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SERMONS OF THE WINTER. 
 
 ITU- LIBRARY 
 I or CONGRESS 
 
 1 WASHI 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 BY / 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE, D.D., 
 
 Minister of the South Congregational Church, Boston. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 IN HIS NAME," " DAILY BREAD," " EVERY-DAY SERMONS.' 
 
 BOSTON: 
 J. STILMAN SMITH 
 3 Hamilton Place. 
 1893. 
 
 & CO., 
 
 f- 
 

 \ 
 
 ■l 
 
 Copyright^ z8q3, 
 By J. Stilman Smith & Company. 
 
SERMONS OF THE WINTER. 
 
 Every working minister knows the convenience 
 of printing sermons. One has more parishioners 
 far away from home than hear him in the church. 
 And it sometimes happens that those who heard 
 want to refresh their memories. 
 
 " Printed at the request of some that heard," is 
 the familiar statement on the title-page of the 
 sermons of a century ago, which seem as quaint 
 to us as these will a century hence. 
 
 I have been, therefore, very glad to print these 
 sermons, week by week almost, as they were de- 
 livered in the South Congregational Church, be- 
 tween Sunday, September 1 8, 1892, and Sunday, 
 June II, 1893. The quiet line of winter life in 
 Boston was broken, once and again, by events 
 which touched to the heart the whole community 
 in which we live. But most of the sermons are 
 not what people call " occasional," but refer to 
 those needs of human life which never change. 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE. 
 
 South Congregational Church, 
 Boston, June 26, 1893. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 
 Page 
 
 The Church and the World ... 3 
 
 The First Church of Christ . 
 
 
 
 l l 
 
 Life Hid with God 
 
 
 
 29 
 
 The Perfect Sunday-School . 
 
 
 
 4 1 
 
 To Glorify God .... 
 
 
 
 59 
 
 Whittier, Curtis, Longfellow 
 
 
 
 7* 
 
 " 'Tis Fifty Years Since" 
 
 
 
 «5 
 
 Personal Religion 
 
 
 
 102 
 
 Modern Idolatry 
 
 
 
 
 113 
 
 To Enjoy Him Forever 
 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 Truth ..... 
 
 
 
 
 i37 
 
 How to Use the Bible 
 
 
 
 
 14S 
 
 Light of the World . 
 
 
 
 
 161 
 
 Phillips Brooks . 
 
 
 
 
 174 
 
 Creeds and Life . 
 
 
 
 
 187 
 
 Law of Love 
 
 
 
 
 . 199 
 
 Christian Mystics 
 
 
 
 
 210 
 
 Failure and Strength 
 
 
 
 
 . 223 
 
 Palm Sunday 
 
 
 
 
 2 35 
 
 Easter . . . 
 
 
 
 
 • 247 
 
 Manhood 
 
 
 
 
 • 25S 
 
 The Will of God 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 . 271 
 
 Summer Service . 
 
 
 
 
 2S2 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 " Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations." 
 
 Matthew xxviii. 19. 
 
 FIVE weeks ago this morning I joined in the 
 service of the Established Church of England on 
 my last Sunday in England. It was in the Cathe- 
 dral of Canterbury, so grand and beautiful. Can- 
 terbury claims to be the seat of the earliest Saxon 
 Church in England, and from which the Archbishop, 
 Primate of England, takes his title. The full cathe- 
 dral service was conducted with dignity and with 
 feeling — that sense, indeed, of what worship is, 
 which one does not always observe in the cathedral 
 service of England. To my great joy, Dr. Fre- 
 mantle, one of the canons of Canterbury, ascended 
 the pulpit when we came to the sermon. You 
 have often heard me speak of him here as being, 
 in my estimate, the first preacher in the Church of 
 England now. I think few of her most intelligent 
 clergymen would be surprised at that estimate. 
 He gave out this text. He read it, as I do, from the 
 Revised Version — a thing to be noticed, because 
 although that version was made under the author- 
 ity of the Church of England, it is not very often 
 heard in her churches. He proceeded, without 
 the least preface, to a discussion of the duty of the 
 
4 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 Church in our day, broad and even radical ; prac- 
 tical to the last degree, and sublimely indifferent 
 to the conventional standards of any narrow theol- 
 ogy. I am not going to repeat the sermon now, 
 though I could do so, and it might profit all of us. 
 His subject in the series of sermons, of which this 
 is one, was the immediate duty of the Church of 
 Christ in our time. He did not say that it was to 
 cave the souls of those who heard the gospel. He 
 did not say that it was to present that gospel to 
 the heathen. He did not say that it was to pre- 
 serve, with honor, the memories of what passed 
 in Palestine in the time of Tiberius. He did not 
 say that it was to preserve and strengthen this 
 or that organization with this or that set of officers 
 and of routine, and he did not so much as allude 
 to the fact that more than half the pulpits of 
 Christendom would have stated the function of the 
 Church in some such conventional phrase. No ; 
 he passed calmly and silently by all such conven- 
 tionalities and commonplaces. " The business of 
 the Church," he said, " is to make more spiritual 
 the daily life of the time." 
 
 The statement is admirable for its simplicity. 
 I-t is broad enough to be a good working state- 
 ment. You may say it is more needed in England 
 than it is here ; and possibly it is more needed 
 among that half of the people of England who 
 would say that they belonged to the Church of 
 England, than to that other half who are called 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 5 
 
 Non-conformists. Of such detail he said nothing. 
 He merely applied his broad principle to the spe- 
 cial matter he had in hand, in that particular ser- 
 mon of a series. 
 
 Now, there is no one here to whom this state- 
 ment seems in the least radical or unfamiliar. 
 The Church of Christ exists to spiritualize the 
 every-day life of the time. Any of us here would 
 have said something of this sort had he been 
 asked yesterday to say why churches exist, or why 
 the church should be maintained. I quote Dr. 
 Fremantle's statement, not as if it were new, but 
 because we may take it — shall I say, as self-evi- 
 dent — as a statement that does not need proof, 
 — a statement which will be widely agreed to. 
 Such a proposition, coming from such a man, in 
 such a place, makes a convenient " departure," as 
 seamen say, for our winter voyage, on which we 
 enter with this morning's service. It is not what 
 Dr. Hale says, it is not what the Unitarians say, 
 from which we will start. It is not the gospel of 
 our left wing, or of the light skirmishers, who make 
 the advance of the army of God. It is the state- 
 ment which slow and conservative England makes. 
 The pulpit in the choir of the Primate's Cathedral 
 of Canterbury makes it, that the Church of God 
 exists to give more spirit in every day to the every- 
 day life of the time. 
 
 This is, beyond doubt, what the Saviour cf 
 mankind meant and asked for when he sent those 
 
6 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 eleven men off on the great affair. This is what 
 he means when he tells them to make disciples of 
 all the nations. 
 
 On this side of the ocean we have an advantage 
 for the discussion of these duties which they have 
 not in Canterbury. Our practical definition of the 
 word "Church" is larger than theirs. This coun- 
 try was made by Englishmen, who crossed the 
 ocean because they believed that the power of 
 the Church belonged to all her people ; while 
 the government of England held that it belonged 
 to the clergy. We have fought that matter 
 through, and everybody here lives on that princi- 
 ple except the Roman Catholic Church and a few 
 of its imitators. We have not any such words to 
 define, or other such foundation to lay. 
 
 But all the more have we to study the duty 
 which every man, woman, and child has in this 
 business of lifting up the spiritual life of the com- 
 munity. To-day — as we meet here again — I 
 have much more to ask, than how in this house 
 we can conduct this service this winter, or what I 
 and my assistants can do about our charities or 
 hospitalities. Our business to-day is to find out 
 how each of us separately, and all of us together, 
 can carry forward this business of the Church. 
 We are born into it, and we cannot get out of it.. 
 We can see in every hour that there is a great 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 7 
 
 deal to be done. Prize-fights, cholera, every- 
 thing that passes in the community, show the 
 need of lifting the community to a higher spiritual 
 life. Who is to lift it? The Church. Who is 
 the Church? You and I. Then our inquiry is a 
 very definite inquiry as to what, to you and me, 
 is a very practical affair. 
 
 And the answer is not far away. It is not in 
 the heavens that we should fly for it, nor in the 
 depths that we should dive for it. It is hidden in 
 the question. 
 
 First of all, the idea of Duty : that I must do 
 this duty or that, as it comes next my hand 
 — this is the Prophet Word. The detail of Duty 
 may settle itself, but the word otight, or the 
 reality ought — beaten into the public mind by 
 blows, flashed in as by electricity, sung in by 
 poets, agreed in by men of talk, best of all 
 shown in daily life by men and women who do 
 what they ought to do — this sense of Right 
 changes the town or the land from being a hell to 
 being a heaven. 
 
 So is it that you and I, if we would uplift this 
 people, are to live not by what amuses us, or by 
 what pleases us, — not for sugar-candy, or sunny 
 prospects, or elegant art, or seeking a shilling's 
 pay for sixpence's work. No ; we are to do the 
 duty that comes next our hand. As we do that, 
 so that men know what duty is, we lift up the 
 
8 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 community from a place among the slums of the 
 universe to its own place in the kingdom of 
 heaven — we spiritualize the world in which we 
 live. 
 
 We bring an Indian from his tepee on the plains 
 and show him our marvels. Perhaps a wizard in 
 Salamanca's cave rings a bell in Notre Dame, — and 
 we ask the savage to express his surprise. But such 
 things are not the great marvel. The great marvel 
 of high civilization, and that which works the little 
 marvels, is the loyal obedience which those who 
 lead the life give, and will give, to law. For in- 
 stance, at seven in the morning a clock strikes ; at 
 once a hundred whistles blow, to show that the 
 world has turned seven twenty-fourths of her way 
 since midnight, since Boston was just opposite the 
 sun. And at that instant so many trains start 
 obedient from so many stations ; so many thou- 
 sand men and women go to so many places where 
 they are needed ; so many keys are placed in so 
 many locks ; so many doors are opened, and the 
 duties of a hundred thousand lives begin. Put 
 that in contrast with the easy indifference of my 
 savage's life, in which he does what he likes to do 
 at the moment he happens to think of it, or leaves 
 it all alone if he do not happen to fancy it. Of a 
 voyage across the ocean, in what is a little world, 
 a ship snapped off from the shore, as they say the 
 moon was flung from the earth when all was yielding 
 and plastic ; in that ship the miracle is the consent 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. Q 
 
 ■in duty of the hundred and fifty men who all 
 together drive her to her port. 
 
 The stoker, half-naked, wheels his coal for four 
 hours from the bunker to the furnace. At the 
 moment when his four hours are over, he knows 
 that another stoker will appear, ready to take the 
 barrow for four hours more. Perhaps those men 
 do not know each other's names ; they hardly nod 
 to each other as they change hands at the barrow. 
 But each man knows that the other is in his duty, 
 and that that duty will be fulfilled. From those 
 laborers, who carry the coal in which God has 
 packed away the fire of the sun, as it blazed a 
 hundred thousand years ago upon some old fern- 
 field, — from those men up to the thoughtful, 
 prayerful, skilful captain, who is awake at mid- 
 night, while I am sleeping in my berth, that he 
 may be sure on just what square mile of God's 
 world that ship is voyaging, — the sense of duty 
 is at the bottom of the hearts of those hundred 
 and fifty men. What is more, that duty is ful- 
 filled. This motive, that motive, another motive, 
 are mixed in together ; but law, and the obedience 
 to law ; duty, and the determination to perform 
 duty; " ought," and all that " ought" stands for, 
 are holding those men each in his place, and each 
 place fits in with each other place, each pinion 
 with each rack. Of which the issue is that the 
 ship "is driven forward, and at the preordained 
 moment of the preordained day arrives in her 
 
10 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 port, because this duty has been done. Now, that 
 is the moral lesson of the value of duty well done ; 
 obedience to the stern voice of the " daughter of 
 Jove." That moral lesson is the same when the 
 stoker does his duty, when the quartermaster 
 does his duty, when the captain does his. And 
 you and I, as we address ourselves this winter to 
 Christ's work, in giving spiritual life to this com- 
 munity, are to remember that our first business in 
 that affair is in the regular, cheerful, cordial, dis- 
 charge of our special daily duty. To be in our 
 places precisely in time, to do the work that is 
 given us in good temper and not in bad, to speak 
 the words we have to sav kindly and not harshly, 
 to show to all men and women, and angels and 
 devils, that cur duty is the first thing, is the cen- 
 tral thing, is the great reality. This is our first 
 affair in this gospel which is given to our charge. 
 
 2. And the second is like unto it. We are to do 
 this duty, whatever it is, in the nursery, in the 
 school-room, at the furnace like the stoker, or in 
 the chart-room with the captain, — we are to do it 
 in love for all the rest. Simply, it is not a me- 
 chanical affair, as when the wheel of my clock is 
 forced into its place by the swing of a pendulum. 
 No ; it is the voluntary determination of my own 
 independent thought, that I will live, not for 
 myself, but for those whom God has given me. 
 Simply, that is, I act as a god acts, and not as a 
 thing. And whosoever is downcast or dismayed 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 I 
 
 because his place in this great hierarchy is so 
 humble, or, worse than that, because he has not 
 found what his place is, has to remember that, be 
 it in this place or in that place, if he will speak or 
 act, or go or sit still, in love for those who are 
 around him, he performs the full apostle's duty. 
 He works the full apostolic miracle. In that love 
 of the brethren he opens the eyes of the blind 
 and the ears of the deaf; he wakes the dead from 
 death, and makes them walk as the children of the 
 living God. That poor emigrant mother whom I 
 see in the steerage, crouching down to protect her 
 baby against the sweep of the north-east wind, 
 stealing the shawl from her own head that she 
 may w T ind it around her child, may or may not 
 put her child to sleep, may or may not make the 
 child's life happier or more comfortable ; but in 
 her own self-sacrifice, in her own indifference to 
 ease or personal desire, she is doing her part. 
 Her light is upon the candlestick, and all men and 
 women who see it may well wish that their light 
 shone before men as well. Which is to say that, 
 in the spirit of love, though one only try to help 
 those who are close at hand, and cannot see where 
 he succeeds in trying, in the spirit of love itself, 
 he is lifting up the whole world, and making it, as 
 I said, a part of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 So that this is our second lesson for our apos- 
 tleship. We are not to be satisfied with the hard 
 performance of the thing which is to be done, as 
 
12 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 if we had brought in the kingdom when we have 
 piled up a hundred cents to make a dollar, or six- 
 teen ounces to make a pound. This kingdom of 
 heaven to which we are to lift the Boston in which 
 we live, is not merely a well-adjusted machine ; it 
 is not an affair of axles and cranks and cogs and 
 measurements. It is a kingdom alive with the very 
 life of God ; it is strong with God's strength, be- 
 cause it lives with his life. And when one has 
 said this, one has said that it comes where there is 
 love, and does not come without it. For it is true 
 of this little section of the kingdom as it is true of 
 the universe, that " love is heaven, and heaven is 
 love." 
 
 You and I, if we mean to be apostles to all the 
 world of absolute religion, are to do every day the 
 duty that comes next our hand — yes, with the 
 precision with which the moving stars do theirs. 
 And we are not to do it simply as the moving stars, 
 dead and unconscious, do. No ; we are to do it as 
 those who love each other, and who live and move 
 and have their being under the infinite empire of 
 such perfect love. 
 
 3. All this is necessary to say, I am afraid, 
 because even literature in its common voices, be- 
 cause, alas ! the pulpit in its more frequent ap- 
 peals, second a certain cross-purpose of the 
 human intellect, in which people talk of " high 
 and low," in which people talk of " strong and 
 weak." The heresy comes in, which discourages 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 3 
 
 Dorcas, who is at work with her needle, because 
 it praises some Aaron Burr who has a sharp and 
 cunning intellect. The heresy comes in, which 
 makes me repine because I can do nothing but 
 bring a load of wood to market, when I read of 
 the sway and power of a man like Whittier, who 
 has written songs for a nation. Now, I must not 
 let myself be swept away by this heresy. It is 
 merely the voice of the flesh and of the devil. 
 The infinite truth is, as the Lord Jesus showed, 
 and every apostle of his has shown, that each of 
 us who chooses to enter into the divine life, can 
 work the divine and infinite miracles with the full 
 power of the living God. In that miracle there 
 is no great and no little ; there is no long and no 
 short ; there is no high and no low. We work it 
 because we are God's children ; it is because we, 
 too, are creative forces. " My Father worketh 
 hitherto and I work." That is its text and axiom. 
 The present God sends me to this or that work of 
 love. Who am I that I should call it common 
 or unclean? The present God has given me 
 power for to-day's endeavor. Who am I, to 
 whine at night because I do not know what stone 
 that endeavor has lifted, or how it has set forward 
 His infinite work for His children? He is with 
 me, and I am with Him. It is the service which 
 is perfect freedom. He and I went about this 
 affair together to-day, and because we went about 
 it together, we know it will succeed. 
 
14 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 Practically speaking, the mission to which we 
 are sent, which the text happens to express in 
 words which were critical when they were spoken, 
 is so absolutely infinite that it gives grandeur to 
 all duty, it enlarges all life to the very utmost. 
 Because I am an apostle of God, I am lifted above 
 meanness and anxiety, I am even lifted above the 
 fear of failure. I may throw aside — on the right 
 hand and on the left hand — all this contempt for 
 my particular position, so only I glorify that work 
 with the glories of love for my neighbor, and do 
 that work in the spirit of absolute loyalty to the 
 present law. In such endeavor as that, and in 
 such enterprise, there is no fear that I shall be 
 satisfied with vulgar tastes or beastly appetites. 
 Thus, if I go about that infinite work, in that spirit 
 of perfect love, I cannot poison this body with one 
 or another stimulant or narcotic ; I cannot debase 
 this hand to one or another fraud or forgery; I 
 cannot coop up this body in one or another prison. 
 Once let me take the sense of apostleship, once 
 see that I am sent about the same business that 
 Jesus Christ was sent about, that he and his Father 
 have sent me into the world as his Father sent 
 him into the world, and I shall insist from day to 
 day on living life higher than the life of the flesh, 
 and on looking farther than a man can look who 
 only opens the window yonder and is satisfied with 
 the view of the street. I shall insist on looking 
 beyond this earth upon infinite horizons. I shall 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 5 
 
 insist in my workshop, on tracing out what I do 
 into its infinite results, and finding the infinite pur- 
 pose with which God has set me to that effort. I 
 shall not read or study without forecasting, though 
 it be dimly, what' is the future which is to come 
 from such words as are written upon this page. I 
 shall not, indeed, go or come in my daily duty 
 without asking, at least, how that duty is to be 
 done in the twentieth century, and in the centuries 
 after that, — how it is that men are to rise on 
 vvings like eagles, to run without being weary, and 
 to walk without being faint. And I shall be a true 
 apostle of this gospel, though I be a shoemaker at 
 the bench, or a coal-heaver on the wharf, if, when 
 Tuesday follows Monday, I am doing that present 
 work with a larger sense of its dignity and its re- 
 sult. Simply, my life of every day is to be a 
 larger life in its purpose than the life of the day 
 before, if I am loyally to accept the injunction of 
 the great apostleship. 
 
 4. That is a critical and dramatic scene when, 
 on a mountain in Galilee, Jesus sends off these 
 eleven disciples, wondering and dazed, on the 
 errand which encompasses the world. Was it 
 the mountain of the beatitudes? Was it the 
 mountain of the transfiguration? No wonder that 
 the painters reproduce it. No wonder that in 
 legend and in history we try to show how the 
 eleven obeyed, — Thomas in far-off India; An- 
 drew in frozen Scythia ; Peter crucified in Rome. 
 
1 6 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 But the scene to-morrow morning is as critical, 
 and to an angel's eye might be as dramatic, as you 
 and I shall go out on the same affair. Of these 
 apostles here, — these men and women, — how 
 many believe they have this mission, and how many 
 are thinking of fame or of merchandise only ; of 
 the dinner with which the day shall close, or the 
 profit of the day's delving and forging? These 
 last must be crossed off our list — they are not 
 apostles. But there are — more than eleven here 
 — yes, many more — who know that they are sent. 
 They are " those sent; " that is, they are " apos- 
 tles." And this Boston, because they are sent, 
 shall be a part of the kingdom of heaven. 
 Because they are sent, these people in Boston 
 shall be made disciples of the gospel of glad 
 tidings. Some there are who can sing its strains, 
 some there are who can tell its history, some 
 there are who can repeat its words — its preface. 
 But, if there were none such, there is not one of 
 us here but can do the duty next his hand, as a 
 son of God may do it. He can do it in gentle, 
 perfect love, as Mary Mother did hers to the baby 
 on her knees. He can so do this loving duty as 
 one who lives in the kingdom of heaven now. 
 
 He who thus enters on to-morrow's work, en- 
 gaging thus in his Father's business, is in that 
 moment an apostle. 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 " For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." 
 
 John iv. 9. 
 
 I TRIED, not long ago, to illustrate the contrast 
 between Jerusalem and this Sychar, — between 
 Jewish and Samaritan formalism ; and at the same 
 time to condense, from two thousand years of his- 
 tory, something of the bitterness which tinges the 
 words, " For the Jews have no dealings with the 
 Samaritans." 
 
 We have idolized the books themselves so 
 much, that, even in pulpit reading, these contrasts 
 hardly appear. I cannot often enough express 
 my horror at our thinking all Bible words good, 
 and all Bible people sacred, in a uniform fashion. 
 Really, in the average thought, Barabbas and Caia- 
 phas are elevated to much the same plane, in this 
 stupid idolatry, as that on which we place Paul or 
 John. But, in face of this habit, I shall try this 
 morning to carry farther the contrast between 
 Jerusalem and Sychar. 
 
 If we were reading of the life of President Lin- 
 coln, and in one chapter of the book read that he 
 met Governor Dix, of New York, at the capitol in 
 Albany, and in the next chapter that he met a black 
 woman at Harper's Ferry, we should at once ex- 
 
[8 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 pect the methods of handling the subject to differ, 
 — we should look for, and we should find, the 
 difference. But the average reader of the New 
 Testament neither looks for nor finds any such dif- 
 ference here, when Jesus parts from a senator in 
 Jerusalem and meets an outcast of Samaria. " Why 
 should there be any difference? It is all one 
 whether this woman has any name or does not have 
 any name. Why should she have a name:* Why 
 should her name be written down? It is all one 
 whether Xicodemus is a senator or a fish-woman. 
 Truth is truth, and if the Saviour had anything to 
 say, he would say it to one, as he would say it 
 to the other. Such is the average stupid habit of 
 plunging on, in Bible reading. 
 
 The distinction really is, between the capital of 
 Israel and a valley of Gentiledom. It is the differ- 
 ence between organized religion and unorganized 
 come-outerism. It is the difference between talk 
 with a nobleman and talk with a peasant. 
 
 Once more : this conversation at Sychar is 
 one connected whole, reported long years after, 
 very likely, but standing wholly by itself. You can 
 publish it alone, and it explains itself. Some of the 
 critics have guessed that each of the seven portions 
 of the fourth Gospel was written by itself, and pub- 
 lished, as we say, by itself. It is certain that that 
 might have been. It is as if both parties knew that 
 they should not meet again. — ■ the Samaritans and 
 the Saviour. There is hardly another chapter in the 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 1 9 
 
 four Gospels which you could so dissect and make 
 it explain itself. It was for this quality that I once 
 called it here " the title-page of the gospel." 
 
 It teaches to the nameless woman and her name- 
 less friends four central lessons, — an abridgment 
 in four texts, I might say, of the gospel doctrine. 
 
 1. In the very fact that he speaks to them, the 
 whole notion of a peculiar people of God — and of 
 all special revelations — gives way. They are not 
 Jews — they are people of Samaria. They do not 
 claim what Nicodemus claimed in Jerusalem for 
 himself and a circle of noblemen. They care 
 nothing for the son of David. So far as they 
 hang by the race of Abraham, theirs is the line of 
 Ephraim. All Jewish partisanship, all Phari- 
 saic pride, all notion that God loves one people 
 more than another, is to be set aside in the work 
 of a Saviour who first announces himself to a 
 woman of Samaria. Whatever else this new re- 
 ligion is, it is not the religion of one race of 
 men. It is, indeed, to prove itself the religion of 
 mankind. 
 
 2. The woman begins talking about ritual, as 
 most people do to-day when they find themselves 
 in presence of a religious teacher. And this 
 teacher sweeps all that away. " God is a spirit, 
 and they that worship Him must worship Him in 
 spirit and in truth." Here is an end of all forms 
 of God or images of God, — ■ of all visible 
 representations of God. No more Phidian Jove. 
 
20 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 No more Jehovah walking in the garden in the 
 cool of the day. It is the fashion of people now 
 to say that they doubt the personality of God. 
 By which they seem to mean that they have given 
 up the ideas of His stretching out His hand, or 
 shadowing with His wings. All which Jesus Christ 
 tried to make them give up in this title-page of 
 positive religion. God is a Spirit. The Holy 
 Spirit, which creates and informs, it is God. 
 They who choose to worship Him, or wish to wor- 
 ship Him, are not to worship Him by tithes or 
 sacrifices. It is not by killing doves or oxen. 
 It is not by processions or by the sound of 
 trumpets. Unless they worship in spirit and in 
 truth, there is no worship. If they worship in 
 spirit and in truth, one form will speak their 
 purpose as well as another. 
 
 3. This Infinite Spirit — which directs the 
 motion of planets and compels the sun to 
 shine, which is in all space — is here. It is 
 here now. Wherever spirit is, this spirit of God 
 is. We men, who are spirits clad in veils, belong 
 to it, and are of the same nature. There is an 
 " Identity of essence in all Spiritual Being, and 
 all Spiritual Life." L So that man is not to count 
 himself apart from God, or God apart from him. 
 Xo ; he lives in God, moves in God, and in God 
 has his being. He partakes his Father's nature. 
 Jesus said this to the Samaritan woman and her 
 
 1 A phrase oi Dr. James Walker. 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 21 
 
 companions when he said so distinctly that God 
 the Spirit sends him and anoints him. " I who 
 speak unto thee am he." 
 
 4. She has the half-heathen idea of her Messiah 
 as of a messenger sent from a far-off king on a 
 distant throne. He is to come with heralds and 
 body-guards ; he is to prostrate Rome, and he 
 is to tell us all things. " He is coming, and he 
 will tell us all things, — he, the anointed." 
 
 " Woman, he has come. I who am talking to 
 you am he. Dusty and tired with my journey, with 
 no herald before me and no train behind me, glad 
 to drink from your pitcher because I am faint, — 
 all the same, I am the child of God, and His present 
 messenger to you. I who speak unto you am he." 
 
 I do not wonder that the painters are so fond 
 of the subject. But one wishes that they did not 
 care so much for the mountains and the well, 
 and cared more for him and for her. That he 
 should have swept away all her prejudices — preju- 
 dices born from twenty centuries ; that he, a dusty, 
 tired, lonely wayfarer, should in five minutes 
 make her know that he is God's son, and is speak- 
 ing God's word to her, — this shows what manner of 
 man he was, and what it is in him which makes 
 him Saviour of the world. 
 
 And she, on her side? That in those five min- 
 utes every cloud should have rolled away from her 
 heaven ; that all dust of man's travel, and all 
 smoke from the sacrifices of priests, should have 
 
22 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 been cleared away, so that she can see that her 
 God visits her and helps her, and that she is a child 
 of God ! Let the artist express that emancipation, 
 and we shall know what is meant when they say, 
 11 All things are become new." This is what the 
 words " New Testament " mean. 
 
 In a word, she saw what Nicodemus could not see. 
 When this same word had come to him to say, " You 
 must be born again ;""I don't think we can," was 
 his reply. But she went up into the village and told 
 her people that this man had told her everything. 
 
 His other disciples join him and the Samaritans 
 from the village. He stays two days in this 
 Sychar, — the typical city of the Gentile, to the 
 eye of a bigoted Jew. And here he establishes 
 the first church in the world. Many of the Sa- 
 maritans believe on him, because they have seen 
 him and heard him. "We have heard him our- 
 selves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of 
 the world." What they heard in those two days 
 we cannot tell; but the central thing in it — to 
 be remembered when all this was written down at 
 the end of threescore years or more — was this: 
 " My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, 
 and to finish His work." "The fields are white to 
 the harvest, though it is early springtime." The 
 doctrine of this gospel to the Samaritans is that 
 man is of God's nature, and that he is a fellow- 
 worker together with God. 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 23 
 
 In one and another mood of meditation — look- 
 ing backward and looking forward — we ask our- 
 selves what Jesus Christ would do for us to-day. 
 What is his mission to this time? Or what would 
 he say to me if my ears heard the plashing of 
 Galilee's wave? So far does this meditative mood 
 affect men, that there are large groups of Chris- 
 tians who dream of a Second Advent near, and are 
 looking for a speedy arrival of the Saviour in this 
 time. A clergyman of the English church told 
 me that a thousand of his fellow-ministers hoped 
 for this. And I knew men, thirty years ago, who 
 were so sure that Christ in bodily presence would 
 settle our Civil War for us, that they did not 
 think they need themselves volunteer. Suppose 
 he came, — what has he to say? 
 
 I dare say this no-named woman of Sychar had 
 asked herself the same question that morning. 
 
 This is sure, that our answer would come as 
 hers did. Perhaps our surprise would be as great 
 as hers. Let us hope our eyes would open as 
 quickly as hers. It is not in a chariot of fire de- 
 scending from the clouds that her Saviour comes. 
 It is not with legions of white-winged angels, or 
 the clarion tones of cherubim before him and be- 
 hind him, that he comes. It is a lonely,, tired man 
 — dusty with travel, and sitting on the wellside, — 
 whom she finds, and who is to tell her all things. 
 So you and I will hear our gospel, not in any 
 voice from the sky, and not in any legend 
 
24 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 written among the stars, but in the midst of the 
 dust, and sweat, and travail of to-day. 
 
 And this is the first lesson that he has for to-day, 
 as it was then : that there is no peculiar people 
 and no separate religion. Pure religion and un- 
 defined is for everybody, — black, white, gray, red, 
 and brown. Nobody is predestinated to it, except 
 that all are born to it. His religion is universal 
 religion. It is absolute religion. In the midst 
 of the modern theologies, which talk of this man 
 as elected to salvation, and that man as elected to 
 damnation, this Son of God walks in, chooses 
 some reprobate of the by-ways for his confidant, 
 and announces a universal religion. 
 
 Now, as then, whoever he met would, most 
 likely, put the old question : " Please, where should 
 you like to have me go to church? Shall I go to 
 the Cathedral yonder? Or would you prefer that I 
 should go to Clarendon street, or to the Tremont- 
 street Methodist, or to the Tremont-street Con- 
 gregational, or to Trinity?' Or, I believe your 
 people say that on Arlington street or Berkeley 
 street is the place where men ought to worship? " 
 
 After eighteen or nineteen centuries the reply 
 is just what it was. Woman, it is not here, it is 
 not there. It is not the place of worship : it is 
 the quality of worship. " God is a spirit, and 
 they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit 
 and in truth." 
 
 And how shall he worship? With this prayer 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 25 
 
 or that hymn? With these articles or that creed? 
 Answers now as then : Look on the fields ! They 
 are white to harvest, — January, March, July, or 
 November, it is all one, they are always white to 
 harvest. God did not finish His world. He is 
 here now. He is in and with His children now — - 
 that with Him His children may go harvesting now. 
 Those join in worship of Him rightly, who rightly 
 and bravely go to work with Him. They show they 
 are truly His, if they go about their Father's business. 
 And this is the sum and substance of pure religion. 
 
 Renan says in his brilliant way that if the 
 Christian world ever wishes to replace by authen- 
 tic monuments those apocryphal sanctuaries which 
 the piety of the Dark Ages has left to it, it will 
 build its temple on the heights of Nazareth. 
 " Christendom," he says, " should build the grand 
 temple where all Christians can unite in prayer, at 
 that point, whence the movement which made 
 Christendom rayed forth at its beginning." 
 
 But if the world seeks a monument of the place 
 where was first proclaimed the truth which has 
 made the world of to-day, that monument exists 
 already in the old well at Sychar. This same 
 writer, sometimes so impertinent in his patronage, 
 is humbled before the central words here spoken. 
 " Jesus spoke here, for the first time, the word on 
 which will stand the building of the eternal relig- 
 ion. Here and then he founded the pure wor- 
 ship, without date and without country, which will 
 
26 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 be the religion of all noble souls to the end of 
 time. The religion of that word and that day is 
 not only the religion good for humanity, it is abso- 
 lute religion. And if other planets have inhabi- 
 tants endowed with reason and the sense of right, 
 their religion cannot differ from this of Jacob's 
 well. Grant that men fall back from it ; that they 
 only cling to. the ideal for an instant. It was a 
 flash — this word of his — in the thick darkness ; 
 and in eighteen hundred years the eyes of man- 
 kind (alas ! of an infinitely small fraction of man- 
 kind) are used to it. All the same, full light will 
 come ; and after the full circle of wandering, 
 man will come back to this word as to the immor- 
 tal expression of its faith and its hope." 
 
 I said here once, that the four mottoes for the 
 new frieze of a new church of the Good Samaritan 
 might well be these four texts : 
 
 " Not in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem" be- 
 cause ours is a universal religion. 
 
 " God is a spirit." This for its statement of God. 
 
 " I who speak to you am he." This for its state- 
 ment of Christ, — that he is a weary wayfarer, 
 sitting thirsty in the midst of his day's work. 
 
 " My meat is to finish God's work, and I se?td 
 you to the harvest." This for man's place and 
 duty, because man is a child of God. 
 
 But you and I can do better things than to build 
 the temple of Nazareth or design mottoes for the 
 walls of a church at home. Paul's word is as true 
 
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 2J 
 
 as it o j ver was, " Know ye not that the temple of 
 God is holy, which temple ye are?" These texts 
 are not for one place or another place. They are 
 truths for you and me to carry wherever we go. 
 This title-page to the gospel is not illustrated 
 when we go on a pilgrimage to the vale of 
 Sychar, when we sit in the shade of the well, 
 and, in some broken tongue, talk to the Samari- 
 tans who are there to-day. No ! It is when we 
 lift up our eyes and look upon these fields that 
 ive illustrate it. It is when we go to work to 
 accomplish our Father's work. It is when we 
 thus bring to the Life of Lives, to the God who 
 is the spirit of all life, the only worship, which is 
 the worship of spirit and of truth. Then and only, 
 we know what these words mean, " I that speak 
 unto thee am he." They will speak in the midst 
 of daily duty. He who speaks will be dusty and 
 travel-worn ; but when we have heard him for 
 ourselves, we too shall know that this, indeed, is 
 the Saviour of the world. 
 
 " Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for 
 they are white already to harvest." If he said it 
 there, in that narrow valley between Ebal and 
 Gerizim, what would he have said here, as from 
 our outlook he saw the Massachusetts of to-day? 
 He need not bid you and me go out to all the 
 world to proclaim his glad tidings : all the world 
 comes to us.. I do not know but I am speaking 
 to some nobleman from Japan, I do not know 
 
28 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 but some Chinese boy has conquered this puzzling 
 language so far that he can follow what I say. I 
 do know that I have only to walk the streets to- 
 morrow to meet men of all the great races of the 
 world. If I could talk in Hebrew I might speak 
 to the Jew who landed last week — not the worst 
 of emigrants, let me say in passing, at a moment 
 when it is the fashion to abuse him. I am to be 
 asked, it seems, before the month is over, to wel- 
 come Eskimos from Labrador on their way to 
 Chicago. And this is only a type, or specimen, 
 illustrating that matchless hospitality by which a 
 pure democracy like Massachusetts gives to all 
 their due, Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and attracts 
 within her charmed limits all sorts and conditions 
 of men. When she built a church like this, she 
 set a candle in a candlestick — set a city upon a 
 hill, that all men might see her light ; might see it 
 and might come to it. And you and I are the 
 wardens who tend that watch-fire. You and I are 
 crews in the life-boat ready to put off into the 
 breakers and rescue the shipwrecked pilgrim from 
 other lands. You and I have received from holy 
 fathers, and from mothers who prayed God that 
 we might be true, the torch which is lighted for 
 the blessing of the world. Who are we, that we 
 should be false to such a trust, should fail to trim 
 that torch and compel it to burn brighter? From 
 hand to hand we give it gladly and sure to this 
 waiting hereafter ! 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 " Your life is hid with Christ in God." — Colossi ans iii. 3. 
 
 It is not the show or the outside which is really 
 of the first import. Life, the motive power, is 
 hidden. 
 
 Jesus himself feels this so intensely that you can 
 see how much he is pained when people do not 
 apprehend it. " Show us a sign from heaven," 
 they say to him, exactly as outside people do now. 
 It is just as sensational reporters, and other out- 
 side people, of all sorts, ask to see this or that, — . 
 which is hidden. And he says, so sadly, " Oh ! it 
 is an evil generation which seeks after a sign." 
 And all the matters of Life, in just his spirit, tell 
 you that Life is a secret. It is a secret, if you 
 please, which you judge by the fruit. But power 
 is hidden. And Paul means, with a certain rever- 
 ence, to state this secrecy, when he says that with 
 Christ our lives are hid in God. There is the 
 secret force of Life. No eye can see it. No par- 
 able is sufficient for it. No words can fully ex- 
 press it. For it is in God. And no eye can see 
 God ; no parable is sufficient for Him, and no 
 words can adequately describe Him. I can take a 
 grain of mustard-seed, and under the microscope 
 it is no longer small. But I cannot magnify it so 
 
30 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 far that I can see its life. I can dissect off the 
 outer hull of the seed, I can split off the sides 
 of the cell, I can point to the germ, and I can 
 say to you, " That germ is alive." But the life is 
 hidden, and I cannot show that to you. Or I can 
 plant the seed, and fifty years after I can take 
 you out into a thicket, and I can say, " Do you 
 remember the mustard-seed we planted when we 
 were boys?" That seed produced a large plant, 
 and I came by here, and carefully shook out all 
 the pods and dried them carefully, and planted 
 them again. The next year, I hired a man to 
 attend to it, and he had several pecks of mustard- 
 seed. He formed a partnership with some other 
 men, and they went into that business. And now, 
 after fifty years, this whole region is devoted to 
 raising mustard for the market. It all came from 
 that one seed. I can show you all these results 
 of the life of the mustard-seed, but I cannot show 
 you its life. Its life is hid with God. 
 
 Whenever, therefore, a courageous girl writes to 
 a friend a letter, in which she says, " I tried in vain 
 to tell you yesterday where my pain came from, 
 and what it was, and I failed. I have tried to 
 write to-day, and I am not succeeding any better," 
 she says to her correspondent just what Paul says, 
 when he says our life is hid in God. The machin- 
 ery is one thing, but the life is different. As 
 different as spirit is from thing, is the life from the 
 machinery. And the ordinary figures fail, because 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 3 1 
 
 life-power is deeper down than are most of the forms 
 of power which we see. I want to find the power 
 which drives my steam-engine, and I go down into 
 the cellar, to the boiler. There the heated steam 
 rushes out and passes into the cylinder above. The 
 engineer says, perhaps, "Here is our power." But 
 he knows, and I know, that there is a secret which 
 we do not see. If the steam escape, we can see it as 
 it condenses. We can even measure its expansive 
 force on our register. But what is the power of the 
 steam? Why does it expand as the fire heats the 
 water? Why? Ah ! that we do not know. We do 
 not see the why, when, or see the where. Some 
 learned friend tells us that it is in the " correlation 
 of forces." He says that heat always expands, 
 and that this measure of heat has been packed away 
 in this coal, and is liberated in the burning. So 
 then we go to the coal-mine, and we ask Mr. Lesley 
 where the coal got the heat ; and he says, " Oh ! it 
 was packed away there a hundred thousand years 
 ago, when this was a fever-bog. And the sun shone 
 hotly here, and that fire of that ancient sun burns 
 now under your boiler." And we thank him, and we 
 go back a hundred thousand years, — for man is 
 infinite, and he can go back and go forward, — and 
 we say, " Please, Sun, where did you get this power 
 which makes the water expand?" And the Sun is 
 good-humored that morning, but he says, " You 
 ought to know more than I do. I am the creature 
 of God, you are the child of God. All I know is 
 
2,2 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 what I do. My power comes to me because it is 
 His will." His life is hid in God. 
 
 It is because the central power of life is thus 
 secret that we speak of our inner Life as we do. It 
 is for this that we pray, as the Saviour prayed for 
 us, in our best prayer, when we ask for Life more 
 abundantly. It is not simply for a wide field of 
 living. It is that the roots of life may succeed 
 in striking deeper, and may draw in more and 
 more of the infinite life of the universe for me, 
 and my daily duties and daily pleasures. It is 
 true that Youth starts, in its imitation of Omnip- 
 otence, with the feeling that it has quite life 
 enough, — more than it knows what to do with. 
 But just so soon as the larger purposes come in, 
 — those ambitions which include infinite aims, — 
 youth or maiden begins feeling for more than the 
 first fountain supplies. We must have infinite re- 
 source. It is, in truth, the Life of God which comes 
 to the rescue — what the Bible calls, the Holy 
 Spirit. Sometimes people know what it is, and 
 sometimes they do not. But always they know 
 that it is. It is the inner Life, not the outer life. 
 It is not the life of running or walking, of eating 
 or drinking; nay, it is not the life of thinking, of 
 remembering, or of talking. It is deeper down. It 
 gives more power to thought, to talk, to walking, 
 or to running. So I say, as one grows in experi- 
 ence, he does not train himself simply on the out- 
 side, that he may write a better hand, or speak 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 33 
 
 better French, or that his memory may be more 
 accurate, or his style more correct. He seeks the 
 inner Life. And he succeeds when he obtains it, 
 when his own life is hid with God. 
 
 So is it that the books which have most com- 
 pletely taken hold of the world, hold it now, and 
 will hold it, are books of the inner Life. First of all, 
 the Bible is especially such. People discuss it as 
 if it were a book of history, or a book of de- 
 tailed instruction in ethics, — and it is. But it did 
 not get its hold on the world either as a book of 
 history or a code of ethics. Nor is it so that it 
 keeps that hold. That came because it is men's 
 guide to come nearer God. "Nearer to thee, my 
 God." You can hardly open it anywhere, that you 
 do not find something which brings God right into 
 your consciousness, — the present God, — the God 
 who is the Life of man. As you read, your life 
 begins to be hid in God. Thomas a Kempis' book, 
 called " The Imitation of Christ," takes its name 
 from being the same thing. As Jesus Christ lived 
 in God, moved in God, referred to God as the 
 fountain of all his Life, so this book would have 
 you and me do, while we read it. In the midst 
 of the ebb and flow of what we call literature, of 
 this picture of our times, and that study of history, 
 and that prophecy of the future, such a book 
 as " The Imitation of Christ " refers to something 
 wholly beneath their brilliancy or their striving. 
 It stands for real power, real Life, the abundance 
 
34 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 of Life of those who live with God. This man who 
 wrote it had drunk at the fountain. 
 
 Our religious habits are formed largely of 
 Jewish models. I mean that our religious lan- 
 guage is taken largely from Jewish books. The 
 parables or metaphors which we use for help are 
 largely taken from Jewish literature. Against the 
 dangers of such figures of speech we must guard 
 ourselves. Because Christ speaks, as Jacob spoke, 
 of a ladder on which angels ascended and de- 
 scended, we must not forget that God is a Spirit, 
 and they that worship Him, worship in spirit. Be- 
 cause the Hebrews had a Holy of Holies, we must 
 not think we have to go here or to go there. 
 Dr. Johnson's translation of an old hymn says 
 
 " O Thou whose power o'er moving worlds presides, 
 On darkling man in pure effulgence shine." 
 
 It implies — and this is what we borrow from 
 the Jews — that we are not anymore sure that God 
 presides on these moving worlds, than we are 
 that He shines on darkling man. Now, the truth 
 is, that we are sure that God speaks in our hearts. 
 This native voice of Right is God : its real 
 name is the Word of God. I could wish, therefore, 
 sometimes, that on some happy island we might 
 find a race of men where religious language began 
 at that end. If their language framed itself in 
 the happy experience of the answer to prayer, 
 on the experience of God's reward when one has 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 35 
 
 done well, on the certainty that when I sought 
 God I found Him because I sought for Him with 
 all my heart, — if we had religious language abso- 
 lutely based on such certainties, I think we should 
 be saved some of our present difficulties. This is 
 sure, that they are all difficulties of language. We 
 choose to speak of God as foreseeing, though 
 we know He is " I AM," and lives without time. 
 Then we say we cannot reconcile His foresight and 
 our freedom, — which means that the poor language 
 with which we spoke of Him has broken down. 
 
 But, however weak language may be, this is 
 certain, that the man who has felt God's help in 
 crisis knows it, and asks no further demonstra- 
 tion. 
 
 It is, indeed, pathetic to see how this simplest 
 language of the gospel writers refers to the Sav- 
 iour's daily and nightly habit. The men seem 
 to have been awe-struck as they saw it. He went 
 into the mountain to pray. He was away all 
 night in prayer. There is that most childlike — 
 one almost says clumsy — wish that they were like 
 him. " Master, teach us to pray." So clear is it 
 to them that his power is God's power, and that 
 he has means of getting it which they do not 
 understand. People are puzzled in just that way 
 now. And the failure of all language — lan- 
 guage being purely material, and of the outside — - 
 accounts for the puzzle. But now, when you 
 see or hear the confidence in the hidden Life, 
 
36 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 you respect it, and you believe. An officer will 
 say to you, " No, I do not want to argue about 
 it, I do not talk about it much. But I tell you 
 that when the signal gun fired I backed my 
 horse round to our place at the head of the 
 division, I ordered a charge, and the division 
 charged. God Almighty was my help and strength 
 in that moment. I know it was so.'' Such is the 
 kind of testimony quiet men give you. The man's 
 life was hid in God's.. " I was abject in grief. I 
 did not care to live another minute. Of a sudden 
 God spoke to me. He said this was His affair — 
 that He had His purpose. I believed Him — I 
 believe Him." When a man looks you in the eye 
 and says that to you, there is no need of other 
 argument or an examination of testimony. It is 
 to him an ultimate fact. He will not go behind 
 it. He does not know where his purpose began 
 or ended. He does not ask where God's purpose 
 began or ended. His life was hid in God. 
 
 I know very well how it is that at this point 
 one and another person will say to me that 
 they do not in the least know what I am talking 
 about. I have heard people say so a hundred 
 times. They say this is all mystery. They say 
 it cannot be explained. As to its being all 
 mystery, I have no doubt of that. All the 
 connections between spirit and body are mys- 
 terious. Of course the relations between spirit 
 and spirit are. I do not say, and I wish no- 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 37 
 
 body had ever said, that there is any cunningly 
 framed multiplication-table in which God's action 
 should be shown in one of the columns and men's 
 action in one of the cross-rows, so that at the 
 point where they met you could see the product 
 of the communion or common action of the two. 
 
 On the other hand, precisely what I say is, that 
 the communion of man with God is not to be 
 explained in any of the arbitrary or mechanical 
 forms. But what, then ? That is not strange. You 
 cannot explain to the man who cannot swim, what 
 is the method of swimming, what is the buoyancy of 
 the water, what it is to be borne up and swept along 
 by it in its flow. While he stands there on the 
 gravel of the shore, he cannot know anything about 
 this. He must trust himself to the water, implicitly, 
 absolutely, and without reserve, or he cannot be- 
 lieve in it, and cannot understand its power. No 
 man can understand. No man can even imagine 
 what his sensations will be in his flight with a 
 balloon, so long as he stands upon the earth 
 without trusting himself to the air ; what it is to 
 see the earth recede, to see it form itself in a cup 
 beneath one, as one floats, all unconscious of 
 motion, and looks down. We can talk about 
 this, but till one fairly trusts himself to the air, 
 he does not feel it, conceive it, or know it. And 
 so in the communions of human life, to a man 
 who has lived along through youth and early 
 manhood, without finding the other half of his 
 
$S LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 life ; without knowing what it is to have his heart- 
 life rounded out and completed by a union with 
 that other half, which is somewhere, and which 
 belongs to him, — it is idle to talk of that com- 
 munion or completeness. 
 
 Now to him who lingers on the beach, know- 
 ing nothing of swimming, you say that he must 
 trust himself to the wave, he must try the great 
 experiment, and see what it is to be buoyed up by 
 it and swept along. And that is what, not you or 
 I, but the Lord Jesus himself, and every voice of 
 God Himself, say to those who have not tried the 
 great experiment of losing their will in God's will, 
 of hiding their life in His life. The birth of 
 Christ, the life of Christ, and his death, were all 
 for this end, — that you and I, and all men, might 
 be willing to trust ourselves to the present love of 
 God. Every martyr who has bled, every prophet 
 who has spoken, every miracle of God's love, 
 every victory of His power, the whole course of 
 Christian history, the whole unfolding of His will, 
 as it has appeared in the affairs of men, — all of 
 these together are harmonious voices in His great 
 appeal to us : that we, too, try the great experi- 
 ment. He would have us give up our little 
 separate purposes enough to work by His great 
 purpose when He calls upon us. He would have 
 our outside, selfish lives die out so that in our real 
 Lives, our eternal Lives, we may be hid in God. 
 
 The language of the whole Epistle to the Colos- 
 
LIFE HID WITH GOD. 39 
 
 sians is as gorgeous and fanciful as is the " Arabian 
 Nights." They had their own superstitions of 
 genii, and afrites, and princes, and powers of the air ; 
 and Paul, who knew them through and through, 
 was born, indeed, among their neighbors, takes 
 them on their own terms and talks to them in their 
 own way. This is hardly a violent figure — speak- 
 ing in such enthusiasm to such men and women — 
 by which he compares the change which Chris- 
 tianity made in their condition to the change 
 wrought by death itself. He says, " They have 
 changed from the life of beasts to that of God's 
 children." Their old lusts, those bodily passions 
 and desires, are done with. You have flung them 
 off as a caterpillar flings off his chrysalis, as a 
 crab flings off his old shell. You are dead, so far 
 as they go. In the Christian world with Christ, 
 your life is a Life all alive with God's Life. With 
 Christ your life is hid with God. Such is his defi- 
 nition of Christianity in the midst of this gor- 
 geous imagery. To think God's thoughts, to be 
 workmen with God, to carry out His plans, to par- 
 take His nature, — this is Life as Jesus Christ under- 
 stands Life, and as Paul presents it to these men. 
 
 Except in poetry, we do not speak of God as 
 sitting on a throne, as walking in a garden, or rid- 
 ing on a whirlwind. God is. He is in all space 
 and in all time. Science almost sees Him, does 
 touch the hem of His garment ; as in all worlds, in 
 any universe, Science finds Law, one and the 
 
40 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 same. Faith tries the great experiment of prayer, 
 cries aloud to this Infinite Law, finds that He 
 hears, He loves, He answers. Glad in the great 
 discovery, man studies the infinite purpose of this 
 Law, and enters into His infinite work. Man 
 shows to himself and to all who take note, what 
 Scripture means when it says he is child of God. 
 Man shares God's nature. To make this clear to 
 man when man was afraid of God, was Jesus 
 Christ's endeavor. To persuade man to ally him- 
 self to this Living Law and Lord of the Universe 
 is Christ's success. And then man, the child, has 
 no longer a separate wish or purpose. God's 
 wish is his wish. His will is God's will. " Thy 
 will be done, on earth as in heaven, " this is his 
 prayer. So is it that in Christian faith man's 
 life, once separate, is separate no longer. In 
 Christ, man's life is hid in God. 
 
 " Father, I bless thy name that I do live, 
 
 And in each motive am made glad with Thee, 
 That when a glance is all that I can give, 
 It is a Kingdom's wealth if I but see. 
 This stately body cannot move save I 
 Will to its nobleness my little bring: 
 My voice its measured cadence will not try 
 Save I with every note consent to sing, — 
 I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless 
 But I with my action must conspire 
 To show me then how little I possess, 
 And yet that little more than I desire. 
 May each new act my new allegiance prove, 
 Till in thy perfect Love I ever live and move." ' 
 iQne of Jones Very's sonnets. 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 " I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in the 
 truth." John hi. 4. 
 
 St. John knew they would want to walk in it. 
 But he knew they would not walk in it unless 
 care was taken from the very beginning. His 
 work and the work of every apostle — and the 
 work of him whom they loved to call the Great 
 Teacher — was all work expended, as is the 
 humblest work of the humblest teacher of a Sun- 
 day-school, that their children might walk in the 
 truth — from the beginning through. 
 
 I do not suppose that I need instil, if I could, 
 more of the spirit which has brought you here into 
 the work of Sunday-school instruction. The cir- 
 cumstances forbid, again, that I should attempt 
 specific advice as to the details of religious in- 
 struction in different schools. These must be 
 determined each by itself. I must speak of 
 methods, rather than of motives. But I must 
 speak of methods in general, rather than in detail. 
 I shall attempt to do so, with entire simplicity, 
 in studying not what may be quite possible in 
 any single congregation, but what I should be 
 glad to see made real in all. We will address 
 
42 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 ourselves to a model Sunday-school, what we 
 wish a Sunday-school might be. 
 
 There is no single enterprise in which this 
 church engages, which rivals in importance its 
 Sunday-school. We shall reopen this school a 
 fortnight from to-day for its winter session, and 
 I take this morning, therefore, for some consid- 
 eration of what a Sunday-school might be, of a 
 model Sunday-school, — I shall hardly stop to 
 ask how far we come up to this ideal, or fail. 
 Those of us who are personally engaged in the 
 matter know pretty well already. And the rest of 
 you had better come and inquire in the detail. 
 My object is rather to show what we can all aim at 
 together, — what is worth trying for, and what is 
 not, — and so I think I shall show what is the tran- 
 scendent and vital importance of an organization 
 which sometimes gets to be considered quite hum- 
 drum and mechanical. 
 
 The difficulties in the whole matter are suffi- 
 ciently obvious. We have more of them, un- 
 doubtedly, than the creed-bound sects have. For 
 all they profess to have to do, is to teach certain 
 supposed truths which they prefer to teach in cer- 
 tain fixed words. The process of religious instruc- 
 tion really becomes with them very much a matter 
 of memory. Sunday-school work becomes in 
 proportion much like day-school work. You 
 teach the catechism as you would the multiplica- 
 tion table. When the child has learned it, you 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 43 
 
 examine him, and by the rite of confirmation, or 
 some other rite, give him a sort of diploma. But 
 that is not our idea, — and so this is not our way. 
 Rating intellectual assent to religious systems very 
 low, we wish to instil habits and principles of life. 
 We set the test of religion rather in life and char- 
 acter. We cannot satisfy ourselves with mere 
 memory-work on text-books. This is, by the way, 
 the difference between our theological schools and 
 those of the strict sects — say at Andover or 
 Princeton. Let a man be well trained in Calvin's 
 Institutes and he passes their requisition for a 
 minister. But our requisition is that a man shall 
 be wide awake, and keenly sensitive to every voice 
 of the Present Spirit. Now, it is very hard to or- 
 ganize any school of prophets which shall do that 
 for him. Because all this is so, a Sunday-school 
 with us must be deficient to a certain extent, in 
 that rule and plummet accuracy of plan, with pre- 
 cise tabular returns showing how near the King- 
 dom of Heaven each child is, and when he may 
 be expected to arrive there, which are so delight- 
 ful in the eyes of drill-masters, and which seem 
 almost necessary when we speak of a school at all. 
 I think it is as well then to confess in the outset 
 that the word scJiool is rather unfortunate, and 
 hardly expresses the dominant idea of the system 
 or the wish we are at work upon. 
 
 This is so evident, that in many experiments the 
 analogies of a school have been wholly abandoned. 
 
44 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 The children have been assembled, not in classes 
 with teachers, but as a congregation for their own 
 religious service. I remember that at Springfield 
 in this State, there was such a service, held in the 
 chapel, at the same time that the parents of the 
 children were engaged in the afternoon service in 
 the church. The afternoon service of the Warren- 
 street chapel — so successful for so many years — 
 was on this plan. I found it in Paris to be the re- 
 ceived system of the Protestant churches. It was 
 there organized so definitely that there was a sep- 
 arate clergyman for the children of two or three 
 parishes. He was appointed specially for his gift 
 of dealing with children. Then at their own time 
 the children came together in the church. I was 
 with them at the Oratoire. Their own minister con- 
 ducted the service with them. They sang, and 
 read with him ; he preached, expressly to them. 
 Their service ended, they went home. Their 
 parents then came in and filled the same seats in 
 church again. Another preacher took charge of 
 their service, and carried that through. The chil- 
 dren's preacher, as I understood, went to another 
 church, and met another congregation of children 
 there, the service for grown people there being 
 conducted at another hour. 
 
 The advantages and disadvantages of this plan 
 are evident at a glance. The instruction given is 
 more fit for the children than that of the ordinary 
 service. But probably it is less so than that of varied 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 45 
 
 classes, each adapting its work to the specific 
 age and ability of the pupils. The chief disad- 
 vantage is that the children are definitely sepa- 
 rated from their parents in the Sunday religious 
 service. It loses the home character, therefore, 
 which is by far the dearest association that it has. 
 The French system all rests on that worn out 
 notion that the chief growth of religion comes 
 from good teaching. Now, it really comes from 
 affection, sympathy, mutual inspiration. Men 
 know we are his disciples if we love one another. 
 And so here in New England all through the 
 dreary generations when children did not un- 
 derstand one syllable that was said in the pulpit, 
 were not asked to, meant to, nor wanted to, — still 
 because they went to church with their fathers and 
 mothers, and brothers and sisters, and sat on the 
 same seats and sang perhaps from the same book, — 
 and talked or heard as they ran or walked to 
 church and back again, all as one family ; — because 
 thus the most solemn religious association was 
 woven in with the family tie, — because Sunday was 
 the one great occasion when all the family was as 
 one, together and seen together : I say, because 
 of all this, the Sunday service, though unintelligi- 
 ble to the infant mind, became real and invaluable 
 to the infant heart and soul. The house of God, 
 so called, became indeed the Sunday home. 
 
 For this reason I do not consider a service 
 specially arranged for children, and taking the 
 
46 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 place of their parents' service, to be the model 
 Sunday-school. 
 
 No ! The system which has providentially 
 grown up here in New England seems to offer 
 the most convenient machinery, if we will only 
 give it true life and motive power enough. This 
 is the system of separate classes, each familiarly 
 met by a teacher who is a personal friend, — all 
 meeting together, however, for a united service. 
 
 Now, in a perfect Sunday-school, I hold, i. That 
 this united service — which is, of course, a service 
 of worship, prayer, and song — must be conducted 
 as a very essential and important part of the whole. 
 Do not let us hurry over it, that we may come to 
 the classes. Do not let the children feel that if 
 they are late at the opening service it is no great 
 matter. Do not let them become slovenly in their 
 reading of the responses, or their singing of the 
 hymns. The ease and free talk of the sepa- 
 rate classes must have no place in the general 
 service. We are to be as orderly and all is to 
 be as solemn as in the church itself. 
 
 The larger part the children themselves take in 
 this service the better. I have been greatly in- 
 terested in those managements where different 
 classes in succession assumed successive parts of 
 it. But I do not mean to speak in detail. 
 
 In general, I have to say, that it is here, and here 
 only, as far as I can see, that our New England 
 congregations are to be trained in ritual ; that 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 47 
 
 is, in devout and really kind behavior in church. 
 The New England mind is curiously indifferent in 
 such matters. People's behavior in church is no 
 worse than it is at a funeral, at a wedding, at a 
 caucus, or at the theatre ; but it is thoughtless, 
 careless — which is to say it is bad, everywhere 
 where they meet in numbers. A man who comes 
 late to church, for instance, in that single piece of 
 carelessness interferes with the devotion of a thou- 
 sand people. Carelessness in such a case becomes 
 unkind. Or a person who talks at church does 
 not merely abandon his own worship and put 
 an end to that of the person he speaks to, but 
 disturbs all the persons who have to see him, all 
 who have to hear him. He is not careless merely 
 — he is unkind. Every person who hurries out 
 of church the moment the service is done does it 
 carelessly. He does it because it is the New Eng- 
 land habit, — a habit formed in the country, when 
 there were horses tied outside which it was neces- 
 sary to attend to. But the result of that haste now 
 where it takes place is that the departing congre- 
 gation look like school-boys glad that their im- 
 prisonment is done. Everything of this sort 
 belonging to ritual, in which, in the church, there 
 is great room for improvement, must be attended 
 to in the Sunday-school. The general service 
 of the Sunday-school should therefore be dis- 
 tinguished for its solemnity, earnestness, and 
 order. 
 
43 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 To speak of one very important particular: I 
 do not see how we can give too much attention, 
 too much time, let me say too much money, for 
 the musical instruction of the Sunday-school. In 
 the only school where I have ever known this 
 matter to be followed up with what seems to me 
 the true energy, — in the old musical instruction of 
 the Warren-Street Chapel, — the results were a 
 benefit, not only to that school, but to all our 
 churches. I am not satisfied with teaching the 
 children to sing a few hymns well by ear, all of 
 them singing one part, and then all subject to 
 panic if an accustomed leader happened to be 
 absent, or if by accident a child let a hymn-book 
 fall. Xo ; in every large school there must be a 
 considerable number of good voices. I think any 
 church would do well which would take all such 
 voices it could get hold of and give them the very 
 best training the town would afford. I think we 
 should thus in time get what we want, — the same 
 sedulous care given to sacred music which the 
 world now gives to operatic music. The Christian 
 idea, of course, is, that every child shall have every 
 faculty trained to perfection. We will not then 
 have any inglorious Miltons. We will not have 
 any silent and unconscious Miriams. Let us find 
 what we have ; let us encourage it, and train it 
 to the best. I see no such ready opportunity for 
 this as is in the machinery of the Sunday- 
 schools. 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 49 
 
 First of all, then, I consider that in an ideal 
 Sunday-school the general service occupies a very 
 prominent part in the exercise, and is to be pre- 
 pared for, on all hands, with the greatest accuracy 
 and system. 
 
 2. Now we come to the class work. And, first 
 of all, my observation of different schools satisfies 
 me that a great deal is gained by detaching the 
 youngest children in a large group by themselves, 
 in a separate room, with teachers competent to 
 lead little children in singing, in simultaneous re- 
 sponses, and in other such exercises as hold the 
 attention and interest of children of that age. We 
 have never been able fully to carry out this plan 
 in the parish schools, because we have never had 
 exactly the right room for it. But when the Unity 
 School was at Tuckerman Hall we had a most in- 
 teresting class of more than sixty children, under 
 the direction of a lady of real religious genius and 
 great skill with children, and two or three very 
 competent assistants. I watched it with great in- 
 terest as one of the great successes of that school. 
 After that general exercise of which I have 
 spoken, these little children are withdrawn into 
 their own class-room. Most of them cannot read 
 well enough to learn lessons from a book. But 
 the teacher can teach them orally what she wishes. 
 They can sing together. They can respond to- 
 gether. They can pray together. And with such 
 a director as I have spoken of, they enjoy the scr- 
 
$0 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 vice, they " have a good time," which, as I shall 
 show in going on, is one of the essentials of a 
 Sunday-school. 
 
 3. Now for the older classes. The first requi- 
 site is great personal confidence between scholars 
 and teacher, amounting to attachment, indeed. A 
 new teacher can do very little at first. Let us re- 
 member that children of the age of which we now 
 speak have no right to go to the school without 
 some preparation for the exercise. They say they 
 have no time to make it; but that is an excuse. 
 There is not a child in this church but could make 
 time to go to Nahant this week, or to go to the 
 theatre, or to other party of pleasure if he were 
 invited. They can make, if they will, half an 
 hour's time for fit preparation for the half-hour 
 spent with the teacher. On the other hand, the 
 teacher gives more than half an hour for prepara- 
 tion ; that is, gives more on the average. Both 
 parties meet, then, in a perfect Sunday-school, with 
 some previous preparation for their exercise. 
 Their conversation must be free, wide-awake, re- 
 spectful, of course, but perfectly easy and friendly. 
 To gain this freedom is the great victory of the 
 teacher; to enjoy it, is the great privilege of the 
 child. 
 
 A friendship based confessedly on religion or 
 an interest in religion, that is what binds together 
 that teacher and that child, — the most precious 
 tie which can come into human life. I will not 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 5 I 
 
 say which is most blessed by it, teacher or pupil. 
 The boy who, in the hey-day of boyhood, finds 
 in his Sunday-school teacher a friend to whom he 
 will take his questions of conscience, and whose 
 advice he will ask as to his pleasures or duties, has 
 gained the greatest blessing God has to give. 
 And the man who, having passed by his own boy- 
 hood, has earned this love and confidence of five 
 or six boys still glorying in theirs, renews his 
 youth, and lives it over again. 
 
 It is hard, indeed, to say which profits most by 
 that intimacy. But this cordiality between teacher 
 and pupil is not to be gained without time. It is 
 not to be gained by merely asking for it. I do 
 not see how it can come unless you parents help 
 it along. Fathers and mothers must give such 
 encouragement both to children and teachers as 
 shall knit them together in this kind of intimacy, 
 if fathers and mothers expect that much is going 
 to come out of the Sunday-school. 
 
 4. I have already intimated that this is not 
 a school after the fashion of other schools, so that 
 at the end of a year you can tell how far the 
 pupils have advanced. Thus you cannot say that, 
 at the end of one year, the children have learned 
 purity; at the end of the second, peace; at the 
 end of the third, gentleness ; at the end of the 
 fourth, that they are so far advanced as to be 
 easy to be entreated ; at the fifth and sixth, re- 
 spectively, they will be full of mercy and good 
 
52 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 works; and in two years more, that they can 
 graduate as without partiality and without hypoc- 
 risy. True, these are the apostle's stages of a 
 Christian life. But you cannot cut them up in a 
 scholastic system, and inculcate them, piece by 
 piece, as some writers seem to think you can. 
 No ! A Christian life is one of those diamonds 
 which does not form itself, does not crystallize, in 
 the operations of an hour a week, in a church 
 vestry, on Sunday morning. A Christian life is 
 crystallizing all the time. Home influence, school 
 influence, street influence, alas ! book influence, 
 talk influence, as well as church influence and 
 the influence of the Sunday-school, go to it. 
 And religion, which is the centre and heart of it. 
 Religion, which is the law of Life, is never taught 
 It is propagated, if you please; it is planted, if 
 you please ; it is caught by contagion, if you 
 please ; it is lighted as a lamp from a torch, if 
 you please ; but it is never taught in words, nor 
 can it be. Religion grows in the child, as he 
 prays at his mother's knee, as he weeps by his 
 sister's coffin, as he loves sister, and mother, and 
 baby brother; as he gives up his own wish to 
 please one of these, or to please God. But it is 
 not taught as a lesson. In a religious family, alive 
 with faith, hope, and love, the child will become 
 religious. Woe to the faithless family, without 
 hope and without love, which wishes that the 
 shipwrecked boy will " get religion," if only as a 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 53 
 
 Sunday morning comes round he may be huddled 
 off to an unknown teacher in some unknown 
 Sunday-school ! 
 
 Alas for the family ! Alas for the child ! 
 
 But the teacher may help the direction given in 
 the family, as we have seen the family must help 
 the teacher. It is a great thing, where a good 
 habit is forming at home, to have the laws of that 
 habit laid faithfully down in the class at school. 
 It is a great thing, where the hint has been dropped 
 at home, for a doubting child to find at school that 
 this was no caprice of his father, but a little spark 
 from the Eternal Fire. Why, to speak of only 
 one detail in a thousand, aside from these influ- 
 ences of tenderness, friendship, free conversation, 
 personal regard which ought to bind together 
 teacher and pupil, only think how many topics for 
 study there are, wholly passed by in our week-day 
 system, which must be studied in the Sunday- 
 school, if anywhere. Such are all the wonders of 
 creation, so far as God's love is shown in natural 
 history, in insect, flower, bird, fish, beast, star, or 
 sun. Such is all the handwriting of history, so 
 far as His will is shown in it, whether of the Bible 
 nations, or of those we call profane. The very 
 science of morals — and it is a science — is not 
 touched in the schools, lest they should be secta- 
 rian. All the geography, history, antiquarian study 
 which illustrate the Bible are left on one side in the 
 same way. Really, if one only looked at these 
 
54 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 lines of learning, one would see that an hour ortwo 
 of Sunday must be given to them, as things are, 
 unless these children, when life begins, are to set 
 sail, — I do not say unable to understand their 
 Bibles, but unable to make out any chart at all. I 
 cannot join in the laugh at the old gentleman who, 
 forty years ago, asked a distinguished preacher in 
 what part of the Bible he should find an account 
 of Mahomet; for, really, under the system in which 
 he had been bred, there had been no place in 
 which he should have made any study of what is 
 called religious history at all. 
 
 But I admit the Sunday-school has not time to 
 teach much of fact. It does pretend to give sugges- 
 tion, impulse, love, and life. In proportion as the 
 teachers seek this, resolve for it and pray for it, in 
 proportion as the fathers and mothers seek, re- 
 solve and pray for it, the Sunday-school succeeds. 
 Where the quest, the resolution, and the prayer are 
 perfect, there is so far a perfect Sunday-school. 
 
 5. But the method of the Sunday-school seems 
 to require that as the children become young men 
 and women, as they enter on the responsibilities of 
 life, all the wider range of discussion, not only on 
 matters of religion, but on matters of theology and 
 moral science, should be open to them in special 
 classes. We call these Bible classes. But that 
 name is very narrow. They should not, I think, 
 be restricted to criticism of the Bible, in which, in- 
 deed, they can do very little, but should open on 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 55 
 
 all the questions of science, of social order, and of 
 domestic life, which come into discussion in any 
 connection with religion. 
 
 6. Supposing these various parts in the or- 
 ganization of the Sunday-school, and supposing 
 the principle of effort which I have tried to de- 
 scribe, there are still two controlling objects to be 
 held in mind by the church which establishes such 
 an institution. 
 
 First. The Sunday-school is an organic part of 
 the church. The whole school, therefore, is to be 
 steadily engaged in one or more works of charity 
 outside its own organization. It is not to sit con- 
 templating itself. It must be doing good to some- 
 body. 
 
 I do not think much good is done in this direc- 
 tion by a penny contribution. It is much better 
 to train the children to do something themselves. 
 Take a girl to some mission sewing-school and let 
 her help in threading needles. Take a class of 
 boys down to see an emigrant ship discharge her 
 passengers, and the next week let them follow up 
 those passengers in Mr. Crosby's hands or in Mr. 
 Hubbard's, so that they shall know what you 
 mean by Children's Mission and Benevolent Fra- 
 ternity. Those children who saw the " Morning 
 Star" set sail have a great deal better notion of 
 the work of Foreign Missions than have those 
 distant children who only put five cents each into 
 a subscription. 
 
DO A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 And, as I said before, remember that in all this 
 we are not seeking to crowd these children, nor to 
 force them, nor to divert them from anything 
 which is natural ; we are not wrenching them out 
 from any native depravity. We are making easy 
 the growth of what would have been sure to grow 
 of itself. Only, in such a world as this, it might 
 have grown gnarled and crooked. 
 
 The idea of force, therefore, which belongs 
 properly enough in other schools, must disappear 
 here, and the presence of the love which under- 
 takes the whole enterprise must be felt every- 
 where. Or, as I said before, everything is to be 
 done so that, on the whole, the children shall 
 enjoy the school ; shall make friends there whom 
 they value ; shall feel a mutual pride and pleasure 
 in it, and especially shall enjoy Sunday. How 
 many children, if they told you the truth, would 
 say they hate Sunday ! Now this must not be. 
 They can grow up to like Sunday ; to look 
 forward to it happily. That they may do so, is, 
 in my judgment, the first distinct office of the 
 Sunday-school. 
 
 Such, briefly stated, are the more important 
 points of an institution which may have the 
 highest place in what we are doing for our 
 children. This measure of success evidently de- 
 pends on everybody's willing cooperation. I hear 
 it said in addresses that if the teachers are good, 
 the school will be good ; but you might as well 
 
A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 57 
 
 say if the scholars are good the school will be 
 good, or if the fathers and mothers work well for 
 it, the school will work. The truth is, the school 
 needs everybody's vigorous help. It needs the 
 steadfast aid of a set of teachers large enough in 
 number for its very largest requisitions, taking 
 hold of it as a sacred charge, their part of the 
 conversion of the world. It needs their work, not 
 only at the hour of meeting, but in the prepara- 
 tion for it, and in their almost daily intercourse 
 with their childern. Yet this body of teachers 
 must not be regarded as a close corporation 
 whose business it is "to run the school." You 
 who have children to place there have a personal 
 interest in it which ought to be larger than any 
 interest which they can take in it. And I cannot 
 too earnestly ask fathers and mothers, who know 
 what children are, who know what they need, to 
 give their assistance and countenance to the work 
 of the school by taking hold with the teachers 
 and among them. The children will respect this 
 school of ours, just as much as they see the grown 
 people respect it. You yourselves will respect it 
 more and value it more, in proportion as you 
 know it more ; and the more steadfastly you take 
 part in it, the more regular you make your own 
 children's attendance, the more careful their 
 preparation which comes largely under your eye, 
 the more vital is the whole. The less is it a mere 
 piece of clattering machinery, the more does it 
 
58 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 live with the Master's own love and energy and 
 life. 
 
 I think if I came here and told you that some 
 one had started an enterprise in North street or at 
 Hilton Head, or in the Cannibal Islands, in which 
 forty or fifty earnest Christian men and women 
 brought together on Sunday three hundred chil- 
 dren to teach them what they might of the Bible, 
 of our Lord, and of daily duty, to make Sunday 
 the central day of the week to them, and to carry 
 its influence the week through, to provide care- 
 fully the best books for them to read, to interest 
 them in charitable work for other children, and 
 to unite them indeed in a Christian brotherhood, 
 growing up in all the blessed influences of a Chris- 
 tian home, — I think you would give me anything I 
 asked, for the continuance and success of an enter- 
 prise so completely in accord with the spirit of 
 Jesus. That is what I describe : only the enter- 
 prise is here. The children whom it would help 
 are not outcasts, but your own. And what we 
 ask is not money, but yourselves ; that you will 
 lend a hand when you may; that you will join 
 yourselves in an enterprise so noble ; that you will 
 help it extend itself as it can, even without bound. 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 "Whether then ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the 
 glory of God." I Cor. x. 31. 
 
 THERE is a great contrast between our children's 
 Sunday of a fortnight ago and the children's Sun- 
 day of their grandfathers. I am perhaps speaking 
 to some who have joined in the service of two 
 generations ago. 
 
 In a genuine Puritan church of the old fashion, 
 whenever the " children's Sunday " came, the chil- 
 dren were arranged in files on each side of the cen- 
 tral aisle. The minister then left the pulpit, and, as 
 he walked down the aisle, he asked each child a 
 question from the shorter Westminster Catechism. 
 Right and left the boys and girls repeated their 
 answers. There are droll stories told of some 
 unexpected vacancy in the upper part of the 
 lines, from which it followed that the wrong 
 answer was given by some hasty child below, who 
 did not have the question which he expected. 
 Allowing for such lapses in administration and in 
 memory, it is quite certain that every one in New 
 England knew the first question in the catechism, 
 and its answer. 
 
 "What is the chief end of man? " is the ques- 
 
60 TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 tion ; and the answer is, " The chief end of man 
 is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." 
 
 The answer is one almost unintelligible to any 
 child, and is, therefore, rather an unfortunate 
 answer for a catechism intended for the divine 
 training of children. It is, however, an answer 
 which, rightly understood, contains the central and 
 essential truth as to man's life in this world, or 
 in any world. It is especially interesting to Xew 
 Englanders, because it expresses the real sense of 
 relationship to Almighty God, which was charac- 
 teristic of the original New Englander. It brought 
 him here, it kept him here, and it made him what 
 he was. In our time we change the phrase. We 
 say, as Goethe says, that a man " accepts the 
 universe; " or we say, as Mr. Emerson says, that 
 he looks upon the universe, and finds that he is a 
 part of it and is governed by its laws ; or we say, 
 as Martineau says, that "honor, truth, and justice 
 are not provincialisms of this little world, but are 
 the same in all systems and in all worlds." But 
 in all such phraseology, we imply that man is not 
 as the stones are, he is not as the snails and 
 oysters ; nay, he is not as the foxes and the lions, 
 or even the half-reasoning elephant. Alan belongs 
 to the universe as one of its masters, who is capa- 
 ble of comprehending its infinite law. This is 
 what is said, in the language of the Xew Testa- 
 ment, when we read that man is a son of God, is a 
 partaker of the divine nature, or is a fellow-worker 
 with God. 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 6 1 
 
 Not because the New Englander said this, but 
 because he believed it, the New Englander worked 
 the miracles which he achieved. He made these 
 deserts, which were deserts indeed, blossom as the 
 rose. He hewed down these mountains, he filled 
 up these valleys, that the car of his God might 
 roll gloriously on. As I said here the other day, 
 whatever he was engaged in, he did it with this 
 sentiment of divine help and of his own divine 
 duty. He split shingles to the glory of God, he 
 shingled his house to the glory of God, he salted 
 codfish and mackerel to the glory of God, he took 
 Louisburg to the glory of God, and he believed 
 he had God's warrant, and that he was in God's 
 service, when he defied King George and the 
 strongest empire of the world. It was because he 
 believed this, that he conquered King George and 
 the strongest empire of the world. It was be- 
 cause he believed he had omnipotent power, that 
 he had omnipotent power. And no statement in 
 the Book of Psalms, as to God's love of a chosen 
 people, and His care for them, was too strong for 
 the old New Englander, as he entered upon his 
 daily duty, as he committed his little state to this 
 or that act of sovereignty, or indeed, in any sense, 
 as he looked forward to a future of infinite requisi- 
 tion. 
 
 The daily power which came, either to a soldier, 
 a sailor, or to some man chopping wood, from 
 this consciousness of his own relation to God, was 
 
62 TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 specially nursed in the early habits of everybody 
 who was under Puritan rule. Wood-chopper or 
 farmer, this man began the day with prayer in 
 his family, to this God for whose glory he was 
 going to devote the day. His wife, and his chil- 
 dren with him, read some word of this scripture 
 which is so full of the immanent presence of 
 God. I do not say that the passage was specially 
 well chosen for the duty of the day; but, what- 
 ever it was, it gave father and mother and child 
 the sense of the existence of the Power above 
 them, — the Power with which, somehow, they were 
 absolutely allied. Whether to break out a snow- 
 drift, or to cut down a tree, or to split a log into 
 shingles, the man went forth to his daily duty with 
 that inspiration. The boy who went to school 
 had not understood the scripture, most likely; he 
 had been uneasy in "prayer-time," very likely; 
 but he did not forget that somehow he was allied 
 to the Power which had bidden the snow fall and 
 the trees grow. I should say that no ecclesiastical 
 order ever succeeded in entwining so closely the 
 sense of God's being with the daily affairs of 
 men and women, as the simple requisition made 
 upon each household by the Puritan system. In 
 Millet's picture, the peasant and his wife drop 
 their heads in prayer as they hear the Angelus 
 sound. But here, where there was no Angelus, 
 where no bell could sound across the meadow, it 
 was well-nigh certain that words of prayer had 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 6$ 
 
 been spoken, by father's or mother's lips ; that the 
 older brother or sister had read something from 
 a scripture which told of God and His power ; and, 
 with this omen and inspiration, boy or girl, man 
 or woman, started on the day. And when it was 
 done, with thanksgiving rendered in the same 
 spirit with which help had been asked in the 
 morning, did boy and girl, father and mother, re- 
 tire to their sleep. 
 
 Is anything more simple than to apply this in 
 every day's duty? And is it not clear enough 
 that, if you make a whole city, or a whole nation, 
 start every day with this infinite motive, that 
 city or that nation achieves what we call impossi- 
 bilities? It is not poetry which says that they 
 have infinite power, or that they are almighty. 
 Without such impulse a man wakes in the morn- 
 ing and goes, languidly enough, to his place of 
 work, hardly knowing what his motive is. Press 
 him, make him look at it, and he says, " Well, 
 I hope that before night I shall have sold 
 more whiskey than I sold yesterday. If I do, 
 more men will go home to their families broken 
 down and cross, more men will be unfitted for 
 to-morrow's duty. But I shall have something 
 more in the bank, and I shall be able to begin 
 next week on a larger scale." This is all, — I, 
 and my success, — and it is not, in the long run* 
 a motive which promises much for your state or 
 for your nation. But, on the other hand, the 
 
64 TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 pioneer of whom I spoke goes out into the bit of 
 woodland where he is at work, alive with an 
 infinite life. "What are you going for?" you 
 ask him ; and he says, " I go because God sends 
 me. I go because God has a purpose for this 
 town and land. God sent me and my father and 
 my brother and my wife and my child into this 
 place, because He did not mean it should be 
 a desert. He meant it should be a part of His 
 kingdom. If I can cut down a dozen trees 
 to-day; if I and Nahum and Andrew can draw 
 them to the stream to-morrow, — by the end of 
 the week we will have a bridge built by which 
 the people of the next town can communicate 
 with us and we with them. By the end of the 
 year we will have society on a nobler footing ; by 
 the end of ten years, here shall be the most beau- 
 tiful village in the State ; and before I die, men 
 shall bless the energy and heartiness with which 
 those began who founded this town. Thank you, 
 yes ; it is a cold day, but I think I can stand it. 
 My hands are chilled, but I can keep them warm. 
 I have devoted this day to the glory of God, and 
 the living God will put me through." 
 
 One would like to know who was the author of 
 the phrase in the Westminster Catechism. Of 
 course, if one imagines, as people of feeble 
 imagination did, that God was sitting on an 
 emerald throne outside the seventh sapphire fir- 
 mament, in a series of concentric spheres like a 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 6$ 
 
 Chinese ivory ball ; if one supposed that by one 
 ladder, or another, men and women were sending 
 up their offerings to Him, — the picture of man's 
 glorifying God was absurd. Of course, again, 
 if to " enjoy God forever" meant that men and 
 women were to sit round in the seats of a con- 
 centric heaven, taking in, from hour to hour, 
 the luxury of such dews of heavenly blessing as 
 might distil upon them in the exercise of Infinite 
 Love, that picture also was absurd. But the 
 quaint words had no such meaning to the mind 
 of the prophet who wrote them in English. Nor 
 had they to the leaders of New England, who 
 took them for better, for worse — for the training 
 of their children. They meant what Paul meant, 
 when he said, in this text, that we are to live to 
 God's glory. And, in speaking of enjoying God 
 forever, they meant what Jesus meant when he 
 spoke of entering into the joy of the Lord, the 
 joy of the absolute and perfect Kingdom of 
 Heaven. " Whether ye eat or drink," Paul says ; 
 whatever you do, nothing is too trifling, do it for 
 the greater glory of God, of this Infinite Spirit 
 who is the Law of all Nature, who is the real life 
 of all being. As we ask in the Lord's Prayer 
 that His kingdom may come, and His will be done, 
 on earth as it is in heaven. 
 
 To live to God's glory is to advance His pur- 
 pose. I may know that the deed I do is critical 
 at the moment. Or I may not know this ; it may 
 
66 TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 seem to be only one of a million million which 
 put that purpose forward. This is all one. I am 
 to know, all along, that I am with Him and He 
 with me, and that He has chosen that I shall be 
 the creator and director in this particular affair. 
 As I said to the children the other day, He has 
 left the palace unfinished, and now He sets me to 
 put in its place the one jewel which shall finish 
 it. Because I know what He knows, wish what 
 He wishes, hope as He hopes, I go about that 
 office. I live to His glory. 
 
 In the critical moments of the Russian cam- 
 paign, to reinforce the French army on its retreat 
 the conscripts of France were summoned and sent 
 into the field two years before their time. What 
 was called the class of 1 8 14 was summoned in 
 1813, and the class of 181 5 to add to their num- 
 bers. These boys without beards came together 
 at the stations, were formed into regiments and bat- 
 talions, and marched into Germany to cover the 
 retreat. At one of the critical passages of that 
 retreat, about the time of the terrible three days 
 of Leipsic, some thousands of them, with their 
 virgin colors, were massed in a position which 
 commanded an important road. To the astonish- 
 ment of the Russian commander, his movement, 
 which had seemed so easy, was thwarted and 
 checked and rendered for the time impossible, 
 because, as Napoleon himself said when he de- 
 scribed it, those boys and their officers were all so 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 67 
 
 ignorant of war that they did not know enough to 
 surrender. 1 
 
 It is not difficult to imagine and recreate the 
 position. They are beardless boys, — - yes ; their 
 officers have gone through but half the course of 
 the military academy, — yes. But they can shout 
 " Vive la France ! Vive Napoleon ! " though their 
 voices have not changed from a boy's treble. 
 And they do. It is the glory of France, and 
 the glory of Napoleon, which brighten the 
 squalid barrack, which cheer the wintry march, 
 which warm the tent or the hut or the bivouac at 
 night. It is for the glory of France, for the 
 glory of Napoleon, that they rally round these 
 captains and this tricolor, as they are massed in 
 the position which an old soldier would call un- 
 tenable. It is for the glory of France, for the 
 glory of Napoleon, that they die there when the 
 time comes to die. And because they know 
 nothing but the glory of France, and the glory of 
 Napoleon, their sacrifice achieves its purpose. 
 
 It is a little illustration, it is a very little illus- 
 tration ; but it does show what we mean when 
 we say a man lives or dies for the glory of 
 
 1 In sending these notes to press, I am not able to cite the narrative 
 in full, and I may have mis-stated the place and date. But I think 
 that the story belongs with Ney's request just before the battles of 
 Leipsic. He asked that he might have the young conscripts placed 
 under his charge, and said he would answer for the consequences. "Our 
 gray beards," he said, " know as much of the matter as we do, and 
 boggle at any difficulty ; but these brave youths think of nothing but 
 glory." 
 
6S TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 God. He accepts God's purpose as the crit- 
 ical and important necessity. He does not ask 
 first, shall I be warm, or shall I be well fed, or 
 shall I sleep well to-night, or shall I fare well to- 
 morrow. Beneath this " I " and " me " is the pur- 
 pose of the universe, the purpose of God. " It 
 is God who gave the command." He says, " It is 
 God who put me on this ground." God's pur- 
 pose, then, is the first affair. The wind is very 
 sharp, and it cuts my skin. The sleet is very cold, 
 and my hands are stiff. But if this voyage succeed, 
 God's will will be the better done. This voyage 
 shall succeed then, because I am here. 
 
 " I know I looked to wind'ard once; 
 But the skipper smiled and said : 
 ' Let no man flinch or give an inch 
 
 Before his stent is made. 
 This is no year for half a fare, for God this year decreed 
 
 That the forty States their hungry mates 
 In all the world should feed.' " 
 
 There is the motive, as a fisherman on the Banks 
 lives to the glory of God. 
 
 The philosophical historian -of the manufactures 
 and commerce of New England comes out from 
 his invaluable survey of her progress in two cen- 
 turies, with this statement of the secret of our 
 success in government: "Those institutions have 
 their sure foundations, not in ranks or orders of 
 society, not in army, senate, or priesthood, but in 
 the fibre of the people themselves." Our success 
 
TO GLORIFY GOD. 69 
 
 comes " in the relations of each individual man or 
 woman to the essential principles of society — of 
 order itself." The New Englander's expression 
 of this relation was that he lived to the glory of 
 God. His by-law for a town-meeting is a differ- 
 ential of the Law which moves the universe. 
 
 The historian and statesman, Guizot, when he 
 was in exile, asked our ambassador, James Lowell, 
 " How long do you think the American Republic 
 will endure?" " My answer was," Mr. Lowell 
 says, ' So long as the ideas of its founders con- 
 tinue dominant.' Of course I explained that by 
 ' ideas ' I meant the traditions of their race in 
 government and morals." 
 
 " The traditions of their race in government and 
 morals." Absolutely central in these traditions was 
 the answer of the New England child to his minis- 
 ter when he asked him, "What is the chief end of 
 man? " 
 
 " Man's chief end is to glorify God," whether he 
 eat or drink, or whatever he does. The American 
 citizen is to do all in harmony with universal Law. 
 He does all things to God's glory. 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND 
 LONGFELLOW. 
 
 "The Lord hath made all things; and to the godly hath he 
 given wisdom. 
 
 " Let us now praise famous men — men renowned for their 
 power, giving counsel by their understanding, leaders of the people 
 by their counsels, wise and eloquent in their instructions : such as 
 found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writing. All these 
 were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their 
 times. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, 
 that their praises might be reported. The people will tell of their 
 wisdom, and the congregation will shew forth their praise." 
 
 Ecclesiasticus xliii., xliv. 
 
 In the short period since I returned from Europe 
 three lives have closed, of persons not immediately 
 connected with this congregation, but in very close 
 communion with the Unitarian church of America. 
 It is worth more than passing remark, that this 
 Unitarian church of America, not very large in 
 numbers, has been honored by the sympathy 
 and help of three men so widely known and so 
 highly prized through this whole nation. As it 
 happens, I was honored, in a somewhat intimate 
 way, with the friendship, and I believe I may say 
 the confidence, of all three. From the grave of one 
 of them — Samuel Longfellow — I have just re- 
 turned. And I break what would have been my 
 choice of subjects here as the year begins, to say 
 
72 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 something of the gifts which have been rendered 
 to America by George William Curtis, John Green- 
 leaf Whittier, and Samuel Longfellow. 
 
 I have known Mr. Curtis somewhat intimately 
 for more than forty years. I saw him last, and 
 heard one of his matchless speeches, at Saratoga 
 last September, when he presided at the annual 
 conference of the Unitarian church of America. 
 The president, chosen at the previous meeting of 
 that conference, was Judge Miller, I think the 
 senior member, as he was certainly the leading 
 member, of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. Judge Miller had died in the interval of 
 two sessions, and Mr. Curtis, as the first vice- 
 president, took his place, and he was chosen his 
 successor. Our Conference is again left without 
 a president, by his death. 
 
 His presence on that occasion, the intelligent 
 and thorough sympathy he always showed in our 
 united work, were wholly in accord with the 
 every-day habit of his life. For year after year 
 — at his home on Staten Island — he regularly 
 conducted the public services of the Unitarian 
 church. I think he did not often write sermons, 
 and I am not sure that he often delivered his own 
 sermons. But from his unrivalled knowledge of 
 the literature of the world, he had brought the 
 best he could find in that line to read for the con- 
 gregation which assembled to meet him. He 
 conducted all the service with seriousness and 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 73 
 
 dignity which made it most attractive. And as 
 the congregation grew larger and larger, with 
 such ministrations of one of its laymen, it always 
 proved, not unnaturally, that they preferred such 
 service to any which could be rendered them by 
 any professional minister. 
 
 In the case of Mr. Curtis, this is only an inci- 
 dent, and in comparison not a very important 
 incident, of the moral service which, from boyhood 
 to the time of his death, he was rendering to the 
 community. And this, as we cannot say often 
 enough, without taking public office, without going 
 into what we call administration. I suppose that in 
 General Grant's time he was often, perhaps always, 
 confidentially consulted on important points by lead- 
 ing members of General Grant's cabinet. But he was 
 never in Congress or in the cabinet. He sat with a 
 pen in his hand, and he spoke by that pen to millions 
 who never heard his voice or obeyed his matchless 
 command in oratory. I heard, myself, his great 
 speech at Delmonico's before the Pilgrim Associa- 
 tion in 1880. I believe — and I have elsewhere 
 tried to show how — that that one speech saved this 
 country from civil war, in the settlement of the 
 Tilden-Hayes question. Of this matchless power 
 what is to be remembered now, is, that he could 
 not have swayed those men so had he been in the 
 administration. He could not speak as he did 
 — an impartial Minos, looking fairly upon both 
 sides — had he technically belonged to one side. 
 
74 CURTIS, WIIITTIER, AXD LONGFELLOW. 
 
 And again, it is to be observed that the moral 
 weight of the man, his absolute purity, his clear, 
 sheer indifference to self, — purity and indifference 
 known to all men, — raised him to that place in 
 men's esteem. Here was a man to whom it was 
 wise to listen. Here was a man who said what he 
 thought. Here was a man, then, who led and did 
 not follow other men. 
 
 Of Mr. Whittier's place in literature I should 
 not think of speaking here. The hold which he has 
 upon the American people is very interesting, — 
 on the whole, it is very satisfactory, — as an index 
 of what the American people are and what they 
 admire. But of his position as a great religious 
 teacher I ought to speak here, and am glad to 
 speak. It is not a little thing that a man has, 
 really unconsciously, written hymns which will 
 be sung for a hundred years in that part of the 
 Church of Christ which sings English songs. I say 
 " unconsciously " has written hymns, for Whittier 
 was, to the end of his days, one of the Society of 
 Friends, who sing no hymns in their public service ; 
 and I am not sure that he wrote any of his lyrics 
 with the direct intention of their being used as 
 hymns. He wrote them because he could not help 
 writing them. They express the nearness of God 
 to man and of man to God, as he felt it his life 
 through. Because he was a poet he had to ex- 
 press that, and he expressed it so well that other 
 people took it up and used it. I think I am 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 75 
 
 speaking in the presence of a person to whom he 
 brought the exquisite hymn, " The ocean looketh 
 up to heaven," immediately after it was written. 
 They were all in camp on the seashore ; and where 
 you or I would say quietly, " How wonderful ! " or 
 " How beautiful ! " he writes a hymn expressing for 
 centuries that sense of glad reverence which is the 
 ocean's first and last lesson to us all. As I believe 
 I said here the other day, the Hymn to Chris- 
 tianity which we sing so often is an Ode to De- 
 mocracy which he wrote upon an election-day. 
 How clear it is that, when a man who is in the har- 
 ness, who is in the fight, if you please, is face to 
 face with other men who think differently or who 
 do differently, — when that man expresses himself in 
 poetry, you have a poem which lives. It is as the 
 old prophecies, because they were written in just 
 such a fashion, have proved themselves immortal, 
 and are read in all languages, from every Bible. 
 
 Now what I am to say here, and what ought to 
 be said in every Unitarian pulpit, and ought to be 
 understood through the Unitarian churches of this 
 land, is that the whole religious movement of this 
 leader of our time is alive with the life of our faith, 
 of our theology, of our religion. The Unitarian 
 church is the Church of the Holy Spirit; the 
 Quaker church is the Church of the Holy Spirit. 
 The two are one. We have no reason for exist- 
 ing, — our church has no reason to exist as an or- 
 ganization, — unless we mean to proclaim, " Here 
 
j6 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 is God, God is now," unless we stand for the gos- 
 pel of the living God to-day. And that is the gos- 
 pel which George Fox went forth to preach to the 
 founders of the Society of Friends. That is the 
 gospel which he was imprisoned and persecuted 
 for preaching. That is the gospel which the peo- 
 ple called Friends brought to America. It is 
 their gospel now, and it is our gospel now. And 
 it is because Whittier sang the songs of that gos- 
 pel that he is welcomed by the people of this land 
 as the best-known religious poet. For this relig- 
 ion, which we call the liberal religion, is the 
 religion of the American people. It is, for in- 
 stance, the religion of universal suffrage, the re- 
 ligion of universal education, and the religion in 
 which every man is a king and a priest consecrated 
 and ordained by the living God. 
 
 I am speaking in the presence of many ladies 
 who will remember a happy class which we had in 
 the vestry of the old church, when we were all 
 younger than we are to-day. It was a class of 
 young people, who, besides other matters which 
 they read and of which they wrote together, regu- 
 larly considered the feasts and fasts and other 
 ceremonial days of the Congregational church, to 
 which we have the honor to be born. It was not 
 their business to consider the martyrdom of Charles 
 the First, nor the saint's day of St. Botolph ; but 
 it was their business to know what were the re- 
 ligious associations of Forefathers' Day, of Fast 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 77 
 
 Day and Thanksgiving, of the Day of Indepen- 
 dence, of Christmas and Easter, of the discovery 
 of America, and the other great occasions of the 
 Christian year which connect themselves with the 
 annual ritual of a religion of freedom. I used to 
 bid the young ladies of that class bring me a poem, 
 or poems, which should bear upon subjects so 
 large as these in the history of a religious state or 
 of a democratic church. It was then that I first 
 really knew how wide was the range of Whittier's 
 thought and action and song. I have the very 
 curious poetical calendar which those ladies made 
 for the Christian year, and it would be worth 
 editing to-day, as an illustration of his mastery, 
 shall I say, of the gamut of our religious life, so 
 extraordinary was the aptness of the word — 
 likely, indeed, to be an eternal word — which he 
 has spoken on one and another of the most im- 
 portant of our struggles, our defeats, and our 
 victories. 
 
 It is easy to pass from such memories to mem- 
 ories which to me involve even closer personal 
 associations. I was honored by Whittier's kind 
 friendship from the year when I was twenty- four 
 years old till he died. Mr. Samuel Longfellow, 
 who died on Monday last, was my daily com- 
 panion and friend from the time when I was 
 thirteen, for many of the earlier years of life. 
 And when, in after years, we were personally 
 parted more, the old tie was never sundered, and 
 
jS CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 with half the world between us, we loved each 
 other as we always shall. Here is another poet 
 who has furnished to us hymns which will be sung 
 in the English-speaking church when he and 
 every man of our time is really forgotten ; because 
 the hymns speak for all time, in language which 
 cannot be forgotten after it has once become 
 familiar. Resisting the temptation to discuss Mr. 
 Samuel Longfellow's writing from the intellectual 
 or from any critical side, I will say that the sim- 
 plicity and reality of his walk with God appears in 
 these hymns in that natural light, with that single- 
 hearted and simple expression, which of themselves 
 compel sympathy. They lift the hymn wholly 
 above the range of criticism or of any low intel- 
 lectual analysis. Mr. Longfellow wrote a hymn 
 for my ordination, and I think I should be safe in 
 saying that from that time it was sung at the 
 ordination of every Unitarian minister for forty 
 years — is sung to-day on such occasions, except- 
 ing when it gives place to another later hymn of 
 his, written for a similar occasion. He was a man 
 of delicate physical health, so delicate that you 
 wondered that he attempted any professional call- 
 ing which requires a man to call upon himself 
 regularly for his work, and gives him no oppor- 
 tunity for lying back for refreshment. All the 
 same, in three different ministerial charges, one at 
 Fall River, one at Brooklyn, one at Germantown, 
 Pennsylvania, he illustrated, for the men of my 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 79 
 
 calling, the best way of working under very diffi- 
 cult contingencies. It is no business of to-day or 
 of this hour to say what those contingencies were, 
 or how he met them. It is enough to say that, 
 with the absolute courage of a gay young soldier 
 leading an attack, with absolute unselfishness, 
 which a man hardly understands unless he has 
 seen it in such a life, and with this absolute faith 
 in the presence of God of which I spoke, he 
 worked the miracles of parish life. He brought 
 together the factory workman and the elegant 
 recluse scholar in one and the same determination 
 that God's kingdom should come. It is only a 
 week since I heard the phrase of a self-centred 
 man of affairs, used to his own way and deserving 
 to have it, who said : 
 
 " Mr. Longfellow could say anything in that 
 pulpit which he chose. We might not agree with 
 a syllable that he said, we might wish that he was 
 saying something else ; but we never thought of 
 anything which you can call antagonism to him, 
 and never thought of limiting in any way his 
 right to say it again and again, as often as he 
 chose." 
 
 For me, I have never seen so remarkable an il- 
 lustration of what Dr. Putnam used to call " the 
 wrath of the lamb," — the strength of a person 
 whose personal life was so tender and modest and 
 gentle that you were half afraid to trust him out 
 of doors, showing itself, when there was any need, 
 
SO CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 in vigor amounting to audacity, and in moral con- 
 trol of every one to whom he had to speak. 
 
 He was of a sensitive and analytical nature, 
 which made him detest, as much as St. Peter ever 
 did, anything that was common and unclean. 
 But he, too, had seen the vision, and he knew very 
 well that what God had cleansed he was not to call 
 common. There is not a dainty critic of them all 
 who could go beyond him in pointing out inele- 
 gancies. And yet, if you saw him with a dirty 
 gutter-boy of the Cambridge streets, whom he 
 had drawn into the boys' club of an evening, you 
 would see that his was that greatest privilege, the 
 intuitive sympathy and love of untutored children. 
 
 Now, here are three Americans — I have a 
 right to say three American leaders — to whose 
 work America looks back with gratitude at the 
 same time, because their death-days came so 
 near each other. They have served America in 
 different ways. But, at bottom, we see that their 
 religious thought, motive, and feeling are abso- 
 lutely the same. Nay, more than this, it is twined 
 in with the same intellectual convictions, with the 
 same theology. They are three men, absolutely 
 in accord in the moral, spiritual, eternal basis 
 of life. They are three men so absolutely in 
 accord, that, if by good fortune they were thrown 
 together for an evening, in travel, say, or at some 
 great festival, each of them would think that that 
 reunion or communion was one of the happiest 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 8 1 
 
 events of his life. And this common basis of life, 
 exactly the same for each and all of them, is what 
 we call " liberal religion." Each of them is a 
 definite acknowledged prophet of the Religion of 
 the Holy Spirit. 
 
 I have said, I have no right to let such a bit of 
 the history of our time pass without note here. 
 Nobody cares for controversy in the pulpit, least 
 of all for that arrogance which says " My church 
 is better than your church." But, all the same, 
 the truth must be proclaimed, that the religious 
 life which fits an American leader to lead 
 America rests wholly on the simple foundation 
 laid down by Jesus Christ, and rests on nothing 
 else. It is simply the exhibition in life of the two 
 commandments : love God, and love man. And the 
 church or organization which has least of curtain, 
 or smoke, or ritual, veiling that central statement, 
 is the church or organization most fit for a leader 
 of America. This truth is so important that no 
 modesty should hinder its proclamation. It ought 
 to be made in every church in America, when 
 America knows that such men have died. 
 
 These three friends of ours had a fourth friend 
 who, as a poet, was greater, I suppose, than either 
 of them: James Russell Lowell. He died a year 
 before Mr. Curtis, with whom he was very closely 
 tied. I am not going to speak of his literary fame 
 or the genius which deserved it. But in the spe- 
 cial connection in which I speak, I ought to say, 
 
82 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 that Lowell also is to be remembered as a great 
 religious poet. It is the poems which express for 
 men man's intimacy with God — by which he will 
 be remembered. Once more, it is wrong that a 
 Christian should not see that each of these poems 
 rests on the broadest and least ecclesiastical po- 
 sitions of liberal or Unitarian religion. And it 
 would be wrong if a Christian did not see that the 
 statements of liberal Christianity were those of 
 Henry Longfellow and of Bryant, who died a few 
 years before Lowell ; by which I do not mean 
 simply that all these great poets avoided the tech- 
 nical expressions of the creeds in their writings. It 
 would be unreasonable to ask any poet to put into 
 verse the thirty-nine articles or the Athanasian 
 creed — -even if he believed them. But I mean 
 that none of these men did believe such state- 
 ments ; they were all members of Unitarian 
 churches, assisted in Unitarian missions, broke 
 bread at a Unitarian communion table, and wrote 
 Unitarian hymns. I do not choose to have 
 the death of three such leaders pass by with- 
 out saying that when controversialists of to-day 
 choose to understate the lead and power of the 
 simplest, unecclesiastical Christian gospel, they 
 are bound, before the American people, to say 
 and to show how it is that the two Longfellows, 
 Bryant, Lowell, and Curtis, belonged in form to 
 the Unitarian church, — and that Whittier, so close 
 in touch with the American people, was the poet 
 
CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 83 
 
 of the liberal side of the Society of Friends, whose 
 faith and inspiration are identical with that of the 
 Unitarian church of America. 
 
 At this moment we cannot think of the poets 
 whom I have named, without remembering Ten- 
 nyson, whose death recalls so many of the best 
 moments of fifty years and more. Of Tennyson's 
 exquisite life, so happy, such a benediction to his 
 time, the eternal lesson is the most profound 
 lesson of religion. Here again, it is not doc- 
 trinal theology, it is no form of outside organiza- 
 tion, which cares to repeat the story. Here is the 
 universal, pervasive, omnipotent song of pure and 
 undefiled religion. How exquisite his art was, 
 even the earliest poems showed. But the song he 
 sung for eternity, and the word he spoke to all 
 sorts and conditions of men, were not sung or 
 spoken till he had gone through the fire. Then 
 he sang to us as prophets sing. He had seen the 
 vision, and he told us what he saw. From begin- 
 ning to the end, vision and prophecy are the 
 song, or the clarion cry of faith, and hope, and 
 love. There is not one word on a lower key. 
 He is simply the poet of true and undefiled 
 religion. 
 
 Such lives all teach the eternal lesson. Of the 
 seven I have named all are loved and honored. 
 And not one of the seven is loved or honored 
 because he was learned or skilful. Not one 
 because he fitted word well with word, or rhyme 
 
S4 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 
 
 with rhyme ; nay, not one because he used well 
 the analogies between visible nature and the 
 secrets of human life, which make up poetry. 
 We love them and honor them h : they 
 
 love, and hope, and believe. They use their 
 knack of language, their learning and their ele- 
 gance of song, for the wider empire of hope, and 
 love, and faith. They deal with the three eter- 
 nities and so win their own immortality. 
 
 And you and I ? 
 
 We cannot sing the songs of a nation. Xor can 
 we save it by our oratory. But we can love man. 
 We also love God. We also are immortal. For 
 you and me, as for any Curtis or any Tennyson, 
 there is open a life with God for those around 
 us, in the open majesty of heaven. For that, you 
 and I consecrate life again to-day. For God's 
 companionship in that life we ask him to-day. 
 And it is nothing for us, as for those same heroes 
 of Christendom it is nothing, whether men re- 
 member us or no. It is everything that we also 
 walk with God this day, as we go to our other 
 homes ; that we also serve men to-morrow, though 
 it be in the humblest services of common life; 
 and that in the dust and smoke of the streets, 
 we know that nothing is common, if we live 
 as these men lived in a Present Heaven. 
 
"'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 " Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better 
 than these? for concerning this thou dost not inquire wisely." 
 
 ECCLESIASTES vii, IO. 
 
 It will be fifty years next Saturday, the 12th of 
 November, since I preached in this place the first 
 sermon which I ever preached in Massachusetts. 
 My friends here have been so kind as to re- 
 spect a wish of mine that I might begin a new 
 half-century of duty in the pulpit under the 
 same auspices with which I began that which is 
 past. 
 
 I did not know, nor do I know now, to the in- 
 vitation of what committee or society I owed the 
 pleasure of standing here fifty years ago. A 
 friend of mine had undertaken to preach here, was 
 prevented, and I took his place, rather unexpect- 
 edly. The next day was the State election, and 
 instead of going to Boston in the morning stage, 
 as I had expected to do, I remained here till after 
 the town-meeting was over. I was asked to open 
 the meeting with prayer, and I did so. I was 
 asked to visit one or two of the sick in the town, 
 and I did so. It happened, therefore, that for 
 nearly forty-eight hours I was in Berlin, as it were, 
 as the minister of the town. I heard then, for the 
 
86 " 'tis fifty years since." 
 
 first time, anecdotes of the ministry of Dr. Puffer, 
 so long the bishop, under our New England ar- 
 rangements, of this diocese. I think I may say I 
 made friends in those days whom I have not lost 
 since. For these reasons it is a great pleasure to 
 me that, through your kindness, I am permitted to 
 speak here again to-day. 
 
 The two sermons which I delivered on that oc- 
 casion still exist, somewhat yellow from time. I 
 am not displeased, after fifty years, to find what 
 texts I chose for them. In the morning we con- 
 sidered St. John's direction, " Let us love not in 
 word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth; 
 and hereby know we that we are of the truth." 
 In the afternoon I spoke from the same epistle of 
 St. John, the text, " Perfect love casteth out fear." 
 I am glad, I say, that I know that that Divine 
 Spirit which guides us always, led me, even in boy- 
 hood, to choose such themes, shall I say, as the 
 fit starting-place for the duties of the pulpit. That 
 perfect love casts out fear, and that this love must 
 show itself in action and not in word, — this may be 
 said to be a fair foundation for whatever the pulpit 
 has to say or do. As to the way in which I tried 
 to enforce these eternal statements, or to present 
 them to the lives of men and women of the middle 
 of the century, I will say nothing. That is a per- 
 sonal affair. You have forgotten, as, without the 
 manuscripts, I should have forgotten, every such 
 detail; and we will not let any such inquiry into 
 
" 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 87 
 
 detail turn us away from what are far more attrac- 
 tive subjects of jubilee meditation. 
 
 It is no habit of mine to look backward. I 
 have, in what seemed to me fit places, urged on 
 young people and old people, urged on every- 
 body with whom I have to do, the fundamental 
 necessity of looking forward more than we look 
 back. I only ask you now to look back over the 
 course of a half-century, because I am sure that, 
 if we do so wisely, we may get the fit lessons for 
 the half-century which is next to come. 
 
 The condition of the country has wholly 
 changed since that time. The condition of the 
 church of Christ has changed more perhaps ; and 
 in the hope that from the contrasts of fifty years 
 we may get some lessons for the next half-cen- 
 tury, I am going now to look backward more 
 than is my habit. At least we shall find the 
 Providential hand guiding history, for those fifty 
 years which make more than a fortieth part of the 
 time since this text was written. We shall also 
 find that, as a general working rule, the direction to 
 look forward more than we look back is a good 
 one. 
 
 It is interesting to see the advance in physical 
 comfort — that is to say, in wealth — in this nation, 
 and probably in all nations. The average wholesale 
 price of flour in Boston, in eight years of which 1 842 
 is the third, was six dollars a barrel. The average 
 price of the same grades yesterday was four dollars. 
 
88 
 
 A barrel of pork cost, fiftyyears ago, twenty dollars. 
 It cost yesterday, on the average, in the same 
 market thirteen dollars. These figures show with 
 sufficient accuracy the improvement which com- 
 merce and invention have brought about in the 
 matter of food, on which matter all other matters 
 of physical comfort follow. 
 
 On the other end of the line, one workman in 
 a cotton-mill makes three times as much cloth as 
 he could in 1842. He then worked thirteen or 
 fourteen hours a day, and he now works ten. He 
 is paid per yard almost exactly twice what he was 
 paid then. There is, therefore, either four times 
 as much cloth made and used, or there are three 
 workmen out of four set free to retire from work, 
 to read Dante if you please, or to play the piano. 1 
 Practically, the arrangements by which they work 
 together are more simple, their promotion is more 
 free. Speaking in general, they have more of 
 the privileges which God gave them when he 
 made them, than they had fifty years ago, as they 
 had more then than they had fifty years before. 
 We cannot too often repeat that the physical 
 advantages of this country were all here the day 
 Columbus landed. But land is nothing, unless 
 there are men and women upon the land. Mines 
 are nothing, unless there are miners. Rivers flow 
 vainly, unless there are boats upon the rivers. The 
 gorge in the mountains is open in vain until men 
 
 1 I have these figures from Mr. Edward Atkinson. 
 
 
" 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 89 
 
 have carried through it the road upon which food 
 and what else man needs is to be carried. All 
 this is to say that the world improves in propor- 
 tion as the men in it improve ; while for the rest, 
 the improvement in soil from year to year is 
 scarcely to be noticed by the most delicate 
 alchemy or by the finest microscope. In mines or 
 quarries there is no improvement. 
 
 I do not know but I might be fairly asked 
 whether any of the tables of statistics show, or 
 whether daily observation shows, such an improve- 
 ment in men, women and children as the increase 
 in wealth supposes. 
 
 I should reply that this is asking too much. 
 The tree must be judged by its fruits. But I will 
 not pretend that every leaf on that tree is better 
 than every leaf on the tree fifty years ago. This 
 is to be said, however, that the statistics, rightly 
 read, show that there is less crime, that there is 
 less disease, that there is less pauperism, than there 
 was fifty years ago ; and that the bitter invective 
 which describes human misery and crime — of 
 which we have to read the outcry every day — 
 really shows a more sensitive conscience, a more 
 watchful examination of the sufferings of men. 
 Thank God that there is this sensitive conscience 
 and this watchful examination ! 
 
 I do not know a more encouraging book in this 
 direction than Daniel Defoe's " Colonel Jack." It 
 is a description of the position of a poor boy in 
 
90 "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 London, about the time when William III. as- 
 cended the throne of England. The worst pict- 
 ures in General Booth's descriptions of " Darkest 
 London" do not compare with the pictures which 
 Colonel Jack gives of his own boyhood. And the 
 contrast between that day and this day shows fairly 
 enough the steady advance which has been made 
 in London, even under the terribly depressing 
 conditions of a city which has advanced in popula- 
 tion as London has, and which is, as Sallust said of 
 Rome, the cesspool into which sinks all the corrup- 
 tion of the world. In Boston we have somewhat the 
 same contrast, between the pretty little maritime 
 town on its three hills, which sheltered a hundred 
 thousand people fifty years ago, and the crowded 
 manufacturing city of to-day. Yet there the ad- 
 vance is sure. 
 
 Now, when we shall come to write history in 
 such fashion as shall show the real motive-power 
 underlying life, it will be a history of the personal 
 lives of men and women ; and the motive-power 
 of those lives, say what you please or guess as you 
 choose, is the life of God in man. That is to say, 
 men and women are stronger, if they know God 
 better, and they are weaker when they know him ■ 
 less. They are stronger in proportion as they 
 know each other better ; they are weaker in pro- 
 portion as they are alone. They are strongest 
 when they have the wide horizon, the infinite ho- 
 rizon, — when they live in heaven ; and they are 
 
"'tis fifty years since." 91 
 
 weakest when they live in the dark, as in some 
 cellar, with no horizon, and seeing nothing. I 
 know perfectly well that all this statement is re- 
 garded as pulpit-talk. It is spoken of as unavail- 
 able assets are spoken of. Men say, "You cannot 
 count it, you cannot weigh it, you cannot in anyway 
 make estimate of it which will add in with your 
 figures which show the price of pork or of flour." 
 All the same is it true that a community of ten 
 thousand people praying to God every morning, 
 living to God's glory every day, and thanking God 
 every night as they go to bed, is a community more 
 prosperous and strong, a community which has 
 more salt pork and more flour of fine brands, than 
 has a community of ten thousand men and women 
 who, in their daily conversation, send one another 
 to hell five hundred times between sunrise and 
 sunset, who never pray to God, who care nothing 
 for the improvement of the world or for His glory, 
 and whose aim is to buy and drink as much 
 whiskey as is possible. Put it on the mere physi- 
 cal standard : the owner of a street is glad when 
 his tenants are of this God-fearing sort, and he 
 is sorry when he finds that the other kind are 
 squeezing in. Thus simply am I led to what is 
 our chief subject to-day: What, if any, are the 
 moral or spiritual changes which have come in, 
 gradually or by sudden impulse, into the life of 
 New England in the last fifty years? 
 
92 " 'tis fifty years since." 
 
 A new gospel had been preached to the people 
 of New England. The drift that way may be 
 traced, historically, to the period when the inde- 
 pendence of the State and the freedom of thought 
 of all her citizens were established. 
 
 Where the fathers had droned out in dreary 
 homilies the words which told them that they were 
 children of the devil, and that ninety-nine-hun- 
 dredths of them were going to hell, a new school 
 of men — Buckminster, both Emersons, Chan- 
 ning, and many others; such men here as Dr. 
 Bancroft and Dr. Puffer — were telling them 
 that they were all children of God, that there 
 was nothing they could not do if they asked God 
 to help them. I remember perfectly that, when I 
 was six years old, or thereabouts, my father and 
 mother took me to the House of Reformation in 
 South Boston, and I saw a body of nice-looking 
 boys, better dressed than the average of my 
 school-mates, going through with the exercises of 
 a sort of Lancastrian school. I heard them sing 
 better than I had ever heard children sing. I 
 have never forgotten the cheerful look on their 
 faces. Naturally, I heard the conversation of my 
 elders about these boys, and the plans that were 
 made for them. Such things were comparatively 
 new, and the real impression seemed to be that 
 these particular boys were to come out all right, 
 as I dare say many of them did; that in the 
 next generation such crime, or fault, or sin as such 
 
"'tis fifty years since." 93 
 
 boys' fathers had committed would be, to a large 
 extent, unknown. There was plenty of money in 
 Boston, as, indeed, there is now — more than peo- 
 ple know what to do with. They did know what 
 to do with their money, and they really thought 
 that they could appropriate it in hospitals, in 
 infant schools, in schools of industry such as this 
 I describe, so as to clean up the whole place. 
 These Boston people did not mean to have any 
 Augean stables about it ; they did not mean to 
 have any pest-holes at all ; any Five Points ; any 
 Whitechapel. They meant to have Dr. Channing 
 and Mr. Henry Ware and Mr. Palfrey attend to 
 the morals of the people who came to church, 
 and they meant to have Dr. Tuckerman and Mr. 
 Charles Barnard and Mr. Waterston attend to the 
 morals and the lives of the people who did not go 
 to church. 
 
 Simply and absolutely, they meant that every 
 man and woman in Boston should grow up with 
 just the same advantages, social, moral, and in- 
 tellectual, with which their best men had grown 
 up : say Caleb Strong, Jonathan Phillips, or Josiah 
 Quincy. 
 
 In point of fact, this was all as phantasmal as a 
 dream of the Arabian Nights. In point of fact, 
 the people who were to fill up Massachusetts 
 were people of a different education, a different 
 ancestry, a different social order, a different ambi- 
 tion, and a different religion. It would not have 
 
94 " TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 been desirable to prevent this. If it had been 
 desirable, it would not have been possible. In- 
 deed, the mere fact of the existence of such a 
 happy valley as they proposed would have 
 brought in upon them from the north and south, 
 and east and west, men, women, and children of 
 all sorts and conditions. As the prophet Isaiah 
 puts it, " The people of the rock would come, the 
 inhabitants of the islands would come, and the 
 villages of Kedar would come." Their dear 
 Boston was to be no happy valley : it was to send 
 out the light that it had, as the rays are reflected 
 from a beacon, to every wormwood valley and 
 every desolate mountain side in the world. 
 
 All the same, while the dream lasted, it answered 
 all the purposes of a reality. In those days, if a 
 prophet prophesied, people came to hear with a 
 definite feeling that some new future was possible, 
 — a feeling which I do not think they have now. 
 I mean that in those days if a man announced that 
 he was going to speak on some reform, or if he 
 called a convention to consider it, he was sure that 
 people would come together. But now that call 
 has been made too often. Men have cried, Lo ! 
 here, and Lo ! there, and there proved to be no 
 Christ. Your prophet may prophesy to-day, or 
 he may call his convention, and no one will 
 come unless he provide some entertainment for 
 them. There must be an orchestra, or a stereo- 
 scope, or a collation. I do not say, and I do not 
 
" 'tis fifty years since." 95 
 
 think, that this is to be regretted. It is a piece of 
 natural evolution. But it is a good sign of the 
 contrast between those days and these. 
 
 Now, what has been gained in these fifty years? 
 To speak first, and very briefly, of visible methods, 
 of palpable things, and of the outside. I spoke of 
 the immense physical advance. That physical ad- 
 vance has reacted to swell the intellectual forces 
 which produced it. Thus there are better school- 
 houses, and more; better hospitals, and more; 
 better parks and boulevards and public gardens, 
 and more ; better public galleries, and more ; bet- 
 ter pictures on the walls, and more ; and, espe- 
 cially, better books, and more ; better libraries, and 
 more. One might spend a course of lectures in 
 showing what are the moral and religious advan- 
 tages of such an institution as our Public Library, 
 or of the evening-school system in Boston, or of 
 " Harper's Monthly Magazine," or of the " Youth's 
 Companion," or of the Chautauqua Reading 
 Course, — all of which represent absolute additions 
 in the higher training of men and women which 
 have been achieved in the last fifty years. 
 
 But these are mere outside signs of the machin- 
 ery of intellectual force. The reality, that which 
 has eternal interest, is the tide wave of moral force, 
 of which such intellectual methods are like so 
 many drops of white spray. This new force comes 
 in with freedom, as soon as you emancipate man- 
 kind. The black man of Carolina is a different 
 
96 
 
 man to-day, in every fibre of his being, from what 
 his father was, who crouched and struggled and 
 lied under the lash only thirty years ago. And 
 that is only a little type of the change which 
 comes over every one, — man, woman, and child, 
 — when, as by a miracle, instead of believing 
 that he is born of hell, or trying to, he knows 
 that he is born of heaven. For one century, 
 children and their fathers are taught in their boy- 
 hood, and from the altar every week the lesson is 
 repeated, that they are children of wrath and in- 
 capable of good. In another century their chil- 
 dren and children's children are taught from the 
 same altars that they are children of God, are 
 partakers of His nature, and fellow workmen with 
 Him. History and literature join in the lesson, the 
 songs of childhood, and the appeals of prophets. 
 Every voice and every example proclaim to men 
 that they have an infinite horizon, infinite privilege, 
 infinite duty, and infinite power. New life is in 
 the appeal. It is as when the frozen and hungry 
 columns of Napoleon, who have been stumbling 
 and staggering up through the snows of an Alpine 
 pass, turn the summit at last, see sunny Italy be- 
 fore them, and hear the Marseillaise sounding to 
 beat time for them as they rush down. It is no 
 wonder, indeed, that the united forces of mankind, 
 be they rich or poor, be they quick or stupid, move 
 with a new energy, and achieve what has not been 
 dreamed of, when they eat of such food, when they 
 
"'tis fifty years since." 97 
 
 drink such elixir, when they breathe such air, and 
 when close before them they see the verdure and 
 the beauty of such a future. Your libraries, your 
 parks, your schools, your hospitals, are all, of 
 course, accounted for. 
 
 With every invention by which you set an 
 intelligent man to attend a machine, where you 
 had a drudge serving by his muscle, you have 
 changed a slave to a freeman. The man who was 
 shovelling out the manure from the stables of the 
 railway, and is asked one day to fit himself to 
 the care of the electrical machinery which takes the 
 place of the horses, — you have lifted him in 
 the grade of intelligent being by your invention. 
 The man who drilled rock fifty years ago in a stone 
 quarry, sees his son lying on the ground in the 
 same quarry directing twenty steam-drills, which do 
 twenty times as much work as he did, and the son 
 perhaps reads Browning or Epictetus, as the little 
 engine drills for him. You change the very qual- 
 ity of the man. In the fifty years I am reviewing, 
 you have been every year freeing your own laborers 
 as you made them workmen, — men who by the 
 power of spirit used the dead world of which they 
 are masters. Here was a victory of all our region 
 in the nation which more than parallels the 
 emancipation of the blacks, the enlargement of 
 the privileges of the serfs of Russia. 
 
 And such a victory is worthless unless the work- 
 man knows where his power comes from, and con- 
 
98 " 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 secrates it to eternal purpose ; unless the child of 
 God knows he is child of God, — nay, knows that 
 because he is child of God, he is omnipotent with 
 God's own almightiness. " Shall I drug this 
 body which God gives me for a tool, — drug 
 it or poison it — I who am his son?" " Shall I 
 cheat that stranger, who is overloaded with this 
 care, — or not, — cheat him who is the son of God, 
 engaged in God's affairs?" Send out your boys 
 alive with such a life. Let them know what is 
 a possible Worcester County or a possible Massa- 
 chusetts ; what we mean when we talk of the reign 
 of God, or of the Commonwealth of Christ. Let 
 them for themselves make the picture of homes 
 without contagion, almshouses without vice, vil- 
 lage streets without temptation, prisons without 
 prisoners, drudgery of the body changed to honest 
 work for the mind, and of the enjoyment of the 
 best instead of the lowest appetite. Let them for 
 themselves forecast the twentieth century as the 
 beginning of the infinite future. Let them know 
 that they have infinite power with which to bring 
 in this future ; and then you shall see the miracles 
 which they can work. One almost says that num- 
 bers are nothing; that whether a hundred or a 
 thousand engage in such forward movement, vic- 
 tory is sure. It is as sure as it was to the eleven 
 whom the Saviour commissioned on the mountain, 
 or to the hundred and twenty who left the upper 
 chamber to bring in his kingdom. You are in 
 
"'tis fifty years since." 99 
 
 alliance with the infinite power. It is as when you 
 harness gravitation for one of your earthly affairs, 
 — when the train of coal runs down the incline 
 from the mountain to the valley, because all the 
 attractive power of the whole mass of the earth 
 drives it on its way. It does not need your push- 
 ing or pulling, because it is under the infinite con- 
 trol of infinite law. 
 
 The work, then, of the century has not been 
 simply the bringing of intellect to bear on the pro- 
 cesses which change matter. It is not simply that 
 the brain of a cunning man transforms a bit of pig- 
 iron into the delicate hair-spring which makes my 
 watch my oracle. It goes to a stage vastly higher 
 than this, for which this is only a convenient illus- 
 tration. In this country, when we made the Con- 
 stitution, we freed men of all sorts and conditions 
 from every tie of feudalism, from every tradition 
 of artificial authority. We bade every man run for 
 himself, and go as he chose. In that physical 
 emancipation we made the first step. Then, side 
 by side with John Adams and Sam Adams and 
 the rest, who wrought this emancipation, came in 
 such men as Chauncy and Ballou, and Buck- 
 minister and Channing, and the others whom I 
 have named, who proclaimed the spiritual emanci- 
 pation, who broke to pieces those harder fetters 
 which chained men, like Prometheus, to the rock. 
 They slew the vulture, shall I say, which was 
 gnawing at his vitals, and he stood free and erect 
 
100 "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 as the son of God, even as Jesus Christ had said 
 he was eighteen centuries before. It is in the 
 joy of that emancipation that you have the real 
 life of the America of the nineteenth century. It is 
 in proportion as men know that they are not con- 
 demned, and cannot be condemned, as they know 
 that they are partners and partakers of the crea- 
 tive, infinite power, — it is in that proportion that 
 they invent more cunningly, that they administer 
 more skilfully, that they lead more courageously. 
 And the blessing came. It has given the fresh- 
 ness and joy which is characteristic of our emi- 
 gration, of our social order, let me say of our 
 political, and even our commercial, associations. 
 Cynics speak bitterly of the happy-go-lucky habit 
 of our people ; it is born from their political 
 freedom, and from the certainty, slowly working 
 its way, that they are heirs of infinite power. For 
 the fifty years which are before you, here is the 
 lesson and the encouragement, that you and 
 yours rely on such infinite strength. You are to 
 harness the everlasting powers to draw your 
 chariots across the causeways you are building. 
 You are to be satisfied with victories no less than 
 those which belong to the omnipotence of the 
 sons and daughters of a present God. 
 
 In all the progress which half a century brings 
 about, this beautiful town has fully shared, and 
 more than shared. I was so fortunate, for ten 
 of the best years of that half-century, to live in 
 
"'tis fifty years since." ioi 
 
 our dear town of Worcester, so truly the heart of 
 the Commonwealth, so that I knew personally of 
 this and that detail of your prosperity. I knew 
 of the re-birth and of the strength of our own Uni- 
 tarian church ; I knew of the prosperity of the con- 
 gregation by whose courtesy we assemble in this 
 venerable edifice to-day ; I knew when Berlin be- 
 came one of the musical centres of the Common- 
 wealth ; I knew of the establishment there of one 
 and another form of manufacture belonging to that 
 varied industry which is remembered by all true 
 statesmen as being a necessity of a high Chris- 
 tian civilization. Whenever I have heard of the 
 cheerfulness, of the elegance, or of the prosperity 
 of this town, my mind has gone back to the days 
 when it gave so kindly a welcome to a green, inex- 
 perienced boy, who had been sent of a sudden to 
 fill an important place which should have been 
 filled by another. All this prosperity of yours 
 is founded, remember, upon freedom. It is the 
 freedom of the sons of God and the daughters of 
 God, which gives us everything we have which is 
 worth having. It is this which changes the drudge 
 into the fellow workman with the Almighty. It is 
 this which makes man also to be a creator. It is 
 when all men are thus truly free, and live in the 
 service which is perfect freedom, that the King- 
 dom of Heaven comes. 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? 
 
 Psalm cxix. 9. 
 
 It is a very natural demand. It may speak in 
 words or not. But no one whose life is on any 
 system can fail to make it. I am a conscious part 
 of a conscious universe. How shall I, personally, 
 take my share. How shall I do what there is to 
 do? How shall I, if I am to take that old phrase, 
 " Live to God's glory, and enter into his joy " ? 
 
 I am going to speak in some detail of specific 
 methods in this affair. I am tempted to do so by 
 a letter which I received not long ago from an 
 old parishioner who is now far away. He says, 
 " Our minister preaches to us about sociology, 
 about the improvement of society. But this does 
 not interest me much. What interests me is per- 
 sonal religion." It is some time since I had the 
 letter; but I will confess that it set me to wonder- 
 ing whether I preach too much about sociology, 
 or the improvement of society, about scarlet fever 
 and drainage, about evening schools and associated 
 charities. We must not make any such mistake 
 here. We must not study engines, without knowl- 
 edge of the expansion of steam, which is the 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 103 
 
 power that drives the engine. We must not have 
 any sermons here which shall not somehow answer 
 the question of this text. Somehow they must all 
 show how God is in man, and man is in God. 
 They must all show " the identity of all spiritual 
 essence and all spiritual life." All of them must 
 show that if man works well, it is because God 
 works in him; that if this century is a better 
 century than the last century, it is because God 
 has had His own way in this century. And if we 
 highly resolve here on any enterprise we will 
 undertake, whether for improving the Sixteenth 
 Ward or for sending missionaries to Japan, it must 
 be because we who are here are born of God and 
 must return to God, because our power is His 
 power, and His power is ours. 
 
 To-day, at all events, we will make no mistake. 
 We will try to set in order specific methods by 
 which successful men have made their life divine 
 lives or cleansed their ways. Method is not all, 
 but it is something; and, though I may not mean 
 to wear another man's coat, it may be of use to 
 me to know how and where and of what material 
 it was made. And here I will say, that, as far as 
 reading goes in this business, I have personally 
 gained more from reading the lives of successful 
 men and women, and knowing what their habits 
 were, and how those habits were formed, than I 
 have from any systems or axioms regarding virtue 
 or life. Take this very 119th Psalm. It appears 
 
104 PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 to contain twenty-four answers to this question. 
 In the original, every line of the first answer 
 began with the letter A ; every line of the second 
 answer began with the letter B. Now I do not 
 believe that, for practical use, all those answers 
 together can be compared with the value of one of 
 Plutarch's Lives, which gives some real incidents of 
 the struggle of some good man with adversity. 
 
 " Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his 
 way? " or, as we put it, how shall he make his way 
 one of the roadways of Infinite Life? How shall 
 he share in the universe? How shall he walk with 
 God? We will begin when he begins, as he starts 
 in the morning. As matter of practical direction, 
 I should say that he had better predetermine, 
 carefully, and by infinite law and purpose, at what 
 minute of every day he will make that beginning. 
 " I will be as regular in my daily business as the 
 sun is in his, or the moon in hers. I have matters 
 to attend to quite as important as the sun or the 
 moon has, and I will not have them shoved on one 
 side or the other by such accidents as the warmth 
 of the bed, the darkness of the morning, or the 
 laziness of my body." I lay down this law for 
 myself, or God and I lay it down together after due 
 deliberation. But, once made, it is a determination, 
 to be changed only for visible, for real, and for 
 definite cause. Of course, I do not mean to say 
 that it is of any great importance whether a man's 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 105 
 
 coffee be warm or cold when he comes to break- 
 fast. But I do mean to say that it is of the first 
 importance to him to live by law, and not by 
 whim ; to live by what is determined, rather than 
 for what is agreeable. And there is no better way 
 for him to enter on such a life, and to place him- 
 self in the great company of those who determine, 
 instead of drifting in the company of bubbles and 
 of thistle-seeds, than the making for himself a law, 
 and keeping a law, as to the moment when he will 
 begin the business of working with his God. 
 
 You will not suspect me of valuing highly de- 
 tails of ritual. But I will say that he is a fortunate 
 young man, or she a fortunate young woman, who 
 has been so trained — by Milton's Paradise Lost, 
 perhaps, or by some wise father, or by some lov- 
 ing mother — that the first thought of daily life is 
 of habit and of course, the thought of the presence 
 of God. As he pulls up his curtain to see if the 
 sky is gray or rosy, he " practises the presence of 
 God," as Jeremy Taylor's fine phrase has it. It is 
 the present God who shines in the sun, or it is the 
 present God who shapes the snow in crystals, or 
 it is He who determines that the sky shall be gray, 
 or it is He whose spectrum tinges it with gold. 
 " Here we are again, dear Father of mine, — with 
 this day of infinite life before us, in this same 
 dear old world, in which we worked together 
 yesterday and which gave me so much yesterday. 
 I have not to go out alone." God has sent the 
 
106 PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 sun to warm me. He has sent these snow-flakes 
 for my pleasure to-day and for my bread next 
 summer; or He bade the robin sing to me whom I 
 heard just now. This sense of companionship is 
 prayer. To remember that we are together, God 
 and I. Nay, that we are one, I and He ; that 
 my purpose to-day is His purpose, and that 
 His object is mine. This in itself is to start 
 cheerful and strong. Given such memory or 
 certainty of one's large relationships and perfect 
 possibilities, and the inconveniences, nay, the dis- 
 comforts, of life hardly assert themselves. One 
 rates them for what they are worth, which is not 
 much, even at the worst. One starts on life with 
 the omnipotence which of right belongs to him. 
 
 " They find they can, because they think they can." 
 
 As I said, I do not want to attach much impor- 
 tance to outside details of ritual; but here is a 
 good place to repeat what I quote so often here, — 
 John Weiss's practical instruction. The practical 
 instruction of an idealist, a true spiritualist like 
 him, who ridiculed forms except as they carried 
 spiritual truth, is specially worth remembering. 
 He said, " Take care you are alone every day, 
 somewhere, for five minutes, in which you can 
 listen and see what God has to say to you." I 
 recollect perfectly that either in the sermon in 
 which he said this, which I heard in the First 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 107 
 
 Church in Portland, in Maine, or in some private 
 conversation, he gave me the almost visible form 
 of a boy in a wholesale grocer's house, going up 
 into the fifth story of a store on Long wharf, and 
 sitting there in the dust and among the cobwebs 
 till he should hear what this Present Spirit who 
 moves worlds, who. directs empires, who makes 
 mothers love their children, and babies love their 
 mothers, — what this Holy Spirit has for him also 
 to do this living day. It is this side of prayer, 
 this listening side, this half of prayer, let me say, 
 which is not enough regarded in the wordy and 
 fussy discussions about prayer. People ask how 
 it is possible that this Infinite Spirit should care 
 for a speck like me, and should listen to me. 
 Well, my reply always is : " It is just like Him." 
 But, set that all on one side. You say God can- 
 not hear you, and that therefore you will not 
 speak to Him. That makes no reason why you 
 cannot hear Him. There is every reason why, with 
 conscious determination of your own, you should, 
 in every new day, find what is the set and drift 
 of that infinite river of Life in which you are, and 
 in which you will swim with the current or 
 against it. 
 
 The race of men to which we belong is often 
 accused of arrogance. The earlier travellers 
 from Europe in America, a hundred years ago, 
 were annoyed, to the last degree, by the extrava- 
 gance, as they called it, of the settlers, — as they 
 
IOS PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 called people who had been here for a century 
 and a half, — when they described what was to be 
 in America in the future. It is to be observed, in 
 passing, that no man of them prophesied half or 
 a quarter what has happened. What I think 
 important in this habit of prophecy is the cer- 
 tainty that it must have arisen largely from the 
 general sense, at least among the people of Xew 
 England origin, that they had divine help in the 
 daily business they had in hand. They had not 
 said for more than a century that they were living 
 " to the glory of God," without having the real 
 idea of God's help coming into their daily lives. 
 Mow, a man who rises early in the morning, with 
 such habits of life and such high inspiration as I 
 have been trying to describe, does feel that he has 
 an infinite ally. He does not feel as if he were 
 going out only to measure his hundred and sixty 
 pounds of weight against the weight of the world 
 or of the universe. He feels that he, himself an 
 infinite soul, he, the son of an almighty God, is 
 going out to attend to certain affairs which that 
 God has in hand. To such a man " there's no 
 such word as ' fail.' " He looks forward cheerfully 
 and bravely to the day which he has before him. 
 
 And here, rather reluctantly, I must leave the 
 detail of the business I have undertaken. I must 
 not try to say how such a man meets his family at 
 breakfast, how he takes the street-car and goes 
 down town to his office or to his workshop. I 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 109 
 
 must not speak of his relations to his clerks or to 
 his masters, to the people under him or the people 
 above him. It must be enough for our purpose 
 now to say that he is not alone ; that, in the high 
 companionship which he has invoked, and which 
 he has won, he will go about his business cheer- 
 fully, bravely, and with that spirit which, as I 
 said, is sometimes called arrogance by the people 
 who do not understand whence it springs. You 
 cannot make such a man believe that the breaking 
 of a linchpin is going to stop the movement of 
 the world ; you cannot make him believe that 
 the failure of delivery of a particular letter is a 
 thing important enough for him to go into a rage 
 about, and make everybody in the concern un- 
 happy. If he feels the presence of God, if he 
 has sought and has found it, by whatever method 
 of communion, he enters upon these affairs of 
 counting-room or workshop from a higher point 
 of view than one does who comes in thinking of 
 " I," and " me," and " mine," and " myself." 
 Dickens's presentation of the two Cheeryble 
 brothers — a real study from life — is a fair 
 enough illustration of the good heart, or the 
 courage which we need not call audacity or 
 arrogance, which belongs to such a man. 
 
 I have said already that for my own part I 
 value greatly the biographies of the Cheerybles 
 and other divinely led people who have had to do 
 with the world. And in giving advice to young 
 
110 PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 people I am always begging them not to be satis- 
 fied simply by the written biographies, in which 
 you have always to see the life through the 
 stained glass of the creature who wrote the book, 
 whoever he may happen to be. But try to get 
 your biographies at first hand. Try to make 
 yourself acquainted with people whom you find 
 brave, good-natured, and high-toned. Do not go 
 to such a man to say, " I want you to tell me the 
 secret of your life ; " but, if he will let you, get 
 into companionship or intimacy with him. Xever 
 you fear but the secret of his life will work its 
 way into your life ; — and you will certainly find 
 that the man who takes life bravely and successfully 
 is the man who does not choose to look at it as if 
 it were a mere machine of the limited organism 
 which belongs to this body. No ; he chooses to 
 look at it as a life swayed by an infinite being, 
 who is in the closest relationship with the Power 
 that works for righteousness, with that Holy Spirit 
 who controls and steadily improves the world. 
 
 We occupy ourselves quite as much as is worth 
 while — perhaps rather more than is worth while 
 — with the outside critical discussions as to these 
 four Gospels, — whether the first Gospel was 
 written by Matthew or by another man who had 
 the same name; whether the fourth Gospel were 
 written in the year 96 or in the year 152. I 
 rather think we have got through with the worst 
 of this, and that in the next generation we shall 
 
PERSONAL RELIGION. 1 1 I 
 
 be more ready than men have ever been in the 
 past to take the reality of the message, without 
 asking too many questions about the shape of the 
 letters or the color of the ink. It is not hard to 
 get at the real secret of those four books, and the 
 other books, only too few, which give the secret 
 of the Life of Lives. It makes no difference to 
 you whether there were two blind men at the gate 
 of Jericho or whether there was one, or whether 
 the gate were the north gate or the south gate. 
 You can do very well without distressing yourself 
 as to such detail. If you can get into some such 
 notion of the life of Jesus Christ as we may sup- 
 pose Paul had, or Lydia at Philippi, or Titus in 
 Crete, or fifty other of these people named in the 
 Bible, who never saw Jesus, whether in Nazareth, 
 in Capernaum, or in Jerusalem, you will be sure 
 to find that, in proportion as that life becomes 
 real to you, does the habit of that life become the 
 habit of yours. You will see what he means 
 when he says, " It is not I who speak." You will 
 see what he means when he says, " Take no 
 thought what ye shall say, for the Father shall 
 tell you what ye shall say." You will see what 
 he means when he says, " The works are not mine, 
 they are the works of the Father who sent me ; " 
 what he meant when he said, " Get thee behind 
 me, Satan ; thou art an offence unto me." For 
 you will know what this is, — that he went into 
 the mountain to pray, that the disciples kuew how 
 
112 PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 close was his questioning and his answering, that 
 they understood the infinite value of his com- 
 munion with an infinite God. And you will find 
 it easy to give yourself to the flow of the infinite 
 life. These are great words, " to live and move 
 and have our being in our God ; " but there is 
 this experience of a few months out of a year or 
 two in Galilee and in Judea, in which we see how 
 a carpenter, who was the son of a carpenter, took 
 on the majesty of life and dignity and omnipotence, 
 because and as he went into the desert to pray, 
 because and as he used infinite forces for the 
 things he had to do. I have never wondered that 
 after-ages worshipped him. They worshipped 
 him, if you please, as men worshipped the 
 meteorite stone which fell from heaven at 
 Ephesus, because to them it was incomprehensible 
 that in these streets of ours, in these highways and 
 by-ways, there should be going and coming one 
 like themselves who was so alive with infinite 
 being. But to you and me this ought not to be 
 incomprehensible. You and I ought to know what 
 the incarnation is of the Infinite Life in a son of 
 man, and how that son of man finds out that he is 
 a son of God. It is for you and me, in the lonely 
 communion of every morning, in the tender gath- 
 ering of every family, in the cheerful and om- 
 nipotent sway of the detail of early life, by 
 commanding the power of an almighty spirit, — 
 it is for you and me to enter into the life of God's 
 sons and daughters. 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL. 
 
 " Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image. . . . 
 Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor worship them." 
 
 Exodus xx. 4, 5. 
 
 WE are apt to say that we have come as far as 
 this commandment bids. We may be irreverent, 
 we say, we may be undevout, we may not wor- 
 ship God ; but certainly we do not worship idols. 
 Because in this church there is no big stone which 
 fell from heaven for you to hang garlands on, or 
 before which you might burn incense, we feel as 
 if there were no idolatrous worship here. 
 
 Still I heard a good address the other day on 
 Modern Idolatry. The speaker, for our condem- 
 nation, spoke of men's idolatry of beauty, of their 
 idolatry of novelty, and even of their idolatry of 
 liberty. In each case he meant that people were 
 satisfied with an object of worship and love which 
 is less than God. It is not large as the universe, 
 it is not far-reaching as eternity. So he showed 
 us, and he showed us very well, that our passion 
 for the beautiful, or our passion for novelty, shuts 
 off the infinite life with God, and for God's pur- 
 
114 MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 pose, of which we are capable, and to which we 
 might aspire. 
 
 But idolatry thus spoken of is simply mean 
 worship or false worship. It is not the worship of 
 a thing. Idolatry, as the second commandment 
 speaks of it, is the worship of the work of our own 
 hands, and it is the worship of something physical or 
 material. We say, of course, that it is absurd for 
 man to make for himself a god. The old prophecies 
 are full of satire and contempt for those who bow 
 down before their own handiwork. Indeed, you 
 might ask how can worship, which is a spiritual act, 
 be rendered to matter, which, whatever it is, is 
 handled by spirit, controlled by spirit, moulded by 
 spirit, at its will. Yes, you can say all this, and 
 you do say it with pride and indignation. But all 
 the same, man, the spirit, is housed in a material 
 body. Man, the spirit, uses the forces of a ma- 
 terial world, and it does happen, though he be 
 ashamed to own it, that when man, the spirit, has 
 framed and handled matter as he will, either in 
 vanity, or in dulness, or in sheer folly, he some- 
 times worships the thing which he has made, and 
 the worship of a thing is simple and pure idolatry. 
 
 The most familiar illustration — I think it has pre- 
 sented itself already to every one of you — is the 
 miser's idolatry ; his miserable worship of physi- 
 cal wealth. It has been forced on this community 
 at this moment by the wretched and worthless life 
 of Mr. Gould, and by his worship of that which 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 1 1 5 
 
 is worthless in itself, unless a man shows he knows 
 how to use it. I will say, in passing, that I have 
 read, with a certain horror, what amounts to advice 
 in some of the journals, to young men and young 
 women, to go and do likewise, to lead lives as 
 mean and low as his seems to have been. But 
 I am not going to speak on the worship of wealth, 
 gold and silver, and bonds and railroads. I should 
 say what I am about to say, even if our attention 
 had not been called that way. The worship of 
 wealth is only one illustration among a hundred 
 of the danger which the second commandment 
 points out, and the sin which it condemns. And you 
 and I ought to go much lower down than the study 
 of avarice, or miser-y, or mammon-worship. What 
 we need is that eternal principle which shall save 
 us from mammon-worship, and Baal-worship, and 
 Moloch-worship, and lust-worship, and Bacchus- 
 worship ; from the worship of names, and from the 
 worship of books, just as it saved these Jews from 
 the worship of pictures and the worship of images. 
 The danger is in any worship of a thing. I must 
 not let a thing come between me and my God, 
 just as I would not build a room for my library 
 and cut a hole for my window, and then fill that 
 window up with a pane of black marble ; just as, 
 on the other hand, I would beg the sunlight to 
 come in, white and unstained in all its glory, just 
 so must I come to God, child with Father, Father 
 with child, with no prison-grating between, with 
 
Il6 MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 no silk, no wool, nor linen, breast to breast we 
 must come, heart to heart, life to life. There must 
 be no name between ; there must be no person 
 between ; there must be no book between ; there 
 must be no incense between ; no image and no 
 thing, else I slide into idolatry. 
 
 The Saviour went wholly beneath condemnation 
 of the carver's trade. It is most tender and pa- 
 thetic, his condemnation, indirect as well as direct, 
 of the more subtle form of idolatry which ruined 
 scribes and Pharisees, nay, half the Jewish nation, 
 in his day. They had no statues of God, no 
 Phidian Jove, no Venus by Praxiteles. So far 
 they had obeyed the letter of the commandment. 
 But still, it was not the Holy Spirit whom they 
 worshipped ; it was not the Infinite Being of be- 
 ings. Like the Samaritans, their leaders wor- 
 shipped they knew not what. They worshipped a 
 name. This slaughter of oxen and doves, this wav- 
 ing of incense vases and singing of hosannas, was 
 the worship of the word "Jehovah," of the name 
 of God, like what seems and so often is the thought- 
 less, careless cry of the Mussulmans, " Allah il 
 Allah ! " in those same streets to-day. Jesus begs us 
 not to sink into this word-worship. His first appeal 
 to our Father in heaven, to the Holy Spirit, is 
 that He will save us from this word-worship. 
 " Hallowed be Thy name," the first ejaculation of 
 the Lord's prayer, the first promise of him who 
 prays, or his first petition, as you please to call 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 117 
 
 it, is the wish that the name itself of God may 
 not become an image, may not be anything like 
 a stained window, that the word may not be a 
 thing between my God and me. Hallowed means 
 transparent. " That Thy name may be transparent, 
 Oh, my Father! so that in Thine own Holy Spirit 
 Thou shalt come to me, not hindered." And 
 think, or take the book and read, that you may 
 see how carefully, how constantly, he speaks now 
 of Our Father, now of The Spirit, refusing to use 
 the Scripture name "Jehovah," or any other word 
 which might separate Father from child, or child 
 from Father. If he uses any, see how he guards 
 it with persistent care. 
 
 Look carefully through any series of conversa- 
 tions in the Gospels, and you will see how the 
 people who were around him, and heard him 
 talk, must have been freed from this danger of ad- 
 dressing their worship to a word. And when, on 
 the other hand, in our day, one sees a congrega- 
 tion of people nodding their heads because the 
 word " Jesus " is read in a service, one understands 
 exactly what he meant when he warned them of 
 the danger of worshipping a name. 
 
 But all the warnings of the Saviour and his 
 apostles have, in their turn, been buried under the 
 dust of our idolatries. Eagerly they say, in one 
 word and another, that the letter kills and the 
 spirit gives life. But this is very hard doctrine. 
 It is a great deal easier to pay visible homage to 
 
I I S MODERN IDOLATRY 
 
 the letter than it is to inspire one's own life with 
 the spirit. And so the world has found it. The 
 same world which is willing to bow the head phys- 
 ically at the name of Jesus, because Paul said, in 
 high rhetoric, that every knee should bow at that 
 name, — this same world, in that mixture of 
 laziness and superstition, has determined to wor- 
 ship the letter of the Bible. That is to say, it has 
 taken a certain book, consisting of the Old Testa- 
 ment and the New Testament, and it has made of 
 this book an idol, exactly as the people at Ephesus 
 took the meteor stone which fell, and built around 
 it the temple of Diana. Ask this same world what 
 this Bible is, and where they found it, and the re- 
 ply does not justify the homage. The reply is 
 that it is a book made up from thirty-nine books 
 in early Hebrew literature, and twenty-seven books 
 from early Christian literature. Ask who selected 
 them, or who gave them the authority which is 
 claimed for them, and there is no answer. What 
 is very curious is, that no assembly or council of 
 the Christian churches ever came to any agree- 
 ment on the subject until the Catholic Council of 
 Trent in the year 1545, and that the list which that 
 council made is rejected by that Protestant half of 
 the church which is most persistent in the letter- 
 worship which I am describing. Whoever did 
 select the books, everybody admits that they were 
 men of recent times, who are confessed to have had 
 every sort of human weakness, of whom nobody 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 119 
 
 can pretend that they were specially inspired 
 except as we are all inspired. On this slight 
 foundation the delusion and superstition have grown 
 up which make people worship the words which 
 may be found in those books. Worse than this, 
 when these words are translated into the English 
 language, by other men equally fallible, this same 
 church will go so far as to select one particular 
 translation, and to the English words in that trans- 
 lation pay the same sort of homage. Now this 
 proceeding comes precisely under the head of 
 idolatry. One might say that the types in the 
 Bible Society's office were literally graven images, 
 before which people have determined that they 
 will bow down and worship. The ecclesiastical 
 trials now in progress in Cincinnati and in the 
 city of New York are merely an illustration of a 
 determination of a set of hard men to hold, in visi- 
 ble practice, to the idolatry of the letter in place of 
 the inspiration of the spirit. 
 
 If only it were Professor Smith and Professor 
 Briggs who suffered under the devices of such 
 idolaters, I might not think it necessary to speak 
 of such matters here. We should say they were 
 learned men who had taken the chances. If they 
 did not want to take the discipline of the Presby- 
 terian Church, we should say they might step out 
 of the Presbyterian Church. We should say that 
 the Presbyterian Church is a great organism, which 
 might be well compared with one of the great 
 
120 MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 political organisms, such organisms as choose 
 presidents. This is an organization which arro- 
 gates to itself also the pretension of a certain 
 divine authority which, so far as I know, no politi- 
 cal club in this country has yet done. But I am 
 talking of this matter now because the danger 
 goes a great deal deeper. The Bible itself is de- 
 throned when you handle it as Aaron handled his 
 molten calf, or as the Ephesians handled that 
 meteorite stone. No man, woman, or child will 
 get the glow of the Bible, its warmth, or its light, 
 or its inspiration, who is thus counting the dots on 
 the letter z, or the crosses on the letter t. In the 
 moment that the Protestant Church, hard-pressed 
 by the spiritualism of its Roman Catholic oppo- 
 nents, descended to the worship of the letter of 
 the Bible, in that moment this book began to lose 
 its real vital hold on the hearts and consciences of 
 men. And when in the place of inspiration you 
 have substituted idolatry, — when the child who 
 came seeking for a mother's kiss meets the hard, 
 unchanging grin of a carved image of stone, — 
 you have, for that child, ruined his Bible. 
 
 I do not use language too bitter when I speak of 
 the terror which such idolatry wakes right around 
 us here to-day. In circles into which you and I 
 can go if we choose, to see such things with our 
 own eyes, persons who show good common sense 
 and right conscience in the affairs of life, here in 
 Boston, are at this moment worrying and distress- 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 121 
 
 ing themselves about the literal interpretation of 
 mysterious prophecies, written, for instance, in the 
 book of Daniel. From these supposed prophecies, 
 they are taught, certain historians and mathemati- 
 cians have proved that this world is to come to its 
 end within the next twenty years, that the Saviour 
 is to ride into the midst of us in a chariot of fire, 
 that the elect are to be taken to live with God, and 
 the damned to be sunk into torment everlasting. 
 The echo of this delusion meets you every day, 
 if you will open your ears to it. 
 
 Now, what is it all founded on? Here is the 
 book of Daniel, written nobody knows by whom, 
 nobody pretends to know. The men who have 
 studied it to most purpose would tell you that it 
 was written several hundred years after the his- 
 torical events which it professes to describe. In 
 another book, which may be found in the Apoc- 
 rypha, so called, are certain additions made to the 
 book as it stands in the Old Testament. The sepa- 
 ration of the two seems to depend simply on the 
 fact that one of them was written in the Hebrew 
 language and the other is found only in a Greek 
 text. The writer of this book, whoever he is, 
 describes four monarchies, and he prophesies that 
 the Messiah's kingdom shall be the fifth monarchy, 
 of which the establishment was to be very soon. 
 In the eighteen hundred years since Jesus lived 
 and died there have been constantly people turning 
 up who felt sure that this fifth monarchy, or king- 
 
122 MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 dom of the Messiah, was to come in in their own 
 time. One such set of people is now ce 
 that it is going to come about the end of this 
 century. 
 
 How is this conclusion wrought out? Does the 
 book of Daniel even say that, at a period corre- 
 sponding to the year I S95 , or to the year 1 900, such 
 an event shall come? Nobody pretends that it 
 makes any such statement. But it is said that it 
 makes this and that statement which, when we com- 
 pare it with modern history, or with the history of 
 the Middle Ages, or with Gibbon's " Decline and 
 Fall," comes out on the results which are proclaimed 
 to-day — proclaimed, very likely, from pulpits at 
 the moment that I am speaking these words. That 
 is to say, I take from the book of Daniel such a 
 text as this: "At the time of the end shall the 
 king of the South push at him, and the king of the 
 Xorth shall come against him like a whirlwind, with 
 chariots and with horsemen and with many ships, 
 and he shall enter into the countries, and shall over- 
 throw and shall pass over ; he shall enter also into 
 the glorious land, and many countries shall be 
 overthrown. But these shall escape out of his 
 hand, even Edom and Moab and the chief of the 
 children of Edom. He shall stretch forth his hand 
 also upon the countries, and the land of Egypt shall 
 not escape." (xi. 40-42.) Then for my purpose I 
 prove that this king of the Xorth and this king of 
 the South were such and such persons — Napoleon, 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. 123 
 
 perhaps, or Frederick the Great, or Charles the 
 Fifth, or Tamerlane. Observe, I do not get any 
 of these historical facts from this so-called inspired 
 book of Daniel. Nobody pretends that Gibbon's 
 history, or Scott's "Napoleon," or Rollin's " Uni- 
 versal History" were written by the pen of God. 
 But because somebody has said — and nobody 
 knows who said it first — that these words in the 
 book of Daniel were written by the pen of God, I 
 mix them up with the annals which the last eigh- 
 teen hundred years have been producing. I dip 
 out of my mixture a cupful of what I call prophecy, 
 and then I tell people to prepare themselves to 
 meet the Saviour within a few years, because this 
 writer says, " They that be wise shall shine as the 
 brightness of the firmament, and they that turn 
 many to righteousness as the stars, forever and 
 ever." 
 
 Is it possible to conceive of more absolute wor- 
 ship of a thing? Is it possible to conceive a more 
 abject mixture of truth with error, of blackness 
 with whiteness, of light with darkness? And is 
 not here a terrible illustration of the danger that 
 comes upon men when, instead of listening quietly 
 and gently to know what the good God of heaven 
 has to say to them to-day, they choose to bring a 
 book between Him and them, and to inquire, in 
 lost dialects, what He said to somebody who lived 
 in the court of Cyrus? It is against exactly such 
 idolatry that the Saviour warned us, using once 
 
124 MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 and again the very words which Moses himself 
 uses, when he wrote down for all time this text 
 which I have cited from the second command- 
 ment. 
 
 Oh, if I landed on the coast of Guinea, and 
 found a black man and his wife and children 
 hanging garlands of flowers on some old carved 
 post, where their fathers had worshipped, and 
 theirs and theirs, — where ages on ages had tried 
 to show that man knows he is not all, that there 
 is Higher Power, perhaps Higher Love, — I could 
 at least understand, and certainly I could sym- 
 pathize. Nay, I think I know how I could talk 
 to those people, and lift their thought from the 
 created thing to the Spirit who creates. Theirs 
 is, at least, a respectable idolatry. 
 
 But when it is here ; when it is the boy who sat 
 on the bench with me at school ; when it is the 
 man who votes for good government at my side ; 
 when it is a man who can read and remember and 
 learn and teach; when he comes into my office 
 and talks to me about the four beasts and the ten 
 horns, and thinks that this is Religion, that it has 
 anything to do with worship, I tremble with an 
 awful horror. Really, I cannot reply to him. 
 Religion — it is God with man, and man with 
 God. I listen, and God speaks. I speak, and 
 God listens. It is not the ringing of bells. It is 
 not the bowing of the head or the knee. It is not 
 adding up the dates of the reigns of kings. It is 
 
MODERN IDOLATRY. I 25 
 
 not the looking out words in a dictionary. These 
 are all things. They are untransparent things. 
 They are unhallowed things ; I might say damnable 
 things. " Come out from them and be separate," 
 saith the Lord. Religion is to live with God, to 
 move in God, and in God to have your being. 
 He is a spirit, and they that worship Him must 
 worship Him in spirit, as in truth. 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 ■ Enter thou into the joy of thy lord." 
 
 Matt. xxv. 21. 
 
 THE exciting dramatic interest of the famous 
 novel of " Monte Cristo " results from the sharp 
 contrast between the introduction of the book and 
 what follows. You meet Monte Cristo first in one 
 of the cells of the Chateau d'lf, a castle-prison 
 which one passes on a rock in the harbor of Mar- 
 seilles as he goes to Leghorn. You live with 
 Monte Cristo long enough in this cell to know 
 what are the horrors of such lonely imprisonment. 
 And then, as by a miracle, Monte Cristo is free as 
 air; he has what Dumas thought an utterly Alad- 
 din-like fortune in his hands ; and the man who, 
 last week, was shut within four walls and had 
 hardly a ray of sunshine, is monarch, one might 
 say, of France, — a monarch, indeed, of the world. 
 He works such wonders as he will ; he goes as he 
 chooses, where he chooses ; he enters upon the 
 largest life which Dumas, in his extravagance, 
 could conceive. 
 
 If you will read rightly those parts of the Acts 
 of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, which 
 show his own personal sense of what his conver- 
 sion meant, you will find that you have just the 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 27 
 
 same sense of contrast as this in the famous 
 French novel. When Paul rejoices, in that jubi- 
 lant way of his, about the liberty in which Christ 
 sets him free, he is like Monte Cristo, surrounded 
 by thousands of those whom he had blessed by 
 his wealth, working some of the wonders which 
 seemed like miracles to a writer of the year 1840. 
 It would seem that Paul had been sent to Jeru- 
 salem to school when he was quite young. The 
 critics think he went back to Tarsus, after what 
 we should call his school-days were over, to re- 
 turn to Jerusalem again when he had determined 
 to enter the honorable company of the scribes 
 and Pharisees. Of the intense energy of this young 
 fellow, every church in Europe and America is 
 now the monument. Of his determination to 
 achieve something, — not only his life, but what 
 has followed his life, is in evidence. I do not 
 suppose that, as a school-boy, he felt so much 
 the oppression of formalism or Pharisaism. ' It is 
 when, as a young man, beginning to think of his 
 own effort, the screw pressed more closely every 
 day, and the fetters seemed more heavy. All 
 very young men are very conservative. Their 
 school themes and compositions are in accord 
 with all which they have read, and they are very 
 desirous of reproducing the old successes. But 
 there comes a time when one finds that the armor 
 his grandfather wore at Agincourt is not big 
 enough for him ; and that moment is one of the 
 
128 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 intense moments of life. To such a one as Paul, 
 there was a distinct prospect of what seemed 
 noble success, when he went up to Jerusalem for 
 what we should now call his theological studies, 
 which was for him the general study of a uni- 
 versity. " We will make this Jerusalem to be the 
 Rome of the world. We will show that moral 
 power, and spiritual power, such as are hid in our 
 scriptures, such as are instilled in every office of 
 our ritual, are nobler powers than these of Tibe- 
 rius, and can in the future sway armies and 
 conquer battles as they did in the days of Pharaoh 
 and Antiochus." With an aim no less, Paul goes 
 to his work, — to be told day by day that he is to 
 inquire into such futilities as the length of the sur- 
 plice which a choir-boy is to wear, or as to the 
 button of the door which shuts the cupboard in 
 which are the sacred rolls of the law. The first 
 time such an order is given to a young man he 
 does not resent it ; he says all is right, and he 
 obeys it, as a cadet at West Point obeys the order 
 which says that his clothes shall lie smoothly upon 
 the shelf of his bedroom. He says that detail is 
 necessary, if you will have completion. But it is 
 when, day after day, the Gamaliel or the Hillel of 
 the college has nothing to tell Paul but this detail 
 or that; it is when one and another new tradition of 
 the elders, claiming to be very old, is brought into 
 the course of study, that the young fellow begins to 
 look more and more grave ; that he talks less and 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 29 
 
 less freely with his companions ; that his idolatry of 
 his teachers exchanges itself for a grim respect and 
 a hard obedience. For Paul, at length, there came a 
 day when a flash of light swept across him. In one 
 blessed moment he found out that the letter kills 
 and the spirit gives light. In one moment he 
 flung away the armor of Agincourt and the gram- 
 mar of jots and tittles, and stood forth in the 
 liberty of the Holy Spirit. It was the liberty in 
 which Christ set him free. At the moment he 
 had no more immediate command of his new 
 riches, than Monte Cristo had when he was swim- 
 ming for his life in the harbor of Marseilles. Bu 
 the swimming is the swimming of a freeman ; 
 and from that moment Paul exults in his freedom 
 as only one could exult who had been handcuffed 
 in a prison cell. 
 
 In the parable from which I take this text, we 
 are left to imagine a similar emancipation. The 
 faithful servant has been faithful in little things ; 
 he has had a little money which he has invested 
 well, and he has made it into more money. But 
 the gist or essence of the parable is the showing 
 how, though the counters be small, the game 
 may be large. Though the things are few, the 
 faith and hope and love by which those things 
 are handled are still the essential and eternal 
 elements, — infinite in every relation of the life of 
 the child of God. To this steward, bred in the 
 simple and humble life of an olive-yard, far away 
 
130 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 from men, the great lord of the whole estate — 
 the duke, if you please, who sways that whole 
 province — speaks words of equality and friendly 
 courtesy. He has looked over the accounts, 
 and he is perfectly indifferent whether the ac- 
 counts be in pence, or in pounds, or in millions 
 of pounds. What he sees is the steady advance 
 from step to step ; the enlargement which, by 
 faith and hope and love, this honest fellow has 
 wrought, in the little store committed to him. 
 And he says to him, first, " Where you did rule 
 a farm, you shall rule a city. You have been at 
 work upon small things; you shall have the 
 management of large things." But he says much 
 more than this. He says, " From this time forward 
 you are as we are. You are not of those servants 
 who fulfil another's will. You are not of those 
 who must obey this or that precedent of service. 
 You are to enter into the joy of your lord. You 
 are to live this larger life which we, who are lords 
 of the earth, are living. You are to determine 
 your own precedents ; you are to lay down your 
 own systems, you are to conduct your own ad- 
 ministration ; you are to enter into this joy which 
 to freedom, and to freedom only, belongs." 
 
 And if you will take the solemn and glad 
 advance by which the pathetic talk of the Last 
 Supper sweeps along, from paragraph to para- 
 graph, you will find that there is the same 
 lesson of the joy of freedom. " Till now I have 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 3 I 
 
 called you servants ; but henceforth I call you 
 friends." The servant obeys this regulation or 
 that regulation ; the servant carries out this or 
 that detail as he has been bidden. But the friend 
 enters into the spirit of the work which is in- 
 trusted to him. The friends meet together with 
 one heart and one soul, almost indifferent as to 
 the uniform which they are wearing. And of the 
 sacred joy of which the Saviour speaks in that 
 parting discourse, it is clear to see that he meant 
 that those men should understand that in spirit, 
 when he was gone, they were to enjoy this 
 glorious liberty of the sons of God. They enter 
 now, for the first time, into that service which is 
 perfect freedom. 
 
 I have cited these four illustrations as the 
 simplest and sharpest way in which I can finish 
 what I was trying to say here a fortnight ago. I 
 reminded you of those mysterious words in the 
 beginning of the Westminster Catechism, as they 
 were laid down two hundred and fifty years ago 
 by the Westminster Assembly. Every child in 
 New England, for nearly two hundred years, was 
 asked on all sacred occasions, " What is the chief 
 end of man?" And every child was taught to 
 reply, " The chief end of man is to glorify God 
 and enjoy Him forever." It is a question hard to 
 answer, whether boy or girl had any very adequate 
 notion what the answer meant; but nothing is 
 more sure than what the men meant who wrote 
 
I $2 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 the answer. Of the first half of that answer I 
 spoke the other day. It is the lesson of this 
 second half which is taught in the simple illus- 
 trations which I have been citing. The chief end 
 of man is to enjoy God forever. That is the 
 answer of the Catechism. In our fashion of 
 speech, we state it differently. We say that a 
 man must "accept the universe." We say he 
 must live by infinite law. We say that the one 
 eternal word is " right," and that to that word he 
 must conform. But none of these phrases serves 
 us, if it do not include the cheerful, hearty, happy 
 sense of life really complete, of going and com- 
 ing with infinite satisfaction, of what Lord Hough- 
 ton calls " the joy of eventful living." This is 
 what Paul means when he says " Rejoice ever- 
 more ; " and that is what the Saviour means 
 when, to these stewards in the parable, he prom- 
 ises the joy of their lord. The larger life, the 
 infinite life, is not simply the correct movement 
 of a valve, which opens at the right instant be- 
 cause it obeys the pressure of a rod which is 
 driven by a precise law. More than that, above 
 that, and beyond that, it involves the exquisite 
 joy of the bird soaring in the heavens ; of the rose 
 at the perfect moment of its beauty ; of the baby 
 delighted when her mother returns to the nursery ; 
 of the hero who sees the flag flying on the staff 
 from which it had fallen. We are not simply to 
 seek in life a hard-and-fast obedience to regula- 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 33 
 
 tion ; that was the effort of Pharisee and scribe. 
 Rather are we to be sure, because we are the 
 children of God, that we can enter with infinite 
 purpose on infinite achievement, with the glad- 
 ness of infinite beings. We are not to be satisfied 
 until we enter into the joy of our Lord. 
 
 I have been selling across the counter a paper 
 of needles for five cents and a yard of tape for 
 one. I have done my best to see that if I helped 
 the life-work of the woman who bought the 
 needles, or the child who took home the tape, I 
 have entered into wider relations than these of the 
 shop. All the same, I have rejoiced, with joy 
 which seemed to know no end, when my master 
 came in and told me I was to have a fortnight's 
 vacation at the mountains or by the sea, — four- 
 teen days and fourteen nights when I need not 
 once cast up a line of figures ; need not once look 
 at a ticket of prices; need not once humor a 
 doubtful customer. I may go into the wilderness 
 and be alone with God. I may see how the pine- 
 trees grow. I may lie in their shade and hear 
 them sing. I may throw a chip into the water, 
 may trace and guide it part way to the infinite sea, 
 and may imagine my own voyage thither and to 
 the ends of the earth. I may lie on the mountain- 
 side all night, and when I wake in the dead silence 
 I may watch the movement of the stars above 
 me, and consider the part which my life plays in 
 the infinite movement of all these worlds. 
 
134 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 For my life is all knit in with God's life. 
 
 And for this emancipation, for this untrammelled 
 freedom, I need not leave that workshop of my 
 daily duty. I need not mount to the stars to 
 find God, or to enter into His joy. I need not 
 descend to the depths. He is here with me be- 
 hind the counter. He is here with me as I walk 
 the street. He is with me at this dance, or this 
 dinner-party. He is with me, if I choose to live 
 with Him. So I begin my day with a spoken 
 prayer or a thought of gratitude. I warm my 
 hands at the fire with a thought of the power, the 
 love, the wisdom, and the eternal purpose which 
 makes the fire burn. I go to the breakfast-table 
 to meet the rest, loving them as He loves them, — 
 not for my selfish hunger, but in the common life 
 of united children. I go to the store or to the 
 shop, with the pride of one who creates as God 
 creates — who is necessary that day to the fulfil- 
 ment of His purpose. I meet the other clerks or 
 workmen as my partners and God's partners. 
 We are in His common work. The men who com- 
 mand me, and those to whom I give orders, — 
 they and I and the good God may be all engaged 
 in the same affair. And that affair is the bringing 
 in His kingdom. Boston is to be a better Boston, 
 the country a better country, the world a better 
 world, because He and I and they are at work to- 
 gether to-day. More briefly, I enter into His joy, 
 or as the Catechism said, " I enjoy Him forever." 
 
TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 35 
 
 People call the sunshine of a life thus spent a 
 matter of temperament. They say it is one per- 
 son's birthright, and not another's. " Oh ! she 
 was born with that happy temperament. I wish 
 I had been ; but I never can see things as she 
 sees them." "Never" is a long word. It is a bad 
 word. Are you sure that you have tried? Have 
 you determined highly that you will live in God's 
 world, not man's? Nay, do you know what it is 
 to determine? Do you loyally study God's work 
 in any of its details, — plant, stone, star, tree, child, 
 or man? Do you, day by day, try to trace the 
 power of the Spirit? It is not a week since I 
 heard a man who thought he was discussing the 
 grand politics, skip from guess to guess, from 
 anecdote to anecdote, all unconscious of Him 
 who Is; of Eternal Right; of what must be 
 because God is here. Are not you making that 
 blunder, as you match your ribbons or bleach 
 your laces? Have you highly determined that 
 you will talk to God and listen to what He says — 
 yes, each time when you are puzzled and con- 
 founded? Have you, every day of life, made a 
 loyal effort to come at the divine life of this or 
 that child of His? Or, when you meet one and 
 another, do you talk of weather and gossip of out- 
 siders, as if there were no real life, or as if you 
 had sworn to conceal yours behind ten thousand 
 curtains? And have you so set up the body as 
 an idol, — the clothes with which it shall be 
 
136 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 dressed, the food it shall eat, the wines it shall 
 drink, the house that shall shelter it, and the car- 
 riage which shall deliver it at some palace door, — 
 that the poor soul, its born queen, is left in dust 
 and ashes like Cinderella? 
 
 Turn from such vanities, as Paul said to the 
 idolaters in Phrygia — turn from them to the 
 living God, His works, His word, His people, 
 His Spirit. These make your life. Live in Him, 
 move in Him, and in Him have your being. 
 Thus is it truly to live to his glory, and to enjoy 
 Him forever. Thus is it to enter into the Joy of 
 your Lord. 
 
TRUTH. 
 
 " I must walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following." 
 
 Luke xiii. 33. 
 
 I MUST. If a man believes he is son of God, 
 he must enter into the service. In this story we 
 have not the full details, to see what is the struggle, 
 and what the adverse temptation. But we can 
 see this : that Jesus is driven out of Galilee by 
 the enthusiastic eagerness of the people. They 
 want to make him king ; Herod the tetrarch, on the 
 other hand, would stand for his own authority; 
 Jesus cannot stay there without arrest. He can, 
 as is intimated in one of these books, — he can 
 go to the Gentiles. He can leave behind him 
 Galilee and its enthusiasms, Jerusalem and its 
 petty formalism ; there are plenty of nations 
 where he can make himself a home, and live and 
 die. But, no. " I must go to Jerusalem." 
 
 He has not taken up this affair of proclaiming 
 God's presence and the possibility of God's reign 
 that he should lay it down because he meets the 
 first adverse gale. Simply, he has given himself 
 to proclaiming this reign or empire of God. Virtu- 
 ally he has said to Herod and all Herod's officers, 
 he has said to all Galilee, and three times he has said 
 at Jerusalem, that all their arrangements and con- 
 
I3« TRUTH. 
 
 trivances must give way — human law, custom, 
 tradition, experience, all must give way — before 
 the present rule of the present Spirit of perfect 
 Right. This Spirit will inspire them if they will 
 let him. He is here, the conscious God of the 
 universe is here, ready to teach them, ready to 
 direct them, ready to carry them through. " The 
 kingdom of God is at hand." 
 
 Xow, to him who has been saying this, in every 
 form of appeal, command, parable, or other im- 
 plied suggestion, — to him there comes the cer- 
 tainty- that, if he continues to say it, he will die ; 
 he will be killed ; and he has a distinct idea that he 
 will be killed as a malefactor or a rebel is killed ; 
 that is, he will be crucified. He can avoid this. 
 He can go into countries where his language is 
 not known, where people are perfectly indifferent 
 to what he says, and there he may drop back 
 into the common life in which one eats and drinks 
 and sleeps, and sleeps and drinks and eats. He can 
 leave j 3 '-zingdom to take care of itself. But no. 
 he will not do this. He has received his orders, and 
 will obey his orders. " I must walk to-day, and 
 to-morrow, and the day following." 
 
 That devotion of his has given us the word 
 " martyr'' as we use it now, and the word ,; mar- 
 tyrdom." The word in the Greek language meant 
 originally a witness, one who testified to what he 
 had seen. The Christian witnesses, dragged to 
 the stake or cross, did not fail in their allegiance. 
 
TRUTH. 139 
 
 They testified to the truth. God is their Father, 
 and they will say so. He speaks to them, and 
 they will listen with allegiance which they give to 
 no others. He directs them to-day and to-mor- 
 row, and what he directs they will do. " We will 
 kill you if you do it," says this praetor or that 
 governor. " Kill if you please," is the answer; 
 " that is all one; we must bear this testimony." 
 This testimony they bear, and the word " martyr " 
 has come to mean a witness who is willing to die 
 rather than fail in his testimony. 
 
 In the experience of the Saviour, that is a very 
 pathetic and suggestive incident in which at the 
 very close, as he appears before Pilate, the repre- 
 sentative of Tiberius, he makes this statement for 
 himself. Tiberius concentrates in his own person 
 the power of the Roman Empire. Tiberius au- 
 thorizes Pilate to act as his representative in this 
 Jerusalem. These soldiers, who stand at the 
 right and at the left as guards, represent the 
 power of the empire; and to carry out any edict 
 of this governor, these soldiers, every soldier in 
 the empire, would be called upon. Pilate, stand- 
 ing thus, asks this carpenter, who is the son of a 
 carpenter, why he is there; and he says, "I am 
 here to bear witness to the truth." Then Pilate 
 makes the answer which timid men and indiffer- 
 ent men, unspiritual men of whatever type, are so 
 apt to make, " What is truth?" Whether there 
 be any Rock of Ages? Whether there be any 
 
140 TRUTH. 
 
 divine law? Whether there be any eternal principle 
 of life? This is the question which Pilate cannot 
 answer. But the Saviour puts himself on record 
 of history as holding the banner, around which in 
 all time shall rally those who are willing in the 
 end to die for their testimony. " He that is of 
 the truth heareth my voice." 
 
 And of you and me there must be the same 
 testimony. That is what all religion is for, — that 
 men may testify to the Truth. Yes, we are to 
 live by it, and we are to die by it ; and any man 
 who will look will find that the dangers of this 
 present day are just what he saw in his time. 
 The danger is that some institution, some fashion, 
 some party-cry, some system of organized social 
 order, shall come in between us and Truth. This 
 is the danger in business, in education, in legisla- 
 tion, and in religion. 
 
 And, on the other hand, all success depends, as 
 it always did depend and always will depend, on 
 men's living in the Truth, or speaking in the 
 Truth. I send an expert into my mine to tell me 
 how wide is my vein of silver. He must tell me 
 the truth. He must not tell me what he hopes 
 or wishes or believes. I read the record of the 
 weather in the newspaper. Fifty observers all 
 over the country must tell me the truth. They 
 must not guess at the temperature; they must 
 look at the thermometer. Or I am buying and 
 selling. Cotton, wool, flour, grain, sugar, coffee, 
 
TRUTH. 141 
 
 tea, spice, coal, -wood, or whatever it may be, I 
 want to know the truth about the stock in the 
 market, the stock to arrive, the price yesterday, 
 and the price a year ago. Indeed, if we sift it 
 down, the reason why this century does things 
 better than the darkest century of the Dark Ages, 
 is that this century finds it easier to come at the 
 truth. Never were men more eager to set this 
 world forward than Thomas Aquinas, or Roger 
 Bacon, or hundreds of those men who sat in dark- 
 ness. But when they sought for the truth, they 
 could not find it in a thousand works and ways 
 where we can find it and do find it and have it in 
 our hands. Thus, I know which way the wind 
 blew at San Francisco last night. I know, if I 
 choose, what was the revenue of the government 
 last week or last year. With my duty to perform 
 to-morrow and my path to choose, I step forward 
 in a world which, after a fashion, is finding out 
 that there is little good in secrecy, and no good in 
 lying ; has found out, on the whole, that it is wise 
 and well to discover and to proclaim the truth. 
 
 This true allegiance of man to the Infinite Law 
 implies and involves more than verbal truth. It 
 is the obedience of every act, so that the man does 
 without concealment, without pretence, without 
 exaggeration, the thing he undertakes to do. The 
 errand boy does not loiter on his errand. The 
 sentinel never misses a turn of his round. 
 The screw-maker never puts one deficient screw 
 
142 TRUTH. 
 
 in the parcel. We shall gain this absolute alle- 
 giance when the kingdom of God wholly comes. 
 To gain it, to bring in that kingdom, is our present 
 hope and duty. In our own time all the plans of 
 religious men looking toward this aim are helped 
 forward and confirmed by the steady determina- 
 tion of the men who study Nature and extort her 
 secrets. The pretences of men of science are 
 ended. They study the Truth wherever it may 
 lead them. The theory must go if the obdurate 
 fact will not sustain it. To note the fact, that is, 
 the thing which has been made, and by loyal 
 comparison of a hundred facts to work out the 
 truth which unites and comprehends them all, this 
 is the business of the men of physical science. 
 When he only tells you of things, he tires you and 
 annoys you. But when he rises to the truth be- 
 hind the thing, he gives you courage and makes 
 your life larger. Now, it is in this accuracy of 
 observation, and in its stern veracity of report, 
 that the science of to-day becomes a part of the 
 religion of to-day, and that both of them, Science 
 and Religion, really hold up each other's hands. 
 To know the reality which is, and to stand by it, 
 to live for it, and, if need be, to die for it, — this is 
 the watchword. This it is to be of the Truth ; 
 to be a seeker of the Truth. Whoever enters on 
 this noble enterprise leads mankind by so much 
 forward. He becomes also one of the leaders ; 
 he is one of the benefactors of his kind. Easy for 
 
TRUTH. I43 
 
 him to see how Jesus Christ, who lived for this 
 Truth, testified to it, and died for it, became by 
 that life and death the Saviour of mankind. Easy 
 to comprehend what that Saviour meant when he 
 said, " The Spirit of Truth shall come to you, 
 and he shall lead you into all truth." 
 
 Because it was the Truth he proclaimed the 
 reign of God. The " glad tidings " of the reign of 
 God they called it ; and well they might. God as 
 ruler, instead of this adulterous Herod or this 
 arbitrary Pilate. God's law, simple and certain 
 as sunrise or as the cooling dew, in place of 
 this tithing of weeds, this ringing of bells, this sac- 
 rifice of oxen, this jot and that tittle of formality. 
 God here, in me, in you, instead of God on His 
 sapphire throne yonder in the highest heaven, 
 instead of God in the Holy of Holies. Glad 
 tidings is all this, indeed, if only any one can 
 really believe and take it in ; if one can live as 
 the companion of such a father, can speak His 
 word and do His will. If one can do it with as 
 little jar and protest as the stars yonder move in 
 heaven. Jesus, who proclaims it now, has from a 
 boy received it. Obedient to his mother, in the joy 
 of home, he has lived in favor with God and man. 
 But when he went to Jordan, yonder, he saw that 
 the time had come for more than home joys, more 
 than the daily duty with his tools. The time is 
 ripe. All men in this world must know — they 
 must be forced to know — that the dear Father of 
 
144 TRUTH. 
 
 us all has not forgotten us. We are here because 
 He is here. We think because He knows. We 
 see because He sees. We live because He lives. 
 Let us listen ; He is speaking. Let us speak ; He 
 will hear us. We can tell Him everything : of our 
 daily needs, — " food for to-day's life, dear Father ;" 
 of our temptations and trials, — " forgive us, dear 
 Father, and deliver us from evil." To show to all 
 around him — to Peter and Andrew, to Mary and 
 Salome — that he knows that this is so ; he must 
 speak to them and theirs. That a larger circle 
 may see it and know it than this of village friends. 
 He must send others to tell it, and they must send 
 others all round the world. 
 
 From century to century since, different gener- 
 ations of men have honored him, in a way have 
 loved him. They could not help that. He compels 
 men's love even though they read it only in these 
 fragments of history. But as to this reign of God, 
 it seems as if men hated to receive anything so 
 simple. An unseen Spirit, whose voice does not 
 make air vibrate, here in this workshop, between 
 me and my fellow-workman, that cannot be what 
 he means by God's reign ! And so such a church 
 as that at Rome proposes a human monarch who 
 shall be the spiritual Father of the world. And 
 he and his council shall direct a thousand bishops 
 — overseers of mankind ; and they shall direct 
 each his hundred or his thousand priests. See, 
 there a kingdom worth talking of! Or, on' quite 
 
TRUTH. 145 
 
 another side, catching up the gorgeous poetry with 
 which he describes the fall of the temples of hell 
 and the glorious coming of God, another set of 
 word-worshippers fix the day and the hour when 
 a procession of cherubim and seraphim, angels and 
 archangels, with names and without them, with 
 trumpets and with cornets, shall come marching or 
 flying into the world, and from some central city 
 or empire shall set right what is wrong. All which 
 is but the continuance of the idolatry, the wor- 
 ship of a Form, of which he was so tired. Yet 
 the best men sometimes show a longing for it. 
 Mr. Seeley, who certainly apprehends the dignity 
 and purity of the Saviour, does not look out on 
 the infinite horizon, of what the Saviour pro- 
 poses. He tells us that the kingdom of God is 
 to be a society of those who join hands and confed- 
 erate. He calls it a club. It is a self-elected com- 
 pany out of the millions of mankind. But this is 
 not so. With the Saviour it is no pageant to be 
 applauded ; it is no hierarchy to be catalogued ; it is 
 no thing to be looked upon and with brush or 
 words described. Simply, it is the reign of God. 
 God here and God now has come, and my work 
 is done in the school-room. Oh, no, not quite 
 done ! Here is this tired boy ; he has been lazy, if 
 you please ; he cannot understand his sum. Will 
 I please stop and show him? How easy to tell 
 him to work it out himself! How easy to show him 
 that his dulness is his own fault ! How pleasant 
 
I46 TRUTH. 
 
 to stretch off for my hour's walk over the fields 
 yonder ! Yet I must not check him thus. I must 
 stay. This is God's school-room. Here is God's 
 empire. He reigns here. His kingdom is at hand, 
 
 Or these treenails we are driving in the ship are 
 but poor stuff. They must have rotted somewhere. 
 If I condemn them, if I ride over to the village, I 
 can get some which are not shaky, which will stand 
 the strain. True, I shall be abused by the boss. 
 He will say I am wasting time and money. I can- 
 not help that. I must not spoil his ship for him. 
 Indeed, it is not his ship as much as it is God's 
 ship. God reigns in this ship-yard. His Kingdom 
 is at hand. 
 
 Or I am a member of the French Parliament. 
 Here are the unpaid bills for my family expenses. 
 The doctor is not paid who cared for my boy 
 when he was burned so badly. I cannot send 
 his brothers to school for lack of money, and 
 here comes by mail a check for 25,000 francs, 
 and a request that I will speak for the Panama 
 loan this afternoon. I was all ready to speak for it. 
 Here is the speech on my desk. But I must not 
 take the money, — must not. This is God's cham- 
 ber. His reign is at hand. 
 
 Or I am an American citizen in my little shrine 
 on the day of the election. Here is George's 
 name, which I may vote for or against. George 
 does not like me. He has often abused me. He 
 prejudiced the bank directors against me. He 
 
 
TRUTH. 147 
 
 pointed me out for the scorn of the whole com- 
 pany one day. But it happens that he stands on 
 this ticket for good government, for law and order, 
 for purity instead of drunkenness, for peace in- 
 stead of war. I must vote for George though he 
 has been unjust to me. For this is God's polling- 
 booth and His temple. We are in His empire. 
 His kingdom is at hand. 
 
 Every one of us may, when he chooses, enter on 
 this business and proclaim this news, for news 
 it is : That God is here, and is on our side. And 
 life will grow simple as He does. For all duty 
 will cluster round this one motive. As it grows 
 simple it will grow serene, and gentle, and easy to 
 be entreated. And it will grow strong. How can 
 I be weak if all Nature is on my side, if God 
 seconds or leads all I have to do? And life grows 
 more glad, for it is more harmonious, when there 
 is no jar nor discord, when my song rings in exact 
 accord with this great diapason of the universe. 
 
 Simplicity, serenity, strength, joy, and har- 
 mony, these are what I gain when I make the 
 Truth my only counsellor ; when I know I must 
 say what Truth bids me. Even if the Truth 
 compel me to persevere to the end. If I loyally 
 obey the voice, I must walk as Truth directs me. 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 
 
 2 Cor. iii. 6. 
 
 I HAVE no right nor wish to say what I said of 
 Bible worship last week without saying more. I 
 tried to show, even bitterly, as perhaps you 
 thought, that we must not make an idol of it — 
 a fetich — as if it were a stone which fell from 
 heaven. I must not say this without showing 
 what we can do with it, and what it can do 
 for us. 
 
 The Bible has certainly been the greatest re- 
 ligious educator of the modern world. In a 
 volume, not large, have been songs, lessons, 
 histories, which have made men live. Those 
 nations which have read the Bible most have 
 lived the most. . That is a clear bit of history. 
 Now, how are we to keep the life, while we refuse 
 to be chained by the idolatry? 
 
 We are to do just as we do with all other 
 lessons and achievements of the men of past 
 times. We keep the lesson, and we set aside 
 the method ; we accept the spirit, and we reject 
 the letter ; we live the life, and are careless about 
 its machinery. 
 
 This needs no elaborate statement. Take a 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 49 
 
 simple, every-day fact. Soon after white men had 
 settled here, they found that they needed a road 
 from Boston to New York. How did they make 
 it? Did any surveyor draw a straight line on 
 the map from one village to the other, and then 
 push a road over the mountains, and across the 
 swamps and rivers? Not at all. That is not the 
 order of society or history, any more than it is 
 the order of physical nature. The first traveller 
 by land followed the trails, as they were still 
 called, which Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Pe- 
 quods had made. That is,- after he left Provi- 
 dence, he kept nearly, though not quite, parallel 
 with the seaboard. The Indian path had to keep 
 on the land-side of the bays and other inlets, but 
 it had to keep on the water-side of the hills and 
 forests. Then, on the line of this rough Indian en- 
 gineering was eventually built the white man's road. 
 In Rhode Island, they call it Queen Anne's road, 
 because it finally took decent form in her day. 
 This is very well for a beginning. 
 
 But time goes on. The whole country is 
 settled. Dark forests give way to sunlight and 
 air. Time becomes more precious as civilization 
 advances. One of you w T ants to see his partner 
 in New York, yet you must be here in your 
 counting-room every day. Six hours even seems 
 too long a time for the journey in either direction. 
 You take the railroad men to task if they exact 
 six hours. You say, " I must go in five hours. 
 
150 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 I ought to go in four. You must straighten this 
 curve, you must cut off that corner." 
 
 Now, suppose a great corporation of these rail- 
 road men replied, " This, is out of the question. 
 You are defying God. You are changing the 
 whole record of His will. He determined that 
 people should go by that old road. If He had not 
 so determined, the Indians would not have trav- 
 elled there. Roger Williams and John Mason 
 would not have gone there. And see here ; here 
 is a letter from Benjamin Franklin in which he 
 says that this is an excellent road, and that the 
 mail of the colonies shall march over it. And here 
 is a letter from General Greene in which he says 
 that the Army Corps found it a very quick road 
 when they marched to New York, in 1776. Do 
 you pretend that you are wiser than Benjamin 
 Franklin? Do you say you know more of mov- 
 ing armies than Nathaniel Greene? " 
 
 If a strong corporation of railroad men took 
 this ground, they would take exactly the ground 
 which the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of 
 New York now takes in trying Dr. Briggs for 
 heresy, and which the Synod in Ohio takes in con- 
 demning Dr. Smith for heresy. Their argument, 
 if you strip off all entanglements, is this : Since 
 the invention of printing, particularly since the 
 translation of the Bible into the daily language of 
 common people, it has been the most important 
 single means of quickening the life of men who 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. I 5 I 
 
 have used it. It has done more than any other 
 agency to bring man and God together, and to lift 
 men into a divine life. Therefore, no one shall 
 say that there are any human errors in this divine 
 book; no one shall point out such errors; and 
 every one shall say that one part of it is as valuable 
 as another. In practice, this comes out in saying 
 that the Bible is the only important instrument for 
 bringing men and God together. It comes out 
 on such idol worship as I spoke of last week, 
 when I described the idolatry which worshipped the 
 Book of Daniel. 
 
 Now, we will not be satisfied with protest against 
 idolatry. How can we truly and well use the 
 Bible? That is our real question. Look forward 
 and not backward. That is our direction. The man 
 who lives in the Spirit, who wants to commune 
 with God, and to enter into His life, how far 
 does this person use the Bible? how far does 
 he use every method which the past puts into his 
 hands? How far does he accept the prophets 
 and seers of the past as his leaders, and at what 
 point does there come in the inspiration or the 
 instruction of the thousand seers and prophets who 
 are speaking to-day of God, and heaven, and 
 duty? How are the two to be blended, the 
 power of the past and the power of the present? 
 Where does one begin and where does the other 
 end? These are great questions. In a certain 
 sense, you might say that it takes all life to 
 
152 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 answer them. Still, in a fashion, the greatest 
 question can be answered in three words. And 
 in a community trained like ours, I have no 
 right to leave what I said last Sunday without 
 making some answer to these questions now. 
 
 The Bible, then, is a record, as good as those 
 men could make, of what certain prophets and 
 seers have found out about God and His ways 
 with men. Sometimes they have stated this well, 
 sometimes not so well, and sometimes badly, as 
 when David expresses the wish that the heads of 
 those little children should be dashed against the 
 stones. But on the whole, it is a record, now 
 historical, now poetical, and now didactic in inten- 
 tion, of God's intimacy with man, and man's inti- 
 macy with God. Because it is, these forty or fifty 
 little books in it have preserved themselves, or 
 been preserved, while thousands of books which 
 seemed of more importance have been lost, or 
 have been wholly forgotten. Because of this 
 intercommunion of God and man, because of this 
 truth here illustrated, that man can speak to God 
 and can hear God, that God can speak to man and 
 will hear man, this book exists. It lies on this 
 desk, it is in your homes, because it sets out this 
 intimacy so closely. To any person, then, who 
 has any reverence for the Bible, any regard for it, 
 or any gratitude, the Bible speaks itself constantly 
 to say, " For the very love of God, of the God of 
 whom you read in this book, seek Him yourself, and 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 53 
 
 listen to Him yourself." Listen as Amos listened 
 when he was herding cattle in Tekoa. Listen as 
 Habakkuk listened as he stood a sentinel upon the 
 tower. He watched to see what God would say to 
 him. He watched to see what he should say when 
 he was reproved. And you and I ? We are not 
 sentinels on towers perhaps, we are not herding 
 cattle perhaps, but we are somewhere, and we are 
 in God's service. We are children of God and 
 partakers of His nature, if we choose. And we 
 are to listen for His words as these prophets 
 listened. We are to proclaim what He has said 
 to us as they proclaimed. As they begged Him 
 to enlighten them, we are to beg Him. As they 
 thanked Him gratefully, we are to thank Him. 
 As they rejoiced in His answer, we may rejoice. 
 As they looked forward to better times, we may 
 look forward. I say, we may ; but we shall not, 
 unless we seek. We shall not hear unless we 
 listen. We shall not see if we shut our eyes. No 
 word of God says or implies that we are His so 
 entirely that His life shall flow into ours, unless 
 we seek that blessing. Every promise, whether the 
 promise of spring-time, the promise of poetry, or 
 the promise of experience, may be stated as the 
 promise of Scripture is stated, that it is those 
 who ask that shall receive ; those who look that 
 shall discover ; those who knock to whom it shall 
 be opened. " If ye seek me, surely ye shall find 
 me, if ye seek for me with all your heart." This 
 
154 H0W T0 USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 is the promise of Scripture, and it is avouched 
 through and through in the voices of out-door 
 nature and of human experience. And simply, 
 this is to say, that every man who reverences the 
 Bible, who loves the words and the promises of 
 the hundred children of God who speak to Him 
 in this Bible, is bound by that love and reverence 
 to join himself to their number, to listen every 
 day to the present word of the Holy Spirit, and 
 every day to proclaim that blessing to those who 
 are around him. 
 
 And how shall he listen? How shall he proph- 
 esy? Listen as these men listened. They did 
 not sit down with a pile of books about them, with 
 a multiplication board and slate and pencil, to de- 
 monstrate by the mathematics the being and at- 
 tributes of God. They sought Him where they 
 were, and where they were they found Him. 
 Habakkuk on his watch-tower, Hosea as he was 
 riding after those cattle, Isaiah as he led a party 
 of pioneers, and set this squad with their pickaxes 
 to hew down a hill, and that squad with their har- 
 rows to fill up a morass. In the open air, I ob- 
 serve, most of them sought Him and found Him. 
 But there is no place where I may not seek Him, 
 and no prison where I may not find Him. Only 
 this is to be said, that when I am under the open 
 heaven, when I am on the shore of His boundless 
 sea, when I am alone in what seems His endless 
 forest, when no prattle of man interrupts His 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 55 
 
 whisper, when no dust from man's digging ob- 
 structs the vision, it does seem more certain that I 
 hear that simple word of loving wisdom, or that 
 I comprehend the majestic miracle of absolute 
 power. Thus is it that the woods are always 
 God's temple ; the sky is always His vaulted arch, 
 and the ocean is always a fellow-worshipper. Thus 
 is it that on the field of my microscope I see God 
 creating now, and I enter into His life, I compre- 
 hend something of His motive, I sympathize with 
 His will, so far as I can conceive it. Thus I know 
 and feel that I am His and He is mine. I love 
 because He loves. I move with His power. I 
 live in His life. In proportion as I enter into 
 the present life of His unspoiled and untarnished 
 world, in that proportion am I sure that He is 
 Father and that I am child. 
 
 It is not that a man is to be kind to his wife 
 because some oracle says so, or kiss his child be- 
 cause a text has directed it. There is no such 
 magic in text or oracle. That sort of obedience 
 makes the law as dreadful as it was to Paul. You 
 cannot compel Life by your statutes. But you 
 can inspire it by your Bibles. It is because the 
 Spirit gives life by the same certainty in which 
 the letter kills it, that this Bible has inspired the 
 modern world. To enter into the spirit of Paul, — 
 reconciling the contentions in these little societies, 
 — that is possible . to him who reads. To make 
 the life of the Saviour as real as is the life of 
 
156 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 your brother who is travelling in Norway, of your 
 daughter who is at school at Wellesley, this is in 
 your power if you choose. True, you may meas- 
 ure out a dose of Bible for the morning and 
 another for the evening, and five for Sunday, to be 
 " taken " as if by the quack direction on some 
 bottle of medicine. But you may enjoy with your 
 Saviour the open air of Galilee ; you may wonder 
 with his wonder and grieve with his sorrow, as this 
 man asks you for a sign, or as that one wants to 
 divide an inheritance. You may enter into the 
 Life of lives, and bid the letter go. You may 
 leave Galilee with him and shun the dangerous 
 multitudes. You may walk to Jerusalem with him, 
 as other disciples did, with better understanding 
 than they had of the mood in which he travelled. 
 You may stand by in sympathy when Pilate sat in 
 judgment. You may follow in tears as men lead 
 him along the Way of Sorrow. You may enter 
 into his spirit; and in that spirit you may pace 
 your way of sorrow ; you may take your journeys ; 
 you may join your multitudes or leave them; you 
 may enjoy your sunshine. And such gift of life 
 you will take, if you scorn the letter which kills, 
 and with all the glow of imagination, all the sym- 
 pathy of love, and all the right to interpret, which 
 any child of God has when he reads or thinks of 
 the Son of God, who has led the world, if you 
 make your Bible your friend, and will not let it be 
 your tyrant. Such gift and privilege are given to 
 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 57 
 
 the prophets of the Most High, to the sons and 
 daughters of the living God. 
 
 We are here to live, — to live more to-day £han 
 yesterday. To work? Yes, so far as work 
 helps life. To play? Yes, so far, and no farther. 
 To be alone? If solitude helps life. To be to- 
 gether? If society helps it. So is it certain that 
 the record of the past, of its prophets and martyrs, 
 its poets, and its Saviour, shall quicken life for us, 
 if we read in the Spirit, if we live in the Spirit, if 
 we speak in the Spirit. Death unto death is that 
 bondage of the letter. But the work of the Spirit 
 is joy, and peace, and love, and life. 
 
 Nor will any one sink into a selfish worship, or 
 into self-worship, who rightly takes in the spirit 
 of the Bible. Notice how it deals with multitudes 
 or nations, and in the end with the whole world. 
 "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in the 
 whole earth as it is by the moving stars." In the 
 very beginning you have the blessing of families, 
 and then of the whole race of Ishmael and Isaac, 
 Abraham's children. It is then the march of a 
 nation from Egypt, and it is the history of a nation 
 which you follow. If you turn aside to a bit of 
 personal biography, like that of David, still David 
 is singing for you the psalms of a whole world. 
 You cannot get, even from the simplest idylls of 
 the Old Testament, or from the little bits of family 
 tradition, — you cannot get the introspection in 
 which a man makes himself all alone, or fights his 
 
158 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 battle regardless of the battles of other men. As 
 you come later down, as there lie open even wider 
 horizons, you find Isaiah and the prophets rebuking 
 Israel for thinking that Israel was alone or could 
 be alone. And, of the New Testament, the whole 
 Spirit is the Spirit which brought on the Master 
 the prosecution of the Xazarenes, when he told 
 them to their faces that God had shown his choic- 
 est favors to Syrian and Gentile. From family to 
 tribe, from tribe to race, from Hebrew to Gentile, 
 and from both to the whole world of man, the 
 Bible leads us up step by step. And, as I say, 
 whoever takes in its spirit, begins, at least, to un- 
 derstand what are the ties which link him with the 
 race ; or, better, what is the common life which 
 beats in the hearts of all men. It is not simply an 
 outside duty by which I bear my brother's burden ; 
 it becomes a necessity of my being. The hand can* 
 not say to the foot, I have no need of thee. Our 
 joy is one joy, our sorrow is one sorrow, our des- 
 tiny is one destiny. And I do not read my Bible 
 to any purpose, unless I find that such is its inspi- 
 ration. Here, then, is another of its lessons for my 
 life to-day. If fashion have separated me from 
 my fellows, if vanity or pride have separated me, 
 if shyness have separated me, which is said to be the 
 constitutional weakness of the great race to which 
 we belong, — if, for any cause, I have gnawed my 
 own heart or counted my own sins or sought a 
 lonely by-track of salvation, my Bible -ought to 
 
HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 59 
 
 drag me out from such loneliness, and compel me 
 to live in the common life. Am I indeed a 
 prophet of the living God, as the Bible says I am? 
 Then I am a prophet who am to proclaim to all 
 the world, to every creature in it, if I can, the good 
 tidings with which the Bible culminates. This is 
 indeed the Saviour's last spoken word, and this is 
 the great direction of the Bible. 
 
 It compels my intimacy with others. You say 
 you had rather live alone? So some honey-bee 
 says he had rather live alone ; he tries the experi- 
 ment, and you find him dead on the outside of the 
 hive. Your life is a common life, and you can no 
 more live alone, than a cell beneath the bark of an 
 elm-tree can live alone. Give and take, lend and 
 borrow, is the law of the being of the cell, it is the 
 law of the bee's being, and it is your law and 
 mine. Every such word as conversation, com- 
 munion, intercourse, comfort, sympathy, — any- 
 thing which brings in the interplay of life, helps 
 to illustrate what I will not call the duty, but the 
 privilege, or, if you please, the necessity, which is 
 upon each and all of us, if we are to live as sons 
 and daughters of God. Here it is that all real 
 literature which belongs to the history of our race 
 is a help to us. Here is it that every form of 
 society, however it seems to fail, and indeed does 
 fail, has, because it is society, its advantage. The 
 high society which books give becomes a reality 
 in our infinite training. If I know Mary Ware, if 
 
l6o HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 I know Florence Nightingale, if I know Oliver 
 Cromwell or Martin Luther, if I know Saint Fran- 
 cis of Sales, if I know Clement of Alexandria, if 
 I know Paul of Tarsus, if I know Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, I am the larger man for the knowing. And 
 I do not read my Bible to any purpose unless I 
 find this out. 
 
 " Walk in the Spirit." These are the words 
 in which Paul sums up Christian duty. Read in 
 the Spirit; these give the lesson for Bible-reading. 
 And he who refuses to worship the letter, ought, 
 all the more certainly, to learn that The Spirit 
 gives Life. 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 "Neither do men light a lamp, and put it under the bushel, but 
 on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house." 
 
 Matthew v. 15. 
 
 The democracy of the four Gospels is the terror 
 of most established churches, as it is the great 
 marvel of history. 
 
 Take this phrase, certainly central, in the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, — " The light of the world." 
 
 Here is the fulfilment of prophecy, — " The peo- 
 ple who sat in darkness have seen a great light." 
 And there can be no nobler phrase to describe the 
 history of what " transpired " eighteen hundred 
 and sixty years ago, than to say that, in a world 
 dark as death, the light appeared. You cannot 
 help seeing that light appeared. Sceptic or credu- 
 lous, you have to agree, at that point in history, 
 that then and there light appeared. Nay, there is 
 one moment and one place when a certain dignified 
 and impressive announcement was made of the 
 principles on which the new reign of things was to 
 move forward. On a mountain-side, which they 
 will show you to-day if you will go there, in a 
 recess in the slope, which the geologists say is the 
 crater of a dead volcano, — dead, as for the lesson 
 of light and life it should be, — there has gathered 
 
1 62 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 a great company of people from all Syria, from 
 all the east of the Mediterranean. To them the 
 Teacher speaks who is to unfold the new lesson. 
 Now we shall know what the light of the world is. 
 
 And he says, — if you think he knows, you 
 must believe, — he says to camel-drivers from 
 Damascus, to shepherds from Edom, to fishermen 
 from Bethsaida, to vine-dressers and olive-men 
 from Cana, — he says to publicans and sinners 
 who have come to hear him, — to this great mul- 
 titude he says, " Ye are the light of the world." 
 
 It is no wonder that such radical appeal to the 
 multitude is the terror of the establishments of 
 priests. It is no wonder that the Gospel of 
 Matthew is the horror of emperors and kings. 
 
 " Ye are the light of the world ; " and there 
 comes the further statement, that such light must 
 not be hidden, but must be put on a lamp-stand, 
 high, and not to be screened, so that it may give 
 light to every one. 
 
 You cannot fail to observe that in any of the 
 ordinary conversations or instructions of the pro- 
 fessional ecclesiastics no such statement is made. 
 The Saviour himself, in another place, says, " I am 
 the light of the world," — which is certainly true; 
 and if you were to ask to-day, in any Sunday- 
 school, and I think I may say in any ordinary 
 theological school, how the world receives its 
 light, the formal answer would be given that 
 Jesus Christ is the light of the world. In such an 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 63 
 
 answer, the remarkable expression of this text is 
 pushed quite on one side ; and if you ask those 
 theologians who are now, even in theological 
 circles, called the " high-and-dry people," how it 
 happens that in this Sermon on the Mount, which 
 they certainly regard as central and critical, — 
 how it happens that he said to those who heard, 
 " Ye are the light of the world," they will answer 
 you that in that part of the address he is speaking 
 to the company of the apostles alone. Here and 
 now, they say, began a line of distinciion between 
 the apostles, with their successors on the one hand, 
 and the generality of mankind on the other. They 
 will say that the Sermon on the Mount, in speak- 
 ing to our nineteenth century, says to all regularly 
 ordained bishops, and to all people in the apostolic 
 succession, " Ye are the light of the world ; " and 
 they give us to understand that any of us who 
 want any light must go and light our candles at 
 those which are held out to us by these who are 
 selected for the business of light-bearers. 
 
 It is fair enough to answer such men according 
 to their folly. Such men are sure to be literalists, 
 and it is fair enough to say to them that if they 
 mean to throw us back on the narrative, we cannot 
 but see that the apostles were not chosen until 
 some time after this address was delivered. What- 
 ever authority was given to them when they were 
 chosen, no such authority had been given to them 
 then. And it is clear enough that the Sermon on 
 
164 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 the Mount cannot be thus subdivided into an 
 exoteric gospel here and an esoteric gospel there. 
 You do not turn from a statement made in a 
 corner to a dozen men, to a statement made to 
 the great body of disciples. No ; here is an inti- 
 mation, made at that central and critical moment, 
 of what I call the democracy of the four Gospels. 
 
 The ecclesiasticism of nineteen centuries is con- 
 stantly trying to brush it away. Such people as I 
 speak of, who want to maintain that ecclesiasticism, 
 will tell you to-day that it is not till a man formally 
 unites himself to the church of Christ that he be- 
 comes a part of the light of the world. If you 
 should ask at Rome, or even at Canterbury, 
 this is what they would tell you. 
 
 Here is the reason, they would say, why it is 
 so important to distinguish between the organized 
 church and the outsiders. And here comes in all 
 discussion which seems to us so queer as to a 
 " close communion," as it is called. Those people 
 hold to a close communion, who are afraid that 
 without it there shall be any uncertainty as to 
 the light which shines upon the world. 
 
 In all such matters it is quite safe to let the 
 extravagances take care of themselves. It is as 
 well to state them ; for a frank statement, un- 
 disguised, is, in itself, their sufficient refutation. 
 Here is the truth, as the Saviour always states it, 
 and as it is asserting itself in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, in defiance of the ecclesiastics. Light is 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 65 
 
 light, and because it is light it will shine ; no- 
 body can help its shining, although men can put 
 it under a bushel. Suppose, then, that by what 
 we call an accident, some worn-out sceptic stum- 
 bles upon a New Testament of which he knows 
 nothing, dips into it, and reads for the first time 
 something which is here. He gets a spark of 
 light from it. That light will shine, and you can- 
 not help its shining. If, when he reads, " As ye 
 would that men should do to you, do ye so to 
 them likewise," — if he say, " That is good ; I 
 mean to try that ; " if he do try it, why, it is a bit 
 of light wherever he tries it. He gives light to 
 those who are around, whoever they may be. If 
 he go down into a gambling hell, and with the 
 first dazed and puzzled pigeon he finds there, tries 
 the experiment so that the poor fellow knows he 
 tries it, why, the light shines in that hell. It 
 shines as distinctly as it shone by the Sea of 
 Galilee. It shines quite as distinctly as if any 
 bishop of them all, with his mitre and his crosier, 
 had come in there. The light is light, whoever 
 holds the candlestick. The only danger is that 
 which Christ himself points out, that he whose light 
 has been lighted, does not let it shine, that he puts 
 it into a dark lantern ; or to say the same thing 
 in Christ's own words, he hides it under a bushel. 
 " But," you say, " does any one hide his candle 
 under a bushel? Pray, what is a lighted candle 
 for?" 
 
l66 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 Why, certainly, people do. The answer is not 
 so much of course, as you imply; We know birds 
 are made to fly; the glory of a bird, his distinc- 
 tive peculiarity, is in those glorious sweeps, and 
 that all but utter freedom. The bird seems to defy 
 the law of gravity itself, by which all the rest of 
 us are chained. But some people like to take 
 birds and shut them up in cages. That is, they 
 like to destroy the very peculiarity which gives 
 the birds their glory. But that is not the reason 
 they cage them. They cage them that they may 
 hear them sing, or that they may look on their 
 plumage. This they could not do if the birds 
 were soaring in mid-ether. Now, there are avail- 
 able reasons offered by people, who, having received 
 the light, keep it under a bushel. 
 
 A man has a glimpse at the heavenly vision. 
 He thinks he sees God, and he thinks he hears 
 Him ; and there is a temptation to stay in the for- 
 est where he heard Him, or in the garden where 
 he saw Him, rather than to go down through the 
 dust of the highway to do what God wants done 
 in State street or in Chardon street. I read 
 Thomas a. Kempis yesterday morning, I read 
 Robert Browning last night, and in each case I 
 had a new glimpse of the celestial glory. I heard 
 what I had never heard. I knew what I had never 
 known. I am going to try for another such 
 glimpse to-day. The temptation takes this form. 
 
 With Judas and Silas, and Lydia and Damaris, 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 67 
 
 last night, I read the Scriptures ; we sang psalms 
 and masses, and we really enjoyed the communion 
 of the Spirit. We mean to enjoy it so again to- 
 day; and we do not mean to risk the chance of 
 enjoying it by troubling ourselves about sending a 
 ton of coal for Archippus, or by taking poor 
 Aristarchus's furniture out of pawn. Or a man 
 says this to you: "I have no gift at helping 
 others. I am shy and awkward. I have no suc- 
 cess in society; but, if you will let me study, I 
 shall forge some truth out of what is now useless 
 ore. I can bring something to pass in my work- 
 shop, while I am useless as a tradesman, who must 
 exchange his commodities against those of other 
 men." 
 
 I do not like to say how far I think this delusion 
 goes among the men of science of our time. 
 Work in the laboratory and workshop is very 
 tempting. Men of the very first ability will tell 
 you they like to follow original research; they 
 like to be testing Nature for her secrets, and gain- 
 ing more light, and more. Then you ask them if 
 they will not let this light shine before men, and 
 they shrug their shoulders. They say, " That is 
 another man's affair. I cannot go to address a 
 public assembly. I have no gift in speaking to 
 other people. I will make the light burn, but I 
 will keep it under a bushel." 
 
 Now, some of these excuses are valid. There 
 are plenty of good reasons why a man should, at 
 
1 68 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 times, withdraw to what we call absolute solitude, — 
 to companionship with God, and God alone. To 
 speak in our chosen figure: at the moment we 
 strike the light, we may need to shield it on every 
 side from the outer air. But, all the same, the 
 light was never lighted for me alone. I must, 
 sooner or later, put it upon a candlestick, that it 
 may give light to all who are in the house. Yes, 
 to all. The parable goes far, and was meant to 
 go far, for the eternal truth goes far. From God 
 Himself this light came, for His purpose it shines, 
 and that purpose is infinite. And you and I are 
 so to use our light, whatever it may be, that all 
 men may glorify Him. This is the quaint Bible 
 phrase — old-fashioned, if you please, and even 
 narrow now. But it was not meant to be narrow. 
 When I live by this central law, when I live to 
 God's glory, what I do is done with an infinite 
 purpose, and with an infinite result. What I say 
 is as clear and true as if God Himself whispered 
 it in my ear, that with my tongue I might pro- 
 claim it. No man thinks of me as the speaker, 
 for every man knows that this is God's word 
 which is spoken. No man thinks of me as the 
 doer, for every man knows that this is God's work 
 which is done. They glorify your Father which 
 is in heaven. This is the quaint phrase. At 
 bottom it means this, that the word and deed thus 
 born from the Light are accepted as heavenly. 
 They must stand ; they must succeed. They 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 169 
 
 mark so much progress of the world towards its 
 heavenly condition. 
 
 It is not the high priest entering the Holy of 
 Holies once a year who is the only light-bearer. 
 It is the ragged boy who screens the coal as it 
 runs down the slide into the barge. If he screen 
 it well, if he do his duty, he also is an apostle. It 
 is not Martin Luther or Father Hyacinthe, speak- 
 ing to a thousand eager listeners who is the only 
 light-bearer. It is the patient schoolmistress in 
 a log cabin who is doing the best she can — 
 " angels do no more " — with that half-naked, stupid, 
 negro child. She also is spoken to when he says, 
 " Ye are the light of the world." It is not only 
 John Milton, or Francis de Sales, or Loyola, or 
 Henry Martin, or Bishop Heber who has this 
 gospel to proclaim. It is the teamster who is kind 
 to his horses ; it is the errand-boy who is on time 
 with his letters ; it is the clerk who throws up his 
 place rather than lie across the counter: they are 
 the light of the world. Men see their tenderness 
 and truth, and glorify the Father who is in 
 heaven. 
 
 I am tempted to tell you a story from the first 
 letter which I opened this morning. It interested 
 me the more because I was actually preparing the 
 notes of this sermon. It was a letter from a lady 
 in a distant city, who told me the tragedy of the 
 life of the young fellow whom she was trying to 
 save from the devil. She had known him as a 
 
IJO THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 boy, she had lost sight of him when he left home, 
 to be an attendant — bar-tender, perhaps — in 
 a Coney Island hotel. There, with all the tempta- 
 tions of such a place, the poor fellow had broken 
 down. He had been drunk, he had gambled 
 away all his earnings, — let us hope he had not 
 gambled away those of anybody else. And so 
 broken down, in rags and disgrace, he comes back 
 to his old friend. She tells me the story of this 
 and that act of tenderness by which she has tried 
 to reclaim him; and — he and she together, for 
 the last nine or ten months — he has trampled the 
 scorpions and serpents under his feet, and so far 
 stands erect. Is he to stand erect? Is he to 
 overcome the enemy who has been too much for 
 him before? I wrote her this morning that, if 
 he is to succeed, it must be by trying to help 
 somebody else. He must let his light shine be- 
 fore men. He must not keep it under a bushel. 
 If he himself can rescue some other poor dog 
 from the temptations around him, as she has res- 
 cued him, then there is a hope for him, for he 
 also is in the apostleship. And he ought to know 
 that he is in the apostleship. It is his place as 
 much as it is hers. It is hers just as much as it 
 is that of any priest; just as the priest ought to 
 know that it is his as much as if he were bishop ; 
 and the bishop ought to know that it is his as 
 much as if he were a pope. It is the place of 
 every one to let his light shine. 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 171 
 
 These are only illustrations, and those not on 
 a large scale, of the steady increase of the volume 
 and sway of light, if light will only shine. And 
 when we rise from the image to speak of The Light, 
 — the light that shines for every heart and for all 
 mankind, — we leave wholly behind us these little 
 illustrations. You who have seen God, you who 
 have heard Him, you who have loved man, yes, 
 and have helped him, — you are the light of the 
 world. Not only the saint who sees God always f 
 It is you as well, though you never had but one 
 flash of the vision. Do your duty, as God 
 works with you, and then your light will so shine 
 that all men will see that here is God ; that God 
 is, and rules. And this is what is bidden. More 
 than teaching children their letters : it is the show- 
 ing children how to live. More, indeed, than read- 
 ing and writing : it is living, loving, growing in life ; 
 succeeding. It is living with a purpose. It is lov- 
 ing all mankind. The true hero, the true prophet, 
 as you always find at last, may not be a man accom- 
 plished in methods or forms. He may not know 
 his letters, and may not be able to teach them. 
 But so he lives to God's glory, so he carries out 
 God's purpose ; his light shines. Because it shines, 
 it makes other lives brighter and easier. They 
 live, their light shines, yet others live and other 
 light shines. And more and more do men know 
 that the power which makes for righteousness sways 
 the world more and more completely. For you 
 
172 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 His kingdom comes, and for me, whether we have 
 come to hear our Saviour from dusty and formal 
 Jerusalem, or from the sea-breezes of Tyre and 
 Sidon, the one thing, simplest and easiest, is to 
 live with men and for men, so as to carry farther 
 God's work and purpose. Freely ye have received, 
 freely give. This is the Saviour's statement, in 
 another place, of this same duty. I have been 
 taught the golden rule. I know the beatitudes to 
 be the truth. I have read the word which can- 
 not die. I have seen the Life of lives. I will not 
 be so mean as to let eighteen centuries give me 
 this, and, for myself, to give nothing to the men 
 and women round me, who do not know, who have 
 not felt, who have not seen, and do not understand. 
 I will not read the daily record of misery in the 
 paper without any effort to help somewhere. I 
 will not see that black sheet of crime without an 
 effort to save somebody. Somewhere, somehow, 
 I can make this eternal light so shine, that some- 
 body shall know God better than he knows Him 
 now, and shall live in more perfect joy and alle- 
 giance to His perfect will. 
 
 This is the Saviour's system of an apostleship. 
 Whether it began with twelve, or seventy, or five 
 thousand, is nothing. It appeals now to every life, 
 so soon as any life hears, sees, or knows. Do you 
 know anything of love? make others love. Do 
 you know anything of truth? make others true. 
 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 73 
 
 Is life worth living to you? make others' lives 
 worth living to them. For it is as true to you in 
 Boston as to those in Syria, that you are the salt 
 of the world. How wretched if that salt lose its 
 savor — worthless ! You are the light of the world. 
 So let your light shine before men, that as they see 
 your good works, they may glorify your Father 
 which is in heaven. 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 (A sermon delivered on the Sunday after his death?) 
 
 In all that I say in the great loss which we have 
 sustained, I know that I am speaking as a per 
 sonal friend. And you who listen have the same 
 feeling of personal regard for Phillips Brooks. It 
 is a pleasure to you that you have lived in the 
 same town with him ; that you have met him in the 
 street ; that you know the cadences of his voice. 
 There is not a person here who knew anything 
 about him, who would not have gone to him in 
 any difficulty: sure, first of all, of his sympathy; 
 confident, next, of wise advice ; and probably he 
 would have given of his own time a^id effort to 
 carry you through your difficulty. 
 
 In this tender personal relation between us and 
 him, we are wholly unable to look upon his life as 
 if he were on the other side of the world. We 
 cannot analyze the methods of his daily duty ; we 
 cannot compare him with other men who had like 
 things to do. And we are very glad we can- 
 not. We are sorrowing for a friend, thinking of a 
 friend, and describing a friend. We cannot place 
 him in any perspective of history, and we do not 
 want to. We cannot say how or why he affected 
 us, and we do not want to. We have lost a dear 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 75 
 
 friend, and we stop each other on the street to 
 say so. 
 
 For myself, I have not the slightest recollection 
 of the time when I first knew him. It seems as if 
 I had always known him. I suppose I first met 
 him when he was a school-boy in the Latin 
 School, somewhat shy, he says himself, but still 
 a favorite with his friends, and taking, like other 
 boys, the joys and trials of boy life. In the Civil 
 War, which cuts across the lives of all of us who 
 had come to manhood, — as a trap-dyke cuts 
 through layers of all ages, — in the Civil War he 
 was holding Philadelphia up to its duty ; and young 
 as he was, was teaching the most aristocratic of 
 churches how democratic is the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ. He must have blessed God, as all of us 
 do, for the great opportunity and the great train- 
 ing of the four years of the war. To wake every 
 morning with a definite duty for the whole ; per- 
 haps to stand by the corpse of your brother, who 
 has died that others may live ; to feel yourself in 
 a hundred crises that you would die so gladly if 
 so you could save the nation. This is to have 
 religion taught in an object-lesson such as you 
 young men and women do not find so easily. 
 He was all linked in with sanitary work, hospital 
 work, recruiting work, work of education, freed- 
 man's aid, refugees' aid, and, young as he was, 
 everybody knew he was a power. 
 
 "Perhaps then first he understood Himself, how wondrously 
 endued. " 
 
176 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 Certainly he must have learned then what are 
 the immense advantages of the position of a 
 clergyman, in a crisis where it is his duty to have 
 a share in every endeavor, no matter how different 
 from that of the hour before. To provide, in the 
 morning, bed, blankets, and coffee for regiments 
 hurried from the North to the front ; at noon to 
 provide stretchers and ambulances to the wounded 
 carried to their homes — literally, to stanch their 
 blood ; in the evening to receive and find homes 
 for starving black women sent North by some 
 puzzled army commissary; to choose teachers and 
 send school-books for the children of those women 
 left half orphans on their islands; to pack ether, 
 surgical instruments, and perhaps playing-cards, to 
 be used by prisoners in the Libby ; to send vac- 
 cine virus to an army corps in Louisiana; and all 
 the time to be stating in public on Sunday, and on 
 every other day, the eternal truths which were at 
 issue ; to hold up a wayward and anxious public ; 
 to comfort those that mourn; to encourage the 
 despondent ; to keep clear the vision of the possi- 
 ble future; — such infinite variety of duty seems 
 wellnigh impossible to a man in any other calling. 
 It may well puzzle or dismay any man who is 
 trained only to a specialty, like a machinist, an 
 inventor, a mere man of letters, or merchant, or 
 mechanic, or chemist, or investor. But the glory 
 of our calling is that it is not a specialty. It is 
 wrong to say, as at our ordinations they are apt to 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 77 
 
 say, that we are " set apart." We are enjoined 
 not to go apart, by infinite injunction ; not to go 
 apart or to be apart. We are servants, ministers. 
 And that not simply to this church, or to that hos- 
 pital, or to yonder prison, but literally to all sorts 
 and conditions of men. Of such universal service 
 Phillips Brooks had doubtless dreamed when he 
 was a student. But the war, with its thousands of 
 activities, showed him that no dream of such 
 universal service could be too grand. 
 
 I see, and hear, and read all the time explana- 
 tions of his greatness. People please themselves 
 with analyses of his power. We do not make 
 much of such efforts. They relieve, perhaps, a 
 little the sense of loss. They give a certain out- 
 side machinery for sympathy. But the simple 
 truth remains, that here is a great man. He is a 
 great man because he is a simple, humble, unselfish 
 son of God, alive with God's life and engaged in 
 God's affair. This is clear, that he is intimate in 
 the closest way with the going and coming of the 
 well-beloved Son of God, whom he has chosen as 
 his nearest friend and his best counsellor. For 
 the rest, he cares little for himself, thinks little of 
 himself, and, as I believe, knows very little of him- 
 self. He is always surprised when people speak 
 of him with enthusiasm. He does not know why 
 they want to hear him speak, and imagines that 
 
178 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 other people ean say the same thing just as well 
 as he does. Such is always the characteristic of a 
 great man. He does these things which surprise 
 and delight the rest. of us as if they are entirely of 
 course, — as to him indeed they are. And so he 
 wonders that every one else does not do the same. 
 
 When we say, then, that here is a great man, this 
 is really not because he is a great preacher, or 
 because he writes so well, or because he knows 
 what he thinks, or because he says what he knows. 
 It is just the other way. He is a great preacher 
 because he is a great man. He says what he 
 thinks because he is a great man. He binds as 
 with a spell the group of young men he talks to 
 because he is a great man. And, because he is a 
 great man, he would have done anything else it 
 was his business to do in the fashion of a master. 
 If he had had to organize emigration, he would 
 have organized it well. If he had had to open a 
 railway to the Pacific, he would have done it well. 
 He is one of those who understands that it is easier 
 and better to do a great thing than a little one. 
 
 Xow, this means that this man is at work on the 
 infinite lines. He is not satisfied with any " say- 
 so " of the cyclopaedia, or any poor rule-of- 
 thumb. You never heard him repeat a com- 
 monplace in a speech. Always he gave you a 
 fundamental principle, the special bit of eternity, 
 on which that transaction rested. It has always 
 seemed to me, when I met him on any public 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 79 
 
 occasion, that he was absolutely careless as to 
 what the schools call a " preparation for an ad- 
 dress." He prepared, but not as they prepare. 
 He did not seem to care for the beginning, the 
 middle, or the end, whether it had any beginning, 
 middle, or end. What he cared for was the spe- 
 cial direction of the dear God who had sent him 
 about that particular bit of business. He wanted 
 us to see that as plainly as he saw it; and 
 almost always we did see it. We went home 
 thanking God that we did see it. We knew for 
 that once at least that God had spoken to us, and 
 had inspired this special son of His to be His 
 spokesman. When you have thus been led in 
 the line of infinite Life by such a leader, you do 
 not care much for any definition or analysis which 
 explains to you in what senses he is to be called a 
 great man. 
 
 This' should be said, however, and I say it as 
 definitely as I can, because it has not been said 
 as I wanted to hear it: This man, with all his 
 power, understood as well as any man that he must 
 do what he had to do in the right way. Thus, he 
 did not speak without knowing perfectly what he 
 was going to say. He never relied on any gush, or 
 enthusiasm, or personal magnetism, or spontane- 
 ous utterance, or the stimulus of a crowded audi- 
 ence. He never insulted an audience, even the 
 smallest and humblest, without — in his way — 
 preparing himself carefully to address them. It 
 
ISO PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 is a great pity that all public speakers cannot say 
 the same thing. 
 
 His way was to determine carefully, in ad- 
 vance, what was the most important principle 
 involved ; so you were perfectly certain when 
 you went to hear him, that you were going to 
 hear something worthy of your careful thought 
 and memory. 
 
 He was, therefore, from early life, a diligent 
 student. Some one said he was an omnivorous 
 reader when he was a boy ; and it is interesting 
 to see — what you will see in all his books — how 
 much he managed to read in the midst of his 
 active duty, in this most active of callings. Nor 
 was this helter-skelter and miscellaneous reading; 
 
 — it was reading on distinct lines which he knew 
 to be his own. Thus, in his valuable Essay on 
 Biography, he treats the whole subject as Mr. 
 Lowell might treat it, or any man of letters, with 
 the ease of one who has himself done what he is 
 recommending to others. 
 
 It is the fashion to say that though he was a 
 profoundly religious man, he was no theologian. 
 This seems to me quite untrue. No man has his 
 power who does not know very well what he 
 thinks, what he feels, and what he knows about 
 the eternities. It seems to me, on the other hand, 
 that he had studied with conscientious care the 
 great questions, — of which there are not many, 
 
 — and had early arrived at some conclusions so 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. l8l 
 
 definite that they were not easily distributed. He 
 was in the theological school early enough to feel 
 the last waves of what we call the " Oxford Con- 
 troversy." He knew what both sides said, and 
 rated what they said at its worth. But such a 
 man knew, of course, all the time, that there are 
 realities far more important than the embroider- 
 ing of an altar-cloth or the links in an historical 
 line of succession. Those realities are what in- 
 terested him. Of all the writers of our time who 
 had helped him and led him, I think he would 
 have named James Martineau as the first. You 
 find traces of Martineau in all that he says, as you 
 do in the thoughtful work of all the great religious 
 teachers who now use the English language. His 
 theology, then, is the theology of all the active 
 church in all the communions of Christianity in 
 this end of the nineteenth century. It is the 
 same for all the theology of the Holy Spirit, 
 or of the Real Presence. These are the Scripture 
 phrases. In the modern phrase, it is the theology 
 of the immanent presence of God. It is the 
 theology of " Immanuel," — " God with us" 
 not the mediaeval theology of God with one man. 
 In his absolute faith in the Real Presence, he felt 
 and understood what was the presence of God 
 with Jesus of Nazareth. He saw how that pres- 
 ence, felt and acknowledged, made Jesus of 
 Nazareth the Saviour of mankind. He saw that 
 Jesus of Nazareth would have lived and died 
 
I 82 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 unknown, like millions of others of God's sons, 
 but that he felt, knew, and said that the word he 
 spoke was God's word, his act was God's act, and 
 his gospel God's command. That nothing in his 
 life was of any value but as it proclaimed to 
 men this immanent presence of God. God here 
 and God now. " The kingdom of God is at 
 hand." But Mr. Brooks knew and felt all this of 
 Jesus because, and as he knew and felt, that God 
 is now always with each and all of His children. 
 The Incarnation for him is no three-years wonder 
 of Nazareth and Jerusalem. It is the central 
 necessity of all human life in all time. To-day, 
 as in the day of Tiberius, in Boston as in Sychar, 
 or in Capernaum, " if ye seek me, surely ye shall 
 find me, if ye seek for me with all your hearts." 
 
 With this certainty as to the Real Presence, he 
 places at their real value many details about 
 which little men quarrel. But he knows that the 
 quarrel is interesting to them, and so he will not 
 speak of them contemptuously. And this re- 
 mark covers that broad tolerance of his which 
 annoys and perplexes so many who love him 
 most. He passes by some little things, as I pass 
 by the mistakes in accent of a Frenchman or a 
 German with whom I talk, though they be mis- 
 takes which a teacher of language would be bound 
 to correct every time he heard them. With his 
 enthusiasm for Maurice, Kingsley, Stanley, Fre- 
 mantle. Tait, and such men who have led the 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 83 
 
 Established Church of England out into the path of 
 freedom, he is willing to accept as interesting an- 
 tiquities certain mediaeval phrases, and even medi- 
 aeval customs, not for what they are now, but for 
 what they have been. The tattered pine-tree flag, 
 which fluttered over the redoubt at Bunker Hill, 
 is not now the symbol of any State or nation. 
 But it was that day. And because it was that 
 day, I bear the rag reverently in my procession, 
 and I preserve it for another festival in my most 
 sacred casket. So is it that these scholars preserve 
 this or that old bit of costume, whether in a creed, 
 in a robe, or a stained-glass window. It is all one. 
 And you must not take them to task, even if they 
 use in old ritual service words of David, which a 
 boy in the streets of any Christian city to-day 
 would be ashamed to use. 1 You must not take 
 them to task, more than you take me to task for 
 the impossible anatomy of the wings of the angel 
 in the window yonder. Such men, when they are 
 large enough to know the reality of religion, think 
 they can afford to disregard what they call in- 
 felicities of old-fashioned expression. It is the 
 little men who are injured by playing with rusty 
 tools : — the men who do not know what religion is, 
 the men who study machinery with no knowledge 
 of power ; the men who have studied crutches 
 and cork legs until they do not know what an 
 athlete is doing when he runs a race. It is such 
 
 1 See Psalm cxxxvii. 9, for instance. 
 
I 84 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 men for whom outgrown creeds and archaic rituals 
 work certain disaster and irretrievable ruin. 
 
 All this is to say again, at more length than is 
 needed, that he has brought the largest motive to 
 the management of daily duty. A child of God, 
 he found out what it is to love God as- Father, 
 and early in life went loyally about his Father's 
 business. To this he consecrates life very early 
 in his career. To do it he makes himself all at 
 home in the life of that first-born Son of God, 
 who first used those words, " I must be about my 
 Father's business," and who lived and died that 
 men may know who God is ; that He is here ; that 
 they can work or play, think and enjoy, as His 
 children do, as those who are born from Him and 
 share His nature. He starts on his career with 
 such consecration, and it proves that he has the 
 power which you would suppose. Cheerful? Yes, 
 because he enters into the joy of Him in whose 
 life he lives : " My joy shall remain with you, and 
 your joy be full." Even of temper ? Yes, level- 
 headed and easy in harness ; for he has infinite 
 power, and people who have that, are not apt to 
 * fret about failure. Ready to wait, to bide his time? 
 Why not? Have we not eternity before us? 
 Modest, unassuming? Of course he does not do 
 these things as if he had taught himself or had 
 learned how. It is your Father who tells us what 
 to do and how to speak. Fond of the young? I 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 85 
 
 should suppose he would be, seeing we are all so 
 many children in our Father's house, going on our 
 Father's errands. Indifferent as to social rank, 
 high or low, rich or poor? How can he keep it, 
 he who is of the Blood Royal, and used every day 
 to the dignity of the palace? Indifferent as to 
 death? That follows when one has undertaken 
 an immortal's career. 
 
 Born in a city whose elegant people train them- 
 selves on system to find fault and complain, he 
 never found fault with anything or anybody. If 
 you only met him in the street or talked with 
 him at a party, you saw that he found life well 
 worth living. And I suppose this is the great 
 lesson he has taught to younger men. It might 
 be a tread-mill to others, but he knew where his 
 patient steps led and what was the path on which 
 he trod. When his boys were with him they knew 
 that life was worth living. Stupid, formal, in the 
 rut, if you only thought of yourself, your income, 
 your clothes, your food, your investment, your 
 horse, or your hound. But not formal, not stupid, 
 not monotonous, if you knew where it led you and 
 why you were alive. Some of you will remember 
 that parable which he used one night at the Union. 
 He led them into the doorway at the bottom of 
 the great monument yonder. What is there 
 before them? Only a few steps in sight to be 
 mounted. Indeed, there is nothing for it but to 
 step on them ; no right hand, and no left. Round 
 
1 86 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 and round in one damned monotony, you say. 
 Round and round, — so tedious, so tiresome, the 
 tenth like the first, the twentieth like the tenth. 
 Still round and round, because it is to-day's 
 duty; round and round, because my Father 
 me. I hold on. I d:> not criticise: I do not 
 complain. Round and round ; it will not last 
 as long as I shall. Round and round, and of 
 a sudden it proves I have been mounting on a 
 spiral all the time, higher and higher in my round 
 and round. The sacred, solemn moment comes. 
 They call it death. I believe it is life, when I see 
 that my faithful duty, day by day, has lifted me 
 where, in the broad sunlight of heaven, I look out 
 on the eternities. I am in the centre of the in- 
 finite horizon. I hear the infinite harmonies. 
 Yes. I see God. 
 
 When his great master and dear friend Stanley 
 died. Dr. Brooks said what we may well say of him : 
 
 " These less sns will be taught by many lives in 
 many languages before the end will come; but for 
 many years ye: to come there will be men who 
 will find not the least persuasive and impressive 
 teaching of them in Dean Stanley's life. The 
 heavens will still be bright with stars, and younger 
 men will never miss the radiance which they never 
 But for those who once watched for his light 
 there will always be a spot of special darkness in 
 the heavens where a star of special beauty went 
 out when he died." 
 
CREED AND' LIFE. 
 
 "Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I 
 say ? " Luke vi. 46. 
 
 Christianity is a life, and not a creed. 
 
 This epigram has been a favorite statement of 
 the more liberal writers and speakers of the church 
 for the last half-century. And as these men 
 animate and control the whole church in all its 
 communions, more and more this statement, or 
 something like it, is heard everywhere. 
 
 It seems that I used it, I know not where, in 
 some public address six or eight months ago. So 
 I found it challenged, very courteously, in one of 
 the least extravagant Catholic journals, when I 
 returned to Boston. The editor, or one of his 
 friends, kindly sent me the criticism. Substan- 
 tially, it was this : " Whatever a man says about 
 it, he must have a creed. Dr. Hale wants men to 
 live well. Somebody, then, must define what liv- 
 ing well is. That definition is a creed. You may 
 say Christianity is a life, if you like ; but so long 
 as you call that life Christianity, you imply that 
 there is a Christian creed behind it." 
 
 This criticism, good-natured and courteous in its 
 tone, seems to me to belong to that playing with 
 words which is the special danger with men edu- 
 
1 88 CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 cated in colleges, or in any other sort of cloisters, 
 without knowing much of affairs. The impor- 
 tance thus attached to words, symbols, or what in 
 politics we call platforms, has brought disaster a 
 hundred times to the Roman Catholic Church, not 
 to say to all other closely organized churches. 
 But as this statement is repeated by a certain 
 school of men, with the best intention, and with 
 the idea that it is important, I suppose that it 
 ought to be considered in any series of sermons 
 on the conduct of life. 
 
 I do not know who first uttered in the English 
 language the particular expression challenged : 
 " Christianity is a life, and not a creed." I thought 
 at one time that the phrase was James Martineau's, 
 and I think I have said so here; but some one — 
 and I am not sure but that it was Dr. Martineau 
 himself — has told me he thought that the phrase 
 could be found in Channing's writings. I do not 
 know, and I do not care, except that I want to 
 correct any statement which I have made under a 
 false impression. 
 
 What it means, when we of the liberal churches 
 make it, is not the statement that there is no such 
 reality as Law. On the other hand, we are very 
 anxious to say that there is a right way of life and 
 a wrong way of life. The right way of life is 
 indicated by Christianity, which is absolute re- 
 ligion. The wrong way of life is well-nigh certain 
 when a man has no religion at all. And when we 
 
CREED AND LIFE. 1 89 
 
 say that Christianity is a life, and not a creed, we 
 mean exactly what Jesus Christ meant when he 
 said, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." 
 He did not say, " I am the law, the statement, and 
 the creed." On the other hand, he said a great 
 many hard things about people who relied upon 
 written statements, inherited laws, and formal 
 creeds. And here it is an interesting thing to 
 observe, that for nearly a generation of men, what 
 we call Christianity, or the Christian religion, was 
 not called by those names ; but it was called 
 "The Way" or "The Road," so distinct was the 
 understanding on all sides that it was a way or 
 road in which people were to travel, and that 
 union in it was to be shown by what people did in 
 their lives, and not what they said with their 
 tongues. 1 
 
 In nineteen centuries of history, nineteen- 
 twentieths of the ecclesiastics of the world, being 
 men educated in the midst of books and fond of 
 them, have felt and have said that the necessity 
 of Christianity is a good verbal statement of its 
 purpose and system. Apostles' Creed, Nicene 
 Creed, Athanasian Creed, Canons of the Fifteen 
 Councils, Decrees of the Council of Trent, Thirty- 
 nine Articles, Westminster Confession, and, liter- 
 ally, a thousand more such symbols, are monu- 
 ments of the interest which the ecclesiastics of 
 
 1 " Way " does not mean " manner " or " method," as it means with us ; 
 but, literally, a path or a roadway. 
 
igo CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 the world have taken in creeds or statements. 
 But all this time these formal statements have 
 not advanced one man or one woman one inch in 
 The Way or in the Christian life. The Christian 
 life has been advanced when some widow took an 
 orphan baby into her hovel on the side of the 
 Viminal ; when St. Vincent took the place of a 
 criminal on the bench of a galley; when Philip 
 Sydney, dying, gave a cup of water to the soldier 
 in more pain than he ; when this or that unnamed 
 physician has gone into this or that hospital of 
 contagion, and died in the performance of his 
 duty. And what we mean when we say that 
 Christianity is a life, and not a creed, is, that Chris- 
 tianity must be avouched, illustrated, and extended 
 by action ; — that Christianity is as dead and as 
 silent when it is only expressed in creeds, as a 
 stereotyped plate, even of the Bible, is when it .is 
 buried in a vault under a sidewalk, or as the 
 record of a phonograph is if nobody sets the 
 roller in motion. And we have very high author- 
 ity in Christian history for saying this. We have 
 the authority of the Apostle Paul, when he says 
 "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 
 That is a very strong statement. It is as if I 
 should say, " Every time you repeat the Nicene 
 Creed without Spirit, without the Holy Spirit, it 
 kills you. You are, to all intents and purposes, 
 a decaying corpse, when you say such things by 
 rote without the inspiration of the present Holy 
 
CREED AND LIFE. 191 
 
 Spirit of the loving God." And we have the au- 
 thority of the Saviour himself, when he said in 
 this text, " Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do 
 not the things which I say? " That is a very short 
 creed which is shut up in the four letters L-O-R-D ; 
 but he hated that, though it implied personal re- 
 gard for him, personal confidence, — if you please, 
 personal enthusiasm, — so long as they did not in 
 visible action carry out the purpose of God for 
 which he was living. It is very suggestive and it 
 is very important that he never says, "Assent to 
 this statement." He even says, " You may believe 
 my words or not, as you like, so you only believe 
 that the things I do are genuine." What he does 
 exact of each and all of them is not in the words 
 " Obey me," not in the words " Listen to me," 
 but in the words " Follow me." That is, they are 
 to show in a visible and positive act that they are 
 walking in his way. And that is substantially 
 what we mean whenever we say that Christianity 
 is a life, and not a creed. 
 
 So firmly seated, however, in the minds of edu- 
 cated people is this determination that everything 
 shall be said before it is done that Cardinal New- 
 man actually refused to treat the question of what 
 primitive Christianity was until it had been scien- 
 tifically stated. "The hypothesis [of an early cor- 
 ruption of Christianity] has no claims on our 
 attention till it is drawn out scientifically, till we 
 
192 CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 are informed what the Christian doctrine is." l One 
 is reminded of the old joke on people of sixteen 
 quarterings who are supposed to say, " Let us be 
 genteel or die." " Let us be scientific or die," 
 seems to us freelances as absurd. 
 
 But the leaders of liberal Christianity have never 
 been unwilling to accept the challenge. They say, 
 and their followers say, — among whom I say, — 
 that a sufficient definition of a Christian is follow- 
 ing Christ, and that if any man makes the effort to 
 follow Christ, whether he expresses this in any 
 formula of words or not, he is a Christian. I say 
 still more, that it is of no consequence whether he 
 be called a Christian or not, so he be living in that 
 divine Spirit in which Jesus Christ lived. Why, he 
 may be an inhabitant of a continent beyond the 
 Antarctic ice, where the name of Jesus Christ was 
 never heard, and where he has been brought to 
 this absolute knowledge of God by other means. 
 
 When we are pressed, or asked if we cannot give 
 in words a definition of what it is to follow Christ, 
 we say we can We interest ourselves, however, 
 in seeing in how few words this can be said ; and 
 I may say, in passing, that it would seem as if the 
 mechanical churches had devoted their attention 
 to seeing how many words the same definition may 
 require. I said to the late Freeman Clarke once 
 that I had succeeded in brinsnncr the verbal defini- 
 
 o o 
 
 1 Introduction to Development of Christian Doctrine, p. iS. American 
 edition. 
 
CREED AND LIFE. 1 93 
 
 tion of Christianity into six words. He answered 
 that he was in advance of me, for he had long since 
 brought it down to four. His four words were, 
 " Love God, love man." My six words were, 
 " With God, for man, in heaven." I wanted, as 
 you all here know, to say that faith, love, and hope 
 are the whole ; perhaps I might have been satisfied 
 with Paul's statement, where he says, " These three 
 abide and continue forever." 
 
 Now, when we say that Christianity is a life, and 
 not a creed, we mean that whether a person can 
 read a creed or not, whether he have been taught 
 it in words or not, if he sees the Christian life he 
 can enter into it and follow it. We mean, as I 
 said, just what the Saviour meant when he insisted 
 upon action instead of expression. And it is very 
 interesting to see, in his own personal history, how 
 closely he held himself to his own statement. Take 
 that most pathetic conversation with the young 
 nobleman of Edom. So far as verbal expression 
 went, he and the Saviour were at one ; the young 
 man says, almost sadly, " I have kept the Ten 
 Commandments ; that is, I have obeyed the written 
 law, from my youth up." Jesus tells him what is 
 the one thing that he needs. The one thing he 
 needs, it seems, is action. " Follow me ; do as I 
 do ; lift up that which has fallen down ; bring com- 
 fort where there is no comfort ; make men see and 
 know that the kingdom of God is at hand." All 
 
194 CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 the established churches, when young men come 
 to them who wish to be ministers of this gospel, 
 say, " Yes, if you will go into such and such a 
 school and study such and such languages and 
 read such and such books, and pass an examina- 
 tion in those books, at the end of such and such a 
 time we will give you a license which shall enable 
 you to go out and say to all the world that the 
 kingdom of God is at hand." But Jesus Christ 
 took no such precautions for good grammar or for 
 conservative utterance. He found some fishermen 
 washing their nets ; he did not say to them, " Learn 
 anything," but he said, " Follow me." He found 
 a man changing money at the tax-broker's stall, 
 and he did not say to him, " Learn anything," 
 but, " Follow me." There is not the slightest indi- 
 cation that one of the twelve apostles had made 
 any study whatever in the formulas of the Jew- 
 ish church, or of the Christian church that 
 was to be. They were simply men who, as he 
 thought, had pluck and energy enough for the 
 position to which he was to appoint them, who 
 had followed him so far that he knew something 
 about them, and whom he therefore appointed, 
 because they were men of action, for the emer- 
 gency. 
 
 I cited on Wednesday night the remarkable 
 illustration of the same principle, in the lives of 
 three unnamed Roman soldiers. There is one 
 man of whom the Saviour says, "I have not found 
 
CREED AND LIFE. 1 95 
 
 such faith, no, not in Israel." He had not found 
 it among these Pharisees and scribes, learned in 
 the law ; he had not found it in the high court of 
 appeal, the Seventy, where he knew Nicodemus 
 personally; he had not found it in the little court 
 of Herod, tetrarch of Galilee; he finds it in a cen- 
 turion in the Roman army. So, at the cross, 
 when all his friends have deserted him, when the 
 mob of Jerusalem has turned against him, with his 
 mother and her friends weeping at his side, the 
 unnamed centurion in command, whose soldiers 
 have wrought the sacrifice, says, " Truly this is a 
 righteous man ; truly this is the Son of God." 
 Once more, after he has himself left the world, 
 when the church is left to the direction of the 
 present Spirit, when the question comes whether 
 this Way of Life is to be one more sect of Judaism 
 or to be the absolute religion of the world, it is 
 left to a Roman soldier to solve that question with 
 Saint Peter. He sends to Peter to come and tell 
 hinr what is the Way of Life ; and Peter comes, 
 and the notion of a peculiar people, or a church 
 separate from mankind, is broken down forever. 
 In these three critical instances, it is men of action, 
 and not men of words, who present to us the ideal 
 of the Christian life. 
 
 To me it is at once pathetic and interesting to 
 see how, in the face of its scholars and creed- 
 makers, the church, in practice, is, almost unwill- 
 ingly, forced into the same line, if it means to 
 
I96 CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 preserve its existence. As Dr. Wayland said once, 
 " Christianity has no defensive armor; it must be 
 on the aggressive, or it is lost." This is absolutely 
 true. What are called the evidences of Christian- 
 ity become the defences of Christianity, and then, 
 in the phrase of the last century, the apologies for 
 Christianity. On the other hand, ask any person, 
 partial or impartial, where it is that he is interested 
 in the history of this religion, and you find he has 
 got hold of Xavier, going out from Europe to press 
 the new life in Ceylon and Japan ; you find he has 
 some story of the Moravians planting their missions 
 of love on the coast of Labrador or in the West 
 Indies. Dr. Storrs, of the American Board of 
 Commissioners of Foreign Missions, said to me 
 once, and I think said with truth, that if the Con- 
 gregational Church of New England had established 
 its great missionary system earlier, he believed the 
 Great Schism would have been prevented. By the 
 Great Schism he meant the separation of that Con- 
 gregational body into the two houses, Orthodox 
 and Heterodox, — a separation which does not do 
 any great harm, perhaps, but which certainly does 
 not do a great deal of good. He meant, what he 
 did not say, that if the church had shown herself 
 in action in the period between 1 8 10 and 1825, 
 most men would have forgotten the rigmarole of 
 the Five Points of Calvin, — rigmarole which leads 
 to idolatry or to infidelity. And so of any Chris- 
 tian saint, — those who fill the calendar of the 
 
CREED AND LIFE. 1 97 
 
 Roman Church, or those, perhaps, who belonged 
 to no established church, people like John Milton 
 or Roger Williams, whose names have not been 
 written on the calendar of any ecclesiastical organ- 
 ization, — if they have done the things that the 
 Lord said, if they have lived in his spirit, if they 
 have followed in his Way, they have wrought the 
 miracle. There is another of Dr. Wayland's epi- 
 grams: some one asked him, of one of his distin- 
 guished friends, if he thought that he was a Chris- 
 tian. His answer was, " Can he drive out the 
 devils? If he can, he meets all my requisitions or 
 the Master's." He referred, of course, to the pas- 
 sage in the Gospels where the disciples told Jesus 
 that they had rebuked one whom they found cast- 
 ing out devils in his name. They rebuked him, as 
 ecclesiastics rebuke such people to-day, " because 
 he walketh not with us." And Jesus said, " Forbid 
 him not. No man can work a miracle in my name, 
 and lightly speak evil of me." 
 
 And the Master is willing that his church shall 
 stand the test to which he leaves fisherman, apos- 
 tle, young nobleman, and repentant sinner. It is 
 the test of kings, and emperors, and fishermen, of 
 preachers and blacksmiths, of artists and dress- 
 makers, — the simple test of thistles, and vines 
 and fig-trees. All of them — the emperor and the 
 blacksmith — shall be judged by their fruits. The 
 fishing-net and the church will be judged by what 
 
193 CREED AND LIFE. 
 
 they do. The doctrine will be judged by the life. 
 The life will not be judged by the doctrine. At 
 this plan of his the doctrine-makers will be dis- 
 satisfied. The men of words will skilfully twist 
 words, to say it were better the other way. You 
 and I — how gladly would we get over the need 
 of travelling ten miles on foot this morning, if it 
 would answer to say we have done it. But it will 
 not answer. To live as one lives who knows that 
 God is here has not proved to be easy. To say, 
 M I believe in God, the Father Almighty," has 
 proved to be very easy. Millions of people say it 
 every Sunday morning. The Saviour of mankind 
 was not pleased when they said it, unless they 
 did it; unless they showed their belief in their 
 act. "Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not 
 the things which I say?" His religion is not a 
 creed, it is a life. 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 " On these two commandments hangeth the whole law, and the 
 prophets." Matt. xxii. 40. 
 
 The two are co-related, — as modern science is 
 fond of saying. 
 
 I have spoken here twice, this winter, on the New 
 Englander's determined habit to achieve some- 
 thing every day. It is what his Catechism calls 
 " living to the glory of God." 
 
 This hard determination, so utterly unlike the 
 indifference of the savage whom he displaced, has 
 been thought to produce an angular and unyield- 
 ing habit of life. The New Englander has the 
 name of being as certain and unchanging as the 
 north-west winds, and of being as cold and gener- 
 ally disagreeable. And there is many a critic who 
 would say, " Give us less determination, if you 
 only will give us more tenderness." 
 
 We who are here should never admit that such 
 a complaint can fairly be made of the New 
 Englander of to-day. But none the less is it 
 our business to ask, in any such study of righteous 
 life as we are making here this winter, how this 
 north-west wind of energy and truth and right 
 is tempered in the Christian scheme. It will not 
 do to have the name " Puritan " regarded as the 
 
200 THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 synonym of stern or pitiless. We must not let 
 what the Scotch call the "unco guid" people, 
 make goodness disagreeable. And, for our own 
 lives, we must not let determination, consecration, 
 and duty claim all the majesty and certainty of 
 law, while tenderness, gentleness, and the forgive- 
 ness of injuries are supposed to be left to the 
 accident of whim, or convenience, or other happen- 
 ings. That is a critical and central text which, in 
 describing our good God, says, " Mercy and truth 
 have met together ; righteousness and peace have 
 kissed one another." If such absolute union of 
 firmness and tenderness are to be found in the 
 Father, why, they must be found, as a rule, in 
 you and me, who are His children. 
 
 And I ought to say, at the very outset, that so 
 far as the New Testament goes, — as original and 
 simple Christianity goes, — there never has been 
 any doubt about this union. From the early centu- 
 ries comes that happy proverb of the outsiders, 
 " Behold how these Christians love one another !" l 
 Puritans may be called hard and austere ; Metho- 
 dists may be laughed at as narrow; New Church 
 people and Baptists may be called clannish ; 
 Episcopalians may be laughed at for the absurd- 
 ity of their harmless formalities; but Christians, 
 pure and simple, were in the beginning, as they 
 ought to be now, cheerful, affectionate, good-tem- 
 pered, good-humored, good-natured. Partners of 
 
 i Tertullian's Apologeticus. 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 201 
 
 Omnipotence, they take life easily. Sure that 
 they are in God's law, they know it will work 
 without jar or friction. They need not be fussing 
 about more oil on this pivot, or less strain on 
 that bearing. Least of all, will any one of them 
 be downcast or distressed because he supposes he 
 has the universe to care for. 
 
 All this is shown in the Epistles. In John's let- 
 ters, the absolute necessity of our mutual love takes 
 the place of all other injunctions about duty. 
 Mercy is justice. In the practical summing up in 
 James's letter,, he demands personal purity first. 
 The tool must be as good as God made it. Then, 
 in an overflowing stream of words, all meaning 
 Love, he names peace, gentleness — "the Chris- 
 tian is easy to be entreated ; he is full of mercy 
 and good fruits." You might say, that is the 
 whole of it. 
 
 And it is here, and in one or two parallel pas- 
 sages in Paul's letters, that there comes in that ad- 
 mirable description of a gentleman. It ought to 
 be written in letters of gold in the schools and 
 colleges. A gentleman is one who gladly remits 
 something from his rights. 1 He does not stick for 
 the letter of the bond. He does not exact the last 
 blot of blood. 
 
 1 1 cannot find this admirable phrase earlier than in J. F. Schleusner's 
 Lexicon, Leipsic, 1808. This is in the reference to Paul's statement as 
 to bishops : " libenter cedentem, et de jure duo libenter remittentem." 
 But it must have been put into epigrammatic language long before 
 Schleusner's time. 
 
202 THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 I do not remember who first called Saint Paul 
 11 the prince of gentlemen ; " but the remark is 
 perfectly true, and we cannot bear it in mind too 
 often as we read his letters. And then, coming 
 back from the Epistles to the Gospels, nothing is 
 more clear than that the attitude of Jesus to all 
 those who were around him was that of one who 
 was making religion cheerful, and rescuing it from 
 the gloom, as he rescued it from the pettiness, of 
 the formalists. That he " went about eating and 
 drinking " was the sneer of the Pharisees ; that the 
 " common people heard him gladly " was the re- 
 port of the policemen. Renan calls his life in 
 Galilee "a summer idyl;" and nothing is more 
 certain than that the welcome which he met was 
 that of those who recognized that his news was 
 indeed " glad tidings." Indeed, the proclama- 
 tion of absolute religion always effects a complete 
 revolution or upheaval from all mechanical and 
 material types of religion. Of this revolution 
 there is no visible token more distinct than that 
 which makes religion the central power of the joy 
 and strength of life ; or, as we say here so often, 
 compels man, the child, to enter into the life of 
 his Father. 
 
 Now, our affair this morning is to bring into our 
 management of daily life those master considera- 
 tions which, as eternal principles, so govern every 
 detail of life that we shall never drop back into 
 that mistake of the sour Puritan of the second 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 2C3 
 
 generation. I say " the Puritan of the second 
 generation," for when we remember that such 
 light-hearted persons as Philip Sidney, and even 
 William Shakespeare, 1 would probably have been 
 marked as Puritans by the men of their time; 
 when we remember that John Milton, who was no 
 ascetic, and who knew how to enjoy life, was Puri- 
 tan of the Puritans, — we understand more dis- 
 tinctly that the familiar censure now passed on 
 Puritanism did not always belong to it. This is 
 very perfectly shown in Macaulay's paper, as the 
 contempt, unjustly piled in later days, upon the 
 Roundheads and others, to whom we owe all 
 the blessings of constitutional liberty. Rightly 
 considered, law is not a bit of external compulsion ; 
 but when it does its perfect work, it is the interior 
 principle of life. When, in the Lord's Prayer, we 
 ask that God's will may be done on earth, as it is 
 done in heaven, we are asking that His life may 
 absorb and control our lives, and that all move- 
 ment of human affairs may be as gentle, as regu- 
 lar, and as agreeable as are the movements of the 
 planets in the universe. Language is full of epi- 
 grams which express this. The poets, as well as 
 the astronomers, see that the planets and meteors 
 move in curves and not in straight lines. There 
 are no sudden breaks and angles ; this was early 
 observed, and the poets constantly remind us of it. 
 
 1 There is an interesting paper by Leonard Withington on this point 
 in his volumes of essays called " The Puritan.'' 
 
204 THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 Of which observation, the value, or the interior 
 meaning, is, that there is no shock nor conflict, no 
 sudden surprise or instant variation of will, but 
 that the motion of nature is a movement smooth 
 and even. Now, such external expressions of the 
 poets are of use, if they show us what is the con- 
 dition of our lives when regulated by and from an 
 interior principle, which subdues the processes of 
 life, and which, on the other hand, makes them 
 strong and effective : if thus we can break down 
 that tradition of the puppet-show, which supposes 
 that the Director of life pulls us hither and thither 
 by strings and wires. Of such pulling and haul- 
 ing, the jerky results are not like the movement of 
 the heavens of God, but are like the contrivance of 
 some inferior being, who has not reason to feel 
 the sense of law. 
 
 The physicists of to-day are fond of saying that 
 all the laws of Nature may be reduced to two : 
 the law of attraction and the law of heat. With- 
 out asking the tempting question whether these 
 two may be reduced to one, let us try to familiar- 
 ize ourselves with this statement in the details of 
 the exhibition of law. Gravitation does not work 
 by starts or fits ; there is not gravitation in this min- 
 ute, and no gravitation in the next minute, with 
 more gravitation in the third minute. It is a con- 
 stant, steady force, always and absolutely to be 
 relied upon, and working with such precision that 
 the orbit is always the same orbit, the sweep of 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 205 
 
 the smoke across the sky is always in harmonious 
 curves, and the ascent of the balloon, if you know 
 the conditions, may be predetermined. So of the 
 law of heat. Heat produces so much expansion 
 from such an amount of heat, or, from such an 
 amount of heat I can develop such an amount of 
 electricity ; and this, as before, by no hitches or 
 starts, by no sudden impulse, but with that abso- 
 lute steadiness which indeed belongs to the very 
 name of law, if we would only use words carefully 
 and distinctly. 
 
 Now, the new impulse which the Christian relig- 
 ion gave to the world was in making the absolute 
 statement that the life and work of man also may 
 be governed thus by law, by a law, by one law, 
 by the infinite law, by the same law which governs 
 planets, governs worlds, and governs universes. 
 Simply, the details of human life may be governed 
 by the law of God ; or, as the Saviour says all 
 along, man is the child of God, and may partake 
 the nature of God, if only he will. Now, as 
 orbits belong to the law of gravitation, what is 
 the law to which the life of separate human beings 
 belongs? The first statement to be made about 
 it is that men's life is a common life. They de- 
 pend upon each other as much as the cells in the 
 leaves of a tree depend upon each other. Pre- 
 cisely as you cannot have one living leaf-cell 
 unless it be linked in with a million, precisely so 
 you cannot have one living man unless he be 
 
206 THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 linked in with millions of living men. His life 
 their life, their life is his life. And if he means to 
 govern his life at all, to govern it rightly and well, 
 he must govern it with a consciousness of this 
 constant central principle of life which binds him 
 to all living men and women, and makes them 
 indeed, as we say so fondly, one family in their 
 Father's love. 
 
 It is true that, if you find a savage or a child 
 who is ignorant of this law of the common life, it 
 is perhaps easier to teach him that this thing is 
 right, that that thing is right, that this statement 
 is true, that that statement contradicts eternal 
 truth ; — it may be easier at the beginning that 
 he shall get this sense of righteousness or justice, 
 of which men speak so fondly, and to which in 
 general they ascribe the characteristics of law. 
 And my hard Puritan comes as far as this. He 
 talks of righteousness, he talks of justice, and he 
 talks of truth ; but I must own that he is a little 
 apt to talk of them as if they asserted their power 
 from the outside, as he incorrectly supposes that 
 the lightning asserts its power in the changes of a 
 thunder-storm. The truth is that there was just 
 as much electricity in the world and in life, when 
 he was sailing on the smooth surface of a summer 
 sea, as there is when he sees these flashes of light- 
 ning in the midst of darkness and tempest. And 
 so is it true that there is as much law, — the law of 
 love and gentleness in the midst of hard righteous- 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 2QJ 
 
 ness, stern truth, and invincible justice, as there is 
 when he sees a mother kiss her child, or any other 
 of the displays of what he is pleased to call mercy. 
 What he needs is to understand that truth, right- 
 eousness, and justice do belong to the eternal 
 sympathy which should bind all men and women 
 together, and which will bind them together when 
 the daily prayer is answered, and God's will is 
 done by men and women who are His children as 
 it is done by Him in the majesty of that infinite 
 life which it pleases us to call Heaven. 
 
 The Puritan gentleman, or the gentle Puritan, 
 — you may call him what you will, — lives for the 
 common welfare. In organizing his State he gives 
 it the name of the " Commonwealth." It is true 
 that whether other men ask of a man who is his 
 father, what does he know, how much is he 
 worth, the Puritan asks, "What has he done?" 
 and he means " what has he done for the com- 
 mon interest." That picture which we had at 
 the Club, of the public work of Johnson and Win- 
 throp and Dudley in the beginning, was well 
 spoken of as the omen and prophecy of the work 
 of the Puritan gentleman for the city of his home. 
 And he invents the phrase " Public Spirit," — the 
 public breath, the life-breath of the community, — ■ 
 as a phrase to express the life-breath of every 
 man and woman in the State. When a man dies 
 who has challenged attention, the question such 
 men ask is as to his public spirit. Mr. Weld, 
 
20S THE LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 General Butler, Mr. Morse, the reporter who died 
 on duty, they all have to pass the same inquiry, 
 Did he live for others, or did he live and die for 
 himself? Was he a man of public spirit? or, did 
 she know she was one in the Commonwealth? All 
 this means that at bottom, in human affairs, these 
 great laws of right, which we name laws of 
 justice, truth, or honor, belong to the mutual 
 law of love. It is the great law of human at- 
 traction. It binds man to man and man to God. 
 To use the modern language, the forces of these 
 laws are correlative. And as I find that electricity 
 and magnetism are the same, and then that elec- 
 tricity can be born from heat, or heat can be born 
 from electricity, that the two are co-related or 
 correlative, so I find that justice and love are co- 
 related, that truth and love are co-related. I must 
 not speak of the one without thinking of the other. 
 When the Saviour said, in this text, " The Law 
 hangeth on these commandments," he meant merely 
 the law of Moses. But he did mean also, that 
 the law in wmich we love God, and the law in 
 which we love man, are one law ; they are co- 
 related. And in a hundred other words he 
 showed that here is the principle of the law, not 
 of Moses, but of all human life. 
 
 I do not go out on a day's duty merely with 
 that hard resolve that I will measure so much 
 work; that I will hew to such a line. I will not 
 try to satisfy myself, by obeying such a statute, 
 
THE LAW OF LOVE. 209 
 
 given at the State House, at the Capitol, or on 
 Mount Sinai. No ; my obedience is willing obedi- 
 ence. My service is perfect freedom. For what 
 I call my duty is done because I love the Lord 
 my God. And because I love Him, I love my 
 neighbor as myself. 
 
 " Father, I bless Thy name that I do live 
 And in each motion am made rich with Thee. 
 
 " May each new act my new allegiance prove, 
 Till in Thy perfect love I live and move." l 
 
 1 Jones Very's sonnet, " In Him We Trust." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 " Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of wit- 
 nesses, let us lay aside every weight." Hebrews xii. i. 
 
 THE course of Saturday lectures is of more im- 
 portance than the modest announcement shows. 
 
 The name Mystic deceives the hast}' reader. It 
 is supposed that mysticism means something mys- 
 terious, — that it is the same as mystery. Indeed, 
 it is a misfortune that the two words begin with 
 the same four letters. 
 
 But, in truth, as the word is used by the gentle- 
 men who have arranged this course, lectures on the 
 Mystics have nothing to do with mysteries, or with 
 anything mysterious. In the language of science, 
 any person who believes in the presence and power 
 of an unseen God is called a mystic. Every 
 mother who teaches her boy the Lord's prayer is 
 a mystic. The boy is a mystic if he says his 
 prayer with courage and conviction. And when 
 these gentlemen prepare to instruct us about the 
 mystics, they promise to take the lives of ten or 
 twelve men and women, beginning with St. Paul and 
 St. John, who have on the whole done the most to 
 make the world believe that God is and is here, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 211 
 
 •that He cares for you and me, and that we shall 
 be and are helped, when we come to Him as little 
 children come to their fathers and mothers. 
 
 About forty years ago, a friend of mine, a 
 student in Germany, called upon the great scholar 
 Frederick Tholuck, in Halle. He explained to 
 Tholuck that he was a Unitarian minister in 
 Massachusetts. " Oh, yes," said the great scholar, 
 " I know the American Unitarians. They are 
 mystics." The words showed how careful his 
 reading of our works here. They showed that 
 he knew the difference between our work and 
 that of Priestley and the older English Unitarians. 
 But I have amused myself, when I have asked what 
 some of the old-time Boston Unitarian laymen 
 would have said, had they known that the high- 
 est authority in the world had classed them all 
 as mystics. Josiah Quincy, the president of the 
 college ; Jonathan Phillips, Colonel Perkins, the 
 leaders in business in Boston ; John Quincy 
 Adams, Governor Lincoln, Mr. Webster, and the 
 other men who led the community in politics, — 
 these were all mystics of the deepest dye ; for 
 they all said their prayers with a distinct feeling 
 that a living God heard them and meant to help 
 them. And they all knew that this Real Pres- 
 ence of God was more important than any reve- 
 lation in any book, on any tables of stone, or by 
 any prophet. Knowing this, they were mystics, 
 through and through. Yet no one of them had 
 
2 12 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 ever heard the word used in this way; and I 
 suppose that each of these men. till he died, 
 would have said : 
 
 '•I am no mystic, sir: I am a matter-of-fact, 
 practical Christian. I trust God, and I know He 
 will pull me through." 
 
 When the gentlemen who announce this course 
 tell us that they will give us the lives of the more 
 distinguished mystics of the last nineteen centu- 
 ries, the}- promise to us the biographies of the men 
 and women who have been nearest to the standard 
 of Jesus Christ. More than this, — and this, it 
 seems to me. is the most interesting side of their 
 work. — they promise us the lives of eight or ten 
 people who have done the most to place the world 
 where it is to-day. For the advance in Christian 
 civilization, while it is due largely to the inventors, 
 to the Franklins and Watts and other people who 
 have known how to handle wire and steel, — is 
 due at the bottom of things to the men who have 
 kept in close touch with Almighty God, who have 
 known Him, seen Him as the pure in heart see 
 Him, heard His suggestions from day to day, and 
 have made clear to the world His Real Presence. 
 They are the men who have followed Jesus Christ 
 directly, in saying that God is here and not in the 
 nth heaven; that God is now, just as much as 
 He was with Moses on the side of Mount SinaL 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 21 3 
 
 To proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand, 
 while most people think it is going to come next 
 year, or five hundred years hence, is the pleasure 
 and joy of these men. To proclaim that the reign 
 of God is here, just as much as in some four-square 
 city of gold and jasper, known by the name of 
 Paradise, is their joy and victory. 
 
 Oddly enough, the visible and mechanical or- 
 ganization of the Christian Church has ten or twenty 
 times, perhaps more, drawn away Christian people 
 from this certainty of God's presence. It has hap- 
 pened, therefore, that ten or twenty times there 
 has risen up some prophet who has laughed at the 
 organizations, or frowned at them, or defied them, 
 or ignored them. He has simply gone about the 
 world saying just what Jesus said : " Here is God, 
 and now is God, and the kingdom of God is at 
 hand." And these prophets have changed the 
 face of civilization in which they lived ; so that the 
 real history of civilization is more wrought in with 
 the lives of these men than it is with the lives of 
 such men as Faust who invented printing, or Watt 
 who invented the steam-engine, or Franklin who 
 taught us how to tame electricity. 
 
 Now, the gentlemen who are lecturing on Satur- 
 day afternoons propose to tell us something of the 
 lives of these prophets. And exactly as the 
 prophet Isaiah is a more interesting person than 
 King Hezekiah, though King Hezekiah made a 
 great deal more show in Jerusalem in the time of 
 
214 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 Isaiah, exactly so is Francis of Assisi a more in- 
 teresting person in the real history of civilization 
 than is Leo X., though Leo X. made a great deal 
 more show in his time. In the time when Richard 
 the First, putting on a magnificent suit of plate- 
 armor, rode on a handsome horse in Palestine 
 against another prince named Saladin, he occupied 
 a great deal more attention in the world than did 
 a man with a black gown named Bernard, who 
 lived in Europe a generation before, and was 
 rated in his time somewhat as a president of a 
 Western college is rated with us now. But as it 
 has proved, the man in the black gown named 
 Bernard of Clairvaux has had a great deal more 
 to do with the development of the civilization 
 which puts you and me into this church to-day, 
 and which has built up the great Exposition at 
 Chicago, than twenty Richards, or Geoffreys, or 
 Raymonds, or Johns, or Thomas a Beckets could 
 have had. It is very true that it is not very easy 
 to get at the lines of the power of such prophets. 
 The Saviour said very truly that no man knew how 
 the spirit of God comes or how it goes. It is as 
 Mr. Thomson and Mr. Edison and Mr. Houston, 
 and all of them put together, cannot tell us how 
 the underground currents of electricity go and 
 come. But when I hear my friend talking, in his 
 own voice, at the other end of the Chicago tele- 
 phone, I know very well that somehow some 
 power has passed between me and him. And 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 215 
 
 when I see Western Europe a paradise, where 
 Bernard of Clairvaux found it a den of thieves, J 
 know that somehow and somewhere the spirit of 
 God has operated to bring about that revolution. 
 The more I work over the science of history, the 
 more I find out that it was Bernard and such 
 prophets as he who worked this miracle. 
 
 I proposed to myself last Sunday, when I read 
 the notice of the lectures, to use the time I have 
 this morning in briefly sketching the lives which 
 are to be illustrated as the six lectures go on, with 
 the hope that I might excite the curiosity of some 
 of you so far that you would make the study 
 which these lecturers propose, not only on Satur- 
 day afternoons, but in connection with your wider 
 reading for the spring and summer. For un- 
 doubtedly the tendency of all our reading is to 
 inquire about the outside of things. We are just 
 like the Pharisees who told Jesus they would like 
 to see some signs. We like to have pictures in 
 the newspapers. We like to have representa- 
 tions of external phenomena. All our temptations 
 are that way. It is, therefore, as I said, a good 
 thing if a set of scholarly young men will make us 
 face about, and look for a little at the deeper 
 causes to which all invention, all manufacture, all 
 art, and half of what we call science, owe their 
 victories. 
 
 As the week has passed by, however, I have 
 satisfied myself that I cannot do more than I have 
 
2l6 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 now done in trying to awaken interest in the course 
 which is proposed at Channing Hall. And I will 
 only try to give a single illustration this morning — 
 rather tempted, if we get any chances, to recur to the 
 same tempting themes again as the spring goes on. 
 And this illustration shall be simply the warning 
 against ecclesiasticism as such, which has, in so 
 many combinations of history, robbed the advanc- 
 ing church of the victories which were just within 
 her grasp. A set of well-meaning, mediocre men 
 of talent and some outside education, step in and 
 push the inspired men of genius aside, saying, 
 " You have done your work admirably well, dear 
 friends; go off and sing your swan-song and die. 
 We will make a machine out of the interest which 
 you have excited, and this machine shall last for- 
 ever." Then they get their machine running; but 
 nobody puts any oil on the working points ; it be- 
 gins to creak very badly ; people are not satisfied 
 with its work, and another prophet has to start up 
 and perhaps break the whole old machine to pieces 
 before he can quicken the life of people again. 
 And again he is sent off himself, while another 
 mediocre set of men of talent come in and try to 
 repeat his work : another machine is built up ; 
 there is another set of rusty pistons and pivots 
 and wheels, and the world goes through the same 
 discipline once more. 
 
 The central lesson of lessons is in the life of the 
 Saviour himself. He is the first idealist of all time. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 217 
 
 He lives and moves and has his being in his God. 
 He lives and moves and has his being in God so 
 absolutely and entirely, that, at the end of two or 
 three centuries, the machine-men, the men of tal- 
 ent, say, " Go to, he is God ; let us worship him. 
 It will be a great deal simpler than trying to bring 
 this intangible, invisible spirit, who is in all the uni- 
 verse, into our lives and hearts and souls." Of the 
 life of Jesus himself, the history is one and the 
 same, from the beginning to the end. To ecclesias- 
 tics on the one side, — generally called Pharisees, 
 Scribes, and Sadducees in the Bible, — and to 
 politicians on the other, — sometimes called Hero- 
 dians, and sometimes by other names, — he says 
 just one thing : he says, " The Kingdom of God is 
 at hand ! " He says, " God is here, and while 
 books are very good things, and laws are very 
 good things, and it is all right, if you want to, to 
 tithe mint and anise and cummin, do, for the very 
 love of God, remember God first. Come to God 
 in every moment, and let Him preside while you 
 are blowing your trumpets, while you are march- 
 ing in your processions, while you are paying trib- 
 ute to Caesar." Now, it is impossible to read 
 church history without seeing how often and how 
 sadly this commandment of His gets turned upside 
 down. 
 
 I remember standing in the cathedral at 
 Mayence, the first time I had ever been in one 
 of the great Catholic cathedrals of Europe, and 
 
2lS THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 doing my very best to come into sympathy with the 
 service there. I have never forgotten the agon- 
 ized expression of the poor priest before me, whose 
 business it was in one hour to repeat the Lord's 
 Prayer thirty-five times. 1 Just think of it ! It was 
 his duty to charge those words full with fresh and 
 genuine meaning, as of a tired child sobbing in its 
 mother's arms, thirty-five times as those sixty min- 
 utes went by. Take that as an illustration of what 
 it is to be told, by the mechanical combinations of 
 hundreds of years, by a long line of officers above 
 you and behind you, that to draw near to God, in 
 that particular hour, — three o'clock Sunday after- 
 noon, on the nth of October, — you must say 
 those hundred or two words over thirty-five times. 
 You see how entirely the thing, the ritual, comes to 
 be first ; and you make as a secondary matter the 
 living, loving presence of this Holy Spirit, who 
 makes worlds and sets worlds moving, shines in 
 suns, opens blossoms, and ripens the fruit. And you 
 may see just this danger in all the visible arrange- 
 ments which we make so carefully for service and 
 for worship. Now, Jesus Christ saw all this in its 
 bald horror. Simply, he hated it; and he said 
 very hard things about it. They wanted him, on 
 the morning of the Sabbath, to say to a poor 
 epileptic boy that he could not attend to him that 
 day because it was God's Sabbath, that he might 
 come to-morrow. The very care that they would 
 
 1 The service is called a Triginta. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 219 
 
 give to an ox or a mule who had stumbled into a 
 pit, they would not give to a child of Abraham. 
 And for such madnesses as theirs he scored them 
 down pitilessly. No wonder that they hated him. 
 No wonder that they wanted to club him and stone 
 him and drive him out of the synagogue there 
 in Nazareth. No wonder that they arrested him at 
 night by Kedron, took him round to Pilate's judg- 
 ment hall, lied about him and his purpose, and 
 nailed him to the cross. Your man of ability, your 
 man of talent, your man of machinery, revolts 
 against the presence of the living prophet, who tes- 
 tifies of that which he has seen, and tells that which 
 he knows, who brings in this flow of infinite life, 
 sweeping down the valley of the river, and carry- 
 ing away all the petty monuments of mortal ingen- 
 uity. The priest is apt to hate the prophet, and to 
 nail him to the cross if he can catch him at dis- 
 advantage. He did so then. 
 
 Here is the account, in few words, of the failure 
 of religion in history to do what men expect from 
 it, and have a right to ask from it. Religion is 
 driven away, and what Dr. Hedge used to call re- 
 ligiosity takes the place of it. You have a son of 
 God, well beloved, going in the night to commune 
 with God, and by day seeking and following His 
 present law. You pay him all sorts of reverence. 
 You build temples in his honor. You sing anthems 
 to him. You worship him. But in the place 
 he filled you do not find what you seek, — 
 
2 20 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 sons of God who are trying in every moment 
 to commune with Him? You have another set of 
 Scribes and Pharisees. They come so far that they 
 tell you that they, and not God, will make your 
 laws for you. They tell you that God has given 
 to them the management of your government. 
 They even tell you that once a month you must 
 come to one of them and tell him your sins and 
 that he will tell you what to do about them. For 
 fear you shall pray wrong, they write down your 
 prayers for you. And so the children of God, who 
 all happily at home, running to him for direction, 
 walking with him, talking with him, doing what he 
 bade them, and telling him all their needs, find in 
 the course of a few generations that they have all 
 been shipped off to a far-away boarding-school, 
 where teachers are very highly recommended by 
 other people like them, but where, alas ! they are 
 very homesick. They do not see the Father's face, 
 and they are all the more apt not to do His will. 
 It is thus that the sweep and progress of religion, 
 from which you had hoped so much, falters, stops 
 like a vessel which has missed stays, quivering in 
 the wind, and losing all progress. And it is then 
 that Augustine cries out:' 
 
 " Oh, my God ! I could not be wert Thou not in 
 me, or unless I were in thee." 
 
 It is then that St. Francis takes me out from the 
 cloister into the world, and the very chatter and 
 singing of his little birds teach me how God loves 
 His creatures and His children. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 221 
 
 It is then that George Fox warns me that every 
 word must be simple, my manners and daily life cut 
 loose from things, while I listen to the present Spirit 
 of Life, — a Spirit who is He, and not It, — a pres- 
 ent God, and not an ancient Law. It is in such a 
 crisis that Channing comes, and in the midst of his 
 intellectual triumphs we hear him whispering tc 
 God, " O God, give us a deeper sense of Thy pres- 
 ence, and instruct us to devotion by every scene 
 of nature and every event of life." And so, a gen- 
 eration later, in our own time, Waldo Emerson, the 
 spiritual child of Channing, wakes this whole Amer- 
 ica of ours from the formalism of its ritual and the 
 rigmarole of its creeds, by going and coming, sing- 
 ing and preaching, at the fireside and on the plat- 
 form, teaching the immanent presence of God. 
 " This is God who tells you what is right. He is 
 God who makes the world so beautiful. He is 
 God who will carry the nation through. Why are 
 you troubled when you have the living God to 
 fall back upon? " 
 
 "And we, seeing we are girt about by so great a 
 cloud of witnesses;" we, who come here one day 
 in seven, lest the dust and smoke should separate 
 us from God ; we, though we have not idols to 
 break nor parchment creeds to trample under 
 foot, — we may well ask if we are God's children, 
 or only His servants. He speaks to me if I will 
 hear, as to Isaiah or to St. Francis or to Channing. 
 This clear voice of Right, — do this, do that ; right 
 
222 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 hand now, left hand now ; ah, it is His voice. It 
 is His present love. It is no decision cut on an 
 old mossy stone for Hebrews or Phnceicians. This 
 heaven of blue, this wonder of the snow, this glory 
 of starlight, it is He who spreads it for me to-day. 
 Father dear, I am grateful ! To-day we hear His 
 voice ; to-day we can do His will ; to-day we 
 can rest ourselves, tired children, in His arms. 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 " Why could not we cast him out? " 
 
 Mark ix. 28. 
 
 THE incident is fairly pathetic, whether we con- 
 sider the Saviour's part in it or theirs. 
 
 He has determined on a great plan which has 
 since succeeded, — a plan then wholly new, of 
 lifting up this world. This is to be done by send- 
 ing out into it twelve men who believe in God, and 
 rely on Him. They are to make other men believe 
 in the present reign of God. And these others 
 are to make others try it. 
 
 Now comes a little local experiment on this 
 plan. The Master is away for a little while, per- 
 haps for a day or two. He comes back to the 
 little company, and everything has stopped short. 
 Things seemed hopeful and cheerful and to be 
 advancing when he went away ; and now nothing 
 is cheerful, nothing is hopeful, and nothing is ad- 
 vancing. Nine of the twelve have been left to 
 show what they can do, and they can do nothing. 
 This epileptic boy has been brought to them, who 
 would have been soothed in a moment had the 
 Master spoken ten kind words to him ; and they 
 have not the spell. Whatever they have spoken 
 has done no good. They cannot cast out the 
 
224 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 devil. And to the Master, as he comes, their con- 
 fession is simply the confession of failure. 
 
 The whole story is so exactly like experiences 
 of our own, that, as I said, it is indeed pathetic. 
 How often do we see people who have been eager 
 to be placed in positions of command, who are 
 wholly unfit for those positions when the moment 
 comes. In Mr. Adams's very entertaining history 
 of the United States, with all his own humor he 
 describes this position of the commander-in-chief 
 of the American army at the beginning of the 
 second war with England. Everybody has been 
 boasting about the taking of Canada : we were to 
 take Canada within the first four months after war 
 was declared ; it was in every speech that we were 
 to take Canada; Canada was to fall into our 
 hands like a ripened pear from a tree. And now 
 here is the commander-in-chief who is going to 
 do the taking, and the critical moment comes, and 
 he knows no more about the taking of Canada 
 than you or I do about the calculating of the 
 curve of a comet. For a few weeks he continues 
 this refrain, that he is going to take Canada; 
 after a few weeks he becomes more silent on the 
 subject; and, when five or six months have gone 
 by, he says to the President that if he wants to 
 employ him any longer he may, but that for his 
 part he should be glad to retire to private life. 
 He finds that it is one thing to suppose one's self 
 in a place of responsibility, and another thing to 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 225 
 
 be in that place. This is just what the nine 
 apostles found. It is what Judas Iscariot, the 
 traitor, perhaps suspected. It is the same as 
 Thomas, the inquiring sceptic, finds. They are 
 here with a world to save, and they cannot save it. 
 The moment the Master arrives on the scene, 
 all is well again. The little encampment, if it 
 were an encampment, takes on light and life, and 
 begins to look forward and not back. The sick 
 boy goes happily home with his father ; the visit 
 has answered the purpose. The people around 
 feel that there is somebody who has power, and 
 they recognize his authority. And things seem 
 as they seemed before he went away. And then 
 it is that these poor fellows, who have failed so 
 absolutely when for the first time they were in- 
 trusted with responsibility, come and ask Jesus 
 what the matter was, why they failed as they did 
 faiL And he makes to them the answer, which to 
 one and another he has made so often, " It is because 
 you had no faith." " If you had faith as a grain 
 of mustard-seed — why, think what a grain of mus- 
 tard-seed comes to. It obeys the laws of its being ; 
 it accepts the infinite life which is offered to it all 
 around ; it grows and becomes a tree ; a million 
 other mustard-seeds are planted from it ; and in 
 the end their shade envelops the earth." He 
 leads them to look forward, as he always does, and 
 to look outside themselves, as he always does. 
 There is victory secured, if only they will accept 
 
2 26 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 for their own the infinite law of all nature and of 
 all being, and will not try to work their wonders 
 by their own poor, broken little wills. 
 
 And this is exactly what he says, or what his 
 Father and our Father says, to us, at any moment 
 of our discouragement: " Why art thou cast 
 down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted 
 within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet 
 praise him who is the help of my countenance and 
 my God." You are cast down, you are discour- 
 aged ; because of your own devising and your own 
 purpose you are expecting to work the marvels* 
 you are expecting to cure him who is sick, or to 
 bind up that which is broken, or to bridge the 
 chasm which is before you. But this is not the 
 way any marvel is to be worked : it is not by our 
 power, but by infinite power. The chasm is to 
 be bridged, not by our wit or wisdom, but by in- 
 finite law. You have failed, because all alone you 
 have attempted the duty that was before you. 
 You would have succeeded if you had acted in the 
 infinite harmony, if you had availed yourself of 
 almighty law, knowing, indeed, that you were act- 
 ing in the divine and almighty purpose. 
 
 All this I am saying, as I promised I would, 
 some weeks ago, when I was speaking here of 
 the daily conduct of life. Even from hour to 
 hour, between the moment when we rise in 
 the morning and the moment when we close our 
 eyes in sleep after our evening prayer, there are 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 227 
 
 two distinct lines of life on which one may make 
 his daily plans, may fight the battle through, and 
 may write his journal of victory or failure when 
 the thing is over. 
 
 I may arrange my day as if I were the centre of 
 the universe. "Look out for Number i" is the 
 proverb of such a life. A great deal of introspec- 
 tive religion — of the religion of repentance, and 
 reward, and punishment, of convent and cloister — 
 looks this way. Many well-meaning books on what 
 is called self-culture look this way. 
 
 Or, from the view of the universe, — the view God 
 takes, for instance, — you may look upon your life. 
 A good illustration is the view which an intelligent 
 private soldier has of a great battle, if he is so 
 placed that he can see, say, the steadfast firm- 
 ness of the centre, the rapid dash of the cavalry 
 on the extreme right, the precision of the shots of 
 the artillery on the extreme left. Such a man com- 
 prehends something of the exigency of the day. 
 He does his own part, not that he may be paid 
 next pay-day, or that he may have two biscuits 
 for supper to-night, but that the army may suc- 
 ceed ; and for his country, that peace follow war. 
 
 In the first point of view, the very highest life 
 one rises to is to pray, " O God, save my soul, and 
 lift me into heaven." 
 
 In the second point of view, one rises to the 
 spirit of all the hopes and petitions of the Lord's 
 Prayer. In this point of view he says, " Thy 
 
22 8 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is 
 in heaven." And then one remembers that one's 
 daily bread comes from the co-operation of a 
 million brothers and sisters. And as one asks for- 
 giveness, one remembers those who have crossed 
 his path unkindly ; so his prayer goes on with for- 
 giveness for them. 
 
 The first point of view states everything in the 
 singular number, "I and me and mine and myself." 
 It deals with finite and limited relations. 
 
 The second uses the plural number, and deals 
 with the infinite relations, Heaven, God, the 
 Holy Spirit, immortality, and the universe. 
 
 The adventurer whose daily life I began to de- 
 scribe here some weeks since may start away 
 from home on one of these two lines or the other. 
 
 If he take the first, from choice or from habit, 
 he comes to his office after his morning walk to 
 say : " The walking is villanous to-day. The peo T 
 pie are very much to blame that they have not 
 opened the gutters. I went above my boots a 
 dozen times, and now I must dress again." 
 
 If he have taken the other line, it is to say : 
 " The day is marvellous for beauty. The sun 
 has all his old power, and the snow is melting 
 everywhere. The lumbermen in Maine will be 
 delighted. There is no fear of short water at the 
 mills. There is a set of fine fellows cleaning out 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 229 
 
 Tremont street, and I stood five minutes watching 
 their work, and wondering that so much science 
 could be put into such humble duty." 
 
 And at the end of the day the entries in one's 
 diary differ, in like wise. 
 
 If he have chosen the individual or personal 
 point of view he writes : " Tired to death and a 
 good deal disappointed. I was just too late for 
 John, because of a block in the street. I missed 
 James, and I suppose he forgot me; " and so on. 
 
 If he started on the other line he writes : 
 " There is good news from Washington, where we 
 have hopes of carrying the bill. The ' Cepha- 
 lonia' has a good day to start, and I found the 
 Joneses all in good spirits at leaving." 
 
 In our modern language we say that one of these 
 people is low- toned, and that the other is always in 
 good spirits. The probability is that the Saviour's 
 language is more accurate. If either of them asked 
 him about it, he would say on the first case, " You 
 need more faith." To the other he would have 
 said that he understood the law of the grain of 
 mustard seed, because he used what faith he had. 
 
 What is this essential Faith? I hope it is use- 
 less to say that such faith as is thus illustrated is 
 not such arbitrary acceptance of four or five facts 
 as can be stated in a verbal creed. A man might 
 say truly, as he started on the day, " I believe in 
 
230 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his 
 Son," and yet might go to his daily duty on the 
 first of my two lines. And the same man would 
 be quite unconscious, when, in the afternoon, he 
 looked in at the Lenten Service and said the same 
 thing, that such belief had anything to do with his 
 dissatisfaction of the morning. All the same it is 
 true, as the Saviour says from the beginning to the 
 end of the Gospel, that that man wants more faith. 
 It is not that he wants to assent to more prop- 
 ositions of history or science : it is that he wants 
 to rely on the foundations of life. In truth, he has 
 been relying on its superficial phases. The He- 
 brew word which we translate " faith " in the Old 
 Testament expressed this. Where David and the 
 prophets are made to talk of faith, they really said, 
 " foundation" or "rock;" and Jesus alluded to 
 the same thing when he speaks of the man who 
 builds on a rock, and when he says his church is 
 to be built upon a rock. He means that, beneath 
 all talk of " me" and " my," beneath all forms and 
 frivolity of external life, there is one great reality 
 named God, there is one infinite life called Heaven. 
 And he means that people who have faith live in 
 absolute relations with God, and live consciously 
 or unconsciously in this present heaven. Of 
 course, in such a life, my friend in his daily affairs 
 does not distress himself so much about the con- 
 dition of the sidewalk; for his mind and heart and 
 soul are engaged more with the grandeur of the 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 23 1 
 
 realities of heaven. As an old officer said to me 
 the other night, " Phillips Brooks never thought of 
 himself at all, and so he had more time than most 
 men to think of the rest of the world and of God." 
 This was a shorthand and convenient way of 
 putting the contrast. 
 
 And we see that just the same thing is shown 
 when we compare these apostles who wanted to 
 cure this boy by a certain method which could 
 be written down in a book, and the Saviour, whose 
 constant communion with God and habit of living 
 in heaven gave him, of course, the strength, the 
 tenderness, and so the command, to which the 
 poor sick boy yielded at once, and could not help 
 yielding. Just that same contrast, as we shall 
 find in every-day nineteenth-century experience, 
 may be wrought out as you and I come and go. 
 
 Rely on the Realities. This is the direction of 
 the Saviour, and every leader of men from that time 
 down has proved its truth. The realities are God, 
 heaven, and the solidarity of mankind. For you 
 and me he promises success to those who will 
 try the great experiment of such reliance. I shall 
 conquer my low spirits, he says, if I forget them. 
 I shall forget them if I do as he did, — if I follow 
 him; if I pull this ox out of his pit; if I lead 
 that blind man a mile or two on his way; if I 
 write a letter to his sweetheart for the Italian 
 beggar ; if I find a home for the woman from 
 Syro-Phcenicia, whom I find on Oneida street, 
 
232 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 puzzled about her English verbs, and chilled by 
 the drabble of a north-easter. 
 
 I shall go cheerfully to my work, he says, if I 
 will start on it as an archangel would. Take it 
 as God's work, and God will put it through. It is 
 God who teaches the acids to act on the alkalis. 
 It is He who drives the electric current through 
 the trolley. It is He who long since packed 
 away His sunshine in what is to-day my coal, and 
 He and I are succeeding together, as I build my 
 fire on what is His hearthstone and mine this 
 morning. A simple statement, and one which I 
 find convenient when I am bored or in any way wor- 
 ried, is, that He wants me to make my life as large 
 as His, and that it is really my blunder if I do not. 
 And that is certainly what the Saviour means when 
 he says it is God's kingdom in which I live, that 
 the kingdom of God is at hand. Let a man sort 
 out his day's errands, as George Herbert swept his 
 floor, making God the cause and motive, and they 
 cease to be annoying as they range themselves 
 about infinite affairs. The breakfast or the supper 
 which I eat becomes the answer to my daily prayer 
 for daily bread. If I take them so, perhaps with the 
 thought of some Sunday of communion ; or if, as I 
 break the bread at the home table or fill the cups, 
 I see that God has ordered the world that I might 
 fill the cup or break the bread, — I shall be less 
 critical about flavor, or the accidents of my own 
 taste. It is for me that Columbus sailed and Da 
 
FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 233 
 
 Gama doubled the cape of storms. It is for me 
 that Stephenson built his engine, and Fulton started 
 the " Clermont." It is for me that the chemists have 
 grappled with silent Nature and compelled her to 
 speak ; for me that the mines give up their treas- 
 ures, that the smiths gave form to metal, and the 
 seamen crossed oceans to carry hither and thither 
 what they did. I say in my prayer, " Give us this 
 day the bread of our being." I sit at the table and 
 I see how the world of God's children are made to 
 answer it, in His care of a world, which is one 
 world, and not a bag of pebbles. I eat and drink 
 there, as Raphael ate and drank when he supped 
 with Adam. It is not as a hog might find an acorn 
 of whose history he could know nothing, and 
 munch it, greedily, but with complaint, as he went 
 to look for another. 
 
 This season of depression of spirits, which took 
 the name of Lent, forced itself upon the church in 
 the northern hemisphere, because in the short 
 days of a northern winter, in its imprisonment 
 and frequent lack of food, the body of man grows 
 weaker, and he cannot do as he would. Is the 
 spirit willing? The flesh is weak. In southern 
 latitudes, if they retain the annual ceremony, they 
 will have to change the months to September and 
 October, when winter is ending. It is in such 
 weakness and discouragement that men and 
 women come to the Father to acknowledge failure. 
 " I am ill-tempered, Father," or " I am dis- 
 
234 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 couraged," or " I cannot see as I would," or " I 
 do not hear," or "I am horribly lonely in the 
 world," or "I never succeed in anything with 
 success." It is — as with the apostles — this 
 devil or that devil whom I cannot cast out. " Why 
 cannot we cast them out?" And the answer is 
 always the same: " Dear children, you must stand 
 on the rock. You must rely on the realities. 
 Live in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, and you shall 
 tread on serpents and scorpions, and nothing shall 
 by any means hurt you. Draw near to God and 
 He will draw near to you. You shall never be 
 alone. Live for the universe, and you shall forget 
 yourself, and gnaw at your heart no more. Ac- 
 cept that universe, and float on the constant cur- 
 rent of its love, and your personal grief and your 
 separate misfortunes are forgotten." 
 
 Why, there was a poor woman once who had 
 only a cupful of yeast. But it was alive, and she 
 trusted the infinite Law of Life. She hid it in the 
 meal, and the life passed from one tiny grain into 
 another. She set aside a little to be the mother 
 of more yeast, and more, — and from that grew 
 more and more. And it was all alive. And from 
 the bread of that baking the world was fed, as 
 from the trees from one mustard-seed its parched 
 deserts were shaded. 
 
PALM SUNDAY AND EASTER 
 
 I. 
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, — contrast 
 the two forms of victory. 
 
 On Palm Sunday you have what the world 
 likes, what the newspapers like, what history 
 likes: a multitude of people, — numbers always 
 are popular, — the waving of palm branches, the 
 clothes spread in the way, the cry of " Hosanna." 
 It is what that lowest form of language known in 
 our time calls " a success." 
 
 On Easter Sunday three or four women, dazed 
 and wondering, come to Simon Peter and to the 
 young man John, who are' hiding in terror. They 
 say beneath their breath, " He is not dead; he is 
 alive." 
 
 Even a Philistine world, like ours, acknowledges 
 that the triumph of Easter, in nineteen centuries, 
 has been worth more than the triumph of Palms. 
 
 Was there, perhaps, a little preparation in ad- 
 vance of the triumph of Palms? Did Peter and 
 Andrew, fresh from the Transfiguration, go up and 
 down the road a little the day before, and suggest 
 to this and that gay company of pilgrims, that it 
 
236 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 would be a good time at last for a little public 
 manifestation ? Were they a little tired of this in- 
 difference of the Master? Did they think it as 
 well to force his hand, to compel him to assert his 
 position? And was the humble triumph of the 
 slope of Olivet the result of this little combination ? 
 
 I do not know. Such things do happen some- 
 times, in excellent causes. I do know that the 
 people shouted, " Hosanna ! " that the people of 
 Jerusalem shouted, " Hosanna ! " and I know that 
 the next Friday the same people, or some of 
 them, cried, " Crucify him ! Crucify him ! " 
 
 Palm Sunday will teach us its lesson, and will 
 make some preparation for Passion Week, if from 
 our own times, modern as we think them, we trace 
 the same contrast between the successes wrought 
 by shouting crowds, and the success of the lesson 
 taught by the women at the tomb. The success 
 heralded by the newspaper, and the real successes 
 of real life ! They are always contrasting them- 
 selves against each other. 
 
 History is never tired of the contrast. She is 
 pitiless in repeating it. There are thousands of 
 elegant medals in the cabinets — silver and gold, 
 very likely — struck to commemorate this victory 
 or that, perhaps this pageant or that, where men 
 who study the medal say that the pageant and the 
 victory will not be. remembered. People cannot 
 tell now what the victory was. Here is Fame, 
 with a trumpet, flying over a battle-field, — I 
 
PALM SUNDAY. 237 
 
 can see that. And here are some letters and 
 dates in Latin, — I can read them. But what do 
 the abbreviations stand for, and where was the 
 battle, and why was it, and when? Just there 
 the medal fails. It is, indeed, one of the curious 
 fatalities of pageants that the people engaged in 
 them think so much of the drapery and the line 
 of procession that they do not remember, as 
 would be well, what the procession is for and 
 why the drapery is flying. On the day when 
 Boston was two hundred and fifty years old, I 
 had the great pleasure, and I will say advantage, 
 of marching in the procession which tried to fix 
 on our memories something of the history of the 
 past and of hope for the future. I was fifty-eight 
 years old, and so it was easy for me to remember 
 where I sat on the brick wall of the Granary 
 Burying-Ground to see the procession of half a 
 century before pass by. The recollection set 
 me to inquiring of one and another old Boston 
 man how much he remembered of the other great 
 pageant in which the end of the second cen- 
 tury was commemorated. It was almost the be- 
 ginning of our modern centennial celebrations. 
 There was no centennial celebration in 1730. I 
 found no person who had any recollection of the 
 event. Josiah Quincy in his prime had delivered 
 an oration in the Old South : no man recollected 
 a word of it. Charles Sprague in his prime had 
 delivered a poem : one or two lines of the poem 
 
238 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 had strayed into use as quotations, but no man 
 and no woman remembered that the poem was 
 a part of the pageant. Indeed, so far as I could 
 find in quite wide inquiry, the only recollection of 
 the great ceremony, to which the city of Boston 
 had devoted its best power and to which it had 
 given a day, was the memory of a little boy sitting 
 on the wall of a burying-ground, to see a regi- 
 ment of soldiers pass by. 
 
 For this there need be made no complaint ; it is as 
 it should be. The procession, the bands of music, 
 the banners, the palms of Palm Sunday, and the 
 shouting of Hosannas, are as purely superficial 
 as the foam on the wave of a beach. Another 
 tide rises, and the marks which the foam has 
 wrought upon the sand are gone. There is no 
 reason for complaining that we forget such things. 
 But there is reason for asking what there is which 
 abides and continues forever, what there is be- 
 neath ceremony and procession. What was there 
 in Jerusalem which was of more worth than bells 
 and trumpets? If Palm Sunday were a Sunday 
 which left no eternal word behind it, what was 
 the eternal word which should be proclaimed 
 upon some other Sunday? 
 
 I think we might put this question to ourselves 
 of our own early experiences ; we should always 
 get the same answer. Here is a cheerful, brave 
 woman, whose outlook on life* is far-reaching, 
 who takes each day as one more opportunity for 
 
PALM SUNDAY. 239 
 
 loyal living, — that is, for serving God and the 
 people around her. You look on her with ad- 
 miration ; you see she has met the problems and 
 solved them ; she has wrestled with this and that 
 angel, and no angel has gone by but has blessed 
 her. Put to her your question ; ask her to go 
 back to recollect the great party which her mother 
 gave the year she was to be received into the best 
 society of her sex. There was all the preparation 
 for the dress in which she was to " come out," 
 there were all the gifts of flowers from her friends, 
 there was the anxiety lest there should be a storm 
 on the day selected. Happily the skies were clear ; 
 the great event was celebrated even by the clouds 
 of heaven, which kept away; and the moon and 
 the stars shone brightly down upon the pavement 
 as her guests came in. The music was just what 
 it should be ; the most charming people in the 
 circle of the town were there to welcome this new 
 life, which was really not simply to take part in 
 the enjoyments of the town, but was to be a real 
 help in the administration of its social order. Yes, 
 the function was a great function, and all passed 
 by successfully ; the letters which the different girls 
 wrote to the different parts of the world announced 
 that Mary's coming-out party was entirely suc- 
 cessful. 
 
 But if you ask Mary to-day what it is which 
 has told in the make-up of her life, and how it 
 is that you find her to-day even and well-balanced, 
 
240 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 whether the news of the day be grievous or be 
 joyful, she will tell you that it was not at the party 
 that she began to live. She began to live in 
 those quiet, long days, when the curtains were 
 drawn down and no one came into her room ; 
 when her new-born baby child, almost too small 
 to cry aloud, lay sleeping in its cradle by her side. 
 It was then and there, as she thanked God for him 
 and for her own life, that she wrought out the 
 problems, that she saw the visions, and her life 
 became eternal. 
 
 The man whose presence at a syndicate prophe- 
 sies success to the enterprise which they have in 
 hand ; the man who has only to go to a prelimi- 
 nary meeting, and men are sure that success waits 
 upon their banners because he comes, — is the 
 same man whom you and I saw, fifteen years ago, 
 as he made his bow to the president in Sanders 
 Theatre, at Cambridge, and received the diploma 
 which the college gave him. The newspapers of 
 the next morning said kind things about the grace 
 and vivacity of his Commencement part ; twenty 
 kind letters from old friends of his father came in 
 the next morning to congratulate him that he was 
 walking in his father's steps. The young fellow 
 himself said, "This is indeed the Commencement 
 of life. It is here and now that I take the oar 
 with my unblistered hands, that I begin to take 
 my part as one of the crew." But time has gone 
 on ; ask him, as you walk home from the syndicate, 
 
PALM SUNDAY. 24 1 
 
 which was the real critical moment of his life. 
 Ask him when it was that real success began. 
 And it is absolutely certain that he will not go 
 back to the festival. He has forgotten all about 
 Commencement Day; he has forgotten about all 
 the letters of congratulation. He will tell you of 
 some lonely vigil by the bedside of a friend ; 
 or of some midnight ride in the midst of tempest, 
 he alone with his God, when he heard the divine 
 voice. God spoke to him and he answered ; or he 
 spoke first to God and God answered. It is in 
 that moment — a moment, perhaps, like that of 
 Easter morning, when the darkness is just giving 
 way to gray twilight — that his real life began. 
 
 Of the Saviour himself the noblest record is 
 that " he made himself of no reputation." Have 
 Peter and John arranged this little triumph? He 
 shows what he thinks of it by riding on an ass. 
 Thus is it that the King of Peace rides into his 
 capital. The stable has been the palace of this 
 prince, the manger has been his royal cradle, and 
 its straw his purple ! First and last he has been 
 teaching them the folly of human triumphs, in lan- 
 guage and in deed which are pitiless. The multi- 
 tude throng him ; he sends them away. t A miracle 
 astonishes them ; they shall not make it known. 
 They offer him a crown ; he goes off into a desert. 
 This devil and that, from the beginning down, 
 will make him, in the devil's way, " king of all the 
 earth." But their ways are not his ways. Their 
 
242 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 triumphs are not his. Alas for any professed pro- 
 claimer of his kingdom, who asks by stealth or 
 in stupidity if somebody, somehow, will not adver- 
 tise his proclamation ! Is it not possible that some 
 cornet band, or some banner on the wall, or some 
 happy placard, may announce that the apostle is 
 to preach or the prophet to prophesy? Pitiless 
 his denunciation in advance of all such manufact- 
 ured triumphs ! Hopeless the fall, as from the 
 temple pinnacle, of the fool who has been so 
 tempted by the Devil ! 
 
 It is indeed curious to observe the same distinc- 
 tion and contrast in the history of Passion week 
 itself. For the first half of it, Palm Sunday, Mon- 
 day, and Tuesday, is all spent in public, in what 
 you might call public successes. It is in temple 
 courts, in the streets of the city; it is in the pres- 
 ence of great multitudes. Then all the surround- 
 ings change. .Wednesday is spent on the hillside 
 of Olivet, in the most serious talk, but still private 
 talk, with the Apostles. It is to them by them- 
 selves and not to any multitude that he tells how 
 the Son of Man shall come in his glory. It is to 
 them that the parables of the judgment are told. 
 And with every evening, in that charming hospi- 
 tality of Bethany, the great story gives its most 
 distinct pictures of life at home. With the supper 
 of Wednesday evening at Bethany, that day's 
 history ends. 
 
 Then, as the most sympathetic critics have ob- 
 
PALM SUNDAY. 243 
 
 served, such men as Keble and William Peabody, 
 when we come to Thursday, even this record 
 ceases. Thursday, the last day of his life, until 
 the evening comes, is the one silent day of the 
 Gospels. It is impossible to escape the suggestion 
 that the talk of that last day, so eager as it must 
 have been, was too personal to be written down. 
 It was Matthew's confession of weakness and his 
 personal suggestion of strength ; or it was Thomas's 
 confession of doubt and his tender and certain so- 
 lution. Or it was John's confession, made for the 
 hundredth time, that his temper had broken down, 
 and the word of encouragement and suggestion 
 which held John up through manhood to age. 
 Too personal and precious, observe, for Matthew or 
 for John to write down. Too tender and personal 
 to come into the traditional narrative of Mark or 
 of Luke. So tender and personal that the seal of 
 silence which shuts them will never be broken. 
 
 It would be no bad thing if in your Bibles, be- 
 tween that gorgeous imagery of the words he 
 spoke on Olivet, when they saw the rays of 
 Wednesday evening's sun flashing on the gilded 
 pinnacles of the temple, — if between those words 
 and the simple, serious story of the Lord's Supper 
 on Thursday night, there were left a page of white 
 paper. That white page might remind us of what 
 we are perhaps too apt to forget. It might re- 
 mind us that there are lessons too deep for words 
 and which are not to be written. It ought to 
 
244 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 remind us that we are not to go out into the streets 
 and ask what hero is hearing the loudest Hosannas. 
 We are not to search the pavement to find where 
 lie deepest the trampled leaves of forgotten palms. 
 For it is in some secret chamber that the infinite 
 whisper of life has been spoken. It was when the 
 soul was alone with God that God gave the prom- 
 ised blessing. Or it was in the gray of a cold 
 morning, when the night damp still hung over the 
 earth, before the sun had risen, before the white 
 of twilight was even dappled with the rose, — it was 
 then and there that those weeping, wretched 
 women received for all the world the certainty of 
 the eternity of Life. 
 
 To-day is the beginning of the Christian year. 
 The next Sunday is the great Sunday of the year. 
 For you and me, as the year goes by, there will 
 be thousands of lessons of the infinite life, — sug- 
 gestions, encouragement, and warnings. What is 
 most curious is, that we have not now the slightest 
 idea how those lessons, how those warnings, will 
 come to us ; through whose lips, in what society, 
 by what parable or illustration. All that we know 
 is, that somehow or other the living God will teach 
 the lesson, and if you or I be enough awake to 
 our royal privileges, we shall accept it and profit 
 by it. If not, not. The lesson will be wasted, as 
 the music of the spheres is wasted in empty space 
 where there are none to listen. Of those lessons 
 not to be counted, not to be foreseen, lessons of 
 
PALM SUNDAY. 245 
 
 the presence of God, of His love and of His power, 
 the only thing certain is this : that they will not 
 come by observation. We shall not hear them 
 in the crowd, where the escort is gathering, the 
 procession forming, and the marshals ordering its 
 march. We shall not hear them where the trum- 
 pets are sounding, when the people are shouting, 
 or the newspapers are prophesying. 
 
 Elijah sat waiting for his lesson in the opening 
 of a cave in Horeb. And a tempest swept over the 
 hills, filled the air with dust so that no man could 
 see, tore from their roots the gnarled trees and 
 whirled them into the valleys. And there was no 
 lesson for Elijah. He sat in the door of the cave, 
 and the rocks shook before him as he looked out. 
 He saw the crags tumble from the cliffs ; he 
 heard them as they crashed into the hollows. And 
 there was no lesson for Elijah. And fire came 
 whirling across the dry hills ; it caught the gnarled 
 trees ; it blazed from their dry foliage ; it left a 
 record of desolation. But there was no lesson for 
 Elijah. 
 
 But after the fire there came a still small voice, 
 and Elijah heard it. For he was a son of God, 
 and he knew God's whisper when it came. He 
 was born of God. He was a spark from the infinite 
 fire; his breath was the infinite Life. And, when 
 the Power who works for righteousness gave him 
 his silent order, Elijah knew and he obeyed. 
 
 For you and me it is not once a year only, in 
 
246 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 the gray of the dawn, that we shall hear that 
 whisper. It is not, as I said, into the rush of 
 throngs that we are to go to listen for it. It is to 
 be, perhaps, at the moment of most oppressive 
 sorrow. It is to be, perhaps, at the moment of 
 most exquisite joy. It may be in answer to the 
 most intricate doubt. It may be while life seems 
 most strong and its purpose most clear. What is 
 certain is, that the vision is there if we open our 
 eyes to see. God's kiss of love is there if we will 
 rest in His embrace. Kis lesson of life is there if 
 we will listen when He whispers. " If ye seek me. 
 surely ye shall find me, if ye seek for me with all 
 your hearts. ' 
 
 •• A roadway carpeted with palms and flowers, 
 
 A welcome shouted by the eager throng : 
 A thousand voices sing in David's song. 
 • Messiah comes, the nation's King and ours.' 
 
 " Shouts, songs, and paims ! Yet as the week goe~ by 
 The shouts are silenced and the palms are dry, 
 Till that last day, when blackness shrouds the sky, 
 
 And those who shouted then, to-day cry, ' Crucify! ' 
 
 •• A cold dark morning, and a new-made tomb; 
 
 Three weeping women groping through the gloom, 
 To dress a corpse from which the life has gone. 
 'And who shall roll away for us the stone?' 
 
 " Only one streak of twilight, cold and gray, 
 Whitens the east and gives a hope of day ; 
 But see. it mounts the heaven, — ' The sun, the sun ! ' 
 See for the world Eternal Life begun." 
 
EASTER. 247 
 
 II. 
 
 EASTER. 
 
 EIGHTEEN hundred and sixty years ago Jesus 
 Christ and his twelve apostles were alone together 
 in an upper chamber at Jerusalem. It was at the 
 annual thanksgiving feast of their people. But 
 for them the feast had all the seriousness of part- 
 ing. He told them, and they began to see, that 
 they met for the last time. 
 
 To-day that meeting together of theirs around 
 that table is commemorated by a similar ob- 
 servance in hundreds of thousands of churches, 
 formed by persons who take his name and call 
 themselves his followers. 
 
 The day after that festival he was killed, — or 
 the Roman centurion who was told to crucify him 
 said so : and such people do not make mistakes. 
 He was crucified and laid in a tomb. The apostles 
 who had been round him, and their handful of 
 companions, spent the next day in abject terror. 
 And then night came, Sunday morning dawned, 
 and that abject terror of theirs was at an 
 end forever. The women of their company had 
 been to the tomb, and his body was not there. 
 Mary Magdalene had lingered there and had 
 seen him. And that night, as they met in 
 wonder, he came himself and spoke to them. 
 
 From that time forward they never believed in 
 death. 
 
248 EASTER. 
 
 From that time forward they led the world to 
 believe in life, and Kfe more abundantly. 
 
 And so it is that day which the new world 
 celebrates as its birthday. About Adam or 
 Prometheus, or the other stories of the begin- 
 ning of physical life, it has no memories, — scarcely 
 any legends, — certainly no birthdays. As to its 
 real life, — its infinite eternal life, — it knows 
 it began on that Easter morning. 
 
 I have said this real life, this infinite and eternal 
 life, choosing those words, which are, however, 
 rather weak, instead of the simple word " everlast- 
 ing" life. The world has not, I believe, always drawn 
 the distinction as to these words. Even in merely 
 studying the history, we ought to see that those 
 eleven apostles were wakened on Easter morning 
 to a sense of what he meant by Life, which included 
 much more than the idea of continued existence. 
 From that time they had some sense of what he 
 meant by abundant life ; they knew what he meant 
 when he spoke of the life of God. It is worth re- 
 mark that in each of the great battles which he 
 had with different leaders of the Jerusalem Jews, 
 he tried to drive home this sense of what it is to 
 live. Here they were, fussing over processions 
 and trumpets and bells and ritual, and he speaks 
 of everlasting life, of the light of life, of life more 
 abundantly. And when he denounces them it is 
 to say, " Ye will not come to me that ye might 
 have life." Such words mean much more than the 
 
EASTER. 249 
 
 continuance of life beyond the grave. They mean 
 life which has the power of the life of God. They 
 mean that if these people will follow him, if they 
 will enter into the dignity and majesty of his life, 
 they will be c.s gods, creating, maintaining, de- 
 termining, and so living in infinite life by infinite 
 law. It is infinite life, life which is not to be 
 bounded, — not simply prolonged life, life which 
 extends in one direction. What he promises is 
 not long life simply : it is large life, — life power- 
 ful because it shares the infinite power ; life glad 
 because it enters into infinite joy; life radiating on 
 a million lines because it is knit up with the life of 
 all other living beings. It means this, as well as 
 life which looks forward to an unlimited future. 
 And what these eleven apostles got a hint of on 
 Easter morning was this reality of the power of 
 life. It would break the tomb, — yes; but it 
 would do more. It would denounce Tiberius, if 
 Tiberius lived on any low plane. It would break 
 up every superstition and ritual, unless the ritual 
 had wrought itself in with the eternities of men's 
 being. It would take every man outside himself, 
 beyond his own headaches and heartaches, into 
 the common life of the universe of the children of 
 God. It would enable men really to partake of 
 the divine nature, to use the strength of God when 
 they were at work for God's purposes, to live and 
 move and have their being in Him. 
 
 From one age to another, according as the 
 
25O EASTER. 
 
 world is looking forward in its Christianity, or is 
 only looking back, the real life of divine manhood 
 reveals itself to the world or is shaded by black 
 clouds. On the whole, what we may call the 
 Church has not made a very rapid advance in ex- 
 tending the sense of the infinite power of human 
 life. The world has relied in one century on the 
 power of steam, in another on the power of armies, 
 in many others on the power of lies; often on the 
 power of close organizations of men. When it 
 has relied on such things, it finds they all perish ; 
 and it has had many very bad set-backs. It is 
 not difficult to imagine a personal devil, organizing 
 the attacks made upon a stupid world, which has 
 chosen thus to forget that its Master and Leader 
 told it that it came to its full power only in the 
 eternity and infinity of Life. It is easy to calculate 
 that if the one little church at Jerusalem had been 
 represented only by two churches in the world at 
 the end of the first century, and these two only by 
 four at the end of the second century, and these 
 four only by eight at the end of the third, — if the 
 Church had had confidence enough in its own great 
 secret thus simply to double the number of its con- 
 gregations as every century went by, — it is easy 
 to calculate that there would be more congrega- 
 tions of men living in the divine life to-day than 
 there really are congregations called Christians 
 on any pretended roll of Christianity. This means 
 that there have been years, in truth there have been 
 
EASTER. 251 
 
 centuries, in which the world is wholly satisfied 
 with machinery, wholly satisfied with groping in 
 archives and examining the entrails of mummies, 
 and in which it is faithless and incredulous as to life 
 and the miracles of life, as Thomas himself was. 
 
 Just in one of those black nights there steps 
 into the world some new John the Baptist, who 
 makes some men repent on their sins, who makes 
 some men who are looking down into the dust look 
 up into the heavens. And this man having pre- 
 pared the way, some son of God, who is alive with 
 the life of God, steps in after him, and he cries 
 out, as Luther cried out, "You are alive if you 
 know that God is and that you are His children." 
 Or he cries out, as Wesley cried out, " Here is 
 God, and now is God." He repeats the old lesson 
 of the beginning, and the world comes up from its 
 groping in the dust and stands awake upon its feet, 
 and looks up to the heaven of God. It goes 
 about the Father's business, as the Son of God 
 well beloved did. And it begins to live. When 
 this happens to the world, why, the miracle of 
 Easter is renewed. And when this happens to the 
 world, it makes one of the great advances which 
 are the real advances in its history. 
 
 One cannot but ask, if he go beyond the forms 
 of festivity, what will come to pass when the world 
 shall take seriously the lesson of Easter? Not sat- 
 isfied with flowers, and the sound of music, and con- 
 gratulations that Christ is risen, what will take 
 
252 EASTER. 
 
 place when the world wakes from its own sleep, and 
 rises itself? It throws off its grave-clothes, it 
 rolls away the stone from the mouth of its tomb. 
 It rises from death. It begins really to live in the 
 eternal life. 
 
 What then ? 
 
 A thousand million people — sons of God and 
 His daughters — will begin on that Easter morning, 
 wherever it shall come, to engage themselves in 
 God's affairs first and in their own afterwards, 
 and then only as their affairs relate to His : as in 
 the rush of a great battle a brave soldier for a 
 few moments forgets his own danger, even his 
 own life, in the determination that the colors shall 
 go forward, and a certain ridge be won. On such 
 an Easter morning every one in Boston wakes, and 
 starts on this day absolutely determined that every 
 one in Boston shall live in a neat and cheerful 
 house, with enough to eat and drink, and that 
 wholesome and attractive ; with clothing and fire 
 to protect against cold and storm ; with books and 
 music and pictures of the best. So far as physical 
 appliances go, every one in Boston highly deter- 
 mines that any one in Boston shall be thus be- 
 friended. 
 
 For the babies in Boston, for the boys and 
 girls who are older, for young men and maidens, 
 everybody in Boston on that Easter morning 
 wakes determined that not one of them shall be 
 led into temptation. On the other hand, they shall 
 
EASTER. 253 
 
 be prejudiced in favor of the realities of eternal 
 life. They shall all be prejudiced in favor of tell- 
 ing the truth; they shall be prejudiced in favor of 
 cleanliness and honor; they shall be prejudiced in 
 favor of social life, and against morose or lonely 
 life. As a recruit in an army is encouraged to 
 vigor, and dash, and to put things through, every 
 one of these young people shall be encouraged to 
 generosity, to bear his brother's burdens, to rescue 
 his brother from fire or water or in any danger. 
 They shall be prejudiced, all of them, to live 
 heartily and with spirit in the common life. 
 
 This seems to mean that with this new impulse 
 to life, of this possible Easter morning, the soul of 
 this man, the soul of that woman, — the souls of all 
 men and women, all youths and maidens, all boys 
 and girls, — shall start up and control their bodies 
 and their minds. To-day, on the other hand, the 
 body of a man and his mental machinery generally 
 control his soul and keep it under. When of a 
 sudden he acts from faith, or hope, or love, the 
 three attributes of his soul, he sets it down himself 
 as something exceptional. He is a little surprised 
 that it all turns out so well. He is like Mr. 
 Maxim when he has flown a hundred yards on his 
 machine : he wonders if he is not dead ; shakes 
 himself to make sure he is not dead ; thanks God 
 he is not dead ; but all the same goes about on 
 foot, or does not go about at all, for two or three 
 days before he renews his strange experiment. 
 
254 EASTER. 
 
 What the world needs is that its prophets and its 
 poets shall persuade it at last that the real master 
 is the soul, and that the body and mind are the 
 tools. Nay, the great experiment, when any man 
 dares try it, makes him his own prophet, his own 
 poet, if he show him that with perfect faith, with 
 abiding hope and absolute love, he mounts supe- 
 rior to the flesh and makes it do his duty. He 
 gives orders to the mind, and sways its remember- 
 ings and its arguings. Life controls the tools, and 
 the treadle and the fly-wheel no longer keep the 
 life down to the pace of their dead and mechanical 
 movement. 
 
 It is no bad experiment for a man to try in his 
 own life, when and how his failures have come 
 from his neglecting or forgetting the great revela- 
 tion of Easter. Life rules ; life directs ; life con- 
 quers. But a man forgets this and trusts, say, to 
 machinery; and machinery breaks down. Or, he 
 trusts to habit, custom, or fashion. But it proves 
 that these have no life in them, and they break 
 down. Thus you say the precedent was thus and 
 so. But it proves that all life had died out of the 
 precedent, and the precedent is good for nothing. 
 This is what happens to all rituals which have out- 
 grown their own generation. It is vain for you to 
 tell me that the ritual was first-rate ritual in the 
 fifteenth century, or the tenth, or the fifth. It is 
 good for nothing now, unless there be in it now 
 the life that was in it then. If not, not. The 
 
 
EASTER. 255 
 
 cocoon is only of use in a museum after the 
 butterfly has gone. And whatever else the butter- 
 fly resembles, he does not resemble a cocoon. 
 
 To make this examination fairly, my question 
 as to failure is, where was the deficiency in faith, 
 where the deficiency in hope, and where the defi- 
 ciency in love? These three are the eternal attri- 
 butes, and they give us the tests as to how much 
 eternal life subsists in our affairs. Did my en- 
 deavor lack in what these books call faith? That 
 is to ask, was it only related to some three or four 
 trifles, connected with myself, my wishes, my 
 memories, my comfort, or was it all wrought in 
 with infinite relations, with laws of the universe, 
 with the Power which makes for righteousness? 
 Could my purpose be fairly called an infinite pur- 
 pose, or was it a purpose only of my own sur- 
 roundings? These questions all ask how much 
 or how little faith there was in that affair. And 
 I must ask just the same questions as to time. 
 How long and how well will my work stand? 
 Has it any place in the next year, or in the next 
 century? What has it to do with my life when 
 this body shall have crumbled back to dust and 
 ashes? This is to ask how far that infinite rela- 
 tion which Paul calls hope enters into my en- 
 deavor. And to be sure that I, and me, and 
 mine, and myself are eliminated from this affair, 
 that I am at work as partner in the universe, as 
 God works with His power and on His plans. I 
 
256 EASTER. 
 
 must be sure how much love there is in my enter- 
 prise. Love is the word which these writers have 
 chosen to express our conscious relation with all 
 conscious beings. And if life is to be infinite, its 
 motive power must express the sympathy of 
 universal love. 
 
 Easter is Easter to me if new-born children, if 
 opening crocus, if the triumph of music and the 
 welcome of friends, teach me once more what it 
 is to live. Not enough to eat and to drink and 
 to sleep. That is not life. Not enough to plant 
 seed, or to plough and harrow to prepare for 
 planting, or to harvest and gather into barns. 
 That is not life. Not enough to read, to remem- 
 ber and recollect, to arrange such knowledge in 
 order. That is not life. But to do these things 
 — yes, as God does them ; to do these things, 
 because they make a part of Heaven. Yes, to 
 do these things, so that these who are right and 
 left of me, these who are behind me and before 
 me, may share my effort and live as I live. This 
 is life eternal and abundant. This is the secret 
 of life with which Easter has to do. The life 
 of faith and hope and love. 
 
 " 'Tis a new life — thoughts move not as they did, 
 With slow, uncertain steps across my mind. 
 In thronging haste, fast pressing on, they bid 
 The portals open to the viewless wind." 
 
 And that viewless wind — it is the Spirit of the 
 Infinite God. The Power who makes for right- 
 
EASTER. 257 
 
 eousness takes possession of my being. The 
 Power who rules the world is pleased to quicken 
 me and make me live. And I, — because I accept 
 His gift, because I am not satisfied with faith or 
 fancy, — I live and move and have my being in 
 my God. 
 
 Wake me to-day, — dear Father, make me see 
 How great a thing this is, — to live in thee. 
 E'en at an open tomb the lesson give, 
 And show me, Father, what it is to live. 
 
MANHOOD. 
 
 " Let us make man." 
 
 Genesis i. 26. 
 
 In any board of education I should be told that 
 the great object of education is to carry out this 
 purpose of the good God. In any adequate trea- 
 tise on government I should be told the same 
 thing. 
 
 "What constitutes a State? 
 Men who their duties know; 
 Know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain." 
 
 And certainly if I turned to the directors of the 
 various churches, to the people who say they are 
 the Church and that other people must obey and 
 follow them, they would say that this is what 
 churches are for — to make men. And probably 
 they would add what this noble legend of Genesis 
 adds: "We want to make men in God's image, 
 after His likeness." 
 
 Is it not, then, rather pathetic, that, with all their 
 endeavors, the people whose business it is to make 
 men, turn out so few specimens of their successful 
 manufacture? 
 
 When I stand, as I have stood lately, to look my 
 last on the noble face of a noble man, I declare to 
 
MANHOOD. 259 
 
 you that for days I am haunted by the question, 
 terrible indeed, — which yet I am going to put 
 to you now, — why there are so few such? It 
 seems ungracious to entertain that question. I 
 cannot help that. It is a question too important to 
 shut it off; too important for us even to pretend to 
 ignore it. Why have we not more men that are men ? 
 " Give us men who are good for something " — this 
 is the real appeal of every branch of business, of 
 manufacture, of letters, of statesmanship, of life. 
 It is hard enough to find an expert who knows 
 about his own business ; a chemist who is an adept 
 in chemistry ; a dyer who really knows what the 
 art of dyeing is ; an engine-driver who does not 
 strain or wreck his engine. You see this whenever 
 a board of trustees has a college president to 
 choose. Much more when the President has a 
 cabinet to appoint or a foreign minister to nomi- 
 nate. 
 
 You are aghast when you see what is the 
 material which presents itself. But when you go 
 farther, and ask not for an expert merely, not for 
 a lawyer, or a chemist, or a diplomatist, but 
 for a man, the penury and failure of our plans 
 for making men reveal themselves more terribly. 
 Then is it that you repeat the groan, Why are 
 there so few men? And when one changes the 
 sex, and for the work of women makes the same 
 inquiry, the women come out no better. You find 
 a plenty of people fussing over detail, who, as 
 
2 60 MANHOOD. 
 
 somebody says, cannot tell a small thing from a 
 great one. But you ask eagerly, and nobody tells 
 you, where are the women? Where is our steady 
 supply, not exceptional, not a miracle, which shall 
 give 
 
 "A perfect woman, nobly planned" ? 
 
 SUCH are rather gloomy questions, whether in 
 education, in politics, or in manufacture. We 
 shall best approach a solution of such questions if 
 we will ask, more seriously than people are apt 
 to ask, what a man is, or what a woman is. For 
 deep down here is the real difficulty. The edu- 
 cator does not know what he is driving at, or the 
 manufacturer does not know what he wants. 
 Many years ago, when I was much younger than 
 I am now, there died a man who had been of a 
 good deal of importance in our public affairs. As 
 is the amiable custom of our modern life, a meet- 
 ing of his associates in business was called to 
 extol him. That was easily enough done, for he 
 had been a man of broad views, of marvellous 
 mental power, and, for some forms of intellectual 
 work, he had won the admiration of all the 
 younger men in his calling. Accordingly, a 
 meeting of important persons was held in the 
 capital of the State where he had lived, and all the 
 journals printed their eulogies upon him. I fancy 
 it was published in a handsome memorial volume. 
 
MANHOOD. 26l 
 
 When all this was over, I addressed a private note 
 to one of the leaders of opinion in this country, 
 who had joined in this testimonial, as it is called. 
 I said to him, " Why did you let your meeting 
 pass by without saying that your friend's life had 
 been embittered and made worthless by his habits 
 of intemperance? At the very moment when his 
 country needed him the most, he was able to do 
 nothing for his country because he could not be 
 trusted to the temptations of the table in the city 
 of Washington." I said, "You place me, and men 
 like me, in the pulpit, and bid us tell young men 
 to keep their bodies pure and control their appe- 
 tites. And then, when a man dies who has not 
 kept his body pure and has not controlled his 
 appetite, you trumpet his name before those same 
 young men, and hold him up as an object for their 
 veneration and imitation." 
 
 My friend was not in the habit of receiving 
 rebukes from me. As things go, I deserved 
 rebuke from him ten times as often as I had a 
 right to give it. But in this case he had nothing 
 to say. He sent me a blank, humble apology for 
 his silence on that critical occasion. 
 
 I tell the story now because, in an instance 
 which fixed itself upon my memory early in life, 
 it showed me how we go about praising this and 
 that and another special achievement, but failing, 
 even in our eulogies, to ask for true manhood, to 
 ask for what is involved in a text like this, when 
 
262 MANHOOD. 
 
 the great God of heaven is supposed to say, " Let 
 us make man." In that case we had a clever in- 
 tellectual machine. I can really conceive that, as 
 the ages pass, some Babbage of the future shall 
 invent a machine which shall do something like 
 what this person had done. And then we award 
 him our praises, perhaps we build him our monu- 
 ments in Mount Auburn, we print our memorial 
 volumes, and we wear crape upon our arms, as if 
 this creature had been a man. 
 
 It is easy enough to see where the temptation 
 lies. The captain of a crew, or the director of a 
 gymnasium, estimates the people who come under 
 his eye by their muscle, or by their power of 
 personal endurance, if you please. But he is 
 comparatively indifferent as to their intellectual 
 resources, so only they can drive the boat along or 
 can catch the ball or can obey orders in a melee. 
 That is the business in which such leaders are 
 engaged, and they are quite right in forming their 
 decision as they form it. Just so with the teacher 
 in a school of metaphysics, or in a technical school, 
 or in an art school. It is his business to tell us, 
 in the art school, whether a pupil have a quick 
 eye or a delicate sense of color; in the technical 
 school, whether he have that divine instinct for 
 invention, or that nicety of eye and hand, from 
 which the great improvements are born ; in the 
 school of philosophy, whether he have the mental 
 precision which will enable him rightly to discrimi- 
 
MANHOOD. 263 
 
 nate as to the expression which is to be given in the 
 delicate shades of statement of reasoning. But, in 
 any such case, the leader or teacher ought to be 
 careful to say to us, " I present to you an artist," 
 or " I present to you an inventor," or " I present to 
 you a metaphysician." It does not follow, because 
 we have an artist, an inventor, or a metaphysician, 
 that we have a man. Yet it is very apt to follow, 
 as in that wretched instance which I have cited, 
 that when this artist has won the admiration and 
 gratitude of the world by the work of his pencil or 
 his chisel, we join to give him the golden crown, 
 where he does not deserve the golden crown. We 
 place him upon our loftiest pedestal where he only 
 deserves a lower place. For we ought to give our 
 highest honor, — and, as this world becomes the 
 kingdom of heaven, we shall give our highest 
 honor, — not to the artist, not to the inventor, not 
 to the metaphysician, but to the man. 
 
 Within the next three months our colleges will 
 be sending out the results of their work. They 
 will present to the world the best that they can do. 
 What will the directors of these colleges themselves 
 say as to their achievement ? From Labrador to 
 San Diego they will say, " We present to you 
 these youths, who have acquired skill in Greek or 
 Latin or mathematics, or in the study of nature, or 
 in the study of history." Possibly they will say, 
 " We present to you this or that young man, who 
 has successfully led his crew in a boat-race or in a 
 
264 MANHOOD. 
 
 ball-match." But there will not be one of them, 
 from one end of the country to another, which 
 will say, " We present to you this youth, who can 
 control his appetites and can govern his mind." 
 That is to say, there is not one of them which will 
 venture to say, on Commencement Day, " We 
 present to you a man." ' 
 
 I am not now discussing the much-abused 
 science of education. But I will say in passing 
 that, where I have seen teachers fail, it has been 
 always because they have made a mistake here. 
 The dancing-master invariably exaggerates the 
 attention to his art. And it is only one teacher in a 
 hundred who rises so much above the detail as to 
 say that the special lessons in his own line make 
 only a limited part of God's great business of 
 education. But it is not fair to say this of teachers 
 only. The same mistake is made by the president 
 of a bank, who has selected some bright boy for 
 the lowest stage in that business, simply because 
 the lad is quick at figures, and who finds out, 
 when the little serpent has grown to be a big one, 
 that he is too skilful at figures, and that he has no 
 conscience and no honor. The same mistake is 
 made when you have promoted your bright West 
 Point lieutenant, and forced him up through the 
 
 1 All that Harvard College says, in presenting the bachelor's degree, is 
 this : " We present to you these youths, whom we know to be fit for speak- 
 ing in public as often as anybody shall call them to that duty." This is the 
 best that has been achieved in a course of study covering four years, and 
 prepared for in many more. 
 
MANHOOD. 265 
 
 grades till he comes out some day in command at 
 a critical point, and you find, alas ! that while he is 
 so skilful in the drill and knows so well how to 
 manoeuvre, he has no general view of the situation 
 and is powerless for active purpose in war. How 
 many young men have made the same mistake in 
 choosing to marry this or that girl, because she 
 was bright in repartee, or because the rose mingled 
 fitly with the lily, to find, before married life had 
 tested her by a week's adventure, that she was a 
 fool. All such failures only show different forms 
 of the mistake on which I am harping. We select 
 our agents for this or that convenient detail of the 
 moment, and we find too late that we have only a 
 performer, and have not a man. 
 
 We are thrown back, then, to the definition of 
 manhood. And perhaps it would be fair to say 
 that churches and pulpits exist, that sermons are 
 preached, and that people come together to hear 
 them, simply that this definition may be enforced 
 week by week, and that week by week we may 
 learn what is a man. A man is not a finely formed 
 or well-trained physical machine. Physical strength 
 and health come from manhood, but they are not 
 manhood. A man is not a well-adjusted, well- 
 trained — shall I say well-oiled ? ■ — intellectual 
 machine. Reasoning, imagination, memory, are 
 good tools of manhood, but no one of these, nor 
 all of them, can make a man. A man is a child 
 of God. 
 
266 MANHOOD. 
 
 No language is fine enough to make the full 
 statement, but this is the best that has been tried. 
 He is born from God and he goes back to God. 
 " Spark from the divine fire," the poets are fond of 
 saying. " Light from the divine light," that is one 
 of the Bible expressions. " Dewdrop from the 
 divine ocean," that is an image hinted at in the 
 Bible. Man is a living soul. Perhaps I shall not 
 do better than to take this phrase. This living 
 soul has the business of controlling this body, 
 making it strong and quick, active and pure. This 
 living soul has the business of controlling this 
 mind, making that to be strong and quick, active 
 and pure. And it is only as this living soul asserts 
 itself, will not be swayed by the body or by the 
 mind, — it is only thus that you have a man. It is 
 only thus that you have a woman. Those of you 
 who have to do with machinery know instances 
 upon instances where, in familiar language, the ma- 
 chine " runs away." The locomotive runs so fast 
 on a down-grade that for the moment it escapes 
 from the hand of the driver. The steam which is 
 called the power is not the power ; for it is crowded 
 back on itself by the impetuous force which the 
 downward grade has given. Precisely in the same 
 way one sees intellectual action, where the vigor 
 of a man's habit of reasoning or where the dis- 
 tinctness of his memory gets the control of his 
 conscience, gets the control of his will, and con- 
 science and will are ridden over by the mere force 
 
MANHOOD. 267 
 
 of the intellectual machine. And in every day, in 
 every hour of every day, you see some poor wretch 
 who has let a bodily appetite so overmaster him 
 that, as Paul says, he does the thing that he does 
 not want to do. He does what he knows he ought 
 not to do. The body has become too strong for 
 the soul, as on that downward grade the weight of 
 the engine was too much for the steam. All these 
 are instances where in the man the divine power 
 has been lost. It is fair to say that the man has 
 ceased to be a man, in the true interpretation of 
 manhood. The man appears only where the soul 
 masters the mind and the body. The man appears 
 where the true will achieves its real purpose. The 
 man appears where the purpose of God is carried 
 out. As Paul says, in that noblest epigram of the 
 New Testament, to will and to do God's good 
 pleasure, here is the sign of the present God. 
 
 You stand at the open grave of a friend, and 
 whether you analyze your feelings and thoughts or 
 not, here is what gives them their drift. Did 
 he rule his thought and rule his body, or did his 
 body rule him, or his books rule him, or his 
 memory? Was he the lord of his own going and 
 coming, or was he the slave of his machinery and 
 his traditions? And when, as you turn away from 
 the grave, you are able to say, " Here was one who 
 had infinite purpose, who knew the divine purpose, 
 and for that purpose lived," then and then only are 
 you able to say, " Here was a man." 
 
2 68 MANHOOD. 
 
 One hears a great deal in our time of better 
 education of the hand, that our boys may be able 
 to drive a nail without bending it, and that our 
 girls may be able to make an intelligible drawing 
 of a flower. We hear a great deal of athletic edu- 
 cation, that boy or girl may be able to walk twenty 
 miles a day, and sleep all the better for it, and be 
 all the fresher the next morning. We are training 
 the eyes of the little children to a keener sense of 
 color; we are training their hands and eyes to- 
 gether to a quicker sense of form. But I wish 
 that we could always manage, in this mere sharp- 
 ening the edge of the tool — for it is nothing 
 more — to give boy or girl a deeper sense of who 
 it is who is to use the tool ; how great, how un- 
 measured, is the power of the boy or the girl. If 
 we could lead along boy or girl from day to-day 
 in this sense of possible mastery, if we could 
 really make them believe that in the temptations 
 which are likely to befall them they can really 
 tread on serpents and scorpions, and that nothing 
 shall by any means hurt them, we should not 
 so much mind if the edge of the tool were not of 
 the very sharpest. When Daniel Boone made his 
 forest home, he owed more to the strength of the 
 blow by which he drove his axe, he owed more to 
 the precision with which the axe alighted in its 
 preordained place, than he owed to the sharpness 
 of the tool. And these boys and girls of ours are 
 to succeed or are to fail according as it is in the 
 
MANHOOD. 269 
 
 infinite power of the child of God which undertakes 
 the duties of manhood or of womanhood. 
 
 The lesson cannot come for them too early, 
 and for us it cannot come too often, nor are we 
 ever too old to review' it, — "I have infinite power." 
 That is the lesson. " As God lives I will use it. 
 I will not let this body, which is not infinite, 
 hamper it; nor this mind, which is all woven in 
 with the body. I, who am a child of God, will 
 use the body and will use the mind." 
 
 This is the true lesson when a great man dies, or 
 a great woman. Little people ask, in a little way, 
 " How could she do what she did, or he? " The 
 great teachers answer, " Of course she did it. She 
 was a child of God ; she could do what she chose. 
 Of course he did. Sons of God do not stop, or 
 turn backward from the plough." And any boy or 
 girl who hears me, who will try the great experi- 
 ment, has this victory open. " I control my body; 
 it shall do what I command. I control my mind. 
 It shall think things which are pure, which are 
 lovely, which are of good report. It shall not think 
 things which are base and mean and in any shape 
 wrong." The boy who makes that determination 
 of a son of God, and determines — puts an end 
 to all other notion, — in that moment becomes 
 a man. The girl who thus determines becomes a 
 woman. These two, at least, of us all, get an 
 answer to our question. " Let us make man in our 
 image," said the good God of life not so long ago. 
 
27O MANHOOD. 
 
 And here are two of his children who propose 
 to join Him in that endeavor. 
 
 Let me read you what Mr. Calthrop has said : 
 
 " Upon God's throne there is a seat for me. 
 
 My coming forth from Him hath left a space 
 
 Which none but I can fill. One sacred place 
 Is vacant till I come. Father! from thee 
 
 When I descended, here to run my race, 
 A void was left in thy paternal heart, 
 Not to be filled while we are kept apart. 
 Yea, though a thousand worlds demand thy care, 
 
 Though heaven's vast hosts thy changeless blessings win, 
 Thy quick love flies to meet my slow-winged prayer, 
 As if amid thy worlds I lived alone 
 
 In endless space; but Thou and I were there, 
 And thou embraced me with a love as wild 
 As a young mother bears toward her first-born child." 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 " Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done." 
 
 Matthew vi. 10. 
 
 We repeat the wish every day in our prayers. 
 
 Life is worth very little unless we have a real 
 hope that the wish will be fulfilled. 
 
 And there is great danger of failure if we do not 
 know what we mean or say. Still more danger is 
 there if we mean nothing when we offer the prayer, 
 in form, so often. 
 
 I may suppose, may I not, that here we are 
 none of us perplexed by the idolatry of the letter? 
 We are not confused by figures of poetry. We 
 do not pray that in our time a chariot may ride 
 across the heavens, and that the Maker of the 
 universe shall descend 'from it, and sit upon a 
 throne, and call us to judgment. Such a proba- 
 bility is announced, perhaps not far from this 
 place, at this moment. But it does not trouble us 
 who are here. 
 
 No ; the kingdom of God is not here merely, — 
 it is not there. It is everywhere where the 
 obstinacy of man, the obstinate child of God, 
 does not stand out against it. As we see a block 
 of ice for a minute withstand the flow of the 
 stream from which it was born, our prayer is 
 
272 THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 that such human obstinacy or other folly may not 
 arrest any longer the reign of God. It is that His 
 will may rule this earth as precisely as when, last 
 week, it ordered the sun to be eclipsed at the hair's- 
 breadth of time, or of eternity, which the students 
 of His will had foretold. This kingdom, reign, or 
 rule of God, when our prayer is fulfilled, is to be 
 everywhere. As Jesus says, "It is to shine as one 
 blaze of lightning shines, over the whole world." 
 
 The words " Thy will be done " were conse- 
 crated by the Saviour in that midnight prayer 
 of Gethsemane. But he does not use them, 
 nor mean us to use them, simply as the palsied 
 assent to a will we cannot change. It is not the 
 dead surrender of fatalism, all but dumb. It is the 
 acknowledgment of our ignorance, that we can- 
 not foresee infinite purposes. And it expresses 
 our certainty of God's love that He does not 
 willingly wound our hearts. For the future it 
 pleads, as it would trust the world to better law 
 than rules it now. That the time may come when 
 God's will shall have hushed the rage of battle. 
 The time shall come when God's will shall have 
 ended man-made pestilence. The time shall come 
 when there shall be no famine. The time shall 
 come when, instead of hunger and thirst, instead 
 of diphtheria and cholera, instead of murder and 
 rapine, instead of fraud and theft and intrigue, 
 God's will shall be done on earth as it is done in 
 heaven. 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 273 
 
 Famine, diphtheria, cholera, murder, rapine, may 
 now be permitted in God's law; but when He 
 rules the earth, as He rules the heavens, they cease 
 to be. 
 
 Now, in offering to Him this prayer, we find our- 
 selves just as we find ourselves when we render 
 any lesser petition. If I ask another man for help, 
 of course he turns on me to ask what I am doing 
 about it myself. An officer asks the commanding 
 general for a reenforcement that he may storm 
 such a position, and the commander gives him the 
 reenforcement only when he is sure that the officer 
 means to do something. A tradesman goes to a 
 bank and asks for a discount, and he must submit 
 to pretty close inquiry as to what he himself is 
 going to do with the money, how he has handled 
 the last money they lent him, and how his busi- 
 ness is going forward. These are little instances, 
 but they illustrate the great necessity as well as if 
 they were larger. I do not go to Almighty God 
 and ask Him that His kingdom may come and 
 His will may be done, unless I propose to do 
 something about it myself. I do not go, if I am not 
 at work as hard as I can to set it forward. Cer- 
 tainly I do not go to Him if I have no idea of 
 what His kingdom is and what His will is. I do 
 not ask in the dark; I am not clamoring, like a 
 man in prison, who shrieks out behind his bars and 
 bolts that he wants to be let out. I know I am a 
 partaker of the divine nature ; and to this infinite 
 
274 THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 power who rules this world I come, and ask what 
 we two, He and I together, are to do, and how 
 we are to do it. Virtually, I pledge myself to my 
 share in the endeavor. I pray that God's king- 
 dom may come, and I promise that I will myself 
 do my best that it shall come. I pray that His 
 will may be done, and in the prayer I pay at least 
 my own contingent ; I promise that my own will 
 shall be in accord with His. 
 
 This means, then, some definite understanding 
 of what God's kingdom is to be, and some definite 
 conception of what God's will is. Here it is that, 
 as I am always saying here, we do not get along 
 at all in the higher lines of life, to consider which 
 we come here, unless we let the imagination work 
 cordially and well, so as to sketch out for us on the 
 screen a vision of a better world than we live in 
 now. No man has a right to pray that the king- 
 dom shall come unless he has some idea, however 
 faint, of what the kingdom is to be. And as I 
 implied just now, no man has a right to say "Thy 
 will be done," in a dumb, dead acquiescence in a 
 power which he cannot resist. He must imply 
 that he is doing his part that that will may be 
 done. My child dies in scarlet fever, and I say, 
 " God's will be done." But when I say it, I mean 
 that, from that time forward, my life is consecrated 
 to helping men of science, and to helping the au- 
 thorities of the city, in trampling out the germs of 
 an unnecessary disease. If I can help it, and if 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 275 
 
 we can help it, God Almighty will certainly do 
 his share, — other homes shall not be desolated 
 and other families made wretched by human neg- 
 lect and failure in that line at least. So far as 
 we can bring our resources to bear, God's will 
 shall be done. From such a high determination 
 as that, our Seashore Home was born and grew up, 
 now fifteen years ago ; and so many tears have been 
 stopped before they began to flow, and so many 
 homes have been living and light, because of that 
 high determination. And, on the other hand, the 
 first question to be put to any low-toned man, 
 diffident, anxious, and distressed, who cannot see 
 into the cloud, and feels that the world is running 
 backward, — the first question to be put to him is 
 whether he have any picture in the least adequate 
 of what the world shall be when God is the ruler 
 of it, and when His kingdom comes. At the 
 very least, he ought to be able to say what is the 
 post to which he is assigned in this business ; in 
 his daily life, from January to December, what is 
 the service that he is rendering, -so that this Bos- 
 ton shall be more alive with God's life in the year 
 1894 than it was in the year 1892? What am I 
 doing in my way, however small, to bring in that 
 hoped-for kingdom? 
 
 One asks this question and answers it, gratefully 
 remembering how much power there is behind 
 him. Colonel Greely told me that when he and his 
 men were starving and freezing in Smith's Sound, 
 
2/6 THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 in that hardest duty of waiting, he could cheer 
 them by nothing so well as to tell that the country 
 was behind them. He would tell them that the 
 United States was used to have its way ; and that 
 the United States, at that moment, was resolved on 
 their rescue. More than this, and better, when I 
 pray to the Power who makes for righteousness 
 that His kingdom may come. There are checks 
 and hindrances. But they are merely drawbacks 
 of time. And He knows no time. He is used 
 to have His way. His name is the All-Mighty. 
 And I, when I really live that His kingdom may 
 come, I ally myself to His all-mighty-ness. 
 
 This soldier was not armed like those of old, 
 Whose heavy axes felled their heathen foe; 
 
 Nor like Ihe bands whom later days enrolled, 
 
 Whose breast-worn cross betrayed no cross below. 
 
 No coat of mail or sacred robe he wore, 
 
 Yet went he forth with God's almighty power; 
 
 He spoke the word whose will is ever done, 
 
 From day's first dawn till earth's remotest hour; 
 
 And mountains melted from his presence down, 
 And hell, affrighted, fled before his crown. 1 
 
 Any adequate conception, I may say any 
 decent conception, of man's own place and duty 
 in these lines would relieve our ordinary talk of 
 some of its worst cant. Here comes an invasion 
 of cholera, sweeping over Europe and threatening 
 America. Such a city as Hamburg is caught and 
 
 i From a sonnet by Jones Very. 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 277 
 
 overwhelmed. Such a hot-bed of disease as the 
 country round L'Orient becomes a nursery of 
 new pestilence. Now, when such a catastrophe as 
 that takes place, that is only wicked blasphemy in 
 which we roll up our eyes and talk about the 
 providence of God, and the inscrutable purposes 
 of God. And it is apt to be mere hypocrisy when 
 we say, " God's will be done." We know enough 
 now to know that but for the folly, superstition, 
 and what one may call madness, of thousands of 
 ignorant and bigoted men and women, no such in- 
 vasion would take place. We can point out the 
 focus-points in the East where this disease, origi- 
 nating nobody knows how, is permitted to multiply 
 itself with a horrible geometrical progression, so 
 that then its tiny germs are sent roving over the 
 world. The whole thing shows, from point to 
 point, at different ganglia of the world's circula- 
 tion, ignorance, stupidity, the absurdities of red 
 tape, the madness of absolute government, the 
 superstition of one set of people and the indiffer- 
 ence of another. Science shows that we have no 
 right to talk about the mysterious providence of 
 the Almighty, and to say simply that we will resign 
 ourselves to a law that is higher than our law. It 
 is both blasphemy and hypocrisy to use such 
 words. 
 
 There is equal blasphemy and hypocrisy when 
 we use them in our own homes. So far as any in- 
 telligent conception of the purposes of God goes, 
 
2;S THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 our children come into the world with the same 
 expectation of being, and with the same prospect 
 of long life, as a young elm-tree, planted in the 
 soil it loves, in some fertile meadow. If you 
 please to say so, that elm-tree has a definite period 
 of life ; when it has lived to be three or four hun- 
 dred years old, so far as we know T the laws of vege- 
 tation, its aged limbs are not sufficient to resist the 
 gale ; it breaks to pieces, and it dies. So far as 
 the elm-tree's being goes, here is the law of its 
 being, — growth, strength for so many centuries, 
 weakness, and fall. But this does not mean that 
 some boy crossing the meadow, who wants a 
 switch with which to drive his oxen, shall not take 
 out his jack-knife and cut down the elm -tree when 
 it is three years old. Very likely he does so, and 
 future ages, who never heard of the boy, and can- 
 not so much as curse him, will suffer for the loss 
 of the glory of the elm-tree, because he needed a 
 switch for his cattle-driving. In a case like that, 
 future ages, if they have imagination enough to 
 know what they have lost, have no right to throw 
 upon God, or upon His general laws, the loss of 
 their elm-tree. If it were of any importance that 
 blame should be rightly assigned, as it is not, the 
 blame falls on the whim of the boy who destroyed it. 
 Now, when I am told, either by the pulpit or 
 in the newspaper, or in the cant of private talk, 
 that that is a mysterious providence which has cut 
 off a man in public life from his duties, just when 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 279 
 
 the State needed him most; or a woman in 
 private life from the charm of her home, just when 
 her home needed her most, — I resent the imputa- 
 tion upon God. I have come to hate that phrase, 
 " a mysterious providence." I think we are wiser 
 when we recollect how much and how far human 
 folly and human ignorance are responsible. I do 
 not know, and I will not pretend to say, for in- 
 stance, to whose folly and to whose ignorance the 
 present epidemic of scarlet fever in this city, or 
 the annual epidemic of diphtheria, is due. But I 
 do say that that is a very short and poor use of 
 language which refers such things primarily to the 
 will of God. I say that, primarily, they ought to 
 be referred to the carelessness, ignorance, folly, or 
 laziness of man. And, knowing what we know of 
 such lapses, such failures, — say in the case of 
 cholera which I described just now, — it is wiser 
 to determine, on the one side, that I will trust that 
 Infinite Goodness which rules so clearly where man 
 has no share, and that, when I meet with evil 
 which I cannot explain, I will accept the proba- 
 bility that it may be referred to some such human 
 folly and failure. At all events, for myself, I will 
 highly determine that, so far as my power goes, 
 I will be a fellow-workman together with God, and 
 that He and I will work together in the determina- 
 tion that His kingdom shall come. 
 
 I am not such a fool as to try, after seventy 
 years of life, to solve the problem of evil. I 
 
2 SO THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 can conceive of a world where the so-called man 
 and woman should have no wills of their own, 
 and be powerless to commit murder, to treat their 
 children cruelly, or in any way to defy God's law. 
 God could have compelled their obedience by 
 law as accurate as that by which the apple falls 
 or the moon eclipses the sun. But those creatures 
 would not be men and women. They would not 
 be God's children. They would be like billiard 
 balls, knocked hither and thither, or they would 
 be pebbles on the beach, rounded by the wave ; 
 but not men and women. God chose to give us, 
 His children, the freedom we have. From that 
 freedom comes your cholera, your scarlet fever, 
 your murder and suicide. From it comes your 
 bad government, bad drainage, bad water, bad 
 streets. From it comes hatred, malice, and all 
 uncharitableness. That is to say, visibly, and in 
 forms easily calculated, nineteen-twentieths of 
 human suffering and sorrow come from the mean- 
 ness, duplicity, selfishness, and wickedness of-men. 
 It seems to me most unfair, and most illogical, 
 that when we know this as we do, we should, for 
 the other twentieth, which we cannot account for 
 and which we do not understand, throw it upon 
 what we call " a mysterious providence." Mys- 
 tery enough ; yes. But it is not fair for us to 
 pretend, because we do not know how this has 
 happened, that it is a blow of a Father's hand, 
 who has devised this plan of punishment for our 
 education. 
 
THE WILL OF GOD. 28 1 
 
 " Thy will be done ! " Yes. And, as in my tears 
 and agony I say, " Thy will be done," I will recall 
 what the prophets have sung, what the Saviour has 
 promised, of that will when it does rule the world 
 and make it heaven. One of these prophets saw the 
 new heaven and the new earth, and the two were 
 the same. The city in which men and women were 
 to live was a new city, and it came, of course it 
 came, " from God out of heaven." It was a holy 
 city, alive with the thought of God, with the love 
 of God. In that city, as he saw it, God dwells with 
 men, and they know He does. If they walk, they, 
 walk with Him. When they sit at meat they talk 
 with Him. And in that city, when He speaks they 
 listen to Him. " He is with them and He is their 
 God." It is not simply that they say He is one 
 day in the week, and then are their own gods six 
 days in seven. He is with them, and they with 
 Him. Tears are there? Yes, at first. But He 
 wipes them away. Death is no more in that city. 
 Sorrow and crying are gone, and there is no more 
 pain. This is what the prophet saw in a city 
 which was really the tabernacle or home of God. 
 In that city, whether called the New Jerusalem 
 or the New Boston, God's kingdom comes, and His 
 will is done as it is done in heaven. 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 " He gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your 
 hearts with food and gladness." Acts xiv. 17. 
 
 SINCE we met here on Sunday I have spent 
 more than half my life in the open air ; much 
 more than half of my conscious life. From 8.30 
 on Monday morning to 7.30 last night, I have 
 been passing from place to place in Massachusetts, 
 Connecticut, and Rhode Island, wondering at the 
 lavish beauty of June, and in the delight of its 
 sounds, its sights, its perfumes, its lights and 
 shades. Insect, bird, fish, and beast, — here have 
 been millions of living beings, who have either 
 had the songs of Paradise to sing, morning and 
 evening, or its still service to render, no less ex- 
 quisite. Impossible not to join in that service, 
 silent or vocal ; and if one have been imprisoned 
 for months, as you and I have been, in these 
 prisons which we call homes, one joins in them 
 with a certain intensity, which seems, perhaps, to 
 one who lives in the midst of such marvels like 
 the " provincial rawness " of the rustic when he 
 finds himself in a city compacted together. 
 
 We are apt to say of every June — what is, I 
 fancy, true — that it is more beautiful than ever. 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 283 
 
 True, because certainly man is more a child of 
 God with every year than he was the year before. 
 What we call inventions and discoveries, and what 
 we call the improvements which spring from 
 them, if they be real, are simply the finding out 
 conscious Nature better than before, and the en- 
 tering into the work of Nature and the Universe. 
 This language, when interpreted from the con- 
 ventionalism of science into the affectionate lan- 
 guage of families, means that the child has found 
 out the Infinite Father better, and has gone out 
 with Him more fondly in his daily affairs. If 
 Mr. Pope and his societies make for me better 
 roads, if somebody contrives for me a better 
 boat, if a wise Legislature opens up for me a wil- 
 derness, — so far, June is better for me, by mere 
 physical improvement. 
 
 And if I, in the twelve months, finding my own 
 card-castles fall, and my palaces of reeds blow 
 away, — if I have determined to build on eternal 
 foundations, to mount to the Mount of Vision, to 
 accept no help but God's help, and no counsel 
 but His counsel, why, by a law even higher do I 
 come to take in the marvels of June more happily 
 and certainly. If I become a creator with God, — 
 if I have highly resolved to live, and move, and 
 have my being in Him, I swing into the current 
 of Infinite Life more joyfully. The song-sparrow 
 does not sing to deaf ears, nor the arethusa open 
 to blind eyes. So it is doubtless true, to the world 
 
284 SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 at large, — let us hope to each of us, — that June 
 is more beautiful with every year. 
 
 Wisely or not, we have so arranged our affairs 
 in the matchless plenty and comfort of modern 
 life, that, of the hard work of the world, nine- 
 tenths shall be done in the months after the first 
 of September and before the first of June. It 
 follows that its play, its rest, its recreation, its 
 vacation, come in June, July, and August. Even 
 the wheat harvest of the West, which is to feed 
 half the world, will be nearly all reaped before this 
 next week is over. 
 
 The joy of exultant life which fills the com- 
 munion-tables and altars of the church with flowers, 
 on days of high festival, lifts men in worship and 
 in religious aspiration wholly above that mean line 
 which bids them bow their heads in the dust 
 and cry, " Vile, vile ! " 
 
 Take our New England history. Puritanism 
 found out in our own century that it had better 
 work before it than compelling men to eat out 
 their own hearts and brood over their two-and- 
 sixpenny sins. It found that religion had to pro- 
 claim glad tidings to the world, and it organized its 
 great missions. It found out that man must live 
 with God, must enter into His joy — the child in 
 his Father's business. As of necessity, the change 
 showed itself in ritual. And our dear Dr. Andrew 
 Peabody said that the first day a bunch of roses 
 was placed on the pulpit of the South Parish 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 285 
 
 church in Portsmouth might be called historical. 
 Every newspaper in New England, he said, an- 
 nounced that there were roses in a church in 
 Portsmouth. Our friend Charles Barnard used to 
 say something like this of the flowers in Warren- 
 Street chapel. I think that is one of their fair 
 grounds for pride there, that they led the way for 
 our decorous churches in this simplest observ- 
 ance by which we welcome the present work of 
 the present God in what we call His most exquisite 
 handiwork, if we dare discriminate. It is only a 
 church which is trying to stereotype old-time 
 functions, to make the prayers of the sixteenth 
 century answer for the nineteenth, or the creeds 
 of the eleventh answer for the twentieth, — it is 
 only such a church which in symbolism can satisfy 
 itself with artificial lilies, with violets painted on 
 glass, or with roses carved in stone. 
 
 The true homage to conscious Nature is, in the 
 language of religion, the glad worship of the pres- 
 ent God. It is worship which I can render in 
 the still night, on the deck of the ship, as God's 
 stars point my way for me. Or I can render it 
 far under ground in the shaft of a coal-mine, as 
 my poor candle shows me how a million years ago 
 God knew my needs and arranged for them. And 
 never is such worship — or gratitude, shall I call 
 it, or do you like the word " love " better — more 
 simple and natural than when with all my heart I 
 thank Him for the color of the forget-me-not, for 
 
286 SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 the grace of the clematis, or the sweetness of my 
 mignonette. 
 
 Scepticism has found, in our time, a coarse and 
 hard reply to the statement that the firmament 
 shows God's handiwork. " You must not say that 
 because the world is, God is." This is the state- 
 ment. " For if the world were not, you would 
 not be, and you could not be arguing. This is 
 what has happened to survive, under the law of 
 selection, in which no one selects." But no such 
 reply annoys me, no such doubt perplexes me 
 when I have in my hand a spring anemone, or a 
 sweet violet, or the lily of the field. The world 
 could have existed without either of them. The 
 great dice-box of destiny could have flung out 
 its worlds into space, with no fragrant violet, 
 with no wind-blown anemone, with no lily of the 
 field, and the balance of gravitation would still 
 have been perfect, the worlds would have rushed 
 without fragrance and beauty wildly through 
 space. When, in the same blossom, my eye here 
 revels in color, when I find exquisite form and 
 perfect grace as I enjoy the fragrance with the 
 color and the form, you find it hard to persuade me 
 that this is the survival of the fittest. When I 
 find the dice always turn up triplets, I am sure 
 that some conscious power loaded them. What- 
 ever power made rose, and lily, and violet, and 
 anemone, had the sense of beauty, and knew what 
 my sense of beauty would be. So that when I 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 287 
 
 find the exquisite Rhodora waiting for me in the 
 wilderness, I say gladly, — it is my spontaneous 
 thought — " the self-same Power that brought me 
 here brought you." 
 
 I believe, what I do not pretend to prove, that 
 that native joy came to me thus, because the 
 Power that put the flowers here put me here, be- 
 cause His life is in all His works, and that His 
 children, of whom I am one, come closer to Him as 
 they know more and more of His handiwork, and 
 enjoy what He enjoys ; as they watch the present 
 life in which His creatures live, and move, and have 
 their being. I say, the present life in which they 
 are now growing. God is. His name is I AM. 
 It is not perhaps easy to think of Him as acting 
 now, with just the thought and feeling with which 
 the poet says He acted in the beginning, when God 
 said, " Let the earth bring forth grass." But it 
 ought not to be impossible. 
 
 God now says, " Let the earth bring forth grass." 
 He is saying it at this instant, and because He is 
 saying it at this instant, the earth is bringing forth 
 grass at this instant; just the same creation is 
 going forward now which, for convenience of lan- 
 guage, we say went forward then, — in what, for 
 convenience of language, we call the beginning. 
 Perhaps one feels this present power of a present 
 God a little more vividly when one sees it in an 
 unaccustomed way. I have told the story here of 
 one of our first men of science, of whom it would 
 
288 SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 be fair to say that he experienced religion — though 
 not for the first time, indeed — when he first put 
 his eye to the eye-piece of a compound micro- 
 scope of high power. In that moment he was a 
 witness at least of the present work of God, seeing 
 crystals shape themselves, seeing cells enlarge and 
 double and separate ; seeing growth in what seems 
 to be its origin. In truth, there is nothing more 
 remarkable when I see an atom, just now invisible, 
 choose its conscious course, and work its way 
 across a tiny drop, than there is when I see an 
 eagle mount in the sky, poise himself in mid- 
 heaven, and plunge in the deep below. In both 
 cases I see an exertion of spontaneous will, and 
 that is always unexplainable. But when I see this 
 through the microscope, the sight shocks my dead 
 habit, and I feel that God is now as He was in the 
 beginning, and as He ever will be, world without 
 end. "I AM is thy memorial still." 
 
 I grant the exceeding difficulty of thinking, 
 feeling, believing, and seeing that God is a Spirit. 
 I am afraid that difficulty will yet last for genera- 
 tions. The woman felt it at Sychar, when Jesus 
 said, " God is a Spirit;" and her brothers and 
 sisters have felt it ever since, and will continue to 
 feel it for a long time. Even the language of the 
 best books does not always help us. Thus the 
 Bible language, and the hymns drawn from it, 
 often run back to the child's notion, which was the 
 earlier Jewish notion, that God lives in a particular 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 289 
 
 place, that He waits for this message, and that He 
 sends that angel. But in this great business which 
 is central, everything makes one hopeful now. All 
 science shows more and more one law in all space 
 and in all time. Whatever Power made this world, 
 the same Power who sustains it made and sustains 
 Arcturus and Orion. To this Power there is no 
 such limitation as space, there is no such limita- 
 tion as time. Now, about this present Power you 
 may have two notions. According as you ha^e 
 one notion or another, you may call it " it," and 
 say, " It does not know what it is doing;" or you 
 may call this power " He," and you may say, " He 
 does know what He is doing." In this last case, 
 you accept the religious philosophy of Jesus 
 Christ. As you consider the lilies, you see in 
 them the tokens of God's present love, and of His 
 present wish that this world, among other worlds, 
 may be beautiful and happy. To take Miss 
 Fuller's phrase, which I used before, " You accept 
 the universe." To take the quaint phrase of the 
 Catechism, " You enjoy God." Best of all, perhaps, 
 is the phrase of the parable, " You enter into the 
 joy of your Lord." 
 
 I certainly am not going to argue in five min- 
 utes this great question, whether the Power which 
 sustains this universe is He or is It; whether 
 He be conscious of His work or not. Indeed, 
 I do not think that question will ever be solved 
 by argument. Rather, I believe, that a world 
 
2Q0 SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 of the conscious children of this God steadily 
 moves forward and upward to its own solu- 
 tion of the question, and with every day, indeed, 
 of the world's life knows Him more and knows 
 Him better. " Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer 
 to Thee." In this great issue I like Dr. George 
 Putnam's epigram, " You say that all this beauty, 
 wisdom, tenderness, harmony, are the result of 
 certain laws of matter, which you tell me are one 
 law. I accept your conclusion. I believe what 
 you say, only with a little change of language. 
 If matter can do such wonders as these, wonders 
 which in my highest spiritual flight I enjoy and 
 prize, I find it better to call it Spirit. What you 
 call Matter, I call Spirit." Or as matter of state- 
 ment, I have found many people are helped by 
 Freeman Clarke's simple statement, which I wish 
 I could repeat in his own clear language. "You 
 say that this exquisite human organization, in 
 which a million million cells of being cooperate 
 with each other for one aim, has resulted in the 
 marvel of thought, in the marvel of conscious 
 being, and in the greater marvels of Faith and 
 Hope and Love. You tell me it is possible for a 
 bit of mechanism to be so exquisitely perfect that 
 the result is conscious Life ; as if the beautiful 
 organ yonder were so marvellously formed, that 
 of itself, without direction, it should begin, when it 
 chose, to play a symphony more marvellous than 
 Beethoven ever dreamed of, and when it chose, 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 29 1 
 
 should cease and be still. Very well, if mech- 
 anism can thus rise to consciousness in man, 
 why may not the mechanism and harmony of 
 your universe rise to consciousness as well? Why 
 might not all the stars of the morning sing 
 together when they heard all the sons of men 
 shouting for joy?" I acknowledge that these are 
 not arguments. They are simply statements in 
 language, by two clear-headed men not apt to 
 deceive themselves, in a matter where they 
 would not argue. I quote them, because I think 
 what is needed most is to rescue the language in 
 which we speak of God, the Infinite Spirit, from 
 the language in which children might speak, or 
 savages, — the language of idol worshippers, or 
 of those who imprison God in a visible form. Let 
 me just say this, and it shall be all. There is 
 to me something amazing in that presumption 
 which I meet now and then in the reviews, which 
 really supposes that the thousand million men, 
 more or less, who live in visible bodies in this 
 little world are the only conscious beings in the 
 infinite universe. It was absurd enough, in the 
 days of men's ignorance, to suppose that sun, 
 moon, planets, and stars all circled around this 
 little globe of ours ; absurd enough to suppose 
 that sun and moon were set only to give us light, 
 and that stars were set in constellations, only that 
 men might exult in their beauty. But this ab- 
 surdity is nothing to the arrogant insolence of 
 
292 SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 the presumption which tells me that while I am 
 conscious of my existence here, and look back 
 with interest on my past and with curiosity on my 
 .future, the Power which makes me and sustains 
 me, orders, the sun to paint the lily for me, and 
 bids the lily grow to be painted, is not conscious 
 of His past, is not conscious of His present work, 
 and is not curious about His future. This arro- 
 gance reaches its climax when we are told, as we 
 so often are, that we men, forsooth, who are the 
 lords of creation, are indeed its only conscious in- 
 habitants. So many Alexander Selkirks, indeed, 
 stranded on the edge of a desert. 
 
 " I am monarch of all I survey. 
 
 My right there is none to dispute." 
 
 But I do not ask you to engage in this high 
 argument, which is, as I suppose, beyond logical 
 reasoning. I wanted to say enough this morning, 
 shall I say to justify our instinctive passion for 
 flowers, and gardening, and nature, and the woods? 
 I want to do honor to that nerve of the eternal 
 life which runs through it all and makes its joy 
 part, indeed, and element of the joy of God. This 
 is no poor bit of the pleasure of sense alone. 
 The passion that takes you out of doors is not one 
 of the vulgar, selfish, or personal passions which 
 Puritans were right in holding under lock and key. 
 Here is the child of God who wants to know what 
 his Father is doing. His own life quickens and 
 
SUMMER SERVICE. 293 
 
 warms and grows young as days grow longer and 
 the sun rides higher, and it is in his godly nature 
 and by one of the divine laws that he delights to 
 see how other creatures of God are breaking from 
 their wintry prison. Life seeks life and loves 
 life. In the opening of a catkin of a willow, in 
 the flight of the butterfly, in the chirping of a tree- 
 toad or the sweep of an eagle, my life loves to see 
 how others live, exults in their joy, and so far is 
 partner in their great concern. 
 
 And this is really what we mean when we say 
 what I think people generally understand, that a 
 man is apt to be nearer to God when he is out of 
 doors than when he is in his home. Literally, this 
 might not be true. But what we are after is the 
 larger life. We do not want to be limited wholly 
 by things of the flesh, what we shall eat, what we 
 shall drink. After these things the Gentiles seek, 
 the Philistines most of all. What we do need is 
 more of God. It may be some sudden and new 
 hint of Him, it may be the infinite and perpetual 
 lesson of the ocean or of the stars. Always it is 
 life. Life larger than a room. Life larger than a 
 day. It was when he got outside a room that the 
 first man in the cool of the day walked with God. 
 And for us, in these later days, it is that we may 
 walk with God, more and more often, that the 
 Saviour bids us " consider the lilies." 
 
SERMONS OF THE WINTER, 
 
 FROM OCTOBER, 1892, TO JUNE, 1893. 
 
 BY 
 REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D. 
 
 These sermons will be sent, post-paid, to any given address 
 on receipt of price, six cents. Bound volume, $1.50. 
 
 No. 1. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 
 
 2. THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 
 
 3. LIFE HID WITH GOD. 
 
 4. THE PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 5. TO GLORIFY GOD. 
 
 6. WHITTIER, CURTIS, LONGFELLOW. 
 
 7. "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 
 
 8. PERSONAL RELIGION. 
 
 9. MODERN IDOLATRY. 
 
 10. TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 
 
 11. TRUTH. 
 
 12. HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 
 
 13. LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
 14. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
 
 15. CREEDS AND LIFE. 
 
 16. LAW OF LOVE. 
 
 17. CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 
 
 18. FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 
 
 19. PALM SUNDAY AND EASTER. 
 
 20. MANHOOD. 
 
 21. THE WILL OF GOD. 
 
 22. SUMMER SERVICE. 
 
 Subscriptions may be sent to the publishers, 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 
 
 3 Hamilton Place, Boston. 
 
THE STORY 
 
 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, 
 
 AS TOLD BY HIMSELF. 
 
 TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D., 
 
 WITH THE STORY OF HIS LIFE FROM OTHER SOURCES 
 WHERE WE HAVE NOT HIS NARRATIVE. 
 
 For Sale by Booksellers. 
 
 Sent, post-paid, by the publishers on receipt of 
 1.25. 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 
 
 3 Hamilton Place, 
 
 BOSTON. 
 
022 216 848 A