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ADDRESSES TO WOMEN 
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CONTENTS 
 
 The Great Exemplar . 
 
 3 
 
 The Realm of Order . 
 
 . 27 
 
 Ends and Instruments 
 
 . 67 
 
 Illusions and Ideals . 
 
 • 95 
 
 Wholeness .... 
 
 . 123 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 THE Addresses which follow need, 
 rather than an introduction, an 
 apology. Of their crudeness and im- 
 perfection no one can be half so 
 sensible as he who now sees them in 
 the cold light of print. Prepared amid 
 the pressure of large and anxious tasks, 
 away from books, and without leisure 
 for reflection ; wholly unwritten, save 
 as to a few brief heads, and delivered, 
 usually, without a single note, they 
 have been taken down by a short-hand 
 reporter, and appear here with all their 
 original defects of form and diffusive- 
 ness of style. I wish I could believe that 
 the judgment of others, who have 
 
VI INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 asked for them in this more perma- 
 nent form, were not more friendly than 
 
 « 
 
 critical, and I can only pray that, if 
 they shall be found to contain a single 
 helpful suggestion, it may be accepted 
 as at least partially excusing the temer- 
 ity of their publication. 
 
 Henry C. Potter. 
 Lent, 1887. 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 An Address delivered in Grace Church, New 
 York, on Tuesday, November 27, 1883, at the Ser- 
 vice for Women engaged in Church work. 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 IT is a matter of heartfelt thankful- 
 ness to me that I am permitted to 
 meet you here to-day. We shall be 
 stronger, I am sure, for our common 
 tasks — for in a very real sense yours 
 and mine are one — for looking into one 
 another's faces, and recognizing that 
 closest bond which binds us together 
 in service to our common Lord. Such 
 a gathering as this helps us to make 
 our communion of service a more real 
 and inspiring fact, and to remind us 
 that, ho\yever far apart may lie our vari- 
 ous fields of work, the work is one, and 
 the workers one, in the motive and the 
 Master that inspire them. 
 3 
 
4 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 Our communion of service, I say, and 
 that it is a communion of service that 
 associates us we may not venture to 
 forget. There is a line of reflection 
 which would seem, at the first view, 
 to be that which, most of all, is appro- 
 priate to this occasion. In our various 
 relations to those societies, guilds, sis- 
 terhoods, and the like, which are repre- 
 sented here, we are much engrossed of 
 necessity in the tasks to be done and 
 the ends to be accomplished. In each 
 of these there is much detail, much 
 that is of the nature of earthly busi- 
 ness, much that is concerned with ma- 
 terial means and resources. And, busy 
 about these — absorbed with questions 
 of finance or charitable housekeeping, 
 buying clothing, or packing a box for 
 a missionary, dressing a wound, dis- 
 pensing an alms, or washing some poor 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 5 
 
 waif of the garret or the street into 
 something like outer whiteness, if no 
 more, it may be said that we are easily 
 tempted to forget the higher ends of 
 all Christian work, to forget that " the 
 life is more than meat and the body 
 than raiment " — to forget that our ser- 
 vice itself is, or should be, a nurture of 
 our own souls in the life of prayer and 
 faith, and saintly speech and thoughts, 
 and instead, like her whom her Lord 
 gently but distinctly admonished, to 
 be " cumbered with much serving/* 
 
 Believe me, I do not forget it. That 
 other side of a Christian life which is 
 not work but worship, not activity but 
 stillness and upward-looking expecta- 
 tion, not contact with men but com- 
 munion with God, we are all in danger 
 of neglecting. Even the highest and 
 most sacred functions (none knows it 
 
6 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 better than he who addresses you) may 
 be in danger of becoming a mechanical 
 and task-work routine, and if any one 
 of us is to be saved from that perfunc- 
 tory and secular temper which sees in 
 our service only an engagement to be 
 kept, so much piece-work to be finished 
 when it is called for, it must be by com- 
 ing back, from time to time, into those 
 upper airs where the soul may hearken 
 and be still. 
 
 But while this peril is to be distinctly 
 recognized, there is another as real 
 and often more dangerous, because less 
 easily discovered. History has been 
 written in vain, if it has not taught us 
 that nothing is easier than to antagonize 
 the life of devotion and the life of service, 
 and to exalt the former as more sacred 
 and more needful than the latter. That 
 legend of the kneeling monk in his cell, 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 7 
 
 to whom, as he prays, there comes a 
 vision of his Lord flashing out upon 
 the bare, white wall of his chamber, 
 and looking down upon him with in- 
 effable tenderness and benignity, was 
 written for all time. He is kneeling, 
 you will recollect, and gazing upon the 
 vision with wrapt devotion, when the 
 harsh clang of the bell at the monastery- 
 gate breaks upon his ears. He knows 
 well enough what it means. A stranger, 
 belated, needy, and importunate, is 
 knocking for admission. Shall he go 
 and let him in, or stay ? Shall he miss 
 the vision, or the service ? And while 
 he hesitates the bell rings again, and 
 regretfully remembering his vow not to 
 be heedless of the cry of any poor man, 
 he hastens to obey its summons, ren- 
 ders the needed service, and returns 
 sadly to his cell. The vision, he is 
 
8 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 sure, will be ended r and the Gracious 
 Presence gone. But no ; it shines down 
 upon him in fuller, nearer beauty, and 
 as he looks he hears a voice, " If thou 
 hadst staid, I had fled." 
 
 The parable is of eternal application. 
 The Church has had in all ages the 
 quietist as well as the busy-body, the 
 pietist and the mystic as well as the 
 philanthropist and the secularist. How 
 many sermons have we heard about the 
 sisters, Mary and Martha — sermons 
 which, with all their eloquence, missed 
 the point of their story, and misread 
 the words of their Lord. For it was 
 not that Martha toiled that her Master 
 rebuked her, but that she toiled at the 
 wrong time and for a wrong end. Who 
 knows at what tasks Mary had wrought 
 early and effectively, that when the 
 Guest came, she might be free for that 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 9 
 
 truer hospitality which consists not in 
 fussiness, but in companionship ? Nay, 
 who does not know that hers was the 
 truer serving which waited upon her 
 Lord? 
 
 11 Ye servants of the Lord, 
 Each in your office wait, 
 Observant of His heavenly word, 
 And watchful at His gate. 
 ****** 
 
 11 Watch, 'tis your Lord's command, 
 And while we speak He 's near ; 
 Mark the first signal of His hand, 
 And ready, all appear." 
 
 So runs the Ember hymn, and we 
 may not miss its meaning. Service and 
 devotion are not the antagonists of each 
 other. Rightly viewed they are parts 
 of one symmetrical whole, a life in 
 which the one interpenetrates the other, 
 and in which the hearkening ear and 
 the watchful eye are sometimes as true 
 a service, as real a work for God and 
 
IO THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 our fellow-men, as the busiest task and 
 the most exhausting labors. A student 
 of nature is strolling through a field, 
 and the laborer who watches him idly 
 passing by, sighs in envy of his indolent 
 and easy life. But in truth that observ- 
 ant eye, those trained powers of dis- 
 crimination and discovery, are taking 
 in the minutest details of his surround- 
 ings, and deducing from them principles 
 which, in their application, shall make 
 the laborers task lighter, and all the 
 world richer. A commander is moving 
 to and fro, absorbed and silent, upon 
 his quarter-deck ; and the man at the 
 mast-head looks down upon him with a 
 vexing sense of the contrast between 
 his own hard and exposed life and that 
 other which seems so much easier. But 
 we know which of the two is even then 
 the more laborious, which brain and 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. It 
 
 eye and ear are on the keener and 
 more constant tension ; in one word, 
 who is the toiler at once the more con- 
 stant and the more indefatigable. 
 
 And all this is of value only as it 
 leads us into the presence of the Great 
 Exemplar. What was the story of the 
 earthly ministry of Christ ? There is a 
 little volume by a non-conformist divine 
 of England, 1 called "A Day with Christ." 
 I wish we might all read it. It is simply 
 the story of a single day's work by the 
 Worker of Nazareth, as told in the Gos- 
 pels, and it is safe to assume that it is a 
 specimen of the greater part of His 
 brief and crowded ministry. I may 
 not rehearse it here, but I may remind 
 you how few, after all, were the pauses 
 in that ministry. Undoubtedly Christ 
 had His moments of stillness. But if 
 1 The Rev. Samuel Cox. 
 
12 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 the story of the Gospels is to be be- 
 lieved, how brief they were ! How He 
 hastens, unrestingly, from town to 
 town ! How no privacy of friend's 
 house, or entertainer's guest-table pro- 
 tects Him from the sinners and suf- 
 ferers who throng to touch and hear 
 Him! And yet, shot through and 
 through was all this service with the 
 silver thread of a Divine calmness and 
 peace. His tasks never flurry Him, 
 His work never masters Him, His en- 
 gagements never enslave Him. On the 
 most urgent errands, He yet turns aside 
 and interrupts them. In the most 
 tragic moments (think of the servant of 
 the High Priest whose ear Peter cut 
 off) He stops to heal and restore ! 
 
 Now, when we look at such a life as 
 this, we find ourselves asking, " What 
 was its supreme spring and spell ? " If 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 3 
 
 you will turn to the fifth chapter of St. 
 John's Gospel, and look at the 17th 
 verse, I think you will find it. Says 
 Jesus : " My Father worketk hitherto, 
 and I work." Hold these words in your 
 thoughts for a few moments, and, mean- 
 time, go along with me in the next step 
 of our meditation. 
 
 We sometimes think of the work of 
 Christ in the world as if, in its human 
 experiences, it was somehow wholly 
 different from our own. But it was 
 not. What are our commonest experi- 
 ences in our work — commonest and 
 most disheartening ? 
 
 (a) Weariness, I think you will agree 
 with me, is one of them. With vigor- 
 ous powers, and light heart, and facile 
 hand, service is a challenge which we 
 gladly and almost exultantly accept. 
 But the day comes — perhaps, with 
 
14 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 some of us it has never been absent — 
 when the brain is dull, and the hands 
 tired, and the nerves jarred, and sore, 
 and shrinking. And then we say : 
 " There was One who could say, * My 
 meat is to do the will of Him that sent 
 Me ■ ; but if He could say that, how 
 different He must have been from me ! 
 My spirit is willing, but oh, my flesh is 
 very weak — yes, and weary. Could 
 He ever have known anything like 
 this ? " Listen, my sister. 
 
 " And He must needs go through 
 Samaria. Then cometh He to a city 
 . . . called Sychar. . . . Now, 
 Jacobs well was there. Jesus, there- 
 fore, being wearied with His journey, 
 sat thus on the well." Did you ever 
 think of the force of that little word 
 " thus " ? Being wearied, He sat " thus." 
 How vivid and masterly the touch that, 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. I 5 
 
 in this way, lets us see the whole scene ! 
 Jesus was wearied, and He showed it. 
 He sat thus — that is, as one who is 
 wearied, with the droop of fatigue, and 
 the languor of exhaustion, on the well. 
 Tired ? Ah ! yes. He knew what it 
 was to be tired, and to find the frail 
 instrument falter before its mighty tasks. 
 Your experience is not unlike His. 
 Into the valley of that humiliation, if it 
 be a humiliation, He has gone before 
 you ! 
 
 {b) Again : another experience com- 
 mon to all of us in work for Christ is 
 that discouragement outside of our- 
 selves, which we find in the stubbornness 
 of that with which our work is concerned. 
 Who shall estimate the enthusiasms 
 dampened, the lofty purposes aban- 
 doned, the large and noble plans left 
 unfulfilled, because, when we addressed 
 
1 6 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 ourselves to our task, we found circum- 
 stances so unyielding, the hearts of men 
 so obdurate, the sympathies of Christian 
 disciples so cold and irresponsive, the 
 leaders in Israel, even, to whom we had 
 so confidently turned, indifferent or sus- 
 picious ? There are those here this 
 morning — I know it, though they have 
 never told me so — who have said to 
 themselves, " What was the good of it 
 all ? my sacrifices, my prayers, my plans? 
 I had an opportunity ; I gladly owned 
 the call that came to me in some provi- 
 dential opening ; I was willing to spend 
 and be spent for Christ. And what did 
 I meet ? From those to whom I went, 
 in my Master's name, and with His 
 message, a chilling and repellent wel- 
 come, or worse still, a sneer and a gibe. 
 From those who were rich in this world's 
 goods, a dole or a refusal. From my 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 7 
 
 fellow-servants in the same household 
 of Faith, a prophecy of my failure, 
 or a jest at my fanaticism. I have been 
 willing to work for Christ, but I have 
 found neither welcome nor help, and I 
 am simply discouraged, and what is 
 worse, half faithless of good or of any 
 triumph of the Truth. " 
 
 There is no exaggeration, I believe, 
 in such a picture as that ; and yet its 
 shadows are not half so dark as those 
 of that age of the world to which Christ 
 came. It is the pre-eminent distinction 
 of His ministry that the Church and 
 the priesthood, the scholars and the 
 cultivated, the wealthy and the emi- 
 nent, each one of them, as a class, op- 
 posed to Him a blank, dead wall of 
 stubborn indifference. It was not that 
 they could not understand Him ; they 
 did not want to. " Ye will not believe 
 
1 8 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 My word," this was what He said of 
 them, and He spoke that which He 
 knew. The obstacle to His welcome 
 was in the will — obstinate, antagonis- 
 tic, unbelieving. And yet, in the end, 
 He triumphed. There came a day when 
 they who had mocked Him yielded, 
 and when " a great company of the 
 priests were obedient to the faith." 
 There came a day when the Cross con- 
 quered pride, when love melted resist- 
 ance, when the truth took captive the 
 soul. 
 
 My sisters, you are working with the 
 same Cross as your symbol, and with 
 the same truth as your inheritance. 
 Hold them up with hands nerved by 
 faith, and with hearts on fire with love, 
 and God will give you your hire ! 
 
 (c) Once more, and as illustrative of 
 other experiences common, I imagine, 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 1 9 
 
 to all of us, there is that discourage- 
 ment which comes to us not from op- 
 position, nor yet from weariness, but 
 from those who are our fellow-workers. 
 You have a purpose, lofty and helpful, 
 as you are persuaded, and those who 
 are associated with you cannot see its 
 merit. It is not that they are indiffer- 
 ent — you know that they are not ; it is 
 not that they distrust you — you are 
 sure of their regard ; but their eyes are 
 holden that they cannot see. Some 
 film of prejudice, or, oftener still, some 
 intellectual incapacity to understand 
 you (one of the hardest things, I think, 
 to bear), makes it simply impossible for 
 them to follow your thought or to enter 
 into it. It is not hostility, it is simple 
 dulness. Or, again, it may be that they 
 do comprehend you, but they are hon- 
 estly at issue with you. " Far be it 
 
20 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 from Thee, Lord," says St. Peter, when 
 his Master foretells His death. The 
 Apostle knew what his Lord proposed, 
 and he honestly doubted its expedi- 
 ency. And to the companionship of 
 such men Christ was doomed, as we 
 should say, during His whole earthly 
 ministry. It would be simple trifling 
 with the facts to pretend that they un- 
 derstood Him, even at the Last Supper, 
 or that they were not honestly at issue 
 with Him as to the expediency of His 
 purpose. 
 
 And yet, He waited — and wrought. 
 The work did not cease because His 
 fellow-workers could not comprehend 
 it. Toiling and suffering, dying and 
 rising again, He who said " I must 
 work, the night cometh," went on in 
 that work till the end, that glorious 
 end, when it came to be with all, as at 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 21 
 
 first it was with two of them, that 
 " their eyes were opened and they knew 
 Him " ! Kneel down, then, O discour- 
 aged one, and when even your nearest 
 and dearest in the Lord cannot com- 
 prehend you, trace His lonely footsteps 
 in the way, and strive yourself to walk 
 in them. 
 
 But how? In such a life there was 
 some mighty and sustaining power. 
 What was it, and how can we make it 
 ours ? To that question we have, I be- 
 lieve, the answer in those words which 
 I have quoted in St. John's Gospel: 
 "My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
 work." Sit down and read the words 
 of Christ in the four Gospels, and see 
 how full they are of the sense of God 
 — God working in nature (" Behold the 
 lilies," "He maketh His sun to rise," 
 " He sendeth rain," etc.) ; in events, as 
 
22 THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 
 
 He turns back for Israel the half-forgot- 
 ten page of Hebrew history and traces 
 through its tangled skein the golden 
 thread of a providential ordering; and 
 finally, in Himself, as when He says 
 " I and my Father are one " ; " The 
 work that I do, I do in My Father's 
 Name " ; " The Father loveth the Son, 
 and sheweth Him all things that Him- 
 self doeth." In the ministry of Christ 
 there is an all-pervading consciousness 
 of a Divine partnership, and, flowing 
 out of it, a calm and serene confidence 
 that He who was working in and with 
 Him, would bring Him, let what might 
 delay or hinder, to the hour when, His 
 task complete, His toil all done and 
 ended, He could say " I have finished 
 the work which Thou gavest Me to 
 do." 
 That was His secret. It must be 
 
THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 23 
 
 ours ; and it may be. One with Him 
 in the fellowship of the Father, confi- 
 dent with his confidence who had 
 caught so truly the spirit of his Lord 
 that he could say " Beloved, now are 
 we the sons of God," and with that 
 other who wrote " We then as workers 
 together with Him, beseech you," we 
 too may not fear to say " My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work." His 
 lamp shines through my reason. His 
 compassion stirs my pity. His cour- 
 age nerves my will. My task, my 
 work, do I call it ? Nay, it is His 
 more than it is mine. He and He only 
 can make me know the meaning of the 
 words : " I can do all things through 
 Christ which strengtheneth me," and 
 He has given me " an Example that I 
 should follow His steps." 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 An address delivered in St. Ann's Church, New 
 York, on Monday, February i, 1886, at the Service 
 for Women engaged in Church work. 
 
 25 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 I AM to speak to you this morning, 
 in accordance with the notice al- 
 ready given to you, of the Realm of 
 Order ; and in reference to the large 
 subject which that phrase suggests to 
 us, we may well remind ourselves at 
 the outset, how we who live in the 
 world of to-day, and who call ourselves 
 Christian people, are a part of those 
 two great realms or kingdoms, each one 
 of which has so much to do with our 
 happiness and welfare. 
 
 We are a part, first of all, of the Realm 
 
 or Kingdom of Nature. The eye with 
 
 which I look into your faces at this 
 
 moment, the ear with which you hear 
 
 27 
 
28 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 my voice, the feet which have brought 
 you hither, the brain which has followed 
 these services so far — all these are a 
 part of the great realm, the first stone 
 of which was laid when " In the begin- 
 ning God created the heaven and the 
 earth/* And when, after a long rest, 
 that creation was followed by those 
 successive fiats or commands, which 
 called light and the lower forms of 
 vegetation and animal life into being, 
 and which crowned the whole with the 
 existence and the powers and the 
 sovereignty of man, this was the in- 
 auguration of the Realm of Order. 
 
 Believe, if you choose — for I think 
 that a larger study will adequately 
 reconcile the two seemingly opposite 
 views of the subject — that these suc- 
 cessive steps of creation were accom- 
 plished, in some sort or other, by a 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 29 
 
 progress or development of life from 
 lower forms into higher: nevertheless, 
 the meaning of what we know as nature 
 to us here to-day is one and the same. 
 Once there was chaos, darkness, seeth- 
 ing forces which had not been called 
 into organized life, and had not been 
 placed in fixed relation to other forces ; 
 and then, as we should say, one day, 
 there came a Voice. He who is Him- 
 self a God, as the Apostle names Him, 
 " not of confusion," but of order and 
 of " peace," because of order in all the 
 ages, spoke at last, and this chaos 
 vanished, and the darkness disappeared, 
 that in the place of it there might 
 appear that thing which we know as 
 the Realm of Order. 
 
 Think, for one moment, of one single 
 feature of that realm, as illustrative of 
 the whole. Think of the law that parts 
 
30 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 day from night, and makes the succes- 
 sion of darkness and light. Suppose, if 
 so impossible a thing were supposable, 
 that, instead of the recurrence of day- 
 light and darkness, in accordance with 
 a law of fixed and sure succession, by 
 which you can tell just as accurately 
 when the sun will rise a year from to- 
 day, as to-morrow — you and I were 
 left to the uncertainties of a vagrant 
 daylight and a vagrant darkness ; a life 
 in which day and night alternated 
 irregularly, spasmodically, without a 
 law, and without any premonition or 
 foreknowledge on our part. Think 
 what it would be to undertake to order 
 your daily life, to minister in the 
 things in which ministry is meted to 
 you, if, first of all, you could not place 
 your hand upon a law of order in the 
 realm of nature, and say, " This thing 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 3 1 
 
 will be, because it has been, and on 
 this fixed and orderly succession, on 
 this due and harmonious proportion, 
 of day and of night, I may count in 
 the work that I have to do in the 
 world." 
 
 What now was proclaimed on the 
 first morning when the sun dawned for 
 the first time on the world, and when 
 chaos vanished to give place to order 
 and to those great laws of nature and 
 of life of which you and I are a part ? 
 This : that the world was to be the 
 home of a creature who was to find in 
 it a Realm of Order. 
 
 And again ; what was proclaimed, 
 when, centuries afterwards, another 
 kingdom came into being as the Church 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ? One day, a 
 far-off land is roused from its lethargy 
 by a cry. There is a voice heard in 
 
32 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 the wilderness ; there is a solitary man, 
 a single personality, lifting up a protest 
 against the sins, the lethargy, the dark- 
 ness, the subterfuges of the time. And 
 that is all at first ; because in the world 
 of humanity the first thing is not or- 
 ganized society, but the individual; 
 first of all, that separate and sacred 
 personality which in the eye of God is 
 the image of His own being, and the 
 likeness of Himself. And so, first of 
 all, there is John the Baptist ; not a 
 church ; not a society ; not a commu- 
 nity or fellowship of any sort ; but one 
 man, setting himself against the drift 
 of his time, kindling other men into 
 life and light and fire, by the power 
 with which he speaks. And this is a 
 perfect illustration — the ministry of 
 this man John the Baptist — of what 
 we may call at once the power and 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 33 
 
 the weakness of individualism in the 
 world. 
 
 For, following the ministry of John 
 the Baptist, we find that, when the 
 Apostles came on one occasion to Eph- 
 esus, there were those who had been 
 baptized with the baptism of John, and 
 who had not so much as heard whether 
 there was any Holy Ghost. They had 
 been set on fire by a new truth, and 
 then they had wandered apparently out 
 of the influence of that which followed 
 the preaching of John the Baptist ; they 
 had not been brought into the associa- 
 tions of the Church of Christ ; they 
 had not been baptized in the Name of 
 its Divine Founder, and they were out- 
 side the means of grace, and therefore 
 necessarily largely outside the hope of 
 salvation. 
 
 But after John the Baptist there 
 
34 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 comes Another, who from first to last 
 reveals Himself as the Prophet, Teacher, 
 Founder, and Ordainer of order. He 
 speaks of a Kingdom, of His disciples 
 as the children of a King. Little by 
 little, taking up that interest and curi- 
 osity and alarm which had been awak- 
 ened by His predecessor, He lifts it to 
 a higher level, to something more than 
 curiosity, or interest, or alarm, to that 
 which we name discipleship ; and when 
 He has gathered about Him a little 
 band of men infused with His own 
 spirit and converted to His own con- 
 victions, what does He do but send 
 these men out to baptize in the Name 
 of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And 
 thus was organized a Divine Society, 
 to create in the world a brotherhood 
 which should be ruled according to the 
 principles of a divine order, and to lay 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 35 
 
 the broad foundations of that great fel- 
 lowship or Kingdom which we name 
 to-day as the Church of God. 
 
 Now, when you come to read the 
 letters which the men whom Christ 
 sent out to preach His Gospel wrote 
 to the Churches which they founded, 
 nothing is more significant than to see 
 how instantly, and therefore all the 
 more suggestively, this thought of or- 
 derliness, of setting things in order, of 
 Christianity itself as a divine order in 
 the world, comes into view. When the 
 Apostle who had founded the Church 
 in Corinth is writing in that first letter 
 of his to that Church, concerning the 
 Sacrament of the Lord's Supper ; after 
 he had rebuked those who had con- 
 verted the Supper into an occasion of 
 revelry and festivity, what is that in- 
 junction with which he concludes? 
 
36 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 " And if any man hunger, let him eat 
 at home : that ye come not together 
 unto condemnation. And the rest will 
 I set in order when I come." l 
 
 Again, when he sends out the men 
 who were to preside over the infant 
 Church he himself had planted, and to 
 build up the handful of believers into 
 something more than a little vagrant 
 band in the waste of paganism, what is 
 the charge he lays upon them ? Listen 
 to the words that he writes to that 
 Apostle whom he sends to preside over 
 the churches in Crete : 
 
 " For this cause left I thee in Crete, 
 that thou shouldest set in order the 
 things that are wanting, and ordain el- 
 ders in every city, as I had appointed 
 thee." 2 
 
 In other words, the new religion was 
 1 I Cor. xi., 34. * Titus i., 5. 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 37 
 
 not merely a new enthusiasm ; the new 
 truth was not merely a new philosophy ; 
 the new Teacher not merely a new 
 teacher, but a King, even as in the face 
 of Pontius Pilate He owned. 1 He had 
 come, not to leave an orphan Church 
 in the world ; He had come to found 
 a Divine Kingdom ; and the very es- 
 sence of a kingdom, whether it be 
 human or divine, is that it shall be 
 founded upon principles of order, and 
 upbuilt upon laws which are fixed and 
 determined from the beginning. 
 
 Surely, a moment's reflection will 
 persuade us that that which was so 
 necessary in the beginning, is no less 
 necessary, nay, far more necessary, to- 
 day. For, what is the difference be- 
 tween that condition of society to 
 which the Christian religion came, and 
 
 1 St. John xviii., 37. 
 
38 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 the condition of society as you and I 
 know it to-day ? On one thing I think 
 we will all be agreed, and that is, that 
 life is enormously fuller now than then. 
 The various agencies which have opened 
 the mind of man to contact with other 
 men, the various scientific discoveries, 
 like steam, and electricity, and print- 
 ing, have somehow multiplied life, so 
 that the points of contact and relation 
 with our fellow-men have been in- 
 creased almost indefinitely. 
 
 But what are the consequences of 
 such a condition of things? The voices 
 that speak to us, the claims that ad- 
 dress themselves to us, the appeals that 
 reach our sympathy, must needs be no 
 less multiplied, and so they are. What 
 most torments people, with sympathies 
 and aptitudes for doing service for 
 Christ in His Church to-day, is the 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 39 
 
 very multiplicity of the claims upon 
 their time, and attention, and emo- 
 tions. How constantly our ears are 
 tried with the voices that come to us 
 saying, " Come over and help us " — 
 those cries of sorrow or want, that rise 
 up around us on every hand ! And 
 therefore it is, that if we are to do the 
 work of Christ, without wasting our 
 forces and throwing away our strength 
 and frittering our energies in the doing 
 of it, we must, first of all, recognize the 
 inevitable necessity of being subject to 
 the Realm of Order. 
 
 What, now, are the conditions of that 
 realm ? 
 
 I. The first which I would name is 
 Discrimination. This is a condition 
 which lies at the threshold of any true 
 fealty to the Realm of Order. In the 
 matter of Christian work, the first ques- 
 
40 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 tion, in other words, for you, for me, 
 to decide, is this: There are some 
 things which are worth doing, and there 
 are some things which are not worth 
 doing. There are a great many other 
 things, it may be, which are worth doing, 
 if we were sure of absolute leisure, if we 
 had no home ties or other claims upon 
 our attention, and if our obligations 
 were so isolated that we could draw 
 a sharp line around them and ignore 
 everything outside of them ; but that is 
 impossible. And so, the first condition 
 of service for one who would serve God 
 is, that he or she shall recognize that 
 there are certain things which have a 
 superior claim, and which must be 
 done with the clear understanding that, 
 in order to do them, other things, 
 which call perhaps with more clamorous 
 voices, must be let alone. 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 4 1 
 
 Again : we must recognize, in accord- 
 ance with this principle of discrimina- 
 tion as the first condition of the Realm 
 of Order, that there are some things, 
 which by our training and station we 
 are fitted to do, and others which we 
 are not fitted to do. How often it 
 comes to pass, that we set our hand to 
 some task or service, just because it has 
 a sentimental side ! Or, again, how 
 often is it that we yield to the im- 
 portunities of a friend to associate our- 
 selves in some enterprise, of which, if 
 we were honestly to analyze it, we 
 should find that that friend is himself 
 or herself a largest part. Take that 
 element out, and the thing does not 
 honestly appeal to our intelligence, our 
 judgment or our sympathies. The first 
 duty under such conditions is to 
 separate the work which comes to you 
 
42 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 with an appeal for co-operation or 
 sympathy, from the mere personal ele- 
 ment, which, in this life of ours, is 
 often the most potent element in warp- 
 ing and perverting our judgments. 
 What we want to know about any 
 work is, first of all, whether it is rela- 
 tively worth doing ; secondly, whether 
 it is a work which we can best do ; and, 
 thirdly, whether it is the work, which 
 being the work which we can best do 
 and being relatively worth doing, of all 
 other work, to-day, comes to us with 
 most direct and strenuous call. 
 
 Bring this principle of discrimination 
 into your life, and how, straightway, 
 confusion, and torment, and unrest will 
 disappear out of it ! You know how it 
 is in the home, where one gets up in 
 the morning with a thousand petty 
 cares appealing to her, and where there 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 43 
 
 is not that calm judgment and delibera- 
 tion first of all in the closet, as to the 
 tasks of the day, which clears the air, 
 and so steadies one with the sense of 
 the supreme importance of things which 
 are fundamental, and with the secon- 
 dary importance of things not funda- 
 mental. Who of us does not know 
 from bitter experience, how, pulled 
 hither and thither by conflicting 
 thoughts, tormented all the day long 
 by questions that we strive to answer 
 and cannot, when the day is done, we 
 sit down and fold our hands in the 
 consciousness that it has been from the 
 beginning to the end a failure, simply 
 because in the beginning of it there 
 was not a reference to and a reverence 
 for this law of the Realm of Order, nor 
 any wise discrimination as to the claims 
 of relative duties. 
 
44 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 There is a very striking illustration 
 of what I mean, in the sixth chapter of 
 the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, 
 when the infant Church, having grown 
 out of its earlier feebleness, had come 
 to have what it has to-day in such large 
 measure, those dependent upon its 
 eleemosynary care, needing the minis- 
 tration of its alms. " In those days," 
 we read, "when the number of the 
 disciples was multiplied, there arose a 
 murmuring of the Grecians against the 
 Hebrews, because their widows were 
 neglected in the daily ministration." ' 
 The issue, as were all others, was taken 
 to the Apostles. Now, the first in- 
 stinctive line of action, for one who had 
 not recognized this principle of dis- 
 crimination in the ordering of his daily 
 life, would have been for these Apostles 
 
 1 Acts vi. 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 45 
 
 to have gone down into the midst of 
 this business of ministration and under- 
 taken to correct the unfairness on the 
 one hand, and the neglect on the other, 
 in regard to the matter of the ministra- 
 tion of alms to the widows of Grecians 
 and Hebrews, by personal intervention. 
 But with that inspired wisdom, which 
 not only laid the foundation of the 
 Church, but raised it out of its elemen- 
 tary crudeness, the Apostle declares of 
 those who were ordained to preach the 
 Gospel, and to lay the foundations of 
 the Church, that " it was not reason 
 they should leave the Word of God and 
 serve tables." Serving tables is not an 
 unworthy work for us of the Ministry. 
 If one comes to our door, it is not be- 
 neath our dignity to feed him. But 
 there are other forces and powers in 
 the Church which can do this precisely 
 
46 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 as well as we can do it ; and if so, we 
 are to recognize that there is such a 
 thing as a law of discrimination ; that 
 that which is greater is not to be neg- 
 lected for that which is less ; that the 
 concerns of the spiritual life are not to 
 be overlooked for concerns of the tem- 
 poral ; that the activities of the Church 
 of God — often a danger in our days — 
 are not to engross themselves with mere 
 matters of outward ministry, so that 
 they forget to dispense that godly coun- 
 sel and those saving truths which are to 
 be the primary powers in turning men 
 from darkness to light. 
 
 II. Again, there is a second condition 
 of the Realm of Order — I mean, Subor- 
 dination. The moment that we look at 
 the infant Church, we find that in it 
 there were what we call different orders 
 of men. There were those who were 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 47 
 
 Apostles ; there were those who were in- 
 discriminately the first Elders or Bish- 
 ops, those who were Presbyters, and 
 those, like these of whom we read in the 
 sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apos- 
 tles, who were Deacons, and, as some of 
 us believe, those also who were Deacon- 
 esses. In other words, no sooner does 
 the Church develop an order, than it de- 
 velops a subordination in orders. And 
 this law of subordination, which from 
 the beginning the world has been trying 
 to get rid of, it resents, it breaks out of, 
 it throws over the wall, only surely and 
 inevitably to bring it back again. We 
 who are here are members of a society, 
 and parts of a state, which calls itself a 
 Republic : a protest we say, against 
 those monarchical forms of government, 
 with their investment of almost abso- 
 lute power in the sovereign, which ex- 
 
48 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 isted in less enlightened days. But it 
 is doubtful whether any sovereign in 
 Europe has as much absolute power, 
 especially in connection with the ap- 
 pointment of subordinates, as is vested, 
 at this very moment, in the President 
 of the United States. In other words, 
 we may call the form of government 
 what we will, sooner or later it comes 
 to this, that there must be some ul- 
 timate dispenser of authority, some 
 ultimate voice that shall give the 
 word of command, in matters of duty 
 and service, in every company, little 
 or great. 
 
 I am sensible that here I am speaking 
 of a matter of great difficulty and del- 
 icacy. How easy submission to rule 
 would be, if authority were always 
 exercised with wisdom, meekness, and 
 love ! To yield to a sounder judgment, 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 49 
 
 when its decisions are made plain to us 
 in kindly ways, and without harshness 
 or arbitrariness of tone, is not ordinarily 
 hard. But when authority is exercised 
 imperiously or dictatorially, to yield to it 
 is sometimes almost impossible, even if, 
 as under such circumstances we are 
 tempted to believe, it is not actually 
 wrong. And it is here that there often 
 arises, therefore, one of the severest trials 
 to temper and character, in such work as 
 most of you are doing. It must needs 
 be done, if it is to be done at all, in 
 subordination to rule and authority, 
 and at this point you in this church to- 
 day, who are, whether as parishioners 
 in a parish, or members of a religious 
 society, or associated in some parochial 
 fellowship, working under the general 
 oversight and direction of some one 
 over you in the Lord, must be aware 
 
50 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 of the difficulty of which I speak. God 
 forbid that I should forget the fact, 
 that those who are over us in the 
 Church are men of like passions with 
 ourselves, of abundant infirmities of 
 judgment ; easily intoxicated, it may 
 be, now and then, with authority ; self- 
 willed sometimes, inconsiderate, not 
 always wise nor thoughtful of others' 
 feelings. But, in the case of men set 
 over women, this is but to suggest the 
 question, How can we expect that men 
 shall always be stifficiently thoughtful of 
 the sensitiveness of women, when they 
 are not women themselves ? No doubt, 
 oftener than otherwise, men are im- 
 patient of suggestion, impatient of 
 counsel or advice, even from those older 
 and wiser than themselves, especially 
 of women, just because it seems to them 
 to derogate from their official authority. 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 5 1 
 
 If my brother clergy were present I 
 might speak of this matter with more 
 frankness. Meantime, let us remember 
 that this is a part of the inevitable 
 friction of that condition of infirmity 
 and sin in which the Church finds itself 
 to-day. It is not greatly different, 
 after all, with women or men. In the 
 little parochial society, as every one of 
 you knows, there are jealousies, because 
 those at the head of the circle of work- 
 ers are there, sometimes, for some very 
 secondary consideration of wealth or 
 influence, or of mere seniority in service. 
 Now, we do not always name our- 
 selves, or our own claims, in such a 
 connection, but perhaps we say that an- 
 other working beside us is so much 
 better able to take the helm and steer 
 the little ship, and set in array the 
 battle, than she to whom the task has 
 
52 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 actually been entrusted. And then, 
 when we are conscious in our work that 
 this other set over us is not always 
 considerate of our judgment or patient 
 of our suggestion, that the briefer and 
 the smaller the authority — alas, that it 
 is so often so ! — the more strenuously 
 it is asserted and the more imperiously 
 shown — then I am bound to confess 
 that acquiescence, submission, for the 
 sake of bringing order out of confusion, 
 is sometimes an extremely difficult 
 thing to render. 
 
 And yet it belongs to us to remember 
 that there can be no service without 
 submission, and that, however ignorant, 
 self-willed or inconsiderate those may 
 be who are over us in any work, it is 
 possible for us, at any rate, to lift them 
 up into a nobler capacity for their service 
 of rulership, by two things : first of all, 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 53 
 
 by the loyalty with which we acquiesce 
 in an authority which has been rightly 
 ordained ; and secondly, by the frank, 
 unreserved candor with which we speak 
 in love those thoughts of criticism or 
 dissent, which, just because they are 
 not told out into the ears of those they 
 are meant for, rankle and fester, until at 
 last they breed that bitterness out of 
 which comes the failure of the whole 
 enterprise. 
 
 How different it would have been if 
 at this or that point in some heated 
 controversy, when we differed from one 
 whose duty it was to conduct the work 
 we did in common, we had first of all 
 recognized the eternal righteousness, in 
 a world and realm of order, of the prin- 
 ciple of subordination, and then had 
 striven to render our service as loyally 
 to the constituted authority as we 
 
54 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 could ; and then, when we could not 
 go further, had spoken to the other in 
 frankness and in tenderness and love, 
 instead of speaking of him behind his 
 back, in bitterness and resentment and 
 impatience ; for, just as truly as the 
 Realm of Order involves, first of all, 
 discrimination, just so truly it involves 
 also subordination. 
 
 III. And then the other and final 
 condition of the Realm of Order, which 
 after all is of supremest consequence, 
 is Inspiration. A very striking book, 
 11 Christianity in Nature, M which is one 
 of the most suggestive disclosures of the 
 witness to the religion of Jesus Christ 
 which may be found in the world of 
 nature that has been written in our 
 own generation, uses, if I recollect 
 aright, this illustration : 
 
 The writer draws the picture of a 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 55 
 
 stream running through the forest, be- 
 side which there stands one day an 
 explorer, who determines to build a 
 mill. What is it that he must do in 
 order that the mill which he builds 
 shall grind his grain and do the work 
 for which he has built it ? This : He 
 must set his mill-wheel in the stream 
 and current of the on-rushing tide, so 
 that the law of gravitation which drives 
 the stream onward in its course shall 
 turn the wheel which his ingenuity has 
 devised, with least waste of power and 
 largest economy of his natural re- 
 sources. In other words, unless he 
 places himself in line with those divine 
 increments of power which God has 
 bound up in nature, he may build his 
 machinery of costliest material and 
 direct his mill with utmost skill, and he 
 will have done both in vain. 
 
56 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 And so it is in our work for Christ in 
 His Church or in the world. It is su- 
 premely necessary for us to recognize 
 that God is a God of order, that so we 
 may put ourselves into position — we 
 who are Christian workers — for His 
 divine inspiration : adjusting our task, 
 our whole order of life, our hours of 
 service and rest, so that through them 
 all there may flow that ever-quickening 
 and ever-moving current of a divine 
 life, which alone turns deadness into 
 power and weakness into strength. 
 Before us, as we sit here to-day, there 
 is this altar of the Living God to which 
 presently we are to draw near, for the 
 strengthening of His Holy Sacrament. 
 Ah, my sisters, when the indwelling 
 power of that divine life does its work 
 in us, what will be our service, our 
 courage, our conquests! First and 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 57 
 
 last, then, we are to recognize that 
 submission to the Realm of Order 
 means expectancy and waiting upon the 
 Divine power, dependence on those 
 treasures of grace which are stored in 
 the everlasting storehouse of God. 
 
 One word, in conclusion, as to what 
 will be the sure fruits of this submission 
 to the Realm of Order. First of all, 
 we may count upon rest and peace. 
 The difference between a life lived in 
 accordance with the Realm of Order 
 and one which is not, is the difference 
 between anarchy and sovereignty, the 
 difference between self-control and self- 
 torment, between strength and weak- 
 ness. Get your life into a divine order. 
 Get it into affiliation with, and sub- 
 mission to, principles of eternal law. 
 Get it into dependence upon the divine 
 strength ; and then what a new thing, 
 
58 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 when you rise in the morning, the day 
 will be ! 
 
 And next to rest and peace will come 
 strength. Here is a heap of stones 
 dumped down into the street. Imagine 
 each stone instinct with life, and having 
 it in its power to fling itself, in some 
 wild way, into some other aggregate of 
 atoms than that in which it finds itself. 
 And then, imagine, on the other hand, 
 that, conscious of the sovereignty in 
 the world of the rule and Realm of Or- 
 der, each one of these atoms takes itself 
 and places itself upon certain lines, and 
 upbuilds each one upon the other, step 
 by step, in accordance with the eternal 
 laws of construction, and you have in- 
 stead a wall which shall stand the 
 storms of centuries, and defy the hand 
 of the strongest enemy. 
 
 Just so it is, when we come to take 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 59 
 
 our life out of the condition of chaos 
 and bring it within the domain of the 
 Realm of Order. When once you take 
 your work, whether in the parochial 
 society, or sisterhood, or in the street, 
 out of the realm of confusion and bring 
 it into the Realm of Order, with set 
 time, with a recognition of things that 
 are primary and secondary, with a rever- 
 ence for a due subordination, then you 
 have become straightway, not an ele- 
 ment of confusion in the world, but a 
 tower of strength, and men will look 
 up to you, and lean on you, because 
 they see in you that columnar quality 
 which is the fruit of obedience to law. 
 
 And then, finally, the last result of 
 this submission to the Realm of Order 
 is the great and blessed assurance that 
 our work will have in it continuity and 
 perpetuity. Ah ! how many people 
 
6o THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 there are in the world — of how many 
 of us here it may be true to-day — that 
 with our aims wedded to some true 
 and precious cause, to which we have 
 given our strength and means and time 
 — the fact that plagues us all the time 
 is this : What will become of it when I 
 am gone ? who will take it up and care 
 for it and carry it on then ? I am but 
 a waif, and the great world rushes on 
 and wipes out the mightiest and hum- 
 blest alike with its inevitable flow. 
 What will be the fate of this little ef- 
 fort of mine, this striving for God and 
 some poor child of His, in the end ? 
 
 I wish I could read to you just here 
 the story of a young girl in England, 
 who, moved by what she saw drink had 
 done in a barrack town on the south 
 coast, went alone into the places where 
 there were soldiers and sailors, following 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 6 1 
 
 them sometimes into the lowest haunts, 
 following them with a persistence, a 
 tenderness and a patience, that would 
 take no denial, and waiting for recogni- 
 tion through long years, until, slowly, 
 out of her single-handed effort, lo ! it 
 came. Just because, from first to last, 
 having, all the while, a plan of her own, 
 she was ready, as she said, at any mo- 
 ment to lose herself in some larger plan 
 for the work, that larger plan came 
 and took her, and through her created 
 one of the mightiest agencies for the 
 reform of intemperance that is to be 
 found in the Christian world to-day. 
 
 It w r as because of the faith of such a 
 woman as Sarah Robinson, holding on 
 to the conviction that her effort was a 
 part of God's own divine plan, holding 
 on also to a clear and definite line of 
 duty, until at last she was able to lose 
 
62 THE REALM OF ORDER. 
 
 herself in a larger plan — it was because 
 of this that her name has become im- 
 mortal in the history of Christian ser- 
 vice in our time; even as it was this 
 which at first won a way into the 
 hearts of those to whom she went and 
 for whom she strove. 
 
 So with you and me, whatever the 
 task may be, and however small and un- 
 known. If we begin it with a wise 
 discrimination, continue it with a wise 
 subordination, and above all, if we be- 
 gin and continue and end it with a su- 
 preme reference to a divine inspiration, 
 it will not fail. Somewhere, some 
 other heart will kindle into a flame for 
 the sake of those for whom we labor, 
 and our labors, long after we are gone, 
 will endure because we have begun and 
 continued and ended them in obedience 
 to the laws of the Realm of Order. 
 
THE REALM OF ORDER. 63 
 
 God's we are, God's we shall be in 
 the world to come. His is the King- 
 dom which is to triumph over all 
 confusion. To redeem it from that 
 confusion, His Son has come into the 
 world. Let us draw near to Him, and, 
 yielding up our life to His control, have 
 every lawless and unordered thought 
 and aim made subject to His Will ! 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 An Address delivered in the Church du Saint 
 Esprit, New York, Monday, February 15, 1886, at 
 the Service for Women engaged in Church work. 
 
 6s 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 OUR theme to-day is Ends and In- 
 struments, and in the fifty-fourth 
 chapter of the Prophet Isaiah there is 
 a single verse which, as expressively as 
 any other in the two Testaments, opens 
 the whole subject for our discussion. 
 That chapter, as perhaps you will recol- 
 lect, is a part of the prophecy with which 
 Isaiah is bidden to prepare the mind of 
 Israel for that greater destiny which 
 awaited it. In an age of national de- 
 cadence, and in a time when a large 
 part of its people were in captivity, 
 God speaking to His Prophet, reveals 
 to him that other and nobler future 
 which awaited His chosen nation, when 
 67 
 
68 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 led out of bondage they should know a 
 perfect liberty, and when all the way 
 along they should be conscious that be- 
 hind them there was a Divine purpose, 
 moulding and controlling events. And 
 in pursuance of that thought, these 
 words are put into the mouth of the 
 Prophet : " Behold, I have created the 
 smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, 
 and that bringeth forth an instrument 
 for his work," by which, undoubtedly, 
 God designs to remind those to whom 
 He speaks through His prophet, of two 
 truths, equally pertinent and helpful to 
 us who are here to-day. 
 
 One of these is that general truth of 
 His own sovereignty. Man is God's 
 instrument. He acts under a Divine 
 guidance and inspiration, even when, 
 like Cyrus, the pagan king, he is not 
 conscious of it, and this he himself illus- 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 69 
 
 trates by those constructive powers of 
 his, with which in turn he forges the 
 instruments, which, like the smith's, are 
 used for his daily work. 
 
 Now if you have ever seen a forge fire, 
 you have seen one of those things which, 
 with the least interesting aspect exter- 
 nally, become attractive, even instruct- 
 ive, the moment that you recognize the 
 processes which are going on there. If 
 one were blowing the bellows and ham- 
 mering a mass of iron, turning it to and 
 fro with his hand as he did so, without 
 an aim or object, the whole spectacle 
 would be equally meaningless and gro- 
 tesque. But as you watch the smith, 
 you see the great mass of molten metal 
 which he handles at the end of his tongs, 
 under those successive blows of the 
 hammer which he deals, assume, little 
 by little, a definite shape. It may be a 
 
JO ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 plowshare that he is moulding, or a 
 pruning-hook ; an instrument of peace, 
 or an instrument of war. The thing 
 that is significant is, that the crude metal 
 is slowly becoming some sort of an in- 
 strument. The expenditure of labor is 
 not for labor's sake alone. Beyond the 
 labor there is an end. In the eye and 
 mind of the laborer, every step, every 
 blow, is directed to a definite result ; 
 and nothing is more interesting than to 
 watch the way in which, out of the most 
 hopeless and apparently obstinate mass 
 of crude material, skill will sooner or 
 later educe a tool which shall do the 
 tasks of the world and subdue the ob- 
 stinacy of Nature. 
 
 But go a step further. Have you ever 
 thought of that other tool — which has 
 so much to do with the fashioning of 
 the tool itself ? What is it that enables 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. Jl 
 
 the smith to shape either the pruning- 
 hook or the plowshare ? You say it is 
 the thought which conceives those im- 
 ages in his brain, and the will which re- 
 solves to put them into execution. 
 But a thought is an unborn child, and 
 like any other unborn child, may never 
 see the light. That which enables it to 
 live is the act by which the thought is 
 translated into some visible expression, 
 and therefore behind the thought of 
 the smith there must be the hand of the 
 smith. He who worketh in the coals 
 cannot think out and excogitate and 
 will into being the plowshare or the 
 pruning-hook ; there must be that other 
 tool, that most marvellous of all instru- 
 ments, I think, which we call the human 
 hand. Was there ever in all the world, 
 a tool, an instrument, like that ? We 
 say that it cannot see, but in the case of 
 
J2 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 those who are without sight how truly 
 it becomes " eyes to the blind " ! We 
 say that it cannot speak, and yet a ges- 
 ture will be sometimes infinitely more 
 expressive than a word ; an averted 
 hand will tell as much or more than the 
 averted face and the most resentful 
 speech. 
 
 And then, think of the ministries of 
 the human hand, as they apply them- 
 selves to sorrow and suffering. We go 
 into the darkened chamber of some 
 friend, to whom, if we could, we would 
 speak a word of comfort in a great sor- 
 row, and the most we can do, and often 
 the best, is by the silent, constant pres- 
 sure of the hand, to give expression to 
 a sympathy which words only blunder 
 in telling, and which we convey far 
 more expressively just because we tell 
 it without words. Again : here is a 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 73 
 
 wound ; how shall it be healed ? With 
 medicine, you say. Yes, but what — as 
 day by day we are being taught so 
 wonderfully in this day of trained skill 
 — what is there in the whole realm of 
 material relief, so effective to bear upon 
 pain and misery and bodily suffering, as 
 the ministry of a human hand ? Watch 
 a trained nurse bandage a limb, and 
 then watch a philosopher attempt the 
 same task. This deft instrument, this 
 marvellous weapon, sensitive, strong, 
 delicate, nimble, is of all other marvels 
 in the world, it seems to me, in the way 
 of instruments, the most marvellous. 
 
 And what is it that makes it so ? 
 Plainly, its adaptedness to its tasks. 
 Think how tender it can be ! Consider 
 how, in those processes of engraving 
 which are the finest and most delicate, 
 and which have to do with the manu- 
 
74 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 facturing of money or its equivalent — 
 there is developed in the palm of the 
 hand a sensitiveness so fine in the treat- 
 ment of a steel or copper plate, that no 
 agency which the wit of man has in- 
 vented, has ever been able to take the 
 place of that primitive touch. Think 
 again, how the hand is adapted for 
 tasks at once grave and delicate ; how 
 it can hold or push or pull, with what 
 gentleness it can touch a wound, and 
 minister to a diseased body, almost as 
 imperceptibly as the very breath of 
 the air. What is it, all the way along, 
 I ask you, that impresses us in this mar- 
 vellous, this incomparable tool ? It is 
 its adaptedness to the tasks which in 
 this world God has given it to do. 
 
 And that reminds us of that painful 
 disagreement, that want of harmony 
 between ends and instruments which, . 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 75 
 
 in other and higher tools than those 
 of the hand, is one of the most 
 trying and disheartening experiences 
 of life. We look at the work which 
 we are doing ourselves, we look at 
 the work other men and women are 
 trying to do for Christ, and we recog- 
 nize, very often, the most cordial pur- 
 pose, the most honest consecration of 
 gifts and talents, and as the end of 
 them all, the most dismal failure. What 
 is the explanation of the failure? It is 
 often simply that, unlike the human 
 hand, the instrument has undertaken a 
 task for which it was not adapted. 
 
 (a) This may come in many ways. 
 In the first place, from want of native 
 aptitude, a want, which, in taking up 
 our particular work in life, whether it 
 be a secular or a spiritual calling, is a 
 matter far too little regarded. In the 
 
76 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 child that grows up under the shadow 
 of our own teaching, there are qualities 
 that differentiate him from any other. 
 Here is the boy at your knee, whom 
 you would fain see great at the bar or 
 in matter of science. Here is the girl 
 to whom you look, when she grows to 
 womanhood, to lift off a little those 
 domestic cares that have fretted you all 
 through her childhood, and which you 
 have borne patiently, thinking that one 
 day they were to be divided with 
 another. And she grows up with an 
 exquisite sense of color, a singular 
 genius for music, or for rendering some 
 humane service to other people, but 
 without the least adaptedness for those 
 tasks which to you seem the most im- 
 portant. And the boy whom you 
 would fain have to love books and the 
 paths of high emprise, finds his interest, 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. JJ 
 
 it may be, in a piece of mechanism, 
 develops tastes utterly alien to those 
 which you yourself have, or that belong 
 to any ancestor whom you can recall ; 
 and then such an one has his life spoiled, 
 perhaps, just because you insist upon 
 coercing his native want of aptitude in 
 a channel for which it was not ordained. 
 
 To us who are here to-day, this ques- 
 tion of aptitude is one which ought to 
 lie at the very beginning of any Chris- 
 tian work whatever. Our own native 
 powers are a part of the endowment 
 which God has given us for serving 
 Him in the world. So far as we refuse 
 to understand them, just in that de- 
 gree, we shall be sure to go astray in 
 any service that we undertake to do for 
 Him. 
 
 (b) And then, next to that mistake, 
 there is the other and far commoner 
 
yS ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 one which we make, in undertaking 
 any work given us to do, in spite of 
 our want of training for it. Take the 
 illustration which I have already used 
 — of one who undertakes to dress a 
 wound, or to minister to one who is in 
 physical pain, without the education of 
 the hand and the eye, which are the 
 indispensable requisites for every such 
 ministry. I might bring the brightest 
 man in the world to sit beside the bed- 
 side of one stricken down with some 
 sore disease, and if he did not under- 
 stand the relation of some simple rem- 
 edy to the case before him, his wisdom 
 and theoretical knowledge would only 
 be an embarrassment in his ministra- 
 tion. Discipline, education, that is, 
 training, is the one element often which 
 distinguishes failure from success. 
 (c) Again, still another explanation 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 79 
 
 of so much of the failure that we find 
 in life and in our own work, in this 
 matter of ends and instruments, is our 
 habit often of over-taxing an instru- 
 ment adapted for a certain work and 
 abundantly well trained for it. What 
 is more painful, when we look out on 
 the daily life of a city like this, than to 
 see so many people — yes, and as we go 
 through the streets, so many brute 
 beasts — on whom are laid burdens 
 larger than they can bear ; whose are 
 gifts, training, taste and predilection, 
 but who are overweighed in the work 
 they have to do, with a task so much 
 too large for them, that failure in it is 
 fore-ordained before they begin. 
 
 Now, such facts as these, in connec- 
 tion with that subject which we are 
 considering here, of the adaptedness of 
 instruments to those ends which they 
 
80 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 undertake to achieve, suggest to us the 
 question, how are we to correct and 
 avoid these specific evils and errors to 
 which I have alluded ? 
 
 I. In the first place — and it is a mat- 
 ter of sincere thankfulness that more 
 and more in our age that fact is being 
 recognized — we are to correct the dis- 
 proportion, the mal-adjustment of in- 
 struments to ends, by a knowledge of 
 our own gifts and aptitudes and charac- 
 ter. What is wanted at the threshold 
 of any task which involves persistent 
 service, and looks forward to effectual 
 results, is that you and I should, 
 first of all, understand ourselves : what 
 it is in the way of native aptitude that 
 God has given us, and so, having taken 
 account of ourselves, should understand 
 the native resources at our command. 
 
 II. And next to that, and no less 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 8 1 
 
 important, is the matter of training. 
 Here, again, we have much to be thank- 
 ful for in that classification of work 
 which is more and more a characteristic 
 of our day. This is an age of special- 
 ists, and if the work of the world is to 
 be done, it must be by means of special 
 endeavors. In other words, in the 
 Christian service that we do for the 
 ignorant, the relief of poverty, the ar- 
 resting of vice, the saving of the fallen 
 — in all these tasks that in our day 
 have grown so large, to do them effec- 
 tively, there must be in every case 
 somebody who is willing, first of all, to 
 learn how to do them, and who by 
 training has learned the deftness and 
 the skill which are the indispensable 
 prerequisites of success. 
 
 Some of you here this morning have 
 had an experience in Sunday-school 
 
82 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 work. I wonder if any young girl, or 
 any woman no longer a girl, looking 
 back to such a time, can forget the first 
 time when she sat down and confronted 
 a Sunday-school class ? That sense of 
 overwhelming helplessness that came 
 upon her as she realized that she was 
 set there in the office of a teacher ', and 
 with the responsibility of not misleading 
 minds in the understanding of the truth 
 — how keen it was ! With the Word 
 of God in her hand, she was to unfold 
 its meaning to those that came there 
 to learn at her mouth the way of the 
 Lord. But how ? With what previous 
 training ? I think we are bound to 
 confess, especially we who are ministers 
 of Christ, that oftener than otherwise, 
 in the incompetency, the inadequacy, 
 the utter unfitness, that exist in such 
 cases on the part of the instrument, the 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 83 
 
 responsibility belongs not so much to 
 the young, unfledged, inexperienced 
 teacher, as to those who, over her in 
 the Lord, have set her to a task for 
 which she is so poorly trained. Teach- 
 ing — is it a natural gift ? to make clear 
 to another the way of eternal life — is 
 that a sort of thing which you can take 
 up and put down, as you would take up 
 a task in needle-work ? And so of any- 
 thing else we are called to do for Christ, 
 even though it be so humble as a task 
 in needle-work — the very first condition 
 on which we ought to insist with refer- 
 ence to ourselves, or any others set to 
 do Chrises work in His Church and for 
 His children, is that there shall go be- 
 fore it some sort of preparation. And 
 therefore, when we are asked to under- 
 take such work, it would be a wise pre- 
 caution if we demanded of those who 
 
84 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 asked us, " How do you propose to 
 enable me to do this work effectually ? 
 Give me some sort of preliminary teach- 
 ing and instruction which will fit me to 
 do it to edification ; give me a school in 
 which I can learn thus to serve Christ, 
 and then I may be able to say that I 
 will consent to do so." 
 
 And here I want to call the attention 
 of those to whom I speak, whose work 
 may lie among the poor, to the great 
 opportunities afforded them of educat- 
 ing a body of helpers to reinforce them 
 in their work, by taking along with 
 them, for a time, those who are willing 
 to serve Christ in this way, but who are 
 held back because of inexperience. 
 When we open the New Testament 
 and learn the way in which the greatest 
 tasks of all were attempted by the men 
 to whom they were assigned, nothing 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 85 
 
 is more significant than that on all 
 the occasions of which we read, the first 
 workers for Christ went forth two and 
 two. The work of laying the founda- 
 tion of the Church, the preaching of 
 the Gospel, were done not singly, but, 
 as a rule, with one more experienced 
 and one less experienced worker, work- 
 ing and moving side by side. Believe 
 me, if we could establish that simple 
 rule in the work we are trying to do, 
 instead of isolating our endeavors so 
 much as we do, the result would greatly 
 inspire and surprise us. 
 
 III. And then, finally, we are to 
 recognize the fact in this matter of ad- 
 justment of instruments to ends, that a 
 most wholesome discipline in the edu- 
 cation of any one of us, for any task 
 which Christ calls us to do, is not so 
 much success as failure. " Happy are 
 
86 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 the people," is a Hindoo proverb, 
 " Happy are the people who began by 
 failing." And it is a proverb of endur- 
 ing truthfulness. As I stand here, there 
 comes back to me the memory of a 
 great thinker, whose services to the 
 Christian religion we may well remem- 
 ber, as we acknowledge the hospitality 
 of this pastor and flock of French lin- 
 eage, and whose name and work we may 
 well honor, as placing us and our chil- 
 dren and our children's children under 
 enduring obligations. Who of you here 
 this morning has not read the story of 
 Blaise Pascal and the Port Royalists, 
 that marvellous man, who, coming out 
 of comparative obscurity, made the 
 whole Church of Rome to tremble at 
 the courage with which he challenged 
 its errors, and who, in his Provincial 
 Letters, has left a literature which, I 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 87 
 
 venture to predict, will endure as long 
 as the graceful and versatile and fervid 
 tongue in which he wrote it? But do 
 you know that Blaise Pascal, the phi- 
 losopher, the Christian teacher, the re- 
 former of an age, and almost of a Church, 
 began his work as a boy of eighteen in 
 a mechanic's shop, where he spent week 
 after week and month after month in 
 vain endeavors to manufacture a calcu- 
 lating machine, the model of which was 
 the germ out of which came that other 
 and still more marvellous mechanism 
 which we know as the calculating ma- 
 chine of Mr. Babbage ? 
 
 Now, then, when Pascal set himself 
 to that task, he made not merely the 
 one model, or two, or a dozen, but fifty. 
 He made them in steel, he made them 
 in brass, he made them in ebony, he 
 made them in ivory. Baffled and de- 
 
88 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 feated at one time, he turned back to 
 the very beginning, and went over the 
 whole complicated business again and 
 again and again. And though the in- 
 strument, which at last he completed, 
 never received the recognition on the 
 part of the scientific world which he 
 himself expected, thus dooming him to 
 another disappointment, he was him- 
 self, by that supreme discipline, that 
 persistent and resolute endeavor, edu- 
 cated to be an instrument in the hand 
 of God of almost incalculable service to 
 future generations. For, out of that 
 baffled endeavor, out of successive fail- 
 ures, stumbling and falling and beaten 
 back, but refusing to be conquered, 
 there came the spirit of resolute courage, 
 which, when he had to face a hostile 
 time and to challenge a hostile Church, 
 gave him the clear insight, the resolute 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 89 
 
 purpose, the almost divine persistency, 
 which has made his name in the realm 
 of Christian thought immortal. 
 
 And this, my dear friends, lifts us to a 
 higher and still larger view of the whole 
 subject. You and I want to fit our- 
 selves, in this matter of Christian ser- 
 vice, to be instruments that shall 
 accomplish an end. We want to know 
 our native gifts, we want to cultivate 
 them by a wise training, we want to be 
 willing to humble and to discipline 
 them into strength, by failure. Yes, 
 but all the time, from the beginning to 
 the end, we want to bear in mind this 
 great, this precious and inspiring truth, 
 that we ourselves are, after all, but in- 
 struments, and that the end of our 
 work is not in our hands, but in God's. 
 There is a little book called " The Prob- 
 lem of the Poor," in which you will find 
 
go ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 the story of Elspeth, a German servant, 
 who, living on the east side of this city, 
 and doing first a work of delegated phi- 
 lanthropy for an invalid lady, took up, 
 after her mistress had died, the work 
 which at first she had done as proxy 
 for another, and broadened and wid- 
 ened it until it became a blessing to 
 the whole neighborhood. Get the 
 book, and read the story called " One 
 Woman's Work," and see how, dominat- 
 ing that humble but helpful life, there 
 was this mightiest secret of service and 
 motor of action, the consciousness that 
 this humble instrument was a tool in 
 the hand of God. 
 
 You and I will go presently to the 
 most comfortable and helpful Sacra- 
 ment of the Body and Blood of Christ. 
 And for what ? For this, that first of 
 all we may put ourselves anew in the 
 
ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 9 1 
 
 hands of One whose instruments we 
 are. Let us be willing to lie still as 
 His tools, in the Hand that is mightier 
 than the human hand. And let us re- 
 metnber, too, for that is the unspeak- 
 able consolation, which, as a door 
 turning on golden hinges, opens to us 
 the fairest and most blessed vision of 
 all, that if, here and to-day, the end 
 and the instrument have been but 
 poorly mated, if the best of us must 
 feel, as who of us does not sometimes, 
 how poorly matched he is with his task, 
 and how too large are the burdens which 
 he bears — for each there is coming a 
 life and a service, w T hen the instrument 
 and the end shall be perfectly mated, 
 and when, in the presence and under 
 the inspiration of a Divine Strength, 
 the tasks, which, as we try to do them 
 here, seem too discouraging, will come 
 
92 ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 to us with a new and gracious invita- 
 tion, just because, there, in the better 
 service, in the Perfect Presence, in the 
 fellowship of a close and constant con- 
 tact with our Almighty Friend and 
 Helper, we shall see our work with per- 
 fect vision, and touch, all the while, the 
 Hand that gives us the courage and the 
 strength to do it. 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 An Address delivered in the Church of the As- 
 cension, New York, on Monday, March I, 1S86, at 
 the Service for Women engaged in Church work. 
 
 93 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 OUR subject this morning is Illu- 
 sions and Ideals, and I shall 
 speak of it, as you can readily under- 
 stand, of necessity, under those special 
 limitations which connect it with this 
 place and these services. 
 
 In a thoughtful volume which I laid 
 down the other day, there occurs a con- 
 versation between two friends, provoked 
 by that very natural enthusiasm which 
 one of them had expressed, in regard to 
 the advantages of living in this gener- 
 ation with the larger light and knowl- 
 edge and opportunity which have come 
 especially to Christian people, through 
 the manifold gains of this nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 95 
 
96 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 In answer to this his companion re- 
 plies that he wishes he could join with 
 his friend in that expression of enthusi- 
 asm, but is constrained to confess that - 
 he cannot. " Looking back from to- 
 day," he says in substance, " there are 
 ages which we call the Dark Ages, and 
 which most of us have been taught to 
 despise. They were ages of more im- 
 perfect knowledge, and of abundant 
 superstition, and they were, as a result 
 of that superstition, sometimes ages of 
 great cruelty and wrong. But, on the 
 other hand, they were ages of a simpler 
 and more childlike faith. They were 
 ages when, if you choose, men had illu- 
 sions in abundance, but were made 
 happy by them ; when Heaven was 
 nearer, when the earth was more inter- 
 esting just because it was more myste- 
 rious, and when life, girt about though 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 97 
 
 it was by what we call a thousand fa- 
 bles, was somehow a more fascinating, 
 just because a more unintelligible 
 thing. 
 
 " We have torn away the mask to- 
 day ; we have shattered the illusions 
 of the past. Knowledge, with its in- 
 satiable curiosity, has dispelled a great 
 many of our dreams. The traditions, 
 the superstitions, as we call them, of 
 our ancestors, have vanished — are we 
 happier for their loss ? Is it a gain to 
 know so much ? Is it a real progress, 
 at any rate in peace of mind, to have 
 destroyed these earlier illusions ? Was 
 not the childlike state, in its compara- 
 tive innocence of evil, in its simple and 
 confiding faith, on the whole a more 
 blessed, more peaceful and joyous state 
 than that to which we have come to- 
 day ? " 
 
98 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 I. Now I think we can sympathize 
 with that feeling, even though we may 
 be ever so enthusiastic concerning our 
 own times. No one who has passed 
 the threshold of youthful life is igno- 
 rant of painful experience — with most 
 of us, alas, to be deepened as life goes 
 along — of the decay of earlier illusions. 
 If we go no farther afield than our- 
 selves, what illusions have been shat- 
 tered, to us who have come to the 
 burden and heat of the day, concern- 
 ing our own character, hopes, and pow- 
 ers ! There was a time when we parted 
 the portal and looked out at the world, 
 kindled by some warm enthusiasm, or 
 on fire with some great truth which 
 had broken upon us for the first time, 
 in the confidence that the tasks to 
 which some clarion voice called us were 
 the tasks for which we were abundantly 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 99 
 
 adapted, and into which we had only 
 to throw ourselves, to achieve certain 
 victory. 
 
 We know better than that now. If 
 no other illusion has been shattered, I 
 venture to affirm, that to most of those 
 to whom I speak this morning, that il- 
 lusion is at best a fading memory. We 
 have learned that, whatever our courage, 
 our daring, our profound faith in our 
 own powers to achieve results, results 
 are not in our keeping ; that the best 
 enthusiasm, the finest fervor, may hurl 
 itself against some old evil, may cry 
 aloud in the market-place in most in- 
 dignant protest, may lift up its hand 
 and voice against some monstrous 
 wrong, and may do it in vain. It is 
 not enough that we are persuaded of 
 our own powers and of the merit of the 
 cause in which we are enlisted to make 
 
IOO ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 us victorious. We have learned that 
 such a faith in ourselves is an illusion. 
 
 And then, again, take that other 
 phase of life, which consists not in 
 achievement, but in resistance. Time 
 was, when we were younger, more in- 
 experienced, less familiar with the 
 enormous power of evil, less set, it may 
 be, in the place where the hot fires of 
 temptation burnt upon us with most 
 resolute force ; when the fall or the er- 
 ror or the misstep of another, seemed 
 to us not only incredible but shameful ; 
 when we said to ourselves, and said it 
 with an honest confidence : " If I had 
 been there, and if that temptation had 
 challenged me, if that hot flush of pas- 
 sion had flamed up in my breast, I 
 know I could have resisted it. I know 
 how the evil thing would have been 
 spurned ; I know that I would have 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IOI 
 
 been strong enough to come off a con- 
 queror/' 
 
 Our feet have slipped since then. 
 The temptation has come and con- 
 quered us once and again. It may 
 have been some subtle habit that, little 
 by little, has encroached upon us, until 
 day by day it has been a hard fight not 
 to yield ourselves wholly to the mas- 
 tery of it ; some sin, that seems no 
 greater than the sin of the tongue, like 
 detraction ; but as the years have gone 
 on, we have learned this lesson, that 
 our own powers of resistance are not 
 sufficient for all the emergencies of life, 
 and that the strength in us, equal, as 
 we thought, to cope with any tempta- 
 tion, is, after all, too often an illusory 
 strength. 
 
 And then, yet again, in regard to our 
 spiritual perceptions of God, our rela- 
 
102 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 tion to Him and the world that is un- 
 seen. Ah ! once there was a time, 
 when in fulfilment of those words of 
 Wordsworth, that " Heaven lies about 
 us in our infancy/' the realm of the un- 
 seen seemed somehow more close to 
 our childish dreams than the realm that 
 is seen. How is it to-day? Has the 
 unseen grown closer or more remote ? 
 Is the realm of the spiritual more real 
 or unreal ? Is not that faith which 
 once seemed so clear and so firm, in 
 danger its very self, sometimes, of be- 
 coming to us an illusion of our child- 
 hood, and the things which seemed to 
 hold us fast, in danger of slipping 
 wholly out of our grasp? Our very 
 power of spiritual perception, which 
 once appeared so vivid, is it not, in one 
 word, in danger of perishing utterly ? 
 II. And again. When we turn from 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IO3 
 
 ourselves to our work, how is it there ? 
 You can remember, I fancy, every one 
 of you, the time when you were first 
 attracted to some interest or opportu- 
 nity, and how it presented itself to you 
 as the one exclusive claim of paramount 
 importance in all the world. What a 
 cause it was — whether of the ignorant, 
 or the needy, or the outcast — was there 
 any other work like it ? Above all, was 
 there any plan like that in which you 
 yourself had become enlisted for doing 
 this work ? Was there not here at last 
 the panacea that was to redeem the dis- 
 orders of society, and uplift the fallen 
 ones, and transform this old world of 
 ours into a new Eden ? 
 
 If you have gone a great way in the 
 work you are doing, you have out- 
 grown that illusion. You have found 
 out, that, however opportune and ur- 
 
104 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 gent that work may be, it is but a 
 small part, after all, of that manifold 
 and many-sided service, by which the 
 world in bondage of sin is to be re- 
 deemed back again to the service of 
 Jesus Christ. You have found out that 
 your own methods are, after all, but 
 very imperfect ; in one word, that your 
 pet scheme for the regeneration of the 
 race is largely an illusion. 
 
 And still more, perhaps, when you 
 turn to the objects of it. The little 
 children you wanted to save, the poor 
 and destitute you wanted to house bet- 
 ter, the needy you wanted to relieve — 
 ah, how engaging they were when they 
 first came to your notice ! How real 
 seemed the need, how genuine the hu- 
 mility that presented itself in the per- 
 sons of these deserving ones ! And 
 then, one day, there comes an insincer- 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. IO5 
 
 ity, and you find out that those whom 
 you have been helping are not ingenu- 
 ous in their poverty ; it may be that 
 their poverty is not real, it may be 
 that it is poverty allied to vice, and that 
 everything you are doing to ennoble 
 only conspires to degrade and pauper- 
 ize ; in a word, that these your heroes 
 and heroines of the realm of the poor 
 are so many fantastic illusions, whose 
 virtues are largely the creation of your 
 own imagination. 
 
 And so of the rewards of our work. 
 There was a time when that work it- 
 self was to us the keenest pleasure. 
 In the beginning of it, in the first fresh- 
 ness of the new love, you can remem- 
 ber how you said to yourself, " Can 
 anybody tire of this service ? What a 
 charm there is about it, what a reward 
 in the very doing it ! Only give me 
 
106 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 strength and courage, and my life will 
 find its happiness in going in and out on 
 such errands, and spending and being 
 spent for Christ and His service." 
 
 Said James Hinton, " Somebody 
 asked me what I wanted to go and live 
 in White Chapel for, and whether it 
 was because I thought the nineteenth 
 century needed a new illustration of 
 martyrdom. I could not make them 
 understand that those walks I took 
 every afternoon in White Chapel, and 
 the pleasure of sending my pictures to 
 be exhibited among the most degraded 
 people — that all this was itself a joy so 
 keen and real, that I sometimes ar- 
 raigned myself for the indulgence of 
 what was a natural taste in me, and 
 which found in their gratitude to whom 
 I ministered, my best reward." God 
 forbid that we should not find the same 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 107 
 
 pleasure in our work. But, oh, if it 
 would only last ! What a bright illu- 
 sion vanishes, when we find out one 
 day that the work once so sweet and 
 gracious is so no longer ; when the con- 
 sciousness of drudgery comes, and when 
 that confident belief which was itself 
 the most inspiring illusion of all — that 
 in the service we should find not only 
 the privilege of doing Christ's work, but 
 a daily joy in doing it — is no longer 
 true ; when we take up our task with a 
 supreme sense of its weariness, and lay 
 it down when the day is done, almost 
 w r ith a sense of thankfulness. 
 
 III. But all this, I think, we could 
 endure, if it were not for the destruc- 
 tion of those other illusions, which 
 have so much to do with the happiness 
 of most of us, in any service or any life 
 in this world — our illusions concerning 
 
108 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 our fellow-workers. Here is somebody 
 who has kindled our whole interest 
 into a flame. Here is a book which we 
 read, which brings to us the life and 
 work of some one we long to know. 
 Here is a personality which somehow 
 or other has come to bear upon our own 
 need, whose call has awakened us out of 
 the lethargy of our old indifference and 
 sent us forth to do God's service, with 
 the feeling that just so long as we can 
 watch that other and be kindled by the 
 tone of her voice, and quickened by 
 the inspiration of her leadership, we 
 can go on without weariness and with- 
 out discouragement. And then, one 
 day, we come near and find that the fine 
 gold is somehow dimmed. One day, 
 this friend of ours is cold to us or pre- 
 occupied, or what is worse still, seems 
 selfish. We discover how along with 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 109 
 
 these graces and powers of leadership 
 and of inspiration, there is a large human 
 element — it may be the love of adula- 
 tion, or of power, it may be self-will, or 
 self-seeking. No matter. As we de- 
 tect the selfish motive, the dross among 
 the gold, as we find that the rare sweet- 
 ness can be clouded by fretfulness or 
 impatience; that the character does 
 not always ring quite true, that our 
 hero, though his face be of gold, has 
 hands of brass and it may be feet of 
 iron, what a shock comes to us then ! 
 How it seems as if not only our hero, 
 our leader, our guide, were somehow 
 unreal, or of the earth, but as if there 
 could be nothing quite real, nothing in 
 all the world that was not illusory, and 
 as if, instead of holding fast to these 
 inspirations which have come to us 
 from contact with those whom we 
 
IIO ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 believed noble and unselfish, we must 
 fling them all away. 
 
 In the life of one of the most emi- 
 nent servants of God, we find an an- 
 swer to that state of mind, I think at 
 once conclusive and complete. A great 
 Apostle, speaking of his earlier ministry 
 and his child-life, says of himself : 
 " When I was a child, I spake as a 
 child, I understood as a child, I thought 
 as a child ; but when I became a man, 
 I put away childish things." The child- 
 life is the life of illusion ; the child-life 
 is the life of half-lights, of imperfect 
 knowledge, of imagination, supplying 
 the place of that discrimination and 
 that intelligent perception, which is the 
 gift not of childhood, but of manhood 
 and womanhood. 
 
 Would we have it different? Nay, 
 could it be otherwise, even if we wished 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. Ill 
 
 it? As with the infant, the half-light 
 is all that its childish eye can bear, so 
 with you and me. Led on by its im- 
 perfect rays to seek a clearer vision, it 
 must needs be that that clearer vision, 
 when it comes, shall often pain and sur- 
 prise us. But it need not be the sur- 
 render of our faith in goodness that shall 
 come to pass, because of the dissipation 
 of our illusions — nay, it ought not to 
 be — but only the surrender of our idols, 
 the emancipation from that earlier and 
 half-pagan hero-worship which put a 
 human being on the throne of the Di- 
 vine, and then would fain bow down 
 and worship it. Surely any experience 
 of disillusion is better than that, no 
 matter what it costs ; and when we see 
 how such a process of disillusion, as in 
 the case of the child, brings us closer to 
 that which is the Eternally True, we 
 
112 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 may well hail it as a blessing in dis- 
 guise. As it was with the Apostle, so 
 it must be unto you and me. 
 
 First, there is the child-sight, imper- 
 fect, cloudy, ignorant, erecting its 
 heroes into gods and goddesses, kin- 
 dling itself into enthusiasm with its half- 
 knowledge and half-imagination, and 
 then the time comes when the knowl- 
 edge is more perfect, and the illusion 
 is revealed in its true character, and we 
 discover how false were a great many 
 of our perceptions of life and character 
 and of our own work. But in such a 
 crisis let us not mistake. What are we 
 to do? We are not to throw away our 
 faith with our illusions, and fold our 
 hands in despair, and cry out that all is 
 false ; but we are to remember that 
 because, when we are children, we see 
 as children, and understand as chil- 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II3 
 
 dren, for that very reason when we come 
 to manhood and womanhood, we are 
 to put away childish things. We are to 
 accept, in other words, the trial, the 
 probation, of half-knowledge ; and then 
 we are to recognize that the shat- 
 tering of our earlier illusions is but a 
 stepping-stone first to a nobler and 
 truer vision of service, and so to a loft- 
 ier ideal of excellence in the doing of 
 it. And just here let me again com- 
 mend to your attention the story of 
 Sister Dora. There are some lives of 
 women who have given themselves to 
 Christ and His service which have the 
 more value just because they do not 
 carefully exclude from their pages any 
 honest delineation of those infirmities 
 of character, which form a considerable 
 part of the noblest natures. And, in 
 the case of Dora Patterson, the power 
 
114 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 and the helpfulness — I speak at any rate 
 for myself — of that book has largely 
 been that it is a story of a woman of 
 infirmities of character, with a hasty 
 temper, with an intense love of power, 
 with a very strong hunger for admi- 
 ration for which confessedly again and 
 again she did things, who, neverthe- 
 less, in the midst of this dross mixed 
 with the gold, carried all the way so 
 high a purpose, ending a noble life at 
 last so sweetly and serenely under the 
 discipline of pain, that to have known 
 her, environed by her infirmities, and 
 yet mastering them at last, is infinitely 
 more helpful and inspiring than to have 
 seen her in that half-light and mediaeval 
 coloring which would have made of her 
 a saint and not a woman. 
 
 No, we are to remember that the 
 things that are earthly must needs par- 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II5 
 
 take of the earth. We long, oftentimes, 
 for an example, a leader, a personal 
 friend and companion, who shall be so 
 free from human infirmities that no- 
 where, at any point, is there anything 
 to shatter our illusion and discourage 
 our idolatry. It is just here that we 
 must distinguish between an illusion 
 and an ideal. There is an ideal excel- 
 lence, but it is an ideal excellence just 
 because, under the conditions in which 
 you and I live and work to-day, it must 
 of necessity be impossible for it to be a 
 merely human excellence. We would 
 fain bring our ideals down here into the 
 work-day world, and make them a part 
 of our common life, and get our inspi- 
 ration by that sense of touch and sight 
 and hearing, which comes from holding 
 on to the hand of an earthly friend. Do 
 you not realize that the moment you 
 
Il6 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 bring them down into this work-day 
 world, they must needs partake of its 
 infirmities and shortcomings, and that, 
 just in so far as they are merely human, 
 they must live and err under merely 
 human conditions? 
 
 No ! The longing in itself is right 
 and noble, but it is given to lift our 
 hearts, no matter by what painful 
 struggle, from earthly idols to the One 
 Ideal that can never fail, and will never 
 disappoint us. 
 
 And what is this but to state in other 
 language that which Jesus Himself 
 stated on the morning of the Resurrec- 
 tion when she who had known Him in 
 the flesh, and longed to cling to Him as 
 her ideal in the flesh, came and flung 
 herself upon His feet, to be bidden 
 back with those lofty words : " Touch 
 Me not, for I am not yet ascended to 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. I I 7 
 
 My Father." She was to touch Him 
 again, not with the hand of flesh, but 
 with the hand of faith, and so she was, 
 by that upper life, lifted far above her 
 own, to be drawn out of this lower life, to 
 let go the illusions of her ignorant past, 
 and to see in them the prophecy of that 
 Divine Ideal, which was to be hereafter 
 her highest inspiration and her truest 
 strength. Remember just here those 
 words in the Collect for Ascension-Day : 
 " Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty 
 God, that like as we do believe Thy 
 only begotten Son our Lord Jesus 
 Christ to have ascended into the Heav- 
 ens ; so we may also in heart and mind 
 thither ascend, and with Him continu- 
 ally dwell." You have lost your earlier 
 illusions. Do not bemoan them. Step 
 by step, as you have gone on in your 
 work, one and another of those earlier 
 
Il8 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 faiths in your work, in your opportuni- 
 ties, in yourself, in your fellows, it may 
 be, have been shattered and crumbled. 
 Remember that all these fragments, 
 these broken lights of virtue of which 
 you get a glimpse here in one character 
 and there in another, but which are 
 united in perfect symmetry and com- 
 pleteness in no human life — that these 
 exist in order that you may lift your 
 aspirations above them to that Ideal 
 Excellence that once walked the earth 
 awhile, incarnated in Jesus Christ, risen 
 and ascended now to His Father and 
 your Father, who is in Heaven, and 
 real to you to-day, only as you " thither 
 ascend in mind and in heart, and with 
 Him continually dwell." And so, let 
 these vanishing images of our earlier 
 illusions be not the discouragements to 
 an earnest service, but the ladder by 
 
ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. II9 
 
 which we climb up to it. Out of the 
 ignorance, out of the misapprehensions 
 of your past, try to come a little closer 
 to Him, who is the one perfect Ideal of 
 excellence — Jesus Christ. 
 
 When she was ministering at Walsall 
 in a hospital, one day, a poor miner 
 over whom she bent, said to Dora Pat- 
 terson, " I want, Sister Dora, to make 
 a confession to you." " Make it then," 
 she said, with her imperious abruptness, 
 11 make it." Even then, as she bent 
 above him, her head was bound up be- 
 cause of a wound she had received from 
 a stone thrown by some unseen hand, 
 when returning from a visit among the 
 poor. " I was the man," he said, " who 
 threw that stone ; I cannot endure not to 
 tell you of it, when I see you minister- 
 ing thus tenderly to me." " My dear 
 fellow," she said, " don't you suppose I 
 
120 ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 
 
 knew it ? I have long ago gotten over 
 my earlier illusion that the poor always 
 love their helpers. God forbid that I 
 should not serve you, because it has 
 been shattered. " 
 
 And so with you and me. God for- 
 bid that we should not serve Him in 
 the image of any of His creatures, be- 
 cause our illusions have been shattered ! 
 Out of these vanishing dreams of the 
 past, let us rather come closer into the 
 presence of the One Excellence, and 
 find it in our perfect, our sufficient 
 Ideal. 
 
WHOLENESS. 
 
 An Address delivered in St. George's Church, 
 New York, Monday, March 15, 1886, at the Service 
 for Women engaged in Church work. 
 
 121 
 
WHOLENESS. 
 
 IN concluding the series of services of 
 which this is the last, I shall depart 
 from my usage hitherto on occasions 
 like this, and say little, if anything, of 
 your work. I want this morning to 
 speak to you of yourselves, and in the 
 sequence of the thought suggested by 
 the last theme that occupied our atten- 
 tion, to speak to you of yourselves as 
 instruments to be used for the work of 
 God in the world. Indeed, I think that 
 if you will reflect a moment, you will 
 recognize how little is any such concep- 
 tion of our work as is expressed by the 
 word " wholeness " possible to us here 
 and to-day. 
 
 123 
 
1 24 WHOLENESS. 
 
 " Wholeness " — what do we mean by 
 the word? Certainly we mean some- 
 thing that is unlike fragmentariness or 
 partialness ; and yet, what view of our 
 work is possible to us without recogniz- 
 ing the characteristic of fragmentariness? 
 Take for example, the work which the 
 Church is doing in a great city like this. 
 We may well, in this inspiring presence, 
 take note of that which is being done 
 here, where an old, and so to speak, 
 largely disused shell has been made, 
 under a new touch, to be filled with life 
 and potent with influences for good to 
 a degree for which we are all equally 
 glad and thankful. How manifold it is 
 in its activities ! How untiring the zeal 
 and energy of him to whose hospitality 
 we are indebted for our service this 
 morning, and of those associated with 
 him ! And yet the first thing the rec- 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 25 
 
 tor of this church would say to you, if 
 standing in my place, would be, after all, 
 to own that any such work as this, large 
 and many-sided as it is, with reference 
 to the needs of a community so vast as 
 ours, can only be fragmentary and par- 
 tial. Think of the twelve or thirteen 
 hundred thousand people who live in 
 New York, and then consider how im- 
 perfectly at best, the Church, whose 
 children we are, can reach and rescue 
 them. We must content ourselves — it 
 is a part of the condition of things un- 
 der which we are working — to do our 
 little segment of work, to do it with all 
 our hearts, and then to confess that it 
 is but fragmentary after all. 
 
 On the other hand, when we come to 
 turn from the work we are doing to the 
 workers, what is it, which, as we read 
 the New Testament in the record of 
 
126 WHOLENESS. 
 
 those marvellous recreations of power 
 and restorations of faculty which are 
 characteristics of the miracles of Christ, 
 is more clearly indicated than this, that 
 howsoever fragmentary our work may 
 be, we ourselves were not meant to be 
 fragments, but each one of us a whole? 
 It is just here that the Christian re- 
 ligion, standing over against ancient 
 art, has so large a significance. You 
 remember those figures of women called 
 caryatides, which are a frequent feature 
 of antique architecture, and which are 
 introduced often in connection with 
 some vast facade instead of columns, 
 to support entablatures. That was the 
 conception of art, because, first of all, 
 it was the conception of pagan human- 
 ity. There was a widely-prevailing 
 view of human beings which regarded 
 them as no more nor better than beasts 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 27 
 
 of burden, useful so far as they had a 
 pair of strong shoulders, and under cer- 
 tain pressure could stand up and resist 
 and bear, and that was all. But the 
 moment we come into the presence of 
 Christ and the work He does in the 
 world, we see how entirely His concep- 
 tion of human nature contradicts that ; 
 how from the beginning to the end of 
 His earthly ministry, where there is im- 
 perfectness, where there is absence of 
 faculty, where there is primitive denial 
 of power, as in the blind man's case, or 
 in the case of the deaf and dumb, He 
 restores it. Surely in the case of such 
 restorations, there is enormous signifi- 
 cance in that side of them which re- 
 veals Christ's work as making human 
 nature whole and human powers sym- 
 metrical, as denying the doctrine that 
 a man or woman is to be content with 
 
128 WHOLENESS. 
 
 certain partial powers, leaving others 
 equally undeveloped and barren. We 
 have a phrase when we speak of people 
 who are incomplete, which, just here, 
 is most expressive. Here is some one 
 full of zeal and energy in his calling, 
 absorbed in his daily business with an 
 ardor so keen that nothing can discour- 
 age it. How the man holds on to one 
 purpose, and pushes himself and all his 
 powers in one direction ! But touch 
 him on the side of humanity, appeal to 
 those instincts which ought to be in 
 him to love his fellow-man, or try and 
 kindle in him some noble aspiration for 
 a life above the seen, and you knock at 
 a door which is closed. Now, I say, we 
 have a phrase in regard to such people 
 which is singularly descriptive. We say 
 of a man like that, "he is but half a 
 man," something in him has been left 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 29 
 
 out. That which makes completeness, 
 that which makes symmetry in charac- 
 ter, is wanting ; and in describing one 
 thus as half a man, we describe him 
 truly. 
 
 I. And so it belongs to us, in connec- 
 tion with the topic I have suggested 
 for our reflection, to ask ourselves what 
 that is in personal character which 
 makes what we call wholeness or com- 
 pleteness. And in undertaking to an- 
 swer that question this morning, I shall 
 not disdain to begin very low down. 
 When I touch your hand, when I hear 
 the sound of your voice, I come in con- 
 tact, in the one case or the other, with 
 something which is the only means 
 which you have of translating to me 
 that which is in your thought. In other 
 words, it is through those physical pow- 
 ers and endowments which God has 
 
130 WHOLENESS. 
 
 given to us, that we make ourselves in- 
 telligible to other people. Shut them 
 all up, and one might be a genius in his 
 intellectual gifts, but would be power- 
 less to influence his fellow-men. It is 
 through this wonderful organism which 
 includes the senses and the sense powers, 
 that the intellect and the spirit of man 
 reveals itself to its brother man, and it 
 is the vigor and wholeness of this physi- 
 cal organization which alone makes 
 greatly possible the errands and the 
 services of mercy on which God calls 
 us to run. 
 
 What now is just here the danger 
 especially of the sex to which I speak 
 this morning? I think it is a twofold 
 danger, and, as such, almost universal. 
 On the one hand, if a woman at the 
 outset of life has natural gifts and 
 charms, that perilous endowment which 
 
WHOLENESS. 131 
 
 we call beauty, then there is a strong 
 temptation to minister to the physical 
 side of her nature, not merely to pam- 
 per herself by indulgence, but to con- 
 sider those things that contribute to 
 the adornment of the body, and relate 
 to the mere flesh and what may be 
 called mere fleshly potency. There is 
 something appalling, when one remem- 
 bers the errands to be done in the world 
 by woman, in the thought of the time 
 that some women spend on something 
 no better than the beautification of their 
 persons, letting the mere decoration of 
 the body engross so large a thought and 
 absorb so much of their time, that when 
 the day is done, and the neglected 
 duty that called them at the beginning 
 of it stands over against them with ad- 
 monitory mien, they are constrained to 
 remember that they have failed because 
 
132 WHOLENESS. 
 
 of some prettiness of toilet trifling, or 
 some thoughtless folly, which ate into 
 the purpose and finally ate up the day. 
 And then again, on the other hand, 
 there is that other danger, and there is 
 urgent reason for speaking of it, which 
 comes to women exempt from the temp- 
 tation to which I have already referred, 
 who, because they may not be richly 
 endowed with physical gifts, despise 
 the care of the body. We ought surely 
 to be emancipated in this century, after 
 the dark pages in the Church's history 
 which are behind us, from the follies, 
 which, in the name of Religion, men 
 and women have committed in the 
 neglect and torture of their own bod- 
 ies ; and equally emancipated from the 
 folly of supposing that godliness con- 
 sists in debility or dyspepsia. Is it not 
 a mechanism of God's own handiwork 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 33 
 
 that we are neglecting? It is a cruel 
 wrong to a gift of God, no less sacred 
 than the gift of the intellect, even 
 though not so high in its powers, if we 
 abuse the body He has given us, by 
 disesteeming its soundness or neglect- 
 ing its welfare, when, by a simple care 
 for the rudimentary principles of health, 
 we might keep this physical instrument, 
 whose powers for ministering are in 
 proportion as it is in a healthy condi- 
 tion, well-tuned. The world is cursed 
 all around to-day, just because men and 
 women have been neglectful and indif- 
 ferent in the care of their physical 
 health. How the home has had its 
 peace shattered and the day spoiled by 
 some mean and bitter word — the fruit 
 of some vicious heart or brain? No, 
 but of some detestable mal-condition of 
 the body, which could be cured if we 
 
134 WHOLENESS. 
 
 would only recognize the sacredness of 
 the instrument God put in our power 
 for His service. 
 
 Surely, between the two extremes 
 of idolatry of the body and neglect of 
 the body, there is a golden mean. It 
 is possible not to make an idol of the 
 body, but a complete instrument of 
 service, to develop that lowest side of 
 you if you please, but even so to make 
 yourself more and more a whole woman 
 by the way in which you respect the 
 laws of health, and thus to reverence 
 that which was made to be the temple 
 of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 II. But again, you have an instru- 
 ment infinitely finer than the body. 
 There is something in you, that, as in 
 old Latin phrase, says intelligo : I know, 
 I perceive, I understand. There is 
 something in you that forever differen- 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 35 
 
 tiates you from all the orders of beings 
 below you, however men may try to 
 make them like you by their training, 
 and which only shows more and more 
 that you are not a brute. Each one of 
 you, if she has used her own mind even 
 in the most imperfect way, has become 
 conscious of this threefold fact : First 
 of all, that she has powers of percep- 
 tion. The mind recognizes truth, dis- 
 cerns a fact ; there is something in it 
 which, like the hand, is prehensile, and 
 that takes hold of that which appeals 
 to its reason and its intelligence. 
 
 Next in order is that power of the 
 mind which we call the power of com- 
 parison. The child begins to exercise 
 it by a subtle intuition, as soon as it 
 begins to think at all, and just as an 
 infant learns the difference between 
 great and small, so as we go on we are 
 
136 WHOLENESS. 
 
 meant to learn, by the exercise of this 
 power of comparison, the distinction 
 between great and little things, and 
 also the distinction between things that 
 are true and the things that are false. 
 
 And then, binding these other two 
 powers, the perceptive and the compar- 
 ative, together, there is what we call 
 the reflective power, which, alas! in 
 this age of ours, is the least exercised 
 of all ; the power, which wants to be 
 disciplined, and developed, and which, 
 in connection with the highest themes, 
 bids us away out of the hurried thor- 
 oughfares of life, to be still, and sit for 
 a little while with the busy hands and 
 feet in perfect repose. This is our 
 mind. The power that perceives, the 
 power that compares, and the reflective 
 power that crowns them all with the 
 act of meditation, and so seeks, as Ba- 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 37 
 
 con says, to know a thing by " thinking 
 through it " — the highest dignity I can 
 conceive of the intellectual nature. 
 
 Now what is the characteristic of the 
 age in which we live, as regards its men- 
 tal attitude ? It is an age of very slen- 
 der and shifting beliefs, an age in which 
 the opinions of yesterday in no individ- 
 ual case, as a rule, are sure to be the 
 opinions of to-morrow. It is an age in 
 which we are wont to find people moved 
 out of their old moorings, and there are 
 more people, I believe, than confess it 
 even into the ears of their most inti- 
 mate friends, who have been moved 
 away from all positive beliefs whatever. 
 But if this is so, I charge such a condi- 
 tion of things, wherever it is found, 
 quite as largely as upon any other in- 
 fluence, upon the influence of what I 
 would call intellectual laziness, a curse, 
 
I38 WHOLENESS. 
 
 I think, of our generation, greater in 
 proportion than in any that has pre- 
 ceded it, certainly for two hundred 
 years. We turn back and think of our 
 fathers and of the narrowness of their 
 faith ; yes, it may have been narrow, 
 but what a hold they had upon the 
 truth they believed, what a power it 
 was in their daily life, just because they 
 had gotten that strong grip upon it, 
 which comes, and can only come, from 
 the exercise of the threefold intellec- 
 tual power, which God has given to 
 every one of us. 
 
 How many of us now, in this genera- 
 tion, can say that our beliefs are mat- 
 ters of strong conviction, that our 
 opinions, whether in regard to letters, 
 or art, or religion, are things which 
 we have reached by " thinking unto 
 them " ? Rather, how many of us 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 39 
 
 have accepted these things by tradi- 
 tion? Undoubtedly, we may not dis- 
 esteem traditions, but the degradation 
 of our intellectual condition in the nine- 
 teenth century, as I regard it, is this, 
 that the traditions on whose authority 
 we hold things, are so often so con- 
 temptible as compared with the tradi- 
 tions that bound our ancestors. Though 
 it is true that many of them were only 
 creatures of traditions, their traditions 
 had the dignity of antiquity, and came 
 trailing down through the glory of past 
 ages, ennobled as being the beliefs and 
 opinions of men and women who had 
 suffered and died for their faith. 
 
 But ours — where did we get them, 
 and how noble and how saintly, and 
 how worthy of the position of leader- 
 ship, have been the men and women in 
 their thought and lives from whom we 
 
140 WHOLENESS. 
 
 often derive them ? Believe me, we 
 could do no better service to our own 
 souls than over against this one word, 
 wholeness, to strive for intellectual com- 
 pleteness, to ask, on what grounds do I 
 hold truth ? and to seek to discipline 
 and call into action the power in us 
 that thinks, and so develop a more 
 clear understanding, whether of the 
 truths of nature or of revelation, by the 
 exercise of the powers God has given 
 us, wherewith to take hold of them. 
 
 III. And then, finally, wholeness 
 means supremely the exercise and the 
 development of the spiritual faculty, or 
 what I would call, as the Bishop of Cen- 
 tral New York, in a very remarkable 
 sermon, which I would that I might 
 put in the hands of every one of you, 
 described, some years ago, as the 
 " Faith Faculty." 
 
WHOLENESS. 141 
 
 In the Gospel, according to St. Luke, 
 there is a description of the healing of 
 the ten lepers by Christ, and the return 
 of one of them, after he had been healed, 
 to pay homage to his Healer. In that 
 case, when Christ had cleansed the lep- 
 ers, He bids them go show themselves 
 to the priest and render the offering 
 Moses has commanded. And then we 
 read that " one of them, when he saw 
 that he was healed, turned back, and 
 with a loud voice glorified God. 
 
 "And fell down on his face at His 
 feet, giving Him thanks : and he was a 
 Samaritan. 
 
 " And Jesus answering said, Were 
 there not ten cleansed ? but where are 
 the nine? 
 
 "There are not found that re- 
 turned to give glory to God, save this 
 stranger. 
 
142 WHOLENESS. 
 
 " And He said unto him, Arise, go 
 thy way : thy faith hath made thee 
 whole." 
 
 Whole — a profoundly significant word 
 just here. The others had done what 
 He bade them do, and they might have 
 replied in answer to Christ's criticism, 
 that He Himself had told them to go 
 and show themselves to the priest, 
 though He had not indeed forbade 
 them to thank Him. But the signifi- 
 cance of His word to this one Samari- 
 tan lies, if I read it aright, in this, that 
 while the others had got what they 
 wanted and gone away in the joy of it 
 — as so many of us do when we get 
 what we want, forgetting the Giver in 
 the gift — this one turned back to Christ, 
 to pour out his heart in gratitude to 
 God. And then what happened ? 
 
 Have you ever asked yourselves that 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 43 
 
 question ? Ah ! I think it was, that, 
 as he looked up into that Divine coun- 
 tenance and heard the tones of that 
 incomparable voice, there smote upon 
 his soul for the first time the Vision of 
 the Divine ! Into his heart there broke 
 at last the sense of God, and so he flings 
 himself at Jesus* feet — in gratitude ? 
 Yes, but most of all in adoration. And 
 that therefore is what Christ meant by 
 saying his faith had made him whole. 
 He was a clean man before, cleansed 
 of his leprosy, but when at last there 
 woke in his breast that consciousness 
 of the Divine, when at last he saw his 
 Lord and owned Him, when the Faith 
 Faculty, in other words, was born out 
 of impotence into life, then, he became 
 a whole man ; not half a man, with his 
 physical powers and his intellectual pow- 
 ers alive, but dead on the Godward 
 
144 WHOLENESS. 
 
 side, but a whole man at last, because 
 his "faith had made him whole." 
 
 Blessed be God for such a word as 
 that to us who are here to-day. It is 
 not wholly an age of indifference in 
 which you and I live, it is not an age 
 of want of reading or culture, or want 
 of talk about religious things — I some- 
 times think there is too much of this 
 in the pulpit and out of it — but it is an 
 age of unfaith, because, while we live 
 so largely upon traditions — whether of 
 the neighbor who lives next door or 
 the prophet who spoke a hundred years 
 ago, it does n't make the least differ- 
 ence — what we believe and affirm is 
 second-hand ; and the Faith Faculty 
 is a thing to a great many people, so 
 far as its loftiest exercise is concerned, 
 all but unknown. 
 
 We believe " the belief " — the Creed. 
 
WHOLENESS. 145 
 
 Is not that faith? we ask. Rather I 
 maintain, faith is vision, the unsealing 
 of the spiritual eye-sight, that power in 
 you and me which turns the dome of 
 brass into the open door of Heaven, 
 and which makes us to behold here in 
 this work-a-day world the form of Him 
 who walks among the golden candle- 
 sticks, and bends above all His workers 
 with inexhaustible sympathy and love. 
 That is the faculty which in this age 
 we need most of all to have awakened, 
 and in what may be called a caricature 
 of it in our time, I seem to see a kind 
 of protestantism of faith, which may 
 well be of significance to you and me. 
 We are many of us much pained by the 
 extravagance of that religious phase of 
 the hour, which concerns itself with 
 what are called Faith Cures, and God 
 knows nobody has less disposition to 
 
146 WHOLENESS. 
 
 disesteem human agencies in connection 
 with the work of healing than I, or to 
 recognize the fact that in God's work 
 to-day for sickness and misery in the 
 world, he expects His children, their 
 hands and eyes and feet and minds, to 
 be, with other natural gifts, instruments 
 of working His cures among men. But 
 when, in accordance with the spirit of 
 an age that believes so much in the 
 seen and so little in the unseen, men 
 exalt physical remedies into the place 
 of the Divine Providence, when they 
 disesteem prayer so largely in the case 
 of sickness and suffering as to disregard 
 it altogether, when it is hard in so many 
 cases, to get people, in connection with 
 the miseries of this life, to place their 
 dependence on the help and love of a 
 Heavenly Father, I don't wonder that 
 there rises up a sect, if you choose to 
 
WHOLENESS. I47 
 
 call it so, which, with its inevitable re- 
 action against this state of things, be- 
 lieves in being cured solely by the 
 exercise of faith. It is a modern phase 
 of Protestantism, which has its profound 
 significance and which we may not dis- 
 regard. 
 
 For, all the way along, work as we 
 will, command as we may the skill of 
 the ablest physician, what we do from 
 beginning to end is conditioned upon 
 what God does. And so, whether we 
 are ministering to the body or the soul, 
 whether our work lies among ill-venti- 
 lated homes, or in the midst of ignorance 
 and prejudice and rebellion against the 
 law of God, let us remember that the 
 thing which is to make you complete 
 women, not fragments, but whole for 
 Christ and His service, is most of all 
 the Faith Faculty, that sees your Lord, 
 
I48 WHOLENESS. 
 
 that hears His voice, and that holds His 
 hand. Says the Apostle, " Ye are com- 
 plete in Him!' Expressive word ! This 
 is the whole womanhood that we 
 want. 
 
 In taking leave of you, with thank- 
 fulness for the privilege of having met 
 you for these past few months, I could 
 offer no better prayer for you or the 
 work you are doing for your Master, 
 than that, in that work, you may each 
 one of you illustrate a whole woman- 
 hood, rounded and complete and sym- 
 metrical, healthy in body, acute and 
 vigorous in mind, but above all, up- 
 ward-looking and expectant in Faith, 
 trusting in the Leader who leads you, 
 confident, because of the strength which 
 He alone can give. 
 
 May He go with you as we part to- 
 day. May He follow you in all the 
 
WHOLENESS. 1 49 
 
 ministries and services that wait before 
 you, and so make each one of you com- 
 plete in Him, " Who is the head of all 
 principality and power" 
 
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