priety of what our Lord said to his disciples, "Let your 
 light so shine that others seeing your good works may 
 glorify your Father which is in heaven." Do we not see 
 with what an attractive lustre Christianity may shine 
 when it is illustrated in the lives of its members on this 
 wise : "Do all things without murmurings and disputings, 
 that ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God 
 without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse 
 nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; 
 
THE PERFECTION OF BEAUTY. 21 
 
 holding forth the word of life that I may rejoice in the 
 day of Christ Jesus"? 
 
 My friends, sometimes when I am ending my sermon 
 I wish very much that Heaven would inspire me with the 
 knowledge of the right way to make the right application 
 of my discourse. If I have unfolded an important truth, 
 or demonstrated a great principle, then I want to find 
 some method by which I may bring it home to the con- 
 science, to the reason, to the heartfelt approval of those 
 to whom I speak, but now inspiration has supplied this 
 great need in the impressive words of our Lord and of 
 his Apostle, just read. Or if we could take to heart these 
 simple and sweet directions, and then, imploring divine 
 aid, sincerely and earnestly endeavor to live in accordance 
 with them, how quickly society around us would feel the 
 hallowed influence. Were all to unite in such consecrated 
 effort throughout the entire church, then Zion would be 
 recognized and acknowledged even by the world as "the 
 perfection of beauty," and then "the beams which shine 
 from Zion's hill would lighten every land." If I were 
 permitted to make one wish, with the assurance that what 
 I wished would be granted to the people that I love, it 
 would be this, that God, who commanded the light to 
 shine out of darkness, would shine in your hearts, and 
 give to every one to whom I speak this day the knowledge 
 of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 
II. 
 
 "NOT OF THIS WORLD." 
 
 "My kingdom is not of this world." — John xviii. 36. 
 
 IT seems the longer educated men live who believe in 
 the Christian system, and whose hearts are filled with 
 the sweet hopes of the gospel of Christ, the more they are 
 impressed, not only with the number, but with the great 
 variety of evidences by which the truth of our holy 
 religion is demonstrated. These evidences are not only 
 numerous, but they are drawn from sources so widely 
 different. They come from departments that have no 
 connection with each other; indeed, we may say the 
 whole physical universe, the whole world may be levied 
 upon for illustrations and for confirmations of the truth 
 of Holy Writ. 
 
 We begin at the beginning ; the Bible is the only book 
 that has given the world a picture, a definition of a God 
 that is entitled to human respect, to human veneration, 
 to human love and obedience. What a wonderful fact 
 that is ! There was not one of all the gods of Olympus, 
 there was not one of the thirty thousand deities that were 
 represented in the city of Athens whose character and life 
 was not blemished or blackened by some vice; whereas 
 the God revealed to us in these holy Scriptures, with 
 perfect unanimity by all the sacred writers, is represented 
 in the same august and adorable light, worthy of the 
 homage and supremest affection of all intelligent crea- 
 tures. How wonderful it is that a system of miraculous 
 evidences running through fifteen hundred years should 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 23 
 
 have ever been constructed — miracles that seem to con- 
 travene the natural and established laws of nature, and 
 so well authenticated that their reality was not denied 
 even by those most acute, ingenious and virulently bitter 
 enemies of Christianity that wrote against it in the early 
 centuries. They admitted that the miracles were 
 wrought; they only denied that they were accomplished 
 by a divine power. They ascribed them to human 
 agencies, but as for the reality of the miracles it could not 
 be contradicted in many instances. How wonderful it is 
 that a system of prophecy that begins, I may say, with 
 the beginning of man's history — that a system of 
 prophecy should have been delineated the first sentence 
 of which was whispered in the ears of our first parents in 
 the garden of Eden, and that prophecy from this germinal 
 commencement has been unfolding through all the cen- 
 turies, so that every century that passes brings a new 
 confirmation of the truth of the Bible, because it witnesses 
 the fulfilment of some prophecy. 
 
 History is, after all, the greatest witness ; the world's 
 history as it moves on is the great demonstration of the 
 truth of prophecy, and, therefore, as the centuries are 
 added one to another the evidences of the truth, of the 
 fulfilment of these prophecies will be cumulative with the 
 progressive ages. And then, my friends, is it not most 
 wonderful that men living in different climates, under 
 different social and political and moral influences, that 
 men who are different from each other in their natural 
 and in their spiritual endowments, should have uniformly 
 taught that the beauty of man's character, in its highest 
 development, is the beauty of holiness. O that I had time 
 to enlarge upon that theme with which my soul kindles 
 when I think of it, that every writer in the New Testa- 
 ment, in some way or other, makes his contribution to the 
 
24 SERMONS. 
 
 effect that man attains to his greatest dignity, and his 
 only true dignity, just as the expulsive power of the 
 heavenly affection expels from his soul everything that is 
 dark and defiling, and fills him with light and truth and 
 hope and love and peace. 
 
 The most wonderful of all the demonstrable evidences 
 of the truth of Scripture, after all, is the picture that it 
 presents of the only perfect ideal that the world ever saw. 
 All men's ideas of virtue and of perfection are fragmen- 
 tary; here is one that is complete, here is one that is 
 absolutely faultless, here is one before which even the 
 skeptic and the scoffer has been compelled to bow — the 
 matchless beauty of the Son of Mary. I do not know 
 what forms of beauty the heaven of heavens contains ; I 
 do know that the heaven of heavens contains nothing 
 more beautiful than my glorified Jesus. And so, my 
 friends, we have the privilege and the happiness of em- 
 bracing a religion of certainties, a religion the proofs of 
 which are always growing stronger and more convincing. 
 Can we recollect without devoutest gratitude that we were 
 born in a Christian land, and that perhaps our first teacher 
 was a pious mother ? 
 
 What a privilege it is to be in connection with this 
 kingdom of which Jesus speaks, the kingdom of which 
 he is the founder, the kingdom of which he is to-day the 
 loving protector. It is a great mistake to suppose that 
 Christ's work was completed with his resurrection and 
 with his ascension. In one sense it was only the begin- 
 ning of his work. Ever since that ascension to glory he 
 has been superintending the affairs of his church, and it 
 is because of his perpetual and loving counsel that the 
 church is perpetuated, and that our hearts are thrilled 
 with the prospect of its ultimate victory. 
 
 A most interesting question here arises as to the rela- 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 25 
 
 tions between this church and the outlying world, the 
 relation between the church and the governments, the 
 different kingdoms and republics in which the church is 
 planted. Our Lord very briefly says, "My kingdom is 
 not of this world." That is a statement that has been 
 controverted, practically, for the last fifteen hundred 
 years by a large proportion of those who claim pre- 
 eminence in that kingdom ; it has been virtually denied 
 by thousands of those who think that the only way of 
 maintaining the permanency of the church, of increasing 
 its power and of securing its universal supremacy, is by 
 an alliance with the State. And this brings me to that 
 epoch of ecclesiastical history to which I wish to direct 
 3'Our attention, because it is the beginning of that alliance 
 and the beginning of that system of union and coopera- 
 tion between church and state which has continued for 
 fourteen or fifteen centuries. 
 
 It is often said that when Constantine ascended the 
 throne and made Christianity the established religion of 
 the empire, Christianity prospered because the Emperor 
 patronized it ; on the contrary, my friends, the Emperor 
 patronized it because Christianity had prospered. It was 
 not the church coming humbly to a Gesar and seeking the 
 hand of the state, it was the state that wooed the church. 
 Constantine had the sagacity to see that the church had 
 already become the greatest power in the world, and it 
 was on this account that he adopted the plan of strength- 
 ening the state and of accomplishing his own ambitious 
 schemes through an alliance with the church. 
 
 The history of this man is one of great fascination, 
 and marks an era in church history. He was born, as 
 many of you know, in the kingdom of Dacia, on the 
 northern bank of the Rhine, the kingdom that embraces 
 modern Waldachia, and parts of that section of the east- 
 
26 SERMONS. 
 
 ern portion of Europe which is included in Hungary and 
 Moldavia. There were six emperors contending for the 
 government of the world — three of them in the eastern 
 part of the Roman Empire and three in the western part 
 — six emperors contending for universal rule. When 
 the father of Constantine invaded Great Britain, the 
 young man hastened to him, having been separated very 
 early from his father, and living in a distant part of the 
 country. He overtook his father upon the banks of the 
 English Channel, crossed the Channel with him, and 
 partook of the easy victory that was achieved over the 
 Britons. Many persons do not know that the father of 
 Constantine died in the venerable city of York, within 
 sight of that magnificent cathedral that so many of you 
 have visited and admired. It was in that ancient city of 
 York that Constantine himself was crowned, and became 
 king of Britain and of Gaul and of Spain. On his return 
 to the Continent, the constant conflicts between these 
 rival emperors had reduced the number to four, and 
 presently to three, one of these being Maxentius, who 
 made every attempt that was possible to destroy Con- 
 stantine — to effect his ruin and his death by fair or by 
 unfair means. I need not recapitulate the story which is 
 probably familiar to you — of the conflicts between the 
 forces of Maxentius and of Constantine, how at the battle 
 of the Milvion Bridge, near the city of Rome, Constantine 
 achieved his great victory; I need not tell you how he 
 conquered his other rival, Lycinius, in subsequent con- 
 flicts, and how, in his early manhood, with a princely 
 presence, with an inflexible will, with a daring genius, 
 with a natural aptitude for war, with the greatest self- 
 control after a life of chastity and of temperance, and a 
 life in which he had habituated himself to every species 
 of hardship, he entered upon his magnificent career. 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 27 
 
 What interests us most in the connection is the story of 
 his conversion, and the insoluble questions that have 
 arisen with regard to it. This is one of those great his- 
 torical problems that never will be solved. There are a 
 great many Christian writers who look upon Constantine 
 as one of the greatest servants of the church, as a man 
 who accomplished more than any man of his day or of 
 those centuries for its welfare; whereas there are others 
 who look upon him as a crafty politician, as a man con- 
 sumed by intense personal ambition, as only half con- 
 verted, if half converted at all. And so the rival factions 
 continue to dispute, widely divergent in their expressions 
 of opinion, as widely differing as the statements of Euse- 
 bius, a great admirer and eulogist, and those of Gibbon, 
 who depreciates the character of this man, and represents 
 him as an artful hypocrite. 
 
 You are aware of the fact that while Constantine was 
 pursuing his career of conquest he alleged, at least, that 
 he had been greatly influenced by a dream that he had at 
 night, in which a voice spoke to his inmost soul, in which 
 he received, as he thought, a divine commission to under- 
 take the reformation of the world. This was followed by 
 that other most remarkable statement, which also is one 
 of the controverted points in history, with regard to that 
 vision which he professed to have seen in the sky, the 
 vision of the cross flaming in the heavens, and a voice 
 that uttered those oracular and inspiriting words, "By 
 this sign thou shalt conquer." One of the most judicious, 
 thoughtful and pious of modern historians, Ulhorn, in 
 his Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism, does not 
 hesitate to say that he believes that Constantine was per- 
 fectly sincere in the statement of what he saw, and of the 
 influence which it exerted upon him. That much we all 
 may admit. Even if it was an hallucination, even if it 
 
2 S SERMONS. 
 
 was some distempered ocular condition that induced him 
 to fancy that he saw that vision, yet he believed he saw 
 that sign in the heavens, and the evidence of that belief 
 is that it changed, to a very great extent, the man's life, 
 and in the most solemn manner at the time of his death 
 he reiterated the story, and communicated the fact to 
 Eusebius, who received it from his lips : that it had been 
 the influencing and controlling incident in his entire life. 
 Charmed with the romance, his ambition was too large 
 to be filled by the possession of the city of the seven hills, 
 and he achieved the daring project of giving the world 
 a new capital. He accomplished what he undertook. He 
 was the founder of the most splendid city, so far as its 
 position is concerned, upon the entire globe — the city of 
 Constantinople. Napoleon himself declared that it was 
 the key to the empire of the world, and that the nation 
 that would hold Constantinople would be the dominant 
 nation because of its peculiar position, lying upon the 
 narrow Bosphorus, touched by Europe on one side, and 
 by Asia on the other ; the Bosphorus so easy to shut up 
 at both ends, and thus to exclude all hostile fleets; the 
 city so fortified by nature as to be impregnable by land; 
 and yet, when those gates are thrown open, all the com- 
 merce of the Euxine (or Black) Sea, all the com- 
 merce of the Mediterranean and the rich countries that 
 the Mediterranean's waters wash, pour their riches into 
 this city, beautiful for situation, strong by position, and 
 the key to the destiny of the East. There it was that he 
 founded his great capital ; there it was that he built mag- 
 nificent Christian churches; there it was that he invited 
 all the patricians of Rome to emigrate and found new 
 homes, homes which he provided for them. The hundreds 
 of palaces he erected were designed to be the homes of 
 learned men from every part of the world, who were 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 29 
 
 invited to that capital to give dignity and influence to it 
 because of their genius and their culture. He ransacked 
 the whole earth and laid all under contribution in order 
 to adorn the city, and such were his spoliations that some 
 one sarcastically said that he had done everything except 
 to bring back the souls of the great masters, the great 
 poets, the great architects, the great sculptors. He had 
 brought back all their works, and had done everything 
 but to bring back their souls, and make them inhabit the 
 city where their works had been collected in such pro- 
 fusion. 
 
 It was in the year 313 A. D. that he issued the cele- 
 brated edict of Milan, the edict that declared Christianity 
 to be the religion of the empire. Then it was that he 
 commenced those reforms for which he has been so cele- 
 brated and for which the church owes him a great debt of 
 gratitude. He was the man who enjoined the observance 
 of the Christian Sabbath, the first man who ever enjoined 
 it by law, or that forced its observance upon any people. 
 Inasmuch as a multitude of Christian churches had been 
 demolished during the persecutions of the early emperors, 
 Constantine required them all to be rebuilt again, and 
 service to be performed in them by those who were not 
 to be molested in the duties of their sacred office. 
 
 These are some of the great changes he introduced, 
 and at the same time it is perfectly evident from the 
 cruelties which he perpetrated that there was an occa- 
 sional going back, in heart, to the heathenism with which 
 he had been irradicably tainted, making Apollo his God 
 as well as Jesus, Apollo with the radiant brow, Apollo 
 the matchless beauty, Apollo with the infinitely cultivated 
 tastes, Apollo, who charmed the imagination of this man 
 so that his homage was divided between Christ and the 
 Sun God. These are the things that fill the whole world 
 
3 o SERMONS. 
 
 with doubt with legard to the fact whether the man was, 
 really, ever a true convert to Christianity, or whether the 
 alliance that he formed between the state and the church 
 was one out of love for the church or as a matter of state 
 policy. 
 
 When our Lord said, "My kingdom is not of this 
 world," these words cut in twain the recognized policy of 
 some of the most enlightened nations of the earth. My 
 friends, accustomed as we have been all our lives to 
 religious liberty, we are oftentimes under a great illusion 
 with regard to the condition of religious freedom outside 
 of these United States. In how many governments is 
 religion free ? Did you ever try to count them ? I did not 
 ask in how many governments is religion tolerated; all 
 religions are tolerated ; but who does not see that there is 
 a world-wide difference between the toleration of religion 
 and the freedom of religion ? If a government has a right 
 to tolerate one religion, it has a right to suppress another 
 religion, and when the government offers to tolerate 
 religion, it offers an insult to every thoughtful man who 
 has been instructed out of these holy Scriptures, and 
 taught what his rights are by that great charter of human 
 rights. Toleration of the worship of God by the permis- 
 sion of a government when that right is a gift direct from 
 God himself to the soul of man? No, my friends, we 
 scorn the permission ; we scorn the indulgence which 
 says, "We tolerate you for that God-given gift which is 
 equally granted to all men, the right to worship God 
 according to the dictates of conscience. Therefore, one 
 of the happiest things that ever occurred in the organiza- 
 tion of this government was the fact that in the Consti- 
 tution of the United States, Congress is forever prohibited 
 from establishing any form of religion or interfering with 
 the religion of any Christian people. It is a noble article 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 31 
 
 in the same Constitution that in these United States there 
 never shall be any religious test that has to be submitted 
 to in order to acquire or to hold any office of trust under 
 this government. It is true the States can make their own 
 regulations, and have done so, with regard to religious 
 freedom ; and it gives us a great deal of pleasure to know 
 that Virginia was the first State to sever entirely the 
 connection between church and state. The conflict was a 
 very long one — it took more years to establish religious 
 freedom than it did to vindicate the independence of the 
 United States ; but at last it was done, and the article of 
 which I speak was embodied in the Constitution in 1785. 
 The next State to adopt such a policy was Maryland, and 
 after Maryland came New York, and forty years after- 
 wards, Connecticut, in 1816. The last link between church 
 and state was not dissolved in Massachusetts until the 
 year 1831, but now there are no religious tests and no 
 religious discriminations in any of the States of this great 
 Union. 
 
 Now we are beginning, my friends, to recognize the 
 infinite wisdom that lies in that little statement of our 
 Lord when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world," 
 by which he meant that it did not have its origin in this 
 world ; that it was not the product of the times ; that no 
 tendency evolved it; that there was no philosophy upon 
 the globe, no religion upon the globe, no nation upon the 
 globe that could originate a system like Christianity. Cer- 
 tainly it could not have been originated in Athens. If 
 you remember the ground that we went over on last 
 Sunday afternoon, the two great rival theological sects 
 were those of the Epicureans and Stoics. Christianity 
 did not emanate from the religion of pleasure, nor did it 
 emanate from the religion of pride ; Christianity scorned 
 both as the foundation upon which it was to build. It 
 
32 SERMONS. 
 
 could not have originated in Rome in its decadence, for 
 then was the very darkest period in Roman history, when 
 all faith in men had been lost, when all faith in the gods 
 of the Pantheon had been lost, when the very hope of 
 immortality was well-nigh extinguished in the world. 
 Christ's kingdom was not of this world because it had a 
 different origin, and next because it has a different 
 purpose from that of any worldly kingdom. What is the 
 purpose of the worldly kingdom ? It is to augment com- 
 merce, it is to multiply the material resources of the 
 people, it is to prepare room for a great population, it is 
 to do everything to make the nation so powerful as to 
 hold its own against all coiners, so strong as to command 
 the respect of the world. Christianity never attempts this 
 directly ; it does it all indirectly. Christianity undermines 
 whatever is not fit to survive in governments simply by 
 rectifying the principles of the people, and it gives sup- 
 port to all that is fit to survive by giving its sanction. 
 The purpose of Christianity is different — it is to restore 
 the lost image of God in the soul of man; it is to make 
 one endowed with that awful attribute at which we 
 shudder when we think of its true meaning, endowed 
 with the awful attribute of immortality, so to live that 
 immortality will be an eternal blessing and benediction, 
 and not an everlasting curse. The great object of Chris- 
 tianity is so, by the preaching of a pure gospel, to influ- 
 ence the consciences and hearts of men as to prepare the 
 way for the universal reign of the Prince of Peace ; and, 
 therefore, Christianity never brings under its wing or 
 asks the protection of fleets or armies; it does not rely 
 upon human help. "My kingdom is not of this world, for 
 then would my servants fight" ; but it is a kingdom 
 founded in human intelligence, because it refines and 
 elevates human thought ; it is a kingdom founded in the 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 33 
 
 human heart, because, as I said just now, such is the 
 expulsive power of a new affection that it casts out all 
 that is unholy and defiling; it is a kingdom of truth 
 established in the soul of man — truth in harmony with 
 eternal law, truth in harmony with immortal love. That 
 is the kingdom that Christ came to establish in the world. 
 "My kingdom is not of this world," and, therefore, when 
 there is an alliance between church and state, both are 
 equally injured. 
 
 In the fourteenth century, John, the Bishop of Milan, 
 inherited a domain, and as, by that inheritance, he was 
 to become a temporal prince, he was required to decide 
 between the two — to make his choice as to whether he 
 would continue to be an ecclesiastic, or whether, renounc- 
 ing his mitre, he would be a secular prince. When the 
 day of decision came he arose from the throne upon 
 which he sat in the cathedral, with a crosier in one hand 
 and a drawn sword in the other, and he said, "These are 
 my weapons of offence and defence, and with this sword 
 I will guard the crosier." My friends, in that little 
 incident I have told you what might be crowded into an 
 hour's discourse with regard to the unhallowed alliance 
 between church and state. Those that combine the two 
 say that so far from renouncing the one because we be- 
 long to the other, they say, "With this sword I will guard 
 the cross, and sword and cross combined shall conquer 
 the world." We cannot contemplate such a system as 
 that, my friends, without dismay, when we remember the 
 injury that it does to the church, and how it is calculated 
 to fill the church with corrupt men, with men who seek 
 high positions, with men who will demean themselves 
 and debase themselves in order to obtain the favor of the 
 state. It degrades the citizen when the state undertakes 
 to control religious creeds and religious beliefs; it de- 
 3 
 
34 SERMONS. 
 
 grades the citizen because it deprives him of the right of 
 conscience, and the independence of a man to think for 
 himself and decide for himself the great questions that 
 lie between the soul and God. You have a state of de- 
 graded people when they are compelled to suppress that 
 which God has given for the elevation and for the 
 development of man's noblest nature. 
 
 The church commits a great mistake when it under- 
 takes to control political movements, when it espouses 
 the cause of either party, when it gives its influence to a 
 particular candidate, when it tries, by any method, to 
 interfere with legislation — then the church is degrading 
 itself; and the state is assuming an unwarrantable 
 authority when it attempts to regulate the creeds of the 
 church, when it attempts to impose penalties upon Chris- 
 tian people for doing what conscience requires them to 
 do. So that, look at the matter all around, in whatever 
 light you may contemplate it, we have a shrinking back 
 from the thought that the day shall ever come when it will 
 even be proposed in this country to form any connection 
 between church and state. We ought to dwell upon and 
 love this great truth announced in these words of our 
 Lord when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world." 
 
 When it was proposed to disestablish the churches in 
 the different States of this Union, some of the best men 
 were filled with fear. The Rev. Dr. Dwight, of Yale 
 College, was almost tempted to put on mourning, because 
 he thought religion would decline when the fostering 
 arm of the State was no longer around it; and another 
 man, whose name I will not mention, also said it was the 
 darkest day in his life, and yet that man lived to bless 
 God that he had seen that very day, for he saw a day 
 that was luminous now in memory, dark as it was in past 
 experience. Now the happy thing is that this subject 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD.'* 35 
 
 admits of a demonstration, that the men who feared the 
 church would decline when the aid of the state was taken 
 away, have lived to see their mistake because they see the 
 triumph of the system everywhere ; and, therefore, if you 
 look at it for a single moment, you will see that it opens 
 up an exceedingly interesting department of investigation. 
 All state influence in behalf of the church, revenues 
 coming from the state in behalf of missions, or for the 
 building of colleges and schools, being taken away, timid 
 men thought there would be a decline in those great 
 interests. On the contrary, the moment the church was 
 thrown upon its own resources it became conscious of its 
 elasticity, it became conscious of a vigor it never before 
 experienced, and the force and sweetness of which it had 
 not tasted. The consequence has been that there is not a 
 country in the world where education has been so well 
 provided for by free schools, by the establishment of 
 academies of high grades, colleges under Christian influ- 
 ence, for three fourths of all the colleges and universities 
 in the United States are in the hands of Christian men, 
 who exert a Christian influence, influences that are salu- 
 tary, and influences that are saving, that are non-sectarian 
 but evangelistic. There is no country that so well pro- 
 vides for the education of its children as this country 
 does, and when I am speaking about children I am 
 reminded that next Sunday is Children's Day, and that 
 there are more children in the Sunday-schools of the 
 United States than in all Europe put together. Is that 
 not wonderful, when we think of great populous countries 
 like Germany, like Great Britain, like other countries that 
 are Protestant — there are more Sunday-school children 
 in the United States than in all the rest of the world 
 combined, so that we have some twelve or thirteen mil- 
 lion of litfle ones the best day of the week to learn a 
 
36 SERMONS. 
 
 lesson out of the best text-book in all the universe, and 
 from Christian men and Christian women. And then 
 there never were such church buildings as these in the 
 United States. I do not mean that the old cathedrals of 
 Europe do not immeasurably surpass them, but these 
 cathedrals were the production of the middle ages, for 
 that was the way the church expressed its devotion in 
 the middle ages. When it did not have missions to under- 
 take, when it did not have benevolent work to do it ex- 
 pressed its devotion by the erection of great cathedrals. 
 When you compare these edifices in the United States 
 with those of the old world, you see what a free Chris- 
 tianity can do for the erection of commodious churches 
 adapted to the purpose for which they were designed — 
 places where it is convenient to speak, and where it is 
 easy to hear and where the people are permitted to wor- 
 ship God without molestation. Then again, there is not 
 a country in the world that makes such provision for the 
 supply of its own spiritual destitution as the United 
 States. Is it not wonderful, my friends, that we have a 
 better system for supplying destitute neighborhoods than 
 even a little country like England, not as large as a great 
 many of our States, and where we would think the whole 
 country could be districted, and where you would think 
 any and all individuals might be reached? There is 
 probably more spiritual destitution in Great Britain in 
 certain localities than can be found anywhere in the 
 United States, with all the splendid civilization which 
 we so much admire and extol, and ever will admire and 
 extol. And then, not only has provision been made to 
 supply this destitution at home, but there never was a 
 land in which the missionary fires burnt upward with 
 such a steady, vestal flame toward heaven as this land; 
 it is the missionary country of the world. 
 
"NOT OF THIS WORLD." 37 
 
 So, my friends, we thank God and take courage when 
 we see what has been accomplished, and we see in all 
 these things the tokens ( O may God hasten it in our own 
 time) of the final triumphs of the cross, and of the certain 
 coming of the time when that name, which is above every 
 name, shall shine like a radiant star upon the very fore- 
 head of our redeemed humanity. And with a hope like 
 this thrilling our hearts we may say, "The glorious com- 
 pany of the apostles praise thee, O Lord : the noble army 
 of martyrs praise thee ; thy holy church throughout the 
 world doth acknowledge thee." 
 
III. 
 
 THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 
 
 "His foundation is in the holy mountains. The Lord loveth 
 the gates of Zion more than the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious 
 things are spoken of thee, O city of God." — Psalm lxxxvii. 1-3. 
 
 T T has pleased God to select mountain summits as the 
 ■*■ places of his most impressive manifestations of himself 
 to men. Of course, he has not told us the reason of this. 
 He could reveal himself in the valley or upon the plain. 
 He could fill the valleys with his beauty and the plains 
 with his glory, but he has chosen to take the mountain 
 tops as the places for his most resplendent revelation of 
 himself. With these lofty summits we have connected 
 the most important events in biblical history. From these 
 mountain peaks hang suspended the great eras and the 
 great events that mark the progress of the church of God 
 in the world. So that when one becomes familiar with 
 what is in the Bible with regard to the mountains, he 
 gets a very tolerable acquaintance with the entire reve- 
 lation which God has given us in his Word. There is a 
 wonderful connection between sacred history and sacred 
 mountains. It was upon Mt. Ararat that the ark rested, 
 and that the human race began anew as if from a second 
 Genesis. It was on the slope of Mt. Moriah that Abraham 
 climbed, with Isaac behind him carrying wood for the 
 sacrifice; and it was there that God provided the vicari- 
 ous victim that prefigures to us the Lamb of God that 
 taketh away the sins of the world ; and it was upon the 
 top of Mt. Moriah that Abraham's faith shone forth with 
 
THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 39 
 
 a supernal lustre. It was upon Mt. Sinai that God came 
 down in thunder and fire to make known his laws to men, 
 and to give that summary which no skeptic can believe 
 could have been invented by a man like Moses — those 
 ten immortal lines that underlie all the jurisprudence and 
 governments of the world. No one but a man partially 
 insane can believe that a plain, unlettered shepherd from 
 Horeb could give a condensed law that could endure 
 through all the changes, all the forms of civilization, from 
 the beginning to the end of time. It was upon Mt. 
 Carmel, that rises abruptly out of the water, with the blue 
 Mediterranean breaking into silvery foam at its base, 
 that the prophets and the priests of Baal held their mighty 
 duel, when the truth was victorious and vindicated in the 
 eyes of the nation. It was upon the summit of Mt. Nebo 
 that Moses went up to the greatest height which he could 
 reach upon the earth, and it was to that summit that God 
 came down and took him higher. It was upon Mt. 
 Hermon that our Lord was transfigured, and that moun- 
 tain still seems to glow with something of the divine 
 radiance that covered it when celestial visitors came down 
 to commune with him respecting the things he was to 
 accomplish at Jerusalem. It was upon Calvary, clothed 
 with a sacredness all its own, that our Lord hung upon 
 the bitter cross, where he purchased redemption for us. 
 It was upon Mt. Olivet, when that redemption was 
 accomplished, he went up to take the seat — the middle 
 seat — on the celestial throne ; and perhaps nothing gives 
 to the mountains of Palestine a more peculiar tenderness 
 than the associations we have between them and our Lord 
 himself. "Seeing the multitude he went up into a 
 mountain, and when he was set, he opened his mouth," 
 and preached the first sermon he delivered, beginning 
 with the ten benedictions. Oh! the solemnity of the 
 
40 SERMONS. 
 
 mountains in the midnight air. Mountains were the 
 oratory to which Jesus went, and where he held com- 
 munion with his Father; and, therefore, we find that the 
 mountains of Scripture show the trend of revelation ; and 
 I do not know what else to compare them to that will so 
 express the idea I wish to impress upon you — that these 
 mountains through the Holy Land form the great piers 
 of the bridge which spans all human history, from the 
 beginning until the time when the curtain will drop upon 
 the completed drama of the world. 
 
 When God's people were led away into captivity, one 
 reason of the melancholy of their lives consisted in the 
 fact that they no longer had a glimpse of the mountains 
 to which they were accustomed. The plains of Nineveh 
 and Babylon were unbroken by a single eminence. "They 
 hung their harps on the willow when they remembered 
 Zion" — the high and holy hill they had been accustomed 
 to climb — that they went up three times a year to offer 
 their joyful homage in the temple. And when the High- 
 land regiments are moved to the East Indies or other 
 low-lying parts of the world, they long for the wind- 
 swept mountains of the north, with the little cottages 
 nestling at their feet, where in their youth they learned to 
 speak the truth, to love God and do right. So those 
 mountains in the Scripture are made a symbol of refuge, 
 of safety, of home. 
 
 When the patriot Bonnivard was imprisoned in the 
 dungeon of Chillon, in a dark dungeon below the water, 
 he sometimes made a temporary ladder that he might 
 climb to the one small window and get a glimpse of the 
 Alps, with their snow-clad summits and the torrents 
 rushing down their slopes, and the blue sky beyond ; but 
 his despondency came back when he went down to the 
 darkness and slime of his dreary dungeon. 
 
THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 41 
 
 We may climb some Pisgah and look out on the scene 
 which God has spread for our joy and comfort. 
 
 So we find much made of the mountains of Scripture 
 as emblems of divine protection — the safety of those 
 who find their refuge in them. "His foundation is in the 
 holy mountains." That is, what God has founded is in 
 the holy mountains : that which is dearest to God, namely, 
 his church, has its foundation upon those great attributes 
 which the mountain represents. "As the mountains are 
 round about Jerusalem, the Lord is round about his 
 people ;" his righteousness, his power — great mountains 
 of safety, of protection. When God wanted to establish 
 that which is dearest in this world, he did not take the 
 valley or the plain, but he took the mountain, where he 
 based the church upon foundations firmer than the primi- 
 tive granite that supports the other strata upon it that 
 make the earth. And so the Psalmist says, "His founda- 
 tion is in his holy mountains." It was impossible in 
 ancient times for the tribes to go to Jerusalem without 
 remembering as they approached the city how high it was 
 above all the surrounding country; and, therefore, we 
 always read in the Bible about going "up to Jerusalem." 
 Some of the greatest cities of the world were built upon 
 dead levels. It was so in Memphis, it was so with Thebes, 
 it was so with Tyre, it was so with Damascus, it was so 
 with Baalbeck ; but the city of Jerusalem was built upon 
 its ancient hills ; and, therefore, it is that we have, in the 
 very opening verse of this Psalm, this great truth told us : 
 the stability of the church of God, its foundations being 
 the perfections of the Almighty, and the great covenants 
 which he makes with his people, and the great covenants 
 which he made with his Son. We carry out this idea to 
 its fuller development, and find the church which had its 
 foundation in Jerusalem become the church which had its 
 
42 SERMONS. 
 
 foundation in the times of our Lord. It is built on the 
 patriarchs and the prophets, Jesus Christ himself being 
 the chief corner-stone! 
 
 "On the Rock of Ages founded, 
 
 What can shake thy sure repose? 
 With salvation's walls surrounded, 
 Thou canst smile at all thy foes." 
 
 "Beautiful for situation, the joy of all the earth was 
 Mount Zion." This was the city of the great King. 
 "Mark ye well its bulwarks, for here was the city of the 
 great King!" 
 
 And of Zion it is said, "The Lord loveth the gates of 
 Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob." The word 
 "Zion" by metonomy is put for the whole city. Zion, as 
 you know, was a single mountain in Jerusalem. Upon 
 it David built his dwelling. Nearby was Mt. Moriah, 
 upon which afterwards the temple was built. But in the 
 process of time the whole city took the name of Zion. 
 Notice in the study of analysis how a word with one 
 meaning grows by successive accretions as the ages move 
 on. Zion once meant only a single hill, then the whole 
 of Jerusalem, then it stood for God's ancient church, the 
 church over which he was King in the days of the the- 
 ocracy; and then when other times and dispensations 
 came, God said, "I have set my King upon my holy city 
 of Zion." Then the word expanded until it embraced the 
 entire Christian Church. We have a beautiful example 
 of this in the passage of Scripture I read. "Ye are not 
 come to the mountain that cannot be touched ; but ye are 
 come to Mt. Zion, to the city of the living God, to the 
 heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of 
 angels, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to 
 Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant." And if you 
 
THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 43 
 
 want to see how a word continues to grow, you will turn 
 over to the last leaves of the Bible (Rev. xiv. 1-3), and 
 you will find that it is not only the church militant, but is 
 applied to the church triumphant ! That mountain of 
 infinite sanctity upon which God reigns is the Mt. Zion 
 above, and it is designated as the Zion of God. 
 
 Now, it is true that "the Lord loveth the gates of 
 Zion better than all the dwellings of Jacob." And why 
 the gates? Because in ancient cities the gates are the 
 fortified places, the emblem of the strength of the city, 
 and you may ascertain the force necessary to capture a 
 city by the strength of its gates. Then in times of peace 
 the gates were the chief places of concourse — where men 
 of influence and power sat and where they held their 
 conferences. And in process of time the gates became 
 the symbols of all that gave eminence and authority in 
 the surrounding country over which it dominated. "The 
 Lord loveth the gates of Zion" — that is, his whole collec- 
 tive church — "more than he loves the dwellings of Jacob." 
 But we are not to think that this meant any disparage- 
 ment to the separate homes inhabited by his people. 
 The text does not say that the Lord does not love the 
 dwellings of Jacob; on the contrary, it implies that he 
 does love them — only that he loved Zion more. Surely 
 he loves the pious households, where love and friendship 
 meet, where the father is the priest, and where morning 
 and evening prayers are offered, and where the children 
 gather around the family altar, and where they are taught 
 to speak the truth and to reverence the Sabbath, and to 
 obey their parents. The Christian family is the founda- 
 tion of the state; and the character of every republic, 
 every kingdom, depends upon the character of the fam- 
 ilies that compose the nation. When God reigns in the 
 family, then God will reign in the state ; and although it 
 
44 SERMONS. 
 
 will not be a theocracy, in the old definition of the word, 
 that people will be a people whose God is the Lord, and 
 that nation will have the exaltation that righteousness 
 brings. The Apostle sent his salutation to the church in 
 the house, and so long as there are apostolic, evangelical 
 churches in households, there will be the same kind of 
 churches in the commonwealth, nation, world. How dear 
 to God are his people, bound together by the ties of holy 
 affection; but dearer is the collective church: sweet the 
 songs that go up from the family altar, but richer are the 
 harmonies and grander the anthems that go up from the 
 entire church of God. As the world turns on its orbit, 
 and as the world revolves the bright sequence runs — the 
 collective prayers and praises of his people ascend to him ! 
 And God loves the church because the church in its 
 united capacity, with its organized departments of holy 
 work, can do more for the advance of his kingdom than 
 individual families can do. The church is the repository 
 of his truth, the place for the administration of his holy 
 sacraments. The church contains an order of men who 
 have to stand up in the presence of the multitude, and 
 remind them of their obligations to God. No matter what 
 form of government they are under, God maintains be- 
 tween the human race and himself the proper relation. 
 It is the office of the church to preserve this Bible in its 
 purity, its integrity, and to translate it into all the tongues 
 that are spoken on the earth, and then send men to all 
 parts of the earth with it. The church is dear to God. It 
 is the place where the cross is lifted high. Every faithful 
 minister of God lifts up Christ on the cross, and Christ 
 fulfills his promise when he says, "And I, if I be lifted up, 
 will draw all men unto me." The church is the place 
 where more people are converted than anywhere else. 
 The Word is salvation to every one that believes. As the 
 
 i 
 
THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 45 
 
 church is the conservator of the truth, men ought to 
 admire the church on this account. The church is the 
 starting-place of every benevolent enterprise the world 
 has ever known, for the lifting up of the fallen, and for 
 the reformation of the vicious. People ought to recall 
 that the first hospital was originated by the church. 
 Beautiful was the spectacle of the hospital, in which the 
 poor, the infirm and the maimed were gathered. So 
 beautiful was this that Julian the Apostate, to recommend 
 his heathen doctrines, began to establish hospitals as a 
 matter of policy. He wanted to decry Christian influence 
 by showing that heathenism could do the same thing. If 
 you go to heathen cities now, you will find that almost the 
 only measures instituted for the relief of the poor and 
 suffering are the measures instituted and carried out by 
 the churches and by the individual members of the 
 churches. Therefore, the church has claims upon the men 
 of the world that the men of the world should honor. 
 "God loveth the gates of Jacob," but he loves the church 
 itself better than the individual household, for there is 
 his throne, there is his altar, there is the refuge, and there 
 is the home of his people, and from it emanates all 
 influences that are designed to bless the world. Then, 
 my friends, I do not know of anything more natural than 
 that if God has this regard for his church, that all men 
 for whose benefit the church was organized should come 
 to it, and give it all the help they can by their influence, 
 their time, by everything that can advance its influence 
 in the world. For God says, "I have chosen Zion ; this is 
 my rest ; here will I dwell ; for I have desired it." God 
 makes Zion glorious by the incarnation of his Son; he 
 makes the church the body of Jesus Christ, he being its 
 Head ; he makes the church the place where the Spirit 
 dwells, and sends forth quickening, consoling, sanctifying 
 
46 SERMONS. 
 
 power; if he makes the church the one luminary that 
 shines through the sin-darkened world, ought not every 
 fair, right-minded man come up to the help of the church 
 with all that he can bring ? Oh ! what a lamentable mis- 
 take men make. Men that think they must have perfec- 
 tion before they become members of the church, for- 
 getting that the church is the training-school, the place 
 for every man who is sorry for his sins, who relies upon 
 Jesus Christ as his Saviour. Every man who feels these 
 things should be a church member. There are many who 
 say, "I know I am a sinner." They should go on and 
 say, "I come to thee, O Saviour, to save me from my 
 sins." Every man is welcome who can say these things. 
 My friends, if the dear Lord came into the world to 
 preach his own gospel, and then died upon the cross to 
 give you salvation, do not you think he has some rights ? 
 Do not you think Jesus Christ has some rights — rights 
 to your love, reverence and service? Christ loved the 
 church and gave himself for it. He gave his tears, he 
 gave his toil, he gave his blood ; and now he turns to you 
 and says, "My friend, my friend, what are you doing for 
 the church I loved? You have the responsibility of souls. 
 You have immortality. What are you doing for me?" 
 My friends, if every man in this house knew the possi- 
 bilities of their lives, it seems to me they would leap for 
 joy. I cannot frame a sentence in this pulpit that can 
 adequately express that thought. If a man has health to 
 come to the house of God to-day, he can obtain salvation 
 by simple acceptance of it. And when I think of this life, 
 this eternal life, that cannot be numbered by hundreds 
 of centuries, and then remember that many of the men 
 here have only a few years before them — when they 
 think of the possibilities of their life, they should leap for 
 joy. Who will may come and say, "I recognize thy claim 
 
THE HOLY MOUNTAINS. 47 
 
 and my duty, and I trust thy promises; and although I 
 am a poor, weak creature, I rely upon the promise that I 
 shall be helped, and believe that I shall go on from 
 strength to strength until I shall rise in the city of God." 
 
 "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our 
 God." So I close with reference to that. Glorious things 
 are spoken of the city of our God ! I wish you would go 
 back and recall the names of the men who have spoken 
 in Jerusalem. Only think of the kings who have walked 
 those streets ! Only think of the prophets who have 
 sung its praises. "Glorious things are spoken of thee, 
 O city of God." We have an ancient city, venerable for 
 its antiquity and memories on the banks of the Tiber. 
 Philosophers, orators, poets have walked through the 
 streets of Rome, but, my friends, did men walk through 
 its streets whose names can be put by the side of David, 
 and Solomon, and Isaiah, and the apostles, and the mar- 
 tyrs ? Oh ! glorious men have spoken in thee, O city of 
 my God! Such a succession of men as this world never 
 saw before. And the men that spoke in ancient Athens, 
 what are they now but dim shades ? Is there any man in 
 this house who is better to-day because of all that Socrates 
 or Plato ever spoke? They please the intellect, but what 
 have they ever done for the real good of the world ? But, 
 my friends, the names of David, of Isaiah, of Paul ; the 
 names of such men as Athanasias, or Augustine, such 
 men as Knox, Luther, Calvin, and Huss, that have shaken 
 society and revolutionized the world — to whom shall we 
 compare them? 
 
 If I had time this morning, I would read you the 
 whole of this sixtieth chapter of Isaiah. I do not know 
 of anything more inspiring than the sixtieth chapter of 
 Isaiah, in which he gives that glowing picture of the 
 manner in which the church shall be enlarged as all men 
 
48 SERMONS. 
 
 contribute to its glory, laying down their treasures; as 
 science comes, and genius comes, and harmony comes, 
 and devotion comes, as the world comes, and gives its 
 treasures into the church of God. If anything is finer, it 
 is the twenty-first chapter of Revelation, when all this is 
 performed, and the eye glistens when St. John says, "I 
 saw the new Jerusalem, arrayed in the glory of God." 
 And when he goes on to speak of the characteristics of 
 the city of God, and declares that there is no sun, because 
 the Lamb is the light thereof. And when he says there 
 is no pain — no pain of body, no anguish of heart ; and 
 where his servants shall serve him, and where the re- 
 deemed shall be blessed for evermore. "Glorious things 
 are spoken of thee, O city of God." Let us be servants 
 in thy palaces ; let us serve at thy altars ; let us be par- 
 takers of thy glory ! 
 
 "Blest seats ! through rude and stormy scenes, 
 I onward press to you !" 
 
IV. 
 THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 
 
 "There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the 
 city of God." — Psalm xivi. 4. 
 
 NO matter how much we might try to become 
 acquainted with a memorable place, by means of 
 our own reading, or by what others may tell us in the 
 way of information, there is nothing like seeing it our- 
 selves. We may study most diligently in order to inform 
 ourselves about some interesting object, but after all, if 
 we are going to get >a clear and a correct conception, it 
 must be by ocular inspection. For example, we might 
 have the plan of a great city, we have illustrated maps, 
 we have engravings and photographic representations of 
 the principal buildings and monuments which the city 
 contains, but a walk of one hour on foot through that 
 city and a look upon those places will give us a clearer 
 idea of its configuration, of its style, of its general exter- 
 nal character than we can get by months of such reading 
 and study. The first sight of a very interesting object 
 generally makes the deepest impression. There are some 
 things that we cannot have intensely but once. Impres- 
 sions may be renewed, but there is nothing like the vivid- 
 ness of the first impression. There are some objects in 
 nature that affect us powerfully the first time we see them, 
 such as, for example, the great chain of the snow-clad 
 Alps, or the first view of the ocean, or of some mighty 
 cataract. There are places that have no intrinsic interest 
 whatever that profoundly affect us the first time we see 
 4 
 
50 SERMONS. 
 
 them ; they have no intrinsic interest, and yet they move 
 our emotional natures powerfully. A battle-field is not 
 at all different in appearance from the wheat-field, but, 
 ah ! the associations connected with the battle-field, where 
 perhaps the liberties of a people were won or lost. It has 
 no intrinsic importance more than any other field, but by 
 the power of mental and moral association. We look 
 upon it with a thrill of emotion, although the hills and 
 plains and trees that grow upon it may be just like other 
 hills and plains and trees. 
 
 The same thing of which I speak is also true of the 
 great rivers of the earth. The first sight of a historic 
 river, like the Rhine, the Nile, or the Tiber or the Jordan, 
 makes an impression that becomes a part of memory. 
 You say, "All water flows between two banks, and all 
 water is composed of the same elements, and has the 
 same general aspect." So it is, my friends, and yet when 
 you stand on the banks of the Nile, that river is no more 
 like the Tiber, or when you stand on the banks of the 
 Tiber, that river is no more like the Jordan than if they 
 were made of different materials, and as if the outward 
 aspect of them were different. And all this comes from 
 the power of association, from the long memories which 
 we have cherished because of the events that have oc- 
 curred upon the banks of these rivers, and because of the 
 effect which they themselves produce physically and 
 otherwise on the countries through which they flow. 
 
 I think I will make my meaning perfectly distinct 
 when I ask you to think of the associations that belong, 
 for instance, to the river Jordan. It is a narrow stream ; 
 it is usually a turbid stream; there is nothing more 
 impressive in it than there is in the Appomattox at Farm- 
 ville to the outward eye, and yet any one who stands on 
 the banks of that river has a rush of memory that goes 
 
THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 51 
 
 back two or three thousand years. We think about the 
 time when, after the great wanderings in the desert, the 
 trained and disciplined tribes of God, under the lead of 
 their great Captain, crossed that narrow river, and took 
 possession of the land that had been promised to their 
 fathers fcur hundred years before ; we remember how 
 the old prophet once came down to its banks and wrapped 
 his mantle together and smote the waters, and they 
 receded so that he passed through dry shod ; we remem- 
 ber how, when Joseph carried the embalmed remains of 
 his father to the place where he wanted to rest, there was 
 a great mourning at the threshing floor of Atad, beyond 
 the Jordan ; we remember that it was upon the banks of 
 that river that the great preacher that shook the world 
 walked, when John the Baptist cried out, "Repent, for 
 the kingdom of heaven is at hand" ; it was upon the 
 banks of that river that Jesus stood when the heavens 
 were opened above him in answer to his prayer, and when 
 the Spirit in the form of a gentle dove, white winged and 
 pure, fluttered down and rested upon him. The Jordan 
 is a sacred river, not only to the Christian and to the Jew, 
 but to the wandering Israelite, who dips his bloody feet 
 in the waters, upon whose banks his fathers pitched their 
 camps three thousand years ago. There is not a river 
 that flows that awakens so many recollections, or that has 
 connected with it so many sacred associations by people 
 scattered all over the world as the Jordan. There is 
 something impressive to my mind in the fact that on the 
 plains of India, or wherever the Mohammedan has a 
 mosque, he reveres the Jordan just as much as the settler, 
 the immigrant who has built a cabin on the side of the 
 Rockv Mountains. So the Orient and the Occident, the 
 far East and the distant West, unite in paying their 
 tribute of homage to this little river. 
 
52 SERMONS. 
 
 Moreover, these rivers are symbols of great spiritual 
 truths, and I am going now to call your attention to an 
 interesting fact — that a river runs through the entire 
 continent of Bible truth, from Genesis to Revelation. 
 Eastward out of Eden went that river that parted into 
 four branches ; and we turn over to the last page of the 
 Bible, and the seer tells us, "And he showed me a pure 
 river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of 
 the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the 
 street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the 
 tree of life, . . . and the leaves of the tree were for 
 the healing of the nations." The river which started in 
 Eden began its gentle flow through the world; it grew 
 deeper, it grew wider as it ran, and in what sweet strains 
 the Psalmist celebrates that river, how beautifully he 
 presents it to our vision in the text, "There is a river, the 
 streams whereof shall make glad the city of God" ! And 
 when we turn over to Isaiah we find that his poetic fancy 
 was quickened and refreshed at the very thought of this 
 river. "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be 
 glad; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the 
 rose." What a charming commentary that is upon the 
 text! "There is a river, the streams whereof shall make 
 glad the city of God." Isaiah tells us, when he thinks 
 about that, that wherever that river flows the whole land 
 blossoms and blooms like the very garden of the Lord. 
 We can hardly look upon any of the latter pages of the 
 prophecy of Isaiah without seeing something illustrative 
 of this great truth ; and what interests us so, my friends, 
 is the fact that this river that is said to run through 
 the world, that commenced with the creation, that began 
 to flow before Adam began to breathe, and has been 
 flowing on through all the generations, is symbolic of 
 the greatest truth that revelation itself reveals, for what 
 
THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 53 
 
 is this river but the grace of God flowing through its 
 appointed channels, flowing through the visible church, 
 with its ordinances and sacraments flowing through the 
 revealed Word, which makes known what God is, and 
 what we are and what we may be, and which brings to 
 the world those blessings which first civilize and then 
 evangelize the nations. Oh ! this the river, "the streams 
 whereof make glad the city of God !" But the ancient city 
 of God in Palestine did not have any river; how about 
 that? Jerusalem was the only famous city of the world 
 that did not stand upon a river; it was surrounded by 
 great hills, and not even the Jordan flowed beneath its 
 walls. There was a celestial streamlet which ran through 
 the city of Jerusalem that was mightier in its influence 
 than the Euphrates, upon which the great oriental des- 
 potic cities that ruled the world were planted. I am going 
 now to tell you about that stream, and make it illustrate 
 my text. 
 
 The little brook Siloam, as you noticed if you followed 
 me as I read those verses from Ezekiel, flowed from 
 under the temple, flowed from beneath the altar, but it 
 did not rise under the temple. It rose in the western hill 
 that lay beyond Jerusalem ; and good, wise King Heze- 
 kiah did for his city what was the city's salvation. By a 
 secret aqueduct he conducted the water from that un- 
 failing fountain in the western hills, first beneath the 
 western walls of the city, and then underneath the temple, 
 so that from the eastern side of the temple these waters 
 were seen issuing out, and so flowed down through the 
 streets of Jerusalem. The wisdom of his expedient con- 
 sisted in this, that when the city was besieged, as it was 
 so often, the supply of water never could be cut off by 
 turning the stream, even as great rivers were sometimes 
 turned by the besiegers of the cities, and the inhabitants 
 
54 SERMONS. 
 
 left utterly destitute of that without which life cannot be 
 sustained. Because of the prudence and foresight of 
 Hezekiah there was always a supply of water that never 
 could be cut off, sufficient for the necessities of all the 
 inhabitants of Jerusalem. 
 
 That is the first fact, but the next one is this, that 
 these waters flowed in a particular way, they flowed from 
 under the altar. If the river is the symbol of the grace of 
 God, please remember that God chooses the channels 
 through which that grace shall flow to men. The grace 
 of God is something invisible, but there are visible chan- 
 nels through which that grace flows, and one of these is 
 the outwardly organized church. If we want to get near 
 these refreshing waters, we have to come and take our 
 place at the foot of the cross ; if we want to drink of 
 those fountains we have to stoop down and humble our- 
 selves, and with a sense of inward thirst which cannot 
 otherwise be satisfied, we must drink of that life-giving 
 stream. 
 
 Ezekiel tells us that with regard to this stream that 
 was consecrated at the very beginning of its flow, wher- 
 ever it went throughout the land it healed everything it 
 touched that needed healing, and he gives us a most 
 extraordinary illustration of what he means. He says 
 these waters ran down and flowed into the Dead Sea. 
 The Dead Sea, you know, is a water so vile, so acrid, 
 that no living thing can survive in it. There is not a fish 
 in the entire sea, not one; and yet Ezekiel's metaphor is 
 this, that if this life-bringing river only flows down and 
 mingles with the sea, the waters of the Dead Sea them- 
 selves shall be cured and made fresh, so that it shall be 
 filled with animated life. Wherever this river goes it 
 carries with it cleansing, it carries with it healing; and 
 in this respect it reminds us of what happens in the 
 
THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 55 
 
 vicinity of the city of Geneva. Two rivers come together 
 there — the Rhone, flowing bright and blue as the bright 
 blue heaven above it, and mingling with the pellucid 
 waters of the Rhone comes the turbid Arve, flowing 
 through clay soils and fed with the dirty debris of the 
 mountains and of the glaciers through which its waters 
 percolate. When this muddy stream meets with the 
 waters of the blue Rhone, such is the antagonism between 
 the waters that they will not mingle. They flow on, two 
 distinct rivers, with a line of demarcation between them 
 visible to the eye. Side by side they flow, but as they 
 flow a process commences and continues until by and by 
 you notice that the clear water begins to triumph over 
 the turbid. On the right bank, along which the turbid 
 stream flows, that stream grows narrower and nar- 
 rower, and the waters become more and more purified 
 as they run, until at last the Rhone triumphs. A few 
 leagues from the city all trace of the discoloration is 
 gone. And so, my friends, in that figure we have, I 
 think, one of the most beautiful illustrations of what this 
 gospel river will do for this world, all contaminated as 
 it is by ten thousand of vices and abominations. In the 
 triumph of the Rhone I see a prophecy of the triumph 
 of the gospel, and I believe the day will come when the 
 cleansing power of that water will not only be felt by the 
 nations of the earth that are now most besotted, most 
 degraded, but that the purifying power of these waters 
 shall be felt and experienced by every individual soul until 
 humanity shall be washed clean and be made pure. 
 
 Next, we are told that wherever these waters flowed 
 there was a fringe of vegetation upon the banks, the fir 
 tree, the olive tree, the myrtle, the green grass, the ver- 
 dant flowers — beauty on either bank, beauty on both 
 banks, wherever this river flowed. Perhaps there is not 
 
56 SERMONS. 
 
 such an arid looking country on the globe as Egypt 
 during the month of August, but there comes a time when 
 the inhabitants turn their faces northward and scan the 
 heavens. By and by a strange haze settles over the land- 
 scape — no clouds, because it is a rainless land, and all 
 vegetation would perish everywhere if the people had to 
 depend upon rains. Anxious eyes are turned toward a 
 certain part of the horison, and by and by the hope is not 
 disappointed, for the inundation of the Nile begins ; by 
 and by its banks are full ; by and by they overflow, 
 and the water runs over the parched plains, and there it 
 lingers certain days; by and by the water subsides, and 
 in a short time the vast plain becomes emerald ; it stands 
 dressed in living green until it changes for something 
 more beautiful, and that change comes when all the plain 
 is gold with the yellow harvest, making Egypt the 
 granary of the East. And so it is with this river of 
 which the prophet speaks. In whatever part of the world 
 it flows see how it awakens the intelligence of men; see 
 what reforms it inaugurates ; wherever these waters 
 come what new forms of life spring up in their beauty, in 
 their symmetry, in their strength. Just in proportion as 
 any nation becomes evangelized that nation is strong in 
 all the elements that make a people of true progress and 
 true power. It is obliged to be so — that wherever the 
 gospel flows it carries certain adjuncts with it that con- 
 stitute the very life-blood of the world. Wherever this 
 gospel goes it establishes churches, with their ordinances 
 and with their sacraments ; it carries with it the written 
 Word of God, and no book was ever written that so 
 awakens human intelligence; there never was such a 
 book that was such an agitator, never such a revolutionist 
 — never a book that so stirs the thought, the emotion of 
 men. A Bible-reading people is always a free people and 
 
THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 57 
 
 a strong people at the last, for the Bible makes men 
 acquainted with their rights and then fires them with a 
 determination to maintain those rights, and they do. 
 The Bible teaches men not to bow at the feet of a spirit- 
 ual despot, and the moment a man is emancipated from 
 the thralldom of a spiritual despot, he says, "I am also 
 entitled to civil liberty," and, therefore, wherever the 
 Bible has gone it has wrought these two great changes. 
 Even among the most despotically governed people the 
 Bible is the book that teaches men that rulers have duties 
 as well as rights, and that the people have rights as well 
 as duties, and that is the greatest lesson that a state can 
 learn. That is the secret of free and of stable govern- 
 ment. 
 
 You recollect to have seen that man described by 
 Ezekiel, as he walked along with the measuring line. He 
 walked a thousand cubits and measured the depth of the 
 water, and it came up to the ankle ; he walked a thousand 
 cubits further, it came up to the knees ; a thousand cubits 
 more it came up to the loins ; another thousand cubits, 
 and it was a river that great galleys and stately ships 
 might sail on, but it could no longer be forded. In the 
 days of good old Enoch, the seventh from Adam, a little 
 handful of people, as many as could sit in these front 
 pews, were banded together, and began to call upon the 
 name of the Lord. The river was then a rill indeed ; you 
 could hardly hear it trickle ; you could only see the glitter 
 of it as it began to flow over the sand, but it flowed on; 
 and then the patriarchs came, and the judges, and the 
 prophets, and the psalmists ; and in the days of David, 
 and in the days of Isaiah, it was a splendid river, cele- 
 brated as such in immortal song, "There is a river that 
 makes glad the city of God." That was true in the days 
 of David, and, thank God, that river has been flowing on 
 
58 SERMONS. 
 
 ever since, deepening as it runs. If the man with the 
 measuring line had attempted to ascertain the breadth 
 of it, and the depth of it, on the day of Pentecost, he 
 would have had a task to perform, and since the day of 
 Pentecost the world has been living under the dispensa- 
 tion of the Spirit. Now the mightiest force in the world 
 is the gospel force, and the strongest institution known 
 on earth is the church of God. Out of the church come 
 all the institutions of Christian benevolence, and all the 
 great enterprises that good people have devised for lifting 
 up the neglected classes, the hopeless classes as they are 
 sometimes called. There are no hopeless classes, except 
 those that the church has ceased to hope for. Whenever 
 the church gets hopeless, then the world may get hopeless 
 too, but there are no hopeless classes. All the enterprises 
 of Christian benevolence by which the unregenerate, the 
 debased and the alienated are brought out of their im- 
 purity and brought into civilization, these are the work 
 of the church. These great institutions by which the 
 gospel is disseminated through the world are not invented 
 by worldly men — none of them are the devices of 
 worldly men. Our boards of publication, our institutions 
 for the education of pious youth for the ministry, those 
 two great factors of modern civilization, the British and 
 Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society, 
 with their gigantic presses running day and night, year 
 in and year out, scattering millions of Bibles all over the 
 world — these are some of the outcomes of the gospel 
 wherever it has gone. 
 
 Therefore, we are told that wherever that river cometh 
 it giveth light, and "it maketh glad the city of God." Oh ! 
 yes, with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of 
 salvation. I do not know how a man can be happy until 
 he drinks of this stream. The grace of God is something 
 
THE RIVER THAT MAKETH GLAD. 59 
 
 essential to human happiness, because it brings man's 
 imperious will so often antagonistic to the divine will, it 
 brings it in sweetest harmony with the paternal will that 
 is always right ; and when the little finite will merges and 
 flows along with the Almighty will, the Omnipotent, ever- 
 right will, the holy will of God, then the man starts right, 
 then the gospel burns up with a clear, steady flame of 
 devotion to God. When the will is harmonized, and when 
 the emotions or thoughts are purified, and are all filled 
 with the graces of the Spirit, cannot anybody see that 
 the man may say, "There is a river whose streams make 
 this heart, this conscience, this will, glad." "There is a 
 river whose streams make glad the city of God." The 
 people who have told the most stupendous falsehood that 
 was ever attempted to be palmed upon the world for its 
 deception are the people who have represented religion as 
 something gloomy, when it was intended as it flows on 
 in its beneficent course through the world, that before it 
 sighing and sorrow should flee away, and in a sweet train 
 should follow thanksgiving and the voice of melody. 
 
 Beloved friends, it comforts me to know that the 
 waters of this river can never fail. I do not know 
 whether the Nile river may not be interrupted some time 
 by a revolution of nature in the East ; it may be so inter- 
 rupted as not to overflow its banks, and then comes a 
 barren strip of sand where there is now beauty and fer- 
 tility; but I know that this river that runs out from 
 beneath the temple walls is a river that will never fail. 
 God's love is a reservoir. It is a reservoir the depth of 
 which cannot be fathomed, and only think that out of 
 that reservoir men of all the ages have been drinking and 
 drawing whatever supplies they wanted, and the surface 
 has not been lowered one hair's breadth for six thousand 
 years. Oh! the imperishable character of the grace of 
 
6o SERMONS. 
 
 God, flowing on forever, undiminished in its force, undi- 
 minished in its healing power, undiminished in its power 
 to make glad the souls of men. "And the Spirit and the 
 Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. 
 And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, 
 let him take of the water of life freely." I cannot make a 
 more friendly wish; I cannot make a more affectionate 
 wish than the wish that I do make for every one within 
 these walls to-day — that whatever else he may fail to 
 secure he will not fail to bend over these waters. They 
 will give refreshment to that weary, sad heart; they will 
 give purity with all the peace that purity brings; they 
 will bring the harmony that will give the happiness that 
 comes from harmony, the divine happiness that comes 
 from holiness. O that each of us to-day would humbly 
 bow and drink of that life-giving stream ! On that last 
 great day of the feast Jesus stood where everybody could 
 see him, and he cried so that everybody could hear him, 
 and he said, "If any man thirst [that means you], let him 
 come unto me and drink." 
 
V. 
 A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 
 
 "I will be to them a little sanctuary." — Ezekiel xi. 16. 
 
 ALL the words in our language which have been 
 derived from the Latin word sanctus have a kindred 
 meaning: sanctity, sanctification, sanction, sanctuary — 
 one idea pervades all these derivatives, and that is the 
 idea of something hallowed, something consecrated, some- 
 thing set apart from a common to a hallowed use. 
 
 In the ancient temple there was one apartment that 
 was regarded as the most sacred of all, and when the 
 sanctuary was spoken of originally reference was had, 
 not to the temple, the whole temple with its different 
 courts, but to that one consecrated place over which an 
 unlifted veil hung through all the year, a veil that was 
 raised only once a year when the high priest entered, 
 with blood upon the altar to make intercession for the 
 people that stood worshipping without. In the process 
 of time, the whole building came to be called the sanc- 
 tuary, and then the word was very naturally and properly 
 applied to all houses of worship erected in every part of 
 the world for the service of the great God. We speak 
 of these as sanctuaries, remembering that they are hal- 
 lowed places, that they are places of refuge, places of 
 rest, places of communion with God, places where men 
 are trained for service, where they gather the strength 
 with which they go out and wage a warfare against the 
 adversaries of the truth, and to labor for the extension of 
 the kingdom of truth and righteousness in the world, 
 
62 SERMONS. 
 
 and where they are prepared for the higher and nobler 
 service of the upper sanctuary. 
 
 In order to understand the full force and significance 
 of this little text — which does not seem to have anything 
 in it at the first reading — we must consider for a moment 
 the peculiar history and position of the people at the time 
 when the prophet was commanded to tell the scattered 
 Israelites that God would be to them "a little sanctuary." 
 
 In ancient times one of the strangest customs that the 
 mind can contemplate, then universal, now universally 
 obsolete, was common, and that was that when two 
 nations made war upon one another, the victorious nation 
 carried away hundreds and thousands of the captured 
 people, and made them captives in their own land. This 
 was especially true of the inhabitants of Palestine, for 
 that little country stood just at the angle where three 
 great countries touched, and across its narrow territory 
 swept the great invading forces — whether thev came 
 from the far north, from Babylonia, or Chaldea, or 
 whether they came from the south, from the land of 
 Egypt sweeping northward — the ground upon which 
 the peoole walked was nearly always trembling under the 
 tread of warriors, and their ears were seldom without the 
 sound of the thunder of the chariots, and the clash of 
 splintering swords ; and as a result of an attack upon the 
 city of Jerusalem, the people of that citv were carried 
 away into captivity — once for a period of seventy years. 
 This was the condition of things when the text was 
 uttered, and its immediate occasion. The few Jews that 
 had been left behind in the land of Palestine, who were 
 still inhabiting the citv of Jerusalem, regarded themselves 
 as the peculiar favorites of Heaven, because thev had 
 escaped captivitv; and they were prone to look with 
 contempt upon their brethren, who had been made captive 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 63 
 
 by the heathen, whose ways and principles they imagined 
 their brethren had to some extent adopted ; they did not 
 look upon them as having maintained the true faith in 
 the God of Israel ; and, therefore, in this chapter of the 
 prophecy of Ezekiel, we find that these home Jews, these 
 Jerusalem Jews, were in the habit of speaking disparag- 
 ingly of their brethren in captivity, saying, "We are the 
 people of the Lord, and in possession of the inheritance 
 which the Lord has given us ; we have our home, our 
 city, we have our church, our temple." Then it was that 
 the prophet was directed to go and bear this message to 
 the captives who had been stolen, who "hung their harps 
 upon the willows when they remembered Zion," and who 
 had not lost any of their inborn love for their church and 
 people, and who prayed for the time when they might be 
 permitted to return to their own land, and whose hearts 
 had grown sick because of hope so long deferred — whose 
 hearts were wounded when they heard that their brethren 
 at home thought them disloyal to their home and their 
 God. Then the prophet was sent with this comforting 
 message, "I will bring you back, and you shall be to me 
 a people." But in the meantime, until the fulfilment of 
 the promise, the prophet was directed to say in the name 
 of the Lord, "I will be to you a little sanctuary." 
 
 In the sermon this morning I want to point out the 
 exceeding kindness of this dispensation, and to show that 
 God still delights in the worship of his people in the 
 churches which have been organized, and where they may 
 meet to sing together, to pray together, to hear the Word 
 of God ; and also that the divine wisdom and divine 
 goodness has been shown to those who have been deprived 
 of such privileges. Nothing that I am going to sav will 
 disparage in the slightest degree the feelings we ought 
 to cherish of the house of God. These Scriptures bear 
 
64 SERMONS. 
 
 the immortal impress of the regard which God himself 
 has for his church and the worship of his people. Turn 
 over the leaves, especially of the writings of this prophet 
 and of the Psalmist — the praise of the sanctuary is often 
 the burden of their song, and his delight in the worship 
 of his people in their churches is their theme. God's 
 people respond, "One thing have I desired, and that will 
 I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord 
 forever" — not literally, not bodily, but always there in 
 my interest and my affection — "to behold the beauty of 
 the Lord, and to inquire in his tabernacle; for in the 
 time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion, in his 
 secret place shall he hide me." 
 
 Man is naturally a social being, and God's people 
 come together and gratify that social nature, so that we 
 find ourselves edified when we sing together, and pray 
 together, and when together we engage in all the exercises 
 of holy worship. God has made the church the depository 
 of his eternal truth ; he has made that long succession 
 of men, whom he intends to maintain to the end of time, 
 to tell the people of it, to force it upon the mind of the 
 people, and above all to uphold the cross, so that his 
 prediction shall find fulfilment, "And I, if I be lifted up, 
 will draw all men unto me." Yes, we are to have regard 
 for the sanctuary, for the institutions of public worship 
 in the houses that have been built and consecrated to his 
 service, that have been hallowed with memories of com- 
 munion with God. in the sacraments that have been ad- 
 ministered in them for generations and generations. 
 Well, while all this is true, I want to call your attention 
 to the divine consideration that is shown in behalf of 
 those who have it not in their power to worship in these 
 temples built with human hands. If I should ask you 
 who wrote the Psalms, these children that are in the 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 65 
 
 house this morning, and that I see are listening to the 
 sermon — even these children would say, "David wrote 
 the Psalms." So he did, so far as the majority of them 
 are concerned; but Solomon wrote one of them, Asaph 
 wrote several of them, and Moses wrote, perhaps, the 
 noblest of them all. For depth and volume of holy 
 thought I do not know of any human composition that 
 can equal the nintieth Psalm. There is a dignity in it, a 
 stately march in it, a grandeur in it, a sanctity in it that 
 arrests our attention, and deeply moves us when we con- 
 template it — the Psalm that begins with these words, 
 "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all genera- 
 tions. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever 
 thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from 
 everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." No doubt it 
 was when the tribes were on their wearisome march to the 
 land they loved and were longing for, and Moses as- 
 cended some eminence, and looked out upon the hosts 
 of Israel in their encampment. Pie remembered that for 
 years and years theirs was to be a troubled and unsettled 
 life, that although they might might be encamped in the 
 place called "Elim," where were palm trees and refresh- 
 ing springs of water, and though they might want to 
 linger longer at a place so refreshing, yet the moment they 
 saw the pillar of cloud rise and move onward they had 
 immediately to fold their tents and join the march. 
 Never could they remain long enough to sow the grain 
 with any expectation of reaping the harvest or profiting 
 by the result of their own industry. They were entirely 
 dependent upon Providence for their daily supply, and 
 theirs was a life of perpetual change — wanderers, home- 
 less, in a great desert ! It comforted the man of God that 
 the Lord after all was the dwelling-place of his people in 
 all generations, the spiritual home, and it comforted him 
 5 
 
66 SERMONS. 
 
 that every devout member of every tribe in the uncertain 
 life which he lived, the life of perpetual vicissitude, the 
 life of constant weariness, the life of continual exposure, 
 could find in the presence of God himself the sanctuary 
 his soul needed, and that there he could find his true rest 
 and true home. And this has been the case with the 
 people of God in all generations. "Here we have no 
 continuing city." Very few of us live in the house which 
 we built with our own hands ; when we recur in memory 
 to our earliest home of which we have any recollection, it 
 is oftentimes accompanied by an emotion of great sadness 
 when we think it is not our home any more, and never 
 will be, and that the place where we learned the name of 
 "mother," with all the endearments of home life, is now 
 in the hands of strangers; and when we go back to it, 
 although there may be some agreeable associations 
 awakened, oftener they are depressing because of the 
 melancholy changes which we see have taken place. God 
 is the spiritual home where we are at rest, and where we 
 find no change, and that home to us is just the same as 
 it was in our childhood. If we have reached middle life, 
 we say, "This is my rest now, just as certainly as when 
 I sat at my mother's knee." And if we have reached old 
 age, our satisfying trust is deeper as the years go on, and 
 as we feel the need of the support of the eternal God and 
 of the everlasting arms. 
 
 I can imagine how the great soul of Moses was com- 
 forted when he saw the thousands and thosands of Israel 
 and remembered that for forty years, through that great 
 and terrible wilderness, they must follow on their weary 
 way, and how it comforted him to say, "Lord, thou hast 
 been our dwelling-place." We talk about our earthly 
 home ; we can find no true rest in any earthly home — I 
 do not mean that we cannot find true love in our earthly 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 67 
 
 homes, for we do. But the very love that makes home 
 so sweet is the occasion of life's deepest sorrow, because 
 we know it is only a question of time when the ties that 
 are dearest will be severed, and not only "the mourners 
 go about the street," but sit in the house and bewail their 
 dead. If the soul would find undisturbed tranquillity, it 
 must be in God, who is our dwelling-place — not in the 
 temple, but in the great Lord of the temple. 
 
 And then only remember that during the lives of the 
 patriarchs there was no such thing as a church in all the 
 world. Well, how did they maintain their worship with- 
 out the advantages, the things we think necessary ? How ? 
 By the fulfilment of the promise. The very first thing 
 that Abraham did when God called him from his native 
 land was to build an altar, and God was there, "a little 
 sanctuary." And when Jacob lay upon the ground and 
 saw that glowing ladder reaching the sky, he said, "This 
 is the house of God, the gate of heaven." There was no 
 house, no gate, but God was there, with all his imparted 
 strength and consolation. Jacob was anything but lone- 
 some and solitary when troops of angels went up and 
 down the glorious ladder, and when God stood at the top 
 speaking words of comfort to his servant. That was a 
 beautiful illustration of the promise, "I will be to you a 
 little sanctuary." 
 
 And then consider how many people there are in the 
 land in which we dwell, where there have been Christian 
 institutions, Christian privileges, ever since the country 
 was settled — how many there are living in communities 
 so sparsely settled that there are not enough to form a 
 congregation ; and if there were enough people, such is 
 the poverty of the people that they cannot support a 
 settled minister. Shall they be left without the conso- 
 lations of religion? They are left without the house of 
 
68 SERMONS. 
 
 God ; but only that, for they have the Lord of the house. 
 "I will be to you a little sanctuary." 
 
 My sympathy goes out to the thousands and thou- 
 sands of people that have no home in all the earth. Per- 
 haps you have never thought of the people whose voca- 
 tions keep them always on the move. I do not allude only 
 to the sailors, whose home is in the forecastle of the ship ; 
 not only those, but the homeless ones, and they constitute 
 thousands and thousands of our race. How many are 
 there who travel up and down the land, whose whole lives 
 are lives of perpetual change, without the comforts of 
 home during the week, and without the privileges of the 
 church on the Sabbath day ! But there are devout be- 
 lievers in the truth, there are loyal servants of God in 
 these countless thousands, and to them God says, "I will 
 be to you a little sanctuary." I am glad to know that the 
 sailor in the forecastle of the ship can find, even in that 
 place, so narrow and noisome — even there he can find a 
 sanctuary where he can meet with his Lord, and hold 
 communion with him in prayer. 
 
 Then I call your attention to another great class. Did 
 you ever make a calculation of the number of people in 
 this land, in these United States, who, by reason of age 
 or infirmity are obliged to stay in their homes? What a 
 great host of the weary and worn, almost worn-out old 
 pilgrims you would find, could you get a glimpse of those 
 who have almost reached the termination of their journey, 
 and who can only sit in the armchair, ministered to by the 
 younger members of the family, only waiting for the 
 doors to open and admit them to the rest so long desired ! 
 Think of the multitude of the class called "shut-in" — a 
 very striking term. I believe there is a newspaper called 
 Shut-in, which is intended for those who, by reason of 
 long illness or infirmity are unable to leave their homes, 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 69 
 
 into whose wearisome lives it brings good cheer. Well, 
 I believe that in the chambers where God's people are 
 confined, and in the houses where they are shut in by 
 reason of recent bereavement, there are some of the most 
 beautiful disciples of Christ to be found in the world. I 
 think some of the most saintly people in the world are 
 those I have been describing. To them God's promise is 
 fulfilled. Some of the most eloquent tributes I have ever 
 heard in my life to the sweetness of God's sustaining 
 grace I have heard in the chambers of sickness, and in 
 the homes made desolate by bereavement. It is not in 
 the pulpit that you hear the noblest expressions of God's 
 unfailing care and love ; it is with those who have had 
 experience of God's grace, and appreciate it thoroughly. 
 To the "shut-in," from any cause, the promise comes. "I 
 will be to you a little sanctuary." 
 
 Then I would have you remember another class. Only 
 think of the people who two centuries ago in the land 
 from which so many of us, so many of our forefathers 
 came; only think of the persecutions they suffered be- 
 tween 1670 and 1688; think of the condition in England 
 and Scotland, when the perfidious Stuarts were on the 
 throne, and until William of Orange came in ; when the 
 government tried to impose prelacy upon the people ; 
 when the people were forbidden to meet in the sanctuary ; 
 when they were driven from their homes, and even abode 
 in caves, taking refuge there from the rude troopers of 
 Claverhouse. And I know of few things more pathetic 
 than the annals of those days, when you read of the 
 haunts which the people of God found; when you read 
 of the cavern which had a very narrow entrance, beyond 
 which was a large chamber, in which they gathered ; a 
 cavern on the side of a steep mountain, where the dra- 
 goons could not reach them, the entrance concealed by 
 
70 SERMONS. 
 
 the heather and bracken that grew about it; where the 
 people of God could gather on the Sabbath day, and who 
 had to sing their hymns in low, subdued voices, where the 
 hours were precious to them because attended with so 
 much peril; where they could hold communion together, 
 where they could sympathize with one another, and where 
 they could gather around the consecrated elements, the 
 broken bread and wine. They knew not if the day should 
 close without disaster. Do you believe that there is any 
 cathedral in the world, St. Paul's, or St. Peter's at 
 Rome — do you believe that there is any cathedral in the 
 world more precious to God than that old cave in the 
 mountain where the old Covenanters used to meet? No, 
 there was the place where they found their rich and full 
 reward ; there God fulfilled his promise when he said to 
 them, "I will be to you a little sanctuary." 
 
 And would you not think it strange if I were to tell 
 you that the place where God has had the most heartfelt 
 praise, the truest sanctuary, was the prison? Only think 
 of that scene in a prison when, with their feet made fast 
 in the stocks, at midnight Paul and Silas sung a song 
 which the prisoners had never heard before, the song of 
 glory to the eternal King — a song whose echoes have 
 never died away, resounding through the world at this 
 moment — when Paul and Silas not only prayed, but 
 sang praises to God! And what shall I say of the 
 remarkable period in the life of Martin Luther when he 
 was taken to the prison in the Thuringen mountains, and 
 shut up for a year? It looked like a hard dispensation, 
 and yet we see the reason for it. Martin Luther had been 
 a man of action, he had been a man of power, he had 
 given his testimony before kings, he had been in the 
 habit of standing before multitudes, never fearing to let 
 his voice be heard. By the hymns which he had com- 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 71 
 
 posed — hymns sung in the palaces and cottages of Ger- 
 many, stirring hymns — he had moved the hearts of 
 millions. And now God, in his providence, had another 
 mission for him, and prepared him for another work. It 
 was God's will to call him from his former life, and 
 imprison him upon the mountain crag, like the eagle he 
 was, where he could hold communion with God and ob- 
 tain a profounder knowledge of his holy Word ; and note 
 what he says, "Called up to God, in my prison I had the 
 sweetest experience of what comes from the grace of my 
 Lord." And well it was that the opportunity was given 
 him to prepare that splendid translation of the Scriptures 
 that gave new dignity to the German language — that 
 down from the height of that fortress that translated 
 Word should come that should be a light, an inspiration 
 to the German empire, and to the German people through 
 the whole world. Never say that a year has been more 
 profitable than that year spent in prison. 
 
 And what shall I say of that immortal dreamer, who 
 was arrested for preaching without a license. When he 
 was arrested, you remember John Bunyan's account of 
 his parting with his family. He took leave of his wife, 
 and of his children, one by one, with a great deal of 
 fortitude, until he came to kiss his little blind child, the 
 youngest of all and the most afflicted, and then the strong 
 man broke down for a moment at least, and he said, 
 "Poor child, they will buffet thee, they will persecute 
 thee ; thou wilt suffer from hunger and cold and thirst." 
 Oh ! it was hard parting from that child. And for twelve 
 years he languished — no, he did not languish at all ; for 
 twelve years he honored and glorified that Bedford jail. 
 And did ever man employ his time better than by writing 
 that glorious allegory, the most glorious book that was 
 ever written, uninspired — a book that has been more 
 
72 SERMONS. 
 
 translated than any other book, and passed through more 
 editions than any other book except the Bible? A book 
 that elicited praise from a cold, cynical man like Dean 
 Swift; a book that was the theme of admiration on the 
 part of Dr. Johnson, whose enthusiasm was not very 
 easily awakened ; a book that received the commendation 
 of the cold, philosophic Dr. Franklin; a book that 
 Macaulay has written about, when he tells us of the age 
 of England that produced only two men that deserved to 
 be ranked among immortals, and those men were John 
 Milton, Who wrote the Fall of Man and the way sin was 
 brought into the world; and John Bunyan, who wrote 
 about the Christ that brought salvation — the man that 
 in a dungeon had a vision of the Delectable Mountains 
 and the City of the Great King ! To him the promise was 
 fulfilled. Bunyan says, referring to his prison home : 
 
 "Here I have found comfort and instruction. Those 
 portions of the Scriptures in which I found little meaning 
 now shine upon me. I have a sweet sense of the nearness 
 of my Lord in these solitary hours. I have felt the truth 
 of what the Apostle said, 'Whom we have not seen, yet 
 love.' My body is indeed in this prison ; my soul is free, 
 and it ascends by prayer to its source, and I hold com- 
 munion with the Eternal, and I rejoice in the coming of 
 the time when I shall be satisfied with the divine vision." 
 
 I think the best, most graphic writing we have on 
 Christian experience is in Baxter's Saints' Rest. Only 
 think of the discipline that he went through during the 
 two years he was in prison ! You remember he was 
 brought before that infamous Judge Jeffreys, and when 
 his counsel prayed that his trial might be postponed for 
 two days on account of the absence of witnesses, Jeffreys 
 said, "He is one of the two greatest rogues in Great 
 Britain." And so that saintly man was committed to 
 
A LITTLE SANCTUARY. 73 
 
 prison, and for two years he languished there, and what 
 is his testimony about it? It was this: "In all places 
 where I have been I have found monuments of the divine 
 love. Every hour that I have passed has been a time of 
 love. Every neighbor, every friend, and even every 
 enemy has been made to be, by God's grace, a minister of 
 love." And then he said, "Father, bring my soul more 
 near to thee, that it may have a purer vision, a clearer 
 proof of that love, until I shall be taken to the place where 
 I shall know thee perfectly and love thee more." 
 
 I hope I have succeeded in fulfilling the promise that 
 I made at the beginning of this discourse, when I said 
 that this little text would show so much consideration on 
 the part of God for the homeless, and for those who are 
 cut off from the privileges of the sanctuary. They have, 
 we have, all that we need in him. 
 
 "In darkest shades if he appear, 
 My dawning is begun; 
 He is my soul's bright morning-star, 
 And he my rising sun. 
 
 "The opening heavens round me shine, 
 
 With beams of sacred bliss, 
 When Jesus shows his heart is mine, 
 And always I am his." 
 
 "I will be to you a little sanctuary.' 1 
 
VI. 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 
 
 "The Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever." — 
 i Peter i. 23. 
 
 IF, during the excavations which they are now making 
 at Herculaneum and Pompeii, there should be found 
 a long-lost poem by some old classic bard, or an oration, 
 or a philosophical dissertation by some great master of 
 thought, how every scholar would desire to possess him- 
 self of such a treasure. But I have now open before me 
 a book that has been more safely preserved and trans- 
 mitted than if it had been encased in lava and just rescued 
 from its stony sepulchre after having been buried there 
 for ages. And what is more wonderful is the fact that 
 while many of the productions of authors who have writ- 
 ten a thousand years since these Scriptures were written 
 have perished, or have come down to us only in a muti- 
 lated and fragmentary form, we have this book in its 
 entirety, in its integrity, in its marvellous exactness, with- 
 out one solitary ray of its original glory dimmed or 
 eclipsed. 
 
 The older portions of this book were written hundreds 
 of years before the father of history was born ; they were 
 written more than three thousand years ago ; and the very 
 last line in the New Testament nearly two thousand 
 years ago ! And yet this ancient book is the freshest, the 
 most up-to-date of all the books that we have upon the 
 globe; there is not another volume that is so modern as 
 the Bible. It might have been written in this year of our 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 75 
 
 Lord, so far as its adaptedness to human society as it 
 now exists is concerned; it might have been composed 
 this present year, so far as the instruction it gives as to 
 human governments, to all associations that are intended 
 for the betterment of the people — to all who occupy 
 positions of trust and authority ; to all who are trying to 
 live higher and nobler lives, preparing for the life that 
 lies beyond this, now so full of trial, darkness and tears ; 
 to all who are preparing for the life of eternal rest, and 
 light, and gladness. This is the book that we read with 
 ever-recurring interest ; it is a book that never loses its 
 freshness ; the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth — 
 the sweet-scented flowers that grow in your gardens, or 
 that you pluck and place in your chambers, how soon the 
 leaves fail, how soon the fragrance is gone ! This figure 
 of inspiration is selected to represent to us the mutability 
 of all things earthly, for the purpose of saying, "The 
 Word of God abideth forever!" 
 
 One of the most remarkable and interesting things 
 connected with this book is that its authors wrote certain 
 things that are so unlike anything that was written by 
 any other authors of other lands or of contemporary 
 races. In order to make it very plain, I will present to 
 you two illustrations, one from the Old and one from the 
 New Testament. Look at the contrast between what 
 David wrote and what any other man wrote in all the 
 world in David's time. Recently you know what interest 
 has been revived in the publication of the sacred books, 
 as they are called, of the Oriental nations ; and some 
 humiliating comparisons were made at our great meeting 
 in Chicago for the purpose of comparing our religion 
 with the old ethnical faiths. But now the most learned 
 men, and those that have acquainted themselves most 
 intimately with their contents, tell us that while they 
 
76 SERMONS. 
 
 contain some very valuable and even precious truths, 
 that those truths are so intermingled and buried beneath 
 interminable rubbish that it hardly pays for the labor to 
 discover and recover those hidden pearls down in muddy 
 waters. It is a remarkable thing that there is not one 
 chapter in all of those Oriental books that would be fit 
 to preach to an intelligent audience in all Christendom. 
 And among their sacred hymns there is not one solitary 
 stanza that would be fit to lead the devotions of a spirit- 
 ually-minded people when they celebrate God's grace on 
 his holy day. And yet there was David, a man whose 
 early life was spent out in the fields in the occupation of a 
 shepherd, who had little communion with anything but 
 nature, who went very early into the army, and who held 
 three sceptres in his hands before he died — golden-tipped 
 rod, the sceptre of royalty ; the sword, the sceptre of the 
 warrior, and the harp, the sceptre of the bard. David 
 wrote a book that not only gave the world new concep- 
 tions of the character of the great God, that not only 
 contained glorious prophecies of the reign of the coming 
 Christ, but he wrote a book that has been the basis of the 
 world's hymnology, the model upon which all our sacred 
 songs are constructed — hymns that are valuable and 
 sweet just in proportion as they contain something of that 
 old rythmic strain. And in those Psalms there is not a 
 moan of the sorrowing heart which does not find expres- 
 sion, not an aspiration which he does not kindle and lead 
 to the object and the right source of all aspirations, and 
 among all the compositions of the world there is none 
 that has so moved the heart of the world as these Psalms ; 
 sometimes tender, and low, and sympathetic, and sweet; 
 and yet there is nothing in all the world like the tri- 
 umphant strain with which these Psalms close, when 
 David calls upon earth and sea and sky, fire and hail and 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 77 
 
 stormy wind, and "everything that hath breath," to unite 
 in that paean of praise that goes up from all beings that 
 think, and live, and love, to the great Creator that 
 gives them thought and life. Js it not wonderful that in 
 that little fragment of a country, without schools of 
 philosophy, without universities, without institutions for 
 literary culture of any kind, there should have lived the 
 bard who wrote the book through which the most im- 
 passioned devotions of God's children in all centuries and 
 lands find their sweetest expression? 
 
 Let me take an illustration now from the New Testa- 
 ment, as well as this one from the Old. There was a 
 country contiguous to Palestine, where oratory uttered its 
 noblest strains, where poetry sung its sweetest songs, and 
 where philosophy reached the highest heaven of its in- 
 vention. In that land there lived a man whose title 
 is "The Divine," and although he was not divine in the 
 Christian sense of the word, our Christian writers do not 
 hesitate to speak of "the divine Plato." Perhaps no man 
 ever lived who had greater advantages ; his genius was 
 transcendent, his opportunities unsurpassed ; with Socra- 
 tes for his teacher, and the most distinguished men of 
 the age for his school-mates ; with the best opportunities 
 of acquainting himself with the lore of all lands, not only 
 by the study of what the most learned had written, but 
 by personal association with the great masters of thought 
 everywhere. Need we wonder that his works constitute 
 the most perfect ideal of Hellenic genius, and are now 
 counted among the most precious treasures of the intel- 
 lectual world? And yet what contribution did he make 
 to the life of the spiritual world? What regenerating 
 effect did his teachings have on his own age, and on those 
 to whom they were immediately addressed? "Plato, thou 
 reasonest well," but how would you like to hear a Chris- 
 
7$ SERMONS. 
 
 tian minister speak as doubtfully about the immortality 
 of the soul as Plato did in his noble argument on that 
 theme ? 
 
 I turn now again to that other little country that lay 
 contiguous to Greece — to Palestine — and there, too, I 
 find a man who had native genius, and some fine oppor- 
 tunities, educated as he was by one of the most distin- 
 guished teachers of the time ; somewhat acquainted with 
 the general literature of the world, and in the enjoyment 
 of some special advantages from his Jewish training and 
 Roman citizenship. Let us glance at those fourteen little 
 letters that Paul wrote — they would only make a chapter 
 in one of Plato's volumes, so far as bulk is concerned. 
 And yet, while to-day there is not a pulpit in the world 
 that takes one saying of Plato for a text, and it may be 
 I am the only minister on this continent that is even 
 talking about him to-day; there are thousands of men 
 who are preaching from texts taken out of these fourteen 
 epistles. This is very interesting simply as a matter of 
 comparison. Here was a man that did not have one tithe 
 of the advantages of the illustrious Plato, who wrote a 
 few little treatises that have actually shaped the theologies 
 of the world, and in all the great controversies among 
 ecclesiastics the authority of Paul is invoked as the great 
 arbiter beyond whose decisions there is no appeal! The 
 Agrippas and Pilates of the first century are now only so 
 many phantoms, the Caesars are but shades; but Paul 
 still walks among the regnant men of the world, and 
 sways a sceptre in Christendom second in influence only 
 to that of his divine Lord. 
 
 These are some of the extraordinary things with 
 regard to this Word, of which the Apostle says it "liveth." 
 If a thing lives and abides forever, it must have in it some 
 internal, indestructible elements. There is a rough 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 79 
 
 phrase, a sort of jargon phrase, of the metaphysicians of 
 the day — "the survival of the fittest" — a very cruel 
 phrase as it is often applied, when it means that the strong 
 should finally trample out the weak, and that might 
 makes right. But it has another meaning, and a very 
 noble one: some things live because they ought to sur- 
 vive; there are some things that keep on living because 
 men must have them and preserve them if they would 
 secure their highest welfare; and when we apply this 
 principle to the Bible, we assert that it survives because 
 it is fit to survive, and it is bound to survive, because it 
 contains those truths which are essential to humanity — 
 indispensable to humanity — because it bequeaths to us 
 those institutions that give to the world its brightness, its 
 beauty, its moral and spiritual elevation — those institu- 
 tions that are such benedictions to all who avail them- 
 selves of them that no man who has had an experience 
 of their value is willing to allow them to pass into desue- 
 tude. The Bible contains within itself the essential ele- 
 ments of its own immortality. 
 
 I can occupy very well what remains to me of my time 
 in pointing out some of these indispensable and inde- 
 structible elements which make the Bible the book the 
 world most needs, and can never dispense with. 
 
 First, it satisfies what is oftentimes an unconscious 
 longing of our humanity, but what is a universal longing 
 of that humanity, and that is, the longing for a God that 
 man can depend upon with unwavering confidence; the 
 longing for a God in whose hands our breath is, and who 
 is to be our final Judge, and yet at the same time who is 
 our loving and tender Father? Perhaps you say that 
 this is not a universal longing — this desire for God. 
 Perhaps you say, when David tells us that the human 
 heart thirsts for God, for the living God, it is an exag- 
 
80 SERMONS. 
 
 geration. It was not an exaggeration; so far from it, 
 it is an inadequate phrase to express the whole truth. It 
 is often an unconscious longing, but it is universal, and 
 I will give you the demonstration. There may be atheists 
 in the world, but there is not a single atheistic community 
 in the world; and we never can forget that impressive 
 statement that old Plutarch made when he said there were 
 cities without walls, without art, without literature; but 
 no city without temples and places where God could be 
 worshipped ! If you want an argument, I have not time 
 to make it ; if you want a proof, it is this : Throughout 
 all the world some deity is worshipped; even the varied 
 forms of polytheism that infest heathen nations, and have 
 infested them from the beginning, furnish proof of this 
 universal need of a God ; and if men do not know the 
 living and true God, they invent a god, because a god 
 they must have. In the lands that were contiguous to the 
 country in which the Bible was written, among the con- 
 temporaries of David, there was a great deal written 
 about gods and goddesses ; but only contrast the gods 
 that mythology painted, and that poets feigned, with the 
 living and true God that these Scriptures reveal ! When 
 David said that his heart cried out for a God that was 
 alive, he represented the only religion that worshipped a 
 living God ; all the gods of the heathen were imaginary 
 beings; there was Olympus visible enough, but no Jove 
 ever stood revealed upon it. It was the living God that 
 David cried out for, and a God that cared for the world 
 of creatures that he had formed — a God that was very 
 high, but not so high that he could not see what was on 
 his footstool; a God that was very great, but not too 
 great to be concerned for his children. David was two 
 thousand years in advance of some scientific men of our 
 time, who say that the creation did not have a Creator; 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 81 
 
 or, if it had, he was a Creator who, having made the 
 worlds, left them to the control of inexorable law. That 
 was not the kind of a God that David longed for, or that 
 these Scriptures reveal — a great dumb, blind, cosmical 
 God, without intelligence, without consciousness, without 
 heart; but the God that these Scriptures reveal, and the 
 God that humanity craves, is a God "infinite, eternal, and 
 unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, jus- 
 tice, goodness and truth" — a God who recognizes the 
 creatures redeemed by the blood of his Son as entitled to 
 become members of his own family, the adopted children 
 of his love. That is the God the Bible reveals to us ; and 
 one reason why the Bible is ever dear, and must always 
 be a precious possession which the world cannot surren- 
 der, is the fact that it reveals to us just such a God as 
 that. 
 
 And not only does it give us this great and necessary 
 revelation, but it provides for another universal want of 
 our humanity. If I were to say that there is a universal 
 sense of sinfulness in the human race, would you give me 
 your immediate assent ? If not, let me make a suggestion, 
 that there is a consciousness in the human soul of some- 
 thing wrong between the creature and the Creator, is 
 evident from the fact that through the entire world, down 
 to a certain period, the worship of sacrifices everywhere 
 prevailed. If this universal consciousness of sinfulness 
 did not exist, why was it that not only among the bar- 
 barous, but among the most civilized and cultivated races, 
 sacrifices were everywhere offered. Even kings felt it 
 honorable to put on the sacerdotal robes and minister at 
 the altar. Why was it that men brought lambs and 
 bullocks and offered them in sacrifice? It was a confes- 
 sion that they needed some mediatory influence, some- 
 thing with which to appease the offended deity. And then 
 6 
 
■MOM 
 
 82 SERMONS. 
 
 why was it that even in the most cultivated of all the 
 nations of antiquity the time came when men were 
 brought to the conclusion that an irrational creature was 
 not quite sufficient for the necessity ; that a human being 
 must be sacrificed for human guilt? And why was it 
 that, when once the lot fell upon the king, the whole 
 country rejoiced, and said, "Now we have found the 
 sacrifice worthy to present to God, one in whom the 
 majesty of the nation is settled and centred, a representa- 
 tive of all that is greatest and best, but now devoted to 
 death for our redemption ? Nothing but the conviction of 
 universal sinfulness could have justified such an offering 
 to avert the dreaded retribution. 
 
 All at once the sacrifices that were universal through- 
 out the world came to an end. This is a great fact in 
 human history — all sacrifices ceased, and for eighteen 
 hundred years there has not been a sacrifice in a single 
 civilized land in Christendom; and why? Because One 
 came into the world to proclaim himself as the Lamb 
 slain from the foundation of the world; God clothing 
 himself in human flesh; because Deity could not suffer 
 and die, and because Deity glorified thus (not the glory 
 of ancient Greece or Rome) must suffer and die for 
 human men. Both man the sinner, and God the offended 
 Sovereign could be represented in the person of Im- 
 manuel, God with us, God for us; our substitute, our 
 atoning sacrifice. 
 
 And now when one perturbed in consequence of con- 
 scious guilt says, "What must I do, how can I make my 
 peace with God ?" the invitation comes to that inquirer to 
 put his trust in this unique and august personage, who 
 came into the world to represent both parties, the offended 
 Deity and the offending sinner, and who offered himself 
 a sacrifice for man's transgression. I do not know a 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 83 
 
 more interesting moment in the life of any man than when 
 he makes the discovery that he is a sinner, inexcusable 
 and justly condemned, because he has trampled not only 
 upon law, but upon love ; when, with a sense of impend- 
 ing peril and coming retribution, he begins to cast about 
 to find out how he can escape the position in which he 
 suddenly finds himself. He turns and turns, but finds no 
 light ; he listens and listens, but hears no voice ; he looks 
 and looks, but sees no refuge, and then all at once he sees 
 the light streaming from Calvary, and hears the voice 
 that mercy utters from the cross; hears the assurance 
 that God gave his "only begotten Son, that whosoever 
 believes on him should not perish, but have eternal life." 
 And if the man asks, "How can my simple belief be 
 sufficient, when I remember how true and holy God is; 
 when I remember the demands of justice; how can he 
 keep his word and be a forgiving God ; how can he grant 
 amnesty to one that deserves nothing but condemnation 
 and wrath? What is the answer? "Justice has been 
 satisfied; its extremest demand has been met; the God- 
 man has been made, in the impressive language of Scrip- 
 ture, 'a curse for us,' — the most terrible word that can 
 be employed — made a curse for us ; wounded for our 
 transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, suffered the 
 penalty of human guilt, until justice itself upon the throne 
 rises up and puts its great arms around mercy with a kiss 
 of eternal love and reconciliation." And if the man, still 
 hesitating, says, "I see what provision has been made, but 
 how can I obtain an immediate personal interest in this 
 great atonement ?" the answer comes — its very sim- 
 plicity makes men doubt — "Only believe." "Let him 
 that is athirst come. The Spirit and the Bride say, Come, 
 and whosoever will, let him come and take of the water 
 of life freely." Purchased at the infinite cost of the blood 
 
84 SERMONS. 
 
 of Christ, but free to you ! And when the man hears that 
 assurance, when he learns that everything has been done 
 for him, leaving him nothing to do but trust in what has 
 been done, then with unhesitating confidence he may 
 adopt the words of the greatest Oriental scholar America 
 ever produced, who said on his death-bed that all his the- 
 ology was reduced to this : 
 
 " Just as I am, without one plea 
 But that thy blood was shed for me, 
 And that thou bidst me come to thee, 
 O Lamb of God, I come !" 
 
 The man that does that is saved. Oh ! yes, the word 
 must be an ever-living, ever-welcome word that makes 
 that provision for the sin-sick soul. 
 
 That point being settled, another consideration arises. 
 We live in a world of mutation, of sudden and deplorable 
 vicissitudes. How bright and beautiful the sky was yes- 
 terday ; who would have thought that to-day would begin 
 in cloud and darkness and storm! Well, this is so in 
 human life — it is just a picture and a pattern of our own 
 experience. Our troubles come so suddenly, ofttimes 
 from such unexpected quarters, and when they do come, 
 they are sometimes hard to bear. In a world that is so 
 full of disappointment and sorrow, the human heart has 
 another great craving — it cries out for something to 
 comfort it. When one of those bereavements come that 
 make all the world a blank, a dreary blank, stripped of 
 all that makes life worth living, if any one attempts to 
 assuage such anguish with the common places of the 
 world's consolations, the sufferer cries out, "Have pity, 
 O my friend, do anything but try to sustain me by such 
 inanities — the hand of God has touched me !" When 
 called to part with that which made life most desirable 
 
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 85 
 
 and dear, when we stand beside the crudest pit ever 
 opened to mortal eyes — an open grave ; when we hear 
 the clods tumbling down upon the coffin-lid, the heart 
 demands something more than all the sympathy that 
 earth can offer. Then this gospel comes to comfort the 
 mourner, to bind up the broken-hearted ! I have seen a 
 mother unmurmuringly take leave of four children, with 
 a calm assurance that the Lord would take care even of 
 them, so sure was she that the Shepherd who had taken 
 care of her would surely take care of her little lambs ! I 
 saw a father one day rise up in one of our hospitals 
 during the terrible days that we never can forget, as he 
 was kneeling by the cot of a son mortally wounded in 
 battle ; the mother on the other side of the cot of her boy, 
 delirious from his wound, unable to recognize her, run- 
 ning her hand over his face, giving him tender caresses, 
 and saying, "Oh ! if you would only look at me, only 
 speak to me, my darling, I could part with you, by son." 
 Even while she thus plead with him, the boy died, and the 
 old father rose — I can see him now just as distinctly as I 
 see you, with his white hair falling over his shoulders ; 
 the old father rose, straightened himself, and said, "The 
 Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away" — and then he 
 stopped ! I could almost see the struggle that was going 
 on in that man's heart between faith and grief ; but pres- 
 ently, with a clear voice he added, "Blessed be the name 
 of the Lord!" If you know of any other book that con- 
 tains what can comfort a bereaved father and mother 
 like that, I should like you to show me where it is to be 
 found ! 
 
 These are some of the reasons why the Bible is bound 
 to live. It is the survival of the fittest: the survival of 
 what is divinely fittest; it has in it those things that we 
 cannot dispense with — the church, for instance; we 
 
86 SERMONS. 
 
 must have a place where we can come together, and bless 
 God, and get the benefit of the sacraments that remind us 
 of our Saviour's dying love. And then out of the church 
 comes the philanthropies that meet the needs of society, 
 the associations and benevolent agencies for the ameliora- 
 tion of want and woe. We cling to the book that gives 
 birth and inspiration to these things because the world 
 cannot do without them. Then, too, we must have the 
 Sabbath, with its blessed rest; the Sabbath, which sur- 
 vives because it is the fittest day of all the days to sur- 
 vive; because the human body physically needs rest, be- 
 cause the human mind needs rest, because the human 
 soul needs the opportunity of undisturbed repose and 
 communion with God. 
 
 And, lastly, we cling to this Bible because we know 
 that we are pilgrims and strangers, as all our fathers 
 were, and we would find the rest into which they have 
 entered, the home in which they dwell. And the Bible 
 is the only book that assures us of such a home. "In my 
 Father's house are many mansions ; I go to prepare a 
 place for you" — and such is Christ's love to his people 
 that he cannot bear to be separated from them forever — 
 and so he adds, "I will come again and receive you unto 
 myself, that where I am there ye may be also." 
 
 Therefore, do you wonder that the Apostle should set 
 this gospel far above everything? What was the last 
 verse of the hymn that we sung? 
 
 " Should all the forms that men devise 
 . Assault my soul with treacherous art, 
 I'll call them vanity and lies, 
 
 And bind this gospel to my heart." 
 
VII. 
 
 THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 ''And many other signs truly Jesus did in the presence of his 
 disciples, which are not written in this book." — John xx. 30. 
 
 THERE is something exceedingly impressive in the 
 silences of the Scriptures, as well as in the utter- 
 ances of the Scriptures. We scarcely know which to 
 wonder at the most ; at what the Scriptures reveal, or at 
 what the Scriptures conceal. Inasmuch as all Scripture 
 is given by inspiration of God, it is perfectly plain that 
 there is no department of human knowledge about which 
 men have any curiosity or feel any interest which these 
 Scriptures could not have cast light upon. If it had so 
 pleased God, they could have foretold all the wonderful 
 discoveries of modern science, all that subordination of 
 the great forces of Nature to the use and convenience of 
 man that constitutes the marvel of the century in which 
 we live. There is no truth in science upon which inspira- 
 tion might not have cast an all-revealing light ; and there 
 is no invention of human genius that inspiration might 
 not have anticipated and revealed. And not only that, if 
 God had so willed it, it would have been easy to give an 
 explanation in his Word of those great insoluble problems 
 that rack the intellects of men, and oftentimes have 
 clouded the faith of men. If God had been pleased, he 
 could have told us something about the origin of evil — 
 that one problem that has baffled the researches of the 
 human race. I do not know whether the wings of this 
 church, if converted into a library, would hold the books 
 
88 SERMONS. 
 
 that have been written in discussion of that recondite and 
 most mysterious of all the subjects that have occupied hu- 
 man attention : how sin came into the world, and why 
 God, the omnipotent and the all-benevolent, should have 
 permitted the entrance of moral evil ! There is not a soli- 
 tary syllable on that subject in all revelation. And then 
 again, when we think of what conflicts and controversies 
 there have been in the schools theological in the endeavor 
 to reconcile divine sovereignty and human agency, free 
 agency — two truths that seem to be one as distinctly 
 revealed as the other, and yet one apparently incom- 
 patible and irreconcilable with the other. These two 
 truths of human agency and divine sovereignty rise up 
 like parallel pillars until they get out of sight. Beyond 
 our sight I have no doubt they arch and meet somewhere 
 in the infinite space, and God knows how to reconcile 
 them at last ; but he does not reveal the method to human 
 comprehension. 
 
 And then again, only think of the small information, 
 the meagre information, it has pleased God to give us 
 about the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. So, 
 in consequence of want of information on this subject, 
 you will find those that look for the personal advent of 
 Christ upon the earth, that believe he will come again, 
 even as he came once in the flesh, and reconcile all the 
 antagonisms of society and dissipate all the miseries that 
 afflict the world. The second coming of Christ! What 
 that is precisely, and how he is to come, and how the new 
 heavens and the new earth are to be organized, is some- 
 thing about which the Scriptures are profoundly silent: 
 they only give us hints that these things will be — but 
 how they will be accomplished, not a syllable of revela- 
 tion! 
 
 And we wonder that so little is told us about the 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 89 
 
 future life. That is a great mystery. There is a great 
 deal told us about this present life, and yet we know how 
 insignificant this present life is, compared with that future 
 life : insignificant because of its transitoriness — we take 
 a few breaths, a few turns through the world; we form 
 a few associations, we gather into families, and we enter 
 into certain lines of business ; and by the time we have 
 gotten well started and have begun to get a little experi- 
 ence, the flood comes, and we are carried away ! "In the 
 morning we are like the grass that groweth up ; in the 
 morning it flourisheth and groweth up ; but in the even- 
 ing we are cut down and wither." And yet a great deal 
 is told us about the present life, and very little about the 
 future life. We are told that there is a future life, and 
 that it will consist of two great departments : the heaven 
 for the good, and the world of woe for the finally im- 
 penitent. How little we know about the method of 
 intercourse and association among souls until the resur- 
 rection shall come : how one spirit will recognize another ; 
 how little we are told about the occupations of heaven, 
 and the employments that shall fill up the eternity of the 
 redeemed ! Inasmuch as these employments are to be 
 perpetual and never come to any end, we would think, 
 according to our method of reasoning, that upon such 
 subjects a great deal would be revealed — that much 
 would be told us with regard to its associations, its 
 employments, its holy pleasures. Yes, the silence of 
 Scripture is very wonderful, as well as the revelations of 
 Scripture. 
 
 "Many other signs did Jesus in the presence of his 
 disciples, which are not written in this book." And what 
 is true of the signs is true of everything else relating to 
 the life of Christ. I take the word "signs" here as a word 
 that stands for all the manifestations of Christ — for 
 
90 SERMONS. 
 
 what he said, and did, and was, so far as he manifested 
 himself to the eyes of men ; and it is true of all of these, 
 the great majority were not written in the book — not 
 the Gospel of John, not anywhere in the New Testament, 
 and not recorded in any book by any author. With 
 regard to the miracles of our Lord, we have on record a 
 few. But of those miracles which are recorded there are 
 only enough to give us illustrations of the great doctrines 
 of grace. There is not a miracle among all the miracles 
 of Christ that was intended to be a mere exhibition of 
 omnipotent power, they all had a beneficent purpose. 
 And we may judge of the great number of the unrecorded 
 miracles of Christ when I read from the fourth chapter 
 of the Gospel of Matthew, "And Jesus went about all 
 Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the 
 gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness 
 and all manner of disease among the people; and they 
 brought unto him all sick people that were taken with 
 divers diseases and torments, and those that were pos- 
 sessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and 
 those that had the palsy; and he healed them." Then 
 we learn that among the miracles that Christ wrought, 
 only a few were selected and put upon record; and we 
 also learn that of the discourses and sermons that Christ 
 preached only a few of them were preserved. We are 
 told in the passage I just read that Christ preached in 
 all the synagogues, while we have only an account of his 
 sermon in one synagogue — when he went into the syna- 
 gogue on the Sabbath day, and was handed the word of 
 Esaias, and when he stood up and read, and when he 
 applied the passage to himself, and said, "The Spirit of 
 God is upon me; and this day this scripture is fulfilled 
 in your ears." And they all wondered! If Christ went 
 through all the villages and synagogues teaching and 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 91 
 
 preaching, what a small proportion of all his utterances 
 have we upon record ! We have the Sermon on the 
 Mount; we have the long discourse that he delivered to 
 his disciples as recorded in the fourteenth chapter of this 
 Gospel of St. John; and then we have a few extracts 
 from the discourses that Christ delivered, and a few con- 
 versations that he held, and that is all. Truly there were 
 many things which were not written in this book! 
 
 And the silence oftentimes occurs just where we 
 would expect revelation ; the silences occur just where 
 our curiosity is oftentimes deep, and just where we crave 
 information. For instance, we are told of the prodigies 
 that attended the birth of our Saviour. Glittering in the 
 heavens was a guiding star. The birth was very lowly; 
 but I should like to know over what other prince did a 
 new star glitter in the sky? The wise men in the East 
 were attracted from their distant homes, and came to his 
 cradle to offer their homage. And then we would suppose 
 that after events so astounding as those, that wise men 
 would come from all lands, that people of all classes and 
 callings would flock to the cradle of the infant Christ ; 
 that there would not be a day in the year in which men — 
 not only from the East, but from the North and the South 
 and the West — would go to the place where Jesus was 
 growing up in his home; and yet there is a perfect 
 silence ; a hush falls upon the history from the time of the 
 birth to the time when his parents took him at twelve 
 years of age with them on their journey to Jerusalem ; 
 and there we have a brief account of his interview with 
 the learned men he encountered in the temple, and how 
 astonishing were the questions he asked and answered ; 
 and then the most extraordinary silence of all occurs, and 
 the more we think about it the more our wonder grows, 
 that for eighteen years — oh ! what a large section that 
 
92 SERMONS. 
 
 is in the human life ; for eighteen years we hear no more 
 of Christ. Eighteen years ! And what makes us wonder 
 most is when we remember the errand upon which Christ 
 came into the world, that he should have attained the age 
 of thirty years before he should have entered upon the 
 work that he came to accomplish ; when we remember 
 that Christ was the "Desire of all Nations," that the 
 world for four thousand years had been waiting for him ; 
 when we remember that he was the theme of all prophecy, 
 that all the types and ceremonies of the Old Testament 
 worship centred upon him, and were meaningless without 
 him ; when we recollect that he came to redeem the world, 
 and that he saw how this whole creation groaned and 
 travailed in pain because of the curse that had smitten it ; 
 that during these awful throes through which the guilty 
 world was passing, the miseries that were making the 
 human race wretched during those years, Christ should 
 have been silent! Yes, the silences of Scripture, the 
 things that are not written, are the things that fill us with 
 amazement. 
 
 Again, when we remember that one-half of the Chris- 
 tian world worships Mary, I have often wondered that 
 so little is said of the parents of Christ after his birth. 
 We have one view of his mother, standing at the foot of 
 the cross, when her dying Son committed her to the cus- 
 tody and love of his disciple. Then she disappears. 
 
 Stranger still, not a word is said about the history of 
 his reputed father, and no one knows where Joseph lived 
 or what his history was, or where he died, or anything 
 about him. He appears in connection, and this connection 
 was wonderful and glorious for a while; and then he 
 goes — like a torch quenched — he goes out into oblivion 
 and total darkness. 
 
 The same thing is true with regard to his apostles. 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 93 
 
 Now I am entering upon another of the extraordinary 
 fields that interest us when we begin to investigate them ; 
 and that is how strange it is that when our Lord, out of 
 the whole world from which he had the power to select, 
 selected twelve men to be his apostles and to be the 
 foundation upon which his kingdom was to be built, he 
 being the chief cornerstone, that only six of them received 
 any mention, except in the catalogues that give their 
 names ! You would think that something would be said 
 about six of the most illustrious men of the world — illus- 
 trious they were; so far as the task which was assigned 
 them was concerned, so far as the place they occupied in 
 the establishment of the kingdom of Christ was con- 
 cerned, they were among the illustrious men of the world ; 
 and yet who knows anything about them? We have a 
 catalogue in the Acts of the Apostles where the names of 
 the twelve occur, and then six of them pass into absolute 
 obscurity; and of the others, their histories break off just 
 exactly where we want them to continue, and that is 
 another mystery and marvel. Take, for example, the 
 history of Simon Peter. Why, the first chapters of the 
 Acts of the Apostles are absolutely resplendent with the 
 work and with the sermons of that great champion of 
 the truth. Then all at once he is dismissed, and you 
 never hear of Peter any more until you find him in the 
 Council Hall at Jerusalem, and that is the last favorable 
 mention we have of him. Who would not like to know 
 the whole biography of that wonderful man? And who 
 would not like to know whether he was ever in the city 
 of Rome or not? You know that is one of the great 
 controversial questions among ecclesiastics, whether he 
 was ever in the city of Rome or not. We would have been 
 very glad to have had some more chapters added to that 
 history: whether he ever went to Rome; and if he did, 
 
94 SERMONS. 
 
 whether any peculiar honors were heaped upon him that 
 distinguished him from the rest. And we would like to 
 know where and how Peter died. There was another 
 disciple that was often mentioned with Peter, and that 
 was James. Did you ever notice what a singular thing 
 it is — James was killed off in a parenthesis ! McLaren 
 says that James was killed off in a parenthesis — that is 
 to say, the narrative was going on, and simply says, "And 
 he killed James with the sword." That is the beginning 
 and the end of that martyrdom. And what shall I say of 
 John? Well, we have the tradition that he attained to 
 old age ; that he went to live in the city of Ephesus ; and 
 we have some beautiful traditions with regard to him, and 
 feel that the concluding history of the disciple that Jesus 
 loved would have been most interesting. We would like 
 to have had some details of the dying exercises of that 
 disciple — the only one that attained to old age ; what 
 was his testimony with regard to the love and faithfulness 
 of Christ, what comfort was there in the dying hours of 
 the holy man of God? But we have no record of the 
 kind. And then take one more illustration, and that is 
 the case of the Apostle Paul. When Peter disappears, 
 suddenly dismissed without any explanation of his going, 
 Paul comes to the front, and then we have chapter after 
 chapter full of information, full of the most delightful 
 detail with regard to the labors and success of that great 
 man, until we come to an account of his imprisonment in 
 the city of Rome ; and, oh ! if we only knew as much 
 about Paul's last sayings as we know about the sayings 
 of hundreds of men that have been imprisoned for con- 
 science' sake, and have been brought out to taste a mar- 
 tyr's death before they wear a martyr's crown ! How we 
 would have revelled if we could only know what Paul 
 felt and said ! And now, just as we are anxious to know 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 95 
 
 what comes next, there is no next, and the history ends 
 without any end. 
 
 And what do we learn from these things; what are 
 the lessons taught us? I think, with regard to the soli- 
 tude in which Christ lived for so long a time, a great 
 lesson is taught us, and that is that the preachers of the 
 Word and the men that are training for the holy office 
 ought to have a long time for study ; that the men who 
 are to be the spiritual guides of their fellow-men and the 
 teachers of the church ought to be men who take the 
 years of toil that qualify them to the right discharge of 
 their office — not having our pulpits filled with novices 
 and itinerant evangelists that carry about fragments of 
 the truth, that oftentimes lack judgment and discretion 
 with their zeal, and who oftentimes only leave the condi- 
 tion of the churches in which they labor more unhappy 
 and more fruitless than they found them. We are taught 
 the lesson that sometimes patience is the greatest virtue 
 that can be exercised — not to anticipate, but to wait 
 God's time, until he pleases to call us into his service; 
 and I know of nothing that is more impressive than the 
 calmness of Christ during those years of preparation. 
 They were not lost years, for when he did come forth he 
 came forth to speak those words which are spirit and 
 which are life to the souls of men, as he will speak those 
 final words which will decide the destinies of men for 
 ever and ever. 
 
 We learn something else from these silences of Scrip- 
 ture : that it was never the intention of revelation to give 
 us the full biography of any man. Why? Because no 
 man's history and no man's doings are of any account 
 except as they stand related to Christ ; and, therefore, 
 instead of filling up the pages of Scripture with those 
 events which only gratify curiosity, the only things that 
 
96 SERMONS. 
 
 are mentioned about the men are things that have some 
 bearing upon Christ, and it is because of the man's rela- 
 tion to Christ that he has any mention at all. And the 
 object of the books of Scripture is never to magnify the 
 writer of the book; he has one theme, and self is hidden 
 behind the glory of the topic which he has to present. 
 And that is particularly true of this Gospel of St. John, 
 for he does not mention those things that the other 
 gospels mention with regard to himself that might reflect 
 honor upon him — he is silent about his own deeds and 
 his relation to Christ, and leaves that to the pens of 
 others. 
 
 But after all, the great reason for the silence of Scrip- 
 ture is that the world may listen to one voice, the only 
 voice, the one saving voice that sounds from heaven, the 
 one voice that is entitled to the reverence of all that hear : 
 men vanish from the scene, but Christ remains — the 
 central figure to occupy the mind and heart, as well as 
 the eye and the ear of the world. 
 
 And there is one thing that we need not fear and need 
 not feel unhappy over, and that is that so many of the 
 great workers in connection with Christ should be sum- 
 marily dismissed, that they should be thrust aside like 
 actors that have performed their parts, and disappear as 
 if they had been dropped down through a trap-door on 
 the stage, and never make another entry. It looks to us 
 sometimes hard that no mention should be made of the 
 faithful men that toiled on and toiled to the end without 
 the world ever having any information of their successes 
 and their recompense. But I will tell you where the com- 
 pensation comes in. Did I say one-half of the apostles 
 received no mention after the final catalogue of their 
 names is presented? I would like to know what differ- 
 ence it makes? Suppose their names had all been con- 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 97 
 
 nected with immortal histories ; suppose their names had 
 been connected with their career of service and useful- 
 ness to the time of their death? What difference would 
 it have made ? After all, any real reward would not have 
 been in such recompense. I do not know of anything that 
 human hearts have craved for that is so worthless as 
 fame. Nothing! And there is nothing so unsubstantial, 
 either. The world has a short memory, and the greatest 
 and the best of men that live in it are soon forgotten. 
 They go into the land of silence, and the world gets silent 
 about them. What difference does it make? What is the 
 value of all the applause that the world may lavish upon 
 them? This music does not penetrate the dull, cold ear 
 of death ; this applause of the world never stirs any sweet 
 emotions in the heart after it is chill and still in the coffin ! 
 No, God does not intend that the recompense of his chil- 
 dren shall come in the shape of earthly recognition and 
 honor. And if you want the demonstration of it, here it 
 is. I said the history of the apostles was dropped sud- 
 denly. Yes, and just as abruptly it is resumed again — 
 just as abruptly it is taken up again, and what do we 
 learn? We learn in the description that is given of the 
 city of God, the New Jerusalem, that recorded in the 
 foundation of those celestial walls are the names of the 
 twelve apostles of the Lord. The tombs that are built on 
 earth over the graves of eminent men yield by and by to 
 the touch of Time, the great destroyer, even the most 
 solid and enduring structures that ever are reared; the 
 epitaphs by and by are obliterated by the work of the 
 elements and the corroding hand of Time. But there, 
 upon those imperishable foundations of the Eternal City 
 stand, in letters of light ineffaceable, the names of all the 
 apostles, the humblest of them and the most obscure, as 
 well as the most illustrious. So God gives the final 
 7 
 
98 SERMONS. 
 
 recompense. Therefore, beloved friends, let us not be so 
 much concerned about the position we occupy in the 
 church of God as about this point : whether we are filling 
 the situation in which God's providence has placed us to 
 the very best of our ability. The perfection of the circle 
 does not consist in its size ; it consists in its roundness, 
 and the ring upon your little finger may be as perfect a 
 circle as that which is described by the revolution of any 
 of the orbs that gravitation wheels through the infinite 
 space. The great question is how we are discharging 
 the duties of the sphere in which we are placed, whether 
 it be conspicuous or humble; and I think it ought to 
 cheer a very large proportion of the people of God to 
 know that the smallest service sincerely rendered out of 
 love to Christ is just as much a matter of his regard and 
 appreciation as the most splendid service that the greatest 
 champion of the truth ever performed. Oh! thank God 
 that the saying is recorded that "a cup of cold water in 
 the name of a disciple shall not lose its reward. 5 ' When 
 they were building the temple at Jerusalem there were 
 men cutting cedar trees away up on the seacoast, and 
 there were others in what now forms the subterranean 
 chambers beneath the city of Jerusalem quarrying stone ; 
 and by and by the day came when the temple was com- 
 pleted, and there were some men that put pinnacles upon 
 it and gilded those pinnacles ; but the men that laid the 
 first stone in the foundation, and Hiram's wood-cutter in 
 the forest, had their part in the building of the temple as 
 much as the man that stood in the portico at last, and 
 announced its completion and turned it over to the church. 
 It does not matter in what part of the structure we work, 
 the question is, "Have we turned our advantages to the 
 best account, and are we filling the sphere, great or small, 
 with a sincere desire to do all that in us lies to advance 
 
THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 99 
 
 the kingdom of the Master and the welfare of those to 
 whom he has bound us and made the objects of our care 
 and love?" That is the question. Therefore, we can 
 afford to be humble; we can afford to take our place 
 among the unrecognized, among those who are not ob- 
 served ; because the time of final recompense will come ; 
 the time will come when our Lord, sitting upon the throne 
 of his glory, when all men are gathered before him, will 
 say, "I was sick and in prison and ye visited me and 
 ministered unto me ; I was a stranger, and ye cared for 
 me ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink." And the 
 surprised auditor will say, "Lord, we would have been 
 very glad to have done this, but we never did it. We did 
 not even live during the century in which thou didst need 
 these ministering services on the part of those that loved 
 thee." And he will say, "Inasmuch as ye have done it 
 unto the least of these my children, my needy ones, my 
 suffering ones, ye have done it unto me. Enter thou into 
 the joy of thy Lord." 
 
 LofC. 
 
VIII. 
 
 "BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 
 
 "And many other signs did Jesus in the presence of his disci- 
 ples, which are not written in this book. But these are written 
 that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that 
 believing ye might have life through his name." — John xx. 31. 
 
 I* N my discourse this morning I stated that all that Jesus 
 •*■ did and all that Jesus said was not recorded by either 
 or by all of the evangelists ; that there were many mira- 
 cles which he wrought of which they took no note ; many 
 conversations and discourses which he delivered of which 
 they made no record ; that there were a multitude of 
 great unsolved problems upon which the Bible did not 
 cast one solitary ray of light ; that nearly all the biogra- 
 phies of Scripture were fragmentary, and ofttimes broke 
 off just at the point where we most wished to have the 
 continuation; and that these things showed that the ob- 
 ject of Scripture was not to teach us science, and not to 
 gratify our curiosity, and not to enable us to indulge in 
 vain speculation; but to concentrate our minds and our 
 hearts upon the one great object, and that it is the purpose 
 of these Scriptures to disclose Christ as the subject of 
 our faith, the object of our perpetual allegiance in this 
 life, and the theme of our praise in the life to come. 
 Many of the things, therefore, about which we would 
 desire to have more information are not recorded, but the 
 text says, "These things are written. " Whatever has 
 been put upon record has been put there that we may 
 believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that 
 
"BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 101 
 
 believing we might have life through his name. We 
 learn, therefore, that everything that is essential to our 
 interest, to our welfare, has been recorded; that every- 
 thing that makes the way of salvation plain has been 
 written, and that the method by which we may obtain a 
 personal interest in that salvation has been disclosed to 
 us, and that all those things that are essential to the im- 
 perishable interest of human souls have been recorded by 
 holy men who wrote as they were moved by the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 Even we, with our limited comprehension of things, 
 can see how the divine wisdom shines in this order that 
 all the essential truths which concern human salvation 
 should have been written. That which is written remains ; 
 it remains unchanged ; it is in such a form that it can be 
 transmitted, from age to age, through all the centuries 
 of time. But if everything that our Lord did in the way 
 of wonderful works ; if all that our Lord spoke in his 
 conversations with his friends and in the public discourses 
 which he delivered, if these had all been recorded, if we 
 had had a complete biography of all the illustrious men 
 whose names are mentioned in the Scriptures, and whose 
 histories are oftentimes very abruptly broken off just at 
 the point where we have an intense desire to know what 
 comes next — if all these things had been recorded, then 
 the Bible would not have been the convenient book which 
 its great author designed it to be: the book which has 
 been transmitted to us in the form that is so easy for us 
 to profitably use; the book which we can have in our 
 houses ; the book which the mother can put in the satchel 
 of her boy when he is leaving home to engage in some 
 new occupation, it may be in some distant part of the 
 country ; the book that the sick man, lying upon his bed, 
 can still hold in his hand and peruse ; the book which can 
 
102 SERMONS. 
 
 be so easily distributed in consequence of its size; the 
 book so easy of translation, and so easy of distribution. 
 It is well, therefore, inasmuch as this book is intended to 
 be circulated through all lands, and become the property 
 of all that can read, and can learn to read, and wish to 
 learn the divine will, and the divine wisdom shines in the 
 fact that we get the book in such form that all these 
 things are possible and practicable. 
 
 Then another thing is true with regard to what is 
 written. What is put upon record cannot be changed. 
 It can be handed down to coming generations. What a 
 wonderful saying that was of one of the wisest of the 
 English authors, when he said that if ships convey the 
 commodities of one country to another, so that people 
 living in one land can be supplied with what is produced 
 in another land, and then can send back commodities 
 which that land does not possess, how much more can we 
 wonder at books, which are the ships which sail down 
 through the centuries, and bear to men the noblest 
 thoughts of the best thinkers that have lived, and whose 
 office it has been to instruct mankind. This is pre- 
 eminently true of the Bible. It is because what God 
 revealed to men has been written that we have the only 
 authentic history of the very earliest periods of the life 
 of the world in which we live. It is because of this fact 
 that we have the history of the creation itself; that we 
 have an account of the first divisions into which the 
 families of mankind were separated one from another. 
 There is a single chapter in the Book of Genesis that 
 gives the names and the characters of the primitive 
 nations of the world, and the great scholar Bunsen says 
 that it is the most learned of all the ancient writings, and 
 the most ancient of all the learned writings; and that it 
 contains information that all the historians that lived 
 
"BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 103 
 
 afterwards could never have given, could never have 
 supplied to the world. Moreover, it is a great thing that 
 we possess a history that antedates all other history. The 
 single fact recorded in the Old Testament of the migra- 
 tion of Abraham is the most important fact that is con- 
 nected with the history of any man that ever lived. The 
 migration of that man was the beginning of a new era in 
 the world's spiritual life. He became the progenitor of 
 the nation that God made the depository of his truth, and 
 upon which the light of revelation was shining brightly 
 at a time when all the rest of the world was in the valley 
 and shadow of death. The history we have of the con- 
 quest of the land of Canaan by Joshua is the history of 
 the providence that God ordained in order to establish 
 his people, and the manner in which he desired to be 
 worshipped at a time when all the rest of the world was 
 in idolatary; and those ten commandments, written by 
 the ringer of God, first upon tables of stone, and then 
 recorded by the hand of Moses in this imperishable record 
 — that comprehensive summary of all human duty, has 
 had a greater influence upon the development of civiliza- 
 tion, upon the establishment of justice, than all the codes, 
 than all the Pandects, the institutions of Lycurgus, and 
 Solon, and Justinian. And when we come to look at 
 some of the names that are written in this book, we find in 
 those men the true fathers of history, and the men who 
 have continued to exert the most salutary influence upon 
 all the generations that have succeeded them — such 
 names as those of Abraham, and Moses, and Samuel, and 
 David, and Elijah, and Daniel. 
 
 Then we have the record of the earliest metrical com- 
 positions that were ever framed and ever used in the 
 devotions of the people of God, and the Psalms of David 
 have given inspiration to all the holy hymns which have 
 
104 SERMONS. 
 
 been sounded through the church in all generations of the 
 world; and those Psalms of David still are the channels 
 through which the purest and sweetest adoration of God's 
 people ascend to the heavens. 
 
 And this is because these things have been written. 
 The Bible is possibly the only absolutely imperishable 
 book. Whether that be so or not, this is true surely, that 
 never, never, by any possibility can it be lost. If every 
 copy of the Holy Scriptures in circulation through civil- 
 ized countries were to be destroyed, we could still repro- 
 duce the Bible immediately from the translations into 
 which it has been made in all the heathen, pagan nations 
 of the world, for into between two and three hundred 
 languages this Bible has been translated. If throughout 
 Christendom — by some catastrophe, which we can only 
 imagine, but which could never be true — all the copies 
 of the Scriptures should be annihilated, immediately they 
 could be reproduced from the heathen nations into which 
 the Word of God has been translated. 
 
 I pass now to another great division of my theme, and 
 to another point which illustrates the divine wisdom and 
 goodness in giving us a written revelation. It is this : 
 A written revelation saves the world from the uncertainty 
 that attends all. tradition. There are only two ways in 
 which truth can be transmitted from one generation to 
 another, and they are orally or in a written form. But 
 the memories of men are too treacherous to be trusted 
 with a depository so sacred as that of God's will to man- 
 kind. And not only so, not only are the memories of men 
 treacherous, but what a proneness there is on the part of 
 men to suppress and to silence what is uncongenial to the 
 natural heart, and how many of the unwelcome truths of 
 the Bible would have been silenced and suppressed if oral 
 transmission were the only method by which these truths 
 
"BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 105 
 
 could be handed down from one generation to another! 
 Men are too fond of their own inventions — they are too 
 ready to amend what they think ought to be amended and 
 improved in the Holy Scriptures ; the world is too full of 
 prejudice and sectarian bigotry to entrust with the trans- 
 mission of the divine will through all the nations of the 
 earth, through all the ages of time ; and, therefore, it has 
 pleased God to put upon record that which it is essential 
 to know. Tradition is ever shifting, ever changing, ever 
 fluctuating. Tradition is like the mists that gather on the 
 mountain top; the written word is like the steadfast 
 mountain itself. Tradition is like the clouds that float 
 through the sky; the written Word is like the stars that 
 burn in their imperishable lustre in the eternal heaven 
 above the clouds. Therefore, we are filled with humility 
 and adoration when we recognize the divine goodness in 
 putting all things it is essential to know upon record. 
 "It is written I" 
 
 I wish to call your attention to another illustration of 
 this most interesting theme. I want to remind you of 
 our Lord's reverence for the written Word. In the intro- 
 ductory service of this afternoon I read to you a portion 
 of the fourth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, contain- 
 ing the account of our Lord's temptation in the wilder- 
 ness. Just before he entered upon his public ministry, 
 and just after his baptism, it pleased God to cause him 
 to pass through the successive trials that are recorded in 
 that chapter and in the fourth chapter of St. Matthew. 
 There he was confronted with the great adversary of God 
 and man; and after forty days in the wilderness, when 
 he was a-hungered, then the devil said to him, "Command 
 that these stones be made bread." What was our Lord's 
 answer? It was, "It is written, Man shall not live by 
 bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 
io6 SERMONS. 
 
 mouth of God." And next we read that when he was 
 taken and placed upon the pinnacle of the temple, and told 
 to cast himself down, and Satan himself quoted Scripture, 
 and said, "He shall give his angels charge over thee, to 
 keep thee in all thy ways, lest thou dash thy foot against 
 a stone." Not only did Satan quote this Scripture, but 
 in the quoting it, satanic like, he perverted the quotation, 
 and did not give it in its true form. You may never have 
 observed, but he left out a clause in the passage which 
 he quoted from the ninety-first Psalm. Turn to the 
 eleventh verse, and you will find the original, and there 
 the Psalmist, speaking of God's providence over the good 
 man, said, "He shall keep thee in all thy ways." He left 
 out that clause ; that is, in the ways of duty — not author- 
 izing running into unnecessary danger and tempting 
 Providence, and then calling upon him. He left that 
 phrase out, and said, "He shall keep thee and bear thee 
 up, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." What was 
 our Lord's reply? It was this: Pie said, "It is written 
 again." Notice, he said, "Again" — you have made one 
 quotation, a misquotation ; now I make another, a true 
 quotation, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." 
 Once more. When he was carried to the summit of the 
 high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the world 
 and the glory of them, and was told that all this power, 
 and all this glory should be his if he would fall down and 
 worship the tempter, then he said, "It is written, Thou 
 shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou 
 serve." And then the devil leaveth him and angels came 
 and ministered unto him, and so that narrative closed. 
 
 Now the thing to which I wish to call your attention, 
 and which I hope you will fix in your memories, is this, 
 that when our Lord was tempted, was exposed to the 
 malice of the tempter, who was permitted for a season to 
 
"BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 107 
 
 try him in these various ways, the only weapon which he 
 used to drive him from his presence was a quotation from 
 the Holy Scriptures, and three times he used exactly the 
 same words, and said, "It is written." 
 
 "These things," says the text, "were written" ; and 
 how the wisdom of God shines in putting upon a perma- 
 nent, imperishable record the things necessary to human 
 happiness and human salvation. Once more. It is an 
 unspeakable blessing to the church that all the creeds 
 and all the confessions of faith which are formulated by 
 councils or by assemblies owe their authority entirely to 
 the fact that they are in direct accordance with what is 
 written. Sometimes it is said that the churches are ruled 
 arbitrarily by creeds and by confessions. There is not a 
 Protestant church in all the world that recognizes the 
 right of any council or any ecclesiastical body — no mat- 
 ter what its name may be — that recognizes its right to 
 impose any creed or confession of faith upon the church. 
 Men do not test the Scriptures by the creed ; they test 
 all creeds and all confessions of faith by the Scriptures; 
 and during the great Reformation all the reformers in 
 turn made plain that truth, namely, that no formulated 
 articles of belief were binding upon the church because 
 of the ecclesiastical authority that communicated them, 
 and that they were only binding so far as they were in 
 accordance with what is written. And, therefore, when 
 new heresies arise, or when creeds are written that contain 
 false articles of belief, we have at once the correction : we 
 bring them to this touchstone, and we try their merits, 
 and we ascertain their warrant to be promulgated and 
 believed simply by comparing them with what is written 
 in these holy Scriptures. 
 
 Hence, I conclude what I have to say upon this sub- 
 ject by reminding you that the text goes on to teach that 
 
io8 SERMONS. 
 
 all these things have been written, that believing, we 
 might have life through his name. The great object, then, 
 of the written revelation is to establish and fortify the 
 faith of the church. "It is written that Jesus is the 
 Christ, the Son of God." Now, if this house were filled 
 with people instead of having this limited audience (a 
 very sufficient one for this inclement evening — I am not 
 complaining of that), and if I could leave this pulpit and 
 go from one to another and say to this and to that one as 
 they sit in their pews, "Do you believe that Jesus Christ 
 is the Son of God ?" I take it for granted that ninety-nine 
 out of one hundred would say, "I never doubted the 
 divinity of Christ." I believe that the men that gave that 
 answer would be sincere in saying that they believed that 
 Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Then, does it not 
 follow logically that if this is their belief, then they ought 
 to recognize that Christ is their personal Saviour; that 
 they ought to identify themselves with his cause; that 
 they ought to profess his name, and consecrate themselves 
 to his service and to the extension of his kingdom in the 
 world? But a man states that he believes that Jesus 
 Christ came into the world to reveal great, indispensable 
 truths, and that all a man has to do is to believe, and stops 
 there — oh ! is there any inconsistency compared with the 
 inconsistency of the man who says, "I believe that the 
 Lord Jesus Christ was commissioned to come into this 
 world to tell me how to make my peace with God, secure 
 my salvation, and make my immortality a happy one," 
 and stops there? Does he not convict himself of the 
 greatest of all possible inconsistencies? What does our 
 Lord say when he comes and confronts such men with 
 statements like these: when he says, "Except a man be 
 born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" ; when he 
 says, "One thing is needful" — there are many things 
 
"BUT THESE ARE WRITTEN." 109 
 
 that are important, but there is only one thing that is 
 necessary ; there are many things that are desirable, there 
 is only one thing that is indispensable. And the man, 
 while Christ, the divine Teacher, is telling him that life, 
 so far from becoming a blessing, will become to him the 
 most dire of all calamities ; that it will be the most fearful 
 of all curses, unless he seeks that new birth, that regenera- 
 tion; unless he attends to that one indispensable thing, 
 the interests of his soul. If that man says, "I believe that 
 Jesus Christ was a teacher sent from God," and stops 
 there — can there be any inconsistency like that ? The 
 man that believes that Jesus is what he professes to be, 
 and yet does not immediately and earnestly seek him, who 
 does not immediately lay aside everything else and sacri- 
 fice everything else, and give himself no rest until he 
 seeks and obtains an interest in that great salvation which 
 Christ has made possible by his death on the cross ! 
 "These things are written that ye might believe that 
 Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" — and then recognize 
 and respond to the single enduring claim that he has upon 
 every man's service and upon every man's love. "And 
 that believing ye might have life through his name." 
 The great end, then, of this written revelation is to show 
 how we may obtain that new, divine life. I cannot in the 
 conclusion of this discourse attempt to unfold that great 
 theme, the method by which we may obtain that divine 
 life. Let me but say that the simple exercise of faith 
 unites us to Christ and makes us one with him. The 
 moment I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and 
 give my heart to him, and consecrate everything I have 
 to him, that moment a new tie is established between 
 myself and my Lord. Faith is receiving Christ as the 
 free gift of God, and resting upon him for salvation as 
 he is offered to us in the gospel. The moment I receive 
 
no SERMONS. 
 
 him, and rest upon him, that moment he receives me, and 
 the moment he receives me I become an adopted child 
 of God — "For as many as received him, to them gave he 
 power to become the sons of God, even to as many as 
 believed on his name." 
 
 Well, if I am made one with Christ by that bond of 
 faith, then as he has life in himself, do you not see I am 
 obliged to partake in that life, and though a little while 
 ago I was among the spiritually dead, I have now been 
 quickened, and I can say, "I live, and yet not I, but Christ 
 that liveth in me." I am made a partaker of the divine 
 nature, and just as the branch abides in the vine and 
 draweth from the vine its nourishment, and becomes 
 fruitful and beautiful, I being grafted in Christ, abide 
 in Christ, and am sustained by him ; and his Spirit sanc- 
 tifying me, makes me like him in life as well as character 
 — makes me like him in outward life, for every life that 
 is a true life manifests itself outwardly ; and the great 
 end of revelation will be accomplished, the great end for 
 which I was born will be accomplished. It is a great 
 thing that God has brought us into being, and made us 
 living souls ; but, oh ! what is that compared with the 
 greater boon, the greater blessing of so quickening our 
 souls that we are made partakers of the divine life and 
 our immortality an immortality of blessedness and glory. 
 These things were written that we might live in Christ, 
 and have that life abundantly ; and any man that wants 
 it, that sincerely wants it, and earnestly seeks it, will find 
 it, for Christ is just the Saviour that every sinner needs, 
 and all the sinner needs is to say, with humble faith and 
 confidence — 
 
 " Just as I am, for love unknown 
 Has broken every barrier down ; 
 Now to be thine, and thine alone, 
 O Lamb of God, I come!" 
 
IX. 
 THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 
 
 "That thou mayst know the certainties of those things wherein 
 thou hast been instructed." — Luke i. 4. 
 
 MY theme for two Sunday afternoons was "the 
 certainties of religion," and those who were present 
 may remember that I had occasion to allude to a very 
 pathetic incident in the history of one of the most eminent 
 citizens of this commonwealth — a man of the staunchest 
 patriotism, a man of the most indomitable courage, and 
 who was honored by his fellow-citizens with one of the 
 highest offices within their gift. He was sadly troubled 
 with skeptical doubts, and one day, in conversation with 
 me, he told me of the particular one that greatly dis- 
 tressed him. He said that if Jesus Christ was what he 
 represented himself to be, that the birth of the Son of 
 God was the most important event in all the procession 
 of the ages ; that if Christ died on the cross for the 
 redemption of the world, then there was no fact com- 
 parable to that, either in this world's history or the history 
 of any other world, because the birth and death of the 
 God-man, of the Redeemer of the race, was the greatest 
 fact that could possibly exist in the universe of God. 
 "But," said he, "if such marvellous events as those occur- 
 red, why do we only have the account of them in the 
 Scriptures? Why did none of the great secular writers, 
 the renowed historians that were contemporaneous with 
 the evangelists make mention of those stupendous 
 events?" It was my privilege to tell him that they did; 
 
ii2 SERMONS. 
 
 it was my privilege to tell you last Sunday afternoon what 
 were the testimonies that 'have been borne to the Christ, 
 who was born in Bethlehem, and died upon Calvary ; the 
 testimony, not of men who believed in his divine birth 
 and mission, but of men like Tacitus, the impartial Roman 
 historian, the testimony of the elegant Pliny, the testi- 
 mony of the infidel writers of the time — men who never 
 pretended to deny the birth of Christ, who did not deny 
 that he wrought great miracles, although they attributed 
 them to satanic influence ; men that did not question the 
 purity of his life, or the fact that he was crucified, as his 
 disciples said, "for the sins of the world." 
 
 There is something very interesting in this ; and how 
 many young men in our city and country, whose reading 
 has not made them familiar with these writers, are ignor- 
 ant of the fact that there is not an important truth, not a 
 statement made in these Scriptures with regard to Christ, 
 that is not corroborated by the testimony of skeptical 
 writers that wrote against Christianity in the first cen- 
 tury ! I could take the writings of Celsus, and Porphyry, 
 and Julian the Apostate — the Emperor Julian — and 
 reconstruct a large portion of the life of Christ, and what 
 is written in these New Testament Scriptures. 
 
 Then again, in speaking of "the certainties of relig- 
 ion," I showed that the world had one perfect ideal, one 
 example that was worthy of imitation, one teacher that 
 was infallible, one that illustrated all possible virtues, and 
 that the ideal which was presented by Jesus of Nazareth 
 was just the ideal for which the world had sighed. How 
 did I attempt to prove it? Not by quotations from these 
 gospels, but from the writings of writers of all ages, who 
 have paid their tribute to the matchless beauty of the 
 Saviour's character — men who have differed in all else, 
 but have united in paying homage to Christ; men of 
 
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 113 
 
 different nationalities, different degrees of genius and 
 education, men of all faiths and of no faith; men that 
 differed in everything else, yet united in admitting that 
 the Son of Mary was the most faultless model that had 
 ever been presented to humanity for its study and imita- 
 tion; and oftentimes these men, when they came with 
 their inquisitive, prying eyes in their great desire to detect 
 some flaw, some blemish in the character and life of 
 Christ, went away filled with a genuine, irrepressible 
 admiration to testify that he was the ideal of matchless 
 loveliness, who alone could satisfy both the intellect and 
 the heart! Among the skeptical writers quoted were 
 Spinoza, Strauss, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Diderot, Marat, 
 Rosseau, Renan, Carlyle, Buckle, Lecky, and John Stuart 
 Mill. 
 
 1. To-day I discuss the subject upon a new and 
 totally different line : my theme this afternoon is that the 
 Christian religion is the only religion in the world that, 
 by any possibility, can become a universal religion; the 
 only religion that has a prospect, an assurance of being 
 the religion of the world. This is so, in the first place, 
 because of its power of adaptation to all the races, to all 
 the families of mankind, dwelling in all the latitudes and 
 longitudes of the earth, whether they live upon the great 
 continents or upon the islands of the sea — its perfect 
 adaptation to all kindreds, and tongues, and tribes of the 
 globe; and its freedom from all that would restrict its 
 influence or hinder its progress. 
 
 Had it identified itself with any one race, that would 
 have excited the antagonism of alien populations, and 
 that very fact would have caused them to reject the 
 religion that had allied itself with a hated race. Chris- 
 tianity did, indeed, appear in Palestine; it is true its 
 founder and apostles were Jews; but it is equally true 
 8 
 
ii4 SERMONS. 
 
 that it was never their purpose to confine their religion 
 to the narrow limits of Palestine. Its Founder himself, 
 in giving his instructions to his disciples, told them to 
 "go and preach the gospel in Judea, and in Samaria" — 
 poor little provinces ; and a miserable outcome that would 
 have been if it had been all ! But what did he add ? "And 
 unto the ends of the earth." One of the early heralds of 
 Christianity was a man who prided himself upon his 
 Jewish ancestry, his Jewish education ; but when he 
 entered upon his new career he tells us that on one 
 occasion when he was meditating, he had a vision of a 
 man from Macedonia, and across the waters came the 
 cry, "Come over and help us." And, obedient to the call, 
 the Apostle crossed those waters, and landed upon the 
 European shore, and preached the first sermon ever heard 
 in Europe. Oh ! how marvellous from that moment was 
 the expansion of the church of God. First, the light rose 
 in Palestine, but it went up to the zenith, that it might 
 illumine all the nations. Westward the star of empire 
 took its way, until the star encircled the globe, and came 
 back to shine again upon the place where the infant Re- 
 deemer lay in his cradle! Europe became Christianized, 
 in the providence of God, that its enterprising nations 
 might become the great missionaries to all the rest of the 
 world. The Christianization of Europe made the Chris- 
 tianizing of these United States possible. Missions have 
 ever been the mother of churches. 
 
 Thus we see how, in the providence of God, Chris- 
 tianity, so far from allying itself to any particular family 
 or race of mankind, was never local, never sectional, but 
 always cosmopolitan. Had it linked itself 'to any single 
 race, or particular form of government, or to any system 
 of philosophy, or to any physical science, it would have 
 been thereby limited and hampered in its progress. But 
 
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 1 1 5 
 
 it is equally adapted to all the tribes and kindreds of the 
 earth. It can flourish under any form of government, 
 giving strength and stability to that which is good, and 
 steadily, silently counteracting and undermining that 
 which is evil ; nourishing and developing what is fit to 
 survive, and accelerating the decay of what deserves to 
 perish — pronouncing in favor of no one form of govern- 
 ment in preference to another. It has identified itself 
 with no system of philosophy, with no school of science, 
 with no theory of political economy; so that by none of 
 these can its marvellous growth be impeded. Had it 
 ever linked itself to any one of these, it would have been 
 fatal to it. Suppose the Scriptures had taught that the 
 Ptolomaic system of astronomy was the true one. When 
 the Copernican system was established and the Ptolemaic 
 overthrown, the Bible would have been overthrown with 
 it. If it had been a matter of revelation, when the falsity 
 of that system was demonstrated, revelation would have 
 received a shock from which it could not have recovered. 
 The same thing would have been true had Christianity 
 allied itself with any of the great forms of philosophy. 
 For example, take the splendid philosophy of Aristotle, 
 which for centuries held the intellects of men in unques- 
 tioning submission, but by and by Bacon arose with his 
 new system of induction, and overthrew it. How for- 
 tunate that none of the writers in these Scriptures said a 
 word about these systems ; therefore, Christianity has 
 gone on in its imperial march. God has been pleased to 
 keep his Word entirely separate and distinct from every 
 one of these things, which would have crippled it, and 
 rendered its progress to the universal conquest of the 
 nations impossible. 
 
 2. All the other great religions have in them, or at- 
 tached to them, institutions or forms of worship, or car- 
 
n6 SERMONS. 
 
 dinal articles of belief which make them local; limited, 
 and incapable of universal expansion. Take, for instance, 
 that wonderful country that now is perplexing all the 
 people that read and write and think about it — that vast 
 Empire of China, with its population of five hundred 
 million. There Confucius sways his sceptre; but the 
 faith of Confucius means the worship of ancestors, and 
 the worship of ancestors means the bondage of the living 
 to the despotism of the dead ; makes anything like prog- 
 ress absolutely impossible, and links that great people 
 irrevocably to the past — a narrow, ignoble past. In 
 India Brahminism dominates, but with its pitiless tyranny 
 of caste makes freedom, brotherhood, community of in- 
 terests impossible. In other parts of Asia Buddha reigns 
 with a gentle sway ; but it is a religion without hope, 
 except the hope of finally escaping the miseries of life by 
 escaping from conscious being. Over a large portion of 
 Asia and Africa Mahomet sways his despotic sceptre ; 
 but Mahometanism means the degradation of woman, it 
 means the control of manhood by inevitable, irresistible 
 fate — not providence, but inexorable fate. 
 
 These religions all have in them peculiarities, charac- 
 teristics, which confine them to certain latitudes or zones 
 of the earth, and which, by necessity, prevent their spread 
 in climates where their rites cannot be celebrated, or 
 among races made antagonistic by alien blood and physi- 
 cal dissimilarity. But the soil has not been found where 
 the seeds of Christianity cannot be planted, nor the 
 climate where its vigorous plants cannot flourish. There 
 is scarcely a language into which its sacred books have 
 not been translated; and no tribe where its converts 
 may not be counted. There are those in this audience 
 who have seen its mission stations on the banks of 
 the Nile, its Christian colleges on the shores of the 
 
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 117 
 
 Bosphorus, and its churches in Calcutta, Bombay and 
 Damascus. 
 
 3. Christianity is destined to be the religion of the 
 world, because it is the religion of the only progressive 
 nations, by which I mean the colonizing, enterprising 
 nations, those who are making advances by reason of free 
 institutions, just laws, useful inventions, sound learning, 
 and ever-increasing commerce. If you are interested in 
 an illustration of the rapid progress of Christian civiliza- 
 tion, let me remind you of what has been accomplished 
 during the present century. We are now near the end 
 of the nineteenth century ; the twentieth century will soon 
 begin. One hundred years ago, as the eighteenth century 
 was drawing to its close, the republic of the United 
 States was born, and already this imperial confederated 
 empire of States has attained to such prosperity and 
 power as to make it evident that by the middle of the 
 century just at hand it will be the dominant nation of the 
 world. Another continent, Australia, has been populated 
 by a Christian people, and will soon become another of 
 the great representatives of modern civilization. One 
 hundred years ago Europe had little intercourse with 
 the Oriental world, and no influence over its vast terri- 
 tories, with their incalculable populations. But now be- 
 hold the magnificent Empire of England in India, with 
 her laws, her schools, her literature, her religious faith, 
 quickening into a new life that mighty realm of im- 
 measurable possibilities of future greatness under the 
 transforming power of the gospel of Christ. Great 
 Britain, at the beginning of the century, was but a proph- 
 ecy of what it is to-day in population, wealth, commerce, 
 all the elements of national greatness. At the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century there was not a railroad on the 
 earth, there was not a steamer on the sea, there was not a 
 
n8 SERMONS. 
 
 telegraph line in any country. Franklin then had not 
 even evoked a single electric spark from the thunder- 
 cloud ; and now that mysterious element is becoming the 
 motor power, which is destined to supplant steam, the 
 brilliant irradiator, and replace all other modes of illumi- 
 nation. All these discoveries, all these subordinations of 
 the forces of nature to the use, convenience, and comfort 
 of mankind have burst upon the world almost in our own 
 day. And these are but the minor factors of Christian 
 civilization. The gospel is the world's true reformer, the 
 one great factor of the nobler civilization that we call 
 Christian. 
 
 Once the world was startled by the dismemberment of 
 one little nation — the partition of Poland between three 
 great powers — but now just at hand is the dismember- 
 ment of two great continents, Asia and Africa. Their 
 dismemberment and disintegration has already com- 
 menced. China, already humiliated by defeat, torn by 
 internal dissensions, with no cohesive principle, with no 
 settled autonomy, will soon be an outlying province of 
 Russia. Germany, France and England are dividing 
 Africa between themselves : one takes five hundred miles 
 of coast, another a thousand miles of coast, and fortifies 
 itself in the interior. How long it will be before letters 
 of administration will be taken out on the estate of the 
 Sultan of Turkey it is impossible to say, but probably in 
 the near future. Constantinople trembles as she feels the 
 pulsations of the coming earthquake. Between the beak 
 of the Russian Eagle and the claws of the British Lion, 
 Turkey, exasperated by being compelled to submit to the 
 most trying humiliations, longs for the return of the 
 good old days when Suleiman the Magnificent carried 
 his conquests far up the Danube and thundered at the 
 gate of Vienna — days never to return ; for it cannot be 
 
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 1 19 
 
 long before the beautiful throat of the Bosphorus will be 
 no longer grasped by the leprous hand of the Turk, and 
 when a Scripture verse in Greek, carved on what was 
 once a Christian church, but now a Mohammedan 
 mosque, "Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting king- 
 dom ; to thy dominion there shall be no end," shall find its 
 fulfilment, and when the Ottoman Empire will form a 
 part of the dominions over which he who has a right to 
 reign will sway his sceptre of righteousness and peace. 
 Four hundred millions of the human race are already 
 under the control of Christian nations, and the church is 
 now girding herself for new conquests and preparing for 
 an extension more vast and rapid than has ever been 
 known. 
 
 4. Consider, too, what is involved in the fact that the 
 English language is fast becoming the dominant language 
 of the world. The significance of that fact is evident, 
 not only because it is true that the English language is 
 the language of commerce, of diplomacy, of international 
 arbitration ; but because it is the language in which more 
 copies of the Holy Scriptures are to be found than in all 
 other languages together, and because more missionaries 
 of the cross are proclaiming their messages of salvation 
 than in all the other tongues of the world combined. No 
 other language, ancient or modern, is resplendent with 
 such a galaxy of historians, orators and poets. Once the 
 Greek literature was the noblest in the world ; but in its 
 palmiest days it did not boast of such a constellation of 
 noble writers as now illumines the literature of the world. 
 The Greek language, with all its flexibility and beauty, 
 compares with English as Homer compares with Shakes- 
 peare — a noble writer, indeed, justly entitled to enduring 
 fame ; but how limited his range, and how ethically 
 inferior to that king of thoughtful men. And, above all, 
 
120 SERMONS. 
 
 it is the English language that bears the ark of Christian 
 civilization all over the world. 
 
 No, it makes no difference where a man was born ; the 
 gospel comes to him and plants the seeds of glory in his 
 soul, and transforms him and makes a new creature of 
 him. 
 
 There was a scientific association in the city of Edin- 
 burgh, which was composed, for the most part, of physi- 
 cians. At one of their meetings a discussion came up as 
 to whether there were not some nations so degraded and 
 morally embruted as to be incapable of civilization. Quite 
 a number agreed to the proposition, and one gave as an 
 illustration the diminutive, stunted little Bushmen, about 
 the Cape of Good Hope. It was impossible, he said, to 
 civilize them — even Christianity would be a failure 
 among them. There was a stranger present, and he got 
 up and asked if a stranger might be permitted to say 
 something about the subject under discussion. He was 
 told he was at liberty to take any part he pleased in the 
 discussion. He said he did not pretend to dispute with 
 those learned gentlemen. "But," said he, "as I once 
 lived at the Cape of Good Hope among these people, 
 whose civilization you think impossible, I would like to 
 tell you a little incident. There was an English officer, a 
 stranger in the country, a man of splendid physique. 
 One day in riding through the country he lost his way in 
 the jungle and found it impossible to recover the route 
 he was travelling. Finally, through the thick under- 
 growth, he caught the gleam of a light, and following the 
 light, he found himself opposite the cottage of one of 
 these Bushmen. Hearing the clatter of horses' feet, the 
 native came out, and seeing the tall Englishman, with 
 brilliant uniform, and his sword girded on his side, made 
 him a low salutation, and asked him to condescend to 
 
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 121 
 
 come in and take such shelter as his humble roof would 
 give. A frugal meal was prepared. After it was over, 
 the Bushman said, 'My wife and I have a custom of 
 reading a chapter, and having a prayer together ; it would 
 embarrass me to offer a prayer in your presence, but we 
 are glad that you are here to conduct this service for us/ 
 The Englishman said that he had never learned to pray 
 himself, and could not conduct the family devotions, but 
 would be very glad to unite with them. The Bushman 
 read a chapter, and then he kneeled down and made a 
 fervent, humble prayer in which he prayed God to bless 
 the stranger that was under his roof, and permit him to 
 once more return to his home. And when the prayer was 
 ended, the Bushman discovered the Englishman was still 
 on his knees; and thinking, in consequence of the 
 fatigues of the day, he had fallen asleep, he went to him. 
 But he found that he was weeping. At last he rose, and 
 said, T came from a Christian land to this heathen coun- 
 try, but I came to find myself a heathen. And now, God's 
 grace helping me, I promise here under this roof that I 
 will endeavor to pass from heathenism into the hope of 
 Christianity.' " Having told this story, the stranger sat 
 down. Nobody attempted to refute it. The religion that 
 could take one of those brutal men, those diminutive, 
 stunted apes, as they were called, and make him a model 
 to the Englishman, is a religion that speaks for itself. 
 
 All the nations shall ultimately be gathered into one 
 common brotherhood. 
 
 " Jesus shall reign where'er the sun 
 Doth his successive journeys run; 
 His kingdom spread from shore to shore, 
 Till moons shall wax and wane no more." 
 
 Never was there a time when life was so well worth 
 living as to-day; never a time when a young man's op- 
 
122 SERMONS. 
 
 portunities for usefulness were so splendid as to-day; 
 and, oh ! how much to be envied is that young man who 
 knows what the possibilities of the future may be, and 
 who consecrates himself to God, and is, by God's blessing, 
 enabled to spend a long and useful life in the service of 
 his Maker and Redeemer, and the service of his fellow- 
 men. The songs that we have been singing to-day are 
 beginning to be echoed throughout the earth, and before 
 long one song shall employ all nations, and the praise of 
 one Christ shall be heard encircling the globe. 
 
 " Oh ! may I bear some humble part 
 In that immortal song. 
 Wonder and joy shall fill my heart, 
 And love command my tongue." 
 
 .__ 
 
X. 
 JOHN THE BAPTIST. 
 
 "THE SPIRIT AND POWER OF ELIJAH." 
 
 "And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah." 
 — Luke i. 17. 
 
 IN every generation, the great God who walks through 
 human history unseen, and whose invisible hand 
 directs human affairs, has raised up men to meet every 
 crisis involving human progress, and the ultimate re- 
 demption of the race. In a monarchical government, men 
 are so trained that they are led to expect leaders, and not 
 to act independently as individuals. In governments 
 called paternal, the people are not educated to think for 
 themselves, or to lay plans for their own government, 
 but are expected to submit to the laws, and to follow the 
 dictation of those who are supposed to be capable of 
 directing them. And even in a republican government, 
 the mass of the people, from conscious ignorance often- 
 times of the true inwardness of great questions, and of 
 what would be best as lines of national policy, prefer to 
 be led by those in whose experience, whose wisdom, and 
 in whose patriotism they have confidence. There is an 
 unconscious element in humanity that leads us to rely 
 upon men of superior strength ; men who are supposed to 
 be capable of relieving the masses of the people from the 
 evils which they fear, and of conducting them to the goal 
 of good to which they aspire ; men who are supposed to 
 be capable of vindicating their rights, and redressing 
 their wrongs. Decision, courage, inflexibility, determi- 
 
I2 4 SERMONS. 
 
 nation — when qualities like these are consecrated to 
 noble ends, then the man who possesses them will always 
 have a following. The man who is believed to represent 
 great principles is the incarnation of the power that others 
 respect, and he is the man who touches the popular 
 imagination, and inspires popular enthusiasm. Such men 
 are welcomed by the people with open arms, and are 
 elevated to the highest positions of influence and trust; 
 they are supposed to be capable of marking out the true 
 policy for the great majority over whom they have influ- 
 ence, and such are the men who not only develop what is 
 good, and what must be developed in national resources, 
 but they are the men who leave the imprint of their own 
 personalities upon the generation to which they belong; 
 and not only so, but they are the men who transmit the 
 influence which they exert to ages which will come after 
 — we know not how many generations of the world. 
 
 It is very interesting to notice the great variety of men 
 who have written and thought upon these subjects, and 
 to see how they unite in their opinion. Last Sunday I 
 had occasion to quote the terse and comprehensive saying 
 of Carlyle, when he declared that universal history is but 
 the history of the great men who make history. Can you 
 think of any one more unlike Carlyle in sentiment, edu- 
 cation and character than Goethe? Yet he says there 
 never was a great reform inaugurated or consummated by 
 the people, but always by one who acted for the people as 
 their representative. John Stuart Mill, in his treatise on 
 "Liberty," says the great majority of the people in any 
 land represent only mediocrity, and mediocrity is not 
 competent to lead. 
 
 And so we see, when men travel, and reach the vast 
 tablelands that stretch almost across some continents, the 
 journey and the view from day to day is one of extreme 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 125 
 
 and wearisome monotony; but when there are mountain 
 peaks that rise snow-capped and glittering in the sun, 
 then there is something to rest the eye, and absorb the 
 admiration ; and great and good men rise from the table- 
 lands, even as the mountain peaks that condense the 
 clouds and make the showers to furnish the fountains, 
 from which flow the waters that irrigate the plains and 
 the valleys of the earth. 
 
 Half way between Moses and Christ — one thousand 
 years before Christ was born — there suddenly burst upon 
 the vision of the world the old prophet Elijah. There is 
 no character more distinctly prominent in all its grand 
 and rugged features than his. There is no life more 
 unique than his. He came from what ancestry? Nobody 
 knows. Other great agents of God's providence had 
 family ties: we know something about their households, 
 and their kindred. Of Elijah we know absolutely nothing 
 in these respects. We only know that he was a native 
 of those wild countries beyond the Jordan, in the land of 
 Gilead, which stood in about the same relation to the rest 
 of Palestine that in ancient times the North of Scotland, 
 inhabited by fierce Highlanders, stood to those who in- 
 habited the cities and towns and farmhouses of the low 
 countries. This man, born and bred in solitude, amid the 
 wild fastnesses of Gilead, was utterly unknown until he 
 burst out with that unexpectedness which always char- 
 acterizes movements at a great crisis in the history of 
 Israel. He came to represent a great truth. When I tell 
 you what the truth was, it will not impress you very 
 much perhaps, because it is something with which we are 
 so familiar ; it is something we think so essential that we 
 almost take it for granted that it is a truth everywhere 
 believed, and everywhere leaving its impression. Elijah 
 came to represent the great truth that the Lord God was 
 
126 SERMONS. 
 
 one God, and that there should be no other gods before 
 him. 
 
 At the period when Elijah made his appearance as the 
 vindicator of this great truth, Israel was in danger of 
 utterly losing the last shreds of belief in the supreme, 
 spiritual God that rules the world by his providence. 
 That was the time when Israel, or what few devout men 
 lived in Israel, saw with consternation an idolatrous 
 king sitting upon the throne ; and not only so, but an 
 idolatrous king who married an idolatrous wife, and she 
 the daughter of Ethbaal of Tyre, a great patron of poly- 
 theism in that adjacent land. The father of Ahab ob- 
 tained the throne by the murder of his brother, and the 
 daughter inheriting the cruelty, and the genius also, of 
 the long line to which she belonged, the moment she 
 became the wife of Israel's king began to use her influ- 
 ence, and her fascinating power, in the establishment of 
 idolatry throughout Israel. 
 
 I have not time this morning to speak of the pomp 
 and imposing character of the ceremony. I must say, 
 however, that the deities worshipped and introduced by 
 Ahab and his wife were Baal and Astaroth — Baal, the 
 God of Sun, and Astaroth or Ashtoreth — which filled the 
 land with voluptuous, cruel, abominable, unmentionable 
 worship. Such was the position of things. And this was 
 the great occasion which Providence selected for the 
 certain introduction of this man into the presence of the 
 king, and when he came, he came first into contact, not 
 only with the throne, but with the power that was behind 
 the throne, which was a great deal stronger than the 
 throne itself. There is no power in the world so dan- 
 gerous, and so fatal, as the power of a wicked woman, 
 when endowed with great intellect, ambition and de- 
 termined will, and when these gifts are united with per- 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 127 
 
 sonal charm and captivating manners. When Elijah came 
 into contact with Jezebel, it was a great crisis in the 
 history of Israel's people. It was the conflict of one 
 strong, indomitable spirit with another spirit equally as 
 strong and indomitable, with this difference, that the one 
 spirit was inspired from above, while the other was a 
 spirit in alliance with the prince and power of darkness. 
 
 Elijah was the man for the time. Probably in the 
 whole land he was the only man fitted, and he came to 
 uphold the great truth, which was a vital truth, or foun- 
 dation truth of theocracy, that God ruled, and that Israel 
 was his people. You talk about the union of church and 
 state. What do you mean by that? You mean that the 
 state, which is one organization, and the church, which is 
 a totally different organization, have entered into a com- 
 pact, and promise, by which they shall unite their forces 
 for certain purposes. There was no such union as that in 
 ancient Israel. It was not a union between church and 
 state, because their church and state were one, and never 
 anything else but one ; no organization to the right, and 
 none to the left, but one organization that included both ; 
 so that the state was only one manifestation of theocracy, 
 and the church another manifestation of theocracy, and 
 God underlying all ; God distinct in all, and God making 
 himself manifest in all. That was the great truth that 
 had to be vindicated in the age in which Elijah lived, and 
 if that truth had been lost, in vain would have been the 
 attempt to continue the succession of the church, and 
 Christianity itself would never have been born. 
 
 And so among the old reformers, you see that Elijah 
 stands the impersonation of the principle, the represen- 
 tative of the great cause, just as Athanasius afterwards 
 stood to uphold the doctrine of the Godhood of Christ, as 
 Luther afterwards came representing another principle — 
 
128 SERMONS. 
 
 the principle of justification by faith, and that the soul 
 needs no mediator between man and God, save Christ 
 Jesus; that the priesthood is abolished; that the con- 
 science is free, and that the open Bible, held reverently, 
 with prayer to God for the Spirit's illumination, is the 
 soul's only needed guide to truth and heaven. At one 
 period of the world Elijah represented the truth that lies 
 at the foundation of both these other truths to which I 
 refer ; for if the world had lost its belief in the existence 
 of an intelligent, personal, loving God, and had a vice- 
 gerent on the earth prepared for both, and intended that 
 both should triumph at the last, then Athanasius would 
 never have had an inch of ground upon which to stand, 
 and there never would have been any room for Luther, 
 and the world would never have heard of either. 
 
 And so it came to pass that Elijah was a sort of intro- 
 duction, sort of forerunner of all the reformers and up- 
 holders of the truth that came after him. He possessed 
 just the qualities that were necessary for a man who had 
 to meet such exigencies as those which confronted him. 
 If you ask me what those qualities were, I will answer, 
 in the first place, his great, predominant qualification was 
 courage — moral courage. There is a difference between 
 courage and bravery. Bravery is the result of the physi- 
 cal constitution. Some men are naturally brave, with 
 their developed muscles, and strong nervous system, and 
 perfect balance through all the various functions of the 
 frame which their souls inhabit — and the result is 
 bravery. But there is something higher than this, and 
 that is courage. Courage is the moral quality, and some 
 men who are not brave are courageous, because the moral 
 quality is the ascendant and the regnant faculty con- 
 trols the natural fear. You remember when an officer 
 spoke sneeringly of a younger officer who in battle showed 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 129 
 
 signs of trepidation, and mentioned it to the commander, 
 the commander answered, "Yes, and if you were as much 
 frightened as he, you would run away, but you will see 
 that he will stand his ground, for he has moral courage." 
 There is many a man whose physical make-up is such 
 that he may tremble in the presence of danger, but who 
 has within him the inflexible sort of spirit that he stands 
 his ground to the last. That is moral courage. I call it 
 moral because it is that in a man which leads him to 
 abhor the wrong. There are some things which it is 
 right to hate. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that 
 which is good. The moral attribute of which I speak is 
 that which leads men to abhor injustice, oppression and 
 wrong of any character, and which leads them to admire 
 and uphold the right. Then courage becomes tinctured 
 with principle, and when imbued with principle it becomes 
 a moral quality, and the men who have moral courage are 
 the men who, when they espouse a great cause, are loyal 
 to it to the end, without regard to personal consequences. 
 That is another element of it. I say they are loyal to 
 their principle to the end, without regard to personal 
 consequences ; they have given themselves to the cause, 
 and the cause possesses them, has taken possession of 
 them, and so they mean to maintain it at the cost of any 
 sacrifice, or at the cost of any peril that may happen to 
 themselves. 
 
 Ah ! how rare such men are. Sprinkled here and there 
 over the wide, wide field of history, you see one and an- 
 other — but how few. How few will stake all on a 
 principle, and die for it if need be, rather than desert it? 
 Such was Elijah, and as a second evidence I will mention 
 the conviction that he had that he was God Almighty's 
 representative, and that he was the Lord's agent — an 
 incident in accomplishing a certain work. Says David in 
 9 
 
130 SERMONS. 
 
 one of the Psalms, "I have set the Lord always before 
 me ; because he is at my right hand I shall not be moved." 
 Who does not know that if a man believes there walks at 
 his side through all the days, and through all the duties 
 of life, an Omnipotent One who is his friend, that that 
 man will have all the strength that can be infused into 
 humanity? It was so with Elijah. His ordinary intro- 
 duction, when he presented himself, was, "The God before 
 whom I stand," "The God in whose name I come," "The 
 God upon whose strength I lay hold." When John Wes- 
 ley was dying, one of the last things he said was, "The 
 best of all is, God is with us." Yes, my friends, that is 
 the best of all. And the man who has the conviction that 
 God is with him, and that God is smiling upon him, and 
 that God at last will recompense him, is the only man 
 who is invincibly strong, and the only man who will 
 probably succeed, because he has the courage of the 
 highest and holiest conviction that can animate the hu- 
 man heart. 
 
 The third element which Elijah had which fitted him 
 for the age in which he lived, to do the work he had to 
 accomplish, was that he lived in such communion with 
 God that whatever was most elevating and noble in its 
 nature was developed, until he acquired that force that 
 the highest spirituality always invests a man with. When 
 the greatest of modern soldiers was speaking of a young 
 officer in the Austrian army, he said, "One thing about 
 that man, he is a thoroughly good man, and that is worth 
 everything else." That is a great deal to come from the 
 lips of the First Napoleon, that he should recognize the 
 inflexibility of goodness, and put it in the forefront of 
 the battle of the right for the world. 
 
 When Walter Scott was dying, he said, "Lockhart, 
 be a good man ; that is worth all the rest." Says the man 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 131 
 
 of many books and wide operations, the man that had 
 studied human nature and knew it well, and the man 
 who recognized the fact that after all, the greatest force 
 of the world was the spiritual force of a man that lived 
 in communion with God. 
 
 When Elijah was about to go away, he took off that 
 rough mantle which he had been in the habit of wearing, 
 and wrapped it together like a robe, or a scroll, and 
 divided the river, and then when Elisha had crossed over 
 with him he unfolded the mantle and threw it upon the 
 shoulders of Elisha, and Elisha became his successor, and 
 it was said he inherited the spirit of his master, Elijah, 
 and this was written about him, "I perceive that thou art 
 a holy man of God." Among all the titles that can be 
 written under the name of the man, or above the name 
 of the man, or around the name of the man, is that of 
 "holy man of God." "A man of God" is a great thing, 
 without the "holy." We say of certain men who have 
 great experience, great knowledge of human nature, great 
 acquaintance with the affairs of the world — we say of 
 one man, he is a man of the world. That is his title. 
 Of another, we say, he is a man of affairs. We say of 
 another, he is a man of pleasure — a man who devotes 
 himself to the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and 
 the pride of life — he is a man of pleasure. Of another 
 man, who is capable of laying down plans for the guid- 
 ance of the coming generation, and who knows what are 
 the essential principles of an enduring free government, 
 we say he is a man of the state. But the greatest thing 
 of all is to call a man "a man of God," and when, in addi- 
 tion to that it is said that he is a "holy man of God," then 
 that man exhibits something of the divinity which stirs 
 within him; that man emits something of the divine 
 power in him, and for that reason he has to make his 
 
i& SERMONS. 
 
 impress upon the generation of which he forms a 
 part. 
 
 It is something very interesting to notice that a man 
 of such qualities not only is able to exert influence which 
 spreads all around him — just as when you throw a peb- 
 ble into a smooth pool, and the circles widen and widen 
 until they touch the brink; but they have a projectile 
 influence — a projectile power, a propulsive power, which 
 sends that influence down through the ages. The first 
 illustration we have of that is about what I have just 
 mentioned, that the spirit of Elijah rested on Elisha. The 
 next is, that all through the Oriental lands there was a 
 strange superstition about Elisha, and that was, that he 
 was to appear in the world again, not only once, but as 
 often as he might be needed. Did you know, my friends, 
 that the Jews, for centuries, when they celebrated the 
 Passover, had a cup filled, and a chair ready for Elisha, 
 in case he should enter and partake of the sacred banquet ? 
 Did you know that among the Bedouin Arabs there had 
 always been a tradition that Elijah had always been 
 travelling the earth in the form of an Arab merchant, ap- 
 pearing for the defence of the weak, and the overthrowal 
 of the wicked? Do you remember that Abdul Pasha, of 
 Persia, almost died of fear, because he fancied he had a 
 vision of Elijah upon Mt. Carmel? And so the feeling 
 has grown, and continued to exist in the world, that a 
 time would come when upon some mountain, exceeding 
 great and high, Elijah would be seen again, as he actually 
 was seen when Christ was transfigured. Such, my 
 friends, is the history of this reform, of this representative 
 of a great truth of his day : of this great herald of the 
 prophets, and of the reformers, and of the martyrs, and 
 of the confessors. Now I close my sermon by saying that 
 we may look through the history of the world, and we 
 
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 133 
 
 will always find that this has been the plan. When Israel 
 was enchained and debauched by oppression, Moses was 
 raised up to bring the people out of their bondage, and 
 when during their forty years' marching and wandering 
 through the wilderness they relapsed into idolatry, and 
 the plague was sent among them, he stood between the 
 living and the dead, and the plague was stayed. And 
 when the particular time came Elijah was raised up, and 
 he prepared the way for Isaiah, and he for Jeremiah, and 
 for the minor prophets, and for Malachi, whose last chap- 
 ter says that one shall come in the spirit and power of 
 Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, 
 and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest he 
 come and smite the earth with a curse. 
 
 Oh ! my friends, this is a very impressive truth, and 
 it is that during all these generations the men that have 
 been raised up — the men in patriarchal days, the judges 
 that ruled Israel, and then the prophets that remonstrated 
 with Israel for their sins, and then in the days of our 
 Lord the disciples he called around him, and after them 
 the confessors and martyrs that followed him — that is 
 the sad line of truth that runs through this history. You 
 ask what it is? These men were never recognized, never 
 appreciated for their true worth, by the generations to 
 which they belonged. Oftentimes — always, we may say, 
 with but few exceptions — their whole history is summed 
 up in that wonderful statement of the Apostle Paul, when 
 in describing the true heroes of the world, he says they 
 were stoned ; they were sawn asunder ; they wandered 
 in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, tormented 
 and afflicted, and then when the ages passed by, after the 
 people slew the prophets, they built tombs for them, and 
 gathered around them, and paid them almost divine 
 honors, But what a lesson it is for men to appreciate the 
 
134 SERMONS. 
 
 good of those who live among them, while they live, and 
 not wait to pay them posthumous honors when the world 
 is made poorer by their departure and is bereaved by 
 their loss. And we must not be discouraged, my friends, 
 if in this great fight of what is wrong in the world, if we 
 are misrepresented, if we are misunderstood. Let us not 
 be discouraged. There has always been something im- 
 pressive to me in that picture of the Mohammedan relig- 
 ion, showing that those who cross the bottomless gulf on 
 a long bridge to enter into Paradise, have to march one 
 by one through an arch of crossed scymetars — reminding 
 them of what their earthly conflict must be — swords 
 crossed above them, and beyond 'that archway Paradise. 
 Thus it has been. Other men have labored, other men 
 have suffered, but ye have entered into their labor. 
 Please recollect this, that we can never recompense those 
 people, when they are gone, by any honors which we pay 
 to their memory; our applauses never go down, never 
 reach the cold shades of death. When men lie in their 
 coffins they do not hear our praises, and our praises never 
 ascend to the realms of light and glory ; they cannot reach 
 that height, and the only return we can make to those who 
 have labored and suffered and triumphed for us in con- 
 tending for the right and truth in the world, and the only 
 true way of showing our gratitude, is to fall into line 
 ourselves, and join the great procession of those who have 
 been trying to maintain the empire of principle in this 
 world. Let the torch of truth be transmitted from hand 
 to hand, and from generation to generation, until it shall 
 illuminate the earth. This is the way, my friends, in 
 which we may show our gratitude to those who are gone, 
 by inheriting their spirit, by walking in the light of their 
 holy example, and by waiting for God's own time in 
 which to bestow upon us the recompense and the reward. 
 
XI. 
 LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 
 
 "And Samuel died, and all the Israelites were gathered to- 
 gether and lamented him." — i Samuel xxv. i. 
 
 THE book that records the lives of the regnant men 
 of the world, the men that I choose to call the kingly 
 men of the world — not because of their rank or heredi- 
 tary power or riches, but the kingly men of the world 
 because of the services they have rendered to their race, 
 services patiently, untiringly and sometimes heroically 
 rendered — does not contain a biography more beautiful 
 than that of Samuel, the prophet and priest of the Lord. 
 While he was yet a little boy his mother brought him 
 to good old Eli as he ministered in the sanctuary, and she 
 said, "I have lent him to the Lord as long as he liveth." 
 That dedication on the part of his mother was followed 
 by an audible call from Jehovah himself. In the stillness 
 of the night, before the last lamp had been extinguished 
 in the temple, the little child heard the voice calling him, 
 and his response was, "Speak, Lord, thy servant heareth." 
 Samuel hastened to fulfil the vow which his mother had 
 made on his behalf by his own personal consecration. 
 Oh ! what an auspicious beginning, what a .calm and 
 beautiful life followed that beginning. No stain rests 
 upon the record of Samuel's piety. After long years 
 spent in the service of the God of his boyhood, he died in 
 peace, and all Israel gathered together, and made great 
 lamentation over him. Noble life, peaceful death, blessed 
 memory ! It was a morning without a cloud ; his youth- 
 
136 SERMONS. 
 
 ful piety was the bright and morning star that dawned 
 before the sun arose, and when that sun went down in 
 peace and splendor it left an afterglow behind it, the 
 trailing glory that still lights up the skies. 
 
 When a private citizen dies, if he is a truly good man, 
 his loss is bewailed, first in the family, in which a light 
 has been extinguished no more to be relumed on earth; 
 and the loss is one that is deplored, too, in the community, 
 by his neighbors and acquaintances. When a man of 
 prayer is taken away, a man whose example and whose 
 consistent living was a guide and blessing to others, then 
 the entire community laments the loss. Just in proportion 
 to the eminence of a man's position, just in proportion to 
 the wideness of the influence which he exerts, if that 
 influence is a beneficent one, and his elevation is one that 
 Providence has caused for wise and good purposes, there 
 are many families and many communities bereaved. It is 
 no longer like the narrow circle of mourners when the 
 private citizen goes, but it is a circle which widens until 
 it takes in a state, an empire — until it takes in, it may be, 
 Christendom. 
 
 We are told that not many mighty and not many noble 
 are called into the kingdom of the Lord. This assertion 
 refers to men of noble birth according to human grada- 
 tion of rank, and to men of might according to the world's 
 estimate of might. There is no might like consecrated 
 genius. There is no nobility like spiritual excellence, 
 there is no power like goodness in the world. We have 
 reason, my friends, to be very thankful that, when esti- 
 mated by this test, the church of God has been blessed in 
 all generations with the truly mighty and the truly noble 
 from the days of Origen and Cyprian, Justin Martyr and 
 Tertulian, Chrysostom and Athanasius, Augustine and 
 Luther, Melancthon and Zwingle, Calvin and Knox, Ba- 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 137 
 
 con and Milton, Whitefield and Chalmers, and Liddon, 
 Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards. I do not know of any 
 men in history that deserve the title of "noble and 
 mighty" as do these men, splendidly endowed by nature, 
 with all their powers strengthened and developed by 
 learning, and consecrated to the service of God and the 
 highest interests of humanity. There are some men 
 whose endowments are such, whose natural and acquired 
 gifts are such that they are compelled to occupy stations 
 of great eminence. Their own humility, perhaps, would 
 induce them to prefer obscurity, but those who recog- 
 nize their capacity for usefulness will not permit them 
 to remain in obscure stations, and when once raised to 
 elevated positions, they are never allowed to abandon 
 their posts. They stand the acknowledged leaders in the 
 state, lights and landmarks of the church, and the pillars 
 in the great temple that God is erecting on this earth to 
 the glory of his grace. 
 
 When such men are called away, the people feel and 
 recognize the great chasm, the great blank that has been 
 made. When those who have left their impress upon 
 their generation are called away, then the involuntary 
 testimony of the bereaved people is, "A great man and a 
 prince is fallen in Israel !" 
 
 The regrets when eminent and good men die are never 
 confined to the particular church in which they were 
 reared and to which they ministered, and the reason is 
 that the church — I am speaking now of the whole com- 
 pany of the redeemed on earth, those whose lives are 
 united by faith in Jesus Christ — knows no geographical 
 boundaries. It is not so with the earth. Either by 
 natural or artificial lines states are marked off, with some- 
 times mountains or rivers for their boundaries. We are 
 told that, "Mountains interposed make enemies of na- 
 
138 SERMONS. 
 
 tions," to the infinite folly, the unutterable folly and 
 misery of mankind. The people that live on one side of a 
 mountain slope are filled with bitter hostility to those who 
 live on the other side of the mountain slope, and so we are 
 told by the bard that ''Mountains interposed make 
 enemies of nations." There are no such geographical 
 divisions in the church of God. It constitutes one 
 brotherhood, one community of sympathy and of common 
 interests. Therefore, when a great missionary, for in- 
 stance, is suddenly taken away, a man like Martyn, or 
 Cary, or Moffat, that death is first bewailed by the heathen 
 converts that have been brought out from the darkness in 
 which they were born to the light into which they were 
 reborn, but the mourning that begins in that little circle 
 of converted pagans spreads widely, and the tidings of 
 that death touch a sympathetic cord throughout all 
 Christendom, and the church feels that it has sustained a 
 common loss. 
 
 I do not remember any period in which the church has 
 sustained heavier bereavements than it has during the last 
 three or four years ; and it is well, my friends, when 
 these events occur, that we should commemorate them, 
 because such tributes are due to the men themselves. 
 And then the taking away of such men, if we only knew 
 it, marks great epochs in the history of the church. More- 
 over, it is a sweet duty to gather up and perpetuate the 
 things that made them deservedly honored and dear to 
 the communities in which they lived and labored. When 
 we treasure up these things and transmit them, we hand 
 down what becomes a precious legacy to the coming 
 generation. 
 
 First, I will mention in this list of eminent lamented 
 the name of William Perry Liddon, a man whose repu- 
 tation is world-wide among scholars, but, for reasons I 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 139 
 
 may presently mention, he was not so popularly known. 
 His is not a familiar name nor a familiar history to the 
 great multitude, even of intelligent and reading people. 
 Canon Liddon was such a man as only a country like 
 England can produce, such a product as can only come 
 from one of its cloistered universities with a long classical 
 training, beginning in childhood and continuing for 
 fifteen or twenty consecutive years in the great schools 
 and colleges, finally in the universities and afterwards in 
 the fellowships that are bestowed upon the eminent schol- 
 ars who live as celibates in those universities, without 
 ever marrying, as was the case with Canon Liddon. It 
 was a rare and beautiful cultivation which he possessed. 
 It was a great and splendid scholarship which he mas- 
 tered, yet being destitute, to a large extent, of those 
 popular elements which touch the imagination of the 
 masses and arouse their enthusiasm, it so happened that 
 he was better known to scholars and reading men than 
 to the world at large ; and yet his is a name that deserves 
 perpetuation among those who have served their genera- 
 tion. I suppose Canon Liddon is better known by his 
 Bampton Lectures than by any other of his works. Those 
 Bampton Lectures which he delivered are believed to 
 contain the completest and most satisfactory vindication 
 of the divinity of Christ in the English language. That 
 is a great thing to say. It was the delivery and publica- 
 tion of the Bampton Lectures that laid the firm founda- 
 tion of his fame. After that he became one of the preach- 
 ers in the University of Oxford, and there he had just 
 the kind of an audience that suited a man of his genius 
 and training. It was a very limited audience as to num- 
 bers, but, my friends, you must not underrate its import- 
 ance on that account. Whenever Liddon preached, he 
 preached to the educated men whose influence was ulti- 
 
140 SERMONS. 
 
 mately to be felt all over Britain. And the man who can 
 control the thought and shape the principles of the 
 educated, is the man who takes hold most effectually of 
 his generation. 
 
 In the discourses which Liddon delivered in the Uni- 
 versity he weighed one thing very carefully. I do not 
 suppose there has been a man in the last fifty years who 
 has studied what I might call "the spirit of the age" more 
 closely* and intelligently than he did. I mean by that, par- 
 ticularly, that he studied all the phases of doubt, all the 
 shades and forms of skepticism to which cultivated men 
 and scholars were peculiarly liable; not the popular ob- 
 jections of the rabble and crowd, but those refined and 
 subtle difficulties which oftentimes are aroused in the 
 minds of the most cultivated men. He watched all that 
 with the most assiduous care, and the sermons that he 
 delivered, entitled, "University Sermons," are discourses 
 adapted to that class of men, and in the day in which we 
 live, perhaps, they have done as much as almost any other 
 sermons which have been delivered to scatter the doubts 
 of scholarly skeptics. 
 
 Another great portion of the life of Canon Liddon, 
 of his active public life, was when he became a preacher 
 in St. Paul's Cathedral. There he was perpetually handi- 
 capped. A cathedral is something made for show. It is 
 a great structure elevated above all the surrounding build- 
 ings to remind people of worship. It is a kind of archi- 
 tectural tribute to religion. So far so good, but there can 
 be nothing worse in its adaptation for public service, such 
 as prayer, praise and preaching, than a great cathedral. 
 It was very painful to sit near Canon Liddon as he 
 preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. Every muscle of his 
 body was put to the utmost tension. His countenance 
 was oftentimes distorted, and every one could see that he 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 141 
 
 was watching to ascertain, if possible, whether his words 
 reached the limit of the great assembly. It was one per- 
 petual strain, from the beginning to the end of his dis- 
 course, to make himself heard. There he stood in his 
 little pulpit, with a massive dome, like the dome of the 
 sky, above him, with his voice interrupted by the imperti- 
 nence of hundreds of arches, columns and pillars. I re- 
 member one Sunday afternoon, when I had gotten a po- 
 sition not very far from the pulpit from which he deliv- 
 ered his sermon, I was deeply interested when he took 
 his text, because it was a very difficult text, and one upon 
 which I wanted to hear his opinion. I never listened 
 more attentively, and never had a greater disappointment. 
 When the sermon was one-third through I ceased even to 
 try to hear him, and there was one strange thing I no- 
 ticed. It was that diminishing echo that could be heard 
 through all the chapels, through all the aisles of that great 
 edifice — a diminuendo note. After the preacher had 
 sounded the word, you would hear it repeated, fainter 
 and fainter, until the echo died away ; and the confusion 
 of sounds rendered it impossible to hear the sermon, 
 although articulately delivered. Such was the man, and 
 such were the labors of the man. He puts us out of sym- 
 pathy with him when we remember his intense ecclesiasti- 
 cism; indeed, he would have cut himself off from the 
 sympathy of the whole dissenting Christian world by his 
 intense ecclesiasticism if it had not been that he was one 
 of the most evangelical of preachers. He loved Jesus 
 Christ, and notwithstanding the churchism that was made 
 so prominent in his discourses, there was breathed 
 through them, from end to end, a devotion to the glory 
 of the Lord, and tender love for the souls of men. That 
 makes his memory, after all, a precious memory to the 
 whole church. 
 
i 4 2 SERMONS. 
 
 Among the bright, genial and loving men that the 
 Church of England has produced, there was no one that 
 was more distinguished for these characteristics than 
 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. He was one of the favorite 
 pupils of Arnold of Rugby, and some of the most beauti- 
 ful tributes that a great master ever paid to the virtues of 
 a boy, while at school, were the letters that Arnold wrote 
 to Stanley's mother while he was still at Rugby. From 
 that school he went to the University of Oxford, where 
 he soon took a very high position, and where, as soon as 
 he took holy orders, he became a member of the circle 
 such as few were ever admitted to even in England. He 
 was a great personal favorite of the Queen. He had the 
 entree at any time to whatever palace at which she hap- 
 pened to be residing. Notwithstanding the fact that he 
 had such a social position as this, in all probability there 
 was not a man in Great Britain who was simpler in man- 
 ers, plainer in dress, more entirely natural and more truly 
 unaffected, more ready to converse with the humblest and 
 the poorest, with whom he might be cast. During his 
 visit to this country I had a most interesting opportunity 
 of knowing the man. I had just returned from England 
 myself, and when introduced to him, some one mentioned 
 that fact. He said, "When you were in London, whom 
 did you hear preach ?" I said, "The last person I heard 
 preach in London was Dean Stanley." He had just 
 crossed the ocean himself, and we made the voyage at the 
 same time, but on different vessels. Said he, "Why did 
 you not come up at the conclusion of the service and 
 introduce yourself to me?" "Oh!" I said, "there are 
 many reasons why a stranger would not do that." "Well," 
 said he, "the next time you come to London, if you will 
 give me the opportunity, I will show you something that 
 no one else in England can show you, that is Westmin- 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 143 
 
 ster Abbey." That sounds strange, doesn't it? Why, I 
 had been going to Westminster Abbey for twenty-five or 
 thirty years. I once spent two weeks in the hotel directly 
 opposite the Abbey, that I might go into it once or twice 
 every day; but when Dean Stanley said, "I will show you 
 Westminster Abbey," I well knew what he meant, and 
 what a great promise and treat were shadowed by that 
 invitation. Those of you who have seen the two splendid, 
 illustrated volumes written by Stanley with regard to the 
 Abbey, have some conception of what an honor and 
 privilege it would be to have such a guide through that 
 most historic building of the world ; a man who knew 
 every tomb and every shrine, and who knew the history 
 of every illustrious man whose dust sleeps within those 
 walls. I accepted the invitation ; but I do not know of 
 anything that ever gave me a much deeper impression of 
 the vanity of all human expectations than what I am 
 going to tell you. It so happened that I returned to 
 England the very next summer. A few months after this 
 interview I went to Westminster Abbey, but I went alone, 
 and you may imagine my feelings when, as I walked 
 alone through the Abbey (it so happened that there was 
 no one in sight just then), I stopped suddenly over a new 
 flagstone in the pavement, and on that stone was engraved 
 "Arthur Penrhyn Stanley." The man that had offered 
 to conduct me through that building was sleeping uncon- 
 scious of all the crowds that walked over his silent dust ! 
 I have not time this afternoon to speak of Rev. Prof. 
 Theodore Christlieb, of Bonn ; I wish I had. But let us 
 cross the Channel, and enter a church in Paris, a church 
 not in the fashionable quarter of the city either, and there 
 we will find standing in the pulpit Eugene Bersier, a man 
 of noble stature, a man who gave an intimation to the 
 world in his very countenance and demeanor of every- 
 
144 SERMONS. 
 
 thing that is refined and noble in the human character. 
 A silver halo crowned his head, although he was not fifty 
 years of age. He was a man of benevolent aspect, and 
 wonderful geniality and grace. 
 
 L'Eglise Evangelique was the church in which he 
 ministered, and there I heard him deliver a funeral dis- 
 course in French. He was a member with me of the great 
 Council of Reformed Churches, which met two years 
 ago in the city of London. There I had the opportunity 
 of hearing Bersier speak, and one evening, to my great 
 delight, I was the guest of a gentleman, and Bersier was 
 the only other guest besides myself. There we spent a 
 delightful evening together. 
 
 Eugene Bersier, of all the modern preachers that 
 France has produced, comes nearer to the great trium- 
 virate that flourished in the days of Louis XIV. ; next 
 to Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. Bersier comes in 
 fourth. For splendor of genius, for beauty of diction, 
 for sweet sympathy, and for all the charities of the gospel 
 of Christ, there was no man of his day that transcended 
 him. My friends, it is one of the saddest of all thoughts 
 that a man who seemed, by the very constitution which 
 God had given him, destined to live a long life of con- 
 tinuous labor, perhaps until after three-score years and 
 ten, should have been stricken down in the very flower 
 and glory of his vigorous manhood. If in any of the 
 book stores which you chance to visit, you see a volume 
 of sermons with the name of Eugene Bersier upon them, 
 you cannot do better than to add them to your library. 
 
 It was a great loss to our struggling Presbyterian 
 Church in France when Bersier died. We do not know 
 how sufficiently to deplore these losses. Here I am going 
 to say a word or two — not of a controversial character, 
 but as somewhat of a contradiction to a very common 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 145 
 
 impression, and a very common remark that is made. 
 You frequently hear such statements as, "The workman 
 dies, but the work goes on." My friends, the workman 
 dies, and I know that God, in his sovereignty, can carry 
 on his work by any agencies that he pleases, and it is 
 true that, in the long run, the work will go on. It is true 
 in the sense that the truth will finally triumph and prevail, 
 but it is not true in the ordinary acceptation, that when 
 "The workman dies the work goes on." The death of the 
 workman often arrests temporarily the work itself, and 
 puts it back. There are some men who die, and whose 
 places are not filled for generations to come. No man 
 has taken the place of Thomas Chalmers in Scotland. No 
 man has taken the place of Bersier in France, and, were 
 it proper, I could mention the names of men that have 
 been lost, not only from our own denomination, but from 
 others in the United States, whose places have not been 
 supplied. When you hear that the work goes on, you 
 hear half the truth. The work does ultimately go on, but 
 oftentimes it is in the church just as it is in the state. 
 You know the death of a great statesman oftentimes 
 arrests a vast movement that would have been accom- 
 plished for the good of the whole land, but for his taking 
 off. You know very well that the sudden and unexpected 
 death of a great general of an army makes victory impos- 
 sible, in the history of that people, for all time. So that 
 it is not worth while to say that such a man is not a 
 national or world-wide loss. The man is missed, and it 
 is a great while before another man comes that has any 
 tendency to take up the work and exert the power which 
 he wielded. Only think of what was the result when the 
 great Huguenot leaders in France fell in their struggle 
 for the liberty which they did not get. That was an 
 instance in which the truth was mighty, and did not 
 10 
 
146 SERMONS. 
 
 prevail. It was crushed beneath the iron heel of tyranny ! 
 There were at least a dozen attempts at a reformation 
 before Luther was born, and every one of these attempts 
 was put down. Some of the noblest reformers that ever 
 lived, when they were taken away, had no successors. 
 Before they died they did their whole work, but they 
 were arrested in their career and silenced forever. Huss 
 was put down, as were also many other noble reformers ; 
 and after Luther, the persecutions suffered by the church 
 in various parts of the world arrested the progress of 
 the Reformation ; and, therefore, it is true that in the 
 end God means that his church shall be victorious, but I 
 assure you that the loss of individual and particular men 
 is often a calamity far greater than it is ordinarily recog- 
 nized. Now when I look abroad, I see no men who have 
 the rank and the capacity for usefulness like the men that 
 I have named this evening. I could have named others 
 like Christlieb in the University of Bonn, Bersier in Paris, 
 like Canon Liddon, like the Bishop of Peterboro (Dr. 
 ^y^dL&s^ "* — -MrGee), who has lately died. These are some of the 
 losses which all Christendom deplores with a common 
 grief. 
 
 One of the greatest lessons that I want to derive from 
 this discourse, and one of the greatest truths that I want 
 to impress is this, that there ought to be a very earnest 
 looking for a different class of men from many of those 
 who are coming upon the stage now, and we ought to be 
 praying that God will raise up men of great endowments, 
 of splendid gifts and large scholarship, and devoted con- 
 secration to his cause; men qualified to become the 
 leaders of the great sacramental army for the conquest of 
 the world. There never was a time perhaps when there 
 were as many mediocre men as there are now, men who 
 do not attain, and who have no prospect of attaining to 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 147 
 
 that learning which makes the leader in the church, and 
 which makes the whole church to rejoice that God has 
 honored such men with such powers. That is the great 
 want of the day in which we live. 
 
 I have often had occasion to remark that I regarded 
 Spurgeon as the most widely useful man living, the 
 greatest power for good in Great Britain, and now that 
 he has been removed from his great sphere, if I were to 
 say that he is lamented by all to whom he was known and 
 honored, it would only be another way of saying that he 
 was lamented throughout all Christian lands ; for where 
 was he not known, and where was he not honored ? That 
 this is not an extravagant estimate I think will be evident 
 when we consider into how many departments of useful 
 labor he was permitted to enter and manifest the greatest 
 efficiency and success. He was one of the few men of 
 whom biography gives us any account, who was able to 
 maintain his popularity from year to year without abate- 
 ment. His was a popularity which, so far from weaken- 
 ing, grew and advanced with successive years. There 
 never was a time perhaps when there was more origi- 
 nality, more freshness and power, more that makes a 
 sermon rich and good, than during the last years of his 
 life. It is not extravagant to say that he was the greatest 
 power for good in Great Britain, when we remember that 
 his church, or tabernacle, on the Surry side of the 
 Thames, had in it six thousand sittings, and it often held 
 a larger number of people than that, for many could not 
 get seats, and were obliged to stand ; when we remember 
 also that these sermons, every one of them, was reported 
 and published that very week ; when we remember that 
 sixty volumes of sermons were issued during his life; 
 when we remember that they were read, not only through- 
 out Great Britain, but through Australia, Canada, the 
 
148 SERMONS. 
 
 United States, West Indies, and wherever the English 
 language is spoken — when we remember, again, that 
 they were translated into a number of modern tongues, 
 and thus went all over the reading world. That was but 
 one of the departments of his great life work ; and, there- 
 fore, it is not an extravagant statement that was made 
 by my nearest ecclesiastical neighbor, my brother of the 
 Second Baptist Church, in an article which he published 
 in the Religious Herald, in which he stated that, "Eng- 
 land was but the platform on which Spurgeon's pulpit 
 stood, and his audience was the world around." I have 
 read many noble tributes to the memory of Mr. Spurgeon. 
 I have read none finer than the one to which I refer by 
 my Baptist brother. 
 
 But this was only one avenue of his access to the peo- 
 ple. Look at the great orphanages which he founded, and 
 which he found the means also of maintaining. Hun- 
 dreds and hundreds of poor, degraded and destitute 
 children were taken from positions where they would 
 have died in vice and squalor, and trained them to occupy 
 places of usefulness and respectability in the world. Then 
 remember that theological school which has, I believe, 
 seventy or eighty students every year, young men whom 
 he has sent out, with the impress of his own example and 
 spirit upon them, to preach the gospel, as far as in them 
 lay, just as he preached it. When we remember these 
 things, we have some idea of the channels through which 
 he reached the great outside world. I do not know of any 
 history more instructive in another aspect than his. It 
 shows how a man with the courage of his convictions, 
 how a man who is intensely loyal to the truth, and fears 
 nothing but what is wrong, will at last triumph over all 
 opposition. Very few men have lived in England that 
 were subjected to the ridicule and misrepresentation Mr. 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 149 
 
 Spurgeon was during the early years of his ministry. 
 Hundreds of stories were invented reflecting upon his 
 manners, reflecting upon him in every way, and yet he 
 pursued the even tenor of his way without even a mur- 
 mur, with his bright, genial spirit unchilled by the abuse 
 that was heaped upon him. He went on quietly, with the 
 pluck and perseverance that characterized him, until the 
 time came that he won over to himself all the parties in 
 England, and not only all the parties, but all the different 
 classes of society. The upper class, that at one time 
 scorned him, recognized his worth at last. Men in the 
 highest positions, in Parliament, and men of great learn- 
 ing recognized his virtues, and the great indebtedness 
 Great Britain owed him, and acknowledged it in their 
 public letters. He won, not only the regard of all classes, 
 but the regard of all sects, which was a great triumph in 
 a country like England, and perhaps no man has ever 
 lived who has done more to bring all the people in har- 
 mony with one another, and promote good fellowship 
 and kind Christian regard among the different denomina- 
 tions than he. It was his joy to know before his death, 
 by the public testimony of the most eminent men in Great 
 Britain, how he was esteemed by the men most qualified 
 to speak on such subjects, both in the church and in the 
 state. 
 
 I have, of course, my friends, been compelled to make 
 this discourse much longer than I usually make my Sun- 
 day afternoon sermons, and I have protracted it more 
 than I intended, such is the richness of the theme. You 
 will see that I have tried to condense, as I went along, in 
 order to compress into the limits of the discourse what 
 I had to say in connection with those to whom I have 
 called your attention this evening. 
 
 There are one or two other facts in regard to this 
 
150 SERMONS. 
 
 man's great usefulness in the world. It is sometimes said 
 that Calvinism is dying out, that the world is abjuring 
 Calvinism. My friends, I do not care to defend Calvinism 
 this evening, because that is not my object or my present 
 purpose. I want to say that the most popular preacher in 
 the world was the most pronounced Calvinist in the 
 world! No man has preached to as many people in the 
 last twenty-five years as Charles Spurgeon. No man who 
 ever lived during all the ages, during all the centuries has, 
 during his life-time, come into contact with as many of 
 his fellow-men on religious themes as Spurgeon; and, 
 during all that time, he has not preached a sermon per- 
 haps in which Calvinism was not the fibre and the spirit 
 of the discourse. Don't tell me that Calvinism is becom- 
 ing unpopular, when the man who could draw more 
 people than any other man on earth was sure to deliver a 
 Calvinistic discourse. When a conceited young theo- 
 logical candidate once made a disparaging remark about 
 Spurgeon to a distinguished prelate in the English 
 Church, he said, "Stop, young man; there are eminent 
 men in Great Britain, but the only man in England that 
 can get an audience, if he choose, of thirty thousand 
 people, in twenty-four hours, is Spurgeon." 
 
 Then, another thing that deserves our attention is this. 
 Such was his loyalty to the truth that he would sacrifice 
 friends for it if need be. There never was a man more 
 affectionate or loyal to his friends, but if need be, he 
 would sacrifice friends before he would sacrifice a prin- 
 ciple. That is a very rare thing in this world. He with- 
 drew from the Baptist Union, three or four years ago, 
 and in making the separation he parted from some of the 
 most intimate friends of his youth and manhood. Inas- 
 much as he thought they held erroneous views, especially 
 with regard to the divinity of our Lord, that was some- 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 151 
 
 thing he could not brook; and therefore, while he never 
 lost his respect or regard for them as men, yet ecclesiasti- 
 cally there was a separation. 
 
 It so happens that I have spent more time in London 
 than in any city in the world except Richmond. There is 
 no city that I know as well. Three months, at one time in 
 my life, I did not go out of the city, and for thirty years 
 I have availed myself of every opportunity that I could 
 get of hearing Mr. Spurgeon preach. I have heard him 
 oftener than any man south of the Potomac, and I think, 
 therefore, that I have had some opportunity to judge and 
 some opportunity to speak with the confidence that I have 
 spoken with regard to this man. And strange to say, 
 during all these years, I never sought to make his ac- 
 quaintance, though I had hundreds of opportunities for 
 so doing. The sole reason was that I did not want to 
 encroach upon that time, for every moment of which I 
 knew he had imperative use. The only interview that I 
 ever had with him happened on this wise. I was at his 
 church one Sunday, when he gave notice that immediately 
 after the service the sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
 would be administered. You are aware that although he 
 belonged to the Baptist Church, he was in favor of open 
 communion, and on that occasion he gave an invitation 
 that was so tender, to all Christians of all denominations 
 that might be present, to unite in celebrating the sacra- 
 ment, that I remained. When the service was over, as I 
 was going out, and was passing down the aisle, I went 
 within five or six feet of where he was sitting in a chair 
 on the platform, and I went up and said, "Mr. Spurgeon, 
 I have been a hearer of yours for thirty years, and I now 
 embrace this opportunity of introducing myself, and of 
 giving you my best wishes." He asked me my name, and 
 his reception was so kind and so affectionate that I have 
 
152 SERMONS. 
 
 often regretted since that I did not avail myself of the 
 many opportunities I had of knowing him personally. 
 
 I will never forget the first time I entered his church 
 any more than I can forget the last, which is the time of 
 which I have just spoken. The first time I visited his 
 church, it so happened that I arrived a little late. Every 
 seat was taken on the lower floor, as well as every seat in 
 the first gallery. There are two galleries, one above the 
 other. I went into the upper gallery, and succeeded in 
 finding a seat at the farthest point that I could have been 
 (almost in the roof of the house) from the preacher on 
 the rostrum. He had not been preaching more than ten 
 or fifteen minutes before I heard a stifled sigh or sob 
 from the man who sat next to me. I had not noticed this 
 man before in the great crowd, but I looked at him, and 
 he seemed like a man whose business was in some menial 
 occupation, dressed in his Sunday clothes. He was coarse 
 and vulgar looking, with very hard features ; but the tears 
 were streaming down his cheeks. He was quivering with 
 emotion, and I said to myself, "If Mr. Spurgeon, standing 
 at that vast distance, can so preach the gospel in its rich- 
 ness and sweetness as to cause every fibre in that man's 
 heart to vibrate, then he is preaching right, and that man 
 is my brother in Christ Jesus," and I felt like taking him 
 by the hand, and telling him so. 
 
 Such is the man who has been taken away from us. If 
 we regret that we did not avail ourselves of the opportu- 
 nities we had of knowing personally the good and great 
 that have lived to bless their generation, there is one com- 
 pensation and one anticipation — in the long hereafter 
 there will be time enough. In the world of recognition, 
 in the world of reunion, in the world of holy fellowship, 
 in the eternal future, there will be time enough to make 
 the intimacies of an innumerable multitude of those who 
 
LIDDON, BERSIER, SPURGEON. 153 
 
 have so lived in this world as to bless their generations, 
 and then gone home to the rest and recompenses of the 
 eternal kingdom, into which kingdom and rest and joy 
 may the Lord, in his infinite mercy, bring every one of us 
 at the last, for his dear Son's sake. Amen ! 
 
XII. 
 "MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 
 
 "There came then his brethren and his mother, and standing 
 without, sent unto him, calling him. 
 
 "And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, 
 Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. 
 
 "And he answered them saying, Who is my mother, or my 
 brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about 
 him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren. For whoso- 
 ever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my 
 sister, and mother." — Mark iii. 31-35. 
 
 [" T deserves our attention that this most impressive 
 ■*■ incident in the life of our Lord is mentioned by three 
 of the evangelists. The account given by each is sub- 
 stantially the same ; the slight variations add to the inter- 
 est of the narrative. Matthew says that when the in- 
 formation came to him that his mother and brethren were 
 standing without seeking for him, that he stretched out 
 his hands towards the disciples, and said, "Behold my 
 brethren." Doubtless, by that gesture he intended to 
 include not only the twelve disciples, but all that were 
 present who loved him. Mark says in his narrative, that 
 our Lord declared whosoever did the will of God would 
 sustain the closest and most intimate of relationships 
 with him; but Matthew says, "Whosoever shall do the 
 will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my 
 mother, and sister, and brother." Mark is always concise, 
 and never amplifies ; and, therefore, he simply says, 
 <( God," while Matthew says, "My Father which is in 
 heaven." And Matthew alone says that all this took place 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 155 
 
 while our Lord was talking with the people; and that 
 gives us an idea of the manner of Christ's preaching. 
 Perhaps there was an element in it that should be more 
 observed and imitated at the present time: Christ spoke 
 in a conversational way, a more familiar address than the 
 stately style of the pulpit in the days in which we live ; 
 and it was a manner better calculated, perhaps, to arouse 
 the attention and impress the minds and hearts of those 
 to whom he spoke — a more loud, vociferous style of 
 speaking came to the puipit afterward. He was "taiking ' 
 to the people when the message came, when he made a 
 new revelation of the relations he sustained towards all 
 that believe on him, when he declared that all that did 
 his Father's will were his brethren, his sisters, and his 
 mother. 
 
 "When our Lord was informed that his mother was 
 standing without, unable to get into the apartment where 
 he was because of the multitude that filled it, he said, 
 "Who is my mother?" Do you detect in that any tone of 
 disregard or disrespect? If you do, you mistake the tone. 
 Our Lord does not dishonor, he does not disparage his 
 mother or his earthly relationships; his object is not to 
 do that, but to exalt those relationships which are highest 
 and most sacred and most endearing. Least of all would 
 our Lord say anything or intimate anything that would 
 lessen our reverence for the family relationship. Of all 
 persons who ever spoke, he would be the last to take down 
 that which the providence and Word of God has endeav- 
 ored to build up. This Word teaches us that the very 
 first of all relationships formed between immortal beings 
 in this world was the family relationship. It is a tie 
 that has survived all the revolutions of time throughout 
 all the centuries ; whatever else of organization has per- 
 ished, it has survived. For a long time, for centuries in 
 
156 SERMONS. 
 
 the history of this world, the solitary tie that bound men 
 together in any system of order and harmony was the 
 family tie. During all the lives of the patriarchs it was 
 the family institution that ruled the world — before the 
 tribal was known, or the national had been conceived of. 
 The family relation is one that exists, not only through- 
 out all the centuries, but in all the lands, in all the nations 
 of the world, in all the forms of government known to 
 men — it matters not whether it be the democratic, the 
 aristocratic, or the monarchical — it matters not, there the 
 family is ; and in all those great revolutions that have 
 come, when war has come and shaken down great em- 
 pires, then the family relation was the first to reorganize 
 and bring back the order which was lost by revolution and 
 rapine. These words must not be taken to indicate the 
 slightest disregard, on the part of our Lord, of the ties 
 of natural affection. His address to John was, "Behold 
 thy mother!" 
 
 In the interpretation of this passage we must never 
 forget — in fact, it is a key to the understanding of all 
 of it — we must never forget that our Lord assumed the 
 family kindred in order that he might establish that 
 higher and nobler relationship that belongs to the uni- 
 versal church of God, in all the world, and in all the ages 
 of the world. The only reason why Christ had a mother 
 was that he might take upon him our humanity, and be 
 the Son of man as well as the Son of God. Unless he had 
 become the Son of man, he could not have sympathized 
 with us as he did, having passed through all the experi- 
 ences of life; had he not been the Son of man he could 
 not have sorrowed in the garden, he could not have bled 
 and died upon the cross. And he became the Son of 
 Mary in order that he might be the Saviour of the world. 
 And when he came with joy to fulfil the Father's will, 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 157 
 
 he cried out, "In the volume of the book it is written of 
 me, I have come to do the will of God, who had a body 
 prepared for me." It was because God had provided for 
 him, prepared for him this humanity, that he became the 
 dear and tender and loving Saviour, in whom we trust, 
 and to whom we can go for comfort in all our sorrows. 
 Our Lord took this sacred relationship in order to illus- 
 trate a kinship that was nobler, that was more spiritual, 
 that was to be eternal. And this was in accordance with 
 all Christ's teaching and his preaching all through his 
 life — he invariably took the lower, whatever it might 
 be, in order to illustrate and enforce the higher. That 
 was always the tendency of our Lord's mind and heart — 
 to glance upward from the terrene and perishable to the 
 celestial and eternal ; therefore, everything that he saw 
 here upon earth about which he spoke furnished him with 
 a theme that was higher and nobler than that upon which 
 he at first began to speak. We see it in the parables of 
 Christ, when he took earthly things to illustrate the 
 heavenly. And that was not simply because Christ saw 
 in earthly things objects that were more suitable as 
 illustrations ; it was not because he saw a fitness, an 
 analogy between earthly and heavenly things, but because 
 earthly things were made at first for the purpose of fur- 
 nishing these illustrations of heavenly truth. I believe 
 that when God made the world he made it that all the 
 world might be a great hieroglyphic in which people 
 might read greater truths than those that relate merely to 
 our earthly history. When you look out this morning, 
 and behold the splendor of the sun in the blue heavens, 
 you need not imagine that God put it there simply to 
 illumine the earth ; it stands as an emblem of the Sun of 
 Righteousness, whose light not only enables men every- 
 where to see, but of that celestial light that kindles the 
 
158 SERMONS. 
 
 souls of men, and prepares men for the higher worship 
 of the skies. There is no element so universal as water. 
 Down in the deep chambers of the earth, in great un- 
 opened caverns, in the springs that gush from the hill- 
 sides, in the artesian wells which men dig with infinite 
 toil and patience, in the clouds that float over the earth, 
 and distil the early and the latter rain — all are illustra- 
 tions of the boundlessness of God's salvation. There- 
 fore, that which is most universal in its use is taken for 
 the type of that salvation which is offered to all who will 
 accept it. Never was there a better illustration of what 
 Christ has done, and is doing, than when he said, "If any 
 man thirst" — and there is no one who does not — "let 
 him come unto me and drink." 
 
 And so we now find Christ taking the family relation- 
 ship, with all its tender associations, in order to remind 
 us of that other family that constitutes the true church 
 of God in the world, that other family that is separated 
 and distinguished by the solitary test of the true church 
 which is mentioned in this chapter — that its members 
 are those who do the will of their Father which is in 
 heaven. That is the great principle that the text reveals 
 to us. We are taught here what is the foundation upon 
 which the church rests ; we are taught here what is the 
 principle of unity that binds God's people together, what 
 is the tie that shall survive even the stroke of death. 
 And what are those happy, sanctifying relationships that 
 shall survive the stroke of death, and have a resurrection 
 beyond the grave, and spring up beautiful and immortal 
 in the paradise of God? "If any man will do my will, 
 he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God. If 
 any man will do my will, the will of my Father which is 
 in heaven, he instantly is related to me by a kindred tie 
 stronger than that that exists between brothers and sis- 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 159 
 
 ters, and children and parents, in the family. "Whoso- 
 ever will do the will of my Father in heaven, the same is 
 my sister, and brother, and mother." 
 
 What mistaken ideas some men have of the will of 
 God ! The moment the will of God is mentioned, the 
 natural mind shrinks back as the sensitive plant does 
 when approached by the finger. "The will of God" — as 
 if there was something tyrannical in it, something arbi- 
 trary, something calculated to abridge human happiness, 
 human freedom ; whereas the will of God simply means 
 the harmony of the universe; the will of God is always 
 right, always just; and not only so, the will of God is 
 always love. Whoever is brought into conformity with 
 the will of God is brought into that which preserves the 
 harmony and secures the happiness of all, for all are truly 
 happy just as they become absorbed in the passionate 
 desire to do the will of God. 
 
 When we talk about doing the will of God, this means, 
 first, that affectionateness of disposition which character- 
 izes the adopted children of God. "I call you not ser- 
 vants, but friends ; for the servant knoweth not what the 
 master doeth, but I have made known to you my wishes 
 and my designs, and I have kept nothing back from you 
 that you can comprehend and that you ought to know." 
 And, therefore, when God bestows upon men that won- 
 drous gift, the grace of adoption, immediately there 
 springs up in the regenerate soul that passionate desire 
 to be brought into perfect harmony and conformity with 
 the will of God. It means affectionateness in our service ; 
 it means an answer, an echo, to what our Lord himself 
 said when he declared, "I delight to do thy will, O God." 
 
 And those who feel that way about it do not pick and 
 choose among the commandments. It is an impartial 
 obedience; and yet how many there are who fail just 
 
160 SERMONS. 
 
 there, and flatter themselves that they do the will of God 
 because they do the things that are easy and pleasant. 
 You must perceive that a voluntary disobedience to any 
 of the requirements of the divine will vitiates the whole 
 obedience to the rest. There are some that profess great 
 reverence to the Ten Commandments, and yet they travel 
 on a Sunday, and do secular work on a Sunday, though 
 God said, "Remember the Sabbath day." He said it in 
 the same tone in which he said, "Thou shalt not steal. 
 Thou shalt not kill." If we obey any commandments in a 
 way that is acceptable to God, it is because we do it be- 
 cause God has required it of us. If I say I am going to 
 do God's will, but am going to make an exception this 
 time, and do my own will, it is no obedience. I do not 
 know where in the Scriptures one can find one intimation 
 that the commandment that requires us to remember the 
 Sabbath day is any less binding upon us than the com- 
 mandments not to kill or steal. It is a link in the great 
 chain. If a man, in one of those huge boxes in which 
 men descend into the bowels of the earth — if, when 
 carrying its cargo of life down into the depths, a man 
 should sever one of the links, and say, "I do not want to 
 do any damage to these men that are suspended above 
 the darkness into which they are descending" — does his 
 saying that save them ; does not the severing of one link 
 precipitate the living men down to the death below ? So 
 the Apostle says that he who breaks one of the command- 
 ments breaks all, because he is striking a blow at the 
 principle that underlies the whole. If we are going to do 
 the will of God, we must do it impartially; and when 
 we hear the words, "Thus saith the Lord," we have no- 
 thing to do but render a strict and immediate obedience. 
 When we talk about conformity to the divine will, it 
 is generally something passive, it means simply resigna- 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 161 
 
 tion ; and when people say, "Thy will be done," they 
 think it means simply, "Keep me from murmuring, and 
 do not let me repine or rebel under this sad dispensation." 
 This commandment is not a sigh from Gethsemane; it is 
 not the wind that wakes the harps that hang upon the 
 willows while God's people sit and weep as they remem- 
 ber Zion. It includes that, but that does not complete the 
 definition of obedience to the divine will. And yet I 
 would not pass it over lightly. This submission under 
 sorrows and bereavements is a large component part of 
 that obedience which God requires and which God ex- 
 pects. It is a very difficult thing to say from the heart 
 what is so easy to say with the lips, "Thy will be done." 
 It is very easy to say, "Thy will be done," when we are 
 succeeding in our plans, when we are prospering in our 
 worldly callings, when we are happy now, and think we 
 are going to be happier presently, and when joy after joy 
 arises in endless perspective ! Oh ! yes, nothing is easier 
 to say. But when those disappointments come, those 
 blasted aspirations ! Sometimes men stake everything on 
 the attainment of one object, and when that is lost every- 
 thing is lost, and the color goes out of the landscape, and 
 the music out of life ; and the greatest triumph of grace 
 is when the man, with all his household gods shattered 
 around him, cold his desolate hearth, can say, "Thy will 
 be done." You have heard of the man who put a weather- 
 cock upon one of the buildings near 'his house, and on the 
 vane by which he could see the direction of the wind he 
 had a motto, and the legend he put upon it was "God is 
 love." One of his neighbors said to him, "You have put 
 on your weather-vane, 'God is love.' Do you mean that 
 God is fickle as the wind?" "Oh! no," he said, "I mean 
 by that that whichever way the wind blows, God is love; 
 I mean that all winds, from all quarters waft blessings to 
 ii 
 
1 62 SERMONS. 
 
 the trusting soul. God is love just as truly when the rude 
 wintry winds blow as when the gentle spring zephyrs fan 
 our cheek." And not long after, when the man that put 
 the motto there lost the most beloved member of his 
 family, the neighbor came and asked him, "How now, my 
 friend?" He answered, "I can say now just as heartily as 
 before my affliction, 'God is love.' " 
 
 A man came to a prisoner in the days of the persecu- 
 tion in Scotland, and he had a basket with a cloth over the 
 basket. He took off the cloth, and said, "Mr. Campbell, 
 do you recognize this ?" and he took up the head of a fair 
 young boy, with beautiful auburn ringlets — a fair young 
 boy that had been executed — "Do you know this ?" 
 "Yes, I recognize the face of my dear boy," and he added, 
 "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; and blessed 
 be the name of the Lord !" 
 
 We have to go to the Old Testament to find some of 
 the finest illustrations of faith, and the greatest illustra- 
 tion of faith this world ever saw, from the time God made 
 it to the time when Christ came to redeem it, was the 
 faith exhibited by the patriarch Job, when absolutely 
 everything that made life desirable was taken from him, 
 and when he said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
 him." 
 
 But this doing the will of God is not simply submis- 
 sion and resignation; it is a willingness that God shall 
 direct our future; it is a willingness that God shall be 
 our guide in all the time to come — although we prefer 
 very much to guide ourselves, we prefer very much to 
 choose our own paths ; it is the wish of the natural heart 
 to carve out by one's own strength the career that leads 
 to success, to stand self-centered, self-sustained, and by 
 innate resources to accomplish the design upon which the 
 heart is set. Man proposes — but oh ! what a triumph of 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 163 
 
 obedience to the divine will when after man proposes and 
 God disposes, the man can say, "Well, after all, thy way 
 and not my way." Say, as good old Baxter said, "As 
 thou wilt, and where thou wilt, and when thou wilt!" 
 As, and where, and when, even to the last ! 
 
 Christ is the leader and the commander of the people. 
 Well, what is a leader worth if those who are his disciples 
 and profess to be loyal to him do not follow him? The 
 hymn we sang this morning contained a good expression 
 of what ought to be the faith of every child of God with 
 regard to the entire future. And if we can lay hold upon 
 and grasp that most comprehensive and sweetest of all 
 the promises, "All things work together for good to them 
 that love God," then we are ready for anything that lies 
 in the future, and we are only too glad that God conde- 
 scends to be our guide, and we will let him have his way 
 with his own. 
 
 Think how much comfort there is in this subject thus 
 unfolded in these sayings of our Lord with regard to the 
 tie that binds him to his people. We know how much he 
 loved his mother; he was constrained by that love to 
 submit himself to that mother; he was obedient to that 
 mother ; and when he was dying on the cross, he made 
 provision for that mother by committing her to the care 
 and love of his dearest disciple ; and yet he said, "Who- 
 soever will do the will of my Father in heaven, I feel 
 towards him as to my mother ; and I use that illustration 
 to give you some conception of the strong and tender tie 
 that binds my heart to yours, and links my life to yours 
 forevermore." 
 
 There are a great many lonely people in this world, 
 and not always the old people. Sometimes you find in 
 the family a maiden. There devolves upon her the care 
 of some relative, sick with a disease impossible to cure, 
 
164 SERMONS. 
 
 and petulant, never satisfied; and that girl watches and 
 nurses and loves with a patience that knows no inter- 
 mission. She could have a home of her own, she has been 
 besought to link her life with one who could give her a 
 happy home; but duty binds her, and there she spends 
 her life for one who makes no return. Is she lonely ? No, 
 not quite; a voice whispers in her ear, ''Child, thou art 
 not alone; I, Jesus Christ, am thy brother." There is 
 another lonely person. It is when a mother who is a 
 widow loses her only child. She nearly buried her heart 
 in the coffin when her husband was lowered into the 
 grave, but she still had a prop to lean upon — her manly 
 son ; and when he was stricken down — ah ! is there any 
 desolation like hers, any loneliness like hers ! It would 
 be unbearable but for the fact that one comes into that 
 darkened chamber and says, "Mother, let me be your son" 
 — and it is Jesus that speaks, it is Christ that says, "Let 
 me take the place of your departed boy. I will never 
 leave thee, nor forsake thee." 
 
 We get an idea from these Scriptures that the church 
 is a much larger organization than we are in the habit of 
 thinking it to be. There are a great many people that 
 limit their idea of the church by the denomination to 
 which they belong, and have little thought and little care 
 of what lies outside of the pale to which they belong. 
 There is not a visible church on earth that contains all 
 the truth, and our Lord recognized that fact, and gave us 
 a principle by which we may judge of what the true 
 church is ; and how comprehensive that principle is, how 
 much it includes ! It includes people of all denominations 
 throughout the entire world, the people that do the will 
 of God. Do not tell me that any name by which any de- 
 nomination is called is so sacred as to demand the ex- 
 clusive regard of Jesus Christ ; it includes all throughout 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 165 
 
 the world that do the will of the Father who is in heaven. 
 Not that denominations are wrong ; on the contrary, it is 
 a wise ordinance of providence that the Christian world 
 is broken up into denominations — a great many good 
 results may come from it ; instead of denominations lead- 
 ing to confusion, they ought to lead to harmony, because 
 separation oftentimes brings peace. People who agree 
 upon a form of government, or a system of doctrine can 
 live together as members of one denomination more com- 
 fortably than people who have opposing views. There- 
 fore, separation leads to peace and harmony, except when 
 bigotry steals into the church, when its leaders become 
 arrogant and exclusive, and want to domineer over the 
 faith of all professed believers throughout the world. It 
 is that that fills the church with discord. What a rebuke 
 to those who would arrogate to themselves the adoption, 
 and the covenants, and the glory — those who believe that 
 others who do not believe in the doctrines of their own 
 church are outside of the covenants of Christ ; those who 
 believe that God may love others enough to save, although 
 they do not belong to the same church, yet they take care 
 not to recognize them as brethren or give them any ex- 
 pression of their love. Intolerance, selfishness, arrogance, 
 bigotry ! These are like the wintry frosts of the week 
 through which we have been passing, that arrest the 
 rivers in their flow, that prevent even a ripple in the great 
 lakes, that seal up all the springs that water the earth, 
 that arrest the flow of the water, even in the houses, that 
 is brought artificially from the reservoirs — that hold 
 everything in their icy chain. This is what wounds Christ 
 in the homes of his friends. Not the light that comes on 
 a day like this, but the warmth that will come a few days 
 later. To-day icicles hang from the eaves, long pendants 
 from the churches and houses ; but by and by the soft 
 
166 SERMONS. 
 
 breath of spring will be felt all over the land ; the little 
 flowers will show their heads above the ground ; presently 
 a voice will be heard, "Lo, the rain is over and gone, the 
 winter is past," and the voice of melody is heard through 
 the land, and beauty and fertility are all over the land. 
 Thus it is when the love of God fills the heart, and men 
 feel the bond, not only to those of their own denomina- 
 tion, but to all that love the Lord God in sincerity and 
 truth. That is the highest and noblest of all affinities. 
 
 So I close by saying that we do not know how many 
 relations we have. We belong to a family — it is a very 
 distinguished family. People are very proud to be asso- 
 ciated with those in whose veins the blood of renowned 
 ancestors flow. I do not know of any dignity comparable 
 to the dignity of an adopted child of the Lord Almighty. 
 "Behold, what manner of love is this, that we should be 
 called the children of God ; and, if children, then heirs : 
 heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ." The 
 church is very large, after all ; it is composed now of two 
 parts ; we call one the church militant, and one the church 
 triumphant, and yet the Lord Jesus is head of the family, 
 whether it be in heaven or on earth — 
 
 " The saints on earth, and all the dead, 
 But one communion make." 
 
 And when we finish our course, if we have kept the faith, 
 then we will become members — not of this struggling, 
 discordant church on earth — but we will become mem- 
 bers of that great company which no man can number, 
 the church of the redeemed and glorified, an immortal 
 and rejoicing Saviour reigning over an immortal people: 
 
 " Where the saints of all ages in harmony meet, 
 Transported their brethren and Saviour to greet; 
 Where the anthems of rapture unceasingly roll, 
 And the smile of the Lord is the feast of the soul," 
 
"MY MOTHER AND MY BRETHREN." 167 
 
 May God bring us to that blessed consummation, and 
 make us members at last of that household, where, I trust, 
 those households that composed our families will be 
 found, without one dear member absent or missing — that 
 in society most dear we may spend our eternity in praising 
 him who sits on the throne, and in giving the homage of 
 our hearts' affection to him that loved us, and gave him- 
 self for us, and washed us in his own precious blood, and 
 makes us king and priests unto God ! 
 
XIII. 
 
 KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING 
 HEART. 
 
 "Now when John had heard in prison the works of Christ, he 
 sent two of his disciples, and said unto him, Art thou he that 
 should come, or look we for another? Jesus answered and said, 
 Go show unto John the things which ye did hear and see; the 
 blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
 and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the 
 gospel preached unto them." — Matt. xi. 2-5. 
 
 I" DO not ever remember to have spoken an impatient 
 ■*■ word to a doubter. I have too often fought with that 
 beast of Ephesus myself not to have the sincerest sym- 
 pathy with those who are troubled with doubts, either 
 with regard to the inspiration of these Scriptures, or with 
 regard to their acceptance with God. Men in the olden 
 time were tormented with devils: doubt is a devil that 
 torments men now, and a more unhappy state of being 
 can scarcely be conceived of. Doubt continued means 
 suspense, and we all know how wearing and trying, what 
 an exhausting thing it is to be in suspense — in suspense 
 about great, vital interests ; above all things, to be in 
 suspense with regard to the soul's future destiny. Even 
 with regard to worldly interests suspense is often so 
 trying that people say, "Oh ! let me know the worst ; tell 
 me at once, and let it be ended — anything rather than 
 this intolerable state of suspense !" Doubt upon the sub- 
 ject of religion is to be greatly deprecated, because it 
 does not help people to the attainment of the great ends 
 that should be paramount and supreme. I do not mean 
 that it is sinful to doubt ; I do not mean that saintly 
 people may not doubt; Asaph doubted, David doubted, 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 169 
 
 Isaiah doubted, John the Baptist doubted, and you cannot 
 read the biographies of the great and good men of modern 
 times without observing how often there were seasons of 
 despondency and spiritual depression. It may be that 
 these visitations are unavoidable. While there is nothing 
 sinful in doubt, there is something sinful in surrendering 
 to doubt, in not making every effort to emerge from it 
 into the liberty of something assured, something positive, 
 something satisfying. 
 
 We may wonder when we see a great, inflexible soul 
 like John the Baptist giving way to distrust, and saying, 
 "Lord, art thou he that should come, or look we for 
 another?" He did not mean that Jesus Christ, the Son 
 of God, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the 
 world — he did not doubt that he had come ; John was 
 not going to retract the noble testimony he had already 
 borne to his Christ: but John did not yet comprehend 
 the spirit of the Master, and in the midst of the season 
 when he pined in the prison and the Lord did not come 
 to his relief, did not even send him a message to cheer his 
 servant in the terrible environment in which he was 
 placed — when John witnessed the slow progress of the 
 kingdom of Christ, and Christ's failure, as he thought, 
 to take advantage of great opportunities for announcing 
 himself publicly as the promised Messiah, and demon- 
 strate it by works which no man could dispute, and by 
 those triumphs John knew Christ could inaugurate — he 
 grew impatient and sent him the message recorded in 
 these verses. And then it was that the Master sent him 
 the answer. 
 
 The beautiful thing with regard to this whole narra- 
 tive is that John went to the right place for the solution 
 of his doubt ; although he could not go in person, he sent 
 his representatives to Christ with the inquiry that bur- 
 
170 SERMONS. 
 
 dened his soul, knowing that Christ was the only one in 
 all the universe that could give a satisfactory answer to 
 that inquiry, and give that rest and confidence to his soul 
 which he craved. 
 
 The man may begin in doubt, and be benefited by the 
 struggle. Doubt is an exercise when faith conquers it; 
 and the man that was shaken before, that lived in a state 
 of unstable equilibrium, after the experience through 
 which he has passed, finds himself planted more firmly 
 than ever upon the imperishable, immovable rock ; but to 
 dwell in doubt is to dwell in darkness, and to end in 
 despair. 
 
 I gave you this morning, in discussing the inquiry of 
 John, some memorable instances of the advantage of a 
 strong, assured faith. The biography of the world is not 
 enriched, it is impoverished — it is made sadly instruc- 
 tive, however — with the histories of the men who did 
 live in doubt, and never got beyond. I think in some of 
 the old Italian towns you find the greatest solitudes that 
 can be found in all the earth. All of our American towns 
 are in touch with one another; by railroad communica- 
 tions, by telegraph communications, by the constant, rest- 
 less movement of the people, they are brought into con- 
 stant touch with one another. Some of these old Italian 
 towns are like lonely islands away off in the sea, out of 
 the track of any vessel and scarcely ever visited. They 
 contain old-fashioned houses, dilapidated, and going into 
 ruin. And the people lead monotonous, uneventful lives. 
 In one of these cities, in the last century, a man by the 
 name of Leopardo was born. He was the son of a 
 count, who had the advantage of a noble library. He was 
 possessed of great genius. In the solitude in which he 
 lived he had but one resource. There were no com- 
 panions worthy of his regard, he had no intellectual equal 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 171 
 
 with whom he could have any pleasant association, and, 
 therefore, his one solace was in books, and he mastered 
 all the classic literature of antiquity, and read all the old 
 classical works that his father's library contained; and 
 in the midst of that plenty, that opulence, that the wide, 
 exhaustless field of learning afforded, we have the spec- 
 tacle of a thirsty soul, famishing for the pabulum of 
 something that should nourish. I know of scarcely any- 
 thing so sad as the career of that young man of extra- 
 ordinary, almost imperial genius. He grew by and by to 
 doubt the only form of religion that ever was presented 
 to him by the two priests that were his tutors : they could 
 not graft the system of ceremonies upon the soul of the 
 man that inquired into the reason of things, and could not 
 be satisfied with outward forms. The first thing upon 
 which he came to any decision was that the church was a 
 miserable imposture, an invention of priests for the pur- 
 pose of oppressing the multitude ; and this skepticism 
 having taken root in his soul, he learned to doubt every- 
 thing he looked upon : Nature was a pitiless machine, 
 invented by some — not benevolent — power, but some 
 mighty power that could construct a vast agency that 
 went on its remorseless way, regardless of the suffering 
 that it might cause by the execution of its pitiless laws ; 
 the heavens above him were brass, and above those brazen 
 skies there was not even an autonomy, not even a cos- 
 mical God. He distrusted human friendship, he doubted 
 woman's love and fidelity; he questioned whether there 
 was any such thing as virtue — whether truth was supe- 
 rior to error. And so, through the weary years allotted 
 to his life, he went on in this sepulchral gloom ; and that 
 man always rises before me as the image of what doubt 
 will do in blighting a noble soul, and how despondency, 
 depression and darkness end in despair and death! 
 
172 SERMONS. 
 
 " It is not love ; it is not hate, 
 That bids me loathe my present state: 
 It is that weariness that springs 
 From all I hear, from all I see; 
 It is that ceaseless, settled gloom 
 
 The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore, 
 That will not look beyond the tomb, 
 
 And cannot hope for rest before." 
 
 I do not know whether, in the human language, you 
 can find a better definition of a soul in Bunyan's iron cage 
 of despair ! Ah ! we have reason to pray for deliverance 
 from doubt, when it gets such a lodgment in the souls of 
 men, when men sit down and say, "It is no use any longer 
 to struggle !" 
 
 The Bible commands us to believe ; but how can we 
 believe because we are ordered to do so? The Bible 
 commands us to love; but how can one command love? 
 Love is free, we love those we want to love, and we be- 
 lieve what we must believe, and we won't believe or love 
 anything else. The natural man will not allow that sort 
 of reasoning in the actual affairs of this life. What 
 father would be satisfied with the logic of his son who 
 should say — I am speaking now of a father who was 
 judicious, faithful, kind, gentle, affectionate, that had 
 studied his son's happiness, that had made every sacrifice 
 to secure his son's highest well-being, and who almost 
 lived for that boy, and whose most impassioned longing 
 was to see him all that could gratify his father's pride 
 and love ; if such a son should come and say, "My father, 
 I have formed associations in life, and habits that have 
 alienated me from you ; now I do not hesitate to tell you, 
 that inasmuch as love is an involuntary thing and cannot 
 be controlled, I am entirely excusable for the fact I am 
 going to announce to you, that I do not love you at all !" 
 The doubtful have not, often, a better logic than that, and 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 173 
 
 that is what the man says that looks up to Christ, that 
 looks up to God, the eternal Father, and says, "I cannot 
 command my love ; I am ordered to love, but I must love 
 as I can, not as I would, and I do not love you." Every 
 right-minded and right-hearted man in the universe 
 recoils with horror from statements like these ; and, after 
 all, it is the moral condition more than the intellectual 
 that creates this condition of skepticism in which the 
 majority of men live. 
 
 There is a wonderful foresight in unregenerate men. 
 Many a man that knows what is right sees clearly that if 
 he does the right he has to do it at a sacrifice he is un- 
 willing to make. He won't renounce that sin, he won't 
 break that habit, he won't change that wrong method of 
 doing business which his conscience rebukes ; he won't 
 make the sacrifice, and therefore he cherishes the doubt 
 as an opiate, as a silence to his guilty conscience. 
 
 These are some of the dislocations in man's moral 
 nature. When we seek a remedy, in what direction can 
 we look? There is but one only. John sent his disciples 
 to Christ, and Christ sent back the answer to John, and 
 the answer was, "The blind receive their sight, and the 
 lame walk, and the deaf hear, and the lepers are cleansed, 
 and the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel 
 preached to them." Well, if there were a doubter here, I 
 would do as John did — send him to Christ. 
 
 Some have said that Christ attempted to convince 
 John by miracles ; but no manifestation of power will 
 convince me when I doubt — power cannot control my 
 free soul. That is a miserable, inexcusable travesty of 
 the whole spirit of the answer which our Lord gave to 
 John. He never intended to convince men by the arbi- 
 trary power of the miracles. There is no moral appeal in 
 the mere exhibition of power. But, oh ! the heart of love 
 
174 SERMONS. 
 
 that throbbed through the miracles of Christ, the spectacle 
 of Christ himself becoming the greatest sufferer in the 
 universe, although the most innocent being in the uni- 
 verse: God having a sinless Son, and that Son the 
 greatest sufferer in the universe because of pity for sinful 
 man! That is the unanswerable power that speaks, that 
 manifests itself, that shines, that irradiates and glorifies 
 the miracles that our Lord wrought. 
 
 "The blind receive their sight." Ah! these miracles 
 of Christ — what did they mean? What good did it do 
 to heal a blind man when there were ten thousand other 
 blind men in the country that were not helped? What 
 good did it do to unstop the ears of a deaf man, when all 
 through the land were thousands that could not distin- 
 guish between the sound of thunder and the voice of an 
 angel? The glory of the miracles consisted in the fact 
 that they were but types of the deliverance which our 
 Lord came into this world to work, emblems of the inner 
 transformations which were wrought by the manifesta- 
 tion of his gracious power. What is the opening of the 
 eyes of a blind man ? A good surgeon can do that ; often, 
 by skill and delicate manipulation, he can take a cataract 
 from the eye, and nature stands again disclosed in its 
 freshness and beauty. But, ah ! the film that settles on 
 the eye of the soul, that opaque integument through 
 which not even a celestial ray can shine ! Ah ! when the 
 divine touch removes that veil so that the soul looks out 
 and sees forms infinitely more beautiful and glorious than 
 any that were ever disclosed to the natural eye — not only 
 forms of beauty and glory here upon this earth, but those 
 transcendent forms of loveliness that the heaven of 
 heavens contains ! What a revelation it is when such 
 sight is communicated to the darkened soul! 
 
 It is a mercy to unstop the deaf ear. We have pity 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 175 
 
 for the people that sit sometimes in the house of God, and 
 who cannot hear even the thunder of the organ, much 
 less the voice of prayer or the songs that we may address 
 to the throne of grace. But, ah! how much more won- 
 derful the unstopping of the deaf ear of the soul, that it 
 may appreciate the harmonies that the harpers standing 
 upon the sea of glass in the heavens strike from those 
 harps with their celestial touch — the harmonies that 
 ravish heaven ! The opening of the eyes, the unstopping 
 of the ears, the healing of the leper ! 
 
 A leper is a loathsome thing, from which humanity 
 recoils ; and yet we had better take a leper to our embrace 
 than allow a leprous soul to dwell in the clay tenement 
 that bears it about for a little season before it is damned 
 eternally ! A leprous soul ! Ah ! when that healing touch 
 comes, so that no infant in its sweetness and purity, no 
 angel in its ineffable grace and sweetness, is freer from 
 taint than the regenerate soul through the triumph of 
 Christ's beneficent power when he cleanses the leper and 
 makes him whiter than snow ! 
 
 And the dead are raised up. Inspiration does not ex- 
 aggerate, but inspiration uses a very terrible word in de- 
 scribing the spiritual condition of the unregenerate man. 
 What is that word? I happen to know three or four 
 words in different languages that mean death ; and I do 
 not know why it is — it may be association — but every 
 one of them — I do not care in what language — every 
 word that expresses what we mean by "death" has in it 
 a sound that jars upon the ear with a discord that grates 
 and wounds. Dead ! dead ! And not only dead, but 
 buried ; and not only buried, but corrupt, with an un- 
 mentionable, unimaginable corruption of the grave ! And 
 when Christ comes and raises such a soul — when, by the 
 power, the resurrection power of the Master, such a one 
 
176 SERMONS. 
 
 is called forth from the tomb, in the very beauty and 
 glory of the Almighty Saviour that calls him forth, when 
 this mortal has put on immortality, when this dishonor 
 has been crowned with glory, then you will see the trans- 
 formation effected by the Master when he raises the dead 
 and buried and putrified soul to the beauty and sweetness 
 of immortal life. 
 
 And the climax of it all is that "the poor have the 
 gospel preached to them." It looks to you like an anti- 
 climax. It is not. The subject has been rising all the 
 while until it has touched its zenith, when Christ is de- 
 clared to have come on a mission to the poor: that in- 
 cluded the destitute of this world's goods. It comforts the 
 poor in spirit, the neglected, the despised, the down- 
 trodden, the uncared-for of our humanity; our Lord, 
 forsaking the adoring ranks that gave him homage, 
 divesting himself of those robes of glory which he wore, 
 and took upon himself the form of a man, of a servant, 
 and came down to be a partaker of their cares and sor- 
 rows and privations; he was rich, yet became poor, that 
 he might make the uncared-for millions of the world 
 know that there is help from heaven, and help for them. 
 The great majority of our race, the overwhelming ma- 
 jority, live in penury, in grinding poverty — the great 
 majority have ever done so, and will ever do so. And 
 what does the world propose to do for their relief? What 
 has the gospel of the socialist, what has the gospel of the 
 anarchist, what has the gospel of the materialist to say 
 to this great, uncounted class, the unnumbered millions 
 of the poor of this world? The gospel of the one says, 
 "You live in a world where injustice is supreme, where 
 selfishness is dominant, where rich men band together for 
 the purpose of crushing down the poor ; and you want a 
 reign of liberty, of equality, of fraternity. Then perish 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 177 
 
 the existing order of things ; let us have a new deal, and 
 divide the world into equal parts, and then the millennium 
 will come" — and a greater, grosser, more dastardly lie 
 was never uttered in the ears of humanity. It overlooks 
 the fact that the purpose to reconstruct society out of that 
 sort of corrupt humanity could only result in failure. 
 They would take the world as it is, and simply by me- 
 chanical arrangement bring humanity, equality and peace 
 to all men, forgetting that the elementary principles have 
 not been eliminated, that that same injustice and greed 
 and power would reproduce in a single generation the 
 very order of which the anarchist complains as the result 
 of human selfishness and human rapacity. 
 
 And then comes another gospel from a new and dif- 
 ferent source. It is the gospel of the scientist that recog- 
 nizes all things as under the reign of an inflexible law, 
 the law that only contemplates the survival of the fittest, 
 the law that makes humanity grow by a blind selection, 
 and which says that it is the order of the world, it is the 
 best thing that can happen for the world, to let the weak 
 go to the wall, the people that cannot protect themselves 
 succumb to the rest ; that it is the fixed law of society 
 that they shall go on until the weak and the helpless are 
 crushed out, and a better order of humanity is developed 
 and encouraged to take the place of those that perish, be- 
 cause they were not fit to survive ! 
 
 The gospel comes with this statement of the case: 
 "The poor ye have always with you, and I am one of the 
 poor ; I was born of lowly parents ; I have never had a 
 home, I have gone about depending upon the charities of 
 others, and when I die I expect to sleep in a borrowed 
 tomb. I have come down to put my great, loving heart 
 under this vast immeasurable mass of suffering men — I 
 have come to identify myself with them, and to tell them 
 12 
 
178 SERMONS. 
 
 of Heaven's sympathy with the poor ; and I am going to 
 begin a process of relief by teaching the poor how to 
 emerge from poverty by the avoidance of those vices and 
 those indulgences that fill the world with poverty, and, by 
 the cultivation of those habits of industry and self-respect 
 and self-control, by which men can rise and better them- 
 selves, and occupy a better position ; and, better than that, 
 I have come to tell the poor, that while their struggle is 
 going on, they have the sympathy of all the purest and 
 best in the universe, and while they may be destitute of 
 this world's goods, they may be rich in faith, and have 
 the accompanying solace of the gospel, heavenly in origin 
 and heavenly in nature, such as gold cannot purchase, 
 such as all the gold of Golconda cannot buy." Christ 
 comes and says, "My gospel is not for the man that sits 
 there on the throne, who rejoices in abundance of pos- 
 sessions, but for the poor; the man that trembles at my 
 word I take to my arms and to my heart; and the tri- 
 umphs of the cross are to be manifested — not in the 
 ranks of those that make social supremacy their ambi- 
 tion — but those that listen to the voice that says, 'Come 
 unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest.' " 
 
 I close my sermon by saying that those that believe 
 these things inherit something of the spirit of the Master ; 
 they practically reproduce his life in their lives in the 
 world. And here is something that I think cannot be 
 denied, not even by the skeptic, and that is, that all the 
 organized forms that this world contains for the uplifting 
 of the down-trodden and for the amelioration of the 
 wants and woes of suffering humanity, are the result of 
 the spirit which Christ breathed into the minds and into 
 the hearts of his disciples. Who have been the cham- 
 pions of the right in every form ? Whenever the right to 
 
KIND WORDS TO A DOUBTING HEART. 179 
 
 worship God according to the dictates of conscience has 
 been questioned, who established it, save the heroes of 
 the cross, who have been ready to sacrifice all for the 
 sake of principles so dear ! Who founded the first col- 
 leges in the colonies that grew into the imperial States of 
 this great republic? Christian men. Who organized the 
 great Bible Societies of Great Britain and America, that 
 scatter throughout the world the leaves that are for the 
 healing of the nations, except men that have reproduced 
 in themselves the spirit of the divine Master? Who are 
 those that are doing most for the uplifting of the uncared- 
 for, dangerous class that are a menace to the social order, 
 and to civilization itself, except the men who devote them- 
 selves to missions and to individual activity in their 
 efforts to bring men out of the depths of poverty and 
 misery — the men that have imbibed the spirit of the 
 Master, and have gone about doing good? 
 
 This is the answer to the question, "Art thou he that 
 should come; or look we for another?" And until in- 
 fidelity finds a better substitute for the wants of the world 
 — until infidelity finds a better object for the adoration of 
 humanity than this — until that day comes, we will take 
 this gospel, and say that — 
 
 " All the forms that men devise, 
 I will call them vanity and lies, 
 
 And bind this gospel to my heart." 
 
 " Thou, O Christ, art all I want, 
 All in all in thee I find !" 
 
XIV. 
 GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 
 
 " Through the tender mercy of our God, the dayspring from 
 on high hath visited us."— Luke i. 78. 
 
 I HAVE oftentimes been asked what book I found most 
 useful to me in the study of the Scriptures. I never 
 take very long to answer that question; the book that I 
 use most frequently and with the greatest advantage is 
 the Concordance ; and if there is any Christian without a 
 Concordance — either that of Young or of Cruden — let 
 me advise him to make that addition to his library without 
 delay. I looked over my Concordance to-day; I turned 
 to the word "mercy," which is the theme of this sermon, 
 and I noticed that there were four columns in the finest 
 print, occupying an entire page, quoting verses from the 
 Old Testament and the New in which the word "mercy" 
 came, or in which something was said about the divine 
 mercy. And not only that, but there is a division in one 
 of the columns giving us the passages of Scripture that 
 contain the two words "tender mercy." You observe 
 these in the text, "Through the tender mercy of our God, 
 the dayspring from on high hath visited us." Only see 
 the beautiful passages ; let me refer you to some of them, 
 in which the tender mercy of God is referred to. In the 
 twenty-fifth Psalm we have, "Remember, O Lord, thy 
 tender mercies, for they have been ever of old." In the 
 fortieth Psalm we have, "Withhold not thy tender 
 mercies, O Lord; let thy loving-kindness and thy truth 
 preserve me." In the one hundred and third Psalm we 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 181 
 
 have this, "Bless the Lord, O my soul ; who crowneth 
 thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies." "Who 
 crowneth thee !" I suppose that is where Oliver Crom- 
 well got his favorite word, when in his speeches and his 
 letters he so often talked about "crowning" mercies. In 
 the forty-third Psalm we have, "The Lord is good to all, 
 and his tender mercies are over all his works." And so 
 in this long chapter, in this seventy-eighth verse of this 
 first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke we have these 
 words, "Through the tender mercy of our God, the day- 
 spring from on high hath visited us." 
 
 There are few words more frequently used in our 
 preaching, and few words that more frequently occur in 
 all our religious reading than the word "mercy" ; and 
 yet, familiar as the word is, we do not always understand 
 the exact import, the precise meaning of it. Mercy is 
 goodness softened by compassion ; mercy is the tear that 
 trembles in the eye of goodness when goodness looks 
 upon suffering. Mercy is favor shown to the miserable. 
 But as sin is the cause of all the misery in the world, 
 mercy means favor shown to the sinful, to the unworthy, 
 to the ungrateful. Perhaps you have in your library 
 books of synonyms. Well, there are no synonyms, strictly 
 speaking, in any language, although there are words very 
 near in resemblance to others in meaning: there is no 
 synonym in any language for the word "mercy." The 
 word "goodness" comes very near to it, but goodness is 
 something different from mercy. The angels rejoice in 
 the divine goodness ; they know nothing of the divine 
 mercy ; goodness they always enjoyed ; mercy they never 
 needed. The word "grace" is also very near to mercy in 
 its signification, and yet there is a distinction between 
 grace and mercy. Grace means God's free, spontaneous, 
 unmerited, unpurchasable favor to those upon whom he 
 
182 SERMONS. 
 
 fixes his regard ; but mercy has respect to the object of 
 that regard. Grace has reference to the disposition on 
 the part of God to show a kindness ; mercy is the gift 
 that the poor sinner receives from the Almighty hand and 
 heart. "When we look at God we call his mercy 'grace' ; 
 when we look at the sinner we call his grace 'mercy.' ' 
 It is with grace and mercy just as it is with some of the 
 great rivers of the world: some of them have one name 
 at their source; they have another name where they 
 empty into the sea. God's benevolence is grace when it 
 issues from his throne, it is mercy when it reaches his 
 footstool on which we poor sinners dwell. And, there- 
 fore, you see, close as the analogy is between these two 
 words, there is a distinction between them, because when 
 we think of grace our reference is to the great fountain 
 of all good ; and when we talk about mercy, we think of 
 the miserable men that need the divine pity. 
 
 Let us fix another distinction clearly in our minds: 
 mercy excludes all idea of merit on the part of one who is 
 the object of it. Indeed, merit makes mercy unnecessary ; 
 merit makes mercy impossible. A man may merit justice : 
 a man never merits mercy. If a man were justly con- 
 demned to die, the act of the executive in giving him 
 pardon would be an act of mercy. If the man were not 
 justly condemned to die, and were conscious of his inno- 
 cence, if he were a brave man he would scorn to ask for 
 mercy, he would demand justice and not mercy. There- 
 fore, you see how important it is to ascertain exactly the 
 place and the meaning of mercy, that we may have a clear 
 understanding of the way of salvation. 
 
 There are so many who profess to be the children of 
 God who have some latent idea of personal merit, and 
 who have a sort of complacent regard for their own 
 reading and study of the Scriptures, for the regularity of 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 183 
 
 their devotions, and for the constancy of their religious 
 services. All that is right and proper, so far as cherish- 
 ing this reverence for the Word of God, and for the 
 obligation to lead consistent and useful lives, is con- 
 cerned ; but alas ! for those who think that all this service 
 and all these sacrifices have anything to do with their 
 justification as sinners in the sight of God. The truth is, 
 there is no such thing as salvation partly by works and 
 partly by grace. If there is such an idea as that, it exists 
 only in the deceived heart of the man who is so unfortu- 
 nate as to cherish it. Salvation is either a gift, or it is a 
 debt : if we have gained it, then will God pay his debts ; 
 if we do not merit it, if we are undeserving, rebellious 
 and ungrateful, then nothing but mercy can give us 
 ground of hope. If I worked faithfully for you for a 
 stipulated price, and you pay me what you owe, I will 
 not allow you to call it a gift. If I give to a man out of 
 compassion — to a man who has done me no service — I 
 will not allow him to call it a debt. Precisely so it is in 
 the matter of salvation. When a man can be found who 
 is so just, so pure, so holy, so unblemished in heart and 
 life as to come before God, and raise his hands and say, 
 "These are clean hands, and this is a clean heart" ; then, 
 if he dare, let him appeal to justice, and demand salva- 
 tion as the reward of his purity and piety; but if a man 
 be spotted with the sins he has committed, his soul 
 darkened and defiled by transgression, and if that man 
 has been cleansed in the precious blood which has been 
 shed for redemption, and purified by the indwelling of 
 the Holy Ghost, oh ! let him beware how he trusts in any- 
 thing he has ever experienced or done, let him cast him- 
 self wholly upon the mercy of God in Christ; and then 
 he rests upon a firm foundation, and then only. The 
 Pharisee in the temple justified himself, and went down 
 
184 SERMONS. 
 
 to his house condemned. The poor publican in the temple 
 condemned himself, and went down to his house justified. 
 
 During the reign of the first Napoleon, a man was 
 tried and was sentenced to death for an offence he had 
 committed against the government. The daughter of this 
 man, but a little child, forced her way through the guard 
 around the palace, and then threaded her way through 
 one apartment and hall after another, until at last she 
 reached the Emperor, and fell down at his feet, and said, 
 "O sire, have mercy on my father !" He asked her what 
 her father's name was, and that name was fatal to her 
 hopes, for said the Emperor, "This is the second time he 
 has committed that offence, and it is just that he should 
 suffer." "Ah !" said the little child, "It is not justice, it 
 is mercy that I plead for my father." The Emperor's lip 
 quivered, and the tears came into his eyes, and he said, 
 "Well, child, for your sake I will pardon your father. 
 Now go away and leave me." That must be our plea — 
 "O Lord, enter not into judgment with thy servants, be 
 not strict to mark our iniquity ; but have mercy upon us 
 according to thy loving-kindness, according to the multi- 
 tude of thy tender mercies, blot out our transgressions !" 
 
 There is a very interesting account given us in the 
 New Testament of the service that was rendered to the 
 Apostle Paul at a critical period of his life when he was a 
 prisoner at Rome, and when a man called Onesiphorus 
 came and showed him kindness and espoused the cause 
 of this prisoner at a time when odium was attached to 
 the Christian name; and not only was odium attached 
 to it, but there was danger in befriending a Christian man 
 who had incurred the displeasure of the authorities. On- 
 esiphorus was not ashamed to espouse the cause of the 
 Apostle, and, as the Apostle said, he was not even 
 ashamed of the chains he wore. And when Paul wanted 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 185 
 
 to express his gratitude to Onesiphorus he did not do it 
 as a worldling would have done — he did not wish for 
 him long life, or wealth, or success, or pleasure, or pre- 
 ferment ; but he summed up all the desires of his heart 
 in one strong petition ; he said, "The Lord have mercy 
 upon him in that day." That always was a very impres- 
 sive prayer to me, because the Apostle does not say what 
 day; there is something very eloquent in the omission. 
 There is but one day — one day for which all the days of 
 time were made ! "That day" — the Apostle knew that 
 none could mistake his meaning — that day, when all the 
 nations are assembled at the bar — the day of final judg- 
 ment of the world ! The Lord grant that we may all 
 obtain mercy in that day ! Mercy, then, will be worth all 
 the universe besides. 
 
 But the text speaks of "tender mercy" ; and now 
 when I come to this branch of my subject I am very much 
 embarrassed ; I hardly know what thread to take up ; I 
 hardly know in the multitude of illustrations that come to 
 me what is most worthy of attention in illustrating, not 
 only the mercy of God, but the tenderness of that mercy. 
 Very often when we contemplate a being like God, we 
 are apt to think that because he is so great and so infinite 
 in all his perfections, because he is so supremely glorious, 
 that he cannot be a tender being; we do not naturally 
 associate tenderness and power together, and yet it is the 
 greatness of God, it is the infinitude of his wisdom and 
 power that makes him the tender being that he is. Do not 
 mistake, and suppose that greatness is incompatible with 
 tenderness, with sensitiveness. What do you see in 
 Nature? The greatest object that you can contemplate is 
 the ocean. There is nothing more sensitive than the sea. 
 If it is calm when night comes, all the constellations of 
 heaven are mirrored on its surface ; in the day-time when 
 
1 86 SERMONS. 
 
 it is calm, if a fleecy cloud flits across the blue, there we 
 may see the cloud floating down in the depths. The ocean 
 is exquisitely sensitive; it is the great daguerreotype 
 gallery of the world, and there is nothing so delicately 
 photographed in her as everything is photographed on 
 the surface of the deep, wide sea. The mountain is an 
 emblem of greatness, and when you stand at the base of a 
 great, beetling crag, you say, "This is an emblem of all 
 that is stern and strong" ; and yet if a little bird happens 
 to perch upon a crevice of the rock and break forth into 
 song, the great rock echoes back the music of the bird. 
 If a little child should happen to cry at the base of that 
 frowning crag, the cry of the little child would be repeated 
 by the rock. If it is one bird singing, you imagine there 
 are two; and it is the singing or the sighing rock that 
 echoes back the carol of the bird or the plaint of the child. 
 So it is with God : his greatness does not make him any 
 the less tender. There is one figure, that occurs very fre- 
 quently in the Scriptures, that gives a very pleasing, a 
 very striking illustration of the divine tenderness, and 
 that is that God takes his unprotected and defenceless 
 children under the covert of his wings. I have always 
 been very much touched by those passages of Scripture in 
 which that figure occurs. The feathers under the wings 
 of a bird are always the softest ; and the little bird takes 
 her young under her wings, near her heart — so near 
 that they may feel its beatings. And so it is with us. It 
 is an exquisite figure our Lord himself used. When he 
 was weeping over Jerusalem, he said, "How often would 
 I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen 
 gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
 not." And so when I look in the seventeenth Psalm I 
 find this, "Keep me as the apple of thine eye; hide me 
 under the shadow of thy wings." The most sensitive 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 187 
 
 part of the human frame is the eye ; and the most sensi- 
 tive part of the eye is the pupil, the apple of the eye ; and 
 God is said to care for his people as for the apple of his 
 eye, and under the shadow of his wings he hides them 
 from all that would harm them. And in the thirty-sixth 
 Psalm I find this, "How excellent is thy loving-kindness" 
 — not kindness, but loving-kindness. Then I look in 
 the fifty-seventh Psalm and find this, "O Lord, be merci- 
 ful to me ; my soul trusteth in thee ; yea, in the shadow 
 of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities 
 be overpast." And in the ninety-first Psalm I find this, 
 "He that dwelleth in the sacret place of the Most High 
 shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say 
 of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress ; my God, 
 in him will I trust." I think we have some very charming 
 illustrations of these passages of Scripture in our Hymn- 
 book. In the fifty-seventh Psalm we have this : 
 
 " My God ! in whom are all the springs 
 Of boundless love and grace unknown, 
 Hide me beneath thy spreading wings, 
 Till the dark cloud be over-blown." 
 
 And in the best of all the hymns that have ever been 
 written — 
 
 " Other refuge have I none ; 
 
 Hangs my helpless soul on thee; 
 Leave, ah ! leave me not alone, 
 
 Still support and comfort me. 
 All my trust on thee is stayed ; 
 
 All my help from thee I bring; 
 Cover my defenceless head 
 
 With the shadow of thy wing." 
 
 Ah! this is just one of the illustrations the Scriptures 
 give us of the tender mercy of our God. 
 
 And now I must take for my last illustration one of 
 
188 SERMONS. 
 
 the promises that are made in the Old Testament prophe- 
 cies. In the Book of Ezekiel, where he said, "I will be to 
 you a little sanctuary,'' I want to show you the inimitable 
 tenderness in these words. At first it does not appear 
 obvious, but it will appear very obvious. When the 
 people were carried into captivity we are told that their 
 enemies taunted them, and said to them, "Sing us one of 
 the songs of Zion." But they said, "How can we sing in 
 a strange land?" They wept when they remembered 
 Zion, when they remembered the temple where the tribes 
 went up, and where the multitude went to keep holy day. 
 Part of their desolation consisted in the thought that 
 they could not meet with their brethren, and unite with 
 them in the worship of the temple ; and how does God 
 comfort them? He said to them, "I will be to you more 
 than the long line of the priesthood ; you need not the 
 golden altar; I will be to you a little sanctuary; I will 
 gather you to me, gather you closely to me, and in the 
 secret of the tabernacle of my love, in the tender pavilion 
 of my heart, I will hide you ; there you may wonder, and 
 worship, and love!" How did the patriarchs do before 
 there was a church or temple in the world? Did God 
 leave them without any consolation? We read that one 
 of them, indeed, laid down at night on the ground, with a 
 stone for a pillow, and he had such a vision that he said, 
 "This is indeed the house of God, the gate of heaven." 
 There was no "house," no "gate" there. What did he 
 mean? He meant that God revealed himself as a dwell- 
 ing-place, a shelter, a home, and that the love and kind- 
 ness of his God was the gate, the door in which he entered 
 and found mercy. 
 
 Then, again, you must recollect how many there are 
 in our own country who are destitute of the privileges of 
 the house of God, because they live in those regions 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 189 
 
 where the population is very scarce, and where the people 
 are very poor, and they are not able to support the ordi- 
 nances of the ministry and the regular worship of God ; 
 and many of them are amongst the most devout people of 
 the world — some of your kindred may live just there. 
 Do you suppose God leaves them because they have no 
 house of worship in which to gather ? Oh ! no ; he says, 
 "I will be to you a little sanctuary." And even when 
 there is no house in the neighborhood where the people 
 may gather, there is often a church in the family, where 
 the father is the priest, the members of the family the 
 congregation, and where God comes down and visits them 
 with his grace. 
 
 And then think of the multitude who have no settled 
 home in the world. You know there are occupations that 
 keep men continually upon the water or upon the road. 
 They have no settled habitation or place of worship. But 
 among these, how many there are to whom God is a little 
 sanctuary. 
 
 I am very much interested in a society located in the 
 city of Baltimore, a society of people who travel upon our 
 railroads. Hundreds of times these people, who have no 
 opportunity, such as you now have, of sitting in God's 
 house and listening to God's Word, long for the privilege. 
 But God does not give them up; he does not deprive 
 them ; he says to them, "I will be to you a little sanc- 
 tuary." I thank God that the sailor in the forecastle, 
 smelling of bilge-water and clothes hung up to dry — 
 even there upon the rolling deep, he hears God say, "I 
 will be to you a little sanctuary; tenderly I will come to 
 you, and will protect and cherish you." 
 
 There is a newspaper called Shut-in; it is published 
 for people who are invalids, and cannot leave their homes. 
 There are a great many people in that situation, who 
 
190 SERMONS. 
 
 would give anything in reason to sit, as you are doing, 
 and listen to the sermon, but, because of duty or sickness, 
 they cannot leave the chamber where they are confined. 
 I do think if there is any place where God's mercy be- 
 comes tender mercy, it is to the people I am describing. 
 Our dear aged friends, and those who are afflicted with 
 incurable maladies — do you think God excludes them 
 from his love and favor because they cannot meet in the 
 church? He has his eye upon them, and the chamber in 
 which they are confined is dearer to him than any cathe- 
 dral upon the earth, unless that cathedral be consecrated 
 ,to pure and spiritual worship. I think some of the most 
 beautiful examples of Christian resignation and Christian 
 grace I have ever witnessed, and some of the sweetest 
 testimonies to grace I ever heard came from the lips of 
 people shut in from the world, but not shut in from his 
 tender mercy. 
 
 And then when people come to the last scene in life, 
 they find a fulfilment of the last part of this text. "The 
 dayspring from on high" visits them. It is a beautiful 
 picture of the dawn of the day, before the sun gets to its 
 zenith — "the dayspring from on high hath visited us I" 
 Ah ! how many there are, who, when they come to the last 
 scene on earth, when they are passing through the valley 
 and the shadow of death, can say, "I fear no evil, for 
 thou art with me" — in the darkness there shines a steady, 
 celestial light ? How many can say : 
 
 ''Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes ; 
 Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies ; 
 Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee. 
 In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!" 
 
 Oh! "how bright the unchanging morn appears" to 
 one upon whom this light has dawned, and who is just 
 
GOD'S TENDER MERCY. 191 
 
 about to bid the world farewell, and to go from the "little 
 sanctuary" here on earth to the great sanctuary in the 
 skies, where the multitude of the redeemed dwell in the 
 light and joy of God's presence, irradiated by his glory 
 for evermore ! 
 
XV. 
 iWEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 
 
 "And when he was come near he beheld the city, and wept 
 over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this 
 thy day, the things which belong to thy peace, but now they are 
 hid from thine eye." — Luke xix. 42, 43. 
 
 THE Oriental world is full of buried cities, the history 
 of which, and the mounds which mark the spots 
 where they stood, are of the deepest interest to the anti- 
 quarian and the scholar. Among these I mention, first, 
 Ur, the city of the Chaldees, the centre of a splendid 
 civilization, the people that gave letters to the Phoenicians 
 and to the Greeks, the people that had mathematical and 
 astronomical tables, that calculated the eclipses and the 
 spots on the sun — the city most memorable as that from 
 which the patriarch came, whose faith triumphed over 
 time, so that he beheld that other city that hath founda- 
 tions, whose maker and builder is God. Then I might 
 mention Nineveh, standing upon the banks of the Tigris, 
 the city of iron chariots and of ambitious soldiers, the 
 city where the most splendid palace was built, save one, 
 that mortal eye ever looked upon; the city whose kings 
 and generals were more feared by the world than Napo- 
 leon was feared by the states of Europe in his desolating 
 career of conquest; the city that, in the zenith of its 
 rapacious power, heard the voice of the solitary, lone 
 prophet, crying out, "Fear her not, for as the grass- 
 hoppers camp in the hedges in the cold day, and when the 
 sun riseth flee away, and no one knows whither they are 
 
SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
 Richmond, Va. 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 193 
 
 gone, so it shall be for longing." Sixty years afterwards 
 that prophecy was fulfilled. Nine hundred years after- 
 wards, when Alexander fought the great battle of Arbela, 
 neither of the armies knew that underneath the spot 
 where they had their conflict was the dust of the buried 
 city. For a thousand years silence reigned until the dis- 
 entombed stones told the story, and confirmed the 
 saying that "they that take the sword shall perish by the 
 sword." 
 
 We might .mention Babylon, the city of sensuality, that 
 fell by its own corruption ; we might speak of Memphis, 
 the city of the dead, the mausoleum of ancient Egypt; 
 we might speak of Tyre, the city of fleet and merchant 
 princes ; but the text calls us to speak of another Eastern 
 city, more interesting to us than any, than all, to which I 
 have made allusion — Jerusalem, standing, not upon a 
 great river like the Tigris, nor upon the arm of any sea, 
 but standing isolated and exempt from the great debate 
 of the world, from the world's ambitions and the world's 
 enterprises, and I might say also from the world's pros- 
 perity, yet the shrine that has been visited by pilgrims 
 from all climes and centuries, the city dear alike to the 
 Mohammedan, to the Christian and the Jew, not because 
 it stands upon the banks of a navigable river, or because 
 a fine harbor opens from it into the sea, or because a 
 thoroughfare passes through its gates for the commerce 
 of the world, but because it contains an empty tomb, and 
 because along the dolorous way there once walked those 
 feet that two thousand years ago were nailed for our ad- 
 vantage to the bitter cross. It is to this city that the text 
 directs our attention to-night, by the mention of some- 
 thing most wonderful, for here we have the record of the 
 last visit that Christ ever paid to it ; here we have the 
 record of his divine sorrow, and here that pathetic address 
 13 
 
194 SERMONS. 
 
 that sounded the city's dirge in notes of immeasurable 
 woe. O that with reverence to-night we might consider 
 the causes of these tears, the meaning of this outburst of 
 sacred grief ! And what, perhaps, first arrests our atten- 
 tion is the strangeness of it, the unexpectedness of it, the 
 contrast which it presents to everything that surrounded 
 Christ, and that was happening in the city at that very 
 moment. It must have been a wonderful sorrow that 
 overmastered all the ebullitions of joy, all that was jubi- 
 lant in the whole city at the time when Jesus was the 
 only weeper. How strange it was that when he got to 
 the descent of the Mount of Olives, and was just going 
 to enter the city that was endeared to him by a thousand 
 tender associations, the city to which his parents took him 
 when he was a little child, when he paid it that ever 
 memorable visit ; that he was just about to enter the city 
 where he had delivered some of his most impressive dis- 
 courses, and where he had wrought some of his most 
 splendid miracles — that the very sight of it all at once 
 should have set him to weeping! Ordinarily, when a 
 visitor is about to enter a great city, he is full of excite- 
 ment, he is full of pleasureable anticipations ; he is look- 
 ing forward to the revival of old memories, to the delight 
 of inspecting scenes of former pleasure, and to the re- 
 newal of happy intercourse with the friends from whom 
 he has been separated ; but now Jesus weeps, and what is 
 stranger still, he shed those bitter tears in a time of gen- 
 eral joy. The inhabitants had just tendered him a great 
 reception ; some of them had cut down the branches of 
 the trees to strew them in the way, and others threw their 
 garments in his path. Everywhere the hosannas were 
 sounding from the populace gathering all around, some 
 marching in the front, and others following in the rear, 
 all crying out, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 195 
 
 the Lord. Glory in the highest !" And yet, in the midst 
 of these acclamations of a rejoicing people, Jesus wept, 
 not with those silent tears he shed at the grave of Lazarus. 
 I am so thankful, oh! so thankful, that there is no sin in 
 tears — 
 
 " When sorrowing o'er some stone I bend, 
 That covers all that was a friend ; 
 Thou seest, dear Lord, the tears I shed, 
 Who wept thyself o'er Lazarus dead." 
 
 Oh ! Christ will not rebuke your grief ; when you go 
 to the cemetery, he would rather go with you and mingle 
 his tears with yours. But these were not silent tears, like 
 those that he wept at the grave of Lazarus ; they were 
 accompanied by broken utterances, a few words at a time, 
 with a sob at every step. Listen — "O that thou hadst 
 known — even thou — at least in this thy day — the 
 things that belong to thy peace — but now they are hid 
 from thine eyes." Oh ! when strong men weep, there must 
 be some reason. Oh ! there must have been some cause 
 for tears like these. They were not such tears as Tenny- 
 son speaks of in the well-remembered passage — 
 
 "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean." 
 
 These were not idle tears, and we know what they meant, 
 or something of what they meant, for they came from 
 the depths of a divine despair ; the tears that formed first 
 in the heart, and then ascended to the eyes; the tears 
 that were wept over days forever gone. 
 
 "And when he drew near he beheld the city," and all 
 at once such were the demonstrations of his grief that he 
 converted that great pageant into something like a funeral 
 procession ; he converted that wonderful festival that 
 the people were then holding into a tragedy. But let us 
 
196 SERMONS. 
 
 go back a little, and see what Christ was doing before the 
 curtain rises on this lamentable scene. 
 
 He had been down toward the sea ; he had been 
 walking through the eastern part of the land, and as he 
 returned he passed through Bethany without stopping to 
 speak with Martha and Mary, whom he loved. He 
 climbed the eastern slope of the hill of Olives, until he 
 reached the summit, and as he approached he was met by 
 the jubilant crowd, some of them rejoicing with nothing 
 to do but rejoice in the King that was coming in the name 
 of the Lord, but others rejoicing in anticipation of what 
 that King would do for them, and blind men came stag- 
 gering along in the hope that their eyes might be healed, 
 while kind people carried upon a litter the lame man or 
 the paralytic who could not walk, and when mothers came 
 carrying their sick babes lying like withered flowers in 
 their bosoms. It was then, when the multitude thus 
 approached Christ, and when he got to the summit of the 
 hill, and looked down from the Mount of Olives, he saw 
 the city spread out in all its extent and beauty before his 
 eye, and down there where the Kedron flowed was the 
 deep valley, not dark and repulsive as it now is, but all 
 filled with terraced and beautiful gardens, and among 
 the gardens, Gethsemane. And then, when he looked 
 across the valley, there upon Mt. Moriah he saw the 
 goodly temple, standing like a mountain of alabaster, 
 with a roof fretted with gold ; and beyond the temple, to 
 the left, he saw Mt. Zion, and to the right, beyond the 
 city wall, he saw that mound just peering over the top 
 of the battlements called Calvary. This was the scene 
 that was presented to him, and then, while all the children 
 were singing, while all the flowers were blooming, and 
 while the air quivered with the melodies of the multitude, 
 then it was that Christ was arrested in his progress, and 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 197 
 
 stood rooted to the spot, and began to weep as he said, 
 "O that thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy 
 day, the things that belong to thy peace, but now they 
 are hid from thine eye." Oh ! we would very much 
 mistake our blessed Lord if we were to suppose that he 
 had no sympathy with the people were were giving him 
 this welcome — that he had no sympathy with the dear 
 little children who were shouting their hosannas. Oh ! 
 he was too kind and tender for that, for he was the Good 
 Shepherd, and those children were the lambs of his flock. 
 The rejoicing people were the people of his pasture, 
 and all of them who had any just ideas of his character or 
 the purpose of his descent into the world — all were 
 Christ's, and he rejoiced at the time when he wept. 
 Again, it is evident that such a strange commingling of 
 emotion in the mind and in the heart of Christ, and some- 
 thing so contradictory to ordinary experience, and to all 
 that we would have anticipated, that we cannot too care- 
 fully try to ascertain what could have been the causes of 
 these tears, and what was the meaning of this lament of 
 Christ. 
 
 The first thing that impressed him when the view of 
 the city met his vision was the melancholy change that 
 had taken place in it. It was still beautiful for situation, 
 but it was no longer the joy of the earth. The temple 
 was still standing there, but it no longer contained the 
 semblance of the divine presence ; it was no longer the 
 house of God, and the gate of heaven ; a superstitious, 
 avaricious priesthood ministered at its holy altars; the 
 glory that once irradiated the cherubim had departed ; 
 the tribes still came up to worship there, but not with the 
 old devotion. Surrounding that temple was a turbulent 
 people clamoring for a temporal deliverer, and just ready 
 to reject their own Messiah, and to crown that rejection 
 
198 SERMONS. 
 
 with the saddest tragedy that the eye of human ever 
 beheld since God made the world. And when Jesus 
 looked, his eye affecting his heart, he wept, as he saw the 
 city almost universally opposed to himself, and to the 
 salvation that he came to offer. Oh! how hard it is to 
 bear rejected love, love scorned, love trampled upon. 
 There never was love like his, never tears like his, when 
 sorrow and love flowed mingled down, and when his 
 heart was almost breaking at the thought that in vain had 
 been his assumption of our flesh, in vain that lowly birth 
 at Bethlehem, the straw, the manger, the cattle, the dark- 
 ness and the midnight cold ; in vain those weary years 
 when he walked the earth without a place to lay his head, 
 in vain his tender entreaties, in vain his miracles of power, 
 all of which were miracles of benevolence and love ; few 
 were his friends, and bitter and relentless his enemies. 
 And now Christ was to be rejected with a super-added 
 sadness; that he came to his own, and his own received 
 him not, and seeing this, he beheld the city and wept. 
 
 That reminds me that there was a class of people 
 that once lived (I hope they have left no descendants), 
 who said that it was a weakness in Christ to weep; that 
 it was a pity there was any record of his tears left in his 
 biography. Oh! my friends, what strange ideas some 
 persons must have had of what constituted true manhood. 
 What a strange idea some persons have of the elements 
 of the truest greatness, and the very strength of the 
 omnipotent God. Never was Christ brought nearer to us, 
 never did he stand in an attitude more touching than 
 when he stood there, on that festive day, the only one 
 that was filled with speechless woe, or if not speechless, 
 expressed by broken words that could only half give 
 utterance to the sorrow that filled his heart. 
 
 I remember, too, when Titus walked round the city of 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 199 
 
 Jerusalem, after its capture, and saw that valley to which 
 I alluded just now, filled with the dead bodies of the 
 slain, as he contemplated the magnitude of that atrocity, 
 so much affected was he, hard Roman as he was, that he 
 wept, raised his hands and eyes to heaven, and declared 
 that he was not responsible for that awful scene. It was 
 David's great ancestor who once wept on the very spot 
 where Jesus now stood weeping, for when David was 
 driven from the city in that great flight which he was 
 compelled by his subjects to take, as he passed the brow 
 of this same Olivet, he threw dust upon his head, and 
 went weeping and falling on his face. 
 
 There is something else, my friends, that arrests our 
 attention here. There was one burden that Christ had 
 always to bear — and he was the only one who ever 
 walked the earth who had to bear that burden — and that 
 was the cross. He foresaw the future, and all that was 
 in the future, with the distinctness of present vision. 
 Oh ! let us all thank God that it is not so with any of us, 
 that an unlifted veil hangs over the future. Oh ! could 
 the youngest and the happiest of us all only see the dis- 
 appointed hopes, the wrecked aspirations, the darkness 
 and the desolation of coming bereavement, would it not 
 take all the music, and all the sweetness, and all the fra- 
 grance out of life? Let us be thankful that we cannot 
 read the future. It was not so with Christ; he saw it 
 all, as I have said, with the distinctness of immediate 
 vision ; and, therefore, at this very time, while the birds 
 were singing, and while the children were rejoicing, and 
 while the multitude were uttering their acclamations, 
 while the trees were waving in the wind, and while the 
 leaves were glittering in the sunlight, Jesus wept and 
 said, "O that thou hadst known, at least in this thy day, 
 the things that belong to thy peace, but now they are hid 
 
200 SERMONS. 
 
 from thine eyes," because Christ saw, at that very moment 
 (while to other eyes the skies were blue), the cloud that 
 was fringing that distant East; he saw the storm that 
 was brewing; he heard the distant moan of the thunder 
 all around the horizon, and he knew that, in a little while, 
 around Jerusalem a trench of death should be dug, and 
 that its people should be pressed on every side ; that there 
 should not be one stone in temple or house that should 
 not be thrown down, and that the day was coming when 
 fathers and mothers, when husbands and wives would 
 fight each other, each snatching for a fragment of that 
 food which they were striving to wrest one from the other 
 — and that food the mother's own babe. Christ saw the 
 desolation that was approaching, and saw it just as clearly 
 as if he had been a spectator — the time when there was 
 not wood enough growing around Jerusalem to furnish 
 crosses on which to hang and crucify its population. 
 When he saw this, do you think words could give ade- 
 quate expression to the infinite woe that filled and thrilled 
 his heart? 
 
 And now suppose some one should say, "What is all 
 this to us?" It is all to us that it was to the people over 
 whom Jesus wept. We have just as much interest in that 
 Christ, and in all that he taught, as the inhabitants of 
 Jerusalem had; and it is just as true of these preachers in 
 the house this evening, and of all the people of God of all 
 the churches represented here this evening, and of all my 
 dear impenitent friends — it is just as true as it was of 
 that generation, that we will altogether be ruined unless 
 we find out the things which belong to our peace, and 
 unless we secure them now. Christ said, "Thou" (Jeru- 
 salem) — not some other city, but "Thou" — "O that 
 thou hadst known" — Jerusalem might have known. We 
 will not speculate about what will finally become of those 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 201 
 
 who never heard the name of Christ, and who did not 
 know that there was a salvation provided for men, but 
 oh ! with regard to those whose ignorance is wilful, who 
 have eyes, but will not open them, and ears and volun- 
 tarily stop them, whose ignorance is not necessitated, but 
 preferable, ignorance in which they choose to live ! Oh ! 
 my friends, what shall we say of those? "O that thou 
 hadst known" — O that thou who dost know, and do not 
 care! That is the difficulty, that is the reason w r e are 
 holding these services ; it is because of the multitudes of 
 those who were born in this Christian land, born of Chris- 
 tian parents, who have lived all their lives under the 
 shadow of the sanctuary, and who have been listening 
 since childhood to the sweetest sounds that mercy utters 
 from the cross, and yet will not embrace the Saviour who 
 died on it — oh ! it is because they will not care for these 
 things that we come night after night with our appeals, 
 and with our entreaties, and with our prayers to God to 
 help us. "Oh ! that thou hadst known the things which 
 belong to thy peace." I could not enumerate what these 
 things are. This congregation is so well instructed that 
 any of you could say what they are. You know the things 
 that belong to our peace are repentance toward God and 
 faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. You know that these are 
 both the gifts, the free gifts of God to every one who 
 asks them. We all know that although we are great 
 sinners, Christ is the greater Saviour. We all know that 
 he is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God 
 by him. Oh ! well do I remember that good man who 
 used to walk our streets, and worship in our churches, 
 who sometimes would say to me, "If that text had not 
 been put in the Bible, I do not know that I ever would 
 have been a Christian; but I know that, although my 
 guilt has been aggravated, and so enormous and inex- 
 
202 SERMONS. 
 
 cusable, there is nothing beyond the uttermost." I believe 
 the Apostle meant it when he said, "And there is nothing 
 beyond the uttermost. I cling to Christ, and know that I 
 will be saved." Talk about peace, there is no> peace, there 
 is no peace with your own conscience, wicked man. You 
 know there is no peace, and there never will be peace 
 until God is reconciled, until you have an assurance of 
 forgiveness, until you are an adopted member of his 
 family, until you have the pledge of future guidance of 
 the Spirit, of victory over the last enemy, and an abun- 
 dant entrance into the kingdom of Christ, and a place in 
 glory everlasting. These are the things that belong to 
 your peace, and these are the things that you neglect, and 
 these are the things, which, because of that neglect, 
 compel us ceaselessly to stand before you as God's ambas- 
 sadors, and beseech you in Christ's stead, and as you 
 value your Own souls, to be reconciled to God. 
 
 Everything is beautiful in its season, but I do not 
 know of anything so beautiful in any season as the day of 
 grace ; so Christ says, "In this thy day," when the Sun of 
 Righteousness is shining; "In this thy day," when God 
 the Father is inviting, when God the Son, with tenderest 
 importunity is pleading, when God the Spirit waits in 
 order that you may come and find all the hope that you 
 need to become a true, loving, happy, rejoicing Christian. 
 Oh ! the sweetness of the day of grace. "In this thy day" 
 — that day is limited, every day is limited. That day will 
 end just as certainly as this Sunday has ended. Even 
 Christ said, "I must work while it is yet day, for the night 
 cometh in which no man can work." Oh! dear, impeni- 
 tent friend, your night will come just as certainly as this 
 Sunday night has come, and if you trifle away your day 
 of grace, and do not get the things that belong to your 
 peace, that day will be followed by night, rayless, impene- 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 203 
 
 trable, eternal night. The man who trifles with conviction 
 is running a most dreadful hazard. The keen vibration 
 of bright truth is hell. There was an instrument of tor- 
 ture once, when a man was laid down on his back and 
 strapped to a board. There was a pendulum that was set 
 to swinging right over his head. The edge of it was 
 sharp as a razor, and it was worked by a kind of clock- 
 work, that let the pendulum down with every vibration, 
 and it came nearer and nearer. It was right above the 
 man's eyes, and as he watched it with every vibration, 
 what a shudder when he saw that pendulum blade coming 
 nearer and nearer, and when he knew that presently it 
 would strike across both eyes ; and as he watched the 
 gleam of that fatal, infernal instrument of cruelty, it 
 reminds me of what the writer means when he says, "The 
 keen vibration of bright truth is hell." There is nothing 
 so dangerous as for a man to trifle with conviction, except 
 to trifle with the Spirit of God. I preached once in a 
 neighboring county, and there was a man over fifty years 
 of age in the congregation, with whom I went home to 
 spend the night. He was not a professor of religion, but 
 had been attending church all his life, and when we got 
 by ourselves, the first thing he said was, "Did you say 
 in your sermon that it was possible to grieve away the 
 Spirit, and that the Bible said, 'My Spirit shall not always 
 strive'?" I said, "Yes, I said that. Why do you ask 
 me?" "Well," said he, "I never heard that before." 
 What amazing mental indolence must fill the minds of 
 some people when they listen, as that man had been doing 
 all his life, and had never heard that that statement was 
 in the Bible. When I said that it was, he said, "That is 
 the most solemn thing I ever heard since I was born." 
 "Yes," said I, "it is a very solemn thing for you, who 
 have passed the meridian of life, and have never yet 
 
204 SERMONS. 
 
 obtained a hope of salvation. It is a very solemn thing, 
 'My Spirit shall not always strive.' ' That man was 
 thoughtful, oh! so thoughtful, all the remainder of that 
 visit. But the man who persists in trifling with convic- 
 tion, by and by will not have any convictions. Oh ! my 
 friends, I am almost afraid to touch on this subject for 
 fear that some that hear will be affected by it for the 
 moment, and then dismiss it. The man who trifles with 
 conviction, and who keeps saying to the Spirit, "Go thy 
 way; when I have a convenient season, I will call for 
 thee," by and by loses the possibility of feeling any con- 
 viction. All the avenues by which eternal truths may 
 come into his soul are stopped up; he bars and locks the 
 gates of mercy against himself, and he gets into that fear- 
 ful condition described in two words by the Apostle, 
 "Past feeling." I do not know what is the most solemn 
 verse of the Bible, but it may be that there is nothing 
 more solemn than these words, "Past feeling." My 
 hearer, will you not help me now a moment, while I try 
 to describe your case, and reveal it to you ? Can you not 
 remember the time when your heart was tenderer than 
 it is now? Can you not remember the time when there 
 was a certain text, certain verses that you could not read 
 or hear quoted without some emotion? Can you remem- 
 ber, perhaps away back, in those childhood days when 
 you stood at your mother's knee, when she looked at you 
 with her angel face, and talked with you about Jesus, that 
 the story seemed sweeter than it has ever seemed since? 
 Oh ! can you not call to mind some precious revival of 
 religion when you were almost persuaded, and when you 
 were so thoughtful and anxious that you went and saw 
 the minister, and asked him to tell you what you must 
 do in order to be saved ? Have not all these seasons gone 
 by, leaving you just as far away — not leaving you just 
 
WEEPING OVER JERUSALEM. 205 
 
 as you were, because it is harder now to awaken your 
 interest, and to touch your heart than it was then ? Oh ! 
 brethren, what shall we do with these people? Lord, 
 teach us what to do, and what we must say, what we 
 must say now, and say it earnestly, and say it lovingly, 
 while you can hear it, and before death stops the mouth 
 of this speaker, and stops the ears of these hearers? 
 What shall we say ? I will not say any more ; I take you, 
 one by one, by the hand, and I lead you into the very 
 presence of Christ to-night. I put you under the very 
 tears of Jesus, and when these tears fall on your cheek, if 
 they do not melt your heart, then, my friends, I do not 
 know what to say beyond that ; but I think that if Christ 
 himself were standing in this pulpit, and speaking to this 
 congregation, perhaps he could not say a more appro- 
 priate or a more solemn thing than this, "O that thou 
 hadst known, even thou, in this thy day, the things that 
 belong to thy peace." Lord Jesus, do not say, "But now 
 are they hid from thine eyes"; wait a little. 
 
XVI. 
 WHAT MEAN YE BY THIS SERVICE? 
 
 "And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto 
 you, What mean ye by this service?" — Exodus xii. 26. 
 
 "T XrHAT mean ye by this service?" The service 
 ' * referred to in the text was the Jewish Passover, 
 that had its first celebration in Egypt on that memorable 
 night when the proud, imperious will of Pharaoh was at 
 last broken by the tenth and most terrible of the judg- 
 ments which came upon him, so that he gave his consent 
 to let the people go, and commence their splendid march 
 to the land of which the Lord God had told them ; it was 
 on the night of the exodus, of their going out, starting 
 on their journey. It was on the night of the exodus, but 
 inasmuch as it was to be a sacrament for all time, and for 
 the generations of the world, even to the end of time (for 
 I shall show you presently the Passover is yet celebrated, 
 and ever will be) ; inasmuch as it was to be a perpetual- 
 ordinance, God gave the injunction, through the mouth of 
 Moses, to this effect: that whenever the children in any 
 Jewish family, after they were settled in the Land of 
 Promise, when any of the children asked their parents 
 what was meant by this sacrifice, they were to tell them. 
 The word "passover" was taken from the simple fact that 
 the angel of death passed over every Israelite's house on 
 the lintels and door-posts of which the blood of the lamb 
 had been sprinkled, passing over the houses where they 
 saw the blood. The ordinance which I shall tell you about 
 was one which was to be observed through all successive 
 
"WHAT MEAN YE BY THIS SERVICE?" 207 
 
 ages, and children would very naturally inquire of their 
 parents what was its meaning, and what its significance. 
 
 Now I wish you to observe, neither Moses nor Aaron 
 were commanded to communicate this, nor were the 
 priests instructed to undertake to teach the children, but 
 this the parents themselves were to do. In the beginning 
 God, in the Israelitish family, caused us to recognize the 
 parents as the spiritual guardian of their children. While 
 the pastor may help, and the faithful Sunday-school 
 teacher, and Bible-class teacher may help, yet the parents 
 cannot delegate, believing themselves unable, the faithful 
 instruction of their children. Therefore, the Jewish 
 father was instructed to tell his children how this Pass- 
 over originated ; what was meant by it ; how it was to be 
 observed, and what blessings might be expected to come 
 from the faithful observance of it. And, my friends, 
 while, of course, the whole paschal ordinance was more 
 interesting to the Jews of that age and time than it can be 
 to us, yet it is of so much interest and importance to you 
 that we do well to speak of it, especially of its connection 
 with another ordinance, which has taken its place, which 
 has been the continuance and perpetuation of the first 
 Passover; another ordinance which has taken its place, 
 and which we, in the providence of God, are going to 
 celebrate this morning. 
 
 It was while the Israelites were groaning under their 
 cruel bondage in the land of Egypt, that Moses was 
 commanded to go to Pharaoh and proclaim the command 
 to let the people go. Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord 
 that I should obey him ; I know not the Lord, neither 
 will I let the people go." Then came the nine plagues ; 
 and then these nine were followed by the tenth, which 
 finally crushed the imperious will of Pharaoh. That 
 judgment which God kept in store was the smiting of the 
 
208 SERMONS. 
 
 first-born in every Egyptian house, and lo ! there was not 
 a house in which, when morning came, there was not one 
 dead. The cloud of divine anger overspread the entire 
 land, and the Jewish families were just as much in danger 
 of destruction, the death of the first-born, as the Egyptian 
 families, and they were only saved by a most extraordi- 
 nary expedient, and that was that every family was to 
 select a lamb, an unblemished lamb, and slay it, and take 
 the blood and a little branch of hyssop, and dip the hyssop 
 branch in the blood, and go and sprinkle it — notice, the 
 command was to sprinkle it upon the side posts and upper 
 lintel of the door, but never on the lower, thus teaching 
 us that the blood was never to be trodden on ; only to the 
 left and right sides and above the door was the blood 
 sprinkled, not on the threshold. Then, when "the Angel 
 of Death spread his wings on the blast," in the midnight 
 hour, the hour of terrible judgment — for judgments at 
 midnight are more terrible than those in the day — then 
 it was that every Jewish house, on which the angel saw 
 the sprinkled blood, was passed over, and all were passed 
 over behind the sprinkled blood. This was the origin of 
 the institution. Nor was this all of its significance ; every 
 Jewish man which took a lamb, and slew that lamb, said 
 by that act, "I am a sinner, and deserve death, but God, 
 in his infinite and adorable condescension and pity, has 
 allowed me to take a substitute, a vicarious substitute, a 
 type of the true Lamb, who was slain by the eternal pur- 
 pose of God." Every Jew who slew his lamb said, "I de- 
 serve this death, yet I hope to live, and know I shall live 
 if I put my trust in God, and put the blood on the door." 
 Thus, at that early period of the world, men were taught 
 that "without the shedding of blood there was no remis- 
 sion." 
 
 Another great significance connected with this ordi- 
 
"WHAT MEAN YE BY THIS SERVICE?" 209 
 
 nance was that those who partook of it were not allowed 
 to eat of it seated. The lamb that was slain had to be 
 roasted by fire; it then became the basis of the feast; 
 they stood around the table with their loins girt about, 
 with their staves in their hands as men ready for flight. 
 Another significant fact is this, that when Israel had 
 taken their flight, and crossed the Red Sea, they by that 
 act declared they had left Egypt behind them, had re- 
 nounced the land and everything in that land; by the 
 crossing of the Red Sea, drew a line of demarkation ; had 
 left Egypt with its idols, and the hopes they cherished lay 
 in the land that lay before; and, although that was a 
 great deliverance when the old bondage was broken, yet 
 remember, my friends, when they were brought out and 
 delivered free men on the other side, with the whole 
 world before them, recollect the great duties resting upon 
 freemen. Before, they were passive subjects ; they never 
 had to think or act, and had no responsibilities ; but now 
 all the responsibilities of freemen devolved upon them; 
 and if they had been loyal to the leader, if they had been 
 faithful to the obligations upon them, had they been will- 
 ing to separate themselves from all idolatrous practice, 
 and all sins, and steadfastly pursued their march until the 
 Jordan was passed, then the Apostle's prayer for Israel 
 would have been answered, when he said, "My heart's 
 desire and prayer for Israel is that they might be saved" ; 
 and they would have been saved had they been true to 
 their responsibilities and trusts as free people. My 
 friends, I scarcely know a more disappointing history, 
 when I remember they had not gone three days' journey 
 in the great wilderness before they began to murmur and 
 to chide with Moses ; when I remember what sins they 
 fell into, what lusts debased them; when I remember, 
 that that people even made to themselves idols, and said, 
 14 
 
210 SERMONS. 
 
 "These be thy gods, O Israel"; when I remember how 
 they broke the covenant, and by breaking their most 
 sacred obligations they were arrested on their march, and 
 how that wide wilderness was sprinkled with graves, 
 graves scarred every plain, so that the track of the march 
 is marked by graves, by skeletons and bleached bones of 
 those who had fallen in the wilderness. Just as in the 
 grand march of Napoleon from Moscow, the route from 
 Russia to France was traced by the stiffened bodies of 
 French soldiers frozen in death — men who died on their 
 way to the home which they never reached — the route 
 all marked, for hundreds of miles, by the dead men, who 
 lay on the interminable plains of frost and snow. These 
 things the Apostle said were written for our admonition 
 and our warning, and they were written for this purpose, 
 my friends, to remind us that enlisting is not the way to 
 make a soldier, enlisting is the initiation step ; putting on 
 uniform is not making a soldier; going through holiday 
 drill is not making a soldier. You ask what it is that 
 makes a soldier? I answer, it is the campaign, it is the 
 march, it is the bivouac, it is the hunger, cold and thirst, 
 it is battling with the storm, it is resisting the withering 
 heat, it is the contest itself; it is the front of battle, it is 
 not the bloody front, but the centre of the storm — these 
 are the things. Let us impress the importance of making 
 a profession of religion, but let us not lay too much stress 
 on the profession itself. It is a noble thing to stand up 
 and bear our testimony that we are on the Lord's side, but 
 that is only testimony of the lips, the life has to bear 
 witness to the sincerity. And this is another significant 
 fact connected with the Passover: it is a story, a sacred 
 fragment of ecclesiastical history of especial interest to 
 us, associated from the fact of its connection with the 
 ordinance in which we have special and peculiar interest 
 
"WHAT MEAN YE BY THIS SERVICE?" 211 
 
 to-day. I need not remind you that there was no sacra- 
 ment instituted among the old Hebrews so important or 
 so impressive as the Passover ; I need not tell you it was 
 a typical shadow of the coming Christ ; it was a pictorial 
 representation of what Christ would be ; it was the great 
 type which pointed forward to the coming Messiah, which 
 should fulfil everything signified in the Passover; as, for 
 example, it was the lamb which had to be slain, and who 
 does not know that one of the favorite names sacred 
 writers give to our Lord is that gentle sacred name ? You 
 recollect, when John walked up and down the banks of 
 the Jordan, his eye was riveted by one approaching, and 
 as Christ drew near, John bore testimony, "Behold the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world !" 
 Then how often, through the various gospels and epistles, 
 and then in the Book of Revelation, we find Christ in the 
 figure of a lamb; and at last we see the throne of God 
 and of the Lamb ; and at last, when we see the company 
 of the redeemed in glory, then it is the Lamb who feeds 
 them, and leads them to those living fountains of water, 
 which satisfy thirst forever, in that place where God 
 wipes all tears from weeping eyes ; it was the Lamb, the 
 slain Lamb. And when the memorable time came in the 
 history of our Lord, when he had fulfilled the great work 
 for which he came into the world, with only the single 
 exception of what was presently to take place in Geth- 
 semane, and what thereafter took place on the cross, he 
 gathered his disciples around him, and said, "With desire 
 I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I 
 suffer." It was the last Passover that would be lawfully 
 celebrated. 
 
 Children who grew up, and had been instructed by the 
 parents knew that the Passover pointed back to their 
 deliverance from the land of bondage into the admission 
 
2i2 SERMONS. 
 
 in the Promised Land ; it pointed forward to the coming 
 of the Messiah. 
 
 So the Lord's Supper, which pointed back, and would 
 point back to the end of time to the night in which he was 
 betrayed, when he took that bread, and said, "This is my 
 body which is broken for you," also should point forward, 
 not to his coming, for he had already come, but to his 
 second coming, and this ordinance points to his second 
 coming. 
 
 I also want to call your attention to this fact, which 
 deserves more attention than is generally given it. I do 
 not know any people I pity more from my heart than those 
 people who tell me they do not care much for the Old 
 Testament; when they tell their pastor this it grieves 
 him from the heart, because he knows how much these 
 people lose. Now, as an instance of this, when the 
 Apostle says, "Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us, 
 therefore let us keep the feast," you would never have 
 understood that if it had not been for the Old Testament 
 history ; he might have used any other word — Arabic or 
 Aramaic — and it would have had as much sense. You 
 have to go back to this Old Testament history, back to 
 the book of Exodus, and read these fragments which I 
 read you this morning ; in fact, the gospel is virtually the 
 same in the New as in the Old Testament ; the New Tes- 
 tament is contained in the Old, the Old is fully explained 
 in the New. This sacramental supper, which our Lord 
 instituted, was the golden clasp which bound together the 
 old dispensation and the new; it was the bridge which 
 spanned the gulf between Malachi and Matthew; it was 
 the perpetuation of the Passover, not the abolition, as we 
 are often told. When our Lord instituted this supper, 
 you make a mistake when you say the Passover was 
 abolished; it was not abolished at all, for the Apostle 
 
"WHAT MEAN YE BY THIS SERVICE?" 213 
 
 says, "Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us, there- 
 fore let us keep the feast." It was abolished just in the 
 sense that the sapling is abolished when it grows into a. 
 magnificent oak; it was abolished just in the sense that 
 your babe is abolished when it becomes a grown man ; it 
 was abolished just as dawn was abolished when the sun 
 rose from the eastern sky; it was abolished in the sense 
 it was fulfilled and perpetuated. "Christ our Passover is 
 sacrificed for us, and therefore let us keep the feast." 
 
 And now, when your children ask you, "Father, 
 mother, what mean you by this service ?" oh ! Christian 
 parents, tell them what the Passover is, and what the 
 Lord's Supper is ; what its blessings and benefits are ; 
 how it gives young men and women, youth and children 
 courage, putting them right before God and the world. 
 No man is right until he comes out on the Lord's side. 
 Tell your children this is their great opportunity of pro- 
 fessing their faith in Christ, and declaration that they 
 believe they are among those who have been redeemed ; 
 they want to bear testimony. Christians are purchased 
 in order to dedicate themselves to his service, and spend 
 long and useful lives in serving God and their fellow-men. 
 Oh ! beloved brethren, Christ our sacrifice, our Christ, 
 invites us to-day. 
 
 It will add to the joy of a good many of these parents 
 to know they will not come alone. It may be you do not 
 have your children with you in the house to-day ; never 
 mind, they are somewhere ; and if they are God's children 
 they are bound to you by a tie stronger than that of blood 
 — the strongest ties are those that bind us first to Christ, 
 then to one another. What a spectacle is a whole family 
 united in Christian love ! Do you know any spectacle 
 more lovely than father, mother and all the children gath- 
 ered at the table of the Lord's Supper? Yes, my friends, 
 
214 SERMONS. 
 
 I can tell you of one more beautiful than that ; you may 
 be surprised to hear there is anything more beautiful than 
 that, but I am going to tell you of something : it is when, 
 at the marriage supper of the Lamb, when all of us are 
 passed through the gates into the bright paradise beyond, 
 when all the redeemed sit down at the marriage supper 
 of the Lamb, the sweetest spectacle will be witnessed 
 there when parents sit down with their children, and turn 
 to their great and glorious Lord and Saviour, and say, 
 "Here, Lord, are we and the children whom thou hast 
 given us." A family saved and communing together on 
 earth is a beautiful spectacle, but oh! a family redeemed 
 and sitting down at that festal board of heaven, over 
 which is the banner of love and peace — oh ! that is a 
 spectacle that will give the joys of heaven new thrill, and 
 the happiness of heaven's pardon a sweeter bliss. 
 
XVII. 
 HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 
 
 "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Shall I say, 
 Father, save me from this hour? No, but for this cause came I 
 unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. Then there came a 
 voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify 
 it again." — John xii. 27, 28. 
 
 WHEN what Jesus called his "hour" approached, his 
 dejection evidently increased; the sorrow that 
 had shrouded all his life deepened as he approached the 
 terminus of that life. There was no time when he did 
 not walk beneath the shadow of the cross ; it was not the 
 shadow, but that which casts the shadow — the cross 
 itself. But now he was in sight of that cross, and that 
 very week he was to die upon it. One of the last sorrows 
 which pierced him was the fact that he had come unto 
 his own, and his own received him not : he had come to 
 the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and they did not own 
 their Messiah, but rejected the great salvation which he 
 came to bring. Just as the Jewish world closed against 
 him, the Gentile world suddenly seemed to open its doors 
 to welcome him. And then came the most extraordinary 
 incident. At the very time when he was shrouded in this 
 gloom, with all the agony of the garden and of Golgotha 
 immediately before him, he had a visit from certain for- 
 eigners, who are here called "the Greeks," who came from 
 their remote homes with an ardent desire to have an 
 interview with Christ; and, as the most natural thing in 
 the world, they went to Philip to ask him to arrange for 
 
2i6 SERMONS. 
 
 an interview. And Philip went and told Andrew, and the 
 two together went with the petition of the Greeks to the 
 Lord, that they might have an opportunity of conversing 
 with him. They said, "Sirs, we would see Jesus." This 
 is a feeble translation of these words, because in the 
 original it means the most intense desire, the most reso- 
 lute resolve — that if it was possible they would see 
 Jesus. And this is what I want to fix for the moment in 
 your minds. This petition from these Greeks, which was 
 brought by the two disciples who had Greek names (and 
 the only two that had Greek names), produced a profound 
 impression upon Christ himself, and marked a new era in 
 his life, and a new era in the history of the world. He 
 came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel — primarily 
 that was his mission; but now, after this interview with 
 the Greeks, we have brought to us the universality of his 
 mission; the time was now coming when the house, the 
 holy house in whose courts they were then standing, 
 should be the house of prayer for all nations, and when 
 he would be lifted up, and the spectacle of that elevation 
 would draw all men unto him. We have now arrived at 
 that period in the history of our Lord when his mission 
 was no longer limited, but when the gates of gospel 
 grace that had stood only ajar were thrown wide open 
 to all the Gentile world. 
 
 There is a sense in which this great fact constituted an 
 "hour" in the life of our Lord — as it marked the begin- 
 ning of a new era — but this is not the sense in which he 
 used the word; his immediate reference was not to an 
 era of gladness, but of deepest gloom. It marks the time 
 when he began to taste the bitterness of what awaited 
 him when he went to Gethsemane, when he ascended the 
 cross. I 
 
 There is something very strange in this perturbation 
 
HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 217 
 
 of our Lord : the fact is, we cannot help being perturbed 
 ourselves, being affected with a strong and solemn sym- 
 pathy, when we hear Jesus say, "Now is my soul 
 troubled," when we remember that he was ordinarily so 
 calm, so unruffled, that he maintained such sweet compo- 
 sure during all the exigencies of his life. Oh ! there is 
 no trouble like soul trouble. "Now is my soul troubled, 
 and what shall I say, where shall I look?" Not to his 
 disciples, although they were ready, no doubt, to give him 
 their tenderest sympathy ; but what could their sympathy 
 do for his soul trouble? What could it do when his soul 
 was transfixed with that pang of anticipated woe? There 
 was only one thing he could do, and that was to lift his 
 eyes above the hills, even to God who made heaven and 
 earth, and find his sweetest solace in remembering that 
 God was his Father. 
 
 And now comes the question : Shall I say, Father, save 
 me from this hour? The humanity of our Lord must 
 have tempted him to offer that prayer — to offer the 
 prayer that he might be saved from the approaching 
 anguish that made his "hour" — hour memorable in the 
 world's annals. But this he could not do : it was for that 
 hour that he came into the world, and inasmuch as the 
 object of his coming would thus have been thwarted, he 
 could not ask to be delivered from the impending trial ; 
 and, therefore, he changed the tone of the prayer, and the 
 entire subject of it, and said, "Father, glorify thy name." 
 Oh! that I could make vivid to your consciousness the 
 connection between the different phrases in this text — 
 between the question he would not ask, and the prayer he 
 did offer, "Father, glorify thy name." 
 
 What is it to glorify the divine name ? I answer : In 
 the Bible a name stands for a character — a name repre- 
 sents an attribute, or a cluster — a constellation of attri- 
 
218 SERMONS. 
 
 butes — just as in secular history a name is a synonym 
 for some distinguishing characteristic. So we sometimes 
 speak of Solon, and of Solomon as synonyms of wisdom ; 
 we speak of Aristides as another name for justice; and 
 Howard, a name for philanthropy. And so we may go 
 through secular and sacred history, and find that the 
 mention of many notable names suggest the virtues ever 
 associated with them. The same thing is true with 
 regard to the divine name, and when the prayer, "Glorify 
 thy name," is offered, it means, "Make a manifestation 
 of thy character" — make such a revelation of thy being, 
 wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth as 
 to make thy name the centre of human regard ; and not 
 only attract human attention, but human affection and 
 devotion. Let the whole world see something of thine 
 infinite perfections, and so be filled with the adoration and 
 love becoming those who can appreciate what is highest, 
 purest and best in the universe. This is its meaning. 
 
 In order to impress us more deeply with the import- 
 ance of this incident, we are told that heaven gave 
 audible expression of its approval : when Christ offered 
 this prayer, there came the emphatic response, "I have 
 both glorified it, and will glorify it again." On three 
 most memorable occasions in the history of our Lord 
 heaven bore an open testimony, that the world might hear 
 and understand the sympathy that heaven had with the 
 sufferer upon earth. At the time of our Lord's baptism, 
 when that rite was concluded, we are told that there came 
 a voice from heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son, in 
 whom I am well pleased." When he stood upon the 
 Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elias, beneath 
 the overshadowing cloud, out of that cloud there came a 
 voice, saying, "This is my beloved Son ; hear ye him" — 
 and at that moment Christ was inaugurated as the 
 
HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 219 
 
 supreme teacher of the world. And now, at the period 
 he calls his "hour," when he put up this petition, "Glorify 
 thy name," again the voice resounded through the 
 heavens above him, saying, "I have both glorified it, and 
 will glorify it again." First, by the river ; then from the 
 mountain top, and then from the temple did these re- 
 sponses come. 
 
 Yes, it was the supreme hour in the history of our 
 Lord. I go a great deal further, and I say it was the 
 supreme hour in the history of the world. It was the 
 hour when all prophecy was finding its fulfilment. Those 
 of you who attended to the reading of the fifty-third 
 chapter of Isaiah remember that the sufferings of our 
 Lord were enumerated so minutely in that chapter that it 
 sounds more like history than a prediction ; indeed, the 
 faith of the prophet transported him to the distant future ; 
 that he spoke in the past tense, although seven hundred 
 years were to elapse before one of these sufferings were 
 endured: he said, "He was wounded for our transgres- 
 sions ; he was bruised for our iniquities" — his faith 
 overleaping the centuries, he spoke, not as a prophet, but 
 as a historian. All these propecies of ancient writ were 
 finding their fulfilment at this memorable hour. And 
 more than that: this hour was marking a new division 
 in the religious condition of the world; now was taking 
 place a separation between the old dispensation and the 
 new ; now the Levitical era was vanishing forever ; now 
 the gates of the gospel were opening for the entrance of 
 all nations. A little while ago it was the paschal lamb ; 
 now it is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 
 Under the old dispensation it was a smitten rock ; now it 
 is the shepherd of the sheep that is smitten. Under the 
 old dispensation it was a brazen serpent lifted up ; under 
 the gospel economy it is the Christ lifted up upon the 
 
220 SERMONS. 
 
 cross, that he might draw all men unto him. Under the 
 old dispensation it was Canaan, the land that God had 
 prepared as the home of his rescued people ; now the 
 church is to look forward to a land of which that earthly 
 Canaan was but a type, a clouded type — a land where the 
 saints of all ages meet in perfect harmony, a land which 
 shall be the home of the saved and the glorified. What a 
 change was now taking place in the religious aspect of 
 the whole world ! 
 
 Such was his "hour." He would not ask the Father 
 to save him from it, because if he had done so he would 
 have failed to save the world ; it was the hour upon which 
 the salvation of the world was depending, and therefore 
 it was that he said, "I cannot pray to be delivered from 
 this hour, but I can pray, and do, that my Father's name 
 may be glorified." Oh ! I want you to notice the infinite 
 pathos of that prayer, when you remember that the prayer 
 might not be answered except by the crucifixion of the 
 Christ that offered it. When our Lord said, "Glorify thy 
 name," it was with the full understanding of the fact 
 that that name could only be glorified by his transfixed 
 hands and feet, and by the awful weight of wrath and 
 woe that pressed down upon his innocent soul — only by 
 the darkened heaven and the shrouding of the divine face 
 that had always shed down the light of love upon him! 
 This was the price at which God's name was to be 
 glorified. 
 
 So we find that Christ took occasion at this very mo- 
 ment to give some instructions to his disciples that let in 
 a new light upon their minds, a light that continues to 
 shine for our illumination as well as theirs. He said, 
 "You take a grain of wheat and put it in a casket, or in 
 the wrappings of a mummy, and it will remain a grain of 
 wheat for a thousand years. But put it in the ground; 
 
HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 221 
 
 it dies, but in time a germ comes from it, and up comes 
 the blade, and the full corn in the ear, so that a single 
 grain of wheat produces a hundred grains, and these 
 hundred a thousand, and these thousand when sown pro- 
 duce food for men through all the cultivated, arable lands 
 of the world. Such was to be the effect of his death, and 
 therefore he said that he would be like a seed cast in the 
 ground, from which would spring the tree whose leaves 
 were for the healing of the nations — on Calvary he 
 would plant the cross upon which he would be lifted up, 
 and make it the centre of all attractive influences, and 
 draw all men unto him. 
 
 Let us see how Christ illustrated this, and confirmed 
 it by his own life : how did he teach that the glory of the 
 Father should be the chief end of men in the world? 
 He taught it by his own manifestation of the Father, his 
 own personal representation of what God was. We talk 
 about attributes, we talk about wisdom, and goodness, 
 and justice, and love; we have vague and dreamy ideas 
 of these abstract perfections. They become incarnate 
 when we see the power of the God-man over the elements, 
 the winds and waves, over diseases, and the power over 
 the dead, power over all the realm of matter and of spirit ; 
 then you have an exhibition of the divine omnipotence 
 with a new comprehension of its meaning. We talk about 
 the goodness of God, of the love of God ; but, ah ! we 
 cannot understand them until we see the Son of man 
 pardoning the penitent, healing the sick, comforting the 
 sorrowing; going about doing good, drying the tears of 
 the bereaved, speaking peace to the troubled conscience. 
 We cannot comprehend the love of God until we see the 
 Son of God offering himself a voluntary sacrifice for the 
 sins of the world, bearing the whole load of human guilt, 
 that humanity may escape the penalty. The manifestation 
 
222 SERMONS. 
 
 of the Father in the person of the Son was made known 
 when our Lord said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father." I have no doubt that some of you, in some of 
 the sculpture galleries of the world, have seen a marble 
 figure with a veil drawn over the face, and that marble 
 veil was so thin, so delicate — so exquisite was the skill 
 of the sculptor — that you could see through it the sweet 
 face beyond. In the humanity of our Lord this delicate 
 veil was so transparent that men could look through, and 
 see the perfections of the Father's glory, and the express 
 image of his person. 
 
 Christ also glorified his Father by giving the world a 
 prayer that taught that the divine glory must come before 
 everything else that can be asked for in our petitions. We 
 call it the Lord's Prayer. There is one petition in it that 
 is personal, "Give us this day our daily bread." This 
 applies to our material wants. There is another, "Forgive 
 us our trespasses" ; and these are absolutely all we are to 
 ask for ourselves in this prayer. All the rest refers to 
 God, and the glory of his name. How does it commence ? 
 "Hallowed be thy name" — that comes before the cry for 
 bread that sustains our bodies. "Thy kingdom come": 
 here we are to seek that kingdom first. You would like to 
 have your own way, but listen, "Thy will be done on 
 earth as it is in heaven ; for thine is the kingdom, and 
 thine is the power, and thine is the glory for ever and 
 ever." The Lord's Prayer is the most intense rebuke of 
 selfishness that could be made in human language? Is 
 there anywhere such a commentary on the command, 
 "Seek first the kingdom of heaven!" It begins and ends 
 with petitions for the manifestation of God's glory, and 
 everything else comes in as an incident. 
 
 Christ glorified the Father, not only by giving us this 
 model of prayer, and by teaching us how to pray in a 
 
HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 223 
 
 manner that would be agreeable and acceptable, but by 
 his death; by his atoning death he made it possible for 
 sinners to be forgiven, made it possible for unnumbered 
 souls to be brought finally to glory. 
 
 I close my sermon by saying this : I have shown you 
 how Christ manifested the Father, and the attributes of 
 the Father's glory, and now I want to say something a 
 little more personal and practical. I want to know what 
 the specific instruction is to you, individually, and what 
 concern you have this day, this moment, in the text upon 
 which I am preaching. I want to say that ofttimes our 
 prayers are intensely selfish, as we ask God to bless us 
 and those of our household. All that is right, as far as it 
 goes, and in all good prayers these petitions may appro- 
 priately come ; but it is a very poor prayer that begins 
 for ourselves, and never goes beyond the four walls in 
 which our family resides. Our prayers for the church 
 are ofttimes very selfish. People pray for the extension 
 of God's kingdom: there are a great many so full of 
 sectarian pride that that means only that God will bless 
 the denomination to which they belong; some have the 
 mistaken idea that they are praying for Christ's kingdom, 
 when it is only a sectarian zeal, a denominational passion 
 with them ; it is a very selfish prayer, because it does not 
 take in all the true, invisible church for which Christ died, 
 and which he means to save. This text comes as a sort of 
 check, to teach us that we must not limit our petitions to 
 ourselves or those nearest to us, but must go beyond the 
 pale of the denomination to which we belong, and take in 
 all true Christians. 
 
 "Father, glorify thy name" — and only thine. In the 
 day in which we live we are constantly impressed with 
 the fact that the great fortunes that men accumulate oft- 
 times are dissipated just as rapidly, or even more so, that 
 
224 SERMONS. 
 
 they are acquired, under the commercial distress that 
 prevails throughout the world. And there never was a 
 time when men took the loss of fortune so much to heart 
 as now. One of the most extraordinary things is that 
 there are more suicides now for the loss of money than 
 ever known since the world began. You read an account 
 of a suicide, and then the narrative says, "He was very 
 much embarrassed in his business affairs." There have 
 been a hundred illustrations of it since this year began, 
 although we are so early in it. Now when a man is 
 threatened with the loss of property, he is threatened with 
 something very serious. It is very serious ; but the first 
 thought of a Christian man ought to be, "Did I desire 
 this simply to get out of it of my own pleasure, or as a 
 trustee for him who gave it to me? Not only for the 
 support of those depending upon me, and the gratification 
 of my lawful wishes, but as an agent for humanity, to 
 instruct the ignorant, to enlighten the darkened, to bring 
 back the lost to the great salvation." The great prayer 
 ought to be, "Father, so order this, and bring to a con- 
 clusion all the perplexing issues of life that my soul may 
 be benefited, and thy name glorified." 
 
 Sometimes a man is in danger of suffering a prodig- 
 ious amount of loss of standing by or espousing some 
 unpopular cause, something that other people repudiate, 
 a principle that he believes to be vital to humanity, and it 
 requires true courage for a man to stand alone in the 
 defence of what he believes to be right. Devotion to 
 honor and principle is something that God himself in- 
 spires in human souls, and there is nothing that God 
 gives men more honorable than this devotion to truth, 
 and there are no more noble men than those that stand 
 unflinchingly for the truth and the right. When a man 
 is put in such a position, the great question is, "Is this 
 
HIS HOUR AND HIS PRAYER. 225 
 
 right in the sight of God? Am I standing upon the 
 ground I ought to occupy? Father, so help me through 
 this crisis, make me so true, and brave, and so careful of 
 consequences, that I may glorify thy name." That is 
 what every true reformer did, what Luther did when he 
 was before the Diet. When he was commanded to recant, 
 he said, "Here I stand, God help me; I cannot stand 
 anywhere else." It was the courage of Knox, and of all 
 the great reformers : they maintained the cause of truth, 
 and, heedless of the world, prayed, "Glorify thy name." 
 That was the spirit of all the martyrs : they were willing 
 to go through fire rather than recant, and their supreme 
 wish was demonstrated upon the scaffold and amidst 
 flaming tongues of fire, "Glorify thy name ; and may I be 
 so loyal to the truth as never to be ashamed of it." 
 
 There is another way in which we may glorify his 
 name. Ah ! me, I will tell you when it is hard to say, 
 "Thy will be done." It is when we are standing by the 
 bedside of some sufferer dear to us, for whom we would 
 willingly lay down our life, and when we see life slowly 
 ebbing away. "O Father, save me from this hour; any- 
 thing but this !" I do not say it is wrong to offer that 
 prayer, to ask the God who gave us love to spare the 
 loved one's life. He may not answer our prayer, because 
 his will is always better than ours, and his love greater 
 than ours. But never, never in the world do we so much 
 glorify our Father's name as when in circumstances like 
 these we say, "Thy will be done. Father, glorify thy 
 name." I feel like I was standing on very thin ice — on 
 holy ground — because if I ask myself the question if 
 one dearest to me in all the world was slowly wasting 
 away by some necessarily mortal disease, would I be able 
 to say, "Father, glorify thy name," without saying, "Fa- 
 ther, spare me" ! I do not know ; I can only pray he 
 IS 
 
226 SERMONS. 
 
 would give me grace in that exigency. But this I do 
 know, that we never glorify God more than when we say, 
 "We do not know whether it is best for this loved one to 
 live or die, but in either case, Father, glorify thy name." 
 These are some of the lessons of this most impressive, 
 instructive portion of Scripture to which I have called 
 your attention this morning. 
 
XVIII. 
 HIS HANDS AND HIS SIDE. 
 
 "He showed them his hands and his side." — John xx. 20. 
 
 TWO of the Evangelists describe this manifestation 
 of our Lord, this peculiar form of manifestation 
 when he showed to his disciples his hands and his side. 
 We find one of these accounts in the Gospel of Luke, in 
 which we are told that on the evening of the day of the 
 resurrection, when the disciples were all gathered together 
 in very great trepidation, and in very great apprehension 
 of what might befall them, that two of the number who 
 had walked that afternoon to Emmaus had been joined on 
 their walk by Jesus, that he had conversed with them, 
 and opened their understandings to comprehend the 
 prophecies of Scripture with regard to him, and that just 
 as they recognized him he vanished out of their sight. 
 What a parable that is of what has been happening ever 
 since — that just as we learn how dear our friends are 
 and how necessary to us, we lose them. Just as we have 
 attained the wisdom which long experience gives, we die, 
 and the world loses the benefit of all the lessons we might 
 give. Just as we learn to appreciate any great privilege, 
 in the act of recognizing its value and its sweetness, it 
 passes away. He vanished out of their sight, but the 
 wondering disciples, filled with the happy tidings which 
 they had to communicate, came to where their brethren 
 were gathered together, and told them that Jesus had 
 appeared to them bv the way : and while they were speak- 
 ing, Christ himself suddenly appeared in the centre of 
 
228 SERMONS. 
 
 the group, and said, "Peace be unto you." Notwith- 
 standing that tranquilizing benediction, they were af- 
 frighted, and thought they saw a spirit. Then we are 
 told that our Lord showed them his hands and his feet, 
 and said, "Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh 
 and bones as ye see me have." This was his demonstra- 
 tion of his true humanity. This was the demonstration 
 given to the world by the incarnate God, that he had a 
 true body as well as a reasonable soul: that he was not 
 only the Son of God with power, but that he was the Son 
 of man, and that he took upon him our humility for the 
 purpose of doing what Deity pure and simple could not 
 do — the Spirit could not bleed and die upon the cross. 
 Therefore, our Lord took upon him our flesh that he 
 might make himself one with us, that he might be identi- 
 fied with us, that we might be brought nearer to him by 
 the ties of sympathy, that he might feel with us and for 
 us, that he might suffer for us, that he might die for us. 
 He assumed our humanity to show what that humanity 
 was before sin tainted it, and to recall to the world what 
 redeemed humanity was to be when Christ should glorify 
 it, and when glory should ennoble it. 
 
 One of the great essential doctrines of religion is the 
 doctrine of the incarnation. I need not tell you that this 
 doctrine is not peculiar to Christianity alone. All re- 
 ligions have had something of the kind, but no incarna- 
 tion that could be subjected to the test of experiment, no 
 incarnation that could be determined by the demonstration 
 of those that could see and hear and touch. The classic 
 republics of old, in their beautiful mythologies, told us of 
 deities that assumed human form, but no Olympian Jove 
 ever sat upon a mountain side with twelve disciples about 
 him ; no beautiful Apollo ever walked through the coun- 
 try or through the streets of crowded cities followed by 
 
HIS HANDS AND HIS SIDE. 229 
 
 those who sought instruction from his lips ; no wise 
 Minerva was ever surrounded by those who watched her 
 beautiful life or who tried to pattern after the model 
 which she gave them of truth and goodness. None of 
 these mythological deities was ever seen by disciples that 
 professed to worship them, and none of the worshippers 
 of the deities to whom I have referred ever pretended 
 that they had held any converse with them, or that any 
 one of them was betrayed by a Judas and crucified on a 
 cross. Therein the incarnation of Christ stands single 
 and alone in its mournful and adorable beauty. Christ is 
 the Christ of history. His incarnation is one taken away 
 from the great domain of fiction, and transferred to the 
 great realm of fact. It is contrary to all that we would 
 have anticipated : that one whose life was so lonely as 
 that of Christ, that one whose nation and race was so 
 abhorred of the world, that he was rejected of that very 
 nation, rejected by his own people, and put to an igno- 
 minious death. It is truly contrary to all that the world 
 ever would have imagined in the sphere of possibility ; 
 that his should have been an influence that ultimately 
 pervaded the world, and that he who was elevated upon 
 the cross should attract more human eyes, and draw to 
 him more human hearts than all the kings and sages that 
 ever have taught or tried to bless mankind. If you will 
 take the trouble to look over the map of Europe, you 
 cannot find a nation whose people do not regard the cross 
 as the emblem of what is greatest and purest and best. 
 Even among those nations which are most thickly over- 
 laid, overcrusted with superstition, and where the falsest 
 forms of religion prevail, still you will hardly find a 
 citizen of one of these countries that would not be 
 offended if you were to tell him that he did not care for 
 the cross, that he did not belong to a Christian nation. 
 
2 3 o SERMONS. 
 
 But there is a narrow circle within that wide, outlying- 
 circle of those who owe a fealty and an allegiance to 
 Christ, whose strength cannot be surpassed by any of the 
 bonds that unite human beings here upon earth, be the 
 ties what they may. Christ died eighteen hundred years 
 ago, and yet the memory of that self-sacrifice is so fresh 
 that if it had happened yesterday human hearts would 
 hardly be more moved by it than they are at present. If 
 you want the demonstration of that, I have it. I have it 
 in the fact that there are millions of men and women 
 to-day who would go to the stake, and die a death of 
 torture before they would renounce their allegiance to 
 Christ, or deny the Lord that bought them. I do not care 
 to argue when I have an overwhelming fact like that to 
 defend. 
 
 The other occasion upon which our Lord manifested 
 himself similarly was on the evening of the resurrection, 
 as related in the Gospel of John, when the disciples were 
 all gathered together, except one, and that was Thomas. 
 It was a most unfortunate thing for Thomas that he was 
 absent. I heard the venerable president of one of our 
 colleges say that when he was a young man he made a 
 resolution, and that was never to omit one of the ap- 
 pointed services of the church lest he might miss some- 
 thing that day upon which his salvation might turn. I 
 know that there is a day when most people hear the ser- 
 mon that God blesses to their conversion, and it would be 
 a sad thing for one to be absent at a time when, if he had 
 been present and listened to the appeal from the Word of 
 God, made effectual by the Spirit of God, he might have 
 been converted. Oh ! sad for that man to be away without 
 reason. Thomas had a week of darkness, of perplexity 
 and unbelief and unhappiness in consequence of his ab- 
 sence. If he had been present, he would have met the 
 
HIS HANDS AND HIS SIDE. 231 
 
 Lord. He missed the chance of meeting with the risen 
 Christ, and when those days passed, and the disciples 
 were gathered together again, and when they told Thomas 
 of what had happened, he said, "Except I see I will not 
 believe. Unless I put my finger in the print of the nails, 
 unless I put my hand into his side I will not believe." 
 And with the most wonderful pity and patience and con- 
 descension, our Lord told Thomas that if he chose he 
 could subject him to the test. "Reach hither thy finger, 
 and touch that wound. Thrust thy hand into my side, 
 and be not faithless, but believing." I do not believe that 
 Thomas had the hardihood to subject his Lord to that 
 rude test, but I think that when the Lord showed Thomas 
 his hands and his side, that Thomas was overcome, and 
 cried out, with a rapture of faith, "My Lord and my 
 God." 
 
 I do not believe that if men had invented the Bible, 
 and had invented the history of our Lord's life upon 
 earth, that they would have represented him, after his 
 resurrection, as coming back to the world in a mutilated 
 form, and bearing upon his body those scars that seemed 
 to deform him, and at least to remind people of his humil- 
 iation and sad death upon the cross. Men would never 
 have portrayed such a spiritual hero as Christ in that 
 form. They would have said, "Oh ! no, whatever he 
 might have endured during his ministry upon earth, after 
 he went through the ordeal of death, came back from the 
 world of spirits, and reappeared once more among men 
 before he went up to his heaven, let us efface every mark 
 of that humiliation that would remind men of his de- 
 grading death upon Calvary." Not so; our Lord took 
 pains to show his hands and his side. And what do I 
 understand, my friends, by that exhibition that Christ 
 made of himself? I understand, among other things, this, 
 
232 SERMONS. 
 
 that when our Lord came back from the eternal world 
 where he had for a short time gone, while his body was 
 lying in the cold tomb, he came back with precisely the 
 affections in his heart that he had before he died upon the 
 cross. If one of your friends were to come back from 
 heaven, and sojourn with you here upon earth, and you 
 knew he was coming, would you not be very doubtful as 
 to how you could entertain him ? Would you not be very 
 doubtful as to what he would find in your house or in 
 your conversation or in your life that would interest him, 
 who had come down from excellent glory? Would you 
 not be filled with wonderful perplexity to know how such 
 a guest should be entertained? Oh! such changes must 
 have taken place in all his views, in all his feelings about 
 things that he can not now be interested any more in the 
 affairs of this life ! But when Christ came back he 
 showed his hands and his side to remind the people that 
 he was the same suffering Saviour that he was before he 
 went down into the garden, and before he went up to the 
 cross, and that he had not been changed at all by the 
 dread experience through which he had passed — that 
 awful experience which one has when his soul goes be- 
 yond the veil, and knows what is there. He came back 
 and showed them his hands and his side. Thus we learn, 
 my friends, that we have an unchanging Saviour ; that he 
 is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. One of the 
 most delightful truths that we can know about Christ is 
 this, that he not only brought back and manifested the 
 scars and the wounds that he received in his conflict, but 
 that he went to heaven in the same body; and we are 
 told that he appears there among the heavenly worship- 
 pers as the Lamb that had been slain, still bearing the 
 marks of the slaughter upon him. What does this teach 
 us? It teaches us this, that Christ's death, so far from 
 
HIS HANDS AND HIS SIDE. 233 
 
 being the end of his career, was only the beginning of it. 
 When you die, your career is stopped. When they put 
 you down in the grave and cover you up, you are done ; 
 but, my friends, Christ's history only began with his 
 death. By his death he only entered upon a new sphere, 
 and a new department of service. St. Luke said, when 
 he began to write the Acts of the Apostles, "The former 
 treatise have I written unto you of all that Jesus began to 
 do and to teach," and that was what he recorded in his 
 gospel ; now he goes on to write the Acts of the Apostles, 
 to tell what Jesus was still doing. We call his book the 
 ''Acts of the Apostles, and that will do for a name until 
 you get a better one ; but it is not the acts of the apostles, 
 it is the acts of Christ through the apostles, Christ work- 
 ing for the establishment and extension of his church 
 through the world, and having his appointed ministers 
 ordained for that purpose. And when we remember that 
 Christ, even in glory, wears the same body which was 
 crucified, and that upon that sacred body there are the 
 marks of the wounds in the hands and in the side, what 
 do we learn? We learn the precious doctrine of his 
 eternal intercession. It is not necessary for Christ to 
 make vocal intercession. Sometimes prayer unspoken is 
 the most powerful and prevailing. Every wound speaks 
 of his love, and every wound appeals to the Father in 
 behalf of those still here upon earth. 
 
 "Five bleeding wounds he bears; 
 They strongly plead for me. 
 'Forgive ! forgive !' they ever cry, 
 'Nor let the ransomed sinner die.' ' 
 
 The fact that Christ came back after his resurrection 
 with the wounds in his hands and in his side, and that he 
 went up to heaven carrying the same wounds, is proof of 
 
234 SERMONS. 
 
 one of the greatest truths, that we have an unchanging 
 Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and (blessed be his 
 name ! ) the same forever. 
 
 The fact that Christ showed his hands and his side 
 also teaches us another great truth. It teaches us how 
 much importance he attached to his redeeming work. I 
 pause just a second, until you get that idea into your 
 minds. I want you to take the point and see it. I say, 
 the fact that Christ took pains to exhibit his wounds 
 shows what an importance he attaches to the redemption 
 that he purchased for man by his precious blood. It 
 shows that what Christ valued was not only his instruc- 
 tions, valuable as they were; not only his miracles, stu- 
 pendous as they were; not only his beautiful life, lovely 
 as it was ; not only these, but that he regarded his death 
 as the great fact of the world's history, and the atone- 
 ment the central doctrine of the world's faith. He shows 
 his hands and his feet and his side in order, in the last 
 place, that in contemplating this sacrifice, in looking upon 
 this reminder of how our salvation was purchased, we 
 might have our gratitude awakened, our affections 
 sweetly drawn out toward him, and that we might love 
 him in return for a love that cost him so much. 
 
 He showed them his hands, the very hands that the 
 mothers wanted him to put upon their babes. "They 
 brought young children unto him that he should touch 
 them." I love to see the children in the church, seated 
 by their parents and listening to the sermon, and it is a 
 singular fact that children oftentimes listen as well as 
 their parents. They brought young children to Christ 
 that he should put his hands upon them, those hands of 
 Christ that were afterwards pierced. Every mother said, 
 "If the dear Lord would lay his hand upon my Rachel, 
 upon my Ruth, if he would only lay his hand upon her 
 
HIS HANDS AND HIS SIDE. 235 
 
 head, would not the gentle pressure of that hand be felt 
 by her in all her days?" Never does our Lord seem so 
 lovely as when he permits the children to clamber up in 
 his lap, and when he takes them in his arms, and presses 
 the dear little ones to his heart. These are the hands that 
 were pierced; the hands that broke the loaves and dis- 
 tributed them to the fainting multitude; the hand that 
 reached down and grasped the dead hand of the little 
 daughter of the ruler, and raised her up, and restored her 
 to her father's love ; the hand that he laid upon the bier 
 and stopped it, when they were carrying the young man 
 to his burial, and when the widow of Nain, his broken- 
 hearted mother, was walking next to the bier the chief 
 mourner. This was the hand that was pierced, the hand 
 that was lifted up in benediction the last time the disciples 
 saw him, when the cloud was about to receive him out of 
 sight. When he shows us those hands, my friends, they 
 tell their own story, and there is a pathos in the appeal 
 which those silent wounds make. 
 
 He showed them his feet. Do you think there was a 
 square acre in Palestine over which those feet, oftentimes 
 in weariness, did not walk? He showed them his side, 
 just under which beat that loving heart so full of sym- 
 pathy that made him weep with the sisters when they 
 stood at the grave of Lazarus, that made him mourn over 
 ill-fated Jerusalem when he cried, "O that thou hadst 
 known in this thy day the things that belong to thy peace, 
 but now they are hid from thine eyes." Oh ! my friends, 
 this is the appeal of Christ when he shows his hands and 
 his feet. That is the appeal he is making to us. Were 
 you here the other day, when I preached on the text, 
 ''Behold, I stand at the door and knock," in which I rep- 
 resented Christ as going around and knocking at every 
 door ; that is, at every avenue by which any entrance can 
 
236 SERMONS. 
 
 be obtained into the human heart, whether the intellectual 
 avenue, the emotional avenue, at the door of memory, at 
 the door of hope, at the door of gratitude? "Behold, I 
 stand at the door and knock." My friends, that which is 
 strange to me is that you are not more affected when 
 Christ knocks there with a bleeding hand. That Christ 
 should come and knock at the door of your heart with a 
 bleeding hand, and knock so long, and be so patient with 
 you, until you have reached the meridian of life, and are 
 upon the downward slope, oh ! wonderful patience ! He 
 stands with melting heart and bleeding hands, and says, 
 "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." This is ex- 
 hibited to us in a most impressive way in the sacramental 
 service. There, if anywhere, our Lord re-enacts the scene 
 that was witnessed by the disciples in Jerusalem. Take 
 away that linen cloth, and what do you see ? The broken 
 bread that reminds you of the broken body. The wine 
 poured out reminds you of the crimson flow of his blood. 
 There his body on the tree ! What an appeal this makes to 
 Christian love ! Oh ! doubting, trembling believer, reach 
 out the hand of faith, and touch that wounded side. 
 Stretch forth thy finger, and put it in the print of the 
 nails, and say — 
 
 "Jesus, thy feast we celebrate, 
 
 We show thy death, we sing thy name 
 Till thou return, and we shall eat 
 The marriage supper of the Lamb." 
 
XIX. 
 
 "TEACH US TO PRAY." 
 
 "It came to pass that as he was praying in a certain place 
 alone on the seaside, one of his disciples came unto him, and said, 
 Lord, teach us to pray." — Luke xi. I. 
 
 IN preferring that request, the disciple unconsciously 
 uttered a prayer, in the very act of asking to be taught 
 to pray. The petition was an expression of ignorance 
 needing instruction, of weakness needing help ; and so, 
 in their conscious infirmity and need of divine direction 
 and uplifting, they said, "Lord, teach us to pray." We 
 are not by any means to infer from this that the disciples 
 were not in the habit of prayer, or that this was the first 
 time when they approached the Lord with a petition. 
 Most of them had been familiar all their lives with the 
 Jewish forms of prayer, and no doubt had oftentimes 
 made devout use of them; but now something had just 
 occurred which gave them a new conception of what 
 prayer was. Our Lord, in accordance with his custom, 
 having retired to a solitary place, was himself engaged 
 in prayer. L'nintentionally, perhaps, his disciples ap- 
 proached the place and overheard the petition which their 
 Lord was offering. As they listened a new Lght broke 
 in upon their minds ; a new conception seized them as to 
 what prayer might be, for as Jesus prayed with upturned 
 face, we may well imagine that he seemed to his wonder- 
 ing disciples to be looking directly through heaven's gates 
 upon the very face of the throne, and as, with confident 
 step, he seemed to ascend the golden way that led to that 
 
238 SERMONS. g 
 
 throne, and his heart glowed with new fervor and his 
 face with new brightness as he approached tht excellent 
 glory ; — so deeply affected were they by what they had 
 been the involuntary hearers of, and by what they had 
 unexpectedly witnessed, that, dissatisfied with th ir own 
 prayers, they came to him and preferred the petition in 
 the text, "Lord, teach us to pray." 
 
 It is well for us, my friends, to have the scriptural ideal 
 of what prayer may be. It would be well for us if we 
 studied more than we do the scriptural modes of suc- 
 cessful prayer. Oh ! how much we could have learned 
 had 'we been permitted to overhear the petition which 
 the oatriarch offered on that memorable night when he 
 wrestled until the dawn of day with the traveller un- 
 known ; wrestled with an importunity which found ex- 
 pression in 'words like these, "I will not let thee go until 
 thou bless me." How much we could have learned if we 
 had listened to the prayer that Elijah offered when, in 
 answer to his supplication, heaven was shut so that there 
 was no rain upon the earth, and when, in answer to his 
 appeal, heaven opened and the showers descended upon 
 the thirsty ground. What instruction we might receive 
 could we have heard the prayer of Daniel on that memora- 
 ble night which you have been so lately considering in 
 your International Sunday-School lessons, when, cast by 
 the king into the den of lions, he was serene, unruffled 
 and filled with peace, while the king that had ordered 
 him to be placed there tossed from side to side with a 
 guilty* conscience all night long, brooding over the wrong 
 that he had done to God's dear servant. If we could only 
 have heard the prayers which that man in such peril 
 offered, the prayers that brought him unutterable, inef- 
 fable peace ; or if we could have overheard David, when, 
 with a broken heart, he cried out in his anguish and made 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 239 
 
 his penitent confession, and then uttered his fervent sup- 
 plications as they are all recorded in the Fifty-first Psalm ; 
 or if we could have overheard the prayers which the 
 Apostle in the dungeon offered when he was ready for 
 the great change which he knew was just at hand, and 
 when, having fought the good fisrht and finished his work, 
 there was nothing more for him to do but to receive his 
 crown. But more memorable than any, more memorable 
 than all these, was the prayer which the disciples had 
 just heard, and which prompted them to come to Jesus 
 and say, "Lord, teach us to pray." My friends, I think 
 this is a very good petition for every one of us to adopt 
 individually. We misrht very well make this the preface, 
 the prelude, to all of our prayers. It would be a very 
 proper prelude to those prayers which we offer in private, 
 in secret, for sometimes our thouehts are verv wandering; 
 sometimes our affections are all dull and dead, and we 
 need the inspiration, we need the uplifting that can come 
 onlv from heaven. We should then stir up the eift that 
 is in us by commencing our prayers with a petition like 
 this. "Lord, teach me at this very moment of my solemn 
 approach, teach me how to pray." So, too, it would be 
 very well for each member of the family silently to offer 
 this petition just as the household gathers for family wor- 
 ship, to say, "Lord, teach my father (or my mother, as 
 the case may be) to lead us in the devotions of this morn- 
 ing;" or, if not that, to say, "O teach us how to follow 
 as we are led!" How well it would be, as we gather as 
 a larger household, as one family in Christ Jesus, in our 
 worship on the Sabbath day, if each one of us would 
 say, "Touch the lips of thy ministering servant, O Lord, 
 and anoint him with the heavenly unction, and may we 
 all remember that his prayer is our prayer, and that when 
 he is giving vocal utterance to these petitions he is only 
 
240 SERMONS. 
 
 giving expression to our own desires. Lord, teach pastor 
 and people together so to pray as to bring down divine 
 benedictions this day." 
 
 Now, the question naturally occurs, How is it that 
 Christ teaches us to pray ? How does he fulfil his petition 
 and answer it? In the first place, we are taught when 
 we consider prayer as a custom consecrated by his own 
 example; in the second place, by the encouragement it 
 affords to those that seek God's face and favor; in the 
 third place, by revealing what is the source and secret 
 of all successful and acceptable prayer, viz., the example. 
 Second, where do you want sweeter encouragement than 
 you find in the verses which succeed this text, when our 
 Lord reminds us that we have a Father in heaven whose 
 care and sympathy for his children exceeds that of any 
 earthly parent? "If ye know how to give good gifts to 
 your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father 
 give the Holy Spirit to them that ask?" Do you not 
 know that when that great ascension gift is granted you 
 may be sure you will be taught to pray for things that 
 you ought to ask for, and in a manner, too, which will 
 be acceptable to God? Third, the foundation, "What- 
 soever you ask in my name," etc. 
 
 Now, let us revert for a moment to the circumstances 
 which preceded this request on the part of the disciples. 
 What was it that led them to come to Christ with this 
 petition? They had overheard, as I have reminded you, 
 the prayer which Jesus offered in what was, at the begin- 
 ning, a solitude, when he was alone, and yet filled with 
 heavenly company, until his disciples came, uninvited and 
 unexpectedly, to the place. There are two great truths 
 set forth with equal clearness with regard to our Saviour 
 in the Holy Scriptures. One is the fact of his deity, and 
 the other is the fact of his humanity. It would be very 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 241 
 
 difficult to tell which was demonstrated most clearly. If 
 we considered only his divinity, we might conclude that 
 prayer was unnecessary for him, at least. That Christ 
 was God was evident from the superhuman works that 
 he wrought, from the stupendous miracles that testified 
 to his omnipotence, as when he controlled nature's great 
 forces, rebuking the winds and waves and converting a 
 storm into a calm ; or, as when he asserted his power 
 over all diseases and healed them by a word or by a 
 touch ; or, as when he demonstrated his authority over 
 the invisible world, so that devils cried out in his presence, 
 "Art thou come to torment us before our time?" or, when 
 he manifested his power in raising the dead from their 
 tombs ; and, lastly, by rising himself on the third auspi- 
 cious day, and coming forth to give benediction to his 
 disciples. But if these things testify to the deity of Christ, 
 we have also equal evidence of his humanity in the fact 
 that his bodily wants and infirmities were similar to those 
 that we possess in the fact that after he had taken a long 
 summer journey, he sat wearied at the well as he talked 
 with the Samaritan woman ; in the fact that he, too, was 
 thirsty and needed food and drink; in the fact, too, that 
 he shed tears. If there is anything that indicates the true 
 humanity of our Lord it is when we see him lifting up 
 his eyes to heaven, and sighing out a petition from the 
 sadness of his heart, just as he was about to heal the poor, 
 infirm man, not only because of his pity for an individual 
 sufferer, but because he looked upon that man as a type 
 of thousands and hundreds of thousands of sufferers in 
 the world ; or when he said to the sisters of Lazarus, 
 "Where have ye laid him?" and sought that natural relief 
 that so many have felt in going to the grave to weep 
 there ; and when he was so moved with sympathy that 
 the Jews who looked upon him said, "Behold, how he 
 16 
 
242 SERMONS. 
 
 loved him ;" and when the Evangelist put on record that 
 shortest and tenderest verse in all the Bible, "Jesus wept." 
 But, my friends, not only are these the proofs of the 
 humanity of our Lord, but we also* have another demon- 
 stration in the fact that our Lord himself was dependent 
 upon prayer ; that he derived from it strength and conso- 
 lation, and was so like us in these respects that he was 
 not ashamed to call us "brethren," for though he was a 
 Son, he learned obedience by the things that he suffered. 
 And what first arrests our attention is the fact that, 
 although Jesus was the sinless One, still that did not 
 render him independent of prayer. Christ had no con- 
 fessions to make, no petitions for pardon to offer; and 
 yet who prayed so fervently, and yet who prayed so fre- 
 quently, who prayed so earnestly, whose prayers were 
 more protracted than the prayers of him who rose on 
 one occasion a great while before day to pray? He had 
 no occasion to enter into his closet, for the hilltop was 
 the closet then, and darkness shut the door that shut him 
 in. We are told that all night he continued in prayer. 
 This was the history of the devotional life of the abso- 
 lutely sinless One. And yet our Lord needed the support 
 that prayer gives. In his hours of overwhelming sorrow 
 he needed the sympathy that Heaven bestows, and we 
 see that true manhood of Christ exhibited in the fact that 
 he sought solitude and comfort and encouragement and 
 strength in his prayers. The loftiest sainthood does not 
 exempt one from sorrow, neither does it exempt one from 
 the necessity of that strength which the sorrower only 
 finds when he can approach acceptably the throne of the 
 heavenly grace. There are some souls that tower above 
 others even as mountains tower above the plain, but it 
 is around the mountain tops that storms most frequently 
 gather, and their lightnings flash and their thunders break. 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 243 
 
 So it was with Christ ; though he came nearest the throne 
 of any one who ever stood upon earth, yet his title was 
 "Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief." 
 
 Now, we learn that no life is so holy as to exempt the 
 saintly man from the necessity of special times and special 
 places for prayer — times and places both. I heard one 
 say that he had arrived at such a stage of spiritual devel- 
 opment that he did not need to offer special prayers. He 
 did not need, he said, to offer vocal prayers ; that his 
 whole life was a prayer. He lived in perpetual com- 
 munion with God, and he needed not, therefore, to utter 
 any verbal petition, and needed not to have any set time 
 for prayer. My friends, it was not so with Christ; and 
 if you wish to condemn, or correct rather than condemn, 
 this sad mistake of one who so little comprehends him- 
 self as to think himself advanced beyond and above the 
 necessity of prayer, you have only to point him to the 
 example of the sinless One, who had his places and his 
 times for silent, lonely, earnest prayer. I believe that 
 one's piety may be so developed that the Christian life 
 flows on like some wide, deep, peaceful river to the sea ; 
 but, oh ! my friends, it is from fountains in the hills, the 
 unfailing springs, tributaries gather that form the wide 
 and placid river ; and if ever a life becomes saintly, it 
 was because the beginnings of that growth in all that is 
 good began in communion with God, and because of the 
 grace which God gave the seeker in answer to his verbal 
 prayers. 
 
 In the New Testament there are eighteen references to 
 Christ's prayers, eighteen references to or quotations from 
 his prayers ; and if we take the eighteen and divide them 
 into groups, you will find that each group teaches a dif- 
 ferent lesson. For instance, one of the groups instructs 
 us as to the length of Christ's prayers; that sometimes 
 
244 SERMONS. 
 
 they were very protracted. There is another group from 
 which we learn that it was his custom to mingle thanks- 
 giving with his prayers. Another group teaches us that 
 it was his custom, while he prayed for himself, to make 
 intercession for others, and so he prayed for his friends, 
 and he prayed for his enemies, and he prayed for his 
 disciples. He prayed as a man : he prayed as a Mediator. 
 He prayed often, he prayed earnestly, and he prayed long. 
 And now, for the sake of more distinct impression, I wish 
 to refer you, to refresh your recollection, to the special 
 occasions that Christ made the times of special prayer. 
 
 First. Christ always began or accompanied and fol- 
 lowed his labors with prayers. The toiling Christ ! Oh ! 
 how little conception the ordinary reader has of the biog- 
 raphies of our Lord as given by the evangelists ; how 
 small the conception of the life of labor, of protracted and 
 lasting toil of our Lord. I wish I had time this morning 
 to take up the history of one single day, recorded by one 
 of the evangelists, to give you some conception of how 
 our Lord spent his days — his days of toil. Well, we find 
 that when such a day was about to approach, he either 
 arose early in the morning, and sought the strength which 
 he might need for the duties of the day; or, when the 
 toils of the day were over, he separated himself from 
 his disciples, and oftentimes with great difficulty, in order 
 that he might retire to some secret place, and there refresh 
 his soul and find his rest through communion with the 
 Father. My friends, let us see to it that we never sepa- 
 rate work and worship. The reason why so much of 
 our Christian work is ineffectual, the reason why it is 
 not crowned with happier results, is that we undertake 
 it with so much self-confidence, and so much reliance upon 
 our ability, without remembering at all that our suffi- 
 ciency is of the Lord, and his blessing alone makes our 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 245 
 
 labor efficient. Oh ! that every pastor could remember 
 this ; that every head of every household could remember 
 this; that every teacher of a Bible class in a Sunday- 
 school could remember this ; that every parent would 
 remember this ; that every business man would remember 
 this. When consecrated by prayer, business may be made 
 an instrument by which the soul shall be trained for a 
 higher and nobler sphere. Christ accompanied all the 
 work of his life with prayer, and his is the great example 
 that we have to follow. 
 
 Second. I remark, again, that when he was about to 
 enter upon a new era in his public life, he inaugurated 
 it by prayer. We have one illustration of this : at the 
 time when he called his disciples, Christ could have car- 
 ried on his own work in the world alone had he chosen, 
 without the aid or intervention of men; but it pleased 
 him to summon to the work of laying the foundation of 
 the earthly church and of giving extension to the kingdom 
 which he inaugurated — it pleased him to call twelve 
 men to that sacred office ; and before he summoned them 
 to their work, he preceded that act upon which the whole 
 future of the church was so much dependent, and upon 
 which the propagation of his gospel throughout the world 
 depended — he inaugurated that work first by solemn 
 prayer. He prayed, and then he called the men who were 
 to be co-workers with him in the establishment of his 
 kingdom in the world, (Luke vi. 12, 13.) 
 
 Third. And so we find that when our Lord entered 
 upon his own public ministry, before he went into the 
 next towns, as he expressed it, to preach the gospel of 
 the kingdom, he first offered prayer before he became the 
 preacher of his own gospel in the world. (Mark i. 35-39.) 
 We are taught, my friends, that when we are about to 
 make a change in our own lives, or when any change is 
 
246 SERMONS. 
 
 about to occur in our own households, that ought to be a 
 time of special prayer. When you move into another resi- 
 dence, the man who builds a house and furnishes it, and 
 takes wife, children and domestics into it, ought to con- 
 secrate that house by prayer just as we consecrate our 
 churches when they are finished, and when we are ready 
 to offer them for the service of the Almighty. It is a 
 beautiful custom, when we move to a new residence, or 
 when we have a new home, to begin our domestic life 
 with a domestic altar, and ask, with united hearts, that 
 God will bless those who inhabit that place and dwell 
 beneath that roof, and to overrule all the changes, of joy 
 and sorrow, and all the vicissitudes of family life to which 
 we are subject, by his good Spirit. 
 
 Prayer is the best preparation for impending events, 
 and for all the changes that take place among friends, 
 and all the separation that take place in families; and so 
 Matthew Henry quaintly says, whenever friends are about 
 to part they ought to pray that God's blessing may be 
 upon them while they are separated, and that it may please 
 God to bring them together with hearts grateful for his 
 providential and gracious goodness during the separation ; 
 or, if they never meet on earth, they ought to pray at 
 parting that they may meet in the place where there are 
 no separations. 
 
 Fourth. In the next place, we notice that our Lord 
 offered special prayer when he was about to enter upon 
 great enjoyment, and when the Father was about to 
 bestow new privileges and new honors upon him. One 
 of these occasions was the time of his baptism. (Luke 
 iii. 21, 22.) We read that while Jesus stood praying, 
 heaven opened, and the Spirit, in the form of a dove, 
 descended upon him. My friends, if you would make the 
 ordinances of God's house, the solemn sacraments of his 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 247 
 
 institution, effectual to your spiritual development, you 
 must accompany them by prayer. If the Spirit, like a 
 peaceful dove descends and rests upon your heart, that 
 Spirit comes only in answer to your prayers. As Jesus 
 stood praying, heaven opened, and as the Spirit descended, 
 the voice of the Father was heard, saying, "This is my 
 beloved Son." And then, again, we read that as Christ 
 was praying he was transfigured. (Luke ix. 28, 29.) 
 That was the only time when Christ gave the world a 
 glimpse of his innate glory. On that occasion, the veil 
 for a moment being taken away, his glory flamed out 
 upon the eyes of all beholders as he was transfigured 
 before them; and as he was praying the fashion of his 
 countenance was changed. My friends, it is prayer only 
 that can give us that tranquillity, that can give us that 
 sweet and heavenly unction by which men shall feel how 
 sweet and potent an influence goodness is, and make us 
 blessings to those with whom we have daily associations. 
 Fifth. I remark, again, that when Christ anticipated 
 great sorrows, he made these occasions the times of special 
 prayer. When he was approaching the hour for which 
 the world had been waiting for thousands of years, the 
 hour when all the promises were about to find fulfilment, 
 our Lord gathered his disciples about him and delivered 
 to them a valedictory discourse, and then he followed that 
 discourse with a prayer, teaching us that every sermon 
 ought to be followed by a prayer, as well as preceded by 
 a prayer, if we would imitate the example of Christ, for 
 just as soon as he finished his farewell discourse to his 
 disciples, we read that Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven 
 and began that wonderful prayer, that intercessory prayer 
 recorded in the Gospel of John, the longest prayer of our 
 Lord's on record. (John, chap, xvii.) When we glance 
 through it, oh! how much that prayer teaches us. It 
 
248 SERMONS. 
 
 began by saying, "Father, glorify thy son." Oh ! what a 
 moment that was. There was a great sorrow impending, 
 the greatest sorrow that humanity had ever known, the 
 greatest tragedy that earth had witnessed was about to be 
 enacted ; but Christ does not speak of that primarily. His 
 great desire was that, whatever the sorrow might be, 
 it should be overruled for his glory, and therefore he said, 
 "Father, glorify thy name !" teaching you, O friends ! 
 that when trouble comes upon you, you ought not to be 
 so anxious that the trouble should be taken from you as 
 that the trouble may be sanctified to you, and be so, in 
 some way, the means of bringing greater glory to the 
 Father and glorify his name. Then how tenderly he 
 prayed for his disciples: "O Father, keep through thine 
 own name those whom thou has given unto me." And 
 then he prayed for their unity, that they might be one. 
 Oh ! the Lord hasten the time when all the different de- 
 nominations of Christendom may pay less and less atten- 
 tion to the things that divide them, and more and more 
 attention to the things in which they all agree, for, after 
 all, the common things are the greatest things, the true 
 things and the best things. Oh ! that the time may come 
 when the Lord's prayer may be fulfilled in the unity which 
 is one day to be vouchsafed to the universal church. He 
 prayed not only for this, but there is one other petition 
 in this prayer which gives it a personal interest to each 
 one of us, and that was when our Lord said, "I pray not 
 only for my disciples ; but I pray for all those who shall 
 believe on me through their word" — that Word which 
 the apostles preached; that Word which has been trans- 
 mitted through all countries, which has been proclaimed 
 in so many thousands of places on this continent and all 
 over the earth to-day — "Those who shall believe on me 
 through their word." Oh ! it is comforting to think that 
 
"TEACH US TO PRAY." 249 
 
 we were remembered and included in that all-comprehen- 
 sive intercessory prayer of our Lord just before his suf- 
 fering. 
 
 And, then, from the supper he went to the garden, 
 and said to his disciples, "Watch ye here while I go yonder 
 and pray." (Matt. xxvi. 36; Mark xiv. 32.) Oh! what 
 a prayer that was in Gethsemane. Oh ! what earnestness, 
 what reverence. Christ kneeled upon his knees, and then 
 he fell upon his face. What resignation ! "If it be possi- 
 ble, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will, 
 but thine, be done." And although the cup did not pass 
 from him, the prayer was answered, for an angel came 
 and strengthened him. Then, the prayer completed, he 
 was ready to go forth and perform that work for which 
 he became incarnate, that work upon which the salvation 
 of unnumbered millions of Adam's race depended, the 
 great sacrifice which he offered of himself upon Calvary. 
 As our Lord lived praying, so he died praying ; for while 
 they were making the preparations for the crucifixion, 
 just as the cruel work began, our Lord said, "Father, 
 forgive them, for they know not what they do." (Luke 
 xxiii. 34.) And then, when the tragedy was over, and 
 when the Sun of Righteousness was going down with a 
 bloody setting behind the lurid clouds, he uttered another 
 prayer. He said ! , "Father, into thy hands I commend my 
 spirit." (Luke xxiii. 46.) 
 
 My friends, into whose hands do you expect your soul 
 to go when you die? That is a searching question. I 
 have often thought that there is nothing that can be im- 
 agined so lonely and so desolate as the soul that goes out 
 of the earthly tenement into awful space, unless there is 
 some friendly hand to lead it, unless there are some tender 
 arms to embrace it. Oh ! to think of the dread loneliness 
 of a soul ejected from the body, going out into the black- 
 
250 SERMONS. 
 
 ness and darkness without a ray, without a guide, without 
 a hope. 
 
 Stephen's prayer was one that he caught from the 
 prayer that our Lord had offered on the cross. When they 
 were stoning him to death, he looked up through the part- 
 ing blue and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of 
 God, and he said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit; and 
 he fell asleep." 
 
 So, dear friends, I close my sermon with the simple 
 expression of the wish that all of the events, that all of 
 the changes, that all of the duties, that all the privileges 
 of your lives may be so consecrated by prayer that when 
 you come to the hour when heart and flesh fail, you may 
 have the assurance of David when he said, "When 
 strength and heart faileth, be thou my strength and my 
 portion." 
 
 The life that is to be followed by a peaceful death and 
 a safe transmission into the house not made with hand's, 
 eternal in the heavens, where Christ will receive the de- 
 parting soul in answer to the petition which he offered 
 in his own intercessory prayer when he said, "Father, I 
 will that those whom thou hast given me be with me 
 where I am, that they may behold my glory." Oh ! say 
 this, "As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness ; 
 I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness." 
 
XX. 
 
 g IN THE SWELLING OF JORDAN. 
 
 "If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied 
 thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? and it in the 
 land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then 
 how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?" — Jeremiah xii. 5. 
 
 I AM going to preach upon a text from which, perhaps, 
 you never heard a sermon, and I hope it will not be 
 less interesting or instructive on that account. Listen 
 again to the strange phraseology of the prophet. 
 
 "The swelling of Jordan." The interest which we 
 feel in rivers does not depend upon their beauty, upon 
 their length, upon their size, or upon their fitness for 
 navigation, but upon the historic events which have made 
 them memorable. We have no associations that are 
 pleasant — we have no associations of any kind — with 
 a river like the Amazon, like the Ganges, though they are 
 classed among the great rivers of the world. That makes 
 no difference in our estimate of them. And yet when we 
 hear the name of the Nile, what a host of memories are 
 conjured up by its mention. We recall that upon its 
 waters was rocked the cradle of Moses, the great law- 
 giver and leader of the people in their magnificent march 
 from the land of bondage to the Canaan, where they were 
 a free people, and enjoyed the best government the world 
 ever knew, the government of the theocracy. So, too, the 
 river Rhine is one of those historic rivers with which we 
 have numbers of associations. What battles have been 
 fought upon its banks! What castles stand upon its 
 
252 SERMONS. 
 
 crags, with a romance in every stone, from foundation 
 up to the battlemented towers on the summit ! But of all 
 the rivers of the world there is no river with which we 
 have associations so sacred and so tender as the river 
 Jordan. From the time that Abraham and Lot held a 
 debate upon its banks as to where their possession should 
 lie; from the time that Jacob, that old patriarch, exult- 
 ingly cried, "With my staff have I passed over this Jor- 
 dan; and now I am become two bands"; from the time 
 that Joseph went up from Egypt to bury his father, when 
 he made that great mourning at the threshing-floor of 
 Atad — down to the time when John the Baptist preached 
 the doctrine of repentance upon its banks, down to the 
 time when Jesus came to be baptized of him, and when 
 from the open heavens descended the dove that lighted 
 upon him, and the voice that said, "This is my beloved 
 Son, in whom I am well pleased." And so from that time 
 to ours, this river has been the scene of some of the most 
 important events in the world's annals. The Crusaders 
 quenched their thirst in its waters in the pause of battle, 
 when they came to recover the Sepulchre from the hands 
 of the Saracens. I cannot give in full the history of this 
 river. I will only say the greatest exploration of its entire 
 course, from the Sea of Tiberias down to its entrance into 
 the Salt Sea, was made by an American, an officer in the 
 American army. There is no river like it, because of the 
 associations connected with it in the mind of the Jew, in 
 the mind of the Mohammedan, in the mind of the Chris- 
 tian, all over the world, and the Jordan is the only river 
 that is looked upon with veneration by these great repre- 
 sentatives of the world's nationalities, the Jew, the Mo- 
 hammedan, and the Christian. And what a singular 
 interest attaches itself to that river, when in all languages 
 it has been made the emblem of that separating water that 
 
IN THE SWELLING OF JORDAN. 253 
 
 divides the heavenly land from ours ; and if I could only 
 turn to the passage, I would give you an illustration of it : 
 
 " Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 
 Stand dressed in living green; 
 So to the Jews old Canaan stood, 
 While Jordan rolled between. 
 
 " Oh ! could we make these doubts remove, 
 These gloomy doubts that rise, 
 And see the Canaan that we love 
 With unbeclouded eyes. 
 
 " Could we but climb where Moses stood, 
 And view the landscape o'er, 
 Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood 
 Could fright us from the shore." 
 
 I am going to give you an analogy which I have 
 worked out, and it has been exceedingly interesting to 
 me ; it is this, that a river is the most striking emblem of 
 which we have any knowledge, the most striking emblem 
 of human life. It is like human life because at its begin- 
 ning it is small as infancy itself. And then it widens and 
 deepens in its onward flow, just as manhood grows richer 
 and fuller with experience, and all the treasures of accu- 
 mulated knowledge. The spectator, as he stands upon the 
 banks, never sees the same water twice ; while he looks 
 at the water just beneath him, it is gliding away, and 
 passes from his sight. So the generations go. But as 
 the spectator stands, the river is still there. And so the 
 human race continues ; although the generations vanish, 
 the great river of human life still rolls on! And then 
 again, what a striking emblem of human life there is in 
 the fact that oftentimes the current of the river is exceed- 
 ingly swift, and then its motion seems almost to cease ; 
 sometimes it is crowded within narrow banks, and then 
 
254 SERMONS. 
 
 suddenly it widens out like a lake; sometimes it runs 
 almost dry, and then again with spring showers it over- 
 flows all the plain ! Oh ! what a striking emblem that is 
 of the penury, of the poverty that oftentimes makes life 
 seem so narrow and so hard ! And what a striking em- 
 blem of that sudden expansion of wide and joyous ampli- 
 tude when Heaven's bounty flows in and overflows, to 
 swell the volume of human opportunity, and human suc- 
 cess, and human happiness ! What an emblem the river 
 is of the vicissitudes of life; what an emblem of the 
 devious ways in which we oftentimes wind our course 
 through life! That river, the Jordan, never ran in a 
 straight line; sometimes it was very turbid and tawny, 
 sometimes bright and clear ; but, like all the human race 
 — and, oh ! what an analogy this is — like all the human 
 race, emptying at last into the Dead Sea ! 
 
 When Napoleon was about to fight one of his great 
 battles in Egypt, he animated his troops by saying, "Forty 
 centuries are looking down upon you." He was remind- 
 ing them of the pyramids when he said that. So, when I 
 look upon the river Jordan, forty centuries chronicle its 
 history with the most memorable events in the world's 
 annals. 
 
 The prophet Jeremiah, who was the author of this 
 most solemn text, was a man whose life was very full of 
 strange experiences. He was a man of very gentle and 
 tender spirit; he was a man that shrunk from responsi- 
 bility, and yet when duty was imposed upon him, there 
 never was a man more courageous, more firm, more reso- 
 lute, more true to every obligation. The condition of 
 the country was one that weighed heavily upon his heart, 
 because Jeremiah was not only a prophet, he was a patriot 
 as well. The condition of the country made him emphati- 
 cally a "man of sorrows." Every time he struck the 
 
IN THE SWELLING OF JORDAN. 255 
 
 quivering wires of his harp a tear seemed to drop from 
 the trembling cords ! He had a happy time during the 
 reign of good King Josiah ; but after his worthless son, 
 Zedekiah, sat upon the throne, then the woes of Jeremiah 
 began afresh. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, who 
 had reduced the country to subjection, was perfectly 
 willing that Zedekiah should have the nominal reign, be- 
 cause the great emperor knew that he would be a facile, 
 pliable tool in his hands, for Zedekiah was a man without 
 resolution, without self-reliance ; he was crafty, cunning 
 and treacherous. In the exercise of his prophetic office, 
 Jeremiah had felt it his duty to tell King Zedekiah of the 
 woes that were coming upon Jerusalem, that it should be 
 captured by the Chaldeans. Zedekiah had already made 
 a treaty with Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon ; but 
 now, when he found the city was to be captured and 
 pillaged afresh, he determined to make an alliance with 
 Pharaoh-Hophra, the king of Egypt, and he acted a 
 treacherous part towards the government of which he was 
 a vassal. The prophet came and assured him that that 
 expedient would be a terrible failure, that the king of 
 Egypt would never prevent the capture and pillage of the 
 city by the Chaldeans. Still Zedekiah refused to believe 
 the words of the prophet. At last they found a strange 
 fulfilment: the king of Egypt did indeed march to the 
 rescue of Zedekiah, but the Chaldean army intercepted 
 him, and defeated him, and obtained such a victory that 
 the Egyptian troops went back to Egypt ; and then the 
 Chaldean troops had nothing to do but complete the cap- 
 ture of the city. There was still one possible refuge for 
 King Zedekiah, and that was to do what the prophet told 
 him to do, to go and humble himself before the king of 
 Babylon, and allow the yoke to be put afresh upon his 
 neck. It was a very humiliating condition, to be sure; 
 
256 SERMONS. 
 
 but it was that or utter ruin. He was unwilling to make 
 that sacrifice — he saw his country ruined ! 
 
 Now you comprehend the significance of the wonder- 
 ful words of this text. "If thou hast run with the foot- 
 men, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou 
 contend with horses ? and if in the land of peace, wherein 
 thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do 
 in the swelling of Jordan?" The meaning of that is 
 simply this, "If you are not willing to humble yourself 
 and take the yoke of the king, who will save the city from 
 pillage, and still allow you to be his viceroy — if you will 
 not consent to that condition, then you must make up 
 your mind to the hard result, to the terrible tragedy that 
 will end this scene ; the demand that the king of Babylon 
 makes, that you should humble yourself, is but a contest 
 with the footmen ; but when he comes to> sack the city, 
 that will be the inroad of the horsemen; and if you are 
 afraid of the little stream that you dare not cross, what 
 will you do in the swelling of Jordan?" This is a great 
 parable. The result of the history I will briefly tell you. 
 The Chaldeans came, the city was invested, Zedekiah 
 attempted to escape, he got out upon the plain, he was 
 arrested while he was a fugitive by the Chaldeans, he 
 was taken captive to Babylon with his sons; his sons 
 were slain before his eyes, and his own eyes were put 
 out, and he was for the rest of his life a captive ! 
 
 This text stands at the head of a number of passages 
 of similar import that we find scattered through the Bible, 
 to only two or three of which I shall have opportunity to 
 refer. Here is one of them : When our Lord was on his 
 way to the crucifixion, as he passed along 'the Dolorous 
 Way, he was followed by the women, beating upon their 
 breasts and wailing as they went, and he turned and said, 
 "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for 
 
IN THE SWELLING OF JORDAN. 25? 
 
 yourselves" ; and then he added, "If these things be done 
 in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry ?" — by 
 which he meant, "If I, an innocent sufferer, must suffer 
 death because I bear the sins of others, what will be the 
 sufferings of others who meet divine retribution because 
 they bear their own sins unforgiven?" "If these things 
 be done in the green tree" — Christ compares himself to 
 a tree whose leaves are for the healing and not for the 
 hurt; "if a being so innocent and pure as I am must 
 suffer death, what shall be the doom of those who have 
 the promise and the possibilities of the rescue, of the 
 Rock of Ages — of the ark of safety — and refuse to 
 enter it, 'what shall they do in the swelling of the Jor- 
 dan ?' " Our Lord wept when he thought of the desola- 
 tion that was to come upon the city. All the calamities 
 that had hitherto befallen the city were not to be com- 
 pared with the ruin and desolation brought upon it by 
 Titus — that is the bloodiest picture in the book of time ! 
 They had passed through trials, but the trials had not 
 been sanctified; they had had many calls to repentance, 
 many opportunities of making peace with God. They 
 put these opportunities aside, and slighted them, one by 
 one. In the land of peace they had not sought the friend- 
 ship and favor of the Prince of Peace, and what were they 
 to do in the swellings of Jordan? 
 
 This is an ancient parable ; and it finds another illus- 
 tration in the discontent which we often find in the minds 
 of people that live in the midst of peace, and in the land 
 of plenty. Possibly no people complain more of life's 
 worries than those that have been dandled in the lap of 
 luxury — it is the people of overflowing wealth, that have 
 tried all of life's pleasures, and found them devoid of 
 satisfaction. There is more murmuring oftentimes in 
 the heart that is covered with lace, with glittering dia- 
 17 
 
258 SERMONS. 
 
 monds above it, than in the poor woman that stitch by 
 stitch makes her hard living in the garret. If people con- 
 not bear the little trials that come upon them for their 
 discipline, what will they do when the great trials come? 
 "If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied 
 thee, then how canst thou contend with horses ?" And if 
 men do not learn patience and resolution under the minor 
 trials and toils of life, what are they going to do when the 
 great trials of life come — that take the fragrance and the 
 brightness and the music out of life, and leave men deso- 
 late? "And if in the land of peace thou art full of mur- 
 muring and rebellion against God's providence, what are 
 you going to do when great troubles come like the swell- 
 ing of Jordan?" 
 
 We have another illustration in those solemn words 
 of the Apostle, when he said, "If the violator of Moses* 
 law died without mercy, when there were only two or 
 three witnesses against him, of how much sorer punish- 
 ment shall he be counted worthy who rejects the Son of 
 God, and slights the blood of the covenant, and does de- 
 spite to the Spirit of grace?" There is an argument from 
 the less to the greater. The man that broke the old law 
 died without mercy, when accused by two or three wit- 
 nesses. The Apostle says, if that be so, then how much 
 greater will be the punishment of the man that tramples, 
 not only upon the law, but upon the love of Jesus, and the 
 man that dishonors the Son by refusing to take advantage 
 of his offers of mercy. Two or three witnesses were 
 required of old ; there are three witnesses now, the wit- 
 ness of the insulted Father, the witness of the injured 
 Son, the witness of the grieved Spirit! Ah! if the men 
 that lived under the old law could not contend with the 
 footmen, what is to become of the men under the law of 
 grace, under the economy of love, what is to become of 
 
IN THE SWELLING OF JORDAN. 259 
 
 them when they trample under foot the atoning Saviour, 
 and do despite to the Spirit of grace — what are they 
 going to do in the swelling of Jordan ? 
 
 And still again, the Apostle cries out, "If the righteous 
 scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner 
 appear?" Not that there is anything defective in the 
 atonement of Christ ; not that there is anything uncertain 
 in the promises of God, but this is what the Apostle 
 means : in order to be assured that we are Christians, 
 what purifying of our lives and hearts, what resistance 
 of temptation, what striving against sin, what earnestness 
 in running the Christian race, what self-denial, what self- 
 crucifixion is necessary to obtain the assurance that we 
 are on the way to heaven ; and if those who profess to be 
 on the way are intimidated by the difficulty of preparation, 
 what shall they do in the swelling of Jordan? 
 
 And so I close my sermon by asking one more ques- 
 tion : What are they going to do who do not seek an 
 interest in the Saviour, who do not make their peace with 
 God because they are hindered by the little, trifling ob- 
 stacles that lie in their way ; because they feel the pres- 
 sure of business, because they do not find time to do that 
 for which all time was given — because they are intimi- 
 dated by the fear of ridicule, are reluctant to break old 
 sinful associations, to part with sinful companionship? 
 W r hat are we to say of those who allow these little diffi- 
 culties to keep them out of the kingdom of heaven — keep 
 them from attending to the things that belong to their 
 eternal peace? And if they reject the overtures of grace, 
 when all the conditions for obtaining peace are favorable ; 
 if they are unwilling to submit to any sacrifices or self- 
 denial while seeking reconciliation with God, what are 
 they going to do when they are on their deathbed, and are 
 buffeted by the swelling of Jordan? You say, "Now I 
 
2 6o SERMONS. 
 
 have not a suitable time to prepare for the eternity that 
 lies before men, and is so near." If you cannot make 
 opportunity now, do you think you will when you come 
 to contend with the cold billows that beat upon you when 
 you get in the swelling of Jordan? I do not know of 
 anything more terrible than the anguish of the despairing 
 soul, trying under the most distressing, most helpless 
 circumstances of life, to make his peace with God — the 
 man that allowed the other trifles to prevent him from 
 getting safely into the city of refuge — the man who 
 struggles when it is too late, and among the buffeting of 
 those billows tries to secure something that requires the 
 best exercise of the mind and heart and the calmest and 
 most rational moments of life ! — in the midst of fever, 
 in the midst of the paralysis that often comes upon the 
 brain at that moment! If he does not contend with the 
 footmen, what will he do with the horsemen; if he does 
 not brave the little stream, what is he going to do when 
 he comes to the swelling of Jordan? That is the awful 
 inquiry that the prophet makes. 
 
 I commend you to the last pages of the Pilgrim's 
 Progress, when Christian and Faithful and Hopeful came 
 to the brink of the Jordan, the separating river, they were 
 delighted to find that when they walked down into it 
 they found themselves walking upon a firm bottom, and 
 they found the river very shallow. There was no swelling 
 then, no desolating flood to oppose their progress. They 
 passed over safely. Payson, when he came to that river, 
 said he found it had dwindled to a rill, so narrow he 
 could step across it. Oh ! happy are those that have im- 
 proved all their opportunities so that when they come to 
 the last critical moments of life they may have nofhing 
 to do but to cross over, and rest under the shade of the 
 trees that fringe the banks of the river of life immortal ! 
 
XXI. 
 A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 
 
 ''So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old: and they 
 embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." — Gen. 1. 26. 
 
 THE East is the land of wonder, mystery, romance 
 and song. It was in the East that the Garden of 
 Eden was planted before thorns and thistles infested the 
 ground, or sin and sorrow came into the world. It was 
 in the East that the old world empires flourished and fell. 
 It was in the East that the patriarchs and prophets of 
 Old Testament history uttered the words and performed 
 the acts by which, being dead, they yet speak to us. It 
 was in the East that the light arose, which, travelling 
 westward, illumined Europe, and then crossing the ocean 
 irradiated these American shores. It was in the East 
 that Christianity commenced its magnificent march on its 
 ever-brightening way to universal conquest. 
 
 Of these ancient empires some have not left a trace on 
 the map of the world. They are gone like the dreams of 
 things that were — 
 
 "Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls, 
 
 O kingdoms of the past ! 
 There lie the byegone ages in their palls, 
 
 Guarded by shadows vast; 
 There all is hushed and breathless, 
 
 Save where some image of old error falls 
 Earth worshipped once as deathless." — Lowell. 
 
 To this there is one memorable exception. Egypt still 
 survives, though it stands only as the echo of a great 
 
262 SERMONS. 
 
 name. But there it is, unchanged — at least, in its strange 
 physical characteristics. Its clear skies are not veiled by 
 clouds, casting grateful shadows on the parched plains. 
 Its long drouths are not relieved by the showers which 
 make the furrowed fields soft and green. No rain drops 
 on the pastures of its wilderness. But the time at last 
 comes when the inundation of its mighty river gives 
 opportunity for literally casting seed upon the waters. 
 Then comes the flash of verdure, and then the richer 
 hues of harvest. So that the Egyptian people say their 
 land for three months is white like pearl, for three months 
 black like mask, for three green like emerald, for three 
 yellow like gold. Yes, Egypt is the wonderful land on 
 the banks of whose solitary river stands the long line of 
 pyramids — the mausoleums where kings lie in their 
 glory, on whose sands crouches the sphynx, with expres- 
 sive face of imperturbable calm, gazing out on infinity. 
 There, too, moulder mighty cities, whose foundings ante- 
 date history, the land whose present degradation verifies 
 the truth of prophecy, that it should be the basest of king- 
 doms, blighted by the leprous hand of the Turk, which 
 taints all that it touches, while adjacent Palestine cowers 
 under 'his brutal heel. It was characteristic of these old 
 world nations that their golden age was in the past. They 
 fondly looked back to a time when 'the skies were bright 
 and the fields were fertile, when laws were just and 
 morals pure, and when prosperity filled the cup of a vir- 
 tuous people. But as time wore on, signs of disintegra- 
 tion and decay filled the minds of the wisest and most 
 thoughtful with forebodings of final disaster and extinc- 
 tion. Seers, poets, historians, decline and fall in melan- 
 choly and hopeless strains. To this general foreboding 
 there was one memorable exception. The bards and 
 prophets of ancient Israel turned their faces towards the 
 
A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 263 
 
 future, and in that future saw their brightest era. There 
 was much in their history to depress and even to extin- 
 guish this hope, but it survived amidst all apostasies, all 
 captivities, all desolations of foreign conquests. With the 
 light of morning in their eyes, and the glories of Messiah 
 thrilling their hearts, they hailed the day when his way 
 should be known on earth, and his saving health among 
 the nations ; when Gentiles should come to his light, and 
 kings to the brightness of his rising, and when all the 
 nations should rejoice on the blessings of his universal 
 reign. Thus, while the poets and sages and the oracles 
 of the old pagan world predicted ultimate disaster and 
 overthrow, and while one by one their hopes of a happy 
 future went down into the sad sea that never gives up its 
 dead, Palestine, the most isolated and territorially insig- 
 nificant of the old nations, lying directly in the pathway 
 of rival kingdoms — its ground trembling under the tread 
 of great armies, often provoking the wrath of powerful 
 neighbors, often pillaged and conquered by them; yet 
 there, in the Hebrew heart, the hope of a radiant future 
 glowed like a perpetual altar fire, and found expression 
 in those triumphant Psalms, which, beating time to trum- 
 pet and timbal, have the ring of conquest in their melo- 
 dious march ! 
 
 The whole Book of Genesis glows with these predic- 
 tions of coming prosperity and power to Israel, till we 
 come to the last chapter, when all these glowing prospects 
 suddenly disappear — suddenly shrouded as with a pall ; 
 so that all that seems to remain is what is hid under the 
 lid of "a cofiin in Egypt." Thus the closing chapter of 
 Genesis ends with the death of the last man who had the 
 influence or the power to help his Hebrew brethren, and 
 we read, "So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years 
 old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a cofiin 
 
264 SERMONS. 
 
 in Egypt." Was there ever such a lame and impotent 
 conclusion to a splendid history ? — ever a hope succeeded 
 by such despair, ever a story so full of joyful anticipation, 
 ending in a tragedy so dismal ? To comprehend the whole 
 depth of the disappointment we must go back to the Old 
 Testament history, and ascertain what were the expecta- 
 tions awakened by the divine promises with regard to the 
 deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, their march to 
 Canaan, and their ultimate prosperity and glory in their 
 own land. A new era began in the history of the world 
 at the call of Abraham; it was the commencement of a 
 new chapter in the great book of Providence. It was the 
 lifting of the curtain which revealed new scenes and 
 actors in the drama of human affairs. The call of Abra- 
 ham was the initial act on the establishment of the visible 
 kingdom of God in the world. It was an event whose 
 influence and results are felt to this day. To-morrow 
 were you to meet a man on the street who had never 
 given a thought to such a subject, were you to tell him 
 that he had a personal interest in the call of Abraham, 
 that his own life and all the influences which had moulded 
 that life were different from what they would have been 
 if no such man as Abraham had never existed, what 
 would he say ? He might say nothing, but he would think 
 that you were smitten with some mild form of lunacy. 
 And yet, were he a man of ordinary intelligence, you 
 could so demonstrate the truth of your statement as to 
 make him admit it. You could tell him that it was not a 
 theologian, but a thinker like Thomas Carlyle, who said 
 that a man's religion was the chief thing about him, and 
 determined all the rest. You could show him that with 
 Abraham began the nation that has shaped the religious 
 history of the world, and whatever shapes that determines 
 the character of domestic, social and political life. You 
 
A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 265 
 
 could tell him the institutions under which we live were 
 not only moulded by the old theocracy and by the Chris- 
 tianity, which was the development of that theocracy, but 
 owe their existence to it. So that the man who thought 
 you a lunatic or fanatic for making such an assertion 
 would himself admit that he was a different man for 
 having been born of Christian instead of pagan parents. 
 Abraham was the central figure in the old world history, 
 and the promises God made to him are yet in process of 
 fulfilment. What were these promises? That Canaan 
 was 'to be inhabited by his posterity, that in his seed all 
 the nations of the earth were to be blessed. Never was 
 their faith more triumphant than his. "He believed God, 
 and it was counted to him for righteousness. " His was a 
 faith that did not stagger at improbabilities, nor at seem- 
 ing impossibilities. 
 
 Though Canaan was then held by a warlike race, 
 though he had no army at his command, no means of con- 
 quest, he knew that the promise was sure ; though he was 
 an old man and childless, yet he never doubted his pos- 
 terity would be as the stars for multitude; though the 
 time of fulfilment of the promise lay in far distant cen- 
 turies, though he was told that his descendants should be 
 strangers in a land not theirs four hundred years, yet he 
 was assured they should come out with great substance, 
 and become a great nation. 
 
 These promises were renewed to Jacob, and though 
 his faith, too, was sorely tried, it did not fail under the 
 sltrain. When famine drove him down to Egypt, he was 
 told not to fear — the way had already been prepared — 
 for a strange providence had sent Joseph there before him 
 and exalted him to the very summit of human power and 
 honor. God said to him I am the God of thy fathers, fear 
 not to go down into Egypt, for I will go with thee and I 
 
266 SERMONS. 
 
 will make of thee a great nation, and I will surely bring 
 thee up again ! Few incidents are more dramatic than the 
 meeting between Joseph and his father, or the interview 
 between Jacob and Pharaoh, and how much nobler was 
 the bearing of the patriarch than that of the king! 
 Pharaoh could not think of anything more graceful in 
 opening the conversation than to ask Jacob how old he 
 was. What surpassing dignity there was in the reply, 
 and when the interview was ended, we read that Jacob 
 blessed Pharaoh and went out. "Without contradiction, 
 says the Apostle, the less was blessed by the greater" 
 (better). And when he went out, it was the kingly man 
 who departed, only a doomed Egyptian mummy was left 
 behind, and the glory of the scene vanished with Jacob's 
 departure. But the largest, most illustrious life has its 
 end. The time came when Jacob said to Joseph, "Behold, 
 I die, but God shall be with you, and bring you again to 
 the land of your fathers. And he said to his sons, bury 
 me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of 
 Ephron, in the land of Canaan. There they buried Abra- 
 ham and Sarah his wife, there they buried Isaac and Re- 
 becca his wife, and there I buried Leah." Canaan was 
 dear chiefly as a memory to Jacob, but to Joseph it was 
 dear as a hope, for when his time came, he said, "I die, 
 but God will surely visit you, and will bring you out of 
 this land, into the land which he sware unto Abraham, to 
 Isaac, to Jacob. So Joseph died, and they embalmed him, 
 and put him in a coffin in Egypt." 
 
 With the death of Joseph, the last ray of hope of de- 
 liverance from Egyptian bondage went out in the black- 
 ness of darkness ; the last link was broken which bound 
 his people to a happy future. So Joseph dies, and they 
 embalmed his body and put him in a coffin in Egypt. 
 What now is left ? Only a few bones and a few promises, 
 
A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 267 
 
 but they were the promises of God. The patriarchs are 
 indeed all dead, but God lives — lives in the immuta- 
 bility of his truth, in the omnipotence of his power. Note, 
 my hearers, after Genesis comes Exodus. Genesis is the 
 beginning of things, Exodus is the continuance, the de- 
 velopment, the consummation of things. Genesis ends 
 with a narrow coffin in Egypt ; Exodus opens with a wide 
 deliverance ; a new and splendid history unfolds itself. 
 Exodus means departure, it means crossing the Red Sea, 
 the destruction of Pharaoh's host, the march to the land 
 of promise, the conquest of Canaan. So, after all, the 
 faith of Joseph was not in vain, the legacy of the em- 
 balmed body was not in vain. The appeal is made to his 
 brethren to remember that God would surely visit them, 
 and bring 'them to the land of their fathers. The expecta- 
 tion that Joseph cherished of being buried in Canaan was 
 not in vain. How sublime was the faith that triumphed, 
 and all that could daunt and quench it ! Munroe Gibson, 
 in his work entitled The Ages Before Moses compares 
 Joseph, the apparent end of his race — so far as power to 
 help them went — to Campbell's "Last Man," making his 
 address to the sun about to go out in eternal niglit — 
 
 "The skeletons of nations were around that lonely man, 
 Yet prophet-like that lone one stood, 
 With dauntless words and high." 
 
 And what did the lone man say ? He said this : 
 
 " Go tell the night that hides thy face, 
 Thou sawest the last of Adam's race 
 
 On earth's sepulchral sod 
 The darkened universe defy 
 To quench his immortality, 
 
 Or shake his trust in God," 
 
268 SERMONS. 
 
 So it was with Joseph's high and dauntless words, 
 "God will surely visit you and bring you to the land of 
 Abraham and Isaac and Jacob." 
 
 Nothing quenched that hope or shook that trust. That 
 trust was the trust of triumphant faith — that hope be- 
 came a history. The promises were all fulfilled : Canaan 
 conquered and possessed, Jerusalem builded, David 
 crowned, Solomon's peaceful sway recognized from the 
 Nile to the Euphrates. The temple was built upon the 
 imperial mount which it graced and glorified, a mountain 
 of alabaster, with golden pinnacles flaming at the tops. 
 The messenger of the covenant came suddenly into that 
 temple. The Desire of all nations was announced, and 
 from the seed of Abraham sprang the world's Redeemer ! 
 So the promises which seemed to be buried in a coffin in 
 Egypt had an Exodus in the birth of One whose coming 
 meant peace on earth, and glory to God in the highest. 
 
 This leads naturally and inevitably to the greatest 
 illustration of the text. When the enemies of Christ con- 
 signed him to the death of the cross, they believed that 
 Christianity itself was consigned, not to a coffin in Egypt, 
 but a sepulchre in Palestine. But the death of Christ was 
 only the Genesis of the gospel of which his resurrection 
 was the Exodus. It was the foundation of his media- 
 torial reign, for — 
 
 "The Cross a sure foundation laid 
 
 For glory and renown; 
 When through the regions of the dead 
 He passed to reach his crown." 
 
 He himself spoke of his death, not as the end, but the 
 instrument of his perpetuated influence and power. 
 
 Christ's followers always speak of him as alive. This 
 is not true of the founders of any other religion. The 
 
A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 269 
 
 followers of Zoroaster, of Confucius, of Mahomet never 
 speak of their master as alive. The Evangelists, indeed, 
 record the death of Christ, but in the next breath an- 
 nounce his resurrection. St. Luke narrates in his gospel 
 what Jesus began to do and to teach, and goes on to tell 
 of his continued activity. The Book of Acts might be 
 called the Acts of Christ, since it is really a review of 
 what the risen, reigning Christ was doing for the ad- 
 vancement of his church on earth, for the heralds of 
 Christianity went forth, not alone and unsustained, but 
 the hand of the Lord was with them, working with them. 
 When Stephen was stoned, as he looked through the part- 
 ing blue, he saw Jesus standing, for would he sit while 
 his holy martyr was dying for him? He saw Jesus, and 
 his own face reflected something of the beauty of the 
 glorified Saviour. 
 
 " He prayed, and from the happy place 
 God's glory smote him on the face." 
 
 Stephen's life was short, if we measure it by years 
 only ; it was long if we measure it by the immortality of 
 influence. Stephen's life was taken up by the young man, 
 at whose feet his clothes were laid ; it had a resumption in 
 Paul, who never lost the impression of that martyrdom; 
 it was an inspiration to him during the years of his trans- 
 cendent course of ceaseless service. If the cross was a 
 tragedy, it was also a triumph. Once, indeed, it was the 
 symbol only of an ignominious death, but now the asso- 
 ciations of men with regard to the cross are not only 
 changed, but are actually reversed. The cross is now 
 traced in starry constellations, it is emblazoned on the 
 banners of conquerors, it is carried on the shields of the 
 mighty, it glitters above the domes of great cathedrals. 
 
276 SERMONS. 
 
 " In the cross of Christ we glory, 
 
 Towering o'er the wrecks of time; 
 All the light of sacred story 
 
 Gathers round its head sublime." 
 
 The very tomb of the risen Jesus is the birthplace of 
 immortality. Men put him to death, and placed him in a 
 sepulchre, that he might restore them to life, and place 
 them in a mansion in heaven. The end of every man's 
 earthly life is a coffin, but no soul was ever shrouded or 
 put in a coffin followed to the grave by weeping kindred. 
 What we call death does not destroy the continuity of 
 the soul's life. Earthly life is the Genesis, death is the 
 Exodus. The time of my departure is at hand, it is bet- 
 ter to depart and be with Christ. When the Duke of 
 Marlboro was in his last illness he was carried before a 
 picture of one of his great battles, and exclaimed, "The 
 Duke was something then, but now he is dying!" The 
 Christian is something when he is dying, for 'his "life is 
 hid with Christ." When Hobbes, the notorious skeptic, 
 came to his last moments, he said, "I give my body to the 
 dust; my soul to the great Perhaps." The great Per- 
 haps ! Paul said, "I know whom I have believed, and he 
 will keep that which I have committed to him against that 
 day." Victor Hugo said, "I feel within myself the pulsa- 
 tion of a future life. You say the soul is nothing but the 
 resultant of bodily powers. Why, then, is my soul more 
 luminous when bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is 
 on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The tomb 
 closes with the twilight, to open with the dawn." A 
 greater than Hugo has said, "Precious in the sight of the 
 Lord is the death of his saints. The greatest triumphs 
 of faith are often witnessed in the final hour — all that has 
 appalled vanished from the valley and shadow. Oh! to 
 see one leaving this world calmly, saying, "I fear no evil 
 
A COFFIN IN EGYPT. 271 
 
 for thou art with me." "My heart and my flesh faileth, but 
 God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." 
 When in such a confidence the spirit prepares its flight, 
 in full view of the open gates of the city of God, with 
 mortal paleness on the cheek, but glory in the soul, and 
 then wings its way to the heavenly home, leaving a smile 
 of holy peace imprinted on the clear cold face, and the 
 life forever still — then death is indeed translation ; it is 
 the boundary line, where earth and heaven meet and 
 mingle ; the dark lattice admits the light of eternal day — 
 no gloomy vault, but a glory gleaming portal, beyond 
 which is eternal bliss. It is no coffin in Egypt, but the 
 entrance to a mansion in the Paradise of God. All 
 generations shall give praise and honor and glory to the 
 Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 
 
XXII. 
 
 UNFULFILLED OBLIGATIONS AT 
 LAST FULFILLED. 
 
 "I pray thee, let me go over and see the good land that is be- 
 yond Jordan, that goodly mountain, and Lebanon. But the Lord 
 said, Get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and behold the land with 
 thine eyes, for thou shalt not go over this Jordan." — Deut. iii. 
 25-27. 
 
 WHEN one visiting the land of Palestine stands on 
 the top of the Mount of Olives, and looks towards 
 the south, he beholds the vast range of the Mountains 
 of Moab. They stand there on the southern border like 
 a great wall, and in general appearance resemble the 
 Palisades of the Hudson in the distance, though, unlike 
 the Palisades, they are thousands of feet in height. 
 Viewed from that standpoint, on Olivet, the top seems 
 a horizontal line, and instead of the serrated form that 
 mountains assume, it is almost like a sea line in the 
 distance ; but as the mountains are approached, and when 
 they are reached, it is found that the summits are waving ; 
 that there are depressions between them, without much 
 depth, and slight eminences, not precipitous, but sloping, 
 two of which are Pisgah and Nebo. 
 
 For a long time it was impossible to identify the locali- 
 ties of Nebo and Pisgah; it was reserved for a canon 
 of the Church of England, for an explorer from the 
 United States, and for a medical missionary of the city of 
 Beirut, to come nearer to the identification of these sacred 
 spots than had hitherto been done, if, indeed, they did 
 not actually identify them. In connection with these two 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 273 
 
 named mountains, if we may call them such — mere emi- 
 nences in the great range — with these two names at 
 least, Pisgah and Nebo, we have associated the most 
 pathetic incident in the life of Moses — I might say, the 
 most pathetic incident in the life of almost every one that 
 ever lived. After forty years of wandering through the 
 desert, now that he had come to the borders of Canaan, 
 he received a startling message to go up into the top of 
 Pisgah, and die there. The text contains the tender 
 appeal that Moses made to the Lord to reverse his de- 
 cision, "Oh ! let me see the good land, the goodly moun- 
 tain, and Lebanon ; let me pass over this Jordan." But 
 so peremptory was the refusal, that the Lord told him not 
 to speak to him any more upon that matter. 
 
 Oh ! my friends, this decision seems hard, at a time 
 when Moses was so near the fruition of his very fondest 
 hopes ; hopes that had been so long cherished, so long 
 indulged. It always aggravates the disappointment when 
 we are just about to reach the thrill of possession, that 
 suddenly the hand is arrested, and the veto finally put 
 upon the hope that dies in a moment. So it was with 
 Moses. I do not know when he began to indulge this 
 hope of entering the Land of Promise ; but I take it for 
 granted that it often occurred to him during his residence 
 in Egypt; often occurred to him during those solitary 
 years, amounting almost to half a century, which he spent 
 in the solitude of the great desert; and, then, from the 
 very time that the magnificent march commenced from 
 the borders of Egypt to the borders of Palestine, one 
 hope must have thrilled his heart, and that was of enter- 
 ing the land for which he had toiled, and for which he 
 had trained the people of Israel. 
 
 What ! — could it be true that the meanest member 
 of that great host could cross the river and enter the 
 18 
 
2;4 SERMONS. 
 
 Promised Land, while Moses, the mighty leader of that 
 host, was left upon the opposite shore, and prohibited 
 from putting his foot upon the coveted ground? It was 
 quite natural that Moses should have longed to get there. 
 It is always natural for us to try, and expect, to reach 
 the fruit of our sacrifices and of our toils. It was ex- 
 tremely natural for Moses to wish to see the land that was 
 endeared to him by so many associations ; the land in 
 which the world's gray fathers had pitched their tents; 
 the land which God had pledged to their posterity; the 
 land where the patriarchs had found their last repose; 
 the land that was allied with everything that was most 
 inspiring in the history of Israel ; the land where the 
 temple was finally to be built ; the land which was to be 
 trodden by the feet of him who, for our salvation, was 
 nailed to the bitter cross. 
 
 How natural, I say, it was that Moses should wish 
 to enter that land, and, after seeing the tribes settled, 
 enjoy their prosperity, their progress, their power, their 
 happiness ! But all this was denied him. And yet, in 
 order to gain such a prize as this, Moses had mad ! e great 
 sacrifices ; he had renounced a throne ; he had refused to 
 be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and when the 
 cup, filled with all that could satisfy the loftiest ambition, 
 was passed to his lips, he put it aside, and chose rather 
 to suffer affliction with the people of God; chose rather 
 to endure the reproach of Christ than to possess the riches 
 and glories of Egypt. 
 
 If I were to speak of the services that seemed to 
 entitle him to such recompense as this, what could I say ? 
 I could say little now, because the subject is too great 
 for discussion here. I can only say this: that among 
 those services was that of being the founder of the most 
 wonderful nation that this world ever saw. History does 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 275 
 
 not celebrate the rise and perpetuation of a people whose 
 career has been so wonderful as that of the Jewish people. 
 Brought out from bondage; drilled to become a nation 
 by the discipline of the wilderness ; permitted to take 
 possession of the inheritance that God had provided for 
 them; then subjected to strange captivities; their city 
 pillaged ; their temple burned ; their land often trembling 
 under the tread of the armies of the successive conquerors 
 who swept over it ; their capital destroyed — and yet, 
 for eighteen hundred years, as distinct a people as any 
 people that now have their own nationality and autonomy ; 
 a separate people, clinging to their ancient institutions 
 and traditions, anticipating the advent of' their Messiah; 
 everywhere scorned, everywhere surviving; impoverished 
 by exaction, yet holding in their hands the wealth of the 
 world ; never losing their identity by assimilation or ab- 
 sorption by other races ; preserving not only their mental 
 characteristics, but their distinctive physical features, so 
 that to this day they are everywhere recognizable at a 
 glance. All this because of the great things in store for 
 them, and through them, in store for the world. When 
 the predicted time arrives when Jew and Gentile shall con- 
 stitute one family, with one Lord and one faith, then, as 
 inspiration teaches us, there will be a new dispensation 
 of mercy to mankind, to be followed by the universal 
 establishment of the kingdom of God on the earth, giving 
 men a new and nobler conception of Providence and 
 grace in the unfolding of the divine purpose as to what 
 redeemed humanity shall become in time and in the eter- 
 nal future. 
 
 The founding of such a nation, designed to exert such 
 an influence, was but a part of the work which Moses 
 accomplished. And it was at such a time, with a past 
 history of personal services so illustrious, and with the 
 
276 SERMONS. 
 
 immediate prospect of Canaan before him, that the 
 startling summons came to him to go up into the moun- 
 tain and die there, without leaving so much as a footprint 
 on the soil of the land he so loved and longed for. Thus, 
 that aspiration expired and went down into the depths 
 of the sea that never gives up its dead. 
 
 This is, indeed, one of the most wonderful of all dis- 
 pensations. I marvel greatly that God should have 
 allowed Moses to cross the Red Sea, and yet not cross 
 the narrow Jordan; that God should have spared him 
 to live one hundred and twenty years, and then, at the 
 time when we are told his eye was not dim, nor his natural 
 force abated, when, enriched by the experience of more 
 than a century, he was better fitted 1 than ever for service, 
 that his career should be abruptly terminated. 
 
 What an ancient parable that is ! What a type it 
 was and is, of what has been happening ever since ! What 
 chapter in the world's history is more sad than that of 
 unfulfilled aspirations ? How many thousand's of men have 
 lived that have had one supreme wish in their lives, one 
 passion, one aspiration, that swallowed up everything else 
 just as a mighty river swallows up all the tributaries 
 that run into it. It may be ambition; it may be love; 
 it may be the desire for usefulness. Still, it has been the 
 master-passion; and when one has staked everything 
 upon the attainment of one expectation, and that expecta- 
 tion is suddenly blasted, then who can describe the 
 
 tragedy? 
 
 "The night has a thousand eyes, 
 
 The day has one, 
 But the light of the whole world dies 
 
 With the setting sun. 
 The mind has a thousand eyes, 
 
 The heart has one, 
 But the light of the whole life dies 
 When love is done." 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 277 
 
 So it has been with thousands since the day of Moses ; to 
 thousands has the order come, "Thou shalt not cross this 
 river, though it be but a rill, and though you have before 
 you your goodly Lebanon, the object of your ambition 
 and aspiration, just within reach, you shall not cross the 
 river, and you shall not possess the mountain." 
 
 How fragmentary are man's works ! What incom- 
 pleteness attaches to man's enterprises of every character ! 
 We see hundreds of illustrations of it. It is not every 
 historian who has the good fortune that Gibbon recorded 
 when he penned the last sentence of his great history of 
 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who, 
 as he walked up and down in the little arbor, remembered 
 now that he had terminated the work which linked his 
 name to immortality. It often happens that the historian 
 dies before he has completed his final volume, and he 
 leaves his work, perhaps a splendid fragment, his own 
 history abruptly terminated. The eye of the great painter 
 is closed before he has given the crowning touch to the 
 coloring of the picture which he hoped would make him 
 famous. The hand of the sculptor is paralyzed while 
 yet the statue stands in prophetic, yet unfulfilled, propor- 
 tions, to sadden the lover of art with the spectacle of 
 symmetry and beauty almost, yet not quite perfected. 
 The patriot-soldier, toward whom a nation turns its trust- 
 ful and loving gaze, as the instrument, under God, for 
 the achievement of its independence, is cut down, with 
 a mysterious unexpectedness, leaving a nation to mourn 
 its bereavement, its liberties yet unattained. 
 
 Ah ! yes, the lives of men are so incomplete, and so 
 full of disappointed aspirations, that this old Nebo parable 
 has had its illustrations in all the ages that have succeeded 
 Moses. We are reminded of the fact that after Isaac 
 Newton — the man of whom it was said that "his was 
 
278 SERMONS. 
 
 the whitest soul of human kind" — made his splendid dis- 
 covery, his theory of astronomy was not, at the time of 
 his death, credited by fifty men on the whole continent of 
 Europe, and by some he was charged with having made 
 an assault upon Revelation by the alleged discoveries 
 which he had published. There, too, was Beethoven, just 
 as he was about to go to the place where no earthly melody 
 penetrates the dull and cold earth of death, who said, 
 "If I could live a little longer I could be a musician." In 
 this sad procession comes Thorwaldsen, who, on the day 
 after he had sketched in chalk the outline of a statue 
 that was to be the masterpiece of his life, was smitten 
 down in a single moment. You see, also, one of the great- 
 est of English discoverers and voyagers, who, after sail- 
 ing around the world, and making rare and rich discov- 
 eries; after having been shipwrecked again and again, 
 and arrested as a prisoner of war ; after six years pining 
 in captivity, comes out at last to find that another had 
 surreptiously availed himself of the discoveries he had 
 made, and claimed the credit of them ; and then, still ani- 
 mated by the hope of vindicating himself and of reaping 
 the benefit of the researches to which he had given the 
 best years of his life, he set to work to prepare new 
 maps and a faithful history of his labors, but died on the 
 day the proof-sheet was put in his hand. 
 
 This is an old parable that is always finding new illus- 
 tration. What shall we say of David Brainard, of Har- 
 riet Newell, of Henry Martyn, of the great reformers 
 who were snatched away before their tasks were com- 
 pleted, and of the missionaries who sailed to pagan lands, 
 only to die almost as soon as they touched the far-off 
 shore. What shall we say to these things? Let us be 
 silent and adore, while we hear the divine answer, "What 
 I do, thou knowest not now ; thou shalt know hereafter." 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 279 
 
 And so, when we ask the question, What is the mean- 
 ing of all these strange dealings with the children of men ? 
 we are taught that the providences of God are like the 
 four half lines written on the palace of one of the Caesars 
 — four half lines ; we must wait for time to complete the 
 rest of the sentence. 
 
 " The great design unnnijhed lies, 
 Our lives are incomplete; 
 
 But in the dark unknown, 
 Perfect their circles seem, 
 
 Even as the bridge's arch of stone, 
 Is rounded in the stream." 
 
 And so it is in the providence of God, though some 
 of the reasons for his dealings with Moses have been 
 explicitly revealed to us. There was one sad passage in 
 his history, and that was when the whole multitude were 
 fainting for water, and when God told him to go and 
 speak to the rock, and a refreshing stream would flow 
 forth, and when, worn out as he was by the murmurings, 
 the accusations and the apostasies of the people, he lost 
 his temper for once, and assumed the power of working a 
 miracle, and spoke unadvisedly with his lips, "Ye rebels, 
 must we fetch you water out of this rock?" And then, 
 instead of speaking quietly to the rock, he smote it twice, 
 and thus dishonored God before the people. And then 
 he was informed that because of this act, by which he 
 had failed to honor God in the eyes of the nation, the 
 penalty should be as public as the offence, and that he 
 would not be allowed to cross that river, or see the goodly 
 mountain, the Lebanon, so long the object of his aspira- 
 tion. 
 
 And yet, my friends, when God denies the request of 
 one of his children, although he may withhold a particular 
 
280 SERMONS. 
 
 blessing, he always makes a compensation by giving an 
 equivalent — by giving something better. If Paul comes 
 and beseeches the Lord thrice that the thorn may be taken 
 out of his flesh, and if the Lord denies that request, Paul 
 goes on with the thorn still rankling; but the discipline 
 he undergoes prepares him for the vision of the third 
 heaven, and then for a mansion there, which was not a 
 vision, but a reality, a home, and an eternal inheri- 
 tance. 
 
 Oh! never was he so near his rest and reward as at 
 the very time he was consigned to the darkness and filth 
 of the Mamertine dungeon, previous to his martyrdom; 
 just as I had occasion to say to you this morning, that 
 our Lord was never as dear to his Father, never as near 
 to the excellent glory to which he ascended, as when he 
 went down into Gethsemane and when he went up to 
 the cross. If the Lord does not give you the exact thing 
 that you are asking for, he will give you an equivalent, 
 or he will give you something better. When he denied 
 this petition of his servant Moses, then immediately, by 
 his sweet submission, the "meekness" of that man of 
 God was perfected, it received its final transforming 
 touch. Then Moses made the last sacrifice that could 
 be made to the divine will. God, indeed, pressed to his 
 lips a cup that was full of bitter disappointment, but with 
 a steady hand he took it and drank it to the dregs; "and 
 then God put into his hands another cup, filled with the 
 wine of consolation, and thus he had his recompense ; and 
 Moses was never so Moses-like, Moses was never so 
 Christ-like," as when he said, "If possible, grant me this 
 request; nevertheless, thy will, not mine, be done." 
 Moses did not remonstrate, did not murmur; he ac- 
 quiesced in the decision of the Lord, and just as soon as 
 he found out that it was not the purpose of God to permit 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 281 
 
 him to cross the water, he filled up the little time remain- 
 ing to him in active duty. 
 
 Oh ! what an example, and what a lesson, to the aged 
 people in the kingdom of Christ, never to lay down the 
 weapons of their warfare, never to resign themselves to 
 supineness, saying, "I have done enough; I have ful- 
 filled my vocation ;" but, inspired by the example of this 
 man, who worked on to the very minute he began to 
 ascend Nebo, can say, "My arduous work will not be 
 done till I have got my crown." After Moses was for- 
 bidden to cross the river, how did he employ the remnant 
 of time that remained to him? He made the speeches 
 recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, and recited to 
 the people the whole history of God's dealings with them ; 
 he made every appeal to their generosity, to their honor, 
 to their faith, to their gratitude, to stand fast to their 
 colors in the service of the Captain of their salvation. 
 He did that, and then he took the law he had written 
 and put it in the hands of the priests, and, lest the priests 
 should corrupt it, he also put it in the custody of the 
 elders, that they might have jurisdiction over the priests, 
 and that the law might remain unchanged in its purity; 
 and then, having done, this, he quietly appointed Joshua 
 as his successor. And when the critical moment came 
 for him to depart, we have a scene which is not described 
 in the Old Testament at all ; we only have it in the writ- 
 ings of Josephus. It may be an imaginary one, but it 
 is a very natural one. He said that when Moses, in full 
 possession of his health and vigor — how strange for a 
 man to go to his death in that superb condition ! — in the 
 full possession of mental and physical powers, began to 
 ascend the mountain, all the women of the tribes came 
 after him, beating upon their breasts, the children weep- 
 ing and wailing, universal distress and lamentation pre- 
 
282 SERMONS. 
 
 vailing everywhere, while those who watched him saw 
 how he seemed to diminish as he went, becoming just a 
 speck in the distance, hardly discernible away up on the 
 heights of Nebo, until he vanished forever from human 
 view. This was the last of earth, and now heaven begins. 
 The Lord received him on that lonely peak; the Lord 
 gently laid him down, and kissed away his life with a 
 kiss of eternal love and reconciliation, and from lonely 
 Nebo, Moses went up to the general assembly of the 
 church of the first born, and took his place in the ranks 
 of the glorified. That was his recompense. 
 
 I was in the chamber of a young minister who was 
 dying. He said: "I have often wanted to see Palestine. 
 I have often thought how sweet it would be to visit Beth- 
 lehem, where the Saviour was born; to go to Nazareth, 
 where he lived ; to tread the shores of the lake around 
 which he walked, and to visit the city where he offered 
 himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. But," 
 said he, "I won't miss Palestine, because I am going in a 
 little while to a better country, where I shall behold the 
 delectable mountains, and the city of the great King, and 
 the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." 
 There was a lovely girl — a member of this church, a 
 good many years ago — who was dying, in her perfect 
 senses, quite conscious of all that was happening around 
 her, and when I took up the Bible to read a few verses 
 at her request, I said, "My dear, what shall I read to 
 you?" She said, "Read me a part of the seventh chapter 
 of Revelation;" and when I read it to her she said, "I 
 was almost there; I heard those songs; I saw those 
 visions." So Moses saw the earthly Canaan just before 
 he entered the heavenly gates. He did not care now 
 for the associations which he expected to enjoy in Pales- 
 tine, in visiting the tombs of the old patriarchs, because 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 283 
 
 in a few minutes he was to be walking with the patriarchs 
 themselves in the glory everlasting. This was his all- 
 sufficient recompense. This was his satisfying recom- 
 pense. 
 
 You have read accounts of imposing funerals, and of 
 the honors paid — and oftentimes justly paid — to the 
 remains of the great and good. There never was a 
 funeral like the funeral of Moses. The Lord buried him ; 
 and no man knoweth the place of his sepulchre unto this 
 day. And, my friends, there is something very interest- 
 ing in the thought that Moses, after all, was not buried 
 in Canaan. There was something very fitting, when we 
 come to think of it, in the fact that he was buried outside 
 of Canaan ; that he was buried out in that heathen land 
 of Moab, intimating to us that the law that Moses had 
 written at the command of God was not to be a sectional 
 code, confined to Palestine ; that the religious institutions 
 of which he had been the founder were not to be im- 
 prisoned in that limited strip of country, one hundred 
 and twenty miles in length by forty in breadth, but that 
 they were to be institutions for the world; and althougn 
 no one knows the place where Moses was buried out in 
 that wild territory, there stands Mount Sinai to com- 
 memorate his life and death, and Mount Sinai is the 
 grand monument of Moses. He needs no other. Then, 
 again, the fact that he was not permitted to enter Canaan, 
 and that he was not buried there, is also an intimation 
 that is very animating and encouraging to us ; that God 
 no longer has a sacred soil. There is no country in the 
 world which monopolizes the divine regard. Moab is 
 now as dear to God as the land on the other side of the 
 river; and in the fact that Moses was buried outside 
 of Canaan we have a dim prophecy that all the nations 
 shall by and by serve the God of Israel ; a dim prophecy 
 
284 SERMONS. 
 
 that the boundaries of Israel shall be widened until they 
 embrace all who worship Israel's God; and when I say 
 that Moses received compensation, and that when God 
 denies one thing he gives a better, I close my discourse 
 this evening by saying that, after all, Moses did enter 
 the Promised Land; after all, he was permitted to do 
 what he prayed God to be permitted to do, and what was 
 forbidden at the time, for when that supreme moment 
 came in the life of our Lord, when he stood upon the 
 mountain, transfigured, there came down to converse with 
 him Moses and Elias ; and from that summit Moses over- 
 looked the land; from that summit he contemplated the 
 place where the great sacrifice was to be made, where that 
 redemption was to be achieved which finally would bring 
 peace on the earth and universal subjection to Messiah's 
 gentle reign. 
 
 My friends, we call Canaan the land of promise. It 
 is no longer the land of promise. Our land of promise 
 is not terrestrial. You have a land of promise, and so 
 have I. We are journeying to the promised land, but that 
 land is not bounded by geographical lines ; it is not 
 separated from us by an intervening river, like the Jordan. 
 It is a promised land, but the Canaan of old was but a 
 dim and clouded type of the land we love, and are looking 
 for ; it is the land into which God has been gathering the 
 purest and the best of earth — many of the members of 
 our churches, many of our friends and kindred. 
 
 Where are those that worshipped with us years ago? 
 Where are those who commenced the journey of life with 
 us — the friends of our youth, our school-mates ? My 
 heart was greatly touched yesterday, or the day before, 
 when I saw the notice of the sudden death of the Rev. 
 Dr. Joseph M. Atkinson, of North Carolina, who was 
 my class-mate at college, and my dear friend ever since. 
 
OBLIGATIONS AT LAST FULFILLED. 285 
 
 Yes, they drop away; but they go one by one to the 
 meeting-^place, and we travel onward in the way our 
 fathers trod, and in the way our friends have trodden, 
 or it may be our children, to the place where the saints 
 of all ages in harmony meet to be forever with one an- 
 other, and with the Lord. With what ineffable delight, 
 with what joy inexpressible, must they look upon Christ, 
 and then, as they look upon one another, discover in every 
 face something of Christ's beauty, and see how every 
 form is irradiated with the glory of the risen Redeemer. 
 Oh! that is the land of promise. That is the "better 
 country" towards which we are journeying. May God 
 take you, my friends — may he take you by the hand 
 and lead you safely on, and safely through the bright 
 gates of Paradise, to the home where there are no blighted 
 hopes or unfulfilled aspirations, but where you will find 
 "every longing satisfied" with the salvation which is not 
 only "full," but eternal. 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY AN 
 EVIDENCE OF ITS DIVINE ORIGIN: 
 
 A LECTURE, 
 
 Delivered at the University of Virginia. 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY AN 
 EVIDENCE OF ITS DIVINE ORIGIN. 
 
 MORE than eighteen hundred years ago, amidst the 
 shadows of the night, and the gloom of a narrow 
 defile near the city of Jerusalem, there might have been 
 seen the dim outline of a human form, prostrate upon the 
 ground, uttering plaintive cries, and exhibiting evidences 
 of the most overwhelming sorrow. 
 
 Presently lights were seen glancing through the foli- 
 age, and the heavy tramp of a company of men was heard. 
 A band of soldiers, and others, bearing lanterns and 
 torches and weapons, advanced, and took into custody 
 the mysterious mourner. A little company of friends 
 witnessed the capture, but they had neither the strength 
 nor the courage to attempt a rescue, and seeing him in 
 the keeping of the soldiers, they all forsook him and fled. 
 
 The next day a tumultuous crowd darkened the sum- 
 mit of a hill, on which three crosses had been erected. 
 On one of these crosses the captive of the preceding 
 night was hanging in the agonies of death. But strange 
 prodigies attended that crucifixion. All nature gave signs 
 of unwonted agitation. The earth, as if instinct with life, 
 shuddered as the crimson drops trickled upon it. It 
 became pervaded by an emotion which seemed to pierce 
 its heart and thrill through its entire frame. Upon its 
 quaking surface the forms of the shrouded dead were 
 revealed to the eyes of the terror-stricken living, while 
 over the opening tombs, the rending rocks, and the part- 
 ing veil of the temple, the sun wrapped himself in dark- 
 ness, and thus pursued his journey. 
 19 
 
2 9 o SERMONS. 
 
 Nor was the sympathy of nature wholly inarticulate. 
 It found an interpreter in the centurion, who, convinced 
 by these prodigies of the divinity of the sufferer, ex- 
 claimed, "Truly this was the Son of God." But strange 
 as it may appear, while this heathen soldier is bearing 
 such noble testimony to the character of the crucified 
 Jesus, his own followers abandon all confidence in him. 
 They did hope that he would prove the long-expected 
 Deliverer — the light of Israel, and the salvation of the 
 ends of the earth ; but, now they believed themselves to 
 have been cruelly deceived. It was a bitter disappoint- 
 ment, but there was no help for it. Their fondly cher- 
 ished hopes must be buried in the tomb in which they 
 believed him to be sealed, the prisoner of death, until the 
 final judgment. 
 
 But soon after, a surprising change took place in the 
 feelings and in the conduct of these timid, disheartened 
 men. Having been scattered, they suddenly rally again, 
 their hopes revive, their confidence is reanimated. They 
 are no longer wavering or fearful ; on the contrary, they 
 are decided and courageous. No argument can shake 
 their faith — no terrors can daunt their resolution. De- 
 cision — intrepidity — the loftiest heroism characterize 
 the men who a little while ago were appalled at the death 
 of their Leader, and who trembled lest there should be 
 any suspicion of their connection with him. They them- 
 selves furnish the explanation of this sudden and other- 
 wise inexplicable change in their views and feelings. 
 They assert that their crucified Lord is alive. Every- 
 where, at all times, in the face of all dangers, they per- 
 sist in the declaration that they have seen him, conversed 
 with him, and possess the most undeniable proofs that he 
 has risen from the dead. So firmly has this conviction 
 possessed them — so wonderfully does it animate them, 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 291 
 
 that they prepare to traverse their own, and even foreign 
 lands, for the sole purpose of proclaiming salvation 
 through the crucified and risen Jesus. 
 
 Whether its earliest heralds were mistaken, or correct 
 in their belief of the resurrection of Christ, is not now a 
 point under discussion. The fact that such was their 
 avowed conviction is all that concerns us at present. That 
 they did maintain this doctrine — that they made it the 
 basis of their creed — the theme of their proclamation, is 
 equally admitted by the Christian and the Infidel. Now 
 of the result of these labors we have two accounts — the 
 one furnished by the friends of Christianity, the other 
 by its foes. Both of these concur in two important par- 
 ticulars. They agree in their representations of the won- 
 derfully rapid diffusion of the new faith, and of the 
 feeble and inconsiderable instruments employed in its 
 propagation. 
 
 We learn from the writers of the New Testament that 
 the first triumphs of Christianity commenced in Jerusa- 
 lem — the very city which had clamored for the cruci- 
 fixion of Christ. A few days after his departure from the 
 world there was an assemblage of disciples, amounting 
 to one hundred and twenty in number. In a little more 
 than a week after, three thousand were converted in Jeru- 
 salem under one sermon of the apostles. This number 
 was in a very short time increased to five thousand. Nor 
 were the labors of the apostles confined to Jerusalem. 
 They traversed the whole land of Judea with wonderful 
 success in gaining numerous disciples. Even a great 
 company of priests became obedient to the faith. Not to 
 dwell upon particulars, it is sufficient to remark, that 
 before the author of the Acts of the Apostles reaches the 
 twenty-third chapter of his brief history of the infant 
 church, he asserts that thousands {fxoptado<; i myriads) 
 
2& SERMONS. 
 
 of the Jews were zealous believers. And before he con- 
 cludes his narrative, he informs us that the religion of the 
 Cross had penetrated Italy and Asia Minor, and had com- 
 menced its aggressions even upon the continent of Africa. 
 In less than ten years from the time when Paul went forth 
 on his missionary tour from Antioch, it was said of him 
 and his companions that they had "turned the world up- 
 side down." 
 
 The Christian Fathers enlarge upon the triumphs of 
 the cross, and dwell with exultation upon the splendid 
 progress of the gospel from land to land, and from con- 
 tinent to continent. Justin Martyr, who flourished in the 
 beginning of the second century, asserted that there was 
 not a nation, either Greek or barbarian, or of any other 
 name, even of those who wandered in tribes, or lived in 
 tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings were not 
 offered to the Father and Creator of the universe, through 
 the name of the crucified Jesus. Tertullian, who lived 
 about half a century later, exclaims, "In whom else have 
 all nations believed, but in Christ who lately came?" 
 
 In his appeal to the Roman governors, he indulges in 
 this exulting language, "We are but of yesterday, and we 
 have filled all places belonging to you, your cities, islands, 
 castles, towns, councils, the palace, senate and forum, we 
 have left you only your temples." And he adds, that 
 should the Christians withdraw in a body from the 
 empire, the world would be amazed at the solitude and 
 desolation that would ensue. 
 
 Such is the testimony of the friends of Christianity — 
 let us see how far these assertions are sustained by its 
 foes. 
 
 About thirty years after the crucifixion, Rome became 
 the theatre of an imperial villany, which has scarcely a 
 parallel in history. The Emperor Nero became the in- 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 293 
 
 cendiary of his own capital. To escape the odium of such 
 an atrocity, he accused the Christians of having set fire to 
 the city, and visited them with the most inhuman cruel- 
 ties. Tacitus declares that those who bore the vulgar 
 appellation of Christians derived their name and origin 
 from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered 
 death by the sentence of Pilate ; that for a while the dire 
 superstition was checked, but it again burst forth, and 
 not only spread itself over Judea, but was even intro- 
 duced into Rome. Now no writer is more carefully 
 guarded in his statements than Tacitus — none more 
 sedulously free from exaggeration, and therefore we 
 know it is no hyperbole in which he indulges, when he 
 speaks of the "bursting forth" of the "superstition" as 
 he would of the leaping flame of a conflagration, or the 
 headlong rush of a torrent. Nor would he characterize 
 an inconsiderable number as a "vast multitude" within 
 the very walls of the capital of the world. His account 
 of the sudden revival, and triumphant progress of the 
 gospel, reminds us of the New Testament narrative of the 
 descent of the Holy Ghost, and the simultaneous con- 
 version of the thousands of Jerusalem. 
 
 The elegant Pliny, governor of the remote provinces 
 of Pontus and Bithynia, bordering upon the Euxine, 
 found these distant regions so filled with Christians that 
 he addressed a letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking ad- 
 vice as to the proper mode of treating them. He com- 
 plains that the number of the culprits was so great as to 
 call for serious consultation ; he declares that their super- 
 stition, as he characterizes it, had seized not only upon 
 the cities, but upon the lesser towns, and open country ; 
 that the pagan temples had been almost deserted, the 
 sacred solemnities suspended, and that scarcely any pur- 
 chasers could be found for the sacrificial victims. No- 
 
294 SERMONS. 
 
 thing asserted in the Acts of the Apostles more vividly 
 illustrates the triumphant conquests of Christianity than 
 do these statements of the pagan Pliny. 
 
 But it is needless to extend this testimony, either of 
 the advocates or opponents of Christianity, with regard 
 to its vast and unparalleled conquests in the primitive 
 ages. It was of rapid growth. It was not slowly evolved 
 from a germ like the mythology of the ancients, origi- 
 nating in the dim antiquity of some remote and obscure 
 tribe, to be developed and perfected by the accretions of 
 long centuries — but it sprang into being, and into vig- 
 orous maturity, before its enemies had any reason to ap- 
 prehend its power or the impossibility of its overthrow. 
 Or, to change the figure, it was not like the coral island 
 insensibly emerging during the progress of ages from 
 unknown depths of the ocean, imperceptibly rising above 
 the surface, and expanding into a continent, but was 
 rather like the sudden vision of some newly-formed orb, 
 springing fresh and glowing from its Maker's hand, and 
 hung up in its symmetry and beauty to shine as a light 
 forever in the firmament of heaven. Certainly and de- 
 lightfully true is it that Christianity, with its celestial 
 radiance, darted, as the beams of the morning sun from 
 city to city, and from continent to continent, until kin- 
 dreds, people, tongues, and nations, were blessed by the 
 light, and warmed by the heat into a new and diviner 
 life. 
 
 All the testimony which we have on the subject, from 
 whatever source it comes, unites in illustrating the swiftly 
 advancing and victorious march of Christianity to uni- 
 versal dominion. Its progress was signalized by the 
 abolition of the corrupt and cruel institutions of heathen- 
 ism, and by the establishment of order, harmony, and 
 prosperity, in the place of misrule, dissension, and wretch- 
 
THE SUCCESS OF. CHRISTIANITY. 295 
 
 edness. The bloody altars of superstition were over- 
 thrown. The temples of pagan deities were abandoned to 
 solitude and decay. The most hallowed shrines grew 
 mute — or, as if smitten with sudden fear, uttered half- 
 audible responses. Solemnly does the choral verse of 
 Milton celebrate these desolations: 
 
 "The oracles are dumb, 
 No voice or hideous hum 
 
 Runs thro' the arched roof in words deceiving ; 
 Apollo from his shrine 
 Can, no more divine, 
 
 With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
 No nightly trance, or breathed spell 
 Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 
 
 Peor and Baalim 
 
 Forsake their temples dim, 
 
 With that twice-battered God of Palestine; 
 And mooned Ashtaroth 
 Heav'n's queen and mother both, 
 
 Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shrine. 
 
 And sullen Moloch fled, 
 Hath left in shadows dread 
 
 His burning idol all of blackest hue; 
 In vain, with cymbals' ring, 
 They call the grisly king, 
 
 In dismal dance about the furnace blue. 
 
 Nor is Osiris seen, 
 
 In Memphian grove or green." 
 
 Thus was the advance of Christianity from zone to zone 
 attested by the overthrow of idol gods and temples. And 
 equally triumphant was it in conflict with every opposing 
 force. At first ignored, then despised, then trampled upon 
 by the civil power — it commanded respect — then in- 
 
296 SERMONS. 
 
 spired fear — then displayed its majestic might, and be- 
 came terrible as an army with banners. It stretched forth 
 its resistless hand, and took to itself the power. It en- 
 robed itself in the imperial purple. The banner of the 
 cross floated from the dome of the world's capitol, and the 
 triumphant church placed upon her brow the diadem of 
 the Caesars. The last page of Eusebius glowingly depicts 
 the blessedness of the reign of Constantine, under whom 
 had been extended the dominion, not of pagan, but of 
 Christian Rome, from the rising sun to the last borders 
 of declining day, while his exulting subjects, in chants 
 and hymns, extolled God the universal King, and gave 
 him glory for the victories of his church. 
 
 But when we have asserted and illustrated the simple 
 fact that Christianity did thus rapidly attain to universal 
 diffusion, we have only entered upon the threshold of the 
 subject. If we wonder at the celerity of its propagation, 
 much more will our wonder be excited when we come to 
 contemplate the numerous and formidable obstacles 
 which opposed its progress — when we consider how 
 every earthly influence combined to prevent its extension, 
 how all the prejudices and powers of the world conspired 
 for its annihilation, while there were no visible agencies 
 at all adequate to the production of a result so stupen- 
 dous, as its advancement from victory to victory, until 
 it achieved the conquest of the world. 
 
 There is indeed one satisfactory method of accounting 
 for the success of Christianity, viz., by ascribing it to 
 that power which built the worlds. But setting aside for 
 the present this single method of explaining its triumphs, 
 its success becomes the most inexplicable of all wonders. 
 
 Christianity is now an existing fact. We can review 
 its history — we can trace its entire career from its origin, 
 through all its struggles and victories, down to the pres- 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 297 
 
 ent hour. But were our standpoint the beginning of the 
 first century, instead of the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury of the Christian era, and were we from that point of 
 observation required to estimate the probabilities of its 
 success, by all the modes of reasoning known to man, we 
 would be forced to the conclusion that it never could pre- 
 vail. Our verdict would be that its success would be 
 contrary to all the laws of mind, to all the experience of 
 the past, to all the relations of cause and effect. There 
 was a time when this was the verdict of all who had heard 
 of the pretensions of Christianity, with the exception of a 
 dozen obscure and illiterate individuals in the land of 
 Judea. Even had Christianity commenced its career by 
 adapting itself to the natural passions of the human heart 
 — had it sought to allure men by the proffer of earthly 
 power, wealth and pleasure — had it imposed no re- 
 straints and required no sacrifices — had it been advo- 
 cated by philosophers and orators — had genius, art, and 
 fashion lent it their fascinations — had rank and power 
 afforded it their countenance and support, even then, in a 
 world composed of nations and races so dissimilar in 
 intelligence, tastes, interests, and habits, we could hardly 
 have anticipated its universal prevalence — for when have 
 all mankind agreed in any opinion, or become simultane- 
 ously subject to the same influence? Said Celsus, one of 
 the early fathers of skepticism, "A man must be very 
 weak to suppose that Greeks and barbarians can ever 
 unite under the same system of religion !" But we pro- 
 ceed to show that Christianity, so far from possessing 
 such natural attractions and adventitious aids as have 
 been alluded to, commenced its career with pretensions, 
 with demands, with advocates, with prospects, all cumu- 
 lated to excite scorn and opposition — calculated to bring 
 it into direct and fierce collision with all established 
 
298 SERMONS. 
 
 opinions and venerable institutions — with all the philos- 
 ophy of the learned, with all the creeds of the supersti- 
 tious, with all the jealousy of governments, with all the 
 enmity of the natural heart, while the agencies employed 
 for its extension were, to human appearance, not only 
 feeble, but repulsive and despicable. 
 
 The very birthplace of Christianity was inauspicious. 
 The Jewish nation was the most unpopular branch of the 
 human family. Their land was the Bceotia of the world. 
 It was regarded as the native home of fanaticism, bigotry, 
 and detestable superstition. We may learn from Tacitus 
 in what estimation the Jewish people were regarded by 
 their neighbors. He stigmatizes them as a race exces- 
 sively depraved, prone to lust, and accounting no abomi- 
 nation as unlawful. He declares that what others deem 
 sacred, they reckon profane ; and what others abhor, they 
 freely tolerate. Now, a religion emanating from a people 
 regarded with such aversion by the rest of mankind, 
 would be prejudged and condemned without an investi- 
 gation. 
 
 But how could Christianity originate among the Jews 
 themselves? It is true, that about the time of the birth 
 of Christ there was among them a very general expecta- 
 tion of the advent of some extraordinary personage, 
 whom their prophets had denominated Messiah. In 
 glowing terms they had described him as a mighty con- 
 queror who should deliver his people from foreign domi- 
 nation, impart new splendors to the throne of David, and 
 extend over the world the sceptre of universal empire. 
 Hence the Jews, from whom civil independence was now 
 departing, eagerly seized upon such declarations, and 
 giving to them a literal interpretation, revelled in the 
 anticipation of the national supremacy and glory to which 
 their deliverer would exalt them. And although their 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 299 
 
 prophets had also spoken of the humiliations and woes of 
 their Messiah, they would have readily forgiven him any 
 failure in fulfilling these predictions, had he but possessed 
 the power to elevate them to that temporal aggrandise- 
 ment which they coveted. 
 
 But when they saw him enter their capital without 
 pomp or pageantry, surrounded by publicans and fisher- 
 men, instead of a splendid retinue of courtiers, followed 
 by the poor, the blind, and the halt — how great was their 
 disappointment and chagrin — how bitter their derision 
 of his kingly pretensions ! Nazareth was his reputed 
 home, and Galileans his chosen associates — but Nazareth 
 and Galilean were names of reproach even in Jerusalem. 
 A Nazarene our Messiah ! A Galilean our King ! No, 
 exclaimed they, this is not he; when Christ cometh no 
 man knoweth whence he is. Is not this the carpenter's 
 son ? And above all, when they saw him unresisting and 
 deserted — spat upon and derided — and then led away 
 to ignominious crucifixion, they regarded this as a fit 
 termination for so miserable an imposture. "Away with 
 him !" "Crucify him I" "Let his memory perish !" And 
 yet — astonishing to relate, and strangely true — multi- 
 tudes of those who had joined in this cry, and who had 
 witnessed his death on the cross, in a few days after, 
 under the preaching of Peter, an obscure Galilean fisher- 
 man, were cut to the heart, and openly — exultingly — 
 professed faith in the crucified Jesus, and became his de- 
 voted disciples ! 
 
 How is this mighty revulsion of feeling, this total 
 change of life, to be accounted for? How came it that 
 the deep-rooted prejudices of thousands were annihilated 
 in a twinkling, or exchanged for admiration and love 
 stronger than death? 
 
 These very men had doubtless witnessed many of the 
 
300 SERMONS. 
 
 wonderful works of Christ — they had been spectators 
 of his affecting death — they had seen the heaving of 
 the rocks, and felt the quaking of the earth, and had been 
 shrouded in the preternatural darkness; and was the 
 preaching of the darkened heavens, and of the bursting 
 tombs, and of the trembling earth, and of the Saviour's 
 dying groans, less eloquent than the preaching of Galilean 
 Peter? Surely not. How, why then, were the Jews now 
 convinced? What overpowering spell so suddenly con- 
 quered their wilful prejudice, their determined unbelief? 
 Surely here is mystery wholly inexplicable by all natural 
 causes. Was it a mere human power which thus con- 
 quered them? Then it was a human power also which 
 cleaved the rocks, and shook the earth, and clothed the 
 sun with darkness. 
 
 Such was the first triumph of Christianity. But the 
 heralds of the cross do not confine their labors to Pales- 
 tine. They visit pagan lands. They proclaim the resur- 
 rection of Christ, and the doctrine of salvation through 
 him alone, to the most barbarous, and to the most enlight- 
 ened nations of the Gentile world. They seem to make 
 no distinction between savage and civilized people. They 
 evince no preference for any particular field of labor, but 
 visit with equal readiness the most refined and polished 
 cities, and the most benighted and barbarous provinces. 
 They are as confident and courageous in the proudest 
 capital as in the obscurest hamlet. The early champions 
 of the cross did not hover about the outskirts of civiliza- 
 tion, like Cossacks around the camps of disciplined 
 armies, only to make sudden and irregular assaults, and 
 then to flee to the wilds of the desert ! It would, indeed, 
 have been a suspicious circumstance, if Christianity had 
 evinced a preference for the haunts of ignorant and sav- 
 age tribes, and had it selected these as the theatre of its 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 301 
 
 first aggressions, untutored and unreflecting men might 
 easily have been made the dupes of an imposture, how- 
 ever base and imprudent. But on the contrary — in the 
 words of a venerable divine — "In this respect Christi- 
 anity stands upon high vantage ground. Its Author first 
 announced himself to an age celebrated in story and im- 
 mortalized in song. His apostles travelled over classic 
 ground. They established churches in the land of Euclid, 
 of Aristotle and Longinus ; of Demosthenes, Solon and 
 Lycurgus; of Homer and Pindar, Atticus and Cicero, 
 Sallust and Livy, Horace, Ovid and Virgil." It was the 
 Augustan age — an age distinguished for its constellation 
 of poets, orators, and statesmen — an age eminent among 
 all others for its inquisitive researches, its ingenious dis- 
 putations, its vast and varied erudition, its bold specula- 
 tions, and unfettered freedom of opinion. Not only were 
 Ephesus and Antioch, and other renowned cities of Asia, 
 honored by apostolic labors, but another city — more re- 
 nowned than all — a city where the merchant found his 
 exchange, the student his university, the artist his studio, 
 the pleasure-loving his paradise, and the wit his admiring 
 audience — the classic capital of the most classic land — 
 there, too, the Apostle proclaimed his message, in the 
 hearing of the volatile, ingenious Athenians (those true 
 Parisians of antiquity) — and proclaimed it, too, with 
 just as much confidence and expectation of success, as if, 
 instead of the Areopagus, he had stood in the cottage of 
 some Galilean fisherman ! Nor did his labors terminate 
 until his desire to see Rome was gratified; until Caesar's 
 household heard from his lips the story of the cross. 
 
 But what popular doctrines do the apostles proclaim, 
 as they journey from city to city, and from province to 
 province, captivating and entrancing one quarter of the 
 globe after another? How contrary to all that we might 
 
302 SERMONS. 
 
 anticipate, is the answer ! Doctrines so strange and in- 
 credible as to provoke ridicule and scorn, or so unpalat- 
 able and offensive as to excite disgust and anger. What 
 could have been more calculated to awaken the derision 
 of the multitude than the proclamation of the resurrection 
 of the dead ? In an age when the immortality of the soul 
 was scarcely believed, nothing could have appeared more 
 preposterous than the assertion that the body which had 
 seen corruption, and returned to its native earth, would be 
 revived, reanimated, and clothed with immortality. It 
 was the annunciation of this doctrine which caused the 
 Apostle to be regarded as a madman by the Roman. And 
 when he visited Athens, whose inhabitants were ever 
 eager "to hear some new thing," he presented to their 
 minds a novelty too strange and startling. When he 
 spoke of Jesus and the resurrection, they characterized 
 him as a "setter forth of strange gods" So vague were 
 their ideas of his meaning, that they seem to have re- 
 garded the resurrection [avaaraato) as one divinity, and 
 Jesus as another ; and when more fully informed as to the 
 Apostle's meaning, they turned away in disgust from a 
 tenet so incredible. 
 
 What ! were they to be told that the bodies which had 
 mouldered and mingled with their kindred dust, and then 
 been dissipated by all the winds of heaven — that the 
 bodies whose very tombs had crumbled to atoms, and 
 vanished, not only from the sight, but from the remem- 
 brance of men — were to be raised to life again ? Were 
 they to be persuaded that the elements would ever dis- 
 gorge the particles which they had swallowed up ? — that 
 not only the earth, but that the sea should give up its 
 dead? that the forms of those who went down into the 
 fathomless caverns of the deep, in the shock of battle and 
 tempest, would emerge from their hidden chambers, and 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 303 
 
 darken the blue bosom of the ocean as they arose to be 
 judged with those who had slept in the earth? Would 
 the warm pulses of life again throb in the scattered dust 
 of Aristotle? Would Socrates, and Plato, and those 
 ancient sages who had indulged rather in the fond hope 
 than in the confident belief of a future existence, again 
 stand erect upon the earth, and gaze upon that sun which 
 centuries ago had looked down upon their graves? No, 
 a doctrine so startling and incredible was worthy only of 
 mockery. 
 
 Even the doctrine of a future life, as it was presented 
 by the apostles, had nothing in it attractive to the natural 
 heart. The heaven which they revealed to the faith of 
 mortals was no such Elysium as that which mythology 
 had delighted to present ; no flowery abode of sensual joys 
 and pleasures ministering to the natural tastes and pas- 
 sions of men ; — no Paradise, where feasting and revelry 
 ruled the hour, where black-eyed Houris reposed in every 
 bower, and whose perfumed air ever vibrated with dulcet 
 melodies, such as Mahomet promised to the faithful (and 
 of which he permitted them to enjoy such large preliba- 
 tions in this life) — but a world whose element was holi- 
 ness, one which excluded all but the pure in heart, which 
 did not offer one attraction to the covetous, the ambitious, 
 the licentious, or the revengeful — one which could be 
 attained only by a path narrow, rugged and difficult of 
 ascent. 
 
 Point out to men a heaven where the pleasures of 
 sense may be enjoyed in a more exquisite degree, and 
 enjoyed forever; a heaven to which Dives may go with 
 his purple robes and rosy wine; where all the natural 
 inclinations and unhallowed propensities may find un- 
 bounded gratification, freed from the restraints of law and 
 the checks of conscience ; — and men will rivet their eager 
 
304 SERMONS. 
 
 eyes upon it, and, if possible, force the gates and scale 
 the ramparts of a paradise so alluring. But, discarding 
 the doctrine of a divine influence, what could so change 
 the natural heart of man as to cause it to aspire to the 
 pure spiritual joys of a heaven like that revealed in the 
 gospel? Whence did myriads obtain those tastes which 
 gave them a relish for the hallowed enjoyments and em- 
 ployments of glorified beings? Whence did impure 
 grovelling mortals derive those qualifications which pre- 
 pared them for the exalted services of a world of purity, 
 for the dignity and the dominion of kings and priests 
 unto God? If such a heaven became attractive to the 
 eyes and hearts of mortals, it was because their eyes were 
 opened, by some divinely exerted power, to the perception 
 of spiritual beauty to which they had been blind before, 
 and their hearts to the reception and love of truths which 
 otherwise had been objects of disgust and aversion. 
 
 But how was a title to the abode of the blessed to be 
 obtained? Would the populace be attracted, conciliated 
 and won by the proclamation of the only name under 
 heaven whereby salvation is even possible? 
 
 On the contrary, would they not be filled with com- 
 mingled disgust and displeasure when they learned that 
 the great burden of the apostle's message was salvation 
 through the merits of a crucified Jew ? 
 
 We have already adverted to the estimation in which 
 the Romans held the Hebrew race. And if such was their 
 contempt and aversion toward that whole people, now 
 that they were in the very act of wresting the sceptre 
 from Judah, how could they be induced to acknowledge 
 a plebeian of that nation as a king — a plebeian despised 
 and rejected by the vast majority of his own country- 
 men? 
 
 Well has it been said — had Jesus been still living — 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 305 
 
 had he advanced toward the capital, as an ambitious war- 
 rior at the head of a brave army — Romans might have 
 respected him as a gallant foe ; still the Temple of Janus 
 would have been thrown open, and mail-clad legions 
 would have marched to meet the invader. But if no 
 greater honor than this could have been shown him, how 
 could the Romans, ignorant of prophecy and of the spir- 
 itual nature of his kingdom, receive him as a King and 
 Saviour? Would they not despise him and deride his 
 pretensions, even more than his own countrymen did pre- 
 vious to the day of Pentecost? 
 
 Accustomed as we have ever been to associate the 
 cross with all that is sacred and venerable, we can have 
 no conception of the disgust which would arise in the 
 Roman mind at the proposal to elevate a crucified man 
 to the rank of a divine Saviour — and withal a crucified 
 Jew — a Jew who was born in a stable. What witticisms, 
 what jeers, what scoffs, would overwhelm the advocates 
 of such a Divinity! No wonder that a Roman governor 
 should have charged one of them with being "mad." 
 Should some one in this land assert the Godhead of an 
 Indian who had been hanged upon a gallows, he would 
 not more offend the moral sense of the community than 
 did this doctrine of the apostles the proud and polished 
 people to whom it was addressed. 
 
 But what doctrines did the apostles proclaim which 
 were not opposed to the sentiments of the natural heart? 
 It is no compliment to a man to tell him that he is totally 
 depraved, utterly helpless, and justly condemned. It is 
 an impolitic way to attempt to gain adherents to a cause 
 by demanding of them heavy sacrifices and painful self- 
 denials. And no system of human invention, seeking the 
 suffrages and applauses of the world, would have, de- 
 manded as its -first requirement, self-crucifixion, and a 
 20 
 
3 o6 SERMONS. 
 
 renunciation of all that is most dear to the natural heart. 
 Yet such were the exactions of Christianity. It was never 
 offered to men as a speculative creed, intended merely to 
 occupy the intellect ; but it was urged as a rule of action, 
 to control the outer and inner life of man — to regulate 
 not only external conduct, but to prescribe imperative 
 laws for the government of the thoughts, desires and 
 affections — condemning ambition, avarice, envy, intrigue, 
 carnal ease, sensual indulgence — and enjoining meekness, 
 temperance, forgiveness, love to God, love to man, love 
 to enemies, purity of life, holiness of heart. 
 
 Almost every precept of Christianity imposes a re- 
 straint or demands the mortification of some passion or 
 inclination of the heart. 
 
 By nature, man is proud and self-sufficient : Chris- 
 tianity declares him to be weak and dependent, and in- 
 capable of self-guidance. Though man is naturally obsti- 
 nate and self-willed, Christianity demands the subjection 
 of every faculty and power to the law of another. Though 
 man is naturally selfish and intent on the gratification 
 of his own wishes, regardless of the happiness of others, 
 Christianity enjoins a philanthropy which is wholly dis- 
 interested ; it demands a sacrifice of personal ease and 
 interest for the promotion of the good of others, and 
 ordains a charity which shall embrace in its arms the 
 whole family of man. Though man is by nature prone 
 to retaliation under a sense of wrong — though, for the 
 moment, revenge is sweet when it is glutted by the de- 
 struction of its victim, yet, even when the bosom is swell- 
 ing with rage — when furious passions lash the soul into 
 a tempest and drown the voice of reason — even then 
 the clear, celestial tones of the gospel are heard, rising 
 above the din of passion, saying, "Peace, be still." "Dearly 
 beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 307 
 
 wrath." "If thine enemy hunger, feed him ; if he thirst, 
 give him drink !" 
 
 When Homer gave to the world his portraiture of the 
 most renowned hero of antiquity, the prominent traits of 
 whose character the great Latin bard has summed up in 
 one nervous line — 
 
 " Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer," 
 
 epithets which might furnish names for four devils, he 
 did not offend the moral sense of his countrymen by such 
 a delineation; neither was Greek nor Roman admiration 
 of the character of this warrior diminished, even when 
 he is represented as dragging the dead body of his gallant 
 rival, bound to his chariot wheels, three times around the 
 walls of Troy, and that, too, in the sight of his aged 
 father. 
 
 How foreign to all the genius and spirit of the age 
 which witnessed its triumphs were the teachings of the 
 gospel ! Plain, unlettered men. without wealth, or rank, 
 or influence (and with one or two exceptions), without 
 address or eloquence, went abroad proclaiming doctrines 
 most novel, startling, unpalatable. "A crucified Christ 
 was all their rhetoric," and yet no doctrines ever promul- 
 gated, before or since that day, met with such universal 
 favor — no teachings ever so penetrated and transformed 
 human hearts, none ever gained a popularity so world- 
 wide. But did Christianity obtain its unlimited su- 
 premacy over the hearts of men, did it triumph over prin- 
 cipalities, did it ascend a throne, and issue its undisputed 
 edicts to the subjugated nations — by forbidding all that 
 corrupt humanity craved, by enjoining all that corrupt 
 humanity was averse to — by waging war of extermina- 
 tion upon every depraved, and, therefore, cherished pas- 
 sion, prejudice and propensity? Leaving out of view the 
 
3 o8 SERMONS. 
 
 intervention of divine power, here is an enigma to be 
 solved by some more gifted intellect than the world has 
 yet been favored with. 
 
 Another obstacle to the progress of Christianity was 
 its uncompromising exclusiveness. It refused to come 
 under the patronage of any other religion. It refused to 
 take any other religion under its patronage. It would 
 not even enter into a friendly alliance. It would not even 
 make a treaty of peace. It proclaimed eternal warfare 
 upon every other faith. Its Janus was never to be closed 
 while an enemy survived. It demanded the overthrow of 
 every altar and temple of paganism. Its aim was a total 
 abrogation of all the religious systems of the world. It 
 demanded the utter annihilation of institutions which the 
 revolution of ages had rendered venerable and sacred in 
 the memories of men. Claiming to be the only true re- 
 ligion, it would not receive the false into its embrace. To 
 every proposed affiliation its genius replied, What com- 
 munion hath light with darkness? What concord hath 
 Christ with Belial? It declared to paganism that its 
 priests were jugglers and its gods a lie. It declared to 
 Judaism that its mission had ended, that its glory had 
 departed ; that it was now only the worthless scaffold 
 around some completed palace, and as such, fit only to 
 be thrown down. It declared to the sage that his pro- 
 foundest speculations were vain j anglings. It ranked the 
 Epicurean with the beasts, and the Stoic with the stones 
 of the field. It estimated the wisdom of the scribe as 
 lighter than vanity. It denounced the sleek and sancti- 
 monious Pharisee as a disguised hypocrite, and rent in 
 fragments the reverend garments whose hem men had 
 stooped to kiss, and exhibited the wearer to the world 
 as a naked child of the devil. 
 
 Such was the attitude which Christianity assumed 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 309 
 
 toward the time-hallowed systems of the world. Such 
 was the attitude of a novel religion — one which sprung 
 from a subjugated people — whose founder was a carpen- 
 ter, and whose greatest apostle was a tentmaker. 
 
 Far easier is it to change the kings than the gods — 
 the government than the religion of any nation. Did ex- 
 clusive, uncompromising, all-assuming Christianity adopt 
 the right policy for effecting such a change ? 
 
 Nor are we to suppose that polytheism had a slight 
 hold upon the affections and prejudices of men. It com- 
 mended itself to the favor of the sensual by the indulgence 
 it permitted. The fires of unhallowed lust were kindled 
 upon the very altars of paganism. It commended itself 
 to the imagination of the refined by the beauty of its 
 mythology. It placed genial household gods beneath 
 every roof. It animated all nature with propitious deities. 
 It gave Naiads to every fountain, and Dryads to every 
 grove. Aurora rode upon the beams of the morning, and 
 Iris clothed herself in the melting hues of the rainbow. 
 Old ocean obeyed its trident-bearing god — the voices of 
 spirits were heard along its flashing waves, and sportive 
 Nereids gambolled upon its yellow sands. 
 
 It commended itself to the taste of the common people 
 by its gorgeously attired priests, its showy temples, its 
 jocund festivals, its stately processions, and brilliant ritual 
 services, rendered more attractive by all the charms de- 
 rived from an alliance with music, painting, and sculpture. 
 How seemingly hopeless the aggressions of Christianity, 
 without imposing rites, without altars, without sacrifices, 
 or visible gods — and utterly devoid of all external attrac- 
 tions ! 
 
 How can a religion of faith — a purely spiritual reli- 
 gion — overturn systems venerable for antiquity, deeply 
 entrenched in prejudices of men, endeared by association, 
 
310 SERMONS. 
 
 up'held by the homage and personal devotion of statesmen 
 and warriors, who felt honored in exchanging the gown 
 and the armor for the sacerdotal vestments, that they 
 might personally assist in the sacred ceremonies? How 
 shall a superstition commending itself to the bosoms and 
 business of men, pervading all the ramifications of social 
 life, interwoven with all the departments of government, 
 under whose auspices Greece had attained her highest 
 heaven of classic renown, under whose favoring smiles 
 Rome had achieved the conquest of the world — how 
 shall a system thus founded, and thus supported, be sup- 
 planted by an upstart faith which does not offer one at- 
 traction to worldly pride, pleasure, or glory, but which, on 
 the contrary, summons its votaries to a life of mortifica- 
 tion and self-denial — to obloquy, and the ruin of all 
 earthly prospects — whose open confession is, "If in this 
 life only we have hope, we are of all men most miser- 
 able?" With prospects like these, what earthly possi- 
 bility is there of its triumph over the firmly-established 
 and fondly-cherished institutions of polytheism? Expe- 
 rience answers — reason, common sense answers — It 
 cannot prevail; it must perish. Nevertheless, it did pre- 
 vail; it did triumph. It scattered polytheism to the 
 winds, it sent its idols to the moles and the bats, it laid its 
 proudest temples in the dust, and on the ruins of the fallen 
 fabric it planted the immovable foundations, and reared 
 the eternal pillars of the Christian church. Is this august 
 structure the work of human hands ? A stone-mason can 
 build a wall; but does it therefore follow that he can 
 build a world? 
 
 We have now considered the obstacles to the success 
 of Christianity arising from its innate ofTensiveness to 
 human taste, prejudice, and reason, its failure to meet the 
 exalted expectations of the Jews, the absurdity of its doc- 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 311 
 
 trines in the estimation of enlightened pagans, the start- 
 ling novelty of its precepts, its want of temporal rewards 
 for its votaries, its unattractive spirituality, its destitution 
 of all such sensuous charms as would captivate the vulgar, 
 its uncompromising exclusiveness, and determined hos- 
 tility to every other religion, and now it only remains to 
 contemplate its triumph over one other obstacle, viz., over 
 the active external opposition which it encountered on all 
 sides — the desperate efforts of its enemies for its over- 
 throw by means of slanderous tongues, and slanderous 
 pens, and the dreadful sword of persecution. 
 
 The success of Christianity under persecution is a 
 strange and deeply interesting phenomenon. It would be 
 impossible to specify all the forms of assault to which its 
 enemies resorted. Wherever Christianity appeared, it 
 excited the rage of various classes and orders of men, who 
 opposed it from widely different motives. 
 
 Professing to be a universal religion, its proclamations 
 must needs go throughout all the earth, and be heard in 
 the ends of the world. Its voice must mingle with the 
 soft murmur of the Mediterranean waves, and with the 
 hoarse tempests which thunder along the bleak shores of 
 the frozen sea. It must come in contact with every phase 
 of human character, as varied by different climates, de- 
 grees of civilization, and forms of government, and hence 
 it must excite an opposition as diversified as the abodes, 
 customs, and interests of mankind. But for the present, 
 leaving this extended field of observation, and confining 
 our attention to the fortunes of Christianity in the Roman 
 Empire alone, we can readily anticipate what a host of 
 foes its aggressions would stir up among that people. 
 Polytheism was the munificent patron both of the fine 
 and mechanic arts. It gave employment to the painter, to 
 the poet, and to the humblest artisan. It gave honor and 
 
312 SERMONS. 
 
 emolument to the vast retinue of priests and officials in 
 the service of the gods of every shrine and temple. It 
 gave entertainment to the countless multitude in whose 
 minds alternate emotions of awe, pleasure, and exultation, 
 were enkindled by public games, processions and festivals. 
 An innumerable sacerdotal throng of pontifices, au- 
 gurs, vestals and flamens derived their support from the 
 revenues of the temples, and from the public treasury. 
 But should the doctrines of Christianity prevail, who 
 would believe their venerable lies? Who would make 
 them donation visits? Whence could they obtain bread, 
 the impostures of their craft once exploded? It is not 
 agreeable either to a mercenary politician or priest to 
 lose office. As a matter of course, all the satellites, and 
 retainers, and dependants of paganism, would rouse all 
 their energies to resist the inroads of the gospel, which 
 took away at once their credit and their means of subsist- 
 ence. The common people would be enraged at the loss 
 of their favorite entertainments. The philosophers would 
 gnash their teeth against a system which closed their 
 schools, and rendered their teachings contemptible. The 
 higher classes of society, men of rank and influence, sena- 
 tors and soldiers, men who derived new distinction by 
 officiating at the ceremonials of religion, would indig- 
 nantly frown upon a faith which mocked at their divini- 
 ties and solemn mysteries. Kings and magistrates would 
 regard with mingled fear and detestation such an over- 
 turning of the religion which was incorporated with the 
 state, which was sustained by proscription and prejudice, 
 which was so interwoven with the civil and military insti- 
 tutions of the country, that no warlike expedition could 
 be ordered, and not even a seat taken in the senate, with- 
 out accompanying religious ceremonies. Hence Chris- 
 tianity was regarded as treason against the state. 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 313 
 
 We cannot wonder, therefore, at the variety or the 
 virulence of the assaults made upon so restless an agita- 
 tor. The foulest slanders were verbally circulated, accus- 
 ing Christians of dark, impure, and bloody rites. The 
 acutest and most brilliant writers employed all their learn- 
 ing and cunning to bring Christianity into contempt. 
 Among others, Celsus, Porphyry, Symmachus, and the 
 Emperor Julian, wrote treatises, fragments of which have 
 come down to us, from which we learn, that although they 
 did not deny the miracles of the gospel record, yet they 
 assailed Christianity with a malignity which rivalled the 
 ingenuity of Spinosa, the wit of Voltaire, and the ribaldry 
 of Paine. 
 
 But the final appeal of terrified and tottering pagan- 
 ism was to the power of the government. The Roman 
 monarchy, the greatest and strongest upon earth, directed 
 all its might toward the overthrow, and, if possible, the 
 extinction of the Christian church. 
 
 A certain class of writers have indeed endeavored to 
 create the impression that the Roman government was 
 wonderfully liberal and tolerant towards the religions of 
 other nations. But a closer examination into the best 
 authorities on the subject will lead us to a very different 
 conclusion. It is true that some of the emperors were 
 disposed to be lenient and indulgent. There were inter- 
 vals during which the church enjoyed seasons of com- 
 parative tranquillity. It is also admitted that individuals 
 were permitted to express their sentiments with a great 
 degree of freedom. For example, upon the stage, and in 
 the writings of the satiric poets, the keenest ridicule was 
 directed towards the thieves, murderers, and adulterers, 
 facetiously styled "the Immortal Gods," and winked at, 
 perhaps enjoyed, by the magistrates themselves. The 
 caustic irony of Plautus and Terence, the philosophic 
 
314 SERMONS. 
 
 raillery of Cicero and Lucian, might be indulged with 
 impunity. It is also true that when the Romans wished 
 to conciliate a particular people they did not hesitate to 
 express great reverence for the gods of that people. But 
 Christianity was not the religion of any nation — but of a 
 new sect. It was a religion demanding unconditional 
 submission to its requirements, and refusing to enter into 
 coalition with any form of idolatry. Hence, there was 
 no motive, or policy, in treating it with conciliation. 
 There was, on the contrary, everything to provoke jeal- 
 ousy and hatred. And when one of the emperors pro- 
 posed to give Jesus Christ a place among the gods of the 
 nation, the proposal was rejected by the senate. 
 
 Moreover, the Romans ascribed their greatness as a 
 people, and the unexampled success of their arms, to the 
 favor of their gods. It was the rhetorical boast of Min. 
 Felix Octavius, that "because of exercising religious dis- 
 cipline in the camp, Rome had stretched her dominions 
 beyond the paths of the sun, and the limits of the ocean." 
 Hence, however theoretically tolerant of other religions, 
 there was often a political necessity for the exclusion of 
 foreign rites. It was forbidden by law to pay religious 
 honors to any deity which had not been recognized by a 
 legislative act. S. JEmilius Paulus, during his consulship, 
 ordered the temples of two foreign deities, not legally 
 recognized, to be destroyed. On several occasions the 
 senate felt itself constrained to exert its power to prevent 
 religious innovations. Livy quotes an eloquent speech of 
 one of the consuls against foreign rites. Dion Cassius has 
 transmitted to us a celebrated oration, in which Maecenas 
 demonstrates to Augustus the danger of tolerating exotic 
 religions ; and even under the reign of Tiberius — that 
 enemy of gods and men — the Egyptian ceremonies were 
 prohibited. A Roman jurist declares it to be a principle of 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 315 
 
 their law, that those who introduced religions of new and 
 doubtful tendency, if men of rank, were to be degraded ; 
 if plebeians, were to be punished with death ! But of all 
 the forms of faith known to the world, Christianity, for 
 the reasons already mentioned, was most obnoxious to the 
 jealousy of government. It could not be a religio licita 
 of the Roman law. Its professors were liable to the 
 charge of high reason. They were stigmatized as irre- 
 ligiosi — hostes Cccsarum, Jwstes popuii Romani. 
 
 Could any one unacquainted with the true nature of 
 Christianity have foreseen the ominous clouds which were 
 to gather around her, and the tempests of fire and blood 
 which were to burst upon her, during the long night of 
 her affliction, he would have deemed it impossible for her 
 even to maintain an existence upon earth — he would 
 have predicted her speedy and utter annihilation. 
 
 In a country blest with a constitutional government 
 and religious liberty — where none dare lay trammels on 
 freedom of opinion, and where the expression, ''persecu- 
 tion for conscience' sake," is scarcely understood, inas- 
 much as none have any experience of its meaning — it is 
 difficult to form an adequate conception of the trials of 
 those whose lives were liable at any moment to be ter- 
 minated by bloody martyrdom — who, in professing the 
 name of Christ, provoked the wrath of principalities and 
 powers — who had to pass by the stake on their way to 
 the communion table. When the world respects the rites 
 and institutions of religion, it is an easy matter to assume 
 the name of Christian. But the profession of Christianity 
 is a very different thing, when the official is seen disen- 
 tangling the thongs of the knotted lash — when the heads- 
 man runs his nail over the keen edge of the gleaming axe ; 
 when the torturer stirs the fagots under the red bars of 
 the iron griddle; when the executioner jags the nails and 
 
316 SERMONS. 
 
 clanks the spikes which are to mangle while they transfix 
 the hands and feet to the cross; when the hungry lion 
 howls round the amphitheatre, and famished dogs stand 
 ready to gnaw the skulls which roll from the dripping 
 scaffold — ah ! then it is a different matter to espouse the 
 cause which exposes its professor to terrors like these. 
 But for the testimony of faithful history, we would not 
 believe that satanic malice could invent tortures, or that 
 hellish cruelty could have been so unfeeling as to inflict 
 torments, such as Christians of every age and sex were 
 then compelled to suffer. It was not the terror of death 
 — but the death of terror which then affrighted the soul. 
 And if, according to the testimony of Lactantius, there 
 were instances in which magistrates boasted that during 
 their whole administration they had put no Christians to 
 death, let Lactantius explain the secret of their boast, and 
 inform us what credit is to be given to those who uttered 
 it. He can teach us that there are punishments worse 
 than death — that the most savage executioners are those 
 who have resolved not to kill — that the most dreadful 
 of all sufferings are those which are disguised under the 
 name of clemency. "They give orders," says he, "that 
 strict care be taken of the tortured, that their limbs may 
 be repaired for other racks, and their blood recruited 
 afresh for other punishments !" Knowing that death 
 would be a release to the sufferer, and that it would con- 
 fer on him the glorious crown of martyrdom, and admit 
 him to the reward of the blessed, "they inflict," he adds, 
 "the most exquisite pains on the body, and are only solici- 
 tous lest the tortured victim should expire!" So great 
 was the variety of the tortures invented for them, that 
 Domitius Ulpianus, a celebrated lawyer, wrote seven 
 books descriptive of the different punishments that Chris- 
 tians ought to have inflicted on them. But if occasional 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 317 
 
 instances occurred in which humane and justice-loving 
 magistrates, yielding to the natural sentiments of pity, 
 were willing, with Trajan, to advise that Christians 
 should not be sought for, and that only such as were ap- 
 prehended should be capitally punished — yet there were 
 no such restraints upon the blind fury of the populace, 
 whose appetite for blood was only whetted by each fresh 
 view of the gory scaffold and the crimson sands of the 
 arena. 
 
 But why should we dwell upon details which sicken 
 the heart and harrow the feelings? It is sufficient to ob- 
 serve that thousands upon thousands were the victims of 
 those persecutions, and that the whole power of the 
 Roman Empire, which had been sufficient to subdue the 
 world, was exhausted in the effort to subdue the church. 
 And here a new phenomenon engages our attention. 
 These persecutions, so far from extinguishing the Chris- 
 tian name and cause, served only to give to both new 
 honors and triumphs. If power smiled upon the church, 
 it grew ; if power frowned upon the church, it grew still 
 faster, and amidst indescribable terrors advanced with a 
 heroism which could "smile at the drawn dagger and 
 defy its point." Amid the dark glooms of persecution, 
 there blazed forth the burning and shining lights of the 
 world. The heroism of the soldier who fights in the pres- 
 ence of thousands, whose victory is celebrated by a 
 nation's acclamations, or whose fall is hallowed by a 
 nation's tears, is nothing to the heroism which supported 
 the primitive martyrs through long months and weary 
 years of imprisonment, and which inspired them with a 
 holy serenity when they stood upon the scaffold, sur- 
 rounded, not by admiring and applauding thousands, but 
 by the hootings and execrations of the infuriated rabble. 
 
 Do you wish for the most illustrious examples of un- 
 
318 SERMONS. 
 
 shaken fortitude which the world has known? Then 
 search not for them on the bloody deck or on the em- 
 battled field — but go to the deserts to which the saints 
 have been exiled, to the dungeons in which they have 
 been immured, to the funeral piles from which they have 
 ascended in chariots of fire, and there behold displays of 
 true valor, infinitely transcending the bravery of those 
 who seek the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth, 
 or who rush on death amid the clangor of trumpets and 
 the thunder of artillery ! 
 
 The resignation of the martyr was no sullen stoicism 
 yielding to inevitable necessity. It was not the savage 
 pride of the Indian at the stake, who dies, and makes 
 no sign of inward agony. It was cheerful acquiescence 
 in the will of Providence. It was the deep and beautiful 
 tranquillity of those who believed that to die in the arms 
 of Jesus was to live forever. 
 
 Like the trees which yield their precious gums only 
 when their sides are gashed ; like the palm which lifts 
 its head highest - when the greatest weight is laid upon it; 
 like the burning forest, which kindles with fiercer flame 
 just as the tempest beats upon it — so Christianity, under 
 the sword, under the heel, under the storm of persecution, 
 only the more mightily prevailed and grew. The good 
 seed of the gospel had been sown over the field of the 
 world, and upon that seed the blood of martyrs fell like 
 fertilizing showers, while over it the flame of persecution 
 was but a torrid sun, quickening it into luxuriant develop- 
 ment, and clothing it with a brighter verdure. 
 
 It is not Paul at liberty, but Paul in chains, who bears 
 testimony before kings, and as a captive makes converts 
 in Caesar's household. 
 
 The enemies of Wycliffe, years after his death, ordered 
 that his remains should be disinterred and scattered. The 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 319 
 
 more effectually to effect this purpose, his ashes were cast 
 into one of the branches of the river Avon, and thus, 
 says old Fuller, "this brook did convey his ashes into the 
 Avon, and the Avon into the Severn, and the Severn into 
 the narrow sea, and this into the wide ocean, and so the 
 ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which 
 is now dispersed all the world over." So, too, in primitive 
 times, the whirlwind of persecution scattered the good 
 seed wherever there was a soil on which it could fall ; 
 and not only did it germinate in rich luxuriance on the 
 banks of fertile rivers, and on the shores of sunny islands, 
 but far away in the distant desert there was the bloom 
 and fragrance of the rose. 
 
 No arguments were so convincing as the patient suf- 
 ferings of Christians, no miracles so overpowering as 
 their prayers, invoking blessings on the heads of their 
 tormentors. 
 
 Do mail-clad soldiers, inured to the atrocities of war, 
 behold a young and beautiful female, possessed of all 
 those charms which poets delight to celebrate and sculp- 
 tors to perpetuate, accused of no crime, but that of loving 
 Jesus of Nazareth — do these men of iron mould, behold 
 her driven through the streets of Rome, stripped of her 
 modest veil, scourged as she goes, and scarred with hot 
 irons, until she sinks in the arms of death, with murmurs 
 of pity and forgiveness upon her lips and triumph in her 
 eyes ? — then these, before unmoved and prayerless men, 
 kneel down in the streets, and declare that, if such are 
 the victories of the Christian faith, they, too, are the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus henceforth and forever ; and there, beside 
 the body of the murdered girl, they swear allegiance to 
 the cause for which she suffered martyrdom. 
 
 Does a little boy, charged only with loving him who 
 took little children to his arms and to his heart, clasp his 
 
320 SERMONS. 
 
 hands together as he is fastened to the stake, and sing 
 his infant hymn as the flames kindle around him, and 
 pray to Jesus not to desert him in the fire ? — there, too, 
 is a spectacle which makes iron-hearted veterans weep, 
 which causes them to call upon the executioners to pre- 
 pare the pile for them also, for, say they, if a child can 
 die thus exulting and go rejoicing to the skies in a whirl- 
 wind of fire, his faith must have come from the skies ; 
 let ours be such a death, and our last end like his. 
 
 Such was the result. The sword of persecution 
 glancing off from the shield of Christianity, inflicted mor- 
 tal wounds upon the body of him who drew it, and at 
 last fell broken from the palsied arm which had wielded it. 
 
 Such was the triumph of Christianity over its mighti- 
 est foe. The Roman power, before which the nations 
 had bowed in subjection, cannot overcome the fishermen 
 of Galilee, but is conquered by them. Historians have 
 made the success of Alexander in subduing the Persian 
 Empire with an army of thirty thousand the theme of their 
 glowing eulogies ; but what was this to the achievements 
 of one little band of apostles? 
 
 Christianity, without arms, without allies, without 
 wealth, without influence, without worldly allurements, 
 goes forth from its lowly shed in Bethlehem, seizes upon 
 Jerusalem, overcomes Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Alex- 
 andria, Rome; overturns idol, altar and temple; sweeps 
 away the religious formations of centuries ; prostrates all 
 enemies in the dust ; places its foot upon the neck of per- 
 secution ; ascends the imperial throne, and gives laws to 
 the subjugated nations. Here is a mystery demanding a 
 solution. Here is an effect, a stupendous effect, produced 
 without any visible agency or discovered natural cause 
 at all adequate to such a result. Here is a consummation 
 attained in defiance of all the ordinary laws which control 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 321 
 
 the changes of society, in opposition to all the principles 
 which govern the developments of human affairs. Be- 
 hold the Christian Church — a symmetrical edifice ; not 
 a heap of building materials, but a structure, well ce- 
 mented, admirably proportioned, and garnished after the 
 similitude of a palace, exhibiting in all its parts evidences 
 of deep design, and matchless skill, and resistless power ! 
 Whose hands reared these walls, yet strengthening, yet 
 rising, waiting only for the capstone, and the accompany- 
 ing shoutings of a multitude which no man can number ? 
 Who is the designer and builder of this temple? 
 
 The Christian delights to answer, "I trace in every 
 polished stone, in every pillar and battlement of this 
 august edifice, the handiwork of a divine Architect. " 
 
 If the infidel refuses to unite in this ascription, and 
 denies the agency of the supernatural in the progress of 
 the gospel and the establishment of the church, then let 
 him inform us how he solves the mystery of the triumph 
 of Christianity without the intervention of a God. 
 
 The attempt has been made. The marvellous con- 
 quests of the gospel in the primitive ages have been as- 
 scribed to natural causes, and to agencies purely human. 
 All the ingenuity of unbelief has been exhausted in the 
 effort to show that instrumentalities, such as man can 
 devise and put in action, were quite adequate to the result. 
 Without formally enumerating these agencies, or demon- 
 strating their insufficiency to themselves to bring about 
 the mightiest revolution ever wrought in the history of 
 the world, it is sufficient to remark, that some of these 
 alleged causes of the rapid propagation of Christianity 
 were effects of a higher cause — even the highest. The 
 swift and wide diffusion of the gospel has been ascribed 
 to the dauntless courage, the purity of life, the inextin- 
 guishable zeal, of its early champions. But what rendered 
 21 
 
322 SERMONS. 
 
 these once timid, ignorant and wicked men the fearless 
 advocates of a faith which exposed them to persecution 
 and to death ? What qualified them to become the authors 
 of the purest and sublimest system of ethics the world 
 ever saw? What kindled the zeal so rational, so well 
 founded, so tempered with charity, so attended by a regard 
 for all the proprieties of life, and yet so mighty to the 
 overthrow of all error and of all opposition? There is 
 only one rational explanation of the transformation which 
 took place in these men, and that is the theological one, 
 that it was produced by a divine influence, causing a 
 thorough, radical and universal change in their principles, 
 affections and lives. 
 
 But while Christianity claims a divine origin, and pro- 
 fesses to owe its extension to a divine power, it does not 
 weaken the force of these claims to admit that it was 
 greatly aided in its propagation by "secondary causes/' 
 and by agencies purely human. These were not, indeed, 
 the primary cause of its triumphs, but it only illustrates 
 the wisdom of divine Providence when we can show how 
 he constrains all human instrumentalities to subserve his 
 plans in the government of the world and the establish- 
 ment of his church. No believer in the great Author of 
 revelation doubts either that he adapted his gospel to the 
 world, or that he prepared the world for its reception, 
 compelling even "secondary causes" to accomplish the 
 adorable purposes of his grace ; but it is hard to compre- 
 hend how any candid man, with all the facts before him, 
 can honestly believe that the church of God was founded 
 and has been preserved in the world by agencies simply 
 human ; or how can he find in secondary or natural causes 
 a satisfactory solution of that mystery of a church with- 
 out worldly influence, wealth, learning, rank or power, 
 represented by men ignoble and despised, declaring, as it 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 323 
 
 did, open war upon all the vanities, vices, selfish interests, 
 cherished propensities and deep-rooted superstitions of the 
 world, yet triumphing over prejudice, argument, elo- 
 quence, philosophy, established religion, the sword of per- 
 secution, and finally clothing itself with the glory and the 
 honor, the dominion and the power ! 
 
 But make a single admission. Ascribe these victories 
 to the superintendence and to the imparted aid of the 
 Omniscient and Omnipotent, and then all wonder ceases, 
 all mystery vanishes. Indeed, willing or unwilling, we 
 are forced to this conclusion. There are no principles or 
 causes of production and change in the worlds of spirit 
 and of matter which are not either natural or super- 
 natural ; but having seen that the former is insufficient 
 to explain the phenomenon before us, we are forced back 
 upon the supernatural. Says Hume, "When we infer any 
 particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the 
 one to the other." Here, then, is the great incontrovertible 
 fact of a religion triumphant over a thousand obstacles, 
 any one of which would seem sufficient to arrest its pro- 
 gress. To refer such an effect to a human cause, and, 
 above all, to such feeble and inadequate causes as infidelity 
 with its best ingenuity has been able to assign, is certainly 
 a shocking violation of the principle of the great skeptic. 
 The disproportion is monstrous. A church resting upon 
 its spire would be a novelty in architecture, but it would 
 have as stable a foundation as that which infidelity gives 
 to Christianity. Regarding the Christian church as an 
 edifice whose maker and builder was God, we delight 
 to contemplate the lofty spire springing from the temple, 
 and pointing to heaven, to remind us of the Almighty 
 Architect. The divine influence to which the Christian 
 ascribes the success of Christianity is sufficient to account 
 for every anomaly, and adequate to the production of 
 
324 SERMONS. 
 
 every effect. Sustained and developed by omnipotent 
 power, we can see how Christianity, at first appearing as 
 a twinkling star, surrounded by clouds and thickest 
 glooms, should nevertheless increase in magnitude and 
 splendor, and cleaving the surrounding veil of darkness, 
 shine forth as the meridian sun. Urged on by the hand 
 that moves the worlds, we can understand how the great- 
 est results were accomplished by the feeblest instru- 
 mentalities ; we see that the selection of humble fishermen 
 as the heralds of salvation, instead of men of rank, and 
 genius, and eloquence, was because "God hath chosen the 
 foolish things of the world to confound the wise ; and 
 God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound 
 the things which are mighty; and base things of the 
 world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, 
 yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things 
 that are ; that no flesh should glory in his presence," and 
 that the power might be seen to be of God. Plain men, 
 convinced by the miracles which they saw Christ perform 
 of the truth of his doctrine, and able to convince others 
 of the same truths by the miracles which they wrought, 
 with love to God and love to men throbbing in every pul- 
 sation of their hearts, and sending the thrill of a diviner 
 life through every limb, impelling them to all-daring, 
 never-flagging action — men thus inflamed and thus 
 nerved went forth into the field of the world, and sowed 
 the good seed which has never perished, and from which 
 thousands in all generations have reaped the harvest of 
 life everlasting. 
 
 The primary cause of the success of Christianity was 
 the operation of the Divine Spirit on the minds and hearts 
 of men, giving to them spiritual perception — subduing 
 their opposition to the truth, and endowing them with the 
 expulsive and impulsive power of a new affection, "Tarry 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 325 
 
 ye," said our Saviour to his disciples, "in the city of 
 Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high." 
 This was doubtless a trying command to men in their 
 situation, certain of the resurrection of their Lord, assured 
 that his kingdom would one day fill the earth with its 
 glory, and knowing that the salvation of the race de- 
 pended upon its reception of the gospel offer. With such 
 tidings to communicate, with such a glorious King to 
 proclaim, they must have longed to advance, at once, to 
 the prosecution of their work ; but the time had not yet 
 come. A new and peculiar influence must descend from 
 heaven and rest upon them ere they could be qualified 
 for the undertaking. As the statue of Memnon, on the 
 shores of the sea, stood tuneless and mute, until the rays 
 of the morning sun gilded its brow, so these heralds of 
 the gospel had neither gifts nor tongues for their sublime 
 proclamation until the light and fire from heaven should 
 descend upon their heads, illuminating and kindling them, 
 and causing them in turn to illuminate and kindle others. 
 But baptized by this heaven-descended influence, though 
 ignorant, they became wise ; though weak, they became 
 resistless ; though timid, they became animated with a 
 courage which nothing in life or death could daunt. By 
 this supernatural agency they were endowed not only 
 with the gift of tongues, but with the power of working 
 miracles. And now their most extraordinary successes 
 are no longer inexplicable. What though they are ob- 
 scure, unlettered men, standing perchance in the presence 
 of rank and power, what is to prevent them from elevating 
 the humble cross, and challenging the admiration and love 
 of beholders for a crucified Saviour, while they bear in 
 their hands the credentials of heaven, and by signs and 
 mighty wonders are able to display to the senses and 
 inmost convictions of men the evidences of an omnipotent 
 
326 SERMONS. 
 
 and omnipresent God, bearing miraculous testimony to 
 the truth and importance of their doctrine? What is 
 there longer unaccountable in the success of Christianity, 
 the moment that the son of the lowly virgin is demon- 
 strated to be the Son of God, and when his poor, unlet- 
 tered, timid followers are seen to be girded with strength 
 from on high? What is to prevent the triumph of doc- 
 trines which exhibit the impress of the same Almighty 
 hand which has left its autograph on every leaf of the 
 book of nature? Should all other miracles be blotted 
 from record, this miracle of the swift and universal spread 
 of Christianity would remain a monument of its celestial 
 lineage, immovable as the everlasting hills. 
 
 And to the same power which gave to Christianity its 
 first victories must we ascribe its preservation in the world 
 during so many centuries, and its present existence, power 
 and progress. There was a period — we need not now 
 trace the path which led to it — when all that was pure 
 and spiritual and divine in Christianity seemed to have 
 been swallowed up and buried under a mass of dead 
 forms and living corruptions ; when superstition and 
 ignorance brooded over the earth as darkness did upon 
 the face of the deep when the earth was without form, 
 and void. But Christianity, though disastrously eclipsed, 
 had not been utterly extinguished. Deep beneath the 
 smouldering ashes a brand from the altar lay buried. It 
 was glowing unseen, like the internal fires which are 
 smothered in the deep abysses of the volcano, presently 
 to burst forth and shoot up their flames to the empyrean. 
 Through all the dark ages the religious element was work- 
 ing, and though misdirected, as in the case of the Cru- 
 sades, it was not annihilated. The Word of God, though 
 bound, was not utterly silent, and even when its whisper 
 was heard, the still small voice was glorified. There were 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 327 
 
 not wanting, even in the bosom of the apostate church, 
 witnesses for the truth as it is in Jesus. Claudius of 
 Turin, in the ninth century, and Peter of Bruys, Arnold 
 of Brescia, in the twelfth century ; Pierre Valdo, WyclifTe, 
 Jerome of Prague, Anselm of Canterbury, and Savona- 
 rola, in later times, all testified against the abuses which 
 had corrupted the church ; and, above all, the Vaudois 
 formed a long-continued chain of witnesses for the truth, 
 holding up the cardinal doctrines of the gospel, even as 
 the Alpine mountains which they inhabited lifted up their 
 summits above the plains to be bathed in the pure sun- 
 light of heaven. The Waldenses, nestling in the valleys 
 of Piedmont, holding fast to their integrity, served God 
 in ancient purity of worship, and never bowed the knee 
 to Baal ; and even when the sword of the persecuting 
 foe smote among them they were not destroyed, but, when 
 scattered, went forth into all parts of Europe, sowing 
 the good seed of the Word of life. It was the noble 
 heroism of this band which inspired that immortal sonnet 
 of Milton, so truly descriptive of their wrongs and of the 
 fruit of their sufferings: 
 
 " Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones 
 
 Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold; 
 
 Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
 When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones, 
 Forget not : in thy book record their groans, 
 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll'd 
 Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
 
 To heav'n. Their martyr' d blood and ashes sow 
 O'er all th' Italian fields, where still doth sway 
 
 The triple Tyrant ; that from these may grow 
 A hundred-fold, who having learn'd thy way 
 
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe." 
 
328 SERMONS. 
 
 When at last the light of the Reformation blazed 
 forth, it was evidently kindled by the same spirit which 
 came down in tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost. It 
 was not by might, nor by human power, that the Refor- 
 mation was accomplished. 
 
 Various temporal princes resisted Rome, but one after 
 another (to use the fine metaphors of D'Aubigne) they 
 broke in pieces at the base of the mighty Colossus they 
 undertook to overthrow. Learning, too, awoke and came 
 to the rescue ; but learning became subsidized, and kissed 
 the feet of the power it attempted to dethrone. At last 
 the apostate church undertook to correct its own abuses, 
 but corruption could not purify corruption, nor could the 
 festering wound originate its own cure. But finally the 
 regenerative power which erected the church of the first 
 century on the ruins of polytheism, built up its demolished 
 walls on the ruins of Babylon. The divine oracles, so 
 long imprisoned, again spoke forth, and the Word was 
 life and light. Pure Christianity revived. Old things 
 passed away and all things became new. 
 
 Since the glorious era of the Reformation, Chris- 
 tianity has illustrated her indestructibility by coming forth 
 unscathed from the assaults of other foes. Even under 
 its noon-tide radiance, and in the enjoyment of the richest 
 blessings which the gospel has communicated to the 
 world, there has arisen an order of men whose hearts are 
 filled with rancorous hatred to its doctrines, and who have 
 exerted all their powers in the attempt to dislodge its 
 truths from the memories and affections of their fellows. 
 Casting aside the old weapons of force, the assault has 
 been not upon the bodies, but upon the minds of men. 
 "In this campaign infidelity has marshalled all its hosts, 
 it has sent forth its ponderous tomes of grave scholastic 
 argument, it has come forth arrayed in the imposing garb 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 329 
 
 of philosophy. It has assumed to itself all the panoply of 
 science. It has mingled its dogmas with the voice of 
 history. It has infused its poison into the fountains of 
 literature. It has blended its notes with the sweet ca- 
 dences of poetry. It has chanted its blasphemies in soft- 
 est strains of music. It has crept into every house in the 
 garb of fiction. It has shot forth the polished arrows of 
 satire, and decked itself with the charms of wit and senti- 
 ment. It has borrowed the livery of heaven, and trans- 
 formed itself into an angel of light. It has pretended to 
 be the only true friend and ally of freedom. It has spread 
 its lures for the feet of the aged, and stolen with velvet 
 tread into the chambers of youth and innocence. Since 
 the era of the Reformation, it has joined hands, as did 
 polytheism of old, with persecuting power. It has again 
 drawn the sword, and kindled the fagot, and quarried the 
 prison, and set in order its implements of cruelty. It has 
 thundered its denunciations against the heralds of the 
 gospel, and armed its myrmidons against the followers of 
 the meek and lowly Lamb. It has abolished the temples 
 of the Most High, attempted to raze the foundations of 
 the church, and to overwhelm in a tempest of fire and 
 blood all who professed to be followers of the crucified 
 Redeemer. And still the church survives, God being her 
 refuge and strength, and very present help in time of 
 trouble. 
 
 There is another and very different illustration of the 
 "success" of Christianity, to which we would fain advert, 
 viz., to its instrumentality in relieving human wants and 
 woes, its amelioration of the wrongs and evils of society, 
 the solace it brings to the wounded spirit, and its happy 
 influence on the temporal prospects of men. Wherever it 
 has gone it has rebuked oppression, repressed violence, 
 and compelled vice, abashed, to skulk in darkness. Chris- 
 
330 SERMONS. 
 
 tianity is now the mightiest power at work among the 
 nations — nay, nations are civilized just in proportion as 
 they are Christian. Modern civilization is the offspring 
 of Christianity. The institutions which most conserve, 
 which most elevate and purify society, owe to it their 
 origin. It is the foundation of all just law; it is the 
 patron of every fine art. It is the genius of whatever is 
 most healthful in literature. From it the poet derives his 
 divinest inspiration, the painter his grandest and tenderest 
 scenes. The sweet charities of domestic life, the most 
 hallowed ties which unite human hearts on earth, refine- 
 ment of manners, courtesy of intercourse, cultivation of 
 taste, all these are among its incidental benefits, while its 
 grand aim is to purify the heart and elevate the affections, 
 and so transform the entire man as to qualify him for the 
 felicities and glories of the heavenly world. While in- 
 fidelity is like the molten lava which, spouting up from 
 the fiery depths of the volcano, overwhelming vineyards 
 and human habitations in its destructive sweep, then set- 
 tles down upon the blackened ruins, hardening itself to 
 stone — Christianity descends like the gentle dews of 
 heaven, steals through the silent valleys, diffusing fer- 
 tility and fragrance as it goes, causing the dry land to be- 
 come springs of water and the desert to blossom as the 
 rose, while before it sighing and sorrow flee away, and in 
 its train come thanksgiving and the voice of melody. 
 
 The author of that admirable little work entitled The 
 Bible True, remarks that "there are two effects produced 
 by the Word of God on the hearts of those who embrace 
 it, which are peculiar to revelation. One is elevated 
 purity. This effect is not confined to the virtuous part of 
 mankind, but is witnessed also in the desperate, and out- 
 rageous, and lawless, who are brought under its power. 
 Men fierce as wild beasts, as cruel as death, and ungov- 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 331 
 
 ernable as the storm, have often felt its purifying power. 
 This has been the case from the first. An early Christian 
 writer says, 'Give me a man of a passionate, abusive, 
 headstrong disposition ; with a few only of the words of 
 God, I will make him gentle as a lamb. Give me a greedy, 
 avaricious, tenacious wretch, and I will teach him to dis- 
 tribute his riches with an unsparing hand. Give me a 
 cruel and blood-thirsty monster, and all his rage shall be 
 exchanged to true benignity. Give me a man addicted to 
 injustice, full of ignorance, and immersed in wickedness, 
 he shall soon become just, prudent and innocent.' v 
 
 Such was the testimony of one who witnessed the 
 power of Christianity in the primitive age. Let us con- 
 tent ourselves with a single illustration of its influence in 
 more modern times, as exhibited in the following simple 
 narrative, extracted from an annual report of the Bible 
 Society, and worthy of perpetual remembrance: 
 
 "In 1787, the ship Bounty sailed from England to the 
 Pacific in quest of young bread-fruit trees, to be replanted 
 in the West Indies. On her way home the crew mutinied, 
 placed the master and eighteen others in a frail open boat, 
 with scanty provisions, and committed them to the mercy 
 of the ocean. Strange to tell, that boat accomplished a 
 voyage of more than 4,000 miles, and reached England in 
 safety. The mutineers, twenty-five in number, set sail 
 for some island in the Pacific. They quarrelled and 
 separated. About half of the whole number were cap- 
 tured by an English vessel-of-war, carried home and 
 hung in irons. Nine of these desperadoes went to Tahiti, 
 took on board nineteen natives, seven men and twelve 
 women, and sailed for some uninhabited island in the 
 ocean. They found one, Pitcairn's Island. Shortly after 
 landing, the Tahitian men murdered five of the mutineers, 
 upon which the twelve women rose at night and killed 
 
332 SERMONS. 
 
 their seven countrymen. Of the four remaining muti- 
 neers, one invented a distillery, and becoming delirious 
 leaped from a cliff into the sea and was lost. Another 
 was shot for attempting to destroy his messmates. Of 
 the two then left, one died a natural death, and the other, 
 named John Adams, alone survived. Here their hiding- 
 place was undisturbed until 1814, when it was visited, as 
 also in 1825. Strange alterations had taken place. The 
 number of inhabitants had increased to seventy. There 
 was no debauchery amongst them. Good order prevailed. 
 Filial affection and brotherly love pervaded the entire 
 society. The blessing of God was invoked on every meal. 
 Prayer was offered every morning, noon, and evening. 
 The laws of civilized society were in force. The rights 
 of property were respected. A simple and pure morality 
 was prevalent. How was this? What had made the 
 change? Had vice wrought its own cure? Had there 
 been some good principles combined with the mutiny and 
 murder, the heathenism and devilish passions, which this 
 gang had been guilty of? No. These evils never work 
 their own cure, except by consuming, like a fire, their 
 own materials. The cause of the change was this. Adams 
 had saved, hid, and preserved a Bible, and when his 
 comrades were dead, he studied it, embraced its promises, 
 believed God's testimony concerning his Son, was con- 
 verted, read and taught its truths to his family and neigh- 
 bors, and God blessed his Word to their conversion also. 
 That very Bible is now in this country. It is a small 
 volume, printed in 1765. The salt sea and the salt tears 
 of old Adams have taken away its gloss and dimmed its 
 print; but it contains God's testimony of Jesus. That 
 was the secret of its power. The worm has eaten it 
 through and through. But the glad tidings to sinners 
 can still be read in it. That Bible has travelled round the 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 333 
 
 globe, has been the means of reforming a whole commu- 
 nity of outlaws, and still lives to proclaim its divine Origi- 
 nal and its life-giving power. When Adams was brought 
 to his death-bed he was old in years, but strong in faith. 
 The friends of the old salt collected around him and 
 asked, 'Well, John, what cheer?' 'Land ahead!' was his 
 characteristic reply. After a few days they again gath- 
 ered around him and said, 'Well, John, how now?' He 
 replied, 'Rounding the point into the harbor.' At last he 
 lay upon his dying pillow, and his relations were standing 
 all around in tears, and yet in hope. One said, 'Brother, 
 how now?' 'Let go the anchor,' was his dying exclama- 
 tion, and he fell asleep." 
 
 Having now taken this general, but extended view of 
 the rise, progress and effects of Christianity, we may be 
 permitted, in conclusion, to cast a single glance toward 
 the future. 
 
 We have seen enough to convince us that our holy 
 religion is indestructible in its nature, possessing within 
 itself no elements of decay, but the principle of immor- 
 tality. The shield of God is spread over it, and the bosses 
 of that buckler are eternal truth and power. There let 
 infidelity hurl its darts until, with nerveless, withered, 
 wasted arm, it abandons the contest, with the confession 
 that such assaults are more idle than casting straws 
 against the impenetrable scales of leviathan. Its past his- 
 tory gives the bright presage of its future victories. 
 Amidst all the revolutions of ages, amidst all the desola- 
 tions of time, amidst all the changing, vanishing creeds 
 and institutions of the world, Christianity still survives; 
 and rises to the view as beautiful and glorious as on the 
 day when, arrayed in its primal loveliness, it came down 
 from heaven to redeem and regenerate the earth. "Se- 
 rapis fell with Thebes, Baal with Babylon, Apollo with 
 
334 SERMONS. 
 
 Delphi, and Jupiter with the Capitol, but Christianity has 
 often beheld the demolition of her sacred temples without 
 being convulsed by their fall." It derives its vitality from 
 him who only hath immortality, and its shrine is not 
 material walls, but the living heart of the good man. 
 When its temples have been overthrown, and its disciples 
 compelled to flee the haunts of civilized life, its hymns 
 have charmed the solitude of the desert, its prayers have 
 hallowed the damp walls of the dungeon, its sacraments 
 have been celebrated in the dens of the earth, its most 
 illustrious triumphs have been witnessed upon scaffolds, 
 its brightest glories have blazed forth from the funeral 
 piles of its martyrs. Other creeds have been like the 
 clouds, for a time piled up in dizzy heights and bathed in 
 the golden beams of the sun, while Christianity, like the 
 sun itself, shines undimmed and unwasted, with none 
 of its original glory obscured. Every day its expansive 
 power becomes increasingly manifest. Its missionaries 
 now traverse all lands, dare all climates, and tempt all 
 seas. 
 
 With each returning Sabbath the praises of its exalted 
 Author are murmured from ten thousand tongues; the 
 strain is caught up from church to church, and from land 
 to land, until the music goes echoing round the world. 
 
 And can we for a moment believe, that a religion so 
 benign, so adapted in its provisions to the necessities and 
 woes of the world, teaching sweet lessons of resignation 
 under present sorrow, inspiring such joyous anticipations 
 of future blessedness, can ever perish ? No ; these celes- 
 tial hopes, whose untiring wings waft the soul above all 
 that is terrestrial, these sublime aspirations, whose angel 
 fingers point to the illimitable sky, and cheer the spirit 
 with the foretaste of a destiny full of glory, honor, im- 
 mortality, eternal life; oh! no; these can never perish — 
 
THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY. 335 
 
 they are heaven-born and indestructible. They can never 
 be supplanted by a sullen, cheerless infidelity, which sub- 
 mits, because it must, to inexoiable fate — which has no 
 prospects, but a cold, bleak world around, and a rayless 
 eternity beyond — whose best discovery is, a grave with- 
 out a resurrection, and a ivorld without a God. 
 
OCT 12 1904 
 
V 1